Gun violence has become so common, it rarely stays in the news for more than a few days. The ones that shocked me, Columbine and Virginia Tech, were the ones that could not be dismissed as individual anomalies but indicated institutional failure.
Most of us survived high school, and wondered what on earth was going on in Littleton. Some of the initial explanations, since disproved by Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass, were the ones that resonated with graduates who knew first hand the status system that allowed one group to scapegoat another or led people to feel persecuted when they were simply overlooked like the strongly religious.
But, we think, something had to fail for routine nastiness or teenage angst to propel Eric Harris into buying automatic weapons and luring Dylan Klebold into his maelstrom. Society’s verdict that they were psychopaths beyond help simply offers a self-serving label in place of recognizing a cultural or institutional failure.
At Virginia Tech we know a lot more, because the parents and school did not blind themselves to Seung-Hui Cho’s problems as people had done in Colorado. They simply had no idea what to do with someone who had stalked people and been diagnosed with mental problems, but could not be institutionalized or even expelled on probability.
The part that shocked me was the role of the creative writing program. Art is supposed to exist as a means people use to externalize and contain their demons, to explore what they know is inadmissible We know the biographies of too many published writers who drank or drugged themselves to death to still believe art is a cure, but we do still think it is a way to explore our worst feelings without letting them become too destructive.
I’ve never taken a creative writing class, and fall into that group that is skeptical about what possible job market a middling school like Virginia Tech hopes to serve with an entire major in creative writing and just what future they see for their graduates after they have provided themselves with employment.
I’ve taught English composition and realize the necessity of helping students learn to write a decent sentence and become knowledgeable enough about their writing to be able to edit themselves. I always stayed with prosaic, factual assignments because I believe the process is the same for all writing - poetry, novels, or essays - and it’s easier to critique something the writer is not personally involved with than something that has required they reveal their feelings.
Louis Menard’s recent article in the New Yorker suggests the central methodology in many creative writing programs is public, group criticism. He makes classes sound more like the self-accusatory sessions of the communists and evangel prayer meetings, than anything I would tolerate.
Such group sessions might possibly work in the sort of summer sessions and graduate programs where each member has to first prove him or herself to be capable writer to be admitted. Such criteria are not possible in a state undergraduate program. Interviews with his classmates make it sound like Cho was exposed to the voices of the very unthinking, conventional students who were first suspected of persecuting Harris and Klebold.
One instructor, poet Nikki Giovanni, had him removed from her classes because she thought he was "menacing" and wrote a letter for the record to the department chairman, Lucinda Roy, who in turn notified school authorities. Another instructor, Lisa Norris, asked the dean’s office about him and was told he had mental problems.
His male play writing teacher, Edward Falco, was less bothered and simply recognized Cho’s writing wasn’t "good" and that he probably took the courses to find a means of communicating.
Writing requires risk taking. A school that turns homework into an opportunity to enforce conformity by reporting deviance betrays the student. The fact Giovanni and Norris were correct in perceiving danger does not negate the ways their reactions and those of their students contributed to Cho’s growing sense of isolation. They, and everyone involved, should know the dangers of liberating the imagination in a creative writing program and either know how to respond or not offer the courses.
Notes:
My memories of comments at the time by Virginia Tech instructors and students confirmed with Wikipedia.
Cullen, Dave. Columbine, 2009.
Menand, Louis. "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?," New Yorker 8 June 2009.
Kass, Jeff. Columbine: A True Crime Story, 2009.
Showing posts with label Risk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Risk. Show all posts
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Michael Jackson and Creativity
It was bad luck for Gale Storm and Billy Mays to die the weekend everyone’s attention was focused on Michael Jackson. Buried in the June 27 edition of the New York Times was a notice that an important diamond cutter had passed on the 15th.
Margalit Fox’s notice was that rare obituary that not only told you the usual information about Antonio Bianco’s survivors, but also described what made him special in his trade. She first needed to explain how diamond molecules react to being violated, before it was clear why it took several months to cut particularly large stones without permanently marring their internal structure.
