Telephone narrative, pt. III

I grilled her hard today. She was home sick, my daugher. I told her that I needed her to tell me a story on the phone, so I could complete my telephone narratives. She is usually like an anthology, but sick, at her mom's house it went like this:

How was the sleep-over on Friday? Good.
What did you guys eat? Taquitos.
What was in the taquitos? Chicken.
You really don't have a good story in mind right now, do you? No.

So, I am taking another route. Here is a story that we built together, all four of us at various times, but, in the beginning, it was mostly me and her. I will write it with her as a children's novel one day, but maybe we will serial it, Dickens-style, on here first.

Three girls are new to an elementary school, and because they feel like social outcasts, they take to sitting next to each other at the sandbox during recess every day while everyone else plays. Sometimes they talk; sometimes not. Every day they sit in the same place. Eventually they notice that their feet have made nearly permanent indentions in the sand, which is fine. Normal. Boring. Until one girl experiments with wearing two different shoes one day to "trick" the sand, but as the trio walks up to the box, the shoe outlines in the sand correspond to the mismatched shoes and her own place on the bench. Somehow, the sand knows something. They experiment further, trying to switch their order right before they approach their sitting place, but the sand is always ready for them. This is weird, but does not compare to the inexplicability of the designs that begin to show up around one pair of shoes at a time: an eyeball, a question mark, a dotted line. The girls learn that not only do the designs in the sandbox foretell their choices, but they can sometime predict the onset of certain temporary abilities that cannot be explained. Or mentioned to adults.

See there, my beautiful daughter. You did have a story in you today. We just had to get it from the archive.

Cultural criticism from Duran Duran

A mental congress is going on in my mind in response to "Is the internet stifling new music?" on BBC News by John Taylor, the bass player of Duran Duran. While I simmer, give it a look. Like with most pieces of culture worth digesting, I immediately think one thing which eventually morphs into something less passionate and more developed. Let me know what you think, especially whether the author's description of contemporary trends in new music consumption relates to your own or not.

Just take a minute to remember . . .

I am always hungry like the wolf for new music. Yes, I went there.

It's good to see you.

Thao rocked the Earl, with a collection of new songs and old ones. By old ones, I mean songs from her first album last year. More of a review tomorrow. Man, she can throw that hair around and twist like a snake preacher.

Music Monday: Ha Ha Tonka

Ha Ha Tonka released its second album, Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South, a couple of months ago. It's fetching. I am digesting it slowly after downloading it from eMusic, and I like its initial impact. The real test will be whether my oldest son sinks his teeth into it. Ha Ha Tonka's Brett Anderson has a unique alternative to a Southern drawl and the band's songs capture an O'Connoresque failed and beautiful landscape. I grabbed their first album last year on the strength of the title alone: Buckle in the Bible Belt.

From the Spin magazine review:  
What do Sherman, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, and the Holy Ghost have in common? All pop up on Ha Ha Tonka's second album and, in large part, define its contours. Novel Sounds is violent, literate, unapologetic Southern rock.

HearYa's high praise and live session for Ha Ha Tonka available here.

Special note: tonight is Thao in Atlanta. Maybe Music Monday will spill over to tomorrow with pictures.

Where is my mind?

An article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. last week comparing faculty environments to Fight Club. It's witty and critical.

About the author, we learn that "Adam Fulton is the pseudonym of an assistant professor at a university in the South." He could be right next door, couldn't he?

My response, appended to the article on the Chronicle website:
Faculty Club indeed. It should be no surprise that Tyler Durden is the sexy researcher and "the narrator" (Ed Norton) is the lowly teacher in this metaphor. Thank you "Adam Fulton," for ripping yourself away from your support groups and pulling back the veil for us. At first it was a frustrating experience, but I was humming "Where is My Mind" by the time your essay concluded.

Bootlegging and Health Care

Script-writing meeting today, to make up for our lost one on Tuesday. No pawn shop pictures this time, but maybe Tuesday. Added some interesting essays and blogs to the list on the left. I will digest them and post some tonight.

Also, it looks like the House of Reps. finished a health bill last night. I will be reading the buzz on it today. Here it is in the New York Times.

myfavoriteshirttoday.com

Yes, that is Keyboard Cat.

Five for Friday: accidents, gratitude, the Loh-Down, time travel, and some more flags

Five unexpected things that happened this week:

 

1.  My youngest son's potty accident as we were walking out the door to school this morning. That may not seem like a big deal (and really, isn't; he's 4), except that our school mornings are like a finely-oiled military machine. From 6am to our 7.24am departure, all four of us have jobs and every job is important; even if the job is "eating bananas." And from 7.24am until drop-off #2 forty miles away  at 9am, there's not much room for flexibility. Coming back to the apartment for a quick change threw me off. I ended up leaving a couple of important things inside in the ensuing costume reconstitution. Ultimately, not a big deal, just a slice of life item.

2.  The help I was able to give a friend in need this morning. Refreshing! It's hard to ask for help; it would have been hard for me if the roles had been reversed (and believe me, tomorrow they could be). In that human moment , I was grateful for being in the right place at the right time.

