Magnetic paint: go away

The craze these days for chalkboard walls is getting complicated. The latest thing is to use a metal-based paint under the chalkboard paint so that your kid has a wall that is both chalkable and magnetic.  This post is for parents considering this endeavour.  The gist, for all you busy people, is fairly simple:  NO.  For those of you with some leisure, I’ll lay it out now in point form.

Chalkboard paint is friendly and wants you to be happy.

-It smells good.
-It remains mixed in the tin.
-It applies to the wall like cream.
-It cleans up with soap and water.
-And it does what it promises.

Magnetic paint hates you and wishes you were dead.

-It smells like turpentine on steroids, and continues to smell for days.
-It settles at the bottom of the tin within minutes of an industrial shake-up, and can’t be remixed without 20 minutes of muscular stirring.
-It applies to the wall like a lump of metal, which is, in fact, what it is.
-It cleans up with NOTHING.
-And, the coup de grace: it does not do what it promises.

But, I hear you saying, I’ve come across people on the web singing the praises of magnetic paint!  Yes.  I read those things too;  that’s why I decided to use it.  But I’m here to tell you today those people are lying to you . I know why they’re lying too.  They’re lying because this stuff is so malevolent they’re embarrassed to admit they bought it.  They struggled, they suffered, but now it’s over — and the last thing they want is their friends and neighbours to know how stupid they were to get duped by the other liars on the web and the smiley fellow at the hardware store.  I have no such shame. I was stupid.  Two coats worth of stupid.  Learn from my example.

The one thing people on the web do admit is that the stuff doesn’t really work.  You have to get “rare earth” magnets, they say, by which they mean really strong magnets, and even those have problems sticking if you haven’t put on enough coats of the vile stuff.  They say “rare earth magnets” instead of strong magnets in a desperate attempt to make their bad decision look like a super bougie decision:  not just any magnets for us, no! only rare earth magnets!  Feh!  And the only reason they admit this one, glaring, overwhelming problem with the product at all is because it’s the one they can’t hide.  Anyone who’s come into their house and tried to stick a magnet on the wall already knows.

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Grade inflation, and academic incivility (Gill #2)

Earlier this year, I attended a production of 42nd Street at Stratford. It was a satisfactory production, though hardly earth-shaking, but the audience gave it standing ovation. And it was at this point that I realized I had to stop worrying about grade inflation.

What I realized, sitting there in the theatre, was that grade inflation isn’t just an academic problem. It’s a social problem. I don’t want to say that North American society as whole has abdicated its power to judge anything as average or mediocre, but I do want to say that a whole lot of segments of society have: we (whoever “we” are, but bear with me) just don’t ever give anything a B anymore, whether it’s a theatre piece (yay! Bravo! Bravissimo! the best!) or a student essay (good work! A!). It isn’t as if we’re deceived either. I mean, the Stratford audience knew that that production was just pretty good; their ovation was half-hearted and it didn’t last long. And academics know that some of our A’s are, shall we say, A’s of lesser quality. But we can’t not stand up for the show, and we can’t say B.

There are good reasons for this, and they are well known. The push toward critical reflection has made us unsure of our standards. The drive to listen, to be changed by others, to consider different points of view — this makes it awfully hard to pinpoint some views as inferior. In short, it’s hard to be nonjudgmental and to judge at the same time. This is not the place to go on about these matters, though, because I want to say something else.

Taking up one of the themes from my last post, I’m thinking that this nonjudgmental quality, this restraint, might provide another reason academics are so uncivil about one another’s work when sheltered by anonymity. Maybe what’s coming out when we blind review each other with comments like “this is a piece of crap” is the suppressed desire to judge something, anything: we can’t give our students the B’s they deserve but we can damn well give our colleagues a D- or an F. “This is a piece of crap,” should therefore be read as saying: “it’s true I don’t apply any real standards in the classroom, but god dammit I still have them, so my field of study continues to have integrity!”

Of course academics have always exaggerated their petty disputes: the narcissism of small differences has characterized the academy for centuries. We’re all used to back-stabbing and we’ve all been back-stabbed. But still, the nastiness of the new style of peer-review might well be a backlash against our own uncertainty.

