This is probably one of the best posts on why Wikipedia and academia don't mix.
It does seem that Wiki goes beyond a typical encyclopedia in detail, especially on certain entries that have twenty different subheadings, yet I can definitely see the need to put limitations on how and where students should use Wiki tidbits.

I was finally accepted to the University of WA English graduate program. Now I just wait and see if I was also accepted as a Teaching Assistant.

*huge grin*

The author of this post seems to be the type of person now voting for Obama. It's interesting seeing how much he correctly projected in terms of the general debacle still currently playing out.

technology

Thanks to my internet being down for a couple of weeks, I was forced to become reaquainted with that seething mass of yellow paper and black ink otherwise known as the phone book. It's a funny instrument, highly useful when Google is off limits, and perhaps even when I do have internet access. The miracle of search engines is not to be belittled, but one does have to have a general idea of what one is looking for. Wheras with the phone book, one might be browsing through looking for, say, a dance clothing shop, whereupon that said person realizes those shops are sandwiched in between 12 dairy suppliers and 4 dart board makers. You can't really find that variety with just one search on Google. I suppose you could look up the Yellow pages online, but that would just be silly.

teaching

About a year and a half ago, I was speaking with one of my professors about graduate school. He was writing me a letter of rec, and he queried why I was just applying to the English grad program and not to Communication (as that was my undergrad degree). I responded off the top of my head (not a safe place to grab stuff from generally) that I didn't want to spend my life performing statistical studies. He seemed somewhat disappointed in my answer and iterated how that really wasn't the focus of the department.

I think I have a better answer now. The more I think about it in this long interim, the more I realize that my true love is teaching. I want to teach college kids to write and how to write well. Now of course I want to integrate what I learned about new technologies and the like, different texts = different ways of writing. But even then in my professor's office I knew on some subconscious level that I was interested more in the structure rather than the content.

It's really the teaching. In my current part time job as a writing tutor, I love it when the kids finally "get" something and when I see their writing improve. Even if it takes a long while, at the very least I seem to be good at helping them see that writing is not the horrific behemoth they once thought.

Hopefully the above ideas come across not quite as cheesy but just as heartfelt as they would in person.

once again

Well, all my stuff is ready and compiled, except for my writing samples that I will print out at the Odegaard Library. At approximately 2:30 today I will have just turned in my application for the UW's English doctoral program. Here's hoping the English classes I took this summer and fall earn me some brownie points. They were quite fun/stimulating/freakin hard/yet interesting at the very least.

"blogging and blugging"

Interesting article.

Religion and Tech?

In Jerry Seinfeld's latest interview, he discloses how he used tenets of Scientology to improve his interpersonal communication and performance skills, going so far to say as "It's all technology."

In another article also posted today on msnbc, tech is used to create Jesus 2.0. The proliferation of Christian based, or faith based websites is being touted as shifting the way we worship.

Now I use a few websites myself for theological questions - enduringword.com being one. But does this really change the way I worship? I'm definitely getting more information, perhaps more quickly than in the past when I would have waited for an opportunity to talk to someone with expertise in the area I had questions about.

In the Jesus 2.0 article, this quote disturbed me, and really gets to the point of this post.

"Spark Networks spokeswoman Gail Laguna argues that religion has a real power to pull together a niche market online" (my emphasis).

Not addressed in this article is how these online sites are being funded. Pop up ads? Donations? Specific churches funding them? When Seinfeld took Scientology classes, how much did he have to pay for them.

I'm finding this recent conflation of technology and religion, all the while ignoring the undergirding economic forces, highly disturbing.

Slate.com has quite a few instances of this, albeit a bit more implicit. "Blogging the Bible" was quite popular on the front page for a few months. There was recently a bit of buzz concerning the man who lived every rule (really?) of the Bible for an entire year. Now, journalism, especially online journalism, is a bit trickier to unpack in terms of economics, besides the fact that journalists want to get paid. But in the case of the Biblical guinea pig, he had a book coming out describing his experiences.

letters

In the past year and a half, three close friends moved to San Francisco, Kansas, and Singapore. Add to that my graduating around the same time and no longer having an excuse to foray from the Eastside over to Seattle = stalking friends on Facebook for information on their quotidian pastimes.

