Days Of Future Posts

[koganbot]

So many days, so few posts.

Look, I'm really a comment-thread guy more than a blog guy, but making supposedly correct triage decisions not to engage in various Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, etc. convos has left me w/out much public presence, while creating a lot of "notes" for posts here I should "write."

Not in the order they will, could, might, or won't appear:

--Grand opening for the hallway-classroom link and tag. I created them several months ago but have so far never properly introduced or promoted them. Perhaps there will be a banner and balloons.

--Tribal 2, the strong reasons people probably have for using the term "tribal" in a positive sense, like, regarding themselves even (which still doesn't mean you should use the word if you intend to engage in actual for real smart thinking, esp. pertaining to current political and social grouping(s)).

--Tribal 3, the strong reasons people like Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Ezra Klein, and a vast ever-multiplying et al. including probably you use the term "tribal" as a pejorative to denote one of the many things that fuck up and make stupid the current political etc. discourse (which still doesn't mean you or Krugman, DeLong, Klein, et al. should use the word if you intend to engage in actual for real smart thinking regarding current political and social grouping(s)). Paraphrases Upton Sinclair.

--Dead Lester 3. Yes, everyone is clamoring for this. </sarcasm>

--Dead Lester 4. One of the Dead Lester posts will be about why I think Paul Nelson never adequately responded to Irwin Silber. This post will be better received than the other one.

--Replication, in regard to understanding the utterances etc. of human beings other than oneself and perhaps other than yourself, too. This will be fun, I hope. It may refer back to the Mark Sinker adjunct thread that for a couple of years now I've been promising to add more to. The post may or may not refer to The Crisis Of Replication in the so-called social sciences, though that part of the post may be less fun.

--HyunA.

--Oh My Girl wtf. ("Windy Day.")

--Cahiers du Cinema, Manny Farber. This post will not be as interesting as you were anticipating.

--Who is our most distant animal relative? This post will not answer the posed question, instead will be a meta meditation on taking sides, developing a rooting interest, etc., in which I will try to endeavor not to take sides or root for anything, except maybe will root for rooting and for taking sides, despite my failure to take sides, or root, in the post, unless I do take sides.

--That political discourse appears to batter through, demolish, and utterly flatten the wall between hallway and classroom while being the stupidest, most screwed-up, and destructive discourse in the world would seem to create a challenge to my assertion that (e.g.) rockcrits are being audacious and intellectually strong in not honoring the boundary between hallway and classroom. (The previous sentence leans heavily on the phrases "appears to" and "would seem to.")

--Is there a way for mathematics to finally click for me so that I might someday actually get it and enjoy it? (See the middle of Dave's post, here.)

--Yardbirds raveups.

--Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm." (Inspired by Edd Hurt's excellent comments on the "Antirockism Is Rockism" thread.)

--Interesting that Mark says "even the Ramones" (all bands being coalitions) given that the Ramones may be the epitome of a Bowie-Roxy-like "Oh oh oh, look look look, see the disparate elements we are combining," e.g., "See us do power chords with Ronettes melodies" and "Watch us do Dylan existential angst as if it's standard teen heartbreak" or "Watch us do Stones confronting-the-inner-fascist as dumb three-chord la-la-la" etc. etc. (This is a passage from a 4,000-word, rambling, very poorly integrated email I wrote and never sent because I hadn't finished it or remotely come close to figuring out what I was saying; perhaps a readable 1,500 words can be extracted from this. Potentially featuring Earth, Wind & Fire and the Pointer Sisters, who actually appear on a Kantner-Slick song.)

--Is "Only The Good Bits" as bad as "Too Many Bad Bits"? (Perhaps in regard to Paul Morley, and perhaps a continuation of PBS Revisited.)

--Why do we remember the past but not the future?

--Truffaut and Kogan (more of PBS Revisited).

--Wittgenstein doesn't buy into the dichotomy between particulars and universals. (This probably can be applied to the replication thing, now that I think about it.)

--Copernicus.

--I'm a comment-thread guy. I practically invented the comment thread. So why are even the good comment threads so killingly mediocre? Why is the Internet such a disappointment?

