I have fallen into a groove.  It isn’t all bad, but it isn’t where I want to be.  Having a milestone birthday has made me contemplative about several things.

My contemplative-self is so quiet and reserved that I feel everything and everyone drifting by me slowly as if I’m invisible.  Reaching out and touching just a forearm with a few of my fingers and making eye contact, I can rise above the groove and get back to the music and noise of life.

If This Doesnt Amaze You Nothing Will

Im Gobsmacked

With all the struggles that come with being autistic has also come an incredible gift for British artist Stephen Wiltshire — he can draw in extraordinary detail from memory.

After standing in London’s Piccadilly Circus for just 10 minutes, ABC News correspondent Nick Watt asked Wiltshire to draw it from memory.It took him a little more than an hour. He drew without stopping. In the end Wiltshire’s image was almost exact in every detail.

Early Start

At age 3 Wiltshire was diagnosed with autism. Though mute and withdrawn, he demonstrated a natural talent and active interest in drawing.Wiltshire uttered his first words only after his teachers at school temporarily took away his art supplies.”I want paper. Please can I have a paper please to draw,” he said.Animals and London buses were Wiltshire’s early favorites, before he moved on to buildings. At 12 years old he was featured in a BBC documentary titled “Fragments of Genius.”In the film Wiltshire took a 10-minute helicopter ride over London. Immediately afterward he completed a detailed and perfectly scaled aerial drawing of a 4-square-mile area of London, including 12 landmarks and more than 200 other buildings.

Fame brought overseas trips, commissions, adulation and astonishment at his ability. For Wiltshire, it brought happiness. When he’s not traveling between exhibitions, the 27-year-old can be found at work in his London gallery.At Wiltshire’s gallery, he has drawings of Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, city scenes from Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Frankfurt and even a 32-foot-long panorama of Tokyo drawn from memory after a 30-minute helicopter ride.”Your memory is like a photograph?” Watt said.”Yea,” Wiltshire said modestly with a laugh.Though Wiltshire lives in London, he says it’s not his true love.”I prefer New York. It’s my best favorite. They’ve got tall, high-rise, skyscrapers. And the streets and avenues and yellow New York taxicabs,” Wiltshire said.

Another summer gone
Memories fading away slowly
Haven’t figured out yet
What exactly went wrong

Another year passed by
Without knowing what’s inside of me
Haven’t lost these feelings
I really don’t know why

Is it okay to love you still
Is it okay to think of you
Is it okay to want you back
Is it okay if I’d call you after so long

Another moment’s gone
You passed me by so quietly
I guess you must have forgotten
Where do we belong?

Another day gone to waste
I can’t seem to focus anymore
It’s wearing me out
Why can’t I have it my way?

Is it okay to love you still
Is it okay to think of you
Is it okay to want you back
Is it okay if I’d see you again

My laptop is hardly the top of the range and after having it for the last 2 – 3 years I thought a memory upgrade might just be what it needs. With the much anticipated Windows 7  (positive or negative), I thought the time was right. But I asked myself where the best would be to buy memory for a laptop and more importantly at the right price?

Well after much searching in the land of the web, I discovered mermemory.co.uk. I have to say I was not disappointed. Even for the most technically challenged, this website actually makes it possible for any technophobe to order the memory they need with 100% success.

What is really useful about this site is the user is provided with a selection tool that identifies your exact make and model giving you or anyone the confidence of buying the right memory module. Delivery was quick, and well I’m typing on the laptop right now so the two sticks are working.

The only thing I would say is that some motherboards do need two modules of memory. I made the mistake of only ordering one 2GB stick and when I tried to repeat the order, because of the flat HTML design the second order did not get processed; nothing that a friendly customer support sorted out promptly on the Monday morning. Apart from that and the fact Mr Memory do not trade on the weekend, I would recommend a visit and a purchase.

The business has a genuine feel to it, but also very capable. Check it out.

I’m sure to most of us this list looks at least somewhat familiar. We all forget, we all slump, and certainly we’ve all wondered how we can do or be or feel better. Even if we don’t necessarily turn to Google for help.

Rather than address each concern, let’s focus on just a couple that are particularly germane to NHM’s primary slant. (In the meantime you can transfer balances to a 12-month 0% fixed rate card, clean your filters, and practice trying to touch your toes.)

Curious as to how my reading comprehension stacks up against the average, I followed Google to Reading Soft’s online speed reading test. Use the web page’s timer to see how long it takes you to read this dull passage, then you answer some multiple choice questions to get your comprehension score.

Personally, I was less surprised by my results (somewhere above good, but below excellent), than by the fact that I found it pretty much impossible to concentrate on reading after just three paragraphs. And not long ones, neither. By just the fourth paragraph down I was skimming — ineffectively as it turned out — and skipping sentences all together.

Am I incapable of getting all the way through a 600-word passage? Certainly not. In fact, I’m quite the reader on my own time. Without ruling out entirely that the passage was less than riveting, I must lay heavy blame on the medium. According to the site, reading is around 25% slower from a computer screen than from paper. And who’s got time for that? The Web, she’s just so easy to scroll through. Why slowly be bored when you could scroll and be done? The answer to that came during the comprehension part of the quiz, when I started getting absurdly easy questions wrong. I’m not a bad reader, per se, I’m just spoiled and lazy.

