The TUBS Cotton Crown (Trouble in Mind, 2025)

    The year I lived in the dorms, one of my suitemates noticed that I was into music. “Tell me what some good bands are” was his line. Being 18 and wary of dorks, I gatekept as best I could. I mean, this dude was not going to start listening to AMERICAN NIGHTMARE or SUPERSLEUTH or even MINOR THREAT if I had been more generous with “my” music. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but part of my distaste for sharing it was that I figured the average person would miss the context of the sounds they were hearing. More than the sonic shock is the fact that I knew my interest in this music was about the social world it opened to me as a teenager. I heard about new bands through friends or friends of friends or zines or going to record stores or being in someone’s car one time or sending away for a record or tape in the mail and then getting the label’s catalog along with my order. It’s not that I felt I “earned” the music; more that I felt I was participating in some kind of conversation by taking these actions. He was trying to interrupt and that didn’t seem right.

    We’re all grateful that I’ve matured since then. Still, those old ways of learning about music die hard. It was my buddy Greg who put me on to The TUBS about a year ago with a “best of 2023” music round-up on his blog. He doesn’t know that he did so, though. I suppose I should tell him. On that blog, he gushed about their first album. It took a few songs to get its hooks in me, but by the time I heard “I Don’t Know How It Works,” it was all over. This record was an essential purchase. As “Wretched Lie” closed out the album, I knew I’d be listening to it forever.

    OK, that’s an exaggeration and we all know it. Still, I was excited to learn they’d have a new album out in 2025 because they’re a band I like and I want to hear them make more music. That’s unsurprising. It’s like saying I’m excited about food. Of course I am. It’s delicious and I need it to live. Is this record that important? No, but you should buy it anyway. It’s spiritually nourishing in that way where you find yourself humming part of it or turning a phrase over in your mind or mouth during the day and feeling excited about listening to it again when you’re in the right place to absorb it fully.

    As I’ve gotten older and busier, that kind of absorbing process has changed for me. I used to make it a habit of reviewing the lyrics and liner notes before listening to an album or single for the first time. I wanted to be fully prepared. I stopped doing that once I was working a grown-up job and had more money to spend on records than time to listen to them. Around the same time, I learned about PULP, who had an important disclaimer in the insert to 1995’s “Different Class.” They advised “Please do not read the lyrics whilst listening to the recordings.” Suddenly, it felt cooler to just let it ride and figure out the lyrics later, if at all. I kept to that practice when listening to “Cotton Crown” for the first few times. I grabbed a few lines here and there. I also did that thing where you kind of make up your own words (as in literally making sounds that do not correspond to known words in English) as you belt out some of the songs. It was a relief to get the LP in the mail and take a look at the insert. I could stop pretending I knew what Owen Williams was singing. Instead, I could lean back and think damn, what a line!

    Focusing on the lyrics helps the songs stand apart, too. The leads and melodies sound a little same-y at first, so having a mood or theme to hang onto while listening to each song makes each one more distinct. I’m also glad I’m not the only one who thought of “Run Around” by BLUES TRAVELER when I heard the opening chords to “The Thing Is.” (Shout out to Marco Patrone’s comment on Bandcamp.) A good example of one of those lines that sticks to your brain is in the refrain to “Freak Mode,” where you’ll puzzle over the intent of “I’m not myself / I’m somebody else / someone who loves you.” Grappling with your identity when you begin a relationship with another person is an interesting concept for a song. You lose a bit of what makes you you, but that’s for the better. Well, Williams might disagree. For a counterpoint, there’s a similar garden-path quality to LONELY WHOLESOME’s “I Don’t Think I Can Love You Anymore (Than I Already Do)” from 2016.

    For my money, the best place where the lyrics and music come together is on “Narcissist.” That chorus is just unfair. It’s downright criminal. Anyone wanting to pick up a guitar and play along would be hard pressed to achieve the tones George Nicholls conjures there. It’s harder than it seems to make something so powerful.

    The power of the rhythm section comes through in “One More Day” and “Strange,” which use subtle build-ups to increase and then release pressure at certain moments of each song. One of the most important things a drummer can do is hit the kit hard and that is not a problem for Taylor Stewart. These songs don’t have “breakdowns” in the sense of a hardcore punk tune but they do make effective use of rhythm to re-center your attention before a key lyric. That’s never clearer than on “Strange,” a song whose maudlin and morbid lyrics truly escaped me before I got my eyes on the insert. It’s about Williams’ mother completing suicide and his reaction to learning that information from a news blog while overseas. The tender intimacy of that revelation is punctuated with the refrain of “how strange it all is,” which seems like both an acknowledgment of the unusual nature of that specific situation as much as it is a reflection on living in the world today more generally. It’s great to have this record with us as we navigate that world. It absolutely does not deserve to fall victim to the misguided gatekeeping of teenagers. The TUBS should be, will be, huge.

