The Times on “Teaching” September 20, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in pedagogy, pop culture.Tags: Add new tag, pedagogy
4 comments
Reading the New York Times Magazine’s College Life issue this morning was nothing if not a reminder that representations of cultures are seldom analogous to the material realities of those who live in them. I’ve written here before about popular representations of professors (and how those resemble approximately 2% of my colleagues), but the Times today expands its reach to include not just professors, but teaching and writing as well.
It begins with an article titled “Those Who Write, Teach.” The title suggested to me, as it would to many in the profession (particularly those of us at teaching institutions), the long-standing conversation about the connections between scholarly work and teaching. In essence, how does your research inform what you do in the classroom, and vice versa? How might you address the very real difficulties of carving out time to stay current in your field while attending to your students’ learning processes?
Instead, “Those Who Write” is a first person piece by David Gessner, in which he describes the plight of the writer “in captivity”—i.e., trapped by an academic job that slowly sucks the wildness out of him and his writing. To be fair to Gessner, there’s not a teacher alive who doesn’t fantasize about what she could be doing if she weren’t grading papers, fielding student questions, preparing for class. But I can’t help getting my feathers ruffled by two things here: first, the ambivalence of the title worries me. Is it referencing the old inspiring saw “those who CAN, teach,” and thus making writing (here strictly defined as creative writing) the equivalent of ability? Or is it more insidious, calling to mind instead the insult “those who CAN’T, teach” and thereby insinuating that writing within the confines of the academy eventually leads to a lack of ability?
Second, Gessner’s image of the work of teaching troubles me. Even as he critiques an earlier era of creative writing pedagogy (“learn by osmosis” from the “great man or woman”), he cites his love for teaching as one that’s grounded in sharing his work, in being a great entertainer, in being surrounded by people committed to writing. On top of this, the job provides a stable daily structure, a “badge” of legitimacy, and the aggregate of all of this moves toward balancing the ways in which he must trade “reading great literature and communing with writers of the past” for “apprentice writing.”
There’s something crucial that’s missing from Gessner’s description of teaching, and that is arguably it’s most important characteristic: the one where you learn from your students, and learn to teach them to learn. I’m in deep cliched water here, I have no doubt, but it’s very simply true: there is great joy and daily reward from the surprise of what students see that you’ve missed; in experimenting with various approaches to connect what they already know with what you hope they’ll take away from any given text.
The innate reciprocity of teaching is also missing from the Times’ second article: Virginia Heffernan’s study of professors on YouTube. I’ll spare you the close textual analysis here, but suffice to say that as she ranks and assesses the available videos, she constructs a very particular equation: virtuoso teaching=charismatic lecture=box-office gold. I have no interest in rehashing ye olde lecture vs. seminar debate. A great lecture is all of the things that Heffernan so closely observes in the videos she cites. Yet I can’t help but flinch at such a medieval definition of teaching. A “sage on the stage” is still that, even if the stage has become an international and digital one. There’s a special irony here too, of using one of the most popular forms of Web 2.0 technology—a designation that highlights the interactivity of the medium—to relay content without reciprocity.
The “college life” issue is one of many recent representations of college life (see Smart People, Elegy, the movie College for god’s sakes). Any more, and a careful cultural critic might begin to suspect that we’re hell-bent on representing a single professor and his/her well-wraught pedagogical urn in order to distract ourselves from all of the other types of college experiences out there.
Twitter-pated August 16, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, pop culture.Tags: olympics, twitter
1 comment so far
I know people who simply lurve twitter. It’s the new cool thing! It’s a microblog! Follow your friends! It’s internet poetry! I wanted to get it, really, but it wasn’t quite working for me. What would be the circumstance wherein I’d want to read such short, of the minute posts? I like the lengthy, meandering blog post, after all. Preferably with pictures!!
But then (and you knew this was coming, right?), I happened upon Slate’s Olympic coverage via Twitter. You would think that there’s nothing else to be said about the Olympics right now. I love me some televised competitive swimming, but this is just getting ridiculous. The whole world knows Michael Phelps’ torso measurement, as well as what he has for breakfast—because it’s on CNN. Fashion magazines are covering beach volleyball; Perez Hilton is tracking medals and opening ceremony cover-ups, for crying out loud. In this climate of neverending sports-cum-nationalism information flow, what kind of coverage could we possibly be missing?
Enter the fabulous one-liner. A few choice quotes:
Slate’s coverage of Dara Torres informing the judges to wait for the Swedish swimmer to change her torn swimsuit; an event heralded as the apotheosis of sports ethics on NBC, merits this tweet: “Torres pointing out the Swede’s torn swimsuit is the greatest act of Olympic sportsmanship since Lochte gave Phelps half his sandwich.”
On the controversial win for Michael Phelps’, wherein he touched the wall 1/100 of a second before the Serbian swimmer. Some cry conspiracy, and Slate’s tweet reads: “No conspiracy, Phelps just has the ability to alter space-time. That’s what he’s doing with that dolphin kick.”
