1B: Joyce Carol Oates (b. June 16, 1938)

Joyce Carol Oates on the cover of Newsweek, December 11, 1972

  

"If you’re not afraid of much in life, you haven’t experienced life yet! There is much, much to be fearful of, though perhaps it is not a good idea to know this. The disasters that you might expect are not likely to happen, but others will, totally unexpected ones. Out of nowhere, they will come, and you will say, But I had no idea. That is the point: you have no idea. Just wait."

--Joyce Carol Oates, in The New Yorker, June 24, 2013

Celestial Timepiece: The Joyce Carol Oates Homepage  has extensive information about Oates. At this site you'll find a biography of her, interviews with her, and criticism of her work. The New York Times has written many articles on Oates. You can find a lengthy interview here with Oates, conducted in 1997, by the Academy of Achievement; the site includes videos and written transcripts of the interview.  Her stature in American and world literature is great; she is often one of the favorites to win the Nobel Prize in literature.  She teaches writing at Princeton University. She is prolific. Her full list of books is here.

Here are 10 Tips on Writing from Oates.

Oates on "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
The inspiration for Arnold Friend of "'Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?' was Charles Schmid, the Pied Piper of Tucson:"

"[Oates's story is] loosely based upon the true story of Charles 'Smitty' Schmid (b. 1942; d. 1975), a serial killer in Tucson, Arizona, called the 'Pied Piper of Tucson.' He was able to lure girls into being with him, partly because he came from wealth. He had a house on his parents’ property, at which he often held parties. He wore pancake makeup and drew a mole on his face to make a 'beauty mark.' He died his reddish-brown hair black, and was known to have gotten several girls to dye their hair for him. He stood between 5’3’’ and 5’4’’ tall, but stuffed his boots with wadded up newspapers and crushed cans to make himself taller. In the end, he killed 3 girls (aged 17, 15, 13), burying their bodies in the desert. He was finally caught through a confession of a former confidante. When he killed the first girl, Alleen Rowe, he lured her out of her house while a friend of his waited in the car. "Smitty" was said to have virtually talked his victim into his car. He also claimed to have some hallucinogenic or psychic powers. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison; he was killed in 1975 by other inmates."--by Michael Kiggins, Nashville State Community College, at http://ww2.nscc.edu/kiggins_m/4-oates.pdf

Oates and Bob Dylan
Oates has said that her story, "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?", was inspired by the Tucson murderer described above, not Bob Dylan, though she dedicated her story to him. However, she did say that she was listening to Dylan at the time that she wrote the story.   Here she is asked about the Dylan connection:

She has also written "Dylan at 60," a reflection on his career.  Now for some Dylan himself, around the time Oates wrote "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-65

Bob Dylan singing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" in a London hotel

from the film "Don't Look Back" (1965).  Dylan starts singing

 "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (at 2:20) after Donovan sings.

 Some say that Dylan's song shares a mood with the Oates story.  Do you agree?

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last

But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun

Crying like a fire in the sun

Look out the saints are comin’ through

And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense

Take what you have gathered from coincidence

The empty-handed painter from your streets

Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets

This sky, too, is folding under you

And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home

All your reindeer armies, are all going home

The lover who just walked out your door

Has taken all his blankets from the floor

The carpet, too, is moving under you

And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you

Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you

The vagabond who’s rapping at your door

Is standing in the clothes that you once wore

Strike another match, go start anew

And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

Here are links to two other Dylan classics: the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video from 1965 and "Like A Rolling Stone" (studio version) and "Like a Rolling Stone" (live performance), the original recording from 1965. Dylan turned 72 on May 24, 2013. He is still recording new music and playing concerts around the world.  You can learn more about Dylan at his website.

If the above video from The New Yorker with
 Joyce Carol Oates does not work, try this link.

