Archive for the ‘onBooks’ Category

Venturing in the “Forbidden Planet”

Monday, March 31st, 2014

My trip into the “Forbidden Planet” comic book store was a cool, and surreal experience. Tucked away on the side of Broadway by Union Square, one person referred to it as a “geek haven.”

She later went on to say, “As someone who loves comics, graphic novels, collectible figures, etc., I don’t know why it took me this long to visit Forbidden Planet, which I am told, is a NYC classic and institution for comic books and the like. I am actually ashamed that it took me this long. I can spend hours here, easily. It’s not an overwhelming store by any means. The layout is well-organized, and their comics and graphic novels are placed in alphabetical order on the shelves. Very cool collectible figures and toys are prominently displayed at the front.”

Doesn’t that mean that because comic book stores like the “Forbidden Planet” are thriving, that the comic book industry is also at a peak? Or has the digitalization of comics caused a decrease in actual comic sales?

Vaneta Rogers, comic book sales blogger  explained, “”Publishers taking chances with increased discounts and returnability on certain launch titles has helped retailers find the ceiling easier on those titles,”On-time shipping also helps keep cash flow positive. Compelling stories shipping on a regular schedule are key to maintaining strong comics sales. We’ve gone through a major sea change, much like in the mid/late 80’s where both of the major publishers (Marvel and DC) have raised the grass and planted new seed in the last two years,” Wellman said. “This has led to some grumbling from old time readers, but also much excitement from new blood who has been watching blockbuster super-hero movies for the last decade and just waiting for the perfect ‘jumping-on’ point.”

So the increase in comic book sales, stems from the newfound appreciation created by the release of superhero movies, like the Avengers.

Share

Is Marvel’s Influence Affecting Young Boys?

Sunday, March 2nd, 2014

I am not a psychologist, and the only exposure that I have to males that are under the age of ten is my younger brother. That being said, from what I know of my brother and his friends, The Avengers has adopted a sort of mythology around it.

As done by el-grimlock on deviantart.

For the group of nine year olds that frequented my house, the Avengers team were very much alive. Playing with action figures, and watching the cartoons on TV, the boys gave me surprising insight into their own perception of the hit series.

One boy, James, explained to me “ Bruce Banner became the Hulk when angry, and because he the Hulk was green, Bruce was jealous of all the other people who didn’t have to change and smash things.”

As simplistic as his explanation was, there was also some validity to it. The intricacies that Marvel likes to weave around its story lines is very present within Bruce Banner’s story arc. Let me try to make sense of it: Captain America was a runt of a soldier during World War II, who was going to sidelined during the war given his severe asthma. As a good patriot, Captain America desired to fight for his country against the Nazi forces so when given the option to be a human trial for an experimental ‘serum’ he took it.

Fast forward to around the Cold War era where Bruce Banner, a scientist researching gamma-radiation, attempts to replicate the previously mentioned ‘serum’.  Bruce was powered by ambition and the the desire to impress, which led to accidentally using the radiation on himself, forgoing both medical and scientific protocol of extensive trials before human testing. In a nutshell, what caused the character to head down that path was ambition, a word that is usually correlates with greed.

Did the other boy’s have similar insights?

Yes they all did. While I was first surprised, I now realize that it is because The Avengers broaches topics that are universally understood.

Did boys see the brawny Avenger’s team, and think that masculinity only equated to appearance?

My own opinion is that to a certain extent, yes. The action scenes, the gear that the actors are made to wear, everything emphasizes the physique of the actors. Take for example Chris Hemsworth, the actor who plays Thor. The uniform he wears is tight fitting, and cuts off at the shoulders displaying his impressive musculature.

The basis of which I wrote this chapter was the TedX talk done by Colin Stokes, How Movies Teach Manhood. Stokes draws his analysis from Disney Princess movies, and explains that while female empowerment in cinema is on the increase, the idea that males can be masculine and emotional has still not been explicitly shown.

The basis of this chapter was the TedX talk done by Colin Stokes, How Movies Teach Manhood. Stokes draws his analysis from Disney Princess movies, and explains that while female empowerment in cinema is on the increase, the idea that males can be masculine and emotional has still not been explicitly shown.

I think that because Marvel is including children in the target audience, some tangible or visible acknowledgment that masculinity is not only appearance, is necessary. Has Marvel accomplished this with the female characters?

Share

The Brooklyn Book Festival

Monday, September 2nd, 2013

September is the best month to be a book-lover in New York City.

I discovered this last year, when I had just started interning for a Brooklyn-based literary magazine, The Coffin Factory. As a member of the team, I was asked to go out to the Brooklyn Book Festival, an annual celebration of all things literary. (http://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/BBF/Home ) It’s the perfect place to be, whether you’re an aspiring writer, an avid reader, or just a college student looking for something interesting to fill your time with.

 

The editors of The Coffin Factory at the Brooklyn Book Festival

The festival itself takes place on one Saturday (this year it’s September 22 from 10am – 6pm). However, there are a plethora of free literary events hosted by various members of the New York City literary scene for the entire week leading up to the big event.

Last year, The Coffin Factory hosted a panel entitled “Who Gives a Sh*t About Literary Magazines?” with editors from Granta, Tin House, and The Paris Review discussing their opinions on literary culture, readership, and the future of print magazines. I remember sitting at the back of the independent bookstore (Book Court) where the event was held and thinking that it was wonderful that such a thing could exist and that so many people cared enough to come. I guess a lot of people give a sh*t about literary magazines after all.

The events prior to the actual festival are always fun, engaging, and sometimes intimate enough to get to talk to the hosts afterwards. There are pretty much always opportunities to win free print issues or subscriptions, and most importantly, you get the chance to be a part of the conversation.

The festival itself is like a maze, with booths for popular publishing houses and lesser-known literary magazines alike. The event welcomes people from all aspects of the literary community, from all over the world. You never know what you’re going to find there. Maybe you’ll strike up an interesting conversation with the staff of your favorite Saturday-morning-read; maybe you’ll stumble upon an internship opportunity. Or maybe you’ll discover a writer or a magazine you’ve never heard of and fall irrevocably in love.

Because that’s what the Brooklyn Book Festival does: somehow, every year, it beckons to people from all different walks of life and manages to coax them out of whatever chaos they are in the midst of. It manages to swallow them completely for one week or weekend out of the year and get them all down to Brooklyn Borough Hall. And when they emerge from the Court Street subway station, they will inhale the distinctive but subtle scent of a good book, hear snippets of conversations revolving around their favorite writers, and see stacks of polished pages awaiting them.

—————————————————————————————————————

Katie Yee, Bennington College

Follow the Campus Clipper on Twitter and Like us on Facebook!

Interested in more deals for students? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter to get the latest in student discounts and promotions  and follow our Tumblr and Pinterest. For savings on-the-go, download our printable coupon e-book!

Share

Books: On Selling and Borrowing

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

College savings are important. Just this month, I had to pack all of my books along with my essential goodies into a car and drive it almost 400 miles only to take the boxes back out and lug them into my parents’ house. It cost a pretty penny. The books are still unpacked and I don’t have space to store them anywhere. This got me thinking: why don’t I start selling on Amazon again?

While living in an apartment in Western New York, I sold books and video games, but mostly books. I made a nice chunk of change selling them, and got rid of things that I had no use for. Of course, I had to invest about $20-$30 to start in order to buy a nice Sharpie and bubble mailers in which to safely mail books, DVDs, CDs, and games. Towards the end, I got a bit lazy and decided to remove all of my listings on Amazon. This time, however, I plan to start up again.

