It was a dark and stormy night . . .
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
For my photography class assignment this week, I tried to capture Fall. Fall has always been my favorite season, but typically my fall photos never quite turn out as beautiful as fall itself. So this year, and with some of my new photography skills (I highly recommend the book "The Photographer's Eye" by Michael Freeman), I tried a different approach.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Image credits: http://www.recipetips.com/images/recipe/bread/pumpkin_bread.jpg
I've gotten behind on movie reviews and such, so how about something a little different for my journal? How about my neighbor's award winning Pumpkin Bread recipe? I was craving Pumpkin Bread, and oddly, where I live it is hard to find. So I put out a call for recipes. Here's Jennie's:
Jennie's Pumpkin Bread
3 cups canned pumpkin puree
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
4 cups white sugar
6 eggs
4 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
1 1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1 cup chopped pecans
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line bottom of three 9x5 inch pans with parchment paper or with waxed paper cut to fit. Grease and flour pans and grease including the paper in the bottom of the pan.
In a large bowl, mix together pumpkin, oil, sugar, and eggs. Combine dry ingredients; reserve 2 Tbsp. flour mixture. Stir dry mixture into pumpkin mixture. Stir reserved flour into nuts to coat. Stir nuts into batter. Divide batter evenly into the 3 prepared pans. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour. The top of the loaf should spring back when lightly pressed. Remove from pans and remove paper. Cool completely on wire rack before wrapping in plastic wrap to store.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
(click to embiggen)
Friday, October 30, 2009
I looked up this poem, written by David Harrington Watt, to give to a friend, but thought I'd post it here as well:
Nunc Dimittis
for Bleiben, 1988-1999
“Now you release your servant in peace . . .” –Luke 2:29
My life was saved when I was fourteen months old.
A woman came to the shelter that day—the day after her rape
—and paid sixty dollars for a watchdog.
She was a fool. I weighed seventy-seven pounds,
but I was no watchdog. She had come looking for a John Wayne,
and chose a Gandhi by mistake.
Still, for three thousand nights
I slept next to her, my snores and sighs telling her:
you are not alone; the world is not as dangerous as you think.
Today, she stand above me. I avert my eyes.
And then, at three o’clock,
As the needle begins to eradicate my pain, she
leans down and places her lips next to my right ear.
She whispers—once, twice, and then six thousand times:
How beautiful you are. You did great. You are loved.
***
Nunc Dimittis is Latin and from the Liturgy of the Hours. In English it reads: Lord, now you let your servant go in peace.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Photo by Jon Jones: www.JonJonesPhoto.com (Gallery: Europe 1)
(direct link) http://www.jonjonesphoto.com/gallery.html?gallery=Europe%201&skipno=35¤tIndex=6
Photo:
I've always been fascinated by photos of people leaving: walking, running, marching, rowing, riding away ... somehow leaving the picture. Many of the photos I own/have purchased capture this. I also love short stories that illustrate this as well: Ursula LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas" or even something like Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain" or movies like "Leaving Las Vegas" or "Blue" from the Red,White, and Blue trilogy by director Krzysztof Kieślowski or the Academy Award winner "The Lives of Others."
