My circle of friends includes more than a few grad students, but few of them seem very happy, especially those who’ve already put every part of the process behind them except their dissertation. As they struggle to wrestle that daunting beast to the ground, I — as a non-academic — try to provide whatever perspective I can. To my mind, a dissertation, just like any other major task, demands that you break it down into small pieces and frame each piece in your mind just right, so I naturally think Nick Sousanis made the right choice by writing his dissertation, panel by panel, frame by frame, as a graphic novel.
Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow recently wrote about Unflattening, Sousanis’ “graphic novel about the relationship between words and pictures in literature” that doubled as Sousanis’ dissertation in education at Columbia University. Doctorow quotes Comics Grid’s Matt Finch, who describes the work as one that “defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.” Uniting the perspectives of “science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points.”
The early decades of the twentieth century belonged to Cecil B. DeMille and his epic films both Biblical and classical: The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah. The grand scale of these pseudo-histories required the most up-to-date cinematic invention of the day, and the most imperial vision, one later decades looked upon rather cynically. But just as the epic has roared back with a vengeance—with technological feats that make The Greatest Show on Earth look like community theater—so another medium of ambitious scope once popular between the wars has made a reappearance: the historical infographic, or as it was called back then, the “histomap”—5‑foot long visual histories of a variety of disciplines.
As with film, information technology has advanced to such a degree to make this early means of condensing huge amounts of data perhaps seem quaint. But if we imagine a world pre-internet, when the prospect of visualizing a subject as complex as, say, evolution, would be daunting indeed, we might just find the histomap as impressive a means of conveying information as its early readers did. These huge graphs of big ideas, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, fit “with a trend in nonfiction book publishing of the 1920s and 1930s: the ‘outline,’ in which large subjects (the history of the world! every school of philosophy! All of modern physics!) were distilled into a form comprehensible to the most uneducated layman.”
We’ve previously featured that 1931 “History of the World!” histomap, an impressive condensing of 4000 years of human activity. The evolution graphic you see here, also from 1931 and “arranged” by John B. Sparks, is equally impressive, and speaks to the times in ways that DeMille’s Bible movies did as well. Bear in mind that the Scopes Monkey Trial had only concluded six years earlier, and the country—as it is again today—was hotly divided over the subject represented here. Nonetheless, Sparks and publisher Rand McNally gamely presented this “Story of the Emergence and Progression of Life” with confident precision and without apology.
I couldn’t begin to tell you how the science here has aged, though some of it, I’d suspect, not particularly well. In any case, the form of this elegant data map, with its graceful lines of descent flowing down the page like magma, complements its content. Rather than presenting the theory of evolution as a forgone conclusion or belief, Sparks’ graphic lays out all of the evidence, and fits it together neatly and comprehensively. Some modern evolution infographics surpass the visual appeal, but not the level of scientific detail shown here. Others reduce the science, and the design, to the level of oversimplified ideology. And though we may have enough historical distance to make infographicss of hundreds of years of evolutionary thought, it may seem that the technology of the evolution infographic may not have advanced as much as we might expect.
Although the boundaries of what should pass for free speech in high school English classrooms will be forever in debate, most everyone would agree some boundaries must exist. But what of the speech of famous authors? Of towering figures of 20th century poetry? Should their speech be subject to review? What of an English teacher who allows the most risqué Beat poem you’ve ever heard to be read aloud in class by the poet himself, Allen Ginsberg, via an online video (perhaps this one)? Award-winning English teacher David Olio, a beloved 19-year veteran, did just that when a student asked to share Ginsberg’s ecstatic, and very explicit, poem “Please Master” with the class.
After complaints from several students, the school administration suspended Olio, then forced him to resign. Whether or not this decision was just is a debate that extends beyond the scope of this post. The variables are many, as Slate’s sympathetic Mark Joseph Stern admits, including the fact that Olio did not exactly prepare his students for what was to come, nor give them the opportunity to opt out. The high school seniors—on the threshold of adulthood and some already with one foot in college—may not have had their “emotional health” endangered, as Olio’s termination letter alleged, but it’s little wonder some of them found the material shocking.
