Hibernation over, hopefully…

It’s been a long three months since I’ve posted. Getting re-acquainted with Tokyo a new job, as well as a few writing projects, have been part of it.  The other has been our new internet situation.

When we moved into our apartment, we had trouble accessing our WiFi. We fussed and moaned for a few days, and then realized —  wow! — We were so much happier without it.

I’ve been more focused than I’ve been in years, and have not only completed two drafts of my first professional script, but three short stories of which I’m truly proud. I’ve sent them off, received one very hopeful rejection email, and am happily waiting for the rest to circulate back through the ether.

I’ve finally, finally reached that point where writing is a happy compulsion. I knew it was there; it just needed one tiny inconvenience to nudge it awake — in this case it meant having to carry my laptop to the kitchen and hook it up to a LAN cable.  The old stand and surf also has an added benefit of making me more focused about what I’m looking for online.

Other people have more control over their online life. I didn’t.  And when you don’t have control, particularly in cases of technology, it’s sometimes best to downgrade. Throw a shoe in the loom, replace that microwave with a conventional oven. The food’s still there. It’s just better.

Tangent Universes or Thomassons トマソン

Ever suspect that a space in your everyday surroundings is the result of a failed teleportation test? A Philadelphia experiment involving office buildings and old movie theaters rather than human guinea pigs?

In Japan, they’re called thomassons, named by artist Genpei Hasegawa after a hitter for the Yomiuri Giants who could well…no longer hit. As anyone who’s spent time here knows, rapid postwar development and politicians’ love of public works projects has turned the country into an industrialized Winchester house full of half-built structures, stairways to nowhere, and water pipes jutting mysteriously out of telephone poles.

Thomassons are any human built space that has lost its use, but remains part of the structure that has taken its place.  Coming across one is mysterious and almost thrilling: Imagine you were suddenly able to see a sign for Platform 9 3/4 in Paddington station, and you’ll have an idea.

Now back in Japan with my trusty camera, I thought I’d follow up on that lost column and have some fun in the process. I’m in a rural area, and some of these photos don’t necessarily fit the definition of a thomasson, but they’re close enough.

I found this next to a rice paddy. A board jammed into a metal grate, almost as if it had teleported from some Home Depot of the future and gotten stuck. That someone would actually saw into the metal grate to insert the board seems the less likely alternative.

And this Tardis-like silo has a thoroughly modern door on its second story, but no stairs, not even a ladder. Who goes in? Who leaves? Who bumps her head or breaks his leg on the way out?

I’ll continue to update the blog as I find them.

Also, Hasegawa’s book HYPERART: THOMASSON  is finally getting an English translation.

Filtering distraction: how to use index cards to stay off the web

“The mind that has no fixed aim loses itself, for, as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

Michel Montaigne  (From a blogshort essay on idleness that describes internet haze brain to a T.)

This is your brain on the web.

Or mine, anyway, and for the last several months I’ve been obsessed with finding ways to curb the impulse for distraction.

For writers, this problem is exacerbated by our own insecurities, that inner voice that tells us we’ve got a fact wrong, or that we simply don’t know enough about a subject to be blathering on about it like some blowhard in the Guggenheim.

One option I’ve tried is the Freedom application. You can find a better description of it here, but basically it cuts you off the web for a designated amount of time. If you want to get back on, you have to reboot your computer.  It’s an excellent way to get started, a sort of training wheels for willpower.

Another option I’ve devised myself is the use of index cards. Many writers praise them as an immediate idea recording device, but they can also be used, I’ve found, to keep my twitchy little fingers from clicking the browser icon. Here’s how it works.

One.

Obtain index cards, one stack will do, but you’ll find you’ll need more as you go along.

Two.

Place one of them next to your computer, and write the name of whatever writing project you’re working on across the top.

Three.

Close your browser, bring up word ( or whatever program you use), and start writing. Fend off the evil voice when it’s simply throwing rocks at you — especially do this when it sounds like your mother. However, if it asks a legitimate question such as “Is that really how internal combustion engines work?” or nags you that “you really need to elaborate more on cuttlefish anatomy,” you pick up that card and write it down. Now I usually number the questions, simply because I know I’ll need the order later, but now you are free from the urge to click your browser and thereby instantly forget what it was you were looking up in the first place.

Four.

Gather up your used index cards. You have a mission. Open your browser or go to a library. Find the answers to your questions — or decide that some of them weren’t really as relevant as you first thought — and write them down.

Five.