I love writing letters. I've asked various friends for their home addresses in the hopes of maintaining pen pal relationships with at least a few that have minutes to spend jotting down their life on paper. And I received my first return from that small effort yesterday. My one friend from Kansas wrote me a beautiful note (her handwriting is sooo much better than mine) and expressed her hopes that we could become even better friends through writing. I definitely think we can, but I asked myself why is it easier to maintain a friendship for some with letters, some with emails? Being in the letter department, which seems to be fast dying, I'm especially curious.

Now, my friend and I are both writers/Engl majors, and we both tend to like the idea of writing in general. The connotations of some old (now dead) British dude writing a classic fable by the hearth side with quill pen and ink on parchment hold infinitely more novel appeal for us than email.

How about Facebook? Well, the layout doesn't seem especially conducive to long letters about personal feelings, aspirations, hopes and dreams. One would have to use up half the page to equal the size of a normal hand written letter. Plus, the Wall is public, and messages are (possibly) checked by moderators.

Yet this whole tech thing isn't going away. What space do letters occupy in the era where we have both Facebook and pen and paper? (It was via Facebook that I got my friend's address) Hopefully the novelty of the letter will keep a few devoted people pushing through hand cramps in honor of this form of communication.

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's innocent ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
In contrast is Barry Spacks' "Freshmen":
Full of certainties and reasons,
or uncertainties and reason,
full of reasons as a conch contains the sea,
they wait; for the term's first bell;
for another mismatched wrestle through the year;
for a teacher who's religious in his art,
a wizard of a sort, to call the role
and from mere names
cause people
to appear.
The best look like the swinging door
to the Opera just before
the Marx Brothers break through.
The worst -- debased,
on the back row,
as far as one can go
from speech --
are walls where childish scribbling's been erased;
are stones
to teach.
And I am paid to ask them questions:
Dare man proceed by need alone?
Did Esau like
his pottage?
Is any heart in order after Belsen?
And when one stops to think, I'll catch his heel,
put scissors to him, excavate his chest!
Watch, freshmen, for my words about the past
can make you turn your back. I wait to throw,
most foul, most foul, the future in your face.
~ William Butler Yeats

children's authors

So, I've been on a kick of rereading my old books from childhood, partially inspired by my sister hauling them all up from the basement. I realized that I threw some of them out in the folly of youth, writing them off as too boring or "little kid" for me. Imagine my shock to find that some of them have been out of print for years, and that the classics of my youth are being replaced by Harry Potter wannabes.

When I was younger, Pippi Longstocking, The Rescuers, and The Cricket in Times Square taught me that imagination is wonderful, mice are resourceful, and cats like singing along with Slim Whitman. Good, silly, fun. Now the kids section of Barnes and Noble is filled with book after book about vampires, werewolves, magicians, and sorcerers. Is this necessarily a bad thing? No, I loved the Dealing with Dragons series when I was younger. But seriously, does a twelve year old girl need to be fantasizing about falling in love with a vampire, or a vampire/werewolf? Or whatever combo the authors of today will come up with next to sell paper?

There was only one copy of The Cricket, squelched in between multiple copies of the latest fad series.

If the writing was actually palatable, I might be able to look at this differently. But flipping through a few of these 'novels' reveals a liberal dose of melodrama and sensuality/violence in place of good writing.

There is another disturbing trend of the grade school author, most likely jumpstarted by the success of Eragon. Do I think young people should be encouraged to explore, create, and write? Yes. Do I think it should be published and held up as a standard of writing? No. Part of the reason we are so encouraged to read as kids is because reading helps us with our own writing and overall comprehension of the world. Twelve year olds should not be looking to twelve year old writing, but beyond.

Keep your heart healthy.