My intellectual life is aimed directly at confronting Hollywood and everything it represents. My whole ideology is set in opposition to the values it represents and helps to indoctrinate. Even on an instinctual, emotional level I am predisposed to hating that which the mainstream. Somehow my life has brought me to this strange place: I have a sustained social interaction with an acquaintance who works in the writing branch of film studio. His day job as I understand it is to make notes and punch up scripts. This is the meal ticket for his freelance work that includes mainstream online publication at a major sports news outlet and selling a romantic comedy to a studio. Our interactions, which take place entirely over the internet, are sometimes polite and tolerant, but often bitter and sardonic. I don't like him, mostly because I have no respect for his work, but my dislike is exacerbated my fear that anything I say against him will be interpreted by others as jealousy.
Part of the problem for me is the self promotion. When he recently posted a link to an article he had written, I was immediately annoyed. The people in our peer group are generally a creative bunch. Most of us write; some of us perform, but none of us fish for compliments and/or brag about our successes save for one. Against my better judgment I followed the link and read. It was pretty typical of everything else on the website, which I may as well reveal is ESPN Page 2. All of it is nonsense more or less, inflating that which barely matters in human existence to life or death proportions. It is the raison d'etre of Page 2 to treat sport as if its shallow emotional resonances were deep, as if its mathematical calculations of statistics were intellect, as if the seriousness with which we look at it is spiritually appropriate. The best stuff on Page 2 has always been by Chuck Klosterman and the late Hunter S. Thompson precisely because they don't love sport. They are more interested in mass love of sport than in personal fandom. Little wonder that they are few and far between at Page 2, and that they were well-established cultural critics in their own right before being invited to contribute to ESPN.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
First Notes on the Contemporary American Man
I recently had to cut off the tap that ran from ESPN into my brain. At least the so-called “analysis” portion which is really just guys who talk about their fandom and grossly overestimate the value of sport. I recall Dave Damashek once musing: “In these troubled times I fell sorry for people who don't have sport. What do they do? How do they escape?” These guys worship uniforms. And the question Damashek asks is buried so deeply beneath a foundation of unknowing, I would have no idea how to answer him in terms that would make sense. People read books, Damashek. They try to figure out what the hell is going on instead of hiding from it. They try to learn how to live life rather than escape from it.
I'll still watch a game or twenty, but my days for listening to podcasts are over. Except for Bill Simmons. I should explain. It isn't that I consider him an exception to the standard idiocy; in many ways he is a champion flying the Idiot flag. Though I am sympathetic to him in some ways, and though he occasionally offers genuine insight (but only when talking about the NBA), I would not call him a good writer. He knows a little about sports. I feel sorry for him when he talks about music. I cringe for humanity when he talks about movies. It is not that my standard is high, just that it is a standard at all. This is the problem with Page 2, with culture at large, everyone is just going through the motions.
I read Simmons because to me he represents the Contemporary American Man, and I have to keeps tabs on that spirit/ideology, because I regard it as what I am up against. He is the champion of the middle brow. The Contemporary American Man loves his any art that makes him feel smart and greets anything that confuses him with suspicion and hostility. Simmons loves mediocre sentimentality in movies and resents anything that looks like it may have been made by someone smarter than him. He has two phrases for this: “artsy-fartsy” and “too cool for school.” These terms cover anything that makes him feel stupid. This infantilism is the affliction of the Contemporary American Man. I suffer from it too, but my advantage is that I have diagnosed it correctly.
I'll still watch a game or twenty, but my days for listening to podcasts are over. Except for Bill Simmons. I should explain. It isn't that I consider him an exception to the standard idiocy; in many ways he is a champion flying the Idiot flag. Though I am sympathetic to him in some ways, and though he occasionally offers genuine insight (but only when talking about the NBA), I would not call him a good writer. He knows a little about sports. I feel sorry for him when he talks about music. I cringe for humanity when he talks about movies. It is not that my standard is high, just that it is a standard at all. This is the problem with Page 2, with culture at large, everyone is just going through the motions.
