PUBLISHED WRITINGS
All writings copyright (c) David E. Goldweber


OP-ED "THE MYTH OF MULTITASKING"
PUBLISHED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, February 21, 2005

On a recent weekend road trip I had two encounters in one day that convinced me more than ever that America is sliding into cultural and mental chaos, that in our rush to “have it all” we end up having nothing.

My first encounter was a restaurant where I ate breakfast. Outside, it was a retro-chic 50s diner. But inside, the 50s were only a starting point for the overanxious decoration crew. Here was James Dean, and there was Marilyn Monroe, but what was Austin Powers doing there? (He’s from the 90s, or, if you must, the 60s.) And why Betty Boop? (She’s from the 30s.) Here was a photo of a wooden-paneled Studebaker, but why was that World War I biplane in the photo above it? And what was all the kiddie stuff doing here - the giant plastic crayons, the balloons, the swirling “party favor” carpeting? To top it off, the servers’ uniforms sported giant smiley faces (they’re from the 70s). It’s as if this restaurant first wanted to do the 50s but somehow couldn’t resist throwing in whatever other decorations came most quickly to mind.

Perhaps I shouldn’t take a family-oriented corporate restaurant so seriously. But my second encounter was an aquarium, one of America’s most famous. It had changed much since my previous visit 10 years ago. First, soft electronic music now played in many exhibit rooms. Apparently, the world’s loveliest sea creatures aren’t enough to hold people’s interest these days; a soundtrack must augment their wonder.

Second, a whole wing of the aquarium was now devoted to “multimedia” extravaganzas. The few remaining fish were now overshadowed by giant plastic dioramas, talking puppets (repeating themselves endlessly, Disney-style), and miscellaneous interactive gadgetry aimed at pleasing little kids. In one room, intended to showcase the importance of jellyfish to our daily lives, everything remotely related to jellyfish was raked together for display. I came to the aquarium to see the fish, the otters, the turtles, the birds, the eels, and the rays... but there I was in the jellyfish wing, with New Age Electronica thumping around me, staring at lampshades and lava lamps. Well why not include tie-dyed T-shirts, I wondered? They’re jellylike, aren’t they? And how about some Jackson Pollock prints while we’re at it?

The impulse that leads us to create these incongruous composites is the same that leads us to the misguided ideal of “multitasking”: to do two (or more!) things at once. It is this impulse that we, collectively and individually, ought immediately to resist.

For one thing, a host of studies has shown that multitasking hampers our memory. Memory loss that appears to be age-related is turning out to be multitask-related instead. MIT researchers have used the term “passive queuing” to explain this: information must line up one after the next - not side by side - in order to be processed by the brain. I’m sure that things would be different if we were two-headed aliens from the planet Zongo. But, being from Earth, we have one head and one brain, and we function best if we use that brain for one thing at a time.

But we lose more than memory when we mix things together. We lose appreciation, we lose a sense of what makes something special. The 1950s have a unique freewheeling charm of their own. Why dilute it? Why miss out? Jellyfish are already beautiful in themselves; it is a soul-cleansing experience to watch them drift carelessly through their waters. Why distract us from them? Why bury their beauty? Whenever our impatience leads us to multitasking - multimedia - multianything - we should realize that we are compromising. We should feel disappointed, and perhaps even ashamed.

I learned something at the aquarium that I think is relevant here. Little fish swim in schools for protection because predators cannot focus on so many simultaneously. To catch prey, a predator must focus on just one fish at a time, leaving aside the others in the school. If a predator attacks many fish at once, he will get nothing, and he will go hungry. Let us take a lesson from these predators when we wish to feed our hungry minds.


