tuesday, april 10, 2007
You may draw your own conclusions
I like learning about infographics, but the ones I make don’t live up to my glorious visions. Here’s one that represents my first two years (six quarters; half the planned total) of college education, if I finish all the work for my classes this quarter:
More explanation: “4 unit” means a complete, regular class and “2 unit” means an incomplete, student-taught, or otherwise less-work-required class (only 4-unit classes count toward requirements). The lines between classes represent a relationship in their subject matter, such as I read a few of the same texts for both these classes, Knowledge from this class was useful in that one, or These classes covered different aspects of the same topic.
This chart is useful for me. It says I haven’t completed enough literature classes, but I collect half-credit computer science classes. My classes have no overarching theme except curiosity about humans and their activities; they’re a little miscellaneous. Most of my classes don’t resemble my vague career plans. I enjoy having this “college” excuse to learn things, and I like playing with Omnigraffle.
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sunday, february 04, 2007
More about Mudrick
Following up on my other quotes about CCS and Mudrick, here’s more from a lovely New York Times review of one of his books:
Mr. Mudrick is rude, contentious, incorrigible, comma spliced, headlong, raunchy, scornful and know-it-all…He plays, wonderfully, to the peanut gallery, and we clap so hard our hands and heads fall off, and then we go home and sleep, alas, with Hamlet: if only he weren’t real.
Also, from his University of California memorial, written by CCS Literature professors:
…he reminds his readers that no artistic statement can be separated from the human being who has made it…Like the voices of his favorite authors, the voice in his writing reproduces his own living voice in an almost uncanny way. That voice is cantankerous, loving, aggressive, spiteful, charming; it abounds with energy and fierce humor. His very funny wordplay remains, and his gift for parody as well as his enormous love for, and need for the arts, as though his own life has depended on them.
There were subjects about which he could never be persuaded to alter his opinion, and this represents a weakness in his idiosyncratic approach. Personality was so important to him, the unstinted expression of a strong individuality was so much part of his own critical method, that he sometimes assumed that the personality of an artist lay closer to the surface than it sometimes does.
His capacity to aggravate was great, but so was his genuine pleasure at being opposed by people he liked…some of the College’s most spectacular successes have been in areas where Mudrick himself had little expertise—for example in the sciences. This bears out the premise on which his College was founded, that similar qualities of curiosity and independence are necessary in order to excel in any subject.
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wednesday, january 17, 2007
What is up with all this blawgging?
Some history and philosophy of the College of Creative Studies, via the googled writings of former students:
Jervey Tervalon (‘78) talks about learning from the person who started this college:
[Marvin] Mudrick was fascinated by people, and he loved people in books, and he didn’t make a big distinction between the two, except for the fact that you’ll know people in books far better than you will know people in life. Here’s the advice he gave me: Read literature like we read the newspaper, skim the boring parts, read carefully what interests you — just keep reading. What Mudrick couldn’t stand were tastemongers, chasing some intellectual hobgoblin of the modern aesthetic; kitsch culture; the cult of family dysfunction; more about slavery; more about the Holocaust…Mudrick believed writing was a function of reading. If you read with passion and intelligence, you’d eventually come around to wanting to write.
Karen Christensen (‘81) also talks about being a Literature major in the Mudrick era:
Mudrick would assign us a new novel every couple of days, and we were asked (though perhaps not expected) to get through piles of Shakespeare (whom he called a misogynist), Chaucer (“just pretend it’s horribly misspelled”), and Milton (again, no favorite of Mudrick’s).
He said, for example, that the measure of fiction was that it had a human story that would interest anyone, of any age, anywhere. Mudrick believed that students were able to write good stories — really good stories — because, as he said to one class, “you’re at the right age, you’re still about to get in touch with your own language…[but] you can’t write expository prose. You can’t write professional prose of any kind, you’re not skilled enough yet.”
That, for me, is Mudrick’s legacy, or at least something he helped to strengthen in me: fascination with the whole of life and a fearlessness about digging into a new bank of knowledge.
