Emotional Weather Forcast

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May 2, 2008 11:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Happy Birthday

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My mom turned 85 today. She claims it was her happiest birthday ever. She also claimed a few days ago that my sister-in-law was feeding her black mushrooms that made her hallucinate. I chose to believe one claim, but not the other.

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April 16, 2008 11:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Dad and Mom in Mesa

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Dad and Mom in Mesa, AZ circa 1988-- It's strange to find all these old photographs, even the ones I shot.
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April 14, 2008 10:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Brothers

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I'm the victim on the left. My brother and I get along much better these days.
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April 14, 2008 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Facing the music

In time, music in particular and culture in general would provide Adorno the perfect vantage point from which to criticize what he saw as the alienation and false consciousness of bourgeois society. This was especially the case once Adorno reached Los Angeles, in the 1940s, where he could observe the radio and film industries first hand.

Yet even Mr. Claussen is embarrassed by Adorno’s ignorant and snobbish dismissal of American popular music, all of which he lumped together as “jazz.” This “seems to be a blind spot in his work,” Mr. Claussen acknowledges; but in fact it is more than that. Adorno’s contempt for jazz and those who listen to it, his belief that popular music is simply the tool of the Culture Industry for colonizing the consciousness of the masses, is suggestive of the arrogant absolutism that characterizes his thought in general.

Because he viewed music as a Hegelian progress from Beethoven to Schoenberg, keeping pace with the inexorable alienation of bourgeois society, Adorno viewed any 20th-century music that was less alienated than Schoenberg’s as a cowardly retreat, a refusal of difficult knowledge. (This applied to Stravinsky’s neoclassicism as much as to the Andrews Sisters.) In an analogous way, critical theory attempts to explain all of contemporary history as the inevitable working-out of a historical dialectic that culminates in Nazism. Adorno is upside-down Hegel: instead of trying to prove that history is driven by the cunning of reason, he tries to show that it is marching in lock-step toward mindlessness.

The Stern German
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April 14, 2008 9:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

For my love

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April 1, 2008 10:32 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

It never ends

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March 31, 2008 2:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Better

It’s hard to remember sometimes that I actually have my own life, my own interests outside of sitting in hospitals and nursing homes—the activity that has dominated the last month for me. I had conferences with students this week and it felt good to get back to being a different sort of care provider. Maybe it’s just that I’m in a generous mood, but the professional and technical writing class I’ve had this semester has been one of the best of my career. People are engaged and involved for the most part, and have picked projects that have some relevance to their career paths. That always makes a difference. Although Krista has taught a unit for the past month so that I could tend to my mother, I still think of them as my class.

One thing that has really made this class click is the use of more technology—I used google docs for the first time with great success, and Krista has taught the instructions module using wikis. I am a firm believer in technology in the classroom, and this has been effective both as a way of presenting material and concepts, but also in just plain getting the job done. Being separated by several states has not made me lose touch with the class at all. It may have its dark side, but I really do think that technology is mostly good.

In the shower this morning, it dawned on me that at the core I really believe that technology has the ability to tell us more about the world. The danger, ultimately, though is losing sight of the world part of that equation. Fantasy has its uses, but in the end, reality is what matters.

More

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March 28, 2008 1:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)