OP-ED "MINORITY WRITERS NEED NOT WRITE ABOUT BEING A MINORITY"
PUBLISHED IN THE L.A. TIMES, July 10, 2004 (original version below)

Another summer break has begun, and with it the arrival of a new edition of the essay anthology I use whenever I teach freshman writing classes. Instructors use these anthologies to teach students how to compose and organize non-fiction writing for use in school, work, and daily life. The anthologized essays, used in classes as models, typically include a mix of well-known and lesser-known writers. Like every edition of every anthology published since the early 1990s, this new edition offers a selection of writers that is ethnically diverse. I’m glad that has not changed. But something else has not changed, and I find myself growing worried. Every minority writer is writing about being a minority.

I have browsed dozens of other anthologies over the years and found almost zero exceptions to this pattern. Every black writer has a piece about the special challenges of being black. Every Latino writer has a piece on growing up Latino, or the history of tortillas, or speaking Spanglish. Native American writers lament their treatment at the hands of Caucasian police, or describe journeys they make to rekindle their lost heritage. Chinese-American and Korean-American writers have pieces about the difficulties their Asian-born parents have living in America. An Indian writer explains why her culture’s arranged marriages aren’t such a bad thing. And so on.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I rejoice at these honest and exciting essays, and I teach some of them in my classes every semester. But it seems to me that writers who happen to be members of minority groups are getting pigeonholed. I think it has become understood and expected, at least by book editors and English teachers and perhaps by society as a whole, that minorities write about minorities and that white people write about everything else. With very rare exceptions, any essay about a non-racial issue - such as history, politics, science, or nature - comes from a Caucasian. The surnames indicate a nice breadth of ancestry (Italian, German, Jewish, Russian, Irish, and so on), but there is little doubt about race.

If extraterrestrials arrived on Earth and decided to study the reading matter of United States high schools and colleges, they would quickly conclude that all minority groups are obsessed with their ethnicities. They would likewise conclude that only white people are empowered to write about anything they please. These extraterrestrials would wonder... perhaps only white writers can be objective? Perhaps only white writers can be trusted to write without tainting their essays with some sort of ethnic slant?

It is understandable why our textbooks would form this way. Many minority writers choose to write about minority issues; indeed, organizations such as the Black Writers Alliance have been founded expressly for this purpose. Textbook editors and publishers seem to assume this is all that gets written and all that anyone wants to read. But Michiko Kakutani, David Suzuki, Stanley Crouch, Stephen L. Carter, and Richard Rodriguez (just to name a few), have written about many interesting things besides race. The National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and Asian-American Journalists Association boast a total of nearly 10,000 members; these journalists cover all sorts of topics besides race. Textbooks could still acknowledge the ethnicity of contributors, where appropriate, in the miniature biographies that are commonly provided before each essay. But why not broaden the content of the essays themselves?

I realize that the concerns of minority writers are real, and that our nation still has a long way to go before it becomes comfortable with its increasingly multiethnic makeup. But will we really achieve harmony by endlessly thinking about ethnicity and race? I can understand why the early editions of these anthologies wanted to include so many essays of this type. But now that more than a decade has passed, it might be time to make some changes.

I say this because I am concerned about our Asian, African-American, Latino, and Native American students. What if some of them are hoping to become writers someday? Are we really doing them a favor when we imply that the only thing they should be writing about is themselves? I believe the time has come to give credence to writers of all types, no matter what they write about. Let’s encourage this, and let’s teach these essays in our classes.


ALBUM REVIEW of "ILLUMINATED" (ATTILA DAVE PROJECT)
POSTED AT AGOUTIMUSIC.COM, October 2003

Attila Dave Project (let’s call them ADP) are the kings of Bay Area progressive rock, and they have just released a scintillating new album. Their first LP, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1996) was charming and fresh but uneven as a whole. They followed up in 2001 with Lifeline, which was far more consistent and mature, sounding as if a youthful apprentice had become a seasoned craftsman. Now, just a year after Lifeline, the trio has built on their success with the powerful Illuminated, their most sustained and ambitious work yet.