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After All (Mary Tyler Moore, Putnam, 1995)

    Early in my friendship with the woman who would become Mrs. Tall Rob, we were eating lunch together with friends at work. For a few years, there were four of us who ate together regularly. First there were two men and two women. Then the other guy left for law school and we had a rotating spot open for additional visitors. After a summer of my beleaguered venting about singlehood, one of the women suggested that the future Mrs. Tall Rob (then single herself) should join us for lunch. I don’t remember this event, but it has been retold to me enough that I am confident relating it to you here. At some point during the meal, I mentioned how I had been watching seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show on DVD. Completely unprovoked, Mrs. Tall Rob offered the hot take “Mary Tyler Moore? Didn’t she have a really bad facelift a few years ago?” I would like to say I laughed it off or was merely stunned and registered my mock disappointment. But, being 25 years old and sorely upset, I simply picked up my lunch tray, threw out my food scraps, and returned to my desk. No word spoken, no meaningful eye contact—just an abrupt exit. I was floored. How could someone speak so about my dear Mary?

    In fairness to Mrs. Tall Rob, she had no idea the minefield she had blithely ventured into. Mary Tyler Moore had been my number one celebrity crush since I caught re-runs of The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick at Nite in fourth grade. I didn’t have the idea of a woman being “hot” at that point in my life. I still thought girls had cooties or whatever. As others have said, though, there’s something about Mary. I thought the shows were funny and I liked that Dick Van Dyke’s character shared my name. It was also fun that one show was in black-and-white and one show was in color. Fast forward about 10 years later or so and I am in college with a DVD player, free time, and some cash from washing dishes. The collected works of both shows were available on sporadically released box sets, so I dutifully purchased them and (re)watched some of my favorite 22-minute bursts of joy. As a young man, I saw Mary in a new light and realized that she was extremely my type. Although I didn’t have the words for it myself, one of the co-workers mentioned above characterized my taste as “the girl next door; milk and cookies.” I denied it in the moment, but she was completely correct. Also correct was my initial thought that both shows featuring Mary were worthwhile from a comedic or dramatic standpoint. Sure, there are plenty of duds or clunkers among the hundreds of episodes shared between the two series, but there were enough all-timers in there to make my quest through five seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show and seven seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show worthwhile as I continued to navigate life after college and after singlehood.

    Given that background, you might be surprised to know that I hadn’t yet read Mary’s 1995 biography. Thankfully, the local library had purchased it nearly 30 years ago, so I was able to easily access it. Knowing some of the details of the contours of her… life… I was already familiar with some of the stories contained inside. Its 315 pages read quickly and give an effective overview of her career to that point. I don’t want to rehash it all here, so I’ll pull out the points that were salient to me and leave you to consider the rest.

    Early on, she recounts sexual assault from a parent’s friend and her mother’s subsequent denial of it. Mary was six at the time. She offers in reflection that “Strange it is how events that change a life inside and out take no more than a moment — ‘You got the Van Dyke Show.’ ‘Let’s get married.’ ‘It didn’t happen.’ I never felt the same about her after that. My mother, by her denial, had abused me far more than her friend” (p. 13). That’s utterly devastating. As her life proceeds, Mary does not return to the moment of the assault as definitive on her development, but the sense of wanting to avoid disappointing her parents does give some sense of its indirect impact.

    She does spend time dwelling on the times when things go wrong, though. Early in her career (i.e., before the Van Dyke Show), she lost out on a part to another actress. They were the last two to be called back and it seemed like Mary was sure to get the bit. She makes the loss all too relatable by writing that “An actress named Penney Parker got the job along with a useless section of my heart” (p. 80). It’s really something to be able to convey that late-adolescent feeling of heartbreak so many decades later. It’s also a revealing comment about the nature of holding onto spite, ill will, or envy even though these feelings are harmful. It’s a lesson I find myself needing to re-learn sometimes. I’m glad Mary and I have had that in common. I also felt a little bit of commonality with her when she recalled how the writers profiling her for articles said she was an “Ice Princess.” Now, stay with me. I don’t think of myself as emotionally reserved (just emotionally stunted), but I did feel my heart sing a little louder when reading that Mary “was brought up to be a perfect person, or to look like a perfect person. So [she] never wanted anyone to know that there were any of the dark shadows [she] now can talk about” (p. 155). That’s maybe not as unique a feeling as I think. Many people struggle with perfectionism and how to react against it. I’m sure it’s harder for someone as in the public eye as a media star. Still, that notion of “celebrities: they’re just like us!” feels a little silly to celebrate in my early 40s but it does also make me feel a little less alone when those moments of dread coming crawling along.

