High Tech Fence-Sitter

March is shaping up to be technology month. I just finished Clifford Stoll's High Tech Heretic, and now have plenty of brain food for the next few months.

The book is largely outdated, which becomes excessively clear in his laundry list of failed technologies. In the belligerently-named chapter "Arrogance of the Techies," Stoll condemns those who "waste enormous resources by making grandiose predictions," including that "network computers would work without disks by hooking up directly over the Internet" and that "electronic commerce, based on cryptographic payment systems, would bring a whole new model for doing business." Done and done.

So Stoll misses the boat on a few things. A few others, though? I wonder if he is not frighteningly on the mark. He insistently returns to the theme of the varied quality of real-world vs. virtual-world interactions. Although not always explicit, this theme peeks its imaginary head out everywhere in a digerati version of whack-a-mole. The technocrats predict that the web will spawn unity, prosperity, and an ever-larger and ever-more-diverse community. Stoll takes great delight in poking that balloon to siphon off its overblown predictions.

Over a decade after this book's publication, though, I don't think either camp's got it quite right. I worry that this is one more instance of my interminable waffling, but I'll break out the maple syrup and forge ahead anyhow. The forging will be into a cornerstone of Stoll's argument: that computers have no place in education, particularly for young children.

Stoll convincingly lays out a depressing future in which teachers are passé and children interact only with monitors, not each other. To the best of my knowledge, that future has not come about. Computer usage in kindergartens and elementary schools seems to be balanced with an understanding that each room still needs desks, books, art supplies, and teachers. In all fairness, I base this assumption of how-things-are on one particular instance of how-things-were-in-one-instance. I recently participated in Nevada Reading Week by volunteering to read to several classes at a North Las Vegas elementary school. The librarians were beyond helpful, recommending books at the 3^rd and 4^th grade levels for me to read and inquiring after my own favorite childhood books. Armed with their suggestions, I wandered down the hall to the first classroom I was slated to spend time in.

No one was there: the room felt oddly hollow with so much evidence of students, but nary a student in sight. My guide, herself a student, said they must be having computer time, so we toodled around the corner into an extra-wide hallway filled at one side with computer terminals, each partitioned from the other. The teacher seemed ambivalent at my presence, calling the students to group on the floor around the chair where I would read. She gave them no instructions for whatever project or game or lesson they were completing on the computers. Frankly, I have no idea what these students were doing before I arrived, but it felt odd that the computer activity could be so easily interrupted for me, a volunteer who could stand to wait for a good stopping point.

Perhaps it is unfair, but I do wonder what pedagogical purpose the computers played for this 3^rd grade. They were not unduly ruffled at abandoning their workstations, but neither were all of them bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the prospect of sitting quietly and listening to me read at whatever pace I chose. In fact, the only moment during the session that the whole class seemed interested came during our post-reading question-and-answer period. I myself was highly interested in how many of these tots asked about college: what was it like, did I ever get bored of reading, why did I go to college. They were desperate for answers from me, a real life human who had Gone To College. They showed a desperation that simply wasn't there as they sat at their terminals or listened to The Penguin and the Pea.

To cut this long story short, the next class carried a completely different vibe. In this 4^th grade classroom, there were no computers, only desks with students quietly doing their work. The teacher asked them to finish what they were working on, then gather around my undersized reading chair. The students all did so, with a certain--and expected--amount of silliness and feet-dragging. They listened respectfully while I read, and were eager to join in when I proposed an interactive reading involving lots of winking and sound effects. But, just like the previous class, they were most animated when the time for questions arrived. My personal favorite: "Can I go to college and be a professional skateboarder?"

Again, these students were desperate for information. The information they sought wasn't generalized, however, nor was it available in Math Invaders or Word Twist. It was personal, it was experiential, it was responsive to their queries. Like the best storybook, I could give them my point-of-view. Like the best edutainment, I come in multimedia: I operate through sound, picture, language, references. We are our own tiny universes filled with both knowledge and hypertext.

So my take-away message may seem to confirm Stoll's argument that students need live teachers, not web interfaces. But that's not quite where I'd go with my message.

