Pop Cultural Pop

December 1, 2011 By 2 Comments

Doing pop culture analysis is like trying to carve a tunnel through a mountainside with a spoon. But as a daily rider of public transportation, I can’t help but notice the images that barrage us as we travel from one point to another. It amazes me that we have sold this space to advertisers rather than using it for art, news, or public dialogue.

Here’s one that I noticed recently:

Advertisement for "The Big Bang Theory"

What strikes me about this ad is that it seems to un-self-consciously demonstrate mainstream America’s imaginary world of neatly defined identity categories and their associated hierarchies of power and influence.

I have never watched “The Big Bang Theory,” so I don’t know anything about these characters beyond what’s shown here. But when I look at the poster, what I basically see is a central white man surrounded by four other, less central people. The central guy is taller than the others and, in the poster I see most often, he is the only one looking directly out at the viewer.

Then there are the “others.” From left to right: the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s effeminate and/or retro and/or gay (as indicated by tight purple pants); the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s not white; the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s nerdy and/or intellectual and/or Jewish (as indicated by glasses); and the woman. Whether or not these descriptions are true of the characters in the show, they are clearly marked this way in the poster.

If you think I’m being reductive, note that these ads for “The Big Bang Theory” (produced by CBS) are in every case — as far as I’ve seen, on the subway — bundled with ads for “30 Rock” (produced by NBC). I’m not sure if I would have thought to read these ads as such an obvious statement of mainstream television’s understanding of identity politics if the two ads weren’t so bizarrely, strikingly similar to each other.

Advertisement for "30 Rock"

I have actually seen “30 Rock,” so I do know something about the characters. All the same, the line-up in the poster is identical to the one I’ve described above, with a single, possible significant difference: the nerdy / intellectual / Jewish role (the one marked with glasses) is now being played by a woman.

So we have again, from left to right and top to bottom: the guy marked as effeminate, emotional, possibly gay; the racial other; the silly, blond woman; the intellectual (now female); and finally, of course, the white guy. No markings on him!

There’s nothing new about this analysis. We all know that white men and women dominate mainstream television, and that identity politics gets absorbed into pop culture — for better and for worse — through the addition of secondary characters, more or less stereotypical, marked as different kinds of “other” in relation to the central white male.

Even given all that, I am struck by the juxtaposition of these two ads — plastered side by side all over New York City’s public transportation system — and by the fact that whoever put them together either did not notice their eerily parallel composition, or else accepted it as a statement about what counts as “prime time” in today’s world.

 

Filed Under: Art, Audience, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics, Style

Social Platforms on the Web: How Fashion Brands Benefit from Using Crowdsourcing Technologies

October 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Since the late 1990s, fashion brands have been using online storefronts as a means of promoting and selling clothes and accessories. Today, online storefronts are firmly embedded into the fabric of contemporary relationships between fashion brands and consumers.

Recently, with the rise of social networking, there is a trend to use social platforms to connect with audiences worldwide. Versatile social systems provide access not only to news and product information but also benefit brands by enlarging their fan base. New social platforms serve as a means for generating and distributing content, connecting people in real time, and offer multiple opportunities for communication, sharing and collaboration. Fashion consumers become producers and share their vision with manufacturers.

Inspired by Red Alma MMA successful example of such collaboration is Polyvore.com. Polyvore users can mix and match hats, skirts, gloves, bags and other items to create a perfect outfit that can be posted on Polyvore for others to see and evaluate. Rebecca Minkoff, an accessories designer, used Polyvore to spice up her New York Fashion Week bag collection. Over 6,500 Polyvore users took part in her challenge and designed a new Rebecca Dee clutch.

Another example is Burberry’s Art of the Trench. Trench lovers and Scott Schuman of the Sartorialist created a database promoting the trench as a timeless and essential part of the modern wardrobe. Partially due to Burberry proactive online strategies, their annual revenue jumped to £1,501 million in March 2011 vs. £1,185 for the same period in 2010.

Zara People! Challenge invites consumers to submit an image containing at least two items from Zara’s latest collection. The winner gets €300. Zara designers are known to be trend followers and not trend creators. Watching how fashion forward people wear Zara provides an instant insight into what styles are popular at the moment. Zara remains one of the largest fashion companies in the world.

