The Sources of Exploration: Miyamoto, Philip K. Dick & The Heart of Art

In Philip K. Dick's 1965 sci-fi classic, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the earth has become an unbearable fireball, a perpetual Texas summer that is barely livable. The United Nations is colonizing planets and moons, sending millions of twenty-first century John Smiths to kickstart agriculture on the harsh, cold, crystallized soil of places like Mars and Europa. In these dark and miserable habitats, removed from the comparative bounty of Earth, the colonists find redemption in Can-D, a drug that "transforms" the user to an imagined paradisiacal beach in southern California. The Can-D users are, in their minds, transformed to another world in an experience described as wondrous, mystical and even religious. In Palmer Eldritch, Dick imagines a world in which drug-induced simulation is the only source of natural wonder for a race that has destroyed its own habitat.

I was reminded of Dick's work today while reading Nick Paumgarten's "The Master of Play," a profile of Nintendo game guru Shigeru Miyamoto from the December 20 issue of the New Yorker. Miyamoto is more or less THE man behind Nintendo, engineering not only its classic and still popular games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Wii Sports, but also its philosophy - the fun first, complexity later purity that Nintendo is known for. Paumgarten's profile details Miyamoto's inspirations for games like Mario and Zelda as emerging out of his childhood explorations in the woods of a rural Japanese town:

[Miyamoto grew up] thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

I was familiar with these stories of Miyamoto and had always thought of the Mario and Zelda games as exploratory masterpieces. To me, they were alternate universes, interactive versions of Alice's wonderland, accessible only through the application of the player's imagination. Such games, rendered in now-rudimentary 16-bit sprites, require a certain willingness to play along, to "fill in the gaps" as Wolfgang Iser might say, a willingness that likely benefits the young over the intellectualized and habituated, a willingness perhaps only accessible to adults through hallucinogenic drugs. It seems almost foreign to me now, and I'm sure even moreso to adults divorced from the experience or who never had it, to consider them in this way. It was a later part of the article, however, that brought Dick's work to my mind. Paumgarten continues,

There may be no starker example of the conversion of primitive improvisations into structured, commodified, and stationary technological simulation than that of Miyamoto, the rural explorer turned ludic mastermind. In his games, Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment, if not always the actual experiences that gave rise to it, since the experiences themselves may be harder to come by in a paved and partitioned world. “I can still recall the kind of sensation I had when I was in a small river, and I was searching with my hands beneath a rock, and something hit my finger, and I noticed it was a fish,” he told me one day. “That’s something that I just can’t express in words. It’s such an unusual situation. I wish that children nowadays could have similar experiences, but it’s not very easy.”

It's hard to argue that the world we live in is not more "paved and partitioned" than the world Miyamoto grew up in, fifty-some years ago in rural Japan. Living in New York City, I frequently reflect on the effects of my concrete environment and the feeling that everything has already been discovered a thousand times before. Even the structure of public transportation can make the world feel small; by necessity, a subway prevents the ability to wander off somewhere of your own choosing, as any destination must be one that someone decided it was worthwhile for people to go, and worthwhile enough that millions of people would be regularly going there. No discovery, nothing new. This is, of course, a selective analysis of New York and the subway system, but one that has its roots in real feelings. As the world becomes more urbanized and more and more people grow up in cities, or comparatively urbanized areas, I wonder what avenues will be available for the sense of play described by Miyamoto.

I'm sure the problem feels especially acute in Japan, the world's most urbanized country, but the idea pops up again and again in Western fiction as well, especially in science fiction. In Dick's Palmer Eldritch and a host of other apocolyptic or pseudo-apocalyptic literature, a depreciated natural environment deprives us of essential aspects of our humanity. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep offered a similar vision of the future in which religion was practiced through computer simulation. While I'm not so much concerned here with religion, I do worry that the feeling of wonder that perhaps burgeons into spiritual elation and intellectual curiosity is increasingly inaccessible in an increasingly urbanized world, and, along with this dearth, available only in simulated form.

