Not surprisingly, the Smilin’ J interview on WTF has drawn a lot of response, virtually all of it negative. The Vatican News did an interview with Richard Dawkins that had much the same result… I only read the first handful of the SJ comments, and for all I know meaningful dialogue has since ensued, and maybe even a few supportive voices have been found. Both would be nice. Unlikely, but nice. In any case, I’ll provide my own take.
There are some issues worth discussing. First, SJ does tidily wrap up all sorts of critical thought —theory, in ironic quotes—into a nice neat bundle and tosses it on the compost, based on its content, which he finds lacking. My own mixed feelings on this material are well known to the VCA, but I’m more inclined to vilify based on the material’s incomprehensibility than its meritriciousness. I have honestly found interesting ideas in the slag heaps of some of this impenetrable prose, which does not excuse its impenetrability but does question how meretricious it might actually be. My objection to using the material in LD has mostly been that the material is not suitable for its high school audience, and that the vast unwashed of 15-year-olds being introduced to philosophy are better served with more traditional and accessible texts. This does not burden that traditional and accessible material with the value of being more true, which is another issue altogether; it simply admits the obvious that philosophy is a difficult subject, and if we seriously wish to engage young students in it, we need to do so in such a way that it will, indeed, engage them. This is not so much teaching scales before you teach Chopin, as it is reading Seuss before you read Shakespeare. Your enjoyment and appreciation skills improve as you move “up” a theoretical ladder of difficulty. It would be an iffy proposition to start high up on that ladder, without having yet developed those enjoyment and appreciation skills; growing into those skills means enjoyment and appreciation all along the way. This is hardly innovative pedagogy.
Of course, there are those who claim that the material is not “above” the best of the LDers, and should not be banned just because it is not populist. This is arguable on a number of counts, but even accepting that there might be high schoolers to whom Derrida is no more challenging than a Dagwood cartoon, there is still the question of engaging in a discourse that cannot be fully understood: I don’t think anyone claims that ALL high schoolers are capable of deconstructing the great deconstructer, for instance. A desire to win an argument should be premised on setting groundwork where the argument can, indeed, be won. Throwing a lot of material around that only one person in the room (possibly) understands doesn’t sound like much of a strategy for anything except obfuscation, which is obviously antithetical to education, even if it does “win” the round. Winning, in this situation, would have been all that it achieved. No brain cells would have been stirred in the process.
Frankly, I do not think that, until we all have read all the philosophy, past and modern, that JS has, we can engage him directly on the issue of truth in philosophy, at least on the academic level. I am from the school (the Menickites) that believes that ultimate truth in philosophy is, in fact, science. Or is in science fact, to be more precise. I talk about that a little in Caveman, and I’ll get around to it more directly at some future date. In any case, I have no intentions of becoming an academic philosopher, or a student of academic philosophy, as in knowing all about all the great (or stinky) philosophers of all time. So I really can’t address that aspect of SJ’s interview. In other words, I agree with him on the consequences of using this material, but I cannot engage him on what he claims are the causes. Although honestly, I doubt if he disagrees with my claims, and it’s just that he wasn’t making those claims himself in the interview.
The second interesting point of the interview, which Duby took SJ to task on, is the disdain for first- and second-year judges, and those same folks as assistant coaches without portfolio. Or, I guess, college coaches in general, if you wish to read a full menu from the implication. Since I am on record as placing assistant coaches on a par with the minor demons of Milton, I would seem to agree with SJ’s opinion here, but I don’t know if I do. What I am against is coaches who hire college students to provide positions if not complete cases to automata high schoolers, and then who send those “assistant” coaches into rounds to flow the competition, all in aid of a bigger trophy at the end of the day. I am also against college students attempting to achieve high school glory a little too late, who do so by finding malleable Trilbys on their own and feeding them material borrowed from their college courses, and then showing up week after week at debate tournaments (and on WTF) to push their theories of debate on the general public, molded in the hot forge of being a second-rate high schooler always on the brink of getting a TOC bid. Now, okay, this is a little cold, and stereotypical, and not completely true, but I have historically run up against the least resolutional arguments and the most erratic judging from college kids who were almost good high school debaters and who don’t seem to fit in at college now and prefer hanging around with high school people. The words “Grow up!” come to mind here, at least for this latter group. I would also direct those words to the adult coaches pulling the strings the the former group. Unlike SJ, I don’t believe these college students should be arrested on sight and banned from the back of the room, but I do feel that they need to be perceived as what they are. A balance of judges is required in the pool, and use of that balance in a neutral albeit meaningful way. My solution at Bump, of course, was to create community rankings of the judges, putting As into bubbles and mixing As and Bs equally in the outround pools. This seemed to satisfy the mob.
The idea of assistant coaches ruining LD seems to be a major theme of the Legion of Doom (which, SJ says, is far from rendered moot by the new NFL rules, but nonetheless seems to be as dormant as a dead bear in a blizzard), and it’s not one I really ever subscribed to. I certainly am against mutual judge preference, but that’s a different thing. SJ subscribes to this assistant coach vilification whole hog, and may in fact be its driving force. In my experience, there just aren’t that many of these people, of either of the stripes I’ve described above, to have that much of an influence except in one small corner of the $ircuit. And since lately I’ve been questioning the true influence of the $ircuit on LD, I’m not thinking it’s all that deadly. But one thing that is true is that these assistant coaches are not spending all their time and energy working with novices. There’s no glory in that, and therefore they’re not giving good educational value for their buck, whether you like them or not, because they’re only applying themselves to very specific competitive contexts. Education of debaters means educating 4 years worth of them, whether they are good, bad or indifferent in rounds. Chauffering a moneyed elite to major tournaments around the country, even in the most well-intentioned and ethical context, does not do that. So even if that’s not what SJ refers to, it is a part of the issue. But, mostly, I think he’s talking about something that just isn’t either that prevalent or that important.
Finally, there is the air of arrogance that is a little thick about the proceedings. Although no stranger to arrogance either in myself or others, I am surprised to see SJ express views that are unrelievedly so. Specifically, it is one thing not to flow rounds, and another thing altogether to claim that it is unnecessary. Those who do inevitably claim that they are more than capable of doing the math in their heads, so to speak, or like SJ that there is something intrinsically wrong with the round that precludes taking notes. I don’t buy it. Yeah, I’m smarter than the average teenager, and often I’m writing down stuff that is fairly unimportant in my assessment of win/loss, but giving off either odor in the round is offensive to the debaters, and if I accept the responsibility of judging then I am willing to accept the formula of proper behavior that accompanies that responsibility; it’s analogous to having debaters wear business suits. I am reminded of one of my more sketchy varsity debaters in his first judging gig, who called for a runner to take his ballot after the NC because, as he said to me in explanation, as far as he was concerned the round was over and the winner was clear. I did refrain from hitting him over the head with a frying pan, but only just. I would like to think that I wait to hear the whole round before making a decision, but if you’ve ever judged, you know as well as I do that there are cases where that is not necessary. But you owe it to the debaters to act as if that is the case. They’re doing a job of work up there, and as long as they’re seriously working at it, I need to at least appear to be seriously working at it on my end, even if my mind is already made up, although I will keep my mind open till the end, because you never know. It’s a matter of simple respect, like their wearing business clothes. I do my best to listen to everything, and heed everything, regardless of its content; I am here to judge that content, but I need to know what it is—all of it—first. I want the debaters to believe that happened, for their own self-respect, if nothing else. In those situations where last year’s TOC winner hits a novice who’s never won a round in a random pairing, that novice deserves a respectful round from both his opponent and from me, even though all three of us might know the result of that round the minute we read the schematic. For many debaters, the judge’s looking busy is important. A judge who doesn’t flow doesn’t look busy. Which means that the judge is not doing what the debater thinks is important. In this case, I think that thing—taking complete notes—is worth the debater thinking it’s important, and therefore worth the judge doing it. Even when he doesn’t really have to, because he’s smart enough to retain all the germane material in his head. It just goes with the territory.
Mostly, of course, I agree with SJ on LD, which is why I was for a short while the Legion’s poster boy. What he’s asking for is that people argue resolutions in rounds, looking for and supporting the truth of their side. This leads to constructive dialogue and great education. This is major. Where we disagree is in some of the smaller side business. But that side business, once it’s printed up, must be considered. For all practical purposes, SJ has now created the longest judge paradigm on record (unless you count this blog). So be it. If I were a debater, I would want him to be adjudicating the round. I just wish he were a little less…serious. It must come from not reading any pomo. Maybe we should all chip in and get him some Derrida for Valentine’s Day. That and some chocolate. That should do the trick.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Monday, January 22, 2007
I own a Bears tee shirt for no readily discernible reason, hence I am ready for the Super Bowl. Meanwhile:
There is, unfortunately, a word spectate. You may say, with impunity—as recently did one of the Sailors—that you wish to spectate a practice round, or at least you can say it with whatever impunity is derived from Web 11, considered by many to be a reliable authority.
I have just thrown my copy of Web 11 out of the window.
Meanwhile, in the continuing annals of Kant, we can add to what we’ve already said that one a priori piece of knowledge that we are capable of intuiting is the concept of space. That is, using nothing but our reasoning, we are able to establish that there is a place that is the mind, where all that reasoning is taking place, and a place that is not the mind, that is outside of the mind. That place outside of the mind is space. This is not space in the Star Trek final-frontier sense, although the magnitude if not exactly the (physically questionable) infinity of that space is included in the concept, but simply the space outside ourselves. Which does just happen to be (physically questionably) infinite. Which is something additional, a synthesis that, using only reason, we are able to grok about space (although Manny never uses the word grok in the Critique of Pure Reason, as far as I can determine; nor does he use spectate, thank goodness). Of course, as we intuit a place outside the mind a priori, we also obviously intuit the mind, a priori. (Manny uses the phrase a priori the way some of the Sailors use the word like, although probably not for the same reasons.) As bedtime reading goes, Kant is the cat’s whiskers. More or less.
This past weekend was one of odds and ends. Prepping some new material for this week’s meeting at the school, running through all the old emails and catching up, backing up to disks, that sort of thing. I’m in the process of sorting through whom we’ll send to CFL Grands, organizing the trips to Newark and Scarsdale, haranguing the Sailors about parent judging, all the usual fandango. And I’m going to have to start thinking seriously about Districts soon, both in corralling the Districtees and in putting together our own Huddish entry. Saturday I went over to put in the trophy order, so the wheels are now officially turning. There was a small moment last year during the Red Light brouhaha when I was considering retiring from district responsibilities, but I was talked out of it. Biggest mistake of 2006!
And, finally, I will mention that last night I watched Empire Records, which I had never heard of until it popped up on Netflix. It’s something of a poor man’s High Fidelity but I do have to admit that it eventually won me over. Considering that practically every movie I’ve watched for the last month has been a total turkey, it was nice to have something to relieve the grimness. Of course, the night before watching this I had watched Follow the Fleet, so you know I’ve been doing my best to find real entertainment in this turkey drought. Let’s face the music and dance, eh? Comparing the two films, one could say that musicals have changed in 60 years, maybe a little. Judge for yourself.
I have just thrown my copy of Web 11 out of the window.
Meanwhile, in the continuing annals of Kant, we can add to what we’ve already said that one a priori piece of knowledge that we are capable of intuiting is the concept of space. That is, using nothing but our reasoning, we are able to establish that there is a place that is the mind, where all that reasoning is taking place, and a place that is not the mind, that is outside of the mind. That place outside of the mind is space. This is not space in the Star Trek final-frontier sense, although the magnitude if not exactly the (physically questionable) infinity of that space is included in the concept, but simply the space outside ourselves. Which does just happen to be (physically questionably) infinite. Which is something additional, a synthesis that, using only reason, we are able to grok about space (although Manny never uses the word grok in the Critique of Pure Reason, as far as I can determine; nor does he use spectate, thank goodness). Of course, as we intuit a place outside the mind a priori, we also obviously intuit the mind, a priori. (Manny uses the phrase a priori the way some of the Sailors use the word like, although probably not for the same reasons.) As bedtime reading goes, Kant is the cat’s whiskers. More or less.
This past weekend was one of odds and ends. Prepping some new material for this week’s meeting at the school, running through all the old emails and catching up, backing up to disks, that sort of thing. I’m in the process of sorting through whom we’ll send to CFL Grands, organizing the trips to Newark and Scarsdale, haranguing the Sailors about parent judging, all the usual fandango. And I’m going to have to start thinking seriously about Districts soon, both in corralling the Districtees and in putting together our own Huddish entry. Saturday I went over to put in the trophy order, so the wheels are now officially turning. There was a small moment last year during the Red Light brouhaha when I was considering retiring from district responsibilities, but I was talked out of it. Biggest mistake of 2006!
And, finally, I will mention that last night I watched Empire Records, which I had never heard of until it popped up on Netflix. It’s something of a poor man’s High Fidelity but I do have to admit that it eventually won me over. Considering that practically every movie I’ve watched for the last month has been a total turkey, it was nice to have something to relieve the grimness. Of course, the night before watching this I had watched Follow the Fleet, so you know I’ve been doing my best to find real entertainment in this turkey drought. Let’s face the music and dance, eh? Comparing the two films, one could say that musicals have changed in 60 years, maybe a little. Judge for yourself.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Coming up: a quiet weekend
According to Kant, all empirical knowledge is conditional and all a priori (reasoned) knowledge is absolute. I just thought I’d point that out, in case you have any cocktail parties planned for the weekend and you run out of chitchat about the upcoming Oscar nominations. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what’s missing in the world today, namely, glittery accolades for the best philosophy of the year. Or best supporting philosophy. Best philosophy adapted from another medium. The whole magoo. We could all show up in our best bibs and tuckers, walking the red carpet, being interviewed by Joan Rivers.
I know. I’m a dreamer. I see things that aren’t and wonder, what time is the next bus to Albuquerque? I’m just that kind of guy.
This weekend is Columbia, which happens annually without any pother on my part, although that could change in the future. Simply put, Chris Palmer, who is the honcho of the Massachusetts Forensic League, has done great work getting various and sundry venues to get their acts together, most noticeably the Bullpups, where field and entry limits were installed making the whole operation manageable and, in my estimation, worthy of its TOC bids. He’s trying to do the same for Columbia. Aside from my old and no longer relevant complaint about the tournament competing with Newark (although honestly, I held my higher level of complaint for those schools who chose Columbia over Newark, thereby not supporting the hard work of the high schools in a high school activity in favor of, well, God knows what), the recent lack of entry limits per school does dilute the pool much like an MHL, which is fine for novices looking for rounds but hardly speaks well of an invitational. In fact, backloading with a handful of schools to buff up the numbers is the second mark of a tournament scoundrel; backloading with your own school to buff up the numbers is the first mark, at least when your motive for doing so is to paint a rosy picture of teeming multitudes to TOC. But I don’t actually think that Columbia is playing any particular game one way or another, they’re just trying to get a tournament going. But from a Sailor perspective, it’s expensive and complicated to attend because of the distance and lack of housing, so it needs to be worth the effort, and I don’t believe presently that it is. If it were to become worth the effort, however, I would feel differently. And if anyone can make it become worth the effort, it’s Chris Palmer. So, we’ll see how that plays out going forward.
Because of the snow around here last night, I ended up not going out as originally planned, so I did manage to post a new Nostrum, making me rather up to date in most of my forensic enterprises. Over the weekend I’ll sort out whatever other odds and ends remain loose, including a bunch of email discussions that need to be addressed. And I’ll sleep in. Twice. And cook. And take naps. And sit by the fire with a cat on my head reading Kant. (My cats are notoriously fanatic about their Kant, and read him every chance they get.)
I know. I’m a dreamer. I see things that aren’t and wonder, what time is the next bus to Albuquerque? I’m just that kind of guy.
This weekend is Columbia, which happens annually without any pother on my part, although that could change in the future. Simply put, Chris Palmer, who is the honcho of the Massachusetts Forensic League, has done great work getting various and sundry venues to get their acts together, most noticeably the Bullpups, where field and entry limits were installed making the whole operation manageable and, in my estimation, worthy of its TOC bids. He’s trying to do the same for Columbia. Aside from my old and no longer relevant complaint about the tournament competing with Newark (although honestly, I held my higher level of complaint for those schools who chose Columbia over Newark, thereby not supporting the hard work of the high schools in a high school activity in favor of, well, God knows what), the recent lack of entry limits per school does dilute the pool much like an MHL, which is fine for novices looking for rounds but hardly speaks well of an invitational. In fact, backloading with a handful of schools to buff up the numbers is the second mark of a tournament scoundrel; backloading with your own school to buff up the numbers is the first mark, at least when your motive for doing so is to paint a rosy picture of teeming multitudes to TOC. But I don’t actually think that Columbia is playing any particular game one way or another, they’re just trying to get a tournament going. But from a Sailor perspective, it’s expensive and complicated to attend because of the distance and lack of housing, so it needs to be worth the effort, and I don’t believe presently that it is. If it were to become worth the effort, however, I would feel differently. And if anyone can make it become worth the effort, it’s Chris Palmer. So, we’ll see how that plays out going forward.