I sent the notice to a friend of mine who’s drawn to the mystery of what’s inside externally drab rocks she finds in her neighborhood. Her return comment was "He must have made a lot of money."
She was a great Michael Jackson fan and we had spent part of Saturday talking about him and what his death meant. No one would just say, "he made a lot of money," although there are those who wonder who will inherit and what will be left after the debts are settled.
I used to wonder what people meant by materialism, because I was raised to respect work well done and to acknowledge the greatness of artists and artisans. I’m still shocked when, regardless of what people feel, they can only express their reaction in monetary terms.
It’s that simple equation that truncates artistic creativity. Someone is always afraid of the cost - the dependent family, the record companies, the concert promoters. As soon as large sums appear on bank statements, representatives of capitalism fear the kind of risks that create wealth in the first place.
No one minds if famous performers spend their money on useless possessions or self-destructive substances. After all, each purchase creates wealth for someone, as do any medical consequences. In their uselessness such transactions are materialism at its purest.
However, none of those petty traders of human frailty can step back at the end of a day and take pleasure in a well-cut stone or a new combination. Obituaries don’t yet record what people made, but what they did. Tombstones still have dates, not dollar signs.
Margalit Fox’s notice was that rare obituary that not only told you the usual information about Antonio Bianco’s survivors, but also described what made him special in his trade. She first needed to explain how diamond molecules react to being violated, before it was clear why it took several months to cut particularly large stones without permanently marring their internal structure.
I sent the notice to a friend of mine who’s drawn to the mystery of what’s inside externally drab rocks she finds in her neighborhood. Her return comment was "He must have made a lot of money."
She was a great Michael Jackson fan and we had spent part of Saturday talking about him and what his death meant. No one would just say, "he made a lot of money," although there are those who wonder who will inherit and what will be left after the debts are settled.
I used to wonder what people meant by materialism, because I was raised to respect work well done and to acknowledge the greatness of artists and artisans. I’m still shocked when, regardless of what people feel, they can only express their reaction in monetary terms.
It’s that simple equation that truncates artistic creativity. Someone is always afraid of the cost - the dependent family, the record companies, the concert promoters. As soon as large sums appear on bank statements, representatives of capitalism fear the kind of risks that create wealth in the first place.
No one minds if famous performers spend their money on useless possessions or self-destructive substances. After all, each purchase creates wealth for someone, as do any medical consequences. In their uselessness such transactions are materialism at its purest.
However, none of those petty traders of human frailty can step back at the end of a day and take pleasure in a well-cut stone or a new combination. Obituaries don’t yet record what people made, but what they did. Tombstones still have dates, not dollar signs.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Gambling - Part 1 - Racing
Racing is controlled chaos; Detroit automakers are mature organizations that banished anarchy decades ago.
They maintain an ambiguous, older brother relationship with racing. It needs the publicity it generates, but doesn’t want to be too near anything quite so disreputable. Marketing men support racing teams, but hope desirable customers for luxury vehicles won’t notice.
They may accept Bunky Knudsen’s adage that they can sell an older man a young man’s car and can’t sell a young man an old man’s car, but they still lust for predictable sales to those with steady incomes, the bigger the better.
GM would rather publicize the Corvette as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500, than announce a Chevrolet driver won the NASCAR championship in 2005.
Pace cars are much more predictable. The company knows the car will perform, and will still look good for photographers when it’s done. Executives can go farther and bring it, or its clone, to track parties and let well-heeled supporters look under the hood, kick the wheels, even take rides. Race teams are much more protective of their vehicles.
But more, it’s harder to predict who will win a race, and the car crossing the line may no longer be a good advertisement for high performance road safety. Since 1970, GM has supplied the pace car to Indianapolis 31 times; Chrysler has had three vehicles, and Ford two. In contrast, GM vehicles won the NASCAR championship 26 times; Ford and Chrysler each five times.
