I rarely LOL, but I did.

Apparently a contest to rename No Child Left Behind has elicited such entries as:

All American Children Are Above Average Act

Mental Asset Recovery Plan

Act to Help Children Read Gooder

No Child Left Untested

No Child’s Behind Left

No School Board Left Standing

Double Back Around to Pick Up the Children We Left Behind Act

Rearranging the Deck Chairs Act

Teach to the Test Act

Could We Start Again Please Act

[For the record (I hate that phrase), I harbor mixed feelings, not unmitigated anger, toward NCLB.]

Fights are not arguments.

This is a great post on that sad necessity, calling out hypocrites on the political left.

I would add to the author’s points the observation that people in this country (that group includes me, by the way) can feel such outrage upon viewing a racist cartoon that nearly everyone agrees is disgusting while elsewhere not pens and presses but bullets and bombs are the expressive instruments of racism, sometimes (as in Darfur) with but futile condemnation from the rest of the world and in other cases (as of Palestine and Israel) without even wrinkling the brows of many onlookers.

Camus the Defense Attorney

Despite its over-reliance on the assumption that its audience is or wishes to be of the aristocracy (and is male, but that’s a given), this is the most eloquent defense of Nietzsche I have ever read. I hope I can write like this in the service of something or someone someday.

“In a certain sense, rebellion, with Nietzsche, ends again in the exaltation of evil. The difference is that evil is no longer a revenge. It is accepted as one of the possible aspects of good and, with rather more conviction, as part of destiny. Thus he considers it as something to be avoided and also as a sort of remedy. In Nietzsche’s mind, the only problem was to see that the human spirit bowed proudly to the inevitable. We know, however, his posterity and what kind of politics were to claim the authorization of the man who claimed to be the last apolitical German. He dreamed of tyrants who were artists. But tyranny comes more naturally than art to mediocre men. ‘Rather Cesare Borgia than Parsifal,’ he exclaimed. He begat both Caesar and Borgia, but devoid of the distinction of feeling which he attributed to the great men of the Renaissance. As a result of his insistence that the individual should bow before the eternity of the species and should submerge himself in the great cycle of time, race has been turned into a special aspect of the species, and the individual has been made to bow before this sordid god. The life of which he spoke with fear and trembling has been degraded to a sort of biology for domestic use. Finally, a race of vulgar overlords, with a blundering desire for power, adopted, in his name, the ‘anti-Semitic deformity’ on which he never ceased to pour scorn.

“He believed in courage combined with intelligence, and that was what he called strength. Courage has been turned in his name against intelligence, and the virtues that were really his have thus been transformed into their opposite: blind violence. He confused freedom and solitude, as do all proud spirits. His ‘profound solitude at midday and at midnight’ was nevertheless lost in the mechanized hordes that finally inundated Europe. Advocate of classic taste, of irony, of frugal defiance, aristocrat who had the courage to say that aristocracy consisted in practicing virtue without asking for a reason and that a man who had to have reasons for being honest was not to be trusted, addict of integrity (‘integrity that has become an instinct, a passion’), stubborn supporter of the ’supreme equity of the supreme intelligence that is the mortal enemy of fanaticism,’ he was set up, thirty-three years after his death, by his own countrymen as the master of lies and violence, and his ideas and virtues, made admirable by his sacrifice, have been rendered detestable. In the history of the intelligence, with the exception of Marx, Nietzsche’s adventure has no equivalent; we shall never finish making reparation for the injustice done to him. [I would put at least one religious leader up there with Marx, but never mind.] Of course history records other philosophies that have been misconstrued and betrayed. But up to the time of Nietzsche and National Socialism, it was quite without parallel that a process of thought–brilliantly illuminated by the nobility and by the sufferings of an exceptional mind–should have been demonstrated to the eyes of the world by a parade of lies and by the hideous accumulation of corpses in concentration camps. The doctrine of the superman led to the methodical creation of sub-men–a fact that doubtless should be denounced, but which also demands interpretation. If the final result of the great movement of rebellion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to be this ruthless bondage, then surely rebellion should be rejected and Nietzsche’s desperate cry to his contemporaries taken up: ‘My conscience and yours are no longer the same conscience.’”

