Just another broken heart’s beaten down story

Here's a great octopus of a poem I discovered this week:

Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy

I’m reviewing a left ventriculography
from a man with chest pain, MI ruled out,
his wife dead for a post-crash hour.
The scan shows his cardiac apex
bulging with each beat, shaped
like a takotsubo, an octopus trap
a Japanese cardiologist recalled
from his childhood fishing village,
the scan just another broken heart’s
beaten down story of futility and resilience.
And I will say, “I am sorry for your loss,”
explain the image, reassure him
his heart muscle will recover in a week,
all the time wishing I could hug him
with eight strong arms instead of two.

— Richard Berlin

I am enrolled in a MOOC, Literature and Mental Health: Reading for Wellbeing — I couldn't know if its focus would be more reading or wellbeing.

Week 1 was a lot of poetry, and the instructors' taste in poetry is rather old and very English, quite unlike my preferred variety. Poetry as stress management, as a means to access stillness. Slowing down.

Some great video interviews, including with Ben Okri, who made a great observation about how we reach for old favourites in times of emotional need — it's not just a comfort blanket, it's the way we know how to access an interior life.

Week 2 covered that classic mental illness, heartbreak (hence the poem above). And Jane Austen (ugh).

We left off with the question: Can literature be harmful?

(Of course! It can send people to prison, incite revolution. It can inspire wives to leave their husbands. They had to stage an intervention for Don Quixote.)

Screen test

I've been watching some of Andy Warhol's screen tests on Youtube.

Some of them are very boring. Indeed, I lose interest in most of them by about the 30-second mark. This surprises me, because I'm generally a patient person who gives my undivided attention to things (like very long books and arthouse movies).

But a few of them really intrigue me — those with particularly interesting faces, or whom I know something about (like Edie Sedgwick, and everything I know about her I learned from Claire Messud's novel The Woman Upstairs).

As part of a course on Andy Warhol, we were invited to use the Vine app to create our own screen tests.

So I "screen-tested" my daughter for a full 6 seconds. And what I got out of the exercise is something I've always known in theory, but here I felt it firsthand: that the picture or video is more about the relationship between the watcher and the watched than it is about the image itself being captured. A kind of still portrait but over time.

The Vine exercise was part of the MOOC's opening unit, on celebrity. And the ensuing discussions continue to be quite provocative, on the nature of celebrity, on cultivating persona, on the phenomenon of social media. Has our promised 15 minutes in fact shrunken to mere seconds? And I wonder how interested I would be in Warhol's art if it weren't for the fact of his own celebrity.

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Warhol Mania is on at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until March 15. It's a small exhibit (2 rooms) but tightly focused on Warhol's posters (including for Perrier) and magazine work.

Because it consists entirely of "printed" work, there's no real "aha" moment such as I've experienced in seeing some other artworks (say, in terms of the colour and texture of a painting). However, it's interesting to see Warhol's works grouped: e.g., his illustrations of shoes and accessories for ladies magazines. And I learned, sadly, that much of Warhol's original work would've been destroyed — typically, the magazine itself is seen as the finished product, and working files aren't retained.

Pop

"I think the artists who aren't very good should become like everybody else so that people would like things that aren't very good. It's already happening."
— Andy Warhol

This week I got back into the MOOC swing, after a couple months' hiatus, with a course on Andy Warhol. The course is structured around the major themes that framed his life and art. After providing a brief introduction to pop art, the focus of week one is celebrity, and touched on topics such as the star system and the appropriation of images in the media. (I'll have more to say about this course in the weeks to come; as well, I'm set to see a Warhol exhibit at the museum this weekend.)

So it's an interesting coincidence that every morning on my way to work I pass through what is currently a portrait gallery of artists as children, and one of those children is Andy Warhol. The exhibit is Voix d'ailleurs, by Quebec artist Louis Boudreault. Already the course material has given me a new perspective on this collection.

Taken individually, the paintings are fairly nondescript, in a neutral palette, and subjects that are almost expressionless. As a collection, however, they fare somewhat better — to stand amid child-Picasso, child-Pollock, child-Kandinsky, child-Disney does in fact give pause for thought about the seeds of greatness.

These portraits recently replaced another set of Quebec icons as children, among them such greats as Maurice Richard and Emile Nelligan. Frankly, the Quebec set was more interesting, with a hairstyle or the turn of a collar readily evoking a different time and place. The collection of artists, on the other hand, has a bland uniformity, as if all art springs from the same place. To me this indicates that Boudreault is closer to his Quebec roots than to the artist community, perhaps a better Quebecker than he is an artist.

