I think I'm still recovering from that last post. ...So...much...information... But in an attempt to press on, I will post about the next chapter in Maryanne Wolf's extremely well written and fascinating book, Proust and the Squid.
Chapter three is my favorite chapter so far. Up to this point, Ms. Wolf has hinted at what Socrates thought about the developing importance placed on reading and writing by the members of his ancient Athenian culture. Socrates is the ancient Greek philosopher of whom I sadly didn't know anything about before I started reading this book. (outside of the seminal early 90's teenage movie masterpiece: "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" all I thought of Socrates was a marble head in a museum...this is true people; I'm not proud of it...but it is true)
Socrates did not trust reading/writing. He was the inventor of...bum, bum bum!!! The "Socratic Method" - though I'm pretty sure that is not what he, himself, called it. He used the Socratic Method to challenge his students thoughts and presumptions about themselves and the society they lived in (ancient Athens). The reason he used it? To promote his absolute belief in the importance of leading an examined life and that through leading an examined life one will full fill one's highest calling as a human being...and, I assume, contribute to the betterment of society by thinking freely and resisting the status quo. Socrates thought out of the box. He was put on trial by his government and five hundred of his fellow citizens sentenced him to be executed because of it...for corrupting the minds of the youth in Athens...corrupting the minds of youth. I wonder if I could ever be convicted of that noble cause?
At his trial, Socrates famously said (as quoted by Ms. Wolf on page 71):
"If I tell you that this is the greatest good for a human being, to engage every day in arguments about virtue and other things you have heard me talk about, examining both myself and others, and if I tell you that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will be even less likely to believe what I am saying. But that's the way it is, gentlemen, as I claim, though it's not easy to convince you of it."
Yeah, he really said that. So by now we can all see, Socrates was a pretty cool and deep dude.
So what did Socrates, this great orator, the originator of Socratic method, the vile corrupter of young and fragile minds feel about reading and writing?!?...He despised it. He thought it was the murderer of the examined life and of any hope of acquiring internalized knowledge; true knowledge...Primary Discourse (?) with a very capital 'D' as the case may be...
He hated reading and writing (apparently he wasn't alone because I guess the majority of educated Greeks felt that written language was inferior to their oral traditions). As Martha Nussbaum is quoted "...[Socrates] believed that books could short-circuit the work of active critical understanding, producing a pupil who has a 'false conceit of wisdom' ". We'll get to that false conceit later, but damn it's good.
I don't even want to summarize with an essentially here...Ms. Wolf breaks down Socrates disdain for the written word to three points, which she discusses rather effectively. --Seriously folks, pages 69-78, the parts of this book about how Socrates felt about reading and writing are worth the price of admission alone--.
1. The inflexibility of the written word.
2. The written word's act of destroying the importance of memory.
3. The loss of control over language.
The first I'll touch on briefly. Socrates did not like that when you read something in a book, you can't actively engage in an argument with that book...the book won't argue back (who knows, maybe it does because I know when I read that I started to have an argument inside my head that went back and forth for a while..."ahh, yes words don't argue back, but wait what if they do? I mean, I'm having an argument right now, holy crap, I am having an argument right now, but wait who am I arguing with? the book or my self? I don't know. Is this an argument too or am I starting to loose focus?...etc...) But Socrates liked to do argue, it was the basis of the Socratic method...to question and answer and question and answer and question and answer and question...with the emphasis on question because there always was another one of those. And each answer lead to further refining of the discourse...or Discourse...and back to the beginning: The inflexibility of the written word.