The big theme, as on Songs and Lifeline, is that of the grand journey: reaching for ecstasy, for enlightenment, for truth, for love. The songs themselves are little adventures that rise and fall, louden and soften, surprising us with tempo changes, mood changes, bursts of light and energy. As we listen, we feel ourselves questing and meandering like mythic pilgrims. Yet the lyrics question the journeys at the same time they expound and extol them; the idealism is laced with skepticism. Will we ever find the big meaning or the full satisfaction? Will the grace of God ever truly shine upon us? If so, might the price be too much to pay? The quasi-title track, “Illumination,” offers an ironic answer: “Illumination comes to the drowning man.”

Musically, as Songs recalled Genesis and Lifeline recalled Pink Floyd, Illuminated is a combination of Yes and Black Sabbath. The atmosphere is swirling and dreamy, yet we might slip into a vortex or a nightmare at any moment. Here we dance in a sparkling and shimmering dawn, yet there we crawl through a smoldering and smokey dusk. There are echoes, harmonies, lush textures laced with bells, chimes, tambourines, recorders, and, on one track, a harpsichord. At times we meet the medievalesque minstrelsy of Jethro Tull, the sardonic humor of John Lennon, the rugged psychedelia of Smashing Pumpkins, the studied buzz of Soundgarden.

The three East Bay-based musicians seem at once more far-ranging and more disciplined. The steady, rolling drumbeats that Rusty Aceves offers on Lifeline are on Illuminated tempered with a jazzy looseness. The winding riffs of Dave Stevenson’s electric guitars can pierce like needles (“The Lotus Eaters”) or wash like waves (“Streaming”). Attila Medveczky’s lead vocals sound smoother than on the earlier albums and harmonize effortlessly with Dave’s (and, on one track, alto Christina Perna’s) backing vocals.

Yet despite their ambition and complexity (and despite their unwieldy band name), ADP never forgets their classic rock roots. They never lapse into the spacey pretense or histrionic ostentation that at times marred the efforts of their Prog Rock progenitors. Illuminated is imaginative and demanding yet at the same time meaty and down-to-earth. At an ADP concert you will find fans of Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Iron Maiden, Rush, the Beatles, and the Grateful Dead sitting side by side, basking in the blaze of the music.


OP-ED "AMERICA'S NATURAL TREASURES"
PUBLISHED IN THE OAKLAND TRIBUNE, July 18, 2002

A few evenings ago in a Berkeley coffee shop, my friends and I were discussing the recent “tagging spree” in Yosemite. Marks on park buildings would be fairly easily cleaned off, but marks on rocks and trees would not. In fact, those rocks and trees would likely remain blighted for years until the paint finally wore off. One friend smirked grimly. “I’ll bet the terrorists are glad,” he said.

That got us thinking. We recalled the seized Al-Queda computers which contained layouts of American landmarks. Surely it would hurt us all if we were to lose the Statue of Liberty, or the Washington Monument, or the Sears Tower, or Mount Rushmore. But in light of the recent Yosemite incidents, it seemed that perhaps America’s most precious places are something quite different.

What if a terrorist bomb caused a cave-in of the Grand Canyon? What if they toppled El Capitán? What if they shot down the last of our California condors? If they poisoned the last of our bison? If they burned up the redwood forests? If they chopped down the General Sherman sequoia? Would not any of these things damage us more as a people and as a nation, than the destruction of any man-made statue, or building, or monument? This is a time in our history, I think, when more than ever we must cherish the wondrous natural heritage bequeathed to us by God, or Nature, or Destiny.

Let us cherish our national bird, the majestic bald eagle, which has a seven-foot wingspan and can dive at speeds over 100 miles per hour. An expert fisher, bald eagles can actually swim, using an overhand movement of the wings that resembles the butterfly stroke.