I think a lot my current self was present in my childhood self. What do you think: can you look at a child and see what they will become?

The art of poetry

The eight-week Art of Poetry massive open online course (MOOC) conducted by former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky is headed into the final phases. The course is terrific. It draws on the Favorite Poem Project, a program Pinsky founded to celebrate, document, and encourage the role of poetry in people's lives.

The course material explores the difficulty, freedom, and form of poetry while considering its relationship to music, courtship, and humour, among other themes. Most of the material is presented via videos, either of Pinsky on his own or leading a discussion group. There are some supplementary readings, and discussion forums in which to continue the exploration of these and related subjects.

(This is first course I participate in that is on the edx platform. The navigation took a little getting used, and I still feel that it's easy to miss certain sections of the course material. The forums are active, but not particularly well-organized or easy to find your way around; Coursera really sets the standard for this.)

But the heart of the course is the personal anthology that each student is required to compile. By the end of the course, I will have annotated twelve poems with reflections and analysis, notes on why they speak to me.

The task was rather daunting — where do I even find poems? But it turns out I've been collecting poetry all along on this very blog.

Now I have a notebook for the poems I find. I write the poems into it by hand. This is an insanely pleasant experience. Like saying a poem out loud and letting it roll around your mouth, writing it out, guiding the pen to make the marks that mean those words, makes it something tangible, something you can feel.

I think it forces a more intense reflection on the poem, the sound and shape of it, how the pieces fit together. I will absolutely be maintaining my poetry journal beyond this course.

To date this is one of the most rewarding MOOCs I've participated in.

We must obey the forces we want to command

For a recent MOOC, On Strategy: What Managers Can Learn from Great Philosophers, the final exam asked us to respond to Francis Bacon's assertion that "we must obey the forces we want to command," presenting two arguments, with a quotation and an example for each.

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Francis Bacon famously wrote that we must obey the forces we want to command in reference to the laws of nature. One can readily transpose this dictum to other domains: market forces, military forces, cultural forces, psychological forces, etc. — each being subject to the same rigor and scrutiny we demand when performing natural science.

Literature is one such domain. Although it is steeped in tradition – the rules of language (from grammar to semantics), conventions of genre, formal narrative structures, as well as cultural expectations – truly original work emerges only once these elements are firmly understood [Argument 1]. The rules are acknowledged and assimilated, and subverted to new ends. This is especially true in the example of Oulipo – a formally defined literary movement. Cofounder Raymond Queneau described Oulipians as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape"[1].

Consider for a moment, though, how it (or any other constraint, for that matter) works. It places a restriction on the expressions and phrases that can be used in a poem, and it determines to some extent what the poet is able to say. It makes the process of writing both more difficult — by short-circuiting habitual modes of self expression — and, paradoxical as it may seem, easier: certain decisions have already been made for the writer. A constraint confronts the writer with a puzzle to solve, not a blank page, and this can be strangely comforting. Finally, a constraint will almost always force a writer to be creative, to seek out new means of self expression.[2]

Clearly the forces of language are fully obeyed by Oulipians in order that their practitioners can bend them to their will.

Science has evolved since Bacon’s time, and its ambitions have become more complex and its progress more nebulous. The pursuit of artificial intelligence is limited in exactly the way Bacon’s dictum would suggest [Argument 2]: "How do you make a search engine that understands if you don't know how you understand?"[3].

Douglas Hofstadter is a cognitive scientist who has become disillusioned with the common approach: "Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not"[4].

While advances have been made in data processing, and a form of "intelligence" has grown out of this capability, we have not yet achieved a truly artificial intelligence. We cannot master this domain until we have fully understood the workings of the mind and can obey the algorithms that are in play.

Bacon's assertion is thus borne out in both successes and failures across domains.

1. Raymond Queneau. Definition provided at Oulipo meeting. Apr 5, 1961.
2. Paul Kane. Review of Oulipo Compendium. Oct 2006.
3. James Sommers. "The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think." Atlantic Monthly. Oct 23, 2013.
4. Douglas Hofstader. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. 1979.

Shifgrethor

Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness invents an alien world that has its own cultures, religions, mythologies, and languages. Her invented language includes some fairly nuanced concepts. The Karhidian language, for example, has several dozen terms for various type of snow. This may be out of a necessary response to the extreme environment, but this same environment, the flora and fauna, and how the land can be used, also shapes the culture philosophically.