Link encounters The Deku Tree in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time(1998)

Even looking beyond the medium of computer games, roller coasters, playgrounds, Discovery Zone franchises, and most obviously literature and film provide human-created opportunities to explore other avenues of experience. While video games and other forms of media built on newer technologies are in their infancy, to what degree will we become reliant on them, or more advanced versions of them, for sensations that mirror the ones discussed by Miyamoto? Or, once they are not presented to us through our environment, will we even notice that they are gone?

2 Course Proposals

Descriptions of 2 courses I proposed for Duke University's Talent Identification Program. The first one was accepted and is being offered summer 2011. The second is a proposal for a weekend course in the fall of 2011. I'm writing this post to practice the habit of posting about something other than freewriting about various media issues. While I've posted other things before, I'd like to get better at it. So here goes:

Existentialism in Film and Other Media
This course will explore the ways in which existential philosophy manifests itself in texts from a variety of media sources– films, novels, comic books, music and more. Beginning with an introduction to classic existential texts by Sartre, Camus and Dostoevsky, students will get a strong understanding of the basics of existential thought. From here, the class will examine short stories, films and other texts, creating interpretations through discussions, paper writing and in-class activities. The course will help students to create their own philosophical interpretations and grow in their ability to analyze and make sense of literary texts and the world around them.

Inspiring Writing Through Multimedia

This course will explore the ways in which internet and multimedia texts can be used to inspire creative writing. Students will learn how to use photographs to help develop characters, YouTube videos to write inner monologues, electronic music to create settings and more. In addition, the class will offer a brief introduction to online publishing and peer feedback on writing. During the course, students will have the option of producing a short story, several poems, or a multi-genre piece. The goal of the class will be to equip students with simple ways to continue writing on their own by drawing on resources already available to them.  The course materials will build upon the most successful lessons from my Inspired Writer and Writer’s Workshop classes, both offered as part of the 2010 TIP Summer Studies program at Texas A&M University.

It's interesting to see these two side-by-side. I had never written a course proposal before submitting the Existentialism course earlier this year. Since the class was accepted, I used this paragraph as a template for the second. Even on top of the obvious stylistic similarities, it's interesting to see my own interests shining through so similarly in both, despite the fact that they were conceived apart. It's also fun to see a little bit of BS in them both.

Thoughts and Rants About Heavy Rain

I finally played Heavy Rain after months of reading about it in various online publications. I started and ended the game feeling...weird. Not that this hasn't been written about, but the level of realism present makes the game feel creepy. Since the early days of games, pixels and computer graphics acted as representations of people and places. Even as graphics have advanced and become more realistic, there is still a representational element - still a clear limitation that detaches the characters from real humans. Here, the characters, rather than serving as representations people, are more like a brand of pseudo-human, looking near-photo-realistic, but moving and acting clunky, wooden and bizarre. This leaves the player with an icky feeling of simulation. I feel like I'm in some sort of zombie Matrix, where humans have been replaced with robots acting like humans (which, I guess, since it's a computer game, is what the characters actually are).

The tense, intended-to-be-emotive music and the uber-suburban setting/plot aren't helping either. The house where the game starts seems ripped off of the set of a poorly designed drama for young adults who want some sort of teenage-dream of cool penthouse-for grownups.

The game's controls, arguably the central element, are a mixed bag. They don't really stray that far from quick-time, FMV games like Dragon's Lair, but the objectives are different. The game has the player press a series of buttons for any number of mundane actions - tooth brushing, door opening, sitting down, etc. The idea, I imagine, is to create a sense of immersion - you can do anything, not just exciting things. However, much of the time, the game forces you to act out these mundane actions. It has a certain novelty, but winds up making the control scheme feel more like work than fun. Especially when you are literally doing the character's work. The game, of course, builds to allow the player to do more exciting things, but small details like pulling money out of a wallet or locking the door are still required. I would be more forgiving if this level of detail actually gave the player freedom to do anything, or even a large number of things, but much of the time, I was wandering around in whatever room or setting I was placed, waiting for an icon to show up indicating that I could do something. What is intended to be immersive, again winds up feeling bizarre.

