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

Still Disgusted

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On hearing the news, I had to ask myself yet again, how many more fucking times does this need to happen? Omaha, Virginia Tech, and now this (with plenty of other less publicized shootings in between). Not only can the NRA go fuck itself for blocking sane gun control legislation, the Democrats can fuck themselves sideways for running away from the issue like the useless cowards that they are.

posted by Werner Herzog’s Bear at 6:25 PM

Yesterday was the anniversary of Chicago’s ‘St. Valentine’s Day Massacre’ on February 14, 1929, and today is the anniversary of the attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the killing of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak on February 15, 1933. These events led to one of the few gun control laws still on the books, the National Firearms Act of 1934. Our recent gun violence should also lead us to take action.

Today, as we grieve with the victims and families of this latest mass shooting, I call on college and university presidents across America to join with us in demanding that the presidential candidates – as well as the U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush – support meaningful action to prevent gun violence. Much more needs to be done to help make our schools and communities safer.

Statement Of Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke, On Northern Illinois University Shootings, February 15, 2008

I’ve been looking around in my usual haunts over the last few days in order to see if there’s going to be a response to the murders at NIU. Maybe folks are trying to be cautious and not take advantage of tragedy by using it for publicity, but so far the reaction has been remarkably low-key, if not invisible. Herzog’s Bear got it just right, I think.

This is the complete post but it’s worth a visit to the site to see the comments. One of the most striking argues that the problem is not too many guns but not enough guns. I heard something similar on Fox the other day. The idea is that these incidents could be prevented if we allowed people to carry concealed weapons.

The irrationality of that argument makes it almost impossible to refute, like trying to convince someone that they were not abducted by aliens. Even worse is the idea that we need these weapons as insurance against our own government. Insurgents, as recent history has shown, don’t need cheap handguns to fight.

In any case, even if we did have to fight our own government we would be silly to mount a violent campaign when a non-violent war would be so much more effective. Maybe one way to counter this silly self-defense notion is to read more about what happens when Americans do take up arms against their own government.

“Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman,” is Cathy Wilkerson’s remarkable memoir that tells this very story. It’s easy to forget that this romance of violent resistance was once a central story in progressive circles, just as it is a central story now in mainstream right wing circles. Wilkerson might be telling the right cautionary tale for our times.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Language, Online Places, War

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