Reader Response Pairing

This summer I am working on expanding the collection of memoirs and personal essays that I teach in my two classes. High school students respond particularly well to personal essays, and I find that they tend to generally enjoy writing about themselves and their lives. Personal essays are a good way for teachers to encourage self-reflection and journaling practices among their students.

I picked up a copy of Growing Up Latino and have been reading through it to find useful texts. Jesús Colón's "Kipling and I" (The link is a PDF copy that I found on the Montclair University website. The copy also includes Kipling's poem "If . . ." and some critical thinking questions. Nerdy teacher stuff.) is particularly intriguing as it provides a nice bridge between personal essays and reader response essays. Colón writes about the effects of a work of literature on his young life, directly referencing lines from the poem and explaining how his perceptions of its message change as he gains life experiences.

Colón provides a nice model that students can use in their own writing. I hope to try this out with some of my classes in the coming semester. We'll take a look at this example and then find poems (or song lyrics) of our own and connect them to our life experiences. I can see this working to bridge personal writing to writing about what we have read. My hopes are that the students will begin to understand reading as a personal connection between an author and a group of readers where ideas are exchanged, manipulated, re-interpreted, and put back into the public sphere for the process to continue.

I Totally Got to Play Chain World!

I've been reading a bit about Chain World, a video game revealed at the 2011 Game Design Challenge in SF, CA (if you followed that link, you can skip to the next paragraph). In brief, Jason Rohrer is an independent game designer who created a Minecraft mod, put it on a USB stick, and wrote some rules for playing the game. You only get to play it off the stick. You only play it once. When you are done playing it and saving your alterations to the world, you have to pass it on to someone else. He submitted the game as an entry in a "Video Games as Religion" challenge and passed it off to wander around the world and become the stuff of legends. Each player gets to contribute to the development of the world and the alterations that they make take on stories of their own, get interpreted, misinterpreted, added to, destroyed, or ignored by each subsequent player (like the real world, except one person at a time). Rohrer was player one, while player two was this guy named Jia Ji, a programmer who mostly works to get money donated to charities and disaster relief. Ji, independent of an against the wishes of Rohrer, set up an online auction that would have gotten the game passed on to various celebrities and regular people. One would bid for a slot in the game's passage from person to person. Procedes would go to various charities. Angry blogging ensued. People either enjoyed that the game was already being altered and reinterpreted, or hated that it was being monetized and regulated even for supposedly good causes.

Those who think that this Ji dude is somehow corrupting the game seem to be angry at least in part by the fact that a player is limiting the way that the game is played, and somehow corrupting its original intent. I think that they are wrong, not , however, for the reasons that Ji gives (something about how things should be used to get money to people in need). Ji strikes me as a ridiculous, hippy, goody-two-shoes,spotlight-hogger who needs a hobby other than the thing that he already does for a living (and this Rohrer dude seems pretty zany, too). What has actually happened here is that now everyone is getting to play the most interesting and actually available part of this unimaginably rare game. Li didn't take anything from anyone or corrupt anything. He just took part in the only way that any of us can hope to play the game.

Rohrer created a video game so limited that essentially nobody (or at least a vastly insignificant number of people) will ever get to directly play it. Even if the auction play order is broken (as it may have already been), you will never be in possession of the USB stick even more so than you will never win the lottery. That means that, for most of us, the interesting part of Chain World cannot be the actual playing of the USB stick. It has to be the in-real-life effect of the game. We play it by thinking about it, and sharing some of that thinking with others so that they can also think about it. We discuss and philosophize about the game. People also do this about religion. People get very angry about religion and yell about how other people's interpretation of religion is wrong. We get all hot and bothered about how other people ruin and misuse religion, even for supposedly good causes. Chain World is supposed to be a video game as a religion. I think that Rohrer succeeded, and we can all play at least the IRL part of the game. I'll never see the USB stick, but I did get to read a few cool articles, think some cool thoughts, and write a blog post that maybe a few people will read. Nobody has ruined my shot at playing this particular Minecraft mod. I totally got to play Chain World and it was a fun way to spend about an hour-and-a-half.

Punk Not Profit

Punk Not Profit is one of many music download blogs that cater to the completionist in us all. I bet you thought you had every single inch of tape ever blessed (cursed?) with Glenn Danzig's voice. Is it important to have the instrumental outtakes from Samhain's November Coming Fire? I'm not sure, but there are worse compulsions out there.

