|
Eason the Fifth posted:Any recent books you recommend? I'm leaning into non-fiction lately mostly because of the declarative style (Empire of Pain was especially good in this regard, and read like a real-life version of the Godfather on account of the facts alone), but I'm down always for any new well-written novels. I haven't landed much non-fiction, but I'm just running into a Contemporary Fiction course this Spring. It focuses on Haunted House stories and I've read some good ones: First, Carmen Marie Machado's Her Body and Other Parties is a good but uneven collection of short stories where one -- an almost-a-novella called "The Resident" -- really stands out. I can also dig on Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic and Alma Katsu's The Deep. I want to say those are all out in the last two years. I also really wanted to like Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching -- it falls into the "I know it's solid but I just can't get into it" bucket. It reads like a rough draft of something really good. Like the kind of book where the Netflix miniseries could be better than the read. And I read Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings, finally. I think the line on Offerings is that it's where Stephen King got his best ideas for The Shining. That holds up in the specific sense that Offerings is one good thing after another, but reading it after The Shining kinda spoilers things. King stuck so close to Marasco's story. I'm not going to say that King did it better but he sure as hell didn't do it any worse. Apart from that: Station Eleven and Midnight Library are also both worthy reads. Not great but good -- what I'll call "well crafted" since each story hits its beats in ways that are both predictable and satisfying. On the flipside, Station Eleven could be, like, a kind of sprawling, multi-perspective epic and a really good one, but feels like it pulls the eject seat at the first possible opportunity. Midnight Library almost overstays its welcome, and if what I'll call the second act had gone on any longer I might have put it down. But I didn't, so there you are. Last: Joe Abercrombie just delivered his last book in the Age of Madness trilogy, which is the first thing I've liked from him since he finished First Law. If you liked Law, Madness is just as good; a lot of the same without feeling derivative. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jan 30, 2022 |
#
¿
Jan 30, 2022 23:38
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 07:18 |
|
|
Fuschia tude posted:Do you use the same method reading for fun as you do texts to prepare for a course? Speed reading, and reading it multiple times? I do not. When I get to split the difference (like I did with these books), I got a nice, leisurely read the first time through. Then when I'm preparing to teach (like I was last week) I'll blast through them a few times to remind myself where everything is. Especially for plotted novels, the repeat-skim method is kinda joyless. There is one exception: I subscribe to Fantasy and Science Fiction and a handful of other short story markets. When I read those, I'll sometimes check the first paragraph of each story to see what's interesting. I almost never read each issue in its entirety. That's not a ding on the quality of a good short story market -- just that there's some amount of stuff that falls under "good, but not for me."
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2022 15:14
|
|
|
Eason the Fifth posted:Thank you! Looks like Burnt Offerings is next on my list. I forgot to mention in my earlier post, but "One Monday We Killed Them All" was a great recommendation. MacDonald's style in that book was a pleasure. Yeah, that passage about the town dying just a little slower than the country around it was a joy. I would slog through a hundred pages of anything after a hit like that.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2022 01:28
|
|
|
Happy Sisyphus posted:Any tips on how to get out of the literature phd racket if I no longer want to be a professor? Where (if you know) did your colleagues who didn't get tt jobs wind up? I think the first piece of advice is to avoid asking some version of the degree question: "What do I do with a PhD in English/Equine Studies/&c?" It's a loser question for any PhD program that's really a five-year vo-tech program for the professoriate. That's most English PhD programs, which are basically teaching and research apprenticeships. A better question is "what can I do with the specific skills and experiences I've picked up during graduate school?" Just for instance, I ran the Writing Center and (later) the FY writing program when I was a graduate student. I did hiring and firing, process and project management, and worked with a real budget. A friend of mine -- I'll call him West -- had a similar set of responsibilities w/r/t a University Press. That said, West is now an in-house librarian for a big law firm in Georgia. But both of West's former co-press-managers are senior editors (one at Scholastic and the other at Grove). Those careers were built on the fellowships they used to pay for graduate school, not on the degree program proper. Another grad school acquaintance of mine manages a tourist cave (i.e. a cave that you pay admission to tour, camp, spelunk, and occasionally go missing in). Another is in stasis as a traveling adjunct with a pretty successful house painting business (this was the position he was in before he started graduate school). For them, graduate school was more like a standalone experience than a bid to enter academia. More broadly -- outside my fellow travelers from graduate school -- the Big Deal is teaching at private boarding schools. We're talking about the heavy-hitters outside major metro areas, with international populations and endowments and students who drive Land Rovers or better. If you like teaching but don't like College Academia, those jobs are no joke. My kid sister (who's a ceramicist/sculptor) went on that market a couple years ago and got hired in at $93K plus a college house and all the boarding school dog chow her family can stand. That's not a one-off. The offers I've seen in my division are in the 80s and 90s. Keep in mind: someone with a lower offer wouldn't show it to me. But they're out there, and common enough that even some of our hires who probably won't pass their two-year review can get them. The second-biggest non-professor space is Academic Administration, especially at R1s. I'm not talking about Deanships as much as I am about director positions at Teaching and Learning Centers, Advising Centers, and so on. These are 9-5 jobs in the main, and the people I know who have them like them. Most of those people have PhDs and at least some teaching experience. The local R1 just hired away a couple of our Associate Profs in Lang & Lit to run their off-campus study programs, which describes a pretty common career pathway. IDK if that's helpful. If you're interested in boarding school jobs, I think my advice is to choose a region and sign on with an agency that serves it. That's where the bulk of the offers I see are coming from.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2022 00:55
|
|
|
Eason the Fifth posted:Sorry to just drop a lengthy essay and ask for your opinion on it, but what do you think about the argument below? I'm almost a decade out of grad school and only have minimal experience with rhet/comp and writing studies, but I seem to remember a lot of these issues being present in the departments at the time, and I can't imagine they've gotten any better. So first: I like the argument, but I also don't know that I have the breadth of experience it takes to sanity check it. That said, it rings true. Twenty years ago, Rhetoric and Composition was still seen as a dynamic and vigorous field. When I did my graduate work it was all about looking back on the then-recent Bartholomae/Elbow debates and looking at the evolution of Writing Centers. And then the whole field just seemed to fold up. It doesn't seem too off-base to claim that R&C repeated the mistakes of Eng. Lit. and so I don't know that I need a whole lot of evidence to be convinced, right? I was also always puzzled that R/C fell under (or adjacent to) Lit programs or in academic Humanities divisions more generally. The more natural fit would have been as a track or specialization in Ed.D programs -- that's really where (a) there's theory of teaching and (b) there's some experience supervising quantitative (statistical) research among graduate students. And in practice, you'd see tight coordination between R/C in e.g. first-year Seminars and Ed.D informed retention and success strategies. Anyway. Where are you thinking this piece would land? That changes your revision strategies a bit.
