Throughlines

Here You Start

2011-08-31T22:35:00.000-07:00

Here you start here with this, keep working on this here and ah, that's done now how about this right next to that, work this angle, feather across to the corner, maybe a little darker something different here, maybe a borderline, okay, and now another another shape another texture another kind of line over here, moving in, moving out, moving around, but patiently (breath and line following the music as you focus down), this one light so this one darker here, okay work around the corner, and then swoop out over to the left and now there's field which wants to become... what? something you haven't done yet, the only rule, perhaps switch pens yes that will do, extending expanding exploring, moment to moment a world emerging from under to the point of the pen on the plane of the paper absent-minded, just one thing and then the next and the next until it's time to move on.

Somewhere Different Now

2011-08-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

Now I don't mind saying, I believe in the waiting
In the visions of grandeur, and the random encounter
I'm not on fire, not burned out,
Just somewhere different now

- Tylan Greenstein (of Girlyman)

I'll tell you what, for the last three months I've been listening to essentially nothing else but Girlyman. I haven't gotten slammed quite so hard by a musical group since Counting Crows came out with August and Everything After in 1993. I've got about twenty of their songs on my iPod, and I've got a Girlyman station on Pandora, and my ears have not been so delectated in ever so long.

I've been in a different space with my artwork, too. Aside from doing whole series of Saturday morning encaustic panels of the kind I wrote about recently, I've been doing a set of sort of meticulous line drawings, using pen and ink on textured watercolor paper. I've been thinking a lot about Paul Klee's remark that "the essence of drawing is the line exploring space," and trying to explore drawing with that in mind. One implication of such a conception is that pre-planning is sort of against the rules. You proceed by putting the point of the pen down onto the paper and then pushing it forward according to whatever internal imperative presents itself as you proceed. The overall composition will ultimately be determined as a series of decisions made in process. In this way of working, it's important NOT to know where you're going. What you wind up with is something, well, different. Here's an example of one I've just completed:

The thing to see here (click on the picture for a larger view) is how each part is connected to the other through visual design logic which was arrived at in process, as opposed to being determined in advance. I started on the left, about a quarter of the way in, worked back to the left edge, and then added one section at a time, moving from left to right. I had two ideas in mind: first, to keep inventing new ways for the pen to work; and second, not to fall back on things I had already done before, either in this drawing or the ones I had done leading up to it. It goes back to Klee's dictum: "The essence of drawing is the line exploring space." I had that notion specifically in mind as I worked on this. It's really an incrementalist approach rooted in an act of faith in "the random encounter." This is a method of working I've been drawn to, both in writing and art, for some time now. It's a process I am using right now in the development of this post, which began at a point, with a quoted lyric, and is building itself around several related ideas which that lyric (as in many other Girlyman songs) both embodies and suggests.

I happened to run across a slide show on the subject of writing the other day and was arrested by this slide:

I can understand why people would be drawn to this way of thinking and working. It has a long history of pedagogy behind it, and it appears on the surface to be only common sense. But from the point of view I've been espousing today, it looks, as a matter of practicality and productivity, entirely backwards. Who sits down to ask herself, "What do I want my writing to do? Today I think I'll protest an injustice. No, on second thought, I think I'll describe nature's beauty." I can't work that way. I wouldn't WANT to work that way. I don't know any working writers who work that way.

What I would rather do, what I find both more enjoyable and ultimately more satisfying, is to sit down and write, and in the process of writing figure out what it is that I want to say. It's precisely because I don't know where I'm going that I find my way to places I would not have expected to get to. (I had a talk with Darin, a friend and colleague who is a musician, the other day, and he was saying his process of composition is much the same. It doesn't begin with a grand unifying vision; it begins with him _playing_ on the guitar, and then, when he finds a lick he likes, writing it down.) I'm not saying that that's the ONLY way to travel. Certainly there are some situations in which it is perhaps efficient to knock out a piece of writing (or a work of art, or a song) for a utilitarian purpose according to a predetermined plan. But where's the fun in that? And why is it that the narrow, un-playful vision of writing so dominates the experience of students in school? It's no wonder kids arrive at a spot where they think they are no good at writing, and claim that they hate to do it.

Another new space: I'm hip-deep in George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. I've completed The Game of Thrones and am midway through A Clash of Kings. I'm reading in great hourlong gulps. I haven't been this drunk on words in a very long time. Martin is being compared, with ample justification, to J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K Rowling, Patrick O'Brian. (I'd add Dorothy Dunnett to the list, but nobody I know has read her, sad to say.) He's a fantasy writer for adults. His story, set in the fictional world of Westeros, is multifaceted and many-layered and character-driven and deeply satisfying right down the syllables themselves. Even purely descriptive passages having to do with food or dress have a kind of saturated richness:

Of food there was plenty. The war had not touched the fabled bounty of Highgarden. While singers sang and tumblers tumbled, they began with pears poached in wine, and went on to tiny savory fish rolled in salt and cooked crisp, and capons stuffed with onions and mushrooms. There were great loaves of brown bread, mounds of turnips and sweetcorn and pease, immense hams and roast geese and trenchers dripping full of venison stewed with beer and barley. For the sweet, Lord Caswell’s servants brought down trays of pastries from his castle kitchens, cream swans and spun-sugar unicorns, lemon cakes in the shape of roses, spiced honey biscuits and blackberry tarts, apple crisps and wheels of buttery cheese.

As a writer Martin is good with people, he's good with settings, he's got a great ear for dialogue. He works his characters into situations where they tear into each other with words as efficiently as they do with axes and swords. Although there's plenty of that going on as well. Anyway, the guy clearly loves telling tales, and he's very good at it. I'm glad to have found my way to his work.

Those of you who have been paying attention will, if you are still with me (bless you) may be moved at this point, to object that this post has evolved, or devolved, despite itself, into something that reads, in retrospect, suspiciously like a thesis essay, complete with a controlling theme and three concrete examples. And all I can say is, well, yes, that's how it turned out, because that's what it wanted to become. But it didn't start out that way. It's a happy little surprise, abounding, as life so often does, in irony: starting out somewhere different, and winding up at home.

E

2011-07-09T00:23:00.000-07:00

Let’s begin with a letter. E, for example.
None commoner. For effort. For excellent.
For eerie, for Eeyore, for entrepreneurship.
Empathy. Electricity. Ecstasy. Twisted sister
to M and W. Bookshelves. Business end
of a pitchfork. Signifier of the virtual ( in -mail
and -tail, -cash and -zine.) Grade you get
when you’ve given up. Number 5.
Third prime. “Ay” to the Romans; Epsilon
to the Greeks. Third note in the C scale,
otherwise known as “mi.” Sound of the scream
that sticks in your mouth in a dream.
All of the above. None of the above.

Process Reflection:

I’ve been doing a little stint as a guest presenter in a summer school American Literature class, and I gave the students an assignment over the weekend: come up with a short piece of writing, in the neighborhood of one hundred words, that represents an attempt to use words carefully in a way that interests you. I shared with them the first in the sequence of the 30 posts on this blog that began in January of 2008 when I wrote 100 words a day for 30 days. That got me thinking of trying it again. This is the result. I opened up the file and had no idea what I would write about, so I just started typing, “Let’s begin with a letter.” The rest sort of wrote itself, as I looked at the letter “E” and kept turning it over in my mind, looking for words. Most of the work was in placing and re-placing sequences of words, tightening the phrasing, and adjusting the line breaks as I went along. I owe something here to Charles Simic for his “Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand.” Nothing too serious, just an entertainment.

Andre Dubus: Father and Son

2011-06-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

I first encountered the writing of Andre Dubus in the early 1980s. I remember being at the Boston Globe Book Fair, which used to be held in the Hynes Convention center. I was walking from booth to booth and wound up at one point at the Godine display. There were a series Dubus paperbacks with cover designs that caught my eye. Each cover had a flat grey background, titles in hand-lettered red calligraphy, and a stark black-and-white photo on the front. Separate Flights had a picture of a white double door, partially ajar, with light pushing out from behind. Adultery and Other Choices had a picture of an unmade bed, just sheets and two pillows. Finding a Girl in America had a picture of the corner of a white mantel with a white urn casting a shadow on the white wall. I picked up each book, read a few passages at random, and was immediately hooked. I bought all three books and read them with amazement and delight. If there’s a better short-story writer in American fiction, I don’t know who it is. (In Canada, there’s Alice Munro, of course.)

Dubus is still one of my anchor points, one of the writers I return to. He used to do readings in the Boston area. I went to them often, and met him and spoke to him once, after a Saturday afternoon reading outdoors at a small suburban library in May of 1985. He was wearing jeans and boots and a vest, and looked as much like a biker as an author, a combination I found reassuring. I told him how much my wife and I enjoyed his writing, and he asked how long we had been married. When I told him 16 years, he called over to one of his friends to tell him, as if this were something that beggared belief. He signed my copy of Voices from the Moon — a 1985 New Year’s gift from my — “Best wishes and hopes for blessings on the children.” Dubus became for me a kind of model and a kind of hero, a man whose artful, intelligent, compassionate writing seemed to justify his statue as a Person of Value.

Some years later, I discovered that there was another Andre Dubus, the son of the man I had meet. I read and very much enjoyed both House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of the Last Days. I wondered how it was that father and son came to share the inclination and the talent to be storytellers. I was curious about what it must have been like to grow up with Andre Dubus as a father.

Now I know. Or at least, I have a report directly from the source. Andre Dubus III has recently come out with a memoir called Townie, and it is a sobering, sometimes shockingly honest story that both complicates and enriches the understanding and respect I have for both writers. It turns out that there is good reason for Dubus to have been surprised that my marriage had lasted so long. He left his first wife (and three children) when young Andre, the oldest, was eleven. (For sake of clarity, I’ll refer to the father as Dubus and his son as Andre from here on in.)

Andre spent his teenage years moving from one low-rent house to another in tough working-class neighborhoods, and because we was small and because he was The New Kid he was often the brunt of the kind of casual brutality and bullying that anyone in that situation was likely to be in for. His feelings of shame, for himself and for his inability to protect himself, and his sisters, and his mother, from what his father had left them to, become the predominant driving force behind the person he decided to make of himself. During his teenage years he began to submit himself to a punishing regimen of weightlifting and boxing lessons. As he grew in strength and skill, he began first of all to stick up for himself, and secondly to go actively looking for opportunities to put his new powers on display, ultimately turning himself into exactly the kind of person who had been making him miserable. (I’m grossly oversimplifying here and overgeneralizing here. His story as he tells it is much more nuanced and much more vivid than any brief summary can capture.)

