A website is listing Berkeley as the 43rd most dangerous city in the U.S. (source).

The "dangerous cities" league table shows no other Californian city with more than 25,000 residents as being more dangerous than Berkeley.

Hah!

Who is "the reader"?; or, What you get for prohibiting the word "I"

It must be exasperating to be a composition student. I am not saying this sarcastically; I mean it. At Cal, I'm blessed with smart, high-achieving students who got where they are today by following rules. They showed some imagination, but not too much imagination, and assiduously followed rules, and thereby got high marks and other official stamps of approval. This wasn't simply a matter of following stated rules, although that was part of it; often they also had to negotiate unspoken codes of comportment. They learned "test-taking strategies," a term that openly acknowledges that standardized tests are a game that can be won through generalized test-taking maneuvers; if the tests were truly effective as tests, then the only possible strategy would be to possess the appropriate depth and breadth of knowledge. They learned rules, sometimes explicit rules and sometimes rules that had to be figured out the hard way. They figured out at an early age that if they failed to follow rules, they could be punished all their lives. And they were not told which rules could be broken safely, or when.

I know exactly why high school writing teachers prohibit the use of the word "I," and if I were in their situation I'd do the same thing. It's a fence around the Torah; it's the blinking "don't walk" signal long before the oncoming cars get a green light.

But now my students truly don't believe that they are allowed to use the word "I," even in the context of assignments for which they clearly need it. They know intellectually that "I" is not the real evil, but the years of training have done them in.

So now it's "the reader," a fictional character by means of which we can obfuscate the difference between "I" and "everybody." Alas.

Avant-garde or nonsense?

Another way to phrase my students' dilemma is that they don't know whether to regard strange writing as ("deep") avant-garde literature or ("random") nonsense. It's a hard thing to figure out, especially if you're not much in the habit of reading poetry.

I was tickled to run into this video of the MSNBC pundit Rachel Maddow explaining dada:



Peter Bürger it's not; as Maddow admits, "art history class was a long time ago."

Maddow raises dada as a possible explanation for an incoherent John McCain ad: perhaps it's incoherent because he's trying to smash art as an institution. By identifying it as dada, we could file it in the "deep" category. Of course, Maddow is really trying to argue that it's not "deep" at all, but rather "random."

But Maddow's satire hinges on a (supposed) formal similarity. Both dada and this ad are identified as incoherent. That doesn't actually help my students tell them apart!

This is why we need better shorthands for avant-garde writing than "weird stuff."

In my dissertation I show that the mama of dada is really Nana.