Blogs like this help to bolster the argument that free music downloading drives the careers of musicians. Most of what Punk Not Profit shares is not available for sale anyplace anymore. I go on, download some rare bit of nonsense and keep scrolling. "Oh, look. An early Exploited demo. I've heard these guys are fun." Download. Listen. Buy some more music next time I'm in a record store. It's free advertising.

And if you prefer classic and psychedelic rock over punk, take a gander at The Day After the Sabbath. The dude loves you so much, he makes you a mix tape every few weeks. Then you start hunting down complete albums.

Vegan Black Metal Chef!

The Vegan Black Metal Chef makes me laugh and laugh. I would caution agains using as much salt and butter substitute as he does. I would also say that headbanging, posing w/ an awesome guitar, and using a mace to mash potatoes are all awesome and common practice in my kitchen from here on out.

Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert

The last book in the Dune series may very well be the best. Chapterhouse: Dune continues the story of human settlement in the cosmos over three thousand years beyond the original Dune. Herbert demonstrates humanity's capacity to learn and grow, as well as our capacity to lie to ourselves and regress. He continues themes of nothing ever actually ending, the struggle for survival, and the constantly shifting definitions of tribe. Herbert takes the ideas and motivations that drove characters from earlier novels and holds them up as flawed. I really enjoy that the history has not at all treated the heroes of the first four novels well. This is a wonderful book that serves as a fine disengaging point for a truly epic story arc.

Damnit. Now I need to be temporarily interested in comic books again.

Quick summary of DC's announcement that in September they will be restarting all of their 52 titles at issue #1 and that many of their heroes will be at least partially reimagined. Also that they will digitally distribute these issues on the same day as the physical releases.

Of course, by the "temporarily" in the title, I mean, "probably for just the month of September." It won’t take me long to realize that I don’t need new superhero stories every month. I have decades worth of them stored in boxes on my bookshelf. I think this is the main problem that DC (and Marvel for that matter) are facing. I love the hell out of some Batman, but I’m not sure that I need that many more Batman stories. These companies need to find new ways to milk their old properties without the cost of monthly publication in any format.

Day 1 of a D&D 3-Shot

In the last few years, my wife and I find ourselves with less free time in general and less free time in common with our friends than we had in college and soon after. Gone (or at least, hard to obtain) are the days when we could bust out the Dungeons and Dragons books, roll up some characters, plan to meet twice a week, and play giant, open-ended campaigns that took years to complete. The all-night play sessions are out as well. We just can't pull any of that off anymore, but we still like the game and the time spent with friends.

The cool thing about those play sessions was the characters. Bringing a wizard from first to twelfth level gives you a deep understanding of who they are, and what makes them tick. You get this organically from repeated experiences. Whole sessions can go by without important plot advancement, just characters practicing being themselves. This is much of what makes roleplaying games cool. You have time to get really invested in the progress of a character.

I am still part of a friend group that get together for roleplaying games, but the play sessions tend to be false starts and one-shots (game sessions where you play disposable characters through a short string of fights agains monsters and then never play with them again after that one time). These are fun, but only in that we are hanging out and drinking beer. You can't get into the characters all that much, and the action has no real purpose. It's something to do, but it doesn't get to the core fun of what keeps me buying Dungeons and Dragons books well into my adult life. I can't swing full campaigns, and one-shot just don't satisfy.

Two days ago my wife and I sent out text messages to a bunch of friends. "Show up @ our place @ noon. D&D 3-shot". About half of the people who we invited showed up and got down to making characters. We agreed to play three times only with this group, and that this campaign would have a closed ending. This was going to be a campaign about plot. The characters would stick around for a little while, so there was some investment in them, but we couldn't spend hours just developing them. They had something to do and they had to get it done quickly. And therein we have the advantage of finite campaigns, they don't have the time for sidetracking or developing characters more than needed. They're satisfying the way that video roleplaying games are. The players get to complete the quest. They don't have to get it done in one night, but they need to get it done.

Afte one session, I'm really excited about where this is going. We have four characters who, while not fully developed, are at least united by a common goal. They have already found some pretty exciting success in moving towards that goal, and, since they are already one third of the way through the plot, they can already see a little bit of what reaching that goal will entail. When the evening ended we knew we'd be coming back for more in a few weeks, so there'll be some anticipation for next time, with the added bonus that next time has to be important. We get to care a little about these characters without having to block out every Thursday evening from not until a billion years from now. I like this 3-shot thing.