Suddenly, Twitter makes perfect sense to me. It’s the transcendental medium for the one-liner, and I prefer the ones that are sarcastic shots over the bow, capable of puncturing the balloon of teary-eyed national sentiment and/or athletic fetishism. In feed form, the tweets are reminiscent of those magical conversations with your smartest friends, whose reactions to absurd events reduce you to tears of laughter.
The Twitter folk position their application as one in which users answer the question “What are you doing?” I can help but wonder whether a better use might be to answer the question “What are you seeing?”
Cho, Round Two July 14, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in asian america, pop culture.Tags: Add new tag, asian america, margaret cho
2 comments
I was delighted to see that Margaret Cho is returning to television with a new show on VH1. It doesn’t take a deep knowledge of tv history to know about Cho’s first sitcom (and notably, the first Asian American sitcom), All-American Girl and the debacle it became (all of which she chronicles, with a characteristic synthesis of pathos and humor, in I’m the One that I Want).
The LA Times article above features this description of the new show:
“It’s kind of a cross between Madonna’s ‘Truth or Dare,’ ‘Joy Luck Club’ and ‘Little People, Big World,’” she said. In truth, the series follows Cho and her family as they improv their way through scripted situations. During the first episode, Cho tells her parents that a magazine has named her Korean of the Year, and the show follows the family’s trip to San Francisco, where she’ll accept it.
In some ways, the format sounds more like Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm to me.
Cho’s return makes me contemplate the significant changes that television has undergone since All American Girl aired in ‘94-’95. In many ways, the sitcom seems like such a dead and deadening form, while the advent of reality television has pushed audiences and performers alike to explore new ways of including live footage into shows. Meanwhile, the scrum of channels fighting for niche markets has apparently turned VH1 into the home for nostalgia, forgotten celebrities (hello, two Coreys!), and subcultural icons. Having said that, I’m surprised that Cho isn’t airing on Bravo—can you imagine a Margaret Cho/Kathy Griffin lineup? Perhaps an end of the season smackdown? [Cho has already appeared on an episode of Life on the D List, where she joins Griffin and Cyndi Lauper for the Gay Pride Parade in Australia. If Cho rates a float there, doesn't she seem to belong to the Bravo family?]
Regardless, I have high but cautious hopes for the success of Cho’s new show. In part, it’s personal: I have such a soft spot for her, and am so ready to see Asian Americans on television that aren’t pretending to be from another country (see Lost, Heroes, etc.). Better yet, I think Cho may have a better chance outside the confines of the sitcom structure (which, I speculate, may have been more of the problem of the show than America’s unwillingness to see Asian Americans on television. But perhaps I’m too optimistic).
So let’s hear it for the move beyond the sitcom, and look forward to the August 21st airing. Keep your fingers crossed…
Confronting the Gap July 10, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in pop culture.1 comment so far
Courtesy of PopCandy this morning comes a link to a short video interview with Ira Glass, host of the transcendent This American Life on NPR. In it, he talks about initial artistic endeavors, and the “gap” between our excellent taste in a medium and our not-yet-up-to-par ability to create something that satisfies our taste level. Take a listen:
Now, admittedly, I don’t read many interviews with writers and creative types, so feel free to confront me on my ignorance. However, this is one of the first times that I’ve seen someone articulate the major impediment to creative work so clearly. Once Glass has said it, of course, it all seems so clear: we want to make the thing that we love, but we love that thing for its best possible representative pieces, to which our own early attempts bear no resemblance. This makes me think of the deep pain of learning a musical instrument. You know, you only want to learn to play the piano because you love Glenn Gould, or Diana Krall, or Chris Martin. But when you first learn to play, you’re of course butchering “The Entertainer” or some such crap, and you’re nowhere near whipping through Mozart concertos with deep pathos. And thus, the temptation is to abandon it forever.
Glass does a beautiful job here not only explaining the need to soldier on, but does so with such compassion for the beginner, and a good deal of gentle mocking of his early self. I love the fact that he pulls out his own early efforts, and is willing to share it. What’s more convincing than hearing the less-than-perfect early attempts of those who have mastered the medium?
Good on you, Ira.
Fluff on Spoon July 8, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, pop culture.Tags: Add new tag, peeps, you tube
1 comment so far
When you spend a good couple of hours in the morning searching for fan videos on YouTube, it’s almost unbelievable what you’ll happen upon. Somehow, this morning, I ended up watching a video of the Keepon rhythmic robot dancing to a song by Spoon.
According to this article on the PBS site (courtesy of Wired Science), the video was a viral YouTube hit in 2007. So sue me; I’m a year behind. Regardless, see if you aren’t mesmerized by his little yellow groove. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself unconsciously imitating his moves, either.
Fantastic, no? I find that I think I’m done about 30 seconds in, but then I keep coming back to it. Is it the blank stare? the mellow, spongy rump-shakin’? [There's something in the Keepon's motions and expression that bear a faint resemblance to audience members at a Phish show.] Apparently, the little guy was designed to work with autistic kids. But what about his little, unacknowledged friend, the Peepon? Oh god do I love a good video response. Take a look-see for yourself:
Equally as mesmerizing, but somehow also a bit nauseating, no? All of that gelatinized sugar. To quote one of the best comments about the video from RustiSwordz, “Its Jabba the Hutt’s funky cousin.” Hi-Larious.
