About Guerrilla Scholarship "Guerrilla Scholar" is a nominal job title of Dr. Sheldon Greaves, the author of Cogito! It is briefly defined as pursuing the life of the mind through unconventional means and methods. This web site is for the promotion and support of independent scholars, amateur scientists, artists, and all those who enjoy the life of the mind but can't, won't, or ought not to do so within the confines of academia.
Guerrillascholar.com is dedicated to the proposition that to acquire knowledge, no matter how obscure, is an essential human activity, and that using our insight to improve the world is the highest expression of the human spirit.
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I like to talk up the idea of “guerrilla scholarship”, which which I define as the notion that one can do serious scholarship outside the embrace of academia. But this story takes the “guerrilla” part to a whole new wonderful level.
An as-yet unnamed young woman who goes by the nom de libre of Nekochan is running a clandestine lending library out of a school locker consisting entirely of books that are banned at the Catholic school she attends. She started this library because she liked many of the books that were on the list, and as she read others she realized that there was some great stuff; classic works. Animal Farm, Paradise Lost, Canterbury Tales, and many others. She explains:
“I was absolutely appalled, because a huge number of the books were classics and others that are my favorites. One of my personal favorites, The Catcher in the Rye, was on the list, so I decided to bring it to school to see if I would really get in trouble. Well… I did but not too much. Then (surprise!) a boy in my English class asked if he could borrow the book because he heard it was very good AND it was banned! This happened a lot and my locker got to overflowing with banned books, so I decided to put the unoccupied locker next to me to a good use. I now have 62 books in that locker, about half of what was on the list.”
This kid has guts, ingenuity, curiosity, and a ton of other excellent qualities. If the school has an ounce of sense, they won’t try to shut this down–hey, it’s getting kids to read!
Seriously, I am positively delighted by this story. What I find so appealing is that even though these kids could easily get and read banned books on their iPods or iPads or whatever, they’re using books. Because you can’t replicate and spread physical books around, you have to bring people together around them. In that sense, books are political, which is just one of the many ways they are subversive. Building a secret community to read great works against the wishes of an authoritarian administration… hell, it just doesn’t get much better than that.
When you start college as an undergraduate, everyone has to take courses in a wide range of mostly liberal arts subjects. The idea behind these courses is to help the college student become a well-rounded individual. One learns to write with precision and power, to read incisively, and to appreciate the world around us. General Ed classes seek to install some of the intangibles that have defined higher education since Antiquity. Usually, the requirement to take these courses gets greeted by a lot of student whining, and one can’t help but recall Plato’s dictum, “That which is learned under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.”
In modern times, and especially in the last 60 years or so, the university system has been pulled in roughly two directions. On the one hand, there is the time-honored tradition of college as a place where you find yourself and define yourself. It is where you learn to think your own thoughts as you study the best that has been thought or said and grapple with excellent minds.
On the other hand, higher education is also where you prepare for a job. Job training is now thought to be the main reason for going to college. There has been for some time a kind of agreement between private business and academia. Academia produces highly trained professionals and the private sector puts them to work. But lately, not only have jobs become fewer, the entire nature of work in America has changed.
When I hear that college is supposed to prepare you to find a job, I want to ask, “Which job? The one you might or might not get when you graduate? The one you find after you are laid off from your first job?” The truth is that for a long time now the working life of a single job for an entire career has become almost unheard of. People routinely pursue second and even third careers, and it’s a good bet that they didn’t take college courses to train for those extra careers.
It’s almost a truism that employers want people who can communicate well, who can write clearly. Where do you learn that? Mostly likely it’s in a General Ed English course. They want people who can think clearly, which falls into any number of GE courses that cultivate the facility for critical thinking and logic.
In other words, what your undergraduate college major may or may not be relevant when you get out into the real world. But the skills you pick up in General Ed may prove to be some of your most marketable.
There is another consideration as well. If you find yourself like so many other Americans, stuck in a lousy economic situation and struggling to keep body and soul together, you can draw remarkable solace from exposure to beautiful art, music, poetry, literature… all that fuzzy cultural stuff that seems to draw the most ire from new undergraduates. General Education was designed to help students gain the ability to appreciate life, but when life kind of sucks because you don’t know how you’re going to pay the bills or where your life is going, it really is amazing how immersing oneself in some excellent creativity can nurture the soul. And the biggest irony of all? You can find a lot of it for very cheap or even free. Classical music on labels such as Naxos are very inexpensive, and used CDs cost even less. There are a lot of excellent internet classical music stations out there. Old school texts of poems, essays, and plays are everywhere, and nearly everything of that kind is free from places like Project Gutenberg. Many classics are available as free audio books from LibriVox.org.
