Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Well -- back to the article -- I think the notion of taboos in general is a morality thing and therefore not based in objective reality, but here it's even more misapplied.

Anyway...I didn't think that he was saying it's the only way to educate someone -- I read this: "Thiel thinks ideas can develop in a start-up environment much faster than at a university. And the project is also intended to question the idea of higher education."

A curious, inquisitive, intellectually honest mind has little to do with education (particularly not in the US), but it does have something to do with being educated.

I am not sure about other countries in other regions, but in my experience, the UK and other Western European countries sort of encourage a "perpetual student" thing that I find really ... attractive... :)

Back to work!

Oh, and just to further drive home the whackness:

http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-a-...

"Tuition is rising, the job market is weak, and everyone seems to be debating the value of a college degree. But Anthony P. Carnevale thinks these arguments are missing an important point. Mr. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, has argued that talking about the bachelor's degree in general doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because its financial payoff is heavily affected by what that degree is in and which college it is from.
...
The report found a close, but imperfect, link between major and occupation. That was no surprise, Mr. Carnevale says, since college is becoming more and more linked to occupation. "The image higher education carries of itself as a large liberal-arts institution where everyone sits on the lawn and reads Shakespeare," he says, "hasn't been true since the 70s."

Some majors are very closely tied to a particular occupation: For example, 82 percent of nursing majors work in health-practice occupations. Other majors lead to several sets of occupations, which could be one explanation for the variation in earnings for those majors. Physics majors, for instance, work in computer occupations (19 percent), management occupations (19 percent), engineering occupations (14 percent), and sales occupations (9 percent).

There was also a close connection between college major and industry. For instance, 84 percent of nursing majors worked in the health-services industry. But again, there is variation in some groups of majors. Biological-engineering majors were split between durable manufacturing (16 percent), construction (11 percent), professional services (10 percent) and nondurable manufacturing (9 percent) industries."

Patty wrote: "oh and also, even though i think empathy is a fabulous thing, it's those parts of the character that shock us, take us off guard, show us some other way of seeing the world, the things that are for..."

Maybe that's why I have such a tough time thinking of one, or even just 10. Connecting to characters may be the best part of reading.

I think we have as whack a view of education in the US as we do sexuality.

[In the US] We have a real schism around what education is and who "deserves" it -- it's as much a class issue as anything else. Now, with so much pressure for everyone to go lest they never be employable, and the ridiculous expense involved which schools are able to charge because everyone has to go, not to mention the education loan craziness, it's become almost a racket.

When I was in school, one year tuition went up 18 percent. 18 percent! Who tolerates that crap when they are already paying through the nose for something? But people coughed it up and took out the loans, because their "education" was so valuable in the agora.

Somehow we got it into our heads as a nation that we all have to specialize as early as possible. Too much specialization leads to a lack of innovation. That's pretty basic, no? So in this, I am totally on board with Thiel (and by the way, it's his money, he can do whatever the hell he wants with it, including subverting a dominant paradigm that no longer functions well).

There is a huge difference between vocational training ... like being an accountant ... and education for creating well-rounded, curious individuals who have critical thinking skills, writing skills, reasoning and problem-solving skills that are NOT specific to an occupation. (Which is not to say people who major in accountancy CAN'T have those skills. But it's not part of their "education" in their profession)

Yeah, I guess I'm a liberal arts throwback. Maybe that makes me anachronistic, old fashioned. The most creative people I've known in my anecdotal little life have degrees in things that are not super-specific to a job role. When people ask me what I'm "trained" to do, the real answer is, I'm trained to read poetry and novels. But I work in technology, which I have zero "education" (or formal training) in. Zero.

So all my ranting (and I could go on for days about this) goes to say, go Thiel. Wreak some havoc, shake that shit UP and freak out the machine.

Don Quixote would be at the top... Bloom, too. Hmmmmm...

Wow! That's an interesting one. And REALLY difficult.

I will have to let that one sit for a few hours...

I read it out loud to hear the poetry. It has a rhythm to it that feels a lot like some of Faulkner.

Some of those things you have to put into the context of when she was writing, which was during the Harlem Renaissance.

Hurston was roundly criticized for not creating "strong" African American characters at a time when the movement was at least in part about showing African Americans as a people who had to be even stronger than the whites because of what they had to go through just to live. To be a woman was a double whammy, so in a lot of work at the time you will see black women portrayed as larger than life matriarchs out of "duty" to the movement's goals.

From what I recall when I read it in school, I had some similar critiques of her relative "strength" but first, there is some historical context to consider (which I never like doing, but it's kinda... right there on the surface and she commented on her work in this context), and second... where I ultimately got to on the whole thing is that her characters are totally, completely human.

That the main character can't read I took to be a statement of how we as human beings know all about love and life without having to read and be academic about it.

It's funny that this is all coming back to me but I couldn't tell you a thing about the plot.