Sounds about right.

From there I moved on to improving memory, and found this online version of the classic match-two-cards Memory game. I picked this one pretty much based on the fact that the url is mathsisfun. Anyway, being a wise ass I immediately bumped up the difficulty level as high as it would go and started the game. Boy, if this ain’t my kind of exercise. I completed the task fairly quickly and got what I can only assume is an amazingly high score.

Has my memory improved? Maybe, maybe not. But I’ve definitely boosted my self esteem.

Memory
Memory is a fickle bitch. It allows me to forget more great ideas then I care to think about (maybe that’s the problem), but then again, it does keep me from crapping in my pants on a daily basis. So, let’s call it a draw.

Alliteration
I’ve always appreciated alliteration. The similar sounds make it so. Some people prefer it otherwise, and although very vapid, their view is also valid. To them, I say: “Tough Ta-Tas.”

Thanksgiving
It’s ironic that people give thanks for all they have, just before the insanity begins to buy them what they want. Thanksgiving is cool because it remains one of our least commercialized holidays – that is, until marketers can figure out a way to make you feel bad about not giving a Thanksgiving Day gift. Which leads me to:

Black Friday
The name “Black Friday” is so foreboding and full of dread that everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. Although one wonders how successful the sales would be if the original name had stuck: “Fucking Idiot Assholes Who Would Sacrifice Their Fellow Man to Save a Buck and the Evil Corporations Who Encourage It” Day?

Vampires
I used to think vampires were filthy, villainous, children-of-the-night, who needed blood to continue their foul existence. Apparently, I was wrong. Vampires are hyper-sexual, misunderstood souls who – even though they inhabit dead bodies – still maintain an ability to fuck.

This issue’s take away: There’s nothing like a cold, hard, toilet seat to remind you that you’re alive.

Note: The Modern Day Critic will be on hiatus through December. Look forward to a new issue in January 2010. Thanks!

I hate church signs. They almost always express some cheesy albeit esoteric sentiment understood only by those who speak in denominational clichés. My favorite is:  CH _ _ CH   What’s missing? UR! (lol) Yeah, and I’ll probably be missing for quite some time until you can stop embarrassing me in public with your tired wit.

Recently, however, I saw one with true merit. It contained real hope, real optimism. It read Today’s problems are tomorrow’s testimonies. OK, so it’s a little corny as well, but it is true nonetheless.

My past problems are the things which I have overcome and now make up my “victory file.” When I get self-critical, I can remember one of those events and think “I finished that!” or “I did that well!” or “I came through that in one piece!”

Oh yeah, there are failures as well, but I remember them as learning experiences, not as painful losses. I choose to see all of these things as lessons learned, positive outcomes, –victories.

I like victories.

Soldiers search bus passengers along the Northern Highway, 1980

Documentary Photographer

Susan Meiselas

Portfolio Review
Sunday, December 6
10am – 4pm SFAI
$100 (sliding scale fees available) Reservations Required

Lecture
Monday, December 7
6pm Tipton Hall
$5 general | $2.5 students/seniors/sfai members

The Santa Fe Art Institute is pleased to bring you award-winning documentary photographer, Susan Meiselas as part of our 2009 Visiting Artist & Lecture season, Memory: Shadow and Light | Art as individual/collective memory. Join us for her lecture on Monday, December 7th where Meiselas will talk about how her work is, by its very nature, charged with the sometimes antagonistic ideas of memory versus history. You can also come by the SFAI between 9am – 5pm M-F through December 31st and see two of her photographs in our Memory: Shadow & Light exhibition.

Susan Meiselas is an American photographer best known for her work covering the political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. Meiselas’ process has evolved in radical and challenging ways as she has grappled with pivotal questions about her relationship to her subjects, the use and circulation of her images in the media, and the relationship of images to history and memory. Since the 1970s, questions of ethics raised by documentary practice have been central to debates in photography. Perhaps no other photographer has so closely and consistently represented and participated in these debates than Meiselas. Her insistent engagement with these concerns has positioned her as a leading voice in the debate on contemporary documentary practice.

You can see her work and learn more about her projects at susanmeiselas.com

Yesterday I discussed my idea with Mez. Explaining to her that I wanted to take a more literal approach to memory, trying to set my piece aside from the usual “I remember when…” sort of artefacts.

Telling Mez my idea of using lines to visually show where someone has been. We came to the conclusion that this could be slightly one dimensional and that we needed another way of showing this.  I came up with the conclusion that I could use the lines to represent something more. Mez suggested using audio for lines specifically relating to the memory of when someone was in particular space. For example should I use animation for a couple walking through a space, if i used the line as a button so that when you scrolled over the line there was an audio for example. “Will you marry me?” You don’t hear an answer but this would show why that space held that memory.

As i stated before i’m not very well practiced using Adobe Flash, but wanting to challenge myself. So Mez gave me a quick tutorial on how to create a hover sound over the line. So i am going to experiment around with this to try and create an exciting three dimentional piece which the audience will be able to interact with.