Speaking of butterflies, let us cherish the famous North American Monarch. Nearly weightless, this graceful butterfly migrates up to 3,000 miles every winter. Their flight from Washington and Montana down across the central and western states to northern Mexico is by far the greatest migration of any butterfly in the world. Monarchs hatch during the summer when they are up north, yet they somehow find their way south to their ancestral winter homes - even to the very same trees as their parents and grandparents before them.

And let us cherish the gentle Florida Manatee, the amusingly plump “sea cow” that has no natural enemies in its native waters. It may breathe only three times in an hour, yet renew 90% of the air in its lungs with a single breath (compared to just 10% for humans). Curious and inquisitive, a manatee may try to touch noses with friendly scuba divers.
Let us even cherish the humble American prairie dog. A linchpin species vital to its ecosystem, the prairie dog has an extremely sophisticated vocalization range that far exceeds that of cats and dogs. Scientists believe their communication system may be as complex as a dolphin’s. Thought to be destructive until very recently, prairie dogs actually enrich our lands by oxygenating the soil with burrows that wind up to 20 feet down into the earth.

We Californians might feel especially proud. Our lofty redwoods are the tallest of all living things - more than 300 feet high. Our mighty sequoias are the largest - more than 80 feet in girth. Both will only grow in California. California also boasts the oldest living entity on the planet: a western juniper tree that first broke the soil an astounding 4000 years ago.

It is these venerable natural treasures, more than anything else, that give a timeless identity to America as a nation and as a people. Through them we are linked to our American ancestors who lived here before us. As past generations saw what we see, and as they loved what we love, we must make sure that our children, and the generations of Americans to come, have the chance to do the same. Once wounded, our natural treasures are slow to recover; once lost, they are lost forever. Let us appreciate these wonders that are ours as Americans. Let us take pride in protecting and preserving these treasures for all time.


OP-ED "THE BUMPER STICKERS OF BERKELEY"
PUBLISHED IN THE BERKELEY VOICE, September 29, 2000

I have no statistics to prove this, but I’m sure you’ll agree that per capita there are more bumper stickers in the city of Berkeley than anywhere else in the nation. I’m glad we have so much to say, that we’re so proud, so outspoken. But I have a love/hate relationship with these bumper stickers, especially the political ones. I see them every day, every week, dozens of them, hundreds of them. Sometimes they make me laugh or cheer, but sometimes they make me angry. In an effort to soothe my own misgivings and to promote greater appreciation of bumper stickers citywide, I offer the following genealogy. I’ve tried to classify not just the types of cars that have bumper stickers but also the ways these stickers make us feel.

Some cars are veritably bursting with bumper stickers. We’re talking twenty, thirty, forty stickers here, and usually all political. They go beyond the bumpers to the trunk and the doors. It’s almost like the driver chose a bumper sticker job over a paint job. When you move toward one of these cars stopped in traffic, the thirty or forty stickers become a bombardment of brazen colors and brazen slogans. It’s like a shotgun blast. It’s very intense, but I can’t help thinking there’s a loss of credibility in these sticker conglomerates. How can anyone support every cause all at once? Even if the slogans are good, it seems they’re competing with each other, canceling each other out.

Yet there’s also a loss of credibility when a car has just one bumper sticker. How did they choose just this one? Why this one and not another? Do they care only about this single issue? Or perhaps they just bought it on a whim... ‘gotta buy a bumper sticker one of these days; might as well buy this one.’ There’s a particularly thick loss of credibility when the single sticker is a vague one like “If You Want Peace, Work For Justice” or “Commit Random Senseless Acts of Beauty and Kindness.” Maybe these people are indecisive.

But even when cars have a healthy medium amount of bumper stickers, there’s an important responsibility of bumper sticker upkeep. Who among us has not groaned at the sight of a worn, faded, peeling, tattered bumper sticker from years, or even decades, past? Can we really believe this person wants to Free Leonard Peltier if s/he lets poor Peltier’s face become spotted with dried dirt and gasoline? Do they really want to Save Tibet when they’ve allowed the Tibetan sunrise to fade into a smoggy dusk? It’s like they used to believe in these causes, but now they’re jaded and disillusioned. The only excuse for these unkempt stickers is that they belong to a used car no longer driven by the original owner. But even then it’s suspicious.

