Wrapped Up In Books

My mp3 player has saved me from countless hours of boredom at my summer job. I spend the better part of my shift listening to NPR, music files, podcasts, and now I've also begun listening to audiobooks. The other day I discovered LibriVox, a public domain assembly of audiobooks with chapters read by volunteers. Since it's public domain, there aren't many books from 1900 forward, so most of the titles don't really interest me, but I've been listening to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey which is the only Jane Austen title that I'm at all interested in. I'm especially enjoying Austen's commentary on the "tradition of the novel" as she saw it. The novel genre was only about a century old when she started writing and it was already a form ripe for parody.

Best line of the book, so far: "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."

The volunteer readers are a mixed bag, though. Some are American, some British, I think one was even Scottish. Some of the Americans tend to read in a snooty, aristocratic voice which is somewhat distracting. One reader, though, was outstanding in the way she was able to create completely unique voices for each of the characters during the dialogue passages. It was very impressive. At first I thought there was more than one person reading, but it was the same woman throughout the chapter. She read two chapters from the book and they were the best chapters so far.

Cemetry Gates

An itinerate professor posted a satirical article for students titled "How To Cheat Good" which describes several ways in which students make it easy for teachers to catch them in the act of plagiarizing their work. In my own experience, I have witnessed most of the "tips" he describes in one form or another. I've always thought that it's a good thing that most students don't have any clue about how to plagiarize effectively so that they can successfully fool the teacher. This is because, in my experience, those students who intentionally plagiarize tend to fall into one of three general categories:

1) Those who are stupid.

2) Those who are lazy.

3) Those who are stupid and lazy.

They're stupid because they don't seem to realize how easy it is for me to track down the online sources that they plagiarized from (and nowadays, almost all of the plagiarism is done with the help of the internet--I'd be at a total loss if they were to start copying stuff from books in the library). They might be able to get away with plagiarizing from online sources if their teacher were an older individual who isn't quite comfortable or knowledgable about conducting online searches, but in my class, they should know better since I often make use of online and electronic materials in my classes.

They're lazy as a result of their tendency to procrastinate. It's so easy to just put off writing a paper one more day--one more day--one more day--until suddenly it's the 11:30 p.m. the night before the paper is due and the student hasn't done squat for the assignment. One could pull an all-nighter and get it done (and I've known a handful of students who have done this), but it's much easier to just to Google the topic or find the approprate article from Wikipedia and copy and paste from the net into Word. And thus it is very easy for me to track down.

Those who are stupid and lazy just make my life so much easier--and amusing. Once, in a lit class, a girl tried to turn in a paper that was nothing more than a couple of articles about an author cut and pasted from two online encyclopedias. She didn't even bother to change the article headings, so as soon as I read, in the first paragraph, "Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963) - " I had a hunch that something was amiss.

There is, of course, unintentional plagiarism which I often encounter in composition classes. Unintentional plagiarism is a result of the student's inexperience with the act of documenting sources. I expect a degree of unintentional plagiarism from my students, especially early in the semester, but there's a clear difference between someone who doesn't know how to properly cite a website and someone who has copied and pasted two or three whole paragraphs from Wikipedia.

You Don't Know

Apparently, I've never understood the purpose of music videos. I always thought of them as a form of commercial that advertises a song or an album or a band on television (indeed, weren't they even called "promotional films" at one time or another?). While some bands would compile their videos onto a VHS tape or DVD for sale, most did not. Thus, most music videos that have been produced in the last 30 or so years have not been available to the public for personal ownership. It is only in the last year or so, with the music companies selling copies of videos on iTunes that this approach to music videos has changed. Now, all of a sudden, they are as much of a commodity as the single itself.

I mention this because the RIAA has begun suing people who submit videos to YouTube. Not only are they suing those who post the official music videos, but they are now also suing anyone who uses an RIAA song as background music of a poster's own video creation.

This is just stupid, as most of the RIAA's anti-consumer strategies of late have been. I can't imagine why any band (or even their record companies) would be opposed to what amounts to free advertising. There may be some cases where the use of a song is done in a way that is not flattering to the band, but I think that such situations are rare. Most of the time, the amateur filmmaker has chosen the song because he likes it or because it fits nicely with the visual content of the film.

Since most of the videos on YouTube are posted without any expectation of financial gain (the site itself is hemorraging money and may go out of business in the next few months), what these filmmakers are doing cannot be called piracy. By definition, piracy means that the pirate is selling the pirated material for monetary gain. That is not happening here. Once again, we have the greedy RIAA placing irrational restrictions on what people can do with their music in an attempt to squeeze every last penny from consumers.

Tell Yourself

From the creators of Ask a Ninja comes Hope Is Emo: A Funny Podcast About a Sad Girl. It' s a satirical look at high school aged "goth" girl and her musings. It's funny because it's true--I've known girls like this in the past. As I watched the episode, I couldn't help but think that Hope (were she real) would likely grow up to be an English major, since that seems to be the career path that most girls like this take.


I went through a "goth" period myself when I was in high school--sort of. And it amazes me how the same basic look and mindset still exists today. Perhaps it has always been around, to some extent, for as long as high school education has been a requirement in this country.