Moving day. It's official, I guess. I'm moving on over to a little more modern blogging software. The new site is:

akaKenSmith.com (...also known as...)

pMachine, you've been a gem. [0 & P]

Silencing. In Anne Applebaum's NYROB essay on the ways Communists locked down civil society in Poland shortly after World War II, the general mechanism is described and illustrated by example. First, the general mechanism:

...the elimination of all remaining independent social or civic institutions, along with the exclusion from public life of anyone who might still sympathize with them. (39)

How far does this process extend? Applebaum describes one official being horrified at the existence of a substantial number of chess clubs not tied to Communist organizations, for example. But more chilling is this interlude during a congress of diverse youth groups:

[Some] of the more radical Communist delegates held a meeting in a side room, during which one of them complained about the church group leaders [present at the conference]. He thought they should be expelled. The Communist officials told him not to worry, the religious young people would be kept under control: "We will give the churches ten blows a day until they lie on the ground. When we need them again, we will stroke them a little until their wounds are healed." (39)

One begins to see a rather full toolkit available to the ruling party, ranging from labor camp sentences for troublemakers to the banning of independent organizations even of the seemingly most benign kind. In time the population comes to expect no social or civic openings for meaningful free expression, and they are defeated.

In “The Power of the Powerless,” Vaclav Havel theorizes about the forms of expression that undermine this kind of power, even when there is no overtly political content, as we might see in some forms of music. He describes eastern Europe a half generation or so later than Applebaum’s essay, a time when the enforcements of Soviet bloc life were very powerful but the ideological façade of the bloc was widely understood to be a sleight of hand enforced essentially by threat of poverty, prison, or, in the case of countries, invasion. Nevertheless, for Havel the problem has much to do with the ability of the society to enforce silence and of the populace to find ways to speak.

I cannot find a direct link between the two generations of silencing in the Soviet bloc and the apathy of American voters, but the seemingly insurmountable indifference of a society (of government? of companies and markets? of social systems such as education?) to a mass of its people’s woes will, often enough, silence them rather than provoke them into speaking. That’s one lesson I take from the beaten-down parts of rust belt cities like ours. Somehow silence is the norm in both kinds of society, one that seeks it with the help of cunning and force and one that pledges openness in all its credos. Go figure.

(“How the Communists Inexorably Changed Life,” NYROB, 11/22/12, currently only available in print) [0 & P]

Our very own UFO. [This week's radio essay--audio here.] We were fairly good kids, I suppose, more or less, but the country had gone UFO crazy and that brought out the crazy in us too. In government labs out west, there either were or were not alien bodies floating in formaldehyde. Silvery saucers darted across American skies and bony, big-eyed faces in the windows scanned our puny human accomplishments down below, or they didn’t. But one thing was certain: our fellow citizens fretted about it on the news and, even better, screamed and ran arms flailing through the streets fleeing for their lives on Saturdays in the TV movies. We were a nation that could really throw itself into hysteria, and my neighbor Jack and I thought this was great. We wanted a piece of that action. With the help of a dime store helium balloon we planned to be the first ten-year-old boys in America to drive their hometown into UFO terror.

To get started, we offered our parents flimsy reasons for visiting the nearby shopping center. Our teacher Sister James Louise had taught us that by carefully leaving out key facts we could commit what was called a sin of omission. So we didn’t say, “Mom, Dad, we’re going to buy the parts to assemble a realistic fake UFO that will thrust Samoa Drive into the headlines.” Instead, we did what we had to do. We lied. Walking to the shopping center, Jack and I strategized about lightweight batteries and silver paint. We brainstormed about constructing a working saucer out of things sold for next to nothing at Woolworth’s. We counted our coins and our few wrinkled dollar bills. This thing just might work.

Up and down the aisles we walked, shopping for the hull of a UFO. At long last we spotted the clear plastic dome of a make-up kit. We bought two, one for the top of the UFO and one for the bottom. Outside the store, when the coast was clear, we threw away the make-up and tucked the two domes into our pockets. Back in the store again, we got up the nerve to order the largest, most babyish helium balloon they would make for us. At the cash register, afraid for our masculine reputations, we also asked the clerk for a bag. Carrying the huge, round, weightless bag through the shopping center seemed hilarious at the time.

After school each day, our work continued in earnest—painting the hull silver except for its windows, attaching batteries to light bulb, and designing a way for the balloon to carry our flying saucer on fishing line and level far below. We tried to figure out how to get someone to spot its glowing windows in the darkness, without seeing the balloon soaring above it. We knew that we should not make the first report, and anyway, we had to be ready to reel in our mischievous device at a moment’s notice. Solutions eluded us, and everything was made more difficult by our having to go to school.

