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Monday, October 02, 2023Allusion or Illusion?: a pop-culture investigation
Most people have a go-to pop culture reference that they consider to be either universal or a litmus test to discover who else uses that media lens to see the world. Some people quote The Office, some people quote Family Guy, a few years ago I discovered that a glut of students who all had grown up overdosing on Spongebob and assumed everyone else knew all of that show's surreal iconography. (I probably quote or think of the world in relation to The West Wing or its sibling broadcast SportsNight — for which I can only apologize for living my cliché.) But I know many people slightly younger than myself (but still considerably older than most of my students) who were effectively raised on re-runs of The Simpsons during their formative years, and so Simpsons references are their chapter and verse. When my niece was born and named Mabel, someone made the following reference to me, thinking I'd get it.
 I recognized the cadence of the language from Vaudeville-era jokes, but didn't think it was a capital-T "Thing". I was subsequently told in no uncertain terms that this was an infamous moment in Simpsons history. The cryptic use of this phrase, and the way in which the story Bart was telling was never finished perhaps both contibruted to how it stuck in viewers' minds, and it gained notoriety as one of the show's "most random references" — which is quite the strong claim in a legendarily long-running comedy that has made innumerable allusions over its institutional reign. So, if you, like me, were intrigued by this phrase's notoriety and wanted to find out what "So I says to Mabel, I says..." is actually a reference to, what would you do? Well, you'd Google it. The results would look pretty much like this: a few videos, some Reddit posts, the normal populist results of Google's secret algorithm.   So, out of curiosity, what did the internet think was the answer to the question before this writer came out with his "definitive" take? The Simpsons Archive, a fan-run webpage with hyper-detailed deconstructions of the minutiae of each episode lists various users' beliefs as to previous instances of the phrase. So while the Simpsons writer may have said on Twitter that, "'I says to Mabel'... is [a] totally freestanding" phrase, others believed they had encountered it in other media created prior to the episode's 1997 airdate. But it is important to observe that The Simpsons Archive doesn't link out to any verification of any of the claims it has collected. It simply reports those claims and apparently has faith in the contributors. Phrases.org.uk, a British website that traces the origins, meanings, and evolution of common phrases responds to a user-submitted question asking about the origin of "So I says to Mabel, I says". This website ultimately comes to the same conclusion as the Simpsons Archive, that the phrase is a direct reference to a scene in The Great Gatsby, where two partygoers use the phrase in the same way that Bart does in the episode: as a storytelling device that is interrupted by a third party. While The Simpsons Archive did no apparent fact-checking of this claim, Phrases Dot Org says that a user went to the text of The Great Gatsby and found the reference there. Case closed! The The Simpsons writer on Twitter is wrong and our lack of trust is validated!  HOWEVER, when I did a full-text search of two different editions of Gatsby in two different websites, neither of them has the word "Mabel" anywhere in the text. So the claim by the user on Phrases.org.uk that she searched Gatsby and found the referred instance is apparently false! Case NOT Closed after all! So we swing back to verifying the claim of the The Simpsons writer, and we have to reckon with the fact that he is not the credited writer on the episode. That may seem like confirmation that his claim is groundless, but he was the executive producer of that season and is listed as "showrunner", so it's unlikely he wasn't in the writers' room for that episode. But the claim still might warrant further corroboration.
