Curtis Weyant

The Problem of Beth

curtis — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 19:24:00 +0000

In the midseason finale of The Walking Dead, Beth dies after Rick and the gang had (they thought) successfully managed a hostage negotiation with Dawn. After hostages are traded – Beth and Carol for two of Dawn's police officers – Dawn predictably and despotically demands that Noah, the ward whom Beth had replaced and who had escaped with her help, remain behind in Beth's stead. Although Noah is willing to sacrifice himself so that Beth can leave, Beth turns back to Dawn and stabs her with a pair of surgical scissors she had hidden in her cast. In reaction, Dawn shoots Beth in the head, killing her immediately, an action which earns Dawn her own mortal head wound from Rick. One of Rick's former hostages orders a unilateral cease fire (before firing can begin), saying that they only wanted Dawn dead. Miraculously, nobody else ends up dying, and Rick and crew leave the hospital, with Daryl carrying Beth's body out to meet Maggie and the rest of the gang in an emotional reunion.

Those who watch The Walking Dead knew that something big was coming. Midseason finales have, in general, become fodder for cliffhangers and plot developments that sometimes even upstage season finales, and with The Walking Dead, that typically means the death of a major character. Last year, we got the beheading of Hershel, Beth's father, and in Season 2, the midseason finale revealed that Sophia – Carol's daughter, the search for whom drove much of the show's plot to that point – was indeed dead and turned. Season 3 breaks the mold with the introduction of Tyreese and Sasha, but we still get the death of Oscar, a former inmate who had joined Rick's group and shown that he was actually trustworthy. (Season 1 wasn't long enough to have a midseason finale.) All this to say that going into the midseason finale of Season 5, nobody was expecting everyone to walk away.

Which is one of the reasons why everyone should've walked away. The fact that everyone was expecting a major death due to the pattern established by previous seasons (plus the revelation by Executive Producer Gale Anne Hurd that it would be a "heartbreaking" episode) is a big signal that the show has become too predictable. Rather than maintaining the suspense of "someone could (but might not) die at any time," The Walking Dead has become more of a "we know someone's gonna die, just tell us who it is already" sort of show. One of the best things the writers could have done, in my opinion, would have been to not kill anybody (except walkers). But we'll get to that in a bit.

Given the buildup of Beth's character in a couple episodes last season and a couple more this season, anyone who didn't predict she would kick it when the showdown came — and we've seen the showdown building up to the midseason finale for several episodes now — hasn't really been paying attention. (Also, Beth alludes to her probable death in a late Season 4 episode just before she is taken by the then-mysterious "ambulance.") This is another reason why nobody, but especially Beth, should have died. The writers have, over second half of Season 4 and the first half of Season 5, given Beth an opportunity to shine. However, it feels like the only reason the writers allowed Beth's character to grow at all was so that they could kill her off. It wasn't to give her any sort of independent voice or to explore the depths of her psyche. Given that the episode aired right after Thanksgiving, the most apt analogy I can think of is that the writers and producers fattened Beth up for the feast.

Throughout Seasons 2, 3 and the first half of Season 4, Beth was mainly a prop character. In Season 2, she was a whimpering, suicidal wreck who almost redshirts herself when she runs to her undead mother. In Season 3 and early Season 4, she manages to overcome her grief, but remains mostly backdrop, suitable as a target of Carl's affections (and Axel's lust), a nurse for Hershel, and a babysitter for Rick – but not much else. She is a notably, and frustratingly, frail female amidst a cast of stronger women, including (but not limited to) Lori, Andrea, Mischonne, Carol, Sasha, and Maggie.

It's not until after Beth escapes the destroyed prison with Daryl that she is allowed any sort of true expansion. Together, Daryl and Beth – who previously had not interacted much – help each other overcome grief and demons past, to the point where many fans were "shipping" them (i.e., hoping for a full-fledged romantic relationship), because apparently it's impossible for two people of the opposite sex to undergo a traumatic experience and develop caring feelings for each other without also screwing. After about two-and-a-half episodes of Beth and Daryl bonding, Beth is taken by some unknown people driving a black car with a white cross on the window.

We don't find out until a few eps into Season 5 that Beth was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. There, she was "cared for" by a group of (former) police officers and an adequate, but not exactly first-rate, doctor who had created a tenuous but survivable environment in the upper floors of the hospital. In this environment, Beth's character really begins to take its own shape. She befriends Noah, a young man who had also been kidnapped/rescued by the Grady Group, and even manages to convince the doctor that his triage system might be a little flawed. She fends off an attempted rape by Officer Gorman using a walker – the dead Joan, who apparently had committed suicide due to being repeatedly raped herself as part of the "compromise" that kept the hospital running – as self-defense. In a brilliant moment of quick-wittedness, Beth then tells Dawn (the chief policeperson/hospital administrator) that Joan and Gorman are looking for her. Using the distraction to their benefit, Beth and Noah attempt to escape the hospital; unfortunately, Beth is caught, but Noah gets away and later runs into Daryl and Carol, ultimately soliciting their help in going back to rescue Beth.

Beth's forced readmission (so to speak) into the Grady Group allows her a more independent role as Dawn's ward. Beth kindles her spark of assertiveness, using both cunning and persuasion to get the medicines needed to save Carol's life. She also begins expressing dissatisfaction and even outright contempt for Dawn and the other Grady Group members. After Beth witnesses one of the officers berating and knocking down an older attendant, Dawn tries to reason with Beth about the concessions required to create stable conditions until someone can rescue them, rationalizations that appear unconvincing even to Dawn herself. When that doesn't work, Dawn appeals to Beth's morality, intimating that Beth was a cop killer for her part in Officer Gorman's death and that Beth owed her gratitude for withholding that information from the other cops. In typical bully fashion, Dawn piles on additional explanations how much Beth is indebted to her, all of which Beth cuts through without wavering. When they realize that another officer (the man Beth had seen abusing the attendant) has overheard their conversation, Dawn switches into tyrant mode and tries to make the other officer jump down the elevator shaft. A fight ensues, and after a brief moment of consideration, Beth decidedly pushes the officer to his death, saving Dawn and herself.

All of this is to show how Beth has grown from the simplistic, adolescent extra of Season 2 into a confident, complex woman in Season 5. The pause before pushing her attacker down the elevator shaft indicates that she must make a decision to compromise her morality, just as Dawn did, albeit in a different manner: It's not a reactionary deed, but a calculated one. This is important for the scene in which Beth dies, because she makes a similarly calculated move then. At the moment when she could have walked back to Rick and the gang, abandoning Noah (at least momentarily) to Dawn's authority, Beth instead chooses to stab Dawn in the shoulder with the surgical shears she had premeditatedly hidden in her cast. Beth's last words before getting the back of her head blown out are, "I get it now," both a referral to Dawn's earlier admission of killing her predecessor because he had become too tyrannical and an accusation that Dawn had become just like him.

One problem I have with all of this is that it feels like The Walking Dead's writers decided one day that they were going to pick a character they had never focused on before, make people care for her, and then kill her off just for the hell of it. The whole trajectory of Beth's maturation feels like it was engineered to elicit a cheap emotional reaction from the audience. This is problematic, because if that's the case, then the writers have done us all a disservice. Comparing Beth to the many characters Joss Whedon has killed, there is a huge difference. While Whedon may get a kick out of killing beloved characters, he never makes them beloved just so that he can kill them. They have a value of their own, and that is why we love them. But Beth never quite got there. She was on her way, but even with as much growth as she showed, she never truly broke out of her supporting character role. Everything that happened to her, everything the writers wrote for her, was to further someone else's storyline. But this is “crit fic” – I don't know this is what the writers thought or intended, I can only conjecture.

More importantly, Beth stabbing Dawn was completely out of character for her – even with the compromises and complexities that she had accumulated in the episodes leading up to it. That Beth “get[s] it now” does not mean that she has to come to the same conclusion as Dawn and attempt to kill her; in fact, it subordinates Beth's own intelligence and morality to have her act like Dawn. By precedent, Beth grew to understand Daryl's demons when they were traveling alone together, but she never became like him, even though she did learn from him. To have Beth stab Dawn in a predictably ineffectual way undermines all the growth she had undergone since her father's decapitation, not to mention the more nurturing and merciful aspects of her character. This is maddening because one of the things that The Walking Dead has done well in the past with a number of characters is to show how people can retain their humanity despite the monstrous situations they find themselves in. With Beth, the writers failed on an opportunity to deliver that same message.

However, the biggest disappoint for me is that the narrative could have been so much better had Beth simply walked away. You know what would have been even cooler? If the Grady Group had also turned around and shut the doors, leaving Dawn all alone with a drawn gun facing Rick, Daryl, Michonne, and the rest. Dawn might still have gone berserk and shot Beth, but in that instance the actions would have felt more appropriate and less like the writers were trying to pull a fast one. Or they might have completely shocked everyone by having a midseason finale that didn't include a major death.

Am I going to stop watching the show because of Beth's death? No, although I will watch it with a little less enthusiasm each week – not only because I liked Beth and am sad to see her go, but because I am afraid that there will be other characters propped up for target practice just like she was. I hope I'm wrong.

Requiem for a DMB

curtis — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 12:08:04 +0000

In every man’s life there comes a time when he must ask himself a hard question. For me, that question occurred out of the blue, prompted by a headline on Facebook. It is this:

Do I still consider myself a fan of the Dave Matthews Band?

I responded to myself with an apoplectic, “Of course I do!” Then, I stopped and thought about it. I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually listened to one of the band's songs. I mean, really listened, or possibly even sang along with.

In fact, as I considered the prospect, I came to realize that most (if not all) of the time, when DMB song came up on my random play, I skipped it. I could not recall any instances in recent memory where I had not done so. I often skip songs, however, depending on the mood I’m in. Maybe I just haven’t been in the mood to listen to DMB lately. All the time.

If you’re never in the mood for something, does that mean you don’t like it?

Okay, this post could go a really weird way from here, but I’ll stick to the topic at hand. Without having the benefit of scientific data (I’m not sure iTunes’ play, skip and other “statistics” are that reliable, especially across multiple devices), it’s hard to say, but I’m pretty sure I’ve skipped DMB songs in a variety of moods. If so, then that seems to indicate my tastes have changed, rather than it being merely a mood thing.

Which is kind of sad. I used to really, really like DMB. Not only did I like listening to the band’s songs, they were my go-to in many cases. Hell, I even practiced hard to master—well, muddle through—the absurd fingerings for “Satellite” when I was first learning to play guitar. And I saw them in concert. Once. In 1996 (or 7?).

This is sad for me because, let’s be honest, DMB were legit mainstream alternative back in the day. I mean, when “What Would You Say?” came out on the radio, there was nothing like it being played to a wide audience. Sure, people grouped DMB loosely with Blues Traveler (John Popper even played harmonica on WWYS) and a few other bands, but they had a distinct sound. It was unconventional music, in a totally acceptable sort of way.

Perhaps that’s why I don’t like DMB anymore, because their sound has become too vanilla. Meh, I don’t think so. I’m an unabashed pop culture fiend. While I certainly like stuff on the fringe, I’ve never been the snobbish type to stick my nose up at something merely because it is popular or even basic. Besides, I still listen to plenty of stuff from the same era — Counting Crows, Hootie & the Blowfish, others that don’t come immediately to mind — without skipping it.

Okay, so let’s test this. Let me play a song. (Listening…listening.) Nope. Didn’t get all the way through it. Dang it.

I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. My ambivalence (I can’t quite call it distaste) towards DMB is either ineffable or its effability escapes me. I shall have to ponder more.

O Captain! My Captain!

curtis — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 02:06:56 +0000

This won't be a long post. Because, what exactly does one write about someone you never knew, but who made you laugh, think and cry more than anyone else in your life?

Robin Williams died today at the age of 63 from apparent self-asphyxiation. Excepting people I've known, the news of his death has probably saddened me more than any other that I can remember.

Dead Poet's Society is the first movie of his that I can remember really making me think. It came out in 1989, when I was 12, and while I was already a reader at that age, it probably did more to inspire me to literary pursuits than any other single story, read, heard or viewed. (Which is why I don't give much credence to people who say that movies and television ruin readers, or any other similarly inane arguments.)

Good Will Hunting still holds my personal record for the movie seen the most number of times in a theater.

I won't go through all the movies of his I liked, there are just too many. But here's what I'll do.

On Facebook and Twitter, I gave my own little tribute, a picture of myself (the same as that above) standing on a desk with the hashtag #OCaptainMyCaptain. It's the honor that the students give John Keating (played by Williams) when he is forced to leave their school in Dead Poets Society. I can't think of a better way to symbolically send Robin off into the Great Whereafter. For now he's part of the Society, and his poetry will live on with that of the greats.

I'd love it if some others joined in and shared this tribute with me. If you do, please be safe and only stand on a desk, table, chair or some other piece of furniture that you know is sturdy and will support you.

P.S. Here's the Walt Whitman poem from where the phrase is taken:

O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

    But O heart! heart! heart!
    O the bleeding drops of red,
    Where on the deck my Captain lies,
    Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! My Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

    Here captain! dear father!
    This arm beneath your head;
    It is some dream that on the deck,
    You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;

    Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
    But I, with mournful tread,
    Walk the deck my captain lies,
    Fallen cold and dead.

You might be a secular Pelagian if...

curtis — Sat, 02 Aug 2014 02:23:13 +0000

I recently took the Which Early Christian Heresy Are You? quiz and my result was Arianism. I posted on Facebook my disappointment at not receiving Pelagianism. But after a few days of contemplation, I’ve started to wonder if I’m really that disappointed.

Pelagianism and Me

In a nutshell, Pelagianism is the idea that there is no such thing as original sin, put forward by a dude named Pelagian sometime in the fourth or fifth century A.D. Alas, we don’t actually have Pelagian's writings — we only know what the people who didn’t like him (like Augustine of Hippo) had to say about his beliefs. Assuming those critics accurately presented his ideas, Pelagian apparently rejected the notion that people are born sinners simply because Adam and Eve sinned. Theoretically, according to Pelagian, a person could live a sinless life without ever having been baptized or needing to ask forgiveness. At its core, Pelagianism is an extreme belief in libertarian free will.

I first learned about Pelagian in a historical seminar my senior year of college. Our text for the class was John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. I had to write a paper on one of the heretics Newman condemns, so I semi-randomly chose Pelagian. (Incidentally, I went way over time in presenting my paper, a condition that still plagues me in my weekly podcasts on Buffy and Doctor Who.) In discussing my paper with Dr. David Basinger, with whom I was taking a directed study course in logic at the time, he told me that he had sometimes been accused of Pelagianism in his academic work. I recall being sardonically amused, and somewhat surprised, at the idea of modern philosophers hurling ancient heretical epithets at each other. Having explored the academic world further since then, I’m no longer surprised, though still sardonically amused.

As a young man exploring new ideas, I was drawn to Pelagianism for several reasons:

It approached humanity from the perspective that people are essentially good, contra the orthodox notion that people are essentially evil and require external validation and “cleansing."
The concept of original sin, covered by the fifth doctrine of the church I grew up in, had always bothered me because of its cosmic unfairness: Why would God condemn a person for someone else’s actions? Various philosophical and theological replies to this never really satisfied me.
Furthermore, in no other orthodox teaching is it even possible for one person to sin for another, yet somehow the first man sinned for everyone else. I saw (and still see) this as a major inconsistency in modern ecumenical Christian belief.
It was anathema to my upbringing, and I am at heart a contrarian.

It was my first real flirtation with heterodoxy, and as with most flings it was hot and heavy for awhile. But then I moved on. Now, as an avowed mesotheist, I can’t really be a Pelagian: Without a working concept of sin, it’s pretty much impossible to argue either for or against a belief in original sin. Thus, I am relegated to looking fondly back at my youthfully vicarious philosophy.

The Heresy of the Individual

However, this quiz I took the other day got me thinking again. Maybe it could work between me and Pelagianism. Maybe we could get back together. I’ve changed as a person, but you never know. Maybe Pelagianism has changed, too….

Although free-will libertarianism and political libertarianism are discrete ideas, there does seem to be a fair bit of overlap. At heart, political libertarianism is about letting people make their own choices, and while those choices could be deterministic on a biological or philosophical level, there’s a distinct language of free will that is used in politically libertarian circles. A lot of that language is couched around über-individualist ideals of “the self-made man” (er, person…) and “pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps,” and yadda-yadda-yadda. The classic American-dream trope that a person can achieve success and happiness despite their birth status, the cultural landscape, governmental intrusions, social pressures, and other seemingly prodigious forces that stand in their way, has a distinctly Pelagian feel, it seems to me.

This is to say that, if individual freedom is the virtue of political libertarianism, then sin is the obstacles which impeded that freedom. Like many Christian conceptions of religious sin, yielding to those obstacles is a failure of human character, an acceptance of a sinful state, because the choice is not the individual's but that of the one who impedes the individual.

(Note that there are some versions of Christianity, and other religions, which explicitly tie religious sin and economic failure together: Those who are righteous are successful, and frequently vice versa. This is not what I mean. My example is a metaphor only.)

But perhaps I’ve approached this from the wrong end. The explanation of a heresy only fully makes sense when set against the orthodoxy it rejects.

Social Orthodoxy

The idea of obstacle as sin is not a solely political libertarian metaphor. Both progressive and conservative authoritarians accept similar notions of the “sin” of obstacles in people’s lives.

Progressives tend to view people as occupying various states of either privilege or unprivilege — that is, as either having certain obstacles in their way or not having them. You are poor or you are rich; you have access to education, jobs and health services, or you don’t; you are a minority, or you aren’t. The obstacles that impede a particular person (or group of people) varies, but some tend to go together, such as poverty and access to affordable education or health care. Like original sin, people are born into these states of unprivilege, and despite not being at fault for the unpriviliege into which they are delivered, they are punished because of it.