Selling items online is a great way to make extra money and lighten your load. It is not as time consuming as people think it is. All you need is about 25 minutes (or less, depending on how many items you are going to sell) to punch in the ISBN numbers and the UPC code and just set a price that you are willing to sell the item at. You don’t want the selling price to be too low, because you won’t make profit. Try to avoid selling items at 99¢. Only large-scale sellers can afford to do that. You might reason that Amazon gives you $3.99 for shipping and handling, but they take a percentage of that and you have to mail the item too—out of your pocket. That’s not worth the money and time for you. I try for items that sell for $3.99 and up. Try to sell your books during back-to-school seasons. Prices skyrocket during these times. It’s actually pretty crazy. I have a book that I bought for $4.99 + S/H three years ago that is now sold on Amazon for $50.99. I don’t get it, but that’s $46 profit in my pocket.

Also, go to book sales if you want to make this a money-making hobby. I bought a fairly large amount of books at $1 each and profited off of them. I’ve found out (although it may be common sense) that older books can make more money, especially if they are OOP, or out-of-print. Some can go for as high as $250 if they are in great condition. Can you imagine paying over $200 for a paperback?

When you mail items like books, especially if they are large like chemistry textbooks, or textbooks in general, send them via Media Mail. It’s the cheapest way to send heavy books to your customer. Don’t bother with First Class or Priority unless the customer has paid the extra for faster delivery. Of course, there are instances where First Class is cheaper than Media Mail. Just ask the teller at your Post Office and they will tell you.

Now, what am I going to do when I have no books to sell? What am I going to do when I want to read books? Lucky for me, I live near a library. It was just this summer that I’ve come to understand how useful libraries are. I can order books—if the local library doesn’t have it—through the library system, and other libraries within that branch will send the books to the closest library to you for pick up, and best of all, it’s free. Well, not exactly free, but you don’t pay for the books, right? You can borrow as many books as you want as long as you have a library card.

I’m not sure about other libraries, but for the library I frequent, you have to show a proof of residence to that particular area. Just show a utility bill or your driver’s license and you should be able to sign up for a card fairly easily.

I can spend all day in a library. It’s a luxury that I can afford—because it’s free. Of course, university libraries are far more extensive, but I can’t complain—well, sometimes I do.

Owning books, of course, has its perks. There’s no due date, you can write in them, and you can take it out of your bookshelf and leaf through the pages for that certain paragraph or sentence at any time. But they do take up space, especially if you move around a lot. However, I don’t plan on selling all of my books. There are a couple that I will hold on to for a long time, if not, forever. These books represent my thoughts and ideas. These books have been read over and over again. Unfortunately, there are books that I do not have time for and have no interest in reading that have found themselves in my possession that I let go with a heavy heart.


Sold some books, did you? Treat yourself and a friend to some delicious Thai food at Reserve!


Michael Koh. Read my blog!!  Follow me on Twitter!

Click here to download the Campus Clipper iTunes App!

Follow Campus Clipper on Twitter or keep current by liking us on Facebook.

Interested in more deals for students? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter to get the latest in student discounts and promotions  and follow our Tumblr and Pinterest. For savings on-the-go, download our printable coupon e-book.

Share

The Romance Novel: A Most Popular and Best-Kept Secret

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

My first time was in a Kmart. My best friend and I were walking around a shopping center near home, looking to kill time after school before starting our homework. We stumbled across the section of discounted books and could not help but pause to giggle at the shirtless, six-packed Fabios on white horses holding women in flowing white dresses (I’m not sure if any of the books actually had that cover, but I wouldn’t doubt it). Once I saw the “2 / $6” stickers on some of the books, I knew that I would be making a purchase that day.

Beth purchased The Millionaire’s Inexperienced Love-Slave while I went for The Glass Slipper and Pure Temptation, which flaunted a muscly man with medium-length brown hair lounging under satin sheets with his arms thrown back as if he thought that he was posing for a dictionary entry of the novel’s title. When we got to the registers with our books, I found out that the bargain price stickers on my two books were lies, and that I would be making the cheapest purchases of my life: books that cost a penny each. I suspected two things: first, that there was a glitch in the register system, and also that the books were even worse written than originally suspected, with its writing perhaps as cheap as my receipt suggested.

Romance novels have been referred to as “smut” and female pornography due to the sexual content that some books contain. However, while some books certainly do contain explicit scenes, others contain nothing more than hand-holding and church-rated kissing. Happy endings, which usually lead to marriage, are essentially required by the genre (Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous unhappily-ending romances); there are, by definition of the romance novel, requirements concerning plot. If the storyline can only be damaged without the sexual elements, the novel is most likely to be classified as an erotic romance novel (example: Fifty Shades of Grey).

Though I’ve held myself back from reading the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy in public, not as daring as the several women in whose laps the books can be found on the train I take every day (I’m sure there are some with the e-book, too), I have a steadily increasing amount of experience with this division of women’s fiction. Apart from my internship with the Campus Clipper, I work with a literary agency. Having only found a small amount of information about the agency before my interview with the company, I resorted to thinking that the agency specialized mainly in helping authors publish romance novels, since most of the information I found suggested so. It turns out that while the agency does do this, it is by no means a romance-only agency. Regardless, I checked out a few romance novels the library, hoping to familiarize myself with the type of writing that the agency represents before I started working there.

My mother was recently recommended the now-infamous Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, and she suggested that I also read it to bone up (no pun intended) on the genre as well as current popular reads. Now done with the first book, she is admittedly a little uncomfortable with this suggestion to her youngest daughter.

Ironically, despite being among the least respected, romance is the most popular North American genre, consisting of almost 55% of paperback books sold in 2004 (e-books are becoming increasingly popular in romance sales, particularly for erotic romance, probably because it allows discretion). About 91% of the consumers are women. While the stigmas that can come with the romance genre seem to be taken lightheartedly by the general public, there are those who are enraged by the books. While some argue for the sake literature, others believe that the books are immoral, degrading, and even dangerous.

 

What makes these books so appealing and popular? The Fifty Shades trilogy, the first of which was published in June 2011, has gone viral, surpassing the Harry Potter series as the fastest-selling paperbacks. But surrounding the book’s rise on the best-seller charts is a load (I can’t help myself) of controversy. The male protagonist’s appeal to BDSM makes the novel more risqué than the average romance, and the popularity of the trilogy has some worrying about the implications that the book gives about what is okay in the bedroom (or the setting of choice).

One woman wonders, “Do middle-aged women, the main audience for this book, really view the threat of violence as an aphrodisiac? And isn’t it dangerous to turn a BDSM-addict into a romantic hero? Would we want our daughters dating Christian Grey?”

Comments such as these might be related to concerns in the 1860s, when critical attention was focused on romance novels because the female reader was believed to be susceptible and vulnerable to ideas. It was believed during this time and for decades later that women should be reading more wholesome works like those that taught them about a moral society and how to be humble homemakers.

EL James’ books are by no means the first romance or erotic romance novels to be published. Fifty Shades has not invented anything new in either the world of literature or the world of sex, or even BDSM for that matter. People could just as easily get ideas from these books as from another million sources. Also, as critic Caroline Lucas argues, just as in the 1860s, readers can exercise “resistant reading,” choosing which ideas they will and will not adopt from a text. Besides, from what I understand, the trilogy distinguishes between BDSM and abuse, and never implies that abuse is okay.