In the midst of the great Downturn, even if the world seems hopelessly banal and derelict, read and think great thoughts. Listen to great music. Let a beautiful painting or photograph carry you away. And if you are a college grad, revisit those courses you hated; they gave you the intellectual tools that might just get you through all this.
The Mass that has defined Christian liturgy since the early Church represents what, on the surface seems like one of the great challenges in the musical arts: given a set text, one that the listeners historically knew by heart and had heard literally thousands of times, find a way to make it new and interesting. Of course, artists in music other arts know that often constraints can liberate. Consider the sonnet with its fourteen lines of iambic pentameter and a limited number of rhyme schemes and yet within these boundaries we find some of the greatest poetry ever written.
Tonight’s concert by the Bay Choral Guild at the Campbell United Methodist Church was another example of this groups mastery of this particular genre of choral music, although I used the word “genre” reservedly. The Mass comes in such a wide array of colors and flavors, as you might expect when some twenty centuries of human creativity are poured into a particular artistic task. This concert featured Masses by three composers: Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548-1611), Josef Gabriel Rheinberger (1839-1901), and Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), plus one short Benedictio by Urmas Sisask (b. 1960).
de Victoria led off the program, first with a Motet “O quam gloriosum”, followed by a Missa of the same name. It was a beautiful performance of both pieces. de Victoria wraps the listener in mysterious, worshipful music that contains wonderful examples of 17th century counterpoint. A lovely sextet Benedictus accented this rendition of the Missa.
The second composer was Rheinberger, a composer that I had not heard or heard of before this evening. A child prodigy who was born in Liechtenstein, much of his music has been neglected until recently. The Mass in E-flat major (Opus 109) performed in the concert surprised me with a remarkably contemporary sound, strongly dynamic and filled with rich emotional content.
The Mass in G major by Poulenc was probably the most divergent stylistically of any piece on the program. The piece is marked by rich textures that change suddenly and unexpectedly, with melody lines that likewise take odd twists (One might use the term “fractal” to describe them). The piece, though technically demanding, was well-sung, but didn’t move me as the first two Masses had.
The final piece by Sisask was pure delight; lively, energetic, joyful. It was one of my favorites of the evening and from the comments of other audience members I gathered that it was popular with many others.
The Bay Choral Guild will be giving two more concerts. On Saturday, June 4 they will perform at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, or you can catch them on June 5 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto. It’s a great program that you don’t want to miss.
For more information on the Bay Choral Guild, and to make a donation to this fine group, visit their website at baychoralguild.org.
Someone is going to explain this to me, if there is any reasonable, rational or believable explanation to be had. The Neocons are at it again, this time beating their well-worn drums of war on Libya. As reported in consortiumnews.com:
Neocon editors who increasingly dominate the New York Times want President Barack Obama to deploy A-10 and AC-130 aircraft for close-combat attacks against Libyan government forces in urban areas.
Rather than give serious thought to peace feelers that have come from members of Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s inner circle, including his son Saif, the Times’ editors – like other key figures in the U.S. mainstream news media – see violent regime change as the only acceptable outcome for Libya.
Neocon editors who increasingly dominate the New York Times want President Barack Obama to deploy A-10 and AC-130 aircraft for close-combat attacks against Libyan government forces in urban areas.
Rather than give serious thought to peace feelers that have come from members of Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s inner circle, including his son Saif, the Times’ editors – like other key figures in the U.S. mainstream news media – see violent regime change as the only acceptable outcome for Libya.
I know that Judith Miller’s reporting for the NYT turned out to be utter trash and just one part of the overall punking of America that resulted in our quagmire in Iraq, but why, for the love of God is the NYT taking Neocons seriously enough to give them editorial control over the “paper of record”? Isn’t there enough of a track record to indicate that these people are intellectual black holes that can suck all the light out of any discussion they choose to pollute with their ideas?
Here’s an exercise I want you to try (seriously). It is a method for out-performing Neocon wags on any matter of foreign policy.
Step 1: Identify a Neocon proposal or prediction. For example, “We must put US ground troops in Libya.”
Step 2: Recast the proposition or prediction as a yes/no question. For example, “Putting US ground troops in Libya will lead to a better situation for us and the Libyan people.”
Step 3: Answer the question by flipping a coin. Heads means “yes,” tails means “no.”