This is now the second post I’ve written about Peeps in the last two years, and I’m a bit disturbed by that.
Back to work now. Get out and get your groove on.
Whitney at the Gap? May 30, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in pop culture.Tags: fashion, the gap
add a comment
If this kind of thing keeps up, I’m going to need a new category, which I’m thinking of calling “WTF fashion”. The thing to which I refer, of course, is this bewildering trend of high/low fashion mixing. It was one thing when Isaac Mizrahi started his own line for Target (which I love). And I got it when WalMart tried to jump on the bandwagon with Eisen, and failed. But today, as I was reading Bunnyshop (which deserves a shout-out of it’s own: fresh, funny, novel approach to fashion and culture coverage), I ran across a post about a new line of t-shirts from the Gap: designed by artists from the Whitney Biennial. You see why I need a new category?
It’s actually quite an interesting idea; I dearly love to see what artists can do with a set genre, and t-shirt and our associations with it are as much a genre (with conventions, restrictions, etc.) as is Renaissance painting, I suppose. And the artists included are, of course, too fun: Chuck Close (who was just recently the commencement speaker here at CSR); Barbara Kruger; and Cai Guo-Qiang, whose mesmerizing exhibition is up now at the Guggenheim. [There are a host of others--take a look for yourself.]
The question, of course, is not who the Gap has chosen, but rather, what’s the marketing play here? For most American shoppers, the Gap is still the place to buy khakis and t-shirts (i.e., “basics”). They’re reasonable, they’re reliable, they’re beloved by the college student demographic. I know that they’ve experimented over the past few years with mini-lines by haute couture designers (e.g., Philip Lim), and now it appears that Patrick Robinson is working for them as well. I don’t have any hard numbers about how those lines are selling; if you know, give a holler! Intuitively, those endeavors seem to be a bit of a stretch, but were at least hemmed in (hah. “hemmed”—get it?) by a broad framework of fashion. The jump to the Whitney artists, however, seems to be a serious reach. Is the hope here that they’ll bring the Biennial crowds to the Gap with the lure of affordable, wearable art? Will the shirts serve as a cultural education for kids born and bred on the mass-market, who’ve never heard of the Whitney? Perhaps both? If I had to make a prediction, I imagine that there will be a good number of those shirts on the clearance racks all over the country by next month. Just a guess. My sense is that neither of these populations wants to be sullied by the aura of the other.
What’s in it for the artists, I wonder? On a theoretical level, I applaud their willingness to embrace something so identifiably mass culture and mark it as art. [Which is a bit of an assumption on my part, and it has to be: while the website gives brief biographies of each artist, it doesn't feature a mission statement for either the company or the artists themselves.]
All that being said, there are some charming pieces there. I’m particularly partial to this one, by Sarah Sze:
[And, with the immediacy that comes with the internet, I may be forced to eat my words. I searching for a picture of Sze's shirt, I found it already listed on Ebay for four times its original price...]
Cult Books? May 5, 2008
Posted by kmiddleton in pop culture, reading.Tags: cult, novel
4 comments
Given that lists are always fascinating and disappointing, there’s a great piece up at the Telegraph on the “50 Best Cult Books” (hat tip to Whitney). The authors have a difficult time constructing the criteria for the category, as any of us would. What do you count as “cult”? What makes it so? For all of the possibilities, the one that stuck with me was this:
we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.
Evocative and metaphoric it may be, but it’s a viscerally satisfying way to differentiate the cult novel from the bestseller, the merely popular, the truly weird. I’m particularly taken with the notion of the book as totem. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time on college campuses, but aren’t there always students (and professors, for that matter) that carry a particularly dog eaten copy of the cult book around with them? Doesn’t it become one of the ways that we identify our essential, unique identities (you know, the one that we share with 400,000 other people)? Aren’t those the ones with the characters that speak to us, make us right with the world, or at least explain the wrongness of the world and our own alienation?
Having said that, the Telegraph list can’t help but disappoint. To their credit, it’s a staunchly historical and multi-national list (including The Sorrows of Young Werther and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—I don’t know how many other categories can claim that). It’s multi-genre as well, featuring self-help books, novels, and philosophical tomes (Godel Escher Bach? I dragged a copy of that around with me for years before I gave up). But the scope robs it of something too; perhaps it’s modern resonance? Were 19th century cult readers—even if they did off themselves in a tribute to Goethe—like 1960’s drug-addled cult readers? Is every cult the same?
For this reader, the comments become the saving grace of the list. Give them a read, and you’ll find yourself testing your own definition of “cult.” The Lovely Bones? Um, no. It was beautiful and sad and a page-turner, but not a cult classic. Fight Club or Trainspotting? Now you’re talking. It’s become a cliche, now, for sure, but it’s almost impossible to read Fight Club without getting sucked into it as a world view. It’s insanely quotable too—maybe in the future we WILL all be wearing leather clothes… While I’m not a huge Philip Dick fan, he certainly deserves a place. And to the commenter who asks whether a book that’s assigned for high school reading can be counted (we’re looking at you, To Kill a Mockingbird), I can only say amen.
