tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22848371060908951242024-03-07T20:24:53.172-08:00ThroughlinesReflections on Teaching, Reading, and Writing... and ArtUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger699125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-30338691027289397752023-03-23T14:27:00.002-07:002023-03-23T14:28:14.758-07:00The Deluge<p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiS3xcCl_c-BuPRn5m4OWSgVgMRJN3lkPCKqCUAEPIUSK9tR7_445RGUsxBoyYd60m1606t2ewAORGExW2l1_2620GiPUA-TpbWbCgxr_z97VCLkiYGwKD-OsDaRXtUtQsF6lsookbChm29kVCM9qU8BdLTcRSkdSDY9fk1acDShkfU6pq2Fy4D-vom" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="366" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiS3xcCl_c-BuPRn5m4OWSgVgMRJN3lkPCKqCUAEPIUSK9tR7_445RGUsxBoyYd60m1606t2ewAORGExW2l1_2620GiPUA-TpbWbCgxr_z97VCLkiYGwKD-OsDaRXtUtQsF6lsookbChm29kVCM9qU8BdLTcRSkdSDY9fk1acDShkfU6pq2Fy4D-vom" width="163" /></a></div> I spent a significant amount of time over the last few weeks reading the novel The <i>Deluge</i>, by Stephen Markley. I'll say right here at the start that <i>The Deluge</i> is not for the faint of heart. For one thing, it comes in at just under 900 pages. And those aren't pages with large print and big margins, either, more like nine-point type and half-inch margins. So to work through it requires a sobering investment of time and energy. And the story it has to tell is no walk in the park either. One of Markley's primary goals is to examine the likely consequences of climate change over the next twenty years. That in itself is sobering, in that many of the prognosticators currently wringing their hands and crying out loud about coming existential disasters talk about what is likely to be happening in 2050 or 2100. Markley's time frame is much more compressed. The sequence of events described in the book starts in 2013 and ends in 2039. Nothing of what is described is remotely implausible, or remotely encouraging. Markley describes in unflinching detail multiple scenarios which people across the globe are already experiencing and can expect to experience in the not-too-far-distant future: heat waves, fires, water shortages, dust storms, and decimated crops on the one hand; floods, storms, and sea-level rise decimating coastal cities across the world on the other. Those events will likely result in the displacement of literally billions of people who will find themselves homeless and on the move without resources.<br /><br />So yes, it's a dystopian novel based on the impact of climate change. But one of the things which makes it such a gripping read is that it is also a character-based novel that depicts, again in utterly convincing detail, the interactions of an enormous cast of characters, the most central of whom are intelligent, well-meaning, and socially engaged, and trying to fight, each in their own way, against what they correctly perceive to be an existential threat to human life on earth. <br /><br />There are 41 chapters in the book. Some are narrated in conventional fashion by major characters. They include a scientist, a charismatic social activist (one of the most memorable characters I've ever encountered on the page), the leader of an eco-terrorist group, an ad rep for a company helping industry give the appearance of supporting climate change activism while working frantically behind the scenes to forestall any change in the status quo. There are also chapters presented as primary-source documents: news articles, magazine articles, and most notably, position papers authored by a fiercely intelligent autistic savant who is tasked by various government agencies with trying to come up with coherent and intelligible delineation of the fearsomely complex issues which need to be dealt with through legislation. (The book would be worth reading if only for the depth and clarity of those position papers.) Each of these characters comes alive as a fully realized human being embedded in a network of family and friends, all of whom have their own stories and challenges as the world careens toward disaster.<br /><br />What became clear, at least to me, as the story moves from year to year and crisis to crisis, is that the scientific and technical challenges having to do with dealing with climate change, vexing as they are, will amount to nothing next to the human challenges. Any single proposal for dealing with climate change, much less a coherent program of necessary initiatives, will necessarily be met with a torrent of indignation, outrage, obfuscation, disinformation, and denial. Some of that pushback is overt and explicit; a larger quantity is covert and maliciously duplicitous. None of which should be surprising to anyone who pays attention to our current political environment, which is exactly and predominantly that way, and getting worse every day.<br /><br />I've read I don't know how many thousands of novels in my lifetime. I don't think I've ever read one more ambitious, or more successful in realizing its ambitions, than <i>The Deluge</i>. It's gripping. It's frightening. It's extraordinarily well-imagined and well-written throughout. It's certainly understandable that most of us would prefer to pretend that the threats we are facing are less immediate and less pressing than they actually are. Al Gore was attempting to call everyone's attention to "An Inconvenient
Truth" sixteen years ago. What has changed in the meantime? Diddly
squat, that's what. Markley's principled mission is to ask that we consider, individually and collectively, the human consequences of that sort of lassitude.<br /><br />Since finishing the book, I find that as I scan the news each day I see the harbingers everywhere of the world as he imagines it in this book. Just this week the New York Times had a <a href=" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/climate/global-warming-ipcc-earth.html" target="_blank">lead article</a> entitled "Earth Is Nearing The Tipping Point For A Hot Future," another "last chance" reminder about the just-released UN report on climate change. What has been the response of our congress, of our president, of our global leadership? Radio silence. Big surprise. Maybe Stephen Markley can help tip the scales, at least for those willing to invest the time and effort into reading <i>The Deluge</i>. I strongly recommend that you be one of them.<br /><br /><br /><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-20194695062882909702023-02-21T07:22:00.000-08:002023-02-21T07:22:05.527-08:00Bookmarks II<p> </p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAefyR_uPU4vLv8QH5ZGZSlbt3qUZHpXALyDbd4Hvt_JCogcrDdMCTE9mV5JykjDKOAEPh6Q_BcgmWK6Fm8fUmv6ZJvmfaNfXf7aET-C5XLGbexVWWi6-vx97SG2Ot5RKpZ6HJ72zjCfovThBBVrX76bDGvRoqxeZSw14vUX9pOUGOta07Hm5T7Okd/s2139/IMG_1055.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1656" data-original-width="2139" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAefyR_uPU4vLv8QH5ZGZSlbt3qUZHpXALyDbd4Hvt_JCogcrDdMCTE9mV5JykjDKOAEPh6Q_BcgmWK6Fm8fUmv6ZJvmfaNfXf7aET-C5XLGbexVWWi6-vx97SG2Ot5RKpZ6HJ72zjCfovThBBVrX76bDGvRoqxeZSw14vUX9pOUGOta07Hm5T7Okd/w400-h310/IMG_1055.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><p> </p><p>Just bookmarks again this week. I've been doing more drawing than writing of late. I like working small scale like this; it lowers the stakes and I can finish a piece in one sitting, whereas larger pieces can take weeks. But if you happen to have arrived here looking for <a href="https://creativenonfiction.org/writing/the-wonder-of-the-look-on-her-face/" target="_blank">something pretty interesting</a> to read, this short essay touches on many of the themes this blog has existed to explore. I ran across it this week in <i>One Long River of Song</i> by Brian Doyle, a collection of essays which is in its entirety pretty awesome. As is his novel, <i>Mink River</i>.<br /></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-76180079587938141502023-02-14T10:04:00.001-08:002023-02-14T10:04:56.490-08:00Bookmarks<p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNokXPJVQHgSjNB2iR3pmWS9-vBNANPz8w628a1XwcG43BdBTLTpr9MPXq6D4r4y4LdlH3DHRRutcoeNPPn6-slYE22nOaNCNNE7HtlHYO8BYV66ziFqR3LvbKiMJ5EbOcQZO3mQk4a4GB5mS4HaaqnPO3vQVp9PkRmcOcXkiQjC-DpFV4JC4gVkj8/s2009/bookmarks.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1383" data-original-width="2009" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNokXPJVQHgSjNB2iR3pmWS9-vBNANPz8w628a1XwcG43BdBTLTpr9MPXq6D4r4y4LdlH3DHRRutcoeNPPn6-slYE22nOaNCNNE7HtlHYO8BYV66ziFqR3LvbKiMJ5EbOcQZO3mQk4a4GB5mS4HaaqnPO3vQVp9PkRmcOcXkiQjC-DpFV4JC4gVkj8/w400-h275/bookmarks.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-25731243893417919202023-02-07T19:02:00.001-08:002023-02-08T11:07:24.656-08:00Shantytown<p> </p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><div><b>Shantytown</b><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.<br /> - Kevin Wilson</i></span><br /><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On the other side of the equation are two peeled apples. The first is sweet, the second deliberates quietly with the kettle and the spoon. It's a predictable dilemma: one of us has to go first. How long can we expect the rain to last? Hard to say. But at least the furnace no longer belches flames, and streets are no longer flooded. If you want my opinion, nine crows is three too many. Grind your teeth all you want, it's not going to help you with the dishes. Across the road, the sound of hammering on someone's roof; it must be close to Easter. Do you follow me? The thing about mathematics: it's structured, at least until you start asking questions. Better to close your eyes, exhale, wait for what comes next. My sister Priscilla drank heavily, but she made a mean chocolate brownie, so we forgave her. Waking up from a dream sweating, breathing hard, tangled in the bedsheets. Later on, when it became clear that the sirens were never going to stop, we got in the truck and drove to Albuquerque. Quiet there, but no water to speak of. Watch out for scorpions, though. I keep asking myself if there's a better way to proceed. No answer as yet. Mercifully, the creek has carried the worst of the debris away. Staying on track is not as easy as it you might think it would be. You need a plan a, and a plan b. Diagrams help, but still. We didn't expect the earthquake, did we. No way to tell what's in store. Count to fourteen. Stop. Count back to zero. If you're going to drive, probably best to start early and stop frequently. Up at the silver mine there's a little shop with garlic fries and tasty milkshakes. Not cheap, but what are you saving your money for, anyway? There's a point beyond which even the bravest are unwilling to go. As for the silverware, you may as well just give it away. All these people wearing masks, as if it is going to do any good. Tribal rituals. That guy at the cash register, the one with the eyebrow piercing and the tats. I've had it up to here with lemon bars, with strip malls, with email chains. My mom used to insist that there's something in potatoes you can't get in any other food. Tell you what: you help me out this time, and next weekend I'll take you to Hudson and buy you that new pair of sneakers you've been talking about. Then of course there's Taylor Swift. For or against? You're supposed to steer clear of the third rail. They talk about the light at the end of the tunnel as if it were an actual thing. Vonnegut knew better. So do you. So do I.</div></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p><b>Process Reflection:</b></p><p>This is a draft of a work in progress. I have a writing partner. Twice a month or so one of us comes up with a prompt and we both write responses to it. In this case the prompt provided by my partner was the sentence that appears in italics at the top, from Kevin Wilson's novel <i>Now is Not the Time to Panic</i>. What interested me about that particular sentence is that it makes a certain kind of sense using imagery and syntax that is offbeat and oblique. But many of the transitions between words and phrases are unexpected; at least to me as a reader they are. They probably make better sense in context, but as a standalone sentence it is interestingly enigmatic.<br /></p><p>There's a pretty long tradition of writing in this vein, what I supposed might be called impressionistic or expressionistic writing, where whatever is being asserted in terms of paraphrasable content is subordinated to the sounds and shapes and surprises of the sequences of words themselves. John Ashbery, for example, made career of writing poems that unfold in such a way that every time you think you're starting to get what he's saying he pulls the rug out from under you. To cite but one example, more or less completely at random (from the middle of a poem called "Love's Old Sweet Song"):</p><p><span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">Meantime, one comes<br />bearing an envelope that is fresh and blue, one salivates; even<br />it it's not a stay of execution but an order for the immediate putting into<br />effect of same there's something to learn. It's not like two cats<br />ignoring each other in the basement areaway. By that I mean it was<br />going to lead up to something and then did, quite quickly. Better<br />than scanning hirsute sands for plumes announcing the arrival<br />of reinforcements; in those cases one invariably skips forward to a<br />time in the near future when everybody is happy again and an engagement<br />ring slips onto a ring finger of its own accord.</span></blockquote>Look at any particular phrase, and it makes sense. Look at them in the context of one another, and the sensemaking falls away. There's <i>something</i> on display, but it's not exactly clear what it is. Something about tone, something about feeling, something about a mind at work that isn't interested in showing your or telling you anything you might already know. The parallels with abstract art in general and collage in particular are pretty obvious. (Ashbery himself was a dedicated collage artist. On the side, so to speak.) I am of course no Ashbery, but I often find his approach to writing to be refreshing.<br /><p></p><p>There is also a whole subgenre of prose poems that also present themselves as experiments in obliquity. Here's an example from Robert Bly:</p><p> </p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>A Rusty Tin Can</b><br /> </p><p>Someone has stepped on this tin can, which now has the shape of a broken cheekbone. It has developed a Franciscan color out in the desert, perhaps some monk who planted apple trees in the absent pastures, near the graveyard of his friends. The can's texture is rough and reminds one of Rommel's neck. When the fingers touch it, they inquire if it is light or heavy. It is both light and heavy like Mrs. Mongrain's novel we just found in the attic, written seventy years ago. None of the characters are real but in any case they're all dead now.</p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>My original goal in writing <i>Shantytown</i> was to just get it going and then write whatever words came into my head, with the intention of undercutting the flow of logic often enough that it would be impossible to make literal sense of it. I used to do this exercise with my high school English students. The assignment was called "Stop Making Sense," and the instructions were to fill up a page with sentences that didn't mean anything, or that at least kept resisting the temptation to mean something. As it happens, that's a lot harder to do than you would think it is. Our brains aren't wired that way. Humans are pattern seekers, and are made uncomfortable when they can't get oriented, either in a world or in a text.</p><p>The passage above clocks in at 500 words, which is the initial goal I had set myself. Tonight, in preparation for a meeting of my poetry group tomorrow, I boiled it down into something Ashberyish that might work as a poem. Some time later on, my intention is to go in the other direction, which would be to expand it by another 500 words or so, and see what shows up.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-71891447572536100632023-01-31T14:04:00.000-08:002023-01-31T14:04:28.644-08:00Rachel Cusk, Second Place (II)<p> </p><p>Okay, so I'm back. Having re-read <i>Second Place</i>, having done my charts and graphs, having met with my cohorts to discuss the book, I'm going to try to work through a couple of ideas I have in my head at this point.</p><p>I suppose the biggest question for me as a reader, and I suspect for other readers as well, is what to make of the narrator, M. The whole book is essentially a monologue on her part, and that's sort of a problem, in that what she has to say about her hopes and dreams is frequently at odds with her behaviors in pursuing those hopes and dreams. For example, she claims to love her husband Tony and to be grateful for what he has done for her, but she invites the painter L into their home and spends most of the novel conducting what certainly feels like an extended flirtation with him. Right from the start, M is drawn to L's work because it seems to represent to her an escape, a portal from what she is experiencing as a constricted life to one that might offer her freedom and transcendence. Even as she tries to articulate this, she seems to be aware that her yearnings are to some degree inexplicable:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>There's no particular reason, on the surface, why L's work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman—but least of all, surely, a young woman whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallized in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentantly male down to the last brushstroke. (11)</blockquote><p></p><p>M's frustration at the limitations she faces as woman, and her resentment of L (and Tony) for the freedoms they possess as males, seem to be rooted in the way she was treated, or remembers being treated, as a child. As she says later in the same paragraph, "The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better — would have been right, would have been how it ought to be — had I been a boy." (12)</p><p>In a climactic and emotionally fraught scene at the end of the novel, after M has finally talked L into painting her portrait, she puts on the only dress she owns that fits her closely, her wedding dress, and heads to the studio. Tony sees her going and screams at her to come back. She refuses, and walks into a situation that is even more fraught than the one she's walking out of. </p><p>By the end of the novel, M seems to have arrived at some sort of realization about the nature of truth and freedom and transcendence, but it's a realization shrouded in a sort of mystery:</p><p></p><blockquote>The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal. (180)</blockquote><p></p><p>That's the basis of her attraction to L's work, why it speaks to her, and what in the end she takes away from her interactions with him and with his work: that there is something on the other side of the surfaces of things, something that is accessible to us only through art, something that could set us free if only we could find our way to it. It cannot be apprehended directly by the senses or stated directly in words. This of course is not a new idea. Franz Kafka once said "I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones." Many other writers have made similarly enigmatic observations along these lines. (Anais Nin: "The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.")</p><p>M's struggles to get past her very individual and very personal limitations in order to arrive at Whatever It Is that is on the other side are at the heart of the dynamism of the plot of this book, such as it is. But there's a larger question that my group touched upon in our discussion: what is Rachel Cusk, the author, up to? She presents us with a character struggling against her own inclinations and her own limitations, a character who is drawn to art and also to some degree frustrated by art, a character who is perhaps admirable in her aspirations, but also hard to sympathize with, since so many of her frustrations seem to be the result of self-inflicted wounds.</p><p>I've thought about this and I'm not sure I have a definitive answer. But my working hypothesis is that it is precisely the inconsistencies and problematics of M's struggle that interest Cusk. It would have been easy enough to make M into a more insightful and capable character, and to make this book into feel-good story where L arrives and M is reborn as a triumphantly free and happy and fully realized person. But that kind of story arc is, well, a cliché, and if there's anything Cusk is not interested in it's clichés. She is regularly dinged by snarky reviewers who consider her work to be "frosty" and "humorless" and "astringent" and "convoluted." Several reviewers have gone so far as to object to the publisher's use of Optima, a sans serif type face, in her books; Dwight Garner, for example, makes the rather puzzling remark in his <i>Times</i> review that "Optima is unusual to see in a novel; it delivers to my eyes a chill sense of the void." Anthony Cummins, writing in <i>The Guardian</i>, goes him one better: </p><p>
<span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p><blockquote>Cusk’s sans-serif Optima
typeface, now as much a part of her brand as high-pressure deliberation on
gender and selfhood, adds to an indefinable sense of threat, with the novel’s