Estraven is repeatedly described as a shadow when he comes to Genly's aid, serving as Genly's shadow (and therefore also his shifgrethor), as Genly has none of his own.

shif•gre•thor noun \ˈshif-grə-thȯr\
1: prestige, face, place, pride-relationship; all-important principle of social authority in Karhide and among other civilizations of Gethen, of which native Karhidians have an innate sense but outsiders lack
2: code of social decorum
3: standard of individual behavior
4: recognition of the level of the manifestation of this quality and the status accorded it

Usage Notes 1. One may discard, forego, waive shifgrethor. 2. One may risk, stake shifgrethor; highly valued and must be given due regard. 3. One's shifgrethor may be degraded, diminished, impugned, insulted. 4. To play shifgrethor is to engage in political games, usually at an individual level, often petty and malicious, always intricate, but sometimes also internationally; can be played on the level of ethics.

Usage Examples
1. I waive shifgrethor; I discard it.
2. We must forego shifgrethor, forbid all acts of vengeance, and unite together.
3. He could lower all his standards of shifgrethor.
4. The shifgrethor of Karhide will be diminished.

Etymology Karhidish, from Old Gethenian "shadow"; possible derivation by analogy "shift" + "grey thore", which is widespread and fastidiously husbanded for maximal usage, minimal erosion, and full integration and balance, therefore "a shift in the balance". Discussion When Getheren of Shath, in the hearth-tale of The Place Inside the Blizzard, takes back his name and his shadow, he is owning his actions, making peace with both his internal conscience and the external society. In so doing he re-establishes the responsibility and dignity of which shifgrethor is borne. As every Karhidian casts his own shadow, shifgrethor is an internal shadow, functioning as a conscience, moral compass, social guide. Karhidian shifgrethor stems from Getheren's original sin and exile and bears the rightness of acknowledgement, necessity, atonement. Honorable men come to be outlawed, yet their shadow does not shrink. They live without shadows (shifgrethor) in Orgoreyn.

Related Words conscience, dignity, etiquette, high-mindedness, honour, integrity, irreproachability, manners, nobility, protocol, respectability, righteousness, right-mindedness, scrupulousness, self-sufficiency, tactfulness, virtuousness
Near Antonyms debasement, disgrace, disreputableness, looseness, pervertedness, reprehensibleness, shamelessness, unscrupulousness, weakness, wretchedness

(This is a revised version of the "essay" I submitted for the relevant unit in the MOOC Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World. As the assignment limited me to 320 words, I have here added an introductory statement and expanded slightly on some points for the sake of clarity.)

Beethoven!

I love Beethoven!

There's a new book out, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, by Jan Swafford, which seems to be striking a chord with the public. I may need to check it out.

NPR's interview with the author covers how the Eroica symphony revealed his personality.

The New York Times also covers the book:

Swafford's voice is genial and conversational, that of a friend who loves to tell you about his fascinations: the foibles of court life, logistical problems of the musician. He supplies a generous chapter on the German Enlightenment, connecting threads of the 1770s and '80s, opposing currents of rationalism and expressive release: Schiller, Kant, Goethe, the American Revolution. He nods toward Beethoven's unhappy childhood, but emphasizes "the golden age of old Bonn's intellectual and artistic life" and "the town's endless talk of philosophy, science, music, politics, literature."

An excerpt is available online.

Music is hard to write about, and the Times includes an example of "silly": a sonata "begins with a couple of can't-get-started stutters followed by sort of a sneeze." But I think that sentence is rather evocative. And if the MOOC I took earlier this year (Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas) is anything to go by, musicians actually talk that way. We can't all be poets. How else can you describe music if not by the noise it makes?

I include here for your entertainment the essay I wrote for that MOOC. Students ranged from serious experts in music theory and performance to music fans who wanted simply to explore a different genre (I fall somewhere in between). Truly, one got from the course what one put into it, and it's one of my favourite MOOCs to date.

The assignment was to choose one of nine stated sonatas, "imagine that you are hearing this sonata as a contemporary work or that you lived when it was a new work," and write a review, and to: 1. Refer to concepts covered in the lecture, including at least five historical and stylistic questions, and 2. Describe what you heard and how it made you feel, with two specific examples.

Without further ado...

Six Keys in Search of a Composer (with apologies to Pirandello)

A review of the Fantasia for piano in G minor, Op. 77, by Ludwig van Beethoven. Written 1809, published 1810. (Performed by Dino Ciano.)

Ah, phantasie. Some kind of cruel joke. A full ten minutes of unmusical noise mixed with show-offy flourishes.

"Fantasy" is the only appropriate categorization for something so unreal wrought of an unholy imagination. It is carnivalesque, bordering on grotesque.

