jameswharris

A Failure to Express Myself

How often in life do you get an idea that you can’t express verbally or in writing? Often a flash of insight will feel whole and obvious, but like dreams, when you try to explain them their logic falls apart. Expressing one’s thoughts is hard. Finding words to explain how you feel is even harder. Whether talking with your soul mate, best friend, or writing an essay for a bunch of unknown and unseen strangers, putting the exact words together is major work. It takes persistence.

How often have you not said anything rather than struggle to find the words? How often have you seen a fantastic movie that moved you at a very deep level, but when your friends asked you about it, all you could say was, “I loved it.”

That happens to me all the time. And since I blog I’m always trying to express an idea that feels obvious to me but one I fail to give whole to my readers, or even to myself when I read what I’ve written months later, after I’ve forgotten the original inspiration.

What we have here is a failure to communicate, as a line in an old movie goes.

Friday I read a series of articles in Scientific American about new educational techniques and my initial feeling was a kind of revulsion. I immediately jotted down some notes, and yesterday I wrote an essay about how I felt. The results aren’t what I intended. That essay was too generalized. If I tried again, how could I approach it differently?

The first essay doesn’t convey the revulsion of my initial reaction. I had A Clockwork Orange kind of image of educators forcing kids to learn. I imagined teaching machines that literally forced data into children’s minds, overstuffing their little heads until they were ready to puke words. At what point does K-12 education become cruel and unusual punishment, or even brainwashing?

Part of my initial reaction was to ask: Are we requiring kids to learn too much?

The secondary reaction to that initial reaction is: What is enough education? What information should everyone have at immediate recall to make them a good and useful citizen?

Another part of my reaction is personal experience. I read a lot of books. I’ve read thousands of books, and tens of thousands of essays and watched thousands of documentaries, and one of the things I feel at 61 is I haven’t processed that information very efficiently, and maybe learning about reality could be more systematic and concise.

We can never know everything there is to know. Not even close. But K-12 and undergraduate curriculums try awful hard to give students a good approximation of all knowledge. And part of my gut reaction to those articles in Scientific American was a criticism of not how we teach, but what we teach. But to get into that topic would require writing a book.

I guess the feeling I wanted to communicate whole about my reaction to what I read was this: Can our education system teach more by teaching less? Can’t we teach kids to be self-educators, to become highly efficient autodidactics that are hungry to learn on their own? Shouldn’t we reevaluate what the standard curriculum should be so that it’s a toolkit for learning and not a vast database?

JWH – 7/24/13

How Much Education Can Our Heads Hold?

As far back as I can remember, the United States has been in a state of educational crisis. You’d figure by now educators would know exactly how much stuff we can squeeze into a student’s head, and the best methods for cramming all that knowledge in quickly and efficiently. Since we hear so much about dropout factories and the failure to produce enough qualified students to meet the needs of our technologically evolving society, I have to assume pedagogy is a colossal failure, but the truth is we’re smarter than ever. I’d even say the dumb kids are smarter than the dummies of the past.

The problem is we want to put more data in brains that haven’t gotten any bigger in the last million years. Urban legends claim we only use five percent of our brains, but scientists know that’s not true. It doesn’t take much living in our modern rat races to fill those suckers up.

Scientific American has produced a special report, Learning in the Digital Age for its August issue, but you can read it all by following the link. It appears large corporations and wealthy philanthropists want to develop computers that instruct students and monitor their progress so computer programs can automatically adapt teaching methods on the fly, and thus constantly improve the spoon feeding of young minds. Sounds painful to me, and makes me glad I’m not a kid in school.

Remember the movie The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves, who plays Neo, is taught new skills via a jack in the back of his head? Well, these teaching machines are essentially trying to do the same thing via the eyes and ears. Want to know Calculus? Sit down at this machine and watch and respond.

Here’s my question: How much can we learn? The storage space in our brains is finite. Comprehension is more than recording facts. But let’s imagine we have a machine that is the perfect teacher, one that completely understands the student, and can feed a kid, byte by byte, the data they need. Let’s also imagine that we want to teach kids Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Algebra II, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statistics and Number Theory. In The Matrix that might have taken a couple of hours, but that was a fantasy. How long should it take to cram in all the math skills we think the average 21^st century kid should know?