Because my experiences and my answers and my tiny universe was shaped by computers, for good or ill. Computers have given me tools to aid my writing, to increase my pool of potential metaphors, and to showcase my thoughts in this very blog. But just as so much that I could fit into a conversation just won't fit into this blog, everything a student--hell, a person--can learn cannot be contained by a computer or the internet. But then, it can't be contained by a book, either.

Ultimately, I think Stoll focuses far too much on the 'how' question, to the exclusion of 'what.' How did I learn? From books and wide-ranging foreign travel and well-read parents. What did I learn? A lot of things, all of which I'm grateful for.

But here's the ultimate ultimate, the tiny doubt that got me questioning Stoll's argument. What I didn't learn young was computing and how I could have learned it was by having computers around to tinker with. So many of my successful engineering friends talk about playing with computers from a young age. I don't mean playing computer games, I mean playing with computers: their innards, their programs, and their languages. I can only wonder how differently my ill-fated attempt at an engineering education might have turned out with similar childhood experiences. I believe enough in myself and my interests to know that literature would have prevailed in the end. But maybe those engineering courses wouldn't have felt so much like being sucker-punched in the gut.

Computers and internet and technology as the answer? No. Computers and internet and technology given some due for shaping people's lives in positive ways? For sure.

A Polemic on Reading, Neither For Nor Against

“The causes of a revolution are usually sought in subjective conditions--general poverty, oppression, scandalous abuses. But this view, while correct, is one-sided. After all, such conditions exist in a hundred countries, but revolutions erupt rarely. What is needed is the consciousness of poverty and the consciousness of oppression, and the conviction that poverty and oppression are not the natural order of this world. It is curious that in this case, experience in and of itself, no matter how painful, does not suffice. The indispensable catalyst is the word, the explanatory idea. More than petards or stilettoes, therefore, words--uncontrolled words, circulating freely, underground, rebelliously, not gotten up in dress uniforms, uncertified--frighten tyrants. But sometimes it is the official, uniformed, certified words that bring about the revolution.” (Kapuscinski 103)

And this is why I cannot understand those who say, “I love literature, but theory. Ugh, I hate theory.” Without theory, we cannot understand how words could be so powerful. Loving literature and hating theory creates a milieu in which literature is merely enjoyable and never earth-shaking. If a few tremors do surface, we have no way to connect them to each other, no way to show the rest of the world how the work we do can topple structures, both real and metaphorical.

In Shah of Shahs, Kapuscinski records an interview with a man who specializes in pulling down monuments to the Shah. The man, Golam, describes the moment in 1953 when statues began to crumble yet again under the weight of released repression. He recalls “the radio saying that the Shah had escaped to Europe. When the people heard that, they went out into the street and started pulling down the monuments” (Kapuscinski 135). Even this man, not an intellectual, not a writer, just an actor playing his bit part to the fullest, even he recognizes the word as the spark and the subsequent piles of rubble as its consequences.

I’ve been reading Foucault lately, and under all the generalized theory and personalized jargon, he makes the same point as Kapuscinski about the importance of words. Words circumscribe the space in which we may act. The voices on the radio announcing the Shah’s departure redefined the space of that historical moment as a space in which stone and metal should explode the Shah’s shape, with the help of the people. In this new space, stone and metal can once again be just base materials, containing innumerable constellations of possible uses, free to be a road, a building, a copper filament, a disordered reminder of the true disorder of life. Before those possibilities, there was only the Shah, and his show of control. The statue, the monument, by forcing tons of material into a single shape repeated ad infinitum across an entire nation, contains all the tensions of a political system in which the appearance of order is the tissue separating injustice from righteous and active revolt. Words can tear this tissue.