The second, I think is profound. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it. It tickles me. It makes me want to cry. It is absolutely insane. Remember how I blogged (ooh, a verb) earlier that by choosing to read, we are actively re-wiring our brains to accomplish that task? Well, Socrates came from a tradition that didn't do that. He came from a tradition that had an extremely complex set of techniques, "mnemotechniques", to help a person memorize and recite VAST amounts of information. When I say vast, I'm talking oceans here. People are memorizing freakin' Homer's Odessey here...and more. And by memorizing that information, people are internalizing it...digesting it...enabling themselves to contemplate and analyze it. The act of memorization puts a great value on deep, contemplative thought. Which is really freakin' interesting because if we telescope to our society. The mighty USA, 2010. We don't memorize much of anything (well at least I don't and I think I'm pretty average and like the bulk of society on this one here). How many of us remember our ten most frequently called freinds' telephone numbers? Much less an entire book? Much less a single paragraph within an entire book? And that leads back to his statement of "false conceit of wisdom". We certainly read a lot of stuff; a LOT of stuff. But how much have we internalized? How much do we chew on and digest and...I think I'll stop with that metaphor...but I find myself agreeing with this "false conceit of wisdom". And what Ms. Wolf does is she extends this concept of lack of wisdom to our digital age and hints, doesn't really argue yet (though I think she will towards the end of the book) that with our digital age we are not only reading words but we are seeing images and hearing sound bites and being fed VAST (there's that word again) amounts of information...but how much of it is actually giving us wisdom? How much of it is being refined. I mean hell, I don't remember what was on the news this morning on Yahoo! and I'm plugged in all the time. I'm constantly checking that website to see what is going on next in Fergie's rich and famous lifestyle.
But you know what? A lot of people think that by focusing on reading and not on memorization (zooming back to the Greeks here) the Greeks enabled themselves to enter a cultural "golden era"; their Classical and Hellenistic periods when art and architecture and I assume drama and writing were at their peaks, are going on precisely when Socrates was teaching and precisely when there is a big shift happening from an oral (memorized) tradition to a written and read one. The argument goes that by creating an alphabetic writing system that focuses on the sounds they made as opposed to symbols to represent objects, the Greeks became incredibly efficient thinkers. They only had to remember thirty-some odd sounds as opposed to thousands of abstract images. And by learning not only to read and write as opposed to memorize, but to do so alphabetically, they enabled themselves...the argument goes...to enter a stage of extreme creativity. They freed up mental capacity. They allowed their brains to no longer focus on memory and enable it to focus on creative thinking...
But I don't know. As much as I am seduced by that line of reasoning, I don't really buy it. I'm skeptical. I think that argument is more of an argument by people who place a MASSIVE importance on an alphabetic language versus a logosyllabic language (pictures). Think western vs. non-western society here. I think it is an argument that is largely based on prejudices...the Chinese and Japanese have enormously complex reading and writing systems and they have incredibly creative societies...just look at their art, architecture...everything...And besides, it was the very same Greeks who learned to value memorization who developed an alphabetic writing system for transcribing their knowledge in the first place.
But, to get back to Socrates here (I'm almost done, I promise). I think his focus on the lose of deep thinking is extremely interesting. Because, when I think of it, I don't think our society, a society that has read and writ for generations upon generations values deep thinking much. We value NEW thinking. And perhaps new thinking is more a product of reading a writing. What, if anything, are we sacrificing?
A few closing thoughts: Socrates third objection is almost amusing to me: The loss of control over language. He was afraid that once something is written down, there is no controlling who gets to read it. There's no controlling who has access to the knowledge. Socrates was put to death for spreading dangerous thinking or knowledge, yet he was afraid of how writing/reading could spread thinking/knowledge even further; beyond his control.
A great irony in all this: we only know what Socrates said because his protege, Plato wrote it all down for us to read.
And now (i can't resist):
And (I love this) the amazing Black Eyed Peas featuring Fergie and flashmob:
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Ms. Wolf, are you trying to seduce me? An open letter
Dear Ms. Wolf,
Am I wrong? Or are you just playing with my emotions? After starting your book I was intrigued. I admit that I wanted to be drawn in by something that could tickle my brain as well as my heart. And in chapter one, you were so good at mixing science and literature in just the right way to keep me wanting more. But, as I eagerly delved into chapter two, you sidestepped my lovers embrace and piled on so many facts about the history of ancient readers and writers and how linguists define different types of language that I felt like I was being smothered by a dancing two ton hippopotamus.