I had through Calculus I in college, but I never really used any math after my last test, other than ordinary dollar processing and to take the GRE. As far as I know all my Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus, Statistical knowledge is gone. Should we waste time packing information into brains that won’t be used later?

What is the basic dataset that every citizen of planet Earth should possess? I believe we should be striving to define the essential basic knowledge, rather than develop techniques for squeezing massive amounts of education into little minds quickly and cheaply. And to be honest, much of the furor over education is about cost. I think a lot of new theories about education are inspired by reducing the costs of K-12 schooling, or by companies that want to get a piece of ever expanding educational expenditures.

Then there is the battle over science versus religion. The faithful know a good liberal education equals the eroding of faith. If we perfect teaching machines to mentor K-12 kids from ignorance to scientific enlightenment would we mandate their use?

Everyday I live with the regrets of what I haven’t learned. Each night as I drift off to sleep I wish for more time for reading and contemplation, thinking I’m getting close to achieving the general unified theory of everything. If I could only find time to read another thousand books, things would make sense, but hell I know that’s not true.

I think we should be teaching something different, something less head filling. I think we should teach how to learn, how to research, how to concentrate, how to write, how to stick to a task until it’s done, and then let kids go to work at age 12. Start giving them real world jobs and problems to work on. If they need trigonometry, chemistry, carpentry, mechanics, electronics, they can pick it up quickly as needed.

It’s not until you go to work that you learn what you really want to know. Why waste all those years learning everything you might need? I think we’ll develop the technology for individualized education very soon. What we need to do now is teach people how to absorb knowledge quickly and apply it right away. Sort of just in time learning. Education has always been lifelong. Why assume it’s K-12 + 4 years of college?

JWH – 7/23/13

Your Pop-Culture Fingerprint

Recently Entertainment Weekly ran “The 100 All-Time Greatest” issue about the best movies, television series, books and albums in the hearts of their editors. There’s no scientific justification for such lists – they are fun but always biased. Best-of-lists dredge up delicious memories of forgotten art, or make you growl WTF! at other choices. For me the real value of such lists is to inspire me to try pop culture favorites I haven’t. You never know when you missed something great, and finding great pop culture is what’s it all about.

Subscribing to Rdio lets me play most of the albums from their list. This is why spending $9.99 a month for a music subscription service is such a fantastic bargain. I’m going to try and play 2-3 albums a day until I get through the EW 100 album list. I’m also going to use Netflix to go through their movie and TV show lists. I wonder if statistics at subscription music services, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix will show a bump from the impact of the EW picks?

I did make a playlist of over 90 of EW’s Top 100 albums at Rdio. If you’re a member you can play it, and if not, you can look at the list of songs. The EW editors are probably much younger than I am, so their list of great albums follows a different generational path than I did, thus their list is a lesson for an old fart like me. Over half the list is new to me, so I’m looking forward to playing a lot of potentially great albums.

You’d think such lists would match sales figures, but they don’t. For example, Michael Jackson’s Thriller is by far and away the best selling album of all-time, but came in as #4 on the EW list. I wonder how many of those 40+ million Thriller buyers would put it at the top of their favorite album list? I suppose Spotify could tell us what albums are most played on their popular service, and that might be a realistic indicator of all-time greatness. Ditto for YouTube plays.

However, in the end, it’s your own love for individual works of art that matter the most. Just thinking about your own favorites should be a meditation of self-awareness, a survey of your own years, like your life flashing in front of your eyes before you die.

On the top of the EW album list sits Revolver, by the Beatles from 1966. I’m playing it as I write this now. It’s a great album, I’ve bought it three times in my lifetime – LP, CD, remastered CD. But Revolver would never be my all-time favorite album. I’m not sure it would even make my top 100 album list. I love so many little albums, like Once in a Blue Moon by Nanci Griffith or Rodeo by Kirk Whalum that would rank higher, albums damn few people know about.