|
|
#
¿
May 26, 2022 19:14
|
|
|
The Zombie Guy posted:Not sure if this is up your alley or not, but here's the question: Hypothetically, it depends on how much effort you want to put in. The most recent linguistic change that would affect your answer is the Great Vowel Shift which, roughly speaking, separates Chaucer's (Middle) English from Shakespeare's (Modern) English. The linguist who's spent the most time working out how Shakespeare's English was originally pronounced is David Crystal, and David's son Ben has made a career out of producing Shakespeare's plays in what both David and Ben call "Original Pronunciation" or "OP". OP Shakespeare kinda sounds like Thom Yorke's been drinking cough syrup, or maybe like an Australian doing a bad Scottish accent. You can see a video of Ben Doing an OP "To Be or Not To Be" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M So I think if you travelled back to Shakespeare's London, you'd probably have more trouble figuring out how to live without toilet paper than you'd have understanding what other people were saying. You're in about 1600, and on more-or-less the right side of the Great Vowel Shift. Middle English -- or pre GVS English -- sounds pretty different. Here are the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVG77xTPH6E Understanding Middle English is a bigger ask. Chaucer wrote about 200 years before Shakespeare, and I think it's safe to say that English changed more in those two hundred years than it has in the five hundred since. That said, Middle English is actually pretty easy to understand. Ezra Pound wrote that "anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books for ever." Pound was also a fascist but on at least one point -- that a clever reader can learn Middle English in an afternoon -- he's basically right. So if you wanted to see Chaucer beat a friar (or see what went down between him and Cecily Chaumpaigne), you'd want to arrive on the scene at least a couple days ahead of time. Great Vowel Shift aside, the next earlier version of English is Anglo-Saxon a.k.a. Old English a.k.a. English 1.0. It started in or around the 5th century and ran until 1066, when the Norman conquest mixed enough Old French (really Anglo-Norman) into Old English (a grab bag of Germanic dialects) to eventually render Middle English. Here's an example of Old English straight out of Beowulf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI You're not getting that in an afternoon, or even a week. So I think the answer to your question goes something like this: 1) Zero effort: You can go back to sometime between 1400 and 1600. It's English but it sounds funny. 2) A little effort: You can go back to sometime between 1066 and 1400 -- probably at the later end of that range, since the Norman conquest didn't just suddenly displace Old English. It's English grammar with a whole lot of new words and everything's gonna sound funny, but you'll catch on before you really, really need to poop. 3) Not a chance: 1066 and earlier. You're basically starting a language from scratch.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2022 21:44
|
|
|
Baron Porkface posted:What is the "point" of Snow White in terms of literary value or child development or pedagogy? I don't know. I'm not being flip when I say that guessing the "point" of something like Snow White -- whichever text you're referring to -- means plumbing authorial intent. And when it comes to Snow White, which was at least one folktale before some version of it was set in print by the Brothers Grimm, it's nigh impossible to pin down the author(s), let alone what they might have wanted to accomplish. But teaching Snow White is a different thing. I think I'd point to Snow White as an example of pre-Shakespearean storytelling and especially as a pre-Shakespearean character. As far as I can tell, Snow White (the character) doesn't have any flaws (ways of thinking or acting that hurt herself or other people). Yes, she's gullible. Like, after some rando shows up with a magic bodice (that suffocates her) and a poisoned comb (that puts her in a coma), she's still credulous enough to take poisoned apples from strangers. But I want to say that the moral vision of Snow White never calls this out as a fault. (Sort of like how the Harry Potter book never call out Harry for not braining Draco Malfoy on day one -- the moral vision is something like "use violence when it's unavoidable," not "use violence preemptively.") And so Snow White -- or at least the versions I know -- aren't character-driven stories in the sense that we'd expect from a Shakespearean or post-Shakespearean text. There's no moment of revelation where SW is like "wait a minute. I've got to set some boundaries," and then struggles to distance herself from a toxic ex. You've also got to stretch to find SW's motivation. In a Shakespearean story (and in a lot of post-Shakespearean ones), characters want to be seen a certain way. That's what drives their actions from the beginning of their story to the end. You might make a case that Snow White wants to be seen as innocent, and I guess she is, but that's not really interesting. And it's not really there. From what I remember, SW doesn't have to strategize in order to appear innocent or beautiful. She just is. I think for modern readers, SW's stepmother (the witch queen who'll kill to be the hottest babe in the kingdom) is a lot more interesting. She's got everything you'd want from a Shakespearean (or post-Shakespearean) character: a desire to be seen a certain way, and habits of thinking and acting that hurt herself or other people. That said, she's less interesting because there's no risk of her ever changing her behavior. You'd have to add that element in if you were going Gregory Maguire her (i.e. rewrite the story from her perspective -- assuming that GM hasn't already done it).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 10, 2022 13:54