I read Simmons because to me he represents the Contemporary American Man, and I have to keeps tabs on that spirit/ideology, because I regard it as what I am up against. He is the champion of the middle brow. The Contemporary American Man loves his any art that makes him feel smart and greets anything that confuses him with suspicion and hostility. Simmons loves mediocre sentimentality in movies and resents anything that looks like it may have been made by someone smarter than him. He has two phrases for this: “artsy-fartsy” and “too cool for school.” These terms cover anything that makes him feel stupid. This infantilism is the affliction of the Contemporary American Man. I suffer from it too, but my advantage is that I have diagnosed it correctly.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Here We Go Again....
Some weeks ago I was explaining to a friend why I will never watch Saving Private Ryan. To me it seemed pretty self evident. I regard Spielberg as a hack, and I detest gratuitous violence. I would define gratuitous rather broadly with regard to film. The Cinema's propensity to depict graphic images of violence and sex is its cross to bear. Sex and violence are only the most prominent cliches a visionary film artist must overcome. Many filmmakers who would call themselves visionary mistakenly believe that the path to overcoming is through immersion. My aforementioned friend refers to the first twenty minutes of Private Ryan as “sublime,” and I suspect that Rob Zombie, who has churned out another Halloween remake, would like savvy viewers to say that about his torture movies as well.
What exactly is measured by the degree of violence I can tolerate? Is it my intellect? Is it my coolness? Like Quentin Tarentino, Zombie would probably say that I'm dumb if I don't understand how cleverly he uses violent imagery. If he thinks that he is making “classic slasher films,” whatever that means, Zombie may be right, because the point of the genre has always been to create for teenagers, or anyone else with an adolescent mentality, a carnival spook-house. I imagine Zombie thinks he is making his audience confront their fears, and therein lies the value. The problem is that Zombie's fears are the fear of an adolescent boy. No. I am misrepresenting adolescent boys. Zombie's fears are the fears that adolescent boys use to distract themselves from their real fears.
I fail to see a substantive difference between the violence he portrays and that which Spielberg portrays.
What exactly is measured by the degree of violence I can tolerate? Is it my intellect? Is it my coolness? Like Quentin Tarentino, Zombie would probably say that I'm dumb if I don't understand how cleverly he uses violent imagery. If he thinks that he is making “classic slasher films,” whatever that means, Zombie may be right, because the point of the genre has always been to create for teenagers, or anyone else with an adolescent mentality, a carnival spook-house. I imagine Zombie thinks he is making his audience confront their fears, and therein lies the value. The problem is that Zombie's fears are the fear of an adolescent boy. No. I am misrepresenting adolescent boys. Zombie's fears are the fears that adolescent boys use to distract themselves from their real fears.
I fail to see a substantive difference between the violence he portrays and that which Spielberg portrays.
Happy Labor Day!
I grow weary of the ideological debate everyone else seems to be energized by these days. It is particularly sad to see my liberal friends slide ever deeper into the us vs. them quicksand. It is an illusion. This country is run by business interests and nothing besides. The corporate masters are interested only in dollars, and in that fundamental sense they are a-political. They are disciples of Milton Friedman before they are anything else. This is not a Cabal by design, but the system is very good at protecting the rich by constantly pitting superficially opposing sides against one another in the media and in the government.
Consider that almost every Hollywood actor, producer, writer, director; every so-called (by Fox News) liberal journalist or reporter all serve media conglomerates. This by the way is the heart of my effort to constantly debunk mainstream film. It's nice that George Clooney and Julia Roberts do a lot of charity work, but their films (their REAL work?) espouse a different ideology. It is nice that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas say the “right” things in their films, but the very style of those films espouses a different ideology. None of them or their peers would ever make the following accusation, and I doubt many would understand the implications it, but if you think that there is a meaningful difference between the CEO of Wal-Mart or Nike and the CEO of Dreamworks or Miramax, you are fooling yourself.
The point is that the system would fall apart if either side was to fully win their apparent war. Further, the conclusion is that neither side can ever win, because the system seems to be perfect. So when liberals talk of this country turning into Hitler's Germany, I think they are missing the big picture. Do they not realize that the right wing is also making that claim? Perhaps liberals would say they are merely using it as rhetoric, but that claim would only betray a fundamental lack of respect for the people they supposedly wish to help via education and information.