How was I supposed to fully comprehend the various diagrams of a human brain? Even though you explained that the difference between the person that looks at a jumble of recognizable letters like 'mbli' and the and then at those same letters forming the word 'limb' equals triple the neural brain activity so well, I was confused.
And can you blame me that I was dumbfounded when you explained that the neurons at the back of my brain reach out with guided synapses to create links between other neurons across the different parts of my brain so that when I learned to read the word 'cow', not only did the back of my brain recognize that I was looking at something with my eyes but five or so other areas of my brain were simultaneously de-coding the letters C-O-W to mean a four legged animal with large udders from which I get a healthy beverage perfect for dunking my chocolate chip cookies in?...etc... etc..?
AND can I really be expected to know that had I not learned to read; those same synapses that reached between neurons and across vast swaths of brain tissue probably wouldn't have made their epic journeys to reach out and touched someone; therefore not creating the necessary brain wiring to allow me to read the word cow as that previously mentioned four-legged animal?
Then, just at I was slowly digesting new information about brain function, you gave me all these different words on page 34 that break down languages into different types. Like: pictographic (pictures) and logograhic (abstracted pictures meaning...pictures) and logosyllabary (which I'm not really sure about, except that they somehow mix syllables and abstracted pictures to create some sort of hybrid written form. Similar to types of modern Chinese and Japanese written language). You said logosyllabary language "makes far more demands on the brain" when compared to the other two; and I believe it because my brain hurts Ms. Wolf, it hurts.
Then you talked about morphological words and how they allow people to add an 's' at the end of words like 'bear' and how without the invention of morphological words we wouldn't be as able to even think the many complex thoughts we do now.
I was crying Ms. Wolf, crying on the inside when you hit me with the Sumerians and Egyptians and how they both had similar languages but before them was this culture that made clay tokens with little scratches on them to tell each other who had more cattle and who had more sheep.
But you didn't care did you? You didn't care when you told me about how amazing the Sumerian language supposedly was...is...er, was...and how it developed and changed over several hundreds of years and how it was essentially one nail, pressed into clay tablets to create different patterns and how the written language consisted of thousands of different symbols that were both logographic and logosyllabary. You didn't care that I was exhausted by then.
I admit, I perked up and laughed when you explained that Sumerians taught students to read both semantically and phonetically which was a "metacognitive strategy to teach reading". I didn't laugh because I thought it was funny. I laughed because you said, today experts are debating whether it is more effective to teach kids to read semantically or phonetically. Apparently the Sumerians figured that one out for us, thousands of years ago. My laugh wasn't really an audible ha ha kind of a laugh, it was more of an inward snicker...more like a heh heh.
But, I cried again when I found out(to be perfectly truthful, I didn't really cry...I don't want to be overly dramatic here) that it took about 7 years to learn to read and write as a kid in Sumeria and that reading and writing was reserved only for the elite. I cried, Ms. Wolf.
Then I laughed out loud (for real this time, because dang it, it was pretty funny) after you explained how learning to write in Sumerian was so hard to do and that there are so many existing clay tablets as evidence of that difficulty. Apparently, students didn't always write as well as their teachers wished because the phrase "And then he caned me" was at the end of many error filled clay tablets.
I was tapped out Ms. Wolf, just about gone. But you kept going. You said Egyptian writing is more beautiful and more complex than Sumerian...You said that we don't know which written language came first. You said that even though the Sumerian culture died, it's writing style lived on for around a thousand years because some fifteen other cultures adopted it as their own. Apparently the Arkadians were one of the adopters and they used it to write books with titles like the "Epic of Gilgamesh" between 668 and 627 BCE and "Advice of a Father to His Son" and "All Things Known about the Universe" and even "Treatise of Medical Diagnostics and Prognostics"
And I was exhausted Ms. Wolf. Exhausted
My brain was pulsing with information that I couldn't possibly understand so quickly.