#2 on EW’s top albums was Purple Rain by Prince, #3 was Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones, #4 was Thriller by Michael Jackson and #5 was London Calling by The Clash. All great albums, but none of them would be on my own personal Top 100 Albums of All-Time list. I wish everyone made their own top lists of pop culture loves so when we make new friends we’d trade lists as a form of introduction. I think what we love defines us better than anything else. Even the things we choose to keep lists of also defines us.

My #1 album is Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan. An album that didn’t even make it onto the EW list. Strangely enough, it’s also from 1966 like Revolver. I can go years without player Revolver, but I play songs from Blonde on Blonde almost every day. That’s why I know its my #1 album. I’m sure there are millions of music fanatics that never played it, or played it once and hated it. I don’t expect my list to meet other people’s standards.

#2 would be Highway 61, Revisited by Bob Dylan, which did make their list. But I have no idea what my #3-100 would be. I just haven’t thought about it that much. But reading the EW list makes me want to create my own list. I don’t know if I have a 100 albums that are absolute favorites. I’ve listened to thousands of albums, and I own 1200-1400 CDs but I’d guess less than 300 still appeal enough to play occasionally, and only a much smaller group would be ones I’d want to play from start to finish, which is the real indicator of a great album. For example, from London Calling I only love one song, “Lost in the Supermarket,” so it’s doubtful it would be on my list.

For an album to be called great I think we have to consider it as a whole. It has to be more than just a collection of songs. It doesn’t have to have a single theme like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but it should have a coherent artistic wholeness.

Why I’m writing this essay is because I realized that if we each made a list of our favorite albums, each list might be as unique as fingerprints. Out of 7 billion people, how many are likely to pick 100 albums and put them in the same order? If we found two people with identical lists, would they also have the same political and philosophical views? I don’t know, but it would be interesting if scientists would check that out for me.

Making a list of favorite albums is actually very hard and time consuming. It’s a terrible strain on the old noggin to try and sift through 50 years of album playing memories. I’m thinking of going through my CDs and pulling out my favorites to put on one shelf together. It might take me weeks or months to create my list, but it might help to physical hold the albums I love when it comes to ranking them. Ranking isn’t absolutely important, but it’s part of the game. Right now I’m thinking my #3 album would be What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye from 1971.

No, maybe I’m wrong, maybe Everybody Knows This is Nowhere by Neil Young would be #3. When I make the final list, it’s going to be very hard to create an absolute ranking.

The trouble is I love specific songs more than I do albums. That’s why iTunes succeeds, and most people prefer songs over albums. It’s also why greatest hits albums are so popular. But I tend to think greatest hits are cheats on a best album list. Two of my all-time favorite songs are “Fresh Air” and “What About Me” by Quicksilver Messenger Service. Those songs were each on albums that I considered all filler except one song, so I’d hate to list them as two of my favorite albums of all-time. If I had to pick just one of their albums it might be Shady Grove.

I wonder how many albums on the EW list are there because of a single song?

I can remember two albums, both double albums I played obsessively for years, but I don’t anymore. Should they count now? When you make up an all-time best of list, is it the albums you love right now, or the ones you loved the most years throughout your life? I don’t know if I’d pick any Beatles album now, but they were essential when I was a teen. These two were very important to me for most of the seventies.

I think Layla and The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East would make my list, but I don’t know at what positions.

EW’s wasn’t very diverse when it came to musical styles. I don’t remember any jazz, or much country, and little folk, and especially no classical. And there were many big hits like Breakfast in America by Supertramp that I thought was conspicuous in their absence. It would certainly find a place on my list. They represent my psychic fingerprint for the music I love.

The albums I remembered while writing this essay are just a drop of water in lake of musical memories. Here are what comes to me at the moment. It will probably take me weeks to think about all my albums. That will be fun, a fun trip down memory lane.

JWH – 7/22/13

A Study in Fame–Bob Dylan

Our world is awash with famous people but how many are really worth the notice? If you live long enough you’ll watch the famous coming and going, maybe not as fast as every fifteen minutes, but its amazing how many once famous faces I can no longer match a name in memory, or tell you if they are dead or alive. Think about it, how many people can you name that have stayed famous your whole lifetime? One of the strangest of the famous that’s haunted me my whole life is Bob Dylan.

