Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Can't stop thinking about this story . . .

HARRISON BERGERON
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

--originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine in 1961--

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh" said George.

"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.

"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.

"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."

"Um," said George.

"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."

"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.

"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."

"Good as anybody else," said George.

"Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel.

"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."

George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."

"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."

"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."

"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set around."

"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

"I'd hate it," said Hazel.

"There you are," said George. "The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"

If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.

"What would?" said George blankly.

"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?"

"Who knows?" said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."

"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not-I repeat, do not-try to reason with him."

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have-for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened-I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."

The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.

And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying," he said to Hazel.

"Yup," she said.

"What about?" he said.

"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."

"What was it?" he said.

"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.

"Forget sad things," said George.

"I always do," said Hazel.

"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.

"Gee-I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.

"You can say that again," said George.

"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."

Monday, March 22, 2010

Reading in a Digital Age

Notes on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary . . .

Print the article?

Sunday, March 21, 2010

People of the [Comic] Book on 4/1 at the CJM

The People of the  [Comic] Book: A Discussion of Jews and Comics

Lectures + Gallery Talks

peopleofthecomic_lg
Date/Time:
Thursday, April 1, 2010, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM Buy Tickets
Admission: Free to Institute for Comics Studies attendees or free with Museum admission.
Contact: info@thecjm.org

About the Program

Join artists Miriam Libicki (jobnik!) and Michael Aushenker (Cartoon Flophouse), as well as scholars Craig Kleinman, Joel Schechter and Rabbi Harry Manhoff, for a roundtable discussion about the connection between Jews and comics, both past and present. Moderated by Lou Schubert!

In connection with the 2010 WonderCon and Institute for Comics Studies, and in collaboration with the Cartoon Art Museum.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

To Be Presented at the 3/17 Senate Meeting, Downtown

Draft Academic Senate Resolution on the
Draft Resolution regarding “Recommendations on the Achievement Gap and Equity”

Whereas, the faculty, administration, and classified staff throughout the City College of San Francisco have worked diligently, creatively, and continuously to support the success of all our students over a period of decades; and

Whereas, Assembly Bill 1725 and state education code establish that community college faculty have primacy in curricular matters; and,

Whereas, faculty alone have the content expertise and practical experience to write curriculum; and,

Whereas, City College of San Francisco (CCSF) has a well-established process for developing and approving curriculum that includes faculty writing curricular proposals individually and in groups, frequently includes a department curriculum committee, and always includes the college-wide Curriculum Committee; and,

Whereas, CCSF also has well-established shared governance processes for non-curricular matters; and,

Whereas, the Student Achievement Gap and Social Equity Report, issued by the Chancellor’s office in October 2009, establishes that there are achievement gaps pre-collegiate sequence completion, degree completion, and transfer for many groups of students at CCSF; and

Whereas, some portions of the draft resolution regarding “Recommendations on the Achievement Gap and Equity,” released to the public at the February 25, 2010 meeting of the CCSF Board of Trustees, may impact curriculum; and,

Whereas, most portions of the draft resolution have nothing to do with curricular matters and can be implemented after appropriate and timely shared governance review or implemented administratively;

Therefore be it Resolved, that the Academic Senate recommends that the Board of Trustees remove from the draft resolution the sentences:
“The District shall offer a sequence for pre-collegiate English in a length no longer than two semesters”;
“The District shall offer a sequence for pre-collegiate Math in a length no longer than two semesters”; and,
“The District shall institute a pass-no pass grading system for all pre-collegiate English and Math courses. Pass-no pass shall be the default grading system. Students shall have the option of receiving a letter grade if specifically requested. This grading system shall be clearly stated on all registration materials for these classes”; and,

Be it further Resolved, that the Academic Senate recommends that the Board of Trustees work with the Chancellor, the English and Mathematics Departments, and the college Curriculum Committee to develop and implement in a timely manner appropriate curricular and other changes to eliminate the achievement gaps at in those departments; and,

Be it further Resolved, that the Academic Senate supports and encourages the timely shared governance consideration of the non-curricular portions of the draft resolution that should receive such review; and,

Be it further Resolved, that the Academic Senate supports and encourages the Board to work with Chancellor to implement in a timely manner all portions of the draft resolution that can be implemented administratively; and,

Be it finally Resolved, that the Academic Senate supports and encourages the continued examination of achievement gaps at CCSF, in all parts of the college, as well as timely action to eliminate all such achievement gaps.