Romance novels have been around for quite some time. According to RadioLab’s podcast “The Greatest Hits of Ancient Garbage,” the most common finding in a landfill of ten centuries of ancient Egyptian garbage is papers of a romance novel (you can hear snippets of it read at 16:13 on the podcast). Though it took an archaeology expedition to make this discovery, we can more easily find early evidence of romance in print such as in Medieval tales of courtship and chivalry and Renaissance literature such as plays and poems by Shakespeare. The Romantic Period shifted the focus towards courtly relationships ending in marriage, which is where most modern romance novels still end.

One major distinction of these earlier works from the modern ones is that most early works were written by and for men of a patriarchal society and from a male character’s point of view. The first best-seller romance novel was written during this time, in 1740 with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Written from the heroine’s viewpoint for a change, it sold like wildfire.

Light, enlightenment, or phallic symbol?

Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë are two well-known Victorian romance writers, and though it can be argued that the sexuality in their romances is more subdued, I ask you to look at the symbolism within their work. I remember being a sophomore in high school and shaking my head in fear every time my English teacher suggested phallic symbolism in Jane Eyre. (Also, I suggest a look at Andrew Marvell’s 1650s poem “To His Coy Mistress” which might be summed up colloquially as “Stop being prude, let’s bang.”)

Such novels, particularly those written by female writers, helped to pave the road for women’s literature, introducing characters that were strong and generated sympathy for the condition of women in society. They often suggested a female quest for freedom and independence. As women outside of the fictional world of novels began to experience freedom for themselves and became literate, more liberated romance novels emerged.

Perhaps the most free expression in romance novels can be found in erotica, where authors have to have a decent set of balls to write without restriction (many just have a decent pseudonym instead). Renowned writer Anaïs Nin, after having drafted an apparently-withheld draft, was once told by her agent to “Leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex.” The result was Delta of Venus, which has apparently been forgotten about in the midst of the Fifty Shades outrage.

Working at the literary agency, I have gained a greater respect for romance writing and those who can write romance well and, yes, for those who can write decent sex scenes (hey, if you’re going to convince me that the character is having the best sex of her life, you better not describe the same thing again and again). Perhaps the most notable feature of modern romance novels is the ease of the read. Unlike an Austen or Brontë romance, the writing of a typical modern romance should be taken plainly and doesn’t feel heavy or make the reader think too much.

But this mindless reading is the reason why literary critics everywhere tend to bash romance novels, saying that they lack merit or do not contribute to the world of literature. Unfortunately, this also paints a bad image of romance readers such that makes them look unintellectual and jaded, ironically bringing the representation of the romance reader back to where it was when women were still generally accepted as the lesser sex.

Some scholars believe that romance novels create submissive readers by showing the female protagonists ignoring issues other than love and marriage. But if we colloquially distinguish our “love life” as a “separate” life, why can’t we have books that also do so? Are mystery novels ignoring everything but unsolved murders? Do fantasy books ignore everything but magic?

Those who argue in favor of romance novels say that they are socially significant because they offer insight into human (usually female) ideals. Whether written on ancient papyrus paper, hidden under a Victorian pillow, or proudly displayed on a Metro North train, it is clear that these ideals, no matter how controversial, have been popular for a long, long time.

While I can’t exactly argue with the assessment of the quality of typical modern romance writing, I will say that not everything that is written strives to contribute to the same world as Hemingway and other literary greats. Sometimes people write and read just for enjoyment. Romance novels are like the flashy sequin shirts worn to a club or the French fries ordered as a side to a salad—not meant to be taken seriously, but meant, instead, to be fun, a sort of escape. In fact, romance novels have experienced a rise in the current recession, just like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind did during the Depression. Lawyer and book-blogger Jennifer Lampe says, “Given the general dismay and gloominess, reading something like a romance with a happy ending is really kind of a relief.” And that’s what modern romance novels are really about. Romance novels are written to be enjoyed, not to enlighten, and they are, simply, about pleasure—the pleasure of reading.

———————————————————

Carina, New York University. Read my blog and check out my Twitter! FOLLOW ME!!

Click here to download the Campus Clipper iTunes App!

Follow Campus Clipper on Twitter or keep current by liking us on Facebook.

Interested in more deals for students? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter to get the latest in student discounts and promotions  and follow our Tumblr and Pinterest. For savings on-the-go, download our printable coupon e-book.

Share

Book Review: Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success – Not Really A Story At All

Thursday, June 28th, 2012

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with.

-Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success

Prior to the partition of India on August 14, 1947, the soon-to-be official nation of Pakistan – surviving on an abated amount of the assured 750 million rupees part of a stipulation drafted by then-Viceroy Lord Mountbatten – found itself on fiscal life-support. The expenses of an inpouring exodus of Muslim refugees along with the associated costs of nation-building replaced the exuberance of being on the verge of independence, with the aberrance of being on the verge of bankruptcy. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, credited as the Father of the Nation – to this day popularly known as Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader) – had to first play the role of Fundraiser of the Nation. The ensuing events would become the context, circumstance, and climax of a story that every child in Pakistan has heard growing up, like “the British are coming,” “We the people,” “I have a dream,” “I did not have sexual relations with that…” – OK, maybe that last one is reserved for more “liberal” households.

Jinnah tasked his newly appointed Finance Master Ghulam Mohomad with tracking down Sir Adamjee Haji Dawood, with hopes that the legendary business mogul and philanthropist would respond to his – and for all intents and purposes, Pakistan’s – desperate “SOS.” About two weeks after August 14, Mohomad, in a meeting held at the Palace Hotel in Karachi, informed Sir Adamjee of the situation to which he famously responded by speaking briefly with M.A Habib – his banker, and founder of modern-day Habib Bank – then turned back to the Finance Master and said, simultaneously handing him a blank check, “You’re problem is solved.” With the stroke of a pen (and a bridge finance secured on his personal assets), Sir Adamjee single-handedly bankrolled the new nation.

***

By all accounts, including one derived from the “story of success” offered in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 best-seller of the same name, Sir Adamjee was an outlier. Gladwell’s book, in admittedly archaic fashion, begins with two dictionary definitions:  1. something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body; and 2. a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample. Outliers – in the spirit of the ever-counterintuitive endimanché  that Gladwell captured the literary runway with – yet again presents a thesis that challenges conventional wisdom. On the book’s Q&A page, the 16-year New Yorker staff writer reveals that the “frustration” which led to the occasion of its writing was “with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier – ‘they’re really smart,’ or ‘they’re really ambitious?’ Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren’t worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude – and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations.”

And dig down Mr. Gladwell does – deep, very deep, as in World-War-II-mass-grave deep. One could crudely characterize the work as a composite of case studies featuring both familiar and unfamiliar accounts of success.  I use the term crudely because although the majority of the book is dedicated to these (typically back-to-back) narratives, which are gracefully handled with the delicate charm and idiosyncratic wit to which Gladwell owes his own success – to say that the Gladwellian ‘version’ of the “story of success” is the intellectual terminus of his anecdotal chaperone, is to mistake the destination with the vehicle. In the eclectic tradition of his previous works (The Tipping Point, Blink) Gladwell deftly draws from a diverse set of sources to support his argument: seeking to answer contrived questions such as what, if any, common factors led to the success of Bill Gates and The Beatles; the reason why Asians and math go together like the French and wine; why Christopher Langan, perhaps the smartest man in the world, is one of the least successful.

