Obscure Band Update
Here's alittle pop culture to smooth the transition into the weekend: assorted comments on some recent iTunes purchases:
Eels, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. I really enjoyed Shootenany, their last album, so when I heard the new single "Old Shit/ New Shit" on the radio, I added this to the iTunes list immediately. I didn't realize that it was a double album, and mostly in a much mopier style than the previous record. Some of the songs ("Son of a Bitch," now playing) sound basically like second-rate Tom Waits.
There are some good tunes here, but they're buried in a lot of undistinguished other material. I like "Railroad Man," "Going Fetal," and "Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)" quite a bit.
Ryan Adams and the Cardinals, Cold Roses. Another slightly uneven double album, with some good stuff mixed in. "Meadowlake Street," "If I Am a Stranger," "Dance All Night," and "Life Is Beautiful" rank with his very best stuff. It's much more country than the last couple of albums, though.
Stereophonics, Language, Sex, Violence, Other?. This is another case of "I liked their last album a lot, so I'll grab this one right away." It's decent, but not great. The standout track is the single, "Dakota," which you get in two different versions if you buy the album from iTunes.
Weezer, Make Believe. On the one hand, it's Weezer-style power pop, and it's pretty hard to screw that up. On the other hand, "We Are All On Drugs" may be the stupidest song they've ever recorded, and yes, that includes the idiotic sweater tune that was their first novelty hit. Then again, "Beverly Hills" is a great song.
Rilo Kiley, More Adventurous. Not really a new record, any more, but somehow I never got around to buying it before now. I assume "Portions for Foxes" must've been used in some silly teen drama on Fox, or something, because it's all over the radio all of a sudden. It's a pretty solid album top to bottom, though.
Fruit Bats, Mouthfuls. This has kind of gotten buried in the new music shuffle-play (thanks to those double CD's mentioned above). I bought it because of the song "When U Love Somebody" (which, spelling aside, does not appear to have been written by Prince), which is a wonderfully catchy little song. The guitar line reminds me of "Stuck in the Middle with You," but not so much that I see Michael Madsen dancing with a straight razor, so that's a good thing.
Nic Armstrong and the Thieves, The Greatest White Liar. I bought this becuase I heard "Broken Mouth Blues" on the radio and said, "Ah-hah! Here's a song to go with 'Hotel Yorba.'" And while that tune does indeed sound a lot like the White Stripes (their good songs, anyway), most of the rest of the album sounds like a lost recording by some brilliant but forgotten British Invasion band-- Herman and the Animal Pacemakers, or something. That's not a bad thing, by the way.
The Libertines, The Libertines. Prior to buying this, all I really knew about this band was that critics really like them, and that one of the main guys is trying to be Iggy Pop-- he's on drugs, he's off drugs, he's in jail, he's out of jail, he's in the band, he's out of the band.. Given that, I expected the sound to be more punk rock and less Pulp. And, well, they sound a lot like Pulp to me. That's not terrible, or anything, but it was unexpected.
The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree. The first pass through this, I was badly disappointed, but it's really grown on me since. I guess I'm just a sucker for weird pop-culture references (the chorus to "You or Your Memory" goes, "St. Joseph's Baby Aspirin, Bartles and Jaymes, and you, or your memory"), and oddball classical references (the chorus of "Up the Wolves" is: "Our mother has been absent, ever since we founded Rome, but there's gonna be a party when the wolf comes home."), and how can I not like an album with a song titled "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod"?
I've got another list of singles from KEXP to go looking for, but I also just acquired the Anthology of American Folk Music (borrowed from a co-worker), so I may be on an O Brother, Where Art Thou sort of kick for the next few weeks. Tough to say.
Posted at 8:55 PM | link | follow-ups | 4 comments
A Rare Flash of Sanity
I've been consciously trying to limit the amount of political stuff I post here, laregly because I don't like the way I sound when I start talking politics these days. I do want to take this all-too-rare opportunity to highlight a bit of good news from this morning's paper:
House Votes to Curb Patriot Act
The House handed President Bush the first defeat in his effort to preserve the broad powers of the USA Patriot Act, voting yesterday to curtail the FBI's ability to seize library and bookstore records for terrorism investigations.
