I just now, out of the blue, remembered these two poems I made for a class back in 2008. I thought they would make a nice blog post, especially since I haven’t posted in a while. You’ll have to download them.
Here’s a story I started a while ago and have been working on. This post is Part 1 of 2, Part 2 to follow:
And of all the things I could have been, what have I become?
That, among other questions, I ponder some nights, late, light gone out like a memory, darkness to replace it like a bottle filling, bottom-up, or emptying from the top which inverts to become bottom by standards of “top”-“down” semantics.
What am I talking about?
I’ve become a chess instructor. Chess is coming back. Things that are classic are all coming back; Ray-Ban optical lenses, particularly “Wayfarer” and “Clubmaster” models, rag-time music, fedora hats. They’re coming back because cyclic is the nature of style and fashion. Such is the nature of much of everything else, besides style and fashion. Cyclic-like. The sun’s ascent from one horizon only to descend upon the other, and to do the same somewhere else until it’s back to from where it came. Everything happens in such repeating cycles, some widening and some narrowing but always repeating, everything in circles; it’s foolish to think otherwise.
Like I said, chess is coming back. A lot of people want to learn how to play it.
Most of my clients are rich and retired; they have the money and the time and nothing better to do with it than spend more of it than they should on an unnecessary education. I teach large group sessions, on Saturdays and Sundays, which cost $38 apiece for each attendee. It’s a rip-off, but they pay it without asking questions. The classes last an hour, and people leave happy and feel smarter.
(When I was very young I was a good chess player. I never lost. I beat my friends, my mom, my older brother, and my dad, without fail. Even if I was more focused on the Nintendo I was playing during the match than I was on the match itself, I still won. But I reached a plateau, having played with just a select few opponents, all of them human, all of them not excellent. Then after getting to be pretty good I didn’t play for a while, mostly because as a teenager I was more into sports and other young-gentlemanly pursuits. And chess isn’t like riding a bike—that’s one of the first things I teach my students, you MUST keep playing to stay sharp—so I lost the novice skill set I had developed at a young age. I was back to the beginning.
You see? Like most of everything else, my chess-learning curve has been cyclic. In this case it has been a widening circle, which you’ll see as I continue my story.
In college I began to play again. I was good against some opponents, but then one time I was beaten swiftly by an amateur chess player, to which I took great offense. I studied and practiced, and I got better again. A neighbor from the apartment across the hall and I got good together and played often over a glass of beer or whatever. The two of us were pretty even-handed. Won some, lost some.
After college I started playing the computer on my MacBook. At first I got my ass kicked, every time and by a wide margin. I thought it was impossible to win.
Then one day I did it. “Check-mate.” White Queen H-5 to H-7 to pin the Black King at G-8, the White Queen being guarded by White Knight at G-5. It was a revelation, a personal climax, a volcanic orgasm of cerebral chemistry. Soon I became skilled enough to repeat my victory over the computer with near-perfect success.
I moved up to higher-powered computers. Real-life opponents were anything but capable. Now I’m the state chess champion of New York. I don’t compete in more prestigious competitions, which my therapist calls a “fear of failure,” though that’s not really important to my story.)
I also conduct private lessons for $60 an hour. In doing so I make about as much as some small-time attorneys I know. Which in a way make sense because I’m probably a better chess player than they are attorneys but in another way it doesn’t make any sense because being taught how to play chess isn’t as important as legal service. Whether or not it’s as valuable at all depends on your system of values, I guess—as far as that goes, everyone’s system is different. It just so happens some people will pay a lot of money for chess instruction.
Personally, I value instruction of that sort. It’s good for people to share what they know with each other; it brings us together and it keeps our minds sharp.
(I like to play the piano. It’s not something I’m naturally gifted at, so I’m willing to learn from someone who’s much better than I am. Since, like I said, I value that sort of instruction, I’m willing to pay for it. Twenty-two dollars every half-hour is what I pay for one-on-one lessons. I don’t think that’s too bad, especially when I consider that what I charge for individual chess lessons amounts to $30 for every half hour of instruction. And Heather, the instructor, is a nice sort, if you know what I mean, so I don’t mind her company in addition to the instruction.)
I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what sort of writing I want to include in my blog. There’s a few things to think over; Do I want to publish? If so, should I save my best work for my private collection, to be published at a later time? I want to make sure I’m still blogging consistently and coming up with some readable stuff.
The question of whether or not to publish is sort of silly. This, here, is by definition published. “Publish” and “publication” are from the Latin pūblicāre, which means to “make public.” By my choosing this is a public blog, and there’s a good chance you are a part of the reading public. Therefore, I wouldn’t be blogging if I didn’t want to publish, right?
