What's Wrong with Carl Sagan's Glasses?

Fifteen years ago I read Carl Sagan’s beautiful book Pale Blue Dot which describes how unique and interesting we are in our own solar system, but at the same time presents the idea of how fragile our isolated little world really is. We’re not the center of the solar system, let alone the entire universe (or--to put it with more of a religious bent-- all of creation), and therefore need to advance space exploration in hopes of increasing our survivability as a species. Sagan has a now famous monologue from that book where he explains just how miniscule we all are when looking back at our planet from four billion miles, as the spacecraft Voyager 2 did when she snapped a now iconic image that became the title of Sagan’s book. The picture of earth, “suspended in a sunbeam,” is certainly a humbling one, and provides an interesting perspective on all of our daily activities and ambitions.

The problem is that that picture, taken billions of miles out, is not our perspective.

Our world is quickly buying into the idea that massive data sets of information can surely solve our problems if analyzed correctly. Big data is trying desperately to equate our lives to statistical analysis and our behavioral patterns to mathematical formula. It seems there’s an omnipresent push to ensure that every aspect of our lives is empirical and reduced to measurable observation. However, this perspective on life is exactly the shortsightedness that Sagan brought to the table with his book. Please don’t misunderstand me—the macroscopic perspective certainly has value; there is value to remembering once in awhile that our lives are actually a microcosm on a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam. However, that’s not the perspective of our day-to-day lives.

We live on the human scale. The human scale includes in its fringes our understanding of the cosmos; however, like our place in the solar system, this cosmic perspective is not at the center. It can’t be. Our world is a world of personal relationships which exist very much within the human perspective, so much so that it in fact defines the human perspective as exactly that which sees and understands existence through the relationships that we work so hard at building, maintaining, or sometimes ending.

The world of big data and a cosmological view of our lives are both incredibly extreme perspectives of our reality. When we wake up everyday, it’s not with thoughts of the asteroid that recently came between the earth and the moon, nor is it with thoughts of crunching numbers to determine an algorithm for dressing ourselves, but rather with thoughts of navigating through the web of human relationships that we’ve created, and with the hope that our navigational senses will make those webs stronger. Questions of family, friends, and work are almost always questions firmly in the fields of the humanities. If there’s an issue with a presentation you have to make at work, it’s more than likely because you’re trying to impress or persuade someone. If there’s an issue with a family member, you’re trying to figure out the best course of action to repair that relationship. If there’s an issue with a friend, you may find yourself thinking on the best advice to give. The close approach of that asteroid—though startling—fades from our constructed reality pretty quickly. For us, the human concerns are those concerns that make up what is real—our constructed reality.

This is the reality that we live in, and the human perspective is therefore the view that we need to keep in mind most often.

J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time

It's important to understand the foundational difference between the father of modern fantasy, Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien, and one of Tolkien's literary descendants, Robert Jordan. Understand that I'm not writing this to proclaim one of these author's king, nor am I trying to convince others of the literary merits--academic or aesthetic--of the writers who happened to be born after Tolkien and so must proclaim homage to Tolkien due in the least to the linear flow of time. Instead, it is important to understand why Tolkien does deserve such an homage, and how he has been successively surpassed particularly in the craft of writing.

To put it simply, Tolkien was an academic, and as such Tolkien has had the strongest understanding or sense of the nature of myth, fairy stories, and their relationship to the fields of historiography and art. Tolkien's two most famous lectures-turned-essays on these topics, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," and "On Fairy Stories," give us exactly the type of groundbreaking academic perspective you would expect from a forward-thinking professor ruminating on their well-trodden field of study. Tolkien understood fantasy, fairy story, or myth, as a cultural artifact, but moreover elucidated the value of that artifact in relation to human experience. Myth, in Tolkien's hands, became real. Conversely, I do not know of any writings by Robert Jordan--or other major contemporary fantasy writers, for that matter--that approach the subject from the angle of academia that Tolkien did. In fact, I think Tolkien did so so effectively that Tolkien essentially closed the book on the value of the fairy story. We're convinced Tolkien-- thank you.

