In the course of a funny and perceptive essay about the fear of public speaking, Sam Harris touches on the scourge of PowerPoint.
Most speakers have learned that PowerPoint should be restricted to interesting images and other graphical aids, with a minimum of text. A few seasoned academics are holding out, however, and still oppress their audiences with walls of words, often in random fonts and terrible colors, so that they can turn their backs at regular intervals and consult a full set of notes… Imagine Martin Luther King, Jr., using PowerPoint, and the price will be clear: To truly connect with an audience, you want their attention on you. To change slides every thirty seconds is to be rendered nearly invisible by the apparatus.
On public speaking – I loved in particular this bit:
Pathological self-consciousness in front of a crowd is more than ordinary anxiety: it lies closer to the core of the self. It seems, in fact, to be the self — the very feeling we call “I” — but magnified grotesquely. There are few instances in life when the sense of being someone becomes so onerous…
For one who is terrified of public speaking, standing in front of a crowd exploits the cramp of self …Yes, that is the problem with being me. Ow… The feeling that we call “I” — the ghost that wears your face like a mask at this moment — seems to suddenly gather mass and become the site of a psychological implosion.
… it’s time to look at a chilled-to-perfection poem. Auden’s Brussels in Winter puts you inside how it feels when the world switches on what Stephen Dedalus, in Portrait, calls the refrigerating apparatus. What the poet describes is already (to him) an unknown world – the city of Brussels – and when this world freezes over, its mystery hardens into absolute darkness. In Brussels in Winter, each charter’d street evaporates, and the desperately lost poet desperately seeks his bearings. Or any bearings.
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Brussels in Winter
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
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Look at how much poetry Auden packs in, how much implication, mood, and philosophy he cooks up in his few abbreviated rhymed lines… Look at his vanful of similes and metaphors as they speed by your eyes…
But slow it down. Take it little by little. See how a poem does what a poem can do.
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
There’s an unclarity of agency here. Who is wandering? Not its formula escapes me; its formula escapes you. The poem is written in an insinuating second-person, in which the poet assumes that the condition of existential lostness and self-alienation he’s about to evoke is certainly not his own alone, but is shared by his reader. He assumes that however grounded you may feel at this or that moment, you easily understand – because you’ve experienced it – the eerie dépaysement that occurs when you lose the formula of existence, the certainty that constitutes your life on earth as a thing, an object of familiarity and recognition.
As for style: cold streets/old string has the assonance, balance, and the near-rhymey feel that make that odd transition – from streets to tangled string – feel plausible. The linguistic proximity suggests a conceptual kinship.
The stopped flow of the fountains has an abrupt feel to it, instantly (along with the poet’s insinuating you) locating you alongside the poet in the same suddenly arrested cityscape.
And here’s another unclarity: Its. Its formula escapes you. It has lost. We don’t yet know to what it refers, which keeps us in the same confusion as the poet. Gradually it becomes clear that it is Brussels, the city.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Only if you’re trapped in some operatic theater of despair can you keep your bearings here. Frozen into place, you take your background part in a chorus of human misery. The reader hears the plaintive calls of the chorus throughout this stanza, with all its long O‘s and A‘s. It sings.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
How odd the world is; and to carry that oddness the poet finds odd figures. City apartments look like sudden outcroppings of the natural world – the world of bearings, groundings… Of course the desperate poet sees them in this way, as distant objects of desire – rich ridges, glowing farms. Warm things, glowing with the fire of their unstoppable being, their autonomous radiance as living, meaning-rich things-in-themselves.
And now the poet picks up a bit of language as it passes him on the street. French? Dutch? His effort to recapture his lost sense of existing has him grasping onto it as definitive in significance, if only he can understand it. But it drives on.
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
Again the poet’s desperation finds the very history of humanity in the expression of a random face… a face also quickly lost in the old, hungry, and humbled winter crowd.
A look contains the history of man, and a body – any random streetwalker’s body – is the embodiment of the shivering city itself. This body carries the frozen city’s pathos, its wispy uncertain half-thereness; and, in the way of humanity, the poet, suffering horribly from his estrangement, comforts himself with the thought that through the streetwalker’s body he can rather cheaply purchase at least a momentary sense of possessing an otherwise tangled and elusive reality.