Because of the snow around here last night, I ended up not going out as originally planned, so I did manage to post a new Nostrum, making me rather up to date in most of my forensic enterprises. Over the weekend I’ll sort out whatever other odds and ends remain loose, including a bunch of email discussions that need to be addressed. And I’ll sleep in. Twice. And cook. And take naps. And sit by the fire with a cat on my head reading Kant. (My cats are notoriously fanatic about their Kant, and read him every chance they get.)
Thursday, January 18, 2007
The Big 5-00, a view of tab, all gloves on sale at half price
I am told by the Blogger software that this is my 500th posting. Lawdie, Lawdie, Lawdie. There’s probably enough verbiage here to single-handedly short circuit half the brains in high school forensics. Then again, if I were O’C, my bank book would now read $2.5 million samolians. I’m working for the wrong website.
To celebrate this far from momentous event, there is a new TVFT podcast, a commentary on the highlights of Lexington tab last week. Literally. I’m not sure if my intention is to de-mystify tab or de-mythologize tab or re-humanize tab, but I do feel that there are people who fear to cross the threshold of any tab room for fear of… something. Granted, there are a couple of tab rooms closed for rules purposes, namely Districts and CFL Grands, where everyone is so worried about doing things absolutely by the book that anything that might jeopardize rule adherence is shunned, barred, banned and burned. But normally, aside from the need for quiet so that we can work undistracted when the times arise and rounds need to get out, and aside from not letting random people go through the results if a tournament does not wish it, a closed tab does not mean that the door is closed to visitors, but merely that results will not be shared William Nilliam. I’m all in favor of people popping into tab if they’re the sort of people I might be interested in seeing, or if they have questions, or even if they want to help out (although often the people who offer to help are desperately needed somewhere else, to wit, on the judging floor). I’m even willing to provide the staff of WTF with information for posting for the eagerly awaiting teeming multitudes, provided that I am allowed to give them a good, swift kick in return. As a point of curiosity, in Nostrum tabbing requires chanting in dead languages and the sacrificing of various barnyard animals; this indeed used to be the case, but later, more developed versions of the software have obviated the need for both singing and bloodletting.
And here’s an anomaly. At the Plebe meeting Tuesday, we talked a bit about moral standards from culture to culture. The middies were perfectly content, mostly, to accept that cultures were within their sphere of moral rectitude to punish the theft of a chicken with anything from a small fine to the cutting off of a hand. On the other hand (no pun intended), they all seemed to agree that stealing a chicken was wrong in any culture. In response, I refer you now to my essays on Cognitive Dissonance, You Kant Always Get What You Want, and, most germane of all, “101 Ways to Cook Chicken” (subtitled, “50.5 Ways to Cook Chicken if You’re One-Handed”).
To celebrate this far from momentous event, there is a new TVFT podcast, a commentary on the highlights of Lexington tab last week. Literally. I’m not sure if my intention is to de-mystify tab or de-mythologize tab or re-humanize tab, but I do feel that there are people who fear to cross the threshold of any tab room for fear of… something. Granted, there are a couple of tab rooms closed for rules purposes, namely Districts and CFL Grands, where everyone is so worried about doing things absolutely by the book that anything that might jeopardize rule adherence is shunned, barred, banned and burned. But normally, aside from the need for quiet so that we can work undistracted when the times arise and rounds need to get out, and aside from not letting random people go through the results if a tournament does not wish it, a closed tab does not mean that the door is closed to visitors, but merely that results will not be shared William Nilliam. I’m all in favor of people popping into tab if they’re the sort of people I might be interested in seeing, or if they have questions, or even if they want to help out (although often the people who offer to help are desperately needed somewhere else, to wit, on the judging floor). I’m even willing to provide the staff of WTF with information for posting for the eagerly awaiting teeming multitudes, provided that I am allowed to give them a good, swift kick in return. As a point of curiosity, in Nostrum tabbing requires chanting in dead languages and the sacrificing of various barnyard animals; this indeed used to be the case, but later, more developed versions of the software have obviated the need for both singing and bloodletting.
And here’s an anomaly. At the Plebe meeting Tuesday, we talked a bit about moral standards from culture to culture. The middies were perfectly content, mostly, to accept that cultures were within their sphere of moral rectitude to punish the theft of a chicken with anything from a small fine to the cutting off of a hand. On the other hand (no pun intended), they all seemed to agree that stealing a chicken was wrong in any culture. In response, I refer you now to my essays on Cognitive Dissonance, You Kant Always Get What You Want, and, most germane of all, “101 Ways to Cook Chicken” (subtitled, “50.5 Ways to Cook Chicken if You’re One-Handed”).
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
The taint
I’ve been watching this phenomenon for some time now, and finally reached a point where I can isolate it and, perhaps, understand it. Correct me if I’m wrong.
In the olden days, when dragons roamed the land and portable music players had cassettes in them instead of mp3s, LD cases began with a construct of value and criterion, plus whatever definitions were necessary for meaningful discussion of the topic. This would be followed by what were called contentions or lines of analysis, which were the arguments the debater was offering to support a side of the resolution. The lion’s share of time and energy was spent on these arguments. An argument could be one long, complicated presentation, broken down into easily understood chunks of point and subpoint, or a debater could offer a couple of complementary or even independent arguments to support a position. If I remember correctly, at the time Taft was in the White House, and they had just installed his special supersized bathtub.
Then things changed. Because there was almost from the very beginning a reliance on the V/C construct to help judges evaluate the arguments, and because suddenly there seemed to be debate camps in every Middlesex village and town, not to mention on the moon, under the Atlantic, and presumably in Hobbiton as well, there came through the various lands new emphases on these V/C constructs, made again and again by those to whom these constructs were very important, i.e., the judges who used them to evaluate rounds, and the camp instructors (often the same people) who used them as something to talk about at their institutes when they ran out of ribald stories about the coaches of yore and their heirs and assignees. The shapes of cases began to shift, and instead of a balance of roughly 1/3 setup of construct and 2/3 argumentation, it began to be about half and half construct and argument. In other words, debaters began to devote half their debating time to analysis of how to analyze their debating, and half their debating time to, well, debating. Creative minds could and did wreak havoc with this new allotment of time, and introduced all sorts of off-case, independent, sub-dependent, non-dependent, theory-based, topic-critical, acritical, you-name-it constructs that obviated the need for argumentation, and occasionally even vilified it. Less creative minds simply proffered increasingly muddled V/C constructs at great length, often listing multiple criteria with various rules and regulations for adjudicating a round depending on which criteria/criterion was used for the adjudication, much like an old make-your-own-adventure-game approach, where if you go down this path, this happens, and if you go down that path, that happens. Turn to page 33 to continue, if you know what I mean.
Now, in the present day, there’s a new wrinkle. I’ve been seeing this off and on in the last year or two in Sailor cases, and in the odd round I’d judge, and I saw it again up at Lexington. There is a new tendency to break cases up into three parts. The first part is all that V/C construct stuff, and that’s 1/3 of one’s time allotment. The third and final part is the literal argumentation, i.e., the presentation of a position of some sort on the resolution. This, too, is 1/3 of one’s time allotment. In the middle, and taking up the other third of one’s time allotment, is something else. It’s not really V/C, and it’s certainly not argumentation. I’m not quite sure what it is, but mostly it seems to be some hifalutin explanation of the proceedings separate both from V/C and from argumentation. It is, in a word, the taint, as the old boys hangin’ around the pool hall would have it. I mean, ‘t ain’t one, and ‘t ain’t t’other. It contains no voting issues to speak of. I guess it’s something of a spin-off of all that off-case, independent, sub-dependent, non-dependent, theory-based, topic-critical, acritical, you-name-it stuff, finally given its own home in a case. So now the so-called sophisticated case one wants to emulate (assuming that one is a blithering follower of fashion) has three parts: V/C construct, arguments and taint.
Which makes me happy. As a word person, I find it useful to pin things down. You may find this antediluvian and reductive in the pejorative sense, but I find that, at least in this instance, knowing what something is helps me understand it better. I can imagine some future world in which taints—which contain no measurable, vote-inducing content—make sense to me, and I am encouraging the mighty Sailors to include them in their cases. But then again, I can also imagine some future world where we all travel to work with jetpacks on our back like escapees from some Depression-era world’s fair. In any case, I have now made two additions to the glossary on the right. One of them is the taint. The other one isn’t.
In the olden days, when dragons roamed the land and portable music players had cassettes in them instead of mp3s, LD cases began with a construct of value and criterion, plus whatever definitions were necessary for meaningful discussion of the topic. This would be followed by what were called contentions or lines of analysis, which were the arguments the debater was offering to support a side of the resolution. The lion’s share of time and energy was spent on these arguments. An argument could be one long, complicated presentation, broken down into easily understood chunks of point and subpoint, or a debater could offer a couple of complementary or even independent arguments to support a position. If I remember correctly, at the time Taft was in the White House, and they had just installed his special supersized bathtub.
Then things changed. Because there was almost from the very beginning a reliance on the V/C construct to help judges evaluate the arguments, and because suddenly there seemed to be debate camps in every Middlesex village and town, not to mention on the moon, under the Atlantic, and presumably in Hobbiton as well, there came through the various lands new emphases on these V/C constructs, made again and again by those to whom these constructs were very important, i.e., the judges who used them to evaluate rounds, and the camp instructors (often the same people) who used them as something to talk about at their institutes when they ran out of ribald stories about the coaches of yore and their heirs and assignees. The shapes of cases began to shift, and instead of a balance of roughly 1/3 setup of construct and 2/3 argumentation, it began to be about half and half construct and argument. In other words, debaters began to devote half their debating time to analysis of how to analyze their debating, and half their debating time to, well, debating. Creative minds could and did wreak havoc with this new allotment of time, and introduced all sorts of off-case, independent, sub-dependent, non-dependent, theory-based, topic-critical, acritical, you-name-it constructs that obviated the need for argumentation, and occasionally even vilified it. Less creative minds simply proffered increasingly muddled V/C constructs at great length, often listing multiple criteria with various rules and regulations for adjudicating a round depending on which criteria/criterion was used for the adjudication, much like an old make-your-own-adventure-game approach, where if you go down this path, this happens, and if you go down that path, that happens. Turn to page 33 to continue, if you know what I mean.
Now, in the present day, there’s a new wrinkle. I’ve been seeing this off and on in the last year or two in Sailor cases, and in the odd round I’d judge, and I saw it again up at Lexington. There is a new tendency to break cases up into three parts. The first part is all that V/C construct stuff, and that’s 1/3 of one’s time allotment. The third and final part is the literal argumentation, i.e., the presentation of a position of some sort on the resolution. This, too, is 1/3 of one’s time allotment. In the middle, and taking up the other third of one’s time allotment, is something else. It’s not really V/C, and it’s certainly not argumentation. I’m not quite sure what it is, but mostly it seems to be some hifalutin explanation of the proceedings separate both from V/C and from argumentation. It is, in a word, the taint, as the old boys hangin’ around the pool hall would have it. I mean, ‘t ain’t one, and ‘t ain’t t’other. It contains no voting issues to speak of. I guess it’s something of a spin-off of all that off-case, independent, sub-dependent, non-dependent, theory-based, topic-critical, acritical, you-name-it stuff, finally given its own home in a case. So now the so-called sophisticated case one wants to emulate (assuming that one is a blithering follower of fashion) has three parts: V/C construct, arguments and taint.
Which makes me happy. As a word person, I find it useful to pin things down. You may find this antediluvian and reductive in the pejorative sense, but I find that, at least in this instance, knowing what something is helps me understand it better. I can imagine some future world in which taints—which contain no measurable, vote-inducing content—make sense to me, and I am encouraging the mighty Sailors to include them in their cases. But then again, I can also imagine some future world where we all travel to work with jetpacks on our back like escapees from some Depression-era world’s fair. In any case, I have now made two additions to the glossary on the right. One of them is the taint. The other one isn’t.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
One small kick for [a] man, one giant kick for mankind
There are moments you live for. Giving O’C a good, swift kick in the pants is one of them. This, for me, was the high point of the weekend, and perhaps the year. He was taking a photograph of the Round Robinskis at the time. If only he had been taking a photograph of us! No doubt he’ll never turn his back on me again. For that matter, I’ll be keeping an eye out for him, since revenge on his part is required, and the proverbial cold serving is bound to come sooner or later.
Meanwhile, I’m going to attempt to record a TVFT about the literal tab room experience, talking about some of the stuff that happened over the 4 days of both the invitational and the RR. You might enjoy some of the gory details, and this one was somewhat emblematic of the beast in general. I’ll try to do it today, but God knows when I’ll get it edited, given that there’s a novice-only meeting tonight at the Ship of Hud. Of course, it makes sense to get it out as quickly as possible, so maybe tonight when I get home… I’ve got an awful busy few days ahead, unfortunately.
It was nice to touch base with Burgers and Emcee over the weekend. Catching up with alums is one of the high points of what I do. And we didn’t get snowed in or iced in or any other sort of precipitationed in, which may be a Lexington first. I even finally got to that ice cream place on the corner, which is definitely worth a trip (and which probably never looked appealing in the past because of being snowed in or iced in or some other sort of precipitationed in). From the RR dinner I managed to come up with a new phrase for the glossary, and from a smidge of judging I think I finally managed to isolate a whole new aspect of case-writing. More on them in days to come.
Meanwhile, I’m going to attempt to record a TVFT about the literal tab room experience, talking about some of the stuff that happened over the 4 days of both the invitational and the RR. You might enjoy some of the gory details, and this one was somewhat emblematic of the beast in general. I’ll try to do it today, but God knows when I’ll get it edited, given that there’s a novice-only meeting tonight at the Ship of Hud. Of course, it makes sense to get it out as quickly as possible, so maybe tonight when I get home… I’ve got an awful busy few days ahead, unfortunately.
It was nice to touch base with Burgers and Emcee over the weekend. Catching up with alums is one of the high points of what I do. And we didn’t get snowed in or iced in or any other sort of precipitationed in, which may be a Lexington first. I even finally got to that ice cream place on the corner, which is definitely worth a trip (and which probably never looked appealing in the past because of being snowed in or iced in or some other sort of precipitationed in). From the RR dinner I managed to come up with a new phrase for the glossary, and from a smidge of judging I think I finally managed to isolate a whole new aspect of case-writing. More on them in days to come.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Tempus fugit
I seem to be sucked into a vortex of progressively more incompletion. I say I’ll do something tomorrow, and I do it eleven years later, and I’m actually proud of having completed it at all. I write here that I’ve got such-and-such on the old todo list, and the odds of my doing that such-and-such are often quite on the slim side. The problem is, I don’t know what I’m doing instead. It’s not as if I’m sitting around playing games or something. In fact, one of the things on my todo list is playing some games. I’m not watching a lot of TV. An hour a day, no more, a regular diet of a handful of new shows and a few classics (I just put Fry and Laurie at the top of the Netflix queue, for instance). I’m not sinking into endless sybaritic dining experiences, course after course of lavish dishes accompanied by the finest wines, while a string quartet plinks away on Papa Hadyn in the background. I’m not even wasting all that much time writing this blog, usually, unless I get off on some particular hobbyhorse I feel should be explicated. In other words, I have no idea where the time goes. And I need more of it. Damn.
I recommend the Milan Kundera in last week’s New Yorker, which I read last night (I can’t even keep up with magazines). It’s about world literature, local literature, parochialism, the aesthetics of fiction, and all kinds of good stuff like that. I am adding The Omnivore’s Dilemma to my select reading list over on the right. This is not a book about the horrors of food processing, an update of Upton Sinclair for the 21st Century, although there is plenty of discussion about the horrors of modern agriculture from a holistic ecological perspective. This is much, much more, a meditation on eating, pure and simple. Any book that explains both the history of corn and counterarguments to Peter Singer is worth reading, as far as I’m concerned. I will report that I enjoyed Monster House more than any other movie I’ve seen recently, including all sorts of well-received films that have virtually put me to sleep (I do watch films on weekend nights only, so it’s not as if my time is being sucked away by cinephilia). I have purchased tickets for Curtains based entirely on the out-of-town reviews. Yeah, it’s hardly indicative of a deep love for theatre such as Joe V’s, where he can whistle the infernal airs from every show closing on the first night for the last 20 years, but I’m a mainstreamer who saw all your classics back when they opened, except for maybe Show Boat and Oklahoma, as in, Jeez, I’m not THAT old!
CLG suggests that the recent weather is the result of El Nino. Given the choice of blaming the weather on, well, the weather, or blaming something on George Bush, I will always take the latter course. Except maybe we could blame Iraq on El Nino. That would work.
Tomorrow is Lexington. Tonight, assuming that I do anything I’m planning to do, I should get the data loaded into Classic TRPC. I should also finish the Nostrum I started yesterday, finish the argument form I was talking about, pack up for a smooth exit in the morning and generally get things in order for the four-day weekend. We’ll see.
