My class schedule for next year, for those of you interested. In case you are confused, I go to a liberal arts school that's divided into nine "blocks," which translates into four classes one semester and five in the other. Looking back on my college career, I am proud to say that I never took a block off, and I never skipped class, not even when I was sick (not that I ever got sick). Unfortunately, the days when one got rewarded for this are now over, and I have to depend on my intellect to reap me benefits. I'm screwed.
1. Senior Seminar: Colonial Literature and Postcolonial Theory
2. Intermediate French
3. American Survey
4. Virginia Woolf
5. Jazz Improvisation
6. Topic: Who Owns Music? The Practice and Politics of Musical Borrowing
7. Advanced Critical Writing
8. Race, Sex, and the Constitution
9. Critical Theory
I know what you are thinking: Is this Sacks guy so hardcore that he is going to end his college career with Critical Theory? Damn right. I couldn't fit it anywhere else.
Some other notes:
-Regarding Intermediate French, I'm screwed. Part of a liberal arts education is that you need to take a requisite number of classes outside your major, which includes a language. Technically the only class you need to pass is one language class at the 205 level, but unfortunately you need to either make it through three beginning classes or pass into a higher level by taking a test at the beginning of freshman year. I passed into French 103, which meant I would have to take two classes. I took 103 back freshman year, but for numerous reasons I have had to keep pushing back when I would take 205. Now, I don't remember any French. This is bad news. I feel especially bad considering the amount of friends, particularly from high school, who have gone and lived in other countries and learned other languages. For some reason, I have tried to remain willfully ignorant of other languages, in part because I never really liked the French language to begin with. I wonder why I never went abroad, anywhere. I guess I couldn't imagine leaving my little liberal arts alcove, but now I'm gonna have to leave, or end up like Eric Stoltz in Kicking and Screaming (see that movie if you haven't).
-Jazz Improvisation is looking to be somewhat hardcore, although I'm sure I can take it way better than most people. I wonder if my teacher will be down for some jazz fusion in the form of, I dunno, Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow.
-I'm only taking Virginia Woolf because it's with the master of all things Woolf, and at Cornell there are disappointingly few classes devoted to a singular author (one on Milton, if I remember, and two on Shakespeare).
-I found out not long ago that a professor of some repute who recently left Cornell (and whose name is not really that googleable but I will withhold it, just in case), talked a bunch of shit about me to a friend of mine. He took great issue with my article on Mark Steyn, which angers me only because I consider that article/interview to be the only worthwhile thing I did on that paper, and he proceeded to tear me up for not being sufficiently critical of Steyn and Cornell for inviting a public speaker that a) didn't have old-school scholarly credentials, and b) maintained that multiculturalism is a deterrent on American progress. I felt like writing an angry E-Mail but I abstained, as surely he is a far superior rhetoritician. Still, I swear to God, if I were ever to become a professor I would not end up being a knee-jerk peacenik like so much of the faculty. I mean at least they can entertain a speaker's presence for a day or so.
-Jesse Helms was a prick.
Also, I need to consider giving this blog a bit more oomph. Those who have known me or seen me will understand when I say I have no concept of visual aesthetics, and I will pay someone to help redesign (and maybe get a guest blogger up in here, anyone interested?*) If some of my bloggier friends (Mendy, Jim, Ricky) want to work something out I would be glad and somewhat relieved.
Oh yeah, since Mendy posted a link to my last.fm meme I am bound by my code of honor to do the same for him: Here. I think his answers ended up being a lot more interesting then mine, but then he got lucky.
*Not Juell.
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Monday, July 14, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
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 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?
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Scholarship for dummies
Currently I'm in Naperville, Ill., home of my aunt and uncle, perusing their bookshelves and playing their pianos (as my uncle is a professional piano teacher, he has several). I am in between trying to finish Gravity's Rainbow and doing some Wikipedia editing (Paul Krugman, in case you were wondering). Honestly I'm not really enjoying it here right now, and I'm looking forward to going back. I decided a long time ago that I just hated any sort of trip with my family, especially long car rides. My reasons are many and varied, but let's just concentrate on one right now.
As my iPod has been dead for several months, and I am too poor/lazy/angry at Steve Jobs to seek a replacement, I was basically forced to sit in the family van and listen to whatever my parents felt like for six hours. Now that isn't necessarily bad, you think. Surely they could play some decent, non-Christmas music. Unfortunately, everyone in my family except me and my father hate listening to music. I know the very notion sounds preposterous. How can one hate music? Let's not even go there for now.
My family likes to listen to books on tape. I hate books on tape. They take forever to listen to, they're often read by horrible actors, and more often than not they are filled with stupid sound effects. Plus, I'm not really much of an auditory learner so I don't get much from them anyway. This time, however, it wasn't a book on tape I was forced to listen to but something called Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which isn't a book but rather an audio college course. The CDs are divided into lectures and posited as just a professor talking about a subject. This actually seems like an interesting idea if you've ever felt like learning about something but didn't want to do all that pesky reading and research.