While almost every fashion brand has some presence online, the challenge is to create a competitive advantage by reaching the crowds and creating clever crowdsourcing strategies that can be used in designing new products and generating sales.

Filed Under: Internet, Marketing, Social Media, Style Tagged With: , , ,

Starting at the top: Notes on cliché and seduction in academic titles

November 4, 2010 By 4 Comments

As a writing fellow, I’ve had a few glimpses into the importance, faculty tell their students, of doing research. Part of this activity inevitably involves going to the library, or at least the library website, and scouring publications for pertinent scholarship to one’s inquiry. Since conducting “original research is a novelty for undergraduates, and since the electronic media offer myriad sources of information ready for the cutting-and-pasting, it make sense that a professor would be concerned with (1) making sure the student does not plagiarize others’ work and (2) instilling a sense that one’s research must enter an already ongoing conversation. So much of instructors’ pedagogical emphasis tends to lie in two fields: the moral and the intellectual, oftentimes in that order. I suspect that students do not make the connection between the two, too terrified of not (appearing to) tread on someone else’s intellectual toes to recognize that the point is to stand on their shoulders. Or, for those enterprising cheaters, the exercise may consist in, as Hillel Schwartz puts it (since I have no original way to put it), “mak[ing] their name by standing on shoulders buried in sand.” But my point here is to draw attention to a third register of the research experience: the aesthetic. Every stroll down the stacks aisles, every click through JSTOR articles, what faces the browsing scholar are titles, titles, and more titles. There soon appear patterns, styles, conventions, some kind of comforting regularity to the vastness of knowledge. Here I want to make some observations of the norms of titling in academic writing. These remarks are not (all) disparaging or snarky about the re-use, mis-use, or abuse of certain linguistic conventions in academia; I simply want to draw attention to how scholars label their work, reproducing in playful or unintentional ways specific kinds of headlines.

  • Present participles: This seems to be a symptom of the interest in and championing of processual approaches, that is, to present the world as in motion, in circulation, always becoming. The title of this post is parodying this cliché of the -ing verb. I am looking at my bookshelf right now and can spot them everywhere: Re-Presenting the City, Losing Control, Colonising Egypt, Exploring the City… I also see some clever variations on the theme: for example, where the title referencing another, more famous title (Coming of Age in Second Life), or where the present participle suggests multiple meanings (Enduring Innocence). Generally, however, the present participle has become a tired trend in titles. (I credit a former boss in publishing for bringing this to my attention and making it a minor obsession of mine.) Moving on…

  • The colon: You know you’re reading academic work when the title is cloven in two by the two dots. There’s not a precise anatomy, but generally the title proper is allusive in tone. The subtitle buttresses it with an explicatory phrase, as in: Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. The latter part is the only bit you really need to get a sense of the topic of the book. Usually the title itself is, ironically, a stylistic flourish, as if to communicate that the book also contains some panache and wit (not a guarantee).
  • Quote as title: I feel like this became vogue during the 1990s when high postmodernism celebrated the voice of the Other and pastiche between high and low culture. But you will still encounter titles, especially in anthropology, that headline a pithy phrase uttered by an ethnographic informant, or a Biblical or other textual bit. I suppose the function of this strategy is to convey some sense of the author’s egalitarianism vis-a-vis her subject.
  • The casual approach: This can go either way. “Notes on…” or “Reflections on…” or even “Some thoughts on…” can communicate the sense that the text will not be especially pedantic, written merely as some loose ideas that suggest more than they argue. Of course, if upon reading the piece disappoints and betrays the airy mood of the title, it can become a marker of pretentiousness.

In a winking gesture, I’ve tried to incorporate all these features in the title to this post. But I wonder what the undergraduate novice, wading through vast oceans of titles, makes of these kinds of conventions, if she makes anything at all of them. The title is not only the first thing you see about an article or book, but in the case of those you don’t actually sit down with–that is, the majority, the title can also be the last thing you read.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Art, Asides, Copyright, Education, Fun, Higher Education, Language, Literacy, literature, Pedagogy, Plagiarism, Scholarship, Style, To Ponder, What if . . .

