The Classroom Conservative

Ghost Town

I hate the determinism of contemporary culture. We know who has won an election based on "exit polls," even though all the polls have not closed. We know that a film is a "bomb" based on one night's receipts. The latter was the fate of Ghost Town, Ricky Gervais' big screen star turn, a film whose word of mouth was silenced by nothing more than the bad press bought by a cool start. Undeterred, stubborn, we marched off to the matinee last weekend: we paid ten bucks each, even though we knew that the second run theatre would have a print within a fortnight. Take that, contemporary culture!

The premise is familiar. Grumpy dentist Bertram Pincus (Gervais) can see dead people, and while they do not want to eat his brain, they really, really need his help. The most persistent of these spooks is played by Greg Kinnear in a complex comedic performance; he is Frank Herlihy, a womanizer whose style is cramped by a speeding bus. The chemistry between Gervais and Kinnear is solid, as the latter convinces the former to intervene and stop the widow Herlihy (played with surprising appeal by Tea Leone) from marrying again. There are charming little touches, as for example when the awkward Pincus is caught wearing the pricetag on the shirt he bought to impress. What is clear is that Gervais makes better those around him: Aasif Mandvi (from The Daily Show) and the wonderful Kristen Wiig (from Saturday Night Live) are polished to a fine shine in supporting roles. In the end, the movie turns on a love triangle that leaves Kinnear's character, deliciously, out in the cold. The other notable point is how appealing Manhattan looks in its depiction here: this film could have been made by the New York tourist bureau.

I will understand, at this point, if you wait to rent Ghost Town, but you would be missing out if you missed it, entirely.

The Obsessions Of A Bookseller

Long before I was able to get an advance copy of Writing the Lost Generation, I was thrilled to see it listed on amazon.ca, available for preorder. It irked me that they did not have the cover illustration, of which I am very proud, and so I sent an image along. I set up the little widget on the right. Other online booksellers followed, but the information available on the Amazon sites made it then, and make it now, impossible not to peek in and take a look each day.

I am prouder than anything with my ability to sell well within the "modernism" category. I am realistic about the sales potential of an academic book, but it is nice to see how well it does amongst its direct competition. I have given titan Fredric Jameson a run for his money this fall, though his book has been out a year and must have some steam out of it by now. When my book is doing well in its category, it peeks into the "top thousand" which, if you consider all the books Stephen King, Tom Clancy, et al, have in print, is not too shabby.

One thing at which I marvel is how much the variability there is in the price. Barnes and Noble has always had a consistent, discounted online price, but the Amazon sites have gone up and down. The Canadian preorder was discounted deeply, and we moved many copies. Now, the discount is "one cent." I am not kidding. The American site put in a discount after a few copies moved, but since they started telling prospective customers that it might take a month to ship, the effect has been blunted. Chapters online, in Canada, has always been full recommended list plus two dollars.

My publisher, I have found, has reasonable prices. I am aghast at other academic publishers who charge three times as much for some of my colleagues' books as Iowa does for mine.

The used sites have been equally interesting. The wonderful Strand bookstore in Manhattan sold at least one inexpensive copy, but another one has gathered dust as other sellers move new ones. What is behind that, I wonder? Some textbook mills with multiple copies have sold all theirs. The book is far more expensive in Europe, and I have little sense of what is going on.

I like watching the universal library catalogues to see where my title has landed. I am surprised at how quickly books get ordered and catalogued these days. I remember this taking a much longer time.

In any case, time was when authors looked only for reviews. This is yet another change ushered in through the internet.

Playing The Judgment Card And Pushing The Envelope

The American election is in high gear, as John McCain tries to save the tarnished Republican brand from the idea, so aptly framed by James Howard Kunstler, that the GOP is "the party that wrecked America." Good luck with that. Soon, Sarah Palin will seek to prove that water is not wet. Up here in Canada, we are in the midst of our own federal election campaign, a low-key affair that feels like nothing more than an aftershock.

In the United States, bloggers on the left and the right scrutinize everything said by candidates and their proxies, but the latest discovery of a new misrepresentation from Governor Palin does little more than polarize voters further. There is the feeling in Canada that our own political gridlock could be broken by a so-called "gotcha" moment. And so we endure days and days of disclosures of something a candidate wrote twenty years ago. People are asked to step aside because of "racially insensitive" remarks, "cold cut" cracks made during a listeriosis crisis.