    When I think of Mary, the three roles that come to mind are Laura Petrie, Mary Richards, and Beth Jarrett. In relating how she prepared for that last role in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, Mary maybe takes the relatability angle too far. She excitedly gets dressed and then into the car to drive to the try out for the role as Donald Sutherland’s cold, distant wife. Then, against all common sense and observable evidence, she declares “I don’t have the kind of looks that stop traffic. I say this from my most well-analyzed and now relatively secure heart” (p. 206). C’mon, Mary. You know that’s a lie. You’re doing the double self-deprecation move. That’s when you falsely claim to be falsely modest about something just so that a friend can reassure you with “No, that’s not true! You’re not giving yourself enough credit” except, that, expecting this reaction, you began by giving yourself a too on-the-nose compliment, so that even when receiving that reassurance, you and your friend both realize that your initial comment was meant to be self-serving praise. Mary knows she’s attractive. She knows we know she’s attractive. It’s just playing around to act like she’s not. Why else spend time in these pages discussing the effects of the Capri pants on viewers and staffers on The Dick Van Dyke Show? Why mention how women would tell her for years after that their husbands had crushes on her? If I had world-class good looks, I guess I’d try to downplay their effect on my career in my autobiography, too.

    That same brand name recognizability was relevant to the relationship that led to her third marriage, to Dr. Robert Levine. He was the New York City physician who was helping Mary’s mom when she ran a high fever on the way back from a family trip to Europe. Dr. Robert told Mary that there were plenty of fans of hers in his practice. She asked if he was one and he told her no, but that “[he thinks he] saw her on the Dick Van Dyke Show when [he] was a kid” (p. 251). She laments that he will always see her as just “an older woman” and not the celebrity that she is. This is too bad for her, because he seems to have plenty of other things going for him that she likes. Notably, he’s not short. She concluded an earlier chapter on a romantic day with Dick Cavett by claiming that she is a “height bigot” (p. 244) and needs a tall man. Let’s pause here.

    The title of this blog is no mere pun. I am tall—six feet, six inches (if I stand up straight)—and my name is Rob. I am also a doctor, but not the medical kind. The fact that my childhood crush married someone named Dr. Robert (not from The BEATLES song) and that he is not diminutive is proof to me that I am basically married to Mary. Want more proof? Remember that her on-screen husband’s name on the Dick Van Dyke Show was Rob. (The best part of that show is any time that she moans “Oh, Rob!” and / or invites him to kiss her by using his name; they wrote the show for me.) Through this tortured parasocial relationship we had, I think it’s pretty clear that I manifested her marriage to Dr. Levine, a man who is younger, taller, and more highly educated than she is. And, we share a name. I rest my case.

    In all seriousness, Mary does have plenty of interesting stories and insights to share in her autobiography, so let’s conclude with a helpful one. During this third marriage, she talks with her husband (i.e., me) about her difficulty with achieving and maintaining sobriety. She has some misgivings about even sharing the news of this struggle with him. He explains that she has sought professional help for a physical problem before, so there should be no difference with seeking professional help for her alcohol addiction, mental health, or emotional health. That’s as ringing of an endorsement for seeking therapy as I can imagine. It’s rare that someone hides the fact that they lift weights or do cardio, so there should not be any problem with openly discussing therapy or medication for mental health concerns either. If it’s good enough for Mary Tyler Moore, it’s good enough for you, too. You might just make it after all.

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Adolescence (Philip Barantini, Netflix, 2025)

    Given that I have spent and still do spend plenty of time with young adolescents each day, it was obligatory for me to watch Netflix’s limited series, Adolescence. I knew so little about the series at first that I thought it was a documentary instead of a drama. I also heard it was going to give a real sense of “what it’s like to be a kid today,” with an emphasis on how phones mediate the social world of the adolescent. So, I was primed for a scolding and some fear-mongering about my and Mrs. Tall Rob’s parenting choices regarding technology. I’m glad it wasn’t so simple and I’m glad, too, that it doesn’t offer pat answers to thorny questions.

