Alex Kudera's Blog, page 128

blanchot's writer

"The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it."

from Maurice Blanchot's Faux Pas

mean or median?

I'd like to see a law that regulates journalists to the point where they are obliged to use either mean or median, instead of the more ambiguous "average" when reporting on student-debt statistics. Although "average" most commonly refers to the mean, it can also be used as a median (middle number) or even a mode (greatest number).

Anyway, this article, from the paper of supreme truth that we as good Americans ought to genuflect afore regularly, is interesting and certainly shows how including the for-profits greatly increases the debt load as well as the percentage of students with loans.

The student-debt average, which I'm presuming is a mean, appears to be in the 26 to 30K range, and I'm also presuming that outliers on the high end could mean that the median is a bit lower than that.

Excluding for-profit schools, the institute reported that 68 percent of graduates had student debt, averaging $27,850; a recent report by the College Board, using different methodology, put those figures at 60 percent and $26,500.
But for all of us fighting for greater and more equitable access to higher education, as any reasonable educator in a democracy would be, we should also consider that many of the students bringing that number down (taking less money in loans) are concurrently working more hours than they should be so as to avoid leaving college with outlandish debts.

The most troubling aspect of the article is that when including the for-profits, in the past four years, the average debt has grown by almost $6,000:

The Institute for College Access and Success estimated that of the students who earned bachelor’s degrees in the United States in 2011-12, 71 percent had student loans, and the average borrower had $29,400 in debt, compared with 68 percent and $23,450 four years earlier.

With such great increases, making debt-to-income repayment the default option for all borrowers seems to be one  way we can help college serve as a genuine "opportunity" for the greatest number of students.

unionize finance?

The story of the Americas continues to unfold as a union in Brazil funds finance workers organizing in New York:

The Brazilian union CUT (Unified Workers’ Central) has provided seed money for organizing efforts in New York City, Miami and Orlando, home to Banco do Brasil branches and call centers. (Brazilian unions have also supported American automotive workers.) CUT president Vagner Freitas explained this transnational strategy at a union convention in September, saying, “We don’t have the bank workers in the U.S. organized, so we can’t organize workers around the world. A lot of them are in the U.S., and they have a great role to play.”

It's tempting to say that we've come endless cycle, I mean full circle, since the days of Kissinger and Pinochet, and yet as of right now, according to a veteran teller, pseudononymous Ryan Filson, quoted in the article, $10 per hour remains the twenty-year-old starting wage for a NYC bank teller. Read the full article at the unionized paper of record. Oh, sorry. I meant read more at Al Jazeera, but I couldn't find anything online which indicated that Al Jazeera's journalists were unionized.

And this article from The Huffington Post suggests a third of our country's half million bank tellers subsist by drawing upon some form of public assistance. (And, of course, I can't prove that the HuffPo writer receives any monetary compensation, but at least one Tenured Radical suggests this is highly unlikely.)

Anyway, on this warm Friday in early December, the slippery slope leads to new employment numbers released this morning, and the employment figures are positive once again, with another 203,000 jobs added in November, but I imagine that the worker-participation rate remains at or near its all-time lows.

You tell me.

cut 180 pages, part II

AK: You’ve told me you cut out a substantial portion of the novel relatively late in the process. Was it cathartic to make such a large cut? Did it include a “eureka” moment, as in, now I’ve got the right length? Had you queried with the longer manuscript before you sent out this award-winning, revised version? 

MJR: A large part of the preliminary work was a bunch of false starts.  I kept thinking my narrator should be sixteen years old, so I wrote about two and half novels about a sixteen-year-old with the same pathology and hang-ups as my narrator.  There were a lot of the same themes, such as excessive guilt without cause, the connection between male desire and violence, and social awkwardness.  Then, in 1998, sometime around my last week of graduate school in Philadelphia, a classmate. . . pretty much slapped me in the face.  He seemed a bit exasperated by me and acted like it was his last chance to set me straight.  The slap was this comment: “Even Faulkner raped his characters with corncobs.”  That was a pivotal point.  It meant a lot of things, one of which was that I needed to bury my sixteen-year-old and make a new narrator who was, say, forty or fifty.  The problem with the first draft of Cartilage and Skin was that I kept trying to bring the sixteen-year-old back in.  I didn’t let him go.  The cathartic moment was finally cutting out all the flashbacks to his youth, roughly 180 pages.  I only queried the revised version.