Oates on Fiction
In an  interview with The New Yorker, June 24, 2013, Oates has this to say:

Interviewer:
There’s been quite a bit of discussion lately about the notion of likability in fictional characters—and whether female writers are under pressure to consider it more than male writers are. It’s difficult to sympathize fully with either of these two characters [in "Mastiff"]. You refer to the woman in the moment of crisis as “the sort of woman you pity even as you inch away from her.” Do you feel you need to like—or, at least, sympathize with—a character in order to inhabit him or her for the space of a story?

Oates:
I sympathize with—and identify with—all sorts of people. I think that there is a measure of hypocrisy in those who profess surprise at flawed characters in fiction—virtually everyone is flawed, and everyone is, at one time or another, ignoble. The concept of a “hero” is unreal and of little interest. Also, we fall in love with imperfect people—some of us with actual criminals, murderers. This is a fact of life. Only in fiction are individuals supposed to be perfect—a woman must be “beautiful” to be a protagonist. In life, virtually anything goes. I think it should be thrilling—it should certainly be encouraging—to be assured that people who are deeply flawed can be nonetheless socially and sexually “successful,” admired, and beloved. If only perfect people were loved, where would that leave the rest of us? It’s hypocritical to expect of others that they be perfect when we know how imperfect we are ourselves. Maybe that’s a delusion of our species, an aspect of denial.

Interviewer:
Is it different if you’re writing a novel?

Oates:
In a novel, it is expected that people will change, over a period of time. The concept of change in personalities is fascinating—one sees definite change in young people, less obvious change in older people. (This is why so many of us like to teach: we can effect change—one hopes, for the better.) The novel is a sort of laboratory experiment in which numerous elements and conditions are brought together with results that should be both inevitable and somewhat unexpected. A short story is, by definition, a short “take,” but it may summarize a life, or it may suggest a life to come. In “Mastiff,” a woman and a man come together—somewhat unexpectedly to both. Under other circumstances, they might not even have liked each other; now, they are going to make a life together. If you don’t think that a marriage can begin in such a way, you are either not being honest or you haven’t had much experience. A marriage like this can be a very good one, since both wife and husband know that they will have to work hard to achieve the relationship: it didn’t come “naturally.”

Oates is Interviewed
Here is a selection of interviews with Oates: The Telegraph, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, Tavis Smiley  and C-SPAN. The last two interviews are videos.

Oates and her Influences
In her interview with Salon, Oates discusses her influences: "The great influences that came into my life when I was in my 20s, I suppose. James Joyce is a great influence in many ways. The Joycean sentence, the way Joyce combines different senses, the way he looked at the world. Oddly enough, Joyce never wrote, as you know, about violence in any way. He said he abhorred violence. He never wrote about that. But there is a kind of domestic violence in Joyce’s writing. So Joyce is certainly an influence. Kafka was a strong influence and Lewis Carroll — 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' — the sensibility I really identified very much with Lewis Carroll. The sense of the absurd, a sort of comic absurd."

Joyce Carol Oates in the ring with World Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson in Catskill, NY, Fall,1986. At the time Oates was working on her book On Boxing. Here is a selection from it. She also reviewed Tyson's Undisputed Truth.

Great Libraries

The request went out today in English 1A.  Name some great libraries around the world.

Click on these links for the answer:

18 Libraries Every Book Lover Should Visit In Their Lifetime

and

62 of the World's Most Beautiful Libraries

and

50 of the Most Beautiful Libraries in the World

Does Los Angeles have any great libraries? Name them and get rich. Link them in the Comments. And get really rich.

1A and 1B: Charles Simic (1938--)

Charles Simic was born in Belgrade in 1938.
He was the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2007
and is on the faculty of the University of New Hampshire.
You can read his poetry at this page.
His poetry appears frequently in anthologies.
One of his celebrated poems is "Prodigy."
You can read it and listen to him read it aloud here.