I remember reading that book and feeling that I was reading something that was woven as a divine act. At the time I could not have been called anything remotely like faithful in any kind of divinity.

Sort of like Amadeus, when Salieri talks about God singing through Mozart ... "God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable..."

She was roundly criticized by other members of the Harlem Renaissance for writing books that were not serious enough.

I tried to find information around how she wrote it, because I distinctly remember that when I read it in school I was told that she wrote it in about 6 weeks or so, the whole thing, after the end of a love affair.

Read it out loud. Definitely, read it out loud.

ohhhhhhhhhh I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE this book.

She wrote it in about 4 weeks, if I recall correctly.

Ohh -- I thought for some reason paypal would have told you. Yes, everyone, I've gotten them. :) Thank you for paying in advance -- helps out with the credit card. :)

The house, for those who haven't seen it yet:

http://www.olivebranchretreat.com/ind...

R.a. wrote: "A small addition:

For me, the 'intimacy' between 'the book,' 'the author,' and/or 'the speaker(s)' get somehow "lost" w/ the e-readers.

Moving between pages is quick w/ "flipping," a "skill" ..."

I agree. I have an intangible relationship with words on pages that no screen-based interface can really replace.

I was recently discussing -- well, ok pontificating with my team at work -- about how web interfaces are starting to follow more NUI (natural user interface) principles that are mobile in basic nature (iPhone, actually).

Which is to say that interfaces with screen-based devices will increasingly emulate more common HUMAN metaphors, just as other parts of our lives have had their UI influenced by what we do on screens.

I saw some amazing stuff a couple of weeks ago that was seriously a lot like the holographic, gesture-based interfaces in Minority Report. Not far away.

Well, yes. And I'm not being glib or flippant about the question, either. I just want to know if it feels unfinished to a reader.

It feels... well, a conversation about his death in particular feels to me ... like an invasion of privacy. It has nothing to do with death or even suicide being a taboo subject -- really it's just that as private a person as he was, now we know something about the pain he experienced when he was with us, and that makes it feel like something untouchable, private, that this round, this life, his soul should be left in peace. (I know I'm not being entirely articulate about this.) I think we talked about this on MySpace when he died...? So I'm not avoiding the subject or being glib as much as I'm trying to respect his memory.

I haven't finished IJ, nor do I have nearly the depth of understanding you do of his work, but I will say that the contrast in style is stark. This book is much clearer to me as a narrative and as a created world. I don't feel as though I am roaming his mind as much as I do when I'm reading IJ.

Apparently in hanging out with all those smarty pants, DFW never heard that one should NEVER get the name of a significant other inked on ANY body part. I mean, even though I had three boyfriends named Sean in high school, that surely wouldn't have worked out, because after that there were two Matt's and later two Jason's -- and that Nick in between would surely have felt left out. Too much revision needed. Although I would love to know what that footnote was...



Just a question. Just a little one. Are we totally sure it was unfinished? By that I mean, in the reading, does it really feel unfinished or do we assume it's unfinished because we've been TOLD so?

There is a chapter just before the foreword that I also found totally stunning. It's hard to write about it and not give anything away. But the chapter on the girl who moves from trailer park to trailer park is SO amazing. I mean, the language is incredibly beautiful to describe these terrible things that both happen to her and that she does. It's just -- breathtaking. It does remind me of some of Infinite Jest.

Holy cow. If you haven't gotten there, the Foreword that starts in the mid-70s page wise will completely knock your socks off.

And some of it even sounds like stuff we've talked about in FF back in the day...

I dig this article:
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/books...

"That's what I love in Wallace, noticed details like that, microdescriptions of feeling states that seem suggestive of whole branching social super-systems, sentences that make me feel like, Anyone who doesn't get that is living in a different world. He was the closest thing we had to a recording angel. There are paragraphs in Infinite Jest where he's able to trap things, fleeting qualities of our "moment," things that you weren't sure others felt but suspected they might. To read these is like watching X-rays of the collective unconscious develop:"

I didn't suggest that it wouldn't be a celebration and I'm not going to claim any special knowledge, or lack thereof, or attach story to, suicide and its impact. That was not my point. It's just my personal feeling about how odd (creepy) it seems to have a launch party... think about that one for a second ... for someone who couldn't be there. Like having a launch party for Nabokov's unpublished work a few years back. I had this flash of a vision of them getting the podium out and giving some kind of speech about the loss of such a man, and how that could be one of the more (poetry of the) absurd scenes in one of his novels.

Sounds insensitive, I know, but really I'm just sensitive to the idea of people glomming onto his legacy. That upsets me. He was here, and he is gone. Just like the rest of us are and will be.

He can be celebrated through his work and optimally the gathering would do that, right?

Anyhoo, enough about my feelings, back to the book. Thoughts? Comparisons?