Things do get better in the control department, however. The action sequences are are some of the most suspenseful I've played, but these sequences get repetitive as well (another mysterious stranger enters, gets in a fight with the protagonist, who must utilize any number of found objects until the stranger gets away.) Overall though, they are well done and are perhaps the most effective part of the game. Still, for a game so heavily built around the ideas of immersive storytelling and moral choices, why are the fight scenes the only parts that are engaging?

This brings us to the story and cinematics. Heavy Rain has been described as having "intriguing plot twists" and a narrative that rivals that of "any" (ANY!?) Hollywood movie. IGN named it Game of the Year for 2010 and described it as "a thriller that had just about everyone on the edge of their seats." I don't know what game these critics were playing or what movies they've seen, but I think when people say that Heavy Rain's story is up there with the best of Hollywood, what they mean is that it feels like a piece of TV or film drama - in other words, its story is, shall we say, of the cinema. This does not make it the best. I'd place it somewhere near the level of I STILL Know What You Did Last Summer. It's incredibly cheesy and horrendously directed. I can't imagine sitting through this as a movie, let alone proclaiming it the best, or even good. And why...WHY...does dramatic music swell up randomly every 4 minutes. I just picked up a pencil. DA-DA-Duuuuuum! I just walked to the other side of the room and sat at the computer. DA-DA-Duuuuuuum! The music has little sense of purpose, and the moments when the music is well-suited to the situation are sullied by the fact that so often, the same music is playing with little to no purpose.

Since I've just went on a long rant about my complaints about the game, I'd like to take a step back and look at it a little more dispassionately. It's hard not to say that it's not impressively ambitious and, in some ways, innovative. Its success will hopefully inspire more develops to at least invest in a higher quality of writing and story, even if this game failed in those departments (in my opinion). Heavy Rain, if it has any impact on development, will likely move games in a direction that I don't like- towards a more narrative, film-mimicking approach. To my mind, this is not what games are good at doing and I believe developers should be looking for ways to exploit user control to create unique experiences only available through games. Still, that's just me. For narrativists, this may be just the game they are hoping for, what Flower is to me: a game that strives in just the right way to push all of gaming in a more serious and thoughtful direction.

Kanye You a Genius for This One

Kanye West featuring Bon Iver - Lost in the World. Whaat? Fantastic. My favorite track so far on the new Kanye CD, this song may be the most effective indie music/rap collaboration I've heard. Building naturally from Bon Iver's autotune-heavy 2009 release, Blood Bank, Lost in the World uses its guest star with surprising necessity. Rather than a novel and perhaps ironic cameo, Bon Iver's looped voice is used to set the emotional tone -  a simultaneous build-up and resolution to Kanye's ego-fueled, emotional torrent of a record. This type of confusion-in-resolution recalls the last track from from Bright Eyes' Cassadega, Lime Tree (at least to me) - an attempt to create something that feels large, substantial and meaningful, but one that is mired in its own wanderings. How can you create a resolution to an album that's about heart-wrenching upheaval and self doubt? Here, on Kanye's track, Justin Vernon's encoded voice starts out the track and later becomes layered over what appears to be a choir-like R&B loop, with only a short verse from West himself. It's like indie-rap Daft Punk. I'm not the biggest Kanye fan in the world, but damn! every new record he puts out takes the thrasher to genre conventions, creating something that feels fascinating and new. Each album could be taken as a strand to be built on, to create an entirely new brand, not just of rap music, but musical in general. Apologies for the lack of mp3s. I'm still a blogging novice. Anyone know how to add music tracks to a Blogger account?

Fallout 3 & The Road

I've been playing a lot of Fallout 3 lately, Obsidian's sprawling, post-apocalyptic, go-anywhere, action/RPG/adventure game for PS3 (and other consoles). The 1950's Americana aesthetic, the grand, orchestral touches at crucial plot points, and the VATS slow-motion combat system give this game a strong artistic feel. The open-ended structure also seems like a great example of fitting form to content: a post-apocalyptic world would feel rather vapid, empty and free. A game set in a society with no form and no law should be similarly light on formal restraints. While playing, you can follow a storyline, but the game doesn't necessarily guide you heavy-handedly. You can go anywhere from the start, talking to NPCs, completing alternative quests and so on.