As readers, we have the advantage of knowing from the start that this story is going to have a happier ending than that of many of the toughs that Andre ran with and fought with, many of whom wind up either in jail or prematurely dead. A large part of what is most interesting about this book has to do with how he makes the transition from being the kind of person whose primary means of self-expression is his fists, to being, like his father before him, a writer of surpassing gifts, and how this metamorphosis is reinforced and enhanced by his father’s re-entry into his life.

Townie is a memoir that reads like a novel. There’s of course a positive side to this, in that the book is a compelling read, not least because Andre is very good with both narrative and character delineation. He knows how to make a scene come alive, and he’s good with language:

IN THE SUMMER, Salisbury Beach was where you went if you had wheels, especially on Friday or Saturday night. It was a sandy strip of barrooms and open arcades, pool halls and dance clubs and carnival rides. There was a roller-coaster built entirely out of wood, bleached four-by-fours that one day would rot and they’d tear it down, but in the late seventies you could hear the rattle of the cars all night long, the cries of riders as they plummeted down one steep slope and got jerked up another. There was the bass thump of DJ music through the thin walls of the Frolics, the boxed roll and ping of steel balls in the pinball machine, the hard-cornered slap of plastic air hockey pucks, talk and yelling, little kids laughing or pleading, the creaking of gears beneath the huge lighted Ferris wheel. There were the revving motorcycle engines, their diesel-fed clacking of steel on steel. There was the electric whine of the Dodge ’Em cars, the buzz of neon lights, and the constant slap and hiss of waves breaking on the dark beach. You could smell motor exhaust and seashells and spun sugar. There was smoking beef and overheated Fry-O-Lator oil and fried dough and butter from a bottle. There was the tang of dried ketchup and mustard on the asphalt, cigarette smoke and bubble gum and suntan lotion and sweat.

But there’s a danger here, for both writer and reader, a danger which is always attendant upon the task of the writing of non-fiction, and that is that there’s always a lot more that actually happened than words will ever be able to re-create, and so there is always a process of selection going on, a kind of re-fashioning of experience in the service of story. As a teacher and a writer, I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the very concept of “Creative Writing.” If Townie had been marketed as a novel, we’d think of it as fiction; but since it’s marketed as memoir, we’re encouraged to think of is as truth.

But I’ve come to believe, and this book reinforces that belief, that just as there can be a great deal of truth in a novel — everything from thinly-disguised autobiography to authentically imagined made-up stuff that conveys a reality that stands up to and at times surpasses the reality we know. (In fact, when I met Dubus at the library, by way of paying him a compliment, I told him was that many of his characters felt more real to me than some of the people I actually know.)

Conversely, there is necessarily a great deal of fictionalizing that goes on in autobiography. The process of fictionalization begins with selection: what I choose to leave out would have colored the story differently, and what I choose to put in is there for a reason: it illustrates something that I want people to understand, but that is filtered through whatever motives I may have for writing my story in the first place. To take just one example, there is a fairly graphic sexual initiation scene early in the book, but only the most oblique mention of Andre’s courtship with the woman who eventually became his wife. There are doubtless many good reasons for the omission, but it’s clear here and elsewhere that there is internal censorship at work, and that the story has been shaped, for better or worse, by a writer whose very gifts as a storyteller may be eliding the truth, consciously or unconsciously, even as he appears to be presenting it to us.

There’s also the fairly obvious point that writing itself is necessarily linear and sequential, one word following another, which is not the way we experience life at all. Any written version of “real” events is a re-construction in another medium. It’s a form of prestidigitation, using words to conjure up images in the mind. But the magic must needs be understood to be, to a greater or lesser degree, an illusion, a mirage, a dream. I don’t mean any of this as a criticism. Townie is a terrific book. I’m glad Andre wrote it, and I’m glad I read it. But it’s a constructed artifact, and inevitably raises as many questions as it answers.

As I said before, perhaps the major turn in the novel, and the one that had the greatest degree of interest for me personally, has to do with the point at which Andre begins to question his motivations for fighting, begins to understand that no matter how intense and satisfying it may feel while you are beating the crap out of somebody, it leaves a residue of of dissatisfaction and shame. After one fight which he gets into, ostensibly to avenge an insult, he goes home to his apartment and lies down on his bed and thinks through the sources of his anger:

But then my cheeks began to burn, this voice in my head: You did that for you. And I saw Cody Perkins back on the streets of the South End, how he walked with his chest out and his head up, how he was always looking for a fight. At eleven and twelve years old, I could only fear and admire him; how could anyone look for a fight? How could anyone want that? But lying there on my mattress in Texas nine years later, my knuckles swelling up, the alley clear and quiet because I had cleared it, I knew why he wanted to find those fights; they were his only chance to get out what was inside him. Like pus from a wound, it was how he expressed what had to be expressed. It gave him the chance to do something for him and him only, and my shame now came from someplace I hadn’t considered before, that maybe inside me there were other ways to get this pus out, other ways to express a wound.

Later, in what for me is truly one of the most magical passages in the book, he describes the first time he begins to consider the possibility of substituting physical self-discipline with another:

But in the kitchen I stopped at the door. I watched myself let go of the knob and turn and put a pan of water on the stove. I opened the flames under it all the way, then watched myself take an empty cup and drop a tea bag into it. I walked back to where I slept for the notebook and a pencil, and why did I set them on the small kitchen table? Why was I sitting there waiting for the water to boil for the tea when I should be running along an icy sidewalk in the night to train? I began to feel too warm in my layered sweats, but I didn’t move. I opened the notebook in front of me. The water began to bubble and I stood and poured it steaming into my cup, the tea bag jerking, then rising, and now I watched as I set the cup near the notebook and took my pencil and held it. What was I doing? And why? Why was I doing this? For a short time or a long time, I stared at the page. I saw how consistently level the blue lines were from left to right, a quarter of an inch high, maybe five-sixteenths. I kept staring at them. Then a curtain lifted and I began to see a factory somewhere where these notebooks were made, men and women running big machines, cutting and printing and binding, and I saw a man like Randy working some press, his outlaw mustache, sweat in the corners of his eyes, then I was in the woods, woods I called Maine, the place Liz was from, and now a young woman who looked very much like her was half drunk on warm beer and was losing her virginity on the hood of a Pontiac. Then I was her, feeling the metal hood under my skin, the jabs into me that hurt, then didn’t but did. The boy she’d given herself to finished quickly, and it was as if I were a mist in the trees watching them sitting now in the front seat. They smoked cigarettes and neither of them spoke. A soft rain began to fall and the boy started the engine and put his car in gear and drove down the rutted road away from what they’d just done together. Away from me. I put down my pencil. In front of me were just handwritten words, quite a few crossed out and replaced with others. I raised the cup of tea to my lips and blew on it, but it had cooled to the temperature of the room. Hadn’t it just been steaming? How long had I been sitting here? I blinked and looked around my tiny rented kitchen, saw things I’d never seen before: the stove leaning to the left, the handle of the fridge covered with dirty masking tape, the chipped paint of the window casing, a missing square of linoleum on the floor under the radiator. I stood and closed the notebook. I picked up the pencil and set it on top like some kind of marker, a reminder to me of something important I shouldn’t lose.

Eventually, he begins to realize that the discipline of writing brings with it other benefits he had not anticipated:

It was a Saturday afternoon, warm enough I didn’t need a jacket. I grabbed my workout clothes and left my apartment. The inside of my car smelled like sawdust and the leather of my carpentry apron on the backseat. For a few miles the day was too bright and real and I blinked at it from the dream I’d cast myself in with the two old ladies and the young man and all those blackberries. Then I was on the back roads heading west. Instead of playing the radio, hunting for that one good song, I drove along in silence. On both sides of the road were woods, but today, for the first time, I saw them as individual trees, each one different from the one beside it or in front of it or behind it. One was as bent with age and weight as an old man, another as thin and straight as a young girl, one pine, the other maple or elm or oak, and the sun seemed to shine on each sprouting leaf, on each needle, on the black telephone lines sweeping from pole to pole, on the veined creosote at their bases, on each pebble at the side of the road, each broken piece of asphalt, each diamond of broken glass from a smashed bottle or cracked mirror or discarded compact from a woman I would never meet. And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I’d lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing—even writing badly—had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

There are a number of passages toward the end of the book where Andre writes eloquently about how writing begins to affect the way he thinks, acts, and lives. Here is one where he makes the terms of the metamorphosis explicit:

Jabs had become single words, a combination of punches had become sentences, and rounds had become paragraphs. When I was done, whether I had written well or not, something seemed to have left me, those same pent-up forces that would have gone into my fists and feet. But it was more than this; I was finding again and again in my daily writing that I had to become these other people, a practice that also seemed to put me more readily in another’s shoes even when I wasn’t writing. The way it had with Donny. Before this, a guy like him would have simply been an angry face I’d force myself to confront in the one way I’d learned how, my weight on my right foot, my hands in loose fists at my side. To see him as anything other than bad would have deterred me when I did not want to be deterred. But writing was teaching me to leave me behind. It required me to suffer with someone else, an act that made trying to hurt him impossible.

And once he has reconciled with his father, gotten married himself, and had children of his own, the metamorphosis is complete:

I was a father now. All day and all night of every week of every month of every year since becoming one, I’d felt surrounded by love, responsible to it, careful not to hurt it, and so grateful to get it. To punch another man in the face was to punch another father, was to punch some father’s son. As much as I admired the heart and the skills of the two fighters we were watching, for me it was like a recovering alcoholic sitting at a bar with a glass of soda water while his friends drink tequila shots. I wanted to tell Pop this. My crippled father, the new one, the one who looked at me and listened more fully now, he would hear all this if I told him. And maybe he wouldn’t feel blamed. Maybe the younger father in him, the one who had had so much work to get done and so little time in which to do it, maybe he would listen too.

June 19, 2011. Happy Fathers’ Day, y’all.

Judgement

2011-06-10T21:35:00.000-07:00

Elements: Yupo paper, wax paper with string (San Fran),
hand-printed hand-made paper (Origamido), tissue paper
(blue circle), Nepalese paper (orange circle), page torn
from a Japanese pulp fiction novel - depicting a taro card -
and a piece of wood broken off from the dresser in my studio.