Friendship and the Love of Art

October 15, 2010 By 1 Comment

Marian Seldes– actor, director, teacher, and journalist– was the guest lecturer at yesterday’s Clair Mason Women of Distinction Lecture Series. “Lecture” might be the wrong word to describe the event, however; Seldes, regal in a shimmering pink and purple flowery wrap-type dress (yes, hard to explain), presided over a fairly remarkable Q&A session. She began by putting her purpose right on the lectern: she was there to discuss the importance of the arts, and her career in the performing arts as about more than rewards and prizes: “To talk of theatre as friendship and love of the art.”

As if to illustrate this theme, Seldes had a posse of theatrical grande dames with her; seated in the front row were blockbuster stage actresses Angela Lansbury and Joan Copeland. Seldes would occasionally comment on their presence; “Angela, just seeing you there…calms me.”

Fantastic Four: Lansbury, Mason, Copeland, Seldes

After opening with a monologue by playwright John Arden about the blessings of art– “business and politics I leave to the crooks”– Seldes said firmly, “this is what I believe.” With that, she was done with her talk, and announced that she would answer any questions that anyone had– otherwise, she had not much else to say. As expected, the questions flowed from every corner of the audience, allowing Seldes to transfix with stories from her rich career, recollected with ample grace and humor; from her early aspirations as a ballerina, to studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse (“you don’t have to be nice to teach acting, but you have to be demanding”), to her well-known roles in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women and Peter Shaffer’s Equus, to her unfulfilled dream of playing Hecuba.

When asked by an audience member which women of distinction had made an impression on her own life, she recalled the head of Theatre at the Dalton School: “Her name was Mildred Geiger, and she was very important to me,” she said simply, and left it at that. While she was critical of the high prices of theatre tickets today, Seldes shaped a most non-judgmental, gratified, and appreciative theatrical figuration– one who is equally enthusiastic as a performer as well as an audience member. She is never bored at the theatre, she maintained, not even when watching a boring performance– there is always something, or someone, interesting to look at. “I think just watching other human beings is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done.” Soon, the final question was posed, there were flowers to present, and talk of a car waiting outside; time to go.

Later, I reflected on Seldes’s point of linking the individuality of actors to the plays they are in, taking the stance that the original cast is just one of the impossible-to-reproduce, ethereal aspects of the theatre. (When asked if Three Tall Women might be revived, she claimed it wouldn’t work without actress Myra Carter in one of the roles.) This insistence could make any of the younger audience members at yesterday’s talk pine for the opportunity to hop into the time machine and head for the box office circa 1967. I went home, curious for more Marian, and found a bizarre little trailer for a documentary on Seldes that somehow manages to capture just a piece of the intensity she brought to Baruch:

Filed Under: Art, Baruch College, Liberal Arts, Style Tagged With: , , , ,

How to prepare and present a conference presentation

October 13, 2010 By 4 Comments

Two of my last three weekends were dedicated to that time-honored grad-student rite of passage, the academic conference. Reflecting on my own performances as well as those of my colleagues, I thought I’d compose a rough guide to the conference presentation. I hope that my fellow cacophoners might share and amend these guidelines I humbly offer. In the spirit of the efficiency celebrated by conference presentations themselves, I will organize these ideas in outlined bulleted form. I work within the social sciences, but I believe much of what I share here may be of use to you  budding humanists and natural scientists, too. Here goes:

Find a suitable conference

  • Sign up for email listservs for subfields and organizations you are interested in. Throughout the year you will get call-for-paper announcements (CFP) offering panel discussions to be a part of. Pay attention to the deadline and guidelines for CFPs. Read their panel description closely. Often they will have a certain rubric within which they are working, with a theoretical approach either tacitly or explicitly signalled.
  • There are many regional and graduate-student conferences organized for people still early in their careers. If you are at the dissertation proposal stage or still formulating your project, these kinds of events are a good idea. The grad student conference I attended in Boulder, Colorado, included very helpful workshop sessions on writing and theoretical approaches to the conference theme (“states of belonging”).
  • Many conferences also accept individual papers. You submit your abstract and they will place you with other “orphan” presenters. You run a greater risk of not getting your paper accepted or getting stuck in a hodpodge potpourri panel (like I was last weekend) if you opt for this approach.