What really brings the metaphor home, however, is the progressive approach to combatting lack of privilege. Like a Christian needs a God who offers forgiveness for sins (including original sin), an unprivileged person needs a savior to offset their hardships, according to the progressive mindset. A government that distributes resources to the unprivileged is tantamount to a divinity who pardons transgressors. As with evangelical conceptions of a benevolent and loving God who offers forgiveness if only one asks, progressives also believe that corrections for unprivileged situations should flow freely from the state in the forms of no-cost services and monetary empowerments.

Of course, original sin affects everyone, while unprivilege doesn’t. But the metaphor still holds even for privileged folk, however one defines the term. For paradoxically both unprivilege and privilege are sinful states into which people are born, the latter coming with perceived responsibilities to feel guilty and help one’s fellow man (er, again...person). There’s even a biblical parable about trying to squeeze through a needle’s eye, or something, after you give up all your money. Progressive redistributive policies aim to correct both the original sins of unprivilege and privilege in one fell swoop.

If progressive tendencies are more evangelical (metaphorically speaking), conservatives are a bit more Catholic. They might pretend to want to help everyone, but in practice they take care of their own. Oh, conservatives talk an almost secular Pelagian game of free-will and ardent individualism, but they believe deep down that people are born into an originally sinful state. They preach the evils of Government and Socialism and talk about ways to get rid of them — by controlling government and society themselves.

Like progressives, conservative authoritarians wield the divine power of government to establish protectionist policies and create tax breaks for favored companies, a practice known as crony capitalism. With the right connections, or the right indulgences, they’ll even waive away sinful obstacles — such as by issuing subsidies that help big agriculture or awarding government contracts to large defense corporations.

Thus like medieval Catholics and Protestants, conservatives and progressives fight bloodily over minutiae, claiming each other holds a massively differing theology. In the end it’s not their beliefs, the tenets of their common orthodoxy, that are different but the ways in which each group responds to those beliefs. Both approaches are alienating because both focus on the inability of individuals overcome injustice, to surmount obstacles — to live without sin.

Eschewing Original Conditions

Okay, I’ve taking the metaphor a little too far, perhaps. I stretched it out of shape, and it got a little thin. Throwing out the religious terminology, there is a sense in which something like original sin seems to exist in the world. As a student of literature, I’ve spent many hours (and days, weeks, years) pondering various facets of the so-called human condition. We are all born into the same fundamental situation with which we have to learn to deal.

One of the reasons why I dislike both progressive and conservative approaches is that they both insist on prescriptive structures, which themselves become original conditions. Neither group likes to admit that their proposed solutions to the misfortunes of life merely shifts those misfortunes, and quite often even creates more of them. No human organization can be anything greater than human. Pretending that any collection of individuals is somehow transcendently capable of curing all worldly ills is to misunderstand the nature of organization.

Pelagians never argued that everybody lived a sinless life. The most they contended was that it was theoretically possible for someone to do so without intervention from any divinity. But they acknowledged that such an accomplishment would be incredibly difficult and unlikely. Likewise, political libertarians believe strongly in the capabilities of the individual to circumvent obstructions and become successful. However, most would acknowledge that they receive some sort of help (possibly even government help) to do so.

The heresy of the political libertarian, then, is the idea that people help each other more — through voluntary affiliations, trade and the freedom to exchange ideas that benefit everyone — by pursuing their own interests than by prescribing ineffective dispensations for others. It eschews the notion that original human conditions define us, and that altering them requires cosmic intervention. Not everyone can escape the conditions they are born into, and psychologically most people continue dealing with their birth conditions throughout the rest of their lives. And yes, “you will always have the poor among you,” but not every person born to poverty will remain poor. Political libertarians don't deny that people are born with either more or less privilege (or whatever terminology you want to use). Rather, we deny that those conditions predetermine the courses of our lives.

Ultimately, looking to some higher authority for absolution from the circumstances of your existence is to deny your merit for the very deliverance you seek. Because there is no higher authority than yourself. At least, not on this earth.

A Reply

I gave my good friend Dave a preview of this musing, and he had some additional thoughts. Here they are, slightly edited for formatting.

This is an interesting take on libertarian philosophy, albeit a quite obscure one.

It struggles to define its audience. It seems to me that two facets of libertarian thought bear relevance to your metaphor: the knowledge problem and the origin of inequality.

Your argument seems to fall into the Mises/Rothbard camp in the way it is structured. That is, it leans toward the positive assertion that "original sin" can be transcended. Whereas Hayek would come at it obliquely like: "maybe original sins do define us, but we can't really quantify those cases to effectively fix them." Only the former is real "secular Pelagianism." In the latter case, intractable original sin may still exist, but we can't actually solve it. So it seems that Hayek offers a way to square libertarian thought with the existence of "economic sin." (ie. sin exists, but the market ameliorates it best.)

But there is an additional moral component here which you could explore more too. In Christianity, original sin is introduced by explicitly immoral acts (disobedience). Progressives speak of social and economic inequality in these terms as well. To Marx and his intellectual heirs, this inequality results from immoral exploitation of the working class. It is possible that this is the case, but it is also possible that inequality is not an effect of immoral acts, but in fact can come into existence as a by-product of only moral acts (voluntary exchange, as Hayek asserts). While the "knowledge problem" approach makes Hayek seem not Pelagian (or at least agnostic), his ideas about the origin of inequality seem to lean Pelagian.

De Casseres indicts the novel-reading public

curtis — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 13:24:49 +0000

In my last post I noted that Ruth Graham’s argument distinguishing young adult fiction from more weighty stories is a perennial lamentation made by stalwarts of Literature. In a previous iteration last December, Terry Teachout descried the critical attention being given to "pop culture" over "high art," and in my response I showed that such arguments were made by none other than Edgar Allan Poe — who was better known during his lifetime as a critic than as a literary figure, and whose works have helped to define entire genres of popular culture.

This morning, I came upon another example of the same argument from 1899, this time from Benjamin De Casseres. Although little known today, De Casseres was an influential early-twentieth century book critic at The New York Sun and other Hearst-empire newspapers, writing hundreds of book reviews, biographical columns, political tracts, poems and short stories right up to his death in December 1945. He befriended and corresponded with the likes of Jack London, Eugene O'Neill, Aldous Huxley, H. L. Mencken and a variety of other artists and critics over the course of his tenure. Of late I have become rather fascinated by the breadth (and quantity) of De Casseres's writings and surprised by the lack of attention this once-eminent critic now receives.

The piece I found this morning came before De Casseres had built up his name, however. It was written while De Casseres was still living in Philadelphia, where he was born, and appears in the form of a letter to The New York Times Saturday Review, written on Oct. 29, 1899, and published on Nov. 11 that same year. Here is the full text:

Some of your correspondents who “take me up” in your next issue of last week for my letter decrying the excessive novel reading of the day are apparently laboring under the impression that I am opposed to the novel per se. Nothing is further from the truth. No one places the art of the novel writer higher than I do, and I hold that when one has a read “The Scarlet Letter,” “Vanity Fair,” “L’Assomoir,” “Richard Feveral,” and “Henry Esmond,” he has read five of the literary masterpieces of the age. To me they are not fiction, but great truths, to be absorbed into the woof and weft of one’s spiritual nature. I do not indict the novel, but the novel-reading public—those who in our libraries allow Goethe, Taine, Spencer, and Browning to grow cobwebbed with persistent disuse, and who crowd around the frothy fiction cases like flies around the sugarbowl. The majority of these latter read merely for amusement—seldom for instruction. They belong to that class of people who subscribe to The Daily Batteringram and Evening Shock, and who patronize the Girl from Paris and the latest disrobing humbug from oversea.

They live by and through their feelings. Their higher centres have become atrophied through a long period of poisonous desuetude. To them Darwin is the man who said, “We came from monkeys,” Henry George “That man who believes in killing the rich,” and Browning—“Why ain’t he the poet who had a fight with his father-in-law?” They know next to nothing of the tremendous philosophic, religious, economic movements of the age, which are intimately connected with the fortunes of you and me and all of us. As Prof. James says, these people are becoming a source of danger to the National character. Novels are sapping their strength; they welter in emotions and revel in the warm baths of sense—though they would indignantly disclaim any such thing. One correspondent tells me that there is enough of the tragic in life without reading Ibsen. Parodoxical as it may seem, I reply that there is so much tragedy in life because we don’t make our lives tragical enough. No ill was ever gotten over by ignoring it. Ibsen has grappled with the problems of all time. All hail to the grapplers and fighters! The kingdom of the spirit does not belong to moon-struck Le Gallienne or broadsword Kipling, but to the Ibsens and Zolas, Tolstoïs, Turgeneffs, and Hauptmanns.

We have had enough of the novel for awhile. The new century is portentous with ominous signs. Rose Nouchette Carey, Mrs. Alexander, Hall Caine, and Le Gallienne are doing nothing to interpret them. They hold a preponderating influence in the world of literature to-day—even among the cultivated; but, as Goethe says, “among those we call cultivated there is little earnestness to be found.” And let us hope that the first shall be last.

The interesting part to me is the form of the argument has changed very little. De Casseres anticipates the arguments of both Teachout and Graham — and the many others who have made the same argument — by trying to distinguish between novels that "hold a preponderating influence in the world of literature" and those which offer "not fiction, but great truths." Interestingly, he also anticipates my own counterargument (by way of C. S. Lewis), that people have different motives for reading, by writing, "The majority of these latter read merely for amusement—seldom for instruction." Rather than seeing this as a positive thing, as Lewis and I both do, De Casseres uses the motivation of amusement to prosecute readers: "I do not indict the novel, but the novel-reading public."

I won't attempt to counter De Casseres's specific comments — I've written enough in response to Teachout and Graham that my own position is likely clear enough already — except to note that this letter is that of a young man looking to move in on the literary scene. By 1922, Theatre Magazine was calling De Casseres "America's foremost creator of brilliant prose," and I can only wonder if by the time he gained such prominence, he had perhaps developed a different view of the value of novels. I'd like to think so, but I will have to look into it more before I know.

Unliterary criticism

curtis — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 21:11:16 +0000

Everything new is old, as evinced by Ruth Graham’s recent Slate article admonishing adults who read “young adult” (YA) fiction. Her basic argument is that books like The Fault in Our Stars “could plausibly be said to be replacing literary fiction in the lives of their adult readers,” and that such replacements are inferior to more nuanced stories by “literary” and “canonical” authors. Stories from Shakespeare, the Brontës, Dickens or Megan Abbott are better, Graham argues, because they evoke “satisfaction of a more intricate kind.”

At heart, Graham’s argument is equivalent Terry Teachout's Wall Street Journal article last December upon the death of Elmore Leonard, to which I responded here. Teachout’s distinction of “pop” vs. “high” art is very similar to Graham’s delineation of “young” vs. “mature” adult literature. (Graham goes even further in trying to distinguish “transparently trashy” YA fiction — i.e., stuff that obviously isn’t literature — from “realistic” YA fiction without offering any substantive generic criteria beyond the presumption that “nobody” defends it as literature.) Likewise, both Teachout and Graham offer prejudicial arguments based on absurd caricatures of the books that make up these subjective and ill-defined literary subsets.

That said, Graham offers a couple variations that aren’t covered by my response to Teachout, which I will address below. Incidentally, while writing up this post, I happened to hear an interview with Graham on Weekend Edition Sunday, in which she responds to some criticism of her criticism. I thought the interview might give Graham a chance to clarify her argument in a positive way, but it turned out that her clarifications are even more elitist and dismissive than her initial article.

The satisfaction of complexity

In the Season 3 episode of Doctor Who “Blink,” Kathy Nightingale asks her best friend, Sally Sparrow, why Sally likes sad things. “It's happy for deep people,” Sally replies. Similarly conflicting emotions are evinced by popular paradoxical portmanteaux like “bittersweet” and stolen foreign phrases like je ne se quoi (the expression of an attractive but ineffable quality). Complex ideas are interesting, and Graham is right to say that many readers “find satisfaction of a more intricate kind in stories that confound and discomfit.”

Where Graham errs, however, is in the conflation of “more complex” with “more mature.” Not all complexity is equal, and there is such a thing as needless complexity. In life, people frequently embrace gratuitous complications (think “drama”), and achieving maturity is often a matter of reducing them. In literature, stories can likewise contain needless complexities — as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again. Identifying complexity with maturity is itself ironically simplistic.

Graham’s larger problem is in asserting that “YA endings are uniformly satisfying...wrapped up neatly, [with] our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future.” In other words, she seems to be perfectly fine with things that are satisfyingly complex, while stories with satisfying endings are shallow and dull. Alas, like Teachout, Graham is not lamenting some universal truth, a Platonic ideal of “Literature,” but the fact that some people tend to disagree with her preferences. The idea that everyone should find greater fulfillment in complexity than simplicity is absurd.

Furthermore, even if it were true that YA endings are simple in the ways that Graham avers, that does not necessarily make YA stories simple overall. Chess has only two possible endings — checkmate or stalemate — yet few would argue that chess isn’t a complex game. Dr. Amy H. Sturgis’ secondary bibliography on YA dystopias shows that there is a good deal of critical and intertextual discussion about the complexities to be uncovered within YA literature. And as for the maturity of YA themes, consider the use of the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games by protesters in Thailand.

The fallacy of false choices

In her NPR interview, Graham acknowledged that there may validity to the argument that “the best YA is richer and more sophisticated than I give it credit for,” claiming, “I would never say that, you know, all YA is on one side of that spectrum, and all adult literature is on the other side.” However, her article implies exactly the opposite. Specifically, Graham notes only two kinds of YA literature: “transparently trashy stuff like Divergent and Twilight, which no one defends as serious literature” and “the genre the publishing industry calls ‘realistic fiction.’” If Graham considers any subset of YA literature to be “richer and more sophisticated” than these two, she has not indicated what it is.

This is a problem because Graham pits her chosen examples of YA literature against the likes of Shakespeare, Dickens and the Brontës (the latter of which I personally can’t condone). This sort of false comparison is rhetorically deceptive — it’s like saying, “Your plastic bracelet is worth less than my platinum necklace, therefore bracelets are of less quality than necklaces.” The only fair comparison would be to compare the best with the best. Of course, it’s impossible to compare the best of anything if your attitude is that it’s all terrible. At least Sturgeon had enough grace to allow a 10% margin on quality.

I won’t be so audacious as to suggest which YA works might be able to go up against the big, recognized names of “Literature,” mostly because it doesn’t matter — a near cousin of the false choice is the false dilemma. Even if the best work of YA literature, whatever it may be, doesn’t quite reach Shakespearean standards, that doesn’t mean it lacks complexity or that adults should be embarrassed to read it. Complexities abound in YA literature, and missing them says more about the reader than it does the book.

Which brings me to my next point.

The boundary of literary criticism

Literary criticism is — ahem — the criticism of literature. However, literary critics seem curiously prone to criticizing things beyond the boundaries of literature. For example, if you call a book (or an entire subset of books) unliterary, then by admission you are not engaging in literary criticism. Furthermore, if you criticize readers rather than books, you have escaped the province of literary criticism and ventured into the larger realm of social criticism.

It’s unclear to me exactly what type of criticism Graham thinks she is doing. Given that her article posted in Slate’s Book Review section, it would seem to imply that she was doing literary criticism. However, she spends an awful lot of time in her article focusing on what she expects from people, rather than from books. A lot of people took offense to that, and Graham doesn’t seem to understand why. In the NPR interview, she said,

[T]here’s this whole other strain of criticism that boils down to, ‘How dare you tell me what to read.’ I guess I find that a little bit troubling. You know, the job of criticism is to make a distinction between good things and bad things, and between complicated things and simplistic things.

I can’t quite tell if Graham is being wilfully obtuse here or if she truly believes that it’s “troubling” to criticize her criticism. Graham does identify some books (or authors) as good and bad, complicated and simplistic. However, she also includes statements like the following:

“Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.”
“These are the books that could plausibly be said to be replacing literary fiction in the lives of their adult readers. And that’s a shame.”
“But how can a grown-up, even one happy to be reminded of the shivers of first love, not also roll her eyes?”

These are not comments about books, but about their readers. If Graham is identifying what is good and bad, she is saying that people are good and bad because of the books they read and the reactions they have to those books. Not surprisingly, such statements are alienating.

I would contrast Graham’s comments about readers with those of C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism. In the opening chapter, Lewis categorizes readers as “literary” and “unliterary,” based not on the books they read but on their general approach to reading. “If the few [‘literary’ readers] have ‘good taste,’ then we may have to say that no such thing as ‘bad taste’ exists: for the inclination which the many [‘unliterary’ readers] have to their sort of reading is not the same thing and, if the word were univocally used, it would not be called taste at all.” This is to say that, in Lewis’ view, it’s pointless to call out most people for not reading “Literature,” because when they read, they are not engaging in a literary pursuit. This is neither an insult to any reader nor a debasement of their maturity, but a recognition that people have different objectives with respect to books.

Graham, however, wants all adults to be “literary” readers. She seems unable to conceive of the a more complex world in which people have divergent desires with respect to books. And since those people aren’t embarrassed enough for her liking, she attempts to shame them. This sort of criticism is definitely not literary — nor is it particularly useful or effective.

How the story ends

In a YA story, according to Graham’s view, the obdurate critic would have a liminal experience that causes her heart to soften and helps her rediscover her own childlike passion for reading “simple” stories, while still enjoying the more complex novels she has learned to appreciate. Think Pixar’s Ratatouille with books instead of food.

However, in this complex world, where most people tend to entrench themselves in their positions without truly analyzing why they might possibly be wrong, I suspect that we’re not inclined to get any satisfactory ending. I’m not so sure that makes for a better story, even if it’s a truer one.