This is either interesting or boring, but it's a pretty good example of how The Internet Can't Be Trusted. This webpage says one thing! This writer says something else! This website says he's not the writer! All of this is to show that there is a significant amount of very niche, very nerdy, very granular content that can be easily found on the internet that doesn't lead to a definitive answer. There remains ambiguity, but if one wasn't careful and just checked any one of these sources, it would be easy to miss the fact that things are more complicated than one might have suspected. Which is why journalists often require two independent sources confirming a story before they go to print. And why most school research assignments attempt to guide you in the same direction, requiring at least three sources in a Works Cited, so that you don't take the word of one source and assume it says, to Mabel or to anyone else, the whole story. Friday, December 03, 2021And the Banned Played On A class here at the high school, on being presented with the concept that censorship still exists, expressed surprise and a mild amount of disbelief. I was asked to see if I could come up with some examples of books being banned in New Hampshire to provide some local context.Every year, many libraries observe National Banned Book Month to inform their readership that free access to books is not as smooth and free as it always appears. One of the many things that libraries point out during this time is that many more books are "challenged" than are successfully banned outright. A ban is an actual removal of the book from access within a community, but the challenge is the first salvo, the raising of the question as to whether a book should be circumscribed (the editorial answer from this blog is: always, no). The American Library Association publishes annual national statistics about banned and challenged books every year to raise awareness that there has always been and continues to be a push to restrict and prevent access to ideas, perspectives, and narratives that some wish to eliminate, reduce, or prevent from becoming normalized. More books are challenged than are actually banned, and many school districts and public libraries will attempt to find some middle ground: preventing books from being checked out from anyone but eighth graders in a middle school, for example, or moving a book from the children's section to the adult section, so that a given youth narrative won't be chosen by chance by curious, open-minded little fingers. But enough generalization. What are actual challenges and bans that have taken place in New Hampshire? Should we cavalierly take being able to read whatever we want, ahem, for granite?  The Wikipedia entry on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland quotes an extinct University of California website that compiled a number of historical challenges to classic, well-known works. They make an unsourced claim that Alice was removed from a Haverhill, NH school for "derogatory characterizations of teachers and of religious ceremonies" as well as for swearing and more lascivious content in 1900. So there is apparently a long tradition of New Hampshire prudishness. A banned books blog additionally claims a New Hampshire town also tried again to remove the follow-up Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass in 1980 because of perceived drug references.That same UC website lists that a New Ipswitch, NH school banned the book The Education of Harriet Hatfield because it had a gay protagonist. Both the list and articles that quote it mention that the teacher that taught the novel refused to remove it and was fired in response. Years later, the teacher, having been reinstated, had more books contested because of gay content. Shortly after the first ban, a different New Hampshire school board passed an ordinance prohibiting "Alternative Lifestyle Instruction", which resulted in a ban of many books, including classical texts. The fact that reporting on the policy specifically pointed out that William Shakespeare's "'Twelfth Night' ha[d] been withdrawn from instruction" has meant that the incident regularly appears in listicles about "surprising" banned books, sometimes from major national publications. All in all, a great look for New Hampshire. While sexuality continues to be a flashpoint for youth-oriented materials and events — the cancelation of a drag queen reading hour in Derry, NH was recently in the national conversation — violence has also been an occasional factor. Local author Jody Picoult's novel about a school shooting, Nineteen Minutes, was intended to provoke conversation about stress, bullying, and our cultural response to violence in the media. Accordingly, the author and publisher provided advance copies to students in Hanover, Newton, and Gilford. Schools had intended to have it be required course reading, and then fears about the content and its emotional impact quickly had it removed from some curricula. However, the book was not removed from Gilford, and its continued inclusion in the curriculum spurred the notorious parent protest about charged sexual language in the book that resulted in a confrontation during a board meeting in 2014. Also combining