Teaching Diasporas, Mummy Relics, and the Future of the Serial: an Enthusiasm of Links

Grim news: foreign language education in American public schools is in sharp decline, largely because No Child Left Behind has drawn resources away from any subject it does not directly test.  This troubles me. If there is anything I would want my (utterly hypothetical) children to study from a very young age, it is language (foreign and, well, domestic).  Acquisition is so much easier in childhood than in later years, and it is a skill set that is both profoundly useful and tremendously marketable.  Furthermore, (and perhaps this is why language study is proving unpopular in much of America) it acknowledges the multicultural reality of our nation while preparing us to be active citizens within that culture of pluralism, and it combats American isolationism (and thus allows us to engage more fruitfully in global diplomacy, the world economic market, and the free exchange of artistic, academic, and scientific ideas across national boundaries.).

Sigh.

But an odd silver lining: the teaching of Chinese is way up, largely because the Chinese government is partially funding a teaching diaspora.

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As it turns out, Joan of Arc's bones are actually fragments of mummified Egyptian remains, some of them feline.  No kidding.  More details are coming out in the glare of modern technological examination, but when the feline remains were first identified a few years ago, academics speculated that perhaps someone threw a demonic familiar into the flames after St. Jeanne.  Except the remains all predate the Maid of Orleans by hundreds of years.

I trust you are on top of this story, Dan Brown.

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I have quite a thing for the serial format: in television, in novels, in blogs. In fact, I once proposed the idea that HBO (or a similarly ambitious network) should give a group of TV auteurs a series of fixed-length serial format macro-series contracts: a show that would be on the air for 30 or 40 episodes, for instance. It would have a larger arc, of course, unlike most TV series, which aren't teleological in their orientation, but wouldn't be fully mapped out like most mini-series, so it would be allowed to develop like a longer series.  Most of all, the creators would be safe from cancellation during this limited-but-not-short run.  And they could pace the show accordingly.  Because this is the major problem with television as a serial medium: pacing, which fluctuates wildly according to the threat of cancellation and various prognostications about the likelihood and length of renewal.

I also have an equivalent fondness for the nineteenth-century serial novel as a format, and a curiosity about how new media can adapt these conventions.  The Guardian speculates about the form here, and much of the debate in the comments sections seems to be taken up with issues of pacing and its ties to questions of melodrama and taste.


Righto.  Time to get on with my day of chores and Beckett reading.  More later, perhaps...

The Curse and Cherpumple Pie

I am fairly sure a curse has fallen upon me.

Yesterday I managed to rack up $1300 in car expenses, and while attempting to shake off the lingering unease from that encounter with the mechanic (I mean, think how many books I could have bought with $1300!!), I sat down in front of the television and my TiVo promptly died.  No warning.  Just total hard-drive collapse after less than a year and a half.  Tsk, TiVo.  I am a devotee of your brand, but this hardly seems like a just reward for the fervor I have exhibited in recommending your product to others.  I practically bullied my poor parents into getting one (which they now love) with several years of constant, tiresome, superior references to how much better their viewing experience would be if they could pause, rewind, watch shows on their schedule, etc.  And this is how you repay me.  Sigh.

At any rate, since I am now cut off from access to my television until I can acquire another DVR or figure out how to rewire my entertainment system, how 'bout I take a few minutes to assemble an enthusiasm of links?

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Something brainy:

I am always intrigued by the neurology of theatre, despite being of a rather unscientific cast of mind myself.  In this video piece from the Guardian, the actress Fiona Shaw (who is always up for an experimental approach to the issues of her field) agrees to have her brain scanned while "performing" to see how this state of mind differs from normal human use of language.

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Something tawny:

On ethnicity and the aesthetics of fake tans.  As, of course, exemplified by my beloved Dancing with the Stars, and expressed by... and here's where we enter the realm of the surreal... The Wall Street Journal.

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Something tasty:

Or at least I thought so.  D sent me to the website This is why you're fat, expecting me to join him in deploring the state of our culinary culture.  He was horrified when I kept exclaiming that the items displayed there were sublime and I wished I was eating them right now.  "No!!!" he cried, "This website is not a meal-idea-generator! It is an apocalyptic warning!".  But really, there is something about the Cherpumple Pie that touches on the sublime.

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And something punny:

The best wordplay I have seen in quite some time comes courtesy of a decade-reviewing column for the New York Times by Richard Powers, one of my father's favorite authors.  Speaking about how the Wii defies our sense that the inevitable drift of a cyberculture is towards the incorporeal, the mental, the fleshless, he finally concludes:

Three years on, we’re less easily fooled by the Wiimote. We game the system. Gullible tennis pros still make their grand forehand smashes, but they also serve who only sit and flick their wrists.