Return and revise your manuscript with your newfound information, and as a side benefit, a new sense of security because this time you have a better idea of what it is you’re talking about.  The really interesting thing that you’ll discover is that very often, your uninformed instincts about particular topics were more on target than you thought. For example, one of my characters was a 1940s Western director who had trouble finding extras who could actually ride horses. I’d worried that this wasn’t a legitimate plot device for getting another character hired on his film, but when I went to do my research, I discovered that this was indeed a common hurdle for directors of big budget Westerns; furthermore, they were even more frustrated by hiring limits set by the Screen Actor’s guild during the time. I was not only better informed, I was psychic!

This system has worked very well so far. If you’re in need of an extra boost of willpower you can use the index cards while Freedom is on. That should keep you away from the facebook/twitter vortex for at least a little while.

Creating a reading journal (a cozy catastrophe in progress)

Here I am in this noisy café, unable to concentrate thanks to a gaggle of chain-smoking obasans complaining mightily about absent friends and their sorely inadequate children.

It’s as good a time as any to update my blog.As I’ve been making my way through the notebook, I’ve been able to devise a my own version of a reading journal and thought I’d share.

Note: I don’t like to choose sections of my notebook for use beforehand: doing so wrecks the fun of writing in it, sort of like slogging carelessly into a pristine patch of snow takes away the magic, so I organize as I go along.

1. Orange is for Reading

This is the reading journal. A work in progress, but basically if the book is certain to contain a lot of words I’ve never heard of, I draw a line down the page. The inner side I use to write those words and the outer edge for quotations, thoughts, or questions.What I like about this system is that it’s an easy way for me to stay honest about what one blogger aptly called “the shit I know I don’t know.”

2. Beige is for Writing.

I don’t really have a system in place here. If I have a story idea or to expand on something in my reading journal, I scribble it down and slap on a tag. That way I can come back and grimace at my leisure.

3. White is for er… Japanese

The move back to Japan demands that I get my ass in gear and start studying the language again. I passed level one of the Japanese proficiency test back in 1997, but 12 years (five of them out of the country) is plenty of time to get rusty. Thus, I added a language section. I use it the same way I do the reading journal, except there’s A LOT more vocabulary space, and my thoughts are mainly awkward practice sentences.

4. Yellow is for Lists

For anything and everything. I’m especially fond of book lists, but they’re also wonderful writing prompts,  great for mining memory and personal experience — a tip from Barbara DeMarco Barrett’s Pen on Fire.

This is what the closed book looks like. I use tags from mujirushi. I love their muted colors. I love their notebooks, too. And their pens. And their lunch boxes, and…I’ll stop now.

That’s pretty much it. It works well so far, but I’m sure that I’ll be wringing my hands over a new class/system soon. How do you organize your notebooks/ reading journals?

Donning the Napkin ‘Stache

I have a big blank confession to make.

I waste paper.

I know, I know.  Print-culture is passé, after all the Huffington Post just announced the Kindle’s victory over the book. All that history vanquished by something Sean Connery might spray over in a Highlander sequel. I know that there are warm and fuzzy, eco-conscious feelings to be enjoyed from the sacrifice of a magazine or a newspaper subscription, but as much as I’d like to leap into the mulch vat, I just can’t.

When I read a longer piece online, I might be saving paper, but I’m wasting time, both my own and the writer’s. To really pay attention to what he or she is saying, I need a paper copy on which I can jot down ideas or questions, underline important points, and I need to do this the old-fashioned way — with a pen on a piece of dead tree.

If I don’t do this, if I attempt to read the article online I inevitably skim it, paying no attention to wording or subtlety, instantly distracted by the next comment or link. By the time I’m offline, having slammed headlong into a flood of new ideas, news, and novelty, I don’t feel that I’ve learned anything.

In fact, I feel dirty.

This cognitive ickiness manifests itself as soon as I attempt to harvest any of this mess into a real life conversation. No matter how serious the headline, or how cutting edge the science, I feel as if I’m yammering about a clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos, like a fake with nowhere near a genuine understanding of what I’ve just read.

Of course, I don’t print every little piece I scroll through on the net, and I certainly use both sides of the page, and recycle what I don’t keep. But I also don’t like feeling cowed by an eco-consciousness looks down its nose at those who rely on paper, but is more than willing to follow Silicon Valley off a cliff.

When it comes to resources, I think it might be worse to haphazardly skim through someone’s work on a laptop, all the while consuming another precious resource – energy, as well as ensuring that the effort and thought the writer put into the piece are wasted as well. And there’s another thread of hypocrisy running through all that anti-print sanctimony; it’s the same sentiment that laments the loss of used bookstores, while virtuously consuming all other forms of print media online.