These doomsday predictions are distracting whether they come form the left or right. Our situation is dire enough without worrying about the possibility of a fascists takeover. I suspect, in fact, that we find ourselves trapped in a system perhaps too perfect to change. Surely the unshakeable, resilient nature of the beast is more frightening than an ideological structure that is unstable enough to allow or even encourage change? We may not have a way out of this.
From Rome to the Nazi State it strikes me that all comparisons of the United States to historical empires are inaccurate. The picture that I am starting to see more clearly all the time, is that there has never been anything like America. Perhaps it is not merely the nation, for there has never been a power structure like the one that rules us – there has never been multi-national corporate power; and there has never been a media conglomeration that walks hand in hand with this power in the guise of its antipode – there has never been a Hollywood. I simply do not think anyone knows how this ends or if it even can, and that should be a lot more terrifying than the remote possibility of fascism.
Consider that almost every Hollywood actor, producer, writer, director; every so-called (by Fox News) liberal journalist or reporter all serve media conglomerates. This by the way is the heart of my effort to constantly debunk mainstream film. It's nice that George Clooney and Julia Roberts do a lot of charity work, but their films (their REAL work?) espouse a different ideology. It is nice that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas say the “right” things in their films, but the very style of those films espouses a different ideology. None of them or their peers would ever make the following accusation, and I doubt many would understand the implications it, but if you think that there is a meaningful difference between the CEO of Wal-Mart or Nike and the CEO of Dreamworks or Miramax, you are fooling yourself.
The point is that the system would fall apart if either side was to fully win their apparent war. Further, the conclusion is that neither side can ever win, because the system seems to be perfect. So when liberals talk of this country turning into Hitler's Germany, I think they are missing the big picture. Do they not realize that the right wing is also making that claim? Perhaps liberals would say they are merely using it as rhetoric, but that claim would only betray a fundamental lack of respect for the people they supposedly wish to help via education and information.
These doomsday predictions are distracting whether they come form the left or right. Our situation is dire enough without worrying about the possibility of a fascists takeover. I suspect, in fact, that we find ourselves trapped in a system perhaps too perfect to change. Surely the unshakeable, resilient nature of the beast is more frightening than an ideological structure that is unstable enough to allow or even encourage change? We may not have a way out of this.
From Rome to the Nazi State it strikes me that all comparisons of the United States to historical empires are inaccurate. The picture that I am starting to see more clearly all the time, is that there has never been anything like America. Perhaps it is not merely the nation, for there has never been a power structure like the one that rules us – there has never been multi-national corporate power; and there has never been a media conglomeration that walks hand in hand with this power in the guise of its antipode – there has never been a Hollywood. I simply do not think anyone knows how this ends or if it even can, and that should be a lot more terrifying than the remote possibility of fascism.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The Invisible Hand of the Market Continues to Dominate You
In previous entries I have suggested that if we do not determine aesthetic standards and apply them to art works diligently, if we do not assert values the market will do it for us, or rather, to us and our culture. I said this in relation to watching and reading Žižek , because I think his aesthetics lack evaluative terminology, or rather, since the whole of his thought is aesthetical, as one of my philosophy professors once told me speaking of Nietzsche, he does not develop specific terms of aesthetic judgment. I argue with friends and colleagues about Žižek's writing on film, and they continue to remind me that he does not do film criticism; he uses popular film to illustrate Lacanian ideas. I continue to assert that this does not excuse him. Žižek is one of the most prominent intellectuals alive who writes about film. He has a lot of influence in other words. I am certain that he could put together a course in Lacan that would elucidate some of the most sophisticated aspects of his theory entirely through a study of Hitchcock. This is well and good, but I still wonder at what point does it become yet another class devoted to the single most studied and most overrated filmmaker in the history of the medium at the expense of a chance for students to see Ozu, Akerman, Dreyer or Bresson?