And as I said above, everything new is old (including that adage). Even if Graham does somehow shift her thinking, someone else will make the same argument in a few months. The circle keeps spinning.

Catholics, libertarianism and poverty

curtis — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 03:48:34 +0000

According to Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, you can't be both Catholic and libertarian. Well, I guess that basically consigns all the members of the Catholic Libertarians Facebook group to hell.

The problem is, Cardinal Maradiaga doesn't seem to know much about libertarianism.

Here are some comments in reply to particulars from the article:

1. Catholics hold a host of incompatible, paradoxical beliefs. Just because there's one guy at the top saying that those incompatibilities and paradoxes are okay doesn't make them less incompatible and paradoxical. I mean, for Christ's sake, Catholic doctrine somehow agrees with both Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo! Generally, humans hold all sorts of incompatible beliefs all the time — it's called lying to yourself, or more technically, cognitive dissonance. As recently reported on RadioLab, some forms of cognitive dissonance can make you more successful. Given that inconsistency is a part of both human nature and catholic doctrine, what does it even matter if libertarianism is incompatible with catholicism?

2. Everything wrong with this article is presaged in the first clause: "Taking direct aim at libertarian policies promoted by many American conservatives...." There are wide gaps between the beliefs of libertarians and conservatives, and conflating them only shows ignorance and an inability to identify nuance. Some conservatives espouse a few libertarian beliefs, such as small government, fiscal responsibility and the right to self defense — but that's tantamount as saying, "Some people agree with other people on a few things." American progressives promote libertarian policies as well, such as civil rights (except, unfortunately, where they tend to ignore the right to self defense) and peaceful foreign relations. Likewise, there are many areas where libertarians disagree with conservatives and liberals together — in fact, bipartisanship is often the very antithesis of libertarianism.

3. "Francis continues to insist that 'the elimination of the structural causes for poverty is a matter of urgency that can no longer be postponed.'" This is an important issue. There are indeed structural causes of poverty, not to mention racism, sexism, and other bad things. The fact that there are structural causes to these things is precisely why libertarians dislike coercive structures. From a libertarian perspective, the response to structural problems is not more structures, or even allegedly better structured structures. Structures always (and always will) have problems. (Who was that guy who said, "You will always have the poor among you"?) Libertarians believe that the only way to reduce structural problems is to take down coercive structures (government and crony business), and encourage voluntary structures (i.e., every group, formal or informal, that you've ever joined because you wanted to be part of it). This is not a perfect solution, problems will still exist, but at least they will not be structural.

4. "Trickle-down economics, he said, is 'a deception'..." Indeed, insofar as "trickle-down economics" is a straw man. Trickle-down economics is an economic idea that redistributing money to wealthy people will supposedly help people in lower income brackets as it "trickles down." Libertarians hate redistributive economic policies, regardless of who gets the initial redistribution. Most libertarians call "trickle-down economics" by other names, such as "bailout" and "crony capitalism." There are a plenty of libertarian economists who explicitly speak against trickle-down economics.

5. Apparently it's a big deal that Paul Ryan, who is a Catholic, "is also a disciple of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand." However, every characterization in this sentence is inaccurate. Ayn Rand famously despised libertarians and said so vociferously and repeatedly (although the Ayn Rand Institute softens her stated viewpoints quite a bit). Yes, her Objectivist philosophy overlaps with some libertarian ideas, but if Rand ever heard you call her a libertarian, she would probably shoot you in the face and declare self-defense from defamation of character (and then copyright her declaration, perhaps as performance art). As for Paul Ryan, just like Shepherd Book ain't a shepherd, Ryan ain't a libertarian.

6. "CUA’s own business school that last year sparked a controversy by accepting $1 million from the foundation of Charles Koch, a billionaire industrialist who is an influential supporter of libertarian-style policies." Most libertarians I know are as tired of hearing about the Koch brothers as everyone else. (BTW, the name is similar to "Coke"; if you don't pronounce it that way, you're saying it wrong.) Furthermore, a lot of libertarians are quite angry with the Koch brothers for their attempted coup of the Cato Institute. Assuming that the Kochs, either together or individually, speak for all libertarians is like saying Warren Buffett speaks for all progressives.

7. "[Maradiaga] said, solidarity with the poor, as envisioned by Catholic social teaching, calls for 'dealing with the structural causes of poverty and injustice.'” Any organization that talks about structural problems of poverty while spending scads of money shuffling around sexual predators and covering up chronic abuse has some big-ass beams to pull out of its own eyes.

Oh, and let's not forget about the people who were tortured and killed at the hand of the Catholic Church in the various crusades, witch hunts and inquisitions over the years, while priests, cardinals and popes lived large. Excepting anyone wants to return to the "good old days" when the popes were emperors, I would caution catholics not to take political advice from the Bishop of Rome or his advisors. Then again, I generally caution against taking advice from anyone whose official title is more than 40 words long.

It may be true that whatever ideal Maradiaga and the Pope are arguing against is incompatible with catholicism — but from my point of view, that ideal is not libertarianism.

In defense of editorial privilege

curtis — Thu, 29 May 2014 12:29:01 +0000

Recently, Neshaminy High School in Bucks County, PA, made a ripple when the student editors of the school newspaper (The Playwickian) decided that they would no longer print the name of the school’s mascot — the Redskins — within its pages. The editors' reasons focus on sensitivity, as indicated in an unsigned editorial published last October, and mirrors the arguments of others who have petitioned to change the names of teams and mascots that reference Native Americans.

It seems, however, that not everyone likes this decision. The Neshaminy school board took the drastic step (some have called it a “public tantrum”) of proposing a revised policy that would compel student editors to print the word “Redskins” in any student-submitted piece. Initially, the revised policy also would have punished student editors who removed or replaced the word, although the school board appears to have backed away from including such punitive actions. The policy was originally set for a vote on May 21, but has been delayed.

Members of the school board are not the only ones to react negatively to the students who felt crises of conscience. NPR identified a couple of rough diamonds who brought their own colloquial sensibilities to the matter. For example, take this comment by concerned parent Steve Pirritano:

If my son wants to write something proud about being a Redskin football player, the students on that paper, under the law, have no right to tell him he has to take the word ‘Redskin’ out of there.

Boiled down, the argument is simple: That Perritano Jr. has the right to say whatever he wants without anybody saying boo about it.

My friends, we are clearly dealing with the epitome of legal genius.

In fact, Mr. Perritano has the issue completely backwards. The Playwickian, along with all other student-run newspapers in Pennsylvania, is governed by the PA Code Section 12.9. In particular, part (g) provides five requirements, summarized as follows:

Student newspaper editors are as free to edit as the editors of any other publication (subject to points 4 and 5 below).
Supervising school officials may remove offensive material or edit material that would cause substantial disruption or interference with school activities
School officials may not censor or restrict material simply because it is critical of the school or its administration
Officials have prior approval privileges, but they must approve within a specified time limit or the material is considered automatically approved
Students not on the newspaper staff can submit stories according to written policies and procedures

Perritano seems to believe that whatever his son writes must be published in the school newspaper verbatim, but that is explicitly not the case. PA law is clear that student editors have the same rights as other editors, and students who submit pieces for publication in the student newspaper must follow the policies and procedures established by those editors. If that policy includes (among other things) not printing the word “Redskins,” then such policies are are perfectly within the realm of editorial privilege. This is no different than The New York Times’ refusal to print a variety of words it doesn’t like.

Regardless of the PA law, however, it is right and proper for editorial boards — including, and perhaps especially, student editorial boards — to have control over the editorial process. It has never been the case that writers automatically get to have their works published without editorial involvement. Yeah, yeah, “freedom of speech,” First Amendment, blah, blah, blah. Freedom of speech is an acknowledgement of the right of people to say whatever they want. However, such rights do not extend any privilege to be published in a particular periodical. Even the PA Code above tacitly requires students to follow the written criteria established by the newspaper’s (student) editorial staff.

Moving beyond Perritano’s perceived privilege, these regulations also highlight what the school board gets wrong. By any objective measure, the school board does not have the legislative authority to compel student editors to print any particular content, even if only one word. Quite to the contrary, the first requirement implies exactly the opposite, that the school board cannot compel any content, since the student editors are “as free as editors of other newspapers.” School officials act as supervisors who may remove libellous or offensive material or edit material that may be disruptive, but neither of those criteria fit this case.

According to the Bucks County Courier Times, the school “board members have defended the measure, saying the policy will protect other students’ first amendment rights from censorship.” The irony here is that it’s the school board, not the student editors, who are attempting to trampling on first amendment rights — which includes the right of editorial privilege, as explicitly identified in the PA code — in favor of a perverted perception of “rights” that simply do not exist.

At any rate, if student newspapers are supposed to provide students with real-world experience related to editing and publishing, then it seems that these students are getting an education far beyond the typical one. I just hope they remember it for a long time, and that they continue to fight against crotchety school boards and all other meddling government agencies that try to impose top-down values and compel publishers to produce content that they morally disagree with.

n.b. Clearly, I have no problem using the word “Redskins” to refer to teams that are named such. Actually, I think the students' editorial policy is kind of silly, and had I been a student editor at Neshaminy, I probably would have voted along with the minority to continue using the word in reference to the school’s sports teams. However, independent publishers are allowed to adopt silly policies, and that’s the right that’s at stake here. Anyone who wants to use the word is free to find another outlet — and ultimately, that’s the real freedom in “freedom of speech.”

Charities should keep Sterling's money

curtis — Sat, 03 May 2014 23:16:15 +0000

A week ago, it got out that an 80-year-old white guy made some racist comments. Considering that such an even was unprecedented in American history, the Internet blew up and the People called for blood. A few days later, LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling was banned for life from the NBA and fined $2.5 million. Furthermore, NBA commissioner Adam Silver made it perfectly clear that he was going to press NBA franchise owners to force Sterling to sell the Clippers.

All in all, I have no problem with the actions taken so far by Silver, or with his intended pursuit of Sterling's ousting. I've seen a few people cry about "freedom of speech," but this is all related to private contracts, so I don't have any ethical qualms from a libertarian perspective. In fact, my only comment to date on the issue is sardonic chagrin at the notable lack of Sterling-Silver puns.

But in all the ensuing hubbub there's one result that I really don't understand. As initially reported by that bastion of journalism known as TMZ, at least some charities are looking to give back money that Sterling. In particular, UCLA is giving back $425,000 and refusing to accept the balance of a $3 million (total) donation targeted toward cancer research.

In short, this is idiotic.

Let me step back. Of course, this is not the first time a charity has given back money. One needs look only as far back as last fall recall that a breast cancer charity returned $2,000 to a group who "motorboated" female strangers (with consent) to raise donations. Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy told NPR, "Usually when nonprofits give the money back, it's because somebody has gone to jail for insider trading or something like that, so they've been convicted of a crime."

In such cases, I can understand the impetus and ethical decision of nonprofit institutions to return funds that are antithetical to their mission. While I don't have a problem with consenting adults motorboating or being motorboated, it's perfectly fine for a private organization to officially disagree with such behavior. The case of financial crime is somewhat different — if the donation is being returned to the perpetrator of the crime, then I don't see how that is better than the non profit keeping the money; however, if it will find its way back to the victims of the crime, then it makes ethical sense to give the money back.

This case is different, however. While Sterling's comments obviously are antithetical to at least some of the organizations he's reportedly supported — such as the NAACP and the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance — it's not clear that the money he gave was tied to those comments, or the beliefs he expressed in them. In fact, it's quite probable that much of his money was made in spite of such beliefs and expressions. As Palmer notes, this is an unusual situation.

Understandably, charities are concerned about their reputations. However, accepting money does not affect reputation — it's all the other stuff that tends to go along with accepting large donations that affects reputation. This includes things like naming buildings, giving out awards and recognitions, or adding donors to lists of high-level givers. The funny thing is that these are all things that institutions, not donors, have control over. As E. P. Clapp at The Huffington Post suggests:

UCLA should have been more strategic. It should have taken the money, but stipulated that it would not name a building, research center, or anything else after Sterling, nor give him an honorary degree or any other award.

By doing so, UCLA would have put the ball in the Clippers owner's court. If Sterling accepted those terms, his money might contribute to research that could save lives. But if he rejected those terms, it would expose the kind of phony philanthropist he really is — donating the money only to wash his dirty reputation and burnish his ego.

The problem with this suggestion may be that UCLA already made an agreement to do those (or similar) things by accepting Sterling's money. If so, the only way to get out of such an agreement, and avoid reputational risk, would be to return the money — in which case, UCLA and other nonprofit organizations may not be so sterling in their own motives as they would have everyone believe.

To be sure, I don't know what agreements may or may not have been made between Sterling and any particular nonprofit institution related to donations. And as I stated above, private organizations are perfectly within their right to accept or reject money given to them on whatever basis they determine.

But for my own part, I have much more respect for organizations who are keeping Sterling's money, such as the L.A. Union Rescue Mission, which stated, "We take money from all kinds of bad people all the time." Not only is this a more pragmatic view, but it is a more ethical one. Because let's face it, nobody is perfect. If nonprofits refused to accept money from everyone who ever did something hateful or unethical or "wrong" under whatever definition you choose, then they would never accept any money at all. That Sterling has a higher profile and more money than everyone else doesn't change the paradigm; it only shows that some nonprofit organizations are hypocrites, too.

If I were the CEO of a nonprofit to which Sterling had donated, this would be my response to the question of whether my organization was keeping Mr. Sterling's donation:

That's the dumbest question I've ever heard. Of course we're keeping the money! Not only are we keeping it, but we are going to use it to better fulfill our organization's mission. After this statement, we will no longer acknowledge the existence of Mr. Sterling, recognize his donation in any way, nor offer any incentives for future donations. However, we do hope that Mr. Sterling goes to hell soon, and when he leaves, we hope he donates the remainder of his estate to us.

And now you probably understand why I am not, nor likely ever will be, the CEO of a nonprofit organization.

Why my kids are taking standardized tests

curtis — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 11:45:46 +0000

As it turns out, I'm a horrible libertarian: I'm allowing my kids to take New York State's standardized tests. The first of these, the English Language Arts, are being administered this week, and the math version will follow in a few weeks, after spring break.

Given my social media contacts, I've seen a lot of — well, bragging, frankly, from people who have allowed ("forced" might be a better term) their kids not to take the standardized tests. Such bragging is typically administered with a lot of grumbling, specifically about Common Core and more generally about the alleged harm of standardized testing on our children.

I certainly have my concerns with Common Core, but the more I thought about it, the less convinced I have become that opting out of present standardized tests will effect any change. In fact, most of the arguments are somewhat nebulous and vague, and it's unclear exactly how the people expect opting out will make the situation better.

With that in mind, below I present some responses to common objections to standardized testing used by people who advocate opting out. These are not necessarily intended to be rebuttals, but additional points of consideration. Rather than citing specific comments I've seen, I'm taking the wording of these objections from the New York page of United Opt Out, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending standardized testing. I am grouping the objections according to my own responses.

Misplaced Incentives

The objections in this category are presented as follows:

Standardized testing takes away approximately 25% of our children's academic school year.

Standardized testing gives teachers incentives to "teach to the test" instead of nurturing higher order thinking skills.

Standardized testing costs millions of dollars of taxpayer money to produce and thousands of dollars of our school district's money to implement.

Standardized testing encourages our best teachers to seek other careers where their expertise is valued.

Standardized testing gives teachers incentive to care more about their teacher evaluation than they do about children.

Here's the thing, though: Having your kid refuse to take the tests doesn't change any of these things. The tests still occur, time will still be spent in preparation for them, money will still be spent to produce and implement them, the teachers who "teach to the test" will still teach to the test, and those who don't like it will still leave.

In fact, even if these objections are accurate, having a kid refuse to take the test may actually be harmful to the child herself, because it decouples the things she is learning from the specific goal of learning them. The objections above acknowledge that incentives matter, a position I agree with, but they fail to acknowledge student incentives. Many children are themselves incentivized to learn by testing — not the best incentive, obviously, but a realistic one. If a child knows she won't have to take a particular test, she may believe she doesn't have to learn the facts or techniques required for that test. In the long run, such willful ignorance is likely more harmful than helpful, especially since kids may be unable to discern what is being "taught to the test" from the knowledge and information that will help them over the longer course of their educational careers.

No Nuance

Another objection is that "standardized testing teaches that there is only one right answer in academics and in life." There are two responses that obviate this.

First, in many cases, there is only one right answer in academics and in life. For example, two plus two will almost always add up the same way, and the primary definitions of most words will not change drastically during a single person's lifetime. There are also plenty of situations where a clearly "right" answer exists, even if there's no objectively correct answer. Ever hear the phrase "The customer is always right"? And most people who want to keep their jobs will perform the tasks their boss assigns in the way that boss wants them performed.

Second, reductivist answers also appear in nonstandardized testing. Many textbooks simplify concepts for students without giving the full historical, political, scientific or other contexts. Anyone who has gone to school has learned from the experience, and often disappointment, of being "wrong" on a test when in fact you were right. The good news is that the further you go in school, the more this tendency diminishes. By the time we become adults, most of us have at least some understanding that life is more complicated than a multiple choice test.

Finally, there's a relatively easy remedy: Encourage your kids to learn on their own and ask questions. Kids who are given, or find, incentive to explore the world beyond the walls of school, will be much happier and better able to handle the nuances of life than kids who don't. If you're relying on school to singularly instill a desire for learning in your kids, then you're the one relying on a "right" answer.

Corruption

The next set of objections are as follows:

Standardized testing is creating corruption among schools where school districts are cheating on test scores.

Standardized testing is creating corruption among students where students are purposefully scoring poorly to negatively affect teachers they don't like.

Corruption is a real problem at all levels of society, as evidenced by the recent Air Force cheating scandal. It might even be true that standardized testing encourages or exacerbates corruption and cheating.