I am going to create another storyboard and also a script for the audio pieces I am going to use.

Last night I was studying for my anatomy test. It’s on the nervous system and special senses. I feel like my memory still isn’t what it was a couple years ago before I quit smoking for this last time. In the long run, I know that my memory will actually be improved due to quitting. At least that’s what all kinds of websites are saying. But right now, that isn’t how I feel. I feel that nicotine must have been acting as some kind of neurotransmitter for so long that my brain developed (or possibly atrophied) to the point where it required nicotine for certain functions.

I quit nearly three years ago. I honestly don’t think my mental process has fully recovered. Now I’m doubting it ever will. I feel more confident about it today than I did at the beginning of this semester. Confident that I can pass the classes I need to take. But I can tell I’m not where I was. I’m relying more on mnemonics and study tricks like that.

Then again, maybe this is all in my head. Maybe this is the remnants of addiction saying to me “you can study better if you just smoke. Sweet, sweet cigarettes…” I used to sit in the coffee shop smoking and studying and drinking coffee. Oh it was magical. I felt so smart. But that was more than 12 years ago. Perhaps I’m idealizing that time.

In any event, anatomy test tonight at 6:30 pm. Home by 9:30 pm. Then only one last anatomy test left this semester. My grades so far in anatomy:

Test #/ Lab test score /Lecture test score
1/100/100
2/104/96
3/102/100
4/ (Nov. 34)
5/ (Dec. 10)

I need 910 points to get a 4.0. So that means I have to get at least a 77 on each of the remaining tests. I’m not too worried. But I still have to study. I won’t get even a 77 if I don’t study pretty hard. I’m not entirely sure why they stopped dropping your lowest test. If they did that, I could stop worrying about anatomy after today. But they changed the policy. Now all your tests count. So I get to keep working at this class until Dec. 10.

Psychology, I just have the final left. I need to get 11% on that to 4.0 the class.

Healthy Lifestyles, I have the final and a final project to turn in. I haven’t seen all my grades for the previous assignments yet. So that class’s grade is an unknown really until the grade for the final project comes in. It’s such a large part of the grade that basically with all the other scores, I think if I get a B or above on the project, I’ll get an A in the class. But if I get a C+, then my grade for the class will only be a B. I don’t have any notion how hard they grade it. This class is teaching me that I need to work on how I deal with stress. You’re telling ~me~?

I think one of the best web applications is the Zoho suite of programs.  I established a Zoho account a couple of years ago after reading a review about it in PC World magazine.  However, I have never seriously used the programs for my everyday work.  As I started Moduel 8, I took another look at Zoho.  I did realize that it had been updated, and more applications to the suite had been added. Actually, I am living the situation in which I would recommend this solution to a student and my school in general.  As you all probably know, it is a constant losing battle trying to keep up with operating systems and new versions of software.  Zoho would reduce these problems and expenses a great deal. Also, I continually run into version problems students have between home and school.  A lot of time is wasted trying to sort out these problems and advising students how to cope with these issues.  The other big problem while dealing with about one hundred junior high students is having their files available when needed.  They constantly lose their flash drive, leave it at home, save it on another computer, or don’t know where they save things.  Zoho would be perfect for dealing with these areas.  Finally, Zoho works pretty seamlessly with Microsoft Office applications, so the transition to this solution would be pretty painless.  I know the idea of accessing their files from anywhere would really appeal to my students.  At my grade level there is nothing we do that Zoho could not handle.

First, know that the members of Film Club have inspired much of what follows through their wisdom, imagination, and conversation. Second, thanks to a young lady who bet me they would never make a Saw VI but managed to be gracious, even after losing. And last, thanks to someone whose name isn’t really Lee Wimberly: his speech at a benefit dinner reminded me that, like David Foster Wallace said, a successful education does not teach one how to think, but what to think about.

My dad was there when I first gave this speech, and he’d never really heard me teach before. It’s kind of funny, I’m thirty years old and still nervous what he thinks. He raised me with such wisdom that I still care more about his opinion than anyone else’s.

Before you read this, I suggest you get prepared like my students have to.  Would you all please stand up for a minute? Can you guys make sure you’re squared away and looking sharp? Shirts tucked in and buttoned up, non uniform hoodies off. Ties straight. Everyone squared away? Good. Take a seat.

I’m going to speak about the nature of rules and the consequences that come from mistaking them, a subject that most people misunderstand. To start, because I am an English teacher, I have two stories to tell.

Story #1.

When my brother was in 2^nd and again in 4^th Grade he had a teacher who used to like to tell lots of stories with horrific endings to them. I think she wanted to warn kids away from misbehavior so she told them these pseudo sermons that she slathered a runny layer of “true-crimes” drama over top. The stories all went the same way. The teacher would say, “I once knew a boy who didn’t look both ways before crossing the street, and one day… on the way home from school… he was eaten by wolves!” Notice, he wasn’t run over by a truck, which would have made sense; the wolves got him. That’s always the way they ended: some child was horribly dismembered for a laughably venial sin. “I once knew a boy who didn’t write down his homework in his planner and one day… when he tried to do his homework… he was eaten by an alligator!”

