Jen Currin’s Hagiography
March 04, 2010
Even the examples of metaphor that you learn as a kid in school aren't taken from real poems; they were written by the textbook writers. But Currin's book uses it. In every single line.
Each tree had to be thanked
so I set to my task.
Some of the spirits were eating candy,
some had apocalyptic faces.
They asked after my bags,
if my brother had given me vitamins.
But the book doesn't pretend to tradition at all. It's unmistakably of this century. Here's what Currin says about her approach to gender in Hagiography:
Relationships are such a big school, they're such a big part of how we learn. It's a big part of what I write about. I love women, so those are the relationships I'm writing about, so the sexual content in my poems will usually be lesbian or queer. Sometimes not; I mean, I'm interested in having other voices, so there's poems in there where people are referred to as 'husband' or 'husband/wife' and that's interesting to me too, but that's also queer.
Her fluidity with gender is really interesting to me. It's not like, say, some of Mark Doty's poems, in which it's "accessible" to straight audiences because it stays vague about gender. It's specific, but specific in lots of different ways.
Fab Lab Sets Its Sights on Haiti
March 04, 2010
Also published on the TechSoup Blog and AshokaTech.
I wrote a blog post a few months ago about Fab Lab, a network of community-operated workshops springing up all over the world. I was excited about Fab-Fi, Fab Lab's name for the simple directional antennas they're using to build a mesh wireless network all over Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
Of course, to get the full effect of what's cool about Fab Lab, it's useful to take a step back. Fab Lab isn't about free wi-fi; it's about providing people with tools to produce whatever they want, tools that were inaccessible to consumers only a few years ago. Afghans are using the same set of tools to bring the Internet to Jalalabad that this young man in south Boston used to build an electric violin:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KupjpoMZ2s?wmode=transparent]
By equipping citizens with the tools of production, I think that Fab Lab and projects like it have the potential to completely transform the process of infrastructure building. I was thrilled, then, to find out that Fab Lab is now working toward a presence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
According to lab organizer Amy Sun, the first step is to host Haitian students at labs worldwide. This serves two purposes: training people to build and staff the lab, and providing temporary housing for displaced students. The next (simultaneous) step is to raise money to build a lab and find the right Haitian partner organization.
Why invest in a Haitian Fab Lab? As Haiti faces so many dire needs, is this really the best kind of aid? It's a complicated question. From Fab Lab:
Fablabs aren’t going to solve any of Haiti's immediate problems. They can't help with distributing food or administering medicine. But Fablabs are more than just a bunch of machines sitting in a room. We've installed Fablabs in places as diverse as an agricultural school in rural India, community centers in innercity Boston, shantytowns in South Africa, the northernmost towns in Norway, and Jalalabad, Afghanistan. No two Fablabs end up being alike.
Fablabs help people learn how to make things as much as they help people make things. Once a Fablab gets through their initial training phase, it is up to them to start working on what they want. Fablabs make things as diverse as tractors, directional wi-fi antennas, hand-powered flashlights, and chocolate boxes.
A Fablab in Haiti is more than a production facility for communication devices or prosthetics. It is a place where Haitians can start taking control of their education and what they want to learn. It is our way of helping Haiti rebuild Haiti.
That line "helping Haiti rebuild Haiti" is important. Last month, I was fortunate enough to attend the Tech4Society conference in Hyderabad, India, a production of Ashoka and The Lemelson Foundation. The innovators and ideas that Ashoka celebrates reflect its motto, "Everyone a Changemaker," the idea that change doesn't work on a top-down model: the best ideas are those that empower everybody to make a change.
Photo: Port-au-Prince residents use a Linksys router to build a makeshift Internet cafe.
Punditry
March 01, 2010
Here's a discussion I had on Facebook with Andy a few months ago, after he became a fan of Amiri Baraka.
I'm thinking about the idea of a "shift to punditry" and where and when and why it happens. Part of the problem, I think, is that innovative writers might not always be so good at articulating the political implications of their works to people who don't already have a certain level of understanding of the political boundaries of this kind of writing - the unconverted, as it were. I'll hesitantly say that I find Baraka's writing to be more interesting than his politics, but what I really mean is that I find the politics of his writing to be more interesting than his politics, as it's displayed in the public eye.
DIAGRAM Cards
March 01, 2010
I'm really enamored with this 10th anniversary playing card set from DIAGRAM. DIAGRAM is one of by favorite literary websites, due in no small part to their eye for making things that look really nice. They've also published a few poems of mine, which doesn't hurt.
Mister Splashy Pants: Losing Control of the Message
February 25, 2010
Originally published on the TechSoup Blog.
Are you ready to start using social media in your organization? It's a more complicated question than you might think: adopting new media necessarily means giving up a certain degree of control over your message, and there's a host of reasons not to loosen the reins. On the other hand, losing that control can bring your message to exponentially more people than were previously possible. Consider the story of Mister Splashy Pants (via):
Left to their own devices, Greenpeace wouldn't have chosen that name. Maybe no environmental group would have chosen it: when Greenpeace extended the poll an extra week, Treehugger issued a plea to give the whale "a decent name." But the result was that the campaign got much more press than it otherwise would have, and was ultimately successful: the Japanese government called off its whaling expedition.
It comes back to a point we've discussed several times on this blog: we're often very different people from our supporters. The most successful marketing campaign might not be our favorite. To anyone not entrenched in environmental advocacy, it's obvious that Mister Splashy Pants is a more eye-catching name than Libertad. (Incidentally, when it comes to creating a message that appeals more to an organization's staff than its donors, churches and religious organizations are among the worst offenders. Does your grunge website actually appeal to the young visitors it's supposed to reach, or just to people who went to school with you in the early 1990s?)
The big caveat is that "letting go" isn't an end in itself: it's a tool to use in achieving your organization's mission. The reason why Greenpeace started the whale campaign wasn't to sell funny T-shirts: it was to draw attention to abuses by the Japanese Fisheries Agency. Brian Fitzgerald, head of digital communications at Greenpeace, admits that the name was controversial among staff, but says he also recognized Mister Splashy Pants' potential as a mouthpiece for serious issues: "We ... pushed folks to make the link between naming Mister Splashy Pants and saving Mister Splashy Pants by taking online action to demand the UN create protected Marine Reserves and asking whale conservation countries to do more to save whales."