Last night I was talking to a colleague about his summer course on the Vampire Film. He tells me its a theory course. He tells me that vampires are the hottest thing going these days, and it is a good way to introduce students to various ideas. Again, it is well and good to introduce students to “important” ideas, by which I'm sure he means the ideologies popular throughout academia – feminism, Marxism, identity politics etc. At some point, however, film departments teach nothing but these courses. The ideas of individuals such as the filmmakers listed above no longer matter. More importantly, we no longer teach how to relate to art properly. And if you don't think this is a case of the market determining cultural values, consider that my colleague told me, “Look, I don't want to teach Vampire Film, but I have to offer something that will put butts in seats. The difference between six and twelve students taking my class is two thousand dollars in my pocket.” Yes, the university pays its instructors per student. Do I have to explain why that is fucking obscene?
Last night I was talking to a colleague about his summer course on the Vampire Film. He tells me its a theory course. He tells me that vampires are the hottest thing going these days, and it is a good way to introduce students to various ideas. Again, it is well and good to introduce students to “important” ideas, by which I'm sure he means the ideologies popular throughout academia – feminism, Marxism, identity politics etc. At some point, however, film departments teach nothing but these courses. The ideas of individuals such as the filmmakers listed above no longer matter. More importantly, we no longer teach how to relate to art properly. And if you don't think this is a case of the market determining cultural values, consider that my colleague told me, “Look, I don't want to teach Vampire Film, but I have to offer something that will put butts in seats. The difference between six and twelve students taking my class is two thousand dollars in my pocket.” Yes, the university pays its instructors per student. Do I have to explain why that is fucking obscene?
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Ode to a Great Contrarian
People often ask me why I don’t like anything – music, movies and the like. As I have said before, this question usually means “Why don’t you like the same things that I like?” The chances are good that I have addressed that problem on this very blog. It is called The Contrarian after all. Today I don’t want to be contrary, though. I want to give you one good reason to read everything you can get your hands on by Lester Bangs: he takes no shit. Reading his interviews with Lou Reed in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is a deep cleansing breath fresh air. Given the current state of discourse in our culture, Lester Bangs seems like a revelation. Because we are living in a time in which criticism (as the word is used in common parlance) is immediately taken as disrespect, the fact that Bangs would try to start an argument with someone he clearly admires, that he would take to task a hero, is stunning. Imagine being face to face with an artist and telling him which of his works are mediocre and why. Of course Lou Reed doesn’t just accept this criticism dumbly; he dishes it right back to Bangs, explaining that he is not as good as he used to be either. Granted each and every scenario is embellished if not made up entirely, but the point is that Bangs envisions a world in which honesty is a possibility. Standards don’t come into it any more than decency. The important thing is to call it like you see it. Or rather that’s the first thing. It is an important consideration in this age when everyone who knocks out any old piece of “creative work” is entitled to praise and thanks as Jamie Kennedy and many of the artists he interviews suggest in Heckler. That is the zeitgeist isn’t it? Everyone should be creative and their creativity should be praised? I don’t like it. I mean our Lester Bangs is Chuck Klosterman, and he goes out of his way to resist judgment at every turn. Klosterman wants to “observe and report,” because who is he to judge? So goes the sentiment. I think if you asked Lester Bangs that question he would say: “I’m Lester Fucking Bangs and I’m smarter, sharper, quicker and more perceptive than you; that’s why I get to judge.” I know it gets sticky once you claim to have a right to judge, but that’s life. It gets messy. Is it particularly interesting to sit back and let everyone have his own opinion? Is it good for culture? As Zizek says, “I’m entitled to my opinion” really just means “leave me the fuck alone.” We have to have dialog, and there is no such thing as dialog without disagreement.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Unsatisfied Fools
I am new to Karl Pilkington. That is to say I have yet to read the books, and I have only just ingested the years of radio shows and podcasts. Of course I have also spent considerable time searching out clips on youtube and the like. While I certainly enjoyed the three part program I found on youtube (probably originally for BBC TV) entitled Karl Pilkington: Satisfied Fool, I think it is rather misnamed. Surely the point is that he is unsatisfied. Is it not this quality of his that makes him so interesting? Most fools (by which I mean most people, but I will get into Karl as a representation of the population at large in a moment) are entirely satisfied, at leas the appear to be. They don't ask questions, they don't make documentaries about their quest for answers to questions (however stupid those questions may be). Perhaps Karl named the documentary himself?