As I was playing, this form and content match began to remind me of Cormac McCarthy's bleak novel, The Road. In that work, McCarthy plays loose with the conventions of standard English, leaving out periods, quotation marks and other handy punctuation. In interviews, he has stated that for an apocalyptic novel, tight sentences and impeccable grammar seemed...out of place.

But the connection goes further than just a lack of form. Players will spend hours (literally; I'm 35 hours into the game right now) scrounging through trash cans, old boxes, abandoned houses and whatever else they come upon. It gives the same sense of desperation as The Road, in which the father and son consistently rummage through everything in search of food. Creator Ted Howard commented that, "[The team] mix it up, moments of sobering loneliness, with you searching for food and water, and moments of craziness, with splashes of dark humour." It's almost as if he's refering to Mccarthy's novel.

I was most struck by the Road-ness of Fallout 3 when I was wandering through the game world and came upon some "raiders" sitting outside of a run-down house. Upon entering the house, I discovered dismembered corpses tied to blood-stained mattresses, old grimy cooking utensils, a strange beige light, and a strong sense of claustrophobia. It was one of the most disturbing and powerful segments I have played through in a video game. The scene appears to be taken directly out of McCarthy's novel, in which the two protaganists encounter a nearly identical house, filled with screaming victims of a similar group of raiders. The father in the novel has the same reaction I did: get the fuck out. However, in the game, the player has more freedom. Since the character in the game is, in a sense, the same as the player, the situation is less real in a way. The player can linger, rummage for food, wander the house (as long as they as they can stand the ambiance). In contrast to the game world and the player, the situation in the novel is reality to the characters, even if it is a fiction to the reader, since there is a stronger divide between reader and character.

I was amazed at how well Howard and the rest of the Fallout team captured this sense of abject horror in a video game. I had the same sense of repulsion and fear playing the game that I did reading McCarthy's scene. In a separate interview, Howard directly notes the influence of The Road, remarking it was required reading for every member of the team.

What feels a bit disappointing in Fallout, then, is that video games have not yet evolved to a point where experiences this emotionally or artistically intense are consistently conveyed. With all of their interactive power, games should be a prime landscape for artistic forays. Fallout is a brilliant work that presents a beautifully dark world, that can make you recoil or reflect, but so much of it is wasted on standard video game tropes. The writing and voice acting are atrociously bad most of the quests represent the same type of fetch or find actions that were standard in the early 90s point-and-click adventure games. The reliance on experience points, levelling up, collecting an absurd amount of guns and other standard RPG and action elements may add to the game in terms of traditional gameplay enjoyment, but take away from the potential for other types of enjoyment or artistic potential, specifically the ability to experience the decayed world that Fallout so imaginatively renders.

The Failings of Highly Ambitious Games

Two recent articles about the failings of two recent video games that both present themselves as more mature, complex narrative experiences:

A Critique of Heavy Rain's Interactive Storytelling

The Failures of Metroid: Other M

What is Love?

Love is an online multiplayer game that seems to function in smaller communities than massive works like World of Warcraft. The idea is to build a civilization with the other plays in the game, rather than blow their faces off. To me, it looks like an impressionist painting mixed with a mid-90's super-polygonal world. The focus seems to be on creating relationships with other players, rather than killing them. Also, I like the whole aesthetic that developer Eskil Steenberg creates. All of my love to these types of aesthetic projects, especially when they are video games.

The Internet Eats Music

For a while now, I've been going on about the role the internet has played in the dumbing-down of popular music. My theory went like this- the internet has allowed people who really love and care about music to seek out new material from a multitude of sources. Whereas in earlier times, someone who loved music would turn to radio, MTV, label catalogues, etc., they now turn to the internet. With an audience made up of both serious music consumers and casual listeners, bands like Nirvana or Radiohead could become huge mainstream successes. With the loss, or relative loss, of the more serious audience, the main consumers of music through mainstream channels are casual music listeners. With this audience, there is less of a need to appeal to consumers looking for better music with more content (as subjective as these designations may be), because these consumers aren't listening, they are scouring blogs or getting music from friends through YouSendIt or Mediafire. The same basic idea applies not just to listening, but to buying music through physical media as well.