I'm not sure what this says about me, but my love for "leaving" photos continues. While looking through the amazing archives of photographer Jon Jones, I ran across the above photo. I love the mood and the way the light falls on the two men in the foreground as well as how the light blurs the men in the background as they make their way down the road. I love that they are leaving. I don't know who these men are or where they are going, but part of me wants to jump in line and go with them.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Each year the university where I teach holds a Casino Night. It's quite a fancy set up. They hire, TJohnE, a professional entertainment company to come in and turn the student center into a real casino, complete with craps tables, roulette wheels, and everything. The university professors serve as "dealers" and the students get monopoly money with which they can buy real chips. I signed up to be a Black Jack dealer, but they only had spots for Texas Hold'em. Of course I brought my camera :-) This guy couldn't catch a break. The cards were just not kind to him. But wow, the lighting in this place was awesome for photos! :-)
Photo also X-posted to LJ's Photographers community for their Sept. Photo Challenge:
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
What is it about caves? I could stay in them forever. One of the prettiest caverns I've visited, I visited recently: Luray Caverns in Virgina. One wonderful thing about Luray, at least for me, is that there are no guided tours. They give you headphones (a recorded tour) which I tossed as soon as they handed them to me. The tour is supposed to be about an hour, I stayed about five ... until closing time, until they made me leave. If I could have found a way to stay, I would have :-)
Here's a link to a vid I made of the Cathedral room (I'm holding a video camera and slowly turning in a circle): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TJtf_jlM3s
Below is a picture of the underground lake ... the top part is all stone, and the stone is reflected in the still water below, making it look a bit like shark's teeth ... the water is about 50 degrees and only about 3 to 4 feet deep:
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/moon/trailer.html
**POSSIBLE MILD SPOILERS**
The review said this film is a study in loneliness and human nature. That's why I went to see it. But the three guys who went with me did so because they wanted to see a classic science fiction film.
They weren't disappointed ... at least not about genre.
MOON, directed and co-written by David Bowie's son, Duncan Jones, and produced by Trudie Styler (Sting's wife) has gotten rave reviews. I'm trying to figure out why.
Yes, it's classic science fiction ... and it's better than most classic Sci-Fi films produced in recent years. The trick cinematography is impressive. One of the guys who went with me pointed out that this film could not have been made with such quality ten years ago. And at least one of the themes is poignant: We are the sum total of our memories.
So what went wrong? Well, in terms of a study in loneliness and human nature, it didn't deliver. It also didn't deliver on various other fronts: 1) the conflict and turning points in the movie were a matter of convenience and not necessarily driven by plot or character. 2) the photography/cinematography (tricks aside) were not impressive. In a Sci-Fi story set in the future in space, one would expect some really amazing technical gadgets and gizmos. But nothing new or inventive here. And you'd also expect some amazing shots of the universe ... but this film doesn't deliver.
(The documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon" ... set 40 years ago is a much more impressive film for science fiction geeks and for those seeking stunning images)
The film left important themes unexplored, such as, if it were possible to upload memories into a human brain ... to cause a human man to falsely believe that he had lived an entire life (he fell in love, got married, had children, etc.) and then revealed to him that everything he believed (about himself, his world, and others) and dreamed (the woman he longed for, the future he'd imagined) had been fabricated ... then who is he really? What's left?
The film posed this question ... then left it unanswered and unexplored.
Odd for a film in a genre that centers around exploration, no?
Monday, August 10, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
When I uploaded this photo from my camera:
it reminded me of when I worked in a court ordered drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic my senior year in college. My job was to take the patients for walks on a nature trail and to encourage them to articulate their plans for the future: to tell me how they were going to live as sober, law abiding citizens.
Yeah, we rarely talked about that. Instead we talked about their fears, regrets, hopes and dreams. And about the past.
But back to the picture. A young girl, probably 19 or 20-yrs-old, thin and pale with long red hair, was a patient while I worked there. Actually, she was a patient twice in the time that I was there, trying to beat an addiction to heroin. Most of the patients were much older than she was. The majority of them were men. She seemed lost. It was difficult to get her to speak, to even say "hi." On our walks, she remained silent. Finally, I gave up and stopped trying to get her to talk. Too often I found her sitting alone in the recreation room, staring out the window, singing softly to herself. She was ALWAYS singing this one song (over and over, like a chant):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl6yilkU1LI
In fact she sang it so much that one day, at the end of my shift while I was cleaning up the rec room, unawares, I starting singing the song too. She was sitting on the couch staring into space, but when she noticed me singing it, she started laughing: one of those fits of laughter that leads to tears. Her giggles, of course, caused me to laugh too. We both just stared at each other and laughed.
It was the only time I saw her smile. She never talked. She never as much as said "hello." I didn't see her speak to anyone else either. But I have remembered both her and that song for over twenty years.