Plus, from a review by the New York Times:
In several of these essays, Mr. Mudrick seems to believe that the only way to judge a literary work is by the lusty willingness of its heroine or the vigor and explicitness of its sex scenes.
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tuesday, january 16, 2007
Majoring in the study of creative generalism
Classes I am taking this quarter:
- CCS Literature 111 — Home and World in British Literature
- CCS General Studies 120 — Memory: A Bridge Between Neuroscience and the Humanities
- Art Studio 122 — Re-Contextualizing the Contents of the Web
- Writing Program 105NM — Writing for New Media
- CCS General Studies 10 — History and Philosophy of the College of Creative Studies
- Computer Science 193 — Information Technology in the Community
- CCS Literature 105 — Literature Symposium
“Home and World” is approximately Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver and The Confusion (I never read The System of the World) but in real period literature. The class is about the eighteenth century in England, which incubated the beginnings of modern print culture and notions of abstract money, among other things. It’s my only Literature class this quarter, which is amusing because it’s the one I’m taking for fun instead of useful learning.
“Memory: Neuroscience and the Humanities” is where we read giant chunks of literature and a bunch of scientific papers and generally pontificate about human brains. I like it.
Both “Re-Contextualizing the Web” and “Writing for New Media” could instead be titled “Here we attempt to teach the interweb” because they discuss mashups, Photoshop, and the epistemological questions of remixability and hypertextuality. The readings give me fits of giggles in their outdatedness and incompleteness, but I can expound upon Creative Commons and Wikipedia for credit! Whee! These classes remind me why some things are better self-studied, but I can’t resist taking them anyway.
“History and Philosophy of the College” hasn’t started yet, but it should be fun. I love my college: it is full of nooks and crannies, people best described as characters, some unusual educational philosophies, and mostly an abiding love of The Student. This is a half-class for one or two units instead of the usual four. “Information Technology” is also a half-class, and it’s where a bunch of students who know things about computers go help local nonprofits and schools learn those things. We’re also supposed to evangelize Computer Science to unsuspecting children (especially girls), but I’m not sure how well I can do that.
“Literature Symposium” is a one-unit required class for Literature majors, where we sit in the Old Little Theatre on Wednesdays for an hour and listen to some minor author reading their work. It’s usually not painful, but it’s not very interesting either.
So I’m taking 21 units (the usual is 12 to 18), but I figure I’ll drop one or two classes by the time the quarter is over. I’m not actually enrolled in “Re-Contextualizing” anyway, and “Writing for New Media” is the only class that would have a letter grade. Part of why I love my college is because it lets me learn as much as I want to, without the fear of nasty requirements or grades. Yay! And now I go back to the regularly-scheduled pile of reading.
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monday, october 16, 2006
Keyboard typing, laserjet printing
Movable type makes you think about:
- The tiny spaces between words and letters
- Whether you have enough “F”s to finish your idea
- How “A” and “a” are completely separate letterforms
- How slow the previous process must have been to make this such an improvement
- How 10em, .2em, and 1em are things you can hold in your hands (and how .3em, 200em, and 0em are nonsense)
- How nice it would be to work with a monospaced font
- Uncommon punctuation as a limited resource to be gathered and treasured
- The negative space on the right end of a line of type
- The drop-down font menu as an analog of labeled font drawers
- How separating content from presentation is impossible in some cases
The little dingbats on the left represent an Apple/command key on my PowerBook keyboard…Gutenberg-style. My galley is full of Helvetica 14 right now, with some Helvetica 10 for effect (caps lock, shift, etc.) and various pieces of punctuation stolen from the Ornaments/Misc. drawers. I know the PowerBook keyboard isn’t in Helvetica, but I wanted to use it anyway. Yes, I’m enjoying this stuff.
It turns out part of my family set newspaper type for generations, which makes me happy: journalism and this laborious print design are antecedents of the things I’m interested in.