Arguably the most interesting (and coincidentally, credible) claim in the book is the general rule of thumb that an “outlier’s” level of ability – world class talent – requires 10,000 hours (roughly 10 years) of practice. What is even more interesting is the circumstances in which Gladwell’s carefully curated cast of characters come to accumulating the ‘obligatory credit’ for earning their Genius time-card – at least from his vantage point. Consistent with the overall counter-conventional-current that propels the entire work: the catalytic element here is external luck as opposed to internal drive. Chapter 3, where Gladwell asserts the 10K rule (or rather re-asserts the ideas of Anders Ericsson; who more sophistically developed the theories originally proposed by his mentor Herb Simon in the 70s), begins with the observation that musical virtuosos such as Mozart and chess grandmasters reach their pinnacle status after about 10 years.  According to Outliers, The Beatles owe their atomic rise to grueling 8-hours-a-day-7-days-a-week-gigs performed over a year-and-a-half stint at dingy clubs in Hamburg’s red-light district. “By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964,” Gladwell notes, “they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers.”

Paul Allen left; Bill Gates right at the Lakeside School

Similarly, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his lesser-known but equally-if-not-largely-more-important counter-part Bill Joy serendipitously attained their transcendent programming ability and innate technological affinity by virtue of time and place. Gates attended the elite, exclusive Lakeside School in Seattle, where the Mother’s Club using funds accrued in an annual rummage sale, installed a time-shared computer terminal in 1968 – the relative modern equivalent of an official NASA shuttle simulator being donated to the astronomy club. Fortune continued to favor the young Gates by providing him late-night access at nearby University of Washington to a mainframe computer where he would sneak off – without his parent’s knowledge – to write code between the hours of 2 A.M and 6 A.M.

Joy, awarded the appropriate appellation of “the Edison of the Internet” and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had an equivalent experience. By 1967, his alma mater, the University of Michigan, housed a then prototypical time-sharing (as opposed to punch-card) Computer Center – one of the first and very select universities in the world to do so at the time. The “difference” between the two, as Joy himself states in the book, was akin to “one between playing chess by mail and speed chess.” This was the situation he would find himself in the fall of 1971: one where “Michigan had enough computing power that a hundred people could be programming simultaneously…” However, unlike Gates, Joy showed no prior interest in computers, nor did he choose Michigan for its world-class Computer Center. The ultimate conclusion to be drawn here is, as David Shaywitz of the Wall Street Journal adroitly expresses in his review of Outliers, “[h]ad Mr. Gates attended a different high school, or had Mr. Joy enrolled at his college a few years earlier, today’s computer industry might look dramatically different.”

The remainder of the book is more or less (mostly more) a broken record remixed by a master DJ, and like the axiomatic bachelor Jabbawockee member stepping onto a dime-filled-dance-floor, I have no idea where to begin – or with who. Reviewing Outliers – or anything from Mr. Gladwell’s entire body of work for that matter – by virtue of its very raison d’être, is an enigmatic exercise. Let me preface what is to follow by explicitly expressing that I consider Malcolm Gladwell’s writing to absolutely be art, notwithstanding the BP-sized-holes that often drown away any chance of fully inhaling his arguments. When mentioning to Campus Clipper, specifically its founder, that I was struggling to complete this review, she was understandably concerned – until of course I revealed that I had chosen to dunk my literary neurons into a Gladwell mindpuzzle. This was met by an esoteric chuckle. “He’s often five-dimensional,” she said. “At the very least, at the same time,” I added.

Despite making several contentious submissions that are, quite frankly, either unsubstantiated or even flat out in contradiction with the facts, I am certain Mr. Gladwell still managed to exorcise his original “frustration.” In regards to the popular section (for readers and reviews alike) on Canada’s amateur hockey leagues (albeit unintentionally) providing the ‘man-child’ advantage to those born earlier in the year, David Leonhardt in his review for the NYT mentions contradictory research at odds with Gladwell extended argument claiming that the same pattern is observable in the classroom. In fact, two of Gladwell’s own stand-out examples, namely Bill Gates and Bill Joy, were born on October 28 and November 8 respectively.  Even further, the former nearly intentionally failed his entrance exam into Lakeside and the latter was matriculated into the University of Michigan at the tender of age of 16.

Another discrepancy worth mentioning is one outlined in a (rather scathing) review for Open Letters Monthly by Peter Coclanis (a distinguished History and Economics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill) regarding the immediately bizarre assertion that Asians – particularly East Asians – regardless of their relative global location, are culturally predisposed to excel in mathematics because of an economic legacy in rice farming. While I would personally certainly enjoy obliterating the train of thought (in rather colorful language) that Gladwell, once again artfully conducts, Coclanis – given  his expertise and work-in-progress  on the history of world rice production and international trade since the 17th century – provides a far more erudite analysis.

“For starters,” Coclanis explains, “paddy rice has for millennia been the leading food crop on Java, in Thailand, in Burma, and in the Philippines. Do these peoples also excel in math? What about people from rice-growing parts of West Africa, in the Senegambian region in particular, where paddy rice has also been grown for millennia?” He goes on by narrowing his focus in congruence with Gladwell’s own in the book, viz the regions of China, asserting that “anyone with even a cursory sense of Chinese history knows, northern China for millennia has been a wheat/millet/small grain-producing region rather than a rice region. Do Beijingers get waxed by Shainghainese on international math tests? Gladwell buries this dicey (ricey?) issue in a footnote and claims that “we don’t know” if northern Chinese are good at math. We may not, but I’m sure that bureaucrats at China’s Ministry of Education (No. 37, Damucang Hutong, Xidan, Beijing) or administrators at either of China’s top two schools—Beijing University and Tsinghua University (both in Beijing)—might have something to say on the matter.”

As Leonhardt (Sunday Book Review for the NYT) writes, the incongruity in such minutiae is “a particular shame, because it would be a delight to watch someone of his intellect and clarity make sense of seemingly conflicting claims.”

***

This brings me back to my original point, and anecdote. It is unfortunate that the commercial success of Mr. Gladwell has lent his publisher, handlers, and following in general with license to make claims like one found in the dust jacket of Outliers: “In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell changed the way we understand the world. In Blink he changed the way we think about thinking. Outliers will transform the way we understand success.” The praising phrases are a tidy example of parallel structure, yes, but also debatable – and debated – to a viral degree. I’d like to start by focusing on the peculiar, and thus consequential, choice of the verb “understand” in the line pertaining to Outliers – and also, how it relates to the book’s complete title. The book is less about rewriting the Story of Success and more about rewiring the Way We Think about Success, less about “understanding” success and more about “appreciating” it. To put it simply, Gladwell’s main argument is far more politically charged than anything found in his previous works: we give outliers too much credit. Recall the vehicle-destination metaphor. The tall tales of our modern day borderline mythological figures are not so tall after all. It is political because in many ways it not only debunks, but essentially subverts the notion of the American Dream – wherein lays the controversy. Not for patriotic, but rather patronizing reasons.