I'm not sure that I want to make any sort of value judgment on any of this, but it is sad for me that there are unlikely to be any more genuine rock stars, any major musical acts that are shared across large segments of the population. I used to be able to talk about Nirvana or The Smashing Pumpkins with nearly anyone. It's a bit more isolating to love Joanna Newsom or even MGMT. I purposely chose very large indie music acts, as even with their massive popularity (tickets to "indie" act Newsom recently cost me $45), these artists are anonymous to large swaths of the population (less so for MGMT). There is less of a shared music culture, and with this loss, communication and community with dissimilar people becomes more difficult, especially if one of the ways you connect to others is through music.

Tirade ended.

Anyway, I came across a fairly in-depth article about the current problems of the major labels and the ways in which they are trying to change. While the article's focus is not the same as my pseudo-thesis on the music industry, it seems to take the internet concept even further- they explore how the broadening accessibility of finding and creating music is killing the music industry. An interesting read: Record Labels: Change or Die

(How) Will Interactive Storytelling Alter Our Perception of Ourselves?

For the past few weeks, I've been following stories about the new Playstation 3 game, Heavy Rain. Heavy Rain follows the story of a serial killer told through 4 different perspectives. The story unfolds through video clips rendered in a real-time graphics engine that is stunningly life-like. Sort of like the old Dragon's Lair games or Choose Your Own Adventure stories, you use the controller to make decisions for the character or perform certain actions. Depending on how you choose, the story alters, but never stops.

Heavy Rain is being described as a much more immersive and engaging experience than most games, blending genres and mediums to create a new form of storytelling- a type of story that many people have envisioned as a perfect project for video games- taking a cinema-esque experience and making it interactive, creating a world in which your choices count, making you a part of the experience. While Heavy Rain doesn't seem to fully realize this gilded dream quite yet, it is a step in the right direction. BTW- Gizmodo has an excellent editorial up about the successes and limitations of the game.

What I am wondering is how things will change if this more interactive form of storytelling becomes a dominant media format. In the nineteenth century, novels emerged as the dominant method for expressing the values and beliefs of our selves and our culture. For the last seventy years of so, film has taken on this role. These are the mediums through which we understand the stories of our lives. We imagine ourselves as movie characters or novel protagonists. We subtly create soundtracks in our heads to different moments, we think in lines from books from time to time, we imagine our prom night the way we saw it in Sixteen Candles, or we expect the type of love John Cusack encounters in a thousand and one romantic comedies. These expectations alter our perceptions of the world and reinforce, or create, in our minds the notion that there is a story to our lives, one to be played out in a certain way, with certain essential events occurring in line with story arcs at least somewhat dictated or influenced by the media we consume.

Mark Wilson, in his article on Gizmodo, has already discussed how video games could come to later the way stories are told. He writes,

If titles like Heavy Rain show us anything, it's that, yes, technology is unlocking new ways to tell a story. While most video games focus on a very linear plot, modeling themselves after movies and theater, they have the great potential to allow the audience to explore parts of a story that could have happened, altering fiction to better emulate real life and challenging the construct of a story as we know it—all well allowing the viewer to feel like they're somehow involved beyond mere spectating. Fiction evolves from a series of events to a series of choices, much like life.

Building on his point, if this genre develops into an art form in which we experience a multitude of consequences, in which there is not one path through which we progress, but a multitude of paths based on our own choices, will our concept of narratives in our own lives alter? Instead of imagining the perfect prom that we saw on a TV show, will we imagine a plethora of options based on diverse factors? Will we resign ourselves to the inevitability of chance? Will we see our selves as more responsible in the creation of our fate? We will stop pushing for idealized experiences? Or, is our desire to create narratives and story arcs too embedded in our psychology- either our psychology as humans or our psychology as western thinkers inclined to think with these types of stories regardless of media influence?