Bush has threatened to veto any measure that weakens those powers. The surprise 238 to 187 rebuke to the White House was produced when a handful of conservative Republicans, worried about government intrusion, joined with Democrats who are concerned about personal privacy.
Now, granted, in a realistic analysis, this is one of the least scary items in the "Patriot Act" (if ever a bill title deserved scare quotes, this is the one), and removing it is only a minor victory. But anything that shows the slightest sign of actual principles on the part of Republican lawmakers (well, 17% of House Republicans) is a positive development.
And, of course, schadenfreude is a wonderful thing:
House Republican leaders are not accustomed to losing, and they did not hide their anger about the result. One aide to a House leader referred to the victorious coalition as "the crazies on the left and the crazies on the right, meeting in the middle."
As a bonus, the amendment was introduced by Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a socialist.
Posted at 7:21 AM | link | follow-ups | 1 comment
Post-Literate Literacy
Bookslut has an interview with Jon Scieszka, author and founder of "Guys Read," a program to try to get boys more interested in reading. I don't agree with everything he says, but some of the things he says make sense:
In fact, that's what gotten us where we are today, where we just keep telling kids, like, you know, "Take your medicine. Reading tastes bad, but it'll make you a better person, so suck it up." But it's not happening! Boys are just leaving reading in droves. And that's not right.
Part of the Guys Read program is where I go around and talk to teachers and librarians about [doing] exactly the opposite. Don't try to beat kids into reading. I think what we have to do is to motivate them to want to learn how to read. That's a difficult thing, so I think the best way to do it is to give them things they like to read. And what we haven't done with boys is we haven't really given them a broad range of reading. In schools, what's seen as reading is so narrow: it's literary, realistic fiction. It's feelings and problems, stuff that a lot of boys just aren't drawn to. So we're setting boys up for failure, because we have a literacy model that's just easier for girls.
I'm not generally wild about gender-specific educational initiatives, in whatever field, but I do like what he's doing. I think he's got the right approach to trying to improve literacy in general-- namely, working on giving kids things that they want to read, and not worrying so much about what they ought to read.
I'll also note that this is where I think the real transformative potential of the whole weblogging phenomenon may lie. The really interesting consequences of the rise of blogs won't come from the political side of things (idiots in bars have been spouting off about politics for as long as there have been idiots, bars, and politics-- tranferring that to the Internet is not a really dramatic leap in the process of civilization). Sure, some talented young pundits will get pundit jobs more quickly than they might have otherwise, and some low-level reporting will be done that might otherwise be lost in the noise of the mass media culture, but this isn't really revolutionary, no matter how many self-congratulatory posts people make about it.
Ironically, the areas of blogdom that have the most potential to transform the world are the areas of blogdom that are the least readable-- all those dozens of 1337-speaking teenagers griping about how lame their math classes are, talking about how totally hot that girl or guy in their third-period class is, and taking an infinite number of dumbass personality quizzes. Unbearable as a lot of it is to the casual reader, it's still text, and anything that gets a large number of young people into the idea of reading and writing text has the potential to really shake things up.
I'm not sure what the consequences will end up being (and it's entirely possible that the whole thing will fizzle out and not change anything much), but an increase in mass literacy would be a Good Thing. And giving people the idea that their own thoughts and opinions are worth broadcasting to the world is the sort of thing that could lead to massive and unpredictable changes in the way people relate.
Anyway, I generally support the Guys Read project (and I sent them some recommendations, back in the day). But when I looked at their web site, I was appalled. What a grotesquely overdesigned piece of crap-- it's all a big Flash thing, so you can't navigate it like a normal web page, and all the links spawn pop-ups containing tiny little bits of text, so you've got to look at a dozen different pages (each with its own annoying Flash crap) to get any real information.
Now, granted, half of the site is deliberately targeted at people who are at best uncertain about reading. But even the "for adults" part of the site appears to be designed for people who have trouble with lists that extend past three bullet points.
If we've gotten to the point where even people who support literacy programs are semi-literate, there may not be any hope after all...