diction caught between the lecture hall and the analyst’s couch. </blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: "Cambria",serif;">Obviously, these guys are going pretty far out of their way to find things to carp about. Equally obviously, Rachel Cusk's novels are not everyone's cup of tea. But I find them to be thought-provoking and relevant and insightful, not in the sense of delivering satisfying prefabricated epiphanies, but in the sense of posing questions well worth thinking about, both in terms of the workings of the novels themselves and in terms of they mirror the often muddy and complicated events of our own lives.</span> <style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-53584210304918321752023-01-24T20:10:00.003-08:002023-01-31T10:48:49.500-08:00Rachel Cusk, Second Place (I)<p> </p><p>This evening, in preparation for a meeting of my book group coming up this Friday, I finished re-reading Rachel Cusk's book <i>Second Place</i>. I had read it for the first time back in November and found it intriguing. Here are some of the preliminary notes I made at that time:<br /><br /></p><blockquote>The Cusk book was inward and awkward and psychologically astute in ways that I have come to expect from her. The narrator is M, a middle-aged woman who has had a long-time fixation on a painter she refers to only as L, whose work spoke to her when she first saw it when she was a young woman. Now she's living with her husband Tony along a marsh on a farm of sorts that has an extra cottage called the Second Place. She winds up writing a number of times to the artist asking him if he'd like to visit; she thinks he would find the landscape inspiring, as she does. She also seems to be entertaining the hope that they will become friends, if not lovers. She hears nothing for a long time. Then she gets word that he is coming, and when he shows up, he's not alone; he's brought along a beautiful young woman named Brett. Most of the book has to do with the time he spends there, and the various disconnects between the narrator and L. There are subplots involving her daughter Justine and her husband Kurt, who have moved in just before L arrives. Justine is befriended by Brett, Kurt spends a period of time as a kind of assistant to Tony on the farm, and L navigates a series of psychological and physical crises, including a having, toward the end of the book, a stroke that radically re-shapes his life and the lives of all the people around him. The bulk of the book consists of interior monologue rendered as direct address toward someone identified only as Jeffers. We're inside the narrator's head the whole time, but the conceit is that M is not talking to us, she's talking to Jeffers, and we are thus in the oddly oblique position of seeming to be listening in on the one-sided conversation. M is clearly a very intelligent and articulate woman who as a narrator and the conduct of her life is ruthless in pursuit of existential understanding. Her upbringing and the events of her life have led her to be suspicious of men on the one hand and family on the other. Her hopes and expectations of finding some formula for freedom and happiness in her life are more or less consistently thwarted by her own impulsive behaviors and insecurities. I liked the feel of the book as I was reading it, the way that the narrative never seemed to move in the ways in might be expected to move, but was insistently making its own way in its own time. It's the kind of book that would necessitate re-reading, and some not insignificant amount of study, to fully appreciate. I may go down that road, I'm not sure. At least enough to pull some quotes and think them over. Cusk has some interesting things to say about being a woman and about being an artist and about how hard it is to make sense of anything when you are in the middle of it.</blockquote><br /><br />I guess I'd say after a second reading that I feel the same way, only more so. There are, as Francis Bacon famously noted, lots of ways of to read. (<i>"...some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested"</i>). This is a book that I suppose can be read for pleasure. That's the way I read it the first time. I was intrigued by these particular characters in this particular situation, and I was reading mostly to find out what happened. Which was fine at the time. But on second reading, knowing what was going to happen, I was much more attuned to the multi-layered psychological dynamics of the characters individually and in their interactions with one another: M and Justine. M and Tony. M and L. Brett and Tony. Brett and M. Justine and Kurt. Tony and L. And so on. I feel like for me to fully grok what is going on in the book, I'm going to have to go back and start pulling quotes that relate to particular themes and laying them out on paper and making charts and graphs in order to be able to figure them out. In other words, to be the reader that this book needs me to be, I've got a lot of work to do, quite probably more work than many readers would likely want to sign up for. Cusk is a thoughtful, demanding writer, and my sense is that there are rewards to be had in meeting her halfway. <br /><br /><br />So fine. But wait, there's more. As it turns out—and this is something I did not become aware of until I was halfway through my second reading of the book—the basic plot of Cusk's book has been appropriated from <i>Lorenzo in Taos</i>, an early 20th century novel by an American writer I had never heard of named Mabel Dodge Luhan. (Apparently, in at least one of the editions of Second Place there is an endnote in which Cusk acknowledges the primary source that she is working from. But that endnote does not appear in my paperback version of the text, and so I wasn't aware of it until I started perusing the reviews of <i>Second Place</i>.) Cusk uses the scaffolding of that book's plot in much the same way that Barbara Kingsolver uses David Copperfield as the template for <i>Demon Copperhead</i>, which I put aside midway through in order to re-read <i>Second Place</i>. So if I <i>really</i> wanted to do my due diligence, I suppose I would need to read <i>Lorenzo in Taos</i> as well. Not sure that's gonna happen. Obsessive-compulsive as I may be, I have to set myself some limits, especially inasmuch as I have a stack of about twenty other books waiting for me on my nightstand. <br /><br />Anyway this is my preliminary attempt to process <i>Second Place</i>. My tentative plan is to do some of that culling and graphing and charting, then talk with my group, and come back with some further thoughts next week. Till then...<br /><br /><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-32823342042770532822023-01-17T12:41:00.005-08:002023-01-17T12:41:29.402-08:00Artifactual<p> </p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHT6SVbSR_6SqDB1XIID2VPiryPzJVtar6lTtXtxhpzo42FQowgOqk21xuKSNOmG0UxAXzt39U__EHpTzMt4NvmdP6rLOTf8FkNBUfcnEnmCN7CrvkzTDS9YCRXwB1Fu8gEvsyrMFY9sSpqW4knXyajeqV4nELsWBB3LjbwCgvlTz3-8hJi4RQXnmR/s2312/rbs%20artifact.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2312" data-original-width="1388" height="430" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHT6SVbSR_6SqDB1XIID2VPiryPzJVtar6lTtXtxhpzo42FQowgOqk21xuKSNOmG0UxAXzt39U__EHpTzMt4NvmdP6rLOTf8FkNBUfcnEnmCN7CrvkzTDS9YCRXwB1Fu8gEvsyrMFY9sSpqW4knXyajeqV4nELsWBB3LjbwCgvlTz3-8hJi4RQXnmR/w258-h430/rbs%20artifact.JPG" width="258" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><b> Artifactual</b><br /><br /><br /><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">What's the point? What if <br />there is no point? What if <br />the pointlessness is the point? <br />At what point does whether <br />or not there is a point become <br />a pointless question to even ask?<br /><br /><br />Do you feel like you owe it<br />to yourself to be able to offer<br />some kind of explanation?<br />What is there you can say?<br />It is, as they say, what it is:<br />right there in black and white:<br /><br /><br />Why this and not that? Why not<br />something else entirely?<br />Fact is, I can't say. I'm not sure<br />myself. I am just trying to make <br />space for something to exist <br />where before there was nothing.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"> </p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Process Reflection:</b></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">I have for some years enjoyed playing around with mark-making in various contexts. One of the simplest forms of mark-making is simply doodling, and at departmental and administrative meetings I found that doodling gave me something to occupy the part of my brain that was going quietly crazy while my left brain was trying to keep up with the flow of the conversation. It's a simple process: apply the point of the pen to the paper, and see what wants to show up. The stakes are low, and if what you have drawn doesn't pass muster, who cares? It still feels good while you are doing it. At least it does to me.</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">At some point I began, in the comfort and privacy of my study, trying more ambitious projects for which I felt the term "doodling" was reductive and dismissive. I preferred to think of them as black-and-white drawings. In some cases those drawings included some recognizable real-world elements. In many cases they did not. (Samples <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/aceblush/albums/72157641633411724" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/aceblush/albums/72157630562986540" target="_blank">here</a>.) I was primarily interested in exploring the ways in which these two simple elements, black and white, interact with one another, particularly in the negative spaces they create for one another. And the time I spent drawing began to feel a lot like a meditation exercise for me as well; I feel calmed and focused while drawing, and I'm often pleased with the results even when I can understand why someone else might not see them as being "art" in any sense of the word they might be familiar with.<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">The other night I happened to be in the mood to draw, but as it happened I had two sheets of blank paper in front of me rather than one, and while I drew I was also thinking about what to write for the weekly meeting of the poetry group that I host on zoom. So while I was drawing I began turning over in my mind the whole question of the value and worth of what I was doing, both as an artist as a writer, and as the words presented themselves I write them down, and as the movement of the lines proceeded I did that as well, more or less contrapuntally. The finished drawing is above. In writing the words, I was aware of trying to mimic, in a playful manner, in the sequences of the sounds the repetitive movements and patterns in the drawing. <br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">The next morning I took the lines I had written and did several revisions, of which the poem you see above is the product, but quite probably not the end product. I have yet to get feedback on the poem from my group. But it seems to me at this intermediate point that the poem is driving at something that I feel is at the core of both drawing and writing: they are disciplines based on a certain sort of magic, which is to make something out of nothing. And I do believe that what results from any particular exercise need not necessarily meet anyone else's criteria of excellence. It's quite enough for me that it makes me feel good when I'm done with it.<br /> </p><p> </p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-61873618550721492232023-01-10T19:54:00.006-08:002023-01-31T11:38:10.789-08:00The Death of the Essay? I Think Not.<p> </p><p>There has been a raft of articles in the last few weeks about ChatGPT and the threat that it supposedly represents to high school and college teachers. There's been much weeping and gnashing of teeth about how the threat posed to academia by artificial intelligence. The titles of many of the articles tend to be alarmist: "The End of English!" "The Essay is Dead!" Teachers are quizzing one another about What Is To Be Done. <i>How will we be able to tell if the students are cheating? Do we go back to making students write essays by hand? Should we just stop having students write at all?<br /></i><br />All of this hand-wringing is symptom of a much deeper set of problems that has been around since long before the advent of ChatGPT. And those problems have to do with 1) the ways in which schools have historically been teaching writing, 2) the purposes for which student writing have been employed, and 3) the lessons that students have been absorbing after being subjected to those practices.<br /><br />The unfortunate fact of the matter is that most teachers treat the essay as an evaluative instrument. The purpose of assigning an essay is to put the student in the position of being able to demonstrate whether or not s/he has learned something that the teacher has determined to be of importance. Not only is the content prescribed, but the form as well. Particular attention must be paid to the shape of the essay and to each of the paragraphs within it. The classic model is the five-paragraph thesis essay, a genre of writing that is not valued and pretty much does not exist outside of the confines of the classroom. (If you are in doubt about that, pick up any copy of <i>Best American Essays</i> published in the last twenty years and see how many five-paragraph thesis essays you find.) <br /><br />In many cases there are other arbitrary rules. The writer must affect a kind of disembodied professorial objectivity. No use of the pronoun "I." No forms of the verb "to be." Each paragraph must have a topic sentence with the following sentences offering supporting details. And so on. Students who follow these rules are rewarded with A's, which they take to mean that they are good at writing. Students who don't follow the rules are penalized with low grades, which they take to mean that they are not good writers. Both conclusions are demonstrably wrong. But that is not the fault of the students, it's a fault baked into the system.<br /><br />So what's wrong with the system? The problem is that it starts with a narrow, transactional view of writing and hammers it home early and often. Many students have, by the time they reach middle school, become convinced that the ONLY reason one would ever choose to write is when required to do so by a teacher. A student who has interiorized that attitude toward writing is exactly the kind of student who would be delighted to be able to turn over the grunt work over to a robot. </p><p>I worked with a first-year teacher some years ago who shocked our English department by objecting to the school's plagiarism policy, on the grounds that he himself had plagiarized often in college, because he saw plagiarism as a very effective time management device. And if you squint at it just right, you can see the logic of his position. "I've a lot of demands on my time. Some of the things I have to do are getting in the way of the things I want to do. So why shouldn't I budget my time accordingly?" The simple fact was that he didn't see writing as something valuable for <i>him</i>, but only as something valuable for the teacher.<br /><br />I spent most of my career as a middle school and high school English teacher trying to give students a different sense of the purposes and possibilities of writing. Part of that effort is of course to make the principled case that writing is ideally something that you do for yourself, in order to teach yourself how to think more clearly and more deeply about whatever it is that you actually do care about. Ask a room full of students of an age whether there is anyone who believes that it's better to be a thoughtless person than a thoughtful person, and it's unlikely you'll get any takers. I've asked that question every year, and I've never had any. <br /><br />So what does writing have to do with thoughtfulness? A lot, as it turns out.<br /><br />First of all, as almost all those who write regularly because they <i>choose</i> to understand, writing is generative of thought. Students assume, largely because their teachers have repeatedly told them so, that you must know what you are going to say before you write. (Teachers teach outlining for exactly this reason, and many require students to have an outline before they begin an essay or even a story.) But from my own personal experience, and from the <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OlXGTQGAm1sXhrKseD2yl9I5JGpEkXN8-EM6u9o3uso/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">testimony</a> of many many writers, that is exactly wrong. If you already know exactly what you are going to write, there's not much point to writing it. On the other hand, if you simply make it a point of discipline to regularly put pen to paper (or fingers to the keyboard) and see what happens, you will often find yourself writing something you would never have thought of outside the context of the act of writing itself. If you are very lucky, you will find yourself writing something that comes as a complete and pleasant surprise to you. <br /><br />Every year I ask the students in my classes how many of them have had the experience of having what they thought was a good idea and then finding, when they try to write it out, that it's not coming out so well. All the hands go up. Then I ask How many of you have had the experience of sitting down to write and having the writing turn out to me much better than what you had anticipated it would be, so much so that it fills you with surprise and happiness? Once in a great while a hand or two will go up, but not often. And that's a shame. Because the reason most students have never had that experience is that their teachers have never provided them with the opportunity to do so.<br /><br />A second reason that writing fosters good thinking is that writing makes thinking hold still, which allows you to reconsider and re-evaluate your first thoughts and at least potentially find your way to second (and maybe third or fourth) thoughts. Once you have something on paper that will hold still long enough for you to consider it, opportunities arise for you to revise your writing for the better. One of my favorite articulations of the power of re-vision is from David Huddle, in his excellent essay "Let's Say You Wrote Badly This Morning":<br /><br /></p><blockquote>Revision is the hope you hold out for yourself to make something beautiful tomorrow though you didn’t quite manage it today. Revision is democracy’s literary method, the tool that allows an ordinary person to aspire to extraordinary achievement.</blockquote><br /><br />I especially like that he links the revision of writing—and thinking—to the idea of democracy. A well-informed, well-read, thoughtful citizenry is at the heart of the whole notion of democracy. If people do not think clearly and do not understand what they are defending (or more often, these days, attacking), then democracy itself is in trouble. Q.E.D. (Yes, I am aware that he was not using "democracy" in its overtly political sense here, but the parallel still holds.)<br /> <p></p><p>The salient point, Allen Ginsburg notwithstanding, is that first thoughts are in fact very rarely best thoughts. I believe it's critically important for teachers to encourage students to put their first thoughts into words. But that's only one step in a multi-part process that might involve any number of followup steps. One that I often have my students rehearse is to ask them, once they have written something that they think works, to write at the bottom of the page, <i>But there's another way of looking at it</i>, and then go ahead and try a counter-argument on for size. The ability to shift your point of view and consider lines of thought different than your own is perhaps the single most important critical thinking skill students can be encouraged to develop. So why don't we give them practice in doing that?<br /><br />Another very instructive followup step that students can benefit from practicing is simply to take something they have written—an essay, a poem, a story, whatever—and set out to cut it by twenty percent. The operative thinking and writing skill here is concision. If you can say the same thing in 240 words that you were saying in 300, that's a gain in forcefulness and clarity. It doesn't matter, really, whether you hit twenty percent on the head. What is important is that at some point in the writing process you spend time weighing each sentence, each phrase, each word and asking yourself <i>Is this necessary? </i>This is how one can become more thoughtful about what one writes.<br /><br />Of course, none of what I am advocating for here makes any sense at all if you are simply trying to get an assignment—an assignment that you did not ask for and do not care about— over with. <br /><br />I read a lot of commentary by teachers now about how they are going to have to change the prompts they are giving in order to make it harder for students to cheat. Well, how about this for a prompt? <br /><br /></p><blockquote>Every Tuesday and Friday I would like you to hand in a "writing sample" that you have written on any subject that interests you. It can be in any form or genre you like: a literary essay, a personal narrative, a story, one or more poems, a dramatic skit, a chapter of a novel. The only constraints are that 1) it should be your own, current work (going back and pulling old pieces of writing off the computer is not acceptable) and 2) that it should represent a minimum of 20-30 minutes of time on task. Be aware of the fact that some of your classmates will do more.</blockquote><br /><br />I have employed this exact prompt for more than thirty years. The writing that resulted varies wildly from student to student. I do not attempt to "grade" these pieces of writing; I simply give the students written and verbal feedback about what I saw developing on the paper. Some teachers are entirely freaked out by the prospect of having students doing all different kinds of writing all over the place. <i>How am I supposed to evaluate it?