Stickiness and Such

It is very funny that Dr. Lay chose this text to respond to because it is one that I actually own and have read. The book is a pretty brilliant explanation of the power of ideas through the use of anecdotes (very similar to a Malcolm Gladwell text) and I think that it succeeds in defining the areas that make ideas successful. I agree with the Heath's view on what stickiness is: Stickiness is the measure of how effective an idea is at being remembered and accepted. Whenever I think about stickiness I think about rumors. We've all been through high school so I know that each of us has heard our fair share of rumors, so it comes as no surprise that some rumors are definitely 'stickier' than others. The rumors that are most successful at being spread are the ones that follow the Heath's rules for SUCCESs.
Anything that gets around needs to be Simple. If a rumor is too complex it will either be forgotten or passed on in a simpler form anyway. It needs to be smaller and easier so that it can be Understood. It is optimal if the person who is passing this to you is directly related to the rumor (a Credible source). It needs to be Concrete in exactly what happened, not ambiguous. It needs to play on the receiver's Emotions (usually surprise) and quite obviously it is generally a Story.
For any idea to be successful it must have these characteristics. Quite simply this is just a formula for the way good ideas should be anyway. We use this model every day in what we say, most of the time it isn't realized.

http://home.comcast.net/~finestkiss3/chansons/Girls-LustForLife.mp3

The Marathon isn't Won on the Day of the Race

The stalking exercise was, as implied by the prompt questions, meant to practice/train/strengthen our abilities as writers. To become better writers there must be intentioned effort. To make the all too easy analogy, it's like athletic training. No one can expect to show up on the day of their sporting event without training and do well. As my high school soccer coach used to say "A marathon isn't won on the day of the race," quite obviously noting that the hours of practice leading up to the race were far more important than any measures that could be taken on race day. I'm kind of digging the bad sports movie vibe I've created thus far so I'll continue with some old adages and remembrances from the heyday of my amateur soccer career. One of the techniques being practiced with this writing exercise is to find inspiration. In the sport world this is equivalent to the pump-up speech. and I don't necessarily mean the one the coach gives a few minutes before the game, I mean the one that comes while the starters are huddled on the field and it usually goes along the lines of "These kids are ****ing ****s! Lets **** them up..." Without this inspiration and drive to play, acquired through whatever means, the game is bland and the writing is boring. To achieve this joga bonito ("beautiful play" or better explained by this video,)



we must all find it within our own hearts to gut out a little joy. It's the surge of the adrenaline, it's the burning idea, it's the imagination. And in writing it all starts with exercises such as the one we were assigned. The 'stalking' showed us that we can push our writing outside its normal limits and come out with something even better than before. It is useful in the sense that it forces us to write as we normally wouldn't. Sure, I wasn't exactly psyched when I read through what we had to do because it was harder than what we usually do, but hey, "the extra mile is a lonely place"

http://brad.bothsidesofthemouth.com/November/FFF/Ratatat%20-%20Loud%20Pipes.mp3

What the Cesar Saw

The thing that sets Cesar Millan apart from other dog trainers and other people in general is that he understands psychology. As it happens, he specializes in dog psychology. He has never been formally trained, he doesn't have a doctorate, in fact he immigrated to this country illegally. He understands how to be firm with his trainees yet he still maintains tact. The most amazing part of Gladwell's case study I thought was how Millan works his magic on these dogs. According to researchers that were interviewed, Millan has an unparalleled use of body language and physical expression. They mentioned a study in the text comparing the human interaction of both dogs and chimps and found that, "The dog goes to the right cup virtually every time. Yet when Hare did the same experiment with chimpanzees—an animal that shares 98.6 per cent of our genes—the chimps couldn't get it right. A dog will look at you for help, and a chimp won't." This examples the fact that dogs cling to our every movement no matter how subtle or unintended, they look to us for help even when we aren't intentionally providing it. I don't think that Millan knowingly considered this fact, he simply understood because of years of experience around dogs while working on his family's ranch in Mexico. Nonetheless he used even his most discrete body movements to inform the dogs of what he expected of them.
What the article seemed to imply is that dogs understand human movements better than we do ourselves. Cesar became the test subject when Gladwell studied his relationship with his wife. The two had a hard time communicating with each other because they didn't understand the psychology of the other. Millan realized that in the same way he deals with dogs differently than humans, he needed to deal with different people differently as well. A different medium needed to be used as well. The physical cues that he used with dogs couldn't work as well with humans because we don't think in that same way, we aren't wired to. Instead we use vocal communication to convey what we think, and we tend to believe what we are told, even if what is told is not entirely truthful.

http://mp3muffin.com/bootsy/Grizzly%20Bear%20Two%20Weeks.mp3

What community of writers does the creator of "Stitch Bitch" reach out to?

