On Being a "Tiger Dad," With a Nod to Amy Chua's "The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother"

Posted on February 5, 2012 by williamjcobb

So I’m having a little more sympathy for the famous “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua (author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) of late, as I’m now trying to work every day on teaching my daughter to read. She attends a Montessori school, with nice teachers and much encouragement, but it seems to me a fairly relaxed, easy forum. I’m tough on Lili, drill her, cajole her, and sometimes argue with her as I try to get her to spell “skate,” “gate,” or “butterfly.” But she’s improving noticeably lately, and is at the stage where she’s now reading entire sentences. I won’t make any claims of her being a prodigy or genius (a la those learning-scam commercials on Noggin: “Your baby can read!” “Your baby can operate a forklift!”), as I think she’s at a typical reading-development stage for a five-year-old. But I know she’s responding to my disciplined approach, even if we’re not practicing spelling/reading five hours a day. But Chua’s book sounds interesting, and I can see why it’s stirred a debate about parenting. Being demanding is itself hard work, but I think it does have a tendency to pay off, as long as it doesn’t backfire. And here’s a photo of my little monkey/genius, relaxing in between her hours of rote memorization drills on how to spell “egregious” and “martinet.”

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Death of an MFA Program, an Insider's View

Posted on February 5, 2012 by williamjcobb

So as is becoming known throughout the university world and blogosphere, Penn State cut the funding for its MFA program, of which I’m the director, and we’ve chosen to cease admitting new students, rather than expect them to pay many thousands of dollars for a degree that is not a sure ticket to huge paychecks. We’ve been a fully funded program for many years, and during that time have not cheated our students, but have offered an excellent education in creative writing, practical teaching experience, and no debt.
But the times have changed.
I see it in terms of the future world described in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Our lit students are fully funded, and I didn’t want our creative writing students to become the Morlocks to their Eloi.
There’s much I could say about this, but won’t. We fought for a year to get our funding back, and failed. Does this say something that, when budget-crunch time comes, the arts are first on the chopping block? Of course it does. Is this a disgrace? Of course it is.

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"Cave of Forgotten Dreams" Now on Netflix, as well as "Atrocious"

Posted on January 31, 2012 by williamjcobb

So although the (dubious, limited) charm of Netflix streaming wore off long ago, I do sometimes find something interesting there if I troll enough, and there are two new films I recommend:  Werner Herzog’s remarkable documentary about 32,000 year-old-cave art, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), which I originally saw in the theater in 3D, and Atrocious (2010), a Spanish horror/suspense film that’s worth watching. Cave is worth it just for the shots of the stone age cave paintings in Southern France (naturally), much of it amazingly beautiful, and the hint it offers about European life in the Ice Age. Atrocious has a deliciously devious trick up its sleeve. Although the plot hints at some malevolence, most of the film is quite banal and ordinary-seeming—think Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity—until the action heats up toward the end, and you the viewer still don’t know what’s going on—that is, until the very end. When the mystery is solved it almost feels like a solution in the spirit of Clue. You should guess it, but you never will.

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Update on "Contagion" Post and Fears of a Bird Flu Pandemic: Researchers Have Cooked Up Super Bird-Flu in a Lab!