"I wanted a poem a dog can understand."

from his interview with the Paris Review

"Charles Simic is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today. Simic’s work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant,' the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and, simultaneously, the Wallace Stevens Award and appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate. He taught English and creative writing for over thirty years at the University of New Hampshire. Although he emigrated to the U.S. from Yugoslavia as a teenager, Simic writes in English, drawing upon his own experiences of war-torn Belgrade to compose poems about the physical and spiritual poverty of modern life. Liam Rector, writing for the Hudson Review, has noted that the author’s work 'has about it a purity, an originality unmatched by many of his contemporaries.' Though Simic’s popularity and profile may have increased dramatically over the two decades, his work has always enjoyed critical praise. In the Chicago Review, Victor Contoski characterized Simic’s work as 'some of the most strikingly original poetry of our time, a poetry shockingly stark in its concepts, imagery, and language.' Georgia Review correspondent Peter Stitt wrote: 'The fact that [Simic] spent his first eleven years surviving World War II as a resident of Eastern Europe makes him a going-away-from-home writer in an especially profound way...He is one of the wisest poets of his generation, and one of the best.'

"Simic spent his formative years in Belgrade. His early childhood coincided with World War II and his family was forced to evacuate their home several times to escape indiscriminate bombing; as he has put it, 'My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin.' The atmosphere of violence and desperation continued after the war. Simic’s father left the country for work in Italy, and his mother tried several times to follow, only to be turned back by authorities. When Simic was fifteen, his mother finally arranged for the family to travel to Paris. After a year, Simic sailed for America and a reunion with his father. The family moved to Chicago, where Simic attended high school and began to take a serious interest in poetry—though he admits that one reason he began exploring the art form was to meet girls."

Read the remainder of the above biography of Simic at this page.

For more information about Simic click on this.

You can watch him on YouTube reading a selection of his poems at Cornell (his reading begins at 7:30), at the Griffin Poetry Prize, and three poems at the Dodge Poetry Festival. All are closed captioned.

Read this informative interview with Simic. It ran in The Atlantic, May 6, 2015. It's called "Writers Should Look for What Others Don't See" and part of a series where writers talk about literature. Simic talks fondly of a poem, "A Sight in Camp," by Walt Whitman. Here's what he had to say about Whitman's poem: "It’s just so matter-of-fact. There is not an extra word. Everything is completely pared down to the essentials. The whole thing is so understandable, vivid, poignant, troubling." Simic sounds like a man who loves to read. Click here to see more of what Simic has to say.

Simic was also interviewed by Granta for their August 5, 2013. In it he says, "A brief poem intended to capture the imagination of the reader requires endless tinkering to get all its parts right."

Simic loves Buster Keaton. He wrote and engaging essay about the filmmaker and comic actor. Not familiar with Buster Keaton? Watch this to see him in (silent) action.

"My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin."

from his interview with the Cortland Review 

 Charles Simic's Yugoslav passport
Belgrade, where Simic was born, was the capital of Yugoslavia from 1918-2006. When Yugoslavia was dissolved in 2006, Belgrade became the capital of Serbia.

1A: Malcolm X

"Learning to Read," which appears in 50 Essays, is taken from The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
 The book, released in 1965, was written by Alex Haley, based on interviews he conducted with Malcolm X. 

Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19, 1925 and was assassinated on February 21, 1965 in New York City when he was about to address a crowd of 400 gathered for a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

Where else can you turn to learn more about Malcolm X?  The Malcolm X Official Website, of course. You can also go to the Biography page on Malcolm to learn more about him.  They also have brief video clips clips about his life.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X
 meet on March 26, 1964.  It was their only meeting.

Malcolm and Martin, closer than we ever thought
By John Blake, CNN
May 19, 2010 11:36 a.m. EDT

(CNN) -- The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was leaving a news conference one afternoon when a tall man with a coppery complexion stepped out of the crowd and blocked his path.
Malcolm X, the African-American Muslim leader who once called King "Rev. Dr. Chicken-wing," extended his hand and smiled.

"Well, Malcolm, good to see you," King said after taking Malcolm X's hand.

"Good to see you," Malcolm X replied as both men broke into huge grins while a gaggle of photographers snapped pictures of their only meeting.

That encounter on March 26, 1964, lasted only a minute. But a photo of that meeting has tantalized scholars and supporters of both men for more than 45 years.