My two younger brothers really like science-fiction and fantasy, to the point where they have absolutely no interest in the real world around them. I don't know if they'd be interested in someone talking about the fantasy book canon (which from what I was listening to, is an abysmally small one), though. Maybe they do. They seemed to not complain, and quite honestly the lectures about Tolkien were much more interesting than anything I've ever actually read from the man, but I'll get to that later.
The professor in charge of this lecture series was Michael D.C. Drout, apparently the biggest Tolkien nerd in the world as well as a professor at Wheaton College (the one in Massachusetts, not the one that just recently lifted its ban on dancing). In his first lecture, he argued that preeminent literary scholars and book critics of our day tend to ignore fantasy books or at least ghettoize them as mere "genre fiction," which I agree is unfair. However, Drout fails to come up with much in the way of fantasy books that should be considered mandatory reading, other than The Lord of the Rings, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, and maybe the Harry Potter books. That immediately poses a problem: of the 12 individual lectures present, seven are exclusively about Tolkien. If he wants more respect for the fantasy genre, he needs to come up with a better list than that.
I guess it's sort of unavoidable to talk about Tolkien, though. I read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings when I was very young, and I wasn't a very big fan, despite being enamored with that sort of thing at the time. It just seemed like it was chock-full of useless languages and characters. I only saw the first movie in the series, and it was so long and boring I didn't bother seeing any of the others. It just really isn't my thing. I did gain a greater appreciation of Tolkien learning about his commitment to ancient languages and linguistics, and while I'm a bit skeptical about Drout's theory that The Hobbit is even tangentially based on Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (how?), it still makes Bilbo Baggins more interesting of a character knowing that he isn't just this fantastic character devoid of human emotion or political feeling. Too much fantasy writing is like that.
In fact, I was just trying to think of any so-called fantasy novel that I think is any good at all. The closest examples I can think of are some of the more out-there novels of Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, all of whom I think fall under the tag "magical realism," which simply isn't the same thing. Fantasy is just too fundamentally limiting of an idea, I think. I prefer my wild ideas to have a grounding in real lives and real people. But then I guess that's the exact opposite of what fantasy's normal readership would want.
As my iPod has been dead for several months, and I am too poor/lazy/angry at Steve Jobs to seek a replacement, I was basically forced to sit in the family van and listen to whatever my parents felt like for six hours. Now that isn't necessarily bad, you think. Surely they could play some decent, non-Christmas music. Unfortunately, everyone in my family except me and my father hate listening to music. I know the very notion sounds preposterous. How can one hate music? Let's not even go there for now.
My family likes to listen to books on tape. I hate books on tape. They take forever to listen to, they're often read by horrible actors, and more often than not they are filled with stupid sound effects. Plus, I'm not really much of an auditory learner so I don't get much from them anyway. This time, however, it wasn't a book on tape I was forced to listen to but something called Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which isn't a book but rather an audio college course. The CDs are divided into lectures and posited as just a professor talking about a subject. This actually seems like an interesting idea if you've ever felt like learning about something but didn't want to do all that pesky reading and research.
My two younger brothers really like science-fiction and fantasy, to the point where they have absolutely no interest in the real world around them. I don't know if they'd be interested in someone talking about the fantasy book canon (which from what I was listening to, is an abysmally small one), though. Maybe they do. They seemed to not complain, and quite honestly the lectures about Tolkien were much more interesting than anything I've ever actually read from the man, but I'll get to that later.
The professor in charge of this lecture series was Michael D.C. Drout, apparently the biggest Tolkien nerd in the world as well as a professor at Wheaton College (the one in Massachusetts, not the one that just recently lifted its ban on dancing). In his first lecture, he argued that preeminent literary scholars and book critics of our day tend to ignore fantasy books or at least ghettoize them as mere "genre fiction," which I agree is unfair. However, Drout fails to come up with much in the way of fantasy books that should be considered mandatory reading, other than The Lord of the Rings, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, and maybe the Harry Potter books. That immediately poses a problem: of the 12 individual lectures present, seven are exclusively about Tolkien. If he wants more respect for the fantasy genre, he needs to come up with a better list than that.
I guess it's sort of unavoidable to talk about Tolkien, though. I read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings when I was very young, and I wasn't a very big fan, despite being enamored with that sort of thing at the time. It just seemed like it was chock-full of useless languages and characters. I only saw the first movie in the series, and it was so long and boring I didn't bother seeing any of the others. It just really isn't my thing. I did gain a greater appreciation of Tolkien learning about his commitment to ancient languages and linguistics, and while I'm a bit skeptical about Drout's theory that The Hobbit is even tangentially based on Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (how?), it still makes Bilbo Baggins more interesting of a character knowing that he isn't just this fantastic character devoid of human emotion or political feeling. Too much fantasy writing is like that.