Racing’s contribution to the automotive industry is more than publicity and brand loyalty. In the early days, before the Model T made automobiles affordable, racing was a way to attract the interest of the wealthy. Indeed, when Henry Ford needed backers in 1901, he raced against Alexander Winton at Grosse Pointe. The next year, he used bicycle racer Barney Oldfield, and started haunting race meetings.
Ford got more than money from racing. The man who designed his assembly lines, Charles Sorensen, was a woodworker who worked with a bicycle racer in 1902.
In Florida in 1905, Ford scavenged a piece from a wrecked French vehicle because he wanted to know why European cars were lighter and stronger. According to Robert Lacy, he had the part analyzed and discovered it was a vanadium alloy. He located a company in Canton, Ohio, to produce the metal for him, then organized his own steel company.
Despite pressure on auto makers to distance themselves from juvenile delinquents and dragsters in the 1950s, racing continued to provide the industry with experimental materials, innovative styles, and new manufacturing methods.
When Ed Cole was asked to produce a cheaper vehicle with newer, lighter weight materials, he introduced the Corvette. It didn’t sell well until he hired Zora Arkus-Duntov to improve performance for the 1956 race at Daytona. Arkus-Duntov had worked with race teams in Europe and liked to say he had driven race cars himself.
After Corvettes and Chevrolet engines took over racing, Ford upgraded the Mustang, and like Ed Cole, reached out to a former driver for ideas. However, Carroll Shelby wanted a contractual relationship, did not become an employee. When he retired from racing, he had developed his own sports car, the Cobra, and retained ownership of his ideas, set boundaries on his influence at Ford.
Racing and the Big Three diverged with the gasoline shortages of the 1970s and the need for lighter, stronger materials and safer vehicles. Solutions for the track, like carbon fiber parts that disintegrate on impact, were no longer transferable to the highway.
Since, designers for Formula One and Indy cars, with their exposed axles, have pursued aerodynamic shapes beyond anything that can be adopted for a family vehicle. NASCAR requires vehicles maintain the shape of street vehicles, but the materials and assembly deviate widely. Neither can provide new styling ideas for Detroit.
New materials, experimental engines are still transferable, but both are more expensive than the car makers think they can invest for performance cars geared to young men.
The most important thing the industry got from racing was an attitude towards risk taking. Despite ruminations that fans go to the track to watch crashes, drivers and their teams do not go out each weekend courting death. They know it’s a possibility, but they use ingenuity to reduce the risk. It’s that ingenuity in the face of impossible odds the automobile industry has lost.
When the Fiero developed handling problems in the 1980s, GM had no managers like Ed Cole to keep the car alive and hire men to solve them. Indeed, it had been frightened by the legal costs of Cole’s other introduction, the Corvair. While it may have sent a Fiero to Indy in 1984, the 1983 pace car was a Buick Rivera, and the 1985 one an Olds Calais.
When SUVs developed handling problems, Jacques Nasser looked for someone to blame, didn’t look to see if Ford had anyone who could find solutions. GM sent an Oldsmobile SUV to Indy in 2001, then reverted to Corvette pace cars.
The companies’ attitudes toward racing are a consequence of their inability to experiment. They’ve reduced racing to something predictable, a marketing ploy to reach certain customers. When it comes to genuine risk, they prefer wall street consultants to help them fend off attacks by a different breed of gamblers, men like Kirk Kerkorian and Steve Miller, Carl Icahn, and Wilbur Ross, who bet a system, not a game. They don’t care if they win a specific race so long as they accumulate enough points to win the championship. Racers never settle for just the money; they want the car that wins.
Sources:
Lacy, Robert. Ford, The Men and the Machine, 1986.
They maintain an ambiguous, older brother relationship with racing. It needs the publicity it generates, but doesn’t want to be too near anything quite so disreputable. Marketing men support racing teams, but hope desirable customers for luxury vehicles won’t notice.