To read the remainder of the CNN report, follow this link.

The New Yorker,  April 25, 2011

"This American Life The making and remaking of Malcolm X".

by David Remnick

“You’re another of the white man’s tools sent to spy!” Malcolm told Alex Haley when they first met.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY EVE ARNOLD / MAGNUM

On summer nights, in 1963, Malcolm X drove his blue Oldsmobile from Mosque No. 7, the Harlem headquarters of the Nation of Islam, to an apartment building on Grove Street, in Greenwich Village, where a freelance writer named Alex Haley sat waiting for him in an eight-by-ten-foot studio. There, the two would remain until early morning. Haley sat at a desk typing notes while Malcolm—tall, austere, dressed always in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow dark tie—drank cup after cup of coffee, paced the room, and talked. What emerged was the hegira of Malcolm’s life as a black man in mid-century America: his transformation from Malcolm Little, born in Omaha to troubled parents whose salve against racist harassment and violence was the black-nationalist creed of Marcus Garvey; to Detroit Red, a numbers-running hustler on the streets of Boston and New York; to a convicted felon known among fellow-prisoners as Satan; to Malcolm X, a charismatic deputy to the Nation of Islam’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the most electrifying proponent of black nationalism alive. “My whole life has been a chronology of changes,” Malcolm told Haley one night, and, in a few months, he would transform himself yet again, becoming El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a Sunni Muslim.

You can read all of the The New Yorker arbicle, above, here

Here is a PBS Documentary on Malcolm X, if your browser allows you to watch it.  If not, try this link.

The Ballot or the Bullet
a speech delivered by Malcolm X
April 3, 1964
Cleveland, Ohio

Mr. Moderator, Brother Lomax, brothers and sisters, friends and enemies: I just can't believe everyone in here is a friend, and I don't want to leave anybody out. The question tonight, as I understand it, is "The Negro Revolt, and Where Do We Go From Here?" or What Next?" In my little humble way of understanding it, it points toward either the ballot or the bullet.

Before we try and explain what is meant by the ballot or the bullet, I would like to clarify something concerning myself. I'm still a Muslim; my religion is still Islam. That's my personal belief. Just as Adam Clayton Powell is a Christian minister who heads the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, but at the same time takes part in the political struggles to try and bring about rights to the black people in this country; and Dr. Martin Luther King is a Christian minister down in Atlanta, Georgia, who heads another organization fighting for the civil rights of black people in this country; and Reverend Galamison, I guess you've heard of him, is another Christian minister in New York who has been deeply involved in the school boycotts to eliminate segregated education; well, I myself am a minister, not a Christian minister, but a Muslim minister; and I believe in action on all fronts by whatever means necessary.

Although I'm still a Muslim, I'm not here tonight to discuss my religion. I'm not here to try and change your religion. I'm not here to argue or discuss anything that we differ about, because it's time for us to submerge our differences and realize that it is best for us to first see that we have the same problem, a common problem, a problem that will make you catch hell whether you're a Baptist, or a Methodist, or a Muslim, or a nationalist. Whether you're educated or illiterate, whether you live on the boulevard or in the alley, you're going to catch hell just like I am. We're all in the same boat and we all are going to catch the same hell from the same man. He just happens to be a white man. All of us have suffered here, in this country, political oppression at the hands of the white man, economic exploitation at the hands of the white man, and social degradation at the hands of the white man.

To read the remainder of the speech, click on this link.

Malcolm X at the time he was charged with breaking and entering in 1946.
  Known as Malcolm Little at the time, he would eventually serve his prison term
 through 1952 in Norfolk, Massachusetts, where he developed  his language skills
 and knowledge of history and philosophy, among other subjects.
He began signing his name Malcolm X in 1950.

1A: Stephen King

Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview

The horror master looks back on his four-decade career

By Andy Greene | October 31, 2014

Stephen King's office building sits on a particularly dreary dead-end road on the outskirts of Bangor, Maine, just down the street from a gun-and-ammo store, a snowplow dealership and, appropriately enough, an old cemetery. From the outside, the anonymous building looks like a new branch of Dunder Mifflin, a very deliberate choice meant to keep King and his tiny staff safe. "We can't be on a main road because people would find us," says one of his assistants. "And it's not people you want to find you. He draws some weird people."