Posted at 9:11 PM | link | follow-ups | [ hide comments ]
Well, a lot of the complaints seem to boil down to “Guys don’t read hard things. Give easy things. Easy good”, so the website doesn’t surprise me.
I didn’t read it that way. Or, rather, I think there are different degrees of “easy.”
Something like, say, The Scarlet Letter is difficult to read not only because the language is archaic and the sentence structure is difficult, but also because it’s a crashingly awful story written in the years before subtlety was invented. I struggled to read it in high school not because I had trouble with the writing, but because I hated, hated, hated the story.
I think Scieszka makes a very good point when he talks about nonfiction. That fits with some things that I remember from hgih school—I had classmates who could rattle off astonishing amounts of information about cars and military hardware, who wouldn’t be caught dead looking at the inside of a textbook, let alone reading a novel. But they could and did read things that were interesting to them.
If you’re really concerned about getting people to read, it makes sense to start by getting them to read things that are interesting to them. I would argue that encouraging general literacy is more important than forcing everyone to read the same set of literary fiction.
Okay, there’s an interesting point about most teachers and librarians being female, and they’re the people who are reading role-models and are picking school texts. But then I’d guess that the gender bias reverses as you move up the hierarchy, and its the people higher up who set curricula. And then there’s a whole “is women’s fiction undervalued” argument, which would also suggest that schools are not full of girly books.
See, I don’t give much credence to that stuff, on either side. If nothing else, many of the “dusty old classics” making up the female-friendly reading curriculum (according to one side) were written by the dreaded Dead White Europen Men, and are supposed to be unfriendly to women (according to the other side).
But I think that the stuff about the interests and inclinations of different groups of readers is important. I don’t think it’s a clean gender split—for one thing, I have almost no interest in books about cars or military hardware—but I think the broader principle that you should encourage students to read by giving them reading material that they like is a good one.
And I don’t think the genre/literary fiction divide is based on gender anyway. The gender divide is the SF/war novel vs romance novel divide.
An interesting contention.
Of course, this will all soon be a moot point, as both are ground beneath the ten-story spiked wheels of the infernokrusher movement…
Chad Orzel, 2005-06-15, 9:36am [link]
About non-fiction, what are we saying? That (school)libraries should carry more non-fiction, and publicise it more? Or that English classes should discuss non-fiction as well as fiction? The first makes sense, but the second? Aren’t non-fiction books the basis of every other subject? About the gender bias, yes, my point was that whatever bias is produced by the things Scieszka points to, it seems to have been balanced out by other things. And on the romance thing, it’s not something I’ve noticed personally, but I do remember people on rasfw throwing around statistics that say ‘romance’ is a massive sector in (US) fiction publishing. Romance novels are probably the female equivalent of the ‘guy’ (fiction) books he’s arguing for, and I think they get about as much respect in the classroom. (Since I happened to have it handy from another discussion, here’s the syllabus for the English course Irish school-leavers study http://english.slss.ie/Main/CourseMaterials2005.htm
About non-fiction, what are we saying? That (school)libraries should carry more non-fiction, and publicise it more? Or that English classes should discuss non-fiction as well as fiction? The first makes sense, but the second? Aren’t non-fiction books the basis of every other subject?
I think the point is that the “guys” he’s worried about will demonstrably read non-fiction on topics that they find interesting, so it’s not that they have problems with reading per se. If you want to get them into reading fiction, one way to do it would be to give them fiction that deals with the same general subjects.
I wouldn’t go to the extreme of assigning Tom Clancy books for the sake of the kids who are really into cars and military hardware, but there’s a lot of room between that and Wuthering Heights, a large chunk of which will have more appeal to many of Scieszka’s “guys.”
And on the romance thing, it’s not something I’ve noticed personally, but I do remember people on rasfw throwing around statistics that say ‘romance’ is a massive sector in (US) fiction publishing. Romance novels are probably the female equivalent of the ‘guy’ (fiction) books he’s arguing for, and I think they get about as much respect in the classroom.
Harlequin romances get about the same respect as Tom Clancy books, true, but many of the “classics” are much closer in spirit to romances than anything that will be of interest to the cars-and-guns set. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, books on the Irish syllabus, are pretty much ur-romance novels.
