Author Archives: Dave

Author, blogger, thinker, developer, and all-around digital creative. Applied theatre professional. Mac enthusiast. Coffee fanatic.

Majoring on the Minors

My college years were tumultuous ones, at best. I began as a music major, was a music education major by my second semester, dropped out entirely, transferred schools, declared a communication major, then theatre, threw in psychology….makes my head hurt just thinking about it. Part of the issue was that I felt as though I had to fit myself into a specific category…that I felt pressured into thinking that I had to be singularly focused. Eventually I succumbed to the promptings of my family in focusing on something that could potentially earn a good income for me in the future, shying away from some of the things that I truly loved (“What are you going to do with a theatre major?”) in favor of an education that would be focused more toward a specific career. Certainly they meant well, and thankfully I have landed in a career in which I can make a difference and in which I can earn income. However, I often wonder what life would have been like had I remained on the path that I initially chose.

Today, my morning began with a post from my friend Catherine entitled “The Humanities Are Dead,” in which she discussed the trend toward adjuncts teaching at universities in higher proportions than tenured professors, and the negative ramifications this has on education. This began the turning of my mental wheels and led to an interesting conversation over on my Facebook page about the link, as three of us hypothesized what the core issue could be. I’ve come to a conclusion that is a bit of an explanation for the tumult I experienced in college (well, the academic tumult, at least), and perhaps even for a few other things as well.

In an industrialized culture such as our own, things tend to be forced into categories with labels by which they can be neatly defined and cross-referenced. Professional fields are victim to this just as is everything else. Thus, universities focus their education in these areas specifically in order to prepare someone to obtain employment in a specific field. In turn, areas of professional practice are able to set standards that force its members to obtain specific educational credentials in order to even the playing field, and (let’ s be honest) just because they can. As a result, education becomes utilitarian, focused only on a goal of earning income, and the concept of “liberal arts” becomes a loosely-utilized tag line to attract students to a school.

Combine this trend with the fact that science is deified and the humanities are treated as cultural events that are good only to have around for weekend entertainment, and we have an industrialized culture that has become enslaved to its industrialization. We major on the minors, obsessing with the physics of how a sunrise casts its light over the landscape before us, while ignoring the poetic contemplation of what it means that it does so.

Just as our culture has become marked by utility without meaning and money at the expense of substance, so has our education followed. As a result, institutions of academia are beginning to lean toward being degree factories that utilize a business model, looking to earn a profit while keeping costs low. Education, however, was never meant to be a business, and the students are losing, often without even knowing that they are losing, because they are blindly rushing into careers with prized pieces of inflexible paper in order to obtain something as fleeting as money. In doing so, they open themselves to life crises when they change careers (as most statistically will at least once), perhaps returning to school in order to begin the process over again.

Then again, that’s good for academia’s business model, isn’t it? Perhaps a coincidence, but…

To this we are leaving our future. I think we should be very concerned, don’t you?

Story Arcs

Karen and I managed to arrange a much-needed change of scenery over the holiday weekend and escaped to the beach. Aside from being completely relaxed and slightly sunburned, another, and more interesting, outcome of this trip was an observation of memory.

What made the trip interesting was that, while we were joining other people for the weekend, the destination was where Karen and I honeymooned. We hadn’t been back since, and the emotional associations that the house, the beach, and the town carried for me took me a bit by surprise…above and beyond what I thought I would experience there.

Memories, I think, are among the most precious gifts given to us, because they remind us of our back story. Interestingly, Karen and I were discussing the value of story in theology and psychology and (oddly) popular music while driving down. What we experienced was a review of the beginnings of our own story.

The friends with whom we were visiting have a daughter. Karen was very close with this girl during her early childhood. However, since grad school and our being married, we live several hours away, and Karen hasn’t been a significant part of this girl’s life in about 5 years. The girl didn’t really remember Karen. I think that’s tragic…to not remember someone influential in your story, a human life that has crossed yours…to not have a referent for where you learned or experienced something that that person may have taught you…that’s something that I can’t imagine. I think it must be similar to what sufferers of certain diseases affecting the memory must experience, although, ironically, they likely don’t know that they’re experiencing it.

I watched Karen re-solidify that relationship over the weekend, and it was fascinating to observe. In the end, while I won’t say they were where they had left off years ago, I certainly think they were on their way. As their story moved forward, they had began to piece together missing links in the preceding chapters, thus solidifying their current lives that much more.

