Mikhail Gershovich
I have not read David Gilmour’s The Film Club: A Memoir reviewed a few months ago in the New York Times. It’s about a man who decides to home school his teenage son through a diet of film, film, film. Three a week. And nothing else. I was curious if anyone perusing this blog has read it, and if so, if they have any thoughts about it concerning alternative schooling and pedagogy.
Yeah, I’m on the Facebook. I resisted for some time, but being able to play Scrabble (or, more accurately, “Scrabulous”) with friends ultimately got me. I’ve developed a bond with the husband of a college friend of my sister-in-law, forged initially through comments on the baby blogosphere, but secured ultimately through online word games played on Facebook. We’ve met only twice. The first time was before our online friendship blossomed. The second was at a party a few weeks ago. We were both a little nervous, but happy to see each other. I joked that we met on “Bromatch.com.” We haven’t played a game in a while, and I just heard from my sister in-law last week that he misses me. Scrabulous challenge forthcoming….
Apart from Facebook’s support for connectedness and competitive word twisting, the site allows users to issue “status” updates whenever they want. This is a delicate but powerful art form. I’ve encountered the following kinds of updates:
Literal: “Luke is working on a blog post”
Self-promoting: “Luke just published this: http://cac.ophony.org/2008/07/24/status-anxiety/”
Philosophical: “Luke is”
Frustrated: “Luke is, but perhaps not according to Human Resources”
Resigned: “Luke isn’t”
Ironic: “Luke’s productivity is unaffected by the distractions of Facebook”
Literary (direct quote): “Luke is under the brown fog of a winter dawn”
Literary (reference): “Luke thinks the only thing keeping him visible is his whiteness”
Historical: “Luke thinks the run on Indymac echoes the Panic of 1893″
Informed: “Luke just got run over by Bob Novak”
Uninformed: “Luke thinks McCain is being too heavily scrutinized by the press”
Anticipatory: “Luke is looking forward to the new season of Mad Men”
Anguished: “Luke keeps writing the same &%#(*&@ sentence over and over again!”
Confessional: “Luke watched Steel Magnolias last night, and is still crying”
Curious: “Luke wonders how many kinds of status updates there are”
Evangelical: “Luke thinks there will never, ever, ever be anything like The Wire on TV again”
Nerdy: “Luke is a csstud and a phpimp”
Political: “Luke is chanting No Justice, No Peace”
Supportive: “Luke thinks that no matter what (redacted)’s dissertation adviser says, the work is top-notch”
Onomatopoeic: “Luke thump thump thumped three miles at the track” (that one is also alliterative)
Swinging: “Luke is be-bop-be-dee-bop”
Sporting: “Luke is yelling ‘Go Green’”
Stumped, Disinterested, or Over Forty: ” ”
Of course, there are other ways to announce your status, or lack thereof, to the world. There’s Twitter, which gives you 140 characters to say what you’re up to (”microblogging,” they call it). There’s the status menu feature of an instant messaging client. There’s all sorts of ways to unify these statuses, to change them on the fly; or you can choose to keep them separate.
Yet, I imagine the following uttered in the border-state twang of a dear BLSCI comrade: “who cares? I don’t want to know what you’re doing, and I don’t want you to know what I’m doing.” Of course not. A status update is not really a status update, but rather a chance to blast your friends with a small dose of personality to break up the monotony of the day. It’s fun, it’s a challenge to be creative, and it’s a chance to stay connected with a community.
My feeling is that this would make a fine satirical cartoon inside the New Yorker. But to give it the cover? Not so sure about that.
Understandably, the Obamas ain’t pleased, finding it tasteless and degrading. The fear is that this image, widely distributed, may give credence to the misinformation going around about the couple. As someone put it to me, “this plays into the suspicions of the morons who ‘don’t do nuance.’” To which I replied: “Since when has the New Yorker cared about those folks?”
People will be talking about this cover, and though it may not reach the level attained by Saul Steinberg’s “New Yorker’s View of the World” or Maira Kalman’s “New Yorkistan,” it will be getting the magazine some attention. So, perhaps as far as the magazine is concerned, it’s effective communication… but it’s also requiring the reader/listener to bring a lot of context to the table.