    From the start, we are taken behind the scenes of two British detectives who are prepping for some kind of tactical maneuver. It is soon clarified that we are not dealing with just those two; there is a contingent of cops in this neighborhood who converge on a single-family home on a street full of houses that look just about the same. As they break down the door and terrify the family, we are given the position of looking just over their shoulder. It’s almost like a ride-along and we are some base influencer hoping to capture “content” for our channel. It’s voyeuristic and intrusive. The family of four reacts with the quavering dread and confusion you would expect in such a situation. We eventually see that the cops are looking for Jamie, a 13-year-old white kid, who is wanted on suspicion of murder. He’s still in bed when we see him and the ordeal has caused him to wet his pants, which the cops suggest he change as they bring him into the station. The first thought I had when watching this scene was that it was meant to show SWATting, a technique where a false police report causes true violence. (What are those incidents called in England?) The disorientation of the camera’s path through the house along with the multiple, one-sided conversations between family members and cops gave me a sense of deep anxiety and fear. Aside from the camera work, it seemed like any other police procedural at this point.

    The remainder of the first episode deals with Jamie’s booking and detention at his local station and his family’s attempts to navigate the legal process with a public defender. He’s advised not to say anything that could harm his case; his refrain throughout the interview is “no comment,” as advised by his attorney. He does slip up eventually, and I was struck by how his counsel seemed to relent once the detectives who arrested him began to focus their interrogation and present some pretty damning and graphic evidence. It’s clear from how his lawyer initially reacts to the case that he thinks he won’t be able to successfully defend him. Maybe he wasn’t interested in prolonging the inevitable… In any event, the episode concludes with Jamie confessing to his dad that he has, in fact, killed a girl in his class, after having stalked her through the street the night before and confronted her.

    With the initial legal procedure out of the way, the next episodes focus on its ramifications at school, at a juvenile detention center, and for the family. This is where the show reveals the depth of its analysis. In considering how Jamie’s crime has wide ranging effects, we learn, too, how many systems are acting upon a child in the world today. His peers and teachers at school make it clear that education is not the focus of their days. One of the cops is dismayed to remark that the kids are basically watching videos or unsupervised while in care of the school. It’s at this point that the male cop’s son (a student at the school) tells him some of the truth of what Jamie’s life on Instagram was like. The scene where he decodes for his dad the meaning of various emojis is pivotal in moving the case forward. We get the sense that Jamie acted out of perceived romantic  frustration or sexual failings when he stabbed his classmate to death for mocking him as a future incel.

    We next see Jamie discussing his situation with Briony, a sympathetic psychologist, while he is being held at a juvenile center. He resents being in a place for children with mental health difficulties because he thinks he belongs in a regular jail. Throughout the episode, which is entirely comprised of his psychologist’s experience in the center, Jamie cagily deals with her questions and attempts to derail or one-up her line of inquiry. She’s disciplined and does not fall for his tricks, but it is quite unsettling to spend so much time in the interrogation room as a viewer. Once again, the camera work is excellent. It gives the sense of being a pacing observer to the conversation. The use of shadow is interesting, too. It is raining throughout the episode, and when the questions take a darker turn, so, too, does darkness cloud the room.

    Jamie does eventually get to a point where he slips up and implies that he murdered his classmate and then totally loses control of his faculties. Briony is steely in response and eventually gets him to relent, but not before he tries to get her to flinch in fear from a physical incursion into her space. He then chides her for being afraid of a mere 13-year-old. Though she prevails in the interaction and obtains useful information in it, we also see that she lets her guard down once he is gone. It is a lot of work to speak with an emotionally distraught adolescent and maintain your composure, especially when he tries to get you to compliment him.

    In the fourth and final episode, it is 13 months since the murder that set the story in motion, and Jamie’s father is celebrating his 50th birthday. The family tries to put on a façade of normality but it falls apart when his dad sees his work van has been tagged with “nonse” [sic] and some local kids laugh at his situation. He’s pissed off enough that it upsets the family’s plans for the day, and it is in seeing him work through this setback that the meaning of the show comes out in full force. It’s a commentary on how fathers fail their sons through not being able to talk with them as they move through the social, emotional, physical, cognitive, and identity changes that comprise these years.