Aargh, where’d my paragraph breaks disappear to?
I have no idea. We did recently upgrade the comments software, so maybe it’s something with that. I’m getting “paragraph breaks” by leaving a blank line between paragraphs, Usenet-style—if you’re trying to use HTML line breaks, they might be getting eaten.
Chad Orzel, 2005-06-15, 11:46am [link]
Okay, I think paragraph tags (that is, left-angle-bracket p right-angle-bracket ) get eaten on preview, but if you don’t preview, they post okay.
Blank lines between paragraphs will work too.
(Chad, I’m deleting the test comments, sorry to clutter your inbox.)
I read a lot as a kid. The first thing I remember reading outside of class was comic books. Later I read science fiction. I read the typical required literature in high school; strangely enough, not so much in college. I read the magazines that came to the house – Pop Science, Pop Mechanics, Pop Photography, Model Railroader, later some news mags and things like Smithsonian. Now I cannot sit down and eat at a table by myself without reading something, even the cereal box if I have to. So, I think the approach sounds about right: the main goal is to get kids to read something, anything. They have to learn to read with comprehension. Then you can hope that they will read something you value.
I agree that the Web site is poorly designed. I know most people have high-speed connections, but my dialup is like a trip to the mid 90s (32K on a good day, 19K on a bad day), so I HATE a site that says “loading content.”
Mark Paris, 2005-06-15, 3:19pm [link]
I think he’s saying something more than that about non-fiction, by agreeing with the interviewer who doesn’t read adult fiction, and talking about the second- and third-graders reading lots of non-fiction. He isn’t very specific, unfortunately, about the books he wants to see replaced. He seems to be in favour of comics and kids’ books, and against 19th century fiction, which isn’t really a fair comparison.
Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, both big romances, yes. But the Irish syllabus also has Juno and the Paycock, set during the Easter Rising (or was it the civil war?), Amongst Women (about an old IRA man), and The Statement (Nazi on the run), so it’s not short of testosterone either. (Besides, I think the main problem with Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Silas Marner is the 19th century style)
Ray, 2005-06-15, 6:21pm [link]
Ive got a good real world example of the differences between girls and boys. I have an 11 yo girl who reads all kinds of fiction type books, and my 9yo boy reads things like bird guide books – or books on dogs with full descriptions and facts of each breed.
Theyre both reading – but my son is quite different – he’s memorized lots of facts of dog breeds, etc. while my daughter reads good stories.Peej, 2005-06-16, 12:59pm [link]
I think he’s saying something more than that about non-fiction, by agreeing with the interviewer who doesn’t read adult fiction, and talking about the second- and third-graders reading lots of non-fiction. He isn’t very specific, unfortunately, about the books he wants to see replaced.
Well, it’s a short interview…
The interviewer says “And what I read these days is actually mostly nonfiction—and comic books and children’s books. I almost never read literary fiction.” That’s a little narrower than “adult fiction”—I don’t read very much literary fiction, either, in the sense of critically-acclaimed mainstream novels. I do read adult fiction, though.
The response to that comment is a little ambiguous, but I think that the main point is that there’s nothing wrong with kids (or adults) wanting to read non-fiction, but not being particularly interested in novels. The more important thing is getting kids to be willing to read, period.
I should also point out that he’s mostly talking about a lower educational level—if you look at the recommendations he gives, they’re mostly aimed at elementary school kids (ages 5-12, give or take), with only a handful of books really designed for junior high and high school kids. High school is really too late—the problem is created earlier, and needs to be addressed earlier.
Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, both big romances, yes. But the Irish syllabus also has Juno and the Paycock, set during the Easter Rising (or was it the civil war?), Amongst Women (about an old IRA man), and The Statement (Nazi on the run), so it’s not short of testosterone either.
I didn’t intend that remark as a geenral comment on the Irish syllabus. I really can’t make a sensible comment on the Irish syllabus at all, because I only recognize about a third of the books on that list, I’ve only read a fraction of those, and I’ve never even heard of the three you mention above.
(Besides, I think the main problem with Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Silas Marner is the 19th century style)
Wuthering Heights is the only one of those that I’ve read, and while the style didn’t help anything, I hated the story.