It is a curious phenomenon that Beethoven should produce a fantasy at all. As of the publication of this phantasie, Beethoven has only once before dabbled with this "form" [issue 1], and given his propensity for structure it seems out of character to eschew it altogether.

It is striking in that it is a single-movement piece [issue 2], and it is the first time Beethoven embarks upon such a proposition [his only other single-movement composition, a polonaise, will be published in 1815].

It does not resemble, in its form or its content, anything else [issue 3] this reviewer has ever heard, in Beethoven's repertoire or that of anyone else. In its singularity, one may surmise that it was conceived as a companion piece for something that is yet to come, though what oddity that may be is difficult to imagine. The bulk of the piece is in B major (but more on this later) — so uncommon a choice my ears are barely attuned to it.

The whole of the approximately nine minutes it takes to perform this piece gives the impression of improvisation [issue 4]. It is highly involved, but with an adventurous spontaneity – Beethoven is intent on keeping us in the moment, with no glimpse of the future.

It seems not composed for human fingers, as if anticipating its performance on some autopiano. This phantasie must require inhuman preternatural skill to play, of which Beethoven has a full store, perhaps harboring in his soul a multiarmed creature both fanciful and monstrous. Beethoven's musical vision must be distorted by a blight he carries within. He must be seeing things, or hearing things. Or not hearing things.

There is an absurdity in naming this work as one in G minor – it starts in this key and stays there for all of twenty seconds. It wanders through several keys [issue 5] before settling on an organizing principle, strange though Beethoven's choice of B major may be.

Yet the atmosphere carries with it some ironic knowledge. Just past the two-minute mark, Beethoven plays allegro con brio [example 1], for almost a minute. I imagine this music accompanying some dastardly rogue villain as he ties a despairing damsel to the railroad tracks, her fate to be consummated by an oncoming steam locomotive, a hostage in his scheme; he twirls his moustaches and winks with a glint as if at an audience.

It is without a doubt a new kind of metamusical narrative. It conveys an awareness of itself, with self-deprecating wit, and an awareness that everyone (that is, everyone who matters) is aware of, and in on, the joke.

This has become music about music, lightly mocking musical tropes. The music is self-referential not just within a piece (as Bach so mathematically exemplified), but between works. Beethoven may be the father of metamusic.

The passages of villainy are followed by harp-like runs. They are disconnected form what comes before and what follows. At about three minutes, where again Beethoven slips into adagio, there is such a run in the fifth bar [example 2] that marks our entry into a different landscape – we have crossed the threshold from chaos to calm. And yet another series of runs in the opposite direction lead us back into presto.

The up and down, back and forth, disorients but also unifies: the runs are the connectors between the disparate, contrasting parts.

Although musically jarring, these runs serve a narrative function, to draw a curtain between the frenzy and calm, dream and nightmare – between fantasy and reality. But which is which? Despite the disorientation, they are in perfect balance, the yin and yang, wholly necessary to each other [issue 6].

With this phantasie, Beethoven has ventured into absurdity. It is illogical, yet logically so. Its search for structure has become its own structure. In a Hegelian manner, Beethoven’s musical dialectic becomes fundamental to its nature. It is in its becoming.

He anticipates an existentialist stance, while maintaining authenticity. One feels in his music the existential despair of the human condition, brought to the brink of the yawning void of meaninglessness. Beethoven heralds modernity, in an already postmodern way.

Certainly Beethoven has taken Kant's words into his head and his heart:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence.

Beethoven continues to connect our finite existence to the infinite.

The fantasia is a bizarre composition, disturbing upon first hearing, but surefooted in the path it forges. Intended for ears strong enough to bear music's schizoid future.

On the shoulders of giants

One of the MOOCs I recently completed was On Strategy: What Managers Can Learn from Great Philosophers. While it is to date the most disorganized and worst prepared online course I've taken, the content and exercises were in fact very valuable.

One module focused on how all genius is built on the shoulders of giants. The assignment was take one or two "giants" of Luc de Brabandere's lecture (featuring Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Russell) and connect them with at least two others, not included in his model. We were to include at least one philosopher and one scientist. I further challenged myself to select women.