squeamishness about content, it was reported that in 2010 a New Hampshire parent challenged the inclusion of The Hunger Games in a required reading list in a local middle school, calling it "'filth' that could desensitize children to violence". Censorship may feel to some like an artifact of the distant past, associated with book burning demonstrations of repression and control that feel almost unthinkable in the current time. But there are those who believe that book challenges are part of a larger wave of a still-growing attempt to censor and control access to thought and experience. Some believe that recent New Hampshire laws are explicitly about censorship of discussion and exposure to information. The American Library Association keeps a blog of its Office of Intellectual Freedom, which tracks current issues in the evolution of freedom of speech, copyright, net neutrality, disinformation, and privacy. For more stories about how they believe New Hampshire intersects with those topics, you can read their archived entries here. NB: The posters recreated here were found in a selection of Banned Books Week posters collected by Ad/Lib. Wednesday, May 19, 2021Fake Names, But Possibly Real Outrage
Since it has just dropped on Netflix, a word about The Woman in the Window, the new agoraphobic thriller starring Amy Adams that is soon to be autoplaying on your home screens. And that word is "Don't". I don't have any concrete or informed opinions about the movie itself, which may well prove to be the perfect metaphor for having been stuck at home for the past fourteen months. I don't have any comment about the fact that it was scheduled for theatrical release in 2020, but apparently confused test audiences, and was re-edited accordingly. It may be trashy fun, or it may be trashy trash. Or it may be good fun! However, I don't want the author to get a penny from your Netflix clicks, and just in case he does, I'm asking you: Don't. I'm a big believer in the proverbial activity of "voting with your wallets" in order to chasten the behaviors of millionaire, success-story celebrities and personalities. Not even getting into the "infamous TERF"-ness of J.K. Rowling that has sent certain fans scurrying to their keyboards to Google how much tattoo-removal might cost, I remember advising students to back away from the Twilight series in print and onscreen when it was revealed that author Stephanie Meyer was tithing 10% of her royalties to a church that was trying to disenfranchise gay rights in California law. Or when fraudulent memoirist James Frey was signing up junior authors for a "fiction factory" that allowed him to use pseudonyms to profit from their grunt work. None of that latter story rings a bell? Well, I'll just mention that there is no "Pittacus Lore" behind the I Am Number Four series and who knows how many other media-ready YA books. There is also no A.J. Finn. There is, however, a Dan Mallory, a publisher who has variously blagged his way into high-paying jobs despite being fabulist who spun stories about the cancer deaths of his parents and his own debilitating illnesses. He used the "Finn" pseudonym to write the novel The Woman in the Window is based on during the popular wave of post-Gone Girl women's suspense fiction (women writers used to partially neutralize or obscure their gender by using initials instead of a first name, so it seems like he's riding on that assumption with his pen-name), which is about a sociopath who lies to feel power over others and manipulates them to relish in superiority. (I won't spoil who the sociopath is, but I will mention that the New Yorker article very much does reveal the twist at the end of the book and film.) A telling moment in the article is that while the author was kept anonymous during early bidding for the publication rights of the book, when Simmons' true identity was revealed, his reputation was such that all other publishers except his employer dropped their bids like a hot potato. His reputation was that toxic.  In wandering through bookstores, I have occasionally seen A.J. Finn's name on the pull-quotes recommending a hot new book. That, to me, has always been a hint that the fabulist must have edited the book in question. And I subsequently assume that it must be terrible. So I will instead end by mentioning two books that sounded interesting when I heard about them in the course of reading about this last story. The first is a mystery novel from an author that worked with Mallory and who is interviewed in the New Yorker article. Sophie Hannah was commissioned by the Agatha Christie estate to write a new Poirot novel (the detective from the upcoming film Death on the Nile), and her book Closed Casket features a character who is clearly influenced by, if not based on, Mallory. The article states that the working title for Casket was "You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Poirot’s About You." I mean, that's just delicious. The second is a book that is so similar to the essential plot and structure (again: spoilers in the link) of The Woman in the Window that if you are interested in that story, you can probably get the same bang for your buck without lining Mallory/Finn's pockets. Saving April by Sarah Denzil seems to not actually be a case of plagiarism or of Mallory using his position in publishing to see the outline of a to-be-published book and rush his own version into production. It seems to be a remarkable coincidence — or potential further evidence that computers could probably finish all of our genre-based, formulaic plots for us, with only the push of a few buttons. Friday, October 30, 2020The Number One Threat to America: BEARS!A lot of people posted The New Republic's article on Grafton, NH's deëvolution from aspirational Libertarian paradise to bear-infested danger theme park. I don't know if I would have made the connection to Grafton if they hadn't, but I tend to have a decent radar for fixating on slivers of NH-rated content in national news and entertainment.  