A few thoughts and observations on the Internets and other forms of communication.
1. I came pretty late to the Twitter party, and I use it somewhat infrequently because (fortunately for my productivity) DCPS blocks pretty much every web site available. So I’m not exactly qualified to opine on its usefulness and popularity, but I’m going to do it anyway.
I saw a friend’s tweet today that re-tweeted a tweet (did I really just write that sentence?) from McSweeneys magazine, under the topic #bleakraplyrics. Obviously, most of these are hilarious (“Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge and I am REALLY afraid of heights”). Clicking on the hashtag, however, allows the viewer – as I’m sure most Twitter users already know – to see other people who have contributed to this fun little parlor game, some quite cleverly (“What’s my mother f#*king name? Sorry, but these psychoanalytic methods aren’t helping retrieve any of my memories”).
This is the true genius of Twitter: fostering collective brainstorming. The networks are loose enough that ideas travel fast; all you need to see is one person on your friends list contributing to a topic in order to learn about it, after which you can pass it on to everyone in your list, et al. The character limit constraint prevents any one person from dominating the conversation and makes it easy to sift through all the ideas. And simply by clicking on the topic, you have a centralized place to look at everyone’s contributions.
I googled twitter + collective + brainstorming and no one else appeared to have written on this, so I feel okay making such an obvious observation.
2. As any regular readers of Wikipedia will surely have noticed (ahem), fake facts abound, often slid in next to real facts so that a casual glance might not reveal them. Usually, it’s pretty easy to pick these out, given their nature.
When truth proves as strange as fiction, however, it’s more difficult. Earlier I was reading about REM and then about Michael Stipe, who, as most people should remember, came out of the closet to no one’s surprise a few years ago. As I read, I came across the following passage (emphasis mine):
Stipe described himself as a “queer artist” in Time Magazine in 2001 and revealed that he had been in a relationship with “an amazing man” for three years at that point.[10] Stipe was also featured on the cover of BUTT Magazine in 2003.
This presents a conundrum. “Butt Magazine” is exactly the sort of name that someone with a juvenile sense of humor towards gay people might make up. On the other hand, porn is weird, and there are no names that I would really posit as off-limits. I couldn’t google “Butt Magazine” at work for fairly obvious reasons, so I had to wait until I got home to solve this mystery.
I should have more faith in the power of Wiki.
3. I was an English major who studied Yeats in multiple classes with several professors who were brilliant at explicating meaning in an accessible manner. Nonetheless, I was never able to get my head around the image of “the center cannot hold.” Currently, I am reading Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and in a single inadvertent sentence, he applied a similar metaphor that made that line abundantly clear to me. That’s right, I didn’t get Yeats until I read a book about rap. Go on and judge me.
Filed under: poetry
Things with the IGRB are over, at least for the time being. Everyone involved possesses hopes of being friends, maintaining the relationship so carefully developed over months, and the reasons behind all of this, the who did and said what and when, are irrelevant, at least to you. For the most part, fault isn’t the issue. Of more concern, I think, is the pain we fear we are causing each other.
For my purposes, what I’m concerned about, after dealing with the levels and facets of feeling, is my urge to speak in other peoples’ words; this happens a lot, when I’m feeling hurt, because I lack the confidence that my own language is sufficient to express what I feel, and so after the hours of sleep – which is what people who deal with depression do – I find myself overcome with the urge to tattoo these poems, these song lyrics (song lyrics! am I sixteen?!), these passages over everything: on paper, on my skin, on my walls, in an effort to divest myself of some small segment of what hurts inside. To repeat them, over and over, like some sort of shallow, pop-culture mantra, until the pain is gone.
Even if you have heard these before. And you have.
| Compulsively Allergic to the Truth | ||
| by Jeffrey McDaniel | ||
I'm sorry I was late. I was pulled over by a cop for driving blindfolded with a raspberry-scented candle flickering in my mouth. I'm sorry I was late. I was on my way when I felt a plot thickening in my arm. I have a fear of heights. Luckily the Earth is on the second floor of the universe. I am not the egg man. I am the owl who just witnessed another tree fall over in the forest of your life. I am your father shaking his head at the thought of you. I am his words dissolving in your mind like footprints in a rainstorm. I am a long-legged martini. I am feeding olives to the bull inside you. I am decorating your labyrinth, tacking up snapshots of all the people who've gotten lost in your corridors. |
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First went wrong is hard to find
We’re paralyzed, we apologize
Our hell is a good life
Last went wrong, where’s my prize under the lights
Can we call it in?
We’ll be on the road
Can we stop?
