I haven’t written in a while, and I don’t necessarily have anything exciting to say at length, so I’m going to write a little, but a couple of times. Blogging Lite, I call it.
First up: Sister Act II. Great movie. Okay, “great” might be an over-statement, but as a staple TBS movie, it’s gold. A “TBS movie” being not only a movie that is played regularly on TBS, it is a movie that you can start watching from any point, and continue to the end, without missing any useful content. This is possible either because there is no useful content, or because the movie is so familiar that you already know what you’ve missed. For me, Sister Act II falls into both categories.
The things that make it such a good movie go beyond Whoopi Goldberg dressed up as a nun. It’s deep and insightful about the plight of inner-city schools. It’s basically a Stand and Deliver with less Latinos and more singing. Kind of like Natalie Wood starring in West Side Story.
And it’s actually the singing that’s so great. Sure, it’s a little slow in the beginning – these kids are way too “street” to sing. But sure enough, the super-hip Whoopi is able to convince them to give it a shot. Doing her best Harold Hill impression, she “la las” them into an amazing choir. And amazing they are. When they first perform, they are timid and shy, especially the soloist, who doesn’t seem to know how to sing at all. By bringing them back into focus, though, not only can they start to sing, but Ahmal, the soloist, turns out to be simply phenomenal. He tears the roof off with his rendition of “Oh Happy Day.” When he hits the high note that surprises everyone, if you don’t feel chills, then you have no soul (both literally and figuratively).
And then, of course, you have the finale, where they do the hip-hoppingest version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (Ninth Symphony), showing up the super-strict, traditional choir who sing the “same” song.
Everything comes together, we see Lauryn Hill is gonna be a super-star, and best of all, they save the school! Now, I went to a public school with a fantastic chorus, and I can honestly say that when the district almost went on austerity, no amount of fancy singing awards was going to kept those boys and girls in maroon jackets (it just so happened we had a championship football team and enough sports boosters willing to raise money until the next budget election to keep us rolling in the arts).
What’s so weird is that the movie was definitely a vehicle to showcase Lauryn Hill’s talents, but also to display Ahmal’s, played by Ryan Toby. But we all saw Hill’s assent into stardom, and yet Toby was left to the wayside. Or was he . . . ?
You see, Toby eventually resurfaced in the hip-hop/r&b group City High. He was one of the two guys you didn’t care about while watching Claudette Ortiz singing (you might remember the song “What Would You Do?”). So you see, Hill wasn’t the only one to make it (and Toby did it without becoming kind of a nut-job).
Also, if you pay attention, you’ll notice Jennifer Love Hewitt doing her thing—post- “Kids Incorporated”, pre-Trojan War—her three best works.
Lastly, the full title of the movie is Sister Act II: Back in the Habit.
It’s a pun. Pun’s are awesome.
‘Nuff said.
Now that I have a roommate, I find myself watching a lot more shows that I normally wouldn’t.
Reality shows.
Now, before I discuss these shows, I do want to point out that I wasn’t actually “forced” to watch television, but that instead of doing, say, anything else, I paid homage to that glowing black box.
Except my “box” is flat. God it’s beautiful . . .
Anyway, last week I saw the finales of two shows, the ubiquitous “Real World,” and “America’s Next Top Model.” Honestly, I don’t have a lot to say about the two shows, because they pretty much speak for themselves (literally), but I will say this:
1) Renee clearly should have won
2) Davis set back gay rights a couple of years
3) Everything in Tom de Zengotita’s book Mediated is completely true
Okay, number three is kind of a shameless plug (or, would be shameless if you knew anything about me, so maybe it’s just a plug), but it’s a great book if you want to understand the world we’re living in. It’s a little deep at times, but it’s got a pretty easy-going style.
Which leads me to . . .
Academic papers.
My semester is finally over, and having got my final papers back, I received one constant criticism (albeit in varied form): “colloquial style.”
Apparently, the way I write my papers (which I guess is kind of like how I’m writing right now), isn’t cool with the academic community. It’s not professional-sounding.
Oddly, though, I hear that as meaning: people can actually read it and understand it.
Case-in-point: I mentioned my problems with Emmanuel Levinas in a previous post. Here’s a guy who obviously had an idea, and went out of his way to tell the world about it. Or did he? Because, let me tell you, the world isn’t reading Levinas. That might be because they never heard of him, but it could also be because they can’t read Levinas. Even with someone more famous, such as Foucault, Sartre, or Nietzsche, very few people can actually read and understand their writing (“few” being a relative term). And yet apparently these guys are dropping pretty important knowledge. So where does that leave us?
Turning to others to translate for us. To bring us closer to understanding, say, Levinas’ understanding. But what happens when the “others” are just as impenetrable as the original?
Hubris.
Hubris?
Academic hubris. What I mean by this is that the “Academy” feels that it is the keeper of the Knowledge (capital “K”). Because their livelihood depends on being counted on to decipher these texts for us, it is imperative that they in turn encode their understanding so that they can preserver their role as “explainers.” Sounds like a conspiracy, doesn’t it? And yet it isn’t too far from the truth. “Acadamese” is essentially a technical jargon that you have to be trained to understand, and writing an academic paper becomes less about educating the masses as it is about displaying your ability to adhere to a system (for a cool example of how this worked, read this. You are automatically limiting your audience to people who understand your language.