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Hypatia of Alexandria was a fourth-century philosopher. As a Neoplatonist, she was heavily influenced by Plato and the Platonic tradition. As such, she valued and used logic and mathematical thinking. She taught the works of Plato and Aristotle in public lectures. ¹

Although considered a pagan, she is significant for bridging classical antiquity to Christianity. Her murder heralded the coming dark ages. I think of her as a philosopher because she promoted a mode of logical thinking (based on Plato), but she contributed to the advancement of various geometrical concepts (also founded in Plato) and developed instruments for use in physics and astronomy. She assisted her father in the writing of his mathematical commentary, Euclid's Elements, which in turn influenced Newton.²

Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz later expanded on Hypatia's work.³

Ada Lovelace was a 19th-century computer programmer (i.e., mathematician and scientist) who worked with Charles Babbage in developing the Analytical Engine. Her study of mathematical and scientific concepts, in particular differential calculus (developed independently by Newton and Leibniz), framed by her poetical and metaphysical attitude, drove the conceptual leap to consider the possibilities of computing machines and their applications, far beyond the arithmetic of Leibniz's calculator.

"Whilst describing the revolutionary implications of Babbage's ideas, Lovelace wrote out the first computer programme […] and she made the sensational suggestion that such a device should be able to compose music if a suitable set of rules could be devised. She thus anticipated the development of both modern computing and artificial intelligence by more than a hundred years."⁴ Among the innovations she imagined (that would be realized only several generations later) were the subroutine (a set of reusable instructions), looping (running a useful set of instructions over and over) and the conditional jump (branching to specified instructions if a particular condition is satisfied).⁵ Certainly her own shoulders are broad enough for subsequent giants to stand on (such as Alan Turing). She desired also "to create a mathematical model for how the brain gives rise to thoughts and nerves to feelings ("a calculus of the nervous system"),"⁶ foreshadowing the entire field of cognitive neuroscience. [See also.]


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I repost this assignment because Ada Lovelace seems to be in the air these days: she's been referenced on Halt and Catch Fire, which I've been watching; Melville House is publishing a book; and I get email from the Be Like Ada program the publisher mentions.

Someone outside of the course asked me, not why did I choose these women, but how I do even know about these women to be able to connect them with the other giants of history. The answer is, they're in the fiction I read. (I'll name, for example, All Men of Genius, by Lev AC Rosen, and Azazeel, by Youssef Ziedan, as obvious references, but there are others.)

Because everything is connected.

Tell-tale

I'm writing an essay, for a MOOC, on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait," because in this unit on Poe and Hawthorne (SF? really?), of the required reading it is the story I've never read before (it turns out I'm that kind of student), and also it's the shortest (it turns out I'm also that kind of student), and in the spirit of procrastination (I need to write 300 words in the next 12 hours, of which about 11 are already accounted for with work, sleep, and personal hygiene), I've fallen down the rabbit hole of Edgar Allan Poe theatrical adaptations, animations, and inspirations on YouTube.

So here's James Mason, with a voice, and a tell-tale heart:

When I'm not here

I MOOC too much.

I'm currently enrolled in only one online class, but the coursework is a little heavy. I'm not even convinced that I'm enjoying Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, but I feel pressured to do the readings and to do the assignments. I tell myself I don't have to do anything I don't want to do — I'm a grownup, the course is free, I can read what I damn well please — and that the grades aren't important, and they aren't, yet they are. But having made the initial commitment, how can I not even try?

So I find myself reading for reasons other than pleasure. I'm not sure I like it.

I enrolled because I wanted to read Ursula K LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness. Which is a dumb reason, because I have a copy; look, it's sitting right there, I could read it whenever I want.

Fortunately, I have in fact read a good deal of the material previously. To this point, I can say that Dracula and Frankenstein are justifiably classics and worth (re)reading.

But I'm not sure I've learned anything. The professor has been a little too focused on sexual symbolism (in fairy tales, Alice in Wonderland, and Dracula) — he discovers much in what, I believe, isn't there. Some of the lectures have been positively eye-rolling. Also, in his view, all fiction is fantasy, so I'm failing to discover anything I didn't already know about "science fiction" or the "the human mind" (or "our modern world" for that matter).

I'm thinking maybe I was never meant to study literature. I should simply enjoy it.

What I am establishing in taking these courses is some kind of discipline: setting a goal, sticking to schedule, completing the task. The trick now is to carry this ability over to the rest of my life, remove the MOOCs from the equation (wean myself away), but transfer the energy and focus to something else. (But what?)

Part of me really does enjoy the feeling of being in school again and stressing over assignments. And in this course more than the others I've taken, I'm thrilling from writing edgy essays just to see if can get away with it. I feel like I'm pulling one over on my peer reviewers, which from time to time causes me a twinge of shame, but mostly it gives me a high.

I may post some of my assignments here for a laugh. Or some from a previous course that I in fact found valuable.

