roachboy

as an aside, i watched the deep sea epsiode of "blue planet" last night and found something kinda suspect about it...

the voice-over sets up you the viewer up as discovering new species while you sit on your sofa in your livingroom. so sitting on your sofa becomes this great adventure which enables you to encompass all the hidden dimensions of the world. sitting on your sofa enables you to withstand huge pressures. through your intrepid explorations from your sofa in your living room, your bravery, you, sitting on your sofa, you acquire a Heroic Destiny: you are the leading edge of human technological progress, you are the first human to see this or that amazingly beautiful multi-colored gelatinous blob----here is a new species, you are the camera, nothing can hide from you. you are a sardine swirling around in a vast cloud to hide from predators where no hiding is possible; you bounce off the surface of a concentrated salt lake a half mile beneath the surface of the gulf of mexico. and you do all this with curious electronic sounds unfolding the source of which is not obvious--are these foley effects, are they feeds from a microphone does it matter?

i enjoyed it...well, except for having grown tired of david attenborough's particular way of indicating breathless excitement and the writer's size-queen fixation (the largest, the smallest, the widest, the thinnest, the most dry, the most lint-filled, the most, the best, the rarest, the least rare, the heaviest, the lighest)...but it seems suspect.

i look out my window now and its a grey rainy chicago afternoon.
i think about blue planet.
3-d doesn't stand a chance.

so it goes in the land of the sovereign spectator.

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that said, i dont buy much of anything that the reviewer chose to highlight from sax's book. his website is slightly more informative, once you get past the large amounts of publicity nonsense that outlines for you the enormity of expertise that is crammed into this book that you that's right you should scurry out right now and purchase.

he checks many of the consequences of that idiot "no child left behind" refashioning of public education into a vast test-prep industry, the choking off of funding at the expense of gym classes, recesses, art and music classes...which seem both ill-advised and to embody a fear of creativity and even of embodied activity in favor of the construction of the sovereign spectator-----get them early and often-----revenue streams will only be improved if kids understand themselves as powerless spectators relative to information early.

i am not sure that sax is pointing to anything beyond the shape of his own research and the inferences he makes based on that. nor do i understand how he makes causal claims---ultimately i suppose, the question really is whether you find the idea of such claims interesting enough to read the actual book.

but it's hard to figure out how we can have a real debate about this if none of is have read the book.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite