Guillermo Del Toro (creator of one of my favorite films of dark fantasy, Pan’s Labyrinth) has partnered with Chuck Hogan to create a trilogy of vampire stories called The Strain, the first book of which is set for release in June. The publisher, HarperCollins, has released a video of Del Toro discussing his inspiration for the series.

I chuckled at his dismissal of Twilight-esque vampires: “none of this romantic, languid young men sucking the necks of beautiful people,” and yes, I recognize Buffy’s Angel in there as well. Del Toro wants to put the fangs back and undo our comfort with the vampire.

My guess is that part of this is just reveling in the vampire’s potential for fear and destruction. After enough high-brow, romanticized, conflicted vampires, it’s a release to let a few tear through the crowds like a “plague of creatures.” We’ve already seen some of this with 30 Days of Night (film and comic).

But I suspect there’s more to it. According to Nina Auerbach’s central thesis in Our Vampires, Ourselves, we have to consider the ties to modern events that prompt this kind of shift. Auerbach argues in the introduction to her work:

There is no such creature as “The Vampire”; there are only vampires … free to change incessantly … Because they are always changing, their appeal is dramatically generational (5).

I am writing about vampires because they can be everything we are, while at the same time, they are fearful reminders of the infinite things we are not (6).

Del Toro says he wants to focus on the “otherness” of the vampire, their “alien, disgusting” nature, so that we do not recognize humanity in them but instead recognize our own inhumanity. The resonance is multi-tonal, I think. I don’t want to stretch this too far, but I think there’s plenty to play with here.

American society¹ is emerging from an era of intense fear of the other and a guilty, conflicted consciousness of our own sense of justice. We keep trying not to look back into the mirror of the past in the hope of avoiding a glimpse of the monstrous in ourselves,² but the mirrors are everywhere right now. How do you deal with an enemy that is among you; that, in some cases, is you?

Which brings us to the clinical, “CSI” approach to this vampire threat. The scientific, rational approach to the problem pushes and pushes until it reaches a point where it must concede that this contagion is what we have called “vampirism.” How do we respond, rationally and scientifically, to this realization? Is that even the best approach? Likewise, our nation is struggling out of a national nightmare only to be greeted by uncertainty, facing new fears that are at the very limits of our scientific, rational control.

Of course, the book’s not even out yet, so maybe I should wait to read the story before I attempt to conduct a comparative cultural psychoanalysis. Still, I think the pattern holds, particularly if we compare the vampires of Anne Rice, Buffy, or Twilight to those of 30 Days of Night or, from all appearances, The Strain.

1. and Del Toro is definitely working within the popular culture of American society
2. for verification, see our response to the economic meltdown or the “torture memos”

Joss Whedon was recently honored with the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism at Harvard University. Part of his acceptance speech is below (link).

If you know me, you know that I’ve been a long-time admirer of Whedon as a creator, thinker, and activist as well as a fan of his work, particularly Firefly/Serenity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

He sees education as humanity’s greatest hope. Stay around for the final quote:

The enemy of humanism is not faith. The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man that is in every humanist, every person in the world. That is the thing we have to fight.

He also offers some insightful comments on gender in his Equality Now acceptance speech from 2006.

His vision is inspiring, as is his message: "We will lose our economy right after we’ve lost our morality."

Cory Doctorow spoke at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference¹ recently and warned against allowing platforms to determine whether or not publishers would use DRM on digital works.

Ultimately, Doctorow argues against DRM altogether, and this speech is a concise and convincing presentation of that argument. His message for publishers in particular is that, whether or not they decide to use DRM, it should be the publishing house that makes that decision, not the distribution platform (i.e., Amazon).

Somewhat jokingly, Doctorow gives us his “law” related to DRM: “Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.” Sadly, not a joke.

Here’s the link to the the speech on blip.tv. Also see EFF.org’s write-up about this speech²

1. A great site with videos and resources from the conference
2. You might also be interested in checking out my “copyright” tag on the blog and on Delicious

Celtx has just released version 2.0.1. The 2.0 release added a number of features, including the Celtx Studios online component and the ability to add extensions. This latest version fixes a few bugs [release notes].

Celtx makes it easy to format scripts for screenplays, stage plays, AV scripts, audio plays, and even comic books. Big plus: it doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars like Final Draft or Screenwriter (because it’s free). It also does plain text and storyboards and can help with production.

