Soundtrack of your life

Last blog assignment, people. Also your last shot at having any fun at all in this course. I always try to include this at the end of the course for a few reasons: For one, it lets people have something personal and creative to include in the portfolio if they want to, because so much of the second half of the course is academically demanding. For another, you've had to hear my pop cultural references all semester, so this is your chance to show me (and each other) yours.

The assignment is simply this: If your life had a soundtrack, what would it be? In my head, my life already does. So pick a couple of songs – the precise number is up to you, but maybe 4 minimum, 10 maximum? – and give a short (or long!) explanation of why you would include them of a soundtrack to your life. The explanation can be very personal (“This is the song I play when I kiss my pillow and cry because Marilyn Monroe is dead”) to the fairly impersonal (“This is my favorite song to dance to because it’s got such a good beat”). Again, it’s up to you.. Here is my list that is WAY too big because doing this was more fun than doing my real work:

“The Great Historical Bum” - Chad Mitchell Trio (kinda, tbe song is older than them, but their version is the one I know best). This is what my crazy illiterate great-uncle Leroy would recite any time he was asked how old he was, so I grew up with it memorized. You'd ask him how old he was, and he'd say, “I was born about ten thousand years ago / There ain’t nothing in this world that I don’t know / I saw Peter, Paul and Moses playing ring-around-the-roses / And I’ll whup the guy that says it isn’t so.” He really was totally illiterate – he suffered massive head trauma as a child and lost the ability to read or write as a result. He had a farm in a part of Minnesota that they still haven't gotten around to paving yet. He was pretty much the most awesome uncle ever when I was growing up, because he let me spend lots of my childhood on driving his fire engine and harassing rams out of the pasture. He also had a brain tumor that took away a lot of his fine motor skills (cleaning and plucking chickens for a dude with no motor skills is not very fun, incidentally), and was once trampled by his own sheep when he pissed off one of the rams. Wow, it turns out that my childhood was pretty damn awesome. I look a lot like him. Hjalmer Willard LeRoy Hawkins, bless you and your crazy.

"Thirsty Dog" - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Oh, man, I love this one. It's fast and loud and my favorite song ever about making an apology. It sort of manages to sum up my feelings about almost every apology I've ever given - the speed of the song speaks to how I always want to blurt out the apology as fast as possible to get it over with, and the lyrics are the perfect mix of genuine shame, regret, embarrassment, self-pity, rage, and alcohol: "You keep nailing me back into my box / I'm sorry I keep popping up / With my crazy mouth / And jangling jester's cap. / I'm sorry I ever wrote that book / I'm sorry for the way I look / But there ain't a lot / That I can do about that."

"I'm Your Man" - Lizzie West. This is a cover version of a Leonard Cohen song. Cohen and his gravelly voice are pretty awesome, but also kind of creepy, so I think this version of it is the sexiest song ever recorded. Hands down. You could try to argue against me, but you would lose, because I am correct.

"Fuck and Run" - Liz Phair.  I like this song because it sounds so much like my life.  Oh, hush, this isn't anywhere near as dirty, or as personal, as some of the stuff I could have put on here. This is from kind of an old album, but I only encountered it relatively recently. Phair does a lot of really creative and daring songs about sexuality and relationships, which is part of what I love about her. When I first heard this song, I started smiling, because I thought it sounded like it was going to be a fun song about one-night stands. ("I woke up alarmed / I didn't know where I was at first, / Just that I woke up in your arms.") And then . . . it wasn't. It was about the singer admitting that the way she was treating her life and her relationships was unsustainable, because there was something fundamentally broken about her. By the time I reached the end, I actually had a little lump in my throat at, "I can feel it in my bones / I'm going to spend my whole life alone." I think it really speaks to that little spot in everyone where you're convinced that you're the only one on the planet who hasn't figured love out.

"The Ocean" - Dar Williams. I sing this in the shower like every morning, because it's so pretty and bathroom acoustics make me sound good.

"Olga's Birthday" - Rose Polenzani. I used to sing this in the shower every morning,, because it's so pretty and I knew all the words.