I recommend the Milan Kundera in last week’s New Yorker, which I read last night (I can’t even keep up with magazines). It’s about world literature, local literature, parochialism, the aesthetics of fiction, and all kinds of good stuff like that. I am adding The Omnivore’s Dilemma to my select reading list over on the right. This is not a book about the horrors of food processing, an update of Upton Sinclair for the 21st Century, although there is plenty of discussion about the horrors of modern agriculture from a holistic ecological perspective. This is much, much more, a meditation on eating, pure and simple. Any book that explains both the history of corn and counterarguments to Peter Singer is worth reading, as far as I’m concerned. I will report that I enjoyed Monster House more than any other movie I’ve seen recently, including all sorts of well-received films that have virtually put me to sleep (I do watch films on weekend nights only, so it’s not as if my time is being sucked away by cinephilia). I have purchased tickets for Curtains based entirely on the out-of-town reviews. Yeah, it’s hardly indicative of a deep love for theatre such as Joe V’s, where he can whistle the infernal airs from every show closing on the first night for the last 20 years, but I’m a mainstreamer who saw all your classics back when they opened, except for maybe Show Boat and Oklahoma, as in, Jeez, I’m not THAT old!
CLG suggests that the recent weather is the result of El Nino. Given the choice of blaming the weather on, well, the weather, or blaming something on George Bush, I will always take the latter course. Except maybe we could blame Iraq on El Nino. That would work.
Tomorrow is Lexington. Tonight, assuming that I do anything I’m planning to do, I should get the data loaded into Classic TRPC. I should also finish the Nostrum I started yesterday, finish the argument form I was talking about, pack up for a smooth exit in the morning and generally get things in order for the four-day weekend. We’ll see.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Hidden Mickey, Warm Noah, Bombarded Termite, Driving Tiger, UDL + MHL, Musical Pot Pourri
O’C apparently thinks he sounds like Minnie Mouse, and that simply isn’t true. He totally sounds like Mickey Mouse. Definitely. Then again, there’s always the Faux’C interview, where he sounds like a crazed leprechaun. What more does this guy want?
Noah G joined us last night. I’ve been working on a generic form for argumentation, and he added a nice helpful piece to the top, and I’ll pass that along here when I fix it up, probably tonight. He also pointed out that, since global warming really won’t destroy the planet until after I’m dead, I should simply sit back and enjoy the nice weather. Always the pragmatist! Meanwhile Robbie seems to be signed up for all sorts of bunches of tournaments, with Noah covering the judging, so the two of them at least are sorted out for the foreseeable. All I have to sort out is the rest of the team.
I’m starting to focus in on sheer speaking skills at the moment. Some people naturally take to bloviating on their feet, while others ease into it more painfully. Plus, there’s that need to crystallize your case in your mind before arguing it, that boiling down to essentials before going into the details. There’s a classic exercise of simply arguing your core thesis, and we did a bit of that last night and we’ll do some more next week. Which will be, entirely, a novice session, concentrating on case-writing and such. I like novice sessions: they don’t allow me to throw golf balls at Termite, as last night’s meeting did, but they are not without their pleasures.
Okay, here's the details: I am not prejudiced in favor of single-contention cases, for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is the difficulty in pulling them off successfully. Good varsity debaters can do so, but this approach is a walking landmine for less experienced folk. And the example of good varsity debaters being what it is, less experienced folk think, Ah, I should be running a one-contention case because So-And-So is really good and runs one-contention cases. No. In golf, there are the white tees and the black tees. The black tees are where the professionals hit their drives. Fifty yards or so closer to the hole, the white tees are where the pikers like me dub their drives. My desire to play golf like Tiger Woods does not delude me into thinking that I can, in fact, play golf like Tiger Woods simply by hitting off the black tee. Or, if he were a debater, running his cases. In my mind, once a debater is successful, anything that works is right, but to switch metaphors, until you can play scales, stop with the ad libbing. Which means, since I know you wanted an explanation, that I get to throw golf balls at Termite. The particular point be illustrated is the ease with which one can defend against one missile vs defending against two.
I haven’t said anything about the trip down to Brooklyn Saturday. Kurt Shelton, who completes the MHL triumvirate of Menick and Cruz, works closely with the NJ UDL, and thus is connected with the NY UDL, so he arranged this communion of the two. We had a good talk with Will Baker, the NY UDL honcho. It’s easy to see the complications of UDLness when you’re actually there in the thick of it, to wit, kids coming from all over the city to compete. Lots of kids. Try to imagine collecting their many dozens and sorting them out and transporting them to an invitational. Very complicated. What we’d like to do is coordinate enough insofar as to at least meet once in the year together, perhaps at the Bronx, which is no more difficult for the city folk to get to than anywhere else, and is a little easier for some of our further-fetched upstaters, but then again, at least for the Sailors, the EBT venue was a piece of cake. This would be simply a blending of the MHL and UDL policy teams, providing some much needed local competition for schools like Lakeland and NFA. Additionally, it would be great for the UDL to sort of pick an invitational, say Monticello, as the one to go to, as they did this year. I was always sort of confused about why UDL would sometimes come to Bump and other times not come, but once you understand the complexity of the beast, the fact that they get to go anywhere outside of the city is pretty impressive. Anyhow, we’ll push for better communication in the future. Everybody will benefit from it.
Of course, the big MHL issue in the tab room remains the vast quantity of Bronx Scientologists. Tabbing an MHL is becoming about as complicated as [insert humorous metaphor here for some very complicated enterprise]. I look forward to Lexington this coming weekend, where the numbers are large enough to just click a button and have the program do all the work while you sit there with the other tabfolk trying to agree whether to listen to Mozart, Oklahoma, Talking Heads or Frank Sinatra. Over the course of a weekend, usually it will be all of the above, and then some. Ahhhh, peace.
Noah G joined us last night. I’ve been working on a generic form for argumentation, and he added a nice helpful piece to the top, and I’ll pass that along here when I fix it up, probably tonight. He also pointed out that, since global warming really won’t destroy the planet until after I’m dead, I should simply sit back and enjoy the nice weather. Always the pragmatist! Meanwhile Robbie seems to be signed up for all sorts of bunches of tournaments, with Noah covering the judging, so the two of them at least are sorted out for the foreseeable. All I have to sort out is the rest of the team.
I’m starting to focus in on sheer speaking skills at the moment. Some people naturally take to bloviating on their feet, while others ease into it more painfully. Plus, there’s that need to crystallize your case in your mind before arguing it, that boiling down to essentials before going into the details. There’s a classic exercise of simply arguing your core thesis, and we did a bit of that last night and we’ll do some more next week. Which will be, entirely, a novice session, concentrating on case-writing and such. I like novice sessions: they don’t allow me to throw golf balls at Termite, as last night’s meeting did, but they are not without their pleasures.
Okay, here's the details: I am not prejudiced in favor of single-contention cases, for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is the difficulty in pulling them off successfully. Good varsity debaters can do so, but this approach is a walking landmine for less experienced folk. And the example of good varsity debaters being what it is, less experienced folk think, Ah, I should be running a one-contention case because So-And-So is really good and runs one-contention cases. No. In golf, there are the white tees and the black tees. The black tees are where the professionals hit their drives. Fifty yards or so closer to the hole, the white tees are where the pikers like me dub their drives. My desire to play golf like Tiger Woods does not delude me into thinking that I can, in fact, play golf like Tiger Woods simply by hitting off the black tee. Or, if he were a debater, running his cases. In my mind, once a debater is successful, anything that works is right, but to switch metaphors, until you can play scales, stop with the ad libbing. Which means, since I know you wanted an explanation, that I get to throw golf balls at Termite. The particular point be illustrated is the ease with which one can defend against one missile vs defending against two.
I haven’t said anything about the trip down to Brooklyn Saturday. Kurt Shelton, who completes the MHL triumvirate of Menick and Cruz, works closely with the NJ UDL, and thus is connected with the NY UDL, so he arranged this communion of the two. We had a good talk with Will Baker, the NY UDL honcho. It’s easy to see the complications of UDLness when you’re actually there in the thick of it, to wit, kids coming from all over the city to compete. Lots of kids. Try to imagine collecting their many dozens and sorting them out and transporting them to an invitational. Very complicated. What we’d like to do is coordinate enough insofar as to at least meet once in the year together, perhaps at the Bronx, which is no more difficult for the city folk to get to than anywhere else, and is a little easier for some of our further-fetched upstaters, but then again, at least for the Sailors, the EBT venue was a piece of cake. This would be simply a blending of the MHL and UDL policy teams, providing some much needed local competition for schools like Lakeland and NFA. Additionally, it would be great for the UDL to sort of pick an invitational, say Monticello, as the one to go to, as they did this year. I was always sort of confused about why UDL would sometimes come to Bump and other times not come, but once you understand the complexity of the beast, the fact that they get to go anywhere outside of the city is pretty impressive. Anyhow, we’ll push for better communication in the future. Everybody will benefit from it.
Of course, the big MHL issue in the tab room remains the vast quantity of Bronx Scientologists. Tabbing an MHL is becoming about as complicated as [insert humorous metaphor here for some very complicated enterprise]. I look forward to Lexington this coming weekend, where the numbers are large enough to just click a button and have the program do all the work while you sit there with the other tabfolk trying to agree whether to listen to Mozart, Oklahoma, Talking Heads or Frank Sinatra. Over the course of a weekend, usually it will be all of the above, and then some. Ahhhh, peace.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Meanwhile, back at the rez
What it boils down to is this, at least from the dinosaur perspective. In the world lately, we’ve seen a lot of examples of bad business. Companies that seem to exist entirely as rip-offs, companies that seem to have no interest in the indirect results of their actions (i.e., ecological impacts), companies that seem to place profits above humanity (outsourcing of production to countries where the labor pool can be exploited at near slavery levels), companies that disrupt communities by their sheer existence (WalMart), etc. There are plenty of these examples, and you can pick and choose among them to find the ones you like the best. And they raise the question: what, exactly, is it reasonable to expect from corporations? How do we evaluate if a corporation is good or bad? Doing good things or bad things? Multinational corporations add a layer of complexity to the issue that is mind-boggling, but nonetheless which must be engaged. What are the obligations of corporations to society? Needless to say, the fulfillment of those obligations by the corporations is, to all extents and purposes, the measure of a corporation’s so-called morality. It is not hard to envision debate and discussion of this material.
What is hard to envision is the false comparison to the moral responsibilities of individuals. If one is proposing a moral conundrum, it has to actually be a conundrum. While we may sit around wondering what to do about Nike and child labor in developing nations, we do not sit around in any sense, practical or philosophical, comparing that problem to the actions of, say, Mike Bietz. Nike and Bietz are apples and oranges, and our struggle to compare them serves no purpose in our understanding of either of them. The struggle takes us down the paths of advanced moral sophistry rather than simple moral explication. But, unfortunately, the wording of the resolution allows no alternative. And much of the arguing that will be done will be addressing the smoke rather than the fire. And that is how good topic areas turn into bad topics.
Tonight is going to be mostly exercises on the ship of Hud. Mini-debates, more impromptus, some general harassment, all the usual business as we prep up for Lexington. Last year my car froze over at Lex, and we had to crawl in through the hatch and drive around for an hour to warm it up enough to open the doors to get out. This year the weather report looks much improved. It won’t be last weekend’s balmy 70 degrees, but at least I’ll be able to get into and out of my car without having to send for the marines.
And I’m hatching what looks like a very nifty end-of-history approach incorporating one of my favorite subjects, World’s Fairs. I even have a book at home called World’s Fairs and the End of Progress., a concept should sound familiar to the VCA. I see an absolutely straight line from the Crystal Palace to the Unisphere that neatly illuminates the post-historical paradigm, while being sort of interesting on its own purely informative merits. It even gets to mention EPCOT; I was recently watching the whole show that includes Disney’s famous last personal broadcast. It paints a picture of the modernist city that is remarkable, and indeed quintessential. The actual EPCOT is nothing if it isn’t a postmodern commentary on that initial vision. Anyhow, the nice thing about this WF idea is that I can do it as a live lecture (I haven’t done one of those on pomo since the original Caveman a couple of years ago) plus a recording plus a nice illustrated essay, a little something for everybody (or nobody, depending on your point of view).
What is hard to envision is the false comparison to the moral responsibilities of individuals. If one is proposing a moral conundrum, it has to actually be a conundrum. While we may sit around wondering what to do about Nike and child labor in developing nations, we do not sit around in any sense, practical or philosophical, comparing that problem to the actions of, say, Mike Bietz. Nike and Bietz are apples and oranges, and our struggle to compare them serves no purpose in our understanding of either of them. The struggle takes us down the paths of advanced moral sophistry rather than simple moral explication. But, unfortunately, the wording of the resolution allows no alternative. And much of the arguing that will be done will be addressing the smoke rather than the fire. And that is how good topic areas turn into bad topics.
Tonight is going to be mostly exercises on the ship of Hud. Mini-debates, more impromptus, some general harassment, all the usual business as we prep up for Lexington. Last year my car froze over at Lex, and we had to crawl in through the hatch and drive around for an hour to warm it up enough to open the doors to get out. This year the weather report looks much improved. It won’t be last weekend’s balmy 70 degrees, but at least I’ll be able to get into and out of my car without having to send for the marines.
And I’m hatching what looks like a very nifty end-of-history approach incorporating one of my favorite subjects, World’s Fairs. I even have a book at home called World’s Fairs and the End of Progress., a concept should sound familiar to the VCA. I see an absolutely straight line from the Crystal Palace to the Unisphere that neatly illuminates the post-historical paradigm, while being sort of interesting on its own purely informative merits. It even gets to mention EPCOT; I was recently watching the whole show that includes Disney’s famous last personal broadcast. It paints a picture of the modernist city that is remarkable, and indeed quintessential. The actual EPCOT is nothing if it isn’t a postmodern commentary on that initial vision. Anyhow, the nice thing about this WF idea is that I can do it as a live lecture (I haven’t done one of those on pomo since the original Caveman a couple of years ago) plus a recording plus a nice illustrated essay, a little something for everybody (or nobody, depending on your point of view).
Monday, January 08, 2007
Are YOU talking to ME???
Questioning authority is not particularly postmodern. Presumably younger people have questioned the authority of older people since time immemorial, prefatory to their taking over those positions of authority themselves. In fact, if there was a perceived process of progress throughout history, this might have been a factor in that process, the challenging of old ideas and either their acceptance or their synthesis into new ideas. Nor is the challenging of the authority of critics particularly newfangled. Writers have complained about critics for at least a few hundred years now, to my own knowledge, and for all I know even Plato grumbled when he read the reviews of Republic in the Athens Daily Tribune. I was reading last night about the Post-Raphaelites, who formed in the early 19th Century quite directly, albeit among other reasons, as a challenge to the art critics of the day. So the idea of a theoretically institutional disregard of critics, or a theoretical disregard of institutional critics, predates even modernism (unless one regards the PRB as early modernists, which is probably not an untenable position).
But in postmodernity it is not simply that there is a disregard or challenge to critical authority, but there is a removal of that authority because we know that critics have achieved it entirely based on the power derived from their special knowledge about their field, as compared to some inherent force of, simply put, good taste. Kant does talk about the aesthetics of art as something objective that we must be trained to appreciate, thus enabling a group of aesthetic overlords or an aesthetic intelligentsia. But this approach to aesthetics has completely broken down in the postmodern condition. We no longer believe in objective beauty, so we no longer accept that there may be people more trained than we to perceive this beauty. The burden on artists is to create art that either incorporates subjective rather than objective beauty into the work, or is interested in issues other than beauty. This is a challenge that Rembrandt, for instance, didn’t have to face.
Last time out I was applying this line of reasoning to the field of movies. My own field, however—books— provides perhaps an even clearer example of what I’m talking about. In the postmodern condition, we don’t rely on critics, or more to the point, everyone’s a critic as bona fide as everyone else. How has that worked in literature?
First of all, we have lost the canon. Not that long ago, there was a collection of books that one simply had to read to be educated. These were the Great Books of Civilization, chosen by generations of academics as the core of knowledge. But the postmodern realization that these were primarily the words of Dead White Men challenged their positions, and the canon was flooded out by the waves of other books from other countries and traditions. Who was to say that only some European males were capable of creating literature? And regardless, books from other traditions and cultures might be more meaningful for a variety of reasons, literary value notwithstanding (which is not to suggest that they are not valuable in a literary sense, only that their proponents were indifferent at times to their literary credibility). So the idea of books selected by some fustian intelligentsia disappeared from the academic landscape. (In fact, those DWM books began to be raked over the coals precisely because of their DWMness. Why wasn’t Dickens more sympathetic to the plight of South African diamond miners, the bastid!!!) And the idea of teachers maintaining the canon was similarly washed away in the flood. There was no longer any power to wield derived from special knowledge of the canon because the Kantian trained aesthetic sense could no longer apply. Other tools, to be found in the (what I think of as semi-literate, language-abusing, unpardonably incomprehensible) bag of pomo teaching tricks, took over in the educational environment. Fortunately there does seem to be a movement toward, dare I suggest it, a post-critical approach to teaching this literature, but the core point of the postmodern critical approach in the first place, that is, the critiquing of the provenance of the old canon, is a fixed and finished reality. Whether the language in the classroom is easy or hard to understand, French-sourced or something else, is merely a matter of fashion, which answers to no dialectic other than the fickle mind of the human animal.