Are They Serious?

Over the last decade, I've felt an increasing difficulty in categorizing art in terms of any one genre, style, or even medium. There could be many books written about this difficulty, so I won't delve deeply into the problem here. However, along with the complication of categorization has come a seemingly increased difficulty in acertaining the intentions of the writer. Art has become almost purposefully enigmatic in a way that differs from art produced during the heyday of New Criticism. Many new pieces of popular art have no seeming message, yet offer experiences just bizarre enough and just far enough out of the range of expectation that we can't assume that they are merely poor art. From obvious postmodern poster-children such as Pulp Fiction to lesser known (and often maligned) films such as Dana Carvey's The Master of Disguise, I often find myself wondering: are they serious?

Are these films what they portray themselves to be? Is there some sort of genre-parodying going on? Or is there a certain heralding of the unexplainable as deconstructionist and postmodern theories of art slowly seep into mainstream consciousness?

This brings me to the song I heard today. I came upon the new Weezer/Lil Wayne collaboration, Can't Stop Partying. The song, penned by Weezer's Rivers Cuomo with a verse by Wayne, sounds at first glance like a cheap rap-rock collaboration, a typical celebration of women, booze, and well...partying, as the title suggests. In the mid-1990's, Cuomo made a (huge) name for his band by releasing bitterly honest and painfully introspective pop-rock tunes that vaulted him to the status of legend in the indie rock community. And yet, since the commercial failure of Weezer's sophomore release, Pinkerton, an album that was composed while Cuomo was studying at Harvard and was written as a retelling of a Puccini opera, Weezer has released seemingly derivative, bland pop-punk. What happened?

I go into depth about Weezer's history as a musical force because it seems that there is some connection between the enigmas described above and Weezer's new glam-rap anthem. Since the release of Pinkerton, it seems that Cuomo has been dedicated to producing generic music that is obviously below his capability as a writer. Moreover, these songs are often laden with subtle nods to the fact that even their author thinks of them as garbage: intentional garbage. This is a man intentionally making music with no clear substance, and yet he still manages to produce albums with hints and flashes of depth. Again, the question arises, is there anything more here than music for the masses?

Like the violence and fart-joke laden works of Eminem that, while they appear shallow in content, are crafted with a great deal of formal skill and intelligence, Weezer's newest song de-stabilizes our expectations for songs. What are we to make of a track with the line, "I gotta have the cars, I gotta have the jewels" that comes from a guy who cited Nietzsche and Stendhal as major influences? If we make the assumption, and I think we can, that Cuomo is not being serious when talks of bottles of Patron and rollin' up to the VIP, we are still left with the enigma of a decade's worth of goofy pop-punk.

But this goes beyond Weezer. Each day there seems to be a new song that can't be made sense of, that fits no traditional genre expectations and has sly lyrical content that seems purposefully impossible to make sense of or even understand whether or not the author is remotely serious. Like Jerry Seinfeld, favorite comedian of the postmodern crowd, might put it, what's the deal with ambiguously ironic songs?



image via HipHopWired

Braid

It's slightly old news by now, but I wanted to post something about Braid for anyone who hasn't been lucky enough to come across it. Braid is the poster child for independent, artistic games; it is a side-scrolling puzzle game with beautifully drawn 2d visuals and a gameplay mechanism which involves the manipulation of time. Braid has been garnering a lot of attention over the past year or so for its boldly artistic...stance(?). Anyone who hasn't seen the game in action, check out the trailer below. It says more than I can by describing it.

Brian Eno on "the death of the uncool"

There is a brief article by Brian Eno in Prospect Magazine on the recent diversification of music tastes. He makes the point that with an ever-increasing number of subcultures and sub-categories of music, that there is no one standard for what makes something "cool." As Eno writes, "The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness." While Eno never uses the word "internet," I would attribute much of the credit for the dissolution of limitations on music taste goes to the accessibility of free music on the internet. With access to millions of songs with little to no cost, it's no wonder that cultural respect has been dissipated across a wider range of music.

