Andy's recent posts

Recent public posts (showing 61-80 of 277).

I agree the blog post was very far off topic. There's nothing wrong with an off topic post every now and again, but his was real far off. I think it would have been better to just start a new thread with his writing, like I and other people have done in the past.

Now if he would have said the thing about CNN's timeline of Iran, then mentioned that he had a blog, that would have been less egregious, imo.

The timeline brings a new element to the history discussion: how the media affects our perceptions, etc. The topic has basically been about the study of history in general, his blog post was about a specific piece of history. Certainly that can shed light on the larger discussion, but if that was his intention, he might have framed the original post that way.

Russ2 wrote: "The demonizing of Iran.

Just which Iran, and by whom?

Seems to me one has one's pick over the course of recent and not so recent history.

And is there anything wrong with pointing to a blo..."

Yes the sun verse the mist theme is thought provoking. In so any cultures the sun was worshipped as a giver of life, and it is that. But we know water to be a resource for life, also. I'm struggling with what it means for a person to be mist and rain.

People really do tend to dry out at the end of life. Cultural references from Holy Baptism to Big Fish come to mind. I've always been drawn to wetlands and swamps, they can be fascinating little systems teeming with life, but I admit I've never fully "felt" the people are water metaphor as much as maybe others have...

Good discussion.

My opposites for logic: Illogic, emotion, and, in some contexts, creativity

My opposites for creativity: unimaginative I agree with death, dogmatism and negativity/cynicism as opposites, too.

I believe Logic is a creative process, and at the same time the creative process often employs illogic.

P.S. Russ, nice to see you hear playing the opposites game. I knew we'd make a post-modernist out of you yet!

…Tracing difference was one way Derrida explained his process. He generally set out to trace a word or words back and forth, or forth and back, on a continuum line between irreducible opposites. His tracing enlarged and expanded meaning. This process explored the difference between opposite terms without a bias for either term. In other words, Derrida might have written about truth by writing about error…

-http://www.ontruth.com/derrida.html

Is flying at night a good one? I just ordered valentines. I saw a book of correspondence in poems between Kooser and Jim Harrison, but I didn't get it.

I like how years are made physical in the poem.

the truck is thirty years

the years are put back in their places like dishes

Kooser is really great at that type of metaphor. Every poem of his that I've ever read has a real unusual metaphor. Now that my urban immersion experiment is on pause for the time being, maybe I'll be able to get into his rural sensibility, which has basically been the reason I've never taken the time to really read his stuff.

I'm interested in why the dishes are vibrating and why the water is rippling... Is it the years echoing, is it the grandmother's ghost moving, passing?

And this line is very chilling: no one's at home in this room

It can be read two ways it seems to me:
1. No one is in the room
2. People are in the room but they don't feel comfortable there, they don't feel at home

Why? Has the room become antiseptic? Too clean and barren? I don't think so, it is a mysterious line to me.

My grandmother moved through this life like a ghost

I think it's notable that he doesn't say she moved through the kitchen like a ghost. Moved through this life makes me want to envision her in other rooms, in other places, outside of the house, visiting friends, etc. That way, the kitchen becomes her spirit room or something. Kind of like in Free Radicals, where the husband's mind was his office, and the cellar was like his soul.

The ending is odd, too. There is a bit of anger.
Why did she turn her back on everybody, is the narrator still angry at her? Did she withdraw emotionally? Commit suicide? Become grumpy and mean? Was she ever a nice grandmother? Was she ever joyful, energetic, outgoing, loving? The poem doesn't say.

Based on my own experience, I would like the grandmother to be nice and cuddly and loving, but I'm not so sure she was.

Oh goodness, all this talk about the importance of facts and logic, but it's creativity that is going to solve the problem? Testing does no good for creativity. Hail the creative arts!

I believe grades are barbaric. Are we dealing with people or with meat? Grade D people end up serving Grade D meat at Taco Bell, is that the idea?

I have met so many successful, fascinating, inspiring people who were not good at getting As.

Starting in Kindergarten we teach our children that being human is not good enough. The continued policy of grading students can certainly be interpreted as a way for the powers that be to maintain control over the populace, as Catherine suggested in the original post.

I'm glad they haven't struck upon the idea of grading attitude, resilience, and passion.

Plenty of people are very interested in history, because of or in spite of their teachers. Not everyone is going to eat up history and fall in love with it. Some will and some won't. Hopefully we as a culture are able to provide support for those who love it and want to spend significant time with it.

Students learn best when a maximum number of nerve cells are involved in the learning experience. That is why telling stories is often a good approach to teaching facts. A story can be a pneumonic device, ancient poetic histories and the like are examples. Feeling empathy or emotional stimulation for a historical figure/event can certainly be a tremendous aid to understanding.