Applying this simple method to their past success at prognosticating foreign policy decisions indicates that they performed significantly below random chance. My guess is that you will do much better. Someone with the right connections might even be able to parlay this into a book deal. Remember, past performance is no indication of future returns. My guess, however, that in this case they will do as bad or worse then usual, and our men and women and many Libyans will suffer needlessly.
So this is the our competence, our “smartest people in the room” who are not only dominating the conversation, they are doing so from venues who should know better (Fox doesn’t count. They never were about competence and they know it.). For the last couple of days I’ve been at a retreat in the wine country north of San Francisco. This morning someone at breakfast asked me what it is that seems to be rotting away our democracy. I didn’t give him an answer then, but upon reflection, part of it has to be this loss of competence. It’s not that incompetent people have suddenly become more numerous, it’s that there is no longer a prerequisite that competence in terms of political, social, historical, and ethical knowledge be required to hold power. There will always be moments where incompetent people grab power, but the problems start when they are allowed to hold it and are not brought to account for their mistakes. In some cases, a competent bureaucracy can overcome a feckless leader (as the Ottoman palace officials did on several occasions), but if we insist on putting the ship of state into the hands of fools, we will have problems.
It also occurs to me that this might be a variation of the Gaia hypothesis that holds that living things tend to shape their environments to better match their needs. Fools in control make it easier for their kind to follow them into power, and stay there.
One of my favorite performing groups, the Bay Choral Guild, began a three-night series of concerts featuring choral music written by living, West coast composers. This unusual format produces what I think is one of the richest and most deeply-textured performances by BCG in recent memory. The unifying motif for the music we heard this evening encompassed a wide range of musical styles, as well as different kinds of texts set to music. However, most of the pieces were based on either some kind of love poetry or sacred verse or hymn. The work of thirteen composers, including BCG Artistic Director Sanford Dole, was represented on the program.
There were several pieces that were remarkable, and some that were simply thrilling. One that I rather liked was “The Dimensions of Love” composed by L. Peter Deutsch, who is also a member of BCG. This piece is based on a poem of the same name by E. E. Cummings. However the piece immediately following by Morten Lauridsen was, for me, the highlight of the evening. “Soneto de la Noche” is an incredibly powerful and touching meditation on love, desire, parting, and death. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a piece of music with such emotional force and content, and ably sung. The lyrics are in Spanish, but the program provided a haunting translation by Nicholas Lauridsen.
The second half of the program began with Robert Kyr’s “Canticle of the Brother Sun” by St. Francis of Assisi. Sung in Latin with a translation provided by Kyr, this was one of the longer pieces but did not seem so. St. Francis was also represented by the famous “Prayer of St. Francis” adapted to music by Sanford Dole. I also personally enjoyed Kurt Erickson’s “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” from the liturgy of St. James, a very moving setting for this well-known standard.
There will be two more performances of this program: Saturday, 19 March at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal church in San Francisco, and on Sunday, 20 March in Palo Alto at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Tickets are available at the door, and please do consider making a generous donation to this excellent member of the Bay Area cultural scene.
Everyone, even the most fervent fossil fuels fanatic must agree that the supply of petroleum is finite. As global climate change becomes more and more distinct and undeniable, the wisdom of burning gigatons of oil becomes all the more questionable. But the more immediate problem is that of peak oil. For those who are not clear on this term, it is that point in an oil field’s life when the oil that is easy to extract has been extracted. The energy cost of getting out more oil goes steadily up until it is no longer profitable to pump the well. On a global scale, peak oil is the sum of all the developed oil reserves. Take collectively, they display the same behavior, yielding less and less oil per unit of energy expended to get it out.
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There is a growing body of evidence that we are, in fact, at the peak oil point; world oil production has been essentially flat for the past several years, and the price of oil has risen steadily higher until it is now over $100 per barrel. This is consistent with a global peak oil scenario.
Even though the Unites States no longer gets most of its oil from Saudi Arabia, it is still a very important resource for the energy needs of America and other nations. The question is, how much does Saudi Arabia have left? On this point the Saudis have been famously reticent to provide numbers that are believable. For years there have been rumors that the Saudis have been using techniques on some of their wells that imply that they have passed their maximum production. From a business standpoint, keeping such facts quiet is understandable, if wrong-headed. Ironically, if oil becomes scarce, Saudi Arabia may well fall the farthest. But we are also dealing with cultural issues. In the Middle East, matters of honor or “face” are paramount, and to acknowledge certain kinds of weakness in matters such as national prosperity or wealth constitutes a serious social and political liability.