Now that’s one version of Hell and punishment, and it’s an upsetting one. Being devoured by wolves or alligators is nobody’s idea of a good time, but there are other ways to think about consequences, and as the apostle Paul has told us, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.”

Story #2.

My second year teaching here I was talking with three seniors who were about a month from graduating. One of them told me he was fighting with his parents and things were really uncomfortable at home. His friend asked what had gotten his parents all upset. He replied, “They found me and my girlfriend having sex on the couch late one night. So now they don’t want me to see her. Now when I want her to come over, she has to sneak in the bedroom window.” He had been looking at his feet when he said this, and I asked him if he liked this girl a lot. “Not really,” was his reply. Then he straightened up, looked me in the eye and said, “Look, I don’t see what the big deal is… I mean you and my parents always talk about this like the first time you do it you’re never going to get over it and you’ll be tied to that person forever. But I’m not really in love with her now just because we had sex. I don’t see what the big deal is. When we did it, nothing happened to me.”

Hygiene like a freshman on the wrestling team.

Now, the tradition of telling stories with horrific endings to scare children into doing the right thing is a long one. One might recognize the terrific punishment meted upon Adam and Eve for their first act of disobedience, condemned to a lifetime of pain and toil for a mere moment’s weakness. Or consider Cain. He fought with his brother and the punishment was exile. There are ancient versions of Little Red Riding Hood that contain no woodsman or hunter to rescue the girl and her grandmother. The two just get eaten. The end. In the original version of Sleeping Beauty, the princess is punished for her carelessness with the spinning wheel by several centuries of sleep, not just an evening. When she wakes up, her whole family is dead.

Notice the present his family left for him in the lower right hand corner.

My favorite examples of stories like these are from a book I read when I was learning German in college. It’s called Struwwelpeter and was originally published in 1845. Struwwel means shaggy, and you can see he’s a bit unkempt. The book has ten stories about different people misbehaving. They are warned about the consequences for their misbehavior, but they don’t stop, and eventually, they come to rather horrible ends. This one is the Geschichte von Suppenkaspar. Kaspar is described as kugelrund “round like a ball.” He’s been well fed. But, on the first day of the story, he decides he doesn’t want to eat any soup, so he gets hungry on the second day. Still he won’t eat. Then on the third day he’s much thinner, and on the fourth, he’s nearly a skeleton, and on the fifth he dies of starvation. My favorite detail here is that his family decides to taunt him, or maybe just express their eternal disapproval, by putting a bowl of soup on his grave.

Listen to mother...

Here’s one called Die Geschichte von Daumenlutscher (The Story of the Thumbsucker). Konrad here really likes to suck his thumb, and when his mother goes out to run errands, she warns him not to. Loosely translated, she says, “Don’t suck your thumbs anymore, or a Tailor will come and cut them off with scissors, as if they were made out of paper.” But Konrad doesn’t listen, and sure enough… The tailor comes along and cuts off his thumbs with a pair of scissors. That’s right, there is no mercy in old German children’s tales…only cold, hard justice.

Is there anything sadder than a thumbless child?

Though they’re often quite gruesome, stories like these all have the same basic point: we are real, and our actions have real consequences. All these stories want their audiences to understand that actions have real results which can’t be undone. This was true in the middle ages and in ancient epochs when these stories were written and it’s true for us now. Most people don’t realize that. In the words of Henry Thoreau, most people “live lives of quiet desperation,” because they don’t realize that the choices they make change them, that they change the people around them, and that they change the world. Most people in our world are determinists at heart. They believe that they should be allowed to do what they want because what they do doesn’t matter. This is simply not true.

For instance, even now, we have more control over the world than we realize. We can actually summon movies and decide which films will be made next year. Do me a favor: don’t watch the next Saw movie. Don’t spend money on it. Don’t buy the DVD. Every Halloween another of these stupid movies comes out. Same plot: creepy guy tortures people, makes vague, hypocritical statements about learning to appreciate life… I’m not sure that being told how valuable life is carries much weight when the guy delivering the message enjoys chopping off arms, but I might be missing something.

Look there’s a reason why these movies come out every year. This kind of film is cheep. They all have the same stupid plot, so they don’t need to pay writers. Very few characters will survive, so you can hire young and unknown actors. All the action takes place in dimly lit rooms, so no big sets to design or far off locations to fly to. No CGI monsters. Cheap. Saw I: 1.2 Million Budget. Saw II: 4. Saw III: 12. Saw IV: 10 M. Saw V: 10.8. Each grossed about 100-145 M in theaters.

And then people reward them by going out and paying 10 dollars apiece. Every year. As long as the people who invest in these movies are making a 900% return on their investments, they are going to continue making them, and we’re all going to have to put up with another stupid sequel to a story that was corrupt and condescending the first time it was told. I mean 900%! That’s an amazing return on your money. Usually, if someone offers you 10% per year it’s extraordinary. There are good stories out there, but as long as this trash makes money, no one is going to finance them. The lesson is this, the way we spend our money determines the future of art, culture, and entertainment in this country. It will affect whether we continue to think of those three things as synonymous or we forget the art in pursuit of entertainment.

