Reconciling myself

Well, I certainly dropped the ball on this thing. I was seized, unfortunately, by one of those Salinger (or Residents!) moments where I felt like being a bit more anonymous. In fact, I don't even know what I'm trying to do right now. I'll give you a brief lowdown on what you may have missed, had you not been present during every moment of my life and don't happen to be a nu-nu. This is in relatively chronological order.

-On what I believe was 4/20, I delivered my symposium project on Philip Roth. Entitled "Telling a Man by the Songs He Sings: Claims and Counterclaims of Anti-semitism in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go," I had spent the last several months, reading through as much of Roth's work as I could while simultaneously producing a 15-page paper that my sponsor would find of enduring quality. Luckily, she didn't find my thesis or anything I said to be that bad (I was probably helped by the fact that, even as an American literature professor, and a Jew to boot, she wasn't that familiar with Roth). Of course, the day before I had to pare down the fucking thing to a manageable 10 minutes. It turns out that reading my entire 15-page paper took something like 25 minutes, so I spent all of Friday hacking it until I was pretty sure I had produced something utterly unintelligible. No matter: very, very few people showed up. I would wager there were maybe 10 people there, and that includes the three students also speaking during my session (entitled "Literary Landscapes: Paradise, Politics, and Religion"--check out my abstract and stuff here) and their respective sponsors, although my sponsor couldn't be there because, irony of ironies, she had to go home for Passover.

Anyhow, I finally did it, and at least my moderator seemed to like it, and was particularly impressed that I did all the research outside of class. I asked her if (as department chairman) this would be good to go as an honors thesis, and she said yes. So at that point I was pretty happy.

-All of the internships I applied for--and I won't bother naming them all here--turned me down. Every single last one of them. So, faced with few other ideas, I decided to go back home once again for the summer. Turns out this was a bad idea.

-I did, however, receive an academic award from the school, which was cool because along with the prestige (I'm aware, don't laugh at me) of it I got $100. It was the Winifred Van Etten award, in case you were wondering. It's not a big deal, there are enough of these to make me feel not so special. Still, it was nice, particularly because I had no idea what I was getting until it was announced at the English awards/Open Field party. Mouton, or someone in the English department wrote a lovely introduction for me too. The only reason I enjoyed it was because it was poetic justice for none of my stuff getting into Open Field, which is the campus literary magazine. This is even though Freeman thought one of my stories was good enough to be entered into the Nick Adams short story contest (which I lost unsurprisingly, although I should add deservedly--I read the story that won, and it is actually an amazing piece of work). Apparently, my peers didn't think anything I did was good enough. I was depressed, but that made it a bit better.

Weirdly, I was invited to attend the English awards night as well as the interdepartmental awards night. Since I had already gotten my award previously, I was just asked to stand up to be recognized. There was no reason why I should have gone. The whole thing was like three hours and nearly unbearable, despite what was supposed to be fancy food. Apparently, there are a lot of awards here.

-Got hired to be the new Arts & Entertainment editor of The Cornellian, which, unlike my job back in high school, actually pays a salary. I was going for Opinions editor but I'm not surprised that they didn't choose me. To date, I have written pieces about the new Portishead album, the new R.E.M. album, and Iron Man. As is custom, the new editorial staff does one issue at the very end of the year, and it ended up not going so well for me as the result of some advertising mishaps, so I basically had to do the whole thing over again. The result: an epic piece on Iron Man that took up the entire page. It wasn't my proudest moment, and it was sort of another reason to be depressed. I couldn't look at it afterwards, that was for sure.

-I saw Iron Man. Loved it. I don't think my review is online, but I'll post it at some point.

-Took two classes, both of which fucked me up in unexpected ways: Grammar & The Politics of English turned out to be a mind-blowingly frustrating class, although not so much with the politics part as it was with the grammar. I don't know if anyone here has ever had to diagram sentences. I certainly hadn't before, but now I can say that it is a loathsome, disgusting, and surprisingly helpful activity. I think I am a better writer for taking the class, and it was sort of nice to have a professor who didn't like anything I did at all. I definitely needed that, but too bad it killed my straight-A winning streak for the semester. I'm not as concerned with that as I am with the way I was demoralized--somehow, even as someone with enough knowledge and passion of issues pertaining to language politics and linguistics, I found I had little of value to say. I did, however, get to do a paper on Salman Rushdie, who readers will know I am a big fan of. I think my thesis was something like the Ayatollah couldn't have possibly read The Satanic Verses before he issued his fatwa, and he definitely didn't read it afterward either. I know, it's so obvious. Story of my life.