As a body of prescribed literature, and ways of teaching it, disappeared in academic circles, so did the presence of the book critic in general. “The Book of the Month Club” is the perfect example of this. BOMC was founded on the principle that one needed to keep up with the latest books, obviously at a rate of one hardcover a month, which was commercially viable for all parties in the transaction. That magic, must-read book was selected by a hoity-toity board of critics comprising writers, scholars, publishers—a regular Who’s Who of High-Toned Literature of the day. These august living white males (I don’t think there were, at least originally, any women among them, given the hoo-ha BOMC made in the 70s when they finally hired a female honcho) knocked their eggy heads together once a month, after countless hours poring over manuscripts in the darkest of garrets, with only bread and water and a threadbare blanket to keep out the chill, selecting for the great unwashed THE book of the month. A thankful public applauded in gratitude.
Obviously this concept is based on a paradigm of great thinkers (i.e., scholars) expanding the canon into modern times. It wasn’t necessarily true—BOMC had its share of daily grind readers sifting through the slush pile, and the board’s literal participation in the selection process was always suspect, not to mention that the books chosen were not always up to the standard of, say, Anna Karenina—but that didn’t matter. The paradigm was accepted. But, as the scholarly idea fell apart in academia, so too did it fall apart outside of academia. No longer can these so-called great minds at BOMC be trusted to pick books for the general public, because there are no longer any reliable great minds according to a recognizable scholarly paradigm, just as there are no longer any reliably great books according to a recognizable scholarly paradigm. The BOMC concept went bust. The organization still exists, but as a shadow of its former self, with no pretensions to dictate the tastes of a vast American reading public.
But reading didn’t go away. And while the American public may not believe in the value of the egghead critic anymore, that public still is looking for a good book to read. So what comes along today? In addition to the clunky recommendations of, say, the Amazon software tools? And aside from the fact that the bestseller list, once a homogenous collection of general titles is now an atomized collection of specialized titles? One word: Oprah. Oprah Winfrey has become the most powerful force in American letters. She can sell more books than anyone, period. Because she is accepted as a critic? Of course not. Because she is accepted as “one of us” by the people who accept her recommendations. They don’t read Oprah’s picks because she knows more than they do, they read Oprah’s picks because they know as much as she does. If she likes it, odds are they’ll like it, much as, very honestly, if my daughter likes something, odds are I’ll like it, because we have similar tastes. Oprah has the great unaffected, unscholarly tastes of the average reader (otherwise her picks would have gone bust long ago, when people read the books and didn’t like them). Her very lack of academic credentials works in her favor.
I haven’t followed what Oprah’s up to lately. After a few years of Oprah’s Book Club she retired the idea, for one reason or another. Then she revised the concept, but slightly changed, in that she and her audience, instead of reading Wally Lamb or the like, would read the aforementioned Anna Karenina, a voyage of discovery for her and her fans. Which is curious indeed, as it is obviously an attempt to digest the canon! Oprah and fans embarked on a tour of DWMs (and, right off the bat, sold more of Count Leo’s book that first month than for years previously), but without the guides of the scholars. This may be the most postmodern event in literature since the birth of Robbe-Grillet!
So literature has gone from canon, to the tastes of Everywoman, to canon with Everywoman as guide, and God knows whence from there. But that is the postmodern condition. Good books aren’t what someone from on high tells us are good books. Good books are what we (or YOU as Time would have it) say they are.
I wonder.
But in postmodernity it is not simply that there is a disregard or challenge to critical authority, but there is a removal of that authority because we know that critics have achieved it entirely based on the power derived from their special knowledge about their field, as compared to some inherent force of, simply put, good taste. Kant does talk about the aesthetics of art as something objective that we must be trained to appreciate, thus enabling a group of aesthetic overlords or an aesthetic intelligentsia. But this approach to aesthetics has completely broken down in the postmodern condition. We no longer believe in objective beauty, so we no longer accept that there may be people more trained than we to perceive this beauty. The burden on artists is to create art that either incorporates subjective rather than objective beauty into the work, or is interested in issues other than beauty. This is a challenge that Rembrandt, for instance, didn’t have to face.
Last time out I was applying this line of reasoning to the field of movies. My own field, however—books— provides perhaps an even clearer example of what I’m talking about. In the postmodern condition, we don’t rely on critics, or more to the point, everyone’s a critic as bona fide as everyone else. How has that worked in literature?
First of all, we have lost the canon. Not that long ago, there was a collection of books that one simply had to read to be educated. These were the Great Books of Civilization, chosen by generations of academics as the core of knowledge. But the postmodern realization that these were primarily the words of Dead White Men challenged their positions, and the canon was flooded out by the waves of other books from other countries and traditions. Who was to say that only some European males were capable of creating literature? And regardless, books from other traditions and cultures might be more meaningful for a variety of reasons, literary value notwithstanding (which is not to suggest that they are not valuable in a literary sense, only that their proponents were indifferent at times to their literary credibility). So the idea of books selected by some fustian intelligentsia disappeared from the academic landscape. (In fact, those DWM books began to be raked over the coals precisely because of their DWMness. Why wasn’t Dickens more sympathetic to the plight of South African diamond miners, the bastid!!!) And the idea of teachers maintaining the canon was similarly washed away in the flood. There was no longer any power to wield derived from special knowledge of the canon because the Kantian trained aesthetic sense could no longer apply. Other tools, to be found in the (what I think of as semi-literate, language-abusing, unpardonably incomprehensible) bag of pomo teaching tricks, took over in the educational environment. Fortunately there does seem to be a movement toward, dare I suggest it, a post-critical approach to teaching this literature, but the core point of the postmodern critical approach in the first place, that is, the critiquing of the provenance of the old canon, is a fixed and finished reality. Whether the language in the classroom is easy or hard to understand, French-sourced or something else, is merely a matter of fashion, which answers to no dialectic other than the fickle mind of the human animal.
As a body of prescribed literature, and ways of teaching it, disappeared in academic circles, so did the presence of the book critic in general. “The Book of the Month Club” is the perfect example of this. BOMC was founded on the principle that one needed to keep up with the latest books, obviously at a rate of one hardcover a month, which was commercially viable for all parties in the transaction. That magic, must-read book was selected by a hoity-toity board of critics comprising writers, scholars, publishers—a regular Who’s Who of High-Toned Literature of the day. These august living white males (I don’t think there were, at least originally, any women among them, given the hoo-ha BOMC made in the 70s when they finally hired a female honcho) knocked their eggy heads together once a month, after countless hours poring over manuscripts in the darkest of garrets, with only bread and water and a threadbare blanket to keep out the chill, selecting for the great unwashed THE book of the month. A thankful public applauded in gratitude.
Obviously this concept is based on a paradigm of great thinkers (i.e., scholars) expanding the canon into modern times. It wasn’t necessarily true—BOMC had its share of daily grind readers sifting through the slush pile, and the board’s literal participation in the selection process was always suspect, not to mention that the books chosen were not always up to the standard of, say, Anna Karenina—but that didn’t matter. The paradigm was accepted. But, as the scholarly idea fell apart in academia, so too did it fall apart outside of academia. No longer can these so-called great minds at BOMC be trusted to pick books for the general public, because there are no longer any reliable great minds according to a recognizable scholarly paradigm, just as there are no longer any reliably great books according to a recognizable scholarly paradigm. The BOMC concept went bust. The organization still exists, but as a shadow of its former self, with no pretensions to dictate the tastes of a vast American reading public.
But reading didn’t go away. And while the American public may not believe in the value of the egghead critic anymore, that public still is looking for a good book to read. So what comes along today? In addition to the clunky recommendations of, say, the Amazon software tools? And aside from the fact that the bestseller list, once a homogenous collection of general titles is now an atomized collection of specialized titles? One word: Oprah. Oprah Winfrey has become the most powerful force in American letters. She can sell more books than anyone, period. Because she is accepted as a critic? Of course not. Because she is accepted as “one of us” by the people who accept her recommendations. They don’t read Oprah’s picks because she knows more than they do, they read Oprah’s picks because they know as much as she does. If she likes it, odds are they’ll like it, much as, very honestly, if my daughter likes something, odds are I’ll like it, because we have similar tastes. Oprah has the great unaffected, unscholarly tastes of the average reader (otherwise her picks would have gone bust long ago, when people read the books and didn’t like them). Her very lack of academic credentials works in her favor.
I haven’t followed what Oprah’s up to lately. After a few years of Oprah’s Book Club she retired the idea, for one reason or another. Then she revised the concept, but slightly changed, in that she and her audience, instead of reading Wally Lamb or the like, would read the aforementioned Anna Karenina, a voyage of discovery for her and her fans. Which is curious indeed, as it is obviously an attempt to digest the canon! Oprah and fans embarked on a tour of DWMs (and, right off the bat, sold more of Count Leo’s book that first month than for years previously), but without the guides of the scholars. This may be the most postmodern event in literature since the birth of Robbe-Grillet!
So literature has gone from canon, to the tastes of Everywoman, to canon with Everywoman as guide, and God knows whence from there. But that is the postmodern condition. Good books aren’t what someone from on high tells us are good books. Good books are what we (or YOU as Time would have it) say they are.
I wonder.
Friday, January 05, 2007
I'd advise popping some corn before reading this one
So you take your disk and insert it into your Little Elvis, and a couple of minutes later you’re printing up stuff like gangbusters on your new printer. Take your other disk and insert it into your PC for the same purpose, and you have sold your soul to the devil. I tried twice to set up the damned thing last night, and hung both times. I’ll try again tonight. WARNING: Do not walk under the windows of the chez this evening, as you may get hit by a tossed Dell.
Aaarrggghhhhh!!!!
If, as is apparent, I have co-opted Fukuyama’s end of history coinage for my own somewhat different purposes, and if I tend to ignore the communist aspects of French pomo, among other academic sins which I’m sure anyone who knows anything about my subjects would be happy to point out on listening to or reading my various philosophical ruminations, then it should also be apparent that I am becoming more of a philosopher than an academic. I absorb whatever it is I absorb from my own various sources, stir it up a bit in the old mental cauldron, and the resulting stew is not really commentary so much as personal synthesis. Given that I presume to assert that the subjective synthesis is based on objective data, what else is that but, if not philosophy (i.e., a love of knowledge or wisdom), at least pointed philosophical analysis? If philosophy is merely the digestion of the works of philosophers, it is purely academic. Applying meaningful ideas that one derives from one’s study of philosophy, in other words using philosophy to some particular end, is what I’m after. And I would suggest that this meaningful application is tantamount to the thing—philosophy—itself.
(In a way, this is not far removed from the idea of arguing the resolution vs theory arguments. The latter are dry and academic and ultimately jejune, in my opinion, while determinations derived from the former can lead to right actions. All the discussions in the universe about what LD ought to be will result in nothing but changes, or lack thereof, in the processes of LD. Whereas all the discussions in the world about, say, domestic abuse or corporate ethics, will result in a more informed citizenry as high school debaters mature and move from the educational phases of their lives into whatever comes next.)
One thing I would elaborate on from my recent Postmodern Condition lecture is that no matter how you reckon with the Foucaultian proposition of a subjectively empowered elite calling the shots on subjective issues in such a way as too remove their subjectivity, we are clearly living today in an ever more post-Foucaultian world. We less and less, if at all, accept authority, especially when we are hard-pressed to figure out why that authority is in its august authoritarian position in the first place. The rather silly Time Person of the Year, “You,” is a good example of this. Or more to the point, those items iterated as indicative of You being worthy of celebration, are good examples of it. Look at movies, for instance. Content notwithstanding, the business of movies is, indeed, a business. A film comes out, and its producers want us to fork over the money it takes to buy a ticket or rent/buy the DVD. It is a monetary transaction, one way or the other. At best, they make a profit, and we are reasonably content that we have gotten the appropriate entertainment value for our expenditure. Normal market forces are at play throughout. They try to sell us what we want, we try to buy what we want, etc. But how do we know what we want? Let’s say that the movie process, for a consumer, is a $20 transaction. It costs $20 for a pair of tickets to the Cineplex, or $20 for DVD. How do we decide where to spend our $20? This is a matter of concern for both the consumers and the producers. We want value for our $20. They want our $20.
The initial dialectic of successful film production in the beginning of the 1900s quickly entailed the concept of branding. The idea of “movie star,” human brands consumers would seek out, was recognized early by movie producers. People went to Mary Pickford movies because she was a recognizable and hence marketable brand. Douglas Fairbanks movies were another brand. As were Charlie Chaplin movies. And so forth. Moviegoers were more likely to buy tickets when the name of the marquee was familiar. (Usually the movies were familiar, too, but that goes with the branding.) New brands were constantly tested, and new types of brands. Alfred Hitchcock’s brand showed that a filmmaker, as compared to an actor, could sell product. And there were also a few other non-acting names above the titles that could bring people to the movie palaces, like David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind.
For a variety of reasons, this sort of branding eventually went bust. The studio systems no longer provided the milieu for the creation of stars, directors became the “new” stars, even critics became stars. Movie-going, which was a regular event for decades, became a special event as television co-opted regular entertainment ingestion. Lots of things changed after “Hollywood” and the big movie studios, but the end result was, indisputedly, that there were fewer films, and people were pickier about which ones to see. The end of history, as far as Hollywood was concerned, came with the breakup of the studios in the 1950s, and along with it, the end of the studio system that owned both the means of production and the venues for distribution, complete and total vertical integration. A slow sapping of strength as one studio after another faltered and died was the result. Hollywood was over.
What replaced Hollywood, by which I mean the big Hollywood studios, was independent filmmaking. Some people say that the ‘70s was a golden age of moviemaking, and this might be true, although there have been others. The 70s saw a new generation of moviemakers make it big: Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, etc. Theirs was a self-conscious brand of filmmaking, as most of them had been educated at film schools, which means that they were the products of not only their filmmaking predecessors but of academics and critiques and theories and all that that entails. As Jean-Luc Goddard so famously said, the best criticism of a film is to make another film, and that’s what these folks were doing. Add to this mix, literally, the French. Cahiers du cinema was the journal where folks like Goddard and Francois Truffaut were writing about movies, and French new wavers were hatching the auteur theory of films, positing the director as the creative center of a film, even including the old Hollywood films that hitherto had appeared to be products of process rather than a single individual. (It is something of an apotheosis of all this when Spielberg cast Truffaut in Close Encounters, Spielberg being the most old-fashioned of the new Hollywood directors.) From the consumers’ point of view—and there were still film consumers because it still takes a whole lot of money to make movies and therefore a whole lot of people paying to see those movies remains a requirement—there were even star critics who percolated down from academia, name brand writers like Kael and Sarris whose opinions were sought after even when one wasn’t all that interested in seeing the movies they were talking about. Film criticism became worthy of shelf space in book stores. But the question arose soon enough: why should I trust these people’s opinions of films? I mean, they’re just other yabbos sitting in the movie theater with whatever personal tastes they might have. Why are their tastes more important than my own?
Here’s the problem of post-history Hollywood. Without a fixed method of collecting money for product (i.e., studio-owned theaters), how do you get people to spend that $20 we were talking about? Before post-history Hollywood, your monopoly did the job for you. But now what?
The beginning of the purest post-historic Hollywood moment is the invention of the movie blockbuster. Usually this honor goes to Jaws and in some respects (i.e. opening weekend) that may be correct, but the earlier The Exorcist sticks in my mind as the first movie that people lined up for from day one, the first movie event, the first big blockbuster. Regardless, in the 70s the event movie came into being, movies that everyone lined up for and saw the minute it opened. Of course, this immediately raises the question, why show up for this movie, about which you know nothing? But I’m more interested in the slightly deeper question, why after you know that a movie is going to be “big” do you accept that bigness as a reason to go see it? In other words, one way or another a film is hyped or publicized, and people find out about it. That’s a different story than why, once people learn that something is going to be, or is, boffo (that’s “big box office” to you), they feel compelled to see it, to add to its boffo-ness. And in that compulsion, more today than ever, is the essence of post-historical, post-Foucaultian Hollywood.
Today, we don’t go see a movie because we have been led there by critics. No critics hold sway in 2007 as they did in the 70s. We have “Rotten Tomatoes” so that we can quantify criticism, which is entirely qualitative and therefore inherently unquantifiable. Siskel and Ebert, who became Ebert and Roper, who I used to refer to as NotSiskel and Ebert, and who have lately been NotSiskel and NotEbert, are the closest we get to critical name brands, but we watch them to see the clips to glean our own impressions of films, and we don’t care much whether they’re Siskel, Ebert, Roper, in any or no combination, with or without guest hosts (including, sacre bleu, Fred Willard), and in ads, there had better be two thumbs up, owners of hands notwithstanding, or forget about it. The fact that Sony invented make-believe critics to supply quotes for its ads proved to some extent that the critical blurbs were mere garnish on the ad page. We have digested our Foucault entirely, divesting all our knowledge elites of their power. The knowledge elite no longer exists.