3.  Being overcome by Sandra Tsing Loh's article in The Atlantic (my original post here). The more I think about it, the more it feels like no one else can understand exactly what Loh's writing about except me. I don't like article's sub-headline ("The author is ending her marriage. Isn't it about time you did the same?"), but the realizations she presents on her own identity, parenting, and other people's marriages, are markedly similar to ones I have had over the last two years.

4. My oldest son's new story idea. It's about an orphan who lives in or near a cemetery and his three companions spread around the globe who are enlisted in an ancient struggle to save the world. It involves elemental powers, time travel with keys, and a gristled old Asian sensai who directs the action. Killer stuff.

5. Picking up a reader each from Guatemala and New Zealand. Again, I am blissfully ignorant about how these counter statistics  work, but don't think I don't geek on that kind of connectivity.

Some quick responses . . .

. . . to The Atlantic's feature on 27 Brave Thinkers. How many of them do you know?

McFate:
Interesting. Learned something new. Not sure I buy it yet.

Parker and Stone:
Brave? Really? I thought cursing and making fun of people made you cruel, no matter how intelligently you did it. I vote this duo off the Brave Island.

Nader:
I have been saying this for years. Twelve of them, to be exact. Proof that the margin affects the center.

Stanley Fish and the Conservatives, the Dark Side, and Jeff Lebowski

Catching up on Stanley Fish's education blog entries at the New York Times, I came across "What Should Colleges Teach?"

Leave it to Fish to make an argument, introduce an organization which praised his approach (the American Council of Trustees and Alumni), and then spend the remainder of the piece disseting his agreement and dissent with the group's ideas. It's challening to say "thanks, but," and Fish does it well, making his conservative point while critiquing ACTA's Conservative agenda.

I have an ambivalent orientation toward Fish. As an early graduate student, I reviewed Fish's Professional Correctness (1999) for a bibliography class. I fought with it and with myself (for liking it) the entire time. In fact, when reading Fish, I often feel like Anakin Skywalker listening to Palpatine's seductive logic about the Dark Side in Revenge of the Sith.

Fish's recent post turned me inward to critique my own course this semester, an intro composition course themed on Teaching and Learning for freshman interested in becoming educators. We  spent a considerable amount of time reading education theorists and debating public school policy, while also practicing memoir, analysis, and observation essays. Is the course trying to do too much? Fish argues yes; sometimes I think I agree with him.

To pop-culturalize my relationship with Fish once more, reading him often reminds me of one of my favorite lines in The Big Lebowski. After Walter makes a logical but melodramatic point, the Dude says, "No, you're not wrong, Walter. You're just an ***-****."

Exquisite

Sandra Tsing Loh's article "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" in The Atlantic several months ago, which is part divorce memoir, part marriage book review, and part cultural critique, is like the most exquisite scene in a beautiful horror movie: finely wrought, terrifying, and without a piece straw out of place. It sparked quite a reaction, mostly, it seems, a backlash against Loh. If my dissertation wants to be this blog's meta-narrative, then this piece is one of the stories lurking in the shadows.

Up and down

No pawn shop pictures yesterday; script meeting postponed.

After a chain of monumentally frustrating events, I had to tie on my running shoes and hit the street. At the end, I ran up this hill five times. There was a lot of steam.

Dreams, The Road, and a poor, shivering version of myself

Last night, I had a dream: I was so poor and hungry that I scoped out a grocery store and hid inside when it closed so that I could eat at night. Yes, I became a nocturnal-grocery store pilferer out of poverty. I think it looked a lot like the Whole Foods in Buckhead.

Another dream in another head, featuring me last night: I just took all of my stuff and disappeared. Went away. Forever. That would be weird, and a lot like giving up, considering recent circumstances.

Apparently, in more than one head, there's a concern that I will fall to ruin, starve, freeze, and/or disappear. Now, am I terrified recently of poverty, hitting the streets, and complete national and international economic catastrophe and cataclysm? Yes (bring on The Road!), for sure. But the real-world me will live.

Thanks for the inspiration Lacunae. 

The poor, dream-world me. I hope someone is going to take care of him. Am I supposed to?

Claude Lévi-Strauss dies at 100 in Paris

 

Lévi-Strauss exerted an enormous influence on the humanities over the last forty years. Nearly anyone pursuing a graduate degree in English, Philosophy, Religious Studies, History, or Anthropology (the list goes on) has had to wrestle with his ideas a bit. His obit by Nadim Audi in the New York Times today made me think about how much began and ended between Sir James Frazier (The Golden Bough) and Lévi-Strauss.

It is appropriate on All is Telling that I recognize the connection between story-telling, interpretation, religion, myth, and anthropology. The obit concludes with:

“Mythologiques,” . . . ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality. 

Also, a French intellectual trivia factoid for you:

From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

स्वागत!

One of our newest readers is apparently from India. 