And so our internecine hostility grows — so much so that we will never come together against today’s real threat: anti-intellectualism. It is anti-intellectualism, rapidly spreading and intensifying in bitterness, that is behind the accountability culture that seeks to drown us in overwork. We all resent it. We all know that it is we who ought to be in a position to judge: we are the thinkers, we are the judges, we are the people who reflect and compare, we invented the goddam standards! — and it drives us crazy that we are being subjected to treatment we should be meting out. But we collaborate: because our ability to reflect has taken us to a point where we are no longer sure of our own standards and therefore in no position to judge others, and, even more, because we can use the accountability culture to fuel our petty grudges against one another and further our struggle for tiny gains in hallucinatory power.

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Internalized oppression in the academy (Gill#1)

I’ve just read a piece by Rosalind Gill of King’s College, London trying to describe something I’ve also been trying to describe for years: the pressures of contemporary academic existence. When I talk about it I usually start by laughing at how we continue to speak of the tension between research and teaching while our daily practice has increasingly nothing to do with either, but instead involves us in middle management roles that come sometimes under the heading of “faculty governance” and sometimes under the heading of “accountability” and mostly in any case just involve writing emails, and answering emails, and filling out surveys, and building websites, and making excel files, and checking other people’s excel files, and attending meetings from which we emerge with more emails to write. My personal approach to email has become almost entirely whack-a-mole. If I see it when I have a minute I’ll bang off an answer, but if it slips away it might as well be gone forever, since every time I sit down at my screen there are 30 more waiting to be dealt with. While I wouldn’t go so far as to describe my situation with the words “a punishing intensification of work,” or “a profession overloaded to breaking point,” I know what Gill is talking about. I rarely read any more, let alone think.

Where Gill is particularly good is in the sense she provides of our acceptance of the new normal, acceptance and collaboration. We recognize that we’re overworked, sure, but we don’t question the sources of the pressure, for instance the bizarrely augmented demand for accountability (or what they call in Britain “audit culture”) which, there as here, was “once treated with scepticism,” but “has now been almost perfectly internalized.” Nor do we raise questions about whether the “’freedom’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘autonomy’ of [the academic job] has proved far more effective for extracting ‘surplus value’ or at least vastly more time spent working, than any older modalities of power.” These are just two of several directions that could be followed up if one wanted seriously to consider how and why we work ourselves to bone, putting up so little resistance to these new demands.

There are a couple of other things Gill doesn’t mention that might augment an account of why we don’t resist. One, not just an academic problem, is the proliferation of distractions, for instance what are technically known as “stupid games” (on which subject see this excellent article). Academics don’t play Angry Birds more than anyone else, but they do play, and they play for the same reasons the rest of the world plays: not to avoid work, but to avoid the guilt that would otherwise fill the hours in which they find themselves unable to work, guilt which, if indulged in, reflected on, and criticized, might lead eventually a desire to change our conditions and those of others. Distraction can’t help but dampen resistance.

Also relevant to the question of collaboration is Gill’s discussion of how peer reviewing has become so much less civil in recent years. “When,” she wonders “did it become acceptable to write of a colleague’s work ‘this is self-indulgent crap’ or ‘put this manuscript in a drawer and don’t ever bother to come back to it’ — both comments I have read in the last year on colleagues’ work.” She suggests two analyses: “repressed rage bursting out as an attack against someone who is not the cause of it” and “[peer reviewing] as one of the few sites where academics may feel that they can exercise some power — thus they ‘let rip,’ occasionally cruelly, under the cloak of guaranteed anonymity.”

It’s related to the question of collaboration because for sure we’re never going to gang up on the masters if we keep tearing away at each other. But it’s still unclear why we’ve taken to doing so. I’m going to take a stab at this in the next post.

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Words and other languages

A few weeks ago my class had an extensive discussion of the “slutwalk,” in which female students put on provocative clothing (or whatever clothing they like) and parade the campus in order radically to challenge the idea that anyone, however she dresses, is ever “asking for it.”  I had a few thoughts in the course of the discussion, and here is one of them.