That time is a blur to me now, but perhaps it was the third day when we rushed back from school to find the balloon on the floor, nodding quietly. Our UFO dreams were deflating. How many great adventures have been stillborn because young dreamers are stuck in school until the afternoon? Jack and I turned to other pastimes; we played board games and went out to look at stars. One night, sitting on his lawn, we saw two lights in strict formation zipping faster than any jet across the fabric of the stars. We could not explain what we had seen—do meteors travel in formation? In our minds, anyway, those two FOs remained deeply and ominously U. As I walked home that night past the dark shapes of neighborhood bushes and echo-y black stretches of lawn and lurking shadows, I worked myself up into quite a fright. [0 & P]

Beyond dictatorship. A little Storify essay, four tweets and three comments long, about language, imagination, and revolution, starring the writing of Libyan novelist and political observer Hisham Matar. [0 & P]

The silence of the citizen. Perhaps this is true:

Silence is the basic mode of the citizen, largely unallied with others, in possession of no regular civic audience, skilled in no genre of public address, in possession of no reliable stream of information or of one so contested and poisoned and vexed as to be more problem than aid, susceptible to cynicism or despair or indifference every moment that is not spent in laboring or consuming entertainment or tending the beautiful or bare walled garden of the private life.

If this is true, then what should the university be? [0 & P]

Radio radio. A fine example of a small story told well, from This American Life--a four-year-old grows very interested in Jesus and what he taught, and then she sees a connection to a new person she learns about, Martin Luther King. Go to Kid Logic (Episode 188) and skip ahead to 13:10 in the audio.

What takes this from a story to a good story? Well, there is something at stake: the father says that he is telling his daughter important things that she's never heard before, and you can tell that he's trying to be true to the richness of the teachings of Jesus and King without overwhelming the child. And the child is hungry for information about Jesus. So, something at stake.

And the people are not static. Their life together is unfolding through the child's growing understanding of the values taught by their two leaders. She's not quite the same at the end as she is at the start, and the father might not be the same either. The people move in their lives.

And there is suspense, maybe two ways. How will the father teach these complex things to his young daughter? How will she take them up? And further: once she figures out one thing about the example of their lives, will she figure out the second thing that is lurking there, that we as listeners know? And if she figures it out, how will she respond? This suspense ties into the stakes.

And an insight into human experience will be lightly stated or implied, as a result.

I remember a writer diagnosing a faulty draft of another writer's short story largely based on the idea of something being at stake. If someone stands to gain or lose, and the progress of the story depends on how that is worked out, that's a good sign about the draft of a story. If a writer has trouble saying in a sentence or two (to another writer or friend) what is at stake, then the story probably isn't clear about it either. Then the story isn't done. The story may have been told, but it hasn't been shaped, crafted, polished. It's not artful. (Source? I'll have to go find it.)

So there are formal elements that you can start to recognize in a good radio narrative. Having done so, maybe the chances of writing a better story improve. Or when you listen to a story, do you notice more about the people and our common humanity because you understand this aspect of story-telling? Maybe so. [0 & P]

Pirates and social media. Innovative collaborations? Movement of information across the world via new technology? Exchanges between groups previously unable to work together? New jobs created by access to new information? Disruptions of market values due to new forces and actors? Sure, but are we talking about pirates here? Yes. See the later paragraphs of Chana Joffe-Walt's 5/22/09 story, "After A Pirate Negotiation, A Personal Connection," on the All Things Considered series called Planet Money. [0 & P]

Pages (academic) never meant to be read. The epigraph from a new book on Shakespeare by Clinton Heylin:

The greatest advantage of Shakespearean studies seems to be that questions may be asked over and over again, and that almost nobody pays attention to the answers — unless he borrows them for his own use in an article or a book. — HYDER E. ROLLINS, 1944 [0 & P]

Working with your hands (your mind). "A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world," says Matthew B.Crawford in his essay on "The Case for Working With Your Hands." Students and faculty might enjoy his essay for the strong writing as well as for the clues he gives about why academic work sometimes becomes arid and the careers college trains us for sometimes do too. What are the essential elements of a lively, satisfying life of the mind? Crawford has a good list, and the former academic illustrates his list from his current work as a motorcycle mechanic.

It seems to me that this essay gives some ways of talking about personal power and agency beyond the obvious aspects of rank and authority earned by position in society or workplace. (NY Times, 5/24/09) [0 & P]

What students love. The book group had been meeting every other Tuesday for several weeks, and many good ideas about the campus came up for discussion along the way. But I sat up and took note when a colleague said this:

Students love it when faculty 'own up' to not knowing something. (R. duC)

I connected this sentence immediately to another thought I had been carrying around for a few weeks, something spoken by a teacher to a group of students:

I don't know how you will apply this [thing we are studying] in your life. (Source lost)

Seen together, the two sentences help teachers remember why students aspire to be the center of their own learning. It's respectful for us to help them do so, and important, too, since they become the users of the knowledge that is passed down and reshaped for new times and invented wholesale along the way. And between the respect and the potency of knowledge that they get to work with, students become energized as learners. You remember whenever you've witnessed such a thing in your own school.

Too often, however, we behave as though we know down deep that we must ventually pass along the cultural heritage, the tools and habits of mind and bodies of information that is our common property, but we don't want to let it quite out of our hands just yet:

No, you can have this stuff later. You know, it's the good stuff, so we can't let you try it out just yet. While you're waiting, could you memorize this other stuff here for a quiz? [0 & P]