Once buzzed in, a visitor enters a sort of Stephen King nirvana – rooms decorated with fan-created artwork populated with characters from his novels, a Stephen King Simpsons action figure, a freakish bobble-head doll of the demented clown from his 1986 book IT, and piles and piles of books. He keeps an old Gothic house (complete with spiderwebs and bats on the front gate) just a few miles away that draws bus loads of tourists, but he's virtually never there. Most of the year, he lives two and a half hours away in Lovell, Maine, and now with his three kids grown, he and his wife, Tabitha, head down to Sarasota, Florida, at the height of winter.

King himself only comes into the office about once a month, but today he stopped by and, as usual, he's juggling a lot of projects at once. He just polished off a final draft of his upcoming serial-killer book Finders Keepers (a sequel to his recent work Mr. Mercedes), a pretty astonishing feat considering he will also release two books this year, write a screenplay for the new Joan Allen/Anthony LaPaglia film A Good Marriage and continue to fine-tune Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a musical he wrote with John Mellencamp.

But right now, the 67-year-old is hunched over an easy chair in his office, chomping on a doughnut that's leaving a growing pile of powdered sugar on his black turtleneck shirt. He's excited about the upcoming publication of Revival, a modern-day Frankenstein story about a preacher who's obsessed with the healing powers of electricity and his 50-year relationship with a drug-addled rock guitarist. It's basically guaranteed to land at Number One on The New York Times bestseller list.

Since 1974, when Carrie hit shelves, King has sold an estimated 350 million books, and he's now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. John Grisham and Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James may outsell him these days, but it's hardly a problem. "He's not competitive," says his longtime agent Chuck Verrill. "The only guy he ever cared about was Tom Clancy. They were both at Penguin once, and it was made clear to King that he was seen as the second banana to Clancy. He didn't like that, but he's very content where he is right now." 

King hasn't done many recent in-depth print interviews since a van accident nearly killed him 15 years ago, but he decided to sit down with Rolling Stone to discuss his life and career.

The vast majority of your books deal with either horror or the supernatural. What drew you toward those subjects?It's built in. That's all. The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated. I can't explain it. My wife and kids drink coffee. But I don't. I like tea. My wife and kids won't touch a pizza with anchovies on it. But I like anchovies. The stuff I was drawn to was built in as part of my equipment.

Did you ever feel shame about that?No. I thought it was great fun to scare people. I also knew it was socially acceptable because there were a lot of horror movies out there. And I cut my teeth on horror comics like The Crypt of Terror.

By writing horror novels, you entered one of the least respected genres of fiction.Yeah. It's one of the genres that live across the tracks in the literary community, but what could I do? That's where I was drawn. I love D.H. Lawrence. And James Dickey's poetry, Émile Zola, Steinbeck . . . Fitzgerald, not so much. Hemingway, not at all. Hemingway sucks, basically. If people like that, terrific. But if I set out to write that way, what would've come out would've been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me. And I have to say this: To a degree, I have elevated the horror genre.

Few would argue with that.It's more respected now. I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature. I'm not trying to be conceited or anything. Raymond Chandler elevated the detective genre. People who have done wonderful work really blur the line.

A lot of critics were pretty brutal to you when you were starting out.

Early in my career, The Village Voice did a caricature of me that hurts even today when I think about it. It was a picture of me eating money. I had this big, bloated face. It was this assumption that if fiction was selling a lot of copies, it was bad. If something is accessible to a lot of people, it's got to be dumb because most people are dumb. And that's elitist. I don't buy it.