Contrast this with Contemporary Fiction, a class I owned unequivocally. I found, astonishingly, that I was more in my element doing literary analysis, and what's more, I found myself enjoying the theory--yes, the theory--of postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Plus, we got to read some wonderful books, including one of my favorites, If on a winter's night a traveler. We also read Breakfast of Champions and J.M. Coetzee's Foe, amongst selections from a big Norton anthology of postmodern literature from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Sherman Alexie, Marilynne Robinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others. Philip Roth was in the anthology (excerpting The Ghost Writer) but we did not read him in class. I felt very much on top of things and was very proud of the writing I did in the class. In fact, I feel like I might put it on here, except it doesn't seem that profound on the internet as it did in the classroom. Anyway, my professor seemed to like it, and me, a lot. I think he liked that I would actually talk about some of the postmodern theory while most would complain it was impenetrable. As he would likely say, that's the point.

-I keep chugging away at Philip Roth. Just finished Deception, by the way, so I'm entering the home stretch. In my next post I'll talk about The Counterlife through Exit Ghost, assuming I can remember anything about them.

-I ended my junior year by doing my take-home final while having an extreme headache, and later, after attending quarter draws night at the bar, getting extremely feverish. Also, I hate packing and I knew I would miss my roommate, Jeremiah, although I'll see him again next year.

-Came home for the summer. The drive back was excruciating. Not only was I feeling extremely sick, to the point where I couldn't eat anything, but it was raining as hard as I've ever seen, to the point where I couldn't really see on the road. It was risky business, but I made it home okay. I've looked, in vain, for a job. It's hard, because pretty much everything has been filled up by people who came back for summer long before I did, as a result of Cornell ending pretty late. I need money and I don't know what to do.

So that's it. I'll get back into the swing of things, slowly. My question is this: from reading this, does this constitute a life well-lived? Obviously I'm not including stuff that is personal, but let's just say that that part is covered. Am I doing enough with my life? What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong?

On the limits of Wikipedia

Here's an essay I was writing that I was originally thinking of submitting to The Cornellian, but I've since had second thoughts since I can't bear to be associated with a newspaper of such ill repute (just look at it, I dare you). Is there something wrong with that? I really would like to not be part of the problem, frankly. I justify it the way Fugazi justifies not doing interviews in corporate magazines like Rolling Stone: even if I am pushing a good idea, it will just be lost in a sea of bad ideas. It's not like anyone is really clamoring to see my writing, anyway.

This is an essay about how I think Wikipedia should be taken a bit more seriously. Feel free to comment vigorously on the subject. It is definitely a debatable issue.

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Wikipedia Should be Considered a Citable Source

Like all of the most revolutionary acts of communication, from Gutenberg’s printing press onward, the open content reference web site known as Wikipedia has weathered criticisms by traditionalists and skeptics alike, its main offense being the allowance of anyone to contribute to a worldwide body of public knowledge. By anyone, that means you, me, and millions of other people that, at some point in our lives, have contributed something of value to a Wikipedia page. Almost overnight, the standard, peer-reviewed encyclopedias of the past (such as the World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica) became obsolete. To some, that posed quite a problem, but to the rest of us, this seemed like the dawn of a new and exciting age where the promise of free information (an idea preached more often than practiced) was actually coming true.

It is obvious that a new and exciting concept like Wikipedia would be greeted with the most amount of skepticism in academic circles. There are many reasons why this is, not the least among them being that it has always been the job of the professor or scientist to not accept any idea or theory without lots of evidence to back it up. For the most part, I have observed that professors, at least at Cornell College, do not believe that Wikipedia is a viable source for citation because they see it is a system fraught with problems. Cite Wikipedia in any form on an academic papers or even mention in passing that you looked at it for research, and it is likely you will be reprimanded or at least given a stern look. I would like to argue that even as I recognize that Wikipedia has certain problems, it has managed to overcome the majority of these problems in a most profound and satisfactory way. It simply doesn’t make sense that the Encyclopedia Britannica is considered an unimpeachable and unbiased source while Wikipedia isn’t. If anything, it should be the other way around, as Britannica reflects the biases of a privileged elite while Wikipedia allows anyone, regardless of age, creed, or class, to contribute. For instance, the section on Ludwig Von Beethoven in Britannica might have a lot about the volume and complexity of Beethoven’s works, but would it mention Abel Gance’s 1936 film Un grand amour de Beethoven? No it doesn’t, but Wikipedia does.