If interested, here are the lyrics:
You've got a fast car
I wanna a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Any place is better
Starting from zero, got nothing to lose
Maybe we'll make something
Me, myself, I've got nothing to prove
You've got a fast car
I've got a plan to get us out of here
Been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won't have to drive too far
Just cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living
See my old man's got a problem
Live with the bottle, that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
His body's too young, to look like his
When mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said somebody's got to take care of him
So I quit school and that's what I did
You've got a fast car
Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
We gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way
Say remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone
You've got a a fast car
We go cruising entertain ourselves
You still ain't got a job
Now I work in the market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You'll find work and I'll get promoted
We'll move out of the shelter
Buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs
Say remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speeds so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone
You've got a fast car
I've got a job that pays all our bills
You stay out drinking late at the bar
See more of your friends than you do of your kids
I'd always hoped for better
Thought maybe together you and me'd find it
I got no plans and I ain't going nowhere
So take your fast car and keep on driving
Say remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speeds so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone
You've got a fast car
Is it fast enough so you can fly away?
You gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way
Saturday, July 25, 2009
This photo speaks for itself :-)
(click to make BIGGER, then keep clicking to make it bigger and bigger!)
Monday, July 20, 2009
I first saw Ron Howard's IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON
(http://www.intheshadowofthemoon.com/), when it was released in the winter of 2007-2008. It's a truly wonderful documentary that won several notable film festival awards. I wonder if they will re-release it today, now that it's the anniversary of the moon landing and it's all over the news. I'd love to see it on the big screen again. The documentary is out on DVD and is a must have if you're a documentary film buff, like me. Below is the original movie poster for the film.
Also pro photographer Jez Coulson recently did a photo shoot with Buzz Aldrin. Check out Jez's amazing picture of Buzz (with eyes turned toward the skies) on www.Jezblog.com: http://www.jezblog.com/index.php?showimage=881
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" said the Chesire Cat.
"I don't know." Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
Monday, July 13, 2009
1:25PM
Can you guess what this is?
or
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
A secondary schoolmate and Facebook friend, Rick Hill (http://treetrunkproductions.blogspot.com/), sent me this interesting article
***
Show or Tell: Should creative writing be taught?
By Louis Menand
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all
***
Because I find the debate over “process” vs. “instruction” an important one in academia, I found the above article interesting. The article both taught me some things and confirmed some other things for me. I also, ironically, found it to be poorly written. It wandered too much and held it's thesis until the very end: after showing in some detail why writing workshops, as they are currently taught (which place the emphasis on process), are bad, the article concludes "In spite of all the reasons that they shouldn’t, workshops work." The author asserts his conclusion without much elaboration.
The article also assumes a false dichotomy: either one tries to write without the help of a writing program or one attends a writing program based on the writing “workshop” model. There is (or should be) a third option: a traditional, instructor led, Robert McKee-style approach. The article provides some interesting history as to why writing programs reject that approach, but I'm not clear why the author doesn't defend a more classical approach that actually tries to teach writing.
What follows are some random reflections on some of the article's passages (provided below in quotations with my comments following the quoted passages)....
ARTICLE: "Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught."
MY RESPONSE: I like this opening. It sums up the situation nicely. Although the author doesn't return to the point until the last paragraph, basically the value of workshops is that they force people to write. But the value of having uninformed people critique one's work is questionable. It begs the question, if the instructor is a (supposed) expert, why does he or she insist on hiding their expertise?
I mean, some professors can be over-bearing with what they know, very true. But I liked classes where the professor really *knew* his or her stuff. Think about it, would you rather take a instruction based class on how to become President from President Obama or a process based “workshop” class from John Edwards? Or, more to the point, would you rather take the same class from John Doe who has 15 weeks of student presentations with little or no comment on them?
ARTICLE: "Around the time that Cassill delivered his renunciation, there were seventy-nine degree programs in creative writing in the United States. Today, there are eight hundred and twenty-two. Thirty-seven of these award the Ph.D."