This question was posed by Peter on his blog and although we briefly discussed this in class, no definite conclusion had been come to. Some people expressed their view that because "Stitch Bitch" was about all writers that it was created for all writers. I think that this is quite far from the truth. I don't think that it would be out of bounds to say that this essay was written with a complex verbiage and syntax. Even as a collegiate student I had a hard time deciphering what this article meant. Considering that 20% of the United States population is under the age of 14 (and I believe that we have already established that these people are writers; they text, they facebook, they communicate) "Stitch Bitch" could not be understood by this demographic. Furthermore, 30% of students will drop out of the american education system before they even earn a high school degree and the proportion of the United States population who will graduate from college is less than 33%. Generally, I don't think that this article could be understood by anyone without a college education, and maybe not even then. For this reason I just don't see how it is possible for "Stitch Bitch" to be created for reading by all writers.
With that being said, the original question comes back into play. Who is it meant for? I would say that this essay was meant to be used in a college English classroom to discuss writing. It is written by a professor originally as a lecture and now we find ourselves reading it in our own writing class as a means for discussing how we write. I don't think that "Stitch Bitch" is meant for anyone more than people receiving an education.

http://quietcolor.com/media/mp3/2009_10/help-im-alive.mp3

Stitch Bitch Questions

1. What is hypertext?
2. What point is Jackson trying to make about writing?
3. What does each subheading mean?
4. In what ways does she believe that writing and the body are similar?
5. What is the concept of 'the banished body'?
6. Why does Jackson go from using 'we' to 'I' at some points?

http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/8/11/2540052/La%20Roux%20-%20Bulletproof%20%28Nacey%20Remix%29.mp3

What the Hell is a 'Hypertext'?

For homework we were assigned to read an essay called Stich Bitch by Shelley Jackson (or not her as she seems to imply in the early part of the article?). The first thing that I did after clicking the link in my e-mail was to simply begin reading the text. This came to a screeching halt after a couple of paragraphs. It is written in an annoying, highbrow tone and it just pissed me off that it seemed like I had to look up every other word (e.g. machinic, synaptic, dissolution, assemblage, stasis, and that is just the first subheading). Obviously I wondered what kind of credentials gave this woman the right to write like such an elitist. So I glanced at the URL and observed that it was published on a Massachusetts Institute of Technology webpage, this didn't help to change my perception. Thoroughly peeved, I was determined to dig through the pompous shell of the work and get to what any of it actually meant. I hit a snag with a word that she seemed to base her whole essay of off, 'hypertext'. A quick trip to dictionary.com defined it as "a method of storing data through a computer program that allows a user to create and link fields of information at will and to retrieve the data nonsequentially." This didn't really make sense to me in the context the sentences that she used it in. Aside from the fact that this text happened to be published online, I didn't see what a computer data storage method had to do with anything that Jackson was saying. What did spring to mind however, was the term 'internal text' that Dr. Lay frequently uses in class. Once again, the computer definition didn't really fit into that usage either, so I chose to break the term into its two parts 'hyper' and 'text'. It was easier for me to process as such with 'hyper' being a prefix meaning excessive, and 'text' meaning the original words of an author. I put those two definitions together to form a new meaning for hypertext: excessive original words of an author. At this point the whole wordy style of the author seemed to make a little more sense to me because she admits that "I am Shelley Jackson, author of a hypertext". But she uses the word more times than that (30 times in fact) and in other contexts the term still takes a little more work to understand. The next usage is:

"You're not where you think you are. In hypertext, everything is there at once and equally weighted. It is a body whose brain is dispersed throughout the cells, fraught with potential, fragile with indecision, or rather strong in foregoing decisions, the way a vine will bend but a tree can fall down"

Now I'm not saying that I understand what she is saying in this passage, because I don't. at all. But now she seems to be using hypertext to describe a body, thus bringing again to my mind the phrase 'internal text'. I can only guess that she thinks that every person doesn't have merely an interntal text, they have an internal hypertext. A hypertext that is too extensive and chaotic to be expressed as is, we can't just say exactly what comes to mind all the time, there needs to be a filter. To come full circle, I think that this is where the computer definition comes in. To organize our internal hypertext we need to link relevant pieces of information from our hypertext together so that we can express them nonsequentially. While that sounds as confusing and wordy as the text that I criticized for being confusing and wordy, what I mean is that before an idea can be expressed, an individual must view their whole internal text and only grab parts of it to take with them to the drawing board. Our internal texts are much too chaotic to be expressed as a stream of consciousness.