</i> they cry. But now we're back to writing primarily as a vehicle for assessment. One obvious response to the question is to accept the fact that not every piece of writing needs to be assessed or revised. Revision begins with selection. Once a student has five or ten pieces of writing on file it makes all the sense in the world to ask them to pick one that they feel good about and work on it some more. And that's where any feedback they might get from their peers or from the teacher may be useful and relevant. Otherwise they write, they get a grade, and it's over with. No further thinking required or expected. <br /> <p></p><p>My purpose in using an open-ended prompt of this kind is to get myself as a teacher <i>out</i> of the position of being the one to determine what it is important to write, how it is to be written, and whether it is worth further revision. Making those kinds of decisions in advance for students has the effect of crippling their ability to think and write on their own. <br /><br />Some years ago, an educational consultant named Everett Kline came to the school where I was teaching to speak to the faculty on the subject of "authentic assessment." At that point, I had been teaching for more than 25 years. Like most teachers, I had throughout my career put in an inordinate amount of planning time into designing assessments, none of which were particularly well received by the students. What Kline said literally blew the circuits in my brain. He said, "If you want to know what students know and what they can do, why don't you ask them?" <br /><br />I spent the second half of my teaching career exploring the implications of that very simple and very powerful question. The prompt I wound up with above was one of the moves that I made in that direction. (There were others.) One of the unanticipated benefits of allowing the students to write what <i>they</i> wanted instead of what <i>I</i> wanted—at least some of the time—was that these "writing samples" gave me a great deal of insight into how their minds worked individually. I got to know <i>what</i> students were thinking and <i>how</i> they were thinking in ways that would never have happened had I been a traditional teacher in a traditionally organized class. That made me a better teacher, and I believe it made them better students.<br /><br />And here's my point with regard to artificial intelligence: if students are given the chance and the encouragement to write in their own voices about what really matters to them, what possible reason would they have for wanting a robot to do that work for them? It's not about AI signalling the death of writing. It's about giving students the chance to write about things they care enough about not to cheat.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-73064498441661405242023-01-03T09:55:00.000-08:002023-01-03T09:55:05.298-08:00By Way of Sorrow<p> </p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi57CPb9dQK3Nz7_vYLXRWSc37Waj0MbeGp9Gsj6Xu6-kr-79sETo4LSJfUrvgR1ZV8kueD1OcNqSVF4i5U_qdEdv2ScXj-I_2ORbLZaHjTe4pxuEVUzos2F2AqYTrbhMd6Yc_4ehVvvkgvUz5iW97clHnmcug7DFrjpetkEa2oXXxsKCeYs_R_FPM_/s672/Screen%20Shot%202023-01-03%20at%209.39.01%20AM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="672" data-original-width="434" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi57CPb9dQK3Nz7_vYLXRWSc37Waj0MbeGp9Gsj6Xu6-kr-79sETo4LSJfUrvgR1ZV8kueD1OcNqSVF4i5U_qdEdv2ScXj-I_2ORbLZaHjTe4pxuEVUzos2F2AqYTrbhMd6Yc_4ehVvvkgvUz5iW97clHnmcug7DFrjpetkEa2oXXxsKCeYs_R_FPM_/w157-h243/Screen%20Shot%202023-01-03%20at%209.39.01%20AM.png" width="157" /></a></div>In the December 11 New York Times Book Review, Sarah Weinman made a series of recommendations for Best Crime Novels of 2022. One book she recommended was by Robyn Gigl, whose debut novel I was able to get from the local library. <br /><br /><i>By Way of Sorrow</i> is a court procedural involving the killing of a white man by a black transgender woman, who claims to have done it in self-defense. The main character in the book, a defense attorney named Erin McCabe is a transgender woman as well. As is the author herself.<br /><br />I grew up in an era when the existence of people whose sexual identity was different than that assigned to them at birth was not part of any public or private discourse I ever took part in or heard of. I'm sure that there must have been such people, probably many of them, but nobody in my world ever talked about that, or seemed to be aware of it. I've become more aware of the issues in recent years, mostly as a result of the efforts of LGBTQ advocacy groups, and, more recently, because of the backlash in certain parts of the political arena against those efforts. But I still, to the best of my knowledge, have never personally interacted with a transgendered person, nor have I read anything that made it clear to me what it was that I didn't know. I had no clue about what it would be like to be transgendered, or about the kinds of treatment that transgender people are likely to be subjected to by others: their families, their friends, the police, the criminal system. Until I read this book.<p></p><p></p><p>Erin McCabe, and her law partner Duane Swisher, agree to take on the case of Sharise Barnes partly because Erin feels an intuitive bond with Sharise based on their shared experience. But it becomes apparent early on to the two lawyers that there is arrayed against them and their client a complex and multilayered network of unscrupulous people with influence in the criminal justice system, and that those people will be willing to do whatever it takes to keep the trial from moving forward. <br /><br />Let me be clear: this is a terrific book from a purely storytelling standpoint. It's clearly written, and carefully plotted. It features likeable, wholly believable characters who are subjected to a series of escalating tensions that lead to a very dramatic conclusion. And it's very difficult not to experience alarm and indignation on behalf of the protagonists as the dangers confronting them continue to mount. It's an intense reading experience for sure. But the book also seems to be intended as a kind of primer for open-minded readers into the challenges and complexities of living as a transgender person in a world which is still largely hostile to the very idea that such a person can, or should, even exist. </p><p>I'm not going to go into detail about the way that the story unfolds. Suffice it to say that it was an amazing read and that along the way I learned a whole lot about gender politics that I never knew. That educative function is most certainly one of the author's objectives as a writer, and she carries it off without sermonizing or letting it draw attention away from the story she is telling. </p><p><i>By Way of Sorrow</i> is, on balance, one of the best books I've read in the last few years. And as it happens, Robyn Gigl has just come out with a second Erin McCabe book, <i>Survivor's Guilt</i>, which Sarah Weinman thinks is even better. So I'm looking forward to reading that.<br /><br /><br /> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-37159284353515616722022-12-27T11:30:00.001-08:002022-12-27T11:31:46.814-08:00Midwinter Day (Mayer)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHAbSm773HDVOS2Cq-wm_TXPV9iJ1ilPeGQKRKw9NaA2ukRIboCCvh3CaWP3Xoi-DVqKX_UxSuiFLCMaNZQEc3VheSHdxaxTa6z0Vka_zOnYCZO74x0-Gr9tl1Ufnv7mnJ4vTJQ5x5iYGtNUvPYaCvD_H7pxPoYXY4rZppVbOVzykMpmcuH_ldCbiT/s990/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-27%20at%2011.16.23%20AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="990" data-original-width="630" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHAbSm773HDVOS2Cq-wm_TXPV9iJ1ilPeGQKRKw9NaA2ukRIboCCvh3CaWP3Xoi-DVqKX_UxSuiFLCMaNZQEc3VheSHdxaxTa6z0Vka_zOnYCZO74x0-Gr9tl1Ufnv7mnJ4vTJQ5x5iYGtNUvPYaCvD_H7pxPoYXY4rZppVbOVzykMpmcuH_ldCbiT/w127-h200/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-27%20at%2011.16.23%20AM.png" width="127" /></a></div><p> </p><p>The name of the poet Bernadette Mayer has come to my attention several times over the years. Several years ago, for example, I ran across <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html" target="_blank">her listing of prompts for writing</a> that has become something of a classic. More recently I read <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/bernadette-mayer-the-poet-of-escape" target="_blank">Rivka Galchen's piece</a> in the New Yorker this December in which surveyed Mayer's career (she passed away in November of this year) and mentioned Mayer's book <i>Midwinter Day</i>, which I was able to find at my local library and started reading on December 20. <i>Midwinter Day</i> is a book-length poem, written about one day in her life, December 22, 1978, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of 1978. (She maintains that she wrote the entire book on that day as well, which seems on the face of it to be a physical impossibility, given the elaborate details of her rendering of not only what was going on around her, but what was going on in her mind as she considered each bit of incoming data. How she could have been experiencing all of that <i>while she was writing</i> is beyond me. But she says that's what she did.)</p><p><br /><i>Midwinter Day</i> divided into six sections, each of which takes us through one chunk of that day: her dreams as she's waking up, the morning she spends in her home with her husband and two children, and so on through the day. As it happened, I wound up reading the middle part of the book <i>about</i> December 22 <i>on</i> December 22. Much of the book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that seems to owe something to both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. There is a kind of manic omnidirectional energy in the poem, which keeps shifting in shape and in focus its attempt embrace everything going on around her and in her mind simultaneously. As might be expected in an experimental work of this kind, some of the passages are more reader-friendly than others. What I found most interesting were the instances in which she puts together inventories, some of which continue for four and five pages at a time. This passage, for example, gives an impressionistic rendition of her observations as she begins moving about her house in the morning:<br /><br /></p><br /><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote>From the bedroom, curtains blue as ink I stare at, red Godard floor white walls all crayoned, from the bed raised on cinder blocks at Dr. Incao's midwife's request so Sophia could be born, fake Indian cover Ray gave us for Marie American Indian and Ray's old real wool blanket and all our sheets her gifts, Lewis' Aunt Fanny's crocheted afghan and Tom's old sleeping bag, the mimeograph machine and its cover, diaper rash ointment, from the walls a butterfly kite, a leaf on a ribbon from nursery school, mushrooms by Joe, an iris and a gladiola by Rosemary, the gladiola painted here, the stuck clock, the window faces south, laundry on it, closet doors hung with jackets, shawls, scarves and Marie's dress, closet floor boots shoes boxes bags baby carriers and my broken inherited chair, that's the airport, closet of stuff, carpet sweeper, another broken chair,from there I go to the kitchen sink you can sit on at the imagined forest window, two coleus plants too cold today, now a Wandering Jew, two related spider plants one is hanging, stones dead branches and collected pine cones, and old ghost and a Boston fern on the spooky refrigerator in which is the food, drawings of attempted faces by Marie that look like Cy Twombly, the dumb electric stove, George's red shirt calendar, soon it'll be over, the Lenox Savings Bank historical calendar, Pilgrims landed yesterday, winter begins today, shortest day of the year, Lewis and Harris with Marie in a Bronx corridor, little light, the African woman backpacking a baby, she's talking to a totem figure, a street scene by Rafael and a German altarpiece Rosemary sent, a crude drawing of a nude woman by Paul, a poster of a panda on the door to the former pantry now a house for two heaters one for air and one for water and the vents ducts and pipes for each, old flowerpots, the hall to the door to the hall, full of boxes of Angel Hair books, the broken bassinet now a toybox with turtles and cups in it, a small space full of brown paper bags and cardboard six-pack wrappers, broom, dishes and pots, fruit on the hood of the stove, bottles and jars, teas and books, medicines foods and detergents, binoculars, the dishwasher, vinegar, garbage, Lewis' mother's old Scotch kooler, spices, another of George's plaid shirts, coats on hooks, a red tray; to the deadpan bathroom, a woman by Matisse in yellow and blue and an ordinary mercator projection of the world, potty chair, diaper pail for cloth diapers, plastic bag of used plastic diapers, toilet sink tub, bath toys an alligator that swims mechanically and a shark with teeth that is a mitt and a sponge, hideous old curling rug lying in the tub after yesterday's flood, hooks on the back of the door, layers of clothing hanging on them, a mirror, ointments and pills, razors poisons and soaps, shower curtains; to the main room the living room, two leaping goldfish, cornflower plant, jade tree, Wandering Jew not doing too well, another spider offshoot, purple weed I don't know the name of accidentally growing in a pot of sedum, Christmas tree fern with a sense of humor, whiskey, the main collapsing table covered with things, rocking chair, small wearing rug on the golden wood floor, two couches with things on them, public school chairs with arms for principals at table, shelves of books and books in boxes, boxes of paper and stencils, two ring binders of photos since Worthington, my desk I steer and things, a standing lamp Nancy got us, a jacket by Joe and a blue shirt by George, a flower by Rosemary I don't remember the name of, a water color of a drapery by Rosemary done in Worthington, a drawing of Ted by Joe, a photo of Lewis by Gerard, pictures of the window out Main Street in different seasons, Main Street and Cliffwood Street, Our Lady of Perpetual Help-butterfly collage by Joe, a slinky male figure by Joe, a watch by George, some Kirschwasser, dead files and dead flies, magazines and library books, toys and balls, a stereo, four windows and the more frequent door. (32)</blockquote><br />I'm sure some readers would find a passage of this kind to be exhausting, but I find it exhilarating, in terms of both its execution and its ambition. She comes closest to defining that ambition herself in this passage from later in the book:<br /><br /><blockquote>I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering like a dream inciting writing continuously for as long as you can stand up till you fall down like in a story to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of the mind like memory. (89)</blockquote> <p></p><p style="text-align: left;">I like the way Mayer pushes the boundaries of the sentence in a way that mirrors more accurately than traditional syntax the way the mind actually moves and makes connections in the moments of everyday life. It seems to me to be indeed "a magical service for survival by the use of the mind."</p><p style="text-align: left;">At the very end of the book Mayer employs a more traditional poetic form and diction to bring the poem, and the day to close with a praise song of sorts:</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><div><div>
<p></p><blockquote><p>From dreams I made sentences, then what I’ve seen today, </p><p>Then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory </p><p>To seeing as a plain introduction to modes of love and reason, </p><p>Then to end I guess with love, a method, to this winter season </p><p>Now I’ve said this love it’s all I can remember </p><p>Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December </p><p> </p><p>Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light </p><p>That takes the bite from winter weather </p><p>And weaves the random cloth of life together </p><p>And drives away the long black night!</p></blockquote><p></p>
</div>
</div><p style="text-align: left;"> </p><p style="text-align: left;">There are people who make it a point to re-read <i>Midwinter Day</i> every year in mid-December. I'm planning to be one of them. It turns out that in recent years there has also been an annual <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L07l_nyeqnA&t=8s" target="_blank">oral reading of the entire book</a> that has been filmed and is available on youTube. There are lots of other resources available about the book as well, for example <a href="https://newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com/2021/12/22/happy-midwinter-day-day/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://allenginsberg.org/2021/12/t-d-21/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br /><br /><br /><br /> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-91347092317685143802022-12-20T12:46:00.003-08:002022-12-20T12:50:26.186-08:00Essay<p> </p><p style="text-align: center;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRhUrd3-f-tJMcoMa-HrGY5NzcfGSJYT8s5LwRpp7aLYkAfaqcSI-83Q7cMU0-6cIFxwuJST-dnLUy2jNL9ZenYQsYWaD8bi2IswD4MGXR5gmRK4_Gdw_H2Y_MJnWIQfOdpZlzFsVniGOD3d9OxeDKfuXHYLwUwynd7NMa4NDDVju-gEaw130PafHc/s2005/essay.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2005" data-original-width="1357" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRhUrd3-f-tJMcoMa-HrGY5NzcfGSJYT8s5LwRpp7aLYkAfaqcSI-83Q7cMU0-6cIFxwuJST-dnLUy2jNL9ZenYQsYWaD8bi2IswD4MGXR5gmRK4_Gdw_H2Y_MJnWIQfOdpZlzFsVniGOD3d9OxeDKfuXHYLwUwynd7NMa4NDDVju-gEaw130PafHc/w434-h640/essay.jpg" title="Essay, RBS collage 2022" width="434" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><b> </b></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><b>Essay</b><br /><br />A place to begin. An undertaking. An attempt at con-<br /> <span> </span>struction, picking up pieces, turning them this way<br /><br /> and that. Squinting, weighing, wondering<br /><br /> <span> </span>whether this one goes here or <br /> there.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"> <span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>How do we de-<br /> <span> </span>cide? Slowly something takes shape, a song<br /><br /> insists on being sung. One voice, another, eventually, a choir. <br /> <span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>A cathedral. Vocational<br /><br /> therapy. We're in this together, we<br /><br /><span> </span><span> </span>gather, we lean on <br /> <span> </span><span> </span>each other. We wander. We stand tall,<br /><br /> we call out, we await the arrival <br /> of the eyes<br /><br /> <span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>that, falling upon us, bring us, <br /></p><blockquote><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>ever so briefly, to life.</p></blockquote><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"></p><p><b> </b></p><p><b> </b></p><p><b>Process Reflection:</b></p><p>Most people, hearing the word "essay," don't necessarily think about its derivation, the sense of the word that means "a trial" or "an attempt." But every work of art, and of writing, is in that most elemental sense an essay. The collage at the top of the page, entitled "Essay" is one of literally <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/aceblush/albums/72157630796100648/page8" target="_blank">hundreds</a> that I have worked on in recent years. The poem, a very "wet" recent draft with the same title, is an attempt both to generate some words <i>about</i> the collage and to mirror in its structure some of the observable elements of its architecture: the way in which disparate fragments and pieces come together, or, insisting on their unique individuality, resist coming together. One critical difference between the two "essays" is that the pieces of the collage, once glued down, are immovable, whereas the poem, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation, is subject to as many re-visions as I have the time and the patience to attempt.<br /></p><p><span> </span><span> <span> </span></span><br /></p><p> </p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-11807010614889171802022-12-13T09:46:00.000-08:002022-12-13T09:46:10.818-08:00Julie Carr: Noun Poem<p> </p><p> <br /><br />Often when I run across a poem that interests me, either in a book from the library or online, I will go one what amounts to an online scavenger hunt, looking for other poems by the same poet or for interviews where the poet talks about what goes on in their head when they sit down to write. Very often this kind of online investigation leads me to blogs curated by other readers who share my interests and enthusiasms with regard to writing, and often in those blogs there is a sidebar with links to other poems and poets. <br /><br />It was in just such a manner that I ran across Julie Carr. I was reading an <a href="https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/tw.renee_.pdf" target="_blank">essay written by Renee Gladman</a> in which she referenced Carr, so I followed the breadcrumbs and wound up reading a number of poems by Carr, which I found interesting precisely because they challenged my sense of what a poem might be, how it might be read, and what sort of "sense" it might be said to be making.<br /><br />I'd like to share one such poem, <a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2009/04/16/meet-three-colorado-poets/" target="_blank">published in the Denver Post</a>, and try to unpack some of what has gone on in my mind as I have read and re-read it. I can't claim to have any special insight or expertise, either in regard to this poem or to Carr's work in general, most of which I have not yet read. And yet this poem does engage my interest. I know that there are some readers who find it hard to relate to art or poetry which is nonrepresentational. I'm not one of those readers. I am actually really interested in the question of what happens when you take a literal medium and remove the literality. What is a drawing if it is not a drawing <i>of</i> something I can point to? What is a poem if it is not a poem <i>about</i> something I can point to? I am actually most drawn to artwork and poetry which explores the in-between spaces: work which is neither entirely literal nor entirely abstract. This one, for example:<br /><br /><br /></p><blockquote><b>Noun Poem</b><br /><br /><br />A man in need of a bird of yarn<br /><br />enters a town with two suns<br /><br />The bird unwinds its tale of read<br /><br />in which a woman paints a postcard for her son<br /><br />This is a sentence with two nouns<br /><br />One is the noun we all know<br /><br />the other will be formed of the wealth of the first:<br /><br />a widower in search of a bride<br /><br />Yes? I am thirsty, he says with laden head,<br /><br />can I have a glass of milk, Mom?