An Enthusiasm of Links

What should the collective noun be for a bevy, a flock, a fleet of links?  This is a great question for the ages.  I will have to ponder it.  Suggestions welcome.  Is there already a collective noun in use? (Or rather, is there already a sufficiently delightful collective noun in use?)

At any rate, I have a chatter of linkage to share with you today:


A blog that never fails to delight: Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog, in which the poet of the Canterbury Tales broods on current and medieval cultural events, like the Twilight phenomenon and the Seth Rogan bromance outbreak:

Ich did reede of the book, the which is yclept, The Bromance of the Rose. It ys writen by Judd Da Poitou, and featureth a Dreamer (Seth Rojean) that enterteth the fayre garden of the lord of pleasure. Yn this garden, the Dreamer looketh depe ynto the fountain of Narcissus, and in yts cristal watirs he seeth a fayre and delicaat Rose. The Rose ys also a woman bycause this ys an allegorie and allegories are lyk that. He falleth in love. So the Dreamer loveth the Rose, but a numbir of evil allegorical figures appeare to nip the relaciounship in the bud. Daungier, Ful Schedule, Incompatible Musique Tastes, Office Gossip, and Uninformed Gender-Based Assumpciouns al rear their allegoricallye ugly heades. The Rose rejecteth the Dreamer and thus he ys in the dogge-house (yt is an allegorie so he actuallie ys in ther wyth the dogg).

An earlier post occurs after the throne is usurped by Henry Bolingbroke, who stages a hostile takeover that makes television into a state apparatus, and uses a website entitled "Television without Mercy" to proclaim the new world order:

GOSSIP GIRL: Spotted: at the Tower of London ys Gossip Girl herself, who hath been ycaught by the diligence of Henry Bolingbroke. She ys taken to Tyburn and hanged. Ye who heare the recap of thys episode, think on what a thyng it is to be a gossip and a teller of tales. Beholdeth the rewardes of telling the pryvytees of othirs upon a blogge! Be ware, lest in yower owene blogges ye bicom jangleres and telleres of tales! Thinketh on yt and in yower myndes rekeneth how deedes haue their endes. Thus endeth the episode.

SO YE THINKE YE KAN DAUNCEN?: Thys episode openeth wyth all of the contestants in front of special guest judge Henry Bolingbroke. Oon by oon, he asketh each if he or she kan daunce. Yf he or she kan nat, ther ys a hanging. Ye who heare the recap of thys epsiode, think on whether ye kan dauncen, and what ye wolde saye yn front of nat only an earthli judge, but eek the high Judge himself upon hys throne at the final daunce. KAN YE DAUNCE? KAN YE? ANSWIR WEL OR THOU SHALT DAUNCE IN FLAYMES. Thus endeth the episode.

It is all brilliant, really.  And of course there is merchandise. I am very strongly considering buying a "Whan Adam delf and Eve span, who had to publish two books to get tenure?" tee-shirt.

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Postmodern piano! The new and delightfully named "fluid piano"

allows players to alter the tuning of notes either before or during a performance. Instead of a pianist having a fixed sound, 88 notes from 88 keys, Smith's piano has sliders allowing them access to the different scales that you get in, for example, Indian and Iranian music. For good measure, Smith has included a horizontal harp.

I am not a musician, by any means (when I was in high school, I tried the cello, but the sounds I made were more closely related to those that emerge from a veterinary hospital for farm animals than from a concert hall), but I have always wondered about how the relative stability of technology (instruments) and language (musical notation) over centuries has affected western music.  So I await the fluid piano experiments with interest.

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It had been some time since I had last read Go Fug Yourself, and when I finally did return to it, it was calamitous: I had pulled a muscle in my back at the gym and every time I guffawed, I followed it with a wail of pain.  Particularly delightful and thus pain-inducing was this series of posts on the subject of the wee Twilight heartthrobs and their struggles with desire and hygiene.

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An out of print Edward Gorey book? And could it be more delightfully named: The Recently Deflowered Girl: The Right Thing to Say on Every Dubious Occasion ?

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There is something of a scuffle afoot in Paris surrounding where Albert Camus's remains should rest.  The oddity of this story is only enhanced by the fact that it added a new word to my vocabulary: Panthéonization.

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P.S. I did get the "Whan Adam delf and Eve span" t-shirt.  But I also couldn't resist one that threatened others in an Anglo-Saxon idiom: "Don't make me unlock my word-hoard on you."   Ah well....