The making of a “reader”

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Are “readers” born, or are they made?

If they are “born” then no amount of instruction is going to make a difference.  But assuming a reader is “made,” how can schools best accomplish that objective?  In 1955 readability expert Rudolf Flesch published a seminal text that highlighted opposing educational philosophies, Why Johnny Can’t Read, and America is still bickering over how reading should be taught more than fifty years later.

I did enjoy books as a very young child.  My parents always took us to the library, subscribed to the newspaper, and had some books in our home – all factors that studies regularly cite as important for shaping reading behavior.  Coincidentally, my name also came from a character in a book, Mrs. Mike.  But I think that two key formative events, both of which happened around the time I was ten, were probably most responsible for turning me into a serious reader.

The first event was our neighbors’ gift to me and my siblings of their grown daughter’s old books.  A whole summer’s reading in a box!  Many of the books were about dogs and horses, two of my favorite subjects.  Several were Walter Farley novels (The Black Stallion, etc.), in which I completely lost myself.  Others were children’s novels that had been popular ten or twenty years earlier – a fact I discovered while visiting the home of a woman about ten years older than me and finding those familiar titles on the bookshelf that held her favorite childhood books.

The second important thing that happened was the habit of my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Fritz, to read aloud to us every afternoon for the last fifteen minutes of the school day.  The book was Treasure Island – a very exciting tale of pirates and adventure.  When the school year ran out before the book ended, I found it in the public library and finished it on my own.

Then I made a fortuitous connection that was really the starting point of my serious reading path.  We had the Authors card game, which was basically a packaged version of the “Old Maid” card game you could play with a regular deck.  (Now that I think about it, we played a lot of card games when I was a kid: “Slap Jack,” “Crazy Eights,” “Go Fish,” “War,” “Euchre,” etc.)  In Authors, instead of the usual sets of all four Aces, Jacks, Queens, etc., you had sets of four cards for each author.  Each author card had the writer’s picture and a list of titles at the bottom.  Instead of collecting sets of Aces or Queens, you would collect “books” of, say, all four William Shakespeare cards.

I knew that Treasure Island was one of the titles listed on the Robert Louis Stevenson cards.  That meant it was a “classic.”  You know: IMPORTANT.  But Treasure Island was also really, really fun to read.  And it made me wonder: Could maybe some of those other “classics” be good, too?

The Authors card game became my “shopping” list for trips to the public library, where my mom took us every couple of weeks.  I read the other Robert Louis Stevenson titles first, then moved on to Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the rest of the authors featured in the card game.

Not long ago my hair stylist asked me how I find the books I read.  The question took me by surprise . . . because books sort of find me!  My list of books stretches way off into the future.  I should live so long 🙂

But she got me thinking.  Why do so many people not read?  Maybe because they don’t have anything interesting to read, and they don’t know how to find a book they would enjoy.  I was lucky to have discovered a “book list” that was meaningful to me at an age when I was ready to advance to a higher level of reading.  But what if I hadn’t?

One of my former students, a returning adult in a couple of the classes I taught as a teaching assistant in grad school, told me that she had never been a reader until one day she bought Downy fabric softener that came with a Harlequin romance novel shrink-wrapped to it.  She had young children, didn’t work outside the home, and if I recall correctly, had not even finished high school.  She was not a strong reader, but she loved that book.  She bought more fabric softener and read another Harlequin.  Then she went to the library and got more Harlequins.

“Once you’re a reader,” she said, “you start meeting other people who read.”  Soon she was buying her own paperbacks, exchanging books with other women, and engaging in discussions about their shared reading experiences.  Then came huge leaps forward: she began reading books that weren’t romance novels and she decided to go to college.

Reading proficiency scores for school children remain dismal.  What if – instead of funding scientific studies about reading instruction or putting dollars into classroom technology like computers or iPads – what if, the government invested some of that money toward supporting talented authors of children’s and young adult books?

The first three Harry Potter novels occupied the top slots of Amazon’s bestseller list long before I had even heard of “The Boy Who Lived.”  During the Pottermania years, children convinced parents to take them to bookstores at midnight so they could buy the newest J.K. Rowling novel the minute it was allowed to be sold.  Even “poor” readers were devouring those books.  Like water seeking its own level, good books find their audience.