Ginsberg’s poem, which you can hear him read above, describes a “fantasized sexual encounter between Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, the inspiration for the Dean Moriarty character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.” It is graphic, writes Stern, but “not obscene.” Instead—in its allusions to St. Teresa’s angelic visitation in a “profane description of anal sex as a nearly divine act”—Ginsberg’s poem is “dangerous because it juxtaposes tenderness with masochism; dangerous because it rapturously celebrates a vision of same-sex intimacy we are only supposed to whisper about.” Read the poem, listen to Ginsberg read it, and judge for yourself.
Of course, this is hardly the first time Ginsberg’s work has caused controversy. His Beat epic “Howl” (1955), with its sexually charged lines, irked the U.S. government, who seized copies of the poem and put its publisher, poet and City Lights’ bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on trial for obscenity. Well over sixty years later, Ferlinghetti has written in defense of David Olio. We can safely assume that Ginsberg, who died in 1997, also would approve. And while we have every right to be shocked by Ginsberg’s poem, or not, and find the decision to fire Olio warranted, or not, I tend to agree with Stern when he writes “if every English teacher were that enthusiastic about his subject, America would be a much more literate, educated and interesting place.”
I’ve attended my share of graduations and hence my share of graduation speeches—from politicians more interested in stumping than inspiring their audience; to local TV personalities assuring graduates they too could become local TV personalities; to the real Patch Adams, who wasn’t nearly as funny as Robin Williams in his less-than-funny turn as Patch Adams. My experience has taught me that graduation speeches generally suck.
But not for the most recent batch of graduates of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, who got both bracing honesty and career validation from a speaker most likely to give it to you straight. With his trademark foul-mouth gruffness, De Niro told the graduating class what every aspiring artist needs to know: “You made it,” he said, “and you’re f*cked.” The world, De Niro told his audience, is not opening its arms to embrace art school grads. For all our pop cultural celebration of creativity, the so-called “creative class”—as we’re told again and again—is mostly in decline.
Of course it’s never been an easy road for artists. De Niro knows this full well not only through his own early experiences before superstardom but from his upbringing: both his mother and father were bohemian painters with turbulent, fascinating lives. And so he also knows of what he speaks when he tells the NYU grads that they “didn’t have a choice.” Where pragmatic accounting grads may be “passionate about accounting,” De Niro says, “it’s more likely that they used reason and logic and common sense to reach for a career that could give them the expectation of success and stability.”
Not the arts grads, the famous actor says: “You discovered a talent, developed an ambition and recognized your passion.” Their path, he suggests, is one of self-actualization:
When it comes to the arts, passion should always trump common sense. You aren’t just following dreams, you’re reaching for your destiny. You’re a dancer, a singer, a choreographer, a musician, a filmmaker, a writer, a photographer, a director, a producer, an actor, an artist. Yeah, you’re f***ed. The good news is that that’s not a bad place to start.
Maybe not. And maybe, for those driven to sing, dance, paint, write, etc., it’s the only place to start. Granted, NYU students are already a pretty select and privileged bunch, who certainly have a leg up compared to a great many other struggling artists. Nevertheless, given current economic realities and the U.S.’s depressing aversion to arts education and funding, these grads have a particularly difficult road ahead, De Niro says. And who better to deliver that hard truth with such conviction and good humor?
Like many people of my generation, I got my first electric guitar as a teenage birthday gift, took a few lessons and learned a few chords, and immediately started a band that bashed out angry punk rock at breakneck speeds. Some of my favorite bands made it seem accessible, and I didn’t have much patience for real musical training on the instrument anyway. Though I’d played brass and strings in school, the guitar had an entirely different mojo. It stood alone, even in a group—primal, wild, and uncomplicated; as Radiohead once observed, anyone can play it.