He loves nature because nature hates you!

This is Friedrich Nietzsche. His own philosophy drove him insane (as you can probably tell from this picture), but somehow the modern world has refused to acknowledge that it might do the same to us if we follow it, and it has been one of the most influential systems of thought for the past 120 years. One of the things he wanted to tell people is how much they can control what happens in the world. He was responding to Christianity, and he thought we were becoming too obsessed with unimportant things. He said in The Birth of Tragedy, “Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life.” Again, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he beseeches us, saying, “remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison mixers they are, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go” (both translations by Walter Kaufmann).

He wanted us to return to understanding the earth, and nature, and our bodies, instead of worrying about something vague like Heaven and the afterlife. When we do that, he said, we give up our ability to influence what’s happening here, we become unnatural, and Nietzsche loved nature. In college the hippie classmates drool over this. They’re all for anything which brings us back to nature, encourages the lack of personal hygiene, and seems connected with forest spirits and natural herbal remedies.

But they’re missing something. Nietzsche’s ideal for human life he called the Übermensch, from which we get the word Superman. The Übermensch is a man who is able to force his will upon other people, to dominate them and to get them to live as he wants them to live and to do as he wants them to do. He’s kind of like the evil superman from Superman III:

Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one’s power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power. (The Gay Science, again Kaufmann)

You can tell he's evil because he's drinking alcohol.

Nietzsche thought of nature the way a lion would, not as a place of harmony, but a place where violent battles for supremacy determined life. Let the fittest survive, he thought. According to Nietzsche, a beautiful oak tree standing in the middle of a forest isn’t there because it has achieved harmony with the plants and creatures around it. It is there because it has stolen light and water from every other plant in the area, because it has killed off every single one of its little brother and sister acorns that fell in the same place. Big trees are ruthless. Nietzsche wanted us to be ruthless, too.

Now we live in a pretty peaceful place, and no one has ever tried to kill most of us at my school. But there’s a more insidious way that this philosophy manifests in our society, and it is through advertizing.

A lot of students are under the impression that movies get made because somebody has a great idea about a cool story to tell and other people decide that telling great stories is important, so they supply between 10 to 250 million dollars to make this happen. Wrong. Somebody has a great idea about how to get people to give them their money, and other people who have a lot of money but really want more money too, are willing to help them. Check out Tad Friend’s article in the New Yorker on the marketing process.

It's Platonic!

It took nearly 50 years for someone to make a movie out of Lord of the Rings, because no one thought they could make money off the movie. That’s it. That’s what Peter Jackson had to argue with people: not “this will be AWESOME” but “this will make money.” They even thought they would cut out huge portions of the story or maybe change Sam to a girl because they thought it wouldn’t be successful otherwise. There aren’t really any main female characters in the story, so producers were afraid women wouldn’t go see it. Plus there isn’t any sex, so they were afraid men wouldn’t go see it. They thought, maybe if Frodo and Sam have a few romantic smooches along the way it will attract a bigger audience. Jackson actually had to convince people that there was an audience for a movie based on the most popular work of fiction in the world.

My students often don’t know that the songs played on the radio are test marketed to see whether people are more or less likely to buy whatever is advertised before or after the song is played. If a song makes people think too much or doesn’t make them want to buy whatever they encounter next, it doesn’t get played. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, has a very intriguing chapter about this process.

My students think that the banter and calls from listeners on alt rock and R&B stations are honest attempts by real human beings to communicate with them.  It’s hard for them to hear that their favorite talk radio host’s job is not Telling the Truth, it’s Selling Ad Space.

TV is of course the worst at this nonsense. TiVo and other digital recorders allow us to fast forward through commercials. So now the ads are creeping into the show itself. Many of you are savvy enough to spot this, like when all three American Idol judges can’t resist the refreshing taste of Coke, or when HEROES takes a 45 second pause to watch one of the characters send a text message on his new SAMSUNG PHONE!!!! And we’re supposed to think, if only I could somehow send typed messages over the phone, I could be a hero too. It’s insulting really.

Even more insulting is the fact that a person or corporation can buy coverage during the news. They can pay to have local reporters interview you about something and pretend its news. It’s called a “Consumer Information” story.

Advertizing is everywhere, and it’s relentless. It is, as Os Guinness put it, “The art of getting people to buy what they don’t need, by describing it in terms they know are not true.” We all know this. We know that Gatorade (or what is that stupid name they’ve given it now? “G”?) won’t make us play ball like a professional. Every boy knows deep down that new Abercrombie shirt won’t make a girl notice him if she hasn’t already. We know a new album or movie won’t make us any happier, not really. But we pretend to believe what they’re telling us is true, because we’re not sure what else to do.

How did we get to a place where our entire world is based on listening to people lie to us? That’s what commercials are… all of them… 30 second lies. The answer is found in the flip side to Nietzsche’s idea of the superman, which he called the last man. Zarathustra explains:

Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.  “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” thus asks the last man, and he blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.

“We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth. (Kaufmann)

The last man is content. He is lazy. He’s pretty sure there’s nothing he can do to make life better or to help those around him. What advertisers have realized is that if they can make the general public into last men, it will be easier to establish themselves and maintain their control in society. If we don’t think there’s anything we can do with our skills or possessions to make life better, we’re more likely to stop creating and spend more time buying useless stuff.