However, this is not to say that Robert Jordan's writing of fairy story, or, as Tolkien coined it, Jordan's use of the land of Faerie (though others like Edmund Spenser used the phrase) was in any measurable way better than Tolkien's, because Jordan obviously owes a tremendous debt to Tolkien's understanding of mythology or fairy story. In short, Tolkien was an academic, a fantastic storyteller, but in the end a mediocre writer. "Clumsy" is the best way to describe The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (LotR), and The Silmarillion. The appendices at the end of LotR and the very existence of The Silmarillion itself, exemplifies Tolkien's lack of mastery over written narrative. I contend that had Tolkien been a master writer, The Silmarillion would have been worked in to the larger tale of LotR. This failure is exactly where Jordan succeeds. The Silmarillion is essentially a giant appendix to LotR. It is part of the story that Tolkien didn't understand how to include in the main body of the LotR narrative. Jordan, on the other hand, doesn't use appendices, but rather 14 novels to make the story--appendices and all--unified. The entirety of the story is meshed together. In a very real sense, Jordan is standing on the shoulder's of Tolkien's genius regarding how fairy stories work, and where Tolkien failed in the craft of writing them, Jordan succeeded.

In Jordan's contiguous (although certainly not chronological) narrative, we get the Breaking of the World and the wonders of the Age of Legends which preceded it. We follow the rise of Artur Hawking and note the fall of the Aes Sedai from worldly importance-- all without appendices and all without breaking stride from the original narrative, because the history of Jordan's world is the narrative, or more specifically, the characters in Jordan's world experience their own mythology in the way that Tolkien explained we ourselves should be experiencing mythology in his essay "On Fairy Stories."

In a sense, I then see Tolkien's five books (previously mentioned) as the equivalent in narrative volume as Jordan's fourteen books. Jordan required the mythological interstitial fluid to connect the mythologies and histories to his characters, and this written connection birthed a tale larger in physical books than Tolkien's, but on the same capacity of narrative accomplishment. This is exactly what makes Jordan's tale so much more readable than Tolkien's and a much more smoother experience. We are not asked to fit the Tolkien-appendix apparatus into Jordan's story, for Jordan does it for us. That is a master writer, and that is exactly what separates the two apart.

Die Novel, Die: The impossible intersection between digital culture and reading a novel

Facilitate learning rather than educate. Interactive and dynamic rather than force fed. Doer and transmitter rather than receiver. I understand and believe in most of the new reevaluation of teaching and pedagogy that has occurred in the past twenty years. Students need to be actively learning rather than passively taught, and darn near every educational study has proven this relatively new ideology. However, in the world of English, there’s a problem.

Students still need to spend time, of their own accord, reading.

This problem isn’t something that’s relatively new, and I think we all have to recognize that now. As anecdotal evidence, I like to point to Frank McCourt’s memoir Teacher Man which chronicles McCourt’s time as a high school English teacher in the public schools of New York City. McCourt’s account of unmotivated students took place over thirty years ago, and in the memoir he reports widely on the lack of reading. Fast forward a few decades and the National Endowment for the Arts reported in 2007 that on average Americans between the ages of 15 to 24 spend two hours of their leisure time watching tv, and only seven minutes of that time reading. Seven. If Neil Postman’s futuristic prognostication regarding the detrimental effects of increased technological distractions isn’t vindicated by this little nugget then I don’t know what can.

Students need to be a central part of the learning process. I buy into that wholeheartedly. But how does an English class proceed to the facilitation of learning when the majority of the class hasn’t read?

Only in the last few years have I started to really understand the relationship between English as a subject that’s part of a school system (and the focus regarding a school “system” is to stress that systems are designed around ideologies) and English as a representation of the literary arts. Literature is art. This is really the crux of the issue that English teachers face in the classroom. As an art, English teachers not only facilitate interpreting that art, but also facilitate how to appreciate it, and how to apply it. The crux of the matter then revolves around the issue of technological distractions and experiencing literary art.

Music is easy, and arguably, visual arts even easier. Although one could spend a whole lifetime studying and appreciating these art forms (as many people do), to experience the totality of these genres of art can often be done in twenty minutes. Understand that I’m talking about the experience of the art, mind you, not the thinking about and interpretation of the art. A pop song is often experienced in under four minutes; many classical pieces can be experienced in under twenty. A novel, however, can take many hours to experience. How, in this way, is the novel to survive a cultural push to crowd out, condense, and clip knowledge into digestible and scan-able scraps?