MY RESPONSE: Clearly, this is a problem. I can't name THAT many good theology programs, and it seems unethical to me to give someone a Ph.D. if they aren't going to get a job with it. Although the point of the article is that with 822 programs, they can always teach others how to not get published too!
ARTICLE: "The argument is that teaching creative writing should always be a scandal, since it’s a scandal that suits everyone. It allows people in creative-writing departments to feel that, unlike their colleagues in the traditional academic disciplines, they are not cogs in a knowledge machine; and it allows the university to regard itself as what McGurl calls a "difference engine," devoted to producing original people as well as original research. He points out that teachers in creative-writing programs were asking "Can it be taught?" right from the start, but that virtually no one has ever tried to lay down rules for what should go on in the classroom. This is because not having an answer to the "Can it be taught?" question—keeping alive the belief that all this training and socialization never really touches the heart of the imaginative process—is what marks creative-writing programs as "creative." Academic creative-writing programs are, as McGurl puts it, examples of "the institutionalization of anti-institutionality." That’s why institutions love them. They are the outside contained on the inside."
MY RESPONSE: Why can’t there be a happy medium between accounting programs and flower-children? The business /SACS types want to quantify everything in such a way that teaching becomes rote and, to my mind, boring. But “lets all share” approaches, while popular with students, lack rigor, and thus ultimately any standards. Given the ideology of writing programs, how would you assess whether or not they are any good? Students getting published might be one criteria, but that ain't happening.
ARTICLE: "People go in at one end and they come out the other, bearing (like the Scarecrow) a piece of paper with a Latin inscription, but also bearing (unlike the Scarecrow) the impress of an institutional experience. The nature of that experience mutates as the folk wisdom of the workshop mutates—from "Show, don’t tell," which was the mantra in the nineteen-forties and fifties, to the effectively opposite mantra "Find your voice," which took over in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. McGurl suggests that these mantras encode shifting patterns of cultural assumptions—about identity, about work, about gender and class, and, of course, about what counts as good writing—and that they have had a big effect on the stories and novels that American writers have produced."
MY RESPONSE: Give the free-for-all approach, the argument here is that writing programs are good places to get a handle on cultural assumptions and attitudes. Sort of like an academic reality show!
ARTICLE: "Reflecting on yourself—your experience, your 'voice,' your background, your talent or lack of it—is what writing workshops make people do."
MY RESPONSE: i.e. — Writing programs reflect the American obsession with individualism.
ARTICLE: "Most readers of "The Program Era" are likely to be persuaded that the creative-writing-program experience has had an effect on many American fiction writers. Does this mean that creative writing can, in fact, be taught? What is usually said is that you can’t teach inspiration, but you can teach craft. What counted as craft for James, though, was very different from what counted as craft for Hemingway. What counts as craft for Ann Beattie (who teaches at the University of Virginia) must be different from what counts as craft for Jonathan Safran Foer (who teaches at N.Y.U.). There is no "craft of fiction" as such."
MY RESPONSE: The logic here is flawed. Because everyone does not agree on exactly what constitutes craft, therefore there is no such thing as craft. Not everyone agrees on economics, but there are recognizable schools of thought: Republican, cut taxes and let the rich invest and help the economy and Democrats, have the government spend money and stimulate the economy that way. Or even in Obama's own White House, his economic advisors argue over what the best course is, but they argue within a context of the shared discipline of economics, using common economic terms, and being familiar with standard economic questions and uncertainties. I'd love to go to a program where I was taught the debate between James and Hemingway over what constitutes craft. But who is doing that anymore? If everyone gets an equal voice, then there's no time for such an education.
My point is that simply because there will be debates over who exactly should or shouldn't be in the canon, doesn't mean we have to throw out the idea of a canon, and of learning from actual, great writers.