    Toward the end of the episode, Jamie’s dad reveals that his own father had physically abused him, so he promised he would never do that to Jamie. The lack of physical abuse is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for raising a healthy child. Punishment removal is not the same as reward presentation. Jamie’s dad thought he had done enough, but he was not ready for what would happen if he did not actively engage his son in activities that might have interested him. Dad only knows sports, but Jamie was a budding artist. Overlooking your child’s interests will certainly ensure they end up maladjusted. Aside from that, they are swimming in an ocean of misogyny that will drown them if social structures or a more knowledgeable other does not step in to rescue them.

    That’s incredibly judgmental and condescending of me. I enter that frame of mind because this show does not resolve much of its tension. We learn in this episode that Jamie plans to confess after all, but we are not shown that scene or its effects on anyone. It simply happens and the world goes on. I deeply appreciate that the writers and director did not resolve everything “in a half an hour with special guest stars and pearls of wisdom,” as the song goes. A longer episode arc would have included more depth of exploration of some of the themes in the series. One that seemed especially unexamined was the role of race in Jamie’s case. His whiteness is presented without comment. This is especially apparent when he is arrested and given the choice to change his soiled pajama pants, as well as the rest of his treatment at the station. It’s not clear whether we are meant to take his identity (i.e., young, white, able-bodied male) as universal or as being particularly situated within the current moment. That said, the fact that there are young women and non-binary children going through the same gauntlet of adolescent difficulties and humiliations as young men do, yet don’t turn to violence to solve their presumed problems, is a strongly implied message here. It’s not about the phones, after all. It’s about teaching the sons (and fathers) of the world that life is a dance, a relay race, a canvas, a tune, a play, a group project, not a winner-take-all war.

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van den Broek, P., Young, M., Tzeng, Y., & Linderholm, T. (1999). The landscape model of reading: Inferences and the online construction of a memory representation

    Conflicts on the Internet stem from a mutual misunderstanding of a shared text. At some point, one of the parties to the discussion will suggest that one of the other parties lacks sufficient reading comprehension or perhaps was not paying attention during reading lessons in school. Here is a reheated annotated bibliography from an independent study section on reading comprehension that I completed during my Ph.D. in reading and literacy in early and middle childhood about ten years ago. I hope you find it useful in locating the possible reasons for your disagreements with others online and off.

    Richard Anderson and P. David Pearson’s chapter in the first volume of the Handbook of Reading Research (1984) concerns schema theory as a possible explanation for how reading comprehension happens. This theory seeks to explain how old knowledge and new knowledge are related in the brain while reading. Schema help readers make inferences about how ideas are connected to each other by describing how the ideas relate to each other in temporal, causal, spatial, part-whole, and member-set ways. In other words, there are many kinds of ways to connect ideas to each other. As readers engage with a text, they connect these old and new ideas through making inferences. The four types of inferences that are made include deciding what schema to activate, holding in mind slots for the information in the schema, assigning default values for a schema unless conflicting information exists, and drawing conclusions to fill in any missing information. So, readers add to their knowledge of a topic by assimilating it into an existing, related schema or modifying existing schema where ideas may be in conflict. When this newly learned information needs to be recalled at a later date, it is accessed in one of three ways (i.e., there are three hypotheses for how schema theory explains memory). These hypotheses are the retrieval-plan hypothesis, the output-editing hypothesis, and the reconstruction hypothesis. Each of these hypotheses describes how the brain searches for information to link up a current schema to a relevant situation. Although schema theory may appear to be convincing, there is not enough evidence of how students make use of them when reading and remembering texts.

    Walter Kintsch (1988) wrote the germinal piece on the construction-integration model. This model is a bottom-up response to the top-down processing proposed by schema theory. Although the model does not explain how inferences are generated, it does explain how these inferences are combined, or integrated, to make sense of a text. As readers engage with a text, they interpret its microstructure (i.e., the connections between words and sentences and entire paragraphs) as well as its macrostructure (i.e., the connection between paragraphs and the full text; the text’s argument, essentially). The combination of the microstructure and the macrostructure is the integrated with the reader’s prior knowledge of the topic to create what Kintsch calls the situation model. There is evidence from time-order activation analysis of when each type of information (e.g., microstructure, macrostructure, situation model) is activated while reading. This sequence of activation does not explain how the integration of inferences works, but it does describe the process of construction and integration as part of comprehension.