Then, somehow a thick honey like humidity filled my heart and mind and I felt warm inside. I floated. Just floated.
How expertly you broke me down, Ms. Wolf, with scientific images, linguistic vocabulary and ancient history. How delicately you lifted me with knowledge of far off and ancient written cultures developing completely different languages from those I just read about. Oh, how the thought of the poetic nature of human ingenuity made me smile when I thought how of so many people spread across time and space had the capacity to invent their own symbolic forms of writing. And that, for generations people would endeavor to master them. I was tickled to hear that we understand some ancient languages yet some remain a mystery.
I fell in love with sadness as I read of how Chinese women that were foot bound, developed and propagated their own secret language called nu shu, female writing. And that it was "drawn on delicately painted fans or sewn into beautiful fabrics in ritual letters". You told me, Ms. Wolf, that the last woman to speak and read nu shu died recently. She was ninety six.
So you leave me at the end of chapter two Ms. Wolf. Wondering which lover I will get next. The confusing one who leads me on with facts and words too big for me to understand at first glance? Or the gentle one who will speak tenderly with stories of mystery and human triumph? Perhaps it will be both; perhaps that is best.
Next, what will Socrates say?
Sumerian tablet
And...
Am I wrong? Or are you just playing with my emotions? After starting your book I was intrigued. I admit that I wanted to be drawn in by something that could tickle my brain as well as my heart. And in chapter one, you were so good at mixing science and literature in just the right way to keep me wanting more. But, as I eagerly delved into chapter two, you sidestepped my lovers embrace and piled on so many facts about the history of ancient readers and writers and how linguists define different types of language that I felt like I was being smothered by a dancing two ton hippopotamus.
How was I supposed to fully comprehend the various diagrams of a human brain? Even though you explained that the difference between the person that looks at a jumble of recognizable letters like 'mbli' and the and then at those same letters forming the word 'limb' equals triple the neural brain activity so well, I was confused.
And can you blame me that I was dumbfounded when you explained that the neurons at the back of my brain reach out with guided synapses to create links between other neurons across the different parts of my brain so that when I learned to read the word 'cow', not only did the back of my brain recognize that I was looking at something with my eyes but five or so other areas of my brain were simultaneously de-coding the letters C-O-W to mean a four legged animal with large udders from which I get a healthy beverage perfect for dunking my chocolate chip cookies in?...etc... etc..?
AND can I really be expected to know that had I not learned to read; those same synapses that reached between neurons and across vast swaths of brain tissue probably wouldn't have made their epic journeys to reach out and touched someone; therefore not creating the necessary brain wiring to allow me to read the word cow as that previously mentioned four-legged animal?
Then, just at I was slowly digesting new information about brain function, you gave me all these different words on page 34 that break down languages into different types. Like: pictographic (pictures) and logograhic (abstracted pictures meaning...pictures) and logosyllabary (which I'm not really sure about, except that they somehow mix syllables and abstracted pictures to create some sort of hybrid written form. Similar to types of modern Chinese and Japanese written language). You said logosyllabary language "makes far more demands on the brain" when compared to the other two; and I believe it because my brain hurts Ms. Wolf, it hurts.
Then you talked about morphological words and how they allow people to add an 's' at the end of words like 'bear' and how without the invention of morphological words we wouldn't be as able to even think the many complex thoughts we do now.
I was crying Ms. Wolf, crying on the inside when you hit me with the Sumerians and Egyptians and how they both had similar languages but before them was this culture that made clay tokens with little scratches on them to tell each other who had more cattle and who had more sheep.
But you didn't care did you? You didn't care when you told me about how amazing the Sumerian language supposedly was...is...er, was...and how it developed and changed over several hundreds of years and how it was essentially one nail, pressed into clay tablets to create different patterns and how the written language consisted of thousands of different symbols that were both logographic and logosyllabary. You didn't care that I was exhausted by then.