So West Virginia University goes after some jerk in the stands wearing a West Fucking Virginia t-shirt?
How about not having hired Rick Rodriguez? Don’t you think if you hadn’t hired Rick Rodriguez that might have helped your image? Or how ’bout that Dana Holgorsen?
Nah – let’s not go after coaches. Let’s go after … that guy! See that guy in the picture? No, not that one. The one wearing the shirt. See?
Let’s liquor up our students and then release big old letters about them to the national press when they act stupid!
That’s how we deal with our students. Coaches? Well, policy there is like this: Give them millions of dollars and let them act like shits and then either
1. keep them on the payroll anyway; or
2. give them millions in severance.
… that there’s big news about Osama Bin Laden.
Killed or captured?
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Update: Bin Laden is dead.
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Remember.
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People are gathering at the White House to celebrate.
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Looks as though there are a lot of GW students among the celebrants.
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From the Gaston Gazette:
[Adam] Royston lives in a dorm just a few blocks away from the White House. He held up his cell phone and chants of “USA, USA” could be heard. He likened Sunday night’s celebration to gatherings for a new government in Egypt.
“There are tons of American flags,” said Royston, who is studying Middle Eastern government at the private school in the nation’s capital. “People are just running for the White House. I just knew that since this is a great day that I had to be there.
“This has got to be the most exciting day at George Washington University in my freshman year.”
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From the Associated Press:
Twenty-year-old Alex Washofsky came despite finals on Monday at George Washington University. He’s also a member of the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps.
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More GW reaction.
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Tomorrow, after she gives a final exam at GW, UD will again visit the Pentagon Memorial. She wrote about it in 2008, here.
[The 2012] budget proposes no changes to traditional Pell grants, which are currently at their highest level ever. What it does is halt, after just two years, a program launched in the 2009-2010 school year that allowed students to apply for a whole second Pell grant for summer school or if they took extra credits.
That program turned out to cost 10 times more than expected, and there was no evidence it was helping anyone graduate from college faster. Instead, it appeared to be the case that for-profit colleges were gaming the system to encourage students to apply for the additional grants to take academically questionable courses.
The tax-profiteers play their games and ruin a good program.
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Update: Trash talk.
UD‘s stomping grounds are described in this way in today’s Washington Post, and it seems about right (though Mr UD claims “We are not a village.”). It’s an article about all the generators people are buying, given the constant power outages.
Because I’m feeling a little better (I’ve got bronchitis), and because today was warm and sunny, I went out to our back acre and began removing the many limbs that fell during what people are calling the thundersnow. I broke smaller branches off of big fallen trees and tossed them into the woods next to our property. Then I dragged the stripped trees into the same woods.
… writes Richard Wilbur in the poem Year’s End; and let’s consider the point he’s making in his stately, nicely rhymed stanzas as we stare December 31 in the face.
At the very end of Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens describes us – well, describes “casual flocks of pigeons” symbolically us – flying in a downward direction at night:
And in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Down we go to death; but on the other hand our wings are “extended” — our arms open out to “More time, more time,” Wilbur writes.
And: As we sink down, we create beautiful, complex “undulations.” Formal grace, and mystery, express themselves in the patterns of our existences.
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Evening’s one thing; evening on December 31 packs mortality-intimation awfully tightly. Stevens’ poem after all is about morning, Sunday morning, the way Sunday morning can be dreadful if you’re suspended somewhere between secularity and belief, if you’d like to believe in some form of soulful immortality. Wilbur has us at night, and the night of December 31 at that; so questions of our mortal fragility and the shape – make it the undulating shapeliness – of our lives – are perhaps even more urgent.
Both poets in any case want to capture the peculiar tenterhooks we’re on – brightly appareled in our lives, we stretch our wings. Yet our true condition is, writes Wilbur, like that of leaves trapped in ice: “Graved on the dark in gestures of descent.” We’re “flutter[ing]” still, but down under the ice. We’re gesturing still, but always in postures of descent. Downward to darkness on extended wings.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
The patterns, if patterns there are, in our frayed lives, express themselves only after we’re dead. Or maybe something of a pattern occurs to us while we sit, in the isolation of the evening sky, prodded into contemplation by a sudden end of time.