The “frustration” that Gladwell cites as his starting (tipping?) point is unfairly exploited to create the presumptive straw man that stands so central in his book(s). The truth is that a very small cohort of people – likely either delusional or severely mis-and-or-uninformed at that (probably both) – believe that Bill Gates’ intelligence alone was cashed in for 50B, that The Beatles’ rigorous performance schedule conjured the creativity needed to sell over a billion records, that Michael Jordan’s 6 rings are a direct result of a genetic anomaly. The truth is that most people believe the exact opposite – even if our romanticized formulas that produce such icons don’t agree on rigid values, nature and nurture are still always present in the equation.  We’ve all heard of the “he stole Windows from Apple” story, the manic-psychotic work ethic of unparalleled champions like Jordan (he meticulously studied weaknesses of opposing teams while on the frickin’ Dream Team and manipulated NBA team beat writers for the same purpose), of the drug-sex-alcohol-and-spiritually electric environments that have led to some of our most beloved creative lights– and perhaps the most assimilated notion of all into the zeitgeist of success: the proverbial “break.” The crucible found in every larger-than-life biography.

Returning to the story of Sir Adamjee (no, I didn’t forget), an essential omission was his prominent status among the Memon community: a well-known and Islamic people renowned for their business acumen and who can be found in the upper echelons of commerce in every corner of the globe. This was not always the case – not even close. Adamjee, lacking any formal education whatsoever, started by working for his father’s humble trading company (if you could even call it that) as a child before quickly being sent off to Calcutta where he would fend for himself, and eventually – while still a teenager – seeking to expand his horizons took a business trip to Burma. His commercial sortie coincided with the calamities of both World Wars. In a then unorthodox move, he committed his capital into stockpiling basic commodities such as jute, rice, and matches (coincidently, those popular among military personnel). In the aftermath of the German bombing of Madras there was a severe shortage of these same essential items. Likewise – as if to prove his newfound wealth was not just the result of luck and timing – during the Japanese invasion of Calcutta in WWII, with the future of the subcontinent being as predictable as a thousand coin-flips, the value of those same goods nose-dived deeper than the U.S.S Wahoo. So he bet on exporting the goods to places he thought would have a shortage via trickle-down (he understood the effects of globalization before we even knew what it was) – and he won, big, really big. For the man who proudly presented himself as a graduate of the Bhadar River (the cotton industry waste dump of his native village of Jetpur), the rest, as they say, is history.

If you ask any Pakistani Memon (identifiable by advertised net-worth, number of Toyota Camrys in the family, and the deterioration of their teeth, in no particular order or proportion) about Sir Adamjee the overwhelming response will be some variant of the following: he is our founder, our father, our mini- Quaid-e-Azam. The abridged history: in the 14th century, Yusuf Sindhi went on a mission to India and converted some several thousand Hindu families to Islam; due to persecution from the Hindus many were forced to migrate to other regions; their genuine devotion and collective cohesiveness is where the name comes from, as Sindhi called them “the Momis,” meaning the exemplary Muslims, eventually becoming “the Memons.” By 1960 roughly 100,000 Memons populated Pakistan with a similar number living in parts of India. Gustav Papanek (President of BIDE; Professor of Economics Emeritus at Boston U; past leader of Harvard University Development Advisory Service) describes their culture and values in Pakistan’s Development:

They were extremely cohesive, frugal, hardworking, well-defined into family groups and had an overwhelming commitment to their traditional occupation of commerce as either employees or self-employed. Only a handful had left their traditional pursuits to become doctors, lawyers, engineers and civil servants. Memons had an extremely high sense of community identity, spoke Gujrati and tended to be organised on the basis of ancestral residency. They were especially strict about community endogamy based on township of origin and had well organized and developed community associations to enforce marriage rules and to moderate group conflicts. They were socially conservative and religiously devout with a large number of hajis among their members. As a community roughly 100,000 Memons ranged across the entire socio-economic spectrum from very poor to very rich.

The culture of modern Memons, what Gladwell might cite as the primary source of their success (I would personally be very curious to see a case study of the group by him), was not intended to create the exclusive club of benefits they now enjoy. Based on the most foundational (and human) values of Islam, it was intended to foster values, not value. Today, Memons despite their continued success have forgotten this; which is what brings to me to my ultimate interpretation of Outliers: Gladwell is apologizing for his own success.

If you’ve read the book then you probably picked up on the latent sense that Gladwell felt as if Chris Langan should’ve been in his place interviewing him for a book on the story of success. That the ex-bouncer’s brutesque photo should be on the back. From the same Q&A page, “I’ve never been able to feel someone’s intellect before, the way I could with him. It was an intimidating experience, but also profoundly heartbreaking…” The invocation of such notions is what leads me to think that Gladwell believes our definition of success is, and has been for quite some time, both obsolete and downright wrong. Not only is it relative (to a child who treks several miles daily for clean water, the idea of someone on welfare; to a middle-school dropout, the idea of someone with a community college degree; to an Ivy League graduate, the idea of billionaire-before-thirty; etc.) but it is also subjective.

Outliers, our so-called nonpareils, are a product of the environment we have created, yes, but the real outliers are those who seek to turn that environment into a product of themselves. Men like Adamjee, who measured his success in the amount of free schools he built and scholarships awarded rather the then the value of his company on the Calcutta Stock Exchange. Who is to say that the most successful person in the world is Bill Gates as opposed to the Dali Lama? Who is to say that success is measured by the balance of cash in your bank account and not the balance of love in your heart? Measured in your personal promotion, rather than collective devotion? The answer should be obvious. The bottom line is that if success is what everyone aspires to, then we have a fundamental responsibility to define it in a set of terms where everyone is on an equal playing field. That field is no longer America. The American Dream Nightmare must be re-written. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whom Gladwell cites as an influence (“We associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb back from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong. That is the lesson of Nassim Taleb.” – The Nation),  writes: “Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.”

***

                This infinitely ambitious challenge requires an equally ambitious Warrior of The Light. The only reason the swerving Outliers train of thought stays on the track of mostly-plausible and doesn’t derail along its natural trajectory into the Land of Apophenia is because the very talented Mr. Gladwell occupies the conductor’s cabin.  However, the information revolution that has provided Gladwell with the solid planks that he ties together with his own poorly woven ropes of idiosyncratic interpolation to build a bridge between our mind and his own, also render that bridge functionally useless. It is entertaining to walk across only so far as to admire its craftsmanship – because it is indeed a bridge that only he alone can be contracted. But it is also an important reminder of what it means to walk in the first place.

 

Mahad Zara, The University of Arizona and Columbia University, Read my blog and follow me on Twitter

Click here to download the Campus Clipper iTunes App!

Follow Campus Clipper on Twitter or keep current by liking us on Facebook

Interested in more deals for student savings? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter to get the latest in student discounts and promotions. For savings on-the-go, download our printable coupon e-book

Share

Poetry Review: David Mutschlecner’s Enigma and Light – Not Your Everyday Ekphrasis

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

“Enigma and Light offers up a poetry unlike anything I’ve recently encountered: intelligent, fearless, engrossed in the rigors of its own journey.” – Elizabeth Robinson

      The exercise of ekphrasis – a literary description or critique of a visual work of art, intended to illuminate an essence which reveals itself (perhaps exclusively) in the dialogue between two mediums   – is not new. Dating back to ancient times, the term’s original definition extended to a description of anything: person, place, art, or even experience. Rooted in the Greek, ek and phrasis, translating to “out” and “speak;” to literally “speak out” to or identify an inanimate object by name. Unoffically originating in Plato’s discussion of the forms, the rhetorical device can be found throughout literary and philosophical history. Socrates and Phaedrus had ekphrastic discussions. Virgil used it in the Aeneid; Homer in the Iliad; Melville in Moby Dick; Cervantes in Don Quixote. But perhaps the most demonstrative – and notable – use of ekphrasis comes to us in Oscar Wilde’s Sui generis The Picture of Dorian Gray. While it also has robustly traceable roots in poetry, from the work of the Pre-Ralphaelite Brotherhood to William Carlos Williams to W.H Auden, the most contemporary, prominent example is found in the eponymous opening poem of John Ashbery’s Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (which of course takes its name from Parmigianino’s famous micro-painting). To put it mildly, Ashbery exploded on to the scene following the book’s release, a worthy recipient of what has been dubbed the “Triple Crown” of poetry awards (the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award). Ekphrastic poetry has, ever since– more due to Self-portrait‘s notoriety than comparative critical reception – lived in the shadow of Ashbery’s landmark collection.