In answer to a friend’s question, I said:

I love writing and I want to do it somehow, but I also want to stay in education… the meeting of the two fields might be what attracts me about getting a Ph.D. in education someday. My reading assignments in ed school last year were often very badly written articles on very important topics, and it angered me that essays on Shakespeare’s use of flower symbolism in the sheep-shearing scene of The Winter’s Tale or whatever are often so much more elegant and interesting to read than papers on how huge numbers of students are being cheated of a good education and a good life. I want to be in education and I want to write about it skillfully so that more people will take respectful note of its issues. I have this rather overdramatic idea of having honed my writing skills in the bowels of apolitical academia, with the help of bubble-bound English lit professors, only to betray their interests and my former ones by using everything they taught me to benefit a field that is at best a neglected stepchild of hardcore academia. We’ll see.

A Liberal Artist Wanders Into The Realm Of Science, With Vexing Results

I took a class on systems theory in college that concentrated on the dynamic, unpredictable, chaotic aspects of systems. The worldviews of the philosophers and novelists whose work we read were endlessly exhilarating, if somewhat terrifying.

Articles I read in grad school last year (by David Cohen and by Stigler and Hiebert) present a very different theory of systems: Far from providing butterflies on power trips with quick and easy ways of causing natural disasters across the globe, huge sprawling systems (ecosystems, languages, education, bureaucracies) exert all their massive might to crush any potential disturbance almost before it appears. Systems are conservative to the extreme. This perspective, too, I find terrifying.

If systems overreact to and amplify change, caution is in order when attempting any kind of reform. Of course that does not seem to be the case, at least in the area I am thinking of, which is school reform. On the contrary, no reform seems big enough, no revolution absolute enough, in the world of progressive education. The education system, at least, appears to be conservative.

But does that assumption argue for more revolutionary reforms or more cautious ones? On one hand, it is going to take a lot to change a system so resistant to change, and we’d might as well start changing as much as we can as quickly as we can. On the other hand, because, as a professor once told me, progressive education is like a pork chop—better nonexistent than half-cooked—even the smallest changes could be very damaging in that they will clash with everything around them and possibly negate or at least fail to help other efforts, progressive or not, at good teaching and administration. By this logic, extreme caution would have to be prescribed.

So I feel paralyzed. We mustn’t be overzealous for fear of being counterproductive, but we must be overzealous if anything at all is to be accomplished. I suppose ideally we would all sit and think for a very long time until we had considered all possible contingencies and felt confident that our proposed reforms would have a radical but not negative effect—and then implement them. But history and society (not to mention human lifespans) do not allow for that. What options are left? Must we either reform the entire system at once or leave it be? Trial and error seems so unacceptable in a system in which (again, as a professor once said) each child is in fourth grade but once.

“Nation’s Blacks Creeped Out By All The People Smiling At Them”

I knew there’d be an Onion article on this phenomenon sooner or later.

Camus Overload

“The essence of [Nietzsche's] discovery consists in saying that if the eternal law is not freedom, the absence of law is still less so. If nothing is true, if the world is without order, then nothing is forbidden; to prohibit an action there must, in fact, be a standard of values and an aim. But, at the same time, nothing is authorized; there must also be values and aims in order to choose another course of action . . . [otherwise] there is nothing but the appalling freedom of the blind. . . . A profounder logic replaces the ‘if nothing is true, everything is permitted’ of Karamazov with ‘if nothing is true, nothing is permitted.’” – The Rebel

Oh. Duh.

Which definition is it?

“Socialism is nihilistic, in the henceforth precise sense that Nietzsche confers on the word. A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.” – Camus, The Rebel

Are ideas eternal? Should they be?

Camus says Stirner says no. I assume he’s talking about the existence, not the validity, of ideas, but I’ve never read Stirner.