Write a strong abstract

  • Most conferences want you to participate (and want your conference fees payment), but they do have limits and criteria for accepting papers. A compelling abstract is critical. Often this is an awkward exercise because  you have not written the paper for which you must make a synopsis.
  • You usually have 200-300 words to work with (the conference I attended last weekend confined me to only 100!), so you don’t have space to elaborate sophisticated concepts, nor to tell everything about your project. Use keywords that signal a certain literature that, after studying the CFP, you know the organizers will be attuned to.
  • Allude to a piece of research you have conducted or a fieldsite/event/documentary source that will serve as the material your paper examines.
  • HAVE A POINT your paper will advance. Even if you don’t yet know what that point is, make a concise and intelligible claim. Emphasize the innovative. The abstract doesn’t have to break new ground; it need only suggest your paper might do so.

Write the paper

  • The organizers will often want you to submit the paper for a discussant to read before the conference and prepare comments. Do NOT send a whole dissertation chapter draft or anything over 20 pages. At worst, the discussant will bear some contempt for this burden; at best, you are diluting her ability to give you concise feedback on your work. A presentation is typically limited to 15 minutes. It takes roughly 2 minutes to read a double-spaced page of text. So anything more than 7 or 8 pages is more than you can say in the presentation.
  • Write a ‘data-driven’ essay. If you are an anthropologist, load it up with ethnographic material. If you are a historian or literature scholar, delve into the primary texts. This will give your discussant a better chance at assessing your analytical points. If you saturate your argument in theoretical goop, it will be frustrating for an outsider with a different perspective. (There are moments when strategic obfuscation is advisable, of course.)
  • Most importantly, you only have time in a presentation to develop ONE maybe two points. In any case, no one will remember more than two points, so keep it tight. It is always more effective to go in depth into one particular aspect of your research than try to sketch together myriad pieces in one whirlwind showcase.
  • Signal early on what your intentions with the paper are. ‘Map out’ the argument so your audience can get a sense of what is to come.

Prepare the presentation

  • The text you submitted to the discussant and what you will say in the presentation should not be the same. There are different opinions on this, but I believe priority #1 is to keep people’s attention for the time you are talking. People generally stay more tuned in when they sense that someone is speaking to them, not reading to them. Some reduce their presentation to a series of points they talk through. This has the advantage of being “live,” but it also runs the risk of rambling. You might run out of time without a prepared text. One of my panel co-presenters last weekend ran well past his 15 minutes without ever coming to anything resembling a conclusion; he had to be unceremoniously cut off at 20 minutes with a curt “thank you” from the time-keeper. Ouch. Remember that by going overtime you are antagonizing your audience and colleagues on the panel. Be courteous.
  • If you are going to read your paper, go to the trouble of making it ‘sound’ better to listeners’ ears. Good general rule: Edit your text so that almost every sentence does not exceed one line in length. Cut down compound and complex sentences into simple declarative ones.
  • Remove all but the most essential references in the spoken version.
  • Practice reading your paper aloud for flow, emphasis, and timing. Replace unnecessary jargon or technical terms with more colloquial speech. You want to be familiar enough with the writing that you can pick your head up and speak to people.
  • Rules of PowerPoint: your PPT slides should absolutely NOT replace your paper; i.e. you should not simply read a bunch of bullet points and text excerpts off the screen to your audience. Yawn.
  • Your PPT show should complement your discourse. Show an image to illustrate a point you are making. Consider inserting a blank slide for portions of the presentation when you want the audience’s attention on you, not on the screen.

At the event

  • If you are using audio-visual equipment, get to the panel session room early to test it out.
  • Listen to your co-presenters’ talks and take notes.
  • Graciously thank the organizers and/or sponsors before you get into your paper.
  • Towards the end of your presentation, a time-keeper will usually hold up signs signaling your remaining time. Just acknowledge these with a nod and adjust your speech as needed. No need to interrupt your own talk with an exasperated “whoa! only 2 minutes left?”
  • If there is Q&A or discussion time, try to make an effort to identify connections between your paper and your colleagues’. If the discussant or an audience member says something misinformed about your research, keep a poker face or just politely nod.