But in making my blog public I’m basically sharing my thoughts with strangers. I didn’t fully realize that until I looked at my blog stats and noticed that 30 different people checked out my blog in one day. Granted, that isn’t very many views by blog standards, but it’s still enough to make me stop and think about the kind of stuff I want to be posting. And it takes me to my next important question: Who is my audience?
With the blog I have now, which isn’t very topic-specific, and because I don’t do a whole lot of self-promoting, it’s tough for me to know who those 30 people are. I’m realizing that, if you want an audience to follow your blog, it’s important to be consistent and very important to have a specific focus. Knowing who your audience is helps.
After considering these questions for about the amount of time it’s taken me to write this post, I think for now I’ll keep blogging for the love of writing, with no particular audience in mind, and without sticking to one specific topic. I don’t feel like enough of an expert to blog about some area of expertise, and I have no intention to pretend that I am an expert when I’m not. But I do know a little about a number of different things, and whatever topic tickles my fancy for a time might find its way into a blog post.
Which brings me full-circle to a topic of recent interest: Competitive gameplay. Specifically, I’ve become interested in chess again and in no-limit hold ’em poker for the first time in my life.
Chess is a game of strategy and planning. Decision-making is based on a number of factors, including your style of play, your opponents style, and whether or not the game is timed. During the opening of a match, things usually progress in one of a handful of different ways. If your opponent doesn’t know what they’re doing then check-mate should be cake within a dozen moves. If not, then the mid-game usually means a each player is going to lose some pieces. The idea here is to envision a few moves ahead so that after some pieces leave the board you are in a position of power over your opponent. By the end of the mid-game you should have a greater overall value of pieces, control of the center of the board, a pawn structure devoid of pitfalls such as doubles and backwards pawns, and your king should be safe. If you’re a visual thinker these strategies will probably map themselves out as diagonals and the relationship between the pieces and the colors of the squares they rest on. If you make it through the opening and the mid-game and have attained these advantages, you will almost definitely defeat your opponent, barring some unfortunate mishap.
The end game is where each match becomes unique, depending on how things have progressed and the strategies used in the mid-game. Obviously, the end game is where the victor is determined. Being able to swiftly bring down an opponent depends quite heavily on how prepared you are for the endgame. If you didn’t think about it earlier, for example, you probably won’t have an opportunity to queen any of your pawns, which is often a knockout blow in an endgame.
I guess what I’m getting at is this. It’s important to make the best decisions based on whatever you know. And you should be confident in decisions you make and are making based on the assumption that you are making the best decisions based on what you know. When you’re losing, play conservative. But know when it’s time to go all in.
I watched the newest Harry Potter film today, The Half-Blood Prince. It was very good. The scene where Harry and Albus–yes, I call him Albus–apparate from Hogwarts to find Voldemort’s horcrux was executed perfectly, exactly as I imagined it when I read the book. Watching the Harry Potter films is like reliving a memory, and nostalgia kicks in during intense scenes like those. Brilliant films. To show the extent of my adoration, here’s an essay I wrote on the matter a few months ago:
There have been many significant novels to emerge since the year 1900; Joyce’s Ulysses, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and anything by Kurt Vonnegut would surely make a list of significant 20th-century novels. However, none of these top my list as the most significant. The most significant novel of the 20th century is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling because of its tremendous impact on both readers and writers, old and young alike. Among my generation, it is by far the most popular book to have emerged during the past twenty-five years, and has been received by critics to great acclaim. Perhaps most telling is the commercial success of the novel and of the Harry Potter series as a whole, which has sold over 400 million copies and been translated into 67 languages around the world. J.K. Rowling has found a way to reach more people worldwide than any other fiction author in history, and many of them are young people of the internet and video game generation who otherwise would not be very interested in books. This achievement alone would be enough for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in the series and the one that got everyone hooked, to be considered the most significant novel of the 20th century, but there is much more.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone gets people excited about reading, especially young people. Many educationalists will say that children’s literacy is directly related to the number of words that they read, and Sorcerer’s Stone provides many words and then some (the longest book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, weighs in at an enduring 870 pages in the US version). It’s almost impossible to stop reading the Harry Potter series after reading the first book, and that’s part of the reason why J.K. Rowling’s work is so significant. It manages to grab hold of you and not let you go until you’re finished with the entire series. I myself have read each of the seven books in the series at least twice, and I don’t recall ever meeting anyone my age or younger who read one or more but didn’t read the entire series. Readers will know what I mean.