But that attitude continues to this day. Literary critic Harold Bloom viciously ripped into you when you won the National Book Award about 10 years ago.Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess. He might be able to say that Mark Twain is a great writer, but it's impossible for him to say that there's a direct line of descent from, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Jim Thompson because he doesn't read guys like Thompson. He just thinks, "I never read him, but I know he's terrible." Michiko Kakutani, who writes reviews for The New York Times, is the same way. She'll review a book like David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, which is one of the best novels of the year. It's as good as Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, has the same kind of deep literary resonance. But because it has elements of fantasy and science fiction, Kakutani doesn't want to understand it. In that sense, Bloom and Kakutani and a number of gray eminences in literary criticism are like children who say, "I can't possibly eat this meal because the different kinds of food are touching on the plate!"

Film critics can look at a popular movie like Jaws and heap praise upon it, then in another section of the paper, the critics will bash you for The Stand.

By its very nature, film is supposed to be an accessible medium to everybody. Let's face it, you can take a fucking illiterate to Jaws and he can understand what's going on. I don't know who the Harold Bloom of the film world is, but if you found someone like that and said to him, "Compare Jaws with 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut," he'd just laugh and say, "Well, Jaws is a piece of crappy, popular entertainment, but 400 Blows is cinema." It's the same elitism.

Switching gears, your new book Revival talks a lot about religion. Specifically, one of the two main characters is a reverend that turns on God when his family dies but also delivers a sermon about why religion is a complete fraud. How much of that sermon mirrors your own beliefs?My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that's been misused by a lot of people. I grew up in a Methodist church, and we went to services every Sunday and to Bible school in the summer. We didn't have a choice. We just did it. So all that stuff about childhood religion in Revival is basically autobiographical. But as a kid, I had doubts. When I went to Methodist youth fellowship, we were taught that the Catholics were all going to go to hell because they worship idols. So right there, I'm saying to myself, "Catholics are going to go to hell, but my aunt Molly married a Catholic and she converted and she's got 11 kids and they're all pretty nice and one of them's my good friend – they're all going to go to hell?" I'm thinking to myself, "This is bullshit." And if that's bullshit, how much of the rest of it is bullshit?

Did you relay any of your doubts to your mother?Jesus, no! I loved her. I never would have done that. Once I got through high school, that was it for me. When you see somebody like Jimmy Swaggart and he's supposed to be this great minister touched by God, and he's paying whores because he wants to look up their dresses, it's just all hypocrisy.

All that said, you've made it clear over the years that you still believe in God.Yeah. I choose to believe in God because it makes things better. You have a meditation point, a source of strength. I don't ask myself, "Well, does God exist or does God not exist?" I choose to believe that God exists, and therefore I can say, "God, I can't do this by myself. Help me not to take a drink today. Help me not to take a drug today." And that works fine for me.

Do you believe in the afterlife?I don't know. I'm totally agnostic on that one. Let's put it this way, I would like to believe that there is some sort of an afterlife. I do believe that when we're in the process of dying, that all these emergency circuits in the brain take over. I base what I'm saying not on any empirical evidence. I think it's very possible that when you're dying, these circuits open up, which would explain this whole white-light phenomena – when people clinically die and they see their relatives and stuff and say, "Hello, it's great to see you."

To read more of this interview click on this.

1A: Single-tasking, Multitasking, and Texting While Walking

James Hamblin, M.D., above, is a senior editor at The Atlantic and writes its health column.

Stanford News, August 24, 2009, reports, "Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price, Stanford Study Shows" by Adam Gorlick. Here are some of the first paragraphs:

"People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.

"High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments.

"But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.

"'They're suckers for irrelevancy,' said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'Everything distracts them.'

"Social scientists have long assumed that it's impossible to process more than one string of information at a time. The brain just can't do it. But many researchers have guessed that people who appear to multitask must have superb control over what they think about and what they pay attention to." 

Click on this link to see the rest of the Stanford News article.

ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos
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The New York Times

Stop Googling. Let's Talk.

By SHERRY TURKLE   SEPT. 26, 2015

COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, “elsewhere.”

These days, we feel less of a need to hide the fact that we are dividing our attention. In a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended. But they weren’t happy about it; 82 percent of adults felt that the way they used their phones in social settings hurt the conversation.