We speak freely in our country, but our words have been cheapened. Demagogues on TV, half-baked romances in the bookstores, serious literature reserved for reading by serious literati. It is not that our injustices are so small that they do not need to be separated from the righteous anger that might correct them. It is rather that we have created our own intangible tissues which inscribe boundaries between people. Our country’s words have not created a space in which all action is possible. Instead, our words have created innumerable spaces in which we each move, thinking we are free, but unaware of the true freedom that merging these spaces together would bring. Instead, we defend to the last the arbitrary borderlines that demarcate what each of us can and cannot talk about, can and cannot be concerned with, can and cannot accomplish. In the end, those tissues exist, but our words do not tear them. Our words approach them, build bulwarks around them, bring us always back to our own comfortable space.

The literary debates about text, work, word, author, these debates matter. These debates could circulate freely, tunnel underground between spaces to create connections between them. We could use these debates consciously to find the ties between each instance of injustice, spread across the whole of experienced life. We could find the ties between injustice and the “official, uniformed, certified words” that would hide injustice from ourselves and from each other.

But we lose ourselves in the chaparrals of other debates, which are themselves self-contained in the limited spaces of ‘politics,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘rich people,’ ‘hobbies,’ ‘intellectualism.’ I would say, to combat losing the forest for the trees, that we should all read across these spaces. I truly believe that such a strategy could change the tenor of every conversation, every decision, every tiny shift in direction our country takes. But many do not read. Them, I do not judge, I do not wish to harangue into reading. Rather, I challenge those of us who study reading, who are willing to wade into the theory of reading, I challenge us to make use of the full potential of the word in other media. Television and radio are not the enemy. They may in fact be the saving grace.



Kapuscinski, Ryszard. Shah of Shahs. New York: Vintage International, 1992. Print.

Twitter Me This

I've recently joined Twitter, and was promptly welcomed by my much tech-savvier friends to the "Twitterverse." Until this week, I avoided joining for reasons which remain quite murky to me. I can only hope that the process of writing them out, as I plan to do here, will clarify those reasons to a shiny sparkly finish. Without further ado, let's take the plunge into Murky-ville together!

Until seeing a presentation in technical communications recently at a conference, I would have argued that Twitter was an unnecessary timesuck living parasitically off the back of the greatest of timesucks, the internet. What is the use of yet another social networking tool for those who already post to facebook, write a blog, keep up with e-mail, use all of their unlimited texts, and call their parents back home on a regular basis? Oh, little did I know.

A techcom professor presented a fascinating case study of a group of folks from Wichita, KS who named themselves "ICT2DC." They describe their group formation process as: "meet on twitter, celebrate Obama's election, & take a road trip to the Inauguration." Each separate piece of this process provides plenty of thought-food, but we'll just start with "meet on twitter."

The idea of actually meeting someone new on Twitter astounds me. Three days into my Twitter experience (For which there should really be a word. I suggest "Twittience," although I am open to other, better neologisms.), I have eleven followers, with all of whom I have an "in-person" or "real-world" relationship. Of those eleven, ten I met while studying engineering outside of Boston, MA. These are the people I turn to when I can't figure out how to resize a photo or I just need to mainline some quick conversation about scientifically nerdy stuff. They're fantastic, and provide a fabulous counterpoint to the English/literary/book-centric mindset that could easily overwhelm my life. I feel more balanced and knowledgeable for their friendships, not to mention less like a humanistic, technophobic Luddite. It would certainly be a steep and slippery path to that latter state of affairs if I limited my interactions with my mac to the necessary word-processing and e-mailing of everyday graduate student-hood.

But had I not had those friends already, had I not made some mixed-up choices at seventeen about what I wanted to be when I grew up, had I not met these smart, funny, interesting people who just happen to build robots and widgets and real things while I make mountains out of intangible molehills, had none of these things happened, would I now be enjoying a tech-fix on Twitter?

I would wager not.

But this group who met on Twitter: they found each other through shared interests, particularly shared political interests. Were I to go scouting for people from here who think like me and happen to post on Twitter, I'm still not clear what added value I would bring to my life. The ICT2DC group actually got together in person and took a thoroughly blogged and tweeted road-trip to the capital. Although the experience sounds interesting, it's not one I'm up for. I have close relationships here in Vegas, not to mention dogs and school responsibilities. Road-tripping is a blast, but riding in a borrowed van with five potentially smelly people who I don't know well enough yet to make fun of for being smelly? Pass.