The stuff isn’t exactly interactive in the way we’ve come to think of other eminent media, but it’s without a doubt some of the most engaging literature you’ll ever encounter. In our culture so dominated by media platforms beside the plain written word, audiences have come to develop a really short attention span. We’re not (all) born with ADD but we tend to develop it as we grow up. We expect to be entertained, and now. Most literature in the 20th century was not being written for these types of audiences. While a good deal of post-TV literature (i.e. the work of Don DeLillo) dealt directly with the eminent media forms of its time—the television comes to mind—as its subject matter, it failed to serve as a fitting alternative to the culture itself and failed to capture the attention of a mainstream audience. Rowling, whether or not she was aware of it, wrote something in Harry Potter that was entirely unconcerned with other media platforms or mainstream cultural products. You never read about the characters in Harry Potter playing video games. (In fact I don’t believe there is a television anywhere on Hogwarts premises.) Indeed, Rowling invents her own varieties of media for the story—magic moving photographs come to mind. All of this Rowling did without coming off as rebellious of contemporary culture or media—which would be awfully cliché—and managed to be wildly entertaining for today’s readership.
For writers, Rowling’s work is a model for commercial and critical success. Harry Potter has opened the floodgates of limitless imaginative freedom in literature and suggests the possibility of having fun with literature, both for writers and readers. Furthermore, for readers and writers who have high hopes for virtue and the championing of good over evil, Harry Potter shines a bright light on literature past, present, and future. Rowling makes us believe in heroes.
8/23/2009
We’ve all read a terrible book before. Sometimes it starts off good and manages to stave off disappointment until the very end. Other times–maybe it was a gift? a personal decision based on a misguided recommendation? an impulse buy?–you put it down after a few pages and never look at it again.
The world of literature, as one of Bolaño’s characters would say, is like a forest, and each work represents a tree or a rock or a stump or a stream. If it weren’t for the hopelessly mundane or even the ugly tree, the really wonderful tree wouldn’t have any measure of comparison by which to appear extraordinary. Likewise, when walking through the forest, you can’t expect everything you see to take your breath away.
But there are certain routes one can take in order to maximize the pleasure of wandering through the book-forest. Call them hiking trails, with little signposts to help you find what you’re looking for. Maybe a friend has walked a certain trail before with much satisfaction and he or she presents you a handwritten map that outlines some interesting winding trails. Your friend says they branch off into different, underexplored parts of the forest and have very little foot-traffic, and you have to see them. Perhaps, alternatively, out of comfort or a sense of assurance you rely on the advice of the experts–The National Park Service, say–and you prefer to get your information directly from them, as diverse and overwhelming as it may be.
Either way, experiences of the soul are very subjective, and it’s unlikely that the mapmaker and the map follower will completely agree which sights are the best to look at. You just know what you like when you see it, right? Therefore, the best sorts of maps are the ones that provide detailed information on the types of attractions that can be encountered on a hike and allow you to make decisions for yourself.
The world of books is just like this forest, and reading is like hiking. If you want to read good books, having some sort of informational outline helps you find them, especially if you have an idea of what you’re looking for already but don’t know exactly where to start. In general, reviews publications like The New York Review of Books have good, albeit long-winded, feedback and guidance.
One of my personal favorites, though, is Flashlight Worthy, which provides newly-updated lists contributed by both the webmaster and the users of the site. On the home page, the lists are organized into precise categories, for browsing convenience, and once you click a list it offers insightful, yet concise, commentary on the titles contained therein. It’s an efficient and fun way for people to find the books they’re looking for and to share their own experiences of literary meandering. It helps you find what you want quickly whether or not you know what you want to read. But to me, it’s more than just a time-saver; it’s visible evidence that the internet as well as the library can be a tremendous resource for today’s literature enthusiasts.
in a magazine called Dissent. It’s not a very good magazine, in my opinion. I wouldn’t say it’s crap but it’s not very good. Anyway, it was the cover art and the feature article–“The New American City”–that caught my eye and were intriguing enough to warrant reading. The writing itself is very dry and lacks any semblance to a piece composed by an energetic writer, but I guess that’s how some magazines want to sound. (Dissent‘s target audience must be of a similar make-up to its writers.) Most of what Katz writes about is pretty common sense, and anyone who has lived the last five years or so as a functioning and autonomous thinker could probably make the same claims as Katz does in about 200 words or less. Actually, make that a couple of tweets. Yes, I think I could make the same claim in a matter of tweets. Here:
“Post-industrial transformations, followed sequentially by suburbanization and racial segregation, have led to a greater divide between the rich and the poor, who live in close proximity to one another. Furthermore, unpredictable economies (redundant. think about it.) have caused American cities to evolve in unique ways, and the term ‘American City’ now has manifested a rather vague definition among urbanists–crime, high- and low-culture and class divisions, gentrification, etc.–that is different from the definitions previously used to describe our urban landscape. Or any other urban landscape in history, for that matter.” Duh.