Michael, you are a wonderful devil’s advocate. In post 35, though, it seems to me that you are utilizing a sense of faith even as you decry it. You take it as a matter of faith that oil is not running out. I take it as a matter of faith that it is running out. (Fifty years ago, it took one barrel of oil to extract twenty barrels of oil. Today, because we have consumed the "easy" oil first, it takes one barrel of oil to extract only four barrels of oil. When the ratio hits one to one, we will effectively be out of oil.)

Then you say this: “But only by knowing the past, and learning facts, will we be able to tell which may be true, and which unlikely.” Surely, if we as humans are prone to being manipulated by non-factual “faith-based” arguments, it would behoove students to not only learn facts, but to also learn to spot faith when they see it, right?

All of the news coming out of Iran is unbelievable. I've only been able to read a couple stories in the NYT.

The Internet and new forms of communication are bigger than any government can control and that is fascinating to me.

My trouble is that I have a hard time following the Twitters. It's not a site I visit very much, maybe if I tried it I'd understand the symbols and the layout of the messages a little better? I don't understand the structure of the platform or a lot of the abbreviations.

Also, it seems like the potential for pranksters and snarksters is so very high... Do you think there are shit disturbers on there, Candy?

:) That smile is for you Yoby!

I posted a draft of an op ed I have been working on about the current state of publishing. The basic argument is that Publishing is doing a poor job at PR.

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/4420...

Any feedback is appreciated if you have a moment and you'd like to read it. (I'm not sure that the thread of the argument is holding together real well, what do you think?)

Did I tell you all that I'm back to work now? The company I used to work for hired me back a couple months ago as an associate editor at a collector's magazine (gun collectors, of all things). The company has an inter-office discussion forum. It's a trip.

Regarding number 8: "8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation."

Oh I feel so sorry for the academics who build the canon, who do the anthologizing. It used to be so easy for them to ignore humanity; now, with the Internet, they've got billions of voices shouting at them different opinions, ideas, feelings, experiences, how will they ever be able to justify their decisions in the face of all that? And if they don't do it right, there are millions of people out there who will do it for them. It must be very threatening to their image of the supremacy of their own giant brains. It all seems so taxing for them. Oh how I long for the days when the professors could just close their eyes and point to the deadest, whitest writers on the list and go home in time for dinner. But now, now they might have to work EXTRA HOURS studying this new challenge to our assumptions. It is all so very taxing for them. The poor babies.

I agree, Collins comes across as lighter. And most of his stuff that I've read seems like personal slices of life. Still very readable, as you mentioned. Speaking of poet laureates, Ted Kooser seems very light, too, though with an interesting approach to metaphor. Unfortunately, I'm not always interested in reading poems set in North Dakota or whereever the heck he is.

I've been looking at a web site called Wet Canvas. It's site where visual artists post work for feedback and encouragement. I find it a very inspiring board. I like to see the wide variety of painting that people do. Sometimes it seems like there is more variety in the painting world than there is in the writing world...

Thanks Sheila. I was reading a book on giant live-action role playing games in Sweden ( http://jeepen.org/kpbook/ ). One of the chapters had this quote: children rehearse and negotiate fragments of knowledge and models of real life through pretend play, by exploring reality and creating new combinations, scenarios and ideas of their own.

Make believe is to a child
as
The murderer is to Nita
as
Writing is to Munro
as
Reading (and discussing!) is to us?

There is a fair amount of stylized and figurative language that, for me, would take this poem out of the personal-slice/comment-with-line-breaks category, if I'm understanding that phrase correctly.

Or, to put it another way, what do you mean by personal slice/comment with line breaks? It seems like that would describe quite a lot of modern poetry. Examples? Or examples of the opposite?

This dream theory makes me think she's playing around a little with realism as a form.

When she gets woken up by the officer, it's a little bit like "Wake up Dorothy" in the Wizard of Oz. It's kind of like asking if the Wizard of Oz, at least the parts where she's in Oz, are realism or fantasy. They seem so real, I think, because the actors and movie makers invested so much of their humanity into those parts that they take on realism for Dorothy and for the audience, kind of like if Nita is dreaming the interaction with the murderer. Maybe it's a dream but it has some of the trappings of realism and much humanity invested in it... To me it seems like Munro is exploring how fiction is a lie that tells the truth (to paraphrase Picasso; which also was going to be my response to the person who was asking about a non-fiction thread... Are we all just fiction junkies or what?!)
It's like she's blurring realism, or showing how she can manipulate a version of realism in order to create some kind of reaction in the reader.

I think Ruth's mention of having that male presence in the house is right on the money. It's like she had to have that body there to understand something about what she is dealing with, the mourning etc, whether it was a dream or not. Almost like a role playing exercise.

Congratulations, Molly. Looks like a neat site to be involved with.