Chad Orzel, 2005-06-16, 1:58pm [link]
The Irish syllabus, as you’d expect, contains a lot of books by Irish authors. I really hated Wuthering Heights too, but I reckon I could have lived with it if it was half the length and in a more modern style. My problems with Silas Marner were all with the style (you may know the plot from the Steve Martin film, A Simple Twist of Fate). Jane Eyre was fine when I read it last year, but I’d probably have hated it in school.
(Oh yeah, Jane Eyre – I read that partly so I could read The Eyre Affair. One of the more annoying things about that awful book is that Fforde gets the events of Jane Eyre wrong. How lazily contemptuous of his readers is that?)
Ray, 2005-06-16, 5:52pm [link]
Oh yeah, Jane Eyre – I read that partly so I could read The Eyre Affair. One of the more annoying things about that awful book is that Fforde gets the events of Jane Eyre wrong. How lazily contemptuous of his readers is that?
That’s part of the joke—the original book in Thursday’s world has a different ending, but after she chases Acheron Hades into the book, she ends up changing things so you end up with our version.
(I’ve never read Jane Eyre, but even I did pick up that something was wrong with the plot. I wound up calling Kate (who has read it) to double-check…)
Chad Orzel, 2005-06-16, 9:37pm [link]
Yes, but it’s wrong in the wrong way.
In Jane Eyre, when Jane discovers that Rochester is already married and runs away, she meets some distant relatives. Her male cousin is about to leave on missionary work, and wants Jane to go too. She is willing, but he says that she can only go as his wife. She doesn’t like the idea, but is just about to agree to it when she hears Rochester calling her name, and then she goes back to her happy ending.
In the Eyre affair, the original book in Thursday’s world ends with Jane going on the missions, but not married to her cousin. That’s an impossible ending. If she didn’t hear (Thursday’s impression of) Rochester calling her name, she would have married her cousin. She couldn’t have ended up on the missions on her own.
I mightn’t have noticed it myself if I hadn’t read the original just a couple of weeks before The Eyre Affair, but Fforde really should have gotten it right.
In the Eyre affair, the original book in Thursday’s world ends with Jane going on the missions, but not married to her cousin. That’s an impossible ending. If she didn’t hear (Thursday’s impression of) Rochester calling her name, she would have married her cousin. She couldn’t have ended up on the missions on her own.
I must bow to your superior knowledge of Jan Eyre on this.
What I really want to know is: How do you keep managing to post comments here without generating notification emails?
Chad Orzel, 2005-06-17, 8:04pm [link]
COMMENTS ARE CLOSED.
Please visit Uncertain Principles' new location at ScienceBlogs to comment.
Links Dump
Stuff has been piling up in my Bloglines feed for a good while now, so I'll unload some of it:
Sean Carroll has been blogging less of late, but he's been producing lots of good stuff, including nice posts on CERN and the Auger observatory, looking for extremely high-energy particles. I do have to quibble with one comment, though:
For the last 25 years or so, particle physics has been in an extremely unusual position -- the theory just worked so well that all the new experiments kept finding particles that had already been predicted. This is the opposite of the historically common state of affairs, in which experimenters keep coming up with unexpected new phenomena that the theorists have to scramble to understand (as we've seen in cosmology in the last decade). I fully expect the tables to turn once again when CMS and ATLAS start releasing new results. We have lots of ideas about what might be around the corner -- one or more Higgs bosons, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, various forms of strong dynamics -- but my suspicion is that what we see won't fit perfectly well into any pre-existing framework, at least not at first. That's when we theorists will really have to earn our salaries, and physics at the high-energy frontier will be as exciting as it ever was.
You don't actually need to wait for the next generation of particle accelerators-- some of the beyond-the-Standard-Model theories are already being pushed pretty hard by table-top experiments. Various groups working to measure the electric dipole moments of elementary particles have already put pretty tight limits on what's possible. Depending on who you ask, the basic version of supersymmetry is either very close to being completely ruled out, or already dead.
Annoyingly, there's damnably little on the Web about EDM results. The best summary I found is in a collection of PDF presentations by the Romalis group at Princeton. These are terrific experiments, though, and are doing more to actually push the limits of theory than the accelerators that are currently on-line.