“Home for a Rest” by Spirit of the West. This is a Scots-Canadian folk rock band. No soundtrack of my life is complete without this one. I first heard this song performed by an enthusiastic Canadian with an acoustic guitar on New Years' Eve, 2003, in Edinburgh, Scotland. It's a great, crazy, drinkin', partyin' song about going abroad to England: "You'll have to excuse me, I'm not at my best / I've been gone for a month / I've been drunk since I left. / These so-called vacations / Will soon be my death / I'm so sick from the drink / I need home for a rest." At the time, I'd been living in hostels in Britain for seven months, surrounded by insane Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and others, who were drunk all the time and occasionally stoned. (Except for the Quebecois, who were stoned all the time and occasionally drunk.) It was a great time: I was never bored even though I was working some horrible jobs, and I loved the people I lived with. Mostly. However, there was always this sense that we knew that the way we were living wasn't really healthy, and that some day we were going to have to go home. That night was just a perfect performance, with all these drunk and desperate expatriates shouting "TAKE ME HOME!" at the end of the chorus, and every time I hear the song, I go right back there in my memory.

Sample Library Field Trip for 11/17

I swung by Memorial Library to find my Halloween book on Tuesday, on my way to class.  I remembered that that was the library it was in, though not the exact title or author.  So in the lobby of Memorial, I did a search in the catalog for "halloween party night," which I remembered as being part of it.  Bingo, the record popped up.  I scribbled down the call number and checked the directory to the right of the elevators. (There's some new electronic directory thing in the lobby now, as well, but I don't actually know how to use it, so I just used the posted paper one.)  I check my scribbled LoC call number against it, and - fifth floor.  Screw taking that many stairs, my ankle's still busted.  I get on the elevator and push five.

On the fifth floor itself, I know I need the north stacks - the fifth is one of the weird split-level floors in Memorial, where the North stacks are like a half-flight down from the South ones.  There's a little map just at the entry to the stacks showing me where to go, and it doesn't take long for me to make my way to the back of the room.  It took me a little longer to find the actual book, because it didn't have the full title printed on the spine, and I was sort of scanning them in a hurry.  It's in the middle of a bunch of books that all look like they're about Halloween; my favorite title that I spot is, "Death Makes a Holiday."

I finally spot it, and take a quick picture on my phone of the shelves above and below it so I can get out of there.  (After all, I'm not actually writing a paper on Halloween, so there's no reason for me to check the book out.  Otherwise, I would probably check the table of contents and/or index to see if it looked useful for me.)  The shelf below is easy to figure out - it's clearly a whole shelf of books on Christmas.  I'm still not entirely sure, however, exactly what comes just before the Halloween books, because a whole bunch of them were written in languages I do not know.  I picked up some titles in Spanish about festivals and at least one in English saying it was about Chinese New Year, so I'm guessing it was some sort of category of "Miscellaneous holidays."  Looks like that's how LoC categorizes this stuff; if it were in a Dewey Decimal system catalog, the foreign language books would probably be in a different section.  Trip done, I go forth in search of coffee.

Double Blog Assignment Post - for 11/17 and 11/19

For Tuesday, November 17th

We're reading/discussing both Naomi Shihab Nye's essay "To any Would-be Terrorists" and Aaron Devor's essay, "Becoming Members of Society:  Learning the Social Meanings of Gender" for Tuesday.  Please respond to both, below:

Nye:
The Nye essay, as the introduction notes, was written largely in response to the events of September 11, 2001.  It's now fourteen years later, and multiple terrorist attacks later, including the one this past weekend, in Paris.  Now, the 9/11 and the Paris attacks are very dissimilar - the countries they occurred in and the groups committing them occupy very different cultural and political realities, but for obvious reasons, they're reminiscent of each other.  Answer the question:  What is the point of writing something like this?  I mean that in two ways.  Doesn't have to be a terribly long answer, just something to spur conversation on Tuesday.
(a)  I mean this seriously:  What argument is Nye actually putting forward, about what, and to whom?
(b)  I mean this as a cry of frustration: In a world where people commit mass murder, what is the fucking point in writing something like this?  Does it actually change anyone's mind, or spur them to thought, or action, or inaction?  What possible effect could this short piece have on the world, if any?  Is it worth writing, and reading, think-pieces like these?