Of Stirner, Camus also says that “even revolution, revolution in particular, is repugnant to this rebel. To be a revolutionary, one must continue to believe in something, even where there is nothing in which to believe.” Stirner is too nihilistic to be a revolutionary, but he can be a rebel.

(Aside: I recently taught my ninth graders that rebellions differ from revolutions only in that they are unsuccessful. Perhaps Stirner, or Camus’s version of him, would say that the “failure” of rebelli0ns is not a matter of historical contingency but rather essential to their nature: that rebellion is a negative argument without a positive one–perhaps without a desire for a positive one, in the case of nihilism–the positive argument, the new order of things, is inherent in revolution from the beginning.)

Anyway, Camus continues thus his discussion of Stirner’s belief in nothing abstract:

“In this desert everything begins to flower again. ‘The terrifying significance of an unpremeditated cry of joy cannot be understood while the long night of faith and reason endures.’ This night is drawing to a close, and a dawn will break which is the dawn not of revolution but of insurrection. Insurrection is, in itself, an asceticism which rejects all forms of consolation.”

You would think I actually cared about sports the way I’m milking these stories of athletes on drugs.

Here is Timothy Egan on the “young and stupid” excuse.

Here is my summary of the article’s most important points as I see them:

1st. Michael Phelps can blame his pot-smoking on youth and stupidity because (1) he is 23, (2) the rest of his life is characterized by excessive discipline, and (3) it harmed no one.

2nd. A-Rod cannot blame his steroid use on youth and stupidity because (1) it took place in his late twenties and (2) he used it to win games and money.

3rd, and by far the most important in my opinion though it’s almost an aside in the article: It is ridiculous for politicians [I read this as "rich and white" politicians, but maybe that's just me] to be dismissing past peccadillos–having affairs, driving drunk, snorting coke–as youthful indiscretions, not just because many of them took place well into adulthood but more so because many people [I read this as "poor people of color," but maybe that's just me] are spending years in prisons for offenses much more youthful and minor (though, thankfully, the Rockefeller laws seem to be on their way out).

[4th. Egan seems to think 23-year-olds are young enough to use the "young and stupid" excuse, which is good because I am 23.]

“Equal Opportunity” FAIL

Two of my students tried to fill out an information form as a preliminary step to applying for this “American Liberty Scholarship.” Each has a two-letter Chinese family name, and each was unable to submit his information because of an error message: “please type your full last name.” Awesome.

Conversation

“In times of doubt and darkness, never turn your back on that which you have arrived at in times of light and clarity.” – St. Francis Xavier (courtesy of my friend Nick)

“In times of tolerable lightheartedness, never turn your back on that which you have arrived at in the depths of despair.” -Depression (courtesy of its residence in my brain)

Philosophy (That Is, Ethics)

Is it about how to live or how to die?

Whole Thoughts from Camus

“At this period [the Romantic] there is even an imperialism of evil, whose aim is to annex everything, even the most orthodox geniuses.”

I’m just waiting for the opportunity to use the phrase “imperialism of evil” in casual conversation.

“Romanticism, at the source of its inspiration, is chiefly concerned with defying moral and divine law. That is why its most original creation is not, primarily, the revolutionary, but, logically enough, the dandy. . . . Much more than the cult of the individual, romanticism inaugurates the cult of the ‘character.’ . . . Dandyism, of whatever kind, is always dandyism in relation to God.”

I love claims like that of the last sentence. Heh?

“Pain, at this stage [of metaphysical rebellion], is acceptable only on condition that it is incurable.”

Is that depression?

(All excerpts are from The Rebel.)

Half-Asleep Half-Thought

Nouns exist or do not exist. Other parts of speech get qualities without existence. Lucky.

From a Student’s Anti-Smoking Essay

“In the future, you’ll be partying next to an oxygen tank.”

x = ~x (ultimately)

I am reading Camus’s The Rebel. At one point it says that “every blashphemy is, ultimately, a participation in holiness.” A few pages earlier there is the suggestion that “the romantics talked so grandly about solitude only because it was their real horror, the one thing they could not bear.” There is also a reference to Blake’s conviction that Milton was “on the side of the demons, without knowing it.”