|
|
|
Earwicker posted:i'm curious what you think of her latest novel, if you've read it. it's a sort of weird metafictional spinoff of Station Eleven that is partly about pandemics and time travel and takes place in multiple periods, but its also very clearly her processing the whole experience of being the author of a popular novel about a pandemic during a pandemic. it also includes some characters/elements from The Glass Hotel so in a way it is sort of evolving into a multi-perspective epic though in a very different way It's on my list but I keep putting it off, mostly because I'm afraid it's going to be an exercise in self-indulgence from a writer who can really do better.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 10, 2022 13:57
|
|
|
Heath posted:The witch seems like she's been elevated to a more prominent spot in pop culture in recent years -- I haven't seen them, but there are entire plays and I believe a TV show specifically to develop her, aren't there? I was checking this out and found IMDb's page of Snow White movies. What a wild ride. quote:Grimm's Snow White (2012 Video) quote:Snow White: A Deadly Summer (2012) quote:Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961) quote:Snow White: The Fairest of Them All (2001 TV Movie) quote:Schneeweißrosenrot (1991) No surprises on that last one I guess.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2022 01:10
|
|
|
Also: I've just signed my employment letter and am now officially a Dean (along with being chair of our English department and the Honors Program). So if you're curious about what it's like to be an administrator in Higher Ed,. ask away.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2022 00:55
|
|
|
The Zombie Guy posted:Do you worry about friends asking for favours, and trying to take advantage of your position? I don't worry about it. My friends know me better than that. It helps that one of my best friends -- the best man at my wedding back when -- is now the President of our Board of Trustees. We've been working around that for maybe ten years and know how to steer a conversation clear of hairy topics. For my Faculty friends it's a little easier. The decisions I'm involved in are more structured and predictable. You can save yourself a lot of time by making rubrics for things like hiring, compensation, and so on, and then running them through your campus processes to make sure they're as equitable as the limitations of real life allow. Like, people aren't always going to like your decisions or even agree with them, but a focus on consultation and process will help everyone respect them. The Zombie Guy posted:Follow up; you seem like a cool and interesting Goon, so how would you feel about providing an awesome quote that I can put on the cover of the novel I'm writing? Glad to. Can (should) I read it first?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2022 13:44
|
|
|
The Zombie Guy posted:Yeah, I just have to write it first. I'm getting ready to start on one, too. IDK if anyone's interested in a writing accountability group (peer pressuring each other into making a weekly page count) but we might be able to make that work.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 16, 2022 20:09
|
|
|
PurpleButterfly posted:Hi! I have read this thread all the way through and find the whole thing absolutely fascinating. I also have many unfinished novels (Nanowrimo veteran since 2004), and I find that idea intriguing. Those kinds of groups really do work. At least my experience is that they work. I think I've found that you've got about three months to get through a manuscript. After that, the enthusiasm fades and you (I) end up dropping the project.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 21, 2022 01:16
|
|
|
dino. posted:Re: Snow White Could be. I think what counts as spice varies from time to time and form culture to culture. And it varies even now. Like, I have some close friends -- mainly professional computer touchers -- who look for technical world-building elements in a story. Like, what matters most in my friend Mark's fantasy reading is that the system of magic, whatever it is, is both consistent and described in a level of detail that makes an assessment of its consistency possible. I think the point is that we're at a cultural moment -- one that's lasted maybe 400 years -- where we've been chiefly interested in stories where characters undergo some process of self-discovery and change. That said, journeys of self-discovery and change didn't just spontaneously appear in our storytelling 400 years ago. They just acquired a new kind of prominence. And some kinds of characters -- characters who are principally acted on by external forces, for instance -- stopped being as interesting as they once were. Our focus kinda changed. We focus on the character, while storytellers at earlier moments focus on the worlds in which those characters live. But that's not an on and off kind of thing. My friend Mark is one of many readers who's at least as interested in worlds as he is in character. And so, yeah. There could have been a teller of Snow White who was intensely focused on that character's internal psychological journey -- same way that the story of Absalom is kinda like King David learning to take responsibility (i.e. David gives his army orders, but doesn't stick around to see them followed, and his son Absalom -- who is objectively a dipshit -- dies as a result). Anyway. The ways that earlier storytellers would strip down a story aren't the way we would strip it down. We generally focus on what characters want and how they try to get it, and focus even further on the ways that the characters ways of thinking and acting keep them from getting what they want. Earlier storytellers strip a story down to different elements, e.g. "and that's why things are the way they are now," or "and that's why you don't take apples from old ladies."