They may accept Bunky Knudsen’s adage that they can sell an older man a young man’s car and can’t sell a young man an old man’s car, but they still lust for predictable sales to those with steady incomes, the bigger the better.
GM would rather publicize the Corvette as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500, than announce a Chevrolet driver won the NASCAR championship in 2005.
Pace cars are much more predictable. The company knows the car will perform, and will still look good for photographers when it’s done. Executives can go farther and bring it, or its clone, to track parties and let well-heeled supporters look under the hood, kick the wheels, even take rides. Race teams are much more protective of their vehicles.
But more, it’s harder to predict who will win a race, and the car crossing the line may no longer be a good advertisement for high performance road safety. Since 1970, GM has supplied the pace car to Indianapolis 31 times; Chrysler has had three vehicles, and Ford two. In contrast, GM vehicles won the NASCAR championship 26 times; Ford and Chrysler each five times.
Racing’s contribution to the automotive industry is more than publicity and brand loyalty. In the early days, before the Model T made automobiles affordable, racing was a way to attract the interest of the wealthy. Indeed, when Henry Ford needed backers in 1901, he raced against Alexander Winton at Grosse Pointe. The next year, he used bicycle racer Barney Oldfield, and started haunting race meetings.
Ford got more than money from racing. The man who designed his assembly lines, Charles Sorensen, was a woodworker who worked with a bicycle racer in 1902.
In Florida in 1905, Ford scavenged a piece from a wrecked French vehicle because he wanted to know why European cars were lighter and stronger. According to Robert Lacy, he had the part analyzed and discovered it was a vanadium alloy. He located a company in Canton, Ohio, to produce the metal for him, then organized his own steel company.
Despite pressure on auto makers to distance themselves from juvenile delinquents and dragsters in the 1950s, racing continued to provide the industry with experimental materials, innovative styles, and new manufacturing methods.
When Ed Cole was asked to produce a cheaper vehicle with newer, lighter weight materials, he introduced the Corvette. It didn’t sell well until he hired Zora Arkus-Duntov to improve performance for the 1956 race at Daytona. Arkus-Duntov had worked with race teams in Europe and liked to say he had driven race cars himself.
After Corvettes and Chevrolet engines took over racing, Ford upgraded the Mustang, and like Ed Cole, reached out to a former driver for ideas. However, Carroll Shelby wanted a contractual relationship, did not become an employee. When he retired from racing, he had developed his own sports car, the Cobra, and retained ownership of his ideas, set boundaries on his influence at Ford.
Racing and the Big Three diverged with the gasoline shortages of the 1970s and the need for lighter, stronger materials and safer vehicles. Solutions for the track, like carbon fiber parts that disintegrate on impact, were no longer transferable to the highway.
Since, designers for Formula One and Indy cars, with their exposed axles, have pursued aerodynamic shapes beyond anything that can be adopted for a family vehicle. NASCAR requires vehicles maintain the shape of street vehicles, but the materials and assembly deviate widely. Neither can provide new styling ideas for Detroit.
New materials, experimental engines are still transferable, but both are more expensive than the car makers think they can invest for performance cars geared to young men.
The most important thing the industry got from racing was an attitude towards risk taking. Despite ruminations that fans go to the track to watch crashes, drivers and their teams do not go out each weekend courting death. They know it’s a possibility, but they use ingenuity to reduce the risk. It’s that ingenuity in the face of impossible odds the automobile industry has lost.
When the Fiero developed handling problems in the 1980s, GM had no managers like Ed Cole to keep the car alive and hire men to solve them. Indeed, it had been frightened by the legal costs of Cole’s other introduction, the Corvair. While it may have sent a Fiero to Indy in 1984, the 1983 pace car was a Buick Rivera, and the 1985 one an Olds Calais.
When SUVs developed handling problems, Jacques Nasser looked for someone to blame, didn’t look to see if Ford had anyone who could find solutions. GM sent an Oldsmobile SUV to Indy in 2001, then reverted to Corvette pace cars.
