Entrekin

Forgot to mention:

Several new posts over at et cetera, including Jo Rowling’s commencement at Harvard and Chris Meeks’ Hollywood book launch party (Be there or be square, baby!).

Also, New picture at Imagery.

What? I told you I was going to get better about updating them. And I actually like how it all works when I maintain them all. Cross pollination, so to speak, or whathaveyou.

I’ve discovered I can use Twitter to do the little heads-ups, like, “Hey, I posted a picture,” or “Hey, here’s some book news.”

It’s not pretty; I don’t actually host this blog myself, yet, and Wordpress.com doesn’t allow certain embeddings, like the flash/java required for the Twitter badge. But it allows the RSS feed, which you can see in the sidebar just to your left.

There’s a bit of a delay (between ten minutes and nearly an hour), but pretty soon a note will appear that I’m in class/teaching/grading today, but have posted the last of the fountain pictures at Imagery.

Now that it’s in the Twitter thing, though, I don’t think I’ll do any more heads-ups. Feels extraneous, after all.

In the meantime, off to class. Catch you on the flippy.

Class day. I’ve been trying to inspire students by empowering them; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. My prompt this time around uses Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking as an example of satire to examine the form’s efficacy in argument, commentary, and persuasion. Mostly, anyway. I mean, that’s the idea, at least. Really, the point of the prompt is the point of the class (and it’s very nearly the point of the movie): any intelligent person should be able to acknowledge every complex issue as beyond issues of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ and realize that every argument has its counter.

Today, one of my students surprised me. We had a speaker-series evening this week, where a Democrat and a Republican were meant to discuss the mobilization of young voters but which actually became a debate about technology and its efficacy. Which wasn’t bad, exactly, but seemed to be the wrong issue. The Republican called this “Politics for the iPod Generation,” and effused about how great technology is. At one point, he mentioned Live-Aid and how excellent it was that it had increased awareness of how many people in the world were starving.

I wanted to get up and say, well, perhaps, but how many of them are now eating.

Because awareness is all well and good, but should not be confused with action.

One other thing I mentioned was this iPod thing; not everyone has one, certainly. USC is smack between Compton and Watts, in Los Angeles; we get reports from the Department of Public Safety everyday, concerning muggings and etc. And I asked how many people around us actually had iPods, or access to the technology.

And my student raised his hand and said, sure, but one might wonder whether those people vote, anyway.

And it stopped me. Brilliant.

It brings up whole other issues, of course, but that’s beside the point. I was just thrilled to catch them thinking (rather than, you know, sleeping, which has occurred a few times this semester, now).

One thing I’ve noticed is that I think some of these students feel like those people who don’t vote. They seem to continuously seek “the right answer,” while the whole point of the course is that there isn’t one; there’s only their answers. Their papers don’t depend on what they say but how they make their case.

I think they’re getting it.

Here’s hoping.

By the way, new pictures over at Imagery.

If you’re into that sort of thing.

I mean, I am.

Obviously.

Getting back into the ole’ blogging swing of things, working out kinks as I go.

I’ve decided I’m going to pretty consistently post a note here when I put anything up over at Imagery. There are another couple pictures over there since last I mentioned it here.

Also, a new blog: et cetera. I’m keeping this one as a news-ish sort of blog; links to news, reviews, interviews, and, basically, et cetera will go over there. Two posts to start with; the first with iPhone pictures, and the second collecting all of the Entrekin reviews to date.

I’m going to be working out further kinks as I go. Expect more in the way of links, a better set up, and probably a redesign of the homepage.

Hope you like what I’m doing with the place. If you have any suggestions, or there’s anything in particular you want to see, let me know, and I’ll see about incorporating them.

Teaching today. Picture at Imagery.

I might stop with the heads-ups; it’s getting pretty consistent across both blogs, now. We’ll see. Oh, and you can comment over there, too. Should work.

Have a good one in the meantime.