ARTICLE: "David Morley’s advice in "The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing" (2007) represents the orthodoxy: "Write any sort of rubbish that covers the outlines of what you intend: the plot outline; character sketches; description; a hackneyed sestina. Begin by freewriting and free-associating sentences until some patterns emerge that begin to intrigue you solely for the sound they make, their rustle of possibility." It’s a method that generates copy for a class to chew on, but writing that way is like throwing a lot of bricks on a pile and then being asked to organize them into a house. Surely the goal should be to get people to learn to think while they’re writing, not after they have written."
MY RESPONSE: The author here is making the case for teaching craft, and of not doing what many people like to do: use writing as a way to emotionally process or as a form of narcissism.
ARTICLE: “Gardner, in his "book "The Art of Fiction," published posthumously in 1983 (he died in a motorcycle accident in 1982), concludes with a list of writing exercises, such as:
2. Take a simple event: A man gets off a bus, trips, looks around in embarrassment, and sees a woman smiling. . . . Describe this event, using the same characters and elements of setting, in five completely different ways.
4b. Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed murder. Do not mention the murder. 4c. Describe a landscape as seen by a bird. Do not mention the bird. 27. Using all you know, write a short story about an animal—for instance, a cow."
MY RESPONSE: Those sound interesting.... Obviously they won't teach structure, but they might help with description and perspective.
ARTICLE: "Stegner believed that the purpose of writing was to give readers what he called an "intense acquaintance" with the author. "The work of art is not a gem, as some schools of criticism would insist, but truly a lens," he explained in an essay published in 1950. "We look through it for the purified and honestly offered spirit of the artist."
MY RESPONSE: Of course this approach to writing only works if the author is an interesting person!
ARTICLE: "One of Rick Moody’s teachers at Columbia asked the class to indicate, by a show of hands, how many found Moody’s work boring. Donald Barthelme, at Houston, assigned students to buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation of John Ashbery’s "Three Poems." Lish taught private writing classes that lasted from six to ten hours, a little like est training. He had students read their stories aloud to the group, and would order them to stop as soon as he disliked what he was hearing. Many students never got past the first sentence."
MY RESPONSE: Ah, the writing as boot camp approach....
ARTICLE: "The writing instructor’s arbitrariness is like the psychoanalyst’s silence: the blanker the screen, the more elusive the approval, the harder students will work to be recognized."
MY RESPONSE: I once studied with a Pulitzer Prize winning author who subscribed to this belief. Alas, he didn't realize that I wasn’t seeking his approval. I actually wanted to learn something. Indeed, I would have stuck with him, despite his disapproval, if he could have actually taught me something! But he was far more interested in trying to psychoanalyze me than trying to teach me how to write.
ARTICLE: "For, in spite of all the reasons that they shouldn’t, workshops work. . . . I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.
"And if students, however inexperienced and ignorant they may be, care about the same things, they do learn from each other. I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything."
MY RESPONSE: Lame ending. If your goal of going to a writing program is to have an interesting experience, fine. But one could do that by traveling to India. Or, I recently went to Boston and had an interesting experience even there! If one's goal of going to a writing program is, well, actually to write something, then "I stopped writing poetry after I graduated" would be a bit of a problem, no?
Liberal Arts undergraduate degrees are for studying things that you'll never actually use. Terminal degrees are for careers, for learning things that you'll use the rest of your life!
XXX
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Interesting Op-Ed piece in the NY Times.
Log Line: In the USA, three groups that have been unusually successful despite lower I.Q.s are Asian-Americans, Jews, and West Indian blacks, while North Americans races, with higher I.Q.s, prove less successful ...
Article:
Rising Above I.Q
by Nicholas Kristof
In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us.
Asian-Americans are renowned or notorious for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College.
As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.
West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.
These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.
Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, “Intelligence and How to Get It.” Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics.
“I think the evidence is very good that there is no genetic contribution to the black-white difference on I.Q.,” he said, adding that there also seems to be no genetic difference in intelligence between whites and Asians. As for Jews, some not-very-rigorous studies have found modestly above-average I.Q. for Ashkenazi Jews, though not for Sephardic Jews. Dr. Nisbett is somewhat skeptical, noting that these results emerge from samples that may not be representative.