The companies’ attitudes toward racing are a consequence of their inability to experiment. They’ve reduced racing to something predictable, a marketing ploy to reach certain customers. When it comes to genuine risk, they prefer wall street consultants to help them fend off attacks by a different breed of gamblers, men like Kirk Kerkorian and Steve Miller, Carl Icahn, and Wilbur Ross, who bet a system, not a game. They don’t care if they win a specific race so long as they accumulate enough points to win the championship. Racers never settle for just the money; they want the car that wins.
Sources:
Lacy, Robert. Ford, The Men and the Machine, 1986.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Failure - Part 1 - Superstition
How can a company continue to fail and still survive?
In the 1980s, Roger Smith said General Motors’ problems included long gestation times to bring new vehicles to market. In addition to engineering delays, plants were not designed for quick retooling.
Today, we’re told GM has problems with long lead times and its plants can’t switch from one model to another. Indeed, the chairman, Rick Wagoner, didn’t even know eight flexible plants existed when he announced it was a new priority.
Smith opened a plant in Fremont, California, with Toyota to learn better manufacturing processes. Micheline Maynard reports that no one from GM attended a plant walk through with Toyota executives to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the joint venture, although some did show for the public ceremony.
When Chrysler was bankrupt, Lee Iacocca said one problem was benefits, and wanted to transfer the cost of health care to the federal government, like its rivals in Japan and Europe. No one listened. Today the answer is manage automobile prices by eliminating medical insurance, but don’t try to manage medical costs.
Observers like Daniel Arst claim GM’s problems 20 years ago were its union contracts, and that it’s still too compliant. Union members complain the UAW’s not assertive enough. When Chrysler was bankrupt, the union demanded a place on the board. The adversarial model was more familiar, but has reached a crisis with suppliers who superintend labor by sending productive work to other countries.
When Ford and GM first noticed the Japanese were doing things differently, they experimented with some of their methods. R. P. Coe, a Ford worker in Indianapolis, claims
Back when I was an undergraduate taking courses in education, I was told people who learned things easily also relearned easily, but those who had problems learning something had an even harder time relearning.
Financial and engineering curricula both have sequences of challenging courses. Some schools deliberately increase the difficulty to weed out students and enhance their reputations. Those students who survive will either be very good, or those who may become too committed to what was so difficult to master.
From the first hiring freezes in the 1970s, many have feared for their jobs. In periods when there were more applicants than jobs, those who were hired felt lucky. Each time companies announced layoffs, those who survived felt lucky to stay.
Luck is not predictable, and does not produce rationale behavior. Gamblers like John DeLorean may respond with bravado. Most are more conservative and respond to the unpredictable with superstitious behavior that stresses repeating what worked before. When rituals fail, men look for what they did wrong, analyze how they deviated from the past.
Nothing has worked because no one committed to any solution long enough for it to work. Coe complains Ford abandoned Japanese employee relations, Maynard reports GM abandoned manufacturing innovation, Arst tells us companies and the UAW abandoned non-traditional agreements, shareholders claim managers abandoned a commitment to cost containment.
When one listens to people discussing today’s problems at GM, one hears the same things one heard 30 years ago. One could be excused for thinking the problems are still the same. Instead, I suspect the problems today are the direct consequences of 30 years of reaction, and that constant retrenchment has created its own view of the possible.
Superstition does not encourage permanent change; it promises quick techniques for perpetuating what worked in the past, and reinforces the view the past was a golden age that needs to be restored. Men who’ve come through rigorous training programs may be even more likely to hold to what first worked.
It would seem as soon as something worked, and things improved, people didn’t just feel safe reverting to what they did before, but felt compelled to return to the previous mode as evidence of success. When problems resurface, they never reconsider the last thing tried, but look for a new charm. Today’s solutions, sending as much work overseas as possible, are as much ritual as measured response, but with more severe consequences than 30 years of insecurity.
Sources
Arst, Daniel. “Hand in Hand, Over the Precipice, The New York Times, 2 April 2006.