That is, until now.

David Mutschlecner’s newest book of poetry (author of Sign and Esse) titled Enigma and Light is an exquisitely crafted (a capacity which Ahsahta Press has recently exhibited industry-leading proficiency for) intertextual gateway to a world whose borders are typically only penetrated via hallucinogenic/augmented imaginative assistance. Past its mesmerizing grey-canvas wrapping – once an adequate attention is attained – inside one is greeted with familiar names unfamiliarly juxtaposed to familiar names, as titles. Mutschlecner adamantly takes his departure from the rhetoric’s Platonic origins, and then proceeds to gracefully transcend it.

My own personal experience with ekphrastic discourse goes back to freshman history in high-school, where I had the serendipitous pleasure of encountering one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. Not only was his knowledge encyclopedic, but his diverse and expansive array of areas of expertise would put most encyclopedias to shame (he memorized libraries while we refused to commit even the Bill of Rights). Yet, it was one fairly well known anecdote, haphazardly proclaimed, that has managed to stick with me some 8 years later. Mr. McShane was in the habit of playing music in class, which given his impeccable taste, was a welcome addition to an otherwise traditionally obtuse syllabus. On one such occasion, without warning (as he was also in the habit of doing) he played “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan, followed by abruptly slamming the pause button (as he was never in the habit of doing) after the line, “you don’t need the weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” If it wasn’t a Dylan song, I don’t know that I, or anyone else in the class, would have even realized the words prior to this anomalous occasion (keep in mind this was around the advent of “artists” such as Lil’Wayne and E40). Of course we would eventually learn that the song and the lyric in particular, was the inspiration behind the Weather Underground, a radical organization started in 1969 which went on to become one of the faces of the New Left.

Dylan somehow (this is another article altogether) captured a zeitgeist buried in young people that they could not bring into aperture themselves. In his art, his message, his essence was the Rosetta Stone they had been waiting for to translate their own ideals (which were more or less parallel to Dylan’s in Blues) into a full-blown movement. To put it simply, it spoke to them, in a language they could finally understand.

David Mutschlecner accomplishes a similar goal, tantalizing his own latent curiosities to uncover ones in the reader he or she didn’t know were there. The poetry grounds its tension in the struggle of a man drowning in ideas and a faith that seem to be at odds. What occurs in Enigma and Light is rare, and does so immediately. A few pages into the opening poem, as David Peak of The Rumpus keenly observes, Mutschlecner gives us six lines that work as a quasi-micro-orientation, a layered ekphrastic invitation itself of what is to come, a revelation of the pulse that sustains each of his scintillating conversations.

“Martin’s marks are Stein’s
word stipplings,
both inter-patterning one another

as they could not
without the clear delineation—
each word girded by the grid.”

This is the precious commodity with which the poet performs his alchemy. The marks and words which inter-pattern one another, the invisible thread of thought which extends beyond eras, mediums, and death itself between artists and thinkers (and us all) alike. Mutschlecner states in the author’s statement that “seeking the inherit similarity in dissimilars is the work of the Holy Spirit;… this is, to me the highest goal of poetry” (which, unsurprisingly, could just as easily could be the words of Ashbery – less “Holy Spirit”), a pursuit satisfying not just an artistic hunger, but metabolic need to digest the work of those who title his extrapolative discussions. On the surface, Mutschlecner‘s work is a serial poem, but a more perspicacious description would be an amalgam of philosophical discourse, an extended and fragmented essay on art, a treatise on form and message and meaning; a meditation on medium.

Gertrude Stein and Agnes Martin, Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound, Thomas Aquinas and Emily Dickinson, Robert Duncan and Dante Alighieri, Joan Mitchell and Charles Olson, Georges Rouault and Robert Motherwell: just a selection of the intriguing – to say the least – pairings which compose this unusual and beautiful work. Names like Herman Melville, Nicholas of Cusa, Robert Ryman, Karl Rahner, Saint Faustina and the Gee’s Bend Quilters, alongside so many more, are used by Mutschlecner to sketch a stimulating, abstract, time-bending map of voices he follows until excavating the fault lines where centuries of celebrated art and ideas intersect.

You might be saying to yourself, this idea seems fresh, interesting, intelligent and perhaps even worth the purchase price on its own. But it might also seem a bit pretentious, implying a necessary body of knowledge very few, if any, potential readers will possess upon checkout. Despite the fact that Mutschlecner’s lifetime of intense study and obsession with detail are (albeit quite elegantly) on open display in essentially ever y other line, this is not necessarily the case. This is, because, and not despite, the premise the work takes. By choosing the unknowable, highly subjective domain that exists in these contrived discourses between artists of his choice; using settings mundane as empty rooms and cracks of sunlight sneaking through veiled curtains as his meditative arenas; a vigorous stripping of line and length, producing a perfectly rationed minimalistic prose; Mutschlecner provides ample avenues of accessibility into his own idiosyncratic thought process and associations. The “world view” which reveals itself at the bottom of the glass of this cerebral concoction is an original one. It is a view that comes more and more into focus with every poem, with the diction, pace and measured metronome of each consistently aesthetically pleasing. The grey area that Mutschlecner’s unique combination of knowledge and inquiry inhabits is a place opened to the reader, where he is then able to infuse his own philosophy and curiosities to a discussion that never ends, and if we are to side with our guide, perhaps never was. A place where the patterns of being that are generated only appear to do so; they have been there all along, our experience is simply the recognition, the girding of each word to the grid.   Consider an excerpt from “Karl Rahner / The Dusky Seaside Sparrow”:

“There is no improvement
can spark substance. The message dead
in this bottle, and yet the message

still, is read: Dusky—“Orange”
—Last one
Died 16 June 87

tagged to the lid. . . .”

It is in such benign everyday moments, ones we all must tolerate, that our most deeply ingrained (whether through internal or external means) patterns seem to correlate; a phenomena for which Mutschlecner has (perhaps unknowingly) conditioned his eye. It is for the same reasons, we are able to make that eye our own, to see from a place where allusions are the horizon on which “thought rolls and turns and” can be followed to gaze upon our most substantial, and lasting constructs: those composed of agreed-upon meaning.

I highly recommend this new collection poetry not just because of its sublime musicality, but it is educational, provocative, and demands an active and thinking mind beginning to end – most of which without the reader even knowing it. If you’re like me, then it won’t take very many lines to inspire the inner artist in you – regardless of whatever you consider your primary walk of life – so why not use the student advantage provided (below) by your friends at #CampusClipper for some awesome art supplies at Da Vinci (they have a great selection of moleskine notebooks too in case Enigma inspires the poet or writer in you as well!).

Mahad Zara, The University of Arizona and Columbia University, Read my blog and follow me on Twitter

Click here to download the Campus Clipper iTunes App!