There must be more to add to this, so all ye commenters please fire away…

Filed Under: Faculty Development, Higher Education, Jobs, Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations, Style

Reggie Watts for Poet Laureate

September 22, 2010 By 2 Comments

So last night, my colleague and friend Amy buzzed me about a free comedy show at Upright Citizens Brigade. She is doing her dissertation research on stand-up comics in New York, so such locales constitute fieldsites for her. There would be other comedians, including Jeffery Joseph relating his experience teaching ‘at-risk youth’ from Riker’s Island, Ron Lynch playing an animatronic comedian of the future, Daniel Kitson on existential loneliness, and surprise heavyweights Louis CK and Jim Gaffigan.

The draw for me, however, was Reggie Watts. The man came out for the final set, when my lungs had already been effectively inverted from hard laughter by the preceding parade of absurdity. Watts burst through the flimsy curtain, his face hidden somewhere between the ‘fro clearly outta contro’ and complementary beard and pot-belly. He looks a bit like Lenny Kravitz if he let himself go, a lot. Only with much more of what the experts call ‘talent,’ no offense to LK or his devoted dozens of followers.

On stage he’s armed with two mics, one of which is plugged into a doo-dad on a stool with little knobs and switches. Mostly his weapon of choice is his voice, which he wields with unpredictable grace. The gizmo is to loop beats and modulate sounds beyond the limits of his larynx, which is expansive as it is. His show is part beat-box concert, with organic renditions of hip-hop- and soul-inspired music, part pastiche theater of impersonations. But not impressions of celebrities or political figures or cultural stereotypes. In rapid-fire, Watts channels the everyday speech patterns and lingo you can put a place but not quite a face to. Then suddenly he’s breaking into song again. It’s a linguistic and musical kaleidoscope that reaches trascendental ground: Watts in some moments seems to turn himself into a pure instrument of sound and vernaculars. I’d say he takes joy in reproducing, like scrambled ethnographic recorder stuck on play, words and beats, if it weren’t for the deadpan delivery that leaves the audience in wonder. I ought to report: while half of the audience giggled in delight at Watt’s virtuosity, the other half stared in bewilderment. I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter were the more intended reaction.

I try to describe this performance, but I honestly don’t know what to make of Reggie Watts. I only sense that an obligation to tell others about him, maybe to warn them maybe to claim that I saw him long before he got famous and sold out or jumped the shark. My first encounter with Watts was this meta-hiphop music video, F*ck Sh*t Stack, where he skewers, in successive verses, rap’s most cherished stereotypes: curse words, the objectification of women, and conspicuous consumption. But satire is not Watts’s modus operandi. It’s too sincere, in a way. (Although musically, he does have his intimate serious side.)

Rather, I direct you towards some of the philosophical and linguistic buffonery, like this clip where Watts opens with an Esperanto-esque gibberish monologue:

or this gig at Google headquarters that seems to go right over the poor egg-head employees:

Or this Max Headroom-esque mix:

In effect, he’s all very -esque. Watts has even faked his own death (and life) as an Exxon ‘maintenance man’ who donates his body to his employer to be turned into fuel (“I, I think I’d like to be a, uh, candle…”)

I suppose I present Watts to the emerging discussion on this site over the relationship between thought and language, content and style. How can language refer to absolutely nothing, yet carry so much meaning? To watch him shape-shift in front of your eyes so jarringly from Queen’s-English professorial cadence into Bed Stuy street slang makes one suddenly aware of the intimate relationship between language as a performed, public activity and cultural identity. It also makes one wonder at how Watts can so effortlessly assume these voices. And finally, there’s the phenomenon of humor at work here: it’s hilarious to speak through the idioms of others, while it’s not funny at all to speak about them, as I have done here.

Filed Under: Fun, Language, Music, Non-Standard English, Style, To Ponder

A Memorial: Saul Bruckner

May 27, 2010 By 7 Comments

When I heard that my high school principal Saul Bruckner had died in his Mill Basin home on May 1, I was shocked, but in an aimless sort of way. It felt huge, impossible—a massive loss and somehow a very personal one. And yet while I had a vast sense that Mr. Bruckner had influenced me deeply, I had no luck when I tried to articulate that influence to the people around me. “My high school principal died,” I told my roommate. “He was really incredible.” And then I’d trail off.