I haven't read much Alice Munro, but it does seem like an odd story for her. It seems so much more pointed and tight plot-wise. It could almost be a mystery story to go in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

But that isn't so if you go with the "It's all a dream" theory. Isn't Munro fond of having characters recall dreams?

I could see some realist saying, Well a person would never go right to sleep after something like that happened. The person is liable to feel so scared that they'd go over to their friend's house immediately. I wouldn't say that Munro missed that, I think she purposely has Nita going to sleep because she needed to be asleep when the cop came over to wake her out of the dream.

The murderer is kind of a double for her husband. He originates at the train tracks where they had previously made love, he hangs out in the cellar (the husband's domain, though not in his study, not in his brain) then she cooks him a mediocre meal like she did for her husband, and then he goes and surprises us by dying before her, just like her husband did.

And the fact that she wasn't really doing much reading, it's almost like she was waiting for some other story to play out. It seems like the books she had to read around the house just weren't going to touch whatever sort of narrative itch she had.

And it's kind of chilling how everybody is feeling so empathetic toward the murderer. I mean if this were strictly a home invasion story featuring a triple murderer, it just seems like it would have an entirely different vibe to me. Does Munro have any other stories about murders or heinous crimes?

The hole in the dream theory is how would she have known in her dream that the man was a murderer before the cop told her, if indeed she was dreaming and the murderer never came in the house? Maybe we'll never know. Or, if I can put forth a crazy, new-agey interpretation, I would say the man, having just murdered his family, had such a strong sort of energy emanating off of him as he stole the car, that Nita picked up on it in her sleep and that's what sparked the dream.

That seems like a crazy explanation, but I recall another story by Munro where an old woman relates to her family a dream she had about a crow and then she dies later that day, seemingly with no other warning besides the crow.

And who even says there would have to be a tidy explanation for such a dream in Munro's story world?

The beginning is so unusual, three attempts at the same simile. It's a useful exercise I think to try.

Interesting interplay between her father and the man with the mustache. They seem like doubles for each otherin some way.

I like this part:
I played my way through honors in school,
the only place I could
talk
the classroom,
or at my piano lessons, Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary always
singing the most for my talents,
as if I had thrown some part of my body away upon entering
her house
and was now searching every ivory case
of the keyboard, slipping my fingers over black
ridges and around smooth rocks,
wondering where I had lost my bloody organs,
or my mouth which sometimes opened
like a California poppy,
wide and with contrasts
beautiful in sweeping fields,
entirely closed morning and night.

I wonder if she ever thought of a typewriter keyboard or a computer keyboard the same way?

Some people even like to delve back into the archives every once in a while. Perhaps for the same reasons that novelists like to put manuscripts aside for awhile before coming back to them. There is a lot of power in recorded writing, to come back to it with a different context. It’s like if you get up to go to the refrigerator and forget what you are doing half way there. Multiply this by many times, and you get the changes that have occurred within an individual when they go to a conversation 24 hours after they last were involved in it. It’s an amazing way to approach a topic with different insights and creativity. There is a theory about studying for an exam that says if you study in different locations on different days, you improve your ability to recall information because you have exposed more neurons to the material (spatial neurons). So just approaching the same conversation on different days can be very powerful (this is probably old news to CR people).

Candy and I were talking to my friend Joe about this when I was moving recently. He kind of scoffed at the idea of spending time in a forum, and Candy and I tried to explain to him what we liked about them. Candy brought up the idea of context, I believe, and I brought up the idea of emotional risk taking and expressiveness.

And, if I can compare the chat forum experience to my old roommate’s group therapy case study book I enjoyed so much, in group therapy, people sometimes reveal themselves to each other in profound ways even if they are trying to hide from each other. In group therapy, sometimes a person’s desire to hide something from the others ends up revealing something important. The mix of people in a room might reveal a person’s reason’s for hiding in a way that the person never could have arrived at through other means of exploration (ie naval gazing).

For me, anyway, I’m much more comfortable expressing myself in writing than I am in speaking. I’m an okay talker, but really, I think it takes me a long time to get what I want to say worked into just the right form, something I’m not always able to do in off-the-cuff speaking, where it seems more of a talent is to just let it fly with little concern for consequences. I once did an informal poll in a writing forum. In this forum, everybody is completely anonymous. It is known that some people present themselves very differently than they might otherwise. Maybe they pretend to be the opposite sex or a different age or whatever. So I asked the question: “When you come on this forum, are you playing a character or are you yourself?” Well, of course, none of the “alts” would reveal themselves in my poll. For me, I tend to be myself but try to be more of a character (it’s funny because I find myself being shy and holding back for fear of what people might think of me, even though it’s anonymous!). The surprising result was that a bunch of people said they felt like characters in their real lives, and felt most like themselves when they were online in this particular forum.