In the program Karl searches for an answer to his question: “Is it worth it to be smarter?” Since Karl is an idiot, he naturally thinks that being smarter means knowing more stuff, so what underpins his asinine question is the belief that if he worked harder at being smart i.e. if he read more, he would amass a repository of more facts and bits of information and thus would be smarter. Of course he leans toward not doing this, toward not learning, because what little he does pick up from reading – and it should be mentioned that he is a terrible, terrible reader with no attention span and no sensitivity to nuance – does no make him any happier. This is also crucial – he thinks knowledge should equal happiness.
The fascinating thing about all this is that it seems irredeemably idiotic when you watch this man bumble his way through these ridiculous questions, but somehow he represents a fundamental human problem. I think we all have it in our heads, even those of us who try to exercise it like a demon, that happiness is the ultimate goal. Whether one views it as a birthright or a responsibility, we treat life as a quest for happiness. Every other activity gets filtered through that lens. Will knowledge make me happy? Will money make me happy? Sex? Drugs? Marriage? Religion? Health? Hobbies? Instead of attempting to balance these these things to achieve some semblance of a whole human most people focus on one or two. Most of us do not have sufficient time for emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical fulfillment or satisfaction. We pick the area that tickles us, the one that is easiest, and focus on that. The reason why this never results in happiness is that the other aspects of existence or consciousness have been neglected and the simple fact of the matter is that all need to be nourished. The intellectual lives in quiet desperation, unable to relate to his fellow human beings emotionally. The poet dies young because he neglects his body which he sees as the cage that traps his spirit. And so on.
Karl is not going to keep his desperation quiet and this is his illuminating quality. He is a fool, but perhaps no more so than most people. (One could argue that the title card inserted at the end that shows his Mensa test score of 83 in relation to the average score of 100 would indicate that he is indeed stupider than most people.) It's just that most people keep their mouths shut. My junior high school science teacher was fond of telling us, “You know if you didn't open your mouth, no one would know how stupid you are.” Alot of us learned that lesson despite the deluge of reality shows in which people give vent to every fleeting eighth-grade emotion and inane notion in their heads and despite that we are taught that self-expression is the supreme purpose in life. This contradiction causes a problem: when people do open their mouths they have a delusional sense of entitlement because they have learned that every utterance is a sacred expression of self-hood than no other person has a right to judge. Nobody wants to speak up, but when they do, you had better thank them for it.
I go through this in every course I teach. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's attempts to educate Karl sound like exactly my experience with students who are supposedly much smarter than Karl is. I beg them to talk. I try to interest them in anything so I will have a point to jump in. But somehow they think that it was the talking that was the important thing in itself. When they start talking and I correct them or critique them in any way, they are flabbergasted. Why am I talking if I am not going to receive adulation and affirmation? In one season of the radio show, Ricky would give Karl books to read – little introductions to various historical figures of note like Churchill and Rasputin. The comedy of it was that Karl kept thinking that he was supposed to get out of it whatever he got out of it, when Ricky was trying to get him to learn specific, key points about the subjects of the books. A lot of this has to do with Karl's reading comprehension and short attention span. This is why Karl's “search” is ultimately doomed to fail – he isn't really searching because he does not how. I think of the student who refuses to accept a single premise proposed by the course, but insists that he is really trying hard. Trying is not only a decision. It is also a skill. Learning is not the addition of information. It is acceptance of ways of knowing that sometimes nullify the ones you used previously.
Karl believes that Knowledge is a collection of facts. In his conception the only advantages to being smart are for “chat” and to avoid coming across “daft.” Substitute “chat” for “classroom discussion” and “not coming across daft” for “getting a good grade” and you have the average college student. Almost every student I ever had wants me to tell them a list of things they can repeat to me in class and in papers. They just want to know what it takes to impress me. How can I not think of Karl exclaiming to the man who quotes Socrates, “See? That's what I want to be able to do.” All of the people Karl interviews tell him the same thing: intelligence is not merely knowing a bunch of stuff. Karl just does not get it. He glazes over like a dog shown a card trick and says, “Yeah but I just think if I had some quotes....” He thinks being smart is the same as impressing other people with quotes. The rub is that a lot of academics think so too! Karl might be better off though, because he knows that he just wants to appear to know stuff, where academics typically think they know a lot of stuff.