Comments

Re: whom

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Still mulling over your other posts, but funnily enough was about to come over here and post this very article. Definitely hit my "I don't like doing this on Facebook" buttons.

But I also hesitated to post it -- Facebook has its own problems, but to the extent that there are problems, they aren't problems that the internet (or whatever) has created. That is, the issue isn't really about transparency or privacy, since sure, Facebook might suck, but it isn't the only thing out there, and the advent of the technologies that include Facebook have undeniably created more promise for connection, not less.

Rockcrit has its offline "private" or "non-public" or whatever channels, always has, and the internet has undoubtedly made that process better, probably without any negative "side effects" at all (if the alternative was, like, letter-writing -- you can still do that, too).

I don't know how you could argue that internet communication hasn't improved the ability for one critic to connect with another one, and then a third one, while the first one sees that, too. And it's not like you couldn't have a good intellectual conversation entirely through *email*, say, with a list of a hundred or even a thousand people, and due to the nature of your choice of medium, not feel so "public" about it, if "public" is a problem.

And if you can allow for that part -- that "yes, an email with two or five or a hundred people on it counts as a sustained intellectual conversation," and that it didn't *have* to draw in passersby, say, or set the world to rights by showing everyone the results of that conversation (or something -- is that part of it?), then we're back at your thornier piece of the problem, which isn't just that people won't sustain the conversation, but that they can't.

I mean, I still think that there's some kinda Conversation Meltdown pie chart with:
--"don't know how"
--"know how, but can't because [reasons]"
-- "I thought I was already doing this, but it doesn't really seem to count in Frank's definition -- what are we supposed to be doing again?"

Not sure how big all those slices are. But it's probably true that the "don't know how" slice is the most difficult one -- it's the one where you have to do all that classroomy shit without abiding the classroom/hallway split -- so maybe I'm just focusing on all the easier slices because I just don't want to deal with the hard stuff. (Don't know how to deal with the hard stuff? Maybe.)

I do think reviving posts on this subject will help deal with that third slice, though -- what is everyone supposed to be doing and how is it that they're not doing it already, even when they think they are?

Re: whom

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I had a thought the other day about "classroomy shit but not The Classroom" -- my students HATE the stuff we do that is the most classroom/hallway-busting (even if it doesn't really accomplish that goal) -- getting into what actually matters to them and letting them do it in the way they want to do it, but expecting some of the rigor they're expected to apply to "the subject matter" even though what we're doing isn't, strictly speaking, "the subject matter." Except to the extent that in the hallway, everything is always the subject already, hence there is no "subject." (Don't really want to mangle up my teaching observations with your metaphorical landscape here. I know that's not always the most productive way to apply it; it's just where my head's usually at.)

What my students usually want to do is pure hallway; but what they believe they SHOULD do, or are supposed to be doing in school, is pure classroom. So first choice: pure hallway. Second choice: pure classroom (this surprised me a little, but it makes sense). Third choice: Dressing up the hallway as the calssroom (as when, e.g., a Jeopardy review game is secretly just an excuse to hoot and holler and gossip and sing and not learn things about what you're supposed to be learning about). Fourth choice: Dressing up the classroom as the hallway (this is just watered-down classroom, and it's usually when students wonder why they can't just pick the hallway or the classroom). I don't know that they really have choices of what they'd like to do in school that doesn't abide classroom/hallway. They don't think that these things should "count" as school.

Employing the practice and deliberation and care that the classroom demands to everything outside of it (*potentially* doing that, anyway -- not that you have to, but that you can and will) is uniquely difficult, I think, when you grew up inside the split.

An imperfect metaphor: when I learned jazz piano, after 15 years of classical training, I was really stuck on how to do it right, since "doing it right" was EASY in classical, was a series of accomplishments achieved with the right practice, more or less. But in jazz you had to do all that technical stuff and also be COOL. You could do everything right, study and practice and all that, and still sound like a dork, still have no hairstyle to show for it. ('Course you needed a hairstyle in classical, too, and I had one. My problem was always with the deliberation and practice, not with the hairstyle. In jazz, my problem was BOTH. I wasn't great at the deliberation and practice, but I also needed a lot more hairstyle to not sound like a goober, and even once I had a hairstyle, people could still make fun of it and they wouldn't be wrong.)