However, it's unclear how having kids refuse to take the test prevents such corruption. It seems unlikely that students who would vindictively score low on a test out of vitriol for their teachers would automatically become better people without standardized testing. More likely, they would find other ways to express their malice. Similarly, school district officials who are okay with manipulating test scores are likely corrupt in other ways as well.

This is not to say that such corruption should not be investigated and dealt with. These are serious situations, and we all have the right and responsibility to resolve them. But having a child refuse to take a test does not, and cannot, resolve any of this corruption.

Harm to Students

The final objection is the only one that suggests specific harm to students: "Standardized testing is developmentally destructive for specific age groups." As stated, this argument is nebulous at best. I don't have any data, nor could I find anything more specific than vaguely worded statements like this. If anyone can point me to concrete information, such as statistics or a study of some type, I would be happy to tackle this objection in more detail.

Conclusions

I have many objections to standardized testing (though, not standardization in general), and someday I might expound on them. Some of the objections raised by advocacy groups such as United Opt Out are certainly valid, and they need to be addressed.

That said, I find no reason to believe that refusing to take a test will help students in any way. As shown above, in some cases refusal could be actively harmful to the student.

It seems that the main motivation of people who object to standardized testing is to raise awareness about specific problems, both real and perceived, by having their kids refuse that testing. To me, using kids as pawns in political agendas is just as bad as, if not worse than, any of the objections raised above, especially since those objections revolve around using kids as pawns in political agendas. (The final objection on United Opt Out's list is, "Standardized testing uses our children as tools to evaluate school districts, schools and teachers.")

Even if having children refuse to take the test results in some awareness, or even change, the method is flawed. Write letters and blog posts and emails, call politicians, organize rallies — even get your kids involved in all of those things with you. But for goodness' sake, don't think that having your kid refuse to take a test is somehow going to change the system. It won't. It can't.

Nice, but who cares? The confluence of Chaucer, Gravity and Dallas Buyers Club

curtis — Tue, 25 Mar 2014 12:16:19 +0000

For the past couple of months I've been auditing Dr. Corey Olsen's class on Chaucer's non-Canterbury Tale works at Mythgard. I've fallen a bit behind due to deadlines related to another project, which unfortunately means I've missed the discussion about Troilus & Creseyde — the main reason I wanted to audit the class. (The nice thing is that I have the lecture videos and forum access to review the at my leisure, now that I'm past my deadlines.)

Anyway, I asked my friend Dave, who is taking the class for MA credit, what he thought of the story. His pithy summary was, "Chaucer is a genius, but I don't care about courtly tales. It's the Middle English version of #FirstWorldProblems." To which I, very humorously and with much aplomb, suggested the alternate hashtag, #FyrstWerldeTrauayles. You may laugh now.

Although I can't (yet) assess Chaucer's second-most famous work myself, I realized Dave's description accurately fits two movies I recently saw: Gravity and Dallas Buyer's Club. Both of these productions have received numerous awards, nominations and general critical and popular acclaim. They are very well made motion pictures by competent directors, compelling actors and capable technical staff, so perhaps those laudatory recognitions are well deserved.

However, as I watched each of these movies, I could not help but find myself being bored, or at best irritated, by their respective stories. Since story is generally more important to me than production value, directorial prowess or even acting ability, the absence of a motivating story is more than a small hiccup for me. Acknowledging that there are many technically fine aspects to both of these movies, what follows is neither review nor critique, but rather criticism, showing where I think the stories of Gravity and Dallas Buyers' Club fail.

Gravity

In a nutshell, the foremost problem with Gravity is that it shoots its wad too soon. There's an unevenness to plot's pacing that, instead of building suspense, depressurizes like a slow-leaking oxygen tank. (See what I did there?) Each successive sequence in the attempt Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) makes to return to Earth is essentially a replay of the previous one: Space debris comes, stuff blows up, Stone finds herself in an uncontrolled tumble, which is corrected primarily through luck or rescue. After the first incident sends Stone rolling off alone into space, there is no real escalation. Sure, she has to deal with other hindrances — low oxygen reserves, pesky technical failures, fire, etc. — but the story fails to develop a cumulative effect demonstrated much better in movies like Mark Wahlberg's Lone Survivor, where you are constantly reminded not only of each present trouble but of all those that preceded it as well. Although not a horror flick (even if Ryan Stone is a perfectly suitable name for a Final Girl), given its lacking story, Gravity's creative directors would have done well to follow Sam Raimi's purported formula for The Evil Dead: "Keep the pace fast and furious, and once the horror starts, never let up."

Another big problem with the story of Gravity is its reliance on first-person exposition to tell Stone's backstory. Modern motion pictures have many tricks to deliver backstory to audiences, but the creative powers behind Gravity chose the boring and uncompelling method of dialogue (or worse, monologue) in lieu of them all. In the first few minutes of the movie before everyone Stone knows dies, we manage to get a few tidbits: It's her first mission, she's nauseous, only she can install a particular thingummy, and she likes the quiet of space. A half hour of action sequences passes before we learn she had a daughter who died from a random accident at the age of four. We get some more personal details when Stone talks to a fisherman, who neither speaks nor understands English, in which she says she never learned how to pray. This happens, of course, about ten minutes before she prays to Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), the guy who saved her and whom she failed to save in return, just after seeing him in an oxygen deprivation-induced dream — showing that Gravity's creative minds do know what dream sequences are, they just chose to use them to give Clooney some additional screen time rather than develop a more compelling character for Stone. I should also mention that we learn more about Kowalski's character background in the first five minutes, with his stories to Houston, than we learn about Stone's for the other 86.

Which leads me to the most egregious problem with Gravity, Stone's almost complete lack of primary agency. When she goes spinning into space, Kowalski not only has to rescue her with his manned maneuvering unit, but he has to give her step-by-step instructions on taking out and then stowing her flashlight. He tows her miles away to the International Space Station, and when their tether is broken, her trajectory is stopped only when she accidentally gets tangled in the parachute of the unusable Soyuz module. She can't even properly fail to save Kowalski, who sacrifices himself by detaching the tether so she won't get pulled away with him. Even after Kowalski is out of radio range, most of Stone's actions are to follow advice or knowledge he gives her, either directly or via dream. Rarely do we see Stone act on her own intelligence or knowledge, which is hinted at in the beginning, but never allowed to evince. Stone never directly utilizes the six months of training she received (which, granted, isn't the two years that NASA typically provides to astronaut candidates, but it's still something). She does, however, bizarrely focuses on a Mr. Miyagi-like quip from Dream Kowalski that "landing is launching" — a curious phrase that has no basis in fact. I'll note that I'm not the first to see problems with Stone's lack of agency in Gravity.

For all of these reasons, the story of Gravity just doesn't work for me. What little character development occurs is slipshod at best. It didn't have to be that way, but apparently the movie's makers thought everyone would be so mesmerized by the stunning visuals — and yes, they are stunning — that they wouldn't notice the story sucks. It's too bad, because with a little focus on characterization, the movie could have really lifted off. (See that? Another pun.)

Dallas Buyers Club

I have an admission to make: I thought Matthew McConaughey ("the McCon" hereafter) did a pretty decent job in this role. Sure, attractive actors have played ugly people before, but the McCon really convinced me. Of course, Christian Bale did a better job of it in American Hustle, but then…Christian Bale. I have to give the McCon his proper dues, however, because on Twitter I doubted whether he was worthy of receiving the Oscar for Best Actor over Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave). I still think Ejiofor deserved the award, but I acknowledge now that it's a much closer call than I had originally considered it could be.

And I was surprised at how similar the two actors' roles are, each providing a historical portrayal of a man who suffers undue persecutions. Ejiofor plays Solomon Northrup, a free man subjected into slavery for the eponymous dozen annī, during which he is beaten and whipped and hung simply because he has the wrong color skin. The McCon gives animus to Ron Woodroof, a belligerent and bigoted man who contracts AIDS by having lots of unprotected sex and injecting himself with lots of intravenous drugs, and then gets angry at everyone when he learns that he can't legally get the untested pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements he believes might possibly give him a chance to treat the disease for a little while. The roles are uncannily parallel!

By "uncannily parallel" I mean "completely dissimilar," of course. Northrup is immediately likable, and it is impossible not to sympathize with every moment of his plight — not to mention weeping with joy when he finally returns to his family. I have a hard time, however, finding any redeeming quality in Woodroof, whose total character growth consists of begrudgingly befriending one particular transgender woman. Mind you, I write this as someone who, as a libertarian, is constitutionally predisposed to liking people who show up powerful government regulatory agencies like the FDA, as Woodroof does, but even that doesn't really give me enough to work with in this movie: By the end, I found it hard to care that the FDA has screwed him over repeatedly.

The sad thing is that the story did not have to be what it was. Far from being a homophobic jackass, the real Ron Woodroof was apparently bisexual — according to many people who knew him for years, including his ex-wife. But apparently writer Craig Borten got to know him better in three days than all of those people, insisting that the trajectory of Woodroof's life was "from bigotry to tolerance." Even if Borten is correct on this point, the movie fails to deliver such a trajectory: The Woodroof portrayed by the McCon is just as motivated by greed and self satisfaction at the end as at the beginning. In and of itself, selfish motivation can be a perfectly fine character component, and it's possible to retain such selfish motivation and also become a more likable person — think Gregory House from House or both Cordelia and Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ultimately, the problem with Dallas Buyers Club is that it waffles between showing character change and showing how a character can effect change without actually changing himself. This indecision is what makes the storyline weak and ineffective.

Conclusion

Both Gravity and Dallas Buyers Club are good examples of what I've come to call the Avatar Corollary to Sturgeon's Law. If Sturgeon's Law is that "90% of everything is crap," then a corollary must be that many things which appear to be fine are deeply flawed in some way. The movie Avatar exhibits this corollary perfectly, given its extremely beautiful settings, the incredible technical prowess required to make it — and the utter void of decent story to go with all of it. I've stated many times to friends and family that Avatar is little more than a beautiful piece of crap. The two movies explored above are much in the same vein.

De-limiting art

curtis — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 15:04:16 +0000

A couple days ago, Terry Teachout wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal denouncing the praise given to Elmore Leonard as a "great American artist" and an increased critical attention on "pop" art to the detriment of "high" art. "It used to be that we didn't take popular culture seriously," Teachout writes, "but now we don't take anything else seriously." Although he gives a brief nod to the acceptability of some attention to popular works, Teachout's argument is tantamount to holding up his hands and saying, "Whoa, now, let's not get too crazy."

The problem with self-described Defenders of Culture — beyond their self descriptions — is that they typically have to manufacture definitions and evidence to support their positions that otherwise are unsupportable. Teachout, in defending his thesis that "we don't take anything else seriously" gives us the following evidence:

Consider the endless encomia that greeted the airing in September of the final episode of "Breaking Bad," which the Daily Beast described as "a perfect, A-1 piece of televisual filmmaking…an unparalleled valedictory achievement." Or Tuesday's announcement by LA Weekly that it's cutting back its theater reviews from seven per issue to two. Or the fact that no classical musician has appeared on the cover of Time magazine since 1986.

I find it incredibly strange, and humorous, that Teachout's evidence for the declining influence of "high art" is extracted from the pages (be they web or print) of those bastions of refined culture known as The Daily Beast, Time and LA Weekly. Imagine popular publications focusing on popular art—outrageous! Even the least popular of these, LA Weekly, is part of a media group that publishes "alternative weeklies" in large cities around the country. However, Teachout doesn't stop to consider the dubiousness of his own evidence. Rather, he goes on to criticize academia for pop culture studies, writing that "nowadays [pop culture] also receives the kind of dead-serious critical attention in the academy and elsewhere that used to be reserved for high art—and increasingly it does so to the exclusion of high art."

In one sense, Teachout is right. As any amateur student of economics knows, participation in one activity means non-participation in all other activities. Thus, if I choose to write a paper about the horror movie Cabin in the Woods, as I recently did, then technically I am choosing not to write a paper on — well, on any other movie that Teachout might consider to be "higher." But that doesn't seem to be what he means by "exclusion," especially in light of his earlier claim that "now we don't take anything else seriously." Can it really be true that academics taking nothing else seriously except for pop culture, and that the study of "high art" has been excluded? I find the assertion both preposterous and easily debunked with a Google Scholar search or two.

Of course, Teachout isn't making any kind of new argument. Quite the contrary, pooh-poohing popular work has long been a favorite pastime of culture critics. During Edgar Allan Poe's lifetime, he was primarily known as a literary critic, and in that capacity, Poe foreshadowed Teachout's present sentiments in an 1846 review of works by Fitz-Greene Halleck: "Mr. Halleck, in the apparent public estimate, maintains a somewhat better position than that to which, on absolute grounds, he is entitled." More humorously, Poe's review of Charles O'Malley by Harry Lorrequer is a rambling, contentious attack on popular literature in general: "We shall not insult our readers by supposing any one of them unaware of the fact, that a book may be even exceedingly popular without any legitimate literary merit," Poe writes. "This fact can be proven by numerous examples which, now and here, it will be unnecessary and perhaps indecorous to mention." Then, he goes on to mention as many examples as he can, throwing in several protracted jibes at Charles Dickens for good measure.

Given such attitudes, Poe's own posthumous influence on pop culture may be viewed as turning the cosmic irony dial up to eleven. Despite the historicity of the argument, however, it hasn't exactly been refined with age: Poe's paradoxical polemic is at least droll, while Teachout's editorial comes across more like a teenager whining because nobody takes the things he likes seriously. In one respect, I suppose Teachout's whimper indicates a modicum of success for pop-culture proponents, who are typically the ones channeling Rodney Dangerfield as they lament the respect they don't get. Silver lining aside, however, it's annoying.

The odd thing is that, once more, Teachout fails to pick convincing examples, this time for works that are...well, not popular. "Novels like Flannery O'Connor's 'Wise Blood,' plays like Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie,' ballets like Jerome Robbins's 'Dances at a Gathering,' paintings like Jacob Lawrence's 'Migration Series,' musical compositions like Aaron Copland's Piano Sonata: These are large-scale works of art that aim higher than their popular counterparts." Regardless of their aim, Teachout fails to offer a convincing distinction between these works and whatever "popular counterparts" he has in mind. The popularity of The Glass Menagerie made Tennessee Williams notable, and the play has sparked multiple film adaptations and high school performances, not to mention that it is currently enjoying a successful Broadway revival. Wise Blood may not have the peculiarly particular Teachout-maligned plot point of people getting their heads blown off in drug deals, but it does have someone getting run over multiple times by a jealous rival, and it's hard to understand why that's somehow "higher." I've only seen Lawrence's "Migration Series" online, and I've only heard Copland's Piano Sonata via YouTube; both are interesting and no doubt do deserve study, but Teachout fails to show how they are objectively "higher" than, for example, the current "Art of Video Games" exhibit at my local Everson Museum or the 8.5-minute jam of Sirsy's "Please Let Me Be" that I've heard dozens of times.

Even though Teachout is making this particular iteration of the argument, perhaps I shouldn't blame him individually. After all, he's merely doing what many critics (among others) tend to do, namely, to conflate preference with Platonic form. The acceptance of a rift between "pop culture" and "high art" is a tacit affirmation that one believes in some objective ideal of Art to which a person may aspire. Assuming for a moment that such an ideal exists (it doesn't), the question becomes: How can we know when a particular work sufficiently approaches that ideal such that it may be labeled "high" art? The only two possible answers to this question are through special knowledge or by popular acceptance, all other answers being derivatives. All special knowledge is suspect, especially with regard to transcendental forms, thus the only true determination that art is "high" can come from broad acceptance — that is, by its popularity. In which case it ceases to be "high" art and becomes pop culture.

If my logical examination above seems tongue-in-cheek, it's only because I find the paradox funny. Folks like Teachout want to distinguish between high art and pop culture, but very often they are not content with simple distinction. They feel the need to convince others they are right, and to evangelize their preferred works of greatness. In doing so, they wind up trying to move the thing they find of value from the realm of "high" art into the realm of pop culture.

The problem stems from trying to make such distinctions in the first place. Teachout writes that "a culture totally dominated by popular art is by definition limited." On the contrary, it's the definition that is the limiting factor, not the dominance of one kind of art over another. Teachout claims that "high art" consists of "works of art that aim higher than their popular counterparts," but this definition is incredibly lacking. An artist can aim; art cannot. Art exists, sometimes extemporaneously and often ephemerally, but to imbue it with goals is an anthropic delusion. If there is a purpose to art, it is an individual purpose that each one of us must take from it. Art cannot give meaning, even when we are able to find meaning within it.

This is not to say that different types of art cannot be categorized or catalogued in some way. Certainly, calling a story "fantasy" or a painting "abstract" can be helpful in discussing the work. But terms like "genre fiction" or "kitsch," which are shorthand for a perceived lack in quality despite popular enjoyment, do little to further artistic understanding, and they create the very limitations that Teachout claims are "by definition." There is nothing inherently "lower" about something popular, nor should we use terminology that implies such.

I'll close by sharing the video of a debate I heard on Q earlier this year on this very topic, specifically in relation to Shakespeare. Some great points are made all around.

Stuff and Goings On

curtis — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 05:20:22 +0000

Yeah, it's been over a month since I've blogged. Can I blame it on the shutdown? Well, either way, here's what I've been doing with my time since then.

Philology through Tolkien — This trimester at the Mythgard Institute, I've been studying philology through Tolkien. The guy who wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was really into languages. No, like, REALLY into languages. In fact, he once wrote that all his Middle-earth stories were just an excuse to make up languages (or something like that). The class was co-instructed by preeminent Tolkien scholar Dr. Tom Shippey and Nelson Goering, with preceptorial help from Dr. Carol Leibiger. It was a fascinating class, and quite difficult. I ended the semester with a paper comparing three versions of the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo — and as I haven't gotten my grade back yet, I'm still thinking about it....