Follow Campus Clipper on Twitter or keep current by liking us onFacebook

Interested in more deals for student savings? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter to get the latest in student discounts and promotions. For savings on-the-go, download our printable coupon e-book

 

Share

Ray Bradbury Tribute: Fahrenheit 451 – “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

“”One of the most brilliant overall jobs of social satire.”
The Nation

“My art is on its final breaths, and chances are it will be dead, buried, and forgotten before most of you walk out of here with degrees.” The seismic words fell so hard on the 400 undergraduate shoulders surrounding me in an ASU lecture mega-hall that I can still vividly recall nearly falling out of my seat. The class was titled “Mass Media & Society” and the speaker was not (to everyone’s delight) our elegant, and aging instructor – the excruciatingly eccentric “original Dr.FUN” (who literally wrote the book on how media portrays sex, love, and relationships and its consequences) – but rather a previous radio executive and disc jockey, and current “expert scholar”; which apparently included spending time in front of groups like an intro elective course at a public university. Regardless of his overt melodramatic undertone, the speaker’s sentiment was hard not to empathize with as an aspiring creative type myself. If you haven’t figured it out by now, this industry insider was – quite broadly – referring to all the “cool new shit (his words, not mine)” that was causing radio to progressively fade into obscurity until only a handful of super-stations would remain. To be more specific, his presentation focused on the greatest threat to radio since television itself: internet in cars. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together to realize that once moto-WiFi is as common as removable cup-holders that most people – particularly those with roots elsewhere than the state on their license plate – if given a choice out of every radio station on the planet, will pick something other than their commercial-littered local indie jukebox for the drive home.

Assuming you possess an average reader’s attention span, right now you’re probably thinking, “cool story bro (assuming you also possess an average reader’s courtesy), but what does this have to do with Ray Bradbury, his death, or Fahrenheit 451 – you know, the book this review is supposed to be on.” Beyond the painfully obvious parallel of “technology is killing art” theme that F451 is remembered for (among other reasons), here, right before my eyes – in whatever relatively infinitesimal, isolated form – was Bradbury’s meticulously crafted nightmare coming true. Something, unfortunately, that is now – given a watchful and interested eye – observable on a daily basis. It wasn’t just that technology like internet-enabled Honda’s would be the death of the “his art” (partly, yes) that precipitated the invisible tears I saw running down the side of the speaker’s face for 65 minutes. It was what that death meant for the rest of us.

Ray Bradbury is one of only a small handful of names that would undoubtedly be on every list of nominees for the Mt. Rushmore of Science Fiction (if such an awesome monument were ever to be erected). With his place among an echelon of genre juggernauts such as Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein; his influence on future masters in their own right including Ursula Le Guin ,Phillip K. Dick, and Neil Gaiman; his work garnering comparison over the years to the likes of George Orwell – with over 500 publications and a laundry list of awards; Mr. Bradbury’s passing is a significant one.

You might say it was peculiar that I found myself researching a secret bookstore called Brazenhead in New York the day it happened; a physical symptom of Bradbury’s great diagnosis. You might say it was peculiar that the day before I was sketching an idea for a piece on outdoor libraries and breathtaking bookshelves; more attempts at fighting a war that is already lost. You might say it was less peculiar that almost every writer/literary/culture/arts/creative/humane type I knew had something to say in the form of everything from status updates, Tweets, and blog entries; to using what other great writers had to say about this great writer to say what he meant to them. To say the very least, on June 6th, 2012 there was a painfully gaping hole pierced into the heart of the American cultural landscape. And while I am in no way qualified to write an ode worthy of patching even a pixel of it, I however can pay homage by using this week’s first review to re-visit one of his most paramount works.

The occasion that lead to my first reading of Fahrenheit 451 is a fairy universal one: assigned reading. Oddly enough, I originally encountered the title on my preparatory summer reading list for sophomore chemistry class (a coincidence that led to some very imaginative interpretations of the title, as I grew up around adults who strictly read, and shelved, the classics – in the most archaic sense of the term). Four-hundred and fifty-one degrees: the temperature at which paper burns. The reference to which perhaps is reason why the first thing that most people think of in regards to the book is book burning – or censorship – itself. The publishers of the mass market paperback version – Del Ray Books – certainly seemed to think so, adorning the more commercial than praising byline of “The Classic Bestseller About Censorship – More Important Now Than Ever Before.” The latter half of which is more interesting, given the edition came out in 1987, as the observation remained a consistent one over the course of the book’s 50+ year lifetime. Ironically enough, less than a fifth of the class had read the book when the first day of class eventually came. But that didn’t stop Guy Montag from – horrible pun incoming – igniting a debate that an innocent onlooker might mistake for an actual scholastic discussion. This of course, speaks less in support for the matter, and more for the subject. No one wanted to be in a generation that was too dumb to realize that it was too dumb to realize anything. Wherein of course lays the dilemma, if we ever did reach that point, how would we know?

What has always impressed me most about Bradbury’s masterpiece is the immersive world he creates. A quick survey of only a few reviews over the past half-century will tell you I am not alone. While Fahrenheit’s America is a comprehensive one that stylishly emanates the dismal and spiritless aura Bradbury intended with a visceral force, the reason its setting is so remarkable (to me anyway) is how it defies all genre conventions, yet remains one of its staple achievements. Science fiction novels are supposed to be filled with flying cars, shiny clothes that talk, sleek gravity-and-architecture defying mountains of pristine steel, ubiquitous bliss and void of disease. But there is none of this in Fahrenheit 451. In fact the only discernible difference between our world and the one Bradbury constructed in 1953 is that books aren’t banned and that firefighters are still just that – and not firestarters. Hell, are the homes that Bradbury’s characters inhabit, with their four-walled television surroundings, igloos of mind-numbing media, any different than our iPhone-tablet-notebook-cinema-3DTV-HD modern day cyber-cemented environment? In this fictional society, happiness is commoditized, allotted, and distributed; and the proliferation of books – thoughts and ideas – only reduces the supply, the quality, while also most importantly, raises the price. Perhaps Montag’s boss, Chief Beatty, says it best:

“Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. (61)”

However, this book is not about book burning or censorship. As Bradbury himself has openly stated, it is about how television has corroded the literate circuits of society’s neurology. It is about the virus that makes it more appealing to drool upon one’s Cheetos covered flesh in a La-Z-Boy than browsing on one’s knees in some dusty library to find a relevant 10 hour cerebral journey. It is about the danger of believing in the “sense of motion without moving.” It is about the burning of culture. At their core (at least in theory), our technology is always intended to enrich the human experience. Facebook was supposed to make it easier to connect. Twitter was supposed to make it easier to communicate. Television was supposed to make it easier to tell stories. The internet was supposed to bring us all together. Even with appropriate historical deviations from these (admittedly trivial reductions) mentioned, the intentions can, more or less, be generalized as noble. And the results don’t necessarily support the opposite as the current digital-zeitgeist might suggest. Some people do use technology to enrich life, rather than permitting its erosion, as this TED talk by Stefana Broadbent eloquently, and empirically, expresses.