|
|
#
¿
Jul 21, 2022 02:27
|
|
|
The Black Stones posted:Just wanted to pop into the thread and say thanks. I came across a link a while back from another forum (can’t remember why) and saw your book “Shakespeare‘s Storytelling” being mentioned. I didn’t care for Shakespeare until I took a class on it in University and fell in love with the stories. I got my first job after finishing my education degree and will be teaching High School English and have to teach Shakespeare. I did it during a practicum but felt I could do better on trying to key into the students why the stories are so great and how they can see it in modern stories. The book has been instrumental at getting a better understanding at how to integrate that. I haven’t finished it (only on page 64 after two reading periods) but it’s already been a great help. It’s also just been a fascinating read from a personal perspective. Great job, I’m glad I picked it up. Thanks! I'm glad it's working for you. Just depending on how you want to use it, I've got assignments etc. that I can send your way.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 21, 2022 02:54
|
|
|
The Black Stones posted:Yeah. I’d be interested in checking it out at the very least. Do you have DM’s? I can send you my e-mail or something. Yeah, I've got DMs. Go hog wild.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2022 13:40
|
|
|
Abyss posted:On another note, did your recent book give you a good start for going up for Full Professor? I have 2 years until I'm able to go up for Full Librarian, and I'm just looking at how much I can realistically publish before then that's worth enough to my peers/external reviewers. It sure didn't hurt. I already had two books out, and I'm at a teaching college rather than an R1, so FP should have been a layup either way. If you're thinking timeline, having a book under contract is just about as good as having one in print, and it's much quicker. I spent about a year banging Storytelling around as a set of notes for an undergraduate Shakespeare class before I realized it would actually make a book. Once I was there, it only took about two weeks to get it under contract. I sent it to Palgrave, they said yes. Natch. But it took nearly two years (Jan '19-Feb '21) to go from contract to publication. Granted, covid happened in the interim, but two years is about the standard. A university press is likely to take even longer. And even for articles, turnaround time from acceptance to publication can be like 18 months. So if you've got two years, you're probably not going to see anything published before your portfolio is due unless you're unnaturally lucky. But you've got plenty of time to develop a book proposal and get it under contract, and plenty of time to get an article or two accepted. Definitely do not wait until your poo poo gets published before you go up for Full.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2022 14:08
|
|
|
Abyss posted:[...]Our guidelines are pretty specific, so as long as I can hit the number of publications I should be good to go. It's just convincing the rest of the Full Librarians/Archivists that I'm worthy enough for the promotion, which still feels like a popularity contest at this point. It can definitely be that, although popularity usually comes across in the, like, degree of enthusiasm expressed in the promotion minute. If you're lucky enough to have concrete, specific criteria for promotion you're in a good place. quote:On another note, as a Dean, do you prefer that faculty come directly to you for an issue or a proposal of a new idea, or would you rather have it filtered up through supervisors/assoc deans first? An open door policy can play merry hell with department politics. Your best rule as a boss in a multi-level system (as e.g. a dean or a division chair) is that anybody can come to you with an idea or an issue, as long as you're not the first person they come to about it. First: issues and complaints need to follow a process. That usually means that a complainant's first stop is a department chair or HR. That's important because you want to separate some kinds of responsibility (e.g. payscale decisions) from random exposure to unverified (and potentially prejudicial) information. I don't want to hear that Alice has accused Bob of sexual harassment. I want to hear about those and similar issues only when some investigative process has reached its conclusion. Second: A lot of people who work at Colleges are both smart and observant. Your Faculty are usually smart but blinkered. They'll have specific kinds of good ideas. Housekeeping, IT, Security, and Facilities, though -- they're the ones who are going to tell you how to turn your 22-seat lab into a 25, which offices the Physics department is just pretending to use, or that you should be renting your floral arrangements instead of buying them. I can't stress this enough: Facilities attracts people who are often very, very good at optimization, process improvement, and thinking through problems. If you're not talking to them you'll miss a lot. Anyway. You want to take ideas, but you don't want to be the first person someone takes an idea to. So if you're going to have an open door for ideas, ask people to come in pairs or teams. That way, everybody who has an idea has had it (a) sanity checked and (b) had to explain the idea to at least one other human being.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2022 02:36
|
|
|
CrypticFox posted:Since you've written a whole book about Shakespeare I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think there is limited room for new research on Shakespeare? There's only so much written by Shakespeare and we're never going to get any more, but it's been the focus of a vast amount of study for centuries. It depends on what you'd call "research." I don't mean that to be cagey. Good criticism is about people's relationships to the subject matter, not an objective or dispassionate review of the subject matter itself. One good example is James Shapiro's Shakespeare in a Divided America. You can say what you want about the concept -- like, I'm not sure the world needs another book that slaps a coat of Shakespeare over whatever problem of the day (e.g. love, management, existential angst) -- but it's a great example of a critic focusing on a relationship instead of on a body of historical evidence. (Also, James Shapiro wrote it so it's almost certainly really good.) More broadly: as ideas ascend in the popular consciousness, there's some demand for books that trace their history. Like, in 2055, academics and popular readers alike are going to be interested in how and why Indianapolis has 125-degree Summers or Silicon Valley is the new Atlantis. Most of the information in those books isn't going to be new. It's just going to be newly significant. There's another kind of research that is less critical but equally good, which is the ol' "debunk a baseless misunderstanding" book. Again, James Shapiro has a textbook example with Shakespeare and the Jews -- a whole book which (rightly) points out that the commonplace assumption about Jews in Shakespeare's England (i.e. that there weren't any) isn't in line with historical evidence. I guess what I'm saying is that, like, neither academic or popular writing exists to mine a factual body of content. Instead, it makes that content fresh and relatable to its audience and maybe conveys some degree of insight. If I were going to get all vague and hand-wavey, I'd say that life is complicated and art helps people make sense of it in ways that are emotionally and psychologically meaningful. Good criticism, academic or otherwise, is part of that sense-making process. And so there's always some demand for it. Shakespeare's plays might be mostly static, but the audience is a moving target. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Aug 15, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2022 16:57