Joss in June (Remix) — At the end of June, I drove down to North Carolina for the Joss in June conference (recap), where I presented a paper entitled "Exploring Cabins in the Whedonverse Woods." In that paper, I take a look at three episodes from Joss Whedon television shows that each feature a "cabin scenario," namely Buffy 3x5 "Homecoming" and 5x20 "Spiral," as well as Firefly 1x13 "Heart of Gold," comparing them with Cabin in the Woods. At the beginning of October, the conveners of Joss in June announced a special issue of Slayage — the academic journal of the Whedon Studies Association — that will feature papers presented at the conference. So, I spent some time reworking and expanding my paper into publishable form. The deadline was November 30, which meant I basically spent my post-Thanksgiving hours trying to avoid a tryptophan coma so I could write. In addition to enlarging the analysis of the three episodes, I added a somewhat lengthy defense of why the "cabin scenario" is an important aspect of the horror film genre, especially given the apparently declining importance of monsters as the genre strays further from its Gothic literary roots. I also included an appendix analyzing the various top cabin movie lists I noted previously. To date, it's the longest academic piece I've written. I won't hear back until February as to whether my paper has been accepted, but I'm keeping a positive view.

That's what I've been doing. Here's what's coming up.

Mythmoot II: Back Again (Dec. 13-15) — Last year, I attended Mythgard's first annual conference, which was dubbed "Mythmoot" (recap). I'm going again this year and presenting a paper – that's right, two paper presentations in one year! At this pace, I might someday be an actual acedemic-type personage. My paper is titled "Masks of Moloch: Demands of Sacrifice in Speculative Fiction and Film." It's about the various manifestations of Moloch throughout fantasy and science fiction literature, and it will look at how the demonic personality continues to be used as a metaphor for sacrifice, especially the socially destructive sacrifice of others (i.e., not "good" self-sacrifice). There are some other great papers being presented, the titles of which are available at Mythgard's events page. Of note, on the same panel of me, my podcasting partner in crime Kat Sas is going to be looking at Doctor Who as a fairy story.

Antimatter-of-fact-and-fiction — A new digital publisher, Antimatter Press, is looking for stories about "local magic" that are one part fantasy, one part history and one part science. I like all of those parts, and I have what I think amounts to a pretty good idea for a story that covers all those bases. The deadline isn't until mid-January, so I have a little time to craft it after Mythmoot...but not much.

So there you go, that's what I'm doing these days. Oh, and then there's the usual stuff: Work, kids, my weekly podcast on Buffy and Doctor Who.

What have you been up to?

Shutdown showdown

curtis — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 23:21:47 +0000

Andrew Cohen over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians argued earlier this week that the partial U.S. government shutdown is immoral on libertarian grounds. Cohen's opening analogy is confusingly opaque, but if you can get past the first paragraph, he does bring up some interesting points.

First, Cohen avers that even though the government does a lot of things libertarians dislike, the shutdown won't actually stop many of them.

The NSA will continue to record or monitor our phone calls, emails, etc. Judges will continue to hear cases about which there should be no laws. Import tariffs will still be collected. I’ll leave it to others to go make a longer list, noting merely that I do not trust that the essential/non-essential distinction will be used appropriately. And lets be honest: our so-called “representatives” in Congress know the score. They know how the essential/non-essential distinction will be used. That means that even if the programs they want cut are exactly the programs that should be cut, they are only engaging in political showmanship.

This seems largely right to me. As much as I'd like to believe that shutdown equals a leaner, more efficient government, intellectual honesty requires me to admit it's more complicated than that. Unlike the sequester earlier this year, which had its own problem of simply cutting a swath of funding across much of the federal budget when a more incisive cuts would have been better, the shutdown allows a fair amount of "discretionary" activity regardless of funding. For example, it's easy to get riled up about groups of Honor Flight veterans who can't visit the WWII memorial because there's no money to pay park rangers. In the grand scheme of things, however, I think that tracking possible large-scale disease outbreaks is closer to a legitimate function of a central government than keeping monuments open — yet the CDC is currently working with a skeleton crew. I don't expect many of the congress critters who glad-handed veterans this week and voted to fund the VA and national parks will be making trips to Atlanta any time soon.

Cohen resists the hypothetical and claims that the shutdown is actively harming people now.

People who were promised paychecks will not get them. Some will get them late. Some will get smaller paychecks (due to furlough time). Some of these people will face tremendous difficulty. I think it fair to say they will be harmed–having planned their lives given the promise of a regular paycheck, they have legitimate expectations that are being set back. Perhaps the government should not have hired those people in the first place (after all, they are “non-essential” personnel!). But the fact is they were hired and treating them this way is wrong and makes a mockery of contract.

Again, I agree with Cohen's premise: People who are getting a paycheck are hurt when they stop getting that paycheck, regardless of why they stop getting that check. This is fairly common sense.

Where I diverge with Cohen's analysis, though, is in his linking of a paycheck to a contract. Foremost, it's unclear whether Cohen is referring to federal employees or to contractors specifically. In either case, his moral objection with regard to the shutdown and its affect on paycheck recipients is logically problematic.

Federal employment and contracts

If any particular contract being mocked, Cohen hasn't pointed out what it is. Perhaps he means something like the idea of a social contract – in a classical liberal sense, not a modern progressive one – but if that's the case, his terminology is ambiguous at best.

Generally speaking, employees in the U.S. are considered "at-will" employees, regardless of whether they work for a government entity or a private organization. According to one source, "About 57 percent of the federal workforce is represented by a union," but while union membership may give those federal employees additional employment protection, unions like the American Federation of Government Employees seem to be calling for back pay and putting an end to the shutdown, rather than claiming that the furlough itself goes against any existing union contracts or agreements. Likewise, government contractors may have contractual guarantees, but I find it unlikely that a government contract wouldn't include provision for a shutdown scenario – and pending contractor furloughs indicate my presumption is correct.

In many ways, the shutdown furlough seems to me very much like a temporary layoff, though my good friend Dave has, perhaps rightly, taken me to task for equating the two types of events. In support of my comparison, the furlough forces employees to stop working and prevents them from getting paid. Furthermore, furloughed civilians are apparently eligible for unemployment benefits (though, I'm not clear about how giving furloughed employees back pay might affect such benefits). On other side, according to the Guidelines for Shutdown Furloughs [PDF] published by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, federal employees are limited in external employment options during furloughs (C.3), a prohibition that wouldn't hinder someone who was truly laid off.

In either case, both furloughs and layoffs are alike enough in that they are typically driven by a financial crisis of some kind. Thus, rather than worrying about contracts, the ethical question becomes how to resolve the crisis by hurting as few people as possible, a question which New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen attempted to address in relation several massive company layoffs in 2009. It seems that Cohen is attempting to make a similar argument when he writes that "we must work to have the government limited in scope, but limited through moral means." If so, his argument is buried in cavils about contracts and oblique mob-protection metaphors.

To be clear, I am not making an argument that the shutdown is moral. All I am saying is that, if it is immoral, it has nothing to do with breaking contracts.

Shutdown silliness

I don't deny that people who rely on federal government paychecks, or federal money in general, are being actively hurt by the shutdown. In such a case, it's valid to ask who is perpetuating the harm, and why. And like almost any situation involving government, the answer basically depends on your party affiliation: Obama blames Boehner; Boehner blames the president back. Harry Reid tries to get a word in every now and then.

The media has doled out their helpings of blame as well. Thomas F. Schaller at the Baltimore Sun says fault for the shutdown rests with "Tea partiers [who] don't care about the Constitution." Fox News always blames Democrats for everything. Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie says that the president is primarily to blame for not knocking heads to pass a budget earlier this year. Meanwhile, Dylan Matthews at The Washington Post's Wonk Blog gets hardcore, historically speaking, and blames that effing Federalist, James Madison. Oddly enough, I don't think anyone has blamed Canada, yet.

All the blame-slinging is over House Republicans' attempt to delay implementation of the Obamacare individual mandate for one year. Instead of conferring with the House, the Senate continues sending a so-called "clean" continuing resolution (CR) that would fully fund government activities, including Obamacare, at previous budget levels. In return, the House keeps voting on "mini-CRs" to fund individual departments of the government that have broad popular support – except in the Senate, apparently, which has so far rejected them all. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The old aphorism that it takes two to tango is apt here. It's hard for me to see any side as wholly serious. As my friend Dave (who is going to start getting a big head since I've now referenced him twice in one post) said on that inherently edifying debate platform known as Facebook:

If you're on the left and think we don't have a spending problem, I can't take you seriously. If you're on the right and cutting the military isn't a significant part of your cuts, I can't take you seriously. If you think the other guy is evil, I can't take you seriously.

Which brings me back to Cohen's argument. While I agree with him that we must work to limit the government through moral means, the very reason we're here in the first place is because nobody seems to want, or know how, to do that. Instead, our leaders curl up into a fetal position, stick their fingers in their ears and yell at the top of their lungs so they don't have to hear anyone else. When everyone throws a tantrum, they are all to blame. And, to me, seems the best argument for the inherent immorality of the present shutdown.

Which means, for crap's sake, it looks like I agree with Chris Christie.

The Truthers are out there – and always were

curtis — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 13:12:14 +0000

A couple weeks ago, film and TV critic Inkoo Kang published a thought-provoking article over at Vulture blaming Fox Mulder for a perceived rise of anti-government, anti-science sentiments in the new millennium. The key, Kang says, is the coolness behind Mulder's "anti-government paranoia ... and skepticism of science." Furthermore, Kang sees Scully's knowledge of science as effectively being impotent to Mulder's own quixoticism.

What was the point, after all, of Scully's scientific and medical training if none of that knowledge ever proved applicable to (the show's) reality? That was The X-Files' sleight of hand: its peppering of scientific jargon gave the show a patina of educated respectability, but scientific knowledge was often derided as a crude and inadequate forensic tool. The greater value lay in Mulder's leaps of faith — or, to use today's parlance, his sense of "truthiness."

Kang has a point here. From the beginning, The X-Files had the suggestion that everything you know is wrong. The very existence of X-files in the FBI was proof positive, in the show's mythology, that mundane-world scientific understanding does not explain everything, and that most people metaphorically push the things they don't fully grok into the sub-basement, bunker office of their brains. From shadow governments to shadowless apparitions, Mulder always had a wacky explanation that disregarded Scully's conventional rational, scientific explanation.

However, in deeming so-called Truthers, Birthers and anti-vaxers to be Mulder's intellectual heirs, Kang does our diligent special agent a disservice. What she fails to point out is that, within the secondary world created by Chris Carter, Mulder was mostly right. There was a veracity to his "truthiness" that the vast majority of real-world conspiracy activists do not have. This distinction is important.

If Kang gives Mulder short shrift, she's not the only one. Mulder is frequently seen as someone who eschews reason and embraces radical leaps of faith. But this view does not compare with many of Mulder's actual actions. Mulder isn't throwing out science; he's working with a different set of facts than most people. In the realm of The X-Files, there are aliens who want to invade the earth and there are cabals of puppet masters pulling the strings of an inept government and witless public. These are not in dispute, and as viewers we get to see the facts that prove Mulder's claims — even when the other characters in the show are left ignorant.

Thus, Mulder is not merely a madman spouting whatever crackpot claim pops into his head. Rather, he is an ardent investigator who actually is seeking the truth. If Mulder's own actions aren't convincing enough, the show's two best-known tag lines back up the idea. As a double entendre, "The Truth Is Out There" suggests that the truth is both crazy and objective, two adjectives that have long historical associations with scientific discovery. The second tagline "I Want To Believe" hints at the fact that Mulder does not believe, but that that belief (at least for him) requires factual evidence. Not only does Mulder seek evidence for the things he wants to believe, but throughout the series he continually refines his theories.

I don't mean to imply that Mulder has the same rigid, scientific methodology as his partner. That said, as Mulder is chasing after the latest monster of the week, it's easy to forget that before his time with the X-files, he was a criminal profiler. (Chris Carter's spin-off Millennium also featured a criminal profiler, Frank Black.) Profiling has a basis in psychology, which some argue isn't a science much to the chagrin of psychologists, and whether to call Mulder a "scientist" because of his profiling background probably depends which way a person leans in that debate. But even if profiling is more of an art than a science, it is nonetheless a technical discipline that requires looking rigidly at relevant facts and drawing conclusions based on them – science-y, at least, if not quite science.

Returning to Kang's critique, it's hard to associate this view of Mulder with the "skeevy, none-too-bright loser[s]" and "gravely misinformed politicians" she dislikes, if only because Mulder himself worked in secret much of the time. He didn't go around waving signs and yelling epithets in front of courthouses. He spent his time dogging down details and finding out as much as he could, even when it put him and those he loved in danger.

Kang also overlooks a simple fact: There have always been people against science and against government. It's always fashionable to see one's own time as being either better or worse, or inexplicably both at the same time, than all prior ages. In reality, however, there isn't any more or less anti-government or anti-science sentiment than there has been.

It's true, as Kang says, that "[w]ith the aid of the Internet, birthers, truthers, and vaccine skeptics have joined the UFO believers in establishing their own insular networks of news outlets, social gatherings, political activism." But if that's true, then it's also true that it's easier than ever to point out how wrong such people are.

Finally, I'd take issue with Kang's reference only to right-leaning movements. Hey, I can bash conservatives with the best of them, but the anti-vaccine movement is at least as prevalent on the left as the right – for every Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry there's a Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And the left has some unique conspiracies of its own which anyone can hear by mentioning "GMO" or "campaign funding."

Ultimately, though, it's not the social and political aspects that bother me most, but the denigration of a man who was earnestly seeking the truth. It's not his fault aliens and spooks did everything they could to silence and discredit him at every turn. Nor should we blame him for weirdos and kooks who wish they could be half the human he was.

Mythgard Webathon on Hobbit Day

curtis — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 21:10:24 +0000

A week from today, on Sunday, Sept. 22 — on Hobbit Day, the shared birthday of the two most famousest of Bagginses — I will be participating in the first-ever Mythgard Institute student-produced webathon. The event will run from elevenses to elevenses (EST) and will feature a variety of original live and prerecorded content created by Mythgardians from across the world, including:

Portions of The Hobbit read in different languages (including some by my good friend Dave Maddock)
Discussions about of the modern fantasy and sci-fi works of literature
Discussions with the founder of the Mythgard Institute, Dr. Corey Olsen – aka, The Tolkien Professor – and Dr. Amy H. Sturgis
A dragonish rumble royale
Trivia contests
And more...

For my part, I'm co-hosting the 3 – 5 p.m. portion. During part of that time, Kat will be joining us for a special live edition of Kat & Curt's TV Re-View, in which we'll be talking about my favorite episodes of Firefly, "Out of Gas."

While the webathon will be fun and exciting, I should also note that in the grand tradition of -athons, it's also a fund raiser. Specifically, throughout the day we'll be checking in on the status of Mythgard's IndieGoGo campaign. The campaign is raising funds to develop free, high-quality educational content to further the critical study of imaginative literature. The more money raised, the more content will be made available later.

Whether you contribute to the campaign or not, we hope to see you at the webathon. More information, including a full schedule and registration link, are available at the Mythgard webathon page.

A terrifying excuse

curtis — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 02:09:19 +0000

Earlier today, I was debating whether to write a post about 9/11 or whether to leave that to the many others who are already writing, talking and remembering about that day. Instead, I was going to write about something more mundane, a personal goal reached.

As I got in my car after work and was driving through the streets of Syracuse, however, I heard two stories on NPR that made me rethink my decision not to write about 9/11. The first was the story about how the Guardian destroyed their Snowden documents rather than face additional pressure from the U.S. and U.K. governments to turn all of it over. The second was about a high school in Alabama where students are learning the technical skills to defend against cyber attacks.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen steady deterioration of civil rights in the name of security. There have been claims about how such actions have stopped terror plots, but they are dubious at best. Bloomberg today reiterated his claim that NYC "has been the target of more than a dozen foiled attacks since Sept. 11, 2001," even though last year the mayor and NYPD were found to be overstating such claims. Terrorism has been used to excuse our invasion of Afghanistan (which I initially supported), our invasion of Iraq (which I never supported), our support for an invasion of Libya and the summary death-by-drone of American citizens without judicial review. At home, post-9/11 policies have led to an a general militarization of U.S. municipal police forces, as chronicled by Radley Balko in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop, and even provoking the first-ever Third Amendment case because a man tried to prevent heavily armed police from taking over his home.

All that has been happening in plain view. In recent months, we've learned that over the last twelve years, federal organizations such as the NSA and the DEA have been using candestine methods to spy on the communications of American citizens in the name of security. In a classically Orwellian move, the security being secured turned out to be insecurity, as NSA agents have used their powers to spy on love interests, an activity that even has its own cutesy abbreviation: LOVEINT. Not only has the NSA been hiding its activities to us, but it's been lying to the secret court established to rubber stamp that administration's activities without any debate from opposing parties.

We consistently hear the same refrain from administration officials and legislatures, that strong security requires strict laws and heavy-handed tactics to prevent another terrorist attack. In the wake of the first wave of the NSA scandal, President Obama made the incredibly naive argument that "You can’t have 100-percent security and also have 100-percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society." Which completely ignores the fact that the secret NSA programs weren't choices made as a society, but that they were made in secret based on lies and vagaries. More recently, as in last night, Obama pulled out the same rhetoric in trying to tie his desire to attack Syria to the safety of the U.S.

If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons. As the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas, and using them. Over time, our troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield. And it could be easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons, and to use them to attack civilians.

The president never comes out and says those civilians could be Americans. However, delivering the speech only a few hours before the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack this country's ever seen, there's little doubt he meant for listeners to draw that comparison.