I enjoy contemplating all these concepts, and I have the highest respect for Camus as a philosopher and for Blake as a psychologist of Milton, but really, this trick of sounding terribly profound by negating apparent tautologies–sometimes almost at random and usually offering up the word “ultimately” in place of any positive argument corresponding to the negation–is getting on my nerves. Blasphemy, ultimately, is holy. Creation, ultimately, is destruction. The space separating the two objects, ultimately, is also the space connecting them. Bullies, ultimately, are victims. Teachers, ultimately, are learners. Black, ultimately, is white. Left, ultimately, is right. Okay, but even a toddler can randomly yell “no” at things (propositions as well as objects). That doesn’t make every annoying little kid a philosopher.

The trouble is that many of these negations are quite correct and enormously important. I just wish there weren’t so many cheap imitations of them.

As much as we all owe to him, I blame Freud for making the frauds sound so credible. After all, what you experience consciously as hatred is really your unconscious desire for intimacy, your pride is actually your vulnerability, your pugnacity is actually your longing for peace, and so on, right?

But of course, the frustration I express is but a symptom of attraction, and my scorn for those who can’t tell profundity from wordplay is but a symptom of my fear that I am one of them.

Best Song Titles (Artists)

A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left (Andrew Bird)

Skin Is, My (Andrew Bird)

Who Told You This Room Exists (Belong)

The Door Opens The Other Way (Belong)

One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces (Ben Folds Five)

Babay (Eat A Critter, Feel Its Wrath) (Blow)

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (Bob Dylan)

I Kill Therefore I Am (Brightblack)

A Little Longing Goes Away (The Books)

What Passing-Bells For Those Who Die As Cattle? (Britten)

Late Nineties Bedroom Rock For The Missionaries (Broken Social Scene)

Sofisticated Fuck Princess Please Leave Me Alone (Carissa’s Wierd)

Beginners Falafel (Flying Lotus)

It’s About The Size Of A House (Hildur Gudnadottir, BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa)

The Direction Was Foggy Or Cloudy (Hildur Gudnadottir, BJ Nilsen and Stilluppsteypa)

Free Until They Cut Me Down (Iron & Wine)

Burn Girl Prom Queen (Mogwai)

Rage: Man (Mogwai)

We Have A Map Of The Piano (Mum)

Behind Two Hills,,,,A Swimmingpool (Mum)

I Can’t Feel My Hand Any More, It’s Alright, Sleep Still (Mum)

Giftwrap Yourself, Slowly! (Porn Sword Tobacco)

Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte (Ravel)

Hey, Hey, Wilderness (Songs of Green Pheasant)

Jesus Saves, I Spend (St. Vincent)

Our Change Into Rain Is No Change At All (A Sunny Day In Glasgow)

Panic Attacks Are What Make Me “Me” (A Sunny Day In Glasgow)

When It Happens It Moves All By Itself (Telefon Tel Aviv)

What It Is Without The Hand That Wields It (Telefon Tel Aviv)

Dedicated Secretary, Liaison, Passionate Mother (To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie)

You Guys Talk, We’ll Spill Our Guts (To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie)

Don’t Be In Between Me, I’ll Grow And Break You (To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie)

Power Hungry Fucks Fold Their Hands When They Talk (To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie)

Wonderful Remark (Van Morrison)

Nieces Pieces (Xiu Xiu)

Cliche but yet–

“If God wanted people to fly, he would have given us wings.”

“You’re right, but look what he gave us instead. He gave us reasons to want to fly.”

- Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

To be quite honest, I’m not even doing this all that ironically.

You may have heard of the Facebook fad. It caught me, and I fell down.

1. I have a pair of gloves that sort of hold their shape when they’re not being worn, and I can’t have them lying around in my sight because I always see them as severed hands rather than as empty gloves.