I suspect that this contradictory stance has more to do with class aspiration than genuine concern for the environment. Richard Rodriquez described this beautifully in the November 2009 issue of Harper’s. Apologies for the long quote, but this really says it all.

Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London, they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and do not disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (add to shopping cart), they will do it. Hey,

I’m sad about the bookstores, too. Really sad. It’s just that like to stay consistent, and think that journalists and essayists deserve the same amount of focused attention as novelists. It’s not too much to ask for, but if it makes me a very minor villain in all of this, so be it. I’ll happily twist the ends of my napkin before attaching it to my upper lip. I think it’s worth the sacrifice of a few trees to save electricity, as well as sanity.

Cloudy with a Chance of Chicken Heart

I love it when two books I’m reading unexpectedly connect. I’ve been (slowly) making my way through Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, a book that I really wish had been around when I was suffering through a ludicrous “ed tech” class last summer that was pushing the cloud computing orthodoxy Lanier discusses. As an atheist with a weakness for Catholic British authors, i.e. Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark, I also happened to have just read G.K. Chesterton’s Man Who Was Thursday. I didn’t like it much; it’s a sort of Monty Python meets Trinity Broadcasting, with Chesterton providing lots of tree fort warm fuzzies for white Christian males. But, I will say that Chesterton’s opening verse resonates with Lanier’s arguments.

A cloud was on the mind of men

And wailing went the weather,

Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul,

When we were boys together.

Science announced non-entity

And art admired decay

The world was old and ended 

But you and I were gay

Okay, except the whining about science forcing a meaningless life upon us, to which I say why read a Bible when you have the Hubble, the verse does seem to fit our current environmental, creative, and digital malaise; if you suspect, as Lanier does, that such a malaise exists. 

Lanier brings up some frightening observations. One that really got to me was his ongoing survey of young people who can’t place any music recorded in the past fifteen years to a specific point, or that google’s uploading millions of books may result in a free for all cherry picking that makes the often bigoted trolling of Bible verse seem puny in comparison.  

Well, in honor of the hive mind, and because I haven’t been doing my part on the horror stories links front, here is Arch Oboler’s famous “Chicken Heart” story, where a you-guessed-it and not a digital cloud rises to engulf the world. 

Now someone pass me a wing.

The Gre…er…Mediocre Pretenders

I was finally able to see Avatar last week, albeit  on a screen the size of a large postage stamp. In Japan most of the controversy surrounding the film has come from Cameron’s alleged borrowing from Hayao Miyazaki, although my general impression of the story veers more toward Anne McCaffrey meets Blackwater.

Stories are always a partial product of those that have come before, but it did strike me that Avatar’s hero represents something, if not new, then what seems to be an emerging trend in borrowed narratives, a sort of backward imposter.

By backward I mean that unlike the long line of cinematic cads, from Ernst Lubitsch’s jewel thief in Trouble in Paradise to real life’s Frank Abnagale, this new type of charlatan is complicit with the system. Previously, our imposters have provided a dash of cheeky reassurance amid the growing inequality, thumbing their noses at social barriers, while managing to beat the authorities, and often, the upper crust at their own game. Their getting away with it always held the promise that with a little ambition anyone could join the club, or at least that there wasn’t much to that club in the first place.

Yet Avatar’s blue cat man is an impostor of a different sort, a Neo Sincere everyman who enters the lives of the downtrodden acknowledging his real identity while concealing a more sinister capitalist motive. It’s not the discovery of who he is that we’re worried about, it’s who he’s with, and here Jake’s story seems less Miyazaki and far closer to the much hyped story of what Lee Siegel has famously called “the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter.” White guy with promise of a large chunk of money, inhabits indigent ethnic character, imbues him with frat boy voice, lives among his people, and gives up all profits in the venture to join the fight and trumpet the cause. In short, white guy saves day, humbly taking heaps of credit, while blue body or interview subject becomes a shell in the viewer/reader’s mind.

Valentino Achak Deng, the man and the human argument, does not really exist in What Is the What. Eggers’s voice is all over the book, in a way that it would never have been if he had stuck with his original intention to write a conventional biography. No one would ever confuse a biographer’s voice, no matter how strong, with that of his subject. But Eggers has totally subsumed his Sudanese hero’s voice into his own. 

Cameron, to his credit, has his hero borrow a shell, but the effect is the same. The Na’vis’ story becomes Jake’s story, told in Jake’s voice, all to glorify — Jake. 