Which brings me to the question: When are we going to stop using 9/11 as an excuse to keep terrorizing ourselves?

When will administrations — presidential, gubernatorial, mayoral — stop using the threat of terrorist attacks as an excuse to browbeat the people they are sworn to serve? When will legislatures — federal, state, municipal — stop using their own ignorance and cowardice as an excuse to pass laws that do nothing for security and everything to oppress their own constituents?

And when are we going to stop using 9/11 as an excuse to let them?

I will remember the tragedy of 9/11 as much as anyone who was alive on that day. I went down to NYC two days after the tragedy, and I saw first hand the devastation of the attack. I even did my own very small part to help out as I could. I remember seeing the despair, the disbelief and the determination of the volunteers who were searching for possible survivors and beginning the long, slow road to recovery.

What I don't remember, however, is anyone asking the government to keeping hanging the threat of terrorist attacks over our collective heads. I won't deny that there are real, viable threats. I won't even deny that some of those threats have been stopped by draconian policies. But using 9/11 to scare us into giving up the very liberties folks like Obama, and Bush before him, claim to protect is not only shameful — it's terrifying.

The reason I was struck by the story about the school in Alabama teaching cyber security to kids was a line from the introduction to the story: "Not enough good guys with the rights skills." That's because the people who are supposed to be the "good guys" have gone rogue. Instead of keeping us safe, they're either spying on us directly or ignoring national threats for their own petty, selfish gain, or both. Meanwhile, cops are raiding houses in full gestapo regalia, shooting people and animals over minor drug offenses, and then seizing assets often without even a pretense. If good guys exist, they are a dying breed. Or they are hiding, terrified of what might be done to them should they speak up.

Hart of Electronic Gold: A Remembrance

curtis — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Two years ago today Michael S. Hart – the founder of Project Gutenberg – died. I wrote this remembrance a few days after his death for another website, but it never got published. I am putting it here now, with a few updates.

Before you read that, however, I wanted to note that I once had the privilege of hearing Michael speak at the keynote session of the HOPE 6 convention in New York in 2006. (Audio here.) It was a great talk, but then I was already one of the converted. My only regret is that I didn't go up to him afterward and introduce myself.

Now, on to the remembrance.

* * *

In an age of Kindles and Nooks and iPads with iBooks, it's easy to take for granted the point, click and read nature of ebooks. But Michael S. Hart who died last Tuesday at the age of 64, predicted it all forty years ago.

In 1971, Hart received a gift $100 million worth of computer time on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois. He spent the first hour and forty-seven minutes trying to decide what to do with the rest of the time, and decided there was only one thing to do:

Type something.

So he grabbed a free copy of the Declaration of Independence and typed it up. Then, in what is arguably the first incident of commercial spam, he emailed everyone he knew and told him where they could find the new file (hypertext and links were yet to be developed). Thus was born the e-text — the not-so-distant ancestor of the millions of ebooks that are downloaded each day from every corner of the Internet.

That the first electronic book on the Internet was the Declaration of Independence is appropriate. In a single, short text, Hart defined what would come to be the philosophy behind the volunteer effort he led for nearly four decades.

A New Printing Press

Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century led to a written revolution that allowed people across Europe — and eventually the world — to share facts and ideas in ways they never could before. Hart prophesied the same potential with ebooks, and so he named his effort "Project Gutenberg."

"When I chose the name," Hart said in a 2002 interview, "the major factor in mind was that publishing ebooks would change the map of literacy and education as much as did the Gutenberg Press.... From the equivalent of the cost of an average family farm, books became so inexpensive that you could see a wagonload of them in the weekend marketplace in small villages at prices that even these people could afford."

The change Hart saw was not immediate. After the Declaration of Independence, he spent the next eight years typing up the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" speech, and famous addresses by U.S. presidents (not necessarily in that order). During this time he also started on Shakespeare's corpus as well as the King James Bible The Bible was released in 1989; however, due to changes in copyright laws in the 1970s, Project Gutenberg was unable to release the version of Shakespeare that Hart transcribed.¹

Slow growth and copyright issues did not deter Hart from his mission to provide free ebooks, however. In the early 1990s, Hart began to organize volunteers to help him accelerate the ebook development process. With the advent of the World Wide Web, it took only five years to grow exponentially from 10 ebooks to 100 ebooks, at which point Project Gutenberg was finally able to release The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Since then, the number of volunteers creating ebooks has steadily increased, and so has their output. In October 2000, a man named Charles Franks created a site called Distributed Proofreaders (DP) to help spread out the tedium of converting "dead-tree" books to their electronic equivalents. Today, DP boasts more than 25,000 titles that it has contributed to the Project Gutenberg library. While DP is by far the largest concerted effort, many other groups and individuals across the world continue to make contributions to Project Gutenberg as well.

Going Global and Fighting Copyright

Hart's goal, as enshrined in Project Gutenberg's mission statement, was "to encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks." With that goal in mind, he was always ready to accept new ideas about how to build his growing collection.

One of the ways Project Gutenberg has provided more books to people is by setting up shop (or servers) outside the U.S. Thus, people in other countries have gained legal access to some books that are still under copyright in the U.S.

For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby still retains it's copyright in the U.S., but is considered public domain in Australia, where copyrights expire fifty years after the author's death (Fitzgerald died in 1940). At Project Gutenberg Australia readers will find Gatsby along with other similar works by authors who died more than half a century ago, such as George Orwell's 1984.

Because Project Gutenberg efforts outside the U.S. are run by volunteers in those countries, this is completely legal. More importantly, it highlights one of Hart's primary gripes about how government has continually prevented the free-flow of ideas to among people through copyright law. In a 2005 interview Hart described how every major extension of U.S. copyright law came at a time when books were set to become easier to obtain.

The Copyright Act of 1831 — strongly supported by lexicographer Noah Webster — was passed shortly after the first high-speed steam printing press was developed in 1830
The Copyright Act of 1909 was passed shortly after the development of electric presses
The Copyright Act of 1976 was passed shortly after the development of Xerox copiers
The Copyright Act of 1998 was passed to prevent digital copying and distribution

"We have been capable of bringing every word ever written to a wider audience than ever before," Hart said, "but the truth is a movement to deny access to this information has been underway for even longer in the form of continuous copyright extensions."

But this fact did not deter Hart from finding ways to continue making ebooks freely available to people. In addition to developing electronic versions of public domain books — that is, books whose copyrights had expired — other projects such as the Creative Commons provided ways for contemporary authors (like speculative-fiction writer Cory Doctorow) to bring their books into the Project Gutenberg fold.

Even more recently, Hart began working with the World Public Library, a consortium that claims to make more than 2 million ebooks available in more than 100 languages. For the last several years, Hart has provided his thoughts about every aspect ebooks, from their use in schools to using solid state drives to build personal libraries equivalent to the Library of Alexandria.

The Revolution Has Been Digitized

Barely two weeks before his own death, Hart wrote a moving ode to Steve Jobs [ed. whose death came a day shy of a month after Hart's], lauding the efficacy of the Apple founder's vision.

"We live in an age where the media are controlled by mega-corporations...who deny the importance of the individual hero…." Hart wrote. "Those people, the inventors, creators, and makers of our products are a now lost species in the eyes and ears of our media's corporate control."

More than 43,000 ebooks and forty years after pecking out the Declaration of Independence, it's hard to read those words now without recognizing the echo of Hart's own revolutionary ideas and accomplishments in them.

Perhaps it's not even much of a stretch to think that someday, someone might suggest "Project Hart" as a better name for the legacy he created.

Footnotes

1. In the massive Project Gutenberg text catalog known as GUTINDEX.ALL, Hart provides the following explanation in a note: "…it was originally considered that we would do one eBook 1971, another in 1972, and then on to Shakespeare and the Bible, with each play or book counting as one title, and thus our numbering system for a while included about 40 files of an eBook collection of Shakespeare that never appeared due to changes in the copyright laws that were not completed when Project Gutenberg went into action in 1971, and left us up in the air for quite some time."

Tonight, on a very special episode of Kat & Curt's TV Re-View...

curtis — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 01:30:20 +0000

Hey, so remember that podcast I've been hosting for like three months now with fellow blogger and Mythgardian Katherine Sas? The one where we get together each week and geek out about...er, I mean have deep intellectual discussions about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who?

Well, if you don't remember it, consider yourself informed.

Our weekly episodes typically post on Mondays, but tonight we posted a bonus episode recapping the first two seasons from each show. We start out talking about our favorite episodes from the seasons, and then go on to discuss some of the overall story arcs and themes.

If you've been listening all along – thank you! If not, now might be a good time to catch up.

Enjoy!

Review: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

curtis — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 12:23:32 +0000

I haven't read anything by Cory Doctorow since Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town first came out. Part of that is because that story blew. Part of it is also because my best friend was banned from Boing Boing after making a perfectly reasonable, but contrary, comment on one of Cory's posts at that blog. (In fairness, I don't know that it was Cory who banned him – it may have been some overambitious site moderator.) Both of those things have left bad tastes in my mouth, and when I get a bad taste from something, I tend not to taste it again.

I changed my mind with regard to Little Brother after taking Dr. Amy H. Sturgis's Dystopian Tradition class at The Mythgard Institute. In that class, we read George Orwell's classic 1984 (full review) and discussed later books that built on Orwell's ideas. Little Brother came up, and after hearing that it was nominated for a number of awards and won several of them, I decided that perhaps it was worth picking up.

Upon reading the book, however, I had some problems with it. And I will take them here one by one.

Classification

This may seem a minor point, but I have a problem calling this book "science fiction." Looking at how the book is classified on Goodreads and elsewhere, it seems most people don't have that same qualm. Many of the awards the book received or was nominated for are generally given to science fiction works (Prometheus Award, John W. Campbell Award, Hugo Award for Best Novel, etc.). So yes, I realize that I am in the minority here.

There is, of course, a long and sordid history of trying to define science fiction as a genre. I could point to perhaps dozens of definitions by various writers and critics and show how Little Brother doesn't fit with each particular one – but honesty would require me to admit that the book does fit within the bounds of many other definitions.

Anyway, my primary qualm with calling this a science fiction work is due to the presentness of it. Science fiction doesn't necessarily have to take place in either the past or the future, or even an alternate reality (though much of it does one or more of those things). If it's going to work in the present, then there should be an extrapolation of something new based on modern science. I'm not sure this book does that.

Doctorow does describe some minor extensions of current, or then-current in 2008, technology. For example, the "Xbox Universal" is a free version of Microsoft's popular gaming platform that nobody uses but apparently keeps around. ParanoidLinux is a flavor of Linux (duh!) that encrypts everything, uses TOR routing, and has a high noise-to-signal ratio, among other things. (Supposedly, the fictional operating systems inspired a short-lived real-world namesake.) But these things seem less like extrapolations of scientific principles and more like deus ex machine plot devices.

Consider this: Say someone writes a book about a kid who rigs his car to go a little faster than most cops' cars. He doesn't really develop anything new, just does some jiggery pokery using cheap parts from the junkyard to eke out a little more speed. Yes, there's something technical and possibly even sciencey going on there, but for the most part it's pretty mundane. It might be a good story, especially if the kid was constantly just one step ahead of the cops, but it would hardly be a science fiction story.

But say instead the boy in our story develops an awesome new rocket that propels the car several times faster than the heretofore fastest land vehicle. Simultaneously, he also has to use his knowledge of physics and engineering to come up with new safety devices to prevent injury from G-forces, a sturdier frame to keep the vehicle from falling apart, etc. There might still be cops that the kid has to get away from, but then the story becomes more about the his use of science and technology to affect his world.

These days, and even five years ago when Little Brother was published, computers are more ubiquitous than cars, and gone is the time when merely using a computer, or even poking around in one, automatically makes a story science fiction. In Little Brother, Marcus doesn't exactly jack into a cyberdeck or strap any rockets onto his laptop. That doesn't make it a bad story, but it does force us to ask the question what kind of story it is.

Which brings me to my next point.

The Didactic Tale

Throughout Little Brother, Doctorow writes what amount to mini-howtos on the workings of wifi, RFID (apparently some people pronounce this "arphid"), encryption and a few other things. Most of this exposition is done in the narrative, rather than the dialog – so there's nothing like, "Well, as you know Bob, the thingamajobbie works by…" before the detailed explanation about how the thingamajobbie works.

This is where the not-being-science-fiction comes into play. Such exposition is absolutely necessary when explaining concepts and ideas that readers are unlikely to be familiar with. For example, in 1940 Heinlein needed to go into some detail about the concept of Douglas-Martin sun-power screens because solar power wasn't ubiquitous yet. Such descriptions about novel technological concepts probably fascinated readers. Today, spending a lot of time on the technical workings of solar energy cells likely would probably bore most readers.

The situation is different in Little Brother. Because contemporary readers likely use the technologies described in the book on a daily basis, the exposition is mostly unnecessary. Even though Doctorow does a pretty good job of boiling down complex concepts for popular consumption, the exposition is still an interruption in the narrative, and not always a timely one.

The amount of exposition also calls into question the status of this book as a young adult novel. The way it's written, Little Brother seems rather closer to a novel written for older adults who want to feel like they're reading a young adult story, but who need a little help understanding the technology that the kids are using these days. And let's not forget that Doctorow was well over the book's frequently touted age of suspicion (25) when he wrote it.

I think the biggest problem here is that Doctorow seems to have set out to Make A Point rather than to tell a story. Stories can have purpose, but when the purpose drives story, instead of the other way around, it will always feel heavy handed.

Flat Characters

First, can someone explain to me what a "severe haircut" looks like on a woman? I keep picturing Homeland Claire Danes, except with a crew cut.

One of the great things about Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World and other stories about top-down societal control is that the people we come to think of as enemies are intelligent, thoughtful and conflicted. In 1984, it is almost impossible not to be impressed with O'Brien while simultaneously reviling him. In Brave New World, Mustapha Mond has a great deal of understanding and insight, and it's even possible to sympathize with him for the choices he has to make, though ultimately we might disagree with those choices.

In Little Brother, Doctorow gives almost none of that nuance. In the book, the DHS personnel are single-minded caricatures of authoritarian control who perseverate about security and the need for secrecy and how the Constitution just gets in the way. At the same time, they're bumbling idiots who can't figure out that a group of teenagers led by Marcus are constantly thwarting their plans.

The problem is that the portrayal of the bad guys ultimately fails the ideological Turing test. Doctorow doesn't take the time to understand the motives of the DHS agents any further than, say, the Daily Koz would take the time to understand the motives of the president of the NRA. A pat political justification appears to be sufficient rationale.

While this might be fine for real-world politics, it from a story-telling perspective it's somewhat lazy. More interesting than would have been DHS agents that we can actually feel some compassion for because we appreciate why they take the stance they do, like in 1984 and Brave New World. And that could even have been done without acquiescing to the society they want to dominate.

Final Thoughts

While I think that Little Brother has some pretty big problems, I should note that I mostly agree with Doctorow's perspectives in the book. I especially like his use of the Declaration of Independence as a motivating force for Marcus, and all things considered I think he makes some poignant statements about the danger and efficacy of security theater, the propensity for people to become lax toward their government as they grow older, and the fallacy of clamping down on dissent.

I also realize that there are a lot of people who quite like this book, and perhaps even some of them are young adults. If this gets people talking about important issues, then I suppose in some sense the artistry of it doesn't matter. And besides, I'm almost 36, so you probably shouldn't trust my opinion anyway.

Copyright Confusion: NSA Edition

curtis — Mon, 02 Sep 2013 17:06:07 +0000

A couple weeks ago independent investigative journalist Ben Swann posted one of his signature "Reality Check" segments on the topic of NSA copyright claims being used to chill speech. The segment focused on an event in which Zazzle, the online marketplace where people can sell merchandise based on their own custom designs, removed some NSA-related T-shirts and other merchandise from the Liberty Maniacs store run by Dan McCall. The removed merchandise showed modified versions of the NSA seal that replaced the words "United States of America" with the cheeky slogan "Peeping While You're Sleeping," and below the seal was a statement that read "The NSA: The only part of the government that actually listens." Zazzle notified McCall of the removals, citing a violation of their acceptable content guidelines, which includes a prohibition of "text or images that infringe on any intellectual property rights including, but not limited to copyrights, trademarks and rights of privacy/publicity."

This isn't the first time Zazzle has removed NSA-themed merchandise. Earlier in August, Max Read published a post on Gawker noting the removal of his PRISM logo T-shirts and several other similar products. Again, as explained in Zazzle's takedown message to read, the merchandise was removed because it "contains an image or text that may infringe on intellectual property rights" of the NSA. The irony is that the PRISM logo itself makes illicit use of an image created by Adam Hart-Davis.

While I understand that this is all very frustrating on a social commentary and civil liberties level, the conversation around these and similar takedowns has left me more than a little bemused by the talk of copyright and intellectual property law. Swann's report goes into issues of parody versus satire, and whether government works can even be copyrighted. Subsequent reports, such as this Daily Dot blog post or even this recent Corbett Report interview with McCall, also have focused on the copyright angle. The reason for my bemusement is that none of this has anything to do with intellectual property.

Beyond intellectual property

The general confusion about intellectual property law here is understandable, given that Zazzle's removal notices cite such claims. However, it's unclear whether the NSA actually made a copyright claim. In an response to the Daily Dot article linked above, the NSA writes that:

The NSA seal is protected by Public Law 86-36, which states that it is not permitted for “…any person to use the initials ‘NSA,’ the words ‘National Security Agency’ and the NSA seal without first acquiring written permission from the Director of NSA.”