At the same time, the music that is mainstream seems to suffer from this leveling of access, at least in terms of quality. Bigger, if not better, media, seems to dominate the attention and pocketbooks of casual customers more and more. Two of the largest media openings in entertainment history have occurred within the past few months, New Moon (film) and Call of Duty 2 (video game).


So, what direction is entertainment media headed in?

the death of uncool

Our Confused Randian Values

Adam Kirsch has a review in The New York Times of Anne Heller's new book on Ayn Rand. The piece seeks to explore the connections between Rand's philosophy and the meandering modern Republican party. He winds up exploring Rand's life and values, with indirect comparisons to our current political landscape. The most interesting part to me was his questioning of Rand's placing of businessman and entrepreneurs on pedestals. He writes,

Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees. Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nietzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.

Kirsch, via Heller, emphasizes the the contradicting values expressed to American students. There is a lot of talk about following your dreams and passions, about making a difference in the world. At the same time, an MBA from Wharton is impressive, while having a "career" as an artist is seen as just that- a career in quotation marks, a career that is not really a career at all, as it does not typically result in wealth. Rand's genius, or failing, depending on what angle you are coming from, is to subsume the value of artistic or philosophically inclined thinkers in her descriptions of businessmen. This is a great point to note for those who have conflicting opinions on Rand's philosophy. I always found myself inclined to agree with the gist of her argument in terms of radical individualism and the strive toward human greatness, yet was still strangely unnerved by the way in which she seemed to manifest these concepts.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller- Book Review by Adam Kirsch

Is it Okay to Be Unhappy? Kierkegaard in The NY Times

A few months ago, philosophy professor Gordon Marino wrote an editorial for The New York Times, Kierkegaard on the Couch. Marino looks at how we treat issues of depression and despair in the modern age. While Marino focuses on identifying differences between despair and depression, for me the important question raised by his article was the issue of how we respond to unhappiness in our society. It seems to me as if American society sees most manifestations of unhappiness as a problem to be treated by medicine or therapy. The concept of valuing our melancholy musings is all but lost. The goal of therapy is not to deeper or clarify your thinking on deeper issues, but to "fix" you for having them. Clearly, I am referring to only a specific type of unhappiness/depression and this type is not the only manifestation of unhappiness or depression. For some, therapy and medication may be helpful and/or necessary. However, it seems that psychiatric care is almost always the first option. Serious spirituality has been relegated to new age practitioners and the church. Even here, the aim seems to be to "fix" the problem, to fix you, as if there is something wrong with deep and problematic quandaries. As the respectability and influence of humanities departments in colleges sinks, and our society pushes more and more towards a medical and scientific conception of thinking, I wonder what the place is for serious thought that fails to be uplifting.

Of Little Note: Thoughts On Recording Observations about Texts

A common assignment in high school English classes has students taking notes on a story, poem, or section of a text. Certainly it is valuable for students to have a means to record thoughts and observations, and such assignments give teachers a way to check if students are reading and at least thinking about the text in some way. More recently, however, I have been wondering what the value is in taking notes on works of fiction. How often does anyone take notes on fiction? This is not a rhetorical question, but a real inquiry. Do people take separate notes on works of fiction? I took notes on textbooks throughout college, but with fiction, I relied almost exclusively on highlights, underlines, and other notes written directly on the page. Of course, high school students can't write directly on their books, since the books must be re-used. Still, if students do not take this skill with them beyond their high school texts, then what is the value in note-taking outside of the classroom? It seems like it would be more effective to assign sections of books using photocopies, poems, and copied short stories and have students write directly on the pages. This skill seems more applicable to the study of literature and other texts beyond the English class.

Marginalia presents its own problems when taken outside of the classroom though. It is a somewhat class-biased activity, as only students who can afford to buy their own books are able to practice this skill. Further, on non-written texts, it is an impossibility to work directly on the text. Here, note-taking seems to hold primacy. If we are to teach and require note-taking, it should be done in such a way that students will pick up note taking as a habit for texts outside of class.