Buechner asserts that all theology is narrative; that is, seen through the lens of one’s life experiences and encounters with God. Similarly, I think that psychology is narrative, also, as it deals with the holistic person. One is not defined by one’s symptoms or pathology alone…those are just pieces of a larger puzzle. One is defined just as much by the lives that touch theirs, by their experiences, by their travels, by their culture…in short, by their story.

I’m glad that Karen renewed her relationship with our friends’ daughter. I’m glad that we had a chance to spend some small time with our friends, because they, and that place, are a huge part of our story, as it interweaves with theirs. To lose any part of that story, any small component, would be to make us less. What I’ve walked away from the weekend with is a renewed sense of importance of how tragic it is to lose any small piece of our story to forgetfulness or neglect.

And, ironically, I forgot to take any pictures.

Saturated by Celebrity

I first noticed the effects this morning. As any of my regular readers know, I’m a news junkie of the highest order. I like to know what’s going on in the world at any given time. That usually involves several sources for my curiosity to be satisfied, even after I’ve downsized my intake in recent months. This morning, I scanned some headlines, and stopped. No streaming CNN or BBC. A quick browse of the New York Times and I was finished, and I knew it was for one reason.

The only thing that anyone was going to cover was Michael Jackson’s death.

I know this because I was watching CNN when the news broke on Thursday that Jackson had been transported to the hospital. I first learned of his death from Twitter later that night. The next morning, that’s all that anyone seemed to cover. Everything else going on in the world, economy and environmental bills in the works, Middle East sabre-rattling, and everyone seemed primarily interested in Jackson.

I have to say that I just don’t get it. As an artist, Jackson certainly had a prolific career, and I enjoyed listening to clips of his songs Friday morning and remembering the times (no pun intended) from childhood and college that were connected to various songs. I respect that three generations of people can connect with his music; certainly, staying power can be a measure of an artist’s success. Jackson did his share of sketchy things, as well, however, things that seem more distant from the public memory. I understand remembering the life of an artist that was influential to our culture, though, and even dwelling on the positive instead of the negative. What I don’t understand are lines of people waiting to place flowers on his star in Hollywood, or people grieving and crying upon learning of his death. Why? It’s not like they knew him or anything.

I suppose that connecting with someone’s art leaves you with the feeling that you know them. Certainly, I remember the surreal experience of first seeing a music star on stage, and the first time I met a star for an autograph. The fact that they were actually human was almost a surprise. I also suppose that this is less the case in the age of social networks…a year or so ago, I sent a Facebook message to the author of a book I found to be an exceptionally good read. The author messaged me back. I still have the message…because, still, there’s something surreal about her dialoguing with me.

That being said, the phenomenon of celebrity worship seems to have taken Western culture by storm in such a way as to cause concern. An oft-quoted HealthDay article that has circulated since Jackson’s death attributes a history of celebrity worship dating back to Chopin and Liszt, stating that we identify our hidden desires with celebrities, and that it is a healthy experience to do so, especially in the consideration of “faltering” religion. While I’m all for some healthy catharsis, I disagree with the article on more than one front. Firstly, religion is not faltering, and secondly, worshipping an artist in the public spotlight is a very poor substitute, even if it were.

Still, celebrity worship is a phenomenon to be reckoned with, even earning the infamous distinction of being coined as a syndrome in some circles (although I’m not aware of any actual diagnosis for such a pathology). I tend to fall more in the camp of Richard Marcus’ 2006 BlogCritics post that celebrity worship is a mark of an intellectually declining culture.

Historically, difficult economic times and war times lend themselves to a public increasingly seeking entertainment as a distraction, as something to take their minds off of the problems that beset them in their current daily lives. I’m not going to take a highbrow approach and say that the art that results from the profit-seeking push to satisfy this impulse is poor (although in some cases it speaks for itself), but I will say that, in the absence of the glamorous life that many of us seem to wish for at some point, it is normal to attach ourselves to a celebrity’s life and work. I had a crush on a music star or two in my adolescence, just like everyone else. The difference is that I grew out of it…many don’t seem to do that, and I think that not doing so is developmentally an issue.