|
|
|
Siivola posted:Hey, what's satire? How do I tell if a piece of British pulp scifi is a satire, or just happens to be about bad people doing bad things? OK. Satire is generally some kind of art that ridicules bad behavior. It usually does this ironically or sarcastically, by pretending to accept the ideas or practices it wants to question. A good modern example was The Colbert Report, where Stephen Colbert played a Bill O'Reilly-flavored host who took popular conservative ideas to their logical (but absurd) conclusions. Satires are also (usually) funny, and have parodic or farcical elements -- think South Park. And they can get surreal -- think Sorry to Bother You. But they can also involve a close and sophisticated inspection of social morals and practices that come close to ranting. Think George Carlin or Lenny Bruce. Technically, satire doesn't have to be comedy. But it usually is. The thing is, there's no single formal element that makes something a satire. It doesn't have to have wordplay or poop jokes or a laugh track. You can argue that a text was intended to be satirical. And you can also argue that a specific audience will receive or interpret something satirically. But satire is all about connections that an audience makes between the thing they're seeing or reading and the larger world in which they live and so, like irony, it's too dependent on socially fluid relationships to define in the same way that you define e.g. a sonnet or a haiku. quote:I'm asking because I'm reading a Warhammer forty thousand novel and, well, I could see why this setting is a hit in some right wing nerd circles. Yeah. I've had blessedly little exposure to Warhammer but I think it falls into the same bucket as Starship Troopers (the Heinlein novel, not the Verhoeven movie). If it were satire it'd be funny.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2022 13:51
|
|
|
Fuschia tude posted:Do you read the film as a satire? 100%. Lord knows what Verhoeven started with as a script, but e.g. the propaganda films do a pretty good job of ironizing the pro-war and what I'll call antidemocratic elements of the novel (which is as humorless even by Heinlein's standards). It's walks the same line as his Robocop.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2022 20:06
|
|
|
Heath posted:The main difference to me is that if something is "accidentally" satirical that it stems from either a lack of an understanding or a deliberate misrepresentation of the ideas they're trying to explore -- like anti-drug PSAs that present a sort of catastrophic view of things like weed, cigarettes, alcohol, unidentified "pills," etc. that don't align with lived experience or reality, that sort of thing -- whereas genuine or effective satire seeks to represent a deeper truth via an absurd extrapolation of an idea because they do have a deeper understanding of the idea they're satirizing. That is, satire is an absurd-but-logical conclusion of an idea, where accidental satire is logical-but-absurd. If you buy into the logic that smelling weed drugs will instantaneously ruin your life, then the conclusions the PSAs draw about their harm are logical -- but they are absurd in the face of reality. If it helps, the usual term for what you're calling "accidental satire" is camp as in campy, which is something that's basically appealing or funny because the audience finds it ridiculous. The broad meaning of camp is media that's so conspicuously banal, mediocre, or ostentatious that is has a perversely sophisticated appeal. That kind of effect can be produced either intentionally or not. The piece to read on this is Sontag's Notes on Camp (1964); the upshot of that essay is that camp is characterized by a kind of frivolous, naive, middle-class pretentiousness -- exactly the kind of positioning that makes mental hygiene and anti-drug PSAs seem so wild. She uses the term naive camp to distinguish accidentally-interesting media like anti-drug PSAs from media that are more self aware.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2022 20:27
|
|
|
Earwicker posted:i havent seen the movie or read the book but the general idea of "service gaurantees citizenship" and variations thereof have been fairly common in a lot of societies so i dont see why that would immediately be read as satire? you can literally become a us citizen through military service, and there are many other countries where some form of service is a mandatory aspect of citizenship. Well, "service guarantees citizenship" is a joke in the US, since it doesn't. Vets get denied citizenship for reasons that would seem preposterous to anyone who hasn't been on the receiving end of military bureaucracy. It took Jim Pawlukiewicz 50 years, and he didn't do anything especially wrong. (He finally got his citizenship a couple years ago). Here are a couple stories about Paul Canton, who's a Gulf war vet from Florida. Surprise, surprise, his state government isn't doing jack for him: https://www.wesh.com/article/central-florida-military-veteran-denied-us-citizenship-again/33397860 https://www.ocala.com/story/special/2020/07/28/us-marine-veteran-from-marion-denied-citizenship-again/112694992/ And here's Roman Sabal, a Marine Corps Vet who couldn't even get back into the country for his citizenship interview: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/453225-marine-corps-veteran-denied-entry-to-us-for-citizenship-interview/ A quick Google will find you stories of vets who earn honorable discharges but get denied citizenship because of things like traffic violations or minor drug charges. Basically, programs like MAVNI are expedited pathways to citizenship rather than guarantees, and -- in a move that should surprise nobody -- recruiters appear to be dishonest about this. This is a longstanding issue and gets a lot of press in some circles. So I have, like, zero doubt that "service guarantees citizenship" in Troopers is a targeted line.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2022 16:43
|
|
|
Zeniel posted:[...] I'd call that parody. Although parody and satire are a lot alike in that they involve a perceptive and ironic imitation of something, satire generally does this as social or cultural criticism. Traditional (read: Horation or Juvenalian) satires also include recognizable people or personality types. So a satirical, IDK, zombie movie might have some Karen run out into her front yard with an AR-15 because she thinks there's a Black Lives Matter march about to get so close to her house that she could justify opening fire. But then the marchers turn out to be zombies, Karen gets eaten, and the cops start arresting everyone whose skin is darker than a paper bag. That's different from a movie that ironically repeats the tropes or conventions associated with a genre of film, although there are places where things get blurry. The second you allude to Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Get Out or a million other films you're going to produce a movie that reads like a political statement even if that's not what you intended.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2022 00:59
|
|
|