Well, anyone can play it badly. There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with the way I learned—it was great fun. But as my musical tastes broadened, so did my desire to play different styles, and years of playing with little formal training meant I had to un- and re-learn a lot of technique, no easy feat without access to a good teacher. Private instruction, however, can be costly and good teachers difficult to come by. Pre-Youtube, that is. These days, anyone can learn to play guitar, from scratch, the right (fun) way, and the wrong (also fun) way, with great teachers, innumerable online mini-tutorials, and some very thorough beginner lessons.
We’ve highlighted a few celebrity lessons here and there, and as far as they go, they’re great ways to pick up some tricks from your favorite musicians. But while people like Paul McCartney and Brian May don’t have a whole lot of time on their hands to make free guitar videos, a number of high quality teachers do, at least as promotional tools for paying gigs. At the top of the post, an instructor named Ravi presents the first ten lessons of his 21-day beginner course, offered on Truefire, an online guitar course service featuring for-pay lessons from such greats as Frank Vignola, David Grissom, and Dweezil Zappa.
This hour-long video functions in and of itself as a complete introductory course that’ll definitely get you started on the instrument. To further help you get the basics down, you can spend hours working through the other free videos here, a “quick start” series offered by Guitarlessons.com and taught by an instructor named Nate Savage. These short videos take you from rudiments like “How to Strum on a Guitar” and “8 Guitar Chords You Must Know” to the slightly more sophisticated but still beginner-worthy “Dominant 7th Blues Chords.” You’ll learn scales and power chords, the bricks and mortar of lead and rhythm playing. You’ll even get a corrective like “7 Mistakes Guitar Players Make,” if, like me, you learned a few things the wrong way, on purpose or otherwise.
Of course mistakes are a necessary part of learning, and often the keys to innovation, so don’t be afraid to make ‘em. But with so much quality, free guitar instruction online, you can also learn techniques that will set you up for success in a variety of different styles. Above, you can watch JustinGuitar’s much-praised videos, which will give you a multipart introduction to playing blues guitar. The key, as with any skill, is practice.
And per the suggestion of our editor, we’re also giving a mention to Guitar Jamz, which features tons of instructional videos that will show you how to play classic songs. In fact, you can find a playlist of 182 easy acoustic songs for beginners right above.
As another, very patient instructor—the host of series “Metal Method”—explains, “learning guitar doesn’t need to be complicated. You don’t need to understand how an internal combustion engine works to drive a car, and you don’t need to understand complex music theory to become an incredible guitarist.” So get to work, guitarists out there, beginners and lifelong students. And please share with us your favorite free online guitar resources in the comments.
Ludwig Wittgenstein finished writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the achievement for which most of us remember him, in 1918; three years later came its first publication in Germany. And to what problem did Wittgenstein put his luminous philosophical mind in the interim? Teaching a class of elementary schoolers in rural Austria. “Well on his way to being considered the greatest philosopher alive,” as Spencer Robins puts it in a thorough Paris Review post on Wittgenstein’s teaching stint, he also found himself “convinced he was a moral failure.” Searching for a solution, he got rid of his family fortune, left the “Palais Wittgenstein” in which he’d grown up, and out of “a romantic idea of what it would be like to work with peasants—an idea he’d gotten from reading Tolstoy,” went to teach kids in the middle of nowhere. See them all above.\
“I am to be an elementary-school teacher in a tiny village called Trattenbach,” Wittgenstein wrote to his own teacher and friend Bertrand Russell in a letter dated October 23, 1921. A month later, in another letter, he described his circumstances as those of “odiousness and baseness,” complaining that “I know human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.” The great philosopher’s experiment in primary education would appear not to have gone well.
And yet Wittgenstein comes off, by many accounts, as an exemplary and almost unbelievably engaged teacher. He and his students, in Robins’ words, “designed steam engines and buildings together, and built models of them; dissected animals; examined things with a microscope Wittgenstein brought from Vienna; read literature; learned constellations lying under the night sky; and took trips to Vienna, where they stayed at a school run by his sister Hermine.” Hermine herself remembered the kids “positively climbing over each other in their eagerness” to answer their philosopher-teacher’s questions, and at least one particularly promising kid among them received Wittgenstein’s extensive extracurricular instruction — and even an offer of adoption.