It seems that note-taking should be practiced on a variety of texts, from movies to magazines, and sit alongside marginalia, which should be practiced more often n class. In this way, we are equipping students with the means to analyze, question, and relate to texts in written form beyond their high school English classes.

Video Games and Scaffolding

I just ordered James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. This text seems to gain more momentum and have more influence each day that passes. Most notable to me is the recently opened "video game school" in New York City, Quest To Learn. Before I jump into the text, though, I'd like to get down in writing some of my own thoughts on the subject.

In the mid-1980's, Nintendo's video games, notably Mario, Zelda, and Metroid, established a certain progression for video game players. The player would progress through the game, struggling with different levels and enemies, only to reach a point where their avatar would get an "upgrade," a better sword or gun, a higher jump, etc. At this point in the game, the enemies and levels would become more difficult, requiring the player to use the new upgrade. Players would need to learn to use their new sword or new high jump to complete increasingly difficult levels or ward off enemies who could only be defeated by using the new tool. After a few levels, the new enemies don't just demand that the player uses the new tool, they assume that the player has become expert with it. From here, players must learn to wield the newest sword masterfully, or they can not move forward in the game. This cycle repeats with various upgrades throughout the games.

In this sense, the game is scaffolded much as teachers scaffold reading curricula. Students are taught a new skill, let's say, inferences. From this point on in the curriculum, students are given assignments that demand inference making. They must learn to make inferences in order to complete assignments designed to test the skill. After a time, activities no longer help students build on the skill or allow room for trying out the skill. It is assumed that students can make inferences, and inferences become expected and required. From here, teachers build upon inferences by introducing new skills, requiring more complex inferences, and evaluating these new skills simultaneously. Just as players of The Legend of Zelda must learn to use "hookshots" and "master swords," students must learn to make inferences, question texts, notice key words, or whatever literary skills are taught.

Going into Gee's work, I am curious to see if there is any overlap between my own, fairly basic, connections between curriculum design and video games and Gee's own parallels. I expect that if he includes elements of this idea, he will take them deeper and farther. I'm curious to see how this connection might be complicated, questioned, and explored.

Image via Webwombat

Scholes on the Value of the Humanities

I'm currently making my way through The Rise and Fall of English by Robert Scholes. It's quite a fascinating look at how some of the traditionally successful aspects of English as an academic discipline are now being challenged. I think Scholes's analysis goes beyond just English though. In highlighting literature's receding place in our culture, his thoughts have implications beyond academics. He seems to be highlighting not just a crisis of literature, but a crisis of values in our society. He writes,

"What this society wants of those who graduate from its schools and colleges with degrees in the humanities-- as opposed to what those who claim to speak for it say it wants-- are, at worst, docility and grammatical competence, at best, reliability and a high level of textual skills. What this society does not want from our educational institutions is a group of people imbued with critical skills and values that are frankly antagonistic to those that prevail our marketplaces, courts, and legislative bodies." (emphasis in original)

Beyond the obvious implications for English (or philosophy or any of the humanities for that matter), Scholes highlights a real problem for humanities graduates, and for our society. There is no tablet of values for the English or humanities classroom. These classes do, however, preach, explicitly or not, the search for meaning, the search for truth, the thoughtfulness to interrogate texts and values. They teach a humanistic worldview, one that aims students at something resembling Plato's concept of "the good" or Nietzsche's "artist." What place does our society hold for such values?

A Wikipedia article on "quarter life crises" might help to shed more light on the problem. The article describes a quarter life crisis as such:

"After entering adult life and coming to terms with its responsibilities, some individuals find themselves experiencing career stagnation or extreme insecurity. The individual often realizes the real world is tougher, more competitive and less forgiving than they imagined. Furthermore, the qualifications they have spent so much time and money earning are not likely to prepare them for this disillusionment."

If this is the case, could a humanistic education actually be harming our students? While many of the values taught through the humanities are ones that I agree with and believe in, it seems that there needs to be some outlet for them outside of a university setting. I wonder, in our day and age, what outlet is there for critical and transcendent thinking outside of the classroom?