I am drawing parallels to the academic world, but it should be clear that Karl's inadequate understandings are indicative of what we might call, for lack of a better term, “human nature.” Perhaps “human tendency” would be better. We all want recognition. What is recognition but an appearance? When a student tells me he really is trying so hard, he is usually merely putting on the appearance while resting firmly within previously established boundaries. These limitations are precisely what stops learning from ever happening. One of the worst arguments I had with a student was over a paper she had written about Stranger Than Paradise. In the prompt I carefully specified that her essay should address the slow pace of the film without using the word “boring.” I regard this as a fairly straight-forward technique. The idea is to encourage the student to think about a very conspicuous aspect of the work without the facile category she would want to plug it into. Perhaps forcing one to use different words will engender new ideas. “If you are bored, you're boring,” someone once said. John Cage said if you are bored for two minutes, try it for four minutes; if you are still bored try it for eight more, and so on. I said that Stranger Than Paradise is slow but it isn't boring. Explain why it is slow. You can imagine what she wrote. After she saw her “D” she screamed at me about how she's entitled to her opinion and all the familiar excuses against thinking and learning I mentioned at the beginning.
Gervais is in Satisfied Foool for about 30 seconds, and he says simply, “Karl won't learn anything from this.” Maybe it's because he really is stupid, and maybe my student who thinks Stranger Than Paradise is boring is stupid. We are not all created equal. Yet there is something fundamentally human about the way Karl will ask a question, but not accept the answer because he already has an idea of what the answer should be. I think of the time (I don't know if it was the podcast or the XFM show) Ricky tries to convince him that dinosaurs and humans never shared the planet and he just cannot entertain the notion. “Surely their paths would have crossed at some point,” he says. He does not conceive of how vast the past is; he only knows that it happened before he got here. In some form or another, we all have that problem. We all know we don't know everything. Most of the time we are dissatisfied with our inadequate understanding of life, the universe and everything. It is only when we are being told answers that we suddenly feel protective of everything we already know.
In the program Karl searches for an answer to his question: “Is it worth it to be smarter?” Since Karl is an idiot, he naturally thinks that being smarter means knowing more stuff, so what underpins his asinine question is the belief that if he worked harder at being smart i.e. if he read more, he would amass a repository of more facts and bits of information and thus would be smarter. Of course he leans toward not doing this, toward not learning, because what little he does pick up from reading – and it should be mentioned that he is a terrible, terrible reader with no attention span and no sensitivity to nuance – does no make him any happier. This is also crucial – he thinks knowledge should equal happiness.
The fascinating thing about all this is that it seems irredeemably idiotic when you watch this man bumble his way through these ridiculous questions, but somehow he represents a fundamental human problem. I think we all have it in our heads, even those of us who try to exercise it like a demon, that happiness is the ultimate goal. Whether one views it as a birthright or a responsibility, we treat life as a quest for happiness. Every other activity gets filtered through that lens. Will knowledge make me happy? Will money make me happy? Sex? Drugs? Marriage? Religion? Health? Hobbies? Instead of attempting to balance these these things to achieve some semblance of a whole human most people focus on one or two. Most of us do not have sufficient time for emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical fulfillment or satisfaction. We pick the area that tickles us, the one that is easiest, and focus on that. The reason why this never results in happiness is that the other aspects of existence or consciousness have been neglected and the simple fact of the matter is that all need to be nourished. The intellectual lives in quiet desperation, unable to relate to his fellow human beings emotionally. The poet dies young because he neglects his body which he sees as the cage that traps his spirit. And so on.
Karl is not going to keep his desperation quiet and this is his illuminating quality. He is a fool, but perhaps no more so than most people. (One could argue that the title card inserted at the end that shows his Mensa test score of 83 in relation to the average score of 100 would indicate that he is indeed stupider than most people.) It's just that most people keep their mouths shut. My junior high school science teacher was fond of telling us, “You know if you didn't open your mouth, no one would know how stupid you are.” Alot of us learned that lesson despite the deluge of reality shows in which people give vent to every fleeting eighth-grade emotion and inane notion in their heads and despite that we are taught that self-expression is the supreme purpose in life. This contradiction causes a problem: when people do open their mouths they have a delusional sense of entitlement because they have learned that every utterance is a sacred expression of self-hood than no other person has a right to judge. Nobody wants to speak up, but when they do, you had better thank them for it.