My first year teaching , a kid got kicked out for plagiarism. He turned in an analysis of The Good Earth that actually had “Book Rags Character Summary” printed at the top. Mine was not the only class he’d done this for. When I asked his friends what was going on with him, they told me he couldn’t stop playing Dragon Ball Z. 15 hours a day. He was even playing video games in Bible class. The teacher threw his Gameboy out a second story window. He had no time to actually read a book and think about it. Others who have found themselves doing something similar, though not quite as blatantly dull-witted, did it for similar reasons. They were distracted by other stuff, and wound up out of time. The punishment for this kid of course wasn’t something graphic and bloody. The dean of students didn’t whack off his thumbs with the golf club … he just removed his ability to turn in any kind of paper, whether phony or excellent. We asked him to leave the school.

The Japanese are actually having a worse problem with this than we are. Recent estimates have concluded that about 15% of the Japanese male population between 18 and 35 years old can be qualified as what they call hokikomori, people who have no job, never leave their apartments and mooch off their parents to buy movies, games, and comic books. They have completely withdrawn from society to live in their own little worlds.

The aim of advertising is simple. It’s to make you stop creating and make you start buying, and it does it in one particular way. Advertisers don’t sell us cars or music or films or food… they sell us ourselves, in slightly twisted forms. The way cows get mad cow disease is the same way we begin to think of ourselves as useless and unimportant. The advertising in this culture tells the young women in my classes that they are valuable only based upon how much visual and physical pleasure they give the men around them. It lies to them and try to get them to buy their ways to success in this area. The truth is that each and every woman at the school is worth dying for. And if the guy she’s with doesn’t understand that…she should stop wasting her time with him.

The young men I teach are representatives of the most powerful, talented, intelligent, and educated generation of men this country has ever produced. But the lie told to us is that our talents are more valuable if we don’t care, if we don’t try hard. I’m not the first to say that, but it bears repeating. This is death, by tiny, tiny increments. What’s impressive about a virtuoso musician is not that it’s easy for him to play incredible pieces, but that he worked hard enough to make something truly ponderous look like no big deal.

If you doubt what I just said check out the recent poll taken by the Boston Public Health Commission where 46% of those polled thought it was Rihanna’s fault that Chris Brown beat her. The most common response was that she must have done something to get him riled up. Think carefully about that answer. The basic assumption is that her job is to please him, and that her mistake was to make him active… to get him to notice. Or check out David Foster Wallace’s book about the 2004 presidential race. He points out that it is better for the establishments in both the Republican and the Democratic parties if young people never vote. The fact that my students are bored or annoyed by politics is not an accident. It is purposeful. They can predict and pander to the older people. But when youth get involved, no one knows what kind of change might come. We might even elect a black president.

Want more proof that culture is feeding ourselves back to us? Think about YouTube’s encouragement to “broadcast yourself” asserting that TV is better when it’s about you. Or iTunes’ genius tool, which is an “amazing new technology” that sells you music that sounds exactly like music you already own. It’s like someone saw what kind of car you drive and tried to sell you a second car just like it. Every time I go to amazon.com, I am greeted by five recommendations for books that are  just like books I’ve already read. Why would I want that? Shouldn’t they be recommending things that are nothing like anything I’ve read, that are totally different and innovative, and will teach me new things? Netflix ranks movies based upon how similar they are to movies I already saw, as if I already know all I need to about film. It doesn’t educate, it retards education. Instead of one called, “Movies You’ll Love,” I want Netflix to post a tab called “We Dare You.”

That internet was supposed to help us get all kinds of information from around the world. We were supposed to use it to make new friends, discover new things. Instead, it’s actually a way to isolate ourselves. Most people have five or six sites they visit every day that are filled with things they already know they like and opinions they probably already agree with. That internet does not challenge us. It convinces us that we already know everything we could ever need to know. Meanwhile fewer and fewer people know the names of their neighbors. It’s too inconvenient. One never knows what they might say.

Look, I like film, music, TV, and books. I like that internet. It’s because I like them that I’m saying this. I think they have the potential to help us, if they remain art forms. If they become merely advertising, they will teach us that each person should live his own life and not pay attention to anyone else’s ideas, because when we’re complacent, when we’re content, we’re more likely to stagnate, rot, and do nothing but spend.

To augment this tendency, the world will tell you that you can fashion your own rules to life, and this is a really attractive proposition. We like the idea of there being no advice we might need from other people, and we resent those who try to make us conform to regulations or patterns, but it is not something any sane person can believe in. There are rules for how to live, and on some level we all appreciate them. Outback may tell us, “No rules, just right,” but try going in there and asking for the vegetarian menu. There are rules everywhere.

Consider: a coach who doesn’t ask his players to work hard, who doesn’t believe there’s a right way to play, is useless and insulting. Imagine if cuts for JV and Varsity lacrosse were made by drawing names out of a helmet, because the coach thought it didn’t matter who was on which team. If a man’s wife doesn’t care whether he cheats, he’s not really married. The fact that his wife is at least a little jealous of his attention is good.