Dylan was born in 1941, and I was born in 1951, and he started recording in 1961, so he was in the generation just ahead of mine, who made an impression us boomers as we became aware of the world around us as teens. Fifty years on, my demographic cohorts are in their sixties, and the generation that influenced us are in their seventies. Many of the famous people that inspired my generation are forgotten or dead – or both.

Most folks are famous for a Warhol unit of time because they create only one noteworthy event on the world’s stage. Bob Dylan has written hundreds of songs, an astounding output of artwork, but what makes many of them memorable is how they fit into history at large. And if you didn’t like his singing, there have been hundreds of performers covering his tunes. At one time I had a playlist on Rhapsody with over 100 cover versions of “All Along the Watchtower.” Part of Dylan’s fame is due to influencing so many other people.

Not only is Dylan famous, but he’s legendary, infamous, and mythic. Although most people won’t think of Bob Dylan when they think of the concept of fame, but if you read his biographies, and there are countless bios to read, you’ll see he’s a perfect example of someone suffering the fates of fame.

Plus Bob Dylan has toured the Earth like no other person in history. Dylan played 2,000 concerts between 1988 and 2007, and he continues to tour at the rate of about 100 concerts a year. His constant touring, which has gotten named the Never Ending Tour, will probably end when he dies. Just look at his tour dates and locations. Fans now follow Dylan from city to city like hippies used to follow The Grateful Dead. Dylan tours like Sisyphus rolls rocks.

Has there been anyone in the history of the world that has traveled to more places than Bob Dylan? Dylan has his own artistic empire of fame.

Yet, to the average person, how many people can name a Bob Dylan song? He’s not that famous, not enough that all 7 billion people on Earth know of him. Currently Dylan is only #65 on one of The Most Famous People of All Time lists. But such lists are bogus, because there’s no real way to measure fame, other than maybe counting daily Google searches.

Of people who listen to rock and roll, Dylan is famous, to people that don’t, I can’t imagine his name coming up very often.

Fame is an odd concept. Fame is both ephemeral and lasting. If you look at the 2013 Time 100 list of most influential people of the moment, you won’t see Dylan, and you will see many names you’ve probably haven’t heard of before either. How many people know of Elon Musk? You’re famous if the media takes notice of you, whether its because you’re heroic, criminal, mad, inventive, creative, stupid, or whatever catches the public’s fancy at the moment.

Some people consider Bob Dylan a rock star, others a songwriter, and others a poet. Fame for a poet really means how often are any of your carefully crafted lines quoted or memorized? Fame for a songwriter is measured by how often do people sing and record your songs. Fame for a rock star is measured by how many people swoon at your image holding an electric guitar. Poetry is a dying art form, but poetry was never popularly consumed to begin with, but some poems have lasted a very long time. A century from now, how many rock stars will actually be remembered? How many figures from popular culture can you remember from 1913? That’s after Mark Twain and before Charlie Chaplin.

The Independent gave “70 reasons why Bob Dylan is the most important figure in pop-culture history” on his 70th birthday. Will any of those reasons be valid in 2113?

Go to this list of Dylan songs at his website, and see how many titles you know. Then click on the song name and read the lyrics. You’ll have to decide for yourself if the words will survive like the words of the great poets of the past. Dylan has lead a legendary life. I’m sure there will be novels and movies based on his adventures in the future. Some have already come out. But his real fame will come from his songs, and the seeds they plant in minds yet born. Byron and Keats never imagined all the thoughts thought about their lines of poetry, and we can’t imagine what will happen to Dylan’s words in the future. But my guess is they will be put to uses in ways we could never fathom even if time travelers came back and told us.

I just finished reading The Ballad of Bob Dylan by Daniel Mark Epstein. It was a compelling read that kept me constantly wanting to find more time to read. Among the many biographies of Dylan I’ve read, it’s among the best, although my favorites are still Positively 4th Street by David Hajdu and No Direction Home by Robert Shelton, now in a new edition. Reading about Bob Dylan is like trying to study cosmology, it’s a subject of endless depth.

