One of my favorite things lets me share a few of my favorite things

I love my wordpress. It lets me share my favorite things more easily than I can on the rest of my site…and speaking of my favorite things, dig this:

Students: Take note, notes tools online

Check out Web Worker Daily for several different on-line notebooks.
Looks handy.

betterworld.com

Imagine my surprise upon checking my mail at school and finding a book in my mailbox. OK, you say, not so surprising, Riemer, you do teach English and no doubt receive the occcasional book in the mail, unsolicited even. True, but not this book. Not Must we mean what we say? by Stanley Cavell. I mean I already own the book, and it is an unusual book even for an English teacher to own. Probably everyone who owns it teaches, but just as probably, not many people own it. In short, it matches well (as they say on Iron Chef). I just want to let everyone know that the kind folks at betterworld.com sent me this great book without my knowing. And it was a nice surprise. And now I have an extry copy. Would you like it? Let me know. Find out more about betterworld.com here. I will be buying books there. Find out about Must we mean here.

Update on the blogosphere’s perceived threat to MSM

Ian has some interesting comments on the post below, “On the blogosphere’s perceived threat to the MSM,” here’s a sampling:

Anyone can be a blogger. Anyone can offer an opinion. Anyone can practice criticism. The net, at one level, is the great leveler. Now all those new writers face the same problem every newspaper faces with none of the resources. How do you get people to read you? The newspapers fail when people are no longer interested in what they have to say. And the bloggers only succeed when they’re saying something wants to hear. That’s econ 101.

Read Ian’s entire response in comments.

The blogosphere’s perceived threat to MSM

By David W. Riemer

Poor Richard Schickel, apparently there is a “guy from car parts” after his job. Since the film/book critic’s piece (shouldn’t he choose one?) on the lack of qualifications of blogger cum book reviewers (“Not everybody’s a critic”read it here) fails to cite one offending source from the blogosphere that illustrates the genesis of his discontent with blog book reviews, I guess I’ll have to Google “book review blog car parts guy” to find out what it is he’s complaining about precisely. But in the midst of the slow, twisting-in-the-wind demise of the Los Angeles Times, this particular bleat about the blogosphere’s inferiority to the Times and other old media rings particularly hollow.

The very site of Schickel’s complaints makes clear the problem. As I alluded to earlier, Schickel is a regular LA Times film and book reviewer whose op/ed piece is running in the newly combined Sunday Opinion/Book Review section. I’m confused. Is Schickel qualified to write opinion pieces? According to Schickel, criticism goes beyond opinion (we agree on this). Is this piece opinion, criticism, a review of the NY Times article that gave rise to his flustered peroration? What? Schickel is clearly upset, the Times is confused, and I am amused.

I’m not really that much of a free-market guy, but this is clearly an instance of markets at work, both in the case of the bleeding-out subscripton base of the Times and in the case of information consumers using the web. Schickel decries the lack of credentials of blogger/reviewers compared to luminaries such as Saint-Beuve, Edmund Wilson, and Orwell. I would point out, not maliciously, but to his point, that Schickel does not hold up well to the inevitable comparisons he invites. And although I don’t know where to find him, I suspect the car parts guy might fall short, too. The appeal to authority doesn’t work in the current state of information markets. I coordinate a multimedia magnet school, and one of our jobs is to educate young people about the authority and usefulness of different sources of information.

Schickel grouses about the democratization of information that the Internet represents:

Let me put this bluntly in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism–and its humble cousin, reviewing–is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sese of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work…

While one may agree with Schickel’s sentiments, that will not change the new territory that the web is operating in. To obsessively fixate on the inferior nature of bloggers’ work in reviewing reveals a deep, dare I say, conservative longing for the status quo ante. Schickel suggests that criticism forms a conversation, or dialogue, through the work of art and the criticism, that continues through the ages. Weblogs perform a more fleeting, but to those who take the time to participate, interesting form of exchange of ideas. By being informed consumers of information, those who seek criticism on the web can find what they’re looking for. It may or may not be Saint-Beuve, or Wilson, or Shickel, or even Riemer, but it will be what it is. And that is how the world actually operates.