When we stop my back will turn your face toward the fence
What I thought it was it isn’t now
All this weight, is honest worse
We’re moderate, we modernize
till our hell is a good life
All we know what to forget, how to do right
Coloring in the black hole
Can’t we stop? when we stop
My hands will shake, my eyes will burn
My throat will ache, watching you turn
From me toward your friends
What I thought it was it isn’t now
What I thought it was it isn’t
Punishment to stall what is done
What I thought was in is missing out
What I thought it was it isn’t now
There’s a pattern in the system
There’s a bullet in the gun
That’s why I tried to save you
But it can’t be done
I am the owl who just witnessed another tree fall over in the forest of your life.
I had this dream last night that I read a poem. That was it; that’s all I can remember; and I didn’t even remember that until I started looking for “One Art” in order to reference it for this stupid essay for this fellowship program, and as I read it I had this vague memory of reading poetry and being struck by the perfection of its composition. It was a feeling that I haven’t had in the waking world in a really long time, and, thinking about it now, I didn’t appreciate that in this fictitious version of my life; I was just thinking, “This is a good poem. I like it.”
I haven’t read a lot of poetry lately. It’s one of my fairly constant goals, to broaden my horizons instead of returning to the same ones over and over, and there’s no reason for me not to do such a thing, but I just don’t always. It’s kind of like going to sleep at a decent hour. On any given night, there is every incentive for me to sleep and almost no positive results from staying awake until 2. (The allure of sleeping until 10AM wears off after five months of unemployment.) And yet I just don’t, whether through some sort of mental sloth or a fear of failure (failure to what? to understand a poem? to fall asleep?) or God knows what. Until I suddenly want to again, and then I read everything I can find for a week or two and set my alarms. There are a lot of things I haven’t been doing lately that I should.
But the memory of that poem inspired me to spend half an hour going through the archives of Rachel’s old blog to find this poem that she posted a long time ago, that I loved at the time, that I knew had something to do with maps and was by Sharon Olds. The only other poem-seeking I’ve done lately is Frank O’Hara, and quite frankly, that’s only because I a) saw him quoted on someone’s Facebook profile and b) Mad Men. Surprise: I don’t like the Sharon Olds one as much as I used to – I’m not crazy about it at all right now, actually, but maybe that’s because I’m not in any sort of love – and I really like Frank O’Hara. But I’m going to post them both here anyway, because I’d hate to lead you on.
Topography
Sharon Olds
After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco againt your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas, your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Animals
Frank O’Hara
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
Filed under: poetry
I found this while looking for Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall (To A Young Child).” I’m not sure that I totally agree with it (that would require a deeper understanding of our current economic state than I have at the present moment), but I found it amusing nonetheless. Read them both if you’re not familiar with the original.
It took being housebound for me to finally start using Google Reader. Despite all the junk food I consume off the internets, I never set up any sort of blog browsing tool, in part because half the blogs I read actually belong to other people I know who don’t know that I read their blog. You heard it here first: IGR is a blog creeper. (Oh, you probably are too.) I suppose that by failing to actually organize these blogs, I allowed myself to deny that I wasted so much time on such things.
Today, however, I have been more or less unable to leave the house. As it turns out, your trusty reporter is more allergic than not to a fairly large class of antibiotics, a fact unknown until, oh, yesterday. When I woke up Sunday morning I mostly looked spotty, but today I resemble a villain in a community-theater production of Batman. Rather than subject others to the sight of me glaring at my arms and willing them to stop itching, I finally learned to stop worrying and love the blogroll. Actually, it seems to save me time, since I’m not constantly trying to remember what I want to read and when I last read it.
All of which leads me to my new favorite blog, This Recording. Note the juxtapositions of verse and baseball! Note the fact that they reminded me that I really wanted to download Cloud Cult (which I inexplicably keep typing as “Cloud Clut”)! Note the breadth of the coverage and the carefully chosen mp3s that go along with each entry! There’s a variety of topics presented here on a regular basis, all interesting and entertaining. A winner.
One last thing: I am still ostensibly on South Beach (ha), but yesterday I received The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook as a gift from Miguk Apa on a trip to the bookstore. (I was also the recipient of a very nice external hard drive. It was a good thing I wasn’t too inflamed to leave the house.) So excited. The cheese bacon grits alone look like they’re worth the price of the book. I wonder if I should even pretend like I’m ever going to diet again.
THE PONDS
Mary Oliver
Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe
their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them –
the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch
only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?
I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided –
and that one wears an orange blight –
and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away –
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.
Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled –
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing –
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
Filed under: ESL, actual transcripts, life on Jeju, life progress, poetry, skool, students, teaching | Tags: ESL, haiku, Korea, poetry, students, teaching
Class notes had to come back eventually. Unfortunately, I stopped taking them for a while, which is why you were deprived. No fear.