<br /><br />She fills him a glass and watches him drink<br /><br />the brush poised in her hand<br /><br />The bird and boy whistle one to the other<br /><br />red spooling from incongruous mouths<br /><br />This is a song with two swallows<br /><br />The other gathers others in the skies<br /><br />This, a sentence with two eyes<br /><br />One sits within his like an egg in a nest<br /><br />the last spills as it mates, as it cries</blockquote> <p></p><p>The first thing that catches my attention, unsurprisingly, is the title, which immediately suggests that what will be foregrounded in this poem will be the kinds of words it uses, as opposed to the kind of meaning it makes. The first two lines confirm that suspicion:<br /><br /></p><blockquote>A man in need of a bird of yarn<br />enters a town with two suns...</blockquote><br /><br />Having been nudged by the title, I am sensitized to the sequencing of the five nouns in the first two lines. And what I am more or less forced to notice in those two lines is that there's a kind of syntactic instability in play. Even though the words are all simple, familiar, one-syllable words (other than "enter" which is two, but still) that I recognize and understand, there's something odd about the phrasing. What is "a bird of yarn," for example? Is it a bird made out of spun wool? Or a bird in a story (yarn)? Or a bird of legend? All of the above? None of the above? And why would a man be in need of one? Carr is putting words together in such a way as to work against the part of my brain that wants to just read the poem and "get it." The third line does the same kind of work:<br /><br /><blockquote>The bird unwinds its tale of read</blockquote><br /><br />The word "unwinds" suggests that maybe we are talking about a ball of yarn after all. But to speak of unwinding a "tale of read" suggests, in an oblique way, not only the the unspooling of yarn, but of <i>a</i> yarn (a story), or even perhaps of the very poem we are reading, as it "unwinds its tale of read."<br /><br />So my sense is that there is a certain amount of playful misdirection going on here. The poem is unfolding, but is doing so in a way resists easy paraphrase, and encourages us to consider multiple possible readings simultaneously.<br /><br />I'm going to resist the temptation to indulge in a line-by-line analysis of the syntactical shifts in the poem and the various possibilities that they present to me as I read, which would likely be as laborious for you to read as it would be for me to write. But I do want to make note of a couple of features of the poem which might not be obvious on first reading but become more so the longer we stay with it. <br /><br />There are three places in which an assertion is <i>in</i> the poem made <i>about</i> the poem: "This is a sentence with two nouns," is the first, and later, "This, a sentence with two eyes." And in the middle of those two assertions, "This is a song with two swallows." I note first of all that are three assertions include doublings: two nouns, two eyes, two swallows. Once I've noted that, I notice other doublings throughout the poem: a man and a woman, a woman and her son, a bird and a boy whistling to each other, and finally the two eyes at the end of the poem: one in apparent contentment in its nest, the other shedding what I take to be tears:<br /><br /><blockquote>One sits within his like an egg in a nest<br />the last spills as it mates, as it cries</blockquote><br /><br />The piece that I've skipped over in that sequence is perhaps the most important for me in terms of how I construct the poem in my mind as I read. It's the middle assertion: <i>This is a song with two swallows</i>. And it is precisely this phrasing that snaps the whole poem into focus for me. It's a <i>song</i>. It is asking to be read as a sequence of words that make a certain kind of <i>music</i>. And once that is brought to the forefront of my consciousness, I see it everywhere. Re-reading, for example, those first two lines: <i>A man in need of a bird of yarn enters a town with two suns</i>. Put aside for a moment the question of what it might mean. Listen to the echoes there, the consonants: <i>man, yarn, town, sun; need, bird; enters, town, two</i>. These combinations and permutations of sound continue throughout the poem: <i>a woman paints a postcard; a bird and a boy whistle one to the other; This a sentence with two eyes; spills as it mates, as it cries</i>. If this poem were read out loud to a listener who had no English, they'd still hear its music.<br /><br />But although this poem presents itself in some ways as an exercise in sound and syntax, it is also a narrative poem of a sort. There's a cast of characters in action in a landscape or series of landscapes: a man and a bird in a town with two suns, a woman painting a postcard and watching her son drinking milk and whistling with the bird "red spooling from incongruous mouths." Which I have to say is belatedly becoming my favorite line in the poem. And finally, surprisingly, the two eyes at the end, each living its own story.<br /><br />I've read the poem maybe twenty times now and it's starting to cohere in my mind. I don't feel the need to have all of the elements here line up and make logical sense. The narrative makes the sense that it makes. The words make the music that they make. I find the poem to be curious and rich and, well, astonishing. <br /><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><br /><style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style> <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-61373281312484391082022-12-06T13:12:00.000-08:002022-12-06T13:12:01.543-08:00Process Reflection<p> </p><p> Every Tuesday for the last five weeks I've posted something here that I knew in advance that I wanted to write about. In each case it was about something or somebody I had been reading (Renee Gladman, Mark Strand). I had a number of motivations for doing so. One was simply that I had gotten out of the habit of posting to <i>Throughlines</i>, but was not yet ready to give it up, so I figured I'd better get myself together and try to jump start it. I have learned from long experience that I work well, or at least better, when I am working to a deadline, either one set for me or one I set one for myself. So I made a preliminary decision, after my first Tuesday post, that I would put something up each Tuesday for as long as I was able to keep that up. So now I'm writing this on Monday December 9, and what you are reading at this moment is the byproduct of that subtle pressure building up: <i>what I am going to have ready to post tomorrow?</i> <br /><br />A second reason for posting was that as a retired English teacher I find it hard to get out of the habit of talking up writers whose work I admire. It's my hope that at least once in a while someone might read about a writer here and be encouraged to go out and read that author on their own. I once read someone's snarky description of a well-known poetry critic as being a "bobbysoxer for the poets that she swoons over." I thought to myself at the time, <i>Well, what's wrong with that?</i> There are of course legitimate differences in how individual readers will respond to individual writers. The question of what is good and what is not good in any of the arts is always up for debate. But as a matter of principle I am more inclined to respect those who speak up on behalf of what they like—even if I am unconvinced by their observations—than those who seem to take pleasure in ripping others to shreds.<br /><br />The third reason—and in my mind the most important—is one I have often written about before. Writing about what I read is for me a generative act: it helps me to better understand what I have read, and, on good days, to work my way into thoughts and realizations that I would not otherwise ever have arrived at. And now that I find myself well into my seventies, it serves the additional function of imprinting in my mind the essence of what I am taking away from the reading. I find at my age that when I don't write about what I have read, it fades much more quickly from my mind. That's always been the case; it's more so now. In recent years I have on more than one occasion found myself halfway through a "new" book saying to myself, "Wait a minute. I think I read this book already." Books I have taken the time to write about, however, tend to stay with me.<br /><br />The same logic applies, of course, to writing more generally: writing about our experiences, writing about what we believe, writing about our dreams, writing about people we know, writing about our pet peeves, writing about what's wrong and how to fix it. So much of what we experience every day is subliminal, below the threshold of perception. We may be scarcely aware of what we actually do think unless we make it a point of practice to spell it out for ourselves. That's why I'm here today, and why I am planning to have something to post next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that. Given the world that we live in and its many distractions, it's easy enough to fall off the wagon, and I supposed at some point I will do that. Until I re-booted myself this November, I had gone sixteen months without posting anything to <i>Throughlines</i>. It's not that I wasn't writing, it's just that I was not posting any of it here. And I've come to miss that.<br /><br />It's not that I'm under any illusions about failing my legions of followers. No one is going to suffer any intellectual or spiritual impoverishment in the absence of my reports from the field. The only person to whom this enterprise is truly essential is me. So here I am. It's good to be back.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-81345726525562115182022-11-29T14:06:00.001-08:002022-11-29T14:12:01.204-08:00Applications (Gladman IV)<p> </p><p>The last few weeks I've been reflecting on the work of Renee Gladman, with particular attention to the investigations she has been conducting about the relationships between writing and drawing. In her <a href="https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/tw.renee_.pdf" target="_blank">essay "The Sentence as a Space for Living,"</a> she has, among many other interesting passages, this one:<br /><br /></p><blockquote>In any case, for months, I’ve been struggling with how to articulate a bridge between the writing I’ve been doing and this drawing I’ve started to do. . . a kind of drawing that feels very much like writing, a way of turning the sounds and symbols for speech and thought inside out. One day in a movie I noticed a character holding a fountain pen over a large pad of paper; as soon as she began to scratch at the surface I felt something turn over in me. I had been drawing for years, aspects of buildings, habitations, but drawing was something I did when I was not writing. And though I had a collection of fountain pens, I’d never used them to draw. A fountain pen has, for me, a love of the line embedded in it. A pen with a good nib wants to just go; drawing put that “turned over thing” in my hand. To move my hand was to look at it, to pass with it. This was a way of being most present in language, because, though I was drawing, I felt immediately that writing had carried over. I knew these were prose architectures I was making, and that into the drawing space: that meant I was no longer in the proverbial “page” into which or out of which comes language. I was now on the visual plane. Yet, it was writing that I was doing. The notion of “drawn writing” struck me as a new kind of conversation with prose. It was the writing of a text with its inner syntax somehow revealed.</blockquote><br /><br />I've been conducting similar investigations over the last several years, doing "drawings" that were based on the notion of the line exploring space. (For example, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2284837106090895124/2575192509637643365" target="_blank">this one.</a>) Most of my drawings arose in the traditional manner of black line on white paper, much like the ones by Gladman which I shared in previous posts. But last year as I was looking over Gladman's web site I saw that she had a number of drawings which flipped the script, deploying white lines (and some color as well) on a black surface. Here's <a href="https://www.reneegladman.com/scores-and-maths" target="_blank">one from her web site</a>:<p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPUYTmcWn4S1x0QQpN8fzsccVXAc9ahGMmCrGf_i5ur43sJdVvYl1Z58dK810_9a4Ci1e7WqaEDIHlThTr3qGZ_cFiIU98WUNEnfKx9FfgaaMWU9C5agbYWGAgnMpWtURhwqoS8UCs64D-da7ZemBhvk1kLgWv_D1wEE1UjJSQMJorZRRIFk5_Sscs/s1390/Screen%20Shot%202022-11-28%20at%208.44.25%20PM.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1022" data-original-width="1390" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPUYTmcWn4S1x0QQpN8fzsccVXAc9ahGMmCrGf_i5ur43sJdVvYl1Z58dK810_9a4Ci1e7WqaEDIHlThTr3qGZ_cFiIU98WUNEnfKx9FfgaaMWU9C5agbYWGAgnMpWtURhwqoS8UCs64D-da7ZemBhvk1kLgWv_D1wEE1UjJSQMJorZRRIFk5_Sscs/w400-h293/Screen%20Shot%202022-11-28%20at%208.44.25%20PM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Copyright Renee Gladman, used with permission)</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br />There's a good deal that might be said about such a drawing about the sequencing and echoing in the white-line motifs, the swaths of color, the sense of a story of sorts being suggested without the use of words. But what struck me most about this drawing, and the others in the sequence, was how dramatic they were, and the kinds of questions that they raised in my mind as I looked at them. I decided to see what I could do by way of entering into that somewhat mysteriously suggestive realm on my own. I began with this one:<br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8jcr-Y5wBugiRhrVhQyXnRdxXy7Msu3SkitS2iCiGZhhVxk-IrKu_a3UAfdtjs36w7J7eo1k1o0_3P72vZwtMhTHEKD5tuzpwKQxtjGv6_oU55lKost5l_qpFdkpa8qs49ISnm23r-rac65bQaUdAcgNa54hRfgBF1E4fKIsVC_cE2G-5m1-4MGkF/s2381/IMG_1033.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1902" data-original-width="2381" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8jcr-Y5wBugiRhrVhQyXnRdxXy7Msu3SkitS2iCiGZhhVxk-IrKu_a3UAfdtjs36w7J7eo1k1o0_3P72vZwtMhTHEKD5tuzpwKQxtjGv6_oU55lKost5l_qpFdkpa8qs49ISnm23r-rac65bQaUdAcgNa54hRfgBF1E4fKIsVC_cE2G-5m1-4MGkF/w400-h320/IMG_1033.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><p> </p><p>This was the first in what became a series of drawings that explored the effects of white line and color on black paper, in a manner which was neither strictly abstract nor strictly representational. Here's one from a little further on in the series:</p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu8LIsR5xXyV8Y3ud7xWECHBbC6BxcmM2z6tgLpgJQxXufY7z7qmGFur_zio4_jwwDWKfhP_N_rwZMePusOZwukK-iarBb8z54NdREuSaMOao6xoCr0NaJizCdcmvfc95sXTq-aMvg5oSnjiYpkk1v4cRXWu9G6CzRmUyqHwfrsXC4epA3ja81l14Z/s1440/2802676C-EE38-4BD8-9D6D-4569F06AF315.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1124" data-original-width="1440" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu8LIsR5xXyV8Y3ud7xWECHBbC6BxcmM2z6tgLpgJQxXufY7z7qmGFur_zio4_jwwDWKfhP_N_rwZMePusOZwukK-iarBb8z54NdREuSaMOao6xoCr0NaJizCdcmvfc95sXTq-aMvg5oSnjiYpkk1v4cRXWu9G6CzRmUyqHwfrsXC4epA3ja81l14Z/w400-h313/2802676C-EE38-4BD8-9D6D-4569F06AF315.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p> <br /><br />There's a kind of intuitive geometry going on here. The major shapes are in conversation with one another: the horizontal and vertical empty shapes framed by the white lines, the grounded reds, the upward striving greens, the floating blue suggestive of something like dance or freedom or escape. These are what I might call, borrowing Gladman's words, prose architectures on a visual plane, which demand to be "read" on their own terms.<br /> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-75941021553689830262022-11-22T07:59:00.000-08:002022-11-22T07:59:07.597-08:00Plans for Sentences (Gladman III)<div><p> </p></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP_EO4YMTOt1pCNcp7zSK8xNafOxF44h-j1PGeBxWGEQWyJWO0Ioq-uliQoS4xLhNAFgYrWley1I03GeKJNDwGfwiypnnKKpNsd6CzgNJKUuvamKQmohBGKA4nRuNoWtLpBIAamU8NtSy2Q3m25_h1gdMkbRT663R7G2Vr9LfPCYtKITF-P4a0DA3G/s384/pfs.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="366" height="162" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP_EO4YMTOt1pCNcp7zSK8xNafOxF44h-j1PGeBxWGEQWyJWO0Ioq-uliQoS4xLhNAFgYrWley1I03GeKJNDwGfwiypnnKKpNsd6CzgNJKUuvamKQmohBGKA4nRuNoWtLpBIAamU8NtSy2Q3m25_h1gdMkbRT663R7G2Vr9LfPCYtKITF-P4a0DA3G/w155-h162/pfs.png" width="155" /></a></div><div> </div><div>In <i>Calamities</i> (2016) Renee Gladman used writing itself to reflect on the ways in which line-making in writing and drawing can be said to mirror one another. In <i>Prose Architectures</i> (2017) she turned to drawing as a means of continuing her investigation of line-making as a mode of thought. In <i>Plans for Sentences</i> (2022), she has circled back around to explore the relationship between visual and verbal lines. She highlights the circular nature of this investigation in her epigraph on the first page of the book:</div><div></div><div><br /><blockquote>These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.</blockquote><p><br /><br />So how might this work? In what sense might sentences be said to have existed previously, and to be currently experiencing an afterlife, and also making their first appearance? I can't be sure that what I am about to say is anything like what Gladman intended, or what someone else looking at the same materials might come up with, or what I may wind up thinking myself at some later date. But it does seem to me that there is a logic to these seemingly paradoxical assertions.<br /><br />The text of <i>Plans for Sentences</i> has an architecture of its own. Open the book anywhere and you will see on the left-hand page a line drawing similar in nature to those in <i>Prose Architectures.</i> (There are sixty such drawings. Roughly midway through the book Gladman begins experimenting with the effects of the addition of color in parts of the drawing.) On each facing page are prose sentences which seem to echo or develop notions suggested by the drawings across from them. It's as if Gladman were looking at the drawings and then "translating" the drawing in a somewhat intuitive and experimental way, or unpacking the thinking that the drawing generates in her mind as she looks at it.<br /><br />But there's another dynamic at work as well. In almost every case there are three or four sentences on each facing right-hand page, and as you read those sentences in sequence you are made aware of echoes and redundancies and divergences not just among the sentences on that page, but among all of the sentences on all of the other pages of the book as well. There's a sense in which the entire book, the collection of drawings and sentences taken as a whole, consists of a set of vibratory interactions. It's almost symphonic in that regard.<br /><br />Let's take, for example, Fig. 9</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ99XNZFkYocrbXkovpkgyCpqy9wpfJfoGMZvD3uvcxc4pmrc7IK2aqqx75Y7TVvwC1ACpm1ba42uLVGLoI4CW93-qwpTBvMEQL4IV-_SHJbmXKKnMEu7zZ5JGrEhhIpUbQ1IrthamG38iUPtyoQNLDwIrV0piIXF-VWPkL3wWRbTzcNFKLidLqM--/s1332/gladman%20fig%209.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1332" data-original-width="1308" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ99XNZFkYocrbXkovpkgyCpqy9wpfJfoGMZvD3uvcxc4pmrc7IK2aqqx75Y7TVvwC1ACpm1ba42uLVGLoI4CW93-qwpTBvMEQL4IV-_SHJbmXKKnMEu7zZ5JGrEhhIpUbQ1IrthamG38iUPtyoQNLDwIrV0piIXF-VWPkL3wWRbTzcNFKLidLqM--/s1600/gladman%20fig%209.JPG" width="314" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">(© 2022 Renee Gladman. Used with permission of author)</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> <p></p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>This drawing is illustrative of many of the ideas about the relationship between the architecture of the sentence and the architecture of the drawing that Gladman has been exploring in recent years. On the one hand, it is clearly a constructed object, a linear sculpture of sorts which balances many different visual elements—horizontal lines, vertical lines, positive and negative spaces, lights and darks, circular and rectangular shapes—in a manner which comes across as artful, almost lyrical. Squint at it just right, and it might be landscape of sorts; squint at it another way, it might suggest a building.<br /><br />On the other hand, many of the sequences, and most of the horizontal movements, look sort of like handwriting, and the drawing as a whole looks as if it might be a second cousin once removed to the kind of prewriting outline that I for one often create when I'm trying to organize some ideas for an essay. A thinking map.<br /><br />With those preliminary thoughts in mind, let's consider the sentences that appear on the facing page:<br /><br /><blockquote>These sentences will constellate the gears that alter your movements on weather; they will foment tiny gears of speech, clicking, turning, moating, and will be like wind blowing thought back onto itself, behind itself so that thought moves by leaning forward<br /><br />These sentences will have performed the dreams of sentences upon arrival<br /><br />These moats will separate objects from subjects and preserve silence<br /><br />They will set the world of text in motion, diverting at the escapement, turning to void, and will make small bodies of sayings that will click and moat</blockquote></blockquote><br />First of all, I notice that there is a kind of instability or lateral drift in the way these sentences unfold that echoes or mirrors in my mind what happens when I look at the drawing. This drawing does not work the way I am used to seeing drawings work. It's not a picture of something, nor is it a pure abstraction. I can sense or intuit a logic to the drawing, but it is not a logic I could easily articulate. There are elements in the drawing that are unique and idiosyncratic, but there are also echoes, lots of echoes, in which one part of the drawing seems to be reflecting or re-presenting another part.<br /><br />Likewise, these sentences do not work in the ways I am used to seeing sentences work. The word "moat" for example, is deployed here three times, once as a noun and twice, surprisingly, as a verb. All four sentences are syntactically correct, but they are nevertheless enigmatic and resistant to paraphrase. And there are, as in the drawing, lots of echoes here: words and phrases repeated in different contexts and generative of different effects.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><br />So to return to the original question of how sentence might be said to exist simultaneously in different times, I think it has to do with the ways in which these sentences—and drawings—reverberate and cross-pollinate with one another. They are "like wind blowing back on thought itself," in all of its instability and recursiveness. As a writer I am always acutely aware of how trying to capture a line of thought in words is necessarily reductive. As Stephen Dobyns remarks: </div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 2.5in;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote>The main problem with turning the world into language is
