Thursday, September 29, 2011
Head Down Behavior
I sit alone in the room
in my wheelchair thinking.
Head slumped,
chin resting on chest.
except for my body,
it must look like I am absent.
No sign of movement;
probably looks like I’m not even breathing.
No outward sign of involvement .
But there’s plenty going on inside this head.
Bolts of lightning in this brain,
Claps of thunder, synapses firing;
Neurons excited electrically and chemically
Are sending signals, billions of them
Monday, September 26, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
In the Septemeber 19th
issue of NEWSWEEK is a story on page 11 with the headline, “Texting Makes U
stupid.” It starts with, “The good news is that today’s teenagers are avid
readers and prolific writers.” The
subheadline reads, “The U.S. is producing civilizitional illiterates.” Author
Niall Ferguson then points out that last year Nielsen found Americans between the
ages of 13 and 17 send and receive an average of 3,339 texts per month. Teenage
girls, 4,000.
With that quotation in mind, I thought
Ferguson was going to say something nice about texting; that he was going to
find some value in it, but I was disappointed. He didn’t point out what digital
dexterity these teenagers must have. He didn’t point out they have invented a
simpler form of the language, i.e. “C u later NOT L,” except in a derisive way.”
Here is a man complicating the language using words like “civilizational.” Nowhere
on the page does Mr. Ferguson say something positive about this “unmissable
trend.”
And what’s the cure for this
blemish on the behind of mankind according to Ferguson? Book camp. Reading Virgil’s Aeneid,
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and so on;
the books on the Columbia University undergraduate core curriculum list.
The author admits he sends 50 e
mails a day and receives 200, but he adds in a bit of sarcasm he reads books
too as part of a “quaint old habit I picked up as a kid.”
I submit Ferguson picked up another
quaint habit as a kid and it is a negative view of anything new. Today he fails
to see any good in something that statistics imply is a prodigious
phenomenon in our culture. Gee, Naill, it can’t be all bad.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Head Down Behavior
I sit alone in my
wheelchair, thinking.
Head slumped,
chin resting on chest.
It must look like,
Except for my body,
I am absent.
No sign of movement;
probably looks like I’m not even breathing.
No outward sign of
involvement in anything;
But there’s plenty going on inside this head.
Bolts of lightning in this brain,
Claps of thunder, synapses firing;
Neurons getting excited electrically and chemically
And sending signals,
billions of them
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
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