Year: 2013

According to Gary Shteyngart, wearing Google Glass makes you seem more appealing to strangers:

My friend Doug and I hit Bushwick and Williamsburg. Everyone at the bar at Roberta’s restaurant wants a piece of me. “Ah, future!” a German man cries. “We saw you have the Google,” a girl from a group of visiting Atlantans drawls. “Can we try it awn?” And then, without warning, I’m talking to young people. We’re all squealing, full of childish zeal. We are rubbing up to the future, hearing the first gramophone playing scratchily in the distance. Doug knows a movie producer who recently got Glass and said, “This is as close as I’ll ever get to being a rock star.” When the velvet-rope hostess at the of-the-moment Wythe Hotel bar in Williamsburg stops to take a photo of me with her iPhone, I know exactly what the producer meant. This is the most I will ever be loved by strangers.

But:

Wearing Glass takes its toll.

“You look like you have a lazy eye,” I’m told at a barbecue, my right eye instinctively scanning upward for more info. “You look like you have a nervous tic,” when I tap at the touch pad. “You have that faraway look again,” whenever there’s something more interesting happening on my screen. To awaken Glass, one must tap at the touch pad or jerk one’s head; otherwise the device remains inactive, conserving its limited battery supply and allowing the user to remain perfectly human. At breakfast, I jerk my head up theatrically, and then use a new function which allows me to move around Web sites by holding two fingers to the touch pad and moving my head about, in effect turning my skull into a cursor. “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto,” my wife says.

After a full day of Glassing, of constantly moving my eye up and down as if in preparation for the bifocals I will need when I’m older, I fall into bed exhausted. I want to take my Glass off, but there’s a tweet from Joyce Carol Oates in response to a tweet I posted of myself wearing Glass. Oates is more concerned about my choice of shirts in the photo I tweeted. “Did Rasputin wear a button-down collar?” she asks, questioning my identity. “Not the actual G.S., possibly.”

A video of Shteyngart experimenting with Glass is here.

Joan Marcus comes to terms with her childhood crush on Caligula, the Roman emperor famed for his cruelty:

In childhood I was conditioned early to empathize with suffering, and Caligula certainly suffered, but he was also dangerous; I suppose that combination was the real source of his seductive power over me. Volatility without pathos wouldn’t have moved me. A man who dominated without showing some vulnerability would have been repulsive, and a gentle soul who got crushed to a pulp would have been pathetic. It was the wounded man simmering with barely-contained energy that fascinated me — passion or violence, it all felt the same.

This is the same quality, I imagine, that draws some women to incarcerated killers — that they smolder, chastened by the system and in need of sympathy.

Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez both had flocks of groupies. As of this writing, Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dhokhar Tsarnaev has thousands of fans on social media sites, many of them young women, many thoroughly smitten. Behind bars these men are immobile love objects, captives suffering bravely under the weight of justice.

Perhaps their fans imagine them wrongly accused, or remorseful, or working through the trauma of childhood. Perhaps, in some strange way, they believe them to be empathetic. These are men who know suffering intimately and would relate to our own. They hate the power structures that hurt them but could share a deep bond with an insightful woman if only they had the chance. News outlets provide plenty of images to feed this fantasy. That aerial shot of nineteen-year-old Tsarnaev shortly after his capture, the one where he’s on the ground face up with his arms locked behind and his abdomen exposed, that’s wounded man porn right there, grist for all those girls who confuse pity with love and violence with passion.

A reader writes:

The recent letter you published in (qualified) defense of Tony Bennett relies on some claims that are pretty well debunked in this Slate article by Jordan Ellenburg.  The state already had a system in place for dealing with the “non-traditional” schools in Indiana, one that would not make the grade for Christel House inherently unfair.  As Ellenburg writes, Bennett intervened after the odd “grade 3-10” issues of measurement had been worked out, and he created an entirely new loophole for the school.  Basically, rather than using a different weighting system, Bennett just got rid of the bad scores of 9th and 10th graders, and then gave the school an A even though with these scores removed it STILL earned a B.

In other words, while your education-employed correspondent may be right in general, in this case Bennett was intervening after the statistical work had been done to account for the factors that made Christel House “unique.”  This is a pretty clear-cut case of politically motivated intervention, not just an accident of a complex school accountability scheme.  These systems may have honest problems, but Tony Bennett is a dishonest one.