So, like legions of other Murrow alums, I’ve been spending time thinking about just what it is exactly that makes me feel like I want a bust of Mr. Bruckner in my living room. Many of us appreciate the important teacher figures from our pasts, but what of the folks who didn’t necessarily teach us long division or what the Rococo period was about? What of the learning that comes from that dispersed thing known as educational leadership?– from administrators, of all people?

The first thing to mention about Mr. Bruckner is just how old school he was, in a new school kind of way. He was a truly progressive educator who didn’t need to appropriate slang or wear a whistle in order to “connect” with young people. He rose up the ranks in the New York City school system (back when it was still a Board of Education, and not a Department) as a social studies teacher, became assistant principal at Dewey High School, and eventually opened Murrow in 1974.

Edward R. Murrow High School is known for the many progressive aspects of its structure and approach, but Mr. Bruckner himself came across as a pretty subdued, non-controversial guy. You’d imagine that a principal who allowed students freedom of choice in their academic pursuits, outlawed bells and hall sweeps and detention and sports teams, gave students the benefit of the doubt when it came to unstructured time, and fiercely defended music and arts programs might be more of a hippie crusader in moccasins than a buttoned-up older gentleman in neat tweed suit jackets. Not so.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Still, those are the facts. When the Times published a short article about his memorial service, I started honing in on what I found so unique about Mr. Bruckner.  The photo that accompanied the article did it; Mr. Bruckner, with his arms folded, his red name tag jutting out from his jacket, listening intently to three students surrounding him, all of whom look like they’ve got more than one bone to pick with the guy. That was his usual posture—arms crossed, ears open, completely committed– and it wasn’t rare for Mr. Bruckner to be outnumbered. I stood in front of him this way many times, standing with my friends and shooting off at the mouth about something or other, while Mr. Bruckner stood stock-still and listened—sometimes with a bemused smile, sometimes with a look of mild judgment. Perhaps the man closed the door to his oblong office (where he also taught his 7:30am AP American History course) and privately screamed into a rattan pillow—if he did, we never caught on.

The man was consistency itself, and I’d guess that he realized just how important that was to us, to see him standing by the main entrance every morning as we entered clutching our bagels. He was an eloquent man of few words, but clear actions. Students at Murrow were allowed to lounge in the hallways during “free” periods (which weren’t called “periods” at all), but if we were obliviously sitting next to a clump of trash, Bruckner would suddenly swing around a corner to pitch it in the garbage, reminding us at once that he was boss, it was our building, and no task was too insignificant for him– or us.

Mr. Bruckner’s death crystallized for me even further when I read an article penned by one of my former English teachers at Murrow, Katherine Schulten. Ms. Schulten is now editor of The Learning Network, and she identifies five poignant lessons for educators that she took from working with Mr. Bruckner.  The final one, “Kids come first,” coupled with her description of Mr. Bruckner—kindness, intelligence, commitment and vision—packaged up exactly what I’d wanted to say all along. How remarkable to observe someone with so little (discernable) ego, a fellow who never went out of his way to strut his feathers and yet implemented such a strong vision at the same time. To be an educator who skips the bloviating and lingers on the students while constructing a school culture that follows his thoughtful concepts– and then he hangs out long enough to really see it flourish and sustain? A term that Mr. Bruckner himself taught me is the only one I can think to use: rara avis.

Ms. Schulten’s article got me thinking: as someone who routinely stands in front of clusters of young people and some days finds the crown of educator a very difficult one to wear, ignoring Mr. Bruckner’s legacy outside of its most general terms shouldn’t be an option. Sure, the life of an adjunct lecturer and Communication Fellow is very different from that of a high school principal, but that’s no excuse to disregard the challenge that his example puts forth. I heard the news about Mr. Bruckner’s passing during the crowded and frustrating end-of-semester crush, when students were filling my  inbox with frantic emails arguing about grades, contesting plagiarism charges, pleading for forgiveness. Some days it’s incredibly difficult to maintain empathy, priorities, and focus—the kind of focus, I realize, Mr. Bruckner persisted with, day in, and day out, for so many years.