Our imposters today are not imposters at all, but limpid, sanctimonious morality peddlers, tied to profits and doling out charity like good Republicans rather than actually trying to fight the system. After all, there’s little drama to be culled from those once debonair airline pilots Abnagale once impersonated, who are now eking out a living on food stamps. Why stand up for them, when one can help an entire people in an exotic place, and yet still seem more selfless and engaged? 

In Cameron’s defense, he may have borrowed others’ plots, but he didn’t appropriate another’s life in the process. Avatar is multi-million dollar proof that in Siegel’s words, “we need other people’s stories the way we need other people’s oil.”

On Not Teaching Writing

Just a little whining about Obama’s State of the Union, most of which I liked, except the Sputnik style push for more science and math. That one’s old.  It isn’t change, and it’s part of Arne Duncan’s corporatist agenda to hack apart the teachers’ unions.

No doubt.

Nevertheless, what kind of defense can the humanities mount when the ed schools themselves are doing such a great job of undermining its subjects. 

I apologize for dragging you into the old cranky time tunnel of nostalgia with me, but when I was in high school, we wrote. And when I say write, I mean we picked up pens and made marks on the blank page, sometimes staring at it for a few frustrated minutes, before pressing on, but we wrote, sometimes churning out one, two –gasp!–  even three pages in the space of a fifty minute class period.

Today’s ed schools, however, train English teachers to do everything they can to stand between the kid and the page.  It’s called “scaffolding” a term taken from Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which initially meant something more complicated, but has now been ham-fistedly tacked on whatever silly scrapbook, Disney video, or papier-mache monstrosity the writing teacher must first inflict on his or her students before allowing them to pick up their pens.

First, there must be ceremonial readings of the text, eased through with motivational gimmickry, after which there will be an all too brief prewriting session, one or two graphic organizers, then peer reviews in which peers who cannot write their way out of a cereal box critique one another’s essays, all of this until the students have gained enough distance from both text and prompt that they can’t remember what it was they were to write in the first place. 

I should note that I’m sinking to a gimmick myself by typing out this entry on Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die site. I have twenty minutes to do five hundred words, because Dr. Wicked will not give me a graphic organizer, he will not dazzle me with visual aids, or that ludicrous mish mash of stupidity referred to as “scaffolding.” If I do not write, Dr. Wicked will simply start erasing everything I’ve done up to this point, and that will feel bad. Very bad. But you see, we cannot have that, because in this mighty land of hollow self-esteem, we cannot allow our students to feel pressure, receive censure, or encounter a consequence at any moment. 

Also, for as useful as they’ve been over the past few thousand years, actual reading and writing have none of the flash of a good Powerpoint presentation, none of the razzle dazzle of faux research, and none of the spurious, reductive labels educational researchers like to slap on kids’ thoughts. 

I could complain about the push for math and science, but I won’t. As a graduate of one of the nation’s top ed programs — a fact of which I am not proud– I’d rather call on reformers to divert their attention from so-called “bad” teachers and look, really look at what’s being peddled to aspiring teachers in today’s ed schools. If they do, they might finally find the easy answers they’ve been looking for all along.

Invasion of the Metacrats

One of my favorite comic scenes takes place in Annie Hall, when Alvy Singer asks an attractive, well-coiffed couple about the secret to their happy relationship. The woman responds that she is “very shallow and empty…(has) no ideas and nothing interesting to say,”  to which the man adds, “And I’m exactly the same way.”

I recall that scene anytime I hear someone brandishing the word meta. There’s an enormous contradiction in self-consciously proclaiming one’s meta-tude,  a lack of self-awareness that Allen’s couple, who could pass for hipsters in today’s Manhattan, ironically has in droves.

My distrust for the word, however, has more to do with its sinister appropriation in corporatized education, where the ability to self-regulate has become a quickie route for educrats to violate personal privacy at the deepest level.

Take so-called cognitive reading strategies, among them “think alouds,” where students are told to verbalize their responses to a text while another student sits by and labels those thoughts from a predetermined list of categories. If the kid expresses boredom, he isn’t really bored, he’s “monitoring.” If he or she relates to a character, it’s not identification but “adopting an alignment.” Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Yet so-called literacy experts dare to tout these strategies as ways to help students become better readers, when such strategies force students to take what are most likely complex thoughts about a text, and filter them through awkward third grade phrasing: “What this means to me is…or…a golden line for me is…(note the emphasis on me, whereas most might argue that literature is a way to understand the other). It presupposes a lack of complexity in the students’ thinking, ignoring overlap, tearing out ambiguities, and forcing consensus on what kids might actually be taking from the text, dismissing entirely, as Jaron Lanier argues in You Are Not a Gadget, “the mystery of human existence.”