Executive Council Electronic Voting--Sign Up!

Sign Up for Electronic Voting

The Academic Senate Executive Council election is coming up fast. 15 seats will be open and the deadline for nominations is April 9.

All full-time, part-time, credit, and noncredit faculty are eligible to vote in the election and voting will begin in late April. The easiest, fastest, and most environmentally friendly method of voting is electronically and we strongly encourage you to use this method.

During last year's pilot, we worked out the glitches in the electronic voting process and this year we want almost all the votes to be electronic. To vote electronically, on the specially prepared, secure, and anonymous website, please:

  1. Send an email to the Academic Senate Election Commissioners at: senelect@ccsf.edu
  2. Include your name and department, along with the message, "I want to vote electronically."
  3. Send the email from your CCSF email address to ensure you are who you say you are.

The deadline to sign up for online voting is 5:00 pm PST, Friday, April 9.

Faculty who sign up for electronic voting will not receive a paper ballot. Faculty who do not sign up for electronic voting will not be able to cast their votes online and will receive a paper ballot.

If you have questions or feedback about online voting, or about the election in general, please send a note to senelect@ccsf.edu.

Charles Muscatine dies

Read about his last book.

Read about him.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Meeting Announcement: Academic Senate Special Meeting, March 23rd at 1 p.m. in the Diego Rivera Theater

Meeting Announcement: Academic Senate Special Meeting, March 23rd at 1 p.m. in the Diego Rivera Theater

All faculty from all campuses are members of the Academic Senate.

"Special meetings of the Senate or Council may be called in the following ways: (a) by the President; (b) on petition of a majority of the Council; (c) on petition of 100 members of the Senate. No business other than that for which the special meetings are called shall be transacted at such meetings." [Constitution of the Academic Senate, Article VI]

A special meeting of the Academic Senate (all faculty) has been called by petition of 100 members of the Senate for Tuesday, March 23rd at 1:00 p.m. in the Diego Rivers Theater. Please plan to attend.

The agenda will be to consider, deliberate, and take actions regarding the March 25th policy resolution signed by Board of Trustees members Steve Ngo, Chris Jackson, and Milton Marks. Passage of these resolutions would establish a level of micromanaging and interference by an elected political board which will permanently damage every academic department at CCSF and imperil our accreditation and academic freedom. The special meeting will be held in the Diego Rivera Theatre on Tuesday, March 23, 2010, beginning at 1:00 and will be facilitated by Karen Saginor - Library. The meeting will be run under Robert's Rules of Order (Fred Teti - Math, Parliamentarian).

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT MEETING FOR THE FUTURE OF ALL DEPARTMENTS AND PROGRAMS AT CCSF — PLEASE ATTEND

Resolutions for consideration at this meeting should be sent to Karen Saginor ksaginor@ccsf.edu by 12 noon, Friday, March 19. Please send as a Word document (Word 2003 preferred) attached to email or as plain text within the body of the email. Academic Senate members are welcome to bring additional resolutions to the March 23 meeting. Proposed resolutions submitted by March 19 may be edited for length or combined with simililar resolutions. Resolutions received by March 19 will be considered first at the March 23 Special Meeting, then --- time permitting --- additional resolutions brought on the day of the Special Meeting on March 23 will be considered.


Look at this: http://stevengo.com


And this: http://ccsfaspres.wordpress.com


And this: http://www.ccsf.edu/NEW/content/dam/ccsf/images/shared_governance/bd_resolution.pdf


And this: http://www.ccsf.edu/NEW/content/dam/ccsf/images/academic_senate/AS_Docs/ListOfMeetings_S10/031710_Executive_Council_Agenda.pdf


AND GO TO THE BOARD MEETING THURSDAY NIGHT!

The BOT meeting is Thursday night in the Wellness Center on Ocean: http://www.ccsf.edu/Offices/VCFA/closed%20sessions/PDF_closed_sessions/2010/March_25_2010_Closed_session_notice.pdf