I admit, I perked up and laughed when you explained that Sumerians taught students to read both semantically and phonetically which was a "metacognitive strategy to teach reading". I didn't laugh because I thought it was funny. I laughed because you said, today experts are debating whether it is more effective to teach kids to read semantically or phonetically. Apparently the Sumerians figured that one out for us, thousands of years ago. My laugh wasn't really an audible ha ha kind of a laugh, it was more of an inward snicker...more like a heh heh.
But, I cried again when I found out(to be perfectly truthful, I didn't really cry...I don't want to be overly dramatic here) that it took about 7 years to learn to read and write as a kid in Sumeria and that reading and writing was reserved only for the elite. I cried, Ms. Wolf.
Then I laughed out loud (for real this time, because dang it, it was pretty funny) after you explained how learning to write in Sumerian was so hard to do and that there are so many existing clay tablets as evidence of that difficulty. Apparently, students didn't always write as well as their teachers wished because the phrase "And then he caned me" was at the end of many error filled clay tablets.
I was tapped out Ms. Wolf, just about gone. But you kept going. You said Egyptian writing is more beautiful and more complex than Sumerian...You said that we don't know which written language came first. You said that even though the Sumerian culture died, it's writing style lived on for around a thousand years because some fifteen other cultures adopted it as their own. Apparently the Arkadians were one of the adopters and they used it to write books with titles like the "Epic of Gilgamesh" between 668 and 627 BCE and "Advice of a Father to His Son" and "All Things Known about the Universe" and even "Treatise of Medical Diagnostics and Prognostics"
And I was exhausted Ms. Wolf. Exhausted
My brain was pulsing with information that I couldn't possibly understand so quickly.
Then, somehow a thick honey like humidity filled my heart and mind and I felt warm inside. I floated. Just floated.
How expertly you broke me down, Ms. Wolf, with scientific images, linguistic vocabulary and ancient history. How delicately you lifted me with knowledge of far off and ancient written cultures developing completely different languages from those I just read about. Oh, how the thought of the poetic nature of human ingenuity made me smile when I thought how of so many people spread across time and space had the capacity to invent their own symbolic forms of writing. And that, for generations people would endeavor to master them. I was tickled to hear that we understand some ancient languages yet some remain a mystery.
I fell in love with sadness as I read of how Chinese women that were foot bound, developed and propagated their own secret language called nu shu, female writing. And that it was "drawn on delicately painted fans or sewn into beautiful fabrics in ritual letters". You told me, Ms. Wolf, that the last woman to speak and read nu shu died recently. She was ninety six.
So you leave me at the end of chapter two Ms. Wolf. Wondering which lover I will get next. The confusing one who leads me on with facts and words too big for me to understand at first glance? Or the gentle one who will speak tenderly with stories of mystery and human triumph? Perhaps it will be both; perhaps that is best.
Next, what will Socrates say?
Sumerian tablet
And...
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
A note about sketchbooks.
I've been thinking...this blog, I want it to be more than a book report about Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of etc...
I want also want it to be kind of an experiment...a living breathing reflection of a mind's meanderings. A wide open window to a day dreamer's thoughts and artistic impulses...which is funny because Maryanne Wolf, the author of Proust and the Squid, pretty much gives me the permission to do just that.
In chapter 1, page 14 she says, and I quote: "In much the way reading reflects the brain's capacity for going beyond the original design of its structures, it also reflects the reader's capacity to go beyond what is given by the text and the author...you, the reader, automatically begin to connect what [an author like] Proust writes with your own thinking and personal insights." (--her tense was past, I changed it to present to fit what I am trying to say.--) Essentially what she tells me is this, and I paraphrase: 'just like our brains had to hot-wire themselves to learn to read we get to hot-wire the ideas presented in any given book and take them for a joy ride to wherever we might go.' And what is so cool about it is, that is the way it is supposed to be.