Simply put? It can’t. The cultural forces that are going to cause the downfall of the novel may have unintended consequences. I’m willing to bet there’s going to be a renaissance in the interest of poetry due to these same forces. Epic, no, but short-verse freeform and the lyric? Absolutely. Shakespeare understood the requirement of readership when it came to the life of a work. In sonnet 18, the speaker depicts his lover’s immortalization in the poem itself:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, / Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;  /  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

What Shakespeare is assuming as he penned these lines, however, is that someone will always be reading it. The poem gives the lover immortal life as long as it’s always read. Will that happen any longer if our culture only values and courts the information that’s easily accessed or instantly searched? Is the lover of the poem still given life if that famous couplet is the only part of the sonnet ever pulled out and read from the Internet’s constantly indexing search engines?

My fear is essentially this. Perennially I tell my students not to read a novel, but to experience it. Experience it as art and allow the novel to work into the inner most recesses of your brain, or, better yet, let it chip away or tug at the core of your emotions where a light of recognition and understanding connects your mind with a thought of one of your own personal experiences. My fear, then, is saying these things to a class of students who have become information spectators rather than artist actors. My fear is standing in front of the classroom and eventually realizing that my generation’s experience with a novel may be the last to experience it as such. But more importantly, my fear isn’t that the students who aren’t reading novels don’t read them because they choose the easy way out by instantly going to Spark Notes or to Google, but rather that they can’t experience it the way that I do because culture has hardwired them to see that experience as superfluous, old-fashioned, and irrelevant.

Once culture has succeeded in that, the novel will be truly dead.

Unglamorous Glorifying of Big Data

The recent article in Popular Science magazine by Juan Enriquez titled “The Glory of Big Data” boasts a tagline that should scream at us to wake up instead of making us drool over the possibilities of data crunching that the article highlights. The tagline reads, “Suddenly, we can know the world completely. Next, we reprogram it.” It’s become very apparent to me that we’re losing perspective on the difference between knowledge and experience.


I attended a conference at Rutgers University in June of 2010 where a speaker on the use of technology in the classroom told us that the future student will have more knowledge at their fingertips due to technology than the specialized knowledge in which a professor will have personally acquired. At first blush this seems absolutely incredible and progressive. The skills the student then needs is not retaining information but learning how to access it.

So where’s the problem? This seems like a giant leap forward in the ever quickening race to acquire information. That’s a good thing right?

What we’re failing to separate is the distinction between what we gain in the human condition through experience and what’s classifiable as attainable knowledge. To make an analogy, I can tell someone that heroin use is harmful to one’s body and that it can damage one’s relationships, like any other substance abuse, because of the intensity of addiction. I know that; that’s knowledge. However, I’m lucky enough to have never experienced it, either first or second hand. Someone who has experienced the awful issues revolving around heroin abuse will access that pool of wisdom they’ve accumulated about its devastating impact. This is a resource that I can’t replicate or duplicate, not with Google or any other powerful information search engine.

Moreover, the human condition is defined as the sum total possibilities of human experience. Notice it doesn’t concern itself with knowledge, because knowledge is not as useful to us without the accompanying experience to turn that knowledge into wisdom. It’s our experiences that define us, not necessarily just what we know.

As a case in point, the perennial stumbling block of all English teachers is Spark Notes or a plethora of the other sites that summarize and analyze literature. This, in and of itself, is harmless, and not the issue. The issue is how this knowledge is used to supplant the experience of reading the art, for art it is. This is the equivalent of someone telling you that Raphael’s “The School of Athens” is a painting that depicts some of the greatest philosophical minds of antiquity, including Aristotle, Plato, and, interestingly and anachronistically, even Raphael himself. Ok, so now I know who’s in the painting. I’ve gained some knowledge. However, in the summer of 2008 I had the pleasure of seeing this famous painting in person at the Vatican Museum. It’s an incredible experience to behold this colossal work. In the few moments I had with the painting I experienced a kinship of understanding with the artist; a connection with Raphael. Although the Vatican commissioned the work, Raphael had the freedom to depict these philosophers as he wished, and one can experience the reverence and awe that Raphael imbibes in the painting by being present with it. It was in the moment of experiencing the art that I began to fully understand how important these Greek philosophers were to our modern world. These thinkers set the stage for others to build upon their thoughts. I didn’t read this sensation; I didn’t have it described to me; it wasn’t analyzed by some third party. I experienced it.