that it's, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing that it
wants to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the
language may become, it is always a diminishment of the reality described.</blockquote><p></p>
</div><div> </div><div>Which is why we have to keep coming back to it again and again, and why, in Gladman's writing, things that have been said before, that have been seen from a particular angle of vision, are revisited and seen again, as if for the first time. The past is the present is the future. The "real," whatever that might be, can only be visited (and re-visited) in our minds obliquely, imaginatively, intuitively.<br /></div><div><br /></div>
I am primarily aware, as I look at<i> Plans for Sentences</i>, of a very active and innovative intelligence engaged in a purposeful and structured exploration of alternative modes of thinking. Reading Gladman is for me not unlike watching a very self-assured artist at her easel as she goes about bringing an entire world to life on the blank canvas. I find the time that I spend attending to her work to be both interesting and inspirational.<br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-56412921442005844762022-11-15T11:24:00.004-08:002022-11-15T12:10:44.651-08:00Prose Architectures (Gladman II)<p> </p><p> </p><p><br /><br /> </p> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiucC9hEqgIABWQvmJhs4TdTIBqhxmY3_tFPDmApTjJPV-lcPp9kb_vNAGDiL7fMY9WDSKk1PNTGybLHUShIL3BHIY_foS5fKVxZ238SuhlSiYlx_UGed9lIrvm28V9sXy1YlslxTjcgBd0rMOOmC_9b2xoZ7M1Kd2dviqcB1x387bamYVWXu6UcJud/s1847/gwpa.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1561" data-original-width="1847" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiucC9hEqgIABWQvmJhs4TdTIBqhxmY3_tFPDmApTjJPV-lcPp9kb_vNAGDiL7fMY9WDSKk1PNTGybLHUShIL3BHIY_foS5fKVxZ238SuhlSiYlx_UGed9lIrvm28V9sXy1YlslxTjcgBd0rMOOmC_9b2xoZ7M1Kd2dviqcB1x387bamYVWXu6UcJud/w200-h168/gwpa.JPG" width="200" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Renee Gladman's <i>Calamities</i> was published by Wave Books in 2016. As I discussed in my previous post, much of what I found most interesting about <i>Calamities</i> was Gladman's thinking and writing about the relationship between the line in drawing and the line in writing. In 2017 Gladman followed up <i>Calamities</i> with a book entitled <i>Prose Architectures</i>, a series of 107 drawings which documented her subsequent investigation of the possibilities inherent in the nature of the line. In her introduction to the book, she says,<br /><br /></p><blockquote>Having had no previous training in visual art, no apparent aptitude for it, I drew from instinct. Or better: I drew out of the matter that was most central to my thinking and living, and that was the city. It seemed the shapes I most wanted to represent or I most could represent were buildings. I don't remember setting out with any particular goal in drawing but I do recall clearly feeling that, through drawing, I had discovered a new manner for thinking.</blockquote><p> </p><p>Following up on this discovery, Gladman in characteristic fashion put a
lot of time and energy into pursuing the implications of engaging in
this kind of thought process. She put pen to paper in a way as to
explore the possibilities of the line not simply as the representation of a
pre-existing thought, but as generative of "a new manner for thinking."
Here, for example, is drawing #30 in the sequence:<br /></p><p> <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA3h1qA3TuCJMaqCrPZZX9lhEplnKel8C8g9u5wFB6rlxkYaat4yhlwthj3110AI4Ya9JYMEZwyCFNoqrRYAo8ANFmfUw14p-QhIMSSpChMOcZP8PpmcyOv4yoZ7tLvs5wFxVlwXBI2HfpFYtSXFC6Arydj57y7rpq8F0wpRsRCdGm5xVGkL5UJ_3s/s998/gladman%201.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="974" data-original-width="998" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA3h1qA3TuCJMaqCrPZZX9lhEplnKel8C8g9u5wFB6rlxkYaat4yhlwthj3110AI4Ya9JYMEZwyCFNoqrRYAo8ANFmfUw14p-QhIMSSpChMOcZP8PpmcyOv4yoZ7tLvs5wFxVlwXBI2HfpFYtSXFC6Arydj57y7rpq8F0wpRsRCdGm5xVGkL5UJ_3s/s1600/gladman%201.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><blockquote><br /></blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Image used with permission of author.)</span><br /></p><p><br />This is a drawing that invites me to keep looking at it. It consists essentially of four vertical structural elements, a grouping of line-based sculptures. Within those structures there are sub-components that echo one another, for example the "C" shape in the second column mirrored by the reverse "C" shape immediately to its right, echoed by a similar shape further up in the same column. The columns are all connected by single lines that suggest perhaps telephone wires running between buildings. There's an interplay between the upward thrust of the elongated major shapes and the horizontal movement of the shorter tiers within each vertical structure, which call to mind asemic writing. The fourth figure, over on the right, feels like an outgrowth, an offshoot, both a continuation of and a departure from what has gone before. <br /><br />The drawing looks as if it might well have been composed in one line, moving from left to right, the pen never leaving the paper. There's clearly a logic to the construction, an aesthetically pleasing unity and balance and coherence. But it is in no sense a paraphrasable logic. This drawing is not a re-presentation of anything. It is, like all the others in this book, a world unto itself. Alexis Almeida, writing in an <a href="https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/tw.renee_.pdf" target="_blank">essay on Tripwire</a> about the drawings in <i>Prose Architectures</i>, puts it eloquently:<br /><br /></p><blockquote>What attracts me most [about] them, then, isn’t any immediately discernable reading, but rather the proximities they create around me: the lines being extended between body and syntax, diagram and utterance, writing, mark-making, and physicality. When Gladman says they are a way “pulling the process of thought apart,” she is also re-imagining the way we can inhabit space, and thought itself, the way we might reconfigure the most familiar social and political structures, as well as how we can position ourselves within them, so that different relational possibilities begin to appear over time.</blockquote><br /><br />These drawings are thus the visible evidence of a certain kind of attention being paid by the artist over an extended period of time to the defining questions about the artistic process: <i>What are we doing when we write? What are we doing when we draw? What are we doing when we speak out loud? When are we doing when we make music? </i><p></p><p>(For fuller overview of the nature of the drawings in the book, check out <a href=" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-qoHt03C8Q&t=46s" target="_blank">this video</a>, a link to which is also posted on <a href="http://reneegladman.com/" target="_blank">Gladman's web site</a>.)<i> </i><br /><br />Gladman's work demonstrates that often in artmaking we are in essence pushing a line (of letters in sequence, of ink on paper, of sounds from within us) into an empty space: paper, canvas, silence. Much of the time, of course, we do these things more or less automatically and unreflectively. But over the years I have come to have a lot of respect for those writers and artists and musicians who investigate with attentiveness and thoughtfulness the ways in which the very act of writing or drawing can lead us in unexpected ways nearer to clarity and truth and beauty. <br /><br />Each of the drawings in <i>Prose Architectures</i> is the product of a certain interrogative disposition, arising out of a focused curiosity: <i>What would happen if...?</i> They are part of a longer trajectory of examination represented by the entire body of Gladman's published work, about which I will have more to say in my next post.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> </p><br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-69488228315580121872022-11-08T12:11:00.001-08:002022-11-11T09:26:05.827-08:00Calamities (Gladman I)<p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiLidojsHoiMoEDe_pDHGUcm4iR6VfzuIaTpk_zts_jZroOP0twUM8Ek8r4cMYaYQ4dlv7anDLJbdpuK1CVOwBzvETISNCIID1n0uqpbZpgzExOWXfZC2vO3S9e9KLOMggOg5OBB94GUOprPw-LmMzJJibrOWMtpfijAnzfPOSj2gA1wIfEpjNlV-A8" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="532" data-original-width="366" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiLidojsHoiMoEDe_pDHGUcm4iR6VfzuIaTpk_zts_jZroOP0twUM8Ek8r4cMYaYQ4dlv7anDLJbdpuK1CVOwBzvETISNCIID1n0uqpbZpgzExOWXfZC2vO3S9e9KLOMggOg5OBB94GUOprPw-LmMzJJibrOWMtpfijAnzfPOSj2gA1wIfEpjNlV-A8=w135-h197" width="135" /></a></div>For many years I have found enjoyment and certain satisfactions both as a writer and as an artist. It is perhaps inevitable that I would wind up reflecting from time to time on the ways in which these two endeavors parallel one another. In both instances, for example, one begins by confronting an empty space (the page, the canvas) and the questions of where to begin, what to do, and what to do next. Jasper Johns wrote a note to himself in his sketchbook that summarized his artistic process pretty concisely: "Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it." And Andy Goldsworthy famously opined that "the essence of drawing is the line exploring space," a phrasing which to my mind applies not just to drawing but to the process of writing as I have practiced it (and asked my students to practice it) throughout my life. <br /><br />Not all writers, and certainly not all teachers, see it that way. And most students have not had the chance to <i>experience</i> it that way in school, a lamentable situation which I have written about often enough that I won't get into it again here. (There are several essays in the "Elaborations" section of the sidebar here that address the issue.)<br /><br />Every once in a while I come across a writer who has a similar way of viewing the process of writing, but a unique and highly personalized way of working within that point of view. One such writer is <a href="https://www.reneegladman.com/" target="_blank">Renee Gladman</a>. Several years ago I ran across her book <i>Calamities</i>, and it basically tore the top of my head off.<br /><br />The book is a collection of short explorational essays, most of which begin with the words "I began the day..." For example:<br /><br /><p></p><blockquote>I began the day standing at at threshold of time—the beginning of something, the end of something. I had a method for standing that was called art, then writing. The way I stood allowed me to see how things could begin and end this way—simultaneously. It was hard to follow these opposing tendencies, especially when you were writing and couldn't see anyay, see anything other than these words appearing on the laptop screen. You were writing about something you weren't looking at. There had been a break. I was saying this on paper.... (31)</blockquote><br /><br />In this passage and in many others, Gladman is pushing a line of thought across the page while at the same time maintaining and articulating her <i>awareness</i> of the fact that she is pushing a line of thought across the page. She is in essence watching herself watching herself, which in another writer's work might come across as tiresome or gimmicky, but which by virtue of the originality and breadth and depth of her thinking winds up being surprising and often, to me at least, exhilarating:<br /><br /><blockquote>I began the day transcribing some of Gail Scott's sentences onto the wall of my living room. For months I had been trying to say something about them, which when I went to say it became layered, thus impossible as an utterance. I had already argued somewhere that one could not express many different things at the same time in the English sentence, and so was not terribly surprised by my failure. I'd learned that to think in this language you had to be patient: you had to say one part, like drawing one side of a cube, then say the next part, like drawing another side, and keep on saying and drawing until eventually you'd made a complex observation and a picture-feeling... But when you were alone, when no one was there to listen to you unfold some puzzle in your mind, you coveted that ability to think in paragraphs with a single sentence, and ability you may never have had but that your instinct said belonged to you. (43)</blockquote><br /><br />Gladman often goes off on riffs that illustrate exactly the many-layered complexities that are inherent within the architecture of the sentence, which is to say, within thought itself, whether expressed in words or in images:<br /><br /><blockquote>I sat down with the objective of pushing words off the page and bringing a picture into being and doing this for a number of hours in a row, for a number of days, all accumulating into a number of months, perhaps amounting to years, such that this became a picture in which was embedded many other pictures and that gave off a dimensional feeling, even though these pictures belonged to my thinking and were nestled in my mind, which like everything else in thought was not like a pot you could pour water into and heat up but rather was like seeing a pot and having a living vision of all the actions therein. You made a space that gathered all the possible pictures accreted through all the pushing of words off the page, and many times called the shape <i>novel</i> and a few times <i>essay</i>. I set the cup down. I pushed the words <i>I set the cup down</i> off the page, then picked up the cup and set it down. I drank from the cup, though I didn't remember this until I'd read the act on the page, my reading having become a picture of a body standing at a window with cars parking below. But it wasn't long that I was in this body thinking about the cup at my mouth or other things the body needed when I realized that all the cars parking were doing so all at the same time, and this was strange. It never happened this way. You never had a moment when all the cars had been gone and then returned all at once, all wanting to park and all finding a space to park and parking at the same time as all the others. Wherever it was that I was standing provided me with a vantage point in which the information that I gathered was becoming a problem for the picture that held me. I had to grab another picture and append it to this one, so that I didn't get stuck, perpetually sipping from that cup and looking over cars behaving bizarrely. (93-4)</blockquote><br /><br />Here Gladman is making total sense, and simultaneously skirting the edges of the surreal. Gladman's discipline in sentence-making—and she is all about sentence-making—is to follow the line of thought where it leads.<br /><br />Any good critical thinker recognizes that all thinking is embedded in a point of view, and that at any given moment our thinking on a particular subject may be embedded in ways that are not readily apparent, if not invisible to us. It is one of Gladman's great strengths as a writer and thinker that she is always questioning and attempting to clarify for herself what lies behind her first thoughts, her first attempts at articulation: <i>Wherever it was that I was standing provided me with a vantage point in which the information that I gathered was becoming a problem for the picture that held me. I had to grab another picture and append it to this one, so that I didn't get stuck... </i><br /><br />The realization that one's situation—as a writer, as an artist, as a human being—is <i>always</i> precarious and to some degree untrustworthy is a necessary precondition for the development of a fuller awareness and understanding. We get to second thoughts and third thoughts only by questioning our first thoughts, a process which can be engrossing and sometimes a little frightening.<br /><br />Later, Gladman talks explicitly about the embedded energies of the line in language, as well as in art:<br /><br /><blockquote>Language was beautiful exposed; it was like a live wire set loose, a hot wire, burning, leaving trace. If you looked into language this way, you saw where it burned, the map it made. The wire was a line, but because it was electrified it wouldn't lie still: it thrashed, it burned, it curled and uncurled around itself. It was a line but one that moved, sometimes forward, but mostly up then back then over itself then out then up then curling in one place until the mark grew dark then out forward and up into a rectangle then inside the rectangle and around, circling with small, tight movements. I was amazed that I was talking about wires when really I was talking about prose. I was talking about how it was to write, but doing it through drawings (but drawings were language) and using wires to spell it out, but I was doing this on a foggy morning, where there were neither drawings nor wires. There was a table, upon which sat a computer, and I was staring at a screen imagining the drawings I had made and wanting them to teach me how to talk about the line, the line in art, which I could use to talk about the line in language, because you'd need to know they were the same line. There was not a thing different about them. (103)</blockquote><br /><br />She follows this up with another statement that I think is clarifying and elegantly expressed:<br /><br /><blockquote>Monika Gryzmala said, "Drawing is a process of thought which is conducted by the hand," and she was an artist, and though she was using language to explain her art, it was her art that most concerned her. Drawing was a process of thought—that was true, and so, and especially, was writing. And we wrote through the hand, even if it was typing: we used our body to write. "Thus, drawing is writing," was how I wanted the quote to go on. And to write was to think; to make lines was to draw; and lines were the essence of writing. (104)</blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-73403072555840573232022-11-01T10:34:00.001-07:002022-11-01T10:44:49.045-07:00The Continuous Life<p> </p><p>I've spent a lot of the last several months going through my poetry files, both analog and digital, and trying to put them into some order. I began keeping those files nearly fifty years ago, when I was first teaching English in middle school. It was understood that as part of the curriculum the students would be asked to read and respond to writing in a variety of genres. The department came to grade-level agreements about which novels would be read in common each year, but when it came to short stories and poems, teachers were more or less on their own. <br /><br />I was fortunate to have come to the middle school after several years of teaching in elementary school, where Barbara Helfgott-Hyett, working with the Poet-in-the-Schools program, had come in as a visiting poet and led writing workshops both with the students, and, after school, with the teachers. One way of working that Barbara shared with us involved the use of model poems. She would present students with a poem she had chosen—often a poem based on a memory or event that young people could understand and relate to—and then ask the students to make observations about craft (what did the writer do first? what next? what do you notice about the language? the shape of the sentences? the stanzas? etc). Then she would ask the students to draft a poem of their own in which they would employ one or more of the techniques they had observed that were of interest to them.<br /><br />When I first began trying to "teach" poetry in my own classroom, I had a very small selection of "teachable" poems, most of which I had picked up from Barbara. As I ran across others in our middle school textbook or in poetry books I found in libraries and bookstores, I would either photocopy them or type them out and put them in a manila folder in my classroom for future reference. When that folder became too thick, I broke it into three folders alphabetized by author (A-H, G-Q, S-Z). Eventually I had a folder for every letter of the alphabet.<br /><br />Then personal computers arrived and it became possible to search for particular poets and poems online, I began archiving poems I liked as Word files. I created a digital folder called "Alpha Singles." As I ran across a poem I liked or thought might be of interest to students, I'd either type it up myself, or copy it from the internet, paste it into a Word document, and add it to my digital archive. That archive now amounts to something like 2500 poems.