What if we focused on getting truly engaging books into the hands of children instead of putting our faith in the latest technology or arguing curriculum politics (i.e., phonics versus whole language)?  What if a significant part of every school day was set aside for kids to select and read whatever appeared interesting to them, including graphic novels?  What if students looked forward to that time as the best part of their day, as I did when Mrs. Fritz read us Treasure Island?  Suppose reading was . . . fun?

If students were regularly immersed in enjoyable books, might they not become more fluent readers – naturally?

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“Westworld” (Boy, have we got a vacation for you!)

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Over the weekend my older daughter and I watched Westworld.  Again 🙂

Although we always enjoy this film for the story itself, we also get a kick out of deconstructing its “high tech” symbolism and noting anachronisms and things so commonplace and taken for granted in the early 1970s that their appearance onscreen is entirely unselfconscious.

For example, the accommodations on the hovercraft ride across the desert to Westworld, are reminiscent of the Pan Am 747 first class lounge (the one with the spiral staircase and fancy dining – video here).  It’s hard to imagine now that air travel could once have been so pleasant, even glamorous.

The scientists/engineers/technicians running the three “worlds” of Delos (WestWorld, MedievalWorld, and RomanWorld) all wear white lab coats and sit at monitors in an underground area that looks a lot like NASA’s Mission Control during the Apollo era.  The computer system that manages both the androids and all other power is characterized by whirring tape drives and blinking lights.  I don’t know if mainframes of the day actually looked like this, but that’s how computers played to 1970s movie audiences.

The “prostitute” and “sex model” androids have 1970s hairstyles, and one is wearing obvious, 1970s-fashionable blue eyeshadow.  When “slain” or otherwise damaged robots are taken in for repair or maintenance, the “shop” resembles an operating room, with all the technicians gowned and masked as if they are performing surgery instead of installing circuitry in machines.

Once the androids start killing human guests, and technicians in the central command center realize they have lost the ability to control robot behavior,  the decision is made to shut down all power to the three theme-park worlds.  Unfortunately, many of the androids continue to run on stored power – like Yul Brynner’s chilling gunslinger, whose purposeful thumbs-hitched-to-gunbelt stride contributes to one of the most memorable chase scenes in film history.  

The technicians try to turn the power back on again – only to realize that they can’t.  They are trapped (air-tight power doors that no longer open) and doomed to die (no air conditioning and no oxygen) as the temperature rises.  Apparently no one tries to contact the outside world for help, even though every computer monitor station has a phone (land line) that ought to operate even if the electricity is cut off.  When Richard Benjamin’s character is running for his life in the tunnels below Delos (brightly lit, despite no power), he finds the central control center and looks in through the unbreakable glass to see everybody dead at their posts.  The computer is busily whirring and blinking away.  Is that a metaphor?  The room is full of dead people, victims of their own hubris, while the technological monster they have created continues to function – apparently without needing electricity, without which both air systems and exits have shut down and the control station has plunged into darkness?

Speaking of computers, a couple of television shows in the early 1970s had episodes built around the premise of errors made by unreasonable computers.  There was The Partridge Family episode, for example, where 10-year-old Danny is drafted into the army and nothing can be done to halt his conscription because computers never make mistakes.  Was the general public of the pre-PC era really so gullible?

At the very end of the Westworld credits (and I like to watch the credits . . .), there is a note that the RomanWorld scenes were filmed at the estate of Harold Lloyd.  Harold Lloyd, the silent film star? 

Yes!  And what incredibly beautiful gardens he had, if what little we see of them in RomanWorld does them justice!  Thinking about Lloyd’s gardens then reminded me of Norma Desmond’s fabulous Mediterranean Revival mansion in Sunset Boulevard . . . and Don Lockwood’s similarly fabulous mansion in Singin’ in the Rain.  Silent film stars really must have lived like royalty, their melodramatic film performances but a pale imitation of the glamorous reality of their offscreen existence.

Which brings me to my main reason for posting about Westworld today.  Travel gives me perspective – just seeing that there is a bigger world and that so many other people are living their lives in it at the same time I am.  Watching movies, likewise, gives me a more expansive outlook. 

So there it is.  Westworld’s tagline is right: “Boy, have we got a vacation for you . . .”  I watched the film this weekend to be entertained, but at the same time I did some “traveling” of another sort – back to the era of jet-setting and “beautiful people,” to the early days of modern computing, to the larger-than-life film stars of the 1920s, and (last, but not least) to the hot-roller hairstyles and blue eyeshadow of the 1970s. 