He or she could be an appreciator of indie-rock, a Ph.D. student in American Literature, or a fan of sunrise pictures, Chuck Taylors, bonzai trees, or debate. Welcome! Pass on All is Telling to all of the Indian Subcontinent.

Or it could be a bot. In which case, I would like to say: 00110110001010001.

Music Monday brings you . . . The Clash: Sandanista

My Five for Friday list last week inspired the idea of Music: Monday. Problem was . . . I was so busy yesterday.

Over the last several weeks, I have been re-digesting The Clash's 1980 uberalbum Sandanista!. When I was initiating myself into Clash-cultdom as a high school sophomore, I ran all of their albums through the processor and loved this one. While London Calling is The Clash's best rock album, Sandanista! is like the poor bespeckled cousin in the corner whom no one understands . . . but has the deepest reggae in his heart. When I downloaded the album (who knows where my cassette dub from 1989 went to?) three weeks ago, I did myself a favor. By the way, do you know that eMusic has some of its catalog set to download at reduced rates? There are 36 songs on the album, but it only cost 12 song credits. eMusic is the jam.
 
Sharing the music with my kids has been a blast. You may know by now that I see one of my jobs as a parent insuring that my children grow up to have "good taste" in media rather than "pop taste." I have had them on a steady diet of important cultural digestion from the 80's for about two years now (more on that later). I introduced them to London Calling several months ago and my 11 yr. old son, in particular, loves it; some of the tracks went on his birthday CD, which is high praise. As we have been listening to Sandanista!, I have pointed out how extreme of a transformation the band went through from LC in 1979 to S! in 1980. My youngest just likes it when Joe Strummer mutters little words at the ends of choruses in "Hitsville," like "remember".

Finally, I came across a "Exploring Rock's Cliche's: Sandanista! as single LP" from Setting the Woods on Fire (thanks for the JPG above, Paul!), an interesting looking blog that's apparently on hiatus. Paul's idea in the post is that, for posterity, we could trim down Sandanista!'s enormous six-album size to one digestible LP by threshing out the lesser creations. I like his choices and the idea in general; it's super listy, a la High Fidelity. However, the album's experimentation was so extreme and important that I just feel bad skipping a track, almost sacrilegious.

Bootlegger body count, Celtx, and Javier Bardem

Today is Script Day; I spend most of every Tuesday contract-writing on a movie script that my co-writer hopes to sell or produce when we are finished. Later I will post a photoblog from her pawn shop where we have our meetings. When my German pal Joho was in town, he almost shifted around his schedule one day just to accompany me to a Tuesday meeting. "Are you really that interested in our script?" I asked. (He was.) He shrugged a bit and said, "Well, yes, PLUS I want to see the inside of a real American pawn shop!"

The script explores the lives of whiskey bootleggers, hoodlums, and, later, drug dealers in the North Georgia mountains from the 1930s to the 1980s. Every piece of the script has its seed in a story that my co-writer was told as a child growing up there. It begins in 1934 with a young whiskey maker's murder-suicide of his family in protest against being sent to federal prison.

I fell into the project accidentally, but the confidence that my co-writer maintains over the work we have produced is contagious. Several months ago, the only thing I could offer were writing talents and an organizational framework. However, I found an online program called Celtx, which facilitates the writing and planning of several audio-visual media forms -- radio play, film, stage play, comic book. It's free online and comes with a script sharing component and access to an online independent film community.

I may write more technically about Celtx and how it works in another post. Suffice it to say that it has made our process more efficient. Less time formatting the script (one of the things Celtx does) and more time writing the gritty dialog. In our film, we want to capture the structure of The Godfather, the language of Sling Blade, and the tone of No Country for Old Men. Just getting the ultra-creepy-sexiness of Javier Bardem in one scene would be an additional success.

Yes, we are shooting high.

The Tyranny of Email, Google's new Wave, and spontaneous combustion debates

Ben Yagoda wrote a thinly-veiled-slap of a review of The Tyranny of E-Mail in the NYT's Book Review last week. Sure I want to read the book now, whether Yagoda liked it or not, but that's what makes strong reviews. If the ideas are interesting enough, you want to read it, see it, or hear it because the reviewer gave it enough thought just to try it out.

Favorite moments from the review:

1. One of Yagoda's personal grudges against email: "It is responsible for the the emoticon."
   
2. Yagoda's use of "fixing to." Of course, in Atlanta, we are much more prone to hear "fixin tuh," but who cares.

After looking over a recent invite to preview Google's new Wave application, Yagoda's debate with Freeman seems even more relevant. Wave will be the devil incarnate to Freeman, if Yagoda's read him correctly. As with the my post on Tyler Cowan's article, I think both sides of the debate may be right, by degrees.

What about a new feature -- spontaneous combustion debates -- in which I would put two articles, essays, or posts together and moderate them like a referee? I would also pronounce a judgment. Yes, that's like judge and jury. May the best rhetorician win.

Three out of four cool girls . . .

. . . prefer Chucks. My daughter and her dancing pals before the parade.

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