If Twitter doesn't provide new friends who may cross over into real-world friendship, then what about new friends who stay happily ensconced in the Twitterverse?

Cue a discussion of the law of diminishing returns. I have met a fantastical array of amazing people in my quarter-century or so of kicking around this earth. Many of them I already communicate with almost exclusively on-line, as they're out of the country, or leading busy busy lives, or at least in a distant time zone. But the on-line communication reads as an extension of their personalities, an on-going development of adult relationships which can encompass adult concerns as well as memories of good times in high school or college.

I worry that meeting new folks through on-line media would detract from the attention I can pay to folks I already know without adding substantial social or personal benefits. This worry--or fear, even--relates directly to the overwhelming heaviness I feel every time I consider trying to keep up with daily, or even weekly and monthly publications. There're too many, and they just keep happening. There's never an end in sight.

Aha! I feel a break-through. My fear is not that I will meet new people, but that I won't know when to stop meeting new people. Life just washes over you, again and again and again, without even the brief respite a true tide waning would provide. Shutting off entire avenues of communication, like Twitter, is not a reasonable coping strategy, but it is at least a clear one with easily defined boundaries. Just don't do it.

Call me the anti-Nike, but I do pride myself on having overcome this fear even before I figured out its true nature.

But then, I can't really claim credit for that. Really, despite all my mental bulwarking and hedging of bets, I succumbed to the lure of Twittience for one simple and underwhelming reason: A totalizing lack of resistance to peer pressure.

This one's for you, Miks. Don't worry, I really am enjoying Twitter.

Fear of Fiction

I wrote before that I might write on this. Now I have, but I don't think I'm done. There's too much still that I haven't dug up.

Reading Maus makes me want to write about fiction. You see, fiction frightens me.

I fear the criticism it might engender.
I fear running out of ideas.
I fear not being interesting enough.
I fear writing stilted dialogue.
But most of all, I fear truth.

In Part I of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, finds and reads a short comic Art wrote about his mother’s suicide. For me, the suspense of reading that short comic before discovering Vladek’s response, of seeing how personal and critical that comic is, this suspense wore my nerves down to nubs.

Here would be a good place to point out that I don’t deal well with suspense. I cannot bear to watch any sitcom whose plot revolves around the inevitable revelation of someone’s deception. Just sitting there, knowing that Joey has been lying all along, and dreading the moment--because it will come--that Monica catches him in his lie. I’d rather change the channel, thank you.

Of course, the moment doesn’t always come in real life. For Art Spiegelman, it came when his father read a comic that Art never expected him to even know existed. Vladek’s response could hardly have been better: “It’s good you got it outside your system” (Spiegelman 104). But one could easily imagine a world in which Vladek did not find the comic, but in which the possibility that he find it dangles constantly, Damocles-style, over Art’s head.

And this is what I fear. What if I create something so personal, so critical, so true, that I stand suspenseful, every day, nervously glancing up to make sure that the possibility of a certain person reading it has not yet crashed down on me.

But wait, you say. Fiction is all about lies. So what truth is there to fear in it? And perhaps, yes, the things that happen in fiction are lies, and perhaps even the people are made up. Fiction is not about what happened, though, at least not the fiction I would like to write. Fiction is about how things are, and what people are like, and why we do the things we do. It may not have happened, but it must be believable.

I know that I’m making insanely gross over-generalizations here. ‘Fiction’ simply encompasses far too much for the things I say to hold true across the board. By ‘fiction,’ I actually mean, ‘the fiction I like to read, because that would be the fiction I would want to write.’ Certainly, I could write unbelievable and wildly popular romance novels if I desperately wanted to stuff my bank account, but I’m not that poor yet. Even then, I wouldn’t want to be writing them, I’d simply want to sell them. So ‘fiction,’ in this essay’s context, refers to something fictional I would be proud to have written for reasons entirely internal to the work itself.