Note that the NSA does not use the term "copyright." Rather, they say that the seal is "protected by Public Law 86-36." A quick Google search shows that Public Law 86-36 is the National Security Agency Act of 1959, the law that established the NSA half a century ago. Looking from the other direction, a quick search of Title 17 U.S. Code (the portion of federal law covering copyright) shows no reference to Public Law 86-36, or any other reference to the NSA seal or to government agency logos in general. This is important, because it shows that the primary law specifically protecting the NSA seal and the law generally protecting copyrighted works function on completely different levels.

It should be noted that the NSA seal is not the only government seal (or logo, insignia, motto, etc.) to be given statutory protection. Most notably, a few years ago Wikipedia received a takedown notice from the FBI with regard to that agency's shield, citing 18 USC §701, to which Wikipedia basically said, "Stuff it." The third bullet on the copyright page of USA.gov states that "You cannot use a U.S. government work in a way that implies endorsement by a U.S. government agency, official, or employee," possibly referring to 18 USC §1017, which makes it illegal to create or use "the seal of any department or agency of the United States" in a fraudulent manner.

Public Domain Sherpa provides a little more information about such statutory protections:

US government works sometimes incorporate names, titles, slogans, symbols, or seals whose use is subject to restrictions by other laws. Although these restrictions have nothing to do with copyright, the end result is that materials are not in the public domain.

Why distinction matters

It's valid to ask why any of this matters. At the end of the day, is there really a difference between the NSA seal being covered under copyright code or some other statute? As it turns out, there is indeed a big difference, as can be seen by taking a close look look at the actual statutes in question.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the NSA's statement above bastardizes the actual statute governing its seal. Section 15a is the relevant portion (text taken from the Senate Intelligence Committee's website):

No person may, except with the written permission of the Director of the National Security Agency, knowingly use the words 'National Security Agency', the initials 'NSA', the seal of the National Security Agency, or any colorable imitation of such words, initials, or seal in connection with any merchandise, impersonation, solicitation, or commercial activity in a manner reasonably calculated to convey the impression that such use is approved, endorsed, or authorized by the National Security Agency.

This last, bolded portion is the critical bit. Swann, McCall and others have cited the censored T-shirts as "fair use" exceptions of the copyright law. Fair use as a concept is described in §107 of the Copyright Code, and there is a long history of Supreme Court case law determining what can be considered fair use – such as drawing a difference between parody as fair use and satire as not fair use. However, because the NSA seal is not protected by copyright, "fair use" as a concept cannot be applied the NSA seal.

This is actually good news, because the statutory protection provided by the NSA seal seems to be more lenient than fair use exception and case law. So long you don't give the impression that the NSA is endorsing any particular content or viewpoint, a lay reading of the statute seems to allow for uses not covered by "fair use" in the copyright sense. For example, it might be perfectly acceptable to use the NSA logo in a satirical work, so long as the various statutes relating to fraudulent use or implication of endorsement are not violated. Such use is theoretical, and I'm not aware of any case law that covers satirical use of protected government seals, logos, insignia, mottos, etc.

Some closing thoughts

As I said before, it's not surprising that there is a lot of confusion about what constitutes copyright law and what constitutes other protections. As can be seen in reading the various accounts of these takedown notices, even intelligent, thoughtful people who research the issues can easily become mired in the statutory minutiae. Heck, it's possible – perhaps even probable – that I've made an error or two in my own analysis here.

Which is why it's important to be skeptical and carefully analyze every claim made. It's clear that Zazzle's claim that the shirts violate intellectual property law is ridiculous. Likewise, it's clear that the NSA's follow-up statement about the logo being absolutely protected by PL 86-36 is just as ridiculous.

If anything, this is yet another example of how overly broad federal regulations have become. The statutory protections against fraudulent use and implications of endorsement are understandable, but when agencies use them to silence critics, that's bad. When companies become so confused and scared that they can't even interpret the law correctly, and when their misinterpretations preemptively silence critics for the agencies — well, that's just plain shameful.

My first 5K: Hooper 5K in Valley Forge

curtis — Sat, 31 Aug 2013 12:05:51 +0000

This morning, I'm running in my first 5K ever. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not much of an athletic person, and I have a particular aversion to running. There are a whole lot of reasons for that, but they mostly just boil down to: I don't like it.

But today is different. There are a lot of races out there that support good causes, but the Hooper 5K is much closer to home for me than any other. That's because the family being helped here belongs to my cousin, Jeremy Hooper.

About ten months ago, Jeremy was involved in a horrific car accident on the PA Turnpike in Philadelphia. The moving truck he was a passenger in hit a Department of Transportation (PENDOT) vehicle, and the turnpike came to a standstill for 8 hours. Surgeons had to be choppered in help extract my cousin from the wreckage, and he spent most of the rest of the day in surgery at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital.

There are a lot of unfortunate results from that accident, and one of them is that Jeremy's right leg had to be amputated above the knee. An artery in his leg had been pinched by his own broken bones, and the lack of circulation to his lower leg meant the doctors couldn't save it. That's awful, but not quite as awful as what could have happened: The doctors said that had the artery not been pinched, Jeremy likely would have died before anyone even arrived on the scene.

One of the reasons why I wanted to run today is because about a year before that accident, Jeremy ran his first marathon. He could have run it just on his own, and upon finishing, I'm sure he would have felt a sense of great personal accomplishment. But when he ran that marathon, he asked for sponsors to help support the non-profit organization charity: water. Just this past week I got an update about the people Jeremy helped by running that marathon. His selflessness then is still having an impact on the world now.

Now, it's our turn to help him. I'm not a runner, I don't even pretend to be. But if my running (and probably some walking) can help Jeremy get the prosthetic he needs to have as normal of a life as he possibly can, then it's the least I can do.

Even if you can't be at the race, you can still help Jeremy and his family. Please visit the Hooper 5K website and consider donating a little bit.

Review: The American Language (4th ed.) by H. L. Mencken

curtis — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 20:54:20 +0000

I've wanted to read this for awhile, and eventually decided to pick it up during my recent Dresden Files sprint, to cleanse the palate between Harry Dresden's various lengthy and often amusing beat-downs. It took me awhile to finish, but honestly not as long as I thought it would, which is perhaps a testament to Mencken's ability to weave an alluring tale about something as simultaneously ordinary and urbane as the everyday language in which we speak.

The main body of the book can be split into roughly three parts. The first five chapters covers the history of American as a language, starting with early recognition of the divergence of the English spoken in the New World from its parent tongue as spoken in Britain, and continuing through the influence of events such as the proliferation of movies in first third of the 20th century and the first World War. Chapters V through VIII provide various grammatical explanations of "standard" American language, as it existed in Mencken's day, with focus and additional exposition about how various commonly recognized words, phrases and idioms came about. Chapters IX through XI focus on vulgar American language, with many humorous asides about school marm inefficacy at teaching "proper" grammar and pronunciation. After a short chapter with Mencken's predictions on the future of the language (XII), there's a long Appendix exploring more than two dozen languages that exist in various parts of the U.S., primarily in immigrant communities, and how those languages have changed, in both vocabulary and structure, by their contact with American.

By and large, the most interesting part of the book for me was those first few chapters exploring the history of the language. Mencken very effectively shows how there mere fact of arriving in America forced explorers and settlers to begin developing their own language to describe the new plants, animals, landscapes and peoples they encountered. One of my favorite anecdotes is Mencken's description of the evolution of the word "raccoon" as people attempted to transcribe it from its original Native American pronunciation:

Thus, in Captain John Smith's "True Relation," published in 1608, one finds mention of a strange beast described variously as a rahaugcum and a raugroughcum. Four years later, in William Strachey's "Historie of Trevaile Into Virginia Britannia" it became an aracoune, "much like a badger," and by 1624 Smith had made it a rarowcun in his "Virginia." It was not until 1672 that it emerged as the raccoon we know today.

Mencken doesn't only focus how new words come into the language. He also shows how America's separation from England prevented developments in the parent tongue from replicating in American. For example, while Shakespeare was busily coining words and phrases in Elizabethan England, the American language had little opportunity, initially anyway, to benefit directly from his inventiveness. Few copies of his works made it to the colonies before the 18th century, perhaps due more to early puritan attitudes about theater than the texts themselves. The first cataloged edition of Shakespeare's plays is at Harvard in the mid-1720s, a hundred years after the dramatist's death, and the first American edition of his complete works was published seventy years later in Philadelphia — though according to Shakespeare in America by Alden and Virginia Vaughn, Shakespeare was popular enough by the early days of the republic for Washington to sneak out of the Continental Congress to see The Tempest.

Such differences due to separation weren't limited to new vocabulary. Existing words also changed their meaning, including which words were acceptable to speakers of "standard" English. Mencken points to a number of cases in which perfectly legitimate English terminology and phraseology survived in America but became disused in England, and then later became known as Americanisms, although they could more accurately be called archaisms that had simply fallen out of vogue.

Mencken also spends a lot of time showing how American language absorbed the language of other cultures. Many more words than "raccoon" have their roots in Native American language. Likewise, contact with the various explorers, settlers and later immigrants brought new words and phrases into the language. Most interestingly, however, Mencken notes the propensity of Americans to simply create new words to accommodate ideas as they are needed. Some of these stick around, though many tend, eventually, to fall by the wayside. And it's hard to predict which will remain ahead of time.

It is, indeed, very difficult, dealing with neologisms, to know how to rate them. The most seemly, etymologically speaking, are often rejected in the long run, and the most grotesque are accepted. Many more go on dwelling in a twilight region, ordinarily disdained but summoned out for service on special occasions. In that twilight region are large numbers of the words that everyone who investigates the American language must discuss.

This applies, of course, not only to everyday words used in public, but also to myriad curses. "Many lack the natural gift for [swearing]," Mencken writes, "and others are too timorous." He then goes on to list a stunningly large number of supposedly offensive words that I could only laugh, both at its size and the relative mildness of its members, before wondering whether he had a private list of more uncivil terms — and how I might get my hands on it.

As might be expected in a book on language, such lists are prevalent throughout the volume, especially in the later chapters. And as might be expected, they are at times a little tedious. Part of why I like the earlier chapters so much is that they tell a story, weaving words and word groups together with their historical context and how they both affected and were affected by the people who used them. In the last few chapters, Mencken tends to ditch narrative and undertake the role of cataloger. That isn't to say the those chapters are useless — rather, I expect the lists of proper names in Chapter X would be useful to any creative writer, for example — but that they are more practical as reference than as narrative. I would be lying if I didn't admit to glossing over some portions of the last several chapters. Likewise for the Appendix.

That said, overall Mencken does an excellent job of balancing scholarship with storytelling. For anyone who has even the slightest interest in American as a language, there are a lot of treasures to uncover, and undoubtedly you will come away with ideas and inquiries to pursue further. This was the last edition Mencken produced, and it still remains a compelling read today. Although there have been other books written about the American language (or aspects of it) since 1936, I suspect it would be difficult to find any that are more enjoyable.

Obama's education cost reform

curtis — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 19:21:42 +0000

A couple days ago, President Obama came to Central New York. I know because the traffic on I-690 was backed up, and I got stuck in the mire on the way home. For some reason (perhaps to avoid State Fair traffic), the presidential entourage — coming from Buffalo and Rochester in Western NY — went across the Thruway, past Syracuse, then came down I-481S and across I-690E to Henninger High School, where there president was to speak. I saw the president's bus pass in the other lane as I was sitting in the parking lot that I-690E became, so I suppose that's something. A tweet by CNY Central Weekend Sports Anchor Tom Eschen, Jr., indicates that 481N was the same way. I'm still trying to figure out why they had to shut down an entire arm of an interstate and disable another at rush hour. Fortunately, "rush hour" in Syracuse isn't that bad to begin with.

During his whirlwind visit to Upstate NY, the president announced his new plan for reducing higher education costs. Basically, he wants to create a new rating system for colleges, and then tie federal funds to the ratings. There's a little more to it than that, such as a focus on reducing costs through technology — apparently something no academic institution ever considered before — and requiring students to make degree progress within a certain amount of time, which will undoubtedly help those who are working full time and taking classes part time to prioritize their pursuits. The White House blog's fact sheet has some additional information, but what struck me is how closely it follows this Atlantic article from a year and a half ago.

As part of his plea for a new education deal, the president criticized consumer college rankings lists for wrongfully incentivizing schools,¹ and perhaps there's some merit to his criticism. But does anyone really think that institutions of higher learning won't try to game a national list tied to federal funding? At the moment, however, it's impossible to say how well this approach will work, primarily because the president leaves the development of the ratings system up to the Dept. of Education — after his plan is approved. Nothing shouts "responsible lending" like waving your hand and saying, "We'll worry about the details later." And Obama certainly wouldn't be the first politician, or the first lender, to do that.

An editorial at WSJ argues that much of the increase in college costs has come from the very funding programs that Obama is looking to reform. The libertarian in me wants to agree with that, but a true analysis indicates that there's a more complex answer. Nonetheless, in his book Going Broke by Degree, Richard K. Vedder explains that:

…very little of the additional financial support recently given to state universities has actually been used to reduce the cost of undergraduate instruction. That is, more generous state support does not usually translate to lower tuition costs. Nor does it enable more students to attend college. Lavishing more state funds on higher education does not significantly affect the number of students going to college, or how much they pay for their degrees.

If subsidies aren't helping to keep tuition costs down now, then rewarding better-ranked colleges and universities with more subsidies won't help. All it will do is stir the soup a little and slightly shift the amount of money each college gets.

The question remains: What could help? As someone with a daughter who will presumably be starting college immediately after Obama's full plan goes into effect (assuming it is passed by Congress, which seems likely), that's more than an idle question for me. Here are some things I think would work better toward actually keeping costs down for students:

Education Savings: The two primary ways to save for college are Coverdell Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and 529 Plans.

ESAs are federal plans, contributions are not tax deductible, but any gains on contributed funds can be withdrawn tax-free for eligible college expenses. Also, there's a $2,000 per year limit. Parents able to save that amount would be able to save a maximum of $36,000 over 18 years. That's a nice chunk, but on average it covers a little more than half of a 4-year degree at a public school, and a little more than 1 year at a private institution.² Raising the contribution limit, or eliminating a limit altogether, would put parents in a better position to pay for a larger chunk of education costs, reducing the overall amount of student loans and subsidies needed.

529 plans vary by state, and in many states contributions are tax-deductible up to a certain amount, and gains are often free from state income tax if the child goes to an eligible college or university (usually meaning, at a minimum, one located in that particular state). Although these are state-administered plans, they are created from a federal law, and it would be trivial to adjust it to require states to make gains tax-free regardless of where the child goes to school.

Obviously, you need to have money in order to save for education. But if Obama is sincere in wanting to help middle class families, then making saving for education easier is a good place to start.

Encourage Business Contributions: Since subsidies, institutional endowments and other top-down monies don't seem to be reducing student costs, it would be better to get more money directly to students themselves. One way to do that would be to encourage more industry participation in scholarship programs.

A couple years ago, I toured the Department of Paper and Bioprocess Engineering (PBE) at SUNY-ESF. In addition to being impressed by the facilities and being fascinated by the science behind paper engineering — something I can honestly say I never thought about before taking that tour — I was surprised to learn that full-tuition scholarships are available³ for students who want to study this niche program. Even more surprising: In the 2010-11 academic year, the PBE Dept. saw 100% of its students placed in an industrial job or higher degree program.

Granted, this is a small program in a small state college, but it shows that meaningful business partnerships can be developed to help students pay for college. While there are many other industry scholarships, endowments, fellowships, and other programs available, tax breaks that encourage even more programs would help students more directly than anything in Obama's plan.

Another way that business contribution could be encouraged is by increasing or eliminating the limit on tax-free employer educational assistance (i.e., tuition reimbursement). Currently, that limit is $5,250 per year.

Other Options: It's not popular to say, but I'll say it anyway: College may not be for everyone. It wasn't for my brother, who went for a year, then left to join the navy. For those who aren't militarily inclined, there are also a variety of trade schools and certificate programs that can quickly provide real-world skills without the expense of a four-year degree. There are plenty of other anecdotal examples of people who didn't go to college and made out fine.

That said, having a college degree generally leads to better jobs. Even much-maligned studies, like my own English degree, tend to have pretty decent premiums. The trick is figuring out if what you want to do requires a degree, and if so, what kind. Then, find ways to reduce tuition yourself.

There's already been a move toward providing and participating in online programs, which are generally far less expensive for both students and educational institutions. U.S. News & World Report started ranking online degree programs a couple years ago. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) through sites like Coursera have appealed to a sense of personal edification by providing university-level classes online for free. Signum University, which contains The Mythgard Institute where I am pursuing an MA, falls somewhere in-between online offerings by brick-and-mortar schools and free MOOCs, the goal being to obtain an actual degree at a much reduced cost to the student.

Finally, there are a number of programs out there that tout themselves as alternatives to traditional collegiate programs. NYC-based Enstitute places "fellows" in technology-related internships, at the end of which they'll purportedly have a digital portfolio that they can then use to get a job. On the other side of the country, UnCollege is a "gap year" program for people who feel underwhelmed by institutional learning. Degree of Freedom is a project by Jonathan Haber to take the one-year equivalent of a bachelor's degree through MOOCs, and I remember being intrigued by Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA idea a few years ago — though I'm sure many would consider the idea of reading so many books somewhat passé in this enlightened age of online lectures and forum discussions. There are plenty of other examples of such alternatives.

The fact sheet for Obama's plan includes calls for increasing technological innovation. As seen here, there already is a lot of innovation happening, both within and beyond the bounds of brick-and-mortar colleges and universities, and the fact sheet lists even more. The question remains, if so many new innovations are being developed, why does the federal government need to step in to subsidize them? The stock answer would be to have more (and more better) such programs, but that's wishful thinking. My prediction is that some colleges will continue to be innovative regardless of whether Obama's plan passes, and others will end up fudging their technology expenditures to make it look like they're innovating so they don't lose federal funding. I hope I'm wrong on the second half that prediction.