To see the Internet as a metaphor for the collective unconscious, and to see our posts recorded, I think it gives us a unique perspective on our own psyches. Actually, I’ve been working on a project where I recycle material from old notebooks into new writing, and I’m taking old forum posts, old emails, even old instant messages and using them as sort of an unconscious for new characters. This way, I don’t have to rely on my limited consciousness of the present. It’s trying to build on what has come before but was nearly forgotten.

I think Candy is very far ahead of the "thought leaders" at work because of her interrogative fearlessness. (Jacket blurb? LOL) It seems to me such a rich topic you’ve chosen, Candy. My mind gets to racin’ whenever I look at that clip! (I like the write up, too.)

[Sorry for the two-parter, it's been so long since I've been here, I couldn't help myself!:]

Candy, I hope you don't mind, but I posted a link to your blog on my company chat forum I think on Monday (yes, our company has its own inter-office chat forum... pretty cool for a chat forum fan like me, especially since we have offices in more desirable cities that I can now communicate with).

Anyway since it's a media company, figuring out how to get people online and viewing our media is a big priority within the company.

I have mixed feelings about my involvement in this initiative. One thing I enjoy about the forums I go to is that they are basically non-commercial. They are not really about money. So it is a little uncomfortable for me to be putting forth ideas (mine and others’) about how to drive people to spend their time on forums at the expense of other things they could be doing with their time. For the sake of our company's profit. (Eventual profit, I should say, because nobody's really making any money on forums yet or online media in general, as far as I know. If anybody has contrary examples, feel free to send them to me in a private email :)

Anyway, remember that article somebody posted on CR about people with mental disorders finding support in online forums? I also posted a link to that article, and this quote:
"For Mr. Robinson and several other Web site users interviewed for this article — all of whom insisted they were not delusional, including one man who said he had been hospitalized in psychiatric wards — the sites provide the powerful, unfamiliar experience of being understood by others."

The kind of understanding that happens on forums might not be profound understanding on the face of it, but there is something about the contexts that are created in the various discussions, and there is something about the fact that the conversations span days and weeks, and there is something about the fact that the conversations are public and recorded and archived.


The same types of communication and understanding can occur at an in-person book group, but that experience is in some ways more fleeting because it is not recorded and archived. The in-person book group may be more powerful in other ways in the sense that the entire people are physically present. I think forums really present the opportunity for just a slightly different kind of communication and understanding.

Trying to figure out how to communicate these benefits to potential forum customers is a bit of a trick. I made a somewhat tongue-in-cheek post the other day.

It may be belaboring what I’m trying to say, but I’m so proud to be involved in all of this right now so I’m posting it here, too:

This article about Facebook turning people into introverts (link at bottom) has a lot to say about our efforts to get people involved in our online communities. The research study doesn't actually show that people are turning into introverts, it's just an alarmist title to sell papers. But it illustrates the fact that there is a major portion of the population who believe online communication is inferior to other forms of communication.

This common attitude hinders our efforts to get people involved in our online communities.

Chat forums, for instance, don't enjoy the popularity they might. It's a PR issue. A lot of people associate discussion forums with sleazy chat rooms. A lot of people associate time spent on the Internet as frivolous time wasting. A lot of people turn up their noses at the idea of making real connections with people online. I know people who spend time at a book discussion site who don't really talk about their online activities with their family and friends, because their family and friends have weird attitudes about this way of communicating. [Confirmed by Dottie in #8:]

Getting people to spend time in online communities still has major PR issues.

Maybe media companies should band together and do a PR campaign, like Got Milk? or Pork the Other White Meat. Something to get the common person more excited about the possibilities of online communities.

It could be called Got Community? or something along those lines.

The ads could go like this:

Have you had it up to here with your friends and family? Go ONLINE, where you're sure to find SOMEBODY who will agree with you! The Internet, find your Vindication.

Or, conversely,

Do your friends and family agree with you too easily? Go ONLINE and pick a fight. EXPRESS your inner TROLL!

This industry group could also sponsor research and art that would extol the virtues of spending time online. This would generate a lot of news stories and interest in the positive impacts of online experiences. I can see Dr. Phil going on Oprah and telling the guest to go online and find a community of like minded people in order to lead a richer, more fulfilling life. Imagine the flood of people running to their computers at Dr. Phil's behest! Some of those people would surely end up joining our communities.

Here's the article about Facebook turning people into Introverts. It's funny on a lot of levels:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sciencean...u...

Here's an article about mentally ill people connecting to other mentally ill people online and deciding they aren't so mentally ill after all (it's a nice example of the virtues of online community building):
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/fa...html?ref=style

The company I work for has grammar classes here: www.writersonlineworkshops.com.

I took a grammar and mechanics class through the site. The material was good and there was some interaction in a class-specific discussion forum. But after working all day staring at a computer, the last thing I wanted to do was come home and stare at a text-based grammar lesson on my computer. It was really very difficult for me to process the info because of the circumstances.

Good luck!