The recent nuclear catastrophe in Japan captured my attention for most of the past week since the March 11 earthquake. Based on the headlines over the last few days it appears that the focus of media attention has shifted to war in Libya. Neither event leads to optimism.
The frustrating thing about the nuclear disaster in Japan has been the not unexpected backlash against nuclear power. Having grown up in the 1980s I remember the many nightmares about nuclear war that seemed to plague that decade.
NetLibrary is a horrible interface for reading or doing research.
Suppose I want to look up “Clifford Geertz” in the Encyclopedia of Social Anthropology. First I try a search - no results.
I know this can’t be right. Geertz is a pinnacle of anthropology, social in particular.
So I go to the name index. The index is not displayed as a single page of entries because each frame of the NetLibrary reader is tied to a physical book page.
Back in October 2002 Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota Senator, was killed in a small plane crash in Northern Minnesota. The memorial service for Wellstone was the last political memorial service that I watched with any personal interest.
I don’t have a television so I didn’t see the recent Tucson memorial in response to the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt. But the same people who criticized the Wellstone memorial for becoming too partisan are making complaints about the memorial ceremony in Tucson.
I don’t know and I don’t care very much whether Jared Loughner tried to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords for political reasons. Trying to divine the motivations of madmen is a fool’s game.
I do, however, care about political discourse and the rhetoric of our daily lives.
Back in 2000 I bid on my first E-Bay auction for a video camera. A few hours after I won the auction I received an outraged email from another bidder telling me that I had screwed everything up by bidding too high for the camera.
From Paul Rosenberg at OpenLeft I headed over to Salon and Heather Havrilesky commenting on NBCs new television series “The Event”.
The real problem is, we don’t care because there clearly isn’t any larger meaning guiding the action, and the only thing we know about each character is that he/she totally loves his/her fiancé/wife/husband/children sooo much that he/she would do anything to keep them safe.
In a country where many viewers don’t have a lot of thoughtful or idealistic notions outside of a “love of family” – worthy though this love obviously is – this is what passes for character development and premise, over and over again.
To begin with: I liked the movie. I’ve liked most of the movies that David Fincher has made and I think that he’s one of the best directors working currently in Hollywood. But…there was something that bothered me.
We’ve been here before.
I’ve seen the same story again and again in Hollywood productions about Silicon Valley, magazines profiles of big businessmen, puff pieces for any and every magazine you can remember reading or not.
I found a video by John Cleese via Presentation Zen that continues some of the themes from my last post on creativity. I’m not entirely convinced by all the hyperventilating people who claim that the internet is making us stupid. But I do think there is a serious concern about the drawbacks of multitasking, and excessive attention to social media.
One key to being more creative, says Cleese, is to avoid interruption.
Crises come and go. I think if you look deep enough into any field you can probably find a crisis brewing and probably a few that were brewing a few years or decades ago. There’s something that appeals to our hind brain whenever someone lets loose the cries of crisis. Just look at how long we’ve been inundated in the “education crisis.” (N.B. Education does have serious problems, I’m talking about the trope/rhetoric of crisis, not the specifics of education)
Back in my youthful glory days I remember watching with interest the adventures of Will Steger and his arctic band of adventurers. In 1986 Steger and seven colleagues traveled to the North Pole by dogsled. I even attended a speech by Ann Bancroft, the only woman in the 1986 expedition, in the late 1980s.
The expedition left March 7 and reached the pole fifty-five days later, which works out to May 1st.
I’ve been reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf this summer. It is a wonderful and brilliant piece of art, part of the high modernist literary flowering from the first half of the twentieth century. The style reminds me of Henry James in many places, but with a smoother syntax. The link to James is the focus on internal dialogue, the thoughts that go on inside each of us when we think about our family; Woolf takes that idea and develops it to a fever pitch.