Coe, R. P. “Ford Mood,” Detroit News, 27 January 2006.
Maynard, Micheline. “At G.M.’s Helm Or Going Under?,” The New York Times, 29 March 2006.
In the 1980s, Roger Smith said General Motors’ problems included long gestation times to bring new vehicles to market. In addition to engineering delays, plants were not designed for quick retooling.
Today, we’re told GM has problems with long lead times and its plants can’t switch from one model to another. Indeed, the chairman, Rick Wagoner, didn’t even know eight flexible plants existed when he announced it was a new priority.
Smith opened a plant in Fremont, California, with Toyota to learn better manufacturing processes. Micheline Maynard reports that no one from GM attended a plant walk through with Toyota executives to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the joint venture, although some did show for the public ceremony.
When Chrysler was bankrupt, Lee Iacocca said one problem was benefits, and wanted to transfer the cost of health care to the federal government, like its rivals in Japan and Europe. No one listened. Today the answer is manage automobile prices by eliminating medical insurance, but don’t try to manage medical costs.
Observers like Daniel Arst claim GM’s problems 20 years ago were its union contracts, and that it’s still too compliant. Union members complain the UAW’s not assertive enough. When Chrysler was bankrupt, the union demanded a place on the board. The adversarial model was more familiar, but has reached a crisis with suppliers who superintend labor by sending productive work to other countries.
When Ford and GM first noticed the Japanese were doing things differently, they experimented with some of their methods. R. P. Coe, a Ford worker in Indianapolis, claims
The Company quit investing in the workers, who drove business success through employee involvement programs. These programs saved Ford millions and led to many cost reductions and help improve manufacturing processes.How can so many smart people fail to learn?
Back when I was an undergraduate taking courses in education, I was told people who learned things easily also relearned easily, but those who had problems learning something had an even harder time relearning.
Financial and engineering curricula both have sequences of challenging courses. Some schools deliberately increase the difficulty to weed out students and enhance their reputations. Those students who survive will either be very good, or those who may become too committed to what was so difficult to master.
From the first hiring freezes in the 1970s, many have feared for their jobs. In periods when there were more applicants than jobs, those who were hired felt lucky. Each time companies announced layoffs, those who survived felt lucky to stay.
Luck is not predictable, and does not produce rationale behavior. Gamblers like John DeLorean may respond with bravado. Most are more conservative and respond to the unpredictable with superstitious behavior that stresses repeating what worked before. When rituals fail, men look for what they did wrong, analyze how they deviated from the past.
Nothing has worked because no one committed to any solution long enough for it to work. Coe complains Ford abandoned Japanese employee relations, Maynard reports GM abandoned manufacturing innovation, Arst tells us companies and the UAW abandoned non-traditional agreements, shareholders claim managers abandoned a commitment to cost containment.
When one listens to people discussing today’s problems at GM, one hears the same things one heard 30 years ago. One could be excused for thinking the problems are still the same. Instead, I suspect the problems today are the direct consequences of 30 years of reaction, and that constant retrenchment has created its own view of the possible.
Superstition does not encourage permanent change; it promises quick techniques for perpetuating what worked in the past, and reinforces the view the past was a golden age that needs to be restored. Men who’ve come through rigorous training programs may be even more likely to hold to what first worked.
It would seem as soon as something worked, and things improved, people didn’t just feel safe reverting to what they did before, but felt compelled to return to the previous mode as evidence of success. When problems resurface, they never reconsider the last thing tried, but look for a new charm. Today’s solutions, sending as much work overseas as possible, are as much ritual as measured response, but with more severe consequences than 30 years of insecurity.
Sources
Arst, Daniel. “Hand in Hand, Over the Precipice, The New York Times, 2 April 2006.
Coe, R. P. “Ford Mood,” Detroit News, 27 January 2006.
Maynard, Micheline. “At G.M.’s Helm Or Going Under?,” The New York Times, 29 March 2006.
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