That’s the gist of the article. It’s more observational than argumentative and isn’t very heavy. That is, it doesn’t pack the punch of a heavyweight boxer. Maybe a featherweight. The tone of Dissent suggests to me that they want to pack a punch, but they don’t really measure up to the tape. They’re a bit undersized and undisciplined, I think, and articles like “What is an American City?” make me wonder: Why did I bother stepping into the ring?
I put the magazine down and didn’t read any more articles. I felt betrayed, or at least let down, by a reading experience I expected to jar my senses, so to speak, with a few interesting new facts or perspectives. Or at least one that would be a good workout. All I got was a warm-up before moving on to more familiar and capable sparring partners: Wired and Harvard Business Review. (If you’ve never read Wired before, you have to check it out. If you have then you probably adore/praise/want to work for the magazine like I do.)
I must say that Katz threw in a pretty compelling argument at the end, one that could only come from the keyboard of a(n older i.e. 50+) person in a university office who has little or no involvement in real-time youth and young-professional culture. He says, “…we have yet to see a powerful and pervasive new urban progressivism” and “the future of American cities…is unlikely to be as buoyant as their past” (p. 26 of the Summer 2009 print). The rhetoric surrounding these claims is about as “thin and fragile” (p. 26) as he believes the future of American cities to be, and is remarkably unclear. It’s a pretty hefty swing, though (back to the boxer metaphor). He really wants to deliver a knock-out blow in the last seconds of the final round. Not really a good tactic, but hey, to each one’s own. However, without the word “pervasive,” I think the punch is doomed not to land.
Anyone who has spent any time in any American city knows that there is a cacophony of youth and promise all over this country, and especially in our major cities. I’ve seen it personally; I live in Detroit and I took my last vacation to New Orleans–these are cities that some people would argue ought to be burned to the ground and abandoned, written off as failures–and the optimism in our cities, even in places that have fallen on such hard times as Detroit and New Orleans, is a dozen times more tangible than any rhetorical jabs blindly launched by skeptics.
And optimism is not only “powerful,” but it’s also contagious. While Detroit for one has a melange of problems and troublemakers top to bottom (cough: Kwame!), it’s only a matter of time before the most difficult-to-fix problems are resolved. Detroit is not exactly a hub of information and an oasis for the tech-savvy, but Detroit’s art scene is incomparable. Furthermore, pretty soon green initiatives and grassroots campaigns will start to become the norm here, and industries like sustainable architecture, once they take off, will have a wonderful and trying task in revitalizing Detroit, an endeavor that will bring about countless jobs.
I say Detroit, like other rust-belt cities, is more than anything a victim of hard times. (Racial segregation is also a huge problem, but that’s a can of worms I am not ready to open up. I’ll leave that to the real heavyweights.)
I guess only time will tell whether the momentous efforts of my generation–and the one above us and the ones to follow–will be “pervasive” to the extent that they become extremely powerful and effective tools for revitalization. I think it just takes a common goal and a little optimism, and I, for one, am optimistic for optimism.
Art for art’s sake, writing for writing’s sake, may have become less important in recent history as the products of artists and writers have become, increasingly, cultural commodities that retain their value for only a brief time and then disappear into nothingness. Therefore, products of art and literature with long-term value are those that affect lastingly upon the reader or viewer and/or convey meaning on a level that subverts or entirely demolishes the product-consumer model of the experience.
All of us who have been through college know that choosing a major can be a big decision. Picking a major can seem like a matter of life or death. “If I choose something in business or economics, at least I stand a chance,” or “there’s no way I can expect to find a job in today’s market with a bachelor’s in psychology.” Sure, it’s important to consider these things when sifting among the innumerable melange of science, engineering, business, communication arts, education majors, etc., hoping to make the right decision.
If you have your heart set on a major, don’t let anyone talk you out of choosing a subject that you are really passionate about.
However, many people aren’t very passionate about studying. I think that’s pretty common and absolutely normal. These types of people probably don’t really care what type of work they will be doing after they graduate, they just want to start working and earning a living. If that’s your case, it’s probably a smart idea to play it safe and just pick something that will be of use when you’re looking for an internship or a job down the road.