rollick posted:Do you have a general approach for reading and understanding "difficult" texts? Taking it line by line, or reading around the cultural context, or identifying the key terms, or anything like that? Or is it just a case of banging your head against the wall long enough for it to crack apart? Generally, generally, I think you'll take your best shot with a text by doing three things: 1) Being comfortable with uncertainty. It's OK to read something and not get it. That true at the level of any individual sentence, chapter, paragraph, or entire text. In a lot of novels, artsy and not, confusion is part of the process a writer means to produce. it's a way of raising questions that you (the writer) promise to answer. Like, think of the first few pages of a SF staple like Dune. There's spaceships, a witch, some kind of test, and this bizarro feudal politics. None of that gets explained, right? You don't know poo poo from the jump. Ditto tons of other books. Blood Meridian or Riddley Walker. All you're getting is the promise of something interesting to be named later. 2) Re-reading. Sometimes something that happens later in a text clarifies or activates something that happens earlier. Like, you don't know which parts of a text are important until you know which parts it picks up later. I'm not one to re-read a sentence until I get it, but I will sure as hell re-read the beginning of a book with the end in mind. 3) Looking at relationships. If a text is designed intentionally (as most "difficult" texts are) there is some relationship between its different parts or dimensions. If you've got, like, an artsy novel, there might be stream of consciousness sections that at first don't seem to belong to any named character but (for instance) turn out to belong to a character who's revealed later, or an inanimate object, or someone's alternate personality, or whatever. A lot of famously abstruse theory (Derrida) is the same way. So you want to approach the text as though the effect it has on you is intentional. Figure it out all at once, like how an owl eats a mouse.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2022 14:09
|
|
|
Heath posted:I've had friends in the past who get very frustrated with texts that are not 100% explicit in saying what they mean. If they don't immediately understand it, it's not that perhaps they weren't meant to, it was a failure on the part of the writer to be clear and concise. Like they got nonfictional report writing stuck in their head as "this is what all writing is, period, irrespective of genre or intention." Yeah. I've had friends and students who were just, like, violently against uncertainty. Like, they couldn't understand how not knowing something could be part of a rewarding relationship with a story. I try to respect it when I see it, but I'm also like who are you? I constantly suspect that I'm talking to some kind of very advanced performance artist prankster. It's like people who think in words. As in, I'm told that some people's actual thoughts take the form of an inner monologue. Like an episode of Scrubs I guess. I'm willing to let the whole idea go uncontested given (a) a vacuum of refutational evidence and (b) a polite need to overtly respect the truth of their experience. But I can't bring myself to really believe it. You might as well tell me a bird can fly to the moon.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2022 02:55
|
|
|
greatZebu posted:That was my snap reaction too. I do usually produce a stream of words in my head when I'm thinking, which creates the illusion that the thoughts and the words are the same thing. But on reflection, the words are a byproduct of the thoughts. As soon as I try to write down the exact words that make up any complicated thought, the gap between the words and the thought becomes obvious. Yeah, I sometimes get words and letters as part of this, like, jumbalaya of confederated impressions. Sort of like a rebus, but more like: 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2022 21:16
|
|
|
Eason the Fifth posted:What are your plans to navigate AI writing, like essays from ChatGPT? That's a really good question. There's a kind of response to ChatGPT that's like "how do I keep students from using it in my class?" That leads down a rabbit hole of improved plagiarism detection etc. etc. And I think that's fundamentally wrongheaded. It's like the "don't use Wikipedia as a source" mantra from the early 2000s, or the "no calculators in math class" from my childhood. You've got to understand the technology (and other resources) that students have, and help them learn how to use those things effectively. That's another way of saying that If students can use collaboration or technology to cheat, I'm not designing my assignments very well. I'm likely assessing the wrong things, too. What I want to do is prepare students for the world of research and writing that they're likely to encounter after graduation -- not keep 2021 trapped in amber. And so my assignments generally take the form of forward-looking assessments. That is, I think of some context in which students might apply what they've learned in my class, and build assignments around that. So one of my favorites is something like "My publisher is building an online repository of teaching materials -- videos, powerpoints, quizzes, and so on -- around [whichever book we're reading]. Create something for that repository." For advanced writing students, I like "Choose one of these publications and write an article for it." So my first instinct on ChatGPT is to (a) allow its use on any of these types of assignments and (b) require its use on at least one or two per course. I'm not going to say that in (for instance) 10 years, a whole lot of content generation will involve training an AI, but students ought at least prepare for the possibility, And so my first thought is using some variations of: 1) Use ChatGPT to produce an educational resource, (like an article, game, or slideshow) and then revise that draft manually in order to improve it. 2) Use ChatGPT to produce media that scores at or above X level on the following rubric, and then write a short response in which you explain how you did that. 3) Use ChatGPT to produce a product, and [some other tool] to produce a similar product, and write a response comparing them. Stuff like that. The reason I'm not using ChatGPT assignments right now is that it goes down too often. I'm not going to require students to use a tool when I can't reasonably guarantee access to it. But I'm also happy to encourage students use ChatGPT and similar tools to create whatever materials for class. If a student's creating an educational card game, for instance, they ought absolutely use an AI to produce the graphics.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2023 03:45
|
|
|
Eason the Fifth posted:Thanks for the great answer. I haven't taught in almost ten years now, but I remember building out some of my assignments with the advice you posted a long time ago in the thread -- back then, I think it was about using wikis as a collaborative tool for knowledge management. (I ended up doing a dollar-menu version of that idea with a class-wide Google doc that kept notes from everyone for everyone to use as a reference, and my students loved it). Oh yeah. I remember doing that. I haven't taught a class that would benefit from that in a while (actually, that's not true: it would have been a really good move in last year's Haunted House stories). One thing that sort of stymied this is that our campus hasn't yet adopted any kind of collaborative document platform -- like, we're not a Google Campus, etc. -- but IT also insists that we keep just about everything we do for classes on college-managed platforms. So there's a lot of internal friction on those specific kinds of classroom projects.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2023 14:32
|
|
|