Numerous Facebook groups have already popped up paying tribute to Mr. Bruckner, and an accompanying campaign to have the street outside of the school renamed in his honor would be a fitting memorial to a life’s work that thrived at the humble intersection of Avenue L and 17th Street. An equally moving tribute is represented by the many students who, like me, have been newly considering just what was in this special sauce and where  we might apply it ourselves. I’d suspect that it won’t just be about picking up that lone piece of trash in the hallways, but also about that particular blend of action and patience. Still, it’s an educational riddle worth committing time to: how did he do it? And how can we?

Filed Under: Administration, Asides, New York, Pedagogy, Process, Style, To Ponder Tagged With: ,

Palm-of-the-Hand Speeches

January 28, 2010 By 2 Comments

Throughout his long career, Japanese Writer Yasunari Kawabata wrote a series of short short stories, which he referred to as his “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.” Kawabata produced 146 of these stories, becoming a true “palmist,” even if his notoriety in the West is focused on his novels.  As described by the editors of the published collection, Kawabata believed that these little stories expressed the “essence of his art.”

I first read these stories in an experimental prose writing course a bunch of years ago, and the concept of these one-to-three page gems intrigued me. I was reminded of these stories this past semester, when, through my work supporting Advanced Accounting, a Communication Intensive Course, I found myself confronting palm-of-the-hand speeches. When I first learned that students had only two-to-three minutes to present their assigned material, I was skeptical. Two minutes to discuss a contemporary concept in accountancy?

As the semester progressed, and I struggled to help students condense the finer points of recording intangible assets on balance sheets, I necessarily focused on the benefits of these l’il speeches. Just as Kawabata’s stories are deeply complex while also being succinct, shorter speeches have the same potential. Translator J. Martin Holman could be talking about ACC 4100 speeches when he writes of the relationship between Kawabata’s small stories and his longer works:

“The palm-of-the-hand story appears to have been Kawabata’s basic unit of composition from which his longer works were built, after the manner of linked-verse poetry, in which discrete verses are joined to form a longer poem, the linkage between each dependent on subtle shifts as the poem continues.”

While longer speaking opportunities are still crucial for our students, these palm-of-the-hand speeches can give students a better familiarity with the basic units of composition required for larger speeches. I used to think of two minute speeches as a good exercise in summarizing, editing and brevity, but they do have their structural benefits, as well.  According to Holman, Kawabata mastered this form using certain elements (the same ones that would make any Palmist speech exiting); “juxtaposition of images,” “unique perception,” and “intriguing and memorable” plots– not reductions, but distillations of larger worlds.

There are clear positives and negatives to assigning such a short presentation, but on certain days, the luxury of having a lot of time to concentrate on just two minutes of material did seem like a very Palmist exercise. Students themselves, however, don’t always see the merits of this, and, rather than viewing it as the essence of their art, are more apt to view the assignment as the gnat buzzing around their schoolwork.  How might it be possible to elevate and enliven these palm-of-the-hand speeches to the place that Kawabata realized they deserve?

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), literature, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Process, Style, To Ponder

Your Signature Style and Trademark Word

December 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Now, I am not sure whether I am still living in *the* fashion capital of the world, or NYC lost out to Tokyo or Milan a long time ago. Regardless, I like to tell the students, (my clients!), I am working with as a consultant about their linguistic repertoir while referring to the vocabulary of fashion.

We usually agree that a dress code is important for their in-class oral presentations. I am also big on good posture and body language, things I take from my own dance practice and things they always pick up on, with almost no exception. What I have found myself becoming increasingly aware of this semester, however, has been the particular “fillers” students use in those pauses that intervene almost as a rule during our rehearsals. They admit that, due to lack of practice, they perform impromtu most of the time, which increases their nervousness. I tell them I understand completely, we are there in order to practice and that this is part of a process; I do not expect a polished product. I notice, nevertheless, their fear of pauses, of silence and their rush to fill those gaps in time with text, noise, something. That’s when we get all those “fillers,” like “like,” “you know,” “actually,” etc. And they get repeated a good deal! At some point in the semester, I remember having a whole lot of fun with one of my groups of students: we were laughing our heads off while watching the previously recorded presentation and counting how many times one of the presenters used the word “basically.” There was a really cordial atmosphere, so nobody took the laughter personally; we all admitted we could have done the same thing, repeating a word endlessly and never realizing it. Curiously enough, the presenter himself/herself did not notice it until I pointed out the pattern. I did not talk about repetition as such, I rather called it their “trademark phrase,” but I urged them to think about other words that could spice up their linguistic wardrobe, so to say, while filling in those pauses they dread. I also reminded them of the fact that pauses are, in themselves, very effective. Presenters should pause for emphasis, for letting the audience digest the information, etc. To go back to dance, again, it is harder to dance slowly than fast and only experienced dancers dare slow it down to a pause.