A real change of scene, in so many senses of the word!

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Success through failure

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

The “Review” section of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contained an interesting short article by Ken Bain, titled “Flummoxed by Failure – or Focused,” which was primarily about the un-fixed nature of intelligence.  Most people are just about as smart as they think they are or believe they have the capacity to become.  In order to learn difficult things, you must be able to overcome failure (see it as a temporary setback) and keep moving forward with the expectation that you will eventually figure it out. 

In other words, you need to be resilient.  And not only is intelligence a more flexible, malleable quality than previously thought, but it also turns out to be less important to academic success than resilience is.

The idea of “lifelong learning” has intrigued me for about 15 years now.  Not in the sense of recreational programs for senior citizens, nor in the sense of professional development seminars aimed at keeping job skills current – but in the sense of perpetual curiosity and continual, purposeful learning.  Whenever I read about artists and inventors, I’m struck by their insatiable desire to learn, and I wonder if somehow establishing such a culture of lifelong learning within a company or society at large would nuture a parallel culture of innovation.

Because I also am a huge fan of Pixar films, I noticed several years ago that the company had an in-house “university” offering an array of courses for all employees.  Randy Nelson, the former “Dean” of Pixar University, is now the “Dean” of Apple University.  I am in awe of his wisdom and insights regarding learning, creativity, and innovation.  If you’d like to find out more about Pixar University and Nelson’s approach to in-house “training,” several articles and interviews are out there online (for example, this New York Times article).

While writing a conference paper a couple years ago, I stumbled across this video clip of Nelson talking about his work at Pixar.  Two things jumped out at me right away, one of which is relevant for this blog post. 

First, let me say a few words about the item that isn’t.  It concerns the idea of “collaboration,” which is very relevant for my teaching and possibly for anyone working on large creative projects.  Engineers in industry work on teams, but Nelson’s concept of how teams should function is quite different from the way “teamwork” is commonly understood.  I’ll post on this topic later in the week, actually, because it’s something I want to explore in more detail, and writing is often my best avenue for discovery.

But back to the idea of resilience.  The other thing Nelson says in the video caught my attention because it runs so counter to the fear of failure that most of us have internalized.  He says:

The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.

“Error recovery” is an interesting concept, because the larger culture certainly does not tolerate failure very well.  But failure (or, more specifically, analysis and then remediation of failure) is an important part of learning – especially for “innovators.”  When you’re involved in creative work, there often is no road map, no “best practices,” and no way to chart your path . . . except through trial and error. 

My job teaching future engineers has led me to the work of Henry Petroski, who writes frequently on the history of design.  More specifically, he highlights failure analysis and the crucial, yet undervalued and misunderstood, relationship between learning and failure.  I had never really thought of how important it is to fail well until I read his work.

Failure is not merely a mistake; its scale is larger than that, as is its associated cost.  Our fear of failure stems quite understandably from its disastrous consequences.

Despite the fact that every toddler falls many times before learning how to walk, getting up again doesn’t come so easily to most adults.  Internalizing the resilience to recover from failure requires practice, and unfortunately the only way to acquire that practice is to fail.

To err is human.  That much may be beyond our control, but how we respond to our errors is something we can take charge of.

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Creativity, “Mr. Patent,” Keith Richards, and me

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Following up on yesterday’s post on “Creativity and the importance of routine,” here is a link to a Fast Company article I recall reading ten years ago. 

Titled “Mr. Patent,” it profiles Marvin Johnson, a research fellow at Phillips Petroleum who has 212 patents to his hame.  (Or “had,” anyway, back in 2002.)

Why do I still remember this article?  Because of Johnson’s approach to innovation and creativity.  He said he looked for small, focused, solvable problems:

What’s really important is finding solutions to problems.  If you find a unique solution, then you have a patent.

Johnson likened his work as a chemist/engineer to another pastime he also enjoyed, solving the coded word puzzles called “cryptoquips”:

You have to have the patience to return to it.  Play with it for a while, go do something else, then come back when you have a new idea.  Each time you return to the puzzle, you pick up the same threads and weave a different cloth.  Eventually you get it right.

It’s interesting that a scientist/engineer would do this with a word puzzle . . . because it’s exactly the same thing I do (Ph.D. in English) with Sudoko, a number puzzle.  I pull out the page of the newspaper containing that day’s puzzle, fold it into a convenient size, and then work on it in tiny chunks of time.  When I get stuck, I quit.  Maybe I don’t get back to it for a couple of days, but when I do pick it up again, I can immediately see something I missed before.  As soon as that new piece of the puzzle is completed, several other parts of the solution fall quickly into place before I get stuck again. 