Having worked out this definition, I don’t think I’ll ever write such a book. It frightens me. I can imagine, but only by straining and wincing, creating a portrait as raw and true as that of Vladek Spiegelman. In fact, the obvious thing to write after reading Maus is a portrait of one’s father. I can’t do that. I cannot submit someone so close and dear to me to such scrutiny.

I tend to forgive, to overlook one’s faults. I always go for the benefit of the doubt. I would make the worst cop, because I would believe every criminal that says she’s innocent. I am not naive. I am simply willing to make mistakes if it means the world I live in is a pretty good place.

Case in point: with that confession, I’ve hardly admitted a deep dark secret. And the confession itself is something of a gloss. At times, I try for forgiveness and fail. I am mean, and convince myself it was necessary. When I’m not avoiding thinking about the faults in others and myself, I’m focusing on them, bringing them into such sharp relief in my mind that all other thoughts fade away. But then, eventually, I find something shiny to distract me, and the world is a pretty good place again.

This is the other side of my fear of writing fiction. On the one hand, I do not want to write something so true that it offends my loved ones. I could give a hoot about strangers. Even if I overcame this aspect of the fear, however, I would have to contend with the fear of deliberately sending my mind into a dark place that it usually works overtime to avoid.

If best-selling romance novels are a field of flowers and butterflies, then fiction is the abandoned well at the field’s edge, with a thin voice screaming out of it to be rescued. I’d like to think of myself as a rescuer, but honestly, truthfully, painfully I am but a bystander.

Even this essay, non-fiction, uncritical of others, this doesn’t quite feel right. What matters? Art Spiegelman worries about portraying his father “like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew.” This worry is much bigger than any I can have about the few words I’ve written here. Nonetheless, I will borrow Spiegelman’s defense, and write “I’m just trying to portray [my fear] accurately!” (Spiegelman 132). Whether or not that fear matters to you, I can tell myself that at least I’ve done it a little bit of justice.

Waterfowl Lullaby

after Miguel Hernández

I see you on a beach, one
of many you have been to.
You eat seaweed
from the rocks to keep salt
always at the ready. Your eyes
tint my skin, they grow roots
under my feet. They give
sense to my shape.

There is nothing I can say
to change your hours. Each one
comes and goes, a wave
evaporating into sand.

My sister is an island, lying
in the ocean. Please laugh,
laugh into the wind. I can hear you
in the taste of the desert,
sucked dry but for faint traces
from beyond the places I have been.

The ocean is a sky. You will die
if you fall into it. But the bird
can wave the white flags
of its wings and fall, falling
which is flying which is floating
and each one remote
from the beach where a wave’s
dissolution ends only itself.

The body with wings beating
flies blind and erratic,
the sun has never
shone so brightly.
How have I never seen
your outline pasted
against the clouds?

Now, so far from the water,
the sky distinguishes
shades of blue only
from itself. How, how
can I tell it your eyes
go deeper, you know more
than it will in seasons of days?

Your eyes are the Pleiades
less five, leading only in loops.
They cry out for corporality,
for the death of all illusions.

You remember, you remember me.
You remember each one of me,
and you are the only one.
Tell your eyes if they no longer
see me, I will not cry. Stay blind
to what’s happening
and to which thing
I tell you is a lie.

Nabokov & Neologisms

At some point in Memphis, after my laptop was stolen, I began recording words on loose paper stuffed into the profuse pages of my dictionary. No computer meant no internet, which meant trolling for unknown terms in my large cochineal Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. It had been a graduation gift from my parents when, at seventeen, I was preparing for a new life in Boston, far from their home in Montgomery and my high school in Mobile. Although I must surely have been given the book at some gathering or other congratulatory event, I clearly remember opening the package alone in my room at my parents’ house. The generous windows welcomed in huge swathes of summer light, marking out the shifting rectangles of warmth that I followed around the room for catnaps when I still lived at home. With that familiar illumination, I perused my new treasure, this book that would slowly reveal new thoughts, useful terms, hopelessly precise jargon, and a raft of memories floating along behind each.