Devor:
The Devor piece was incorporated in the reader largely because of the ideas it contains, but I'm more interested in the genre of what it is.  I'm going to ask you to address both in this blog assignment.  I'm not going to ask you to summarize it because, hilariously, when I looked it up online to double-check its publication history, I found another instructor doing basically the exact same blog assignments as me who'd already done that.  So, instead, I'll ask you to pick one part of the article (a few sentences or a paragraph) that you either find very convincing or very unconvincing, and do the following three things with it:
(a) Quote it (including page number).
(b) Explain it - rephrase it in your own words, restating what you think Devor's point is in the passage. Pretend you're explaining it to, like . . . your mom.
(c) Address whether you find it convincing or unconvincing, and explain why, including any evidence (probably personal experience, given the nature of the topic) you have backing your position.

May want to put some work into this one; it could turn into an impressive entry to submit in your final portfolio if you, for example, totally blow at writing about fiction.


For Thursday, November 19th

FIELD TRIP, WOO!

Go to the library catalog at:

www.library.wisc.edu

Find a physical book relating to your topic.  I don't care how recent or weird your topic is, there will be a book related to it in some way.  If you're doing, say, "How did Freakfest get started?" a question I just made up . . . let's see, I play around with my search terms a little . . . and . . . viola!

Rogers, Nicholas.  Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002.  
GT4965 R634 2002, Memorial Library

Okay, it's not the actual Freakfest, but I would say that a book like this would be useful back history for my project.  See that last thing in the entry?  That's it's Library of Congress call number, and the library where the book is located.  Now, before Thursday, go find it, and write about finding it.  You don't have to check it out, you just have to go physically locate it on the shelf, and do a short write-up about your trip to go find it.

That write-up will, first, have an entry just like the one above with its bibliographic info, a call number, and the library it's in.  Then, include a description of your trip (Was it difficult/easy, when did you go, how did you locate the book, whatever.  Just tell the story of your journey.)  Then, you have to describe what books are above and below it on the neighboring shelves.  Give either a summary of the topic(s) they appear to be on, or a title in each direction.  I'll put up a model once I boogie down to Memorial and track down this Halloween book, but I haven't done it yet.  I'm just telling you now so you have four days to do it.

And yes, if you already went and found books for your project, you kind of have to do it again (sorry, Hannah).  Just to be able to do the "what's on the other shelves" thing.  It might feel like busywork, but I promise it's not - it's a way to get you to think about what the LoC thinks is related to your topic.

Blog assignment for 11/11/15

I'm having some technical difficulties on my end with some stuff, but I wanted to get this out after my blog fail for yesterday.  Your assignment for tomorrow:

Find two reputable sources that you think might be useful for your research paper.  For each, give an MLA style bibliographic entry, then a quick explanation of what it is, how you found it, and why you think it will be useful.  This is a quick and sloppy version of what's called an annotated bibliography.  Here's one of mine:

Summerhayes, Catherine.  The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt.  Milano:  Charta, 2007.

The dissertation chapter I'm working on includes talking about a movie called beDevil, which is honestly a very strange vignette film of ghost stories in Australia.  Its director, Tracey Moffatt, is the only female Aboriginal director I know of, which is part of why it's important for my project.  This is an actual book that I found in Memorial Library, and it's pretty great; it has a lot of her artwork and frame-by-frame shots of all of her movies up to 2007, talking about how they can be visually interpreted.  The book is going to be very useful to help me analyze the film, as well as background information on Moffatt's biography and career prior to making beDevil.  I'm going to have to be careful, however, to not rely on it entirely; I need to use the other books and articles I found to make sure I'm taking multiple viewpoints into account.

Ronson Wrap-Up

Well, this is it, folks.  We finally say goodbye to So You've Been Publicly Shamed.  (I'll probably at least refer to it as we complete the course, but we're done reading.)  I always feel as though Ronson doesn't quite know how to end his books.  He's a professional journalist, and I find the standalone articles he does for print and radio work to be excellent, but when it's a whole book, it's like he tries to smash so much stuff into it that ultimately he has no idea what his point was.  He's very good at pointing at things and asking, "Isn't this super weird?" but sucks when explaining how we can or should react to it.  The last sentence of this book is . . . okay, I guess, but it's not terribly revolutionary or enlightening.

So that's your job for the blog:  Come up with two major responses to the book.  They will be:

* First, a descriptive statement.  What would you end up saying is the major point of the text?  Pick one case or story Ronson tells, from anywhere in the book, that you think backs up your claim.  (Difficulty:  You can't use Lindsey Stone.)