SO, besides being a book report place, this blog is also going to be my digital sketchbook place for a while...a place where I will share random drawings and seemingly disparate thoughts or inspirations. I will try to treat this sketchbook more gently than the hard cover ones I keep with me in my bag. I don't want this one to sail off the roof of the car it is resting on as the driver (whom will remain anonymous) speeds away with me in the driver's seat.
I shall close with:
And Philip Glass:
I want also want it to be kind of an experiment...a living breathing reflection of a mind's meanderings. A wide open window to a day dreamer's thoughts and artistic impulses...which is funny because Maryanne Wolf, the author of Proust and the Squid, pretty much gives me the permission to do just that.
In chapter 1, page 14 she says, and I quote: "In much the way reading reflects the brain's capacity for going beyond the original design of its structures, it also reflects the reader's capacity to go beyond what is given by the text and the author...you, the reader, automatically begin to connect what [an author like] Proust writes with your own thinking and personal insights." (--her tense was past, I changed it to present to fit what I am trying to say.--) Essentially what she tells me is this, and I paraphrase: 'just like our brains had to hot-wire themselves to learn to read we get to hot-wire the ideas presented in any given book and take them for a joy ride to wherever we might go.' And what is so cool about it is, that is the way it is supposed to be.
SO, besides being a book report place, this blog is also going to be my digital sketchbook place for a while...a place where I will share random drawings and seemingly disparate thoughts or inspirations. I will try to treat this sketchbook more gently than the hard cover ones I keep with me in my bag. I don't want this one to sail off the roof of the car it is resting on as the driver (whom will remain anonymous) speeds away with me in the driver's seat.
I shall close with:
And Philip Glass:
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Proust and the Squid part I
Blog 1 (I know the first one was really blog 1, but I don’t think it counted all that much)
First, the facts:
Proust and the Squid (she explains why in the first chapter)
The Story and Science of the
By Maryanne Wolf
Copyright 2007 by Maryanne Wolf
Published by HarperCollins Publishers
The author, Maryanne Wolf breaks her book into nine chapters and categorizes the chapters into three parts. While I won’t go into the names of each chapter ahead of time, I do think it is interesting to note the Part titles.
Part I: How the Brain Learned to Read
Part II: How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time
Part III: When the Brain Can’t Learn to Read.
Next some impressions:
Now, I know what you are probably thinking…
Now my approach:
Since I have to write ten blogs and this book is divided into nine chapters I will blog as I go. I will attempt to briefly summarize the main points of the chapter and relate it in some way to whatever framing questions seem to apply. I will also editorialize with my thoughts and feelings and generally attempt wit in my presentation.
Part I: How the Brain Learned to Read (that’s history people and it goes back some 4,000+ years)
Chapter 1: Reading Lessons from Proust and the Squid.
So I know you are all dying to know why Proust and why the Squid. Ms. Wolf lets us in pretty quick. She chose Proust because of his eloquent, lovely and intellectually deep writing (there are quotes from him scattered throughout) and the squid because in the 1950’s scientists studied squids’ brains in an effort to understand human brains and brain plasticity.
Ms. Wolf: The act of reading is a two part process; Biological and Intellectual.
The Squid represents Biology and Proust represents Intellectual…ness.
First the Biological (or rather Social): Essentially the mere fact that we can read and write is INCREDIBLE. The ability to read/write is not a foregone biological conclusion of every infant from birth. We have to learn it. And it is a social construct transferred to us starting at birth by our family and teachers as a reading/writing “Discourse” (ahhhhh, Gee theory, my brain hurts). The type of reading you and I are doing this very moment is based on the “alphabetic principle” and we owe that principle to the ancient Greeks some 2,000 years ago. The alphabetic principle basically says: there is an alphabet consisting of letters that represent sounds. Those letters are strung together in a categorized way to represent more complex sounds that become words. The words themselves represent objects or ideas and can, in turn, be strung together in even more complex ways to form more complex sounds that become sentences which can represent a whole slew of different meanings and systems of thought and theories and manifestoes and ideologies etc…etc… From what we understand, the Greeks owe their invention of the “alphabetic principle” to earlier more picto-graphic efforts by the Sumerians, Egyptians and Cretes, some 2,000 years before. And (to skip to the next chapter a little bit) the Sumerians etc…owe what they learned to tens of twenties of thousands of years of experimentation by other cultures before them.