Now, thanks to Wikileaks, we have some credible information with numbers. According to a 2007 diplomatic cable, Dr. Sadad al-Husseini, who is the former Executive Vice President for Saudi Arabia has overstated the size of their reserves by about 40% or 300 billion barrels. Dr. al-Husseini also believes that as a result Saudi Arabia will have trouble meeting its production goals and cannot therefore help keep oil prices in check.
An important takeaway point from this is that it further supports the idea that we are in fact going through peak oil now. It also creates an added incentive to find ways to reduce or even eliminate our dependence on oil. This is an extremely difficult problem; oil touches virtually everything in our lives, so as prices continue to rise we will face the need not merely to adjust, but to completely remake our civilization into something more sustainable and not nearly so specialized in where it gets its energy. It is probably high time for you to start thinking about this issue, because it has the potential to make this insipid economy even worse, and sweep away any pretense of “recovery.”
The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the prospect of upheavals in Yemen, Jordan, and Lebanon have completely changed the picture of the Middle East and the future of the War on Terror. Briefly stated, this was supposed to belong to the radical Islamists, and instead it happened with zero input or help from them. It has demonstrated, for those who still need convincing, of the political poverty of al-Qaida and other groups who align themselves with a philosophy of political change by violence and terrorism. On the other hand, the Muslim Brotherhood—who decades ago renounced violence–is sharing the driver’s seat with Mohammed El Baradei in leading the opposition.
Radical, militant Islamists have not fared well in Egypt for other reasons. After a suicide bomber killed 21 worshipers at a Coptic Christian New Year’s mass, Egyptian Muslims banded together to form human shields around Coptic churches throughout the country as a gesture of support for the Christian minority community and to rebuke the actions of the extremists.
For the past several decades, al-Qaida and its intellectual and political allies saw themselves as the vanguard of the force that would bring down the corrupt, mostly secular governments of Arab nations. They further claimed that they were Islam’s great defenders against the rapine of Western ideas and its war against Islam. Suddenly, they have become all but irrelevant. Whether they stay that way will depend in large measure on how the US responds to the revolution in Egypt.
Al-Qaida has set itself up as the protector of Islam from those who war against the religion, but Mubarak, for all his other shortcomings, was not stupid enough to try to curtail Islam as his predecessor Jamal ab al-Nasser did, or the Shah attempted to do in Iran. With this a non-issue, radical Islamists lost an important handle on the situation. The issues, rather, were about basic human rights, where Islamists have a record of excesses that weaken their moral standing.
The United States must embrace this opportunity to drive the Islamists further in to irrelevance. By treating with El Baradei and the Muslim Brotherhood, and doing what they can to persuade Mubarak to step down and not drag out the inevitable, and more importantly if it becomes clear that the US is doing this openly and not trying to manipulate the situation behind the scenes to install yet another Mideast strongman, this would cripple Islamists and Jihadists throughout the region, particularly al-Qaida. But if the protesters get a different picture, then our troubles in the Middle East will only multiply.
Click here for an excellent analysis on this aspect of the Egyptian Revolution.
I love it when a personal bias or gut feeling gets confirmed by some real evidence.
For along time I’ve noticed that I seem to do better writing when at least some fraction of the work is done on paper with a pen or pencil. I particularly like using a nice rollerball pen or, better still, a fountain pen. Even the cheap ones you can buy at Daiso stores for a buck and a half can be quite pleasant to use.
But it isn’t just the tactile sensation of writing that makes this kind of thinking pleasant. My thinking and composition is more effective. My writing is smoother, less wordy, more logical. So at some point, when something inside my brain says that I’ve got a good idea of how the piece should go, I sit down at the keyboard and start typing. Most of the time (but by no means always) the piece flows out and into place.
In addition, I personally feel that I learn more and more quickly when I write things down with a pen or pencil instead of a keyboard. Things stick in my head faster and more completely. When I have time to engage in scholarship, I still like to use 3×5 cards. Tools like Evernote are wonderful, but they don’t have the same positive effect on the old brain circuitry. Cards are wonderful for sifting and winnowing ideas, forming connections, etc. I have yet to find a computer tool that is as effective as a stack of notes on cards and a nice, clean desk or table to spread them out and push them around like some mad tarot spread.
Now, thanks to this item from Lifehacker.com, we find that writing with a pen, on paper is apparently better for the learning process and assimilating information.