* Second, a prescriptive statement.  What do you think is the single most important thing people should do (or think, or not do) differently after reading this text?  Why?

Post these, and scribble down enough of them on a sheet of paper (or print it out) so you remember what you said in class on Tuesday.  I'll ask you to do a little more work with them then.

Blog assignment for 10/29/15

Don't worry; we've got so much to do on Thursday that we're not going to spend too much time on Ronson.  I have a longer blog planned for when we actually finish the book, though, so heads up.

This Thursday's assignment is, again, on the ethics of the chapters.  Two questions:

* You may not have heard before of the EU's "right to be forgotten" idea and Google's compliance with it.  To what do degree do you agree with the ability to have your records wiped from the Internet?  Think about it in comparison to Michael Fertik's requirements on page 220 - that top paragraph has a whole list of people he refuses to help with his business to rehab their image.  Do you agree with his list?  Are there things you think one should be allowed to bury, and things that should stay on your "permanent record," so to speak, any time a prospective employer (or potential significant other!) does a search?

* The "expert witness" chapter is another one that feels a little weird.  Fortunately, it's very short.  You need to know, in that court transcript at the end, that in British English, "pants" means "underwear."  (I know that transcript was, for me, heartbreaking to read.)  Do you think the ethics of shaming in a courtroom in this way different from doing it in a public forum?  It's perfectly legal for a lawyer to do this, but how ethical is it, and how does it relate to a lawyer's ethical requirement to help their client to the best of their abilities?

Blog Assignment - 10/20/22

It's another short one, because it's a busy week, but it's a two-pronged one.

Part One:  Pick one part of Ayn Rand's article, "Racism," which seems wrong, false, questionable, or strange.  Quote it (including page number), and explain what your problem with it is.  (If you've forgotten, the reading is on learn@uw, in a new section called "Readings."  You do not have to print out/bring this reading to class.) 

Part Two:  Write three research questions that you can see yourself working with on Thursday.  These might turn into your ten-page papers, they might not.  As a reminder, "Cancer" is not a question.  Examples:

* How do different religions encourage or discourage shame and shaming?

* What caused the Negro Leagues (in baseball) form and dissolve?

* What are the effects of social media use on college students' well-being?

Warning:  I will be allowing our Librarian to read these before you meet her on Thursday.  It's not like she's going to know who you are, but you should know that eyes technically outside the class will be seeing it. 

Blog assignment for October 15

Okay, as I said, I forgot about the graphic sex in the chapters you're about to read.  My bad.

By Thursday, though, you should have read chapters 7 - 9.  In their way, they're all about unconventional sexual behavior - but very different versions of it.  I've been trying to figure out the best way to have you write about these chapters for a few days.  You've got two choices:

*  Explain to me why these three chapters could be seen as belonging together or not.  Do you think they have similar messages, or different ones?  One paragraph.

* How do the titles of the three chapters relate to the content? One paragraph.

Blog assignment for October 8

Short, short writeup for tomorrow.  I was hoping to be able to access some of my old files by last night to get this up sooner, but the people at goddamned SUPER CHARGER are filthy worthless scumbags who lie about their delivery times, so my "real" computer is inaccessible.  I apologize for the timing on this.  As a result, this is a very, very short assignment.

You do need to read Murray and Zisser, as noted on the updated course calendar.  They're both in CCC (the green book) and they're both very short.  Here's the assignment:

Pick out ONE idea from either article that you think is useful to think about as you do peer review or go over your own stuff.  Then pick ONE idea that you don't think is useful.  Please explain why, for both.

Thank you for your patience.

Blog Assignment due October 6

So I was trying to figure out how to make all the writing/reading you have to do this week actually work for both you and me.

As you may have suspected (and as I think I may have actually declared in class), part of asking you to do these blog assignments is trying to coerce you into doing the readings.  BUT I've definitely upped the volume of how much reading I'm asking you to do at once, and I don't have the time to read through summaries from everyone of sixty/seventy pages at a time, anyway.  So here's what I think I'm going to ask you to do for this assignment:

* PIck one chapter to summarize.  You're reading three (4, 5, and 6) overall, but you only have to summarize one in a paragraph.  You must, in your summary, explain how the title of the chapter relates to its contents.