Instead, we go to particular movies because those are the movies we are going to. We put our ears to the ground one way or the other and select those films, and we grab our $20 and we are off to the races. We, the general public, know the weekend box-office of every film released, every week. We do not know the weekly sales of Chevy Impalas, but we know how Borat and Happy Feet are doing. We know that Pirates II set opening weekend records. We may sense that it’s a so-so movie, but we went in droves, and if that wasn’t enough, we spent enough more $20s to make it the biggest selling DVD on release right before Christmas. Quality did not or does not interest us. Quantity, on the other hand, does. We go where the crowd goes. But not because we’re “keeping up;” it’s not that we wish to be au courant. We believe that the crowd knows better than the old elite because we believe that the crowd represents us. The crowd is the aggregate of the disenfranchised, the common person writ large, hence ourselves. We want out own opinions to matter. In this case, we accept the opinions of those just like us, the other members of the crowd.
And we take this further. NetFlix recommends movies based on what we like as we rate each film in their collection. They show us how everyone else feels about the movies. But they’ve gotten rid of their in-house critic from the olden days, and only residually push Ebert as their critic brand, although they do have a handful of other critics as part of a film’s overall presentation, sort of a “Rotten Cherry Tomatoes.” We “Digg” content on the internet, which means we decide what to read based on quantity of readership and acclamation by quantities rather than by quality, to which we add our own quantitatively incremental vote. And, ultimately, we create our own films, because we can, and we then Digg/thumb-up/recommend/watch in the same follow-the-crowd pattern. We watch the same viral videos. We go to YouTube to see what other people are seeing. Google pays megabucks to buy YouTube just in case it actually is the future. And, if YouTube IS the future? Is post-history’s next step away from a knowledge elite the creation of a content-producing non-elite? I mean, I can’t be the only person in the world who thinks YouTube is the largest collection of moving pictorial crap ever collected in the shortest amount of time, and yeah, Time is right that YOU did it, but no offense folks, you didn’t do it very well, and personally I don’t think that you’re going to be getting all that much better at it any time soon.
Blogging, of course, is another symptom of the post-historical, post-Foucaultian postmodern condition. Mea culpa, brothers and sisters, mea culpa. The sheer idea that I can consider myself a philosopher only can arise in the post-historical, post-Foucaultian environment.
My guess is that, in the long run, the growth of private movies will have little or no effect on public movies. The ability to privately publish books hasn’t changed literature, it’s just enabled more people to privately publish books. Similarly the ability to privately publish films won’t change cinema, it will merely enable more people to privately publish their movies. When I plop down at night to save the cheerleader, I’ll be looking for an hour’s quality (in my mind) entertainment, not quantity (in the popular mind) entertainment. Maybe you’ll be sitting down for an hour of good old YouTube videos. But somehow, I really don’t think so. And with the breakdown of the historical dialectic, that’s as much predicting as I’m willing to make.
Aaarrggghhhhh!!!!
If, as is apparent, I have co-opted Fukuyama’s end of history coinage for my own somewhat different purposes, and if I tend to ignore the communist aspects of French pomo, among other academic sins which I’m sure anyone who knows anything about my subjects would be happy to point out on listening to or reading my various philosophical ruminations, then it should also be apparent that I am becoming more of a philosopher than an academic. I absorb whatever it is I absorb from my own various sources, stir it up a bit in the old mental cauldron, and the resulting stew is not really commentary so much as personal synthesis. Given that I presume to assert that the subjective synthesis is based on objective data, what else is that but, if not philosophy (i.e., a love of knowledge or wisdom), at least pointed philosophical analysis? If philosophy is merely the digestion of the works of philosophers, it is purely academic. Applying meaningful ideas that one derives from one’s study of philosophy, in other words using philosophy to some particular end, is what I’m after. And I would suggest that this meaningful application is tantamount to the thing—philosophy—itself.
(In a way, this is not far removed from the idea of arguing the resolution vs theory arguments. The latter are dry and academic and ultimately jejune, in my opinion, while determinations derived from the former can lead to right actions. All the discussions in the universe about what LD ought to be will result in nothing but changes, or lack thereof, in the processes of LD. Whereas all the discussions in the world about, say, domestic abuse or corporate ethics, will result in a more informed citizenry as high school debaters mature and move from the educational phases of their lives into whatever comes next.)
One thing I would elaborate on from my recent Postmodern Condition lecture is that no matter how you reckon with the Foucaultian proposition of a subjectively empowered elite calling the shots on subjective issues in such a way as too remove their subjectivity, we are clearly living today in an ever more post-Foucaultian world. We less and less, if at all, accept authority, especially when we are hard-pressed to figure out why that authority is in its august authoritarian position in the first place. The rather silly Time Person of the Year, “You,” is a good example of this. Or more to the point, those items iterated as indicative of You being worthy of celebration, are good examples of it. Look at movies, for instance. Content notwithstanding, the business of movies is, indeed, a business. A film comes out, and its producers want us to fork over the money it takes to buy a ticket or rent/buy the DVD. It is a monetary transaction, one way or the other. At best, they make a profit, and we are reasonably content that we have gotten the appropriate entertainment value for our expenditure. Normal market forces are at play throughout. They try to sell us what we want, we try to buy what we want, etc. But how do we know what we want? Let’s say that the movie process, for a consumer, is a $20 transaction. It costs $20 for a pair of tickets to the Cineplex, or $20 for DVD. How do we decide where to spend our $20? This is a matter of concern for both the consumers and the producers. We want value for our $20. They want our $20.
The initial dialectic of successful film production in the beginning of the 1900s quickly entailed the concept of branding. The idea of “movie star,” human brands consumers would seek out, was recognized early by movie producers. People went to Mary Pickford movies because she was a recognizable and hence marketable brand. Douglas Fairbanks movies were another brand. As were Charlie Chaplin movies. And so forth. Moviegoers were more likely to buy tickets when the name of the marquee was familiar. (Usually the movies were familiar, too, but that goes with the branding.) New brands were constantly tested, and new types of brands. Alfred Hitchcock’s brand showed that a filmmaker, as compared to an actor, could sell product. And there were also a few other non-acting names above the titles that could bring people to the movie palaces, like David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind.
For a variety of reasons, this sort of branding eventually went bust. The studio systems no longer provided the milieu for the creation of stars, directors became the “new” stars, even critics became stars. Movie-going, which was a regular event for decades, became a special event as television co-opted regular entertainment ingestion. Lots of things changed after “Hollywood” and the big movie studios, but the end result was, indisputedly, that there were fewer films, and people were pickier about which ones to see. The end of history, as far as Hollywood was concerned, came with the breakup of the studios in the 1950s, and along with it, the end of the studio system that owned both the means of production and the venues for distribution, complete and total vertical integration. A slow sapping of strength as one studio after another faltered and died was the result. Hollywood was over.
What replaced Hollywood, by which I mean the big Hollywood studios, was independent filmmaking. Some people say that the ‘70s was a golden age of moviemaking, and this might be true, although there have been others. The 70s saw a new generation of moviemakers make it big: Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, etc. Theirs was a self-conscious brand of filmmaking, as most of them had been educated at film schools, which means that they were the products of not only their filmmaking predecessors but of academics and critiques and theories and all that that entails. As Jean-Luc Goddard so famously said, the best criticism of a film is to make another film, and that’s what these folks were doing. Add to this mix, literally, the French. Cahiers du cinema was the journal where folks like Goddard and Francois Truffaut were writing about movies, and French new wavers were hatching the auteur theory of films, positing the director as the creative center of a film, even including the old Hollywood films that hitherto had appeared to be products of process rather than a single individual. (It is something of an apotheosis of all this when Spielberg cast Truffaut in Close Encounters, Spielberg being the most old-fashioned of the new Hollywood directors.) From the consumers’ point of view—and there were still film consumers because it still takes a whole lot of money to make movies and therefore a whole lot of people paying to see those movies remains a requirement—there were even star critics who percolated down from academia, name brand writers like Kael and Sarris whose opinions were sought after even when one wasn’t all that interested in seeing the movies they were talking about. Film criticism became worthy of shelf space in book stores. But the question arose soon enough: why should I trust these people’s opinions of films? I mean, they’re just other yabbos sitting in the movie theater with whatever personal tastes they might have. Why are their tastes more important than my own?
Here’s the problem of post-history Hollywood. Without a fixed method of collecting money for product (i.e., studio-owned theaters), how do you get people to spend that $20 we were talking about? Before post-history Hollywood, your monopoly did the job for you. But now what?
The beginning of the purest post-historic Hollywood moment is the invention of the movie blockbuster. Usually this honor goes to Jaws and in some respects (i.e. opening weekend) that may be correct, but the earlier The Exorcist sticks in my mind as the first movie that people lined up for from day one, the first movie event, the first big blockbuster. Regardless, in the 70s the event movie came into being, movies that everyone lined up for and saw the minute it opened. Of course, this immediately raises the question, why show up for this movie, about which you know nothing? But I’m more interested in the slightly deeper question, why after you know that a movie is going to be “big” do you accept that bigness as a reason to go see it? In other words, one way or another a film is hyped or publicized, and people find out about it. That’s a different story than why, once people learn that something is going to be, or is, boffo (that’s “big box office” to you), they feel compelled to see it, to add to its boffo-ness. And in that compulsion, more today than ever, is the essence of post-historical, post-Foucaultian Hollywood.
Today, we don’t go see a movie because we have been led there by critics. No critics hold sway in 2007 as they did in the 70s. We have “Rotten Tomatoes” so that we can quantify criticism, which is entirely qualitative and therefore inherently unquantifiable. Siskel and Ebert, who became Ebert and Roper, who I used to refer to as NotSiskel and Ebert, and who have lately been NotSiskel and NotEbert, are the closest we get to critical name brands, but we watch them to see the clips to glean our own impressions of films, and we don’t care much whether they’re Siskel, Ebert, Roper, in any or no combination, with or without guest hosts (including, sacre bleu, Fred Willard), and in ads, there had better be two thumbs up, owners of hands notwithstanding, or forget about it. The fact that Sony invented make-believe critics to supply quotes for its ads proved to some extent that the critical blurbs were mere garnish on the ad page. We have digested our Foucault entirely, divesting all our knowledge elites of their power. The knowledge elite no longer exists.
Instead, we go to particular movies because those are the movies we are going to. We put our ears to the ground one way or the other and select those films, and we grab our $20 and we are off to the races. We, the general public, know the weekend box-office of every film released, every week. We do not know the weekly sales of Chevy Impalas, but we know how Borat and Happy Feet are doing. We know that Pirates II set opening weekend records. We may sense that it’s a so-so movie, but we went in droves, and if that wasn’t enough, we spent enough more $20s to make it the biggest selling DVD on release right before Christmas. Quality did not or does not interest us. Quantity, on the other hand, does. We go where the crowd goes. But not because we’re “keeping up;” it’s not that we wish to be au courant. We believe that the crowd knows better than the old elite because we believe that the crowd represents us. The crowd is the aggregate of the disenfranchised, the common person writ large, hence ourselves. We want out own opinions to matter. In this case, we accept the opinions of those just like us, the other members of the crowd.
And we take this further. NetFlix recommends movies based on what we like as we rate each film in their collection. They show us how everyone else feels about the movies. But they’ve gotten rid of their in-house critic from the olden days, and only residually push Ebert as their critic brand, although they do have a handful of other critics as part of a film’s overall presentation, sort of a “Rotten Cherry Tomatoes.” We “Digg” content on the internet, which means we decide what to read based on quantity of readership and acclamation by quantities rather than by quality, to which we add our own quantitatively incremental vote. And, ultimately, we create our own films, because we can, and we then Digg/thumb-up/recommend/watch in the same follow-the-crowd pattern. We watch the same viral videos. We go to YouTube to see what other people are seeing. Google pays megabucks to buy YouTube just in case it actually is the future. And, if YouTube IS the future? Is post-history’s next step away from a knowledge elite the creation of a content-producing non-elite? I mean, I can’t be the only person in the world who thinks YouTube is the largest collection of moving pictorial crap ever collected in the shortest amount of time, and yeah, Time is right that YOU did it, but no offense folks, you didn’t do it very well, and personally I don’t think that you’re going to be getting all that much better at it any time soon.
Blogging, of course, is another symptom of the post-historical, post-Foucaultian postmodern condition. Mea culpa, brothers and sisters, mea culpa. The sheer idea that I can consider myself a philosopher only can arise in the post-historical, post-Foucaultian environment.
My guess is that, in the long run, the growth of private movies will have little or no effect on public movies. The ability to privately publish books hasn’t changed literature, it’s just enabled more people to privately publish books. Similarly the ability to privately publish films won’t change cinema, it will merely enable more people to privately publish their movies. When I plop down at night to save the cheerleader, I’ll be looking for an hour’s quality (in my mind) entertainment, not quantity (in the popular mind) entertainment. Maybe you’ll be sitting down for an hour of good old YouTube videos. But somehow, I really don’t think so. And with the breakdown of the historical dialectic, that’s as much predicting as I’m willing to make.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Many belaborings of the obviouses
After saving the cheerleader last night (and I do thank Panasonic for perfecting the DVD recorder), I spent a bunch of time collating the MHL data for Saturday, when we'll be down in Brooklyn hobnobbing with the NYUDL. I’ve created this neat little Excel db that makes entering into TRPC the data that comes to me from emails a breeze. Of course, I only had to do the LD, because the UDL will handle tabbing the Policy side, and I sent that data off to Kurt for just that purpose, as he is Mr. Policy in the MHL universe. Which makes me Mr. LD, and O’C Mr. Imsending149noviceshavefunseeyounextmonth. He’s out basking in the warm California sun, needless to say, for the WTF tournament, which means that I am unplugging my computer in preparation for the absolute bombardment of pix, skems, pix of skems, skems of pix, the works, in ex-cruz-iating detail. You may wish to do the same.
Some yabbo complained about the quality of the O’C interview. This is, of course, the definition of a yabbo, when you write an entire spiel about how you had technical problems and your quality is unavoidably stepped down as a result, and someone responds, Dadgummit, this quality isn’t very good. Whatever happened to reading skills, anyhow? The real problem with the interview is the inanity that it contains, not the noise degradation. I mean, who wants to listen to me asking O’C what his favorite speaking point was? Tomorrow’s lecture is on the forest vs. the trees.
Nevertheless I did put out a new Nostrum last night. I should be back on track for the foreseeable f., all things being equal. I read the original letters from Jules as introductions now, since they are extant for the period I’m producing, and it is remarkable to see that all this material was written by the lads back in ‘96/’97. Ten years ago! (I throw that in for those whose math skills are down there with those yabbonian reading skills, although I would imagine that most of the VCA was able to figure that out on their own.) Plus ca change, maybe, as the French philosophers say.
Tonight I’ll rev up the new printer, knock off some of our new MHL ballots (with the NFL judging instructions on the flip side), fantasize on how to dismember Termite (don’t ask), wonder why only one novice is sending me cases for Saturday, contemplate explaining the difference between Gems of the Ocean and cocaine cartels to the Sailor who apparently wants to register for a tournament in Bogota, and probably begin taking down the Christmas tree. And if that’s not a busy night, I don’t know what is.
Some yabbo complained about the quality of the O’C interview. This is, of course, the definition of a yabbo, when you write an entire spiel about how you had technical problems and your quality is unavoidably stepped down as a result, and someone responds, Dadgummit, this quality isn’t very good. Whatever happened to reading skills, anyhow? The real problem with the interview is the inanity that it contains, not the noise degradation. I mean, who wants to listen to me asking O’C what his favorite speaking point was? Tomorrow’s lecture is on the forest vs. the trees.
Nevertheless I did put out a new Nostrum last night. I should be back on track for the foreseeable f., all things being equal. I read the original letters from Jules as introductions now, since they are extant for the period I’m producing, and it is remarkable to see that all this material was written by the lads back in ‘96/’97. Ten years ago! (I throw that in for those whose math skills are down there with those yabbonian reading skills, although I would imagine that most of the VCA was able to figure that out on their own.) Plus ca change, maybe, as the French philosophers say.
Tonight I’ll rev up the new printer, knock off some of our new MHL ballots (with the NFL judging instructions on the flip side), fantasize on how to dismember Termite (don’t ask), wonder why only one novice is sending me cases for Saturday, contemplate explaining the difference between Gems of the Ocean and cocaine cartels to the Sailor who apparently wants to register for a tournament in Bogota, and probably begin taking down the Christmas tree. And if that’s not a busy night, I don’t know what is.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
An old sidewinder revisited
Rule number 1: Don’t go poking around under rocks and bushes unless you’re prepared for what you might find there. For instance, it’s very pleasant to take a nature walk in the foothills near Stanford, although on your jaunt you will pass prodigious signage warning that there are rattlesnakes under the bushes, and suggesting that you do not rile them up. To be perfectly honest, I do not find these signs to be an encouragement for walking anywhere within two miles of any bush in the place, much less riling up the local fauna. As a matter of fact, I find these signs encouraging of getting back into the car, very carefully, and heading out to the coast posthaste. There are no rattlesnakes in the Pacific Ocean, as far as I am aware.
