Steve Erickson, Arc d'X anyone?

Curse me for a novice, but is anyone out there familiar with Steve Erickson? I just picked up a copy of Arc d'X (1993) which is billed as being in the "avantpop" genre. I'm mentioning it here because Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings play significant parts in the novel.

Any info (comments, suggestions, criticisms) from anyone who's read Erickson would be appreciated!

P.S. I purchased this (on sale, mind you, for 50 cents) in clear violation of the "2 out for every in" book rule I established over the summer. Apologies to my shelves.

TED: Charles Leadbeater on education innovation

I got this via Twitter. (You're right, I never thought I would say that.) The "money quotes" start at about 15:00 to the end, but you'll lose some context. Do yourself a favor and just watch the whole thing.

A gentle reminder for our gentle readers of what month it is

For a host of reasons I forgot to post this yesterday, but there's still plenty of May 2010 left. You may recall Kris Broughton's recent post over at Brown Man Thinking Hard. It was written in response to neo-Confederate shenanigans (too many to list here) from Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, and was titled "America Has a Black President Month" Comes Every 30 Days. It said, in part:

This is "America Has A Black President" month.

The next celebration will begin May 1st. The one after that will be June 1st. The one after that...

Keep smiling.

My feet were on my desk when I posted this

If you're not sure why this photo is here, read the story about it at snopes.com:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/photos/desk.asp

Sorry pursuits: On attention, multitasking, reading and writing

"I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place."
--Annie Dillard

I rarely read the fiction of Dillard or many of the literary/general fiction writers. But I know they're there, and appreciate that they prop up a significant part of the reading universe. (Otherwise, it would be turtles all the way down, right?) I like to discover what they have to impart about writing through their unique lenses. So I was curious about Dillard's 1989 book, The Writing Life. It was written before the Web, before cell phones and smart devices were ubiquitous, before the short burst multicasts of Facebook or Twitter or Google Buzz or...

The quote at the top of this post leapt off the page and wouldn't go away, so I tucked it away for eventual use in my campus e-mail's rotating sigline. It came to mind yesterday as I discussed worldly matters with my friend over at Sea Mist. We found we were in substantial agreement on many things, including the apparent foreshortening of the human attention span, and the change in what used to be called "common courtesy" in face-to-face encounters of all kinds. Attention span and courtesy have both seemed to suffer with the siren's call of distracting hip devices (hip in any sense of the word you like).

For now, I'd like to consider that aspect of attention that includes the ability to understand or make an extended argument-- for example, to be able to absorb ideas that take more than a screen's worth of real estate to express.

Is this a problem for you? If so, why? If not, why not?
.

Spiraling in the Orbit of Precious: Films We're Not Watching

Thanks to the Oscar® nominations, there is another round of discussion around the film Precious.

On February 4, critic Ishmael Reed got some play in the New York Times. He had previously discussed his views elsewhere (e.g. in the comments to a post over at NewBlackMan) but the Times has now deemed fit to give his critique wider distribution. This caught the attention of Prometheus 6 (P6), who started a thread about not giving Precious an Oscar.

Although I've previously voiced an opinion about movies of 2009 I probably won't see, including Precious and The Blind Side, I'm pulling some of my own comments from the above P6 thread for possible cross-pollination here. I said in part:

With the movie, there's the work itself, in its intended medium. And then there are the memes emanating from it across several media as to what it means to be "realistic" and "black" at the same time-- becoming and carrying the message much more than the book ever did. To judge the work itself as a work takes more than I have in this phase of my life. I can tackle movies not of this era with all their faults (with a couple of exceptions), but Precious is both too current for that and so obviously not made with me in mind.

This led to what I meant by "not of this era... (with a couple of exceptions)" and I followed with the exceptions, films of the past that I find eminently skippable:

The exceptions right off are Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, and what I mean by "tackle" is to accept them as products of their time, study and analyze them, or maybe even refuse to analyze-- to detach just enough to watch them as is. Birth, I've seen it once and might do it again. GWTW, I've never been able to sit through.