Okay, fair is fair. If my candidate exhibits poor judgment, I want to know. But this search for the "gotcha" smacks of as much desperation as Liberal leader Stephane Dion trotting out the individuals who might have better led his party, his vanquished foes who do nothing more than highlight his own scary radicalism. I have always thought there is something dangerous in trying to demonstrate the menacing habits of thought of your opponents: you risk allowing the electorate to develop sympathy for - or even empathy with - them. I do not believe, for example, that Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz should resign because of his tasteless jokes. He should resign if it can be shown that he did his job poorly. If his own constituents want to turf him because of his personal judgment, that is their business. But as leader after leader lines up to speak of Mr. Ritz like a war criminal, I can only think that, like me, you remember some comment you made when you should have kept your mouth shut.

And, when Canadians start to associate themselves with Gerry Ritz, our Tories have won half the battle.

What Do We Do When They Know Too Much?

When I was a graduate student teaching the kinds of things about which I knew little, as graduate students must, I would spend my evenings working through these doorstop-sized Victorian novels, only to have some kid, only slightly more pimply than I was, ask me a question about which he surely knew more than I did. I would look thoughtful and quiz her or him on the specific passage that gave rise to the question and then rush to think a half-step ahead.

It was great and reckless fun at 25.

These days, I stand in terror of some 21-year-old who has read more philosophy than have I, some 18-year-old who has stumbled into my lecture with head spinning from sociological brilliance to prune my thoughts before they blossom.

But this, I fear, is the middle-aged-man's version of the adolescent nightmare in which we go to class naked having slept in while forgetting to study for an exam. It does not happen. It is not that my ideas are brilliant, particularly, it is just that they have not read the dissenting opinion. Everything seems like an introduction. Everything feels like an affront to their homespun, cracker-barrel assumptions about the world in which they live. If I was younger, I might pray for the challenging question.

In teaching a class last week on American transcendentalism, I longed for students to have more background in European romanticism. Oh, how Emerson would come alive if only they knew Wordsworth before they got to me. But, alas, Romanticism is pitched at the same level here, and two such courses cannot be pre-reqs for each other. And, anyway, the more proscriptive the requirements, the smaller the pool from which to fish.

So, I put the worm on the hook on the end of the string at the end of the branch, and off I go into waters of varying depths.

What is actually most troubling are the circumstances in which students who have some background ever do come to us. This is most often the student who is "repeating" a course or who has "background knowledge." At the University of Lethbridge, students in the former category can take any course twice, space permitting, and so it is not impossible to find a "C" student wanting an "A" to get into a professional program back in a class again. Do these students intimidate classmates who are hearing all this for the first time? Anecdotal evidence suggests this is so. The most troubling examples are in language courses, where students who have lived abroad bring, sometimes, advanced skills into the classroom, as in the latter category above. Can we penalize students who, on the basis of what language they heard their parents speak, know more than students just starting out? We certainly try. There are pre-reqs, credit restrictions, and placement tests. But the truth is that these regulations have few teeth.

I support trying, as far as is reasonably possible, to place students in environments where they will learn, not simply where they will have their prior learning assessed. To do the latter is not my job. I tell my students that as soon as someone invents a meat thermometer that can assign them a grade when placed in their ear, I will adopt it. Until then, I will test them on what we have done after we have done it. And, if someone's boredom impedes this exchange, if someone's keenness to demonstrate prior learning disrupts the class, I have to act.

But that is a terrible responsibility with which to burden an instructor. We need to find better ways in administrating places of learning to make sure people are in the right classes. I guess, at the end of the day, I'd rather have to stretch myself to fill in the gaps - even if that is less fun - than I would to find that there are no gaps for me to fill.

David Byrne And Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Listening to the NPR "All Songs Considered" podcast on a recent drive to Calgary, I heard "Strange Overtones," a new song from David Byrne and Brian Eno. Bob Boilen, the program's host, told a story about meeting Byrne in the late 1970s as Eno was readying production on the Talking Heads' sophomore album. Eventually, Byrne and Eno collaborated on a side project, and it was during the re-release of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts that the two began working together again, for the first time in about twenty-five years. "Strange Overtones" is one of the eleven songs that makes up Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

It is worth noting that the NPR podcast, downloaded automatically from iTunes each week, has become for me an indispensable source of music information as record stores crumble. Whether or not our big box stores have adequate depth of catalog, it is impossible to search for what you do not know exists. There are few places where you can be sure to find a full range of new music options. The reliable Mr. Boilen told me that this exciting new collaboration had been released, and so - because I was going to be in the big city, anyway - I thought I would drop by Megatunes, one of the few true record stores operating in Southern Alberta. Located along the so-called "Red Mile," a busy thoroughfare with little parking, the Calgary location can be a challenge to reach. So, I got myself dropped off and made a dash for the door. The knowledgeable staff, their authority bolstered by tattoos and piercings, had been spending the afternoon inventing unlikely album titles, and so when I asked for Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, they thought I was a plant. They had not heard of it.