Want to read two excellent reviews of Shakespeare criticism? Visit this blogger’s Amazon reviews: Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare and Northrop Frye on Shakespeare

My G-g-g-generation

By David W. Riemer

“The generation gap.” The phrase still resonates in my generation with a soundtrack provided by the Who (an old rock band): “…t-t-t-talkin’ about my generation…”; “won’t get fooled again!” Along with Roger Daltrey’s wailing vocals and Pete Townshend’s power chord bravado, I hear the echoes of other ghosts: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” “Fight the power!” “**** the man!” Just a few problems, though. The Who, whose landmark album, “Who’s Next”, featured cover art of the band zipping up their tight jeans after having apparently relieved themselves on some concrete bunker/monolith in the midst of a barren wasteland (Take that, monolith!), those rebels the Who, as I was saying, now supply the theme music to the CSI suite of crime investigation shows. That’s showing the man. Thirty, forty years ago, these guys were feared by my elders as cultural barbarians, Dionysian dysfunctionals, threats to the established order. Now they serve as an opening act for Led Zeppelin’s (another old rock band) ode to the Cadillac, “Black Dog”—a rowdy, rockin’, guitar-riff-on-testosterone-masquerading-as-a-song now dedicated to selling cars in an ad campaign presumably targeted at people over thirty. Sic transit gloria.

What do these musings have to do with anything? Well, at a high school they have a lot to do with the whole institution. This is a place that forcibly brings the generations together into a close and potentially meaningful relationship. And with a little understanding on both sides, the dynamics of the generation gap can help us understand each other a little better and help deepen us in the business of this place: learning. (This piece originally appeared in La Yuca, the student newspaper of Verdugo Hills High School, where I teach.)

I never thought when I was in high school (you really should see my high school yearbook photos) that I would end up being the guy (grouchy old man) who locked the gates on young people trying to get into a school after a bell had rung. Man, what a sell-out to my radical, hippie, commie-loving roots. But through a meandering path of decisions and circumstances, that’s what I do most days at 8:00 a.m., or thenabouts. I’m not grouchy, of course, not that old, either, but I do lock the gates on latecomers. And I do think that those who are late, and especially those who are habitually and chronically late, have some important lessons to learn. In first grade, you learned how to tell time; by tenth grade, you should know what time means. As a teenager, I also thought all this was stupid. There is the essence of the generation gap: both sides of the divide stand firmly on their respective ground, convinced that they are right. And both sides generally fail utterly in recognizing the standoff in all of its manifestations. But there is case after case of this issue in any given school day.

It occurs to me that the oldsters will always think the youngsters look silly—or wrong. Their hair, or lack of it; their clothes, or lack of them; their decorations—tattoos, piercings. The hair thing is pretty much over—heck, I even cut mine recently—and there are plenty of slick, razored scalps shining on both sides of the generational chasm. Clothes have probably always been a divisive issue. I know some of my generation’s (and my own) fashion choices were, er, questionable, shall we say? I remember cultivating a rotation of variously faded 501’s, looking for just the right wear patterns, washing them excessively. Coupled with the de riguer white cotton tee shirt, topped by the unbuttoned Pendleton, my friends and I must have looked like a band of potential recruits for a street-based crime organization (gang). All we had to do was button that top button and exchange the Levi’s for some Dickies. But we knew where our waistlines were, and our choices in underwear style and provider were not a matter of public record. As to decorations, those belonged on cakes, not your arms and legs. Earrings went in your ears (one if you were a male)—not your nose or belly button, much less anywhere near your organs of procreation. Art was done on canvas, not human skin. Tattoos were the province of drunken sailors and convicts. So maybe we have come a long way. Then again, maybe we made a wrong turn. A sensitive person can understand both possibilities.

Let’s not even talk about music. That’s a subject for another post.

Which brings me to the larger point. Teachers hate to admit it, but we are the conservators of culture. Many if not most teachers have a liberal tilt, but we work in an institution that has as its underlying purpose the, dare I say it, PRESERVATION OF CIVILIZATION. Yes, friends, in many ways we are like those Irish monks in the monastery, feverishly scribing away, trying to preserve the past in the midst of a barbarian storm swirling around outside our locked gates. We tried unlocking those gates when I was in high school and the jury is still out on the open-campus, all-the-world’s-a-school experiment I was part of. I mean somebody’s got to read the books and someone has got to get the young people to sit still long enough to do that. And that somebody is us. So I will continue to lock the gates and to recite Blake’s lyrics to teenagers: “Tyger, tyger, burning bright…” And in the background I know the soundtrack well by now (cue up Who’s Next): “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss…Won’t get fooled again!” Must be time for CSI.