It’s not industry-standard, and won’t help much beyond the writing of the script (at least not yet), but if you don’t work for a film studio and write any type of script on a regular basis, give Celtx a try.

I’ve been reading Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers, a book that’s been on my shelf for a while, and I’m fascinated by the echoes between the struggles this nation faced in its early years and the ones it faces now.

In chapter one, Ellis explains that America was founded in the conflict between the opposing principles of revolution and union, independence and cohesion, the individual and the republic. These two sides are embodied by the revolutionary “spirit of ‘76” and the unifying goals of the Constitution ratified in 1788. Ellis points out that the Constitution didn’t resolve this conflict, but instead captured it within boundaries that allowed the debate to continue safely. In his words: “The debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity” (16).

This suggests that we need to collectively recognize and acknowledge this aspect of our national identity and learn to benefit from it and harness its power, not allow that power to rip us further apart.

To put a finer point on this, consider how Ellis summarizes the two sides of the debate. On the one hand:

The core revolutionary principle according to this interpretive tradition is individual liberty. It has radical and, in modern terms, libertarian implications, because it regards any accommodation of personal freedom to governmental discipline as dangerous. In its more extreme forms it is a recipe for anarchy, and its attitude toward any energetic expression of centralized political power can assume paranoid proportions. (14) (emphasis added)

The recent “Tea Party” demonstrations are examples of the more extreme expression of this perspective.

On the other hand:

The core revolutionary principle in this view is collectivistic rather than individualistic, for it sees the true spirit of ‘76 as the virtuous surrender of personal, state, and sectional interests to the larger purposes of American nationhood … It has conservative but also protosocialistic implications, because it does not regard the individual as the sovereign unit in the political equation and is more comfortable with governmental discipline as a focusing and channeling device for national development. In its more extreme forms it relegates personal rights and liberties to the higher authority of the state … and it therefore has both communal and despotic implications. (14) (emphasis added)

The cries from the Right that Obama is building a socialist and/or fascist government find their origin here.

This debate continues, of course, in louder and perhaps more extreme terms than we’ve seen in the last few years, but it’s nothing new. I wish both sides of this debate would do more to acknowledge its origins and to recognize that it is largely this tension that has made America so powerful and unique. In short, to make the debate productive.

Most of us lament the limitations of a “two-party system,” but its origins are in our founding. And even though one side demonizes the other in an endless circle, the worst thing that could happen, I think, is if one side decisively “wins” and defeats the other.

Because both sides are right, of course, and each side must continue to check the extremes of the other. I just wish this could happen with more rational, open debate that could lead to genuine progress and compromises that bring solutions. Instead, the media and many politicians, on both sides, are content to ride the waves of hysteria and division. It’s a waste of a good debate, and it threatens our security more than either side could on its own.

In chapter two, Ellis highlights the early division and tension between political and financial power. More on that in a later post.

If you don’t already know about the “#amazonfail” controversy that occurred over the weekend, these sources will get you caught up:

• Neil Gaiman’s explanation of his involvement
• Two possible explanations for the problem: thing one and thing two
• Publisher’s Weekly summary and Amazon’s first official response

From these, it should also be clear why all of this matters: Amazon is, for better or worse, the everyman’s online public library, the first or second stop in researching any published work, and the place most people go first for book recommendations and reviews. So when something—a glitch, stupidity, or malice—prevents books from appearing in searches or causes them to lose their rankings, it’s a problem. And when that something appears to be tied to Amazon’s assessment of what is or is not “adult” material, then concerns about censorship and sexual discrimination are justly raised, particularly given other Amazon fiascos (like the removal of negative reviews).

Still, Amazon is in a tough position. On the one hand, most people don’t want searches for “girl scout cookies” to bring up inappropriate content. And of course, who gets to define “inappropriate”? On the other hand, how do you automate control of searches in such a way that it doesn’t become an automated arbiter of morality? This is not to say that de-ranking and/or hiding books based on whether or not they reference GLBT lifestyles is excusable, even if it is an accident. I’m just saying, it’s a tough and very public high-wire to walk.

What concerns me most, though, is that Amazon really does seem to be the public library and recommendation engine for the masses rather than, well … actual libraries or better-moderated resources. Because being a library is not Amazon’s job. Amazon is a business, there to sell things to the people who want to buy those things. This is one more example of the often-dangerous blending of commercial and informational interests.