Posted on January 22, 2012 by williamjcobb

So after mentioning that I had watched Contagion recently and posting some musings about pandemic/bird flu fears, which is in the background of my new novel, The Bird Saviors, I was slightly taken aback by the recent news that two separate teams of scientists, in the Netherlands and in Wisconsin (though working together, as I understand it), have succeeded in creating a SuperFlu in the lab, the kind that some have said could naturally occur in mutation. Contagion imagines a scenario in which bats (which really aren’t birds, but anyway) defecate into hog farms, and the virus becomes airborne-transmissible through this cross-species mutation. That’s standard virus-mutation theory.  The two teams of researchers created this airborne-transmissible bird flu (with potential mortality rates of 50%, which is devastation-level) using ferrets as the cross-species animal, and state that they have done so to understand how this could happen. (It’s also a commonplace theory in climate change science that new viruses often emerge during periods of climate upheaval, caused by species migration into new areas.) Here’s a chilling quote from one of them: “Dr. Fouchier said he was surprised by how easy it was to change the virus into the very form that the world has been dreading. Now, scientists around the world will have to grapple with what to do with Dr. Fouchier’s creation.”—New York Times article, see url below.
Fouchier is a virologist who was part of the research team. This is one of the few things I’ve read that makes the fears seem well-grounded: a scientist creating exactly what we fear the most, and saying “he was surprised by how easy it was.” Here are two urls detailing the recent news:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/science/scientists-to-pause-research-on-deadly-strain-of-bird-flu.html?_r=1&hpw
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/21/details-of-new-lab-created-bird-flu-strain-may-be-too-dangerous-to-publish/?iref=allsearch
And while we’re on the subject, here’s the book jacket of my new novel, The Bird Saviors, which will be released on June 21st.

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News On the Cormac McCarthy Front: Baby Eater No. 2 Speaks! Plus a New, Original Screenplay by CM

Posted on January 20, 2012 by williamjcobb

So for all the Cormac McCarthy fans out there, of which I am a most enthusiastic one, here’s an odd bit of info that just fell into my lap about the film version of The Road (2009). Before I saw the film I wondered how they would handle that scene late in the novel when the father & son see a pregnant woman and a couple of men in the distance, and then later come upon their camp, only to discover the newborn baby roasting on a spit over a campfire. I remember thinking the first time I read the scene, Now that’s too much. The film certainly kept quite close to the material of the novel, but that is one scene not present in the finished film. But . . . .
Apparently originally it was meant to be. How do I know this? I met Baby Eater No. 2! (Or it may have been Baby Eater No. 1. I forget.) He’s actually a student in one of my classes. He was an aspiring actor in the Pittsburgh area, and he auditioned for a “hairy male” role in the film, and got it. They filmed the scene, but it ended up on the cutting room floor, as they say. He seems to think they decided it was too gross. (I’m not surprised.)
There’s also one other bit of Cormac McCarthy news in the air: He’s apparently written and sold a screenplay, titled The Counselor. This is not really shocking, a foray into screenwriting: In interviews he mentioned that he had originally written No Country for Old Men as a screenplay, but couldn’t sell it (??), and then wrote the novel. Here’s the link about the new screenplay:
http://flavorwire.com/250324/new-cormac-mccarthy-written-screenplay-needs-filmmaker

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On "Contagion": The World Is Ending Because Gwyneth Paltrow Cheated on Her Husband

Posted on January 15, 2012 by williamjcobb

So I finally got around to watching Contagion last night, which I’ve been mildly curious about since there’s a hardcore virus epidemic at the core of the story, and in my new novel there’s a flu epidemic angle as well. And wouldn’t you know, the first thing you see is Gwyneth Paltrow’s (kind of sickly looking) face in the first scene, with the label Day 2, which makes you wonder, What happened to Day 1? (Your curiosity will be solved at the end of the film.) At times Contagion seemed like The Descendants meets The Road, as after Gwyneth Paltrow dies it’s revealed she was cheating on her husband, like George Clooney’s wife in The Descendants. And there are other scenes where food riots occur as the pandemic breaks down social services and food delivery, which seemed like a prequel to The Road.
The question is: Good movie or not? The first half is exciting, the second half fizzles out. I’ve read a great deal about viruses and pandemics. Odd as it may seem, the more I read, the less fear I had about them. Yes, I agree that serious virus outbreaks are inevitable, perhaps, but pandemics are very rare. I don’t believe the oft-stated notion of “It’s not a matter of if but when.” That’s often opined about everything from asteroid impacts to super-volcanoes, but “if” the “when” may be millions of years from now, it doesn’t seem to matter much. There are a number of scientists/epidemiologists who suggest that viruses are so complex that it’s hard to make any predictions about them, and that our ability to deal effectively with them has increased enormously from episodes/outbreaks in the past. The Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 is often mentioned as an example, and there’s an excellent book about that event: John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (2005).