* Provide commentary/feedback in a short paragraph on at least one different chapter.  (You can ask questions or comment on three, if you like, including the one you're summarizing, but at least some of this paragraph must be about a different one.)  This is wide open to you; you can mention a part you didn't quite understand, talk about a part you liked or disliked, etc.  If you get stuck, here's a couple things to think about:

Do you feel that there's anyone here that "deserved it?"  Even if not, is there an appropriate use of public shaming?

Both Justine Sacco and Dave Eshelman give explanations - arguably excuses - for their behavior.  What do you think of the reasons they give for what they did or said?

Do you see a relationship between Keohane's "How Facts Backfire" and these chapters?  (I sure do.)

Surprise! Fun, independent blog assignment!

First off, I feel like I need to explain why I started laughing so hard and became incoherent at Trevor's explanation of who Michael Moore was last week.  It's because when he asked, "Is he a great big fat person?" he was doing an impression of Ted Levine's character, Jame Gumb, in Silence of the Lambs:

And I found this unbearably funny.  

Okay, with that out of the way, this blog assignment is going to be very short.  I mostly just want you to read this article because it's something I'd like you to think about for short assignment four, the longer paper due in two weeks, and ultimately the Ronson book as well.  I'd like you to read the Keohane article (also available through learn@uw) and do these three things:

* Summarize Keohane's piece in 1-2 sentences - just a very broad overview.  

* Answer the question:  Have you ever seen this happen to people?  People who simply refuse to change their minds no matter what they learn?  

* Answer the question:  Have you ever changed a strongly-held opinion because you learned something new?  If so, what was it?  If not, do you think Keohane's explanation of how people react to facts matches your own behavior?

Not long, just something to cement the piece in your head.  You'll need it.

First Blog Assignment - Due 9/22/15

I like trying to guess how many of the people on stage have showered recently.

This is pretty standard for what a lot of your blog assignments are going to look like.  It's fairly basic; it's going to be a very short version of the Gladwell assignment (Short Assignment Two).  Give me two paragraphs:

* One, a paragraph in which you summarize the reading - in this case, Chapters Two and Three of Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed.  I had you read the two chapters together because they're more or less part of the same story.  Try to just smash them together into a single, short paragraph, with a topic sentence.  Here's my example, using the first chapter of the book:

In "Braveheart," the first chapter of So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson explains that he was driven to explore the topic of how people use the Internet to shame others because of an experience he had in which men he disagreed with were attacked on a Youtube video. The disagreement stems from three men professionally interested in Internet algorithms who create a Twitter feed named "Jon Ronson," complete with a pixelated photo of Ronson, which creates tweets based on an algorithm apparently based on Internet information surrounding Ronson's name.  Ronson's case is that the Twitter account has basically stolen his identity, and he confronts the men who programmed it, then posts their conversation in a Youtube video.  While Ronson eventually "wins" in that the Twitter account is taken down, he is startled by the vicious nature of the Youtube comments attacking the three other men, and it compels him to begin researching the ways and reasons people have used the Internet to insult and harass others who have engaged in "shameful" behavior.

Ronson can genuinely be a difficult author to summarize because he asks more questions than he answers.  Do your best, and do the same thing for the second and third chapters - smash them together into a single paragraph that summarizes both.

* Two, a paragraph in which you express your reaction to what you've read.  I'll usually provide a few questions in case you can't think of anything.  You do not have to answer these questions, but it's a place to start in case you're really stuck.  Here are the ones for Chapters Two and Three:

How unethical are Lehrer's actions? How about Moynihan's?  At what point does Moynihan seem to change his mind about the morality of his actions, and is it a reasonable point?  Do you end up rooting for anyone in this story?  What do you think went wrong with Lehrer's apology, and what do you think of the apology, yourself?  Can you imagine yourself in a situation like this, either being in Moynihan or Lehrer's shoes?  How would you do things differently or the same?

You don't have to watch the video at the head of this post, but if you've never heard "Like a Rolling Stone," the song Chapter Two is partially about, you probably should.  Again, this blog assignment should not be something that you are slaving over for hours; it should just be something that helps you focus your thoughts and prepare for class.

Nick Cave Watches When You Sleep

It's okay, he's just worried about you.