bearing blog

The quote not taken.

At the last meeting of the homeschool co-op, someone suggested using audiobooks on CD in the car to expose the kids to poetry.   I thought that was a great idea of the "why didn't I think of that?!" variety -- they have had little patience for poetry as read-alouds, but they have loved classical music CDs in the car.  I  had an order almost ready to go at Rainbow Resources anyway; I immediately added A Child's Introduction to Poetry and sent in my order, and when the box arrived we put the disc in the car right away.

Success!  The kids love it and have been reciting snippets of sonnets and haikus.  I will be getting more poetry CDs for sure.  It has been nice for me, too, to listen to recitations of famous poems, many of which I remember from high school English, while driving.  When they come in through the auditory channel, it's really quite a different experience from reading them off the page, even reading them aloud.  You're more of a passive receiver, rather than using your own voice to modulate and interpret the poem, and you have to receive the poem linearly instead of visually taking it all in at once, knowing which lines are long and which short, and when to expect the end.  Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandburg, Robert Browning -- it's a nice collection, mostly of well-known favorites.

Listening to the recitation of Frost's "The Road Not Taken," I was reminded of my favorite rant about quotations out of context.  By the time I got to tenth- or eleventh-grade English literature, I had read the famous quotation from this poem about eleventy-thousand times:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

This quote is always, always, always used to support the thesis that the wiser, better man will take the "road less traveled."  Have you ever seen a place where it is not used as an implication that the road less traveled is the one that leads to happiness?  Something about being unconventional, I suppose.  You will see people writing, for example, that the poem offers "good advice."  That sort of thing.

I remember being really annoyed and angry at the quoters when I encountered the whole poem, finally.  Because of course the poem as a whole implies nothing of the sort, offers no advice at all, contains no judgment about the relative merits of the two paths.   The last stanza contains a whiff of mystery and not a little regret alluding to the consequences of the choice, but to me most of the regret is contained in the line "I could not travel both/And be one traveler."  

It strikes me as a simple meditation on the tragedy of reality:  that you can't experience everything.  Listening to it again, maybe for the first time, in a purely audio format, I was even more strongly struck by it.

But I have always been irritated at the quoters who take the last three lines, not even the whole last stanza with its "sigh," and use it to imply the inherent superiority of the road less traveled.  Hey, sometimes it's the right choice.  Other times it's not.  Logic, people.

"Profs. Embuggerance and Feisty."

Glossographia brings us a funny story from the depths of Google Scholar, which is Google's full-text-searching answer to searchable catalog subscription indexes like JSTOR, SciFinder, etc.

One of my students in my introductory linguistic anthropology course this term is doing a paper on linguistic aspects of laughter and humor. During my search, I encountered the following citation (direct from Google Scholar to you):

Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.

After I stopped laughing, I set to figuring out what was going on.

The answer turns out to be a metadata problem that's endemic to machine indexing. It serves to illustrate the differences between machine and human indexing, and also to spark an interesting discussion in the comments about the relative merits of Google Scholar and the subscription services. Academics or former academics may enjoy it. It reminds me a bit of the perennial "Wikipedia vs. Encyclopaedia Britannica" debate, even as it reminds one of the commenters more of John Henry, the steel-drivin' man.

(h/t Eugene Volokh, from whom I take the title of this post)

The Nobel Peace Prize.

Even though at first I really, truly thought I was reading an Onion headline when I saw "Barack Obama Wins Nobel Prize" yesterday...  and even though I'm really thankful that skepticism about this particular honor appears to be largely (if, as is to be expected, unequally) bipartisan and not another cause for major, ugly division...

I think the Nobel committee are demonstrating that they're rational actors here.  It's just that their motivations aren't the motivations that people expect them to have, and the power they have to act is less (and more) than people realize.

The people of the Nobel committee do not, actually, possess a special power to identify individuals that have accomplished extraordinary feats to reduce world conflict and promote peace between peoples.  Even less do they possess the power to recognize less fruitful but no less heroic efforts toward that goal.  Any of us can do the same with a decent Internet connection.

Nor is the ability to give away a chunk of cash to a deserving recipient particularly special.  Lots of organizations and individuals do this every year. 

What they do uniquely possess -- and I am sure they are aware of this -- is a peculiar power to send a message of approval, a message that will be repeated in the world's large media outlets and so be sure to be heard.   And that's the power they are deploying every year:  the power to say "We approve of this person or this organization." 

They also possess -- again, this is a unique thing -- a certain moral authority that commands respect.  I don't know what the worldwide "approval rating" of the Nobel Peace Prize committee would be if you took a poll, but I have to think that it's pretty high and pretty evenly spread out, compared to other similarly visible global groups. 

The power to send messages will continue, I think.  But the moral authority, the worldwide respect, can be lost, or diluted, or restricted to a smaller group of sycophants.  I expect that it depends largely on people's perception of whether the messages they send are consistent with the group's stated purpose.

So anyway, I suspect the Nobel committee was (rationally, and in accord with their actual rather than imaginary special powers) trying to do this with the Prize:

(1) To send a message to the people of the United States that the committee approves of our selection of Barack Obama as president.   (Remember, they don't care that much about our domestic policy of any kind.  It's not really on their radar.  Think foreign policy alone.)

(2) To send a message to Barack Obama that they expect him to promote the Nobel committee's visible and stated and public purpose of promoting peace.