2. I lived in southern China (Guangdong Province) for a year when I was two years old and my parents were teaching English at a university there. When we got back to Hawai’i and they continued to use with me what Cantonese we had all learned while abroad, I apparently rebuffed them with the comment, “We’re in an English-speaking country now!” I have not yet recovered from the shame of having said that.

3. My ten most listened-to artists, according to Last.fm and in descending order, are Bach, Radiohead, Mozart, Burial, Tricky, Elliott Smith, Lupe Fiasco, The Avalanches, The Arcade Fire, and Belle & Sebastian.

4. I never drank alcohol until my first year of college, and I never smoked anything until my first year after graduating from college, when I discovered that pot makes me puke but cigarettes give me a perfectly pleasant little buzz. I now drink regularly but smoke very rarely.

5. I took my friend to the mall in my parents’ car one time when I had a driving permit but no license. We were so scared the police or my parents would catch us, though, that we turned around and headed back home approximately five minutes after I parked, with bated breath, in the mall’s crowded lot. I think that was the extent of my “wildness” in high school.

[I'm sorry, parents, if you read this and the previous two posts startle you.]

6. I keep in my email inbox only those messages I have yet to reply to or otherwise act upon, and I’m mildly obsessed with keeping the number of such messages below that (I think it’s nine) at which Gmail starts having to stretch its inbox boundaries.

7. I can’t stand to write with non-standard grammar but speak with it all the time. This double standard (no pun intended) carries over into my teaching.

8. Sometime around my ninth grade year, probably after the summer during which I read all six of Hardy’s major novels in quick obsessive succession, I presented my mother with the hypothesis that all great books are sad. She made a valiant effort to present me with counterexamples, but I don’t think she ever convinced me that I was wrong.

9. In ninth grade biology I had to take a test to determine which hemisphere of my brain was dominant, and my left and right brains kept tying though I took the test again and again in my desperation to label myself.

10. I play Corelli’s “La Folia” almost every time I take out my violin, and it makes me happy, as do Bach partitas.

11. I dislike washing dishes and once was so nauseated by the act that I nearly vomited, but I don’t mind other forms of cleaning.

12. I greatly enjoy watching percussionists do their thing.

13. I prefer pencils to pens, except of course when grading papers, for which I use green pen like my favorite elementary school teacher.

14. I never swore much until I became a teacher and was prevented from doing so for certain hours every day.

15. When I was a toddler (in China), I amused myself by lining up with excessive neatness categories of things in our apartment. One day it would be all the pairs of shoes we owned; another day it would be all the pots and pans I could find in the cupboards. I hear I also ran around naked when there was no heat in the winter, much to my parents’ astonishment, during that year.

16. I strongly preferred math and science classes to English classes for nearly all of my pre-college years, though reading was always what I enjoyed most outside of school.

17. I feel compelled to mitigate the narcissism of writing this with some comment scorning the very act, but of course that would just be (or rather, is, since it now exists) more narcissism. Oh well.

18. The only TV shows I’ve ever watched regularly are Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street.

19. I have recurring dreams about travel gone wrong: missed flights, lost luggage, changed schedules, wrong trains, etc. These topics do not bother me excessively when I am conscious. I sort of wish I had less mundane nightmares.

20. I am mentally ill (with depression), and as such I am covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

21. Though I am an English teacher I can’t stand applying the writing process to my own work. I want every sentence and every paragraph to be born fully-formed like Adam (but after a much more arduous labor). I also regularly write the conclusions to my essays in the shower. This was pointed out to me by my roommate in college.

22. I don’t really procrastinate or do things at the last minute.

23. Movies frequently make me cry but books hardly ever do, though I “get more” out of books than I do out of movies (just because I am more skilled at reading than at viewing, not because one art form is superior to the other). The only book I remember really making me sob (also in the shower) was All Quiet on the Western Front.

24. When I was in second grade or so I wrote a letter to the author of the Sweet Valley High series informing her of all the typos I had found in the books. I have no memory of this.

25. I’ve never had a cavity.