Context: A moment of opportunity, the elements in front of me
on the desk or on the floor as I was cleaning after another
piece I just had been working on almost arranged themselves.
They were there, I was there. Suddenly, IT was there.

What’s in it for me? I like the composition, the linkages, boxes
within boxes within boxes. I like the wood, the way it doesn’t
fit but does, the way it sits under and points out and sings
its fibrous song in harmony with all the rest of it. I like the colors.

The tarot card, Gabriel blowing his horn, the dead arising.
That story. The notion of story, stories within stories within stories:
bible story on a tarot card in a novel in an artifact from a Friday afternoon
in the life of a man telling his story, after a fashion. The picture demanding
judgement of its own, from which other judgements will necessarily be made.

Is it a work of art? If so, of what degree? Sufficient to justify time spent on it
that might have been spent more fruitfully? Is it enough? And if it isn’t, then
what? This is the way it goes: we start where we are, we spiral out, we soar,
we return, we settle, we sleep, and dream, images unfolding in our minds.

Encaustic Workshop

2011-05-28T22:37:00.001-07:00

For the last several months I've been attending a workshop at George's studio where we've all been playing around with encaustic, which is in essence painting with wax. It's a challenging medium to work with, because it's more difficult to control than paint is, and it's also difficult to predict just exactly how fast the wax will dry as you apply it, how hard it will be when it dries, and what will happen when you go to fuse it with a torch or heat gun, which is one of the steps you have to go through when you are putting on the wax in layers. There are a million possibilities in terms of how you use the wax as well: dribbling it, scraping it, painting with it, glazing with it, embedding stuff into it (string, leaves, colored paper, wood chips, shells, etc.) It's also kind a mess to work with and to clean up. The fumes from the heated wax can be dangerous, so it's best to work outside, and the wax dries on the brushes and they're not much good for anything but wax once that happens. So we're grateful to George for letting us use his place and for setting things up for us. There are about ten or twelve people who have been coming in and out of the workshop depending on our schedules on any given Saturday. Since none of us really have worked with the medium before, it's mostly been an exploration. The technique I've derived the most satisfaction from is putting down a layer of wax, incising or inscribing into it, floating another color on top of the incisions, and then scraping the top layer flat, leaving the color in the lines. You'll see a lot of that below.

Right from the start we've had the idea of maybe finishing up with a show or exhibition of some kind, so we've been mostly working in a square format on panels that George has cut for us. Here's a selection of what I've done so far. They'll all look the same size here, but they range from about five inches square to about a foot square. So here's the current lineup:

Court and Spark

2011-05-24T00:16:00.000-07:00

Court and Spark

“No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader...”
- Frost

Today a student stopped by to ask about the paper
due for tomorrow’s class, our last. She wanted to know
what it was supposed to be about, and whether it
had to be in the form of a thesis essay.
“Why,” I asked, “would you even want to go there?
Why don’t you try doing something more interesting to write,
and therefore, in all likelihood, more likely to interest me
or whoever winds up reading it. You might for example,
try to explore on paper who you are, and where
you are, and what you think about all of that.”
“Something philosophical?,” she asked? “Well, yeah. It could be. Or,
maybe try your hand at poem or two, following whatever
arbitrary rules you might choose to set for yourself, like
maybe writing ten words per line for a certain number
of lines, and just see where that might lead you.
The idea would be to more or less trick yourself
into writing something that surprises you and gives you pleasure
during each hour, each minute you spend working on it.
That’s something I, for one, would be happy to read."

Process Reflection:

True story, or as true as I could make it within the limits I set for myself, which are those described in the latter part of the poem. The conversation with the student was of course, much looser and much longer, but this is pretty much what happened, boiled down to its essence. During the course of our meeting she mentioned some exercises she had done in a creative writing class that she might like to dust off and try again, and I was reminded of, and told her about, a sequence of 30 posts I did starting back in January of 2008, a hundred words a day for 30 days.

My original intention in this post was to write 100 words exactly, ten words per line for ten lines. But as I was approaching 100 words I saw I wasn’t going to be able to get the story told without going over the limit, so I just kept on going to the next friendly number, which turned out to be 200 words. I actually only got into the ballpark, number-wise, and then used the word count tool to check myself. It took me almost as long to make the adjustments word counts and adjust the line breaks as it did to do the draft. Tinkering until I got it right. (Next day note: Then when I read out out in class today, I found a couple more wrinkles, which I have just attempted to iron out.)

The teacherly point to be made here is that without challenging myself to write something, I would have written nothing at all. By giving myself a nice low hurdle, I was able to approach it at a slow jog and keep on running. Wrote something that worked, had fun. Game over.

(The title is whimsical: the name of an album from way back by Joni Mitchell, and an oblique reference to the student, to her question, and to my answer.)

Anyone looking for a more elaborated argument on the merits and demerits of the thesis essay is invited to read "Essaying the Essay," to which there is a link in the sidebar to the left, under "Elaborations."

The Tiger's Wife

2011-05-22T23:56:00.000-07:00

All writing is linear in that it consists of putting one word after another. All writers approach that basic imperative with a conscious or unconscious repertoire of moves that taken together make up a way of working, a style. Some writers strive for a kind of transparency. One might think of Chekhov or Alice Munro or even a writer of mainstream popular fiction like John Grisham. Reading their books, one is inclined to forget about the authorial presence altogether. In their self-effacement, they submerge themselves to the story they have to tell. They are like landscape painters whose technique is so precise that their paintings might be mistaken for photographs. Their goal is less interpretation than reportage; their style is literal and uninflected.

Other writers have evolved a way of working based on certain purposefully selected or self-imposed principles or inclinations. Writers like these—Hemingway, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, etc—are impossible to read without being more or less constantly aware of and alert to the presence of the author making his choices:

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase.

These opening lines from McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses establish immediately a certain level of diction and a certain self-conscious attention to the architectural elements of syntax. This is not everyday language. It’s language of a particular tone and texture. The language is intentionally defamilarizing: it puts us on alert to the ruminating presence of the author in the background, and asks that we stay that way. The stories created in this manner are stylized in the way a painting by Gauguin or Picasso is stylized: true to the world as experienced, but also filtered and mirrored back to us through an interpretive consciousness.

Those are the extremes. But there are a lot of writers who split the difference between the plain style and the personal style in various interesting ways. One of the greatest pleasures in reading for me is when I find myself being drawn into a world by a writer whose control of the language is such that the details are at once subordinate to the narrative and yet somehow delightful in and of themselves. I’ve recently been finished reading Tia Obréht’s engaging and frequently astonishing novel The Tiger’s Wife. I won’t say much about the plot here; suffice it to say that it’s set in Yugoslavia, concerns in a general way the efforts of a young woman to discover the circumstance of her grandfather’s death, and manages, in a quite surprising and convincing way, to meld elements of realism and fantasy and mythology.

What I most enjoyed about the book, and what I want to try to explain here, is the paragraphs. The individual sentences in the book are not stylistically remarkable. What is remarkable is the way Obréht is able build momentum through the patient accumulation of details, any one of which could be literal, but all of which taken together contain the lyric power of song. Here, for example, is her description of the main character’s arrival at a village she has set out to find:

There was no way to get up the slope behind Barba Ivan and Nada's house, so I walked north toward the main square where the silent spire of the monastery rose out among the roofs. Early morning, and the restaurants and shops were still shuttered, grills cold, leaving room for the heavy smell of the sea. For about a third of a mile, there were only houses: whitewashed stone beach houses with iron railings and open windows, humming neon signs that read Pension in three or four languages. I passed the arcade, a firestorm of yellow and red and blue lights under an awning laden with pine needles. The Brejevina camping ground was a moonlit flat of dry grass, fenced off with chicken wire.

A greenish stone canal ran up past the campground, and this was the route I took. Green shutters, flower boxes in the windows, here and there a garage with a tarped car and maybe some chickens huddled on the hood. There were wheelbarrows full of patching bricks or cement or manure; one or two houses had gutting stations for fish set up, and laundry lines hung from house to house, heavy with sheets and headless shirts, pegged rows of socks. A soft-muzzled, black donkey was breathing softly, tied to a tree in someone's front yard. (84-5)

The first paragraph is straightforward enough. We’re being led through a landscape, and it’s just one thing after another, more or less what we might be seeing in the order we might be seeing it in if we were walking with her. But what delights me is the way she works into the scene, the way her imagination goes into overdrive and starts dropping in details which are both surprising and convincing: the tarped car, the chickens, wheelbarrows full of bricks, gutting stations for fish, pegged rows of socks, and there, at the end of the line, “soft-muzzled, black donkey was breathing softly...” I gotta tell ya, I love that donkey. That donkey appears at just the right moment and cements the whole sequence in my mind. It makes me laugh out loud.

There are pages and pages of passages in the book that are delightful in just this way: they render with imaginative grace and precision scenes which are startlingly beautiful. One of the subplots in the book—in fact, the one that gives the book it’s title—has to do with a tiger who escapes from a zoo in the aftermath of a bombing attack on the city. Here is Obréht’s description of the tiger’s flight through the city that night:

People must nave seen him, but in the wake of bombardment he was anything but a tiger to them: a joke, an insanity, a religious hallucination. He drifted, enormous and silent, down the alleys of Old Town, past the smashed-in doors of coffeehouses and bakeries, past motorcars flung through shopwindows. He went down the tramway, up and over fallen trolleys in his path, beneath lines of electric cable that ran through the city and now hung broken and black as jungle creeper.

By the time he reached Knez Petrova, looters were already swarming the Boulevard. Men were walking by him, past him, alongside him, men with fur coats and bags of flour, with sacks of sugar and ceiling fixtures, with faucets, tables, chair legs, upholstery ripped from the walls of ancient Turkish houses that had fallen in the raid. He ignored them all.

Some hours before sunrise, the tiger found himself in the abandoned market at Kalinia, two blocks up from where my grandfather and my grandma would buy their first apartment fifteen years later. Here, the scent of death that clung to the wind drifting in from the north separated from the pools of rich stench that ran between the cobbles of the market square. He walked with his head down, savoring the spectrum of unrecognizable aromas—splattered tomatoes and spinach that stuck to the grooves in the road, broken eggs, bits offish, the clotted fat leavings on the sides of the butchers' stands, the thick smell smeared around the cheese counter. His thirst insane, the tiger lapped up pools from the leaky fountain where the flower women filled their buckets, and then put his nose into the face of a sleeping child who had been left, wrapped in blankets, under the pancake stand.