Blue Labrador posted:Are you ever too old to get a Master's degree? I don't think so. I went to graduate school with people in their 50s and 60s who were doing it for the love. They were generally well-adjusted and happy people so I'm not going to take a dump on them. At the same time, graduate school can be an expensive hobby. Even if you're going for free (like on a TAship) you're trading a real income for a teaching stipend. quote:Every former professor I've talked to has tried to hammer home the fact that academia won't feed mouths, but, like... I'm not interested in having a family, and I have no grand delusions that I'm going to be a millionaire. Is academia so depressing that you straight up think it isn't worth pursuing? Academics are professionally miserable. Sad but true. I say this with love, but I have never met another population of professionals who were so invested in their own unhappiness. Also, I hear a lot of complaints from my fellow academics that are a little too based in entitlement. Like "I would make more as a high school teacher," which is (a) often untrue and (b) a much more difficult job. That issue is separate from what I'ma call the professional viability of a master's degree. There's some point in thinking about a degree in terms of dollars in and dollars out -- like, "will this thing pay for itself over X years?" You can sharpen your pencil on that, and depending on your tolerance for risk, your own financial goals, etc. that may be the end of the conversation. There are better ways to make a return on e.g. $40K than getting an M(F)A in English or Theater. But there are at least three other reasonable ways to think about education: 1) You can pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Some people want to become an expert just for the purposes of becoming an expert. Totally valid. 2) You can pursue an education to find yourself: to figure out who you are and what matters to you. That can mean finding communities, traveling, joining clubs and organizations, and so on. 3) You can pursue an education to support yourself and your community. There are lots of courses of study that are socially necessary even if they aren't strictly profitable: teaching, social work, and so on. And people often pursue them because they feel some obligation to use their talents for the benefit of others. These aren't exclusive, right? You can have some reasons that pull from (1) and some from (3). I think the important thing is to understand why you're doing what you're doing; otherwise, you're gonna end up confused and unhappy when your expectations don't line up with reality. quote:If you're still at it, why? I love learning for learning's sake, and I like to think that's still worth it on some level. I'm still "at" being an academic. I'm a Dean now, and that's fine -- I still teach a few courses every years, and there's a lot of reward in doing administrative work that (for instance) makes it easier for other people to teach great courses. It's a lot more work than just being a professor, but I've also found that I need, like, a higher degree of structured challenge than a professorship provides.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2023 14:47
|
|
|
Teriyaki Koinku posted:On a similar note, is it possible for AI writing tools to be beneficial for students rather than just a plagiarism tool? So I think you could do some really interesting teaching work in a standardized, sandboxed environment like Quillbot if it has a robust instructor toolkit. Like just for instance: 1) What if the only way a student could produce a citation was by selecting (or copy/pasting) text from their browser? Not only would you eliminate the all-too-common problem of fabricated sources, but you'd also be able to get relatively easy data on which sources your students were reading for different projects. 2) What if the instructor end of this had some analytics? That way, you could see (for instance) what decisions a student made during the drafting process, or check their drafting speed, or see how they actually build their piece of writing (outlining vs. throwing words on the page, for instance). You could do a lot of process work that isn't really possible in a system where the only thing you really get to see are completed student projects. I'll bet a dollar you could also more effectively spot LD students by looking for cues in their composition process. 3) What if an instructor could set the level, degree, or style of the editorial suggestions the environment offers? So, for instance, you could set the auto-suggestions to target a 4th-grade reading level, or 8th-grade, or 12th-grade. That kind of tooling would be a huge boon in more advanced writing classes where you're asking students to zero in on a specific audience rather than just slap down a bunch of words that demonstrate an understanding of content. 4) What if you could deploy some advanced templates that took students from premise to project? Like, They Say I Say has a pile of these that would be really useful for helping students develop their first article (things like "the balance of research says __________, but the specific assumption that __________ is unsupported by research"). So these kinds of tools have a lot of potential when you think of them as teaching environments rather than strictly assistive technologies. Think of how Engineering courses use e.g. MATLAB. In the same way, I'm not really concerned that students will fail to develop essential skills by using assistive tech. I like to say that student=person+tool, meaning that meaningful skill development is predicated on which technology or technologies you decide to allow. And, as a rule, you therefore want to stay current. Assistive writing tech isn't going away, and so you probably want to (a) learn how to make it an effective part of your teaching and (b) help students learn to use it in a way that will serve them in whatever they do after graduation.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2023 21:53
|
|
|
Qualia posted:that is an astonishing answer Hopefully that's the good "astonishing" and not the "astonishing" my wife uses to talk about how my suits fit.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2023 14:03
|
|
|
12Apr1961 posted:[...] This led me to wonder - did Shakespeare do anything interesting with "comic relief" characters in otherwise serious plays? Was he just following the standards of the time, or was he doing something clever or ground-breaking with them? What Shakespeare did with his comic relief characters is a kind of subset of what he did with characters more generally. Shakespearean characters generally want validation. Maybe they want to be valued, or maybe they want to be seen in a certain way (as a good son or a good King, for instance). And they also begin their stories by thinking and acting in ways that hurt themselves and others. A Shakespearean character might want to be valued by being seen as the smartest, most sensitive person in the room, and try to accomplish that by making everyone else look intellectually and emotionally obtuse. That's Jaques in As You Like It. And that's funny in a painful kind of way. You get this guy mooning over wounded deer, correcting everybody whenever they say anything, and the harder he tries to live up to his own expectations the more unlikable he becomes. In a story like Jaques's, one of two things happens: Jaques either learns to behave differently -- maybe he realizes that he can be valued more for his honesty than his pretentiousness -- or he doesn't. In J's case, he doesn't. In pre-Shakespearean plays, you can't really talk about character development in those terms. If characters change, they adopt a new philosophy vis-a-vis fate or God. Irredeemable characters get their comeuppance. But they don't look at their own behavior as a problem that needs solving. And so comic characters in pre-Shakespearean stories generally exist to set up a trick, and the story of the play is really the story of whether the trick succeeds or fails. Like, there are tons of stories where some young dude tricks a greedy old man out of his much younger wife, right? Chaucer is full of them. That story begins when the young man shows up (or when the much younger wife does) and ends YM and YF bang. There's no add-on where the greedy old man is like "huh. Looks like I need to change my behavior if I want to be happy" or the YW or YM is like "wow. I've hurt a lot of people and (A) I need to change or (B) I'ma keep on truckin'."