I’ve been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, I’ve had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk? I’ve looked at families, friendships and romance. I’ve studied schools, universities and workplaces. When college students explain to me how dividing their attention plays out in the dining hall, some refer to a “rule of three.” In a conversation among five or six people at dinner, you have to check that three people are paying attention — heads up — before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds, but with different people having their heads up at different times. The effect is what you would expect: Conversation is kept relatively light, on topics where people feel they can drop in and out.

Young people spoke to me enthusiastically about the good things that flow from a life lived by the rule of three, which you can follow not only during meals but all the time. First of all, there is the magic of the always available elsewhere. You can put your attention wherever you want it to be. You can always be heard. You never have to be bored. When you sense that a lull in the conversation is coming, you can shift your attention from the people in the room to the world you can find on your phone. But the students also described a sense of loss.

One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add “facts” to their conversation. “Daddy,” she said, “stop Googling. I want to talk to you.” A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

Read the rest of this essay here.

This video also appears with Closed Caption (CC) here.
 A PDF of an essay by Sherry Turkle, similar to the talk above, appears here,
 and it was published in her book,
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Each Other and Less from Each Other

1A, 1B, 1C: OFF-CAMPUS LIFE: NEWSPAPER READING

Bob Marley, yes, that Bob Marley, reading the newspaper.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Off-Campus Life

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By JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS

Published: September 5, 2009

Try to read a good newspaper every day — at bedtime or at breakfast or when you take a break in the afternoon. If you are interested in art, literature or music, widen your horizons by poring over the science section. In the mood for spicy scandals? Read the business pages. Want to impress your poli sci prof? Read columnists.

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Tamara Shopsin

Educators give some helpful advice to young adults entering school this fall.

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The newspaper will be your path to the world at large. At Williams College, where I was a student in the 1930s, we read the alarming reports in The Times about Germany’s brutal onslaught against peaceful nations. In the spring of 1938, we burned Hitler in effigy — and made Page 11 of The Times! In June 1940, as France fell to Nazi troops, hundreds of graduating seniors urged compulsory military training, and provided another Williams story to the paper.

In addition, a great newspaper will teach you how to write: most articles are models of clarity and substance — with no academic jargon! Pay attention to the writer’s vocabulary, see how many active verbs are used, file away striking new words for future use. Study how articles are structured — how the first paragraph tells the reader simply and clearly the subject and main points. Take a look at the last paragraph; it will often show you how to conclude an essay with a pithy phrase or a telling quotation.
A great newspaper will help you in the classroom — and it will be your conduit to the real world outside the classroom. Become addicted.

Another way to stay connected with the real world: get to know your teachers outside of class. Chat and engage with them, perhaps on the walk away from class. Ask them not only about the coursework but also about their own intellectual interests and research. Equally important to maintaining that lifeline to the universe beyond college is getting to know the janitors and housekeepers in your dorm, the security staff on the campus, the people who work in the cafeteria. Talk to them, ask them questions and thank them.

James MacGregor Burns, a professor emeritus of government at Williams College and the author, most recently, of “Packing the Court,” has been teaching since 

HERE'S A COUPLE OF THINGS I WANT TO ADD: During the first weeks of school I often stress the importance of reading the newspaper daily.  James MacGregor Burns, who has been a college teacher for over 50 years and the author of many books on U.S. government and history, encourages students to "[t]ry to read a good newspaper every day."  Most of you do all the things he suggests, but it is good to see his ideas in print. In addition to reading MacGregor's article, (see above), you might want to take a look at some of these other articles in The New York Times Education Life section.  You'll find articles on "The Year of the MOOC,"   and . . . you name it. Please post some of your reactions to what Burns and the other writers have to say.  What do you think is going on at colleges today?

Follow these links to three newspapers that you should become familiar with.  Why not make one of these your home page?

Los Angeles Times

The New York Times

The Washington Post

and this one, too:

BBC news

Want to see more newspapers? Of course. See Newseum.

Eva Longoria with newspaper. Not just an accessory.