Over the years, a few people have asked me about using RPGs in the TEFL classroom. I’ve done a lot, and have a lot to say about it, but I’ll boil this down to some observations and resources. Continue reading
The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov
I hope the handful of people paying attention to this site will excuse my long silence : a lot of things have been brewing, and it’s a year of good news due out in dribs and drabs, but for now, I want to tell you about the book I’m reading right now, Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer.
I’ve never heard of Leskov before, but he’s proving to be wonderfully peculiar fun. The Enchanted Wanderer is a Russian novel from 1873, which I found the book at the district library one town over from where I live; as soon as I saw the description in the inner gatefold, I had to sign it out.
What is it? Basically a picaresque novel about a cursed bogatyr (wandering Russian warrior) sworn by his mother) to the service of God and cursed by the ghost ofa monk he whipped to death for fun… so he’s basically doomed eventually, inevitably, to a monastic life. Well, someday he’ll be living one, but he responds to this curse by living it up as long as he can by, you know, wandering around and getting into all kinds of trouble: picking fights with military officers, stealing horses, babysitting a nobleman’s infant child… you know, the usual stuff. That’s the stuff I’ve read so far, and I’m less than halfway through at the moment.
Oddest bit so far: once he finds himself free from effective indentured servitude, he’s at a loss for what to do with himself:
To be honest, I couldn’t help thinking about how, for all the time that had passed since I’d run off from my masters, I still had no place to settle down and warm up my hands. “The jig is up,” I thought. “I’ll go down to the police headquarters and turn myself in. Except,” I thought, “what a perfect waste, now that I finally have a little money, to let the police take all of it. Let me have a little pleasure from it first; let me find a tavern and have a little tea with biscuits. Then I’ll turn myself it.”
And that’s basically what he does… well, the tea and biscuits part,anyway.
Tea and biscuits, folks.
Then he goes for a stroll and, er, as one does, he finds himself enslaved by Tatars, who chop up horse hair and insert it subcutaneously into his heels to cripple him so that fleeing on foot is impossible.
(And so it goes…)
I’ve seen Leskov described as being sort of a commoner-author, and being known for not freighting his stories with all the angst (existential, religious, and dramatic) that we tend to think of when we think about 19th century Russian literature. Well, I guess you all think of that: I haven’t read much of the stuff, so I only have this by reputation. Leskov lands somewhere closer to Waugh and Swift than Franzen, in any case, and I’m enjoying this book. (Though now I wish that whoever does the buying for the library had gone all in and gotten the Penguin edition that collects some other short stories along with the eponymous novella, because I have a feeling I’ll be wanting more once it’s done.)
Blaming the Internet
If you’re looking at an interesting argument against the trade sanctions to which the DPRK (North Korea) is currently subject, this article is worth a read. It’s an interview with Felix Abt.
Naturally, when I hear a businessman claiming his for-profit venture in North Korea is really a way of helping bring about reform there, I’m suspicious: it’s also a way of profiting off some of the most vulnerable people on Earth, and I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of business leading reform because business will (first and foremost, necessarily) always jigger things to benefit itself. It doubtless will bring reforms, but will it be the kind of reforms the people in North Korea need?
Still, it’s hard to justify sanctions we know aren’t going to topple the regime…
In any case, what brought me to write this post is actually just one passage in the article, in the part where the author explains the flamewars between the “sanctioner” and “engager” camps on North Korea-related forums:
Unfortunately, arguments are commonplace and cooperation between the two is rare. Part of this may stem from the fact that most North Korea scholars are above the age of thirty-five; as non-digital natives, they haven’t grown up on the wild, whacky Internet, where tone is easily misinterpreted. (Say what you like about those Reddit-reading Millennials, but in North Korean affairs, they have sharper netiquette and are less prone to digital meltdowns.)
That’s amusing. I’ve seen some pretty ridiculous trolling (and the odd digital meltdown) on Reddit, like other places young Internet users frequent. I don’t think Millennials are really all that more calm or etiquette-possessing than their elders.
I don’t think it’s misinterpretation of tone, or a failure of etiquette, that leads to flame wars and meltdowns. I think it’s a combination of:
- terrible writing skills
- terrible reading skills
- a crippling desire to force other people to think like oneself
The poor reading and writing skills I describe seem, from what I can tell, to be pretty common across generational lines. Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials all mostly suck and communicating in writing, because writing’s something that looks easy to do well, but isn’t. (A lot like photography in the age of smartphones: everyone’s got a camera, but one rarely sees a truly arresting, masterfully shot photograph.)
So if it’s not that they have better reading or writing skills, is it that Reddit-reading Millennials are somehow less under the influence of the dogmatic impulse? Don’t get me wrong: I think persuasive argumentation’s a good thing. But persuasion, as I always tell my students, isn’t about forcing someone to agree with you: it’s about making a compelling argument for your position, such that those who disagree cannot easily dismiss it, and the (very) few who are willing to admit they might be wrong may be convinced to reconsider their own position. That’s hard, especially when you truly care about a subject—and most of the people who bother to talk about North Korea and sanctions do care about it, after all. (Plenty of them might not be native English speakers, on top of that.)
Not that it’s because of better etiquette: that made me laugh. Millennials may be more savvy about certain things, but their manners are no better—and, I’d say, frequently just as terrible as—their elders. 1 Actually, my experience suggests young people are just as prone to dogmatic, thought-coercive excess. It’s just that among people of that age, it’s highly fashionable to affect a tone of disinterest: fashionable snark, attempts at irony, an arch tone, and claiming not to give a shit what anyone thinks.
Which is not to say I like that affectation. I just think it might be culturally adaptive, in a world where most people aren’t interested in being a good reader, writer, or thinker, and in a world where one must live surrounded by people who mostly aren’t very good at those three skills either.
Which is to say, it’s funny how often we blame the internet for things that are actually end user problems.
(Which is not to say there aren’t important design problems on social network sites. But that’s a subject for another post entirely.)
The Millennials I lived with a few years back had horrendous etiquette, and on top of that, actually claimed no such thing as basic universal etiquette existed. As my wife put it, they seemed to want to be parented through their lack of good manners.↩
Street Mobs and Cyber-Mobs
You know what’s bizarre and fascinating? All the horrible, bewildering cybermob behaviour we’ve been seeing online the last few years?
It has deep, striking parallels with how people behaved in London in the 1700s. The mobbing, the doxxing, the hacked nude pictures of female celebrities and defamation campaigns… none of it’s new, except for the change of venue. Our London street mob lives in social media, but they replicate the behaviours of the mobbing Georgian Londoners to an astonishing degree.
(Charles Green’s depiction of the Gordon Riots.)
That’s what this post is about.
Blogger’s Existential Crisis
Does that make it a Blogxistential Crisis? Er…