This is also how I work on writing projects.  When I wrote my dissertation, it was the longest thing I had ever written, maybe ten times the length of any single course paper.  I didn’t know how to do it.  In some ways, for me at least, the most valuable part of that final academic experience was coming to understand myself as a writer and accept the fact that my work style is quite different from most people’s.

It was very disconcerting back then for me to talk with the other grad students and hear them saying things like, “Yeah, I’ve finished Chapters 1 and 2.  My advisor has Chapter 3, and I’m working on Chapter 4 now.”  Because I had NOTHING “finished” until the entire thing was finished, all at once. 

This was the only way I found I could write: a little bit here, a little bit there.  I’d get an idea about a tiny little chunk of material, so I’d write it up.  Maybe it would be three pages.  Eventually all of my chunks started to organize themselves into categories, so I created “chapter” files in my computer and moved the chunks into their new neighborhoods.  But each “chapter” was just a jumbled mess of chunks.  Nothing that could really be called “finished.”  I was embarrassed to share anything with my advisor, and I have to give him a lot of credit for working with me on my terms.  He looked at my disorganized pages and gave me feedback but never made me feel ashamed of my discursive, nonlinear writing process.

Finally, by the end of the project, the entire “whole” of my dissertation began to make itself clear.  I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with my vision.  At the end of each day, I could see the path ahead of me so clearly that I could have written nonstop for days or weeks . . . if only I could have stayed awake long enough to do it. 

When I read Keith Richards’ memoir Life two years ago, I could totally identify with his reason for using heroin.  When he was producing the Exile on Main St. album during the Rolling Stones’ actual “exile” in the south of France, Richards said the heroin allowed him to stay awake for incredibly long periods so he could see his musical ideas through to completion.  (Interesting aside: I was just double-checking the spelling of “street” in the album title and discovered that a documentary film called Stones in Exile came out two years ago, just a few months before Richards’ book.  Sounds intriguing; I’m going to check it out 🙂 )

It never occurred to me to use something like heroin, thank God.  What I did instead was to take time at the end of each work day to write down what came next, just jotted notes that tried to capture the gap between where I was and the completed “whole” I was trying to reach.  Then when I sat down to work again the next day, all I had to do was read my notes from the night before – and I was mentally right back in the same place!  I could see the entire, completed whole again stretching out ahead of me in my mind’s eye.

I’m not sure how or even whether my experience has significance for anyone else. 

But if your working style is more linear, like the other graduate students who were able to move through their dissertations chapter by chapter, maybe you could try working my way if you ever get “stuck.” 

And if your working style is messy and indirect, like mine (and I suspect we are a distinct minority), know that you are not alone and that learning to work in the only way you can work will make you a lot happier and more productive than trying to be efficient and organized the way you think you “should” be.

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Creativity and the importance of routine

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

One of my favorite writers is Flannery O’Connor, a Southerner who lived and wrote for most of her life on a farm in rural Georgia.  Possibly you’ve never read her, or maybe you read one of her stories once and wound up, like me, repulsed and confused. 

Here’s what turned me into a Flannery O’Connor fan.  Several years ago, I had to read a whole slew of her short stories in about a week’s time because so many book clubs wanted to register for the same Great Books session on “Everything that Rises Must Converge” that I was asked at the last minute to come on board as a second facilitator.  When you read any writer’s work all at once like that, you start to notice little things.  In O’Connor’s case, I started seeing the word “sly” quite often in her stories, shading her characters and foreshadowing events.  Somehow in that one word O’Connor manages to summon up all the darkness of the human soul.

But what I want to talk about today is creativity, specifically the importance of cultivating a creative “practice” for anyone who aspires to be an artist of any kind.  Flannery O’Connor deserves mention here because of her disciplined work habits.  During grad school I first encountered this quote of hers:

I don’t know if the muse is going to show up or not on any given day, but by golly, I’m going to be at my desk from 8 to 12 every morning in case she does.

Don’t you love that image of O’Connor sitting at her desk, ready to greet the muse?  Although no one can forcibly will creative work into being, anyone can be present and open and attentive – poised to capture any glimmer of inspiration that may reveal itself. 