<br /><br />I wound up having two archives: the manila folders in my file cabinet, and the digital files on my laptop. At the start of this year I thought I might as well go through both sets of archives, print and digital, and concatenate all of the poems I have on file into a complete digital archive. Along the way, I typed up or downloaded a great number poems, some of which I had run across before, many of which I had not. Often I would simply pick a line with an unusual sequence of words from a poem I had in print but wanted to have in a digital version. I might, for example, take a line (Ashbery's "waiting to leave the tongue behind," for example) and type it into the search bar, where I would most often find the entire poem available online. <br /><br />At times I would wind up being directed to familiar turf, as for example the <a href="https://poets.org/">Academy of American Poets</a> or the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/">Poetry Foundation</a>, but often I would find myself visiting one of the hundreds of blogs curated by poetry lovers of every conceivable stripe; and when I had copied the poem I had sought out, I would start scrolling through whatever else was posted there, and in so doing would discover many other interesting poems and poets I would never have encountered in any other way. Indeed, one of things I enjoy most about conducting targeted searches of this kind is precisely the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that I'm going to find something even more interesting that I didn't even know existed.)<br /><br />All of the above has been by way of introduction to a poem by Mark Strand that I found online while I was hunting for another poem entirely, but which pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks. I'll get to that poem shortly, but first a word or three about Mark Strand, who long has been one of my favorite poets. His poem "What to Think Of," for example, has been for many years one of my go-to texts for use in the classroom:<br /><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><b>What to Think Of</b><br /><br />Think of the jungle<br />The green steam rising.<br /><br />It is yours.<br />You are the prince of Paraguay.<br /><br />Your minions kneel<br />Deep in the shade of giant leaves<br /><br />While you drive by<br />Benevolent as gold.<br /><br />They kiss the air<br />That moments before<br /><br />Swept over your skin,<br />and rise only after you’ve passed.<br /><br />Think of yourself, almost a god,<br />Your hair on fire,<br /><br />The bellows of your heart pumping.<br />Think of the bats<br /><br />Rushing out of their caves<br />Like a dark wind to greet you;<br /><br />Of the vast nocturnal cities<br />Of lightning bugs<br /><br />Floating down <br />From Minas Gerais;<br /><br />Of the coral snakes;<br />Of the crimson birds<br /><br />With emerald beaks;<br />Of the tons and tons of morpho butterflies<br /><br />Filling the air<br />Like the cold confetti of paradise.<br /></p><p><br />One of the things I most enjoy about this poem is its playfulness. It puts us in a surprising (and deftly rendered) landscape and asks us to imagine ourselves as existing in a magical dimension in which we are honored and worshiped. Not something most of us have experienced, or are likely to, but pleasant enough to contemplate, for sure.<br /><br />In the classroom, we read the poem together, the students make some observations about what the poet has done and how he has done it, and then we shift to the question of what one would need to do to write a poem of this nature. The most obvious answer in this case would be to start with the working title "What to Think Of," and then write a poem that gives your reader some interesting things to imagine. (You could of course also borrow anything else that you observe or admire in Strand's poem: his use of short couplets, the way he plays with the sounds made by the words (<i>green steam, Prince of Paraguay, kiss the air that swept over your skin</i>) the interweaving of real and surreal imagery, etc.) The idea, in other words, is to use the architecture of "What to Think of" as a kind of scaffolding for a poem of your own composition. Structurally, it's basically just a list poem (Think of <i>a</i>, think of <i>b</i>, think of <i>c</i> and <i>d</i> and <i>e.</i>)<br /><br />When you're done with your first draft and considering which parts of the poem to keep, which to drop, which to expand), you might choose to keep the title (and acknowledge its inspiration with an epigraph like <i>after Mark Strand</i>) or give it a different title of your own composition that seems appropriate for whatever it is that you came up with.<br /><br />This particular exercise always seems to provide students with a game to play that results which are interesting and enjoyable to read, and more importantly from my point of view as an educator, interesting and enjoyable to have written. My primary objective as an educator throughout my career has been to try to create environments in which the students' experience of writing as a source joy and satisfaction. I won't go into detail about about this in this essay, because I have written about it <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/12BDqv3_rIi8qB5VpBvQI2kZhWlBde7t0bn9irKD6Ghw/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">at length before</a>, but the notion that writing can be a source of pleasure for the writer is generally foreign to my students. Enjoyment of writing is not something that they are ever likely to have experienced in school. Every year I would have one or two students who loved to write, but that's something that they either were born with or learned on their own, but not in the context of their English classes. As it happens, I was a kindergarten teacher for a few years as well at the start of my career, and I know that most kindergartners LOVE to draw and to write, after a fashion. But by the time many of them hit second grade they have become convinced that writing is not something they're good at, and certainly not something they enjoy. So one of my primary goals is to try to give my students the chance to re-discover the pleasure of writing as a pleasurable form of exploration.<br /><br />And that is in fact one of the reasons I like Mark Strand's poems. He's clearly a writer who enjoys what he is doing. His subjects are sometimes whimsical, and sometimes quite serious, but it can be exhilarating to follow his mind as he works his thoughts out on paper. That's certainly the case with the poem I now, at last, put before you:</p><p><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><b> The Continuous Life</b><br /><br /><br />What of the neighborhood homes awash<br />In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,<br />Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,<br />Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving<br />From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,<br />Have run their course? O parents, confess<br />To your little ones the night is a long way off<br />And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them<br />Your worship of household chores has barely begun;<br />Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;<br />Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,<br />That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;<br />Explain that you live between two great darks, the first<br />With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest<br />Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur<br />Of hours and days, months and years, and believe<br />It has meaning, despite the occasional fear<br />You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing<br />To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,<br />That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,<br />A family album that fell from its own small matter<br />Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,<br />You don't really know. Say that each of you tries<br />To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear<br />The careless breathing of earth and feel its available<br />Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending<br />Small tremors of love through your brief,<br />Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.<br /></p><p><br />I've read this poem dozens of times and it blows me away every time: the ambition of it, the audacity of it, the beauty of it, the compassion of it. I'm reminded for the zillionth time of Christopher Clausen's assertion that all literature "implies some kind of answer, shallow or profound, to the fundamental human questions, What kind of world is this, and how should we live in it?" The striking thing about this poem is that Strand isn't leaving those critically essential questions to be answered by implication, he's coming at them head-on. Right in the first sentence, he asks a question which might be paraphrased as "At what point do we as humans just give up?" Interestingly, Strand filters this question through the consciousness of the children, who are "watching the grownups for signs of surrender," and wondering, as the grownups themselves must wonder, how hard to work, how long to work, and how to know when the work is done. What does it mean to be alive? How should we live? What wisdom can we convey to our children about how to answer these questions?<br /><br />These are huge philosophical questions, which have generated many lengthy (and for many of us more or less impenetrable) texts by the likes of Descartes and Kant and Wittgenstein and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. But here is Mark Strand, trying to spell it all out for us in four sentences. <br /><br />I love the second, long sentence, a capsule summary of the human experience:<br /><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><i> O parents, confess<br />To your little ones the night is a long way off<br />And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them<br />Your worship of household chores has barely begun;<br />Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;<br />Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,<br />That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;<br />Explain that you live between two great darks, the first<br />With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest<br />Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur<br />Of hours and days, months and years, and believe<br />It has meaning, despite the occasional fear<br />You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing<br /> To prove you existed.</i><br /></p><p><br /><br />This is the reality of life: that it is at one and the same time completely ordinary, and deeply mysterious. We are given this time, and yet no matter what we do to use it wisely we will have to face the fear that what we have done is not enough. I love that line about <i>the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops</i>, those instruments of the quotidian which have their own miraculous beauty, if only we can bring ourselves to apprehend it. As a person who has been retired now for close to nine years, I can attest that the taste for mundane and the worship of household chores does in fact seem to grow, and that the question of what we might hope or wish to leave behind as we approach that second darkness grows in resonance as well.<br /><br />And then the music and precision and eloquence of the very last sentence:<br /><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><i> Say that each of you tries<br />To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear<br />The careless breathing of earth and feel its available<br />Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending<br />Small tremors of love through your brief,<br />Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.</i><br /></p><p><br /><br />The available languor of the earth! And the tremors of love it engenders. I'm stunned by the originality and beauty of the phrasing, and of the idea. I can perhaps imagine myself beginning a poem as Strand began this one, essentially starting with the question, "Well, what about _______?" and then attempting to offer some answers. But I cannot imagine myself getting from point A to point Z in the way Strand does here. It's a poem which unfolds a sequence of ideas and images in a way that is artful and musical and emotionally resonant, and, to my way of thinking, profound. <br /><br />One of the reasons I am drawn to poetry is that it is a means of keeping myself focused, of learning and re-learning how to pay attention, a life skill that Strand both endorses and demonstrates in this poem. Why are we here? We are here to keep busy, to learn something, to lean down and hear the careless breathing of the earth, and to experience such love as we can encounter (and generate) in our selves, our days, and beyond. <br /><br />Makes sense to me. <br /><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-68119029081996267072021-07-04T10:26:00.003-07:002021-07-04T10:26:25.755-07:00At the Park<p> </p><p>(Third in a series...)</p><p> </p><p> A clear bright sunny morning. Cool now, with the promise of heat later in the day. I'm sitting at a picnic table at Creekside Park. Last year as part of a flood-control program the town demolished a couple of stores that used to be here and built the park as an outdoor gathering place. It's nice: they laid down wooden beams all around the area, mulched the ground in between with wood chips, and then added seven picnic tables, each equipped with its own overhead umbrella. There are also lights strung across the park from various trees to various poles, which lend the park a festive air in the evening, when the tables are often packed with families listening to musicians who come to play there. The whole park is built over a land bridge which spans the creek running beneath it.<br /> Right now I'm the only one in the park, but all around there are people in motion as the town gears up for its work day: bikers, walkers (many with dogs), people lining up outside the bagel shop. There's a guy standing just at the edge of the park wearing bluetooth earphones and staring off into space as he holds up his end of a conversation with someone invisible to me. The traffic on San Anselmo Avenue is light but steady: suburban moms cruising by in their late-model SUVs, dads in their sports cars on the way to the office. Here comes a big refrigerator truck, compressor thrumming, brakes squealing as the driver pulls over in front of the bakery just down the street. A woman in black slacks and a blue tie-dyed t-shirt, her black hair dyed mostly blue as well, walks across the park, frowning. A few minutes later she re-appears, carrying a bag of something, and crosses the park in front of me again, going back the way she came. There are a bunch of banging noises as the guy from the truck drops pallets of food from the truckbed to the street before carrying them into the bakery.<br /><br />The whole park at this time of day is shaded by redwood trees, twenty-nine of them, by my count. But there are little patches of sunlight all around, appear to wiggle or dance as the morning's light breeze fans their branches. To my left, just to the edge of the park, there's a wooden bench facing onto a lawn area which is bathed in golden sunlight.<br /><br />I've been waiting for something to happen, something remarkable to present itself to me as being particularly worthy of attention or comment, but it seems like this is not going to be that kind of morning. Which is okay, I think. As I'm about to leave, I see a large poster display detailing the long-term plan for the area. It explains that what is now the park will eventually be opened up to reveal the creek beneath it. This park is not going to be here for long. But I find it odd, and oddly reassuring, that here in the middle of town, surrounded by roads and traffic and commerce, this island of strategically curated inactivity has been brought into being. For as long as it lasts.</p><p><br /><br /> <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-24579595403378842462021-06-13T09:48:00.004-07:002021-06-13T09:50:15.518-07:00In the Yard <p> </p><p>(Second of a series, see previous post for details.)</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQjyMA-wzwLkbTF6hmUHl8PKuaeCobt_L9-XHDkfH11VrySbS07k0ICXL7cX1j_5wKvV2uJlzhoDfHFXSKgN5Rh8dfldWKK4klH9HlsBX7hCvy5gD3H6iI6Wb-PxxYyCgrs7P8bIA0fkI/s2048/IMG_3608.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1753" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQjyMA-wzwLkbTF6hmUHl8PKuaeCobt_L9-XHDkfH11VrySbS07k0ICXL7cX1j_5wKvV2uJlzhoDfHFXSKgN5Rh8dfldWKK4klH9HlsBX7hCvy5gD3H6iI6Wb-PxxYyCgrs7P8bIA0fkI/w179-h209/IMG_3608.jpg" width="179" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><b> </b></p><p><b> </b></p><p><b>In the Yard</b><br /><br />The weather in my part of California is cool most of the year: forties at night, sixties during the day from December to May. During the second half of May this year, it's been getting warmer, and I've been going out in the back yard to sit in a chair in the sun and read for an hour or so each morning. I like to breathe the fresh air and feel the sun warming me as I read. And I'm trying to re-establish a rhythm to my reading. The last few years I've been reading more sporadically and randomly. I start one book, then put it down and pick up another, and then a third. I alternate between books and magazine articles and online news feeds, and I find, like everyone else, I guess, that my mental life seems fragmented and discontinuous. So it's been nice to get into a routine of reading. I've managed to read and finish three recent books by Jhumpa Lahiri—I'm going to be teaching <i>Interpreter of Maladies</i> again this summer and I've been looking for supplementary materials—and a couple nonfiction memoirs as well.<br /><br />There are two things I've noticed reading outside. One is how rarely it is ever really quiet in the way you might expect a suburban neighborhood to be quiet. It's a rare morning indeed when there is not some noisemaking apparatus in evidence: weed whackers, wood chippers, chain saws, leaf blowers. Sometimes several of them at once. I grew up in an era when the only gas-powered devices you would hear in the neighborhood other than automobiles were lawnmowers, and you'd only hear those on weekends. Now, it's a rare thing indeed to be able to sit outside and NOT have aggressively intrusive ambient noise. <br /><br />The other thing I've noticed is how prolific the insect life is. As I sit in my chair, I'm always catching movement out of the corner of my eye. Bumblebees and honeybees fussing in the flowers. Hornets. Wasps. Flies. Butterflies. Dragonflies. Spiders. Beetles. Gnats. Little tiny white insects that look like dust in the wind until you see them flapping their tiny wings, zigging around at odd angles. I found myself wondering where we stand, in this age of self-generated existential crisis, as compared to the insects. So I looked up: according to Google are apparently something like 200 million insects on the planet for every human being.<br /><br />I recall reading a some twenty or thirty years ago a book by David Quammen entitled <i>Natural Acts</i>, which contained an essay called "A Republic of Cockroaches." Quammen was one of the very many naturalists who were looking around in the 1980's and wondering where we were heading as a species. Or to put it more succinctly, he was wondering what the planet would look like after we finish the job we have set ourselves of exterminating our species. His nomination for who would be best placed to rule the New World Order? Yep, cockroaches. He envisions "whole plagues of them, whole scudding herds shoulder to shoulder like the old herds of bison, vast cockroach legions sweeping as inexorably as driver ants over the empty prairies." And he explains why. <br /><br />My feeling is, if not cockroaches, then one of our other winged brethren. They've got us outnumbered, and they don't seem to care much, one way or another, what we do or don't do on this planet. They'll do fine without us.<br /><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-59276893570607337242021-06-11T09:38:00.002-07:002021-06-11T09:40:59.885-07:00Whereabouts<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG0os8syt331GbXXfq7orX3vDGI2MbAgSqVOKPMLc7dr0aNQZ5yH8uL6KgSanLz5FqMwq0BB5YtZq2hYPNaRlRIPx5ekwYi6WzacsGK9tL5uAsM_Z_Nv4hqJ3vbOW-uStDVltYQKKtsCQ/s400/wherabouts.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="248" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG0os8syt331GbXXfq7orX3vDGI2MbAgSqVOKPMLc7dr0aNQZ5yH8uL6KgSanLz5FqMwq0BB5YtZq2hYPNaRlRIPx5ekwYi6WzacsGK9tL5uAsM_Z_Nv4hqJ3vbOW-uStDVltYQKKtsCQ/w124-h200/wherabouts.jpg" width="124" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Jhumpa Lahiri has a new book out. A couple years ago she moved to Italy, taught herself Italian, and then decided that she would write her next novel in Italian. She did that, and published it in Italy, and then translated it herself back from the Italian into English and published it in the U.S. and Britain, with the title <i>Whereabouts</i>. It has an unusual structure for a novel. It consists of 46 short essay-ish reflections about what goes on in the narrator's mind as she recalls various places she finds herself in as she goes about her life. The chapters have titles that are prepositional phrases like "On the Street" and "In the Bookstore" and "At My House" and "By the Sea." They're all really short, none more than three or four pages, some less than one page. As you read them in sequence you get a kind of indirect portrait of the woman telling these stories: she's middle-aged, she lives by herself, she's thoughtful and observant, formal in her use of language, independent, but still a little uncertain of herself.<br /></div><br />There's a writing exercise that I sometimes ask my students to do that is modeled on the idea of a picture and a caption. It's a very straightforward and effective way of exploring and developing your own thinking. I sometimes ask my students to write something in that form, which basically amounts to a two-part dance: "Tell me what you see." (The Picture) and then "Tell me what you think about what you see" (The Caption.") A lot of the chapters in <i>Whereabouts</i> are built that way. Here's one, for example:<br /><br /><br /><p></p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><b>In the Sun</b><br /><br /> Today there are protests downtown, and the helicopters have been circling the city all morning. But it's the sun that wakes me up, and beckons me to my desk, where I write, wrapped in my robe, and then it draws me down to the piazza, where I'm greeted by the contained mayhem of my neighborhood.