Obsolete Skills

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Robert Scoble came up with the idea in a recent blog post to make a list of ‘obsolete skills.’ He describes these skills as things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us, and provided a few examples including:

* Dialing a rotary phone
* Putting a needle on a vinyl record
* Changing tracks on an eight-track tape
* Shorthand
* Using a slide rule
* Use a product or service before doing a blog post?
* Optimizing 640K-worth of memory
* Using Wikitext?
* Refilling a fountain pen
* Operating a dictaphone
* Using the eraser ribbon on a typewriter

The community has started to create a much larger list of these obsolete skills, check out the full A-Z list. Feel free to contribute more if you can, and if you have the time, please make a page with a short description of the skill.

Obsolete Skills

I drove to Chicago for an interview a few weeks ago and just before I got there a slow, steady snowstorm started. It’s freaky enough on the tollway, even in good weather, but in a snowstorm it’s a nightmare. One reason it’s so difficult is that windshield wipers just can’t keep up with the snow and slush.

You have to pick just the right speed, and even then the windshield goes dark periodically, obscured by buckets of gray muck thrown up by the semis. And all of this is happening at 50 miles an hour or more, although step by step the traffic was slowing down to 30 or 40 miles an hour.

In the midst of all of this I notice that my windshield wiper fluid had run out. This means that each time the windshield fills with the gray muck I can’t wash it off. Instead, the muck smears like thick mud. Now I am peering franticly through dark smears on the windshield, barely able to see to drive.

I’ve got to get off– that in itself is no easy matter on the tollway– and get some water. I make the exit and, after three or four tries, realize that the convenience stores that sell gas have air hoses but not water. It seems like such a simple thing: water. But it’s not available.

I briefly considered bottled water and then, at the last moment, looked up to see the familiar blue jugs of fluid. It had been so long since I even opened the hood of my truck, much less fill up the windshield wiper fluid– that I had completely forgotten what I needed to do!

It seems like a stupid mistake but, on reflection, it makes perfect sense. I bought my truck about six years ago on an extended warranty that required– and paid for– regular service at the dealer. They were wonderfully efficient, maintaining and filling every possible fluid and oil. No news was good news.

I thought about all of this when I found out about the obscure skills website, which lists odd little abilities many of us used to rely on regularly. I used to change and set the spark plugs in my car, and I’ve done brake jobs and replaced water pumps. No more.

Partly, of course, because I’m older and occupied with other things. Whatever the reason, I’m not sure how sentimental I can be about these changes. On the one hand, I don’t like ‘sealed box’ technologies. On the other, it just seems like a kind of hobby I once loved.

Sometimes, too, even an oil change could be a nightmare; it wasn’t always as easy as it sounds. I can remember laying on the driveway in the heat of the Texas summer, struggling to turn that odd wrench that we used for oil filters. It was irritating and messy. It’s not the technology we miss, I think, it’s something else.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Online Places, Writing

Poetry Criticism: Poetry and Politics

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To establish a platform for discussion—and inevitably to over-simplify, to establish a heuristic in what has become a huge body of discussion on the subject—I would argue that contemporary poets espouse three main views of the relationship of politics and poetry. One caveat: Any poem that takes itself seriously as poetry with complex interactions of prosody and lexicon will tend to address all three points of view, but I think the division of approaches is useful.

1. The Content View: One approach represents themes and positions as content in the poem in order to take a relevant political position. The writing process is instrumental to delivering this content or lexical view.

2. The Prosodic View: Another point of view argues that limiting technical mechanisms to representation, to narration and description concedes the most significant political issues of our time. To avoid ceding strategic ground to a political opposition, these poets use a more indirect approach to presenting political ideas by exploring the meaning embedded in prosody. We can call this alternately the rhetorical, non-lexical, or prosodic view.

3. The Non-political View: The third perspective is that poetry need not address quotidian issues of politics. Poetry is really about humanity’s relationship to nature, the universe and the individual’s most deeply felt personal realities that transcend mere politics.