The experience of art is different in a museum than on a computer screen—anyone who has ever visited a museum or has been in an art studio can tell you this. Spark Notes and its ilk mar the ability for a student to experience the art—to allow the student to formulate their own constructions of meaning and experience around the act of experience itself. The Spark Notes method of disseminating knowledge from the art is not referential nor does it allow for the indelible personal connection. Take a look at some of the incredible things that genetic engineers are now close to accomplishing—like bringing back the wooly mammoth—which could potentially go horribly and irreversibly wrong. Tell someone that science is potentially the greatest force the human species has ever wielded, and they’ll know it. Talk to a scientist that has ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or watched Jurassic Park and they’ll have the wisdom of it.

Determining what humans stand to lose if knowledge supersedes experience is a difficult conclusion to pin down. However, the loss of experience must impact the depth of the human condition. Take away experiences and one makes human existence meaningless. In a sense, pure knowledge is embodied by the Internet itself. It’s important to remember that the Internet—data-- is not who we are. However, if education and our daily lives are now defined by how we access our information and not what types of experiences we have, we should expect a great shift in what it means to be human. The degree of that shift, and in what direction, bodes ill.

Fiction for Dummies – Why fiction is important in our culture

I just finished reading Stephen King’s “1922” and was thoroughly wowed. King’s prose contains such a gritty truth that one is compelled to not only be horrified by the gore and the terror, but to understand it, mainly through the identification of the protagonists as the everyday sort. There are no Odysseuses , Beowulfs, or tragic hero in King’s story, simply the mundane who learn their lives aren’t mundane after all, but filled with as much depredation and loathing as any a hero might face. This is, in essence, King’s poetics, his literary aesthetic. That aesthetic is so gut-wrenching in its insistence on everyday characters that King felt compelled to reveal some of his thoughts on the creative process—and the role of fiction in our society in general—in an afterword:

            “I have little patience with writers who don’t take the job seriously, and none at all with those who see the art of story-fiction as essentially worn out. It’s not worn out, and it’s not a literary game. It’s one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives. And the often terrible world we see around us. It’s the way we answer the questions, How can such things be? Stories suggest that sometimes—not always, but sometimes—there’s a reason.”

King’s brilliance truly lies in his commitment to the art of prose. Sure, he’s made a ton of money writing his entire life, but he declares that money is tangential, that it’s the art itself that’s important.

            What King is diving at is the unshakeable desire for art in our lives. All true art, sometimes referred to as high art, is “one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives.” Fiction is a social requirement. King goes on to express his idea that commonplace characters placed in uncommon situations are the most riveting and emotionally appealing—hence the derivation of his poetics above. However, as an artist—specifically a writer—King is mentioning something that I’ve taken a large interest in in the past 12 months or so; the idea that art is essential, or even vital, as King mentions, to our very understanding of why we’re here and what we’re doing with the time we have. Intellectualism, understood as the single characteristic that separates humans from all other species on the planet, fiends for art. Those without much education have difficulty connecting to high art because of a lack of understanding of how the media work, and so most people become lovers of pop culture. One has simply to turn on a radio and a TV to hear and see pop culture hard at work, offering itself up for easy and unsophisticated consumption.

            As King points out however, it’s high art like fiction—true fiction, the kind of fiction that is produced by writers who take their jobs seriously—that is absolutely essential to understanding our world. True fiction invites us in to ask the question, How can such things be?, on a more complicated and sophisticated level. What’s interesting about King’s poetics as he explains in the afterword is that he is looking for a devouring emotional response from the narrative first, and then the intellectual response second once the book is put down. King discusses voraciously reading Orwell’s 1984 as a teenager due to his emotional connection to the book while reading it. It appears King feels that emotion is the first way in which we should respond to true art. But why feel through something before one allows the intellect a crack at it? I think the answer lies in the fact that one’s mind doesn’t shut off when reading fiction, but rather is turned down to a dull roar while the emotional side is often stoked and tended like a desperate fire on damp wood in the dead of winter. We crave for emotion for our very survival, for our most immediate connection to what makes us human. Sometimes we need to pull ourselves off of the Information Super Highway and enter the dirt track that leads into the Forest of Feeling.