This summer, I helped my parents clean all my old toys and sports equipment out of their garage and attic. For every item my mom found she would ask me what I wanted to do with it. When I cared about something, like my little league baseball glove, I would tell her exactly what I thought should be done with it. “Give it to me,” I’d say. “I know where it belongs.” When I didn’t want something, when I thought it was useless, I would tell her it didn’t matter what she did with it. Remember the conversation Alice has with the Cheshire Cat?

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat

“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

When someone tells us there are no rules for how to live our lives, what he’s really saying is that like junk he found in the garage, he doesn’t think our lives are worth anything. Oddly, we can tell when a policeman doesn’t care because he doesn’t give us the tickets we deserve. A job is really useless when the boss doesn’t care if his employee comes to work or not. A teacher doesn’t think his students are important or valuable when he stops holding them to any standard: when he doesn’t care if they show up late, turn things in on time, pay attention, or, yes, wear the uniform.

Ancient people understood this fact, and when they figured out something important about life, they wrote it down and recorded it. The observations of Israelites we call proverbs. The people who spoke English a thousand years ago wrote some called gnomes. This is the wisdom that separates those who think like children from those who think like adults. The Anglo-Saxons recorded all the things that a king should do, or a son, or a woman, or a person watching the cattle. This is probably the most famous passage.

Because they lived in the north and winter was scary, these people wrote about the signs that spring was coming so that no future generation would lose hope that winter would end. Look at the verb in that poem. These are things that MUST happen. No other opinion considered.

The unique thing about these messages is how little they talk of punishments. Even Proverbs doesn’t ever really threaten dismemberment for refusing to follow its advice, though it does say there will be consequences. No one gets his thumbs cut off. No one is devoured by wild beasts. What happens to people who don’t collect firewood for the winter or who live in foolishness is too plain, too simple, too true to mention.

Remember him?

For instance, Struwwelpeter himself gets off pretty easy. He refuses to comb his hair or cut his fingernails. Then no one wants to be around him. That’s it. No forced amputation, no tortuous death, no haberdashers with giant knitting needles… just loneliness…just nothingness, like hell. This is the most realistic of all the stories in this book. I’m not afraid that if I suck my thumb Sweeny Todd will cut it off. I don’t like soup either, but I’m not going to starve by Sunday if I stop eating it. However, I really do think that if I were to stop washing, people would stop talking to me. That at least is not an exaggeration.

Sometimes, students who come back to see me after they’ve graduated boast about how little reading they did in school. My thought every time is, “Congratulations… you’re an idiot.” Getting away with not doing work isn’t a reward, it’s the penalty. They’ve become the kind of people who don’t learn when offered the opportunity. Things like detentions, grounding, and jail time, are just threats to warn us, to scare us away from the true penalty. The true punishment for murder is not incarceration; it’s that you become the kind of person who disdains human life. We use the phrase, “Don’t worry, nothing will happen,” as if it’s supposed to comfort us. Can you imagine what life would be like if nothing every happened to you ever again. You never managed to move, or respond, or grow for the rest of your life, if you became the true embodiment of the Last Man?

Adam and Eve think that God will stomp on them if they disobey, but the real punishment is that they go from being rulers of a garden, to wanderers in a wilderness. They lose the ability to do the good things they were created to do. God actually promises not to harm Cain, and Cain thinks this is a good deal. Instead he wanders as an outcast for the rest of his life. His penalty for abusing brotherhood is to never have a brother again. I have friends who are suffering the true punishment for alcoholism. They never killed anyone, but they abused drink to such an extent that they know if they ever have it again, their wives will leave and take the kids with them. Their punishment is that they can never again participate in something good that they once enjoyed.

That’s why I laugh when people say they don’t believe in God because he’s not stopping people from sinning. Sure he is. All of us will either conform to Christ’s image and live forever, or we won’t. Either way, when we die, we’ll stop sinning. What’s scary about death is not that it might hurt; it’s that we lose all the great things about life we never really cared about.

Staying like this would be a real punishment.

Imagine if Konrad the thumbsucker grew up and still sucked his thumb at age thirty. Those who think like children might think that was a good idea, but no one who thinks like an adult ever could. The punishment for refusing to learn and grow is to remain a child, to never have anything new happen, to never change, and that is a terrifying punishment. Only a child would think that living without rules, without the wisdom of those around us could ever be a good thing.

Look, I have reason to think I’m pretty smart. I got into a college so obscure and elite most of my students can’t even spell it. By the time I was 24, I had a master’s degree and could read seven languages. But every one of the students at my school knows more than me about something. And not just a little. There are kids in my English classes every year who struggle with Shakespeare, but they know things about life it would take years to teach me. This is an important concept: other people know things we don’t, and we ignore the truths that others have learned at our own peril.

To avoid becoming a deadened conglomeration of formerly human parts, to avoid becoming one of Nietzsche’s last men, an advertiser’s dream come true, there is something we all have to do. We must seek the opinions and wisdom of people who are different from us. They’re the people who are going to help us break out of our own perspective and see the world in four dimensions. They’re the ones who might actually teach us something true about life. No one can teach life to himself.