There may also be a scientific basis for the pen’s superiority over the keyboard when it comes to writing development and cognitive functions. Dr. Virginia Berniger, who studies reading and writing systems and their relationship to learning processes, found that children’s writing ability was consistently better (they wrote more, faster, and more complete sentences) when they used a pen rather than a keyboard; these are, of course, subjects without a penchant for using either tool. We also previously covered the WSJ article that connected handwriting and cognitive abilities; in one of the studies cited, adults learned new symbols and graphic shapes better when they reproduced them with pen-and-paper instead of typing them.
I’ve been thinking for some time that I would like to do a study in which two sets of students write a short research paper, but one group is only allowed “old school” methods: note cards, typewriter, pen, paper, researching in books. My suspicion has been that they would do every bit as well as their more wired counterparts. So next time you want to learn something, take notes the old fashioned way and see if you get more accomplished.
As I’ve slouched toward the two-year mark since my layoff in March of 2009, I’ve given a lot of thought to how one survives and keeps body and soul together when money is tight and the next job just won’t turn up.
Gradually it occurred to me that I have a lot to say on that and related subjects, so I’ve decided to start a new blog on the brave new world of unemployment, underemployment, poverty and scraping by in the worst economy America has seen since the Great Depression. I’ve decided to call the blog “Unexpected Leisure.” Where I plan on looking at this and related subjects from various perspectives.
I will continue to post here on the usual subjects (i.e., pretty much everything), but I invite you to have a look at it and hopefully join in what I hope will be an enlightening and even empowering discussion.
I’ve always loved radio. When I was a child, my brothers and I would gather around the radio to listen to a station in Portland, Oregon that would replay old shows from the 30’s and 40’s: The Shadow, Amos and Andy, The Inner Sanctum and, our favorite, The Lone Ranger. We would create our own radio shows using a tape recorder; comedy mostly, but other things as well.
Then, sometime in my mid-teen years I discovered that I had a “voice.” The kind speaking voice that gets a good chest tone and commands attention. In other words, an announcer’s voice. In high school, this led to my working as a radio “stringer” for local radio stations. I would write short news pieces about the goings on at our high school and then phone them in, mostly to the news desk at KSLM in Salem, Oregon. I got to be pretty good at it; usually I could get a thirty-second news report in one take. My contact at KSLM, Terry Fuller, decided I had potential in the broadcast industry and encouraged me to get my commercial broadcast license (”Radiotelephone Operator 3rd Class”). This meant studying an manual and taking a test that turned out to be just a little bit harder than the test for a driver’s learner’s permit.
Following graduation, I was hired for the summer of 1977 as a disc jockey at KSLM doing late-night and weekend shifts. It was fascinating stuff, even if I didn’t quite resonate to the “middle of the road” format of Montavani and 101 Strings. I was also responsible for piping in the news from Mutual Broadcasting that came in on the wire at exactly the top of the hour, which meant that I had to time my records so that the last one ended with about five seconds to spare before the news came it, and then switch over seamlessly. I got pretty good at that, too. At the bottom of the hour, I’d read news items I’d pulled off the teletype chugging away in the other room, tearing off the stories that looked interesting.
And along the way, at this and other small radio stations I gained an appreciation for small-scale, local radio. As more and more radio stations were bought up by large media conglomerates, radio stations grew less and less interesting, less and less relevant. More recently I’ve been discovering the ham radio community since getting my license a little over a year ago.
But against all odds and expectations (on my part, at least) Congress has passed the Local Community Radio Act. This law removes previous restrictions on small, low-power community radio stations. Of course, the major broadcasters fought this bill, but a fierce, determined grass-roots efforts won through. Ostensibly the rules were to prevent signals from small stations interfering with larger stations, but this was a dubious objection at best. The bottom line is that the way is now open for thousands of community stations to take to the airwaves. This is a wonderful opportunity not only to counter the talk-radio idiocy that has grown to corner the disinformation market, but to create radio that is creative, quirky, idiomatic, and local.
Radio is one of those things that gets forgotten in this age of cell phones, iPods, cable TV and any of the other many forms of mass communication. But the invention of the small, cheap transistor radio way back when fueled a minor information revolution. A single AM station could connect isolated towns and villages in rural America or across African deserts or south sea islands.
Frankly, I didn’t think this day would come but I’m very excited by the possibilities. So what do you think? Anyone out there want to start a radio station?
Seriously.
For more on Community Radio, visit http://www.prometheusradio.org/
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