Then we have the bumper sticker clichés. These often appear alone. This category includes slogans that are old hat and slogans that only a maniac would disagree with. “Think Before You Act” (really? didn’t know that!). “God Bless America” (okay... now what?). “I Brake For Animals” (not me! I aim right for their heads!). “Kill Your Television” (yeah! no matter what’s on!). “Beam Me Up Scotty, There’s No Intelligent Life Down Here!” (yawn).

Sometimes you’ll see satirical bumper stickers that make fun of the earnest ones. Backlash Bumper Stickers. These do well when not mixed with the usual ones. A car on my block sports stickers that read, “Earth First! ” and “I Love Animals! .” Other cute ones include “I Brake For No Apparent Reason,” “Geez if you believe in Honkus,” “Very Funny Scotty, Now Beam Up My Clothes,” and “Don’t Drink And Drive .” These remind me of the sarcastic ‘yellow diamonds’ that were popular back in the 80s to combat the ubiquitous Baby on Board. You remember: Child Behind Wheel, Mother-in-law In Trunk.

Backlash Bumper Stickers are particularly effective if they come to you in disguise. I remember one little car parked on Shattuck Square that looked exactly like a stereotypical hippiemobile, hand-painted with swirling psychedelic designs, faces, and trees. Rectangular stickers covered the bumpers and trunk, and I was sure I’d be in for “Love Your Mother,” “Arms are for Hugging,” and the like. Instead, I was amused to find misanthropic banter such as “Fountain Of Youth? How About A Fountain of Intelligence!” “More Jobs? How About Less People!” and “End Racism - Kill Everyone.”

Then there are the cars that have no political stickers at all and instead opt for complete humor. I once saw a car with a series of self-referential stickers that included “It’s Bad Luck to be Superstitious,” “All Generalizations Are False,” and “Eschew Obfuscation.” This driver might want to seek out the seldom-seen “My Other Bumper Sticker is Funny” sticker. It’s hard to gripe about amusing cars like these, but I wonder if their drivers aren’t just a bit too apolitical, a bit too neutral and moderate. Surely they’ve noticed the political stickers that surround them? Do they mean to mock their concerns? Do they mean to imply these concerns are unimportant? Heck, at least the Backlash Bumpers make a point.

My favorite cars are those that have just two or three political bumper stickers (neat and clean, of course) that go together and support each other. “Vegetarians Taste Better” goes nicely with “Love Animals By Not Eating Them.” “Girls Kick Ass” goes well with “Men Are Proof That Women Can Take A Joke.” “Libertarian Party Before It’s Too Late” goes well with “Vote Libertarian And Win A Free Country” and with that other (rather shameless) Libertarian one that gives the 800 number. “Extinction Is Forever” goes nicely with the Greenpeace whale or the WWF panda. “Question Authority” goes nicely with “Subvert The Dominant Paradigm” (although I’ve seen that Dominant Paradigm one so often that I’m beginning to wonder if it’s the paradigm that needs to be subverted). A particularly impressive car I saw in Tilden Park had “Fat and Proud” on one side of its bumper and “Bald is Beautiful” on the other. That’s so bold that it becomes political.

Whatever the particular message, cars like this are the most refined and classy of all bumper-sticker-bearing vehicles. It’s cumulative impact, like in advertising. What these cars say to us is, “I’m caring but not indiscriminate; I’m passionate but not reckless; I’m committed but not fanatic.” Perhaps I take these things too seriously. But a bumper sticker is quite a permanent fixture (ever try to scrape one off? ever scrape off a chunk of your bumper?). Long live the bumper sticker, say I. But don’t treat them lightly, don’t take them too far, and don’t think that the rest of us aren’t looking... and judging.




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