<br /> It's a splendid Saturday, the first warm day. Only a few people are still wearing boots, I see jackets unzipped and the blistered heels of girls in flip-flops who can't stand their punishing leather ballerina flats anymore. Even though it's a Saturday there's still a dash of elegance to how people are dressed: the bold shade of a jacket, the tight lines of a dress. It feels like a party effortlessly organized at the last minute. The piazza becomes a beach on days like this, and a sense of well-being, of euphoria, permeates the air. All the stores are full of people, long lines at the bank machine, the butcher, the bakery, but no one's complaining. If anything they enjoy the wait. While I'm in line for a sandwich a woman says, "What a spectacular day." And the man behind her says, "This neighborhood is always spectacular."<br /> It's my turn for the sandwich.<br /> "Just wait and see how delicious this is going to be," the man behind the counter says. He's known me forever and makes me the same sandwich at least three times a week. "Today it's going to be the best ever."<br /> He dips a ladle into a bucket on the counter. He weighs two slices of fresh cheese on the scale, arranges them on a roll, wraps the sandwich in a paper, and gives me the bill. "Here you go, my dear."<br /> It hardly costs anything. I look for a place to sit and find a spot in the playground where they deal drugs at night, but at this time of day it's bursting with kids, parents, dogs, also a few people on their own like me. But today I don't feel even slightly alone. I hear the babble of people as they chatter, on and on. I'm amazed at our impulse to express ourselves, tell stories to one another. The simple sandwich I always get amazes me too. As I eat it, as my body bakes in the sun that pours down on my neighborhood, each bit, feeling sacred, reminds me that I'm not forsaken.</blockquote><br /><br />An ordinary day, described with some nice specific details. The narrator goes out, she sees people, she buys a sandwich. An ordinary day, yes, but also extraordinary, as all ordinary days are, if we can bring ourselves to experience them fully, deeply mysterious, or "sacred," as she puts it. In the last line she's reminded that she's "not forsaken," which would seem to imply that there are times when she does in fact feel forsaken. That actually is one of the recurring themes in the book: how being an independent woman is kind of a double-edge sword. Sometimes you feel empowered, sometimes you just feel lonely.<br /><br />There's also the moment when I feel like Lahiri is kind of winking at us, when she has her narrator talk about our powerful impulse to tell stories to one another, which is of course exactly what Lahiri is doing in writing this book. The act of storytelling is one of the ways that we can build bridges to one another. <br /><br />This show-and-tell, observe-and-reflect exercise can can serve as a starting point for a story, a poem, or an essay. Since I'm planning to ask my students to try their hand at it in the summer session beginning next week, I've been playing with the format myself. Here's one I wrote last week. I'll post others later.<br /><br /><b></b><blockquote><b>At the Mall</b><br /><br /> Today I went to a nearby mall with my wife, who needed to get a new case for her phone, because the old one had cracked. They had exactly what she needed at a kiosk at one end of the mall, and on the way back to our car we passed an Anthropologie store that we both like to browse in. She likes it because they have a room at the back where they often have out-of-season clothes on sale, and I because they often have very thoughtfully and elegant designed art displays. Today, for example, they had on display in one window with a roughly but realistically shaped white wooden model of a seagull hanging by invisible threads as if in flight. It was followed by a series of other seagulls arcing across the window behind the light blue dress on display in front of a dark blue backdrop that suggested the sky. As you moved your eyes to the right, each seagull in the series became smaller, as if further away, and more abstracted as well: the ones in the middle were outlines cut out of bubble wrap, and the ones to the far right were two-dimensional cardboard cutouts with wording from magazines pasted on. The progression suggested a certain kind of artistic self-consciousness moving from immediate physicality to a more distant conceptual plane. Like I said, thoughtful. Philosophical, even. Certainly moreso than most windowdressings.<br /> Inside the store, they often have similarly clever and inventive displays, and sometimes works by local artists hang on the walls. So we walked around for a while. My wife found a sweater she liked at a very good price, and I did some people-watching and looked at the artwork. I saw one semi-abstract landscape painting, by an artist who has a studio not far from my house, which I noticed had been hung on the wall sideways, whether by accident or intention I have no idea. When my wife was ready, there was a line at the register, so I told her I'd sit outside while she checked out.<br /> I sat down in one of the tables outside the store facing a statue of a duck next to a fountain which sometimes spouts water and sometimes does not. Today it was not. There were three wooden Adirondack chairs next to the fountain. In one sat a black-haired boy about three and a half or four years old. In the next sat his sister, who looked to be maybe six. Dad, an athletic-looking guy in a baseball cap wearing a blue soccer jersey with "ITALIA" written on the back, was sitting in the third chair, the one closest to me, peering intently at his phone screen.<br /> The little boy got up and started jumping up onto the fountain's raised platform, and then jumping back down. As he landed each time, he would let out a sharp cry and then glance over at his dad to see if had noticed. He hadn't. He did this perhaps ten or twelve times, and dad kept ignoring him. The boy took a coin out his pocket and tried to put in on the head of duck, but as soon as he let it go it rolled off the duck, bounced on the platform, and disappeared into the nearby bushes. The boy, momentarily sobered, went over to look for it, but could not see it, so he turned back and went over to dad and asked, "Where's mommy?" <br /> Dad looked up from his phone and gestured with his thumb to the store behind us. "She's in there," he said and turned his attention back to the phone. "I want to see mommy," said the boy. <span></span>Getting no response, he pulled back his arm and smacked his knee. "I want mommy, "he cried, louder now. <br /> Dad pulled out a stuffed turtle toy and said, "Go over there and I'll throw this to you." The kid ran about fifty feet away and turned. "Throw it to me," he said. "That's too far, his father said. "Come closer."<br /> "No! Throw it to me."<br /> His sister, who up until this point had been sitting quietly, hopped up and positioned herself between her brother and her dad, with her arms out. Dad threw the turtle to her. She dropped it, but picked it up and threw it back to him. The boy was screaming, "Throw it to me!" <br /> "You're too far away," said Dad, tossing it again the girl, who dropped it again.<br /> That made the boy even more upset. He ran over to dad. "Where's mommy?" he demanded.<br /> "I told you, Mommy is in the store."<br /> "I want to see mommy NOW!!"<br /> "Mommy's not here. You're going to have to deal with it."<br /> The boy started slapping his fathers knees and screaming. "NO! NO! NO! I want mommy!!"<br /> Dad grabbed his arms. "Don't do that," he said. "You do that any more, you're going to be sorry."<br /> At this point the kid went into a total screaming meltdown, attracting the attention of all the people eating outside across the plaza and all the passersby. "Knock it off," said Dad. "All these people are looking at you. They'll think you don't know how to behave."<br /> "I DON'T CARE!! I DON'T CARE, I WANT MOMMY!!!" He was slapping at his father with both hands and screaming while his sister sat quietly in the chair beside them, watching.<br /> That was the point at which my wife walked out of the store with her package in her hand. She looked at the boy screaming and the dad sitting there. I stood up to meet her.<br /> "What happened, did he fall down and hurt himself?"<br /> "Nope. Nothing that simple. Let's head to the car. I'll tell you along the way."</blockquote><br />An observant reader like yourself will have noticed that the narrative is heavy on the observation and light on the reflection. I thought about tacking on some sort of commentary, but decided against it. What I might choose to say is, if I've accomplished my task, implied, and perhaps better left unsaid. The point of undertaking an exercise like this is to get a piece of writing underway. If you are lucky, the writing will turn out to have a mind of its own, and will lead you to a different place than the one you might have anticipated you would wind up at. Or, as William Stafford puts it in his essay "A Way of Writing,"—which remains my all-time favorite commentary on the art of writing, and one which every year I ask my students to read—<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">"<span>A
writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has
found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of
if he had not started to say them." </span></span></span>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style><br /><br /><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-81096769544347339662021-03-30T16:28:00.001-07:002021-03-31T10:23:26.173-07:00Landslide<p> </p><p>I've been gone a long time. Three months and change. During which a lot has gone down that is not likely ever to find its way toward articulation. It's been a weird, hard time for everybody. The pandemic. The insurrection. The free-floating craziness and stupidity. I have found it hard maintain concentration on the sorts of projects that in the past have given me satisfaction. I have, for example, a stack of books each of which I made it halfway through before picking up another. I pretty much stopped making collages for a couple of months. Like everyone else, I guess, I've been feeling disconnected.
Yesterday on some combination of impulse, boredom, and despair I took a blank piece of paper a Pigma Micron pen and started the first pen-and-ink abstract I've done in like forever. It felt good to focus down and watch the shapes emerge and see how they adapted to and talked with one another. </p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhseM_O-X9UvhIc56lWn2yn1Zpc8FiF0MiR0X1-OKpJnhPBgyxHa1sIW7hzARVyCi-WWdbI_tCh1F4VIoX5Au-GOCu1kGjsJkpZ_d2WyXfnHgxvrqrTMtJV9mAQ50R-mtcrPSkXh1xZl2o/s2048/IMG_0875.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1373" data-original-width="2048" height="269" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhseM_O-X9UvhIc56lWn2yn1Zpc8FiF0MiR0X1-OKpJnhPBgyxHa1sIW7hzARVyCi-WWdbI_tCh1F4VIoX5Au-GOCu1kGjsJkpZ_d2WyXfnHgxvrqrTMtJV9mAQ50R-mtcrPSkXh1xZl2o/w400-h269/IMG_0875.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p> </p><p>The shapes came first, and evolved the rules of their generation as they emerged over the course of an hour or two. At some point I had to decide whether to fill in the entire paper or not, but it felt better to me to let the shapes exist in a dialogue with the larger field of white. So I did it that way. Today I inked them in, and that became a second exercise in attention and observation.
While I was inking them in, I was considering what I would choose to entitle the piece, which began to present itself to me as a kind of archaelogical field. Titles are always problematic for me, in that once you have put a title on the piece you have essentially defined it down. A piece like this one, which could suggest or "mean" a lot of things in a lot of ways, is delimited or reduced by a title. Someone looking at the piece and then at the title is being given a frame that is going to affect the way the piece is perceived. As I was working I wrote down some of the titles that went through my mind: </p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Because I Said So </p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Systemic Inertia </p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Elegy </p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Little By </p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Afterword </p><p style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;">Wrack </p><p>In the end, I decided on "Landslide," which conveys some of the sense the completed picture gives me of various things falling one on top of another. (I'm a fan of Jean Dubuffet, and in many of his paintings and drawings, like <a href="https://newsroom.ucla.edu/dept/faculty/jan-29-april-30:-dubuffet-drawings-at-the-hammer" target="_blank">this one</a> and several of the ones <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/jean-dubuffet-founding-father-of-art-brut" target="_blank">here</a>, he has what appear to be cross-sections of subterranean environments. So that was in the back of my mind as well.) So "Landslide" works, I guess, although I sort of like the idea of a constellation of possible names, each of which would provide a different filter for considering the work. But at least there is now new work to be considered, which I'm happy about. </p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-23671574108415160502020-12-18T10:48:00.004-08:002020-12-19T10:03:59.843-08:00Kindred Spirits<p> </p><p> A few weeks ago I got to spend a few days in a house which had an extensive collection of old books. I spent a fair amount of time pulling titles off the shelves and sampling their contents. My most interesting discovery was a two-volume collection of essays by a British cleric and educator named Vicesimus Knox, who lived from 1752 to 1821. His father had been headmaster of the Tonbridge School, a post which Knox himself held for some time as well. Knox seems to have become a controversial figure because of his his public criticism of British foreign policy as well as his outspoken opinions on pretty much everything else under the sun.<br /> I knew nothing of this, or of Knox himself, when I started sampling his essays. The first thing that caught my eye, as I was flipping through the book, was an essay entitled "On the Means of Reading with the Most Advantage," in which he offers advice to students on how to best approach their studies, being careful to strike a tone which is encouraging without being directive:<br /></p><blockquote>I wish to premise, that in what I now say, and in whatever I have said, in the style of direction and advice, I mean only to offer, not to intrude; to submit, and not to dictate.</blockquote>I've spent my entire adult life as an educator, and I've done perhaps more than my share of such exhortations to students, encouraging them to read widely, and attempting to provide them with the analytical tools that might allow them to derive both pleasure and and intellectual enrichment from their studies. I've also been a lifelong practitioner of, and advocate for, the act of writing itself as a means of improving one's thinking. Writing makes thinking hold still, which provides the opportunity for first thoughts to become second thoughts. And writing is a powerful means of directing and focusing attention, which is the starting point for all thinking. Learning, engagement, delight: all begin with the decision to turn your attention in some particular direction. The quality of your engagement with what you are working on or what you are reading is determined in large part by how well you can channel your attention. Which is the argument that Knox makes:<br /><p> </p><blockquote>Indeed, if we can once fix our attention very closely to a good book, nothing more will be necessary to make us love it: As in nature, when two bodies approach each other very nearly, the attraction of cohesion fastens them together; so when the mind attaches itself closely to any subject whatever, it becomes, as it were, united to it, and gravitates towards it with a spontaneous velocity. There is indeed no study so dry, but by fixing our attention upon it we may at last find it capable of affording great delight. Metaphysics and mathematics, even in their abstrusest parts, are known to give the attentive student a very exalted satisfaction. Those parts then of human learning, which in their nature are more entertaining, cannot fail of being beloved in a high degree, when the mind is closely and constantly applied to them.</blockquote>All very well, of course, but not so easy to put into practice. Which Knox acknowledges:<p></p><p><br /></p><blockquote>In order to acquire the power and habit of fixing the attention, it will at first be necessary to summon a very considerable degree of resolution. In beginning the study of a new language, or any book or science, which presents ideas totally strange, the mind cannot but feel some degree or reluctance or disgust. But persevere; and, in a very short time, the disgust will vanish, and you will be rewarded with entertainment. Till this takes place, make it an inviolable rule, however disagreeable, to read a certain quantity, or for a certain time, and you will infallibly find, that what you began as a task, you will continue as an amusement.</blockquote>I was quite pleased to make the acquaintance of a fellow educator, who some two hundred years ago was writing very carefully crafted essays, of a kind not unrelated to those I have written myself on these subjects. A kindred spirit, so to speak. I wound up finding his two books of essays online at a reasonable price, and have spent a number of hours over the last few weeks reading them and transcribing passages which I have found to be of particular interest.<br /><br />There is much to admire here. He is an artful stylist, albeit over-formal by today's standards. Most of his sentences are artfully constructed; many are quite funny. I laughed out loud more often that I had expected to in reading these essays. He has a broad range of opinions on politics, on art, on the classics, on religion, on what constitutes morality, on what makes for a well-lived life. He takes those opinions seriously, and he has made it his life's work to fix them in words so as to share them with anyone who might stumble across them, even two hundred years later.<br /><br />Which is not to say that I am in agreement with all, or even most, of what he has to say. He, like me, like all of us, is a product of his times and his upbringing, and much of what he has to say is grounded in assumptions that those of his class and his (Anglican) religion would have taken for granted, but which would ruffle many a feather for readers in 2020. He takes his duties as a moralist quite seriously, and trains his rhetorical skills, which are considerable, on a wide variety of targets, some of which he cannot quite resist—and this is surprising coming from the humble country parson—the temptation to wax vituperative. Here for example, is a passage from "On Supporting the Dignity of the Commercial Character":<p></p><p><br /></p><blockquote>A time has been, when merchants only retired to their villas when they had accumulated their fortunes. They now begin with a villa, as if it were as necessary as a warehouse; and end with bankruptcy as naturally, as unreluctantly, and as unblushingly, as it it had been the honourable object of their mercantile pursuit. Distress and difficulty excite meanness and artifice; fraud and injustice soon follow, and the dignity of the British merchant is sunk in the scandalous appellation of a swindler.</blockquote>In another essay, one with the imposingly indignant title, "On the Vanity and Folly of Departing from our Proper Sphere to Become Authors and Orators, Without Previous and Sufficient Preparation," he argues, in essence, that members of the working class should be mindful of—and remain in—their places. In particular, he doesn't believe that such people have any business entertaining writerly ambitions:<br /><br /><blockquote> The unfortunate man who has once contracted this lamentable distemper immediately feels an aversion for his trade or manual employment. He considers himself as a great natural genius, who has been brought up by his injudicious parents to a business far beneath him, and for which he is totally unfit. He is too delicate for hard or disagreeable labour, and too volatile for the phlegmatic employment of a counter or a counting-house. But it is a certain truth, that we seldom succeed in the mode of life which we do not love; and distress of every kind is the certain consequence of relinquishing the service of Mercury to pay court to the Muses.<br /> I wish the literary trader or mechanic to consider how very much out of character a student by profession would appear, were he to invade the province of the work-shop, and to lay down the pen and the book for the chisel, or the hammer, or the last, or the needle, or the trowel. He would succeed but ill in his studies if he chose to spend his time at the counter and in the warehouse, instead of the library; and the trader and the mechanic may assure themselves, that notwithstanding the flattering suggestions of their own vanity, they usually appear no less absurd, and succeed no less unhappily, in writing verses, or composing orations, than the student would appear in making a shoe, or retailing cheese and haberdashery.