Had Bob Boilen let me down? No, as it turns out, the album has been released on the internet, much like Radiohead's In Rainbows last year. Unlike Radiohead, though, Mr. Byrne and Mr. Eno have set prices. There is a deluxe set, including a film, but the two most common pricing options allow you to download the album for nine dollars; for twelve dollars you can get the download now and receive a real disc at some point between now and November.

I like this idea a great deal. Those of us who need a real, plastic object with liner notes included can indulge ourselves. I encourage you to check out the associated website here. The only problem, of course, is how to browse these new, virtual record stores. These new finds of mine, like Bowerbirds and LCD Soundsystem, feel like I stumbled across them. What will I do if Mr. Boilen leaves NPR?

It occurs to me that I have said little about the music here. I am a big fan of the Talking Heads, and I have enjoyed the eclectic solo work of David Byrne. But if, like me, you find that solo work impossibly ambitious, as broad-ranging across two or three albums as your whole record collection, you will find him on firm and familiar ground here. You will be hard-pressed to find anything elsewhere this Fall as catchy as "Strange Overtones." In fact, I caught CBC Radio using it in its theme music last week. Byrne writes lyrics across this album for music Eno had lying around, essentially, and the first single takes a gentle poke at his collaborator for a "beat" that is "slightly out of fashion." Perhaps only "Poor Boy" is as up-tempo as that track, but all are equally melodic - "proper songs," as Byrne has described them - and highlights can be found in "Home," "My Big Nurse," and "Life Is Long." David Byrne plans to tour with this music, and I expect it will be a series of memorable shows.

My download was uneventful, and the sound quality is super on my iPod. Still, I look forward to receiving my CD in the mail. It is the conservative in me.

Free Newspapers And The Challenge To The Broadsheet

One of the big changes I noticed in my visit to London this summer was how "free papers" had taken hold in England. The capital now has at least two, the Metro and the London Paper, and by the end of the day they make tube trains look like bird cages, in spite of efforts to encourage readers to recycle them. Heck, I even noticed that there is another free, occasional publication targeted exclusively to taxi drivers.

The free paper has a long pedigree, actually. It may be as much as seventy years old. Certainly, we saw it introduced to Newfoundland when I worked in magazines and newspapers in the late 1980s. Lethbridge, Alberta, my modest little city of 80,000, has four or five such publications clogging up my recycling box. If public outcry stemmed the tide of flyers, the free paper has stepped in to meet advertisers' needs. The proliferation of these papers underlines just how important advertising is, and always has been, to the publishing industry. I was often asked, when I wrote for a magazine, to cut three or four inches out of a story to accommodate an advertisement. If I was ever precious about my writing, having it measured in inches rather than words disabused me of my affectation.

But if you are going to forego the financial support of your readers, entirely, if you are going to throw in your lot with the advertisers, you will effectively devalue the editorial content. While the degree to which this is true will vary -- one publication here in Lethbridge runs "advertorial" copy, exclusively, while another keeps a modest roster of local freelancers -- the importance placed on the content of the paper loses out on balance with the advertisements. The irony here, of course, is that if we wanted flyers in our house, we would not decline them. And if advertisers want us to keep their ads around our houses for any period of time, the content of the paper must justify it.

What I found interesting about the balancing act undertaken by the London free papers is that their editorial content was so good. With the ad revenue generated by a huge audience in the capital, more resources could be devoted to the stories. Why, then, is the content so bad in the free papers in major centres across Canada? It was possible to keep abreast of the major stories of the day by reading the Metro and the London Paper, and you could not beat the convenience of having someone hand you the news as you got on a train after work. But the problem, of course, is that these free papers could never compete with the depth of coverage in the great British broadsheets. My worry would be that, in an age during which our information is chopped up into small morsels, read on the internet or between stops on the commute, fewer and fewer people will care.

The daily newspaper is still a wonder of the modern world, rooted in the increase of literacy in the nineteenth century, and I hope we can find a way to help it persist well into the twenty-first.