I wonder now what my own “trademark phrase” is. I am sure I have one; maybe I should record myself as well and then hit the rewind button and watch, relinquishing, for once, the power I have as the eye/I of the camera.

Filed Under: Style

Torture? culture? Torture-culture?

April 22, 2009 By 1 Comment

In an undergraduate class I teach on the social and cultural history of the US during times of war we always end the semester with a discussion of the contemporary conflicts we’re involved in now — “GWOT”, Iraq, Afghanistan — and attendant domestic issues like privacy, constitutional rights, legal jurisdiction over “unlawful enemy combatants”, balance of power between branches of government, political rhetoric, etc.

This semester we read and discussed the recently released Red Cross report on US treatment of terrorist detainees, treatment which was conclusively shown to be torture. Once we got the basic history stuff out of the way, I asked students to think through whether such treatment can ever be justified — a little dime-store ethical philosophy thrown in to the history classroom. There are usually some who think there’s no justifiable use of such harsh tactics as have been regular lately. Others insist that, if torture could be known to be likely to work, then we have to leave moral absolutism behind for a more utilitarian approach — i.e. it just might be OK to do some pretty rotten stuff to someone if it saves thousands, hundreds or scores of lives. This is always an interesting discussion, but it’s one that also makes clear how much the understanding of the torture question has been framed for my students by popular culture (“24″ (the worst culprit) and the many other movies and shows we all can probably remember).

This year however, in two separate classes, something new arose: Students, on their own started advocating torturing people not to in order get intelligence that would prevent 9/11 Pt. 2, but as punishment. Eye-for-an-eye sort of thinking — you get what you deserve, and there are no real limits to what you might deserve except how egregious your own crime was.

I found this truly unsettling. How did we get here? I think that the way we got here is a good old fashioned slippery slope. On TV, the bad guys get tortured and either give it up or not, die or not, feel terrible physical pain or not — but they’re the bad guys, so in the verbal and visual rhetoric of trashy (and extraordinarily popular) TV, it seems OK to many viewers. Torture becomes a regular adjunct to justice.

In addition, there are movies every year which prominently feature torture of human beings either in the same context or as “horror films” (really sadism films), in which the torturers are bad guys, the enemy. In the second case, torture seems despicable, so in one evening of viewing a person could be treated to a rather schizophrenic overall depiction of the issue – the cruel device of the worst fiends and the necessary tool of the righteous. But also in the second case, the problem is not that torture becomes linked with justice, but rather that it becomes entertainment; it’s a fun way (apparently) to get scared for an hour or two before making out with your girlfriend or checking on the sleeping kids.

What separates us, ideally from the Taliban, among other things, is our idea that justice and vengeance are different things. What renders us humane instead of merely human is, among other things, the idea that there are some acts which are simply morally unacceptable. What separates adults from children, among other things, is that adults see the real social utility as well as the moral truth of the old saw that two wrongs don’t make a right.

As a culture, we’re letting go of these things by the way we accept depictions of torture, as both titilating and just. To have a torture culture is not just to accept depictions of torture without clear disapprobation; it is, as the term “culture” implies, to grow, to nourish torture. And so, I think, when you have a culture rife with torture perhaps you end up seeing the fruits of that tortuculture blossoming in your nice calm classroom one April day.

Filed Under: Audience, Debating, Higher Education, Language, Liberal Arts, Media, Non-verbal Communication, Politics, Style, To Ponder, Uncategorized, What if . . .
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