Rule #1

We should listen less to our friends, and listen more to our family. This sounds counter-intuitive, but our family members are valuable to us because they are different from us, not because they are similar. When they disagree with us, we still have to deal with them. We choose our friends, so they usually just end up feeding our own opinions back to us. If we disagree with our friends, we can ditch them and find new ones, but if we disagree with our parents, we can’t get new ones. We have to confront their position and recognize how it challenges our own myopia. One of the best things about my brother Joe is that he loves me so much he tells me whenever I’m an idiot. He is a little more zealous in this pursuit than I would like him to be, but he thinks differently than me, and he refuses to let me be less than I could be. I can count on it; when I need it, he will always correct me and always forgive me.

Rule #2

We should listen to people who are older than us. Many of my students don’t want to think about this, but if their parents have been married for 20 years, even if they only uh…spend time together… twice a week, they’ve still done it two thousand times! They”re much better off getting advice on romance from parents than from that guy on the lacrosse team who totally got to third base with the drunk chick from the catholic school in the hallway closet at the party last weekend. My mom went to St. John’s in the seventies. Think about that. She saw the terrible things substance abuse can do to people, because she saw her friends and classmates succumb. My students would be much better served listening to her advice on the subject, not the fourteen year old telling them that smoking up hasn’t hurt him at all.

The world is changing rapidly. It’s cliché, but true that technology is warping our world. Spend time talking to people who grew up before the electronic age before we lose their perspectives and their wisdom forever. In only a couple of years there will be no one left who remembers what it was like to live through WWII. Soon people will not remember life before TV. We will not remember what it was like when the Bomb went off. Some of my students don’t even know which bomb I meant. These are precious perspectives, and to lose them hurts us and hurts our humanity.

Rule #3

We should listen to dead people. That is one group of people who are entirely different from us because they lived in different times and cultures. Everyone can do it, because those people took the things they knew to be true, the things that would help show the future generations how to live, and they wrote them down. Read books written by people who are long dead.

Don’t do it because it’s fun. I am continually amazed at the people who complain about the reading in my classes by saying they found it boring, or difficult, or by saying that it wasn’t “their type” of book, as if I’m assigning it because it will be fun. Of course it’s not fun. It’s school. I assigned it because it’s good, because it contains wisdom that’s thousands of years old, because people might not read it if left to themselves. I don’t care if it’s fun. I wonder if the students ever complain to their math teachers that the homework they’re given isn’t the kind of math they like to do in their free time. Something tells me they don’t.

Don’t read old books to enjoy them. Read to learn what it means to be human from the wisest humans who ever lived. To understand romance, read Much Ado About Nothing. To understand the challenges of parenthood, read Oedipus. To understand the importance of marriage and religion, read the Odyssey. To really understand the power of alcohol, read Henry IV, Part I. Anyone might enjoy it, but even if he doesn’t, it will make him a better person. Maybe it will be enjoyable, but that’s the bonus.

This is how we grow up. Learning from other people, especially those with different perspectives is how we achieve maturity. By talking to other people and getting their opinion, instead of just sticking with our own, we can find our calling and learn to see ourselves the way God sees us. We can understand how to create meaningful work.

If we don’t ask wiser people about sex, fate, celebration, God, work, death, children, politics, fear, and everything else that makes up life, no one is going to feed us to wolves or chop our thumbs off. The true tragedy in life is not a violent death; it’s not disease, or nuclear bombs. To drink deeply and feel no joy, to study and not learn, to work but never create, to love and produce no fruit, to be left alone with oneself, is Hell. If we don’t find out the eternal rules and follow them, I promise, absolutely nothing will happen for a very long time.

the warrior…

crouched under the shadows of his pliable shield.

the light crystal…

crushed and scattered by the breeze that once calmed this being.

a thin mist of long-forgotten warmth,

lingering from time to time…

For many, the subject of memory remains a mystery.

As a writer, I’m particularly interested in memory. I’m working on two psychological thrillers, both dealing with recollections of past events. The second novel contains a number of flashbacks prompted by triggers, such as a particular sound or a certain smell. For a long time, I assumed that the strongest memories are the most accurate, but about a couple of years ago I heard otherwise.

Apparently, memories get muddled. When a person remembers an event from long ago, they’re really remembering a memory of that event. In some instances, people reinvent memories after a particularly traumatic event.. I’ve even heard that criminal lawyers dread dealing with witnesses who claim to have vivid memories of a crime, as so often the opposing lawyer manages to cast doubt on the witness account.

However, I still think the strongest memories are generally the most accurate. Recently, I got to see a class photograph taken at primary school. I hadn’t met any of the pupils or teachers for years and had moved location many times since the taking of the photograph. Children tend to remember grown ups as being “old”. As an adult looking back, I was expecting the teacher and headmaster to look much younger in the school photograph. But they didn’t. They looked exactly how I remembered them from years ago – a couple of rather austere grown ups. The hair, the facial features, the expressions all matched.

So what does this mean for me? It means that I’ll trust my memories and intuitions in future.

A locomotive

then cars, then—half-way through—

remembering to count.