JWH – 7/14/13

A Feminine View of an Apocalypse

I hope I’m not being too sexist here, when I review Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. The books seems to be a feminine take on the end of the world. But I have read many end of the world stories, and I think they’ve always have been written by males. Books about the collapse of civilization are a special favorite of mine since I was a little kid, and now they are becoming very popular with young adult readers. It’s rather fascinating to read a woman’s take on the genre.

First off, this isn’t going to be a regular review, because it’s going to contain spoilers to all the essential events in the story. Let’s just say that I found Life as We Knew It to be extremely readable and likeable, but I want to dissect it because it was such a different view on the end of the world as I know it. It was a rather nice and civilized view, and I’m essentially asking if that’s because the author was female. Of course, this is a YA novel, so maybe it was pulling its punches, but then I’m not sure if YA readers want to be handled with care. Kids loved The Hunger Games, which made them sort of like Romans at the Coliseum.

Surviving a brutal world at the collapse of civilization is the core appeal of reading end of the world stories. Like I said, I really liked Life as We Knew It, and felt it was a compelling read. I’d recommend it to any adult or kid who loves to read YA novels, but I’m now going to pick it apart for psychological reasons. If you haven’t read it, don’t read beyond the cover photo.

When civilization collapses all rules disappear. Survival is the number one driving force. And in most post-apocalyptic novels of this type, the key conflict is kill or be killed. Susan Beth Pfeffer completely side steps this issue. An asteroid hits the moon and brings about catastrophic changes to life on Earth. The story takes place from May to March, beginning slowly, but ending with a brutal “nuclear winter” like winter. The story is told by Miranda, a sixteen-year-old girl in diary form, and is about how her single mother Laura keeps Miranda, and brothers Matt and Jon alive when civilization falls apart.

One reason I love these after-the-collapse stories is they present a perfect fantasy puzzle of “What would you do?” in the same situation. If you were sitting in your suburban home watching the news and knew that civilization was about to come to an end, what would you do? Laura withdraws a lot of cash out of her bank and pulls her kids out of school. She also gets an old lady neighbor and they all go on a frantic shopping spree for food and necessities. Now this is practical, but Pfeffer presents this chaotic moment as too civilized. Sure it’s a madhouse at the grocery story, but not crazier than Walmart at 4am on Black Friday. And it’s a bargain, all shopping baskets can be stuffed with as much stuff as possible for just $100, so each person gets several loads. That’s just unbelievable.

And here’s the thing, that one shopping spree lasts the family eleven months. Even though they live near a pond, there is no mention of fishing. Even though they live in the outskirts of town with lots of trees to cut down for firewood, there’s no mention of hunting squirrel, rabbits, raccoons, possums, groundhogs, frogs, turtles, dogs, cats, birds or anything else. Everyone begins to starve, but they take dead bodies to the hospital. If these people are that hungry and think they won’t make it through the winter, why aren’t they eating the dead? I’ve been a vegetarian since 16, but hey, every real life story I’ve ever read about starving finally comes down to cannibalism. By the time Mrs. Nesbitt died, Miranda and family should have been hungry enough to eat her.

Pfeffer evidently doesn’t believe in killing animals for food even though the family eats a lot of canned meats. It’s strange that the boys chop wood seven days a week to get ready for winter, but never go hunting and fishing. Nor do they go scavenging. In Pfeffer’s world, the rule is people leave each other alone, and only plunder each other’s houses if the family dies or moves south. But Matt, Jon and Miranda never routine scavenge homes on their own. That’s way too civilized. And dare I say too girly? Life as We Knew It is way too civilized view of no civilization. America is full of gun owners, but we don’t see guns in this story except for a couple tiny mentions.

Liberals often ask NRA members why do they need assault rifles. Well, they are for the end of the world. When civilization goes down the toilet, it’s a dog eat dog wild west world. In Susan Beth Pfeffer’s apocalypse it’s a please-and-thank-you end of the world scenario. Only nature kills, not people.