James Sherry, AlYoung.org, February 9th, 2008

Here’s a great discussion I found on AlYoung.org about the aims and goals of poetry. It was organized by the Poetry Society of America in 2000, and features “Thomas Sayers Ellis, Marilyn Hacker, Erica Hunt and Ron Silliman.” James Sillman’s opening remarks are particularly engaging, touch (unknowingly) on the great divide in English Studies between Rhetoric and Composition and Literary Studies.

Sillman cites as an example of The Content View, Thomas Hardy’s WWI poem, “Channel Firing”: “All nations striving strong to make/ Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters/ They do no more for Christes sake/ Than you who are helpless in such matters.” It’s language that is “instrumental to the theme and transparent, a lens focusing the eye of the reader.” This is what Pierre Bourdieu called a popular ethos and its has long shaped composition courses.

And for The Prosodic View, Ron Silliman’s“Sunset Debris” 50 pages of questions with no answers. “Are we there yet? Do we need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet? Is it perfect bound? Do you prefer ballpoints? Do you know which insect you most resemble?” At the center is interpretation, “the writing process and the words themselves together create meaning.”

Here Sillman is in effect defining what Bourdieu called the formalist aesthetic; it’s shaped literary studies for a hundred years. (Sillman rejects the third position as obviously irrelevant to a discussion about poetry and politics, but I am not sure he was correct to do do.) As Sillman says towards the end of his introduction, “poetry contradicts business-as-usual expectations in a way that makes the very act of writing poetry political.”

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, Writing

Citizens for Tax Justice: Who’s Rich?

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Several Presidential candidates have proposed allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for wealthy Americans. For Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, “wealthy” means those with income above $250,000, while for former Senator John Edwards, this means those who make more than $200,000. These thresholds have caused some consternation among the people in the media and plugged into politics. Some progressive activists have asked why in the world people with incomes as high as $200,000 need to keep the tax cuts President Bush enacted for them when basic needs like healthcare for children aren’t being met. On the other hand, many in the media seem to think that people in the $200,000 –250,000 income range are solidly middle-class and deserve every tax break they have ever received.

“Who’s Rich,” Citizens for Tax Justice, January 16, 2008

Americans, as bell hooks famously observed, never really talk about class, particular in relation to education. It’s as though we suffer a kind of democratic self-delusion that because anyone can (theoretically) go to college all of our problems have been solved. Practically speaking, of course, things never quite work out that way.

Now that the presidential race is substantially settled it’s time to start pushing the counter-arguments and facts. On one side is going to be Obama or Clinton or some combination. Either way their economic policies are largely identical. On the other will be McCain, probably accompanied by some far-right leaning vice president. He’s only a hair more progressive than Bush.

Whatever the particular grouping, as Citizens for Tax Justice has shown, the campaign has thus far been based on some powerful misconceptions about the realities of American society. Edwards put poverty on the agenda, but he did not manage to counter our ignorance about class.

In fact, people with incomes above $250,000 or even $200,000 comprise less than 3% of the U.S. population. That hardly seems middle-class. “By state,” CTJ’s report goes on to say, “the percentage of taxpayers with AGI above $200,000 ranges from a high of 6 percent in Connecticut and Washington, D.C. down to only 1.3 percent in West Virginia.”

CTJ goes to list several plausible reasons why this self-delusion persists. For one thing, people “who influence the political discourse… tend to live in or around cities where incomes and the cost of living are higher.” These people, too, are likely to be “highly educated people who come from wealthier families.” The wealthy cluster in particular regions, too, usually close to water or mountains.

Interesting, CTJ also that these misguided ideas about class persist even if candidates talk about percentages. “A Time Magazine poll in 2000,” they note, “found that 19 percent of those surveyed believed themselves to be among the richest 1 percent of Americans.”

CTJ, of course, wants to fight these ideas with better information that is more widely distributed. It’s hard to disagree. Some of the these numbers are amazing, once converted into everyday figures. If you were single and made your way to the top 1%, for example, you would have to earn “an average wage of $224 an hour.”

To become an average member of the top 1%, you would have to made $722 an hour; if you a “two-earner couple” each of you would have to make $112 an hour to make it into the top 1% and $361 an hour to become an average member.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Online Places, Writing