In an article in the New York Times this week, there was a bit about how during social distancing, the attendance at a quartz mine in Herkimer, NY has shot up. This, to me, feels a little like the kind of activity that NH has experienced where every mother's son seems to be hiking mountains on the weekends, just to have something accessibly outdoorsy to do since going to things Inside has been canceled. As we look forward to the dark weekends of staying inside from November to March, suddenly parking a mile down the road to hike Mount Major with seemingly EVERYONE else doesn't seem so bad.Buried in this article was a mention that the Herkimer Diamond people bought the Ruggles mine in Grafton, NH a few years after it closed in 2016 upon the retirement of its owner. (A Change.org petition to have it listed as a landmark lists the sale price at $900K, while an NHPR story on the sale says that Keller Williams finally moved it in Sept. 2019 for $500K.) While every article about the sale mentions that the new owners planned "significant improvements"... the fact that March 2020 happened soon thereafter would leave at least this reader unsurprised by unanticipated pandemic-related delays. However, I can't help but connect the dots and wonder if the sheer institutional lawlessness and the unexplained burgeoning ursine population is also going to make it difficult to provide a safe place for random New England tourists to wander about hammering wodges of mica out of stone face, without turning around and coming face to face with Bart wanting to put either it or you in his pic-i-nic basket. Friday, October 09, 2020[The World's Tiniest Violin.ICO]It should come as no surprise to anyone that I have the emoji function turned off on everything I own. I have disabled the emojis on GMail, I have turned off the pop-up emoji keyboard on my phone, and I live a life free from the impulse to express myself in pictograms. Because of this lack of use, I simply don't think in smiley-based punctuation — although I have learned slightly to take my normal impulse of wanting to turn every conversation into a nested batch of movie references and begun collecting a cache of animated GIFs. This has begun to make my correspondence resemble some of the more egregious, trend-chasing book reviews on GoodReads, that can't go two sentences without sprinkling in some aggressively snappy moment from a Reese Witherspoon movie I've never watched. My own tastes for quotable lines, however, are slightly less compatible with Giphy.  (Their arguments were that it was fun, and I was old. The second part was definitely true. The first part is a misdirection: of course it makes you feel good to see a picture of the face of a person that you like — we respond emotionally to the faces of other humans, as we search for and interpret nuances and subtleties of emotion. So it's nice to see the faces of people we'd prefer to be socializing with when we are at work, in school, in any environment where we'd prefer to be somewhere and doing something else. That's less actually about it being "fun" and more about it being oddly escapist, and that it feeds the social media addiction beast in an unhealthy way, by providing micropleasures that get us to return again and again and again to our phones, instead of finding sustained, healthy sources of those emotions in the real world.) I also found that I preferred things in my life where I could search for and find them again quickly and efficiently. The amount of time it would take me to find a text by searching for a key word in a conversation was miniscule in comparison to the amount of time it took me to scroll through screen after screen of photos. I, for one, don't always have a clear memory of when I'd taken a photo, so I couldn't just say, "Oh, that was from 2013" and quickly find it — and even then, I might still have to sift through and preview loads of images from that time.  