Finally, up through the sleepless neighborhoods of the lower city, with the sound of the second river in his ears, the tiger began to climb the trail into the king's forest. I like to think that he went along our old carriage trail. I like to imagine his big-cat paw prints in the gravel, his exhausted, square-shouldered walk along my childhood paths, years before I was even born—but in reality, the way through the undergrowth was faster, the moss easier on paws he had shredded on city rubble. The cooling feel of the trees bending down to him as he pushed up the hill, until at last he reached the top, the burning city far behind him. (94-5)

Again, what pleases me most about this passage is not so much the narrative line. As far as that goes, she could have just said, “The tiger fled to the hills.” It’s the movement of the tiger through the city, the horror of the bombardment conveyed through the tiger’s sensations, and the placement and accumulation of the details. The tiger “put his nose into the face of a sleeping child who had been left, wrapped in blankets, under the pancake stand.” Under the pancake stand!! Seriously, how cool, how artful, is that?

One last example: at one point the villagers, having become aware of the tiger’s presence among them, decide they are going to have to hunt it down, and in order to do so, they need a weapon. What follows is a history of how that particular weapon came to be available:

There was only one gun in the village, and, for many years, it had been kept in the family home of the blacksmith. It was an old Ottoman musket and it had a long, sharp muzzle, like a pike, and a silver-mantled barrel with a miniature Turkish cavalry carved riding forward over the saddle below the sight. A faded, woolly tassel hung from an embroidered cord over the musket butt, which was a deep, oily mahogany, and rough along the side, where the name of the Turk who had first carried it had been thoughtfully scraped off.

The musket had made its way to the village through a series of exchanges that differed almost every time someone told the story, and went back nearly two centuries. It had supposedly first seen battle at Lastica, before disappearing in the mule-pack of a defecting Janissary from the sultan's personal bodyguard, a soldier-turned-peddler who carried it with him for many decades while he roamed the mountains, selling silks and cook pots and exotic oils. The musket was eventually stolen from the Janissary peddler by a Magyar highwayman, and, later still, dragged out from under the Magyar's body by the mounted brigade that shot him down outside the house of his mistress, whose blouse, wet with the highwayman's blood, was still unbuttoned when she begged the brigadiers to leave her the gun as they took her lover's corpse away. The highwayman's mistress mounted the gun above the counter in her tavern. She dressed in mourning, and developed a habit of cleaning the gun as though it were in use. Many years later, an old woman of sixty, she gave it to the boy who carried milk up the stairs for her, so it would protect him when he rode against the bey's citadel in an ill-fated uprising that was swiftly crushed. The boy's head ended up on a pike on the citadel wall, and the gun ended up in the possession of the bey, who hung it in a minor trophy room of his winter palace, between the heads of two leopards with crooked eyes. It stayed there for almost sixty years, through the reigns of three beys, hanging opposite a stuffed lynx—and then, as time passed, a sultan's last battle outfit, the carriage of a Russian queen, a silver tea-set honoring one alliance or another, and eventually a state car belonging to a wealthy Turk who, shortly before his execution, had forfeited all his possessions to the citadel.

When the citadel fell, shortly after the turn of the century, the gun was taken away by a looter from Kovac, who carried it with him while he went from town to town, selling coffee. In the end, switching hands in some skirmish between peasants and Turkish militia, the musket went home with one of the survivors, a youth from the village, the grandfather of the blacksmith. That was 1901. Since then, the gun had hung on the wall above the blacksmith's hearth. It had been fired only once, in the direction of a sheep rapist, and never by the blacksmith himself. Now, my grandfather learned, the old gun would be used to kill the tiger. (118-9)

That passage is, to my mind, a kind of glorious self-indulgence on the part of the author. It’s not critical to the plot. It doesn’t move the story forward. What it does is put on display the virtuosity of a writer whose imagination is just so powerful and so flexible and so adept that it’s a pleasure just to watch it work. Reading Obréht brings some of the same pleasures to the reading brain that watching the Olympics brings to the televison-watching brain: the same mixture of respect and admiration and delight at the prospect of being present to a performance at a very high level of proficiency.

Desperate Characters

2011-05-16T00:21:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of this semester I got talking with the students in my American Literature class about the notion of the Great American Novel. While we were talking I mentioned that Jonathan Franzen — whose most recent novel Freedom had been seriously put forward (and in other quarters seriously disdained) as a contemporary candidate for TGAN. That discussion led me to find and re-read Franzen’s iconic 1996 essay “Perchance to Dream,” in which he tried to respond to those critics who were of the opinion that the novel as a form is outdated and outmoded, socially irrelevant at best and an instrument of hegemonistic exploitation at worst.

What I had not remembered about that essay was the degree to which it focused on another novel, Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox, which Franzen praises at one point as “a perfectly realized book.”

So I tracked down a copy of Desperate Characters, and read through it in three or four great gulps (unlike Franzen’s tomes, which can double as doorstops, it’s only 156 pages). I’d have to agree with Franzen’s assessment: there’s scarcely a paragraph in the book that you might not choose to highlight for one reason or another, depending on what you were choosing to attend to.

The opening paragraphs of the book are, for example, a little mini-workshop in artful compression:

Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously. As he sat down, Otto regarded the straw basket which held slices of French bread, an earthenware casserole filled with sautéed chicken livers, peeled and sliced tomatoes on an oval willowware platter Sophie had found in a Brooklyn Heights antique shop, and risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl. A strong light somewhat softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade, fell upon this repast. A few feet away from the dining room table, an oblong of white, the reflection from a fluorescent tube over a stainless-steel sink, lay upon the floor in front of the entrance to the kitchen. The old sliding doors that had once separated the two first-floor rooms had long since been removed, so that by turning slightly the Bentwoods could glance down the length of their living room where, at this hour, a standing lamp with a shade like half a white sphere was always lit, and they could, if they chose, view the old cedar planks of the floor, a bookcase which held, among other volumes, the complete works of Goethe and two shelves of French poets, and the highly polished corner of a Victorian secretary.

Otto unfolded a large linen napkin with deliberation.

“The cat is back,” said Sophie. (3)

The procession of details in the opening paragraph quickly establish the texture and tonality of the domestic world that the Bentwoods have created for themselves. French bread, casserole, willowware, Tiffany shade, cedar flooring, the bookshelves, the Victorian secretary: the Bentwoods live in a certain sort of world defined by what they eat, what they buy, what they surround themselves with.

The next two sentences are like a good one-two combination in the ring. “Otto unfolded a large linen napkin with deliberation.” Think of all the overtones and undertones of that word, “deliberation.” It suggests equanimity, self-satisfaction, thoughtfulness, attentiveness, patience, centeredness. “The cat is back,” is jarring, and not just because of the starkness of the monosyllables and the harsh assonance in the context of all the baroque ornamentation that has gone before. It’s suggestive of that which is NOT contained in the Bentwood’s little bubble, that which is wild, feral, un-domestic and undomesticated. In very short order the cat, in response to Sophie Bentwood’s good-intentioned ministrations, has sunk its fangs into her hand, and that jarring experience becomes the first of a series of events over the next few days that call everything that the Bentwoods have come to believe about themselves into question.

Re-reading Desperate Characters, I was all the more aware of the grim satire behind the elements chosen for inclusion in the first paragraph. On first reading, you may sense, subliminally or intuitively, that something is up. On second reading, you see how virtually every word is charged with intention, and freighted, if not exactly with malice, perhaps with a kind of unyieldingness. Joan Acocella closes a recent essay review about Fox in the New Yorker by quoting Darryl Pinckney to the effect that Fox is “sometimes hard to the point of cold.” Acocella's article establishes that Fox's steely-eyed attentiveness was hard-earned. Desperate Characters is not a comforting read, but it certainly is a beautifully realized novel.

Life As We Knew It

2011-04-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

I recently ran across a blog post that was asking why we ask students to read the stuff we do when they could be reading something they might actually like, like The Hunger Games or Life as We Knew It. The Hunger Games I knew about, but Life as We Knew It was a new one on me. So I wound up downloading a sample chapter to my Kindle, and on the strength of that chapter wound up buying the whole novel, which I then devoured in about two days.

Life as We Knew It is a YA novel which takes a fairly simple premise, almost silly premise, and then pushes it to the point where it becomes not just believable but intensely real and engrossing. It’s a novel that reads pretty much like what it purports to be, which is the journal of a high school sophomore. There isn’t much of interest going on stylistically. The language is everyday language, the sentences themselves are everyday sentences, the characters are not particularly remarkable in terms of their talents or capabilities. Even though I’m a compulsive annotator, I read the entire book without making note of a single passage that called attention to itself from a writerly perspective.

It’s a little surprising, then, that I found the book so satisfying, and that it has maintained such a strong presence in my head since I finished it. It succeeds because it builds so carefully, and renders with such patience, the experience of an ordinary girl in what turns out to be an extraordinary situation.

As the novel opens, Miranda, the main character, has just found out that her father’s second wife is pregnant. She’s excited because he’s asked her to be the godmother. She’s also looking forward to the upcoming swim meet and thinking about whether she might like to start skating again, after having taken some time off due to an injury, and she’s trying to reconnect with an old friend she’s drifted away from. And some of her friends are asking her what she thinks about the rumors that an asteroid is about to collide with the moon.

That collision, only dimly attended to in the weeks and days leading up to the event, is what sets off all that follows in the novel. The moon, knocked off its regular orbit, comes closer to the earth, setting off a sequence of effects: tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, ash in the jet stream, climate change, interruptions in the electronic grid, changes in the growing cycles of plants and the delivery systems for food, gasoline, pretty much everything. These changes occur gradually at first and become progressively more disturbing and have a progressively more disruptive effect on the lives of Miranda and the people around her. The book is largely about the escalating series of losses and threats and how Miranda and her family cope with them.

Life as We Knew It might be read as a sort of prequel to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a darker, more stylistically ambitious novel which takes place after civilization as we knew it has collapsed. Susan Beth Pfeffer is offering a vivid depiction of how that collapse might begin. And because it begins with more or less where we are and demonstrates how fast it might all go up in smoke, it is all the more sobering.