Why I am a Luddite

By David W. Riemer

Last year—or was it the year before?—I opined in these very pages (vented is more like it) on the downside of cell phones. I still loathe them. But it has occurred to me that cell phones, for all of their faults and obnoxiousness, are merely one component in a technological plague of biblical proportions. Who needs locusts when you have BlackBerries (used to be food), PDA’s, iPods, MP3 players, TiVo, web-access on those pernicious cell phones (not to mention video on cell phones, iPods, etc.), satellite dish TV, HDTV, satellite radio, you-name-it tech gizmos? As the coordinator of the school’s Multimedia Communications Magnet, this may sound heretical, but I think we are drowning in a sea of irrelevant, unconnected, mostly trivial information, and drowning is not a good thing. (This piece originally ran in La Yuca, the student newspaper at Verdugo Hills High School, where I teach.)

Instant information is not necessarily a good thing. All of these devices extend the reach and speed of information. But there is such a thing as too much information, and there exists a fundamental and crucial need to be able to distinguish good information from bad information or disinformation. And being able to get information quickly is not as important as getting information correctly. The dangers of instantaneous information are well-illustrated in the case of the recent West Virginia coal mine disaster, where a misunderstood radio communication was quickly spread by cell phone, raising the hopes of family and friends that the miners had been found alive. As we now know, those calls were based on incorrect information and the hopes raised were cruelly dashed by the truth, which took time and careful inquiry to establish.

Also, these devices are classic swords of Damocles: they cut two ways. On one hand, they connect people to information and other people. On the other hand, they isolate individuals from those around them and intrude on common courtesy and consideration for others, coarsening our already crass social mores. Curmudgeon that I am, I believe the negatives far outweigh the positives in this case. The iPod is the perfect example of the isolating quality of technology. Having taught high school for 18 years, I am painfully aware of the fact that many teenagers are isolated and alienated. (And I am sympathetic. Heck, seeing all these people walking around having a party in their own head, listening to gosh-knows-what on their iPods makes me feel isolated and alienated.) But do we really need an entertainment device that cuts the user off from any meaningful interaction with the rest of the world?

In this technological brave new world, our sense of public and private are consistently being undermined and denied. People privatize what used to be a public experience, listening to music, and in the process they completely isolate themselves from others. Similarly, the cell phone—sorry, I can’t help myself—makes public a previously private activity. Remember phone booths, those quaint devices that kept your private drivel neatly separated from my sensitive sensibilities? If you don’t remember phone booths…oh, forget it. This fogey gives up.

And honestly, when people tell me, “TiVo has changed my life!” or just as bad, “I couldn’t live without TiVo!” I worry. Not for them. They are lost causes. Oh, no, my scope is grander than that. I worry for society itself. Which is to say I worry for myself, because I have to live with these nuts. Really, television is not important enough for me to have to be able to watch everything I possibly could watch at my convenience. In fact, I believe that every television program I miss is a good thing. No doubt I was doing something more important and useful.

Do you know the origins of the word, “saboteur”? A saboteur is one who engages in sabotage, the intentional destruction of property—most typically machinery. The word comes from the wooden shoes worn by Dutch peasants—“sabots.” The act of sabotage was coined when the Dutch peasants destroyed mill machinery by throwing their wooden shoes into the gears, stopping the machinery. Have you heard of the Luddites? Here is a description of their origins and practices from Wikipedia. I know, I know. An online encyclopedia? You’ve given up, Riemer! But I know the information to be correct from my considerable, book-based research, and I believe in citing sources:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (For more about the Luddites, click on this link): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites

The Luddites were a social movement of English workers in the early 1800s who protested – often by destroying textile machines – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution that they felt threatened their jobs. The movement – which began in 1811 – was named after a probably mythical leader, Ned Ludd. For a short time the movement was so strong that it clashed in battles with the British Army. Measures taken by the government included a mass trial at York in 1813 that resulted in many death penalties and transportations.

The English historical movement has to be seen in its context of the harsh economic climate due to the Napoleonic Wars; but since then, the term Luddite has been used to describe anyone opposed to technological progress and technological change. For the modern movement of opposition to technology, see neo-luddism.

I hereby declare myself a neo-luddite. And regret to note the Luddites lost.

Some Luddite Links:

Thomas Pynchon’s excellent 1984 musings: “Is It OK to be a Luddite?”
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html