THURSDAY, 12 JUNE 2008
2A – Infinite Classroom Challenge
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not perfect but did want to perform
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a ton of girls with pinkeye…ew
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can’t remember who won
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unusually good perormance from…that girl in the front
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Twin A is in this class, Twin B is in 2E (don’t forget)
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don’t mix up Baek Mi Young and Baek Ji Young (dammit Korea)
1K – Konglish Jeopardy
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had to do jeopardy instead of Muhan Dojeon because computer doesn’t play sound
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noisy as all hell
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got really into Jeopardy
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keep insisting that poor IGR 1 is my boyfriend…if they only knew
After stupid teacher conversation thing I have to go to the opposite side of town to see HD’s stone exhibition. To be fair, I don’t really have anything else to do, since the stupid AmeriCorps application still won’t work – it is now telling me that my account is locked after too many invalid attempts (zero) to log on. I obviously cannot just give up on finding a job, but this (lack of) response is incredibly discouraging.
EDIT: I never made it to the rocks. I went out for ice cream, galbitang, and an avocado-cheddar BLT (all within three hours) and played Scrabble with Africa. But while I have your attention, let me provide you with a few old student haiku.
First, we have a few meditations on seasons, with the way they reflect on our own (and our friends’) lives.
There is the cool wind
There is the beautiful scene
So I like fall bestI like spring so much
Spring is warm enough to play
But, I do not play.I like winter best
We can play snowball fight too!
Oh Ji Seok likes tooSpring is very warm
At spring are enjoy PC room control board
We are crazy
Reflections on love and its vagaries:
I love MC Mong
His face is very lovely and cute
But he have a girlfriend
I am handsome boy
I had girlfriend yesterday
Now I don’t have her
Love return give me
But we are loving with our
Love is beautiful
Paeans to favorite foods.
I like egg fry best
Because that is delicious
I very like egg
Envy for coteachers:
(Co-Teacher F) has much money
His salary is getting bigger and bigger
Now his salary is .6 billion
Descriptions of students’ selves and others:
I am smart and cute
Also I am wonderful
But this tall a lieI am bad boy
I don’t have any money
But, respect me ha!
I am a good boy
Many people respect me
I am a cool boy
He likes a crain
He wants be crain driver
He loves a crain [ed. note: accompanied by illustrations of construction equipment]
Within this category, there is a very special subset devoted entirely to my student Monkey. Monkey’s name, I may as well tell you now (realistically, in Korea, this is not going to help you identify me at all), is Man Ki. Now you understand. I actually have a few more of these at school, so I’ll try to find and post them tomorrow.
Man Ki is psycho
Man Ki always see (?) bad things
So Man Ki is short
Man Ki is short
But Man Ki is cut(e)
Man Ki is crazy
and Man Ki always show the sexual video.
And, of course, the metahaiku.
It’s so difficult
I don’t do it either (?)
It’s a haiku [ed. note: the author of this poem is named Yoo Seok]
I spent less than twenty-four hours in Seoul this weekend, tracing the path of our future MSYDP superstars and ensuring that they will have enough speakers to keep them entertained and enough jjajangmyun (ew) to keep them fed. It’s exhilarating now that all of this is starting to coalesce, that we’ll be able to take these kids and let them dream about a better world together. A couple of our friends/allies at the Embassy were gracious enough to spend their Sunday out in the city in the rain with us, helping us make sure that everything was going according to plan, and they even talked a little bit about the possibilities for next year. I’m not even sure if I’m prepared to hope for that possibility yet.
On the subject of possibility, though, here’s an editorial from the NYT that offers some rather sober food for thought, if nothing terribly new:
I think she’s quite right in asserting that
…voting for Clinton does not make a person sexist – there are other reasons to reject her.
The subject of sexism and Ms. Clinton, of course, isn’t anything that hasn’t been covered before, and the statistics the author cites are hardly surprising. Still, the fact that this article needs to be written at all, that there are still statistics to cite, is indicative of the issues that the girls of MSYDP, at least, will someday face. In one of the few advantages that my school has to offer, they had a gender studies program last year for the students – one that I would ordinarily have dismissed as repetitive, old news, perhaps replacing material of actual substance. But now I’m not so sure. Aside from the fact that a few of the boys at my school have obviously not learned to respect women (or maybe people, for that matter), most of my students seem reasonably aware of the actual, as opposed to societal, limitations placed upon them. But Jeju, with something like 65% of its women involved in the workforce, still outpaces the other provinces here by a good deal. And those women are still cleaning and cooking in addition to teachering and lawyering. Sometimes the girl power message feels repetitive, but I suppose we’re the first real generation to have it hammered into our heads repeatedly, and whether or not it works to change those numbers – and to create candidates who aren’t hated for their gender, as opposed to their tactics – remains to be seen.