So if I'm not blogging much this summer, it's because I'm still MOOCing, or gone fishing, or out at jazz festival, or having a nap.

Mind modelling

As you may have noticed, in general members of book clubs regard the characters inside books exactly the way they regard the characters outside books. The facts that the former are made of the alphabet and the latter of muscle, tissue, and bone are of little relevance.

— from The Summer without Men, by Siri Hustvedt.

Science backs this up. It's the same brain centres lighting up in response to a stimulus, whether in the world or in our minds.

This is the essence of a short online course I recently completed, and it's a curious serendipity that I was concurrently reading a novel that addressed the same concept within it.

By the age of 3 or 4, we develop a theory of mind, applying the sense of our own personness, to others, real or fictional, in order to understand them, to fill in the gaps.

Real life is good experience for understanding and appreciating literature; and fiction can be good practice for real life.

Certainly the girls attending the narrator's summer poetry workshop learn this lesson.

The Summer without Men was not the book I expected it to be. Having read Hustvedt before, I knew it wouldn't be chick lit. There's some angry feminism about it, not all of which I agree with.

The narrator's a poet, an academic. As much as she references Kierkegaard, I never fully warmed to her.

Transcendence of form

Beethoven's music is Hegelian philosophy: it is at the same time truer than this; i.e., it contains the conviction that the self replication of society as something identical is not enough, indeed, that it is false. Logical identity as the esthetic and produced domination of forms is at once practiced and criticized by Beethoven. The seal of its truth in Beethoven's music is its suspension: the transcendence of form, through with form for the first time achieves its inner meaning. The transcendence of form is for Beethoven the portrayal — not the expression — of hope.

— T.W. Adorno, as quoted in Hegel — Purpose, Results and the Philosophical Essence, by Scott Hornton, in Harper's Magazine.

I've just finished another online course, this one exploring Beethoven's piano sonatas. I've learned quite a bit about the structure of Beethoven's music, and about the historical context for all the rules he was stretching to breaking point. And I've come to some understanding about some of the elements that attract me, about why I love Beethoven so much (even though I wasn't especially familiar with his sonatas before taking up this course).

I got to realizing just how modern Beethoven is, and it got me thinking about Kierkegaard and the crisis of modernity, and I started drawing connections, and recognized an ironic stance in Beethoven's work, how self-reference can only come from self-awareness, how he could be said to be composing metamusic. Beethoven of course precedes Kierkegaard, but Hegel would've been all the rage, and Kant: "The moral law within us and the starry heaven above us!" — which Beethoven had scrawled in a notebook. The music is becoming. And Beethoven is infinite.

And in writing my final assignment, I found scattered across the internet evidence that others have thought as I have. A reassuring thing.

And I am reminded to pick up Thomas Mann again. I must read Doctor Faustus.

Mind reading: cognitive poetics

How to read... a mind is a two-week online course starting March 17, offered by the University of Nottingham.

The journey from new student to advanced study is really very short. Over two weeks, you will become fairly expert in cognitive poetics. You will understand in quite a profound way what it is to read and model the minds of other people, both real and fictional. You don't need any preparation other than your curiosity and your own experience of reading literary fiction or viewing film and television drama.

Although I haven't figured out how to read the title of this course, it sounds fascinating, and far too short. I'm going to be an expert in cognitive poetics!

I am positively addicted to MOOCs. (And I love saying "MOOC.") I just finished my fourth MOOC last week, and I start another next week. Only one of them has been purely for personal interest — the rest were for, as they say, professional development. "How to read" (MOOC number six) is a return to feeding my non-working life.

A short story about storytelling

One of the MOOCs I started last week — Content Strategy — is, ironically, less than engaging. The definitions — of content strategy, content marketing, journalism, branding, and other terms — are muddled at best, where I so desperately yearn for clarity. So far I've learned only that "people will only learn about things they're motivated to learn about."

I was, however, heartened to find, buried in the discussion forums, a note on the importance of storytelling (and a link to this clip). While I find the marriage of narrative concept to business context a bit unsettling (I like narrative, business not so much), it's also reassuring — it acknowledges a truth that great authors have long known, that Don Draper has long known, that I've long known.

The MOOC experience, continued

I recently completed my second massive open online course (MOOC). This time the course was User Experience for the Web offered by Open2Study. The course was self-paced.

It was completely different from my first MOOC.

The differences are attributable to three main things:

• subject matter: User Experience for the Web vs Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity
• platform: Open2Study vs Coursera
• course format: self-paced vs weekly assignments

Details and observations
While the recent course was self-paced, mostly what this means is the material is already canned. You don't have to wait until the following week for the next block of videos and quizzes to be released.