A question we didn't get to over at P6 (although we are having a lively exchange about films, Black films, really good films, and really good Black films) is whether we can speak and write intelligently about something we shy away from or won't see. I think this is possible (I think I have a viable example besides controversial films) but I'd like opinions on it.

Sane Men Love Gwen Ifill

This weekend I got the rare opportunity to spend an hour and a half with commentator Gwen Ifill, who is neither common nor a 'tater. This was not in person, of course-- don't be silly.

Many Friday evenings I ensconce myself at home (those days y'all were just thinking of are mostly past, thanks). I while away the hours not conferrin' with the flowers, but kicked back in the company of three intelligent women: Rachel Maddow (her eponymous show), Belva Davis (This Week in California), and Gwen Ifill (Washington Week). Friday the 13th was such an evening.

The extra hour with Gwen happened Saturday morning because she had a live appearance on BookTV (C-SPAN2) which was at the Miami Book Fair. Usually the Miami Book Fair gives us more than our RDA of Carl Hiaasen, and nothing against Carl personally-- his shtick is entertaining and all-- but it was nice to see Gwen holding court with the appreciative Miami crowd, and actually taking questions from people of color. (If you think I'm incorrectly implying something about that particular book fair, I won't argue. I don't watch every minute of it.)

Since this was a book tour appearance for The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (just released in paperback, new afterword, blah blah) Gwen did not have to maintain her journalistic game face. This allowed her fine sense of humor and some decent mid-level snark to come through. As a bit of a curmudgeon myself, I appreciate the well-placed one-liner or clever aside, and she came through.

Gwen was also as courteous as possible, but no more so, to a woman who tried to hijack the Q&A portion to preach about a personal crusade against child labor. This was quite the professional save as Gwen let her know that a question was required if you were going to hog the mike. She disengaged the woman from the stand by accepting a brochure, and went to the next person in line, just like that. No fair security required. Well done.

The final question asked about an online project that was new to me, and would have been worth the hour even if Gwen hadn't been fascinating and snarky enough. The question gave her an opening to discuss her involvement with The HistoryMakers, which has been compiling African-American video oral histories for some years. Gwen has done a few of these interviews and you can access them directly here.

Avoiding blog bankruptcy with blackface

Around the time I decided to go for a broader presence online-- i.e., do more than just comment on other folks' posts, or e-mail with the more "mature" friends/family who don't thumb-type the living daylights out of each other-- I just knew there would only be the occasional day or week in which PL (physical life) would interfere. I knew wrong.

"Ha ha," the fates scoffed, as they recited the oft-misattributed maxim "Coincidence means you weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on."

And when I'm not paying attention, I'm an easy mark. Ask and it may not be given, but it will definitely be added to my to-do list. This peaked about a week ago with a request for cross-pollination of class projects, wherein I would collaborate with two other faculty members who teach the same cohort of students. Yes, I do know that co-teaching doesn't reduce teaching time as it takes more time to plan than teaching alone. But I fell for it. So much for leisurely blogging time.

You should know that when chores, duties, commitments and over-commitments pile up on me, I gradually get curmudgeonly and start to kvetch and lose sleep until even I can say NO to new requests. I'm there. Now I'm shoveling projects back off my plate. Rather than pull the plug here at TOTF or over at The Joshua Fit while I regain my professional bearings, or maintain that nothing of import happened in the whole dad-blamed universe in the past week and nothing is happening now:

We look through the lens but not at the lens itself:

'America's Next Top Model' Creates Stir After Bi-Racial Photo Shoot
Thu Oct 29, 12:28 PM PDT

Weeks after an Australian variety show made headlines around the world after a group of white performers donned blackface to perform as the Jackson brothers, Tyra Banks is making headlines herself for turning her latest "America's Next Top Model" candidates bi-racial for a photo shoot.

I am not really outraged. Disappointed, perhaps. Tired, definitely. At the other end of the awareness spectrum, Bob Herbert chastises me for my enervation:

From Herbert's October 27 column:

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.

All right, fair enough. A good night's sleep, then, and then get back to shoveling nice-guy ProfGeo projects off my plate.