Final Thoughts

Back in June, John Tamny at Forbes argued that people go (or send their kids) to college for connections, not learning. I'm skeptical because I've always enjoyed the learning part, and the true answer probably lies somewhere between our views.

Either way, school costs likely will continue to rise regardless of how efficient colleges and universities become or what ranking they receive from the Dept. of Education. That's because Obama and his policymakers are looking at college the way leftists look at pretty much everything, as though value is a product of labor plus the cost of materials. But value is in the eye of the beholder, and sometimes that beholder is 18-to-22 years old and is really bad at assessing value. Actually, most times it's that way.

Footnotes

1. "There are also plenty of existing league tables that rate colleges, but Obama criticised private-sector rankings such US News & World Report for 'sometimes rewarding universities for raising costs'." — Obama proposes new college ranking system in effort to bring down costs, The Guardian, 22 Aug. 2013

2. "For the 2010–11 academic year, annual current dollar prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board were estimated to be $13,600 at public institutions, $36,300 at private not-for-profit institutions, and $23,500 at private for-profit institutions." National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Facts

3. "The Syracuse Pulp and Paper Foundation,
funded by paper and allied companies, offers up to full-tuition scholarships to eligible students. The Foundation also provides liaison between industry and the College so that the curriculum stays relevant to industry needs and current technology." — Paper Science and Engineering is for you! [PDF]

List of shameful plugs

curtis — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 04:09:50 +0000

I wrote a list for McSweeney's Internet Tendency called Shameful Plugs. It's pretty funny. Especially the last one. But it's only funny if you read them all in order. There's something ascendant — or, perhaps, descendant — about the sequence.

This is my second list published at McSweeney's. The other is my rather popular list of Common Sense Solutions to Alt-Pop Song Problems. I say "rather popular" because it has more than 1.4k Facebook likes. That's a lot for a McSweeney's list, just saying.

I've submitted a few other lists over the last three years, but none were accepted. Let's see, I had a "Top 10 Better Endings for LOST," and then there was the list of "Safety Tips." Oh, I also had "Declarations of Independence." Those will not be making public display, at least, not until my biographers get a hold of them after I die and they hack into my gmail account. They were rightfully rejected.

One that I wish they had taken was my list of movie quotes translated into Elizabethan English. I went ahead and published them on this blog as What bespoken images art these?" in honor of the Bard. You're welcome, Earth.

Incidentally, McSweeney's also rejected my retelling of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a Twitter feed. (I submitted as a feature, not a list.) I don't blame them. It's sometimes difficult to see genius in the moment.

I feel that I've protracted this exegesis on lists as much as one can protract such an exegesis. Enjoy the list.

Mythgard – Fall Classes and IndieGoGo Campaign

curtis — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 23:57:02 +0000

For the record, I'm still taking classes towards my MA at Mythgard, although I took the summer "off" — which is to say I merely audited Dr. Amy H. Sturgis' Dystopian Traditions class (which is now available as a course pack), rather than taking it for MA credit. We read a lot of great books, including George Orwell's classic 1984 which I recently reviewed, and even got to watch a couple of movies — and while I may be in my *cough*cough*mid-30s*cough*cough, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I still like watching movies for school. Some things never change....

This fall, Mythgard is offering another bunch of great classes, and I'll be back to the MA grind. But before I get into that, I wanted to make note about Mythgard's current IndieGoGo campgain.

Mythgard's IndieGoGo Campaign

A few days ago, Mythgard launched an IndieGoGo campaign (do you think I've written "Mythgard IndieGoGo campaign" enough times for the search engines to pick it up – yayz for SEO!) You can go on over and read all about it, but here's the skinny, the low-down and the real deal:

Mythgard will be producing up to 20 class sessions — through its Mythgard Academy — on fantasy/science-fiction literature, which will be free to the public
The funds contributed to the campaign will go toward the production and distribution of those class sessions through Mythgard
Anyone who contributes at least $25 will have the opportunity to vote on the topics of the class sessions.
As with similar campaigns, there are other perks as well, depending on the contribution amount.

Given that I've been a student at Mythgard since its inception 2 years ago, I have full confidence that these will be high-quality classes on topics you are unlikely to be able to study anywhere else. So please consider chipping in a little!

Now, on to the fall class schedule.

Philology Through Tolkien

I will be taking Philology through Tolkien, to be taught by the dynamic duo of Dr. Tom Shippey — yes, that Dr. Shippey — and Nelson Goering. I'm really excited for this class, and if you're not, then clearly you haven't seen this great promotional video for it:

Sherlock, Science and Ratiocination

I wish I could take Sherlock, Science and Ratiocination from Dr. Sturgis as well, but alas my monetary and temporal constraints won't allow me. Starting with Edgar Allen Poe and continuing right up to the modern BBC production of Sherlock Holmes, this class will look at the development of detective fiction over the last couple hundred years and its particular influence on modern literature. Guess what: There's a video for this class, too.

Tolkien and Tradition

Lastly, but certainly not leastly, comes Tolkien and Tradition by another great Tolkien scholar, Dr. Verlyn Flieger, who recently won her third Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies and who is co-editor of the Tolkien Studies journal. This class will take a look at Tolkien's academic interest in real-world myth (vs. his Middle-earth legendarium) and his adaptations of those myths — including a look at the recently published The Fall of Arthur. Do I need to mention that there's a video for this one, as well?

Sign up!

If any of these classes look good to you, there's still time to sign up! Even if you're not interested in a master's degree, you can still audit and have access to the live streaming lectures, great forum discussions and class materials. I promise, you will have a great time!

Happy 4th of July

curtis — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 04:01:06 +0000

There's a lot to get angry about with things political, and I certainly add my share of angst to the ire. In the last week, there's been enough "commentary" about the SCOTUS decisions to strike down DOMA and California's Proposition 8 to fill quite a few volumes. During that same time, President Obama's speech about climate change, which was dubbed "the best by any president ever" by almost-President Al Gore, was aired in full only by the one cable network that has a stake in the game: The Weather Channel. And just this morning, I read about some silly Republicans in Arizona who want to make high schoolers quote an oath promising to defend the constitution in order to receive their diplomas.

But sometimes, it's good to just set everything like that aside and take a few moments to remember why we all get so vexy and miffilated at each other. July 4th, being the birthday of our country, seems like as good a time as any (and perhaps better than most) to do that.

Personally, I like to take a few moments to watch the piece of dramatic magic by Penn & Teller in the video clip below. They do so a great job of both showing and saying why this country is so great, even with all its flaws and heated debates. If you have a few moments, I encourage you to watch it as well.

If you have some other way of clearing the political dross, please share in the comments below.

Joss in June recap

curtis — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 01:23:38 +0000

This past weekend I had the privilege of attending Joss in June, an academic conference on the works of Joss Whedon held at Cleveland Community College in Shelby, NC, where I also got my first taste as a presenter. While there, I also had the privilege of meeting a number of great people, including one of my professors at The Mythgard Institute, Dr. Amy H. Sturgis.

I started my day by arriving at the conference about 45 min. ahead of time and sitting in my car (with the A/C on full blast!) for about 20 of those minutes while I practiced reading my paper one last time. When I finally went inside, I got to spend a few minutes chatting with Dr. Sturgis before everyone was ushered into the banquet room for some opening remarks. The first session started promptly at 9:15.

Thar be spoilers below. I don't know why I felt compelled to write that in a piratey accent, but in my brief synopses of the panels I attended below, you should be aware that there are spoilers for various and sundry Whedon productions. Also, please note that while I'm recapping some of the papers I heard, these are by no means an attempt to recreate the presenters' full arguments, and I may (unintentionally) get their arguments wrong.

Session 1, Panel 3: Morality & Ethics

Molly Race, an independent scholar, presented a paper titled. "Making Compromises: Morality in the Dollhouse." Molly argued that the difference between life and death in Dollhouse is the ability to form a moral code. (Incidentally, just before the keynote address at the end of the day, I had an opportunity to debate with Molly which was more ethical, using dolls or robots [a la the BuffyBot] to attend more than one panel simultaneously. We reached an impasse.)

Paul Race, another independent scholar, presented "Faith and the Firefly – Building a Moral Center by Consensus." Paul surveyed the various value systems of the crew of the Serenity, showing how they changed (or didn't change) over the course of the series, and how the movie Serenity showed some regression of values in some characters.

Greg Knehans from UNC Greensboro gave a presentation titled "'I am the Law': Buffy, Alain Baidou and Betrayals of Ethics." Primarily, Knehans used the story arc from Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to explain the moral philosophy of Alain Baidou. I won't even attempt to summarize this, but will note that I've added Baidou's Ethics to my Goodreads to-read list.

Session 2, Panel 4: Comics

I really wanted to attend both panels in this session, but not being very familiar with Whedon's work in comics, I chose to attend Panel 4.

Elizabeth Rambo of Campbell University presented "Banter, Battles, Betrayal, and 'Kissy th' face!'", essentially an overview of the themes and formats of Sugarshock, a short digital comic series Joss wrote about an intergalactic band that saves the universe by singing the saddest song ever written. I was completely unaware of this comic before this presentation, and it was great to see what Joss can do with his quirk turned up to 11 (or maybe like 15...).

Independent scholar Jed Harris-Keith gets extra credit for presenting what unpredictably (to me, anyway) could be called the most controversial paper of the day:¹ "How Joss Whedon Made Scott Summers a Man: Exploring Masculinity and Adulthood in Astonishing X-Men." Jed deftly showed how Whedon managed to make Cyclops overcome his arrested development and learn how to control his powers.

Somehow, Masani McGee from the University of Rochester got me to enjoy looking at men's bodies for 20 minutes in her presentation titled "'Big Men in Spangly Outfits': Spectacle and Eroticism in Joss Whedon's The Avengers." I don't feel that I should say anything more than that.

Session 3, Panel 6: Firefly

I was really looking forward to this panel all day, since Firefly is my favorite Whedon production. I wasn't disappointed.

Tamara Wilson of Flagler College shared her paper titled "Cannery Row and Firefly – Misfit Crews in Lonely 'Verses," which essentially compared and contrasted quite a few of the characters and situations from each. I'm not a huge Steinbeck fan, but she may have convinced me to re-read CR in a new light. (The shortness of it helps, too.)

Sara Hays from Middle Tennessee State University talked about "Tight Pants and Pretty Floral Bonnets: Outfitting the Outlaws of the 'Verse." Between this and the "Big Men in Spangly Outfits" presentation in the previous panel, I can honestly say I spent more of my day hearing about costumes than any other particular topic. Sara took us through the migration of the various outfits in Firefly, showing how they changed over time and what the changes communicated about the characters, and then the somewhat dramatic shifts in costumes for Serenity. (In retrospect, it would be interesting to see how the costume shifts may align with the value shifts Paul Race discussed in Panel 3.)

Amy Sturgis presented "'Crowded in My Sky': Frontier Narratives and Freedom in Firefly and Serenity" (part of a longer essay included in The Philosophy of Joss Whedon), which ties together a number of ideas, including how Malcolm Reynolds more closely adheres to the archetype of a Turnerian frontier hero than other, better-known icons like characters played by John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, or even other science fiction characters like Han Solo. Amy also showed how Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" apply, with Mal representing negative liberty and the Alliance representing positive liberty.

Session 4, Panel 10: New Lenses

I went first. My paper was titled "Exploring Cabins in the Whedonverse Woods." Basically, I took a look at the movie The Cabin in the Woods and three episodes from Whedon TV shows (Buffy 3x5 and 5x20, and Firefly 1x13) to show how the cabin scenarios in each of them has a focusing effect that elicits certain character actions which otherwise would not be drawn out.

Alex McCown from The New School for Social Research presented "Don't Go Into the Basement: The Cabin in the Woods and the Ideology of Horror as a New Way to View All the Whedonverses." Alex argues that Cabin provides a single ideology through which to view all of the various Whedonverses, which have no single ideology between them, and that comprehensive view allows new insights into Whedon's works that otherwise were not available. (There were some interesting intersections between Alex's paper and my own, without any significant overlap.)

Linda Jencson of Appalachian State University discussed "Of Vampires, Transylvanians and Gypsies in California, and the Russian Mafia in Space: Joss Whedon and Russophobia." Whedon has been criticized for various missteps in his portrayal (or lack of portrayal) of non-white, non-Western characters. To the list of criticisms, Linda adds Whedon's portrayals of Eastern Europeans, in particular the characters of Jenny Calendar and Dracula from Buffy and Adelei Niska from Firefly.

After the panels, we got to hear a great keynote address by Rhonda V. Wilcox on Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, and the various ways he modernized it and how it differs in particular from Kenneth Branagh's 1993 version. I won't try to summarize this, but it somehow left me wanting to see Whedon's version even more (which, no, I haven't done yet...).

All in all, it was a great day.

Footnotes

1. It wasn't that controversial.

Episode 4 of KC TV Re-View, plus Joss in June

curtis — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 11:51:11 +0000

Episode 4 of Kat & Curt's TV Re-View, titled "All Your Bodies Are Belong to Us," went live last night. We're in the thick of things, exploring 1869 Cardiff with Mr. Dickens and trying out for the cheerleading squad. If you haven't joined the fun already, now's as good a time to start as any.

Also, this coming weekend I'll be traveling down to Cleveland Community College in Shelby, NC, where I will present a paper at the Joss in June conference, a national scholarly conference on the science fiction/fantasy works of Joss Whedon. My paper is titled "Exploring Cabins in the Whedonverse Woods," and it takes some of the ideas from the movie The Cabin in the Woods and applies them three different cabin scenarios in Whedon's other works, namely two Buffy episodes (3x5 "Homecoming" and 5x20 "Spiral") and one Firefly episode (1x13 "Heart of Gold"). I'm presenting on Panel 9 during Session 4 (conference schedule here). Should be a good time. Dr. Amy H. Sturgis will be presenting there as well.

A brief survey of cabin horror film "top" lists

curtis — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 06:48:53 +0000

In preparing for the paper I'm presenting at the Joss in June conference at the end of the month, I've run across a bit of a phenomenon. To wit, about 14 – 15 months ago there appears to have set upon the internet commentariat a desire to craft "top" lists of horror movies that featured cabin scenarios. This phenomenon isn't unexplained; on the contrary, it is quite apposite to their appearing roughly within a month of the release of Cabin in the Woods, the critically and popularly acclaimed genre deconstruction written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard and directed by Goddard.

By way of "research" (Read: procrastination on finalizing my paper), I have managed to collect a number of these lists and catalogue the movies listed. Below, in separate sections, I have listed both the movies listed as well as the lists themselves. What use this may have to anyone remains to be seen.

Cabin Movies

Since many of these movies appeared on multiple lists, I've ordered them by the number of mentions. It's curious that Cabin Fever received so many mentions – possibly because it has the topic of the lists in its title. Cabin in the Woods likely did not receive as many mentions because these lists were in reaction to the release of that movie.

14 mentions

Cabin Fever (2002)

12 mentions

Friday the 13th (1980)

11 mentions

The Evil Dead (1981)

6 mentions

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Evil Dead II (1987)
Wrong Turn (2003)

5 mentions

Antichrist (2009)

4 mentions

The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2011)

3 mentions

The Burning (1981)
Dead Snow (2009)
Sleepaway Camp

2 mentions

I Spit on Your Grave (2010)
The Last House on the Left (2009)
Pumpkinhead (1988)
Secret Window (2004)

1 mention

The Breed (2006)
Campfire Tales (1991, 1997)
Deliverance (1972)
The Descent (2005)
Evil Dead (2013)
Fargo (1996)
Friday the 13th (2009)
Funny Games (2007)
Grizzly (1977)
Hatchet (2006)
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
The Howling (1981)
Severance (2006)
Silent Voyeur (2004)
The Strangers (2008)
Straw Dogs (2011)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
There's Nothing Out There (1991)
Timber Falls (2007)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
The Village (2004)
The Woods (2006)

The Lists

Here are the lists from which the above data was compiled:

Angus, Kat and Leah Collins. "Top 5 Scary Cabin Movies." Dose.ca. 11 April 2012.

Colebank, Jeff. "Top 10 Horror Films About Camping." Horror News. 3 Aug. 2011.

Dickson, Evan. "10 Top 'Cabin in the Woods' Movies." Bloody Disgusting. 18 March 2012.

Evry, Max. "Our 5 Favorite Cabins in the Woods." 13 April 2012.

Gibron, Bill. "The Top 10 'Cabin' Movies of All Time." Pop Matters. 11 Sep. 2012.

Koenig, Abby. "Top 10 'Cabin in the Woods' Movies." Art Attack Blog. Houston Press, 16 April 2012.

Lemire, Christy. "5 classic movies set in cabins." boston.com. AP, 12 April 2012. [n.b., I didn't included Meatballs or Little Darlings in the compilation for, hopefully, obvious reasons.]

Marvel Guy. "Top Ten Cabin Movies." n.d. Web. 12 June 2013.

MTV Movies Team. "Five More Cabins in the Woods." MTV Movies Blog. MTV.com, 13 April 2012.

Rawson-Jones, Ben. "Evil Dead, Antichrist, Cabin Fever: 10 best cabin in the woods movies." Digital Spy. 23 April 2012.

Taylor, Drew. "To Get Ready for 'Cabin in the Woods,' Here Are The Top 5 Cabin Movies." The Playlist. Indiewire, 10 April 2012.

"The best cabin horror movies for May 2-4 viewing." The Scope. 18 May, 2012.

"Top 5 Cabins in the Woods." Metamovies. Metacafe, 16 April 2012.

"Top 5 Creepy Cabin Movies." Tr3s. 10 April 2012.

"Top 5 Scary Cabins in Movies." Female First. 20 Sept. 2012.

Curtis Weyant

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