Those with good memories might recall my letter to the New York State Forensic League last year, whining about this and that in my usual fashion. Aside from being cited as having a bad attitude (you can take the boy out of fifth grade but you can’t take fifth grade out of the boy) my impression upon the assorted States nabobs seems to have been, charitably put, less than minimal. In fact, I seem to have been the catalyst for codifying pretty much everything I was complaining about. The rule of thumb that, If Menick likes it, it can’t be right, seems to have taken root. In the latest example of this: I had suggested that the system of state qualifications, being entirely predicated on the speech placement model, needed revision. In the present model, it is not impossible for a student to break at every tournament he or she attends and still not qualify for States! Apparently I should have kept my trap shut.
The going rate of qualification—apparently an incorrect one—has been to extrapolate placement from the drop, if necessary. That is, everybody who doesn’t advance from octos is in 9th place, from doubles is in 17th place, from quarters is in 5th place, etc. The way the official numbers work under this approach, if 148 people attend a tournament, everyone in doubles would get a qual. No one dropping in doubles gets a qual if it’s less than 148 people. Which is already pretty severe. But, the way it’s supposed to work, apparently, is based on seed, which means that, with 148 debaters, as few as 1 of the persons dropping in doubles could conceivably get a qual. (Have I lost you yet?)
Here’s how NYSFL puts it:
We have had some questions about the awarding of half-qualifications to debaters in tournaments with elimination rounds. While the following procedure has always been in effect, we felt that there is a need to explain it again.
Let's look at an example to show how the half-quals are awarded.
We have a tournament with 9 half-quals. The tournament breaks todouble octofinals . Obviously, everyone who goes on to quarter finals receives a half-qual. The question is, who among the non-advancing octofinalists [gets] the 9th half-qual.
Take the debaters who did not advance and rank them according to their ORIGINAL seed. The highest seed among the non-advancing octofinalists receives the half-qual. So, if the non-advancing octofinalists had the following seeds:
7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 32, the 7th seed gets the half-qual.
In the past, we have had coaches ask if all the non-advancing octofinalists were in an unbreakable tie and if all 8 should be awarded the 9th half-qual. This is not the case.
Maybe it’s just me, but I see the odd problem here. First of all, varsity LD at States is the smallest of the 3 LD divisions, and is the only one that would presumably be almost totally fed by this system. By smallest division, my recollection is numbers somewhere around 45 in 2006, and this in one of the most populous LD states in the country. (We’ll not include any other issues which may mitigate against varsity participation in the tournament in the present discussion, since the State organization does not recognize any other mitigating issues.)
It would seem to me that any tournament legitimately breaking to doubles is asking of the breakers that they be of high quality. And 147 is, well, a really high number, especially to break and get no credit for it at the state level. By not rethinking its qualifications procedure, States manages to exclude what looks like a pretty good bunch of debaters. If you attend a half dozen tournaments this season, and win one but drop early at 5 others, you can’t go to States (absent their regional qualifier system). Given the small number of debaters in the field selected by this system, i.e. the varsity, wouldn’t it make sense to change the system? Given the generous nature of the regional qualifier system, it’s certainly not inherent in the States organization that they are, simply, parsimonious. But they do seem to be blind to the realities of LD aside from the small, one-day, MHL/CFL/MDL type tournaments that are geared to younger debaters, and to some extent have a more intramural feel to them than the true cauldron of invitationals. It’s easy enough to revise the system directly along the line of breaks. Break twice, any tournament, and you’re fully qualified. What’s wrong with that?
I’ve said this before. The people who run the state organization are perfectly nice. But they are not running an organization that truly represents the interests of at least the debate side of the universe. And this, I’m afraid, is just one more example of it.
And, no doubt, I’ll get another D- for attitude for having written this.
Those with good memories might recall my letter to the New York State Forensic League last year, whining about this and that in my usual fashion. Aside from being cited as having a bad attitude (you can take the boy out of fifth grade but you can’t take fifth grade out of the boy) my impression upon the assorted States nabobs seems to have been, charitably put, less than minimal. In fact, I seem to have been the catalyst for codifying pretty much everything I was complaining about. The rule of thumb that, If Menick likes it, it can’t be right, seems to have taken root. In the latest example of this: I had suggested that the system of state qualifications, being entirely predicated on the speech placement model, needed revision. In the present model, it is not impossible for a student to break at every tournament he or she attends and still not qualify for States! Apparently I should have kept my trap shut.
The going rate of qualification—apparently an incorrect one—has been to extrapolate placement from the drop, if necessary. That is, everybody who doesn’t advance from octos is in 9th place, from doubles is in 17th place, from quarters is in 5th place, etc. The way the official numbers work under this approach, if 148 people attend a tournament, everyone in doubles would get a qual. No one dropping in doubles gets a qual if it’s less than 148 people. Which is already pretty severe. But, the way it’s supposed to work, apparently, is based on seed, which means that, with 148 debaters, as few as 1 of the persons dropping in doubles could conceivably get a qual. (Have I lost you yet?)
Here’s how NYSFL puts it:
We have had some questions about the awarding of half-qualifications to debaters in tournaments with elimination rounds. While the following procedure has always been in effect, we felt that there is a need to explain it again.
Let's look at an example to show how the half-quals are awarded.
We have a tournament with 9 half-quals. The tournament breaks to
Take the debaters who did not advance and rank them according to their ORIGINAL seed. The highest seed among the non-advancing octofinalists receives the half-qual. So, if the non-advancing octofinalists had the following seeds:
7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 32, the 7th seed gets the half-qual.
In the past, we have had coaches ask if all the non-advancing octofinalists were in an unbreakable tie and if all 8 should be awarded the 9th half-qual. This is not the case.
Maybe it’s just me, but I see the odd problem here. First of all, varsity LD at States is the smallest of the 3 LD divisions, and is the only one that would presumably be almost totally fed by this system. By smallest division, my recollection is numbers somewhere around 45 in 2006, and this in one of the most populous LD states in the country. (We’ll not include any other issues which may mitigate against varsity participation in the tournament in the present discussion, since the State organization does not recognize any other mitigating issues.)
It would seem to me that any tournament legitimately breaking to doubles is asking of the breakers that they be of high quality. And 147 is, well, a really high number, especially to break and get no credit for it at the state level. By not rethinking its qualifications procedure, States manages to exclude what looks like a pretty good bunch of debaters. If you attend a half dozen tournaments this season, and win one but drop early at 5 others, you can’t go to States (absent their regional qualifier system). Given the small number of debaters in the field selected by this system, i.e. the varsity, wouldn’t it make sense to change the system? Given the generous nature of the regional qualifier system, it’s certainly not inherent in the States organization that they are, simply, parsimonious. But they do seem to be blind to the realities of LD aside from the small, one-day, MHL/CFL/MDL type tournaments that are geared to younger debaters, and to some extent have a more intramural feel to them than the true cauldron of invitationals. It’s easy enough to revise the system directly along the line of breaks. Break twice, any tournament, and you’re fully qualified. What’s wrong with that?
I’ve said this before. The people who run the state organization are perfectly nice. But they are not running an organization that truly represents the interests of at least the debate side of the universe. And this, I’m afraid, is just one more example of it.
And, no doubt, I’ll get another D- for attitude for having written this.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
We must go down to the sea again
Back to business, I guess. Tonight the Sailors meet for the first time in a couple of weeks, although they did do some alleged research over the break, or allegedly did some research over the break, your wording here depending on the cast of your allegations. Research and cutting cards can be a machine-like process, when it’s done correctly. Assignments are made, judicious findings are brought forth, and collections are assembled and distributed. The Sailors seem to use research primarily as an opportunity to disorganize the planning of the trip and to confuse each other as to the distributions of their labors’ fruit, if any. Such an approach has become a tradition over the last few years. I am brought back to the days of the group I must refer to nowadays as the Postgraduates, who could research the hell out of Lucifer himself. I mean, Wedro had a card for everything, from the sun setting in the West to every single line of Kant being: A) right, and B) wrong. I could, presumably, organize the present naval corps into something similar, but I always think of myself as a coach, not a co-conspirator. I don’t do research for the same reason I don’t write positions: I already went to high school, and I feel no need to go again. I envision the role of coach as, well, coaching, not playing. That’s why the coaches of football teams don’t wear any padding, or the coaches of basketball teams don’t have to be particularly tall, etc. Coaching is coaching and doing is doing. Or maybe coaching is doing coaching and debating is doing debating. I perceive a big difference. Maybe I’m alone in that.
I do have to admit a sense of relief on having salvaged the O’C interview yesterday (check it out on the podcast page if you haven’t already). Not that I don’t have a fondness for the Faux’C version, now semi-retired, but it just doesn’t have the legitimacy of the real thing. Obviously. Still, the concept of Faux’C keeps developing in my mind, and I’m nursing the existence of Faux-Jon Malarkey, the present coach of V of I HS, which is not far from Hen Hud as the crow flies, as they say. I guess if I had a different version of coaching in my mind I wouldn’t have time for all this nonsense. Feh!
I went out yesterday and picked up a new printer for the MHL. Kurt and O’C and I had agreed to this at Byram Pt Deux. It will feed multiple copies, which means we can print our own ballots, and then copy them when they’re filled out, and also we can scan results and make pdfs rather than distributing scads of paper packages. I’ll grab some extra cartridges and paper on Thursday (I bought the printer at BestBuy, which isn’t what its name suggests for such peripheral things). Remember when I go off the cliff that the new printer belongs to the MHL, and not to me, except for the cable, which they don’t throw into the package anymore, the pikers. No wonder HP is making all that money. Anyhow, I’ve already got enough printers to feed an army, provided you’ve got an army that lives on printers, so I really don’t need another one for home use. For the traveling tab room that is my weekend life, on the other hand, we’re now in particular business. I’ll set it up with my computers and toss it into the bag for Saturday, and away we go. Again.
Otherwise, I’m back at work starting today, and presumably so are you, so, as I said, back to business.
I do have to admit a sense of relief on having salvaged the O’C interview yesterday (check it out on the podcast page if you haven’t already). Not that I don’t have a fondness for the Faux’C version, now semi-retired, but it just doesn’t have the legitimacy of the real thing. Obviously. Still, the concept of Faux’C keeps developing in my mind, and I’m nursing the existence of Faux-Jon Malarkey, the present coach of V of I HS, which is not far from Hen Hud as the crow flies, as they say. I guess if I had a different version of coaching in my mind I wouldn’t have time for all this nonsense. Feh!
I went out yesterday and picked up a new printer for the MHL. Kurt and O’C and I had agreed to this at Byram Pt Deux. It will feed multiple copies, which means we can print our own ballots, and then copy them when they’re filled out, and also we can scan results and make pdfs rather than distributing scads of paper packages. I’ll grab some extra cartridges and paper on Thursday (I bought the printer at BestBuy, which isn’t what its name suggests for such peripheral things). Remember when I go off the cliff that the new printer belongs to the MHL, and not to me, except for the cable, which they don’t throw into the package anymore, the pikers. No wonder HP is making all that money. Anyhow, I’ve already got enough printers to feed an army, provided you’ve got an army that lives on printers, so I really don’t need another one for home use. For the traveling tab room that is my weekend life, on the other hand, we’re now in particular business. I’ll set it up with my computers and toss it into the bag for Saturday, and away we go. Again.
Otherwise, I’m back at work starting today, and presumably so are you, so, as I said, back to business.
Monday, January 01, 2007
A New Year's present for the VCA
They said it couldn't be done, but I managed to suck the original Jon Cruz interview out of the MegaPod. In a flurry of engineering magic, I simply put the microphone up next to some speakers, and started recording. It's Yankee know-how like this that sent men to the moon. Although considering the sound quality and the fact that I was too lazy to edit out the interruptions from people coming and going in the Monti tab room, it may be more Apollo 13 than Apollo 11, but it's still the moon, Alice.
Subscribers to The View from Tab will soon be shocked to find the interview in their iTunes library unbeckoned. The rest of you pikers can listen by going to my podcast page (there's a link on the right of this column, with the little microphone icon).
Let the joy and rapture begin.
Subscribers to The View from Tab will soon be shocked to find the interview in their iTunes library unbeckoned. The rest of you pikers can listen by going to my podcast page (there's a link on the right of this column, with the little microphone icon).
Let the joy and rapture begin.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Then again, maybe W was actually in one of the Jackass movies
I am in the process of waiting for notification from iTunes that they have accepted the feed of “The View from Tab” for syndication. This means a number of things. First, that I have written correct XML for the feed. Second, that I have updated my podcast page. And third, that I have recorded “The Postmodern Condition.” I like this lecture. It attempts to explain what it means to be an artist, or an architect, or perhaps most importantly, a philosopher, in an age of postmodernism. It frames everything within the concept of dialectics, and the failure of history as a dialectic. The death of architectural modernism is explained as the birth process of the actual concept of something that would be known thereafter as post modern, and it shows how all artists, and probably all thinkers, must confront the breakdown of the historical dialectic, i.e., the postmodern condition. Needless to say, it includes no quotations from Adam Sandler, George Bush or any members of the casts of any Jackass movie. It is meant as a standalone piece, a short general introduction to the idea of postmodernity as compared to the detailed explanations of Caveman.
It’s amazing what someone can do with a little free time on their hands. The point of creating “View” as a feed is so that I can post future installments to a waiting public, snicker, snicker. I have an idea for a show with me and Faux’C; more on that as it develops in my mind.
Next on the day’s agenda: making some Disney World dinner reservations. I don't know if I can keep up this amazingly hectic pace...
It’s amazing what someone can do with a little free time on their hands. The point of creating “View” as a feed is so that I can post future installments to a waiting public, snicker, snicker. I have an idea for a show with me and Faux’C; more on that as it develops in my mind.
Next on the day’s agenda: making some Disney World dinner reservations. I don't know if I can keep up this amazingly hectic pace...
Thursday, December 28, 2006
A little of this, a little of that...
I swore to myself that I’d be at the computer this morning by 9:00. Missed it only by about an hour. Not bad for a holiday.
In the most important piece of news, Liz has gotten a clean bill of health, and we go into 2007 a lot happier than we exited 2006. Whew.
So now we can get back to business. First up, sorting through all the invoices from the NFL and getting that check out before there’s a late fee. For some reason Safari is giving me Yahoo mail issues, but Firefox seems to be kechy peen, so the fault lies not in our account but in our software. Kate insists that I’m some sort of troglodyte for my use of Safari, but as I pointed out, the fact that at the office Firefox prints words before I type them sort of mitigates against my reliance on it. I guess that feature would be very useful if I were daunted by the blank page, but I seriously doubt if that’s going to happen any time soon.
Then there’s the discussion of our Red Light District status with the district schools. I’ve been putting off sending out a note to the schools mostly because there isn’t much to say other than file all your points, and honestly, most of them either do or don’t. I’ve been feverishly doing so lately. For instance,every time NoShow judges, there’s 4 more points in the bag. Come to think of it, I'm thinking of changing his nickname to HeWhoShowsUpEveryWeek. Woot, woot!
[Time passes.]
So, with all of business conducted, after 2 hours the mailbox is clear! The next item on the agenda, aside from getting up and running upstairs every time the phone rings, is warming up the leftover lasagna for lunch. Tuesday we had the Rubin Era alums over for dinner, and a swell time was had by all, I think. They are a rather remarkable bunch. Josh is at Harvard Law, and Katie’s at Georgetown Law; she’s thinking litigator, which means that I’ll finally have someone to defend me when the gendarmes catch up. Alexandra is drumming up business for White Plains hospital; she does PR, which I gather means going out and making people sick. I could do that. Wedro is trading stocks, and has managed to lose hardly any money at all despite the incredible bull market. Jared just got back from Argentina, having given up the literary agent trade, and he’s living in Brooklyn on the chichi side of Prospect Park (my Kate is on the Real People side). CLG is still thinking of more school, and the general consensus was that she should go to California to see how the other half lives. As I say, what a group. Although it is strange to offer them wine and beer. I used to have to worry that they might be drinking wine and beer behind my back (although I never got the feeling that they were too dicey behavior-wise back in the day, although occasionally CLG has begun to explain what was really going on and I’ve had to ask her to stop because I just don’t want to know) and now I merely have to make sure they can drive home legally. How times change.
This afternoon, with any luck, I’ll begin catching up on Nostrums. Plus, I’ve got preliminary notes on an intro to Pomo that I have to work on. And, oh yeah, I have to go out and buy a chicken for dinner.
Life is good.
In the most important piece of news, Liz has gotten a clean bill of health, and we go into 2007 a lot happier than we exited 2006. Whew.