As mentioned before, most criticisms of Wikipedia have to do with its open-forum format, which leads many to believe that it’s a site filled with inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and an emphasis on what is perceived on popular, “low” culture over more high-minded intellectual pursuits. The last point is for cultural critics far smarter than myself to argue about, but for now, it should be noted that these inaccuracies and inconsistencies aren’t as plentiful as one might think, for the reason that Wikipedia, like any good system of ideas, has its checks and balances. As you read this sentence, thousands upon thousands of administrators are patrolling recent changes to the site, verifying claims and references, and amending or even deleting these pages according to their best judgments. These administrators were chosen to have these powers as a result of the amount of time and attention each made towards making Wikipedia as unbiased and accurate as it could be. Administrators in turn choose more administrators, many of whom specialize in certain fields and become administrators of certain areas (subcategories often referred to as “WikiProjects”). These administrators are also capable of locking down articles in the event that they become frequently vandalized, and preventing users from making edits until it is deemed safe again.

Any system that rewards hard and copious amounts of work with special privileges is often referred to in a knee-jerk fashion as intrinsically American, as Wikipedia has, although I would be quick to point out that Wikipedia’s idea of governing is hardly democratic, as there is a clear divide between the normal Wikipedia editor like myself and the administrator, and while administrators are capable of checking each other, normal editors cannot easily check the power of administrators. If anything, it is, as one Wikipedia administrator explained, “an anarchy with gang rule.” While I would be loathe to say that this school of thought breeds great and lasting nations, it seems that in the realm of free information dissemination, nothing could be more perfect. Who better to charge with the task of spreading knowledge than the most knowledgeable, or at the very least the most interested?

In my experience, and I have tested this, any attempt at vandalism on Wikipedia won’t last very long. At this point in Wikipedia’s short life-span, there is always the slight possibility that a piece of information is incorrect, but any amount of double-checking on the part of the researcher would be 99% likely to set the story straight. Try it out yourself: make some specious claim on some article and so how long it takes to be removed. It’s quite a fast process. More difficult to reconcile are the claims that articles on Wikipedia are, while not technically inaccurate, certainly biased in one way or another. Most of the times this bias can be dealt with on the individual article “Discussion” pages, but it had come to the point where some felt they were unable to get their viewpoint across no matter how much editing they tried to do. Andrew Schlafly, son of anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly, was so incensed by the fact that Wikipedia didn’t considered the Bible to be an unimpeachable historical document that he created his own homemade wiki: Conservapedia. On Conservapedia, you could find unbiased articles on, for instance, “The Gay Bomb,” an aphrodisiac chemical weapon that could turn its populace into homosexuals (and was apparently proposed by the Clinton administration). A more substantive level of criticism has been aimed towards documented cases of members of congress and special interest groups alike paying writers to make their Wikipedia pages paint them in a kinder light. This is an egregious offense, and one that is notoriously difficult to regulate due to the amount of anonymity users are allowed. However, I have noticed that administrators do a good enough amount of patrolling to make this almost a moot point.

I’m aware of these limitations, so I propose that in citing Wikipedia articles, as we would with citing anything else, we should put limitations on what is acceptable. My idea would be this: In order to be considered a citable source, an article must have been considered an acceptable member of at least one of the many hundred “WikiProject” groups. So, for instance, if you are citing something about a novel, you would have to make sure that the article was part of “WikiProject Books,” which can be seen by viewing the "Discussion" page at the top of the article. If it doesn’t belong to any group, it shouldn’t be cited. Additionally, the article being considered should be rated at least above “stub-class” on Wikipedia’s internal quality scale (a ranking usually determined by committee). These criteria make the level of quality and accuracy easy to verify by both student and professor. And, in case a professor has any lingering doubts about a certain statement or citation (and he or she always should), Wikipedia makes it very easy to search through its edit history, so it would be easy to observe whether or not the information existed in the first place.

I know that this is not an issue that professors or students choose to deal with very often, and it is true that there is often no need to cite Wikipedia, as it traffics in public knowledge, which in most cases doesn’t need to be cited. However, the option must exist. There are so many exciting and interesting things about Wikipedia, among them: the fact that spread of information is no longer confined to an elite group; that the notions of “high” and “low” culture are being shown to be patently false and justly obliterated; and, perhaps most importantly, that the internet is capable of providing us with an exponential amount of material more detailed and diverse than all the public libraries in the world combined. It would be a shame to see it rejected on college campuses simply because it is used too much.

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P.S. Does anyone know how to do cuts, like livejournal cuts?