This course does actually have some structure, 4 modules that could be consumed over 4 weeks. (Quite likely this course may actually have been first introduced with weekly releases.)

The course information for User Experience indicated that the material would require 2-4 hours a week. I'd say it's significantly less. (For Kierkegaard, I'd put in more time than indicated.)

(One could at this point access the Kierkegaard material and consume it at one's own pace, condensing it all into a week or so. But I doubt many people would want to do so, given the intensity of the subject and the time commitment for an 8-week course.)

Each module consisted of 8-10 topics presented in videos ranging in length from about 2 to 7 minutes. There is a 1-question quiz at the end of each video segment that reinforces a key point.

I did most of the coursework (that is, watched the videos) over my morning coffee. With the videos at about 4 minutes a pop, they're bite-sized and it's really easy to say, just one more. I did about 2 modules a week (with a break for Christmas between weeks). I can easily imagine that one might complete the entire course in 1 day.

This setup really did motivate me to keep going.

The videos show the instructor talking, and writing key points on a clear-glass whiteboard. It's all shot against a black background; he uses pink, yellow, green, and blue pens. The presentation is very clean and minimal. While it doesn't compare to the production of the Kierkegaard course videos, it is well suited to the course material.

No required reading. No essay.

Because the course is self-paced, the forum has the feel of a static archive more than of an ongoing and dynamic discussion. The discussion is filtered by module, but this wasn't obvious to me. The setup does not encourage participation.

Class stats indicate that 8,386 students have taken this course and that there are 1,316 classroom posts. (Less discussion and fewer students than Kierkegaard, but no organization. Invisible yet chaotic.)

Open2Study gives you badges for "accomplishments" (like linking a social media account). I hate this kind of thing (I wonder who likes this kind of thing). The alerts are distracting, not motivating. (The alerts are probably configurable, but I'm lazy.) (My skepty-sense is tingling: badges are less to do with motivating a user than generating soundbites that are sharable on social media for the purpose of product promotion disguised as individual accomplishment.)

The final grade is based on the module "assessments" — multiple-choice tests consisting of 5 or 10 questions. (I suspect the format may have been changed from 5 to 10 questions sometime during my enrollment, as for the first three modules, 10 questions now appear, 5 of which I have not answered.)

This course was not affiliated with any university or other learning institution (other than Open2Study itself). The instructor was a professional consultant.

Intangibles
For Kiekegaard, the course page felt like its own place, with discussions, assignments, resources all handy and centralized. I felt engaged and immersed in the course material. I felt like a student.

For User Experience (ironically) I felt very much like a consumer; the classroom is just a slight corner of the Open2Study brand.

I felt less invested in the User Experience course, partly because of the subject, but the whole of the presentation of the course contributed to my not taking it too seriously.

This was reflected in my grade, an easy 88%. A perfect score would be in easy grasp for anyone, but because of both online and real-life distractions, I didn't care enough to make it happen. Contrast this to the 92% I scored for Kierkegaard, of which I am immensely proud and I feel I worked hard for.

I don't feel that I learned anything; rather it served to consolidate what I already know from business experience, editorial instinct, and common sense. (This is still worth something.)

The User Experience course felt very lightweight. That's definitely due to a combination of factors: the subject and my attitude towards it, as well as the course design.

Summary
It's probably fair to say that you get from MOOCs what you put in to them.

I took the User Experience course because I have a mild interest in the subject as it relates to my work; it's not a deep personal interest or an academic curiosity as I felt with Kierkegaard. And I was curious to see how other types of courses in different MOOC environments operated.

Also, I think I may be somewhat addicted to MOOCs, the rush of the combination of learning, discipline, and achievement.

This week I start 2 more courses: Content Strategy for Professionals: Engaging Audiences for Your Organization and Writing for the Web. They are a little more closely related to each other in terms of subject matter (and I'm taking both because of how they're related to my work, rather than purely for personal interest), but they are on different platforms, so they should be easier to compare.

See you on the other side.

No resolution

In 2013 I read approximately 50 books. Some were very long, and some were very short. I say approximately because some were so short it doesn't quite seem fair to count them. And it depends if you count all three parts of the trilogies that were packaged as single volumes. And there's the book I mostly reread, cuz I was looking for something and got sucked in, but I didn't count it because I skipped a few pages here and there. And then I included something I read for work and not for fun. And I'm too lazy to make a decision about these things and go back and count them properly. I read approximately 14,000 pages (why, yes, I did keep track). I say approximately because some page counts include endpapers and other book matter, and given the wide variety of material I read, one cannot establish a standard page. Also, about a third of my reading was e-reading.