So now we can get back to business. First up, sorting through all the invoices from the NFL and getting that check out before there’s a late fee. For some reason Safari is giving me Yahoo mail issues, but Firefox seems to be kechy peen, so the fault lies not in our account but in our software. Kate insists that I’m some sort of troglodyte for my use of Safari, but as I pointed out, the fact that at the office Firefox prints words before I type them sort of mitigates against my reliance on it. I guess that feature would be very useful if I were daunted by the blank page, but I seriously doubt if that’s going to happen any time soon.
Then there’s the discussion of our Red Light District status with the district schools. I’ve been putting off sending out a note to the schools mostly because there isn’t much to say other than file all your points, and honestly, most of them either do or don’t. I’ve been feverishly doing so lately. For instance,every time NoShow judges, there’s 4 more points in the bag. Come to think of it, I'm thinking of changing his nickname to HeWhoShowsUpEveryWeek. Woot, woot!
[Time passes.]
So, with all of business conducted, after 2 hours the mailbox is clear! The next item on the agenda, aside from getting up and running upstairs every time the phone rings, is warming up the leftover lasagna for lunch. Tuesday we had the Rubin Era alums over for dinner, and a swell time was had by all, I think. They are a rather remarkable bunch. Josh is at Harvard Law, and Katie’s at Georgetown Law; she’s thinking litigator, which means that I’ll finally have someone to defend me when the gendarmes catch up. Alexandra is drumming up business for White Plains hospital; she does PR, which I gather means going out and making people sick. I could do that. Wedro is trading stocks, and has managed to lose hardly any money at all despite the incredible bull market. Jared just got back from Argentina, having given up the literary agent trade, and he’s living in Brooklyn on the chichi side of Prospect Park (my Kate is on the Real People side). CLG is still thinking of more school, and the general consensus was that she should go to California to see how the other half lives. As I say, what a group. Although it is strange to offer them wine and beer. I used to have to worry that they might be drinking wine and beer behind my back (although I never got the feeling that they were too dicey behavior-wise back in the day, although occasionally CLG has begun to explain what was really going on and I’ve had to ask her to stop because I just don’t want to know) and now I merely have to make sure they can drive home legally. How times change.
This afternoon, with any luck, I’ll begin catching up on Nostrums. Plus, I’ve got preliminary notes on an intro to Pomo that I have to work on. And, oh yeah, I have to go out and buy a chicken for dinner.
Life is good.
Friday, December 22, 2006
Things to do:
Friday
More Christmas shopping. With things being what they are, I fell way behind, which is unusual for me, as normally I’m done by the first frost.
Buy prosecco. It goes with everything, and it’s marginally festive. Trust me on this. Make bellinis for the doubters in the crowd,
Buy groceries. I’ll do most of the cooking, as always. Today I pick up the last minute items, including enough eggs to open a hen house.
Watch a movie. I can’t remember the last movie I watched. Something soothing tonight, but I’m not sure what.
Saturday
Clean the house. While Liz is recuperating, I have to do all the heavy lifting by myself. If I were her, I’d stretch this recuperating business as long as possible.
Start cooking. The more I can do early, the better. I should be able to knock off a few eggplants, for instance (no relation to the eggs, mentioned above).
Go to the Big Apple circus. I’ll see you there if you’re at tomorrow’s 4:30 show. Go, Grandma!
Go out to dinner. We’re thinking ribs, which are very holiday-ish, somewhere, I’m sure. Hush puppies. Dark southern beer. Hmmmm.
Sunday
Christmas eve breakfast. This is a new wrinkle, as the rels will already be installed on various cots, couches and beds of nails around the house and will need nourishment.
Cooking. Mostly final prep for D-Day. Soak a bean or two, study the menu closely and prrioritize, that sort of thing.
Go out to traditional Christmas Eve movie. We’re thinking Happy Feet as the perfect crowd pleaser, as it has tap dancing and penguins and high praise from all and sundry critics.
Baking. This is different from cooking. There’s nothing like the scent of chocolate wafting through the house after a traditional Christmas Eve movie.
Traditional Christmas Eve dinner. Which, curiously enough, is all new this year, because my cousin who’s staying with us doesn’t eat nuts. Her father used to live on nuts. Who knew? Think beet carpaccio, scampi, risotto with squash. Nice.
Monday
Presents, cooking, eating, presents, cooking, eating, digesting, traditional Christmas movie at the chez home theater (last year it was Shaun of the Dead, which has gone down in family history as the best Christmas movie ever), eating. This no doubt is what the entire VCA will be doing Monday. Deck us all with Boston Charlie.
And so, Merry Christmas to all—as Bill O’Reilly would insist on our saying—and to all a good night. I’ll see you on Tuesday or Wednesday. (Given that last night I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and stumbled into the living room where Pip TW and I read a piece on postmodern dance by the light of the Christmas tree before re-retiring, I’m sure I’ll have something to say when the time comes.)
More Christmas shopping. With things being what they are, I fell way behind, which is unusual for me, as normally I’m done by the first frost.
Buy prosecco. It goes with everything, and it’s marginally festive. Trust me on this. Make bellinis for the doubters in the crowd,
Buy groceries. I’ll do most of the cooking, as always. Today I pick up the last minute items, including enough eggs to open a hen house.
Watch a movie. I can’t remember the last movie I watched. Something soothing tonight, but I’m not sure what.
Saturday
Clean the house. While Liz is recuperating, I have to do all the heavy lifting by myself. If I were her, I’d stretch this recuperating business as long as possible.
Start cooking. The more I can do early, the better. I should be able to knock off a few eggplants, for instance (no relation to the eggs, mentioned above).
Go to the Big Apple circus. I’ll see you there if you’re at tomorrow’s 4:30 show. Go, Grandma!
Go out to dinner. We’re thinking ribs, which are very holiday-ish, somewhere, I’m sure. Hush puppies. Dark southern beer. Hmmmm.
Sunday
Christmas eve breakfast. This is a new wrinkle, as the rels will already be installed on various cots, couches and beds of nails around the house and will need nourishment.
Cooking. Mostly final prep for D-Day. Soak a bean or two, study the menu closely and prrioritize, that sort of thing.
Go out to traditional Christmas Eve movie. We’re thinking Happy Feet as the perfect crowd pleaser, as it has tap dancing and penguins and high praise from all and sundry critics.
Baking. This is different from cooking. There’s nothing like the scent of chocolate wafting through the house after a traditional Christmas Eve movie.
Traditional Christmas Eve dinner. Which, curiously enough, is all new this year, because my cousin who’s staying with us doesn’t eat nuts. Her father used to live on nuts. Who knew? Think beet carpaccio, scampi, risotto with squash. Nice.
Monday
Presents, cooking, eating, presents, cooking, eating, digesting, traditional Christmas movie at the chez home theater (last year it was Shaun of the Dead, which has gone down in family history as the best Christmas movie ever), eating. This no doubt is what the entire VCA will be doing Monday. Deck us all with Boston Charlie.
And so, Merry Christmas to all—as Bill O’Reilly would insist on our saying—and to all a good night. I’ll see you on Tuesday or Wednesday. (Given that last night I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and stumbled into the living room where Pip TW and I read a piece on postmodern dance by the light of the Christmas tree before re-retiring, I’m sure I’ll have something to say when the time comes.)
Thursday, December 21, 2006
A <> A+2
I’m always thinking about novices. Virtually all of what is called by some progressive in LD—and note that the word progressive is taking on the cloud of connotations nowadays that the word liberal used to have in the mouths of Reagan conservatives—is antithetical to working with high school freshmen if for no other reason than that they’re not ready for the material. That is, even if so-called progressive—and I just can’t write the word progressive straight for fear that you might think that I mean that somehow this material is, in fact, progressive—LD is superior, or right, or true, or best, or however you want to portray it against traditional approaches, it is nonetheless none of those for 14-year-olds. The reason is simple. They’re not old enough. They haven’t been around to learn enough yet to synthesize this sort of material. I mean, you can’t read critiques of Kant until you’ve read Kant. You can’t understand the futility of post-historical narrative until you understand the gist of the historical narrative in the first place, and then have a sense of all the factors that mitigate against it in contemporary society. Bebop makes no sense without swing. And youth per se has nothing to do with achieving these understandings except insofar as the younger you are, the less time you’ve had to get your initial grounding. It’s not a question of maturity (or at least it doesn’t have to be a question of maturity): it’s not the quality of one’s time on earth but the quantity.
Last night we had a chez attended primarily by the Plebes, and I was struck by the difference between that session and the one the night before with the upperclassfolk. Primarily the ucf never shut their yaps, while the Plebes hardly ever open theirs. To a great extent this is a factor of their unfamiliarity with me (we haven’t spent that much time together yet), and they’re unsure of how much I really want to hear from them, versus how much I want to tell them what to think. But also they don’t have that much to say yet. I mean, if we’re sitting around discussing Enron, WalMart, Apple and Nike, in the space of about two minutes, what exactly do they know about the nature of these corporations, and the impacts these corporations have on the world. We did manage to determine that LPW owns no Nikes and that Richard’s size fourteens are awe-inspiring, however. One of the Plebes, having discovered (albeit not read) Rousseau, has already worked out an affirmative position based on some random quote from good old Jean-Jacques (which was pronounced anything but Jean-Jacques), eliciting from me a momentary blast on general will and some misgivings about the effect of civilization on the poor noble plebian savage, after which I suggested that all resolutional pegs cannot be hammered into the hole of social contraction.
As I said, they’re young…
Anyhow, going forward, I’m thinking that, for brainstorming purposes, it’s probably not a good idea to isolate young and old. Granted the old will do all the talking, but a good stew needs seasoning. And the young ‘uns will learn at the knees of the elders. I hope. In any case, young and old will now go forward and research Jan-Feb over the break. Again, I hope. May God have mercy on their heathen souls.
Last night we had a chez attended primarily by the Plebes, and I was struck by the difference between that session and the one the night before with the upperclassfolk. Primarily the ucf never shut their yaps, while the Plebes hardly ever open theirs. To a great extent this is a factor of their unfamiliarity with me (we haven’t spent that much time together yet), and they’re unsure of how much I really want to hear from them, versus how much I want to tell them what to think. But also they don’t have that much to say yet. I mean, if we’re sitting around discussing Enron, WalMart, Apple and Nike, in the space of about two minutes, what exactly do they know about the nature of these corporations, and the impacts these corporations have on the world. We did manage to determine that LPW owns no Nikes and that Richard’s size fourteens are awe-inspiring, however. One of the Plebes, having discovered (albeit not read) Rousseau, has already worked out an affirmative position based on some random quote from good old Jean-Jacques (which was pronounced anything but Jean-Jacques), eliciting from me a momentary blast on general will and some misgivings about the effect of civilization on the poor noble plebian savage, after which I suggested that all resolutional pegs cannot be hammered into the hole of social contraction.
As I said, they’re young…
Anyhow, going forward, I’m thinking that, for brainstorming purposes, it’s probably not a good idea to isolate young and old. Granted the old will do all the talking, but a good stew needs seasoning. And the young ‘uns will learn at the knees of the elders. I hope. In any case, young and old will now go forward and research Jan-Feb over the break. Again, I hope. May God have mercy on their heathen souls.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Waiter, bring me shad roe
What a group. Yeah, the "i" in idea is the kicker. I wasn’t even thinking of that. Alec Wilder could learn a few things from the VCA. It’s nice to know that American popular song lives on.
(And “Scrambled Eggs,” of course, was the working title of “Yesterday” before the words were written. Everyone my age either knows this, or, well, they don’t get to sit with the cool people. Try it out on parents of your own if you’re willing to subject them to the acid test of hip. There’s nothing worse that finding out your parents actually are, or aren’t, hip. Either scenario just isn’t…right. Parents should be ahip, which is like amoral applied to coolness. It’s the best solution all-around, definitely.)
Last night we assembled an upperclass chez, and kicked around a few topic ideas concentrating purely on conceptualizations of corporations. I wanted to get away from the initial pure morality issues that I had brought to the original brainstorming session (although I did shoot out my notes from that session to the Sailors on the listserver, itemizing the various pure morals arguments that were theoretically possible). The more you discuss this topic, the more you realize that it will be hard to argue anything meaningful regarding corporate ethics, although we are zeroing in on some basic concepts. No doubt everyone else is zeroing in on the exact same concepts (or so far off base that they’ll never be heard from again). Tonight there’s a session just for the plebes; obviously I’ll steal all the good ideas from last night and act as if they were always my own, and plant them in the virgin brains of the newbies, but mostly I’ll be browbeating them to research and work over the holiday. No sitting around playing Gears of War. No watching all the Star Wars movies from beginning to end. No going to grandma’s house. No sleeping.
My plans for the break? Well, there’s that pomo View from Tab that I’m still cogitating over, there’s the morality and justice units for the Hillary Duff, and I did start playing RCT3 finally while I was hanging around the hospital (there’s a bright side to everything) and it’s every bit as mind-sucking as the earlier PC versions I played back in the dark ages. On the other hand, the Wikipedia timeline of Back to the Future that’s circulating over the blogosphere has set me to thinking I’m due for that particular trilogy again. And I need to catch up on my sleep. Which means I’ll be doing what the Sailors better not be doing.
It is nice being the grownup. And not a particularly hip one. Except for Scrambled Eggs. And, oh yeah, the dirty words to “You’re the Top” written by CP himself. Some day, when you’re grown up yourself, I might share them with you…
(And “Scrambled Eggs,” of course, was the working title of “Yesterday” before the words were written. Everyone my age either knows this, or, well, they don’t get to sit with the cool people. Try it out on parents of your own if you’re willing to subject them to the acid test of hip. There’s nothing worse that finding out your parents actually are, or aren’t, hip. Either scenario just isn’t…right. Parents should be ahip, which is like amoral applied to coolness. It’s the best solution all-around, definitely.)
Last night we assembled an upperclass chez, and kicked around a few topic ideas concentrating purely on conceptualizations of corporations. I wanted to get away from the initial pure morality issues that I had brought to the original brainstorming session (although I did shoot out my notes from that session to the Sailors on the listserver, itemizing the various pure morals arguments that were theoretically possible). The more you discuss this topic, the more you realize that it will be hard to argue anything meaningful regarding corporate ethics, although we are zeroing in on some basic concepts. No doubt everyone else is zeroing in on the exact same concepts (or so far off base that they’ll never be heard from again). Tonight there’s a session just for the plebes; obviously I’ll steal all the good ideas from last night and act as if they were always my own, and plant them in the virgin brains of the newbies, but mostly I’ll be browbeating them to research and work over the holiday. No sitting around playing Gears of War. No watching all the Star Wars movies from beginning to end. No going to grandma’s house. No sleeping.
My plans for the break? Well, there’s that pomo View from Tab that I’m still cogitating over, there’s the morality and justice units for the Hillary Duff, and I did start playing RCT3 finally while I was hanging around the hospital (there’s a bright side to everything) and it’s every bit as mind-sucking as the earlier PC versions I played back in the dark ages. On the other hand, the Wikipedia timeline of Back to the Future that’s circulating over the blogosphere has set me to thinking I’m due for that particular trilogy again. And I need to catch up on my sleep. Which means I’ll be doing what the Sailors better not be doing.
It is nice being the grownup. And not a particularly hip one. Except for Scrambled Eggs. And, oh yeah, the dirty words to “You’re the Top” written by CP himself. Some day, when you’re grown up yourself, I might share them with you…
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
How many points for understanding the eggs reference?
It should come as no surprise that I am a bit overzealous about the American Songbook. So the idea that “I Get a Kick Out of You” is a Frank Sinatra song, mentioned in a recent comment, is not exactly wrong, given that it is one of his signature tunes, but first and foremost it is a Cole Porter song. The analogy here might be, when you get on an elevator, the 1001 Strings version of “Yesterday” (which at one point, and this may still be true, was the most recorded song ever) is indeed a signature tune of Muzak, but first and foremost it is a Paul McCartney song (or, arguably, a Beatles song, but that’s neither here nor there to anyone who knows their Beatles at this point—scrambled eggs, anyone?).
Porter is one of those amazing people who did lyrics and music both. These are two rather different skills, and it is unusual to find anyone who can do both well, although in rock music it is not unusual to find people who can do both adequately. As a rule, though, one will be excellent, the other rote. Dylan, for instance, didn’t break much ground in harmonics but knocked off the odd memorable phrase now and then. I mention rock because the 60s were the dawning age of the creative performer, and if a rock group or single expected serious consideration, original self-generated material was a must, so the idea of mastery of music and words isn’t as staggering today as it was in the golden age of American song when the Porters and Gershwins and such were doing their thing. Porter, knowing language and music, and singing, which is important if you want people to be able to successfully put your music across, and these folks were always writing for other people, phrases things in a most amazing way:
I get no kick [beat] from champagne
That is, in fact, 8 beats. I love that implied pause.
Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all
Note the internal rhyme, alcohol with all.