Our buying habits turn over information to Amazon that they use to try to sell us more things. On the surface, this doesn’t seem much different from Amazon trying to provide us with additional information that matches our interests. And maybe it’s not. Except that fundamentally, it really is. Because providing is not Amazon’s priority (nor should it be). Selling is.

Amazon is not your friend, there to make helpful recommendations or further your research or expand your perspective or provide the best sources of information. It’s your pusher, there to sell you things it thinks you’ll like. And most of us are already hooked.

When I started blogging, it was to record my thoughts about teaching. I moved the blog around a bit in the process, from a hosted site at Edublogs to a personal domain and, finally, to its current address. Along the way, I also left classroom teaching and, in the process, my blog lost some of its focus.

It’s been nearly two years now since I stopped teaching full time. I still stay connected in a few ways, and my current job still focuses on education, though now geared toward business professionals. However, my work, reading, and interests have shifted from a nearly-exclusive focus on education to a broader perspective that includes writing, genre, and folklore.

From this point forward, I expect to be writing more about the world of writing (technique, legal and technological concerns, publishing, etc.), genre (with an emphasis on “dark fantasy” and its purer cousins), and folklore (a general term that I use to cover religion, philosophy, urban legends, and the like). I’ll also post randomly about politics, photography, or other things, all of which I’ll keep in the “Asides” category. If you have an interest in only one of these categories, you can use the category feed for each to subscribe only to posts in that category. If you’d be happy to receive the mix, grab the main RSS feed. (Visit the “Subscribe” page for all the options.)

I’ve also started to use Twitter (no promises there), and will be organizing my research on Delicious and Zotero (neither of which are up-to-date as of this post, but I’m working on it). Feel free to look me up there or on any of the services listed in the sidebar.

I know I’ve lost a number of readers through the dry spell and the changes, but I hope to discover some new voices and to re-connect with others with a renewed focus and more regular posting schedule.

Yesterday, I lamented another piece of fuzzy-headed writing about education from a major news source. Today, I want to add that the comments, at least, give me hope. Most of them take Brooks to task in one way or another. And even better, the comments chosen in the “Editor’s Selections” list all point to the various errors in the article.

I can identify at least two reasons my educational blogging has dwindled so dramatically in the last year: (big obvious one) I left the classroom and (increasingly more obvious one) the arguments around education reform make me tired. I feel like there’s very little that hasn’t already been said, and ignored, by someone, somewhere.

Take this op-ed in the New York Times by David Brooks, for example. It’s full of so many reductive, clichéd, and just plain wrong notions that it makes my scalp burn, but he rattles them off as if he actually knows what he’s talking about and has evidence to back it up.

Now, I read his mini-bio, and he sounds like a really smart and interesting guy, and like he probably knows a hellofalot about business and politics. Why do we, as a nation, seem to think that qualifies someone to provide commentary and advice on how education should happen!? (You know the answer already, don’t you?)

Let’s run through a few of his comments, just for fun (emphasis added):

… increase merit pay for good teachers (the ones who develop emotional bonds with students) and dismiss bad teachers (the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed).

The bait-and-switch here is infuriating. What is the primary cause of all the "treating students like cattle" stuff, that concerned teachers have been warning and raging against for years? Oh yeah, all that standardized testing … which Brooks will go on to praise:

Thanks in part to No Child Left Behind, we’re a lot better at measuring each student’s progress.

The problem is that as our ability to get data has improved, the education establishment’s ability to evade the consequences of data has improved, too.

NCLB has done nothing to help us get "better" at measuring progress. We’re measuring lots of things, but we’re no where near getting enough correlation out of any of it to say we can speak confidently about "progress." And our primary method for collecting data right now is to ask kids to fill in bubbles. So no, our data hasn’t improved in any meaningful way, we just have more of it. And therefore, maybe the consequences that teachers (because that’s what he really means) are trying to evade are the consequences of bad data that’s being praised as helpful and reliable.

The thing is, plenty of people (people much smarter and more eloquent than I) have said all of this and more, and have done so over and over again. Still, here it is again in the NYT, and there it is again pouring from the political pulpits, and there it is over there on my TV screen, and …

So I find it hard to scrape up enough energy to have the same argument again. It seems like not enough people are paying attention to the well-reasoned debates. (And they are out there if you look for them, but even those are feeling a bit repetitive lately). I guess that’s because they take time and effort to think through, don’t fit easily into headlines, and don’t make for effective sound bites.