Apparently, most of the world does not fit in that category.
Now, this may seem a bit ranty, but it just seems odd to me that a “conversational style” is an unacceptable form of discourse. I mean, if the Ideas are there, and they are presented with evidence to back them up, then who cares if it’s in the form of casual prose or a comic book? I don’t mind getting graded off for my content, but my form? What does form have to do with knowledge?
Answer: Nothing. It’s elitism and it’s snobbery.
It’s also kind of stupid. Think about it from a marketing stand-point: what is the value of a book that no one (relative) is going to read? Obviously technical matters, such as scientific papers, tend to be inherently dry, but even that has found a popular audience. Do you know who Stephen Hawking is? I rest my case. So think what you could do with the humanities. Imagine having a great idea on how to interpret a piece of literature, and writing up the idea in such a way so that everyone who reads that book thinks of your idea. Wouldn’t that be great? Moreover, isn’t that the point? To make your idea a part of the literature so that the two are inseparable, thus making your mark and ensuring your position. Which is, of course, the second point of marketing, in which you sell yourself. Style is the way in which writers distinguish themselves from other writers (in conjunction with content). And yet, I’m reading comments on my papers about topic sentences, anecdotes, and figures of speech.
Granted, there were also comments about content, but that’s besides the point—or, at least, part of the point, but not exactly something I wanted to share. But maybe I should. Because I think that maybe if I rocked the house with my research, my style wouldn’t be so much of an issue. However, I didn’t actually do that poorly on these papers, meaning that in the end, my theories weren’t too poorly articulated, and it was my style sticking in their craw, if only a wee bit.
The weird thing is that books like Hawking’s and de Zengotita’s have had success. Clearly there is research, clearly there are ideas, and yet they are written so that people can actually understand them (especially consider Hawking’s, whose A Brief History of Time, which sold quite well, was re-written as A Briefer History of Time, to make the theories even more accessible). I’m not saying I’m writing ground-breaking stuff, but at least someone without a graduate-level education could get to the crux of my papers.
Maybe that’s “selling out.” But last time I checked, universities were going away from the tenure system. Who’s more likely to be given a professorship in the future: the person who publishes Acadamese papers in journals, or the person who publishes best-selling books? I’m not saying I can even belong in either of these categories, but I’m thinking this: If I was the president of the university, I’d probably want the “name” on my faculty, because it might be easier to loosen the purse strings that bolster the endowment if I can trot out the guy who was on “Oprah” instead of the lady who presented at the International Conference on Poems Written About Left-Handed Haberdashers (I’m willing to bet that such poems exist, if not the conference itself).
In Death of a Discipline, a book that kind of falls on the Academic-side of this argument, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (say that name five times fast) calls for those who study Comparative Literature to join forces with those who engage in “Area Studies,” combining, re-thinking, and re-working the approach of these disciplines to be able to do a more thorough (and better) job. At a couple of points, she makes clear that this will not be an easy process, but in the end, this evolution will greatly benefit the studies.
Where I agree with Spivak is that it will be beneficial and that there will be resistance.
What I’m proposing though is not a “combination” of two disciplines, but a de-mystification of all disciplines.
Or maybe I just don’t want to have to change how I write my papers.
The bathroom at my job has a plaque that says:
Plan Ahead: It wasn't raining when Noah built the Ark.
For some reason, I have a problem with this. First off . . . come on. Plaque in the bathroom? Is that necessary? If I want to read in a bathroom, I’ll bring my own material. Or, at least if you’re providing, try some magazines or something. I don’t want to be inspired on the toilet. I’ve got some things on my mind already. That’s why churches have pews, not stalls.
Second, what is the plaque saying, anyway? Yes, on a factual basis it wasn't raining when Noah built the Ark (and by the way, I have some problems with the fact that there are two “Arks” in the bible, and the more important one is less famous -- heck, if it wasn’t for Indiana Jones, some of us still might not know about it. I mean, couldn’t God have come up with a different word for these two artifacts? Then again, he did leave it up to Adam to name everything, so maybe we should just blame the Son of Man). But that’s not the point of the plaque. The message is that Noah, by building the Ark, had the forethought to be prepared for the Flood. That he was being prepared like a proto-Boy Scout.
Here’s my issue with this: He had God telling him to build the Ark! I’d plan ahead too if Yaweh sent me a personal e-mail detailing exactly what I needed to do if I didn’t want to die a horrible death.
So I guess my problem is not so much the message (as trite as it is), but the context. It’s not exactly fair to compare my getting a presentation ready with Noah building the Ark. Not really the analogy I would have went with.
Unless my job is trying to tell me to plan ahead about my time in the bathroom. In which case I guess I do make sure there is toilet paper.
I guess that went pretty long anyway. I should write my prefaces after I write the post.
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