Sean also has a piece on the worst teaching evaluation study method ever. Actually "RateMyProfessors.com" has to be one of the worst ideas ever... (I'm not looking, dammit, I'm not...)
Sticking with physics for a bit, Peter Woit agrees with Lee Smolin that the structure of academia is inhibiting the "next Einstein." Personally, I think this theory is well into the yellow zone on the Crank-O-Meter, but it's moderately interesting to read.
Speaking of the culture of academia, Bill Tozier shows that some ideas never get old:
When I started graduate school an embarrassingly long time ago, it was the age of the "silver platter": all the old dead wood were “about to retire”, and tenure would be readily available to all us new starry-eyed youfs shining (somewhat by default) in our fields. We would have multiple job openings to choose from, up-bids on our salary offers, clamoring departments vying for our brains with poshness and perqs galore.
Needless to say, it didn't happen fifteen years ago, but just the other day, I heard a colleague repeat the same basic theory with a straight face.
The Little Professor offers some thoughts on the popularity of the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's a short post, but it nails both the reason why I think I could repackage some bloggy writing and make money off it, and why I hesitate to do so.
Elsewhere, I continue to get all my good astronomy news from LiveJournal, in this case a pointer from James Nicoll to an article on the discovery of a rocky extra-solar planet. Also in LJ-land, the oft-linked Matt McIrvin takes on the recurring issue of consciousness in quantum mechanics.
And finally, because I like to post the occasional silly link, The Periodic Table of Haiku (via Peg Kerr). Sadly, all of the haiku for elements I've been associated with kind of suck, so instead, I'll close with the quote I used in the front matter of my Ph.D. thesis (on collisions in metastable xenon):
"Can you name the six noble gases?"
[...] I rattled them off in their prper aristocratic order. "Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and-- er-- Radon. All were raised to the peerage in the eleventh year of England's George Fifth, and Neon was awarded the Order of the Seraphim by Gustav the Sixth of Sweden for its compassionate service in guiding to bars and beaneries guys who roll into towns late at night."
(From The Moon's Fire-Eating Daughter by John Myers Myers.)
Posted at 9:18 PM | link | follow-ups | 3 comments
Graduation Day
The two hundred and mumbleth commencement exercises of Union College were held this morning, in sweltering heat (90 degree temperatures, and 9000% humidity)-- a wonderful day for parading around in black robes. (And bagpipes. Why is it always bagpipes?)
The day has basically been a big social whirl for me-- first, the graduation itself, then a quick trip home to put on a dry shirt, then a celebratory lunch with my thesis student's family, then a party thrown by one of our neighbors (that had nothing to do with the College, though a few faculty were in attendance). The dog has been crated for most of the day, except for three short walks (I would've taken a her on a longer walk, but she was panting alarmingly after about a block and a half), and will undoubtedly want a lot of attention tonight. And Kate won't be back for another hour or two.
I do want to take a minute, though, to mark the graduation of the first class I've seen through from start to finish. These guys started the same year I did, and they've been a good bunch, especially our majors and minors (of course, every department says that).
So, congratulations Ryan, Alyssa, Garrett, Evan, Mike, Barnaby, Emily, and Lori. Best wishes for your future careers, and if you should happen to make a billion dollars, please remember that Schenectady needs more lasers.
Posted at 7:32 PM | link | follow-ups | 13 comments
“If we’ve gotten to the point where even people who support literacy programs are semi-literate, there may not be any hope after all…” Well, a lot of the complaints seem to boil down to “Guys don’t read hard things. Give easy things. Easy good”, so the website doesn’t surprise me. Okay, there’s an interesting point about most teachers and librarians being female, and they’re the people who are reading role-models and are picking school texts. But then I’d guess that the gender bias reverses as you move up the hierarchy, and its the people higher up who set curricula. And then there’s a whole “is women’s fiction undervalued” argument, which would also suggest that schools are not full of girly books. And I don’t think the genre/literary fiction divide is based on gender anyway. The gender divide is the SF/war novel vs romance novel divide.
Ray, 2005-06-15, 8:03am [link]