My students tend to believe that there are codes inscribed in facial expression, bodily gestures, and clothing — that these form a discourse, beyond words, one that we use to communicate, one that must be understood within a given cultural frame.  And yet they also believe that they may, if they so desire, mute this discourse, un-speak and un-hear it, such that one would no longer be expressing with the body and the face and the clothing, such that not even one’s tone of voice would count, but only words:  no means no, however you say it, and whatever gestures accompany it.

I am interested in this resurgence of the logos, this notion that the word, flat and dead, without accompaniment, without ornament or subtext, and above all disembodied, is the top dog of communication.  It seems obvious to so many people, but to me it seems only legally obvious.  By this I mean that in the kind of legal cases that prompted activities like the slutwalk, it was necessary to draw a line between operative signals and inoperative signals, and the only place where such a line can be drawn with clarity — and thus the correct place to draw it — is between words and everything else.  But leaving aside the legality and speaking philosophically, the decision to draw the line there seems arbitrary.

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Talking to Americans

Jonathan Lethem writes:

‘I lived for a time in Canada, and found myself fascinated by the slavish pride of a culture basking in a self-recriminating joke. “A lobsterman turned his back on three catches in an uncovered bucket. A bystander worried the lobsters would escape, but the lobsterman waved him off, saying, ‘No problem, these are Canadian lobsters. If one reaches the top the others will pull him back in.’” Yet who, lately, seeing how transparent the Internet-comments culture has made our vast leveling rage, our chortling conformism and anti-intellectualism, our scapegoat-readiness, could keep from thinking: “We’re all Canadian lobsters on this bus.”’

Are you having trouble understanding him?  That is probably because the internet has made you as stupid as a Canadian.  Let me summarize.  Canada is a slavish culture.  This means that when Canadians see someone striving for excellence, they drag him down.  In fact Canadians are so vulgar they tell a joke about their slavishness, making it a virtue.  America is getting slavish too because the internet gives a platform to hoi polloi, allowing the base to demand that the excellent conform to their standards.  Like Canadians, they now laugh — they chortle, to be precise — while they sacrifice virtue on the altar of vulgarity.  They are, as the line about the bus suggests, “bozos“– as Canadians always were.

But possibly you are still having trouble understanding.  Possibly you have heard this joke before, but told about crabs not lobsters, and about management not Canadians.  I’ve heard a dozen versions myself, none of which mentions lobsters, and none of which mentions Canada.  Which is not to say, of course, that Lethem wasn’t told the joke in Canada, by a Canadian, about other Canadians.  Anyone can say anything, and anyone else can believe it — and not just on the internet.  But the implication that it’s the national joke is simply wrong, and the implication that it represents Canadian culture is  both wrong and rude.  Lethem panders to the most vulgar American expectations of Caunckstan, of the socialists to the north who are forced, as a political principle, to deny excellence.

There is a relatively well-known Canadian joke about lobsters.  It goes like this.

In a small fishing village, a Newfoundlander was walking up the wharf carrying two three-pound live lobsters, one in each hand.  Whom should he meet at the end of the wharf but the Federal Fisheries Officer who, on viewing the wiggling lobsters, says: “Well me laddie I got you this time — with two live lobsters three weeks after the season closed!”  The Newfie says, “No, my son, you are wrong. These are two trained lobsters that I caught two weeks before the season ended.”  The Fisheries Officer says, ” Trained like how?”  “Well my son, each day I takes these two from my house down to the wharf and puts them in the water for a swim. While they swim I sits on the wharf and has me a smoke, or two. After about fifteen minutes I whistles and up comes me two lobsters, and I takes them home.”  “Likely story”, the Fisheries Officer says. “Lets take them on down the wharf and see if it’s true.”  So, the Newfie goes ahead of the Fisheries Officer to the end of the wharf where, under supervision, he gently lowers both lobsters into the water.  The Newfie sits on a wharf piling and lights up a smoke, then another.  After about fifteen minutes the Fisheries Officer says to the Newfie, “How about whistling?”  The Newfie says ” What for?”  The Fisheries Officer says, ” To call in the lobsters.”  The Newfie says, ” What lobsters?”