In other words, Bradbury’s message is not “we should say to hell with the machine”, but rather, “we will find ourselves to be hell if we become like the machine.” We allowed Facebook to turn friendship into a list of “friends” and preferring to “like” instead of love. We allowed Twitter to turn talking to tweeting. We kept watching Jersey Shore instead of The History Channel (or were inexplicably late in recognizing art like The Wire). The two sides at war here are not technology and man, but rather two forms of happiness: the hedonist and the spiritualist. Happiness doesn’t come in megabytes of data; it comes from taking mega bites out of the source. Books as they stand, both in Bradbury’s time as much as our own (though this is less and less becoming the case) were merely the review of the fruit – intended to entice. They are merely vessels for carrying the history of those who “braved the storm of life and lived” so that the rest of us may know that such a courage exists in us all. Bradbury says it best, ventriloquizing through ex-professor and Montag’s second significant mentor, Faber:

“It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need; it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. (82).”

So, go forth and find your own cosmic sewing machine; whether it burns at 451 degrees or not. Because otherwise the same flames will consume your exposed, naked mind – and you’ll believe in the “sense of motion, without moving at all”. Chances are you can find a copy of Fahrenheit 451 sitting on one of those side-walk book buys on your way to or from work (especially during the next few weeks).

And in honor of Ray Bradbury and intelligent thinking and meaningful human interaction everywhere – take a trip out to the New York Public Library. Remind yourself of the breathtaking resource tucked away in the heart of downtown. Read Fahrenheit 451 in a way and place similar to how and where it was written. While you’re at it, either before or after, stop by BareBurger for a great bite – and take advantage of the great student discount (below) provided by your friends at #CampusClipper!

Mahad Zara, The University of Arizona and Columbia University, Read my blog and follow me on Twitter

Click here to download the Campus Clipper iTunes App!

Follow Campus Clipper on Twitter or keep current by liking us on Facebook

Interested in more deals for student savings? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter to get the latest in student discounts and promotions. For savings on-the-go, download our printable coupon e-book

Share

Book Review: About a Mountain by John D’Agata – “To whomever I did not help.”

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

"...one of the most significant U.S writers to emerge in the past few years." - David Foster Wallace

It seemed to us we we’re a very great people” – The United States of America

John D'Agata

      A week into November of last year at the University of Arizona, right around when the leaves of date palms litter the walkways all over Tucson, I found myself in a familiar place: nose wedged in a book, eyes drowned in its ephemeral words, limbs temporarily frozen and forgotten; I was lost. My wasteland: the nuclear storage fields at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. My drug: our future. My spirit guide: John D’Agata. About a Mountain is one of those rare firecrackers of books that not only sparks  widespread controversy, but does so for a reason only other writers, penetrating thinkers, acerbic comedians and unattractive vampires can appreciate – being misunderstood. It took all of 10 pages before someone who didn’t fall into one of those categories – ironically, a geology professor (who is a leader in his field, and thus remain unnamed) – was overwhelmed by what could only have been a personal agitation that superseded general human etiquette, to point out – let’s say less than eloquently – that an entire book was dedicated to fact-checking the 200 pages of brilliance that laid in my hands, and unequivocally supported a conclusion that many readers had come to: in About a Mountain, John D’Agata is at his best, and John D’Agata is  completely full of shit.

      It isn’t hard to see why. Consider the book’s opening lines, describing Las Vegas’ centennial: “If you take the population of Las Vegas, Nevada, and you divide that by the number of days in the year, there should be 5,000 people in the city and its suburbs with a birthday on the same day that Las Vegas began. On the hundredth anniversary of its founding, however, Las Vegas had only gathered twenty-nine of those people.” Alongside lines such as the dedicatory inscription at the beginning of this review – in particular, one’s seemingly intended for an exceedingly enlightened, mysterious audience somewhere in the distant future – D’Agata immediately introduces readers to his favorite (and, unsurprisingly, most misunderstood) move: bending time and place while simultaneously trapezing between the ledges of fact and fiction. It is in this uncomfortable domain of the known and unknown where D’Agata’s peculiar logic, his idiosyncratic mind, and fascinating personal experience are employed (and shine) to reexamine not only where we are, but also where we’ve been; and most portent – where we are going.

      You might have noticed that I’ve reached several hundred words without actually diving into the masterful narrative that Charles Bock of The New York Times called “unquestionably art, a breathtaking piece of writing.” A review that reprimanded – and derided – the artist only a few paragraphs later for the same reasons for which it initially protruded with admiring jaundice: “I don’t know what to think. What’s specific or representative or smudged? Pandora’s box is wide open.” What Mr. Bock fails to realize, despite his awareness of D’Agata’s explicit claim that “I[He] is in search of art” and not fact is that this was precisely the book’s purpose – one that (perhaps without the reader’s acknowledgement) it polemically fulfills.

So why should you, or anyone, really care? The overarching message of About a Mountain serves as a messianic compass as we attempt to successfully navigate our way through this precarious storm of cultural and technological chaos. More than ever, the ability to critically parse between fact and fiction, numbers and art, truth and wisdom is paramount to our continued existence; one that is worth preserving anyway. The book itself weaves an in-depth coverage of the political suave and maneuvers used to re-interpret a million year problem into a 10,000 year solution (an absolutely stunning metaphor for the pattern of thinking that has lead us here) along with the tragic story of Levi Presley – a boy who jumped off the Stratosphere tower in Vegas – and the connection of his death to D’Agata’s own experience answering calls on a suicide hotline. It is because, not despite, this discordance that D’Agata’s ambition and pursuit of art is realized. Here, the details that are debated  (resolved with end notes in later editions) – from the significant, such as the day of Levi’s death, to the minuscule, such as the actual color of hills in the Nevadan autumn – are irrelevant. Keeping up? Good. Because it is through this very deliberate and aesthetically striking ridiculing of fact, or knowledge, that any of the information is made relevant.

credit: IowaNow

      Creative Nonfiction is not journalism – D’Agata despises the term, instead championing the “essay”, invoking Montaigne’s “essai”, meaning ‘an attempt or trial’ to route the journey of consciousness throughout a narrative; a provocative stance to say the least. His elastic perspective regarding this paradigm is manifested in the titles of the book’s chapters: starting with the journalistic staples of “Who, What, How, Where and When” and concluding with a trifecta that outlaws objectivity entirely, “Why, Why, Why.” Certainly, this complex concept is beautifully articulated when he writes, “Clear that if I point to something like significance, there is the possibility that nothing real is there. Sometimes we misplace knowledge in pursuit of information. Sometimes our wisdom, too, in pursuit of what’s called knowledge.” Indeed this is a hefty price to pay for maintaining the beloved boundary, the artificial security, between objectivity and subjectivity, where intellectual vertigo and doubt are priceless casualties in the name of conventional tradition. D’Agata’s perspicacious observation is further reflected in the portrayal of back-door politicians who recommend the feasible option instead of confronting the truth with wisdom. Despite the borderline infinite data on Yucca Mountain, “a place that we have studied more thoroughly at this point than any other parcel of land in the world… still it remains unknown, revealing only the fragility of our capacity to know.”

“When we are not sure, we are alive.” – Graham Greene

While I can’t direct you anywhere in the city with palm trees year round, there are plenty of opinionated strangers everywhere. So why not grab a copy of  About a Mountain  and head to Cafe Mocha, fill up with a great sandwich, then focus in with a free Cappuccino (using the coupon below), and if you absolutely can’t help yourself, ‘fact-check’ this monumental work with their free WiFi.

Mahad Zara, The University of Arizona and Columbia University, Read my blog and follow me on Twitter

Click here to download the Campus Clipper iTunes App!

Follow Campus Clipper on Twitter or keep current by liking us on Facebook

Interested in more deals for students? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter to get the latest in student discounts and promotions. For savings on-the-go, download our printable coupon e-book

Share