Category: Writing

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Neil Young Mixing Sound and Words and Pictures

Normally, I try to stay away from posting things here that are overtly political, though I have to say that I do agree with the sentiments that Neil Young is expressing in his song “Let’s Impeach the President” and his album Living With War. And I like Neil Young well enough.

But I just thought that this video for the song “Let’s Impeach the President” was really brilliant. It just does a really good job of parodying/imitating the genre, of mixing words and images and sounds, of reporting research data, etc. It’d be great to show students in FY Comp– well, except maybe the politics would stir things up too much…. Or maybe that would be a good thing.

Here it is also available via YouTube:

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Once again, not this year…

It’s another November, and that means it’s another National Novel Writing Month, another month where I am unlikely to write a novel. Oh, well…. Actually, I think this is a great idea, but the problem I (and nearly every other academic I know) is that November is a pretty crazy month as far as work goes.

Anyway, I have two thoughts for now. First, it’s worthwhile checking out this site once in a while since they have some interesting stories about people participating in NaNoWriMo. Second, I have recommended to graduate students stuck on their final projects the book about all this written by the founder of this “dare,” Chris Baty, No Plot, No Problem. Baty is of course talking about fiction writing, but I have to say I admire so many of his techniques for just “getting it down” on a page (or, I suppose, a screen) that are in this book. Stuck on a writing project? Buy this book.

In the meantime, check out the site.

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Facebook in; MySpace out?

From today’s Washington Post, “In Teens’ Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year.” Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:

Teen Web sensation MySpace became so big so fast, News Corp. spent $580 million last year to buy it. Then Google Inc. struck a $900 million deal, primarily to advertise with it. But now Jackie Birnbaum and her fellow English classmates at Falls Church High School say they’re over MySpace.

“I think it’s definitely going down — a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now,” said Birnbaum, a junior who spends more time on her Facebook profile, where she messages and shares photos with other students in her network.

From the other side of the classroom, E.J. Kim chimes in that in the past three months, she’s gone from slaving over her MySpace profile up to four hours a day — decorating it, posting notes and pictures to her friends’ pages — to deleting the whole thing.

“I’ve grown out of it,” Kim said. “I thought it was kind of pointless.”

Dang– and this after I’ve tricked out my MySpace page! (well, okay, maybe not…).

For what it’s worth though, I think this is one thing to point to as evidence about why “blogging” and “social networking sites” like MySpace are actually two different things.

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Sony Reader reviews are so-so

I read this review of the Sony Reader (by WSJ reporter Walter S. Mossberg) in the AA News Sunday paper (even though it was published earlier). Pretty interesting review; this particular reader is clearly not ready for “prime time,” but maybe this is a sign that something that’s actually a workable “electronic book” is around the corner.

Oh, also according to this article, they’re going to sell these things at Borders. Since Borders is headquarted in AA, I have to assume that I’ll be able to check one of these things out at the flagship store downtown at some point.

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Existential Emergency

This is a little off the usual topic here, but I found this pretty entertaining and this is a project of a student of mine in English 596, John Biando, along with several other grad students in various programs in our department. John is in the creative writing program, and as you can tell from this project, Existential Emergency, he’s very interested in alternative forms of story-telling. Cool and amusing stuff.

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Cursive drying/dying, and that's okay with me

From the Madison, Wisconsin The Capital Times (and really, I think it’s a reprint from something that was in The Washington Post), comes this article, “Cursive is drying out; Pen not mighter than the keyboard.” A quote from the opening couple of paragraphs that I thought was interesting:

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less.

To me, that 10 minutes a day or so (and I think my son spends more than that in his fourth grade class, but I could be wrong about that) is just fine. As one person in this article says, the only place adults use cursive in our society is to sign their names.

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Good CSS Article (or, something else that has been pushed to the side lately…)

I have skimmed through this morning an article on A List Apart called “12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards.” It strikes me immediately as the sort of thing that would be perfect for a class I teach about once a year, Writing for the World Wide Web.

Then I remembered that I was planning on developing an online version of this course for Spring 2007. I had intended to get this into the pipeline/python of getting the proper departmental approvals and such at the beginning of the school year.

And then I remembered: of course, the strike.

It is funny (not in a ha-ha way, of course) the ways in which the strike and its on-going aftermath rears its ugly head.

In any event, it’s a good article on CSS….

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Misc. Catch-Up on RSS Feed Reading, part 2

To continue what I started the other day (though it’s hopeless to pretend I’ll catch up on reading stuff in my feeds– there are over 700 unread entries today):

I think that’s about as caught up as I’m going to get. Time to mark all as read and move on….