    In 2005, Kintsch & Katherine A. Rawson further refined Kintsch’s original construction-integration model. In this refined model, there are four levels of comprehension: linguistic, microstructure, macrostructure, and situation model. The first two levels refer to words & phrases, and propositions, respectively. The third level, the macrostructure, refers to the connection between the propositions. The combination of the microstructure and the macrostructure is known as the textbase. The fourth level, the situation model, is the combination of the textbase and the reader’s prior knowledge and goals or purpose for reading. This model of comprehension is coherent because it can explain both on-line and off-line processing. On-line processing involves the integration of the textbase and prior knowledge, while off-line processing is the reconstruction of the inferences that were made to create the textbase. If you’ve ever stepped away from a text and felt that you understood it better upon reflection or the passing of time, then you have experienced the off-line processing discussed here.

    Kintsch and Rawson have empirical evidence that shows readers making these types of inferences, which suggests the model is more robust than Kintsch’s original formulation. For example, readers pay more attention to the first sentences of paragraphs than they do later sentences in the paragraphs. This focus of attention contributes to the construction of the macrostructure. And, because conventionally structured writing often features important information in the first sentence of each paragraph, the reader can use that piece of prior knowledge to construct the situation model while reading. It follows from this attention to a text’s macrostructure that authors could help their readers learn new words from context by putting the most important words or concepts in the first sentence of each paragraph in a text, though this plan might not be feasible.

    Before Kintsch and Rawson’s (2005) refinement of Kintsch’s 1988 model of construction-integration, Arthur C. Graesser, Murray Singer, and Tom Trabasso (1994) responded to the construction-integration model with the constructionist model. This model seeks to explain the different types of inferences readers can make. The authors list 13 types of inferences, but argue that not all are necessary. They describe certain conditions that need to be met for six of the inferences to be generated. The other seven types of inferences are said to be superfluous. As with the construction-integration model, there is empirical evidence supporting the constructionist model. This evidence comes in the form of preceding theory, verbal protocols, and time-order activation analysis. The verbal protocols present an additional source of information not captured in the construction-integration model, which gives the constructionist model additional explanatory power.

    Incidentally, this article has one of my favorite tables in all of reading research (p. 375), which is a breakdown of the 13 types of inferences possible to make while reading Ambrose Bierce’s “How Leisure Came.” Here is that parable: 

A Man to Whom Time was Money, and who was bolting his breakfast in order to catch a train, had leaned his newspaper against the sugar bowl and was reading as he ate. In his haste and abstraction he stuck a pickle-fork into his right eye, and on removing the fork the eye came with it. In buying spectacles the needless outlay for the right lens soon reduced him to poverty, and the Man to Whom Time was Money had to sustain life by fishing from the end of the wharf.

In particular, it is the 12th class of inference, involving “the emotion that the reader experiences when reading a text” that I find so endearing about this article. The authors cite the following text as eliciting the emotional inference: …on removing the fork the eye came with it. The inference made is simply stated as “The reader is disgusted.” Of course the reader is disgusted! Among all the other possible inferences to make when reading this text, the pure disgust it engenders is the most palpable response that I feel. Your mileage may vary, as the next model of reading comprehension indicates.

    The landscape model of reading comprehension, published in 1999 by Paul van den Broek, Michael Young, Yuhtsuen Tzeng, and Tracy Linderholm, is a response to the construction-integration model and the constructionist model in that it attempts to explain individual differences in reading ability, which is something the construction-integration model does not do. The landscape model can also be thought of as a response to schema theory because it attempts to explain how different mental slots are activated or accessed during reading. The authors use co-activation to explain the role of prior knowledge; concepts that co-occurred in previous readings will be co-activated in the current reading. Thus, reading comprehension involves the interaction between the reader’s attention, the text, the reader’s background knowledge, and the reader’s ability to retrieve information. Where the idea of a landscape matters is that each reader has a different idea of what is important enough to activate prior knowledge about.

    In other words, our lived experiences (which include reading) are varied, so certain words  or concepts may “pop” for us when we see them, but they may not “pop” for others because those others have not had the same experiences. Each of our mental landscapes is different because of our varying background knowledge, so we will each take something different from the same text. Further, the co-activation of concepts in a reading cycle (i.e., a sentence) suggests the importance of context in learning vocabulary. If the context is rich with concepts related to the meaning of an unknown word, then the reader will co-activate these related concepts when the word is seen in a new context. This series of co-activations may explain how context is used to infer the meaning of unknown words, an additional explanatory benefit of the landscape model of reading comprehension.