I’ve written before about my leanings toward catastrophism. I’d suppose I’d describe myself as a short-term optimist and long-term pessimist. I pick up the papers every day and don’t see any good reason to suspect that any of what appears there is likely to get better any time soon. (Sample inventory from today’s paper: budget crisis forcing government service cutbacks, BP oil disaster effects a year later (along with increased support (!!) for continued offshore drilling), continued coverage of nuclear disaster in Japan, record number of tornadoes in the South this year, suicide bomber in Afghanistan kills three, al-Qaida resurgent in Yemen, rebels fleeing in Libya as Qaddafi forces unleash cluster bombs in neighborhoods, chemical companies charged with injecting hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous and carcinogenic chemicals into wells from 2005-2009. And so on.) I’m at a loss as to what to say or do in the face of headlines like that. This is the world we live in. This is the world we have created. And this is only a taste, I fear, of what is to come.

The most affecting passage in Life as We Knew It comes toward the end of the book. Miranda's family has been trapped in a house with no electricity for more than a week by a savage blizzard. They’re rationing food out of cans, one meal a day, and melting snow to get water, and the older people in the family are cutting back on eating so that Miranda’s youngest brother will be able to eat a little more. And it’s dawning on her: this is as good as it’s going to get.

I still remember when Mom sprained her ankle the first time and we played poker and really enjoyed ourselves. If you’d told me three months before then that I’d have called that a good time, I would have laughed out loud.

I eat every single day. Two months from now, maybe even a month from now, I might eat only every other day.

We’re all still alive. We’re all healthy.

These are the good times.

An asteroid hitting the moon? That’s about the last thing we need to worry about. But everything else in Life as We Knew It is pretty much dead on.

The Silent Sky

2011-04-03T18:28:00.000-07:00

I was in San Francisco last week and wound up taking a walk one evening on Grant Street in Chinatown. I stepped into one of the stores and there was some music playing caught me by surprise: acoustic guitar, violin, and some kind of hand-struck drum in an arrangement that sounded like a lot of Western folk music, and a very soft, floating woman’s voice doing the vocals in what I assumed was Chinese. It was one of those odd moments where it felt like I had stumbled into the right spot at the right time to hear this music. I asked the woman behind the counter what was playing, and she handed me a CD entitled Silent Sky by a band called Haya.

I bought the CD and have been listening to it since I got home. Turns out the title track, the one I heard in the store, is up on YouTube:

Turns out the lead singer, Daiquing Tana, is not actually Chinese at all, but Mongolian. I’m not sure which language she’s signing in. The CD case includes a booklet with the lyrics translated somewhat precariously into Engish:

The sunrise and the moonset
In the flourish world
From the eternal
Your frame is melting in the setting sun
I sound a sad blessedness
Silent prayer for the soul of dedication to pacify
When everything returns to silence
I have no desire.

On the blowy grassland
There is my lover
Ah you wind blowing gently
and listening to his sadness songs
Ah you moon, could you lighten his way
Ah you fire, could you make him warm

The Mongolian thing got me wondering again about the purported connection between the Mongolians and the Huns. I have yet to come across a coherent explanation of the history, but from timelines like this seem to suggest that the modern-day Mongols and the Magyars had common ancestors in Siberia as far back as 500 B.C. and that much of the military and cultural history of China, Korea, Russia, India, the Middle East, and Central Europe has been influenced by the actions of Mongol and Hun warriors like Attila, Genghis Khan, and Kubla Khan.

Here I Am

2011-02-20T23:51:00.000-08:00

I’ve just opened a new file in Google docs. A blank page confronts me. I’m stare at the screen. The cursor, a simple vertical black line, blinks at me, signaling a readiness, a willingness to begin. I stare at the screen. I’m thinking. It’s not that I don’t have ideas, I’ve got ideas up the wazoo, as my high-school classmates used to say, back in the day. The question is, which one? And why that one, and not one of the others?

I get up and go to the kitchen and retrieve my notebooks. (Well, four of them. The analog ones. On my computer there are notes in Word and Googledocs and Evernote and on my iPhone. And there are file cards and Post-its in little piles all over the place.) There are my two little pocket Moleskines, one for notes, one for sketches. There is my work notebook, where I take notes at meetings. And then there’s my personal journal, which I write in mostly on Saturday and Sunday mornings, right after I have done my morning exercises and right before I shower and eat. It’s my Saturday/Sunday journal because those are days when I have can usually count on having time to write that does not impinge upon other scheduled events, like making it to work on time. I do sometimes add stuff to the journal during the week, but usually it’s by pasting in something I’ve read or want to remember. This, for example:

Art is really an activity, and cannot be otherwise. There is no static art. Art is always an activity. And the fact that it ends up as a painting that somebody hangs on a wall is just a by-product of an activity. It’s not the activity itself. The real act, the real art, is the making of the art. And the real making of the art is a performance. Whether there’s people there watching you, or you’re doing it on your own, you’re moving around, you’re doing this thing and then that thing, you have an order to the way you work, there’s a body language at work in the way you stroke the canvas, there’s a sense of prioritizing of what big shapes and what little shapes, there’s always a sequence of some kind involved. Art is composition, and composition is always in time. It’s always a performance.

That passage is from a video interview on the web site of George Woollard. I've been attending workshops with George for a couple of years now. He likes to talk while he works, and I discovered early on that what he had to say about art is not only interesting in itself but often has all kinds of resonances with what I have myself been thinking (and telling my students) about writing all these many years. So after the first few sessions I began using a digital tape recorder to capture his remarks. Then I’d transfer the digital recording to my laptop, plug in my earphones, open the file, open a new Word document, and then painstakingly transcribe the audio: listen to a sentence or two, click pause, type what I heard, click go. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. (It generally takes me about three hours to transcribe a one-hour talk.)

There are a couple of benefits that arise from this process. One of course is that I get to hear the talk again, more or less in slow motion, and the act of transcribing the words brings them more deliberately into my brain. It’s nice to have the extra processing time. Even if I never re-read the transcripts, it’s still a good way for me to absorb what he was trying to get across. In fact, having the transcript available is not unlike having the painting to hang on the wall. It’s nice to have, but it’s not the activity itself. George’s point being, it’s the activity itself that is the art, and the art in its making is a performance. (As it is in writing. As it is even as I write this, doing this thing and then that thing, involving myself in a project of sequencing: let’s see, now where are we? And what comes next?)

Another spinoff benefit: my touch typing is way better than it was when I started. A third: I can take excerpts from the talks and fold them into other work, as I have done here, moving from one idea to the next.

I’ve been reading Stanley Fish. Chapter 6 of his most recent book, How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One, has a chapter on “The Additive Style,” which begins like this:

Sentences like Milton’s and Pater’s are not bashful about foregrounding the process of their own construction. They flaunt their artfulness and invite readers to share in the verbal pyrotechnics they display. But suppose you wanted to achieve another effect, the effect of not planning, order, and control, but of spontaneity, haphazardness, and chance. Then you might avail yourself of another style, no less artful, but marked by the appearance of artlessness. The fountain of this style is the French Essayist Michel de Montaigne... who announces (in “A Consideration upon Cicero”), “I write naturally and without a plan; the first stroke of the pen just leads to a second.”... [and] “I do not portray [finished] being; I portray passing...from day to day, minute to minute... This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas.” (“Of Repentance”).

What Montaigne says here echoes another of George’s core mantras: that you don’t need to know where you’re going. You need to know where you are:

So what you want to do is you want to embrace the process of composing. Composing, fabricating, creating the image. That’s what your job is. So as you try to figure out what you’re doing, this is what you do. You’re just putting one foot in front of the other. You’re walking through the composition, so all you really have to do is just decide what the next step is. You don’t have to know what the end product is. All you need to know is, okay, well, here I am.

Process Reflection: Well, this post is fairly transparently, I hope, an exercise in trying to relate and to apply a concept from the world of art to the world of writing. Another idea that George talks a lot about is the idea of linkage: that whether you are doing representational art or abstract art you begin at one point and then build outward from there, linking one move to the next. I started where I was, over there, up top, and worked my way forward. And now, here I am, over here. I’ve been making the argument with students and colleagues for years: this is what writing is about: facing a blank page and working your way into something. There are times when I (or my students) approach the blank screen or the blank canvas with a pre-set idea. But I find that what I (they) write on those occasions rarely satisfies me in the way that working in a more explorational way does. I didn’t know when I started what I was going to write about. But as I worked into it, the connections fell into place. It’s a process. It’s a performance. “Art is composition, and composition is always in time.” And so is writing.

Random Query: Did anyone else notice the colon in the title of the Fish book, and if so, does it create a disturbing ripple in your internal universe the way it does in mine?

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: The proximate cause of me posting at all this evening was a post by Ken Ronkowitz on Weekends in Paradelle, one of a legion of really interesting blogs that Ken somehow manages to maintain, which basically embarrassed me in the nicest possible way into once again taking up the sword. Thanks, Ken.

Complaint Department: It looks like once again yet already Google docs has disabled the function that used to allow me to post directly from Google docs to my blog. So that means I have to copy, paste, and re-format everything to publish it. Color me unhappy about that. C'mon, guys. Please? Pretty please with sugar on top?

The Just and the Unjust

2011-02-08T17:13:00.000-08:00

Back in November Christine Thomas over at Literary Lotus published an interview with Scott Turow in which he came up with a list of the five best legal novels. I had read three of them: Billy Budd, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Snow Falling Cedars. I had not, however, read The Just and the Unjust, by James Gould Cozzens, about which Turow had this to say:

Cozzens was regarded as a major American novelist in the middle of the 20th century, and he has fallen by the wayside in terms of public esteem. But this is just a very, very good book about a small town lawyer. It’s ultra-realistic, which means that it is from that time when realist novelists believed that their job was to portray only the so-called middle range of experience, which other people might call boring. But it’s a really beautiful book. It’s a beautiful portrait of a time and a place. If anybody really ever wants to know what it was like to be a small town lawyer in the United States in the 1930s, people whose grandfathers or great-grandfathers were lawyers in a small town and want to know what their life was like, I would say read this book.