            We’re saturated by information in the form of facts and statistics on a daily basis—the supreme comfortable realm of non-fiction. King’s compulsion to defend fiction is firmly grounded in our contemporary social context. His desire to defend what he does as an artist resides solely on the observation that our society seems to be turning away from fiction to keep our head out of the clouds, yet it’s the exploration of the clouds that makes our journey on the ground so rewarding.

On the Title "Prometheus Repurposed"

It is now 2010 C.E. The age before us marvels the will as well as the mind, when one thinks of the technological wonders and human horrors that are potentially within our reach. Our technology-- and our relationship with it—can produce a future with divine possibilities or destructive consequences. The human race stands at a very interesting, yet trying point in its history. The evidence of an unsustainable population growth, coupled with social and economic issues that have never before been of such a magnitude, will either catapult humans into a new stream of consciousness concerning our relationship with the earth and with each other or, pessimistically, will kill us. On a centurial timescale the tipping point has been reached. How we navigate through the social, cultural, and scientific waters of our age will be the pivot point of humanity’s next greatest epoch.


There are visionaries we should be listening to—scientists, mathematicians, economists, ecologists, teachers, professors, theorists, theologians, philosophers, and writers. These visionaries are of our present age and of ages past, for the act of envisioning is to see an aspect of life more clearly than others. It’s this power, this imagination coupled with cognition, that can transform a society’s world view and alter the course of human behavior.

It’s easy to speak in generalities such as these. To say outright that the world has issues does nothing to solve them. This blog will focus on those writers and thinkers who have a unique outlook on the human condition. That’s everyone who has ever written, you may be thinking. True, but even ancient writers were writing for ancient audiences, who suffered through their own problems and produced various forms of culture to understand the world and their time as it pertained to them. How does that help us today? How do those texts speak to us in 2010?

Prometheus was a god in the Greek mythology who stole the fire from Hephaestus’ forge and gave it to us mortals. Fire—or more specifically the act of creating it—was top technology in the time of the Olympians. Punished for eternity by being chained to a high rock, Prometheus was fettered for having taken knowledge of the universe that changed human history. We’re duplicating this scenario now. Humans have successfully melded man and machine into bionic symbiotes. Gene splicing and genetic engineering pave the way for a wholly novel way of treating previously fatal disease. The Internet and the gadgets that access it are becoming faster and more functional, allowing us to share data with each other at unprecedented levels. We are harnessing the powers of nature itself—science is our fire.

But Prometheus suffered for it. Well, in a sense so are we. Let’s imagine that Prometheus conferred with Zeus and made a diplomatic arrangement. Instead of stealing the powers of the universe, Prometheus taught mortals the consequences of such power before it was exploited. Such a parable seems laughable until one considers the capacity humans have for learning. It is this capacity that I will explore on this blog. How do we implement the technology we’ve obtained in a manner that is productive and not destructive? Lastly, we need to continually apply the lessons given by writers and thinkers of the past to our issues, to our needs. Our future will be bright only as long as we confer and begin a discourse with the past. Prometheus must be recast and repurposed. The use of technology should not result in punishment, but rather, should result in a clear recognition of our role as a leading species among many on this planet.

Obama the Dramatist – is it enough?

There have been few people in my life that inspired me. I’ve had three great English teachers in high school and three fantastic professors in college. My wife helps me to do good work—having a family is an amazing feeling and a good hunk of motivation. Last night I watched Barak Obama give a speech in St. Paul, Minnesota. I actually had shivers run down my spine and through my legs when he spoke. In all seriousness, the last time I’ve had that happen was while watching the rousing speech William Wallace gives to the Scots before the battle of Sterling in Braveheart. So, Obama is one hell of a public speaker. We all know this, but what does it mean?

For one, I think it’s pretty clear that Obama is well educated. Now, granted, some people are well educated and can’t speak well, others are smooth talkers yet can’t figure out how to put a square peg into a square hole, but Obama is different. I’ve heard Obama compared to JFK too often to accept that he’s all charisma. No, there’s more there.

He’s put together one heck of a primary campaign. Battling through irate ministers and a demographic age deficit has given Obama validity in his claim that he has the experience to run the country. I’m not saying that that’s all a President is going to face, I’m saying that Obama has the skills to cope, recoup, and come out on top. He has the smarts, the drive, and the perseverance to see things through. This is what our leadership has been lacking for the past eight years. This is the type of person we need at this crucial moment in our history.