O’Connor called her work ethic “the habit of art,” which she explained more specifically as an artist’s worldview, or way of being: “The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art.” 

Writing is something in which the whole personality takes part – the conscious as well as the unconscious mind.  Art is the habit of the artist and habits have to be rooted deep in the personality.

O’Connor’s description sounds a lot like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which advocates personal growth through creative practice, as a way for “recovering” artists to find their spiritual center in a society that does not value art. 

It makes me happy to think of creativity as a “habit” or “practice” – an ongoing activity continually performed – instead of a personal attribute (as in a “creative” person).  Anyone can “be” creative if to be creative means engaging in creative activity.

Consider these words that come to mind when I think of creativity as daily practice:

Routine – derives from the French route, meaning “road” or “route,” with the –ine suffix indicating the diminutive.  So a “routine” is a small road.  I like that.  If you want to go somewhere creative, a routine is a road you take to get there.  But it’s not like driving a flat-out freeway, where you grip the steering wheel and concentrate on speeding along with traffic in the pneumatic tube of an interstate.  Instead, it’s more of a back road, like the “blue highways” driven by William Least Heat-Moon.  You drive it, but you can enjoy the scenery and meet people along the way. 

Discipline – derives from the Latin roots disciplina (“instruction”), discipulus (“pupil”), and discere (“to learn”).  So discipline is less about strength of will and forcing oneself to perform than it is about curiosity, teaching, and learning.

Perseverance – derives from Latin by way of French, with the original meaning coming from per (“by” or “through”) and severus (“serious,” “severe,” “strict,” “grave,” “dignified,” “earnest”).  My old American Heritage Dictionary describes “perseverance” as having a favorable connotation, suggesting patience and continuing strength in withstanding difficulty or resistance, whereas “persistence” and “tenacity” imply dogged resolve that is willful, unreasonable, annoying, and perhaps aggressive.  So “perseverance” is less about winning at any price or being grimly determined not to quit (grrrr . . .) than it is about just showing up every day with a calm steadfastness and doing the work.

Filmmaker Woody Allen is famous for saying that much of success in life is a matter of just showing up.  (Exactly how much is a little unclear to me.  Sometimes it’s quoted as 90%, sometimes as 80%.  But we can safely say “much” of success, in any case.) 

Showing up.  That’s what it takes to have a successful creative practice.  How simple is that?  (And hard, at the same time.)

Allen is an excellent example, in fact, of someone who shows up and does the work.  For close to fifty years he has methodically maintained an output of about a film a year.  And for thirty years now (1982-2012) he has released a new film every single year.  Not only does he direct, but he also often writes and acts.  Plus, he is a jazz musician (clarinet) who has toured the world with a New Orleans-style band for about a half-century as well.

Routine.  Discipline.  Perseverance. 

You show up and do the work – so if the muse appears, by golly, you’ll be there to meet her.

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Fun with the Periodic Table (and math)

Posted on July 7, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

What is it about the Periodic Table that inspires so many take-offs? Look at all these fun makeovers:

Actually, the real Periodic Table is pretty interesting, too, even for someone who hated chemistry class (me).

I bought this book, The Mystery of the Periodic Table, for my kids, but I ended up being the person who enjoyed it the most.  The history of how elements were discovered and the Table ordered is fascinating, especially its uncanny mathematical precision in prediciting the properties of as-yet-undiscovered elements based on their empty-square positions in the Table.

There’s a similar book for grownups,  The Disappearing Spoon (etc., a really long title), by Sam Kean.

The ancient Greeks were really on to something when they discovered the “golden ratio.”  If you can tolerate one more link in a link-heavy post, this old (1959) Walt Disney short, Donald in Mathmagic Land, has the nicest explanation ever of the mathematical underpinnings of the universe.  It shows the inherent mathematical structure underlying architecture, music, nature – and even games like billiards or pool.  Informative and very entertaining.  Used copies of this DVD can be found on Amazon for under $20, and you can also usually find this 27-minute cartoon on YouTube, too.  Here’s a link to the movie on YouTube, and if it has been removed by the time you click through, you can probably find it easily by searching for the title.  Someone else will probably have reposted it by then.

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Barefoot summers

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Driving home yesterday, we saw a woman crossing the street, barefoot and limping.  Was she hurt?  More likely, we suspected, she was reacting to the asphalt under her feet.  With the outdoor temperature hitting 100°, the street probably felt like a hot griddle.