It turns out it’s not an easy book to get hold of. It’s not on the shelves at the local bookstores, and it’s not available on Kindle. I was able to get a pretty weatherbeaten copy from the UH library, and I found Turow’s assessment dead on. Although Cozzens may not have been an innovator or stylist along the lines of his contemporaries Faulkner and Hemingway, he is a capable and disciplined storyteller who knows his way around a sentence. His narrative style tends toward a kind of desciptive precision and deliberation that brings the world of the courtroom vividly to life and is very satisfying to read. Here, for example are the opening sentence of Chapter Two:

This was the hour when time stood still. The well of the court was sunk in tepid shadow. Above the slanting half circle of shadowed seats the courtroom windows were free from the sun now, but bright with light; and Abner, leaning back in his chair, could see the northeastern sky, a hazed hot blue behind the sunny treetops. The heavy quiet in the court was not broken so much as mildly stirred by Bunting's voice. Bunting's questions, even and dry, spoken slowly, rose in the silence and shadow, caromed off wall and ceiling, and the multiple echoes died. From the witness stand, Doctor Hill, the coroner, returned his answers with professional deliberation, the ripple of sound beginning again, widening out, echoing, dying.

On the bench Judge Vredenburgh moved his head, his double-chinned but strong and firm plethoric face turning in sharp advertence, his blue eyes glinting, from Bunting to the witness and occasionally to the jury. His right hand under the desk lamp before him could not be seen, but the light winked now and then on the metal end of a pencil as he wrote. Under the bench Joe Jackman, in the glow of his lamp, wrote too, and paused and wrote and paused, his expression bemused, his thoughts apparently far away. Next to Joe sat Nick Dowdy, gray head bowed, fat chin sunk on his chest, placidly asleep. Next to Nick, Mat Rhea, the clerk of Quarter Sessions, looked at his clasped hands, slowly and patiently twiddling his thumbs. Farther down the line, Gifford Hughes, the prothonotary, sat back, his mustache sadlydrooping, his eyes dreamily fixed in space. Beyond Gifford, Hermann Mapes, the clerk of the Orphans Court, bent forward, plainly busy with some of his office work. In their elevated chairs around the circle of the rail, the tipstaffs were drowsing. Now one, now another, now two or three at once nodded slowly. Then one or another woke, lifting his head with a light practiced jerk, affecting to have been awake all the time. Down by the lower doors the state police officers yawned.

I love the way the language moves in that passage, the attention to light and sound in the first paragraph, followed by the quick, deft, shorthand sketches of the local cast of characters in the second. Cozzens depicts them with empathy and deep understanding.

The main character in the book is Abner Coates, who is assistant to the District Attorney in a murder case. The novel follows in patient detail the course of the trial over three days. During those three days, Abner finds out that the DA is going to be moving on to another job and it looks like this will give Abner the chance to himself become the DA. The question is whether or not he wants it. He had thought he did, but then, for a variety of complicated reasons, he decides to turn it down, and in this passage, where we follow his thoughts as he tries to reconcile himself to his decision, seems to me to be a classic inventory of sorts, revealing a great deal of understanding about the life of a trial lawyer in particular, but also about the dilemma of really any person trying to find the balance between complex, challenging work and quality of life issues:

Walking up to where his car was parked behind the courthouse, Abner did what he could to adjust himself to such a great change of plan. It would certainly be a load off his mind. When you were in the district attorney's office they kept you on a sort of treadmill. Quarter Sessions were sure as death and taxes. You cleaned up the term's trial list, and as soon as you were through, indeed, before you were through, it began all over again. Night and day, people (and often old familiar ones) were busy with projects considered or unconsidered, which would suddenly collide with the law and become public. In advance you could count on case after case — always fifteen or twenty — of operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicating liquor. Boys were swiping things because they had no money; and some of them were going to be caught and held for burglary, larceny, and receiving stolen goods. There would be forcible entries here and felonious assaults there. Somebody would wantonly point a firearm; and somebody else would sell malt beverages on premises without license. Fornication had duly resulted in bastardy, and the Commonwealth was charged with seeing that the disgruntled father supported his little bastard. Heretofore respectable, an old man would feel indescribable urges to expose himself to women, and this was open lewdness. Forged instruments would be uttered, fraudulent conversions attempted; and, in passion or liquor, somebody might seek to kill a man or rape a woman.

And so the indictments piled up. The district attorney's office saw the prisoners, and talked to witnesses and listened to complaints. They arraigned the guilty pleas in Miscellaneous Court; and prepared the others for the grand jury. The county officers brought in to them the non-support and desertion cases; prisoners became eligible for parole, and the parole violators were picked up. Keeping step with it all (or sometimes a little behind) the papers to be signed and the forms to be filled kept accumulating — recognizances; petitions for appointment of counsel, for approval of bills of expense, for attachment, for condemnation and destruction of contraband, for support and to vacate support, for writs of habeas corpus ad prosequendum and ad testificandum; the criminal transcripts; the warrants; the waivers of jury trial — anyone ought to be glad to get rid of all that. Not to mention the endless hours in court while you asked formal tedious questions to foregone conclusions, while you waited for juries to make up their rambling minds, for his Honor to get through in chambers, for absent witnesses to be found and produced, for court to open and court to adjourn — "My God!" thought Abner. "What a way to spend your life!"

This is a book I really enjoyed reading, the kind of solid, patiently crafted book you can sink your teeth into.

Write or Die

2011-02-03T12:47:00.000-08:00

A student came by yesterday for a conference and happened to tell me about a web site, writeordie.com. Which is actually what I used to draft this post. It's a pretty simple concept. You set yourself a time limit and a goal of then a certain number of words. (I chose ten minutes to come up with 200 words.) The site provides you with a text box with a timer and word count at the bottom. If you don't keep typing, the screen goes from pink to red to darker red, and then a horn starts to blare, and eventually the program starts erasing the words you have already typed. It's basically a way of forcing yourself to write, leaning more heavily on sticks than carrots.

It's been almost two months since I've posted anything on Throughlines and I knew I needed some kind of a kick in the pants to get myself started again. So this is as good a start as any, I guess. I gave myself ten minutes to come up 200 words. Right now I've got four and a half minutes left 34 words to go, so unless I run off the rails and into a rock wall I'll probably make it. Then I can go ahead and post this and say to myself, there, it's done.

At least the first draft — of exactly 200 words until I started editing it — was done. Then I just copied what I wrote there into the Blogger window, proofread and tidied up.

Process Reflection:

Well, it served the purpose, and I can see it would be a cool tool in certain situations. There's something a little franticness-inducing about typing while keeping an eye on a timer. The experience reinforced for me how much stop and go, how much thinking and re-thinking I normally do while I'm writing. Often, it's actually a kind of meditation practice. This time, it didn't feel like that.

The Interrogative Mood

2010-12-05T21:36:00.001-08:00

My favorite literature-related blog is Scott Esposito's Conversational Reading. He recently had a post about a new book by Padgett Powell's new book The Interrogative Mood, which is described as a novel, but is really more of a book-length list poem consisting entirely of questions. Esposito cites an interview in which Powell talks about the origins of the book:

I was in the habit of receiving emails in a particular form from a female colleague at work, instructing me how to act,’ he says – he teaches creative writing at the University of Florida. ‘They would go something like this: “Is it time for our esteemed director to chat with the provost about the autonomy of the programme? Are we remembering what was promised us last week by the dean?” I started wanting something in response. So I sat down one morning and wrote: ‘‘Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable?” Within about two pages I was done with her and I was having so much fun I wanted to carry on.

And carry on he does, for close to two hundred pages. The obvious challenge, right from page one, given the severe formal limitation which the author has submitted himself to, is to somehow avoid making the reader feel bored or bludgeoned and overwhelmed by just too damned many things coming at him for too long a time.

So how do you do that? Well, it helps to be manic and it helps to be funny (this is the funniest book I've read in years) and it helps to be innovative and uninhibited and it helps to have a supercharged brain that that can get from point a to point b to point z and back again in lots of different ways.

Here's the opening salvo:

ARE YOUR EMOTIONS PURE? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than a named horse? In your view, do children smell good? If before you now, would you eat animal crackers? Could you lie down and take a rest on a sidewalk? Did you love your mother and father, and do Psalms do it for you? If you are relegated to last place in every category, are you bothered enough to struggle up? Does your doorbell ever ring? Is there sand in your craw? Could Mendeleyev place you correctly in a square on a chart of periodic identities, or would you resonate all over the board? How many push-ups can you do?

Are you inclined to favor the Windward Islands or the Leeward Islands? Does a man wearing hair tonic and chewing gum suggest criminality, or are you drawn to his happy-go-lucky charm? Are you familiar with the religious positions taken regarding the various hooves of animals? Under what circumstance, or set of circumstances, might you noodle for a catfish? Will you spend more money for better terry cloth? Is sugar your thing? If a gentle specimen of livestock passed you by en route to its slaughter, would you palm its rump? Are you disturbed by overtechnical shoes? Are you much taken by jewelry? Do you recall the passion you had as an undergraduate for philosophy? Do you have a headache?

Why won’t the aliens step forth to help us? Did you know that Native American mothers suckled their children to age five, merely bending at the waist to feed them afield? Have you ever witnessed the playing of shuffleboard at a nudist colony? If tennis courts could be of but one surface, which surface should that be? In your economics, are you, generally, laissez-faire or socialist? If you could design the flag for a nation, what color or colors would predominate?

This is essentially all by way of warming up. As Powell gets going, he keeps inventing new ways to bend sequences to new purposes and to begin connecting them so that they (at times) resonate with one another and (at times) leap off in other unanticipated directions. Sometimes there are little riffs with philosophical overtones:

Is there enough time left? Does it matter that I do not specify for what? Was there ever enough time? Was there once too much? Does the notion of “enough time” actually make any sense? Does it suggest we had things to do and could not do them for reasons other than that we were incompetents? Did we have things to do? Things better done than not? Thus, important things? Are there important things?

(The book I found myself thinking about as I was reading The Interrogative Mood is John Ashbery's A Wave. In both books, you basically are launched into a hyperstimulating verbal environment with sequences of sentences and thoughts coming at you in waves: the verbal equivalent of jazz, with many of the attendant pleasures thereof.)