Follow this link to read more Michael James Rizza on Cartilage and Skin.

Contemporary American Flash

 The dreams disappear and the music stays, but server and barista demand too much time and more effort at emotion than any job pays, and then you busk and strum and cash comes and goes and you leave town and live with your sister and her man and kids and it’s too crowded with family noise. So with acoustical guitar and green canvas sack, you find yourself in your forties on a bus to nowhere, Minnesota, to meet a nowhere man in late autumn chill. It’s a black-girl booty run to a white boy broken and broke. He’s got nothing but small panes in a tiny studio and he dies every day as a recovering artist and addict and no music gets played and no gigs get staged and the slab of steak you fry just for him gets thrown at the wall of the shower stall. Staring out at his old junk and used table and chairs, you wonder why no rusty needles are stuck in the torn pillows of his faded couch. Or under the beaten rug or behind the bare loveseat where his tantrums pour out quick like wine from his bottle, and you know no one is recovering from nothing and the sex is no thrills or never save for one special time when you wait for him all day long in a lavender bath robe and silvery thong. He comes home from his whiskey and beer and mid-life rage and you lower him down on the queen-sized futon and spend sixty minutes touching and pointing as he just lies there, a moan and a sigh, and then he groans too loud and softens too soon and that’s the saddest sound of your world getting colder.

thankful for a five-star review

Of course, I could, and would, complain, but aside from the usual, I'm thankful for this new, unsolicited review that I discovered earlier this week for my college commencement story. If you prefer reading for free to shopping at discount, you're welcome to check it out anywhere e-books or downloaded or right off the screen at smashwords.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful5.0 out of 5 stars Is This All There Is? November 25, 2013 By BirdieTracy  Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase When I started reading this story I groaned. Was this going to be another tale of collegiate pothead paradise? I am sincerely glad I kept reading. As I read I became convinced that not only did the author attend college, but he has had time to mature and synthesize his experience.

The story centers around a young man who is just about to graduate. As he walks around campus he encounters a wide variety of students. The earnest protesters of the current flavor of evil, those who want to stick it to the man- as long as they don't get caught and other assorted wildlife. It is to be a day of pocket epiphanies.

If I sound dismissive then let me assure you that I am not. College students walk the razor thin line between childhood's final end and adulthood. For the most part, the only ones unconcerned about what comes next are those who already have an in somewhere (and I would imagine that even they are sweating bullets). There is an overwhelming feeling of "is this it?"

The author does a tremendous job of pulling all of this together. And I have to thank him for briefly putting me "back in the day."  

cut 180 pages

Michael James Rizza on Cartilage and Skin:

I started Cartilage and Skin in 1998.  When I went to South Carolina in 2004, I had a complete draft, which was roughly 180 pages longer than the current 324 pages.  As I worked on my PhD, I didn’t really think about my book.  Sometimes during that period, I would open to random pages and tinker with the language.  In 2006, I added a sentence about Horatio Alger; in 2009, I added a sentence about “rhizomatically-inclined sophists.” That was the last sentence I added.  In the spring and summer 2010, after I finished my dissertation, I cut out the 180 pages (which, as I mentioned, dealt with his youth) and moved some things around.

Read more at When Falls the Coliseum.

Cartilage and Skin

Congratulations to Dr. Michael James Rizza on this past week's release of his award-winning debut novel, Cartilage and Skin . Over at When Falls the Coliseum, in response to my interview questions, Mike interweaves thoughts about Karl Marx, male prostitution, the "masculine imagination," and much more.

what really happens to anyone?

"Tuition is $31,385 a year; meanwhile, Kovalik said Vojtko earned less than $25,000 from teaching eight classes a year. And though Vojtko had worked at the university for 25 years, when she was let go, she wasn’t entitled to severance pay, let alone a pension. Her situation seemed to embody everything that is wrong with the economics of higher education."

Read more of this detailed and balanced article from Slate.

reading out loud

In under eight minutes, Alex Marcus reads a passage from Fight for Your Long Day.