Thursday, March 31, 2011

Is blogging a lot like academia?

Last week, a SUNY professor I am happy to know posted a link on Facebook to a clip from the 2009 movie Leaves of Grass, in which Edward Norton plays the roles of twin brothers. As IMDB has it, "An Ivy League professor is lured back to his Oklahoma hometown, where his twin brother, a small-time pot grower, has concocted a scheme to take down a local drug lord." The NY Times called the movie "a straight-twin/stoned-twin story."

The clip nails academia in a mere forty seconds:



But ... isn't what Edward-Norton-as-Brady-Kincaid describes also a lot like blogging?

3 comments:

  1. To some extent - it's all opinion, riffing on opinion and sometimes fact and their interpretation. As is all commentary, all story. It's pretty much all we do: talk about ourselves by passing around different versions of the human experience. "Good" versions inch towards funny, or more original, or inspired, or researched. Less interesting ones are boring, repetative, echo chambers. All that's changed is the channel.

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  2. Reminds me of a conversation I had with my philosophy major roommate in college. I asked him if he thought Plato was correct. His response was to launch into a monolog about the context of Plato's writings, before I stopped him, and tried to get him to actually answer the question. Things continued in that manner until I eventually gave up. A philosophy degree apparently can make you fluent in contextualizing other people's opinions on the nature of existence, but it doesn't get you much further than anyone else when it comes to assessing the relative truth of it all.

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  3. brilliant movie steve..just saw this this month...may repost this ne...
    love

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