Sometimes it feels as if you are under interrogation by a pyschologist attempting to assess your competencies and your character, as if in rehearsal for The Last Judgment:

Were you a thumb sucker? Would you rather argue with people or not? Can you think of a musical instrument useful in murder other than piano wire? Have you studied the soft toes of geckos? Do you comprehend with complete certainty how bonds work? Would you sail an ocean on a small boat? Do people who purport to know what a fractal is have a leg up on those who confess they don’t? If you came upon a party celebrating something or someone with a yellow sheet cake and white icing, would you partake happily? Do you remember the candies called jawbreakers and Fireballs? Do you have a cutting-edge TV? What dead person would you bring back to life? Do you favor protecting the little wilderness remaining, or do you concede that there is so little left it might as well be ceded to the tide? Would a small red balloon cheer you up? A dog?

And sometimes it's just, well, like this:

If I said to you, “I want to return to 1940 and have a big coupe with big running boards and drive it drunkenly and carefully along dirt roads never causing harm except for frightening chickens out of the road, and I want you standing out there on the running board saying Slow down, or Let me in, and laughing, but I don’t stop, because of course you don’t mean it, you think as I do that a big 1940s coupe and careful drunken driving and one party outside the car and one inside and both laughing and chickens spraying unhurt into the ditches is what life was then, is what life was before it became ruined by us and all our crap,” and if I said to you, “I have an actual goddamned time machine, I am not kidding, we can get in the coupe inside thirty seconds if we take off our clothes and push the red button underneath that computer over there, come on, strip, get ready”—would you get ready to go with me, and go? Would you ask a lot of questions? Or would you just say, “Shut up and push the button”?

So if you find yourself, as I did the other night, with your finger hovering over the keyboard as you debate with yourself whether or not a book of this kind might be worth ponying up some cash for? Shut up and push the button.

The Golden Vanity

2010-11-07T18:37:00.001-08:00

I'm teaching again this fall, one class of sophomores, and since I've been asking them to maintain commonplace books I've been keeping one of my own. Earlier this week I decided to try a second torn-paper collage (the first was the subject of my previous post on Throughlines, which it seems hard to believe was more than a month ago), and it came out, without a whole lot of planning or forethought, like this:

I don't know what you see when you look at this, a ducky or a horsey perhaps. But when I got done with it and took a step back, I know exactly what popped into my mind: it's a boat. And something in my reptile brain was telling me which one: the Golden Vanity. And therein hangs a tale.

Forty-five years ago, during freshman orientation week at Fairfield University, the luck of the draw for dorm rooms matched me up with a guy named Bill Sheehan. I had never met him before, and I did not see him much afterward, but the few evenings we spent together in that dorm room had a significant impact on my life. Because he had brought his guitar, and he could play, and he could sing, and he was familiar with a whole bunch of music I had barely heard of and certainly never heard.

It's hard to believe, listening to what gets played on radio stations today, that once upon a time there was room on the airwaves for the likes of Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The folk music revival and the British Invasion (The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, among literally hundreds of others) happened more or less simultaneously with and helped to fuel political engagement - civil rights and Vietnam war protests among them - among high school and college students to a degree that is pretty much unimaginable today. A colleague had a conversation with his students during homeroom the other day and they apparently incredulous that such a thing as the draft ever existed.

Anyway, one of the songs that Bill Sheehan sang for me in our dorm room was a song called The Golden Vanity. It is number 286 of the set 305 songs included in the exhaustively researched English and Scottish Popular Ballads which were collected by Francis Child and published in a series of six volumes from 1882 to 1898. I bought the whole set in the Dover Paperback edition and I have it still.

As with all other ballads passed down by word of mouth over many generations, there are a lot of variations of the song. The one that Bill sang for me was a somewhat simplified and colloquialized version not unlike that recorded by dozens of folk musicians of the era. The lyrics as I learned them went something like this:

The Golden Vanity

There once was a ship and she sailed upon the sea
And the name of the ship was the Golden Vanity
And we feared she would be taken by the Spanish enemy
As she sailed upon the lowland, lowland, lowland
Sailed upon the lowland sea.

Then up spoke our cabinboy and boldly out spoke he
And he said to our captain "What will you give to me
If I swim along the side of the Spanish enemy
And I sink her in the lowland sea?"

"Oh I will give you silver and I will give you gold
And my own fair daughter your bonny bride shall be
If you'll swim along the side of the Spanish enemy
And you'll sink her in the lowland, lowland, lowland
Sink her in the lowland sea.

Then the boy he made him ready and overboard sprang he
And he swam to the side of the Spanish enemy
With his brace and auger in her side he bored holes three
And sank he her in the lowland, lowland, lowland,
Sank her in the lowland sea.

Then quickly he swam back to the cheering of the crew
But the captain would not heed him, for his promise he did rue
And he scorned his poor entreaties when loudly he did sue
And he left him in the lowland, lowland, lowland
Left him in the lowland sea.

Then the boy turned around and swam to the other side
And up to his messmates full bitterly he cried
"O messmates, draw me up, for I'm drifting with the tide
And I'm sinking in the lowland, lowland, lowland
Sinking in the lowland sea."

It's a grim little tale, no? Any way you read it, it's a downer. Perhaps the kid is a hero who gets screwed by the captain, who, now that he has what he wants, doesn't see why he should bothered to live up to his promise. Easier to let the little sucker drown. Or perhaps the kid himself is a greedy little manipulator ("What will you give to me?") who gets his just deserts, although that reading is contradicted by the cheering of the crew, who clearly see him as a hero. (In other versions of the song, however, the crew is too busy playing cards and drinking to take much notice of his plight.) But even if he did undertake the mission for selfish purposes, he has struck a blow for the home team. He deserves a better fate than a watery grave. It is, like many of the other "popular ballads," a strange song, with its little nugget of cynical wisdom, to be passing down from generation to generation.

However, as John Gardner use to say, "the passions may be terrible, but the syllables are a relief." The song, as Bill sang it, and as he sang many others, was hauntingly beautiful. I bought my first guitar two weeks after freshman orientation, and continued to play (not well, alas) for 35 years, before my shoulder basically gave up the ghost on me. But the song, and the story, and the memory, have stuck in my head, and were recalled up out of the deep by the chance fall of torn paper as it was glued down.

This

2010-10-01T18:28:00.001-07:00

This is what I do. This is where I live right now. This is the dawn, the dusk, the ying and yang, the yes and do, the high and low. This is the moment. This is the thought. This is the secret. This is the dream. This is the land, the ocean, the sky. The near and far, the sound and the silence, the what and the how. The why. This is the breath, the muscle and bone, the blood. The inside. The outside. The surface. The depths. The wings. The roots. The seed. The flower. The mother, the son. The beginning of something, and all that will be left at the end.

Simple Surprises

2010-09-29T23:51:00.001-07:00

Process Reflection: I'm starting to get the hang of the printmaking process. And one of the things I'm learning is that sometimes simple is better. At the end of last week's Tuesday night printmaking class, I had about forty-five minutes left to work after having spent most of the evening working on a big experimental print that didn't really work out. So rather than go back to the drawing board with that one, or just pack up and go home discouraged, I figured I'd play around a little bit.

I took a piece of scrap plexiglass from the drawer and rather quickly drew out some curved shapes with an x-acto knife through the contact paper that protects the surface. Then I painted the whole thing with a mixture of acrylic medium and carborundum grit. While it was drying I tore up some scraps of painted paper into small triangular shapes and painted the backs with Rhoplex, a pressure-sensitive glue which binds the papers to the print when you roll the plate through the press.

Once the medium and the grit had dried on the plexiglass, I peeled off the remaining paper backing, which left smooth plexiglass in some parts and tooth-like rough shapes in other parts. I inked up the plate and then wiped it down, leaving ink on the rough areas and no ink in the white areas. Then I put the plate on the press bed, laid the paper triangles down on the plate glue side up, put the white paper for the print on top of that, lowered the blankets that protect the roller when the press is being used, and rolled it through. I really didn't know how it was going to look, but when I lifted the print I was pleased with its musical, rhythmic quality. It's bright and lively and easy to look at. So last night I wound up doing two more along the same lines, the first with the same plate and the second with another, slightly larger piece of scrap plexiglass:

The last print has more contrast and is more dramatic, but those big black areas feel a little overpowering to me. I'm going to try another next week with a more neutral ink, maybe a brown or green, and maybe scratch back into the dark areas a little.

One thing I've got to try to figure out: the Rhoplex is a very sticky, rubbery glue and it's a bear to work with. It's very hard to get glue on the back of the paper without also getting it on the front, especially with small pieces of paper, which tend to move around when you are brushing them which gets glue on the edges that smears onto the front. Then when you go to print, the paper sticks not only to the white paper, but also to the plate, and you wind up tearing it when you lift the print. Rats.

A Way to Work

2010-09-19T23:29:00.001-07:00

I've been attending a series of Saturday morning plein-air painting sessions with George, and one of the things that he has been encouraging us to do is to draw and paint with our non-dominant hand:

"People talk about being the master of the medium and all of that, but in fact when you look at artists' work a lot of times mastery isn't just dexterity, mastery is about control over the process, it's about control over what is conceptual in the work, what is abstract in the work, what is important to the storyline. [Painting with your left hand] gives it a kind deliberateness and intentionality which I think is a critical thing..."

The point of working this way is to take yourself out of your comfort zone, out of the kind of comfortable automaticity that leads you to work more quickly because your hand seems to know what it's doing, and into a way of working which is, because it is unfamiliar and somewhat awkward, introduces a kind of vulnerability and freshness into the process.

As George points out, the problem with landscapes at a certain level of proficiency is that they all start to look pretty much the same. That's a mountain, that's a tree, that's a lake, that's the sky. You take it in at one glance, and it's an unusual landscape indeed that has the power to draw you into it and keep you there. A less self-assured, more ambiguous landscape, if it is composed well, has at least the potential to exert that kind of power.