</blockquote>Nor, alas, is he a fan of the novel. He's all in favor of reading of classic texts as a means of self-improvement, and he thinks that books about travel and geography are fine. But the novel? Not so much. Here's a passage from "Of Novel Reading":<p></p><p><br /></p><blockquote>At an inflammatory age the fuel of licentious ideas will always find a ready reception. The sentimental manner seems of late to have supplanted it. But it is a matter of doubt, whether even this manner be not equally dangerous. It has given an amiable name to vice, and has obliquely excused the extravagance of the passions, by representing them as the effect of lovely sensibility. The least refined affections of humanity have lost their indelicate nature, in the ideas of many; and transgressions forbidden by the laws of God and man have been absurdly palliated, as proceeding from an excess of those finer feelings, which Vanity has arrogated to herself as elegant and amiable distinctions. A softened appellation has given a degree of gracefulness to moral deformity.</blockquote>Knox has a very clear set of ideas in his head about what constitutes the moral life. And he thinks we must be constantly on guard against temptations, those things which will distract us from what should be most central and most important. Novels, for example. Licentious. Dangerous. Extravagant. Indelicate. Transgressive. Morally deformed.<br /><br />Reading itself is, for Knox, best understood and practiced as a means of self-improvement. In his essay "On the Efficacy of Moral Instruction," he explains:<p></p><p><br /></p><blockquote>The end which I have chiefly in view in submitting these remarks, is not only to recommend an attention to books and instructive discourses, but to produce, if possible, an alteration in the scope and object of that attention. I wish readers to take up a book with a desire to receive from it moral instruction, and not merely literary entertainment. Every one of us, whatever be our improvements, is liable to relax in his principles, unless they are frequently renewed and strengthened by admonition. Fortunately for us, books of morality abound; and places, where instruction is given in the most solemn manner, are almost daily open for our reception. But alas! how few of us purchase and peruse a book with a sincere desire to be rendered better men; and how many attend to the preacher solely to gratify their curiosity and derive amusement! Bad, indeed, must be the book and the sermon from which any man may not, if he will, receive some hint, which, when seriously reflected on, would lead to improvement. But our want of humility, and our idea that subjects which concern our worldly interest and pleasure are the only subjects worthy of the anxious care of a man of sense, render all which the wisest men have collected for our guidance utterly abortive.</blockquote><br />I do not agree with many of Knox's core assumptions. I don't think that it is or should be necessary for any of us to devote every moment of our lives to self-improvement. I believe that should be some room in our lives for recreation, for speculation, for exploration. I believe it is possible, indeed desirable, for us to take an interest in the world and to derive enjoyment from it, rather than to gird ourselves against any form of distracting innovation. And I am deeply suspicious of the ways in which self-righteous moral crusaders have throughout history been aligned with and served to foster oppressive treatment of women and minorities and members of what are understood to be the lower classes, and have characterized free thinkers of every stripe as heathens and pagans and infidels. The problem with self-righteousness is that it too often provides cover for dismissive and uncharitable behaviors that generate misery and unhappiness for those poor souls who are its target.<br /><br />But the fact that I disagree with Knox does not interfere with my appreciation for what he is trying to do. He spends, in the pages of his book, an impressive amount of energy just trying to lay out what he believes and why he believes it, and to offer advice and suggestions to the rest of us according to his lights. His essays are an invitation, and a challenge: Here's what I think. What do you think? I'm glad that he chose to do that honorable work, and that his thoughts are still available to us some two hundred years after he wrote them down. That's the beauty of writing: it makes thinking hold still.<span> </span> <p></p><p>And the guy does, in the end, have a sense of humor. Those of you who were ambulatory in 1963 may remember a novelty song by Jimmy Soul called "If You Wanna Be Happy," which made the (tongue-in-cheek?) argument that you'd be better off marrying an ugly woman than a beautiful one. But lo and behold, here is Knox, two hundred years earlier, making the same case, in his essay "The Want of Personal Beauty a Frequent Cause of Virtue and Happiness":<br /><br /></p><blockquote> It may appear paradoxical, but I will assert it to be true, that women who have no great pretensions to beauty are usually found, as the companions of life, the most agreeable. They are, indeed, for the most part, I do not say always, the best daughters, the best wives, the best mothers; most important relations, and most honourable to those who support them with propriety. They who aim not at such characters, but live only to display a pretty face, without one domestic or social virtue, can scarcely rank higher than a painted doll, or a blockhead, place with a cap on it, in a milliner's window.<br /> There is something of an irritability in the constitution of women whose minds are uncultivated, which, when increased by opposition, and confined by habit, usually produces a termagent, a shrew, or a virago; characters which, from the torment they occasion, may be said greatly to participate of an infernal nature. Nothing but reading, reflection, and indeed, what is called a liberal education, can in general smooth this natural asperity. A woman who, by attending to her face, is led to neglect her mind, and who, besides, has been flattered in her youth by the admirers of her beauty, seldom fails, in the more advanced periods of her life, to vent the virulence of her temper, now soured and blackened by neglect, on all who have the misfortune to approach her. Her husband, if she has, peradventure, entangled some miserable wight, undergoes such torments as might justly rescue him from purgatory, by the plea of having suffered it already.</blockquote>Hard to read that without laughing, or without imagining old Vicesimus chuckling to himself as he bent over his foolscap to pen those words. One of the reasons I like to write is that sometimes, in like manner, I manage to surprise myself by coming up with something funny or apt. I imagine that even I had been alive in England in 1820, I would not have been likely to encounter Vicesimus Knox, and if I had, I'm not sure that we would have been the best of buddies. But reading his work now from a distance of some thousands of miles and some hundreds of years, I think of him as a kind of friend.<br /><br /><p></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-82526038872112895222020-01-18T10:10:00.003-08:002020-01-18T10:21:35.464-08:00Standard Deviation<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Over the last month or so I've been working on a chapbook of sorts. I made a selection of twenty-one of my own collages and wrote a sort of prose poem to accompany each piece. Here are two examples:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b> Outcropping</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In the Blue Hills, rocks as big as
houses lie scattered where they fell out of the receding glaciers—some from as
much as a mile high—at the end of the last Ice Age, often broken into two or
three pieces from the force of their collision with the earth. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now they are surrounded by old-growth trees,
saplings, briars, blackberry bushes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
air crackle-crisp, the sky a hazy blue. We stand looking down at the winter
lake glistening in the gathering dark, listen to the elders chanting as the Blue
Angel steps forward to offer a prayer.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"> Caballero</span></b>
<b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7eRlhcjXiIuy1PoCrQSJvTReZQ-wv8aAzBQPkHbs5yvhVpnkzUA8uQtB3H4g6_2qd5aOfq8qUl5K09EYiNapIzz8la3aEihki-OSDDPJRbAMvUIdVH9LmtpVNY2rlnstn_vDdIr3o8II/s1600/caballero.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1212" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7eRlhcjXiIuy1PoCrQSJvTReZQ-wv8aAzBQPkHbs5yvhVpnkzUA8uQtB3H4g6_2qd5aOfq8qUl5K09EYiNapIzz8la3aEihki-OSDDPJRbAMvUIdVH9LmtpVNY2rlnstn_vDdIr3o8II/s400/caballero.jpg" width="302" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">They rode by late in the afternoon,
covered in dust and sweat, trying to hold their heads up under the brutal heat of
the setting sun. We all sat in the shadows of the jacarandas and watched them
plodding stolidly toward the mountains in the west. The oddest thing was the
sound of the song they sang softly in some language we had never heard, a song whose
meaning we could only loosely infer from the fragments that reached our ears
intermittently, conveying a mood of weariness and resignation, along with something
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If you're interested, here's a link to the <a href="http://www.aceblush.com/standard.pdf">whole document</a>, with a full explanation in the preface.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2284837106090895124.post-56437519683509002492019-09-22T10:20:00.002-07:002019-09-22T12:01:45.253-07:00The Falconer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhli7MU5ooK3E0g6LBFf3Y9_33s1VQ-NfPoDUkngHwkbA3daA4EA1JP538JdDqHxLnzxI0X16uYzkleNyLhW6bO2D5T9y1L1dHU25r1N9LElVWtNhGinlW9MUv5AEmxtah_1rvib2fqzvA/s1600/falconer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="194" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhli7MU5ooK3E0g6LBFf3Y9_33s1VQ-NfPoDUkngHwkbA3daA4EA1JP538JdDqHxLnzxI0X16uYzkleNyLhW6bO2D5T9y1L1dHU25r1N9LElVWtNhGinlW9MUv5AEmxtah_1rvib2fqzvA/s200/falconer.jpg" width="149" /></a></div>
I read on average somewhere between 50 and 100 books a year, although I start more than that. It used to be that once I started a book, I'd commit to finishing it. As I've gotten older I've given myself permission to bail. I'll give a book ten or twenty pages and if it hasn't grabbed me by then I'll move on to something else. In a typical year, out of a hundred books I might find five or ten that really light me up. (Some of those books are listed in the sidebar under the heading "Recommended Reading.") Every once in a great while I'll run across a book that is so good that as soon as I finish it I go back to the beginning and read it over again.<br />
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Early in August I ran across a warm review in <i>The Economist</i> about <i>The Falconer</i>, by Dana Czapnik, a novel set in the 1990's about a seventeen-year-old girl whose primary passion is basketball. I am (or was) a high-school English teacher, and I was for many years a high-school girls' basketball coach, so I thought it might be in my wheelhouse. It turned out to be one of the books that was so good the first time that I had to read it again. And I'm here to tell you that it was even better the second time, and the third.<br />
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Lucy Adler lives with her mom and dad in New York City. She attends Pendleton High, a private school where she is the star player on the basketball team, a circumstance which provides her with exactly nothing in the way of social status amongst her peers. She's an outsider. She's tall and she's athletic, but she's not cute and she's not sexy in any of the ways that are recognized as acceptable by her peers. She has two close friends: a boy named Percy, her best friend since elementary school who is also a basketball stud and for whom she has harbored a secret crush for years, and Alexis, one of her teammates, who is also a social outsider at the prep school. Lucy spends a lot of time with her older cousin Violet, an aspiring artist, and their conversations are both rich and revealing.<br />
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Those are the facts, and there is nothing special about them. Some characters in a setting. What makes the novel so startling, so alive, is the personality of Lucy herself. She's fierce. She's relentless. She pays attention to everything, and turns what she sees over in her mind, trying to figure it out. The entire novel takes place inside her head as she navigates the social landscape and the physical landscape of the city itself. Here, for example, she's considering her experience growing up as a girl:<br />
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I've known since I was little that the kids having the most fun were the boys. They got to run through the world, feral and laughing. Girls were quiet, played at being grown-ups with dolls, whispered into each other's ears and giggled behind cupped hands. They imitated each other's expressions, gesticulations. Found comfort dressing like each other and traveling in groups. At the playground, they'd draw flowers and politely seesaw, have competitions to see who could swing the highest. I'd watch the boys with envy from a distance. They didn't want me to participate in their games of war. They'd tear through the playground like animals, and I so wanted to have that kind of abandon. Eventually, I found my place among the boys because I was a strong enough athlete that someone would occasionally want me on their team when they got some sort of organized play together. I was sporadically allowed to participate but never allowed a say in the direction of the game. A bit player. But it was okay not to have any power, as long as I was given a few moments to run roughshod through the world with my skinned knees and shins and hollowed-out mosquito bites, so much surface area of my body red and brown and scabbed. But then when I was given those permissions, as few as they were, I found that there was no place for me with the polite girls practicing penmanship during art class. I was not like them. They didn't understand me. The girls thought I was weird. That I wanted to be a boy. But I didn't want to be a boy. I wanted to be a girl who had fun. My version of fun. (61-2)</blockquote>
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So, this is Lucy's dilemma. She has talent, she has ambition, she's smart and she reads with the same ferocious energy she brings to everything else she does in her life. (She's read and thought about Yeats, Shakespeare, Celine, Faulkner, Kundera, de Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Melville, and Tennessee William, among others.) She's drawn to risk, to disorder. At one point late in the novel, she has been watching a caretaker raking a sort of indoor garden in the city, and her response is typical of her mode of processing throughout the book: observant, thoughtful, trying to make connections, trying to figure out what's going on around her and how she fits in, or doesn't:<br />
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...He is methodical, walking north to the wall, then turning and walking south until the entire section of dirt is well hydrated. Then he puts down his watering can and gets a rake. Again, he goes back and forth over the dirt so that the moisture is evenly distributed. He does not make a sound. He does not play music. He just goes about tending to the earth. Rake north. Rake south.<br />
There is something monk-like about him. Has he taken a vow of silence too? I've always been fascinated by the people who choose to do that. A vow of silence is an attempt to tamp down the wild parts. Maybe some people can't handle the disorder of the universe and so they have to impose some kind of order on a random segment of their lives to make the chaos more bearable. That's what I think of whenever someone describes themselves as "type A." Making lists just to cross them off. So silly. I may spend a lot of my time white-knuckling my way through human existence, but I prefer chaos. (189)</blockquote>
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Lucy, is clear-eyed, open to experience, and at times emotionally raw. When you are drawn to the flames, it's likely you'll get burned. Some readers may be put off by Lucy's choices and by the language she uses to express them. There's a lot of casual obscenity in the book. There is a sexual initiation that does not go well for her, during or after. Lucy smokes the occasional joint. She steals basketballs from her school because she can't afford to buy them herself. She does a lot of other things that aren't in the good-girl playbook. But she's a fully engaged human being and I, for one, can't help but admire her spirit, her intensity, her intelligence and determination. She's a thinker, a ponderer, and she uses her engagement with the game of basketball as her refuge and centering point:<br />
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There is no silence like the silence in your own head when you allow it space to be silent. No sirens. No honking. No ka-klunk kaklunk. No shouting from the games on the other courts. No music. No playground screams. No stroller wheels. No creeping thoughts. No wondering. No melancholy. No happiness. Just: ball on pavement. Silence. Air. Thwip. Ball on pavement. Ball on pavement. Feet on pavement. Ball on pavement. Silence. Air. Thwip. Again. There is a meditation in this. A nirvana. I cannot find it anywhere else but here. A ball. A hoop. And me. (241)</blockquote>
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There are stylistic choices made by the author that are interesting to me as well. Often, for example, we will follow Lucy's thoughts through a series of observations that are inventoried more or less in list form. For example, early in the book she is walking through her neighborhood, and that walk is rendered as a list of impressions, with her reactions to those impressions at times interspersed:<br />
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Orchard and Grand. Laundromat. Lots of linoleum and rows of machines and a few people folding clothes in the window... Grocers. Dyed tulips and roses that will turn the water purple when they're brought home and put in vases by mothers or girlfriends, keepers of vases. Bruised oranges. Metal vats full of melting ice with Pepsis and Cokes floating on the surface like corporate-branded buoys...Nail salon. Fluorescent lighting and a row of dingy Barcaloungers with water buckets at their base. Only three customers. Asian women with lightly permed hair wearing the same dark blue aprons, filing away at strangers' nails. An emery board orchestra inside. Never had a manicure. You can't have long nails and play ball. (31-2)</blockquote>
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Some readers might find such inventories tiresome. But for me, here and elsewhere, they serve not only to bring the neighborhood to life in my imagination, but to characterize Lucy as someone who is a habitual close reader of the world she inhabits. There's a two-part writing move that I often ask my students to practice: "Tell me what you see. Then tell me what you think about what you see." It's a good way for me to get to know the students and to get a sense of how their minds work. It's the same basic principle on display here, although in a much more fully developed way. We get to know Lucy by hanging out with her, seeing what she sees, and hearing what she has to say about what she sees. The book is replete with interesting conversations that she has with Percy, with Alexis, with Violet, and, in a stunningly revelatory turn toward the end of the book, with her mom.<br />
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Two other thoughts. The first is that <i>The Falconer</i>, perhaps inevitably, is being compared to The <i>Catcher in the Rye</i>. Fair enough, there are more than enough points of connection to justify that. (Is it a mere coincidence that Holden's school is Pency and Lucy's is Pendleton? That Holden wants to be the Catcher in the Rye and that Lucy wants to be the Falconer (depicted in the NYC statue shown at the top of this post*)? And so on.) But here's the thing: in my judgement at least, Lucy is a more interesting and multidimensional character than Holden, and <i>The Falconer</i> is the better novel. Salinger gets points for being a groundbreaker and writing what was at that time the only novel of its kind, which made it into a classic novel of adolescence. But <i>The Falconer</i> is a better-written and more broad-ranging novel. <br />
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The second is that I have read some commentary which criticizes <i>The Falconer</i> for using "too many f-words for a young adult novel." To which I have two responses. First, this is not a YA novel. It's a novel, period. (I have issues with the YA novel as a genre, but that's a topic for another time.) <i>The Catcher in the Rye</i> was not written as a YA novel either, although it seems over the years to have been shoved into that pigeonhole. Second, have you spent any time with teenagers in the last twenty years? I have, and I'm here to tell you that virgin ears are a thing of the past. The characters in this novel talk the way people I know actually talk. And I look at that as a value-add, not as a shortcoming.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
* "Our ices continue to melt in our palms as we walk past <i>The Falconer</i>, a statue of a young boy in tights, leg muscles blazing, releasing a bird, only his toes on the ground, the falcon's wings in the midst of opening... I know I'm supposed to love the statue of Alice in Wonderland, being a girl and all, but I've always loved this one. It's reminiscent of the feeling when you hit the perfect jump shot. The way your body goes skyward and the ball is released at the tippy-top of your fingers and you know, as soon as you let it go: that shit's gonna fall in. (61) </blockquote>
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