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2023 18:41
|
|
|
Earwicker posted:in 1891 The OED confirms that -- no surprise. But dick was much earlier slang for some dude you were banging. Check this 1654 example from New Brawle: quote:You can..lie like a logge by me all Night, and when you rise, turn your back-side towards me, as though I should kiss that: out thou unnaturall Knave thou; thou feeble dick thou. And in this 1707 example from Wit and Mirth: quote:For when Country Gillians do play with their Dicks, Then London must Father their Bastards. So, on one hand, I'm inclined to respect the idea that "dick" for "penis" originated c. 1890. On the other, it's a little surprising that a synecdotal or metonymic use of the 1654 "dick" (lover) took 150 years to show up in print. But the evidence is what it is. Anyway: An even earlier usage is "Dick" for "ordinary guy," as in "every Tom, Dick, and Harry." That usage shows up in 1553: quote:Desperate Dickes borowes nowe and then againste the owners wille, all that euer he hathe. I'm tempted to think that this is the most direct ancestor of the (1905) "dick" for "private detective" -- meaning something like "an ordinary person working in the capacity of a private detective," rather then e.g. a non-civilian investigator. “dick, n.¹, sense 1.b”. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, July 2023, <https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2812541297>
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2023 14:17
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:[...] I'm curious if you could speak to the notion of motivation as you conceive it, specifically the necessary element that in Shakespearean work motivation is about how a character "wants to be seen". I'd like to argue that while it's possible to read this framing into each character's motivations, this seems to plausibly be an artifact of the medium: that this is a stageplay from a period where, in stageplays, the character's motivation is expressed verbally to an audience, sometimes directly. Could you provide any counterexamples from other plays? I apologize, I expect you've fielded this question before. So let's start here. In general, pre-Shakespearean stories had characters with external motivations: they want to achieve a specific, tangible thing for reasons that (a) aren't psychologically or emotionally complicated and that (b) are assumed by the story or text to be self-evidently important. In a morality play like Everyman, for instance, Everyman is looking for salvation and simply needs to learn how to attain it. And the whole process is factually-based and emotionally straightforward. He learns that good works are the way to Heaven and that's that. You can still see external motivations at work stories that aren't character-driven i.e. in which the focus isn't on a character's process of self-discovery and change. Indiana Jones is already authentically Indiana Jones. James Bond is already authentically James Bond. These characters don't learn to become better versions of themselves (or significantly fail in the attempt) and so the audience doesn't need to be told who they aspire to be. They are already who they aspire to be. Their stories focus on what they do and not who they become by doing it. So there's a whole category of externally-motivated characters -- not in Shakespeare, but in stories both ancient and modern -- whose motivations aren't easy to express in terms of "how they want to be seen." They're out keeping the Ark of the Covenant away from the Nazis or keeping Goldfinger from doing whatever the gently caress Goldfinger does (blowing up Fort Knox?) and their stories are mostly about how they get it done. And so a "how they want to be seen" motivation isn't strictly an artifact of the medium. You can have a perfectly good play or a movie that features an essentially static and externally-motivated character (say, Sherlock Holmes) who gets what he wants (solving the crime), and that motivation doesn't need to have a psychological or emotional dimension. All that said: when a character is internally-motivated -- they aspire to become something that they aren't already, or discover that they need to change in order to become who their world needs them to be -- some version of "how I want to be seen" motivation is pretty much inescapable. A story needs to tell the audience which direction a character's gonna move in (or try to move in) and so -- from the jump -- it'll tell you how a character wants to be seen and why they aren't already seen that way. quote:Also are you all right with being identified as the author of this text in the goonmade books and "I just finished a book" threads? That's fine with me.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2024 22:38
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Thanks, that's a very helpful explanation, and clarifies for me the relationship between the internally motivated character and the nature of shakespeare's contributions. FYI the review's over here. Thanks for the review!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2024 17:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 07:18 |
|
|
Silver2195 posted:I think Brainworm has said that he doesn’t like the concept of “theme” very much, because it’s rather reductive. I've said that before, and I probably even called theme "reductive." What I should have said is that theme is imprecise. As I understand it a theme is an abstract idea or concept that is repeated throughout a story. It's different from a refrain in that a refrain is a phrase or set of words repeated verbatim (like "so it goes" in Slaughterhouse-Five), while a theme can comprise a set of phrases that are all in orbit around the same idea. Just for instance: Coco is in heavy rotation in our house right now. (If you haven't seen Coco it's a movie about a kid from a family of shoemakers who wants to become a musician, and in the process gets trapped in the land of the dead on Cinco de Mayo). And Coco has several themes. Family is one. Music is another. And they are all expressed in different ways by the various things that characters say and do, i.e. characters say things about music and family, but also e.g. play music and differently comport themselves toward their families. The problem with "theme" as it's commonly used is that all it denotes is repetition. This idea, music or family or whatever, comes up again and again. And as a student or a critic, that's not much use. Ideas get repeated for really different reasons. Just for instance: in Coco, music is a symbol. The characters think about music in different ways, and these differences help describe how the characters are different from one another. Ernesto de la Cruz, for instance, uses music to impress the public and get famous. Hector uses music to support his family (and especially his kids and grandchildren). Miguel (ultimately) uses music to connect with his family and tell their story. Family, on the other hand, is what I'd call a moral vision -- a sort of baseline statement about how characters in Coco ought behave toward one another. All these characters (Miguel, Hector, Mama Imelda) eventually arrive at the same moral conclusion about family: family trumps individuals (or "supporting your family is more important than your individual bullshit"). Mama Imelda, for instance, drops her "no music" rule when it becomes clear that enforcing it will hurt her husband (Hector) and great-grandson (Miguel); Miguel, for his part, abandons his dream of being a musician when he realizes that sticking to it will hurt Hector and Coco. And so on. So you've got two ways that a "theme" gets used in Coco, and they're both really different: one (music, the symbol) tells us how characters are different a the beginnings of their stories. The other (family, a moral vision) tells us how they become alike at the end. And so calling both of these things themes is kind of a weird stopping point. It identifies something formal about Coco but doesn't say anything about how that thing shapes the story or why it's there in the first place. It's sort of like describing a poem's rhyme and meter. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not so important that high school teachers ought to emphasize it. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Feb 16, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2024 22:30
|
|