So tell me why should it be true
That I get a kick out of you
Then on to the lovely
Some get their kicks from cocaine
which is bowdlerized by Sinatra into
Some like the perfume from Spain
which just isn’t the same. Ask any smelly crackhead. But the next section is the top:
I know that if / I took even one sniff
It would bore me terriff / ic’ly too
This is the sort of phrasing that I think absolutely requires the lyrics and music to come from the same brain. And it’s fun for a performer to sing. Then, of course, speaking of merging performance with the words and the music there’s the rising notes to accompany the flying words of
I get no kick on a plane
Riding too high with some guy in the sky [three internals, four if you count the I in riding]
Is my idea of nothing to do
But I get a kick out of you.
I have nothing against Sinatra, witnessed by my ownership of, I guess, almost every album he ever recorded. But he’s no friend of the composers: he makes all songs into Sinatra songs, which is his great strength as a singer. If you want the music distilled, the way the writers wrote it, there are other singers you should visit. Fred Astaire is one of the best for direct interpretations of songs as written. Ella. Feinstein. These are orthodoxies. But my absolutely favorite singer, other than Sinatra? No contest. Louis Armstrong. If Sinatra is pop’s God, Louis is God’s pop.
Porter is one of those amazing people who did lyrics and music both. These are two rather different skills, and it is unusual to find anyone who can do both well, although in rock music it is not unusual to find people who can do both adequately. As a rule, though, one will be excellent, the other rote. Dylan, for instance, didn’t break much ground in harmonics but knocked off the odd memorable phrase now and then. I mention rock because the 60s were the dawning age of the creative performer, and if a rock group or single expected serious consideration, original self-generated material was a must, so the idea of mastery of music and words isn’t as staggering today as it was in the golden age of American song when the Porters and Gershwins and such were doing their thing. Porter, knowing language and music, and singing, which is important if you want people to be able to successfully put your music across, and these folks were always writing for other people, phrases things in a most amazing way:
I get no kick [beat] from champagne
That is, in fact, 8 beats. I love that implied pause.
Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all
Note the internal rhyme, alcohol with all.
So tell me why should it be true
That I get a kick out of you
Then on to the lovely
Some get their kicks from cocaine
which is bowdlerized by Sinatra into
Some like the perfume from Spain
which just isn’t the same. Ask any smelly crackhead. But the next section is the top:
I know that if / I took even one sniff
It would bore me terriff / ic’ly too
This is the sort of phrasing that I think absolutely requires the lyrics and music to come from the same brain. And it’s fun for a performer to sing. Then, of course, speaking of merging performance with the words and the music there’s the rising notes to accompany the flying words of
I get no kick on a plane
Riding too high with some guy in the sky [three internals, four if you count the I in riding]
Is my idea of nothing to do
But I get a kick out of you.
I have nothing against Sinatra, witnessed by my ownership of, I guess, almost every album he ever recorded. But he’s no friend of the composers: he makes all songs into Sinatra songs, which is his great strength as a singer. If you want the music distilled, the way the writers wrote it, there are other singers you should visit. Fred Astaire is one of the best for direct interpretations of songs as written. Ella. Feinstein. These are orthodoxies. But my absolutely favorite singer, other than Sinatra? No contest. Louis Armstrong. If Sinatra is pop’s God, Louis is God’s pop.
Monday, December 18, 2006
Reentry
It's going to take a little while to get back to speed. Liz was eating chicken when I left the hospital today, which I take as an excellent sign. And she's coming home tomorrow. I've asked Tik (pronounced tik) to pick up a few of the Christmas decorations he's been grabbing off the tree while no one is looking, but so far he acts as if it's my job to clean up after him rather than him cleaning up after himself. The noive! Pip the Wondercat, on the other hand, looks forward to another lap to purr in when we are all together again. Never underestimate the therapeutic value of cuddling cats. Come to think of it, someone was on the hospital floor today with a therapy dog, a hound of some sort that couldn't get any purchase on the polished floor, which made him look like Bambi on the ice. Very entertaining. Never underestimate the therapeutic value of any entertainment, especially stupid pet tricks.
So, getting back to the old stand... I did begin recording the epistles of St. Jules to the forensicians last week. I had thought they began with number 33, but in fact it was number 32, so I put out a special edition with just some of the old email, including kudos from the legendary Soddy, one of the original fans of the lads’ work. I may or may not get any more episodes out before Christmas, what with everything else going on, but I should put a few in the can immediately following 12/25. I did create a new general introduction telling any yabbo who stumbles across this stuff that they should start at the beginning if they wanted to make any sense out of it. Speaking of which, now that I have a gargantuan ancillary hard drive semi-permanently attached to Little E’s firewire slot, I’ve been thinking of acquiring the latest iLife suite, which allows the ability to create podcasts in GarageBand (although, come to think of it, if I wait a couple of months I can get the next latest iLife suite, but then again, that might be Leopard-only and I am loath to upgrade operating systems, being from the school that if you want to cause damage to your computing life, start with an OS upgrade). Little E’s only inherent problem is his small hard disk. Put an OS and a couple of apps, plus Virtual PC, and 30 gigs disappears in a puff of computing smoke. Make this a rule: when you buy any sort of storage, either separate or a part of something, go for the max. You’ll never regret it.
One of the joys of insomnia is reading at three in the morning, and I've been doing some pomo work that is encouraging me to do a new View from Tab, yet another entry hook into the whole shebang. Again, maybe next week. Tomorrow and the day after the Sailors are in for a couple of chezzes on corporate ethics. Oh, the humanity.
So, getting back to the old stand... I did begin recording the epistles of St. Jules to the forensicians last week. I had thought they began with number 33, but in fact it was number 32, so I put out a special edition with just some of the old email, including kudos from the legendary Soddy, one of the original fans of the lads’ work. I may or may not get any more episodes out before Christmas, what with everything else going on, but I should put a few in the can immediately following 12/25. I did create a new general introduction telling any yabbo who stumbles across this stuff that they should start at the beginning if they wanted to make any sense out of it. Speaking of which, now that I have a gargantuan ancillary hard drive semi-permanently attached to Little E’s firewire slot, I’ve been thinking of acquiring the latest iLife suite, which allows the ability to create podcasts in GarageBand (although, come to think of it, if I wait a couple of months I can get the next latest iLife suite, but then again, that might be Leopard-only and I am loath to upgrade operating systems, being from the school that if you want to cause damage to your computing life, start with an OS upgrade). Little E’s only inherent problem is his small hard disk. Put an OS and a couple of apps, plus Virtual PC, and 30 gigs disappears in a puff of computing smoke. Make this a rule: when you buy any sort of storage, either separate or a part of something, go for the max. You’ll never regret it.
One of the joys of insomnia is reading at three in the morning, and I've been doing some pomo work that is encouraging me to do a new View from Tab, yet another entry hook into the whole shebang. Again, maybe next week. Tomorrow and the day after the Sailors are in for a couple of chezzes on corporate ethics. Oh, the humanity.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Hiatus
I've been out of commission for a while, and will be for a little while longer. Short reason: my wife has just had an operation. The good news is that everything went well, she is doing fine, and the prognosis is excellent. Curiously enough, there is a computer in the solarium of the hospital, although there is no sun, so I had a minute to log on and write this. She should be going home either Monday or Tuesday, and normalcy should set in roughly by the end of the week.
By the way, driving home last night I heard Garrison Keillor rhyme hiatus with potatoes (pronounced pa-tay-tas). I could use him the next time I go into my Dr. Seuss mode.
By the way, driving home last night I heard Garrison Keillor rhyme hiatus with potatoes (pronounced pa-tay-tas). I could use him the next time I go into my Dr. Seuss mode.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
I get no kick from sham pain
I have always found it curious that much of what I don’t like about debate is totally ass backwards. The article on performative college debate referenced on ROTC points out that this style of competition arose from the need for undersized teams to level the playing field against the big combines. Usually these funky new teams were less well-endowed financially than the old, established teams. The running of kritiks in high school policy has a comparable history: small teams unable to compete with big teams’ research-cutting abilities resorted to different tactics that would eliminate the size differential. But here’s the rub: in LD, there is no reliance on quantity of evidence. With some minor demurral, you’d have to admit that in LD a small team has exactly the same access to physical resources as a big team. Add to this the curious twist that it tends to be the $ircuit teams that more often gravitate to theory and critical debate than regional teams. That is, the teams with more money—which not only translates into more ability to travel but also a greater likelihood of assistant coaches, who in my mind are often akin to the Miltonian minor demons—are using the tactics devised by the teams with less money, substituting parlor tricks for resolutional analysis despite the fact that they have equal access to resolutional material insofar as there is no quantitative advantage to having “more” material in LD, as compared to having more research in the tubs in Policy. It’s a bizarre situation. Thank goodness it’s better to have a handful of clever upperclassmen win rounds by whatever means available than to ground a dozen novices in elementary ideas concerning morality and ethics and the various issues of the resolutions! At least I know where my priorities ought to lie.
Last night we did a demo round, and while I like doing these, I’m a little wary of the vulture mentality that seems to strike afterwards, where everyone in the room wants to have at the poor demonstrators with their own unique criticisms. “Hey, Menick, I didn’t get to tell them yet which particular idiots I think they are in my own special fashion.” While the upperclassmen bring experience and good advice, the underclassmen—I hate to say it—don’t know their patoots from their bezoots, otherwise they’d already all be qualified for States, TOC and early admission to at least 3 Ivy League universities. So I do try to limit critiques to the captains and the novice coordinators, who have earned the right to give their opinions. Oh, yeah, and me. Although mostly the others do the job well enough before me, and I just bat cleanup.
Anyhow, all this thinking about morality arising from the next topic is pointing me to adding a good unit on the subject to the Hillary Duff. Ditto the previous topics’ pointers at justice, another gap in the Duff. One must evolve with the times, although how I left these out in the first place is beyond me. At some point I should also port over the Foucault from Caveman, but as I was saying to OC over the weekend, what I need to do is decide what book to recommend to the Sailors as their Foucault intro (fooko intrault?). Ah, the joys of reading Frenchmen for pleasure! Absent Flaubert, Gide, Zola and, I’ll admit it, Robbe-Grillet, I hardly ever do that. I mean I read them, but I get no pleasure from it. Oh, well…
Last night we did a demo round, and while I like doing these, I’m a little wary of the vulture mentality that seems to strike afterwards, where everyone in the room wants to have at the poor demonstrators with their own unique criticisms. “Hey, Menick, I didn’t get to tell them yet which particular idiots I think they are in my own special fashion.” While the upperclassmen bring experience and good advice, the underclassmen—I hate to say it—don’t know their patoots from their bezoots, otherwise they’d already all be qualified for States, TOC and early admission to at least 3 Ivy League universities. So I do try to limit critiques to the captains and the novice coordinators, who have earned the right to give their opinions. Oh, yeah, and me. Although mostly the others do the job well enough before me, and I just bat cleanup.
Anyhow, all this thinking about morality arising from the next topic is pointing me to adding a good unit on the subject to the Hillary Duff. Ditto the previous topics’ pointers at justice, another gap in the Duff. One must evolve with the times, although how I left these out in the first place is beyond me. At some point I should also port over the Foucault from Caveman, but as I was saying to OC over the weekend, what I need to do is decide what book to recommend to the Sailors as their Foucault intro (fooko intrault?). Ah, the joys of reading Frenchmen for pleasure! Absent Flaubert, Gide, Zola and, I’ll admit it, Robbe-Grillet, I hardly ever do that. I mean I read them, but I get no pleasure from it. Oh, well…
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
F Lit, Humpty Chomsky, Lost Luggage, Awakenings, Sleep
So, enough about politics, new and old. I don’t think we said anything conclusive, but it was interesting for me to rattle the mental cages in which I keep my Founders info. I’ve been a major devourer of Founder Lit for years, because there is something intrinsically intriguing to me about these people and their creation. For those of us who, in theory, sit around designing the best societies, it is educational to study those who sat around and attempted it for real.
I did give a lecture on the new topic last week. Or, more to the point, I gave a lecture on absolutism v relativism, pointing out all the hooks for a pure morality argument. Obviously, I don’t like these approaches, otherwise I wouldn’t resort to my Dr. Seuss mode to critique them. I do not like them, Sam I am: throw in one more iamb and you’ve got pentameter and I’d be burlesquing Shakespeare. (Life is tough, you know, but at least now you’ll never forget that the difference between Geisel and the Bard is a mere two syllables.) Tonight some of the plebes will do a practice round, then next week we’ll have a couple of chezzes to discuss corporate ethics before heading into vacation. Either people will debate corporate ethics, or they’ll debate pure morality. Honestly, for once I can’t say that the latter is non-resolutional. Whoever does the wording for these resolutions needs a few years in the box with some of my day-job copy-editors. Words do not mean what you want them to mean… (I have this sudden vision of Chomsky and Lyotard in fierce debate with Humpty Dumpty. Great Googly Moogly!)
Last weekend was Ridge. The ever amusing O’C arrived with fewer than 3000 novices, and wasn’t even the last to show up. His definition of punctuality, of course, is not that he arrives on time, but that someone else arrives even later. This has always been the Bronx definition of punctuality, and I wonder if O’C was always this way or merely acquired it when he started teaching at good old Scientology. In any case, he managed to arrive without having any case, i.e., his suitcase went back to the Bronx on the bus without him. This rendered him, at the very least, less than sartorially resplendent for the weekend. Fortunately he did bathe Friday night, which helped a little. Those of you who have watched O’C at a tournament know that he spends most of the time typing away, reporting every hiccup to WTF. Every time he moved away from the computer in tab to check on whether the Scientologists were still in the tournament, Dario or I would go on his machine and type something seditious. O’C swears that there is a vast audience of mooks out there glued to their computers, following from afar every batting of the forensic eye, but somehow I doubt this. If there are such mooks, their need of a life is profound. I mean, haven’t they ever heard of Gears of War? Or Saved by the Bell reruns? Or maybe even reading a book? Jeesh!
I got to tab Pffft, which was not hard. Aside from a little smoke and mirrors on one round where I went from double to single flights, plus some minor pilfering of judges from LD, it was all according to Hoyle. There’s this thing at Ridge where, at exactly ten o’clock at night, the computers shut down and eat all your data. Fortunately Dario was ready for this Cinderella moment, flashdrive in hand, after having suffered absolute meltdown last year. It’s a curious phenomenon, with shades of Oliver Sacks and selective memory, where everything is new again the next day. Weird. But at least once you know about it, you’re okay.
I won’t be at Regis this weekend—I’ll explain why soon—so for me the debate calendar year is about over, absent these couple of meetings. I could use a break. A little sleep never hurt anybody.
I did give a lecture on the new topic last week. Or, more to the point, I gave a lecture on absolutism v relativism, pointing out all the hooks for a pure morality argument. Obviously, I don’t like these approaches, otherwise I wouldn’t resort to my Dr. Seuss mode to critique them. I do not like them, Sam I am: throw in one more iamb and you’ve got pentameter and I’d be burlesquing Shakespeare. (Life is tough, you know, but at least now you’ll never forget that the difference between Geisel and the Bard is a mere two syllables.) Tonight some of the plebes will do a practice round, then next week we’ll have a couple of chezzes to discuss corporate ethics before heading into vacation. Either people will debate corporate ethics, or they’ll debate pure morality. Honestly, for once I can’t say that the latter is non-resolutional. Whoever does the wording for these resolutions needs a few years in the box with some of my day-job copy-editors. Words do not mean what you want them to mean… (I have this sudden vision of Chomsky and Lyotard in fierce debate with Humpty Dumpty. Great Googly Moogly!)
Last weekend was Ridge. The ever amusing O’C arrived with fewer than 3000 novices, and wasn’t even the last to show up. His definition of punctuality, of course, is not that he arrives on time, but that someone else arrives even later. This has always been the Bronx definition of punctuality, and I wonder if O’C was always this way or merely acquired it when he started teaching at good old Scientology. In any case, he managed to arrive without having any case, i.e., his suitcase went back to the Bronx on the bus without him. This rendered him, at the very least, less than sartorially resplendent for the weekend. Fortunately he did bathe Friday night, which helped a little. Those of you who have watched O’C at a tournament know that he spends most of the time typing away, reporting every hiccup to WTF. Every time he moved away from the computer in tab to check on whether the Scientologists were still in the tournament, Dario or I would go on his machine and type something seditious. O’C swears that there is a vast audience of mooks out there glued to their computers, following from afar every batting of the forensic eye, but somehow I doubt this. If there are such mooks, their need of a life is profound. I mean, haven’t they ever heard of Gears of War? Or Saved by the Bell reruns? Or maybe even reading a book? Jeesh!
I got to tab Pffft, which was not hard. Aside from a little smoke and mirrors on one round where I went from double to single flights, plus some minor pilfering of judges from LD, it was all according to Hoyle. There’s this thing at Ridge where, at exactly ten o’clock at night, the computers shut down and eat all your data. Fortunately Dario was ready for this Cinderella moment, flashdrive in hand, after having suffered absolute meltdown last year. It’s a curious phenomenon, with shades of Oliver Sacks and selective memory, where everything is new again the next day. Weird. But at least once you know about it, you’re okay.
I won’t be at Regis this weekend—I’ll explain why soon—so for me the debate calendar year is about over, absent these couple of meetings. I could use a break. A little sleep never hurt anybody.
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