In any case, he says, the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have.
One large study followed a group of Chinese-Americans who initially did slightly worse on the verbal portion of I.Q. tests than other Americans and the same on math portions. But beginning in grade school, the Chinese outperformed their peers, apparently because they worked harder.
The Chinese-Americans were only half as likely as other children to repeat a grade in school, and by high school they were doing much better than European-Americans with the same I.Q.
As adults, 55 percent of the Chinese-American sample entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of whites. To succeed in a profession or as managers, whites needed an average I.Q. of about 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of just 93. In short, Chinese-Americans managed to achieve more than whites who on paper had the same intellect.
A common thread among these three groups may be an emphasis on diligence or education, perhaps linked in part to an immigrant drive. Jews and Chinese have a particularly strong tradition of respect for scholarship, with Jews said to have achieved complete adult male literacy the better to read the Talmud some 1,700 years before any other group.
The parallel force in China was Confucianism and its reverence for education. You can still sometimes see in rural China the remains of a monument to a villager who triumphed in the imperial exams. In contrast, if an American town has someone who earns a Ph.D., the impulse is not to build a monument but to pass a hat.
Among West Indians, the crucial factors for success seem twofold: the classic diligence and hard work associated with immigrants, and intact families. The upshot is higher family incomes and fathers more involved in child-rearing.
What’s the policy lesson from these three success stories?
It’s that the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education. For at-risk households, that starts with social workers making visits to encourage such basic practices as talking to children. One study found that a child of professionals (disproportionately white) has heard about 30 million words spoken by age 3; a black child raised on welfare has heard only 10 million words, leaving that child at a disadvantage in school.
The next step is intensive early childhood programs, followed by improved elementary and high schools, and programs to defray college costs.
Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
X-posted to moviebuffs
(click on pic to make bigger)
*MILD/POSSIBLE SPOILERS*
Yes, they've done it again, Pixar, the studio that churns out more hits than misses (have they ever turned out a true miss??). You may have heard critics say that this is Pixar's "movie with depth" ... it does have depth, but not entirely for the reasons given by the critics, and it's more than SIMPLY its depth that makes this film so unique.
Okay, let's set aside the talking dogs and the dogs that can fly airplanes for now (it would be nice to set them aside permanently, but hey ... what can you do?). What gives this film its poignancy is more than the nearly silent montage at the beginning, the montage that sets up the story (let me note that this is quite possibly the best use of backstory I’ve ever seen in a film), what gives this film its power is its use of time. It’s rare to see a film (or even read a story) that uses time so effectively. At any given moment in the film, time — past, present, and consequently the future — is held in dramatic tension, so much so that anytime the viewer is watching “the present,” he or she, at the same time, is being reminded of the past and being asked to consider the future. That's really difficult to pull well off in a dramatic story.
Unique also is that at each of the dramatic turning points there is either little or no dialogue ... the viewer is left in “silence” to interpret the events. From a writer’s or even a director’s perspective that is a risky, dangerous move ... yet this film pulls it off beautifully and powerfully.
UP’s attention to detail is almost unmatched ... the filmmakers are obsessively attentive, down to even the most subtle gesture or nail in the wall, and almost nothing in the film is off-point (if you're wondering what is off point, see the talking dogs or the dogs that can fly airplanes comment above. And folks, if a dog can fly an airplane, he can also open a locked door!).
Is this Pixar’s best to date? Hmm ... I’m tempted to say yes, but then I’m reminded of Toy Story (some of the writers on this film also wrote Toy Story) ... so ... I don’t know, but both Toy Story and UP have taken a genre too often relegated to the realm of simple children’s tales and elevated them to art. UP is a animated tale that could rival Oscar winning dramatic films like Million Dollar Baby or even a film that deals with UP’s same themes, like About Schmidt.
If that’s not enough, and if you’ve seen UP, consider this: isn’t UP similar in many, many ways to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”? Doesn’t Carl’s journey also take him through the end of an age and ... there and back again ... in a way that leaves him forever changed :-)
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