NOW Biological: From birth, sight is programmed into our genetic makeup; we will see. Hearing is programmed into tour genetic makeup; we will listen. Even language is programmed into our genetic makeup; we WILL talk even if we have to invent our own words for things. But in order to learn to read and write, our brains have to adapt a slew of different and complex systems and mold them to the task of reading/writing (and the book goes into some detail about what those different processes are). But the main biological idea in a nut-shell is:
We actually physically alter our brains in order to learn to read and write –physically ALTER our own brains. We change our brains to make meaning of patterns of lines and dots on paper. If we didn’t learn to read when we were kids, our very own brains would be DIFFERENT brains today from what they are! WE CHANGE OUR BRAINS — AHHHHHHHH!!!!! CRAZY!
That obviously makes my head spin with wonderment.
Finally, Intellectually: There were some really cool things Ms. Wolf highlights in regards to the intellectual pursuit of reading. The main one, however, is that reading is an individual experience and that our minds wander when we read and that is a good thing. When we read, we bring all our own experiences and thoughts and ideas to the intellectual table and telescope the ideas in the book to create our own ideas. The act of reading becomes a process that opens our minds to new thoughts and broadens us to new experiences that don’t necessarily have to be ours first hand.
Ms. Wolf closed her chapter with some trepidation about how reading is changing in the digital age and stated her concern that with more information instantly at our fingertips, we are not cultivating the same kind of deep thought that reading books can facilitate. She made an interesting observation that perhaps kids now are altering their brains in a different way to learn a different type of reading that how people have been historically altering their reading brains.
I will close this blog with the same quote by Proust that Ms. Wolf opened her book with.
“I believe that reading, in its original essence, (is) that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude” – Marcel Proust
Saturday, June 12, 2010
A Blog about....Blogs.
Coming soon....oooooooh.
That was my post when I first set up this site in an attempt at circumventing the order of things. I thought, well, I could just write what I think about blogs first...then I could look for blogs that I find interesting later, perhaps tomorrow, or the next day or the next week... But as I sat and try to write my first "blog about blogs", I couldn't really think of much to say. There was no source material to comment on. So I went back to the original assignment and pursued things in the proper order. I searched out some blogs and tried to find some interesting ones before I actually wrote anything down. However, as a sign of mostly full transparency, I figured I would leave my very first effort at a blogging post up...for posterity sake.
I've never been a big blog guy. I know people who do, for sure; but haven't spent much time visiting anyone's blog and hadn't really dreamed to writing my own. I do have a pseudo blog that functions as a website for my art. But it doesn't work like a blog really works.
In order to really understand what a blog is I first set out to familiar territory. I'm an avid NPR fan and love Wait-Wait, Don't Tell me and Studio 360. "If the radio shows are so good," my brain told me, "their blogs must be brilliantly funny and insightful! (respectively)." Obviously that was set up to emphasize that while they weren't all that bad but they weren't totally amazing either. I was able to dig up this tasty tidbit (bad pun intended in retrospect) from Wait-Wait though and Studio 360's blog did have the following awesome you tube music video link with a song about the BP gulf coast oil spill featuring Mos Def, Trombone Shorty (who I had Never heard of before), Lenny Kravitz, Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Tim Robbins:
I love that song/video...