If this joke doesn’t say anything about the Canadian ethos, it probably does say something about the Newfies:  about their pluck, about their wiliness, and about their willingness, on a small scale, to defy authority.  It’s not, I admit, a paean to excellence.  But then that wouldn’t be funny.

Lethem’s comments aren’t funny either. This is, though.  At least, if you’re a Canadian.

 

(Lethem’s piece is here, and I took the pre-edited version of the real Canadian lobster joke from here.)

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Post-Rosh Rash

Another Rosh has come and gone, and another rash of young Jews is complaining on the interwebs about the fact that Synagogues charge for High Holiday tickets.  How dare they charge people to pray, they ask?  How dare they turn away those with no tickets?  What happened to the Jewish concern for the poor?  Isn’t the tradition full of stories in which a Jew welcomes a beggar into his home who turns out to be Elijah?  And the argument goes on.  Churches, they say, would never charge people to come and pray, so how must this practice look to the goyim?  Isn’t it giving Jews a bad name?

But such analyses are not complete.  Synagogues have special funds for the poor:  funds for broad charities, of course, but also special funds for the poor who pray with and identify with the congregation.  Try attending a Shul faithfully for a year and then going to the rabbi and explaining you can’t afford HHD tickets.  It’s not very many rabbis that under such circumstances will turn you away from from Rosh and YK services.  That is, if you really can’t pay.  If the reason you can’t buy Synagogue tickets is that you blew all your money on Arcade Fire tickets, that’s another story.

In the city I grew up, a poor family would have their butcher bill paid every month from the fund.  This happened discretely, without any exchange of words, so as not to cause embarrassment, or what we call verbal ona’ah.  Someone from the Shul would go into the butcher shop and inquire.  If the family had been able to take care of the bill that month, great;  if they hadn’t, it would be taken care of from the fund.  Where did that money come from?  It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that it came from the ticket revenue for Rosh services attended by Jews well able to pay.

So if you’re too broke to pay for your HHD tickets, maybe it’s worth asking yourself if you’re really, really too broke.  One thing I’m pretty sure about:  no one is getting rich off your money.

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The nature of things

My rental car astonishes me.  The doors lock by themselves when I pull out of the driveway, the windows come back up washed, the radio tells me what’s playing.  I finally get the jokes people were making ten years ago about cars that would make you breakfast.

I’m sure it’s been suggested before, but why doesn’t Toyota produce a car called the Retro?  It would look like today’s cars, and have all the features that are actually useful (I feel sure there must be some) but it wouldn’t do the things my rental does.  Because I can lock my own doors.  And I don’t want my radio to flash ANTONIO… VIVALDI…, since one of the pleasures of listening to KUSC is to test my knowledge of classical music.  Above all I want manually operated windows in case I drive into a canal and my electrical circuits stop working.

Another news item on the Welcome to the Twenty-First Century front.  My alma mater has subscribed to a program called Grammarly which promises to be able to check students’ writing better than their own computers, the advantage presumably being that it pops up a short grammar lesson every time it identifies a mistake (see? so it claims to be educating as it corrects, as if any student is going to read all that mush, come on).  But now get this.  One of the first sentences in the demo is, “The emphasis on nature, the supernatural, and superstitions were all part of Irving’s works.”  And Grammarly suggests changing “nature” to “the nature.”  Haw!

Check it!  See how many errors you can spot.  It’s quite fun.

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Pokémon gets political

Despite the fact that the Nintendo game, Pokémon, has been through many incarnations (there are at least fourteen versions between Pokémon Blue, 1996, and Soulsilver, 2010) the story has remained pretty much the same.  You put together a team of monsters, train them up, fight the Elite Four to become the league champion, and along the way defeat the bad guys.  Now and then the gamemakers add new monsters and new gimmicks, but the basic story doesn’t vary.