Lanier describes the elevation of the meta as a kind of digital Maoism, the mash-up being more powerful than the sources who are mashed, and in education this attempt  to label and compartmentalize each and every thought further devalues the humanities as a mere utility for a phony form of self-actualization.

Imagine if the genome project simply stopped at the last gene, attempting to diagnose every physical trait and disease, while ignoring the discovery that complex proteins play just as large a role in our biology. This is what so-called education experts wish to do. Only they’ve given those genes such ugly names, and they have no view as to how they work together.
Forcing students to sift their thoughts into categories such as monitoring, visualizing, and reflection — the latter a popular form of behavior modification in today’s ed schools —  denies a person’s individuality, his or her ability to think in manifold and complex ways of which we’re not anywhere near an understanding.

It’s a violation of our right to privacy and our right to name the terms of our relationship with the authors we read, and even more, it will backfire, because the educrats, having little understanding of the value of literature, and thus not a very good understanding of human beings, haven’t thought to factor in performance.

They will not be accessing young people’s thoughts, nor coming to a greater understanding of how to improve literacy, they will simply be instilling a kind of defensive performativity in their subjects, that denied a quality curriculum and the room to think, might translate to the real aim of all of this: conformity.

A little anti-Jedi political sentiment

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated this blog, partly because I’ve been on a long strange, and largely wonderful trip over the past few weeks. My partner and I escaped our dull as death California town before its self-congratulatory brand of academe and therapy culture managed to drain the last of our energy, spent a fantastic month in Portland, and are now back in Japan, where if luck prevails, we will settle for a few years.

One reason that we are here, although we did miss this place, is legal. As a binational GLBT couple from countries that won’t afford us immigration rights, we didn’t have the option to stay in the U.S. We knew this when we left Japan five years ago, but I honestly thought then that something at some point would have to give. Then 2004 hit, Kerry lost, and we now have a Democratic president more interested in making nice with the likes of Rick Warren than standing up for GLBT rights.

There was a saying that went around in the GLBT community before the 2000 election, when Nader voters and the media were trying to convince everyone that there was simply no difference between Al Gore and Mr. Chuckles: “You have to be gay to know the difference.”

For many gays and lesbians the same thing could be said during the 08 primary battle. Do I think that Hillary Clinton would have quickly handed us our rights? No. Do I think she would nevertheless be making more progress toward them than President Obama? I do.

I mean we still can’t get the guy to speak up about Uganda. She has.

I did not vote for Obama in the primary because I could not vote for a man who’d allow the likes of ex-gay therapy touting crazies like Donnie McClurkin anywhere near him. Why vote for a man who flees a photo-op with Gavin Newsom for fear of being associated with gay marriage, and then asks Rick Warren to speak at his inauguration? Also, really Mr. President, Warren is a lousy ass orator.

To many gays and lesbians it seemed obvious from the start that this President would be a coward, not only on the issue of equality, but also the environment, the war, and well…spending freeze anyone?

And here’s where I get bat shit crazy. Silly season commence.

I am beginning to wonder a mite whether our President (a little too old to be an X-er, but young enough) or his supporters’ tendency to dismiss the angrier side of activism, those who think that progressivism means striking sanctimonious Thoreauvian poses, and taking the conciliatory path on every issue, then justifying their feckless stances through the use of abominable metaphors usually involving their recent discovery of complexity through the mixture of red and blue into –gasp!–purple, might have been partly derived from the precious code of the Jedi?

You know — “Never give into your anger…Once you give into the dark side it will forever lead your path.”

But man, Luke!  It works hella great if you’re a Republican.

Seriously, let’s look at the spinelessness of the Jedi in the Episodes I and II. They land on a planet, adopt Anakin, leaving his mother on Tatooine as a slave, and then complain because the nine-year-old has “too much fear.”

That sounds just like the Democrats right about now. ”

I admit, it’s nutty to blame Star Wars, but it’s a handy representation of the therapy culture has done its number on the left. Maybe I spent too much time in California, but it seemed populated by the kind of people who if they were living in say, the Civil War era South, would have lectured the abolition movement about the need for slow, incremental change.

Right now I think we could all use to see a little fear and a little anger in our president, enough to make him maybe like want to lower the greenhouse emissions to a level that might actually save New York. Or to express a little disgust at bigots who would like to hang gay people in Uganda. Or maybe he can get mad when the Republicans try to blame the hash they’ve made of the country during the Bush presidency on his own policies.

So Mr. President, give into your anger. It’s okay. Yoda is just a puppet.

Or is that you?