Another:

NPR yesterday had a fairly good report on Tony Bennett. Showing “both sides”, as they do, they gave Bennett’s side of the story:

After his system gave the friend’s charter school a “C”‘ he quietly ordered corrections (the school doesn’t graduate students, since it only handles two grades under 12th grade). With the “fix” made, the system upped the grade to an “A”. Good story, but it doesn’t cover everything. NPR then got a rundown of the situation from Mike Petrilli, VP at Thomas B. Fordham Institute who’s been critical of Bennett policies in the past. Petrilli slammed the school and Bennett, saying the school was failing Indiana’s state standardized tests.

Another reader, who agreed to forgo the Dish’s default anonymity policy, writes:

My name is Lili Lutgens and I am President of the Board of Directors of Community Montessori Charter Public School in New Albany, Indiana. We are a pre-K through 12th grade charter public school that uses Montessori teaching techniques to offer families in our community an alternative to traditional public education. Like Christel House Academy, we added one grade per year until 2010 when we graduated our first class of seniors. We also take children who have struggled academically in the traditional public education environment and so we take a lot of kids who are not very good test takers.

But unlike Christel House Academy, our accountability scores have never taken any of this into consideration.  Instead, we are judged solely on our students’ test taking performance and graduation rates.  Never mind that we are offering an alternative for kids struggling in a traditional academic setting and that historically in any given year we have had a significant number of new students.

I guess we just don’t have the kind of money to donate that it takes for the state to give us the benefit of the doubt.

By the way, if you want more info on exactly why the standardized tests underlying these accountability scores are problematic, you may want to look at the work of W James Popham, professor of academic testing at UCLA.  In a nutshell, the tests do not measure instructional quality but are used to judge it anyway.  Popham delivered an important paper at the annual meeting of the National Council on Educational Measurement last year, and it can be found here [pdf].

Eric Benson takes a look at Professor Borges, a new book compiling the transcripts of a survey course taught in 1966 by Jorge Luis Borges, the famed Argentine writer:

The twenty-five lectures that make up the book are ostensibly introductory, but they’re only masquerading as English 101. Instead, this is Borges’s highly idiosyncratic tour of his favorite authors and most revered myths, a view of history and literature as filtered through his capacious, whimsical mind.

The book begins with the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain in the Fifth Century AD and ends with Robert Louis Stevenson’s death on the Samoan Island of SavaiʻI in 1894. Vikings, mythical Old English heroes, and Icelandic historians dominate the first third of the course. James MacPherson, a literary forger who composed an anachronistic epic called Ossian and tried to pass it off as ancient Scottish verse, is credited as a key founder of the Romantic movement. The writings of nineteenth century poet William Morris are the topic of the three classes. The works of John Milton and William Shakespeare are the topic of none.

Instead of hallowing the English tradition’s most acclaimed texts, Borges offers the proudly non-academic thoughts of an erudite enthusiast. He narrates the events of largely forgotten battles. He goes on tangents to discuss arcane linguistics. And he tosses off historical theories based on the scantest shreds of evidence (Beowulf’s setting in Denmark and Sweden is definitive proof that “after 300 years of living in new lands, the Anglo-Saxons still felt homesick”). It’s hard to imagine these lectures will end up as required reading for any serious English-literature course. It’s also hard to imagine any serious reader failing to discover pleasure in the joyful digressions and virtuoso distillations of this strange, wonderful book.

Mark O’Connell marvels at the man’s immense learning – and peculiar prejudices:

The “Borges” who is revealed, or perhaps performed…seems like the Platonic ideal of the man of letters: a man who taught himself German because he wanted to read Schopenhauer in the original, and learned it, moreover, by reading the poetry of Heine; a man who taught himself Icelandic in order to pursue his interest in Norse sagas. His loss of sight seems strangely appropriate; in the interviews, he speaks of the “luminous mist” of his blindness as though it were a kind of blessing, a removal of all distraction from what was most important, most real—the life of the mind. (And there was never any shortage of people willing to read to the great writer in his old age.)

But there were things that Borges didn’t see whose invisibility had nothing to do with his physical blindness—things he didn’t see because he wasn’t interested in looking at them. The lecture course in “Professor Borges” doesn’t feature anything written by a woman. It’s a history of English literature that includes no Austen, no Shelley, no Charlotte or Emily Brontë, no Eliot, and no Woolf. He was a great admirer of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, but even that admiration is not without its strain of condescension: in an interview with the collection’s editor, Willis Barnstone, he describes her as “the most passionate of all women who have attempted writing.”

Hardcore fans can check out this Borges lecture on Johnson and Boswell, excerpted from Professor Borges in the New York Review of Books.

(Photo of Borges with “groupies” in 1976, via Wikimedia Commons)