Until now.  Because the new games, Pokémon Black and Pokémon White, have a twist, a story behind the story.  As you fight your way through the Unova region preparing yourself to compete for the league title, you keep running across people making speeches in town squares arguing that it’s cruel to keep pokémon in little balls and use them as battle tools. Pokémon are meant to live free in the wild, they say, and we should all release the ones we’ve imprisoned and leave them alone.  The people making these speeches are, of course, the bad guys—Team Plasma, they are called—and we have to fight them.  But it’s not obvious why they’re so bad until we discover that their leader, one Ghetsis, actually wants everyone to release their pokémon so that he’ll be the only one who has any, at which point he intends to take over the world.  As this is dawning on us, we also gather that the money and much of the political pull behind Ghetsis comes from a teenager named Lord N.  But when we eventually meet N we find that he has no idea of Ghetsis’s true intentions but is forcefully committed to the idea that keeping pokémon is cruel—though he is, by the end of the game, beginning to wonder whether Ghetsis isn’t wrong, whether monsters and humans can’t live and work together in harmony.

So we have (1) Ghetsis, the hypocrite, cynically encouraging N’s idealistic belief that keeping pokémon is cruel for the double purpose of using N’s charisma to sway the masses to his point of view (which will further Ghetsis’s aims) and using N’s money.  At the same time he keeps N cloistered in N’s own castle.  There N spends his time, when he’s not obsessing over the problem of poké-cruelty, in a room full of toddler toys, obviously established by Ghetsis to retard the teenager’s growth.  Then we have (2) N, the idealist, naive enough that he never even begins to wonder about Ghetsis’s motives, but ever and again turns over in his mind the problem of pokémon.  The game ends with N giving us a solemn farewell and flying off on his dragon to think things over in solitude.  He has not, even now, grasped that Ghetsis was manipulating him.  And finally we have (3) Team Plasma, the masses, some of whom follow the Ghetsis model and some the N model:  brutal thugs and deceived idealists.  This is not a bad introductory account of politics, or a version of it anyway.

Now behind the politics, it seems to me, there is a psychology.  The members of team Plasma who know that the goal is world domination are plain meanies and thus, naturally, cruel to their pokémon.  But the members of Team Plasma who are themselves deceived, and who truly believe that pokémon should be released, are also probably cruel to their pokémon:  for that they believe the rhetoric suggests that they cannot imagine a loving relationship between humans and pokémon.  This provides a deeper link between the thugs and the idealists than that the latter are deceived into helping the former.  They are at their core the same:  at any rate, there is something the same in them;  thugs and idealists share a cold space in the heart.  And this substantially deepens the broad lesson the story tells about the dangers of idealism, bringing it down to the level of the individual.

But if I’m right so far—if I’m right that Plasma members are universally cruel to their pokémon —this lends support to Plasma’s founding idea: pokémon indeed should be released.  The game makes Plasma the bad guys, and does a great job of it.  For the first time in the Nintendo Poké World, we see why the bad guys are bad.  And of course we’re supposed to disdain Plasma’s central claim, and refuse to release our pokémon.  And yet Plasma’s very existence proves the claim right.

Which brings us finally to the gamemaker.  It seems to me that somebody, at some point, took a course in a political theory.  It doesn’t have to have been a very good course.  These aren’t sophisticated ideas.  But at any rate whoever it was kept thinking, and made an attempt to apply the results to the Poké World.  Clearly the purpose of the plot is to defend the entire Poké Enterprise:  to raise the question, which maybe bothers sensitive young gamesters, of whether it is okay to battle with these sweet creatures until they make one another faint, and to answer it with a resounding yes.  It is okay. Pokémon like it.  It’s Team Plasma who thinks it’s not okay.  And Team Plasma is bad.  So the question is solved.  Except, in light of what I’ve said about Plasma’s own cruelty, maybe Plasma is right.  And maybe the question is not solved.

On this basis, I would argue that the gamemaker enters the Poké World in the person of Lord N, obsessively considering the question of poké cruelty and oscillating between answers, embedding one answer within another, and so on.  And the purpose of the game is to consider the moral worth of the game.

But now, the final twist:  the gamemaker is being N in order to take our money.  And therefore he is also Ghetsis.  So at the top-most level, Ghetsis is N and N is Ghetsis.  And thinking about moral questions is a financial transaction.

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Drinking at College

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My 15 minutes lasted 15 seconds

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