We might also consider Wittgenstein a champion, in his own way, of equal treatment for the sexes: unlike other teachers in rural early 20th-century Austria, he expected the girls to solve the very same vertiginously difficult math problems he put to the boys. But by the same token, he doled out corporal punishment to them just as equally when they got the answer wrong, and even when they didn’t grasp the concepts at hand as swiftly as he might have liked. This rough treatment culminated in “the Haidbauer incident,” an occasion of child-smacking consequential enough in Wittgenstein’s life to merit its own Wikipedia page, and which effectively ended his educational involvement with youngsters. The incident reportedly left an 11-year-old schoolboy “unconscious after being hit on the head during class.”
“Ultimately, he was to alienate the villagers of Trattenbach with his tyrannical and often bullying behavior, the result of a mind unable to empathize with the stage at which some of his pupils found themselves in their learning,” writes education blogger Alex Beard in his own post on Wittgenstein-as teacher. “Today we would admire his high expectations and the purity of his intention as an educator, but look rather less kindly on the Ohrfeige (ear-boxing) and Haareziehen (hair-pulling) that his students later recalled.” We modern-day Wittgenstein fans have to ask ourselves what wonders we might we have learned had fate assigned our elementary-school selves to his classroom — and whether we would have graduated to our next year unscathed.
As if we needed the competition—am I right, parents?—of some very excellent children’s books read by some beloved stars of stage and screen, and even a former vice president. With Storyline Online, the SAG Foundation, charitable arm of the Screen Actor’s Guild, has brought together top talent for enthusiastic readings of books like William Steig’s Brave Irene, read by Al Gore, Satoshi Kitamura’s Me and My Cat, read by Elijah Wood, and Patricia Polacco’s Thank You, Mr. Falker, read by the fantastic Jane Kaczmarek. There are so many readings (28 total), I could go on… so I will. How about Betty White’s irresistible reading of Harry the Dirty Dog, just above? Or Rita Moreno reading of I Need My Monster, below, a lighthearted story about our need for darkness? Or James Earl Jones, who touchingly discusses his own childhood struggles with reading aloud, and tells the story of To Be a Drum, further down?
I won’t be able to resist showing these to my three-year-old, and if she prefers the readings of highly acclaimed actors over mine, well, I can’t say I blame her. Each video features not only the faces and voices of the actors, but also some fine animation of each storybook’s art. The purpose of the project, writes the SAG Foundation, is to “strengthen comprehension and verbal and written skills for English-language learners worldwide.” To that end, “Storyline Online is available online 24 hours a day for children, parents, and educators” with “supplemental curriculum developed by a literacy specialist.” The phrase “English-language learners” should not make you think this program is only geared toward non-native speakers. Young children in English speaking countries are still only learning the language, and there’s no better way for them than to read and be read to.
As a matter of fact, we’re all still learning—as James Earl Jones says, we need to practice, no matter how old we are: practice tuning our ears to the sounds of well-turned phrases and appreciating the delight of a story—about a dirty dog, a monster, cat, cow, or lion—unfolding. So go on, don’t worry if you don’t have children, or if they happen to be elsewhere at the moment. Don’t deny yourself the pleasure of hearing Robert Guillaume read Chih-Yuan Chen’s Guji Guji, or Annette Bening read Avi Slodovnick’s The Tooth, or… alright, just go see the full list of books and readers here… or see Storytime Online’s Youtube page for access to the full archive of videos.
Image by Università Reggio Calabria, released under a C BY-SA 3.0 license.