About a book a week. That's about normal for me for the last several years. About 38 pages a day. That's not likely to ever change much, as that's just how much time there is in a day. Good for me. As for people who continue to say they don't have time to read: whatever.

My very favourite book that I read in 2013 was Kate Atkinson's Life after Life.

To everyone who visits my humble little blog, cheers! I just uncovered a slew of comments I was previously unaware of, made mostly via Google+, I think. I didn't mean to ignore you, I just didn't know you were there.

Random Things

How awful was The Time of the Doctor? Taking shortcuts in all the wrong places in favour of overly drawn-out sentimentality. And a bunch of it was just dumb (see this review, for example).

The article "How Do E-Books Change the Reading Experience?" demonstrates how people continue to conflate content with form. One of the contributors writes, "E-reading opens the door to distraction." Get a little self-discipline, I say.

I started a self-paced MOOC back in December, User Experience for the Web, mostly for work-related reasons but also because I'm kind of hooked on the MOOC concept. I'm determined to finish it in the next couple days, and I plan to report on the experience here.

Started playing Psychonauts with the kid. It's no Grim Fandango, but it's fun, and it does take me back... (to a simpler time? a previous life?).

I am reading A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, with a few people. A very big book. A coworker and I had drawn up a reading schedule — we're slated to finish by May. I was a couple weeks late getting started, but now I find myself pulling ahead. It's really wonderful — soap-opera-y and political. I was delighted to find that it is being read by dovegreyreader and company, so there are some resources for us to fall back on.

The MOOC experience

I've completed my first massive open online course (MOOC). It was weird at the start, but it didn't take long to get my bearings.

Here's how it worked.

I enrolled in Soren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity. So did 23,000 other people.

Every week new course material was released: 3 or 4 videos, each on average about 20 minutes long; a list of required reading (PDFs were supplied); a discussion question; a quiz.

So over the last 2 months, I have watched several hours of professional documentary-quality video, and read a couple hundred pages of Kierkegaard, with some Plato and Hegel thrown in.

The quality of the video lectures really surprised me; this was not merely a recording of some fuddy-duddy lecturing in front of a classroom. This professor was a great speaker; he was filmed in various locations around Copenhagen. There were also several interviews with other Kierkegaard scholars. Each video ended with a quiz question, which was not graded but was meant simply to reinforce your understanding of the video material.

The weekly quiz consisted of 10 multiple-choice questions. These did count toward the final grade. They weren't hard, but they weren't easy. I learned early to take my time and refer to my notes, which meant taking better notes during the lectures. Before you submit each quiz, you must check the box indicating that you will abide by the honor code, which states something to the effect of your work being your own (but there's nothing to preclude me from using my notes).

In the first days, the discussion forum exploded with 23,000 people sharing their enthusiasm and trying to get to know each other. That was a bit overwhelming. But I eventually learned to identify which discussions I wanted to follow and know that I couldn't stay on top of them all in any meaningful way even if I devoted all my waking hours to the task. I learned to tune out the white noise.

The course information indicated that the material would require 3-5 hours a week. I'd say it's a bit more. And that estimate doesn't include the potential timesink of the forums.

Some people complained about the deadline for the final essay. I was amazed, and disappointed, that the deadline was adjusted to accommodate the whiners. The schedule had been made clear at the outset of the course, and I expected everyone to stick to it; in fact, pushing back the deadlines by a week very nearly jeopardized my ability to complete the final stage (peer review) because I had organized my life around the original dates. It worked out though, but this shouldn't happen. An extra week for the final essay should've been built in from the start — working on an essay while keeping up with the regular weekly assignments is tough.

It's difficult to grade the humanities in the best of circumstances, and a MOOC is not the best of circumstances. The grade breakdown for this course was 70% from quiz scores (best 7 of 8) and 30% from an averaging of your peers' assessments of your essay. My feeling is that the quizzes were too easy to be given that weight. Essay marks, however, are hard to control — less quantifiable, more open to dispute.

Is it a perfect setup? No. But can you teach the humanities via MOOCs? Absolutely.

According to this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education and the survey they conducted, the median for MOOC registrations is about 33,000 students (so my Kierkegaard course is a bit on the low side).

• The rate of completion in MOOCs is believed to be around 10 percent.
• For students who so much as submit the first assignment, the completion rate leaps to 45 percent.
• And it goes up again if students pay for the course.

So I'm proud to have finished.

And I've already registered for more.