http://www.box.net/shared/static/p63opp6yl3.mp3

Billy Collins' Poem Questions

1) Who/what is Collins' poem about?
2) Does "the bread and the knife" have any meaning?
3) Why does Collins choose to satirize the original poem?
4) What is Collins saying about stealing?
5) What is Collins saying about poetry?
6) Why does Collins read his poem in the voice that he does?

http://indymusic.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/miike-snow-silvia1.mp3

"Great Artists Steal, They Don't Do Homages."

It took no more than a few minutes of reading Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence" for me to understand exactly what Lethem was describing. It instantly brought to mind a quote that I read a while back that I thought better summarized my feelings on the subject. The quote is from one of my favorite directors of all time Quentin Tarantino, who when being question by a reporter about his style replied, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." Sure, this quote makes him sound like a jackass, which may not even be too far from the truth, but it serves my purposes quite well. And that is the reason why any person steals an idea, because it serves their purposes well. Students plagiarize to get a better grade. Quentin Tarantino copies story elements to make entertaining films. I steal his quote to better explain my thoughts. You'll notice that the common thread between all of these circumstances is that each thief steals to make better. Better grade. Better film. Better blog post. One personal experience I've had with this is the music that I listen to. I'm big on the house/trance scene in which many artists will take another artist's previously recorded track and do their own take on it (Lethem briefly touched on it in his essay when he told of King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry). This act is called "remixing" and oftentimes one of these remixing artists will take a song that enjoyed a lot of mainstream success, like something of off the Billboard Top 40, and then take away all instrumentation and lay down a new track underneath the original vocals that better suit their personal tastes. Anyone could argue that this is stealing, these remixers are taking the words and vocal melodies that another artist wrote and putting their name on it, but you can't argue that they have bad intentions. In fact, these remixers are trying to make the song better, they feel that they can take this part of a song to form a better one. This is why all artists steal. Quentin Tarantino takes plot elements from other directors because he thinks he can do it better. People steal lines from texts because they feel it better suits their purposes. Ancient stories like the Odyssey are retold because writers feel like they can tell it in better, more relevant ways. It isn't a spiteful act, it is for progress.

and to further my point, here is a good remix
http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/5/27/2457799/Frankmusik%20-%20Confusion%20Girl%20%28The%20Aspirins%20For%20My%20Children%20remix%29.mp3

Mark Twain and Blogging

In a lot of ways the invention of the blog has revitalized the way that we use language in this digital age. It is a simple, cheap and effective way to communicate to anyone with internet access. The real power of blogging though is just how free it is, and I mean free beyond the usage of inexpensive, a writer of a blog has the freedom to voice any opinion without censorship. Blogging has frequently been a source of political controversy over the expression of ideas, from governments in Asia arresting citizens for libel against their regimes to here in our own country where the Pentagon has cracked down on soldier's blogs. Less controversially, blogging has developed its own vernacular. The relative anonymity of the internet has lead to more relaxed language usage for the simple reason that no one is holding the blog writers accountable for their writing. The verbiage used on the internet is a stripped-down version of the previous formal standards. For example, I am about to transition to a different thought in the next sentence, but I don't plan on indenting; partly because I feel like I set a precedent by not indenting in my last post and partly because it doesn't really matter because it isn't going to stop anyone who would have normally read this from reading it. If he were around today I think that Mark Twain would embrace this newfound simplicity based solely on his view in the letter he wrote to D.W. Bowser in which he said: "I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English–it is the modern way and the best way." It truly has become the modern way, there is very little emphasis on flashy words or engaging sentence structure. In blogging, creative words have given way to a creative use of the blogging medium itself. The best way to communicate creativity is to tweak the html code to format it differently or use pictures to say better than words what you mean. After all, many bloggers don't revise their posts before posting to make them better, as a classmate of mine astutely texted me: "I'm kind of just ranting about the topic. I feel like thats all blogs are anyway" (like Derrida says, everything is a text) And that is quite true, and also where we deviate from Twain's ideas. He says "We write frankly and fearlessly but then we “modify” before we print." Blogging has taken the form of frank and fearless writing, just without the modification, without censorship, just as it has been since its creation. Is this where the future of our language is headed? Toward unabashed opine? Yes, deal with it.

http://www.eternalnyc.com/boomchik/Night-By-Night-Skream-Remix.mp3