The practice of tracking each of these things came to an unmemorable stop with the purchase of a new computer. Mac’s dashboard screen, so helpful for keeping up with sports stats and stock prices, lets you link directly to an on-line dictionary, putting you at just a few keystrokes’ distance from the definitions you need. Searching for and learning terms this way happens in the moment, however, putting the emphasis directly on the need, not on any kind of pleasure or enjoyment of the process itself. You lose the phylogeny of a word’s slow insertion into your vocabulary, the seductive tangibility of the crepitant pages, the numinous experience of an unexpectedly apt word jumping from the page in its unmistakable bold print, as though to say, I’m here! Use me! Pass me on to others and make me your own!

Phylogeny, I looked up while an undergraduate. I no longer recall the source of that word, but the words which precede and follow it fire up the associative links in my head, rushing me from one possibility to another. In the penciled chaparral of script filling my unlined printer paper, the back of which contains the final page of an essay by my mother on Falstaff’s character in Henry IV, Part II, I find the following list leading up to phylogeny: cognomen, opalescent, lambency, lambent, antinomy. After phylogeny come: neoteny, numinous, affinal, consanguineal. I wonder, was this list not drawn from the theory I read for a course on sociology and anthropology? Certainly cognomen, phylogeny, affinal, and consanguineal could slide unnoticed into any text on cultural exploration and family relationships. But opalescent? Numinous?

Now there is a word which I am glad to have learned. Whenever I discover it in new places, I feel the thrill of discovering an old friend’s good fortune in unexpected circumstances. I have used the word in poems and love letters, as a one-word description of my favorite person, to explain the strange choices that have led me here, to a singular moment in a particular place, where I never expected to find myself, or to find myself writing, describing the way words demand to be written, as a sort of birth certificate marking their entry into my intellectual life.

An amalgamation of inconsequential circumstances led me to once again take up my dictionary and its loose-leaf additions while reading Speak, Memory. A lucky amalgamation, that is, as Nabokov is far too erudite for the internet dictionary to be of more help than hindrance. To search online after every unfamiliar word in Speak, Memory would be to invite a distracting systole of attention, drawing me away from the slightly faded pages and directing me to the screen’s eclat, then pulling back again, only to rush in towards the broken sentence abandoned for semiotic insight, my eyes searching for the syntagma where I left off.

How awful to be so torn. Instead, with the dictionary resting open on my lap, it becomes a table on which Speak, Memory can spread itself out, the halves flapping open like Nabokov’s beautiful winged butterflies. The dictionary is a foundation, whose material being reflects the other’s hard covers and gum smell. The two can relate to each other, and I can travel, back and forth, along the path established between them by the mutual experience of simply being a book. No division of attention here, but rather the creation of a conversation, in which one asks and the other answers, all--it feels like--for my benefit.

I wish that, like Nabokov, I could confirm my memories. If only there was a witness to my linguistic ramblings, who could remind me gently, Oh, no. “Antinomy” was definitely in Infinite Jest. Remember? When the boys play Eschaton? Or, “opprobrious”? That’s one of Matthew Arnold’s, back when he was on his religious kick. But then, I retract my wish.

For isn’t one of the most startling qualities of words their ability to shed associations and be seen in a new light? This is how poetry can so affect the senses, shocking us into a vision of a dead crab shell as a little traveling case with such lavish lining! Or slowly, carefully reversing our expectations to reveal shepherds’ feeding their lambs with teapots rather than teats. Just knowing what a word means and where it comes from does not make me its master. If such were the case, every time I wrote down a new definition and placed it back into my dictionary, I would have merely added another static datum to the database in my head. I refuse to treat words as static. I would rather not remember where they all came from, if it reminds me to treat each one as an unlimited province of possibility, overlapping with some other provinces, and coterminous with the rest, as far as the mind’s eye can see. As the user, not the master, of this language, I do not own my words, but usufruct allows me to enjoy their lambent fruits.

This is just to say

I have read
the dreams
that Freud dreamt
and studied

and which
I have probably
now overthought
for myself

Forgive me
my fascinating dreams
so sweet
and so cold