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Aside from the article, there are a few other things I’m sharing here. The first is this poem, which I found in a rather roundabout way. I’ve only read one other William Logan poem, and it also used meter and rhyme in a manner that most of the modern poets I’ve read seem to eschew. Guess I should have taken that class on Poetic Forms in college.
For an Old Girlfriend, Long Dead
Lying on that blanket, nights on the seventh green—
in the dry air the faint scent of gasoline,nothing above us but the ragged moon,
nothing between but a whispered soon…Well, such was romance in the seventies.
Watergate and Cambodia, the public lies,made our love seem, somehow, more true.
Of the few things I wanted then, I needed you.I remember our last arguments, my angry calls,
then the long silence, those northern fallswe drifted toward our newly manufactured lives.
Does anything else of us survive?That day in Paris, perhaps, when you swore
our crummy hotel was all you were looking for—each cobbled Paris street, each dry baguette,
even the worthless sous nothing you’d forget.Outside, a block away, the endless Seine
flowed roughly, then brightly, then…Then nothing. Nothing later went quite that far.
I remember that Spring. Those breasts. That car.- William Logan
I’m also going to plug the newest Beirut album, The Flying Cup Club, which isn’t actually new at all, but is if you’re me and just got around to listening to it:
These are all in .m4a format, but you should probably already have iTunes anyway, and if you don’t, well, not being able to listen to this album is your punishment.
I probably like it mostly because I was listening to it today when it was nasty and rainy out, just like part of the reason I like the Police’s “Spirits in the Material World” is because I first heard it when I had a tiny part in a perfectly awful play we did at My College called “The Beloved Community,” and while the play itself wasn’t worth much, I liked contemplating the ideas of community and how much it’s worth – how beloved it should be. If you will. It gave me this weird feeling of naivete and optimism that, for unknown reasons, I associate with the late 80s and early 90s, probably because that was when I was first contemplating these ideas. It was also the first time I had heard the Police, although certainly not the last time, as I was also listening to that song fairly recently. And so will you, because it’s right here.
Filed under: IGR Recommends, lesson plans, poetry, skool, students, teaching
Twice in ten minutes, if anyone’s counting.
2-4 - I Wish…
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Famous American: Nina Simone
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I could feel them dragging…this is such a confusing concept
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liked song
1-6 - The Price is Right
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well-behaved
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responsive to numbers (but didn’t know million)
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took threat of point subtraction seriously (GOOD)
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WotD: discount
2-2 – I Wish
- Famous American: Nina Simone
- started class with genie scenario, kids were receptive
- more “I Wish” examples necessary to fill time
- ended up doing rhymes to finish class
2-3 – I Wish
- Co-Teacher E thinks they need more time to practice
- covered “I wish I could” and change of subjects (i.e. “I wish she could”)
- Famous American: Nina Simone
- find picture of Nina Simone that students will not compare to: giraffe, monkey, me
I’m beginning to realize that I should have paid more attention in fifth grade. My knowledge of grammar is roughly comparable to the Supreme Court’s knowledge of pornography: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. Teaching the subjunctive is really hard. On an unrelated note, I tried to take a shower and discovered that the tub is covered in a fine matting of hair. I have come up with a number of explanations for this scenario, and none of them hold up. Maybe I’ll go to the jjimjilbang tomorrow instead.
Reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma makes me want to be a farmer, which is a bad idea for so many reasons I don’t have time to list them all here. Less self-destructively, it also makes me want to learn more about Wendell Berry, who comes from my state, or one of my states, at least. I regret that I didn’t learn more about him when I was there – I have friends who have recommended him to me before, but I was not fully appreciative of Kentucky at the time. Well. Now I am.
In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams
Wendell Berry
<!– Wendell Berry poem –>
I. The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves, one of the necessities, so they may speak what is true, and have the patience for beauty: the weighted grainfield, the shady street, the well-laid stone and the changing tree whose branches spread above. For want of songs and stories they have dug away the soil, paved over what is left, set up their perfunctory walls in tribute to no god, for the love of no man or woman, so that the good that was here cannot be called back except by long waiting, by great sorrows remembered and to come by invoking the thunderstones of the world, and the vivid air. II. The poem is important, as the want of it proves. It is the stewardship of its own possibility, the past remembering itself in the presence of the present, the power learned and handed down to see what is present and what is not: the pavement laid down and walked over regardlessly--by exiles, here only because they are passing. Oh, remember the oaks that were here, the leaves, purple and brown, falling, the nuthatches walking headfirst down the trunks, crying "onc! onc!" in the brightness as they are doing now in the cemetery across the street where the past and the dead keep each other. To remember, to hear and remember, is to stop and walk on again to a livelier, surer measure. It is dangerous to remember the past only for its own sake, dangerous to deliver a message you did not get.
Stolen, indirectly, from a friend I’ll call Ashland.
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from Eavan Boland:
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