“When I was a kid, that blacktop wouldn’t have bothered me at all,” I bragged to my husband.  Maybe in May, but not by July 4th. 

None of us kids wore shoes in summer.  We went barefoot from the day school let out, and the acclimation process every year was almost a ritual.  At first our soles were so tender that walking on gravel was like a thousand knifepoints.  Running to the Payless grocery store for milk required strategy; we walked on grass as far as we could, and once grass was no longer available, concrete was by far preferable to asphalt.  When we had to cross the street, we hobbled and hopped across the bubbling tar. 

(Literally, on the tar thing.  Either they make streets differently today, or the sun doesn’t beat down as hotly, because I never see tar bubbling anymore.  But, as I recall, one of our favorite pastimes on a hot summer day was puncturing tar bubbles.)  

By midsummer our feet had toughened to shoe leather.  We would race down our alley with nary a twinge.  The glorious day we could finally walk across hot pavement without wincing truly marked our independence from school and grownups and rules.

Then came the end of August and a shopping trip for back-to-school shoes.

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Thoughts on “Blade Runner” thirty years later

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

I recently joined a LinkedIn group called “World Cinema Critics” to be part of a community engaged in serious film discussions.  Lately we’ve had a comment thread going on the subject of Blade Runner, a movie I hadn’t seen since its theatrical release back in 1982. 

The Blade Runner movie poster.
The film © 1982, 1991 The Blade Runner Partnership
Poster artwork © 1982 The Ladd Company
Source: http://www.impawards.com/1982/blade_runner.html

Last Friday I finally made time to watch it again, partly inspired by the early-June release of director Ridley Scott’s latest film, Prometheus, but more immediately prompted by the World Cinema Critics discussion.  

In that conversation, Blade Runner has gotten mixed reviews – praise for its visionary sets but lukewarm regard for its story.  This surprised me.  Although I certainly remember Blade Runner for its dark, atmospheric design, the one thing that has actually stayed with me most all these years is the story itself . . . particularly one key scene. 

If you’re not familiar with Blade Runner, it is about a cop (or, Blade Runner) who hunts down and “retires” escaped “replicants” in the gritty, crowded city of Los Angeles in the year 2019.  Humanlike creatures who have been bioengineered for use as slave labor off-world, replicants are designed to have limited emotional capacity.  They must be strictly controlled to minimize danger to humanity, and they can be distinguished from humans only by evaluators trained to measure their empathic response through biometric data collected during interrogation sessions.

Former cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), the most talented Blade Runner ever, has been called out of retirement to track down and kill those four escaped replicants.  Complicating matters, though, is his discovery that Rachael (Sean Young) – the assistant/protégé of Tyrell, the man whose company makes the replicants – is actually an experimental replicant herself. 

What I recalled so vividly from watching Blade Runner in the theater was Rachael’s attempt to prove to Deckard (and herself) that she is human by showing him a childhood photo of herself with her mother.  Deckard counters with a recitation of Rachael’s most indelible childhood memories – demonstrating to her horror that her sense of “self” is nothing more than implants of memories originally belonging Tyrell’s niece.

This scene, in which Rachael realizes she’s a replicant, is far shorter than I remembered – ironic, considering its focus on unreliable memories!  Maybe that particular moment assumed such significance in my recollection because the idea itself was so powerful. 

Who are we, after all, without our memories?

A few years ago I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the second time.  In my first reading (which coincidentally occurred at about the same time Blade Runner was in theaters), I was far more interested in the book’s father-son motorcycle trip than the philosophical musings interspersed with the plot.  I remember impatiently skimming those boring sections to get back to the motorcycle story.  However, in my second time through the book, I was amused to realize that I kept skipping over the motorcycle trip to return to the far more interesting philosophical discussion of “quality” instead.  

Similarly, Blade Runner is not the same film for me thirty years later.  But it holds up remarkably well. 

Last Friday night, I noticed aspects of the film’s production design that didn’t even register the first time I saw it in the theater.  In particular, I was struck by the way its deliberate anachronisms speak to each other to form a surprisingly coherent overall visual experience.

The buildings’ interiors and exteriors are either Art Nouveau or Art Deco, styles that flourished from about 1890 through the 1930s.  Daryl Hannah’s replicant character, Pris, wears leg warmers, a look briefly fashionable during the 1980s, which may have made her a more attractive as a “pleasure model” for a 1980s audience.  The clothing and makeup of other characters (especially Rachael and Detective Gaff) have a distinctly 1940s look that, joined together with design elements like Venetian blinds and low-key lighting, creates a “film noir” feel.