In general, the how-to book—whether on beekeeping, piano-playing, or wilderness survival—is a dubious object, always running the risk of boring readers into despairing apathy or hopelessly perplexing them with complexity. Instructional books abound, but few succeed in their mission of imparting theoretical wisdom or keen, practical skill. The best few I’ve encountered in my various roles have mostly done the former. In my days as an educator, I found abstract, discursive books like Robert Scholes’ Textual Power or poet and teacher Marie Ponsot’s lyrical Beat Not the Poor Desk infinitely more salutary than more down-to-earth books on the art of teaching. As a sometime writer of fiction, I’ve found Milan Kundera’s idiosyncratic The Art of the Novel—a book that might have been titled The Art of Kundera—a great deal more inspiring than any number of other well-meaning MFA-lite publications. And as a self-taught audio engineer, I’ve found a book called Zen and the Art of Mixing—a classic of the genre, even shorter on technical specifications than its namesake is on motorcycle maintenance—better than any other dense, diagram-filled manual.
How I wish, then, that as a onetime (longtime) grad student, I had had access to the English translation, just published this month, of Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, a guide to the production of scholarly work worth the name by the highly celebrated Italian novelist and intellectual. Written originally in Italian in 1977, before Eco’s name was well-known for such works of fiction as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, How to Write Thesis is appropriately described by MIT Press as reading: “like a novel”: “opinionated… frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious.”
For example, in the second part of his introduction, after a rather dry definition of the academic “thesis,” Eco dissuades a certain type of possible reader from his book, those students “who are forced to write a thesis so that they may graduate quickly and obtain the career advancement that originally motivated their university enrollment.” These students, he writes, some of whom “may be as old as 40” (gasp), “will ask for instructions on how to write a thesis in a month.” To them, he recommends two pieces of advice, in full knowledge that both are clearly “illegal”:
(a) Invest a reasonable amount of money in having a thesis written by a second party. (b) Copy a thesis that was written a few years prior for another institution. (It is better not to copy a book currently in print, even if it was written in a foreign language. If the professor is even minimally informed on the topic, he will be aware of the book’s existence.
Eco goes on to say that “even plagiarizing a thesis requires an intelligent research effort,” a caveat, I suppose, for those too thoughtless or lazy even to put the required effort into academic dishonesty.
Instead, he writes for “students who want to do rigorous work” and “want to write a thesis that will provide a certain intellectual satisfaction.” Eco doesn’t allow for the fact that these groups may not be mutually exclusive, but no matter. His style is loose and conversational, and the unseriousness of his dogmatic assertions belies the liberating tenor of his advice. For all of the fun Eco has discussing the whys and wherefores of academic writing, he also dispenses a wealth of practical hows, making his book a rarity among the small pool of readable How-tos. For example, Eco offers us “Four Obvious Rules for Choosing a Thesis Topic,” the very bedrock of a doctoral (or masters) project, on which said project truly stands or falls:
1. The topic should reflect your previous studies and experience. It should be related to your completed courses; your other research; and your political, cultural, or religious experience.
2. The necessary sources should be materially accessible. You should be near enough to the sources for convenient access, and you should have the permission you need to access them.
3. The necessary sources should be manageable. In other words, you should have the ability, experience, and background knowledge needed to understand the sources.
4. You should have some experience with the methodological framework that you will use in the thesis. For example, if your thesis topic requires you to analyze a Bach violin sonata, you should be versed in music theory and analysis.
Having suffered the throes of proposing, then actually writing, an academic thesis, I can say without reservation that, unlike Eco’s encouragement to plagiarism, these four rules are not only helpful, but necessary, and not nearly as obvious as they appear. Eco goes on in the following chapter, “Choosing the Topic,” to present many examples, general and specific, of how this is so.
Much of the remainder of Eco’s book—though written in as lively a style and shot through with witticisms and profundity—is gravely outdated in its minute descriptions of research methods and formatting and style guides. This is pre-internet, and technology has—sadly in many cases—made redundant much of the footwork he discusses. That said, his startling takes on such topics as “Must You Read Books?,” “Academic Humility,” “The Audience,” and “How to Write” again offer indispensable ways of thinking about scholarly work that one generally arrives at only, if at all, at the completion of a long, painful, and mostly bewildering course of writing and research.
FYI: You can download Eco’s book, How to Write a Thesis, as a free audiobook if you want to try out Audible.com’s no-risk, 30-day free trial program. Find details here.
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