When this happens, the “entertainment industry” (the fact that there is one is an issue of its own right, but one for a different post) pushes to satisfy the public’s desire for more of a star, or a type of star. That, after all, is how they make their profit, and that profit is far more important to them than artistic substance. Thus, not only is an enormous amount of attention focused on an artist, but artists are created by the media, and ones with what Marcus describes as having “dubious talent” at that (at the risk of insulting anyone here, I’ll simply point you to his apt examples on page 3 of his post). With this, mediocrity reigns supreme, and artistic substance declines as a culture becomes much more interested in vicariously living lives of caviar dreams than of appreciating quality, to say nothing of engaging in reality.

My intention is not to debate whether or not Jackson’s work falls into a definition of substance or quality, or even to offer a definition for either within this limited space. I simply wonder if, in our media saturated age, we aren’t failing to outgrow that emotionally developmental period in which we feel the need to follow, and even duplicate, every aspect of an artist’s life. I’ve expressed here before that, when this occurs, we feel as though we own that artist, that he or she owes us something, leading to their publishers or studios to see potential profits and take control of what that artist is producing. This leads to a universal loss of artistic quality in the name of money.

This also leads to individuals being grief-stricken over the passing of one whom they did not actually know, to a point that their own lives with those that they do actually know are affected.

Catharsis and dreams aside, folks…this just isn’t healthy.

The Evolution of Expression

Is literature evolving?

That’s a stupid question, I suppose. All art forms evolve with time and the societal context in which they exist, but I find myself wondering if literature is evolving a great deal more than the intelligentsia would like to admit. Specifically, I wonder about it’s function of maintaining a record of society. Tillich said that, in it’s artistic expression, a society conveys it’s spiritual substance. While I question his concept (as I understand it) of “ultimate concern,” I agree with him on at least the level that a culture’s artists communicate what is prevalently on the collective mind of that culture. That being the case, and depending on the definition of art that one would like to use, it is suddenly easier than ever in our Web 2.0 culture for anyone to contribute to the permanent record in which our culture will be remembered generations from now.

This comes to mind, among other ways, through a comical connection I had a few moments ago with a family member on Twitter. To eschew a great deal of backstory, the haiku has recently been a subject of casual attention for me, and I was experimenting with writing two haiku this afternoon. Of course, I tweeted that I was doing this (Why, you ask? It’s sort of like a “Jeep thing;” if you don’t do it, you wouldn’t understand). This prompted a family member to tweet a joke back at me in haiku form. I replied. Then he tweeted in iambic pentameter. We were joking about the limitations that Twitter would theoretically place on writing poetry. Similarly, a recent venture came to my attention called twit_play, “a story told entirely through Twitter updates.” The concept is essentially a play told through tweets. These sorts of expressions are experiments for me at first blush, sort of a social “what if?” game played out to satisfy hobbies and pose interesting social questions, among other things.

What if they’re more than that, though?

Suppose for a moment that your tweets are a part of a literary collective of sorts, in the sense that you’re answering the question, “what are you doing?” moment-by-moment. Sociologically, a collection of tweets appearing on Twitter’s public timeline from individuals in the same country from a defined period of time could prove a reflection of the social consciousness. Many users of Twitter post reflective and, yes, poetic updates to the micro-blog, lending to the possibility that this could be a sort of new literary genre, generated in real-time, reflecting the thoughts of a culture as it exists right now.

By the same logic, then, bloggers are contributing in the same way, reflecting in detail their thoughts and reflections on various topics and considerations that are deemed important at a given time period in a given culture.

If, then, the interactive Internet is generating a new art form as it streams words, images, audio and video from our shrinking world instantly, thus reflecting the consciousness of humanity at any given moment, then we are all artists easily capable of contributing to this giant work.

Now, this theory would naturally prove irritating to many an artist, especially those who only recognize work in a hard, tangible form. There are those who think the way Ray Bradbury thinks as he is quoted in a recent New York Times article: feeling that the Internet is unsubstantial, floating in the air somewhere, and unreal.

These are two extreme ends of the spectrum, and I’m not sure I’m ready to subscribe to either of them as of yet. I think there is more than a strong likelihood, however, that we are observing the next shift in modality of artistic expression. My concern is that, as we watch a new form of expression evolve, we must be cautious to not permit it to detract from those forms of expression that preceded it. In the same way that film became it’s own medium by standing on the shoulders of the stage, so digital word-play must recognize it’s literary parent as it grows into adulthood.