* Late update: in the interest of “Equal Time,” Edge of the American West offers this:
I am currently teaching a writing course, and a day after explaining compound sentences, and minutes after preparing a lecture on eliminating wordiness, I picked up Philip Roth’s A Plot Against America and came across the following mammoth and dazzling sentence.
“Elizabeth, New Jersey, when my mother was being raised there in a flat over her father’s grocery store, was an industrial port a quarter the size of Newark, dominated by the Irish working class and their politicians and the tightly knit parish life that revolved around the town’s many churches, and though I never heard her complain of having been pointedly ill-treated in Elizabeth as a girl, it was not until she married and moved to Newark’s new Jewish neighborhood that she discovered the confidence that led her to become first a PTA “grade mother,” then a PTA vice president in charge of establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and finally the PTA president, who, after attending a conference in Trenton on infantile paralysis, proposed an annual March of Dimes dance on January 30 – President Roosevelt’s birthday – that was accepted by most schools.”
While this sentence is not a-typical for Roth, it certainly is for the most of us. It’s important to note that it does not break any grammatical rules (it isn’t even a run-on), and that even my overly-sensitive grammar check didn’t have a problem with it.
I shared it with my students to illustrate that run-on doesn’t necessarily mean long, and to point to the fact that wordiness is not simply about the amount of words, but the meaning of the words: Roth has no redundancies here.
Peter O’Toole, on Fresh Air, telling Terry Gross about shooting the dangerous scene pictured above for Lawrence of Arabia.
I love how O’Toole takes her question and turns it into a narrative, reveling in the details, painting a picture, and ending with a bang. As is often the case, Gross asks a follow-up question that leads to a coda by O’Toole that sums up not only the moment and the story, but also his entire approach to life.
A while ago, I made my first trip to Comerica Park, the stadium where my beloved Detroit Tigers play their home games. I say “play their home games” because to me, Tiger Stadium will always be their true home, even if in the future it’s left only partially standing. I grew up about an hour from the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and my trips to that grimy cathedral were always something special. The place was beautifully disgusting, crusted with the cheers (and spit) of generations of faithful. Above all, it had character so palpable that it didn’t matter if half your view of the field was obstructed.
Tiger Stadium 
photo credit: hassgocubs
I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.
So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.
Comerica Park photo credit: kw111786
As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.
Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.
Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.
The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.
Comerica Park Scoreboard photo credit: McPhloyd
One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.
At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.
Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.
At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.
The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.
Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the final in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.
Since golf began being widely played during the 19th century until sometime in the middle of the twentieth, clubs had shafts of wood, not metal, certainly not graphite. The heads of clubs were slivers of metal about the thickness of a frying pan, the size of a silver dollar and had only a rumor of a “sweet spot.” A comparison might be playing tennis with an old-style 80-square-inch wooden racket strung with cat gut. Golf balls were originally stuffed with feathers (called “featheries”).
Today, the technology that goes into golf clubs and balls is seriously NASA-like. But without going into any more detail about polymers and titanium, let me get straight to the point: from the wooden clubs of the past to today’s clubs that amount to swingable periodic tables, something rather interesting has failed to change, namely golfer’s scores. The average amateur score is stuck at about 100, which stinks. (Almost everyone who golfs stinks at golf, myself included.)
Is it easier to hit the ball farther and straighter with hi-tech clubs? Yes. But if you then practice less it cancels out. Thus universal mediocrity on the links.
Perhaps readers can sense where I’m going for the writing tie-in. What if all the tech-centered promises of usefulness and openness and rethinking of pedagogical frameworks that we all talk about so much have downsides that cancel out any real improvements for young people learning to communicate? In golf, you might just as well play with a crisply rolled umbrella in your hand instead of a $400, wind-tunnel-tested science experiment UNLESS YOU HAVE A GOOD, REPEATABLE SWING. In regard to writing and reading in the web-world (yes, including “web 2.whatever we’re up to now”) is any amount of access or connectivity or integrated learning or p2p or interactivity or blogging or Wiki-ing going to make a difference – or rather, is the difference worth it – if it comes at the cost of implicitly discrediting the fact that there is no substitute for sitting down and reading a whole book? Lots of whole books. Yes, hours of time with just you and the (paper) pages. It is empowering for students to direct their own learning, but how impotent is a mind left without at least some relatively deep reading? Blogs keep us connected to those who share our various interests, but how disconnected from the human spirit are we without having read great novels? How can one really appreciate good writing if the most challenging thing one reads is cac.ophony.org?