After some more searches that resulted in lukewarm results, I thought that I would check out a couple of blogs by some friends of mine. Radio Free Bannerglad and This is Africa. Both of these are well written and entertaining blogs by professional writers. Ty's, the first one, is about his home and family life and mostly intended as a peek into the life of a stay-at-home dad and his young year son and their trials and joys together. Despite what one may think of the over all subject, he usually weaves in some sweet and often humorous truths into his work. Chris' blog is incredible; not only because he is a gifted writer (he's been published in the NY Times) but because he is leading an enviable life (he has been spending the past 3-5 years traveling to far off exotic places, writing about it, getting recognition for it and making money doing so).
So I got to thinking; "Oh brain of mine, what have I learned from this trek into the blog-o-sphere?" Well, Ty and Chris make their living as writers and their blogs are good because the blogs themselves are their final forms; not derivatives of a brilliant original like those of the Wait-Wait Don't Tell Me and Studio 360 radio programs.
But I think there is something even more compelling to learn about blogs. They offer windows into others' lives and allows us all to connect to the world outside ourselves. They allow any author tell us what is important to her/him and to educate us about something we may never had even heard about. And whether is it a damned cool song and video about the BP oil spill or one featuring a man actually drinking a shot of gin and mayo it is pretty powerful to think that all you have to do get your ideas out is click 'Publish Post'. I think I will.
That was my post when I first set up this site in an attempt at circumventing the order of things. I thought, well, I could just write what I think about blogs first...then I could look for blogs that I find interesting later, perhaps tomorrow, or the next day or the next week... But as I sat and try to write my first "blog about blogs", I couldn't really think of much to say. There was no source material to comment on. So I went back to the original assignment and pursued things in the proper order. I searched out some blogs and tried to find some interesting ones before I actually wrote anything down. However, as a sign of mostly full transparency, I figured I would leave my very first effort at a blogging post up...for posterity sake.
I've never been a big blog guy. I know people who do, for sure; but haven't spent much time visiting anyone's blog and hadn't really dreamed to writing my own. I do have a pseudo blog that functions as a website for my art. But it doesn't work like a blog really works.
In order to really understand what a blog is I first set out to familiar territory. I'm an avid NPR fan and love Wait-Wait, Don't Tell me and Studio 360. "If the radio shows are so good," my brain told me, "their blogs must be brilliantly funny and insightful! (respectively)." Obviously that was set up to emphasize that while they weren't all that bad but they weren't totally amazing either. I was able to dig up this tasty tidbit (bad pun intended in retrospect) from Wait-Wait though and Studio 360's blog did have the following awesome you tube music video link with a song about the BP gulf coast oil spill featuring Mos Def, Trombone Shorty (who I had Never heard of before), Lenny Kravitz, Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Tim Robbins:
I love that song/video...
After some more searches that resulted in lukewarm results, I thought that I would check out a couple of blogs by some friends of mine. Radio Free Bannerglad and This is Africa. Both of these are well written and entertaining blogs by professional writers. Ty's, the first one, is about his home and family life and mostly intended as a peek into the life of a stay-at-home dad and his young year son and their trials and joys together. Despite what one may think of the over all subject, he usually weaves in some sweet and often humorous truths into his work. Chris' blog is incredible; not only because he is a gifted writer (he's been published in the NY Times) but because he is leading an enviable life (he has been spending the past 3-5 years traveling to far off exotic places, writing about it, getting recognition for it and making money doing so).
So I got to thinking; "Oh brain of mine, what have I learned from this trek into the blog-o-sphere?" Well, Ty and Chris make their living as writers and their blogs are good because the blogs themselves are their final forms; not derivatives of a brilliant original like those of the Wait-Wait Don't Tell Me and Studio 360 radio programs.
But I think there is something even more compelling to learn about blogs. They offer windows into others' lives and allows us all to connect to the world outside ourselves. They allow any author tell us what is important to her/him and to educate us about something we may never had even heard about. And whether is it a damned cool song and video about the BP oil spill or one featuring a man actually drinking a shot of gin and mayo it is pretty powerful to think that all you have to do get your ideas out is click 'Publish Post'. I think I will.
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