In fact, I was just trying to think of any so-called fantasy novel that I think is any good at all. The closest examples I can think of are some of the more out-there novels of Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, all of whom I think fall under the tag "magical realism," which simply isn't the same thing. Fantasy is just too fundamentally limiting of an idea, I think. I prefer my wild ideas to have a grounding in real lives and real people. But then I guess that's the exact opposite of what fantasy's normal readership would want.
Friday, December 14, 2007
I got an A+
For the first time in a very long time, I got an A+ on a paper. My professor even said it was one of the best papers he has ever gotten in his class. So, that put me in a cheery mood. In case you were wondering, I'm in Music History III: Romantic to Modern Era and I just did a paper on the banning of Richard Wagner in Israel (because of his Nazi ties, among other things). I don't think I want to put the whole thing on here because you don't really need to be interested, but here's the opening paragraph nevertheless:
The very existence of great art, however one chooses to define it, almost always necessitates a need to erect a political barrier between the work of art and the views of its artist. To take film as an example, one can be impressed and enthralled by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation while recognizing that it is a blatantly racist and inaccurate account of the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan—similarly, that same person can agree with what Michael Moore is trying to say in Farenheit 9/11 while noting that a lot of it is misleading and propagandistic. The barrier seems reasonable enough, but as with almost all theories, problems can arise. What if this artist may have been indirectly responsible for the death of a friend or loved one? Such is the strange case of Richard Wagner’s legacy. Everybody who has studied Wagner at one point or another can probably agree on two central points: one, that he was one of the key composers in world history with a body of work that is almost unparalleled in terms of ambitiousness; and two, that many of his personal views, especially regarding Jews, were abhorrent and unforgivable, especially in light of how his views were co-opted and used by Hitler as a justification for the extermination of the Jewish race. In 1948, more than sixty years after Wagner’s death, the state of Israel was formed, partially as a response to the need of so many Holocaust survivors (many of whom were forced to listen to Wagner in concentration camps) to establish a Jewish state. Since that time, there has been an unofficial ban on playing the music of Wagner in the state of Israel, and the few attempts individuals have made to perform Wagner (notably by the Israeli conductor and composer Daniel Barenboim) have been met with a significant amount of conflict, both from Israeli citizens and public officials. The reasons Israelis offer for eliminating Wagner from the Israeli repertoire are understandable, but they reflect a certain amount of hypocrisy: Why ban Wagner and not other confirmed anti-Semites, as the majority of individuals in Europe during the late 19th century at least harbored some sort of anti-Semitic belief? The answer lies not in the works of Wagner but in the image and symbol of Wagner, as used by Hitler. The unofficial ban on playing Wagner's music inIsrael
Kind of long-winded, but essentially correct, right? If my prof asks, I might make this into a syposium project. I'll talk about that later.
The very existence of great art, however one chooses to define it, almost always necessitates a need to erect a political barrier between the work of art and the views of its artist. To take film as an example, one can be impressed and enthralled by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation while recognizing that it is a blatantly racist and inaccurate account of the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan—similarly, that same person can agree with what Michael Moore is trying to say in Farenheit 9/11 while noting that a lot of it is misleading and propagandistic. The barrier seems reasonable enough, but as with almost all theories, problems can arise. What if this artist may have been indirectly responsible for the death of a friend or loved one? Such is the strange case of Richard Wagner’s legacy. Everybody who has studied Wagner at one point or another can probably agree on two central points: one, that he was one of the key composers in world history with a body of work that is almost unparalleled in terms of ambitiousness; and two, that many of his personal views, especially regarding Jews, were abhorrent and unforgivable, especially in light of how his views were co-opted and used by Hitler as a justification for the extermination of the Jewish race. In 1948, more than sixty years after Wagner’s death, the state of Israel was formed, partially as a response to the need of so many Holocaust survivors (many of whom were forced to listen to Wagner in concentration camps) to establish a Jewish state. Since that time, there has been an unofficial ban on playing the music of Wagner in the state of Israel, and the few attempts individuals have made to perform Wagner (notably by the Israeli conductor and composer Daniel Barenboim) have been met with a significant amount of conflict, both from Israeli citizens and public officials. The reasons Israelis offer for eliminating Wagner from the Israeli repertoire are understandable, but they reflect a certain amount of hypocrisy: Why ban Wagner and not other confirmed anti-Semites, as the majority of individuals in Europe during the late 19th century at least harbored some sort of anti-Semitic belief? The answer lies not in the works of Wagner but in the image and symbol of Wagner, as used by Hitler. The unofficial ban on playing Wagner's music in
Kind of long-winded, but essentially correct, right? If my prof asks, I might make this into a syposium project. I'll talk about that later.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
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
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
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
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?
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