    If you take nothing else away from reading this post, it should be that the only skill or strategy involved in reading comprehension is inferencing. Connecting known information to new information in a text through making an inference is how we make meaning of text. If we do not know enough information about what we are reading, then we will not comprehend it. We will each take a different meaning from the text because we have different levels or types of background knowledge on any given topic. We can add to that knowledge through additional reading (or viewing or listening) and use that newly integrated knowledge to help us construct new meanings or deepen existing ones. When you are frustrated with someone not understanding your message online, consider that they have not had the same experiences as you have, so they don’t have the same associations between certain words or ideas. This idea seems so simple as to be tautologous. It’s kind of funny how the greatest contributor to reading comprehension is previous comprehension.

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References

Anderson, R. C. & Pearson, P. D. (1984). A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading comprehension. In P. D. Pearson, R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, & P. Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, Vol. 1, pp. 255-292. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Graesser, A. C., Singer, M., & Trabasso, T. (1994). Constructing inferences during narrative comprehension. Psychological Review, 101(3). 371-395.

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Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery (edited by William Irwin, Blackwell, 2007)

    Last week was a school break, so it’s a good time to spend a sunny day in a university library and read a book from my reading list cover to cover in one sitting because I can’t borrow it from the library. It was also break week for Northwestern, so I basically had the place to myself. For a few hours that day, I was in bibliophile heaven, reading a book in a forgotten corner (well, not really, because the building I was in was roughly circular, but you get the idea) of a research library at a name-brand institution. I was so focused, I didn’t even take a break to get lunch.

    You’re likely familiar with this kind of book even if you haven’t read it. I think the first in the loosely defined series was Seinfeld and Philosophy and I know I read something like The D’oh of Homer: Simpsons and Philosophy when I was trying to understand my own undergraduate philosophy courses a little better. Although I appreciate the approach these books take, they never clicked for me. Sure, I’m a fan of METALLICA and The Simpsons, among other pop culture fare that have been featured in these books, and of course I am a huge nerd, so I’d love to read about the intersection of philosophy with these allegedly low-brow pop culture artifacts. Somehow, the combination of the two things was less than the sum of its parts; they were not two great tastes that taste great together. So, you may understand why I didn’t want to purchase this book when I could read it for free at the library.

    As I previewed the text, I noticed that the series info page tells us “Thinking deeply about TV, movies, and music doesn’t make you a ‘complete idiot.’ In fact it might make you a philosopher, someone who believes the unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined cartoon is not worth watching.” That was certainly reassuring. Not that I agree with the idea that pop culture and idiocy go hand-in-hand, mind you. I don’t need to give my favorite bands, books, shows, or movies an academic sheen to consider them worthwhile. It’s nice if I can but it’s kind of like the idea of a guilty pleasure; I’ll interrogate why I like something, but feeling guilty about it is a little weird.

    You can probably imagine that METALLICA has been an important band in my life for quite some time. Basically, I’ve been interested in them since 7th grade. I was aware of them earlier, but I wasn’t ready for them until I was a young adolescent. And, of course, like most young adolescents, I had to express my interest in them through clothing. It seems that at least one of the authors had the same experience as me. In an essay on METALLICA’s message of nonconformity, individuality, and truth, Thomas Nys writes about being 14 years old and how, at the time, he “believed that wearing a METALLICA t-shirt provided the perfect expression of my rebellious nature. Nowadays, I believe wearing the t-shirt provided the perfect excuse for not talking to the beautiful girls I was secretly in love with (girls who would have nothing to do with such a rebel)” (p. 41). If that doesn’t hit home, I don’t know what does. It’s not just the recognition of the attempt at iconoclasm, but the later realization of the metal t-shirt as social kryptonite that resonates here. I’d be lying if I said I still felt the same way about METALLICA as I did when I first heard them, or that I’m even into the same songs after all these years. What’s interesting here instead is using the band as a kind of measuring stick of my own growth. There are different aspects of the band, let alone eras, that have appealed to me at different times in my life. It’s not a linear progression either. It’s like that old saying about not being able to step in the same river twice because the river has changed as much as you have. One change I was not ready for was the transition from hearing METALLICA on modern rock radio as a teenager to hearing them on a throwback or retro-focused station in recent years. As another chapter in this book brutally declares, “Eventually, even METALLICA will find rotation on only the oldies station” (p. 110). Even though I know that to be true and have witnessed it with my own ears, it still stings. When I consider that those words were written as early as 2007 at the latest, I feel the sting even more deeply.

