I don’t have any tattoos, mainly because I don’t know of any message or image I’d like to have permanently engraved on my corpus. But I do appreciate some of the tattoos at this Buzzfeed link. I think I like most the idea of using simple illustrations from some of these books — the minimalist approach.
This is what I saw while driving past on my way home today:
Byron IL Middle School, 1 May 2013
I was just driving home, minding my own business, when an epistemological quandary in the shape of an unhealthily high temperature flashed at me: Do I accept the meaning of these symbols, or do I instead choose the differing message I’m interpreting from what my senses tell me, thereby regarding the printed symbols as empty of meaning? (And while I ponder, I’ll stay inside my air-conditioned car, just in case.) Ah, I’m always having to decide what is my reality. And the symbols with which we or others used to describe reality may not be describing reality at all. This afternoon, this public school’s message board started publishing fiction.
Posted in Comic silliness, Fiction, Ogle County Poet Laureate, Philosophy
Tagged 262, Byron Middle School, epistemology, fiction, lies, reality
Playing catch-up here with links to sundry articles:
1. Writing and reading as more interactive than before. (via The Dish)
2. Food stamp participation by county.
3. U.S. students make up the largest proportion of top-scoring students. It turns out that we don’t need education reform so much as we need poverty reform.
4. We have relationships with our dogs, which relationships we can tell stories about; but we only look at our cats, of whom we make images. Thus, there are more books about dogs but online video and photos of cats. From my experience living with both, I’d say that’s about right.
5. The first World Wide Web page, recreated. Already, I feel like a oldster, telling my students of the days when I was first online, 1992, when I used the Gopher program to find addresses of people at other universities, and when I had email but only had two or three other people with whom to communicate online. I liked this story above for both the Gopher mention and for the screen image from NeXT computers, which I also used in fall 1992 and which now seems like the Edsel of computers.
6. The New York Times Book Review may be on its last legs. , and with it, “Book reviews, I am afraid, are a downer, an outdated form. Literary editors – hell, literary people in general – are mightily outdated, too.” And as much as I enjoyed reading the Book Review as a younger person who wished to participate in the community represented by the Book Review, I’m not sure any more that the end of “literary people” is necessarily a bad thing. “Literary culture” now seems an idea founded as much on myth and opinion and posturing as much as anything else.
7. Birth of a new conjunction: “slash.”
8. What you eat help forms what you like to eat.
9. A “Lord of the Flies” real-life adventure that wasn’t so “Lord of the Flies”-ish at all. :
One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip. They left safe harbor, and fate befell them. Badly. Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel, because they could see that arguing could lead to mutually assured destruction. They promised each other that wherever they went on the island, they would go in twos, in case they got lost or had an accident. They agreed to have a rotation of being on guard, night and day, to watch out for anything that might harm them or anything that might help. And they kept their promises—for a day that became a week, a month, a year. After fifteen months, two boys, on watch as they had agreed, saw a speck of a boat on the horizon. The boys were found and rescued, all of them, grace intact and promises held.
10. A post about literary pets contains this quotation from William S. Burroughs about his cats:
Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience — any fucking thing. Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love.
Love? What is It?
Most natural painkiller what there is.
11. Pictures from the frontlines of TV news on-location reports, showing some of what the edited image excludes. This reminds me of some of the press conferences I went to as an agriculture reporter, where my first-person accounts could have easily been more interesting to read than the items being conferred.
12. Media reporting tends to misunderstand and misstate science results.
13. Andrew Sullivan considers how a lot of online media exposure may influence/alter our thinking.
Posted in Links
Tagged Andrew Sullivan, Burroughs, cats, dogs, education, first page, food, food stamps, foods, gopher, interactive reading, interactive writing, literary culture, literary pets, lord of the flies, new conjunction, new word, New York Times, New York Times Book Review, NeXT, poverty, reporting, science, science reporting, slash, taste, technology, thinking, TV news, what we eat, World Wide Web
The memoir of Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a compelling, sobering read. (History of the memoir and of its writer is detailed here.)
A couple sections that particularly grabbed my attention:
[the U.S. government] that claims to be the leader of the democratic free world, a government that preaches against dictatorship and “fights” for human rights and sends its children to die for that purpose. What a joke this government makes of its own people! What would the dead-average American think if he or she saw what his or her government is doing with someone who has done no crimes against anybody? (source)
And (where “[-----]” indicates redaction):
“You can decide which one you’d like to watch.” I picked the movie Black Hawk Down; I don’t remember the other choice. The movie was both bloody and sad. I paid more attention to the emotions of [ -----] and the guards than to the movie itself. [-----] was rather calm. He paused the movie every once in a while to explain to me the historical background of certain scenes. The guards almost went crazy emotionally because they saw many Americans getting shot to death. But they missed the fact that the number of U.S. casualties was negligible compared to the Somalis who were attacked in their own homes. I was just wondering how narrow-minded human beings can be. When people look at one thing from one perspective, they certainly fail to get the whole picture, and that is the main reason for the majority of misunderstandings that sometimes lead to bloody confrontations. (source)
and finally:
[One of the captors said:] “You haven’t been tortured. You must trust my government. As long as you’re telling the truth, nothing bad is gonna happen to you!” Of course [-----] meant The Truth as it’s officially defined; I didn’t want to argue with [ -----] about anything. (source)
Over the last week or two, I have been emailed a number of notices that I’ve got new followers, but only a few of these seem to be real people. Many of these email notices don’t contain any listing of posts by that follower, and several “followers” seem to have commercially oriented names.
Two questions: 1. Is anybody else getting these lately, and 2. are these fake followers going to lead to me getting new spam every time I add a post?
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged ads, commercials, follower, follower-spam, followers, spam