A quick check confirms that Blade Runner won an Academy Award for art direction – an honor well deserved!

In the end, though, it’s the visceral response of my 30-years-younger self to the STORY that I keep circling back to.  What makes Blade Runner a classic, for me, is its central theme of identity and what it means to be human.  While my 2012 self has to smile at Blade Runner’s 1982 vision of Los Angeles in 2019, this film also makes me think quite seriously about Bill Joy’s 2000 Wired Magazine essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” and Ray Kurzweil’s speculations about the coming “technological singularity.” 

Someday humanity may need to confront difficult questions about what it means to be human, who “counts” as human, and what inalienable “rights” belong to the machines we create.  Blade Runner presciently points the way toward that discussion.

At the same time, Blade Runner strikes far closer to home in exploring another human mystery that remains satisfyingly unfathomable: the union of one man and one woman.

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Little Free Library

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

Have you heard of the “Little Free Library” yet?

Boxes like birdhouses full of books are popping up in front yards around the metro Milwaukee area.  My own neighborhood has several.

What a nice idea this is . . . and how simple!  A Little Free Library box is basically a weatherproof book cabinet on a post.  You set in up in your front yard and put a few books inside that you’re finished with.  Anyone walking by is invited to take any that look interesting, and people are encouraged, but not required, to pass along books that they’ve finished with to new readers.

Any kind of book is okay – kids’ books, novels, cookbooks, how-to books, coffee-table books.  People browsing or replenishing the stock often meet each other, and the Little Free Library becomes a neighborhood focal point and gathering spot of sorts.  It’s not a replacement for the city library, but it has its own special place in readers’ lives.  It may even serve to bring books to nonreaders, especially in poorer neighborhoods where trips to the larger library may be rare and bookstores don’t exist.

Several articles have been written about the phenomenon, which was started by two men in Madison, Wisconsin, and has spread across America and into other countries.  If you’d like to read more, the Little Free Library website contains links to several news stories in newspapers and television, including this USA Today article that details the project’s beginnings.

If you’re handy, you can build your own Little Free Library with free plans from the website.  Otherwise, you can order one in a variety of styles for a cost of $250 – $400.

Posted in Books and reading, Little Free Library, Milwaukee | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Leaving the nest

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Katherine Wikoff

One of the baby chickadees left the nest early this morning, around 5:30 a.m.  (See video of the nest I shot about a month ago here.)

Shortly after letting the dogs back in, I glanced out the kitchen window and saw a bird, too small to be one of the adults, poking its head out of the knothole and looking around.  Up, down, left, right . . . sort of scoping out the situation.  Then another bird popped its head up and pushed its way to the opening.  Just like any other siblings, they jostled for position and finally settled for sharing the view, taking turns sticking their necks out.

At last, the first bird decided it was time.  It hopped from hole to branch, just as its parents have done so many times.  There it sat for about two seconds . . . until it lost its balance and tumbled off.  Tiny (and I mean TINY) wings fluttered in a blur, making the fall slower as it wobbled downward.

Once it landed, the baby chickadee sat motionless in the grass for a long time, probably befuddled by what had just happened.  A ground bee moving past hovered slowly closer, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Would it sting the defenseless little bird?  As the bee moved in toward the bird, the tiny chickadee shot its head forward and pecked at it.  The bee backed up and flew off. 

Finally the chickadee took flight again, struggling to get higher than a straight line about a foot off the ground.  It made it to the top of our fence, then sat there for several minutes recovering from the effort before fluttering in a low, lurching line across our neighbor’s driveway to a bush at the edge of her patio.  Our neighbor has a bird feeder, so at least the baby chickadee will have some other birds and food around, if it has the wits to stay there until it’s stronger.

The adult returned to the tree at this point, perching on the rim of the knothole and leaning inside with food.  I wondered what it thought . . . or even whether it thought.  As a parent, I would be frantic to discover one of my children gone.  Do birds think this way, too?  Or does the expression “bird brain,” implying a mind incapable of complex thought, have any basis in reality.

The adult entered the nest, stayed for a few moments as usual, then slipped back out of the knothole and flew off. 

Not much later, a tiny chickadee face peered out.

 

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