    I could go on about the autobiographical connections I felt to various moments in the chapters of the text, but what really excited me about reading this book were the new insights gained about a band I thought I knew so well. For instance, in a discussion of the importance of the band as community, Rachael Sotos shares how important the collective identity of we was for the band, especially in the early days. She writes, “If we consider in particular the first album, Kill ‘em All, it is truly remarkable how predominant the experience of the ‘we’ is at the beginning of METALLICA’s journey. In the lyrics of this album the word ‘we’ appears more times than on all the other albums combined. It appears and is repeated, again and again announcing the ‘we’ of the newly born speed metal community” (p. 90). That’s an incredible point to make and one that seems so glaringly obvious in retrospect. “Kill ‘em All” stands on its own, while their other albums have certain echoes, connections, or relationships that make them part of an era or music history moment. What Sotos argues here is that in addition to the sonic novelty of a ten-song album that essentially invented thrash metal as a genre, the importance of the album is in the collective nature of its expression. This was a mission statement from a band that saw itself as a crew. In contrast to a hardcore punk band that might have sang about an us-versus-them orientation to being pissed off at society at large, and, in so doing, draw the audience into community with it, METALLICA declares here that they are an unstoppable machine, so you’d best get out of their way. And here I was thinking I couldn’t love “Kill ‘em All” any more than I already do.

    Those familiar with the band’s lineup might be scratching their heads at this point because they know of the infamous lineup changes that have been part of the band over the years. Manuel Bremer and Daniel Cohnitz have got you covered in their chapter on “Is it Still METALLICA? On the Identity of Rock Bands Over Time.” They take on the idea of the Ship-of-Theseus-like recomposition of a band’s lineups over time as they consider what counts as being the true or the original version of the band. Who is that we?, essentially. In their chapter, they offer a thought experiment from involving a “Mave Dustaine” who uses mad scientists to transplant his brain into Kirk Hammett’s body while Kirk is on the tour bus one night. So when Kirk wakes up with “Mave Dustaine’s brain,” the band is astonished that “he has forgotten how to play almost all of his solos, but he can play many songs by a band called Degameth. Is it really Kirk who woke up in Kirk’s bed with Kirk’s body but with Mave’s memories?” (p. ~186). This is a delightful exercise that gets at the idea of band’s identity. It also has the benefit of being hilarious—just try not to laugh when thinking of an alternate reality with someone named Mave Dustaine sings for Degameth, while Hames Jetfield’s band, Temallica (or Metal Mania, if they had chosen that name instead…) is considered the lesser band. Of course Dave Mustaine played a pivotal role in METALLICA’s development, and their choice to unceremoniously kick him out of the band because of his alcohol intake is notorious example of dudes not being able to talk through their problems with each other. They continued to use riffs and songs he’d composed for their first two albums, just as Kirk brought riffs and songs from EXODUS when they recruited him  to replace Dave. Does that mean METALLICA is a revised lineup of EXODUS and MEGADETH a revised version of METALLICA? Not quite, but the argument over who can claim to be the originator of an idea is not merely a question from a compositional royalties standpoint.

    On the topic of “what counts” as a band in terms of their lineup, I deeply appreciated Philip Lindholm’s chapter, entitled “The Struggle Within: Hetfield, Kierkegaard, and the Pursuit of Authenticity.” As lead singer, founding member, and rhythm guitarist, James gets plenty of attention in the band’s history. That said, it was very interesting to read how Lindholm traced Hetfield’s existential journey by way of his lyrics. The most intriguing part of the chapter was footnote, which is exciting in its own right. This one contains an excerpt from a 2001 interview with James from Playboy, where he mentions how his parents’ faith was socially alienating for him. I know they were Christian Scientists because it has been subject of METALLICA songs before. But, the detail that a young James “couldn’t get a physical to play football” (p. 72) when he was in high school makes my mind reel. To think that there’s a version of reality where James becomes a full-on jock and pursues sports instead of music is almost too much to bear. Would he have gone to college? Would he have been less of an outcast? Would he have been as interested in music? Who would Lars have connected with when he put an ad in The Recycler? James’ missed shot at competitive sports glory because of his parent’s religious beliefs eventually made METALLICA possible. It’s staggering to think of what almost wasn’t…

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