Google Images has been interesting, because when you search for — as an example — a picture of a squid, Google has no idea whether the picture is actually of a squid. What it knows is whether the image is on a page that had the word "squid" somewhere near it. If the web-programmers have done their work to assist users who browse using visually-impaired reader compliant techniques, then images will be properly labeled with text descriptions, making them accurately searchable. (I've been enjoying the emails from the New Yorker — more on that soon — because the placeholder text for their stories' cover art is often hilariously generic... a recent sample: "Image may contain: Book, Skin, Human, Person, Glasses, Accessories, Accessory, Text, Arm, Tattoo, and Female".) Part of the work with some machine-learning AIs in the last number of years has been to create programs that can identify the contents of a digital image in the same way that a person can, instead of just "seeing" it as a series of colored pixels of different values. This would help automated processes in search engines to know what is actually in an image, something that the adult-content censorship algorithm on Tumblr was notoriously terrible at detecting — an algorithm that, incidentally, unsurprisingly had problems with images of drawings of squid. I shan't explain further.So I was taken aback by a description of a post by the Lincoln Foundation in a New Yorker article detailing the philosophy, members, efforts, and effects of the controversial Political Action Committee. The article includes links to a number of tweets containing political spots by the PAC, but in one instance, instead of linking to the video, the writer described it: "Using heavy synth beats, Patterson remixed the audio of the Trump interview overnight. Edwards captioned the clip with nothing but emojis. The spot has been retweeted, quoted, and liked nearly sixty thousand times." Dear The New Yorker: how am I supposed to join in the "nearly sixty thousand" people who responded to this based on that description? And to the Lincoln Project, a parallel question: how am I supposed to search for this video on your Twitter timeline when the video contains no searchable identifiers and the only searchable content is just a string of tiny pictures? Turns out, one can search by emojis, and one has been able to do so for some time now (amusingly, my browser doesn't successfully render the emojis in that article, so the sub-headline reads, "You can now ? using Google", which is slightly more ambiguous...). So if I knew which emojis had captioned the aforementioned video, I would be able to replicate them and possibly find that particularly tweet. Except! I went to a representative tweet from that account,* that was comprised of just a video and an emoji, and then tried to search for it. And it all sort of fell apart there... Because, as I mentioned, I've turned off all the emoji functions on all my stuff. So I wasn't able to just type the contents of that tweet into my search bar. And I've discovered that copying an emoji with a mouse on a desktop browser doesn't produce the same result — it essentially creates the same effect as pasting the descriptive image tags for an adaptive browser, and search engines don't yet seem to understand that searching for [Face with Tears of Joy][Rolling on the Floor Laughing] is the same as searching for 😂🤣. Ah, well. Back to the 📝 * EDIT: I tried like crazy to find a Twitter account that was slightly less problematic than this one to use as an example. Maybe it was a failure of exposure or imagination, but while I found plenty of tweets that were just images with no relevant searchable data, and plenty of one- or two-word pithy posts, very few people seem to post content with just an emoji and an attachment. If can I find a less political, less controversial source, I may come back and edit this post. Monday, October 05, 2020Sitting? Satting? Your ExamsI had to take the GREs to get into graduate school to become a librarian. That was a grueling prcoess that is a long, odd story on its own, involving a dislocated rib, painkiller-induced drowsiness, and Windows 98. That was in 2003 (a year some of you may have but scant memory of), and in 2008, during a convoluted chapter of employment paranoia, the BHS administration encouraged me to take the PRAXIS to possibly get certified as an English teacher. But aside from that, I have't had to hunker down in a chilly, rigorous environment to fill out ovals (depending on how you feel about your polling station and local elections) for quite some time. Meaning it's been a while since I have been leveraged by circumstance or necessity to take any form of standardized test, and even longer since I had to take the SAT. I worry about this every so often when SAT season comes around, because my experience is so distant that I literally no longer remember what my scores were, and the SAT has changed so much since I took it, that those numbers are no longer relevant. But more importantly, I don't feel like a good resource to be able to assist students with test-taking strategy or with interpreting their scores. I have guest-administrated the SAT once it replaced the Smarter Balanced test as the standardized source for math and English scores to indicate how NH students were living up to the No Child Left Behind requirements, but all that meant was that I read out the required standardized paragraphs and kept time in tight little intervals. I haven't sat an exam in what seems like forever. Which reminded me of an old episode of the sitcom NewsRadio, where a high-achieving character on the show in her 30s retakes the exam to find out if her brain is deteriorating with age and she's actually stupider than she was in high school. Mr. Harrison told me that there had been an incentive scheme for schools in some districts in Florida where teachers were paid a bonus based on their highest SAT score. This was ostensibly to attract the most intelligent teachers to work there, but ended up with teachers duking it out with students over test-taking slots, SAT tutors, and resources in order to pocket a greasy buck (the system has since changed, outraging teachers who had designed their financial status around that significant annual bonus). So he has taken them quite recently, perhaps as recently as some of our youngest teachers.  