I’m trying to be a little provocatively anti-tech here, and I ask: Workers of the Post-Book Techmad Connectiverse Freedom World – are you united? Is it OK that people don’t read books and that we imply that anything that takes so long is old-fashioned, unconnected, Luddistic and lame?
Happy US Open viewing!
Extras: Best golf instruction book: Harvey Pennick’s Little Red Book. Best golf-based literature: P. G. Wodehouse, Heart of a Goof.
Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the second in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.
One of the enduring paradoxes of golf as played by amateurs is the huge and hugely disproportionate emphasis placed on the drive. That’s the first shot on a hole, hit off a tee instead of from the grass, with the biggest, longest club in the bag. It is a powerful feeling, and often looks great too, when you smack a ball way, way down the fairway just where you wanted it, bringing a sense of satisfaction that must somehow be tied up with the primal urge to demonstrate one’s physical prowess to other would-be alpha males. Of course, most drives, even ones that go far, do not go far in the right direction. And when the monster-drive-that-almost-was ends up in the woods or in three-inch long grass, you’ve hurt yourself far more with your strong-man indulgences than if you’d have sacrificed distance for accuracy. These indisputable facts, however, seem to have approximately zero effect on the minds of most amateur golfers. As I write there are thousands of (mostly) men wasting $200-300 on drivers whose heads (the part that hits the ball) are almost exactly the same size (at 460 cm3) as a pint glass.
In the end, golf is a game of less-than-inches. About half of the normal hacker’s shots will actually take place on or around the green (the short grass where the hole is) when the ball is probably less than twenty yards from the cup. And thus the timeless phrase, “Drive for show, putt for dough.” (A variant I think I actually prefer was suggested to me by Tom: “It’s not how you drive, it’s how you arrive.”) When you need to hit the ball just 20 yards (a chip) or roll it just 10 feet (a putt) what happens is not only more difficult, but much more important than the drive. Only dedicated practice can yield even occasional success when faced with greenside subtleties. Many times I have played golf with old men – really old, not middle aged – who just tap the ball down each fairway while my pals and I are wailing away from the tee and then trudging into the woods in search of an uncooperative ball (which we will then of course try to hit as hard as possible from under a rock, giving in again to the Siren song of the heroic). At the end of the round, we find that the eighty-year-old has shot his age while we’ve stumbled into the unsatisfactory upper-nineties. The difference is that we have cool clubs and he has a good swing. We have a giant dictionary and updated thesaurus on our desk, if you will, but he knows how to write.
The point is: do sweat the small stuff – which brings me to writing. Mark Twain addressed this point when he said something like “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” I still (cringingly) remember writing “poems” in middle school classes and figuring that the more multi-syllabic adjectives I could shove into the description of something the better. Good poetry must mean using superficially intense, longish words right? This was not unlike equating your golf prowess with your expensive, grotesquely large driver: an attempted shortcut that usually yields really embarrassing results. To get good at using metaphor a never-ending, effort. To craft a truly clear and useful sentence can ultimately take hours. Whether at its more basic levels (making sure you have an antecedent for a pronoun, subject-verb agreement) or in the mysterious and elusive quest for a meritorious style, what matters is not the flashy phrasing but the effective communication of your worthwhile perceptions, ideally in a way that effects or informs your reader in salutary ways. A golf shot starts with envisioning exactly how and where you intend the ball to fly or roll. A piece of writing begins with envisioning what information you want to convey. The good shot and the good essay are thus both instances of successful translation, and neither comes easy, and neither can be purchased.
(Another crazy and endearing thing about golf – though not so much like writing – is that the best professionals sometimes make very stupid, very costly mistakes. Read about an infamous instance.
What would it look like if Honest Abe had PowerPoint at his disposal on that fateful day in 1863?
Quite possibly, this.
Its creator, Peter Norvig, also describes his rationale here, and considers the value of PowerPoint in “PowerPoint: Shot with its own bullets,” which was published in The Lancet.
We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bullet-pointed bathwater, but the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation might prove useful for those discussing with students (or colleagues) what makes for good (and bad) PowerPoint.