Like I said, Life as We Knew It is a gripping, well told story, even though it doesn’t fit the standard after-the-collapse model. Is that because Pfeffer is a woman and expects the end of the world to be different? Or does she believe young adult readers shouldn’t imagine such a brutal existence, even though they’ve been assigned Lord of the Flies for decades? Or is her novel just a cozy story of how she thinks things should be if civilization should collapse? Sort of a politically correct Mad Max?

Even the ending was too nice. Miranda has decided to leave home to die in hopes of leaving more food for her younger brother who everyone thinks should be the ultimate survivor. But at the last minute she finds a flyer from a newly set up government office that’s giving away food. They are saved. Civilization hasn’t completely collapse and its making a comeback. Survival has merely been one of waiting, hoarding food, and rationing. No one in this story fights to survive. They struggle, they endure, they work hard, but they don’t fight.

The thing I’ve always loved about after the collapse stories is the pioneering spirit of starting over. Of reinventing old ways of doing things to replace modern technology. There is no invention in this story, no learning to make bows and arrows, no Gilligan’s Island professor inventing new tools out of old parts, no reading old books to figure out how to make animal traps and cure hides. Most of all, these people don’t scavenge, steal or kill. Nor are they preyed upon by armed hoards of starving survivalists. Every family holes up in their own house and waits. Ultimately, waits for the government to help them.

Hey, I’m about as liberal as they come, but I know better than wait on the government after civilization goes down the drain. I don’t know if the collapse of civilization would be as brutal as The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but it should be as brutal as Survivors (BBC 1975-1977), a favorite TV show of mine. My all-time favorite after the collapse story is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. That’s because it’s about the intellectual rebuilding of society. Stewart shows that once civilization collapses it will be very hard to rebuild. I’m afraid Susan Beth Pfeffer doesn’t really understand what a collapse of modern society means, or she didn’t want her story to be all about realistic brutality. I have to give Suzanne Collins a lot of credit for having her sixteen-year-old Katniss facing realistic brutality in a honestly violent way.

Even if Pfeffer didn’t want Miranda and her family shooting guns at other people, she should have at least included a local militia protecting the neighborhoods and setting up the power behind the rule that you don’t loot your neighbor’s house unless they are dead or moved. Pfeffer makes no suggestion that strangers would organize or work together. Family is the only bond. That’s odd, don’t you think? After every natural disaster I see endless news stories about strangers helping each other.

Also I was disappointed that Miranda and her family totally depended on the phone, radio, TV and the Internet for their news, and once those systems died, they just did without. Why didn’t they communicate more with other people? Why wasn’t their some kind of gossip grapevine, or bulleting board news system? Pfeffer’s characters aren’t inventors, but I think necessity really is the mother of invention, and they faced a whole lot of necessity.

I believe we all write end-of-the-world stories that reflect our own psychological make-up. And this could be a little like taking your clothes off in public.

I’m calling Life as We Knew It a feminine apocalypse because her nonviolent view of the end of the world is so very different from all similar books I’ve read which have always been written by males. Is that sexist or political incorrect of me? Who says end of the world stories have to play by masculine rules? But why didn’t Miranda try to catch fish at the pond, or the boys try to kill squirrels when they were chopping wood?

Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe most women would be fighters in real life, and probably if they wrote fictional accounts of surviving, their characters would be fighters too. I’m just wondering why Pfeffer wrote such a polite story about a brutal time? Is this her naked honesty of how she thinks people would behave?

In this story food only comes from the grocery store, and help only comes from the government, and desperate people never resort to using guns. Where’s the 4th of July spirit? I grew up watching westerns, so I guess I might be indoctrinated differently.

Maybe I shouldn’t write such a story as this, because my naked views might be loathsome. But now that I’m old, and in declining health, it would be much different from one I would have written at 25. I should write an after-the-collapse story about a gimpy old fart trying to survive the end of the world. It would have a hilarious scene of a life long vegetarian killing and eating a squirrel.

JWH – 7/4/13