Other people have plans to continue school to get a master’s or an advanced medical or law degree. To these types of folks, I tip my cap to your resignation and humbly recommend you study something you are interested in that will be good preparation for future schoolwork, just don’t let it burn you out. Remember, it doesn’t get easier after your undergrad, and your real career preparation is going to be what you learn after you get your bachelor’s.
Maybe you plan to take the reigns of your family business after college. That’s great, too. My advice is to get a good ol’ business degree and get involved in work outside of school. You could even remain close to the family business so that when you assume a leadership position you’re ready to do an excellent job.
Some people out there just want to go to college for the experience and the degree. Their plan is to meet someone with a much better job outlook than theirs and to marry them. If your one of those people, just get a communications degree.
You thought I was going to say liberal arts degree, didn’t you?
Ugh…liberal arts majors get a tough rap. Many people probably wonder what that even means, “liberal arts.” There’s a lot to being a liberal arts major that outsiders just can’t understand. I’ll put it this way: If, while in college, you want to get involved in an elite and overly-self-righteous group of students who look upon one another with respect and admiration and will do anything to prove they are better than everyone else–a group that is praised by it’s membership and misunderstood and even looked down upon by outsiders–AND you don’t want to join a sorority or a fraternity, choose a liberal arts degree.
I make that claim (half) in jest. The truth is, no matter what major you pick you’re going to be part of a group, and people outside of the group may have a tough time relating to you because they can’t understand why in the world you have chosen your X degree and not their Y degree. However, there are, in my opinion, certain short- and long-term advantages to being a liberal arts major and choosing a liberal arts degree.
First off, if you’re unsure about what to study and you don’t have any long-term career plans, a liberal arts degree provides an excellent, well-rounded education and is a good bridge to just about any master’s degree. Degrees in philosophy and English, the two liberal arts subjects within which I have the most personal experience, are very common B.A.s for people who go on to study law, for example. I would argue that, aside from any kind of specialized pre-law programs, philosophy is the best preparation and English is second best for law school. In either field you will refine and develop your reading and writing skills and will become an expert in critical analysis. You will also get used to spending a lot of time doing schoolwork, unless you’re a slacker. If you’re a slacker don’t bother applying to law school. The study of philosophy, moreover, is obsessive about logic and reasoning skills and incorporates extraordinarily dense and seemingly incomprehensible subject matter into your curriculum, which, I think, is pretty much what law school is like. So you may as well get used to it by studying philosophy.
Second, some people are just plain passionate about things like literature, cultural studies, writing, psychology, liberal arts, etc. I, personally, have a deep passion for reading, writing and language, so I majored in English. I took writing classes–creative fiction, poetry, non-fiction, writing for the web–and I took some Spanish classes above and beyond the requirement.
Based on that information, you would think my chances of finding a job are grim. But that’s a myth–one that has reached seemingly epidemic proportions.
Nick Corcodilos, a fellow English major and fellow member of the liberal artsy Phi Beta Kappa fraternity, has this to say about how to succeed post-grad with a liberal arts degree. Among some of the important skills he considers to be strong among liberal arts alums are:
and, what Corcodilos claims is perhaps the most important:
That is, learning how to learn and work. It’s hard to understand what this means unless you are, or have been, a liberal arts student, so I won’t try to explain this point in great detail. I’ll just say this: somehow, studying a subject in the liberal arts forces you to pay close attention not only to the information you are working with, but also the way your own brain is processing and systematizing the information. There is a constant self-examination going on that makes it so that, after writing a paper for an English class or a philosophy class, you have a detailed understanding of both the information studied and the mechanism of studying that information. Pretty cool, huh?
Therefore, the mind of a liberal arts major is almost infinitely adaptable to situations and problems, and, thus, is able to think of creative solutions to such problems. And everybody has problems that require creative solutions, so your skills will be in high demand. Furthermore, as a liberal arts major you will develop an open mind to others’ ideas and input and superb work habits, which will go a long way in any job. After you get out of school, it will be beneficial to acknowledge these skills and be able to communicate them and present examples to interviewers and potential employers.
The examples I’m talking about could be anything; work and volunteer experience, examples of extracurricular group leadership, and sports are all good. So, no matter what major you pick, get involved in something. That sounds cliche and redundant, I know, but seriously–it’s, like, the most important thing.
Actually I take that back. The most important thing is networking, getting to know people, and making potential professional contacts, because as fun as college is, it’s really about getting ready for the real world. An encounter with the real world, if you’re not prepared, can feel like getting flattened by one of those huge buses you see whizzing around campus. You don’t want that. So be polite, be humble, work hard, and take advantage of your opportunities after you graduate. Until then, enjoy the freedom and safety of college life, study what suits you, and work harder than everyone else.
Living Letters 