Nothing unexpected here.  Since we are dealing with an organization, of course, and since some sort of law states that every organization's first purpose is self-perpetuation, we can probably add this third purpose:

(3) To increase their organization's world stature and moral authority, by associating the name "Nobel Prize Winner" with President Barack Obama, a name they are betting will continue to be regarded highly on the world stage (not the domestic stage -- remember, you have to separate the two, we're talking about people outside the US here) for a long time.

Whether their actions actually give them the results they hope for ... we'll have to see.   But let's not forget the opportunity cost here.   They could have used their power to draw attention -- and attention means funds -- to some little, unknown organization that's doing great good somewhere, somewhere where attention and funds could make the difference between success and failure.  They chose a different path, a glitzier one to be sure.   The world rarely remembers the choices that could have been made, but weren't. 

(Next time I'll complain about the Nobel Prize in Physics.  I promise.)

"Filtered reality."

David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy makes a novel baseball/politics analogy that I think is right on.

I then said something like – “but it does seem like the overall level of defense is improving all over – I see so many great plays these days . . .” before I recognized how stupid a comment that was.  Of course I was seeing more great defensive plays than I had 10 or 20 years before – because 10 or 20 years before there had been no Sportscenter (or equivalent).  In 1992 (or whenever exactly this was), I could turn on the TV and catch 20 or 30 minutes of great highlights every night, including 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays; in 1980, or 1960, to see 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays, you had to watch 20 or 25 hours of baseball, minimum.

I call it the ESPN Effect – mistaking filtered reality for reality.  We do it a lot.  All I hear from my left-leaning friends these days is how crazy people on the right are becoming, and all all I hear from my right-leaning friends is how crazy people on the left are becoming, and everyone, on both sides, seems very eager to provide evidence of the utter lunacy of those on the other side.  “Look how crazy they’re becoming over there, on the other side!” is becoming something of a dominant trope, on left and right.  It is true that we’re seeing more crazy people doing crazy things on the other side (whichever side that may be, for you) coming across our eyeballs these days.   But that’s all filtered reality; it bears no more relationship to reality than the Sportscenter highlights bear to the game of baseball.  My very, very strong suspicion is that there has never been a time when there weren’t truly crazy people on all sides of the political spectrum doing their truly crazy things.

That sounds about right...

Dumbest line yet about the tornado in my neighborhood.

Mike Kaszuba of the Star Tribune writes without a trace of irony,

"...the many foreclosed homes in these inner-city neighborhoods have complicated the cleanup. Some homes were in such disrepair that their garages had collapsed into the alley..."

Yeah, that's right, my neighbor's garage was in the alley because the home was in such "disrepair."

Had nothing to do with the 3-foot-diameter TREE THAT FELL ON IT.

The photo accompanying the story is of a collapsed garage.  Astonishingly, the owner of the garage is not only not in foreclosure, he is actually pictured in the photo.   Yet his garage was in such disrepair that it was unable to withstand a "huge maple tree" that "crashed through the roof."  

Cautionary words on the new encyclical.

Until you get around to reading it -- I know I don't have time for at least a couple more days -- bear in mind what Jimmy Akin has to say.  Especially this part:

1) Do not put weight on anything you read in the newspaper or on secular talk radio regarding the encyclical. The mainstream media simply does not "get" religion, and they are too incompetent on matters of religion to report accurately anything that the pope says or does. Sorry, but it's the truth.

Yup.  I saw a couple of headlines yesterday as I read the news, one of which went something like "POPE CALLS FOR ALL-WORLD GOVERNMENT TO CONTROL THE GLOBAL ECONOMY."  The proper response to something like this is eye-rolling and a muttered "Yeah, can't wait to see where they got that from."

 

Cultural Youtube surfing.

This morning I followed a link from Deep Glamour in a post about sprezzatura to this clip of Viviana Durante dancing the lead of Aurora in "Sleeping Beauty."  (Embedding disabled, but it's worth a view -- the control and balance and precision is amazing.  It's been a long time since I've seen a ballet in person, and watching the clip made me remember how much I enjoyed going to the Dayton [OH] Ballet as a child and teenager).

The kids arrived and watched over my shoulder, and so I showed them numerous other clips.  Mary Jane in particular was entranced by the ballerinas.  

Every once in a while, an afternoon spent surfing YouTube randomly with the kids is a lot of fun, and why not count it as part of the school day?  We usually come across at least one thing that's quirky and very cool.  

Today it was this clip of a Russian children's choir.  They sing two songs.  The second is okay, but the first one -- "Katuschia", lyrics and translation are here -- amazed the children (and me) so much that we had to watch it at least five times.  My kids love to watch clips of children performing, they love to hear people singing in exotic foreign languages, they love fancy costumes -- it's perfect:

Something about the exuberance of the children in the chorus really got to me!

What the heck are the "Catholic Cannonball Awards?"

I need to know, because, like, I've been nominated for one.

In the "Susan Boyle" category.

I am not sure how to take this.  Which one of you is responsible for this?

What's your NPR name?

"From Minneapolis, I'm Ergin Fernie."

Doesn't quite have the same ring as Sylvia Poggioli.

and sometimes tea

... is a blog, new to me, that Margaret (Minnesota Mom) linked to today.  I have been reading through it and am impressed.  Nice job.

(And I'm glad for the little quote at the top that explains the title.  I loved The Rape of the Lock when we read parts of it in high school English lit, but I would never have caught the reference without help.)