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A New and Suspiciously Warm Year

Posted on January 9, 2012 by williamjcobb

So after three weeks of offline holiday fun in the snowclad confines of southern Colorado, I’m back in Pennsylvania and noticing what a strange (don’t know about brave) new world it is—one without much of a winter. The excellent website Climate Progress has a good summation of the strange weather of January 2012, which smells like “global heating” to me. Scroll down a few posts to the one by Jeff Masters for the list of recent, scary climate signs:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/issue/?mobile=nc

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Reading Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" Offline, amidst a White Christmas

Posted on December 27, 2011 by williamjcobb

So between wrapping zebra puppets and trees with colored lights, I’ve been reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows while living offline, which is an interesting contrast. He basically argues that our internet use is changing the way our brains work, and most of his analysis is convincing, if at times repetitive and somewhat simplistic. (His comments about Facebook, for instance, seem naive, basically only seeing it as what its proponents claim it to be, “a great way to keep in touch with family and friends!”, rather than a queasy narcissistic timesuck.) The book’s strength is that it’s not a jeremiad against the internet, although perhaps that’s a weakness as well: at times he softens his criticism so much that the book seems squishy. (If it’s not a problem, so what?) But I certainly agree with some of his observations, which are generally backed up by one (dubious psychological or pseudoscientific) study or another: We’re becoming more data-hungry, more scatter-brained, and are less likely to “lose ourselves” in books more than ever. Some of his recap of the development of the book is illuminating, and when he starts to suggest that “books are dead,” he counters that with reports from the 19th century about the decline of books, which functions as a useful reality check.
And then I go out hiking in the Colorado snowdrifts. This is a picture of the creek in my backyard.

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On Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"

Posted on December 14, 2011 by williamjcobb

So in between dressing up stuffed animal rabbits as Rapunzel and noticing that leopard-skin tights, boots, and earmuffs seem to be popular among mallrats, I’m reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010). It’s complex, not simply “the internet is bad” or anything that reductive. He gives a reasonable and well-balanced discussion of how internet usage (and ebooks, I would also argue) are changing the way we read and think, and that while there are some who argue the effects are largely beneficial, he does focus on the difficulty of being immersed in a long text, after being accustomed to the shorter bites of information on the internet. The Shallows was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and that seems a well-deserved honor. He begins with a discussion of Marshall McLuhan, hugely influential in the 1960s, now a bit of a cultural relic, but who makes some good points about the technological innovations and changes: “What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in th elong run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society. ‘The effects of technology do no occur at the level of opinions or concepts,’ wrote McLuhan. Rather, they alter ‘patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.’ The showman exaggerates to make his point, but the point stands. Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”
At one point Carr admits to having less and less patience for longer books, and for longer periods of reading in one text, skipping around a lot, intellectual multitasking, to some extent. If that’s a crime, I’m guilty too. And I agree there are great benefits to internet-based reading and learning, but drawbacks as well. Two examples I can cite from my own experience: The origin of the Magna Carta (signed in 1215) and the Gutenberg Bible (printed in 1450-51, it’s believed) are a couple topics I’ve looked up recently, that stick in my head. Add those bits of information to the snowball of information we see in any day, and it would be easy to argue that we’re gaining much for what we lose. I’m not so sure. I asked my students in a senior course some basic questions about history, and, for example, few of them could name the dates of the Civil War. Is that important? I’d say yes. But as Carr notes, there’s no going back.

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"The Descendants" & Kardashian Wannabes

Posted on December 14, 2011 by williamjcobb

So like all good (and not-so-good) Americans I ended up at a mall (in St. Louis) today, amused by the Kardashian/Jersey Shore wannabes with their alien-life-form hair and Cleopatra-on-meth eye makeup, getting a Teddy bear made from scratch, which was actually a rabbit dressed as a princess. Afterward we ended up seeing the new Alexander Payne film, The Descendants, starring George Clooney in a good role, like Up in the Air only different. But the teenage daughter of the film kind of stole the show. It’s funny, sad, and touching, with no car chases or things exploding, and I don’t remember any vampires or zombies, but they were probably lurking in the parking lot. The best part involved a grumpy old grandpa and an insolent if harmless teen.

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