I go through this in every course I teach. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's attempts to educate Karl sound like exactly my experience with students who are supposedly much smarter than Karl is. I beg them to talk. I try to interest them in anything so I will have a point to jump in. But somehow they think that it was the talking that was the important thing in itself. When they start talking and I correct them or critique them in any way, they are flabbergasted. Why am I talking if I am not going to receive adulation and affirmation? In one season of the radio show, Ricky would give Karl books to read – little introductions to various historical figures of note like Churchill and Rasputin. The comedy of it was that Karl kept thinking that he was supposed to get out of it whatever he got out of it, when Ricky was trying to get him to learn specific, key points about the subjects of the books. A lot of this has to do with Karl's reading comprehension and short attention span. This is why Karl's “search” is ultimately doomed to fail – he isn't really searching because he does not how. I think of the student who refuses to accept a single premise proposed by the course, but insists that he is really trying hard. Trying is not only a decision. It is also a skill. Learning is not the addition of information. It is acceptance of ways of knowing that sometimes nullify the ones you used previously.
Karl believes that Knowledge is a collection of facts. In his conception the only advantages to being smart are for “chat” and to avoid coming across “daft.” Substitute “chat” for “classroom discussion” and “not coming across daft” for “getting a good grade” and you have the average college student. Almost every student I ever had wants me to tell them a list of things they can repeat to me in class and in papers. They just want to know what it takes to impress me. How can I not think of Karl exclaiming to the man who quotes Socrates, “See? That's what I want to be able to do.” All of the people Karl interviews tell him the same thing: intelligence is not merely knowing a bunch of stuff. Karl just does not get it. He glazes over like a dog shown a card trick and says, “Yeah but I just think if I had some quotes....” He thinks being smart is the same as impressing other people with quotes. The rub is that a lot of academics think so too! Karl might be better off though, because he knows that he just wants to appear to know stuff, where academics typically think they know a lot of stuff.
I am drawing parallels to the academic world, but it should be clear that Karl's inadequate understandings are indicative of what we might call, for lack of a better term, “human nature.” Perhaps “human tendency” would be better. We all want recognition. What is recognition but an appearance? When a student tells me he really is trying so hard, he is usually merely putting on the appearance while resting firmly within previously established boundaries. These limitations are precisely what stops learning from ever happening. One of the worst arguments I had with a student was over a paper she had written about Stranger Than Paradise. In the prompt I carefully specified that her essay should address the slow pace of the film without using the word “boring.” I regard this as a fairly straight-forward technique. The idea is to encourage the student to think about a very conspicuous aspect of the work without the facile category she would want to plug it into. Perhaps forcing one to use different words will engender new ideas. “If you are bored, you're boring,” someone once said. John Cage said if you are bored for two minutes, try it for four minutes; if you are still bored try it for eight more, and so on. I said that Stranger Than Paradise is slow but it isn't boring. Explain why it is slow. You can imagine what she wrote. After she saw her “D” she screamed at me about how she's entitled to her opinion and all the familiar excuses against thinking and learning I mentioned at the beginning.
Gervais is in Satisfied Foool for about 30 seconds, and he says simply, “Karl won't learn anything from this.” Maybe it's because he really is stupid, and maybe my student who thinks Stranger Than Paradise is boring is stupid. We are not all created equal. Yet there is something fundamentally human about the way Karl will ask a question, but not accept the answer because he already has an idea of what the answer should be. I think of the time (I don't know if it was the podcast or the XFM show) Ricky tries to convince him that dinosaurs and humans never shared the planet and he just cannot entertain the notion. “Surely their paths would have crossed at some point,” he says. He does not conceive of how vast the past is; he only knows that it happened before he got here. In some form or another, we all have that problem. We all know we don't know everything. Most of the time we are dissatisfied with our inadequate understanding of life, the universe and everything. It is only when we are being told answers that we suddenly feel protective of everything we already know.
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