It's an effective video which calls attention to many of the things I love about MIT but it left me frustrated. For one thing, most of the folks they depict still come across looking like geeks, not that there's anything wrong with that! And I thought the video would have been more effective if it broadened our definition of geek to include all of the rest of us at MIT who don't participate in the robotics competition or spend most of our time talking to our shoes. I'm proud to be a geek -- and to be geekish about culture and art. To my mind, saying that MIT isn't all geekish because it teaches the humanities is another way of saying that the humanities are cut off from the things that made MIT famous and I don't accept that core premise.
So, rather than teaching our incoming students to feel proud because they aren't geeks, we hit them with a geek entrance exam, inspired by our colleague Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Diaz's writing is full of in joke references to games, comics, animated series, and pop music, all of which form the raw material for the various characters to construct their own personal mythologies.
Make no mistake -- Junot Diaz is a geek; he's also a hep cat. Both sides of his personality were on display during his appearance on The Colbert Report earlier this summer. In writing this book, it is clear that Diaz was struggling to make sense of his own geekish impulses and perhaps, this award winning book is his way of reflecting on how and why he belongs at MIT. It's an amazing book which I recommend to anyone reading this blog.
Every year we select a book to send to our graduate students to read over the summer. The books are carefully chosen to help set the tone and establish some key themes for the coming year. This year, we chose Oscar Wao and our graduate students are lucky enough to be able to sit down for a conversation with the author later this week. To get in the spirit, I put together a little quiz which includes many, though not all, of the geek references in the novel. We used it to break the ice as the graduate students got to show off their geek expertise. I thought you might also enjoy working their way through the quiz. I didn't bother to put together the answers. That's what Wikipedia is for, silly!
To show how geeky my students are, they ended up using ChaCha, the new text-message based research service, to track down answers to some of the hard to identify terms.
How Big a Geek Are You?
The following are geek culture references from Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao.
How many of them can you identify?
How many other CMS students do you need to talk with to figure out what they all
are?
What digital resources would you use to track down this information?
Muhammad Ali
Akira
Lloyd Alexander
Appleseed
Isaac Asimov
Atari
Jeans Pierre Aumont
Balrogs
Billy Batson
Battle of the Planets
"Beam Me Up"
Big Blue Marble
Biggie Smalls
Blake's 7
Ben Bova
Bon Jovi
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Captain America
Captain Horlock
Chaka
Chakobsa
Champions
Clay's Ark
Daniel Clowes
Dark Knight Returns
DC
D&D
Samuel Delaney
Deathstroke
DM
Doctor Who
Dr. Manhattan
Dr. Zaius
Dorsai
Dune
Eightball
Elvish
Encyclopedia Brown
The Exorcist
The Eyes of Mingus
Fantasy Games Unlimited
Final Fantasy
George Foreman
The Fountainhead
Galactus
Galadriel
Gamma World
Gen. Urko
Ghost
Gondolin
Good People of Sur
Gorilla Grod
Gary Gygax
Green Lantern
Hardware
Hector Lavoe
Robert Heinlein
Frank Herbert
Herculoids
Hernandez Brothers
Tracy Hickman
Harry Houdini
Robert E. Howard
Ill Will
Incredible Journey
Intellivision
Jabba the Hutt
Jack Kirby
Jedi
The Jeffersons
Kaneda
The Great Kazoo
Stephen King
Land of the Lost
Stan Lee
Ursula Le Guin
Lensman
Lothlorien
H.P. Lovecraft
Luba
Magic
Manhunter
Man Without a Face
Marvel
Mary Jane
Master Killer
John Merrick
Frank Miller
Minas Tirith
Miracle Man
Maria Montez
Alan Moore
Mordor
Morlock
My Side of the Mountain
"Nanoo-Nanoo"
Neo Tokyo
New Order
Andre Norton
"Oh Mighty Isis"
Palomar
Phantom of the Opera
Phantom Zone
Planet of the Apes
Roman Polaski
Project A
Rat Pack
Lou Reed
Return of the King
Robotech Macross
Rorshach
The Sandman
Sauron
Doc Savage
Shazam
Sindarin
Slan
"Doc" Smith
Robert Smith
Solomon Grundy
Sound of Music
Space Ghost
Squadron Supreme
Olaf Stapledon
Star Blazers
Star Trek
Street Fighter
Tom Swift
Sycorax
Take Back the Night
Teen Titans
Tetsuo
The Terminator 2
This Island Earth
Three's Company
J.R.R. Tolkien
Tomoko
Tribe
Tripods
Twilight Zone
U2
Ultraman
Adrian Veidt
Veritech Fighter
Virus
The Watcher
Watchman
Watership Down
Margaret Weis
H.G. Wells
What If
What's Happening
Wonder Woman
X-Men
Zardoz