A New York Times reporter was asked to retake the exam to investigate what SATs were like in the midst of the Corona debacle. Tests in the Spring had been canceled, and there were concerns both about the number of slots and seats available and the safety considerations in the testing environment. Despite that fact that a recent survey of NH colleges indicated that only one (Dartmouth) still requires the SAT for admission, part of a larger trend of schools moving away from having it as an application prerequisite, the stress around taking the exam remains real, and students report feeling like it is both a personal metric for success and almost a cultural rubicon to be crossed.As the state of NH dabbles with it's own homegrown standardized test that's "more tailored to New Hampshire" students, the SAT may become sufficiently irrelevant, even as a 90-year old tradition that feels to some, culturally, like the apotheosis of high school knowledge. Even in 1996, a teen tried to comfort Lisa, the NewsRadio character, by telling her the SAT wasn't such a big deal. But Lisa replied, "Well, maybe not, but you better pretend it is, or else you won't get a good score, which means you can't get into a good college and then you won't get a good job and then your life will be ruined." Shoot, maybe I should sign up for the SATs. Good thing we have a couple SAT prep books in the library. Free (like all library materials) to a good home! Friday, March 27, 2020Storytime CaféToday in "Email solicits and services", the NH Humanities Council sent out a link about the power of hearing poetry read aloud. Read-alouds were going to be my topic today anyway, so this was a happy coincidence. People already associate me with reading poetry out loud competitions thanks to my involvement in National English Honor Society and a certain (mostly defunct, gladly) Instagram account memorializing and meme-ing certain past POL assemblies. But reading aloud is one of provinces and services associated with libraries. It's a public service — sometimes controversially so — and listening to someone else reading is one of the ways we develop the reader inside our heads that helps us learn to fluently read silently as adults. I'd like to do a read-aloud each Friday. This was a thing I had intended to develop during break during the new year (seeing as how it's March now, it's pretty obvious how well that's been going), called Hashtag First Chapter Fridays, where for ten minutes each week I would read out loud in the library from the first chapter of a different book, seeing if it had a good hook, or an attractive start to get someone interested in reading more. I still think it's a good idea, and I may swallow my pride and just do them as recordings instead of live performances.  But to start things off, I was going to find some clips from an old ad campaign for coffee. In my early days of working at the library, I had a memory of stumbling on a series of ads featuring some swarthy English gentlemen reading excepts from classic romance fiction in an attempt to sell coffee and an adjacent sophisticated lifestyle. The website hosting the clips doesn't really exist anymore, but there is a fun video analyzing the campaign and its success. What fascinates me is that one of the books read during the second half of the ads was a book I brought home from the library to re-read and had thought I might use as an opening chapter reading, THE ROTTERS' CLUB by Jonathan Coe. While flolloping about on YouTube trying to find a captured clip from one of the Carte Noire readings, I instead tripped over this excerpt of Dominick West reading from the early chapters of THE TRINITY SIX by Charles Cummings. I'd never heard of the book before, but because I do love West's voice, I thought I'd give it a shot. The book quickly veers from a mildly risible espionoir (to coin a phrase) into a successfully captivating lecture about rationed food during the siege at Leningrad. As we react to Governor Sununu's declaration of a state-wide shelter-in-place order, it was gripping to listen to the subsistence and desperation the Russians attempted to survive in 1942. I genuinely recommend clicking that previous link and listening to it. I'm working on getting more and further access to audiobooks so that you can use your public library card to listen to other voices and other stories and continue to develop the reader in your mind to journey to places and opportunities we're not allowed to go anymore. For example, since we can't watch the new James Bond film in April, I think I might luxuriate in the aforementioned Dominick West read the authorized new-ish Bond novel, SOLO. Have a good weekend.
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