As we've been working on this, I've been thinking about a writing exercise I sometimes ask my students to do, which has some of the same purposes and some of the same effects. I ask them to write about whatever they would like to write about, with one minor restriction: they can't use the letter "e". Writers, and not just student writers, have developed a kind of shorthand proficiency with the basic elements of written communication, and often what gets written has a kind of offhand, glib quality to it. Choosing to work without the letter "e" throws you a little off balance and forces you to pay a different kind of attention to the words themselves, how they are spelled, how they are shaped, how they are sequenced. You can't work automatically any more. You have to invent a new way of working on the fly. You may lose something (you may lose a lot) in terms of precision and fluency. But you may gain something in terms of texture. And you will definitely gain something in terms of originality and freshness and compositional interest. And it's certainly not impossible to do:

This last Saturday, up at Wa'ahila Park on looking out on Manoa Valley, all of us drawing with our non-dominant hands, I got to thinking about a task I could assign which would allow for this kind of play in both art and writing. My kids maintain journals, and I thought I'd ask for us all to draw a cross to cut our journals into quadrants, thusly:

So tomorrow — or on a day not far away — I'm going to try this out in class. With luck, kids and adults will all play around with it a bit and find it satisfying, if not scintillating. So that's a plan. Aloha, for now.

Novel No Longer?

2010-09-14T00:59:00.001-07:00

In the March 15 issue of the New Yorker, James Wood wrote a review in which he raised the question of whether the novel can be said to be an evolving form, and if so, whether the more traditional writerly techniques associated with the form are now, in essence, old hat.

Perhaps it is as absurd to talk about progress in literature as it is to talk about progress in electricity—both are natural resources awaiting different forms of activation. The novel is peculiar in this respect, because while anyone painting today exactly like Courbet, or composing music exactly like Brahms, would be accounted a fraud or a forger, much contemporary fiction borrows the codes and conventions—the basic narrative grammar—of Flaubert or Balzac without essential alteration.

By grammar, I mean the rather lazy stock-in-trade of mainstream realist fiction: the cinematic sweep, followed by the selection of small, telling details (“It was a large room, filled almost entirely by rows of antique computers; there was an odd smell of aftershave and bacon”); the careful mixing of dynamic and habitual detail (“At one of the computers, a man was unhurriedly eating a spring roll; traffic noise pierced the thick, sealed windows; an ambulance yelped by”); the preference for the concrete over the abstract (“She was twenty-nine, but still went home every evening to her mom’s ground-floor apartment in Queens, which doubled by day as a yoga studio”); vivid brevity of character-sketching (“Bob wore a bright-yellow T-shirt that read ‘Got Beer?,’ and had a small mole on his upper lip”); plenty of homely “filler” (“She ordered a beer and a sandwich, sat down at the table, and opened her computer”); more or less orderly access to consciousness and memory (“He lay on the bed and thought with shame of everything that had happened that day”); lucid but allowably lyrical sentences (“From the window, he watched the streetlights flicker on, in amber hesitations”). And this does not even touch on the small change of fictional narrative: how strange it is, when you think about it, that thousands of novels are published every year, in which characters all have different names (whereas, in real life, doesn’t one always have at least three friends named John, and another three named Elizabeth?), or in which characters quizzically “raise an eyebrow,” and angrily “knit their brows,” or just express themselves in quotation marks and single adverbs (“ ‘You know that’s not fair,’ he said, whiningly”). At this level of convention, there is a shorter distance than one would imagine between, say, “Harriet the Spy” and “Disgrace.”

I am willing to concede the accuracy of his inventory, willing even to extend it by making note of on the rhetorical power of devices as the lengthy inventory in the form of a list, such as the one with which the second paragraph above begins. And I understand that a critic like Wood, who has read God knows how many novels a year for how many years, may well reach a point when everything comes across begins to sound like something he's read before.

But I do not share his impatience or disillusionment with "mainstream realist fiction," and I find that I have little patience for the sort of avant-garde "experimental" writing which jettisons such hackneyed devices as plot, characterization, and the careful accumulation of details, in hopes of becoming The Next New Thing. On the contrary, it is precisely the fact that the tools are so familiar and the rules of the game so well-defined that allows me to make credible distinctions between "Harriet the Spy" and "Disgrace," or, say, between Jonathan Franzen and Leo Tolstoy, to whom, incredibly, Franzen has recently been compared in several adulatory recent reviews.

By way of illustration, here is a passage from a book my friend Paula loaned to me recently, The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears. This is a book I have been working my way through slowly and with full gratitude and appreciation for the authors masterly attention to exactly the kinds of narrative mechanics that Wood purports to find tiresome. In fact, I marked this passage as I was reading (and then re-reading) it precisely because the writing itself gave me so much pleasure:

It was raining lightly and he hurried, crossing the road and putting his foot in a deep puddle that had opened up in the pavement the previous winter and had never been repaired. He stopped and looked down at his soaking foot and sodden shoe, his only decent pair of winter shoes, which he had taken out that morning and checked carefully to make sure their soles were still good. With luck they would last. This would not help them, and he cursed the war, the Germans, Marcel, the city, and the weather equally, for bringing their final disintegration that much closer. Then, more slowly and carefully, looking down at the ground, he walked the last couple hundred meters to his home, standing in the entrance, shaking himself and brushing as much water as possible out of his hair and off his clothes.

He went up the stairs, into his chilly apartment, and even before he switched on the lights he fetched a towel. He stood by the window drying his hair, staring down at the steps of the church of Saint Agricole opposite. It was nearly eight; the doors were open and the last people at evening mass were coming out, each one pausing at the door, looking up at the rain as though they could see where it was all coming from, then hunching down and hurrying away.

Only one person there was not in a rush, standing close by the entrance, faintly illuminated by the light coming out of the open doorway. Julien stiffened. The patience of the way the woman let the rain run down her body rather than trying to find cover. He could see little, but he would have recognized here in any light or any weather.

He ran down the stairs, forgetting his soaking shoe, not taking a coat or umbrella, and ran as quickly as he could across the street, bounding up the steps two at a time.

“Julia!” he called out.

She turned and smiled, and held out her arms to him. When he finally let go he was soaked to the skin once more. (257-8)

I love this passage. I love the specificity of detail in the first two sentences, and how much work Pears is able to get done with such deft, quick strokes: the puddle, the shoe, what Julien's concern for the condition of his shoe manages to suggest about the larger circumstance of his life. The way that the rain becomes not just a weather event but an efficient means of driving Julien's actions (going up the stairs, toweling off, looking out the window), characterizing Julia's state of mind (she's the only one NOT seeking shelter) and finally dramatizing, through Julien's obliviousness to what a moment ago was his greatest concern, what he feels for her. If this whole passage were to be thought of as a sort of writerly performance on the parallel bars, that last line is just a lovely, artful dismount.

Wood says,

I love literature, but not because I love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking. I like work that’s focused not only page by page but line by line on what the writer really cares about rather than hoping that what the writer cares about will somehow mysteriously creep through the cracks of narrative, which is the way I experience most stories and novels.

I say, I love literature, but not because I love stories per se. I love stories which are told artfully and which reflect, precisely in their artfulness, the writer's deep concern for what he really cares about. I would hope that that care would extend to his characters, to his reader, and to the careful deployment of what storytelling resources the writer has at his disposal, as well as to the larger questions (Clausen: What kind of world we is this? How we should live in it?) which, as Wood rightly suggests, the novel as a form is uniquely designed to explore.

September Song

2010-09-09T22:30:00.001-07:00

There hasn't been a whole lot of music on the radio the last few years that I much care to listen to, so I've been happy with the rise of Pandora, which gives me the chance to put in the name of a song or an artist to create a channel which will play songs selected by some computerized algorithm that matches my song to others having some of the same tonal or instrumental or generic characteristics, or, as their web site has it, "everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony."

I've tried different channels, and some of them wind up giving back a pretty narrow band of songs just like what you thought you might get. But last week I tried basing a channel on Richard Thompson, and the thing about Thompson is that he's pretty much a category-buster all by himself: a folk singer most people have never heard of, an innovative and edgy lyricist, a rock legend who has never had, as far as I know, a song in the top twenty (or even the top fifty), and one of the most versatile and accomplished masters of the guitar ever to walk the planet. And so he seems to knock the algorithm-making machine sideways a bit, and it keeps spitting out a very weird and eclectic and surprising mix of songs by all manner of musicians across a whole bunch of decades (Thompson has been cranking out his eclectic music for 40 years), everything from Led Zep to Neil Young and Boston and Dire Straits on the one hand, to people I've never paid much or attention, like Bruce Cockburn, or even ever heard of, like Stephen Bennett or Colin Hay or Big Head Todd and The Monsters.

Anyway, the other night I was in the gym and suddenly found myself listening to Tom Rush singing "The Urge for Going," a song I used to love and had not heard in maybe 20 years. It's a great song for September, and his gravelly voice against the clean acoustic guitar lines really resonates with Joni Mitchell's lyrics. I particularly love the end of the song, where acceptance and appreciation swirl in competition with mourning and regret:

I'll ply the fire with kindling,
I'll pull the blankets to my chin
I'll lock the vagrant winter out
I'll bolt my wandering in
I'd like to call back summertime
And have her stay for just another month or so
But she's got the urge for going
I guess she'll have to go

And she's gets the urge for going
when the meadow grass is turning brown
All her empire's are falling down
and winter's closing in

I lived in New England for twenty-five years, and know only too well whereof he sings. Even though we don't have seasons in Hawaii (well, we do, but the differences between them are much more subtle), the song still reverberates with me, perhaps even more so as I approach birthday number 64, and September as begins to feel maybe a little optimistic. But that sun still feels good.

Me and Louise

2010-09-07T00:02:00.001-07:00

During the summer I took a printmaking course at the Linekona Art Center downtown. I have for some time been an admirer of the sculptures of Louise Nevelson, many of which were essentially assemblages made up of small wooden pieces in complex architectural configurations. "Sky Cathedral" is a good example:

There's something magisterial about this piece, and many of her others, a forcefulness, a kind of authority, all of this random stuff being gathered together and composed, asserted as a unified whole. It's beautiful and impressive and even a little scary.

As I've looked around on the internet and elsewhere, I've run across a lot of other things I like, like for example this configuration of sculpted steel squares:

Anyway, during the printmaking course we were encouraged to try, among other things, using cardboard to print from, I thought I'd try make a print that borrowed on her architectural style. So I made a cut out a series of cardboard pieces and glued various shapes on top of one another and laid them out and did a couple of prints like this one:

So that was okay, but the paper-and-ink medium didn't really offer the tactile, monumental quality that I was looking for. So the other day, I took out the bag of cardboard cutouts I had made and glued them down onto a piece of plywood and then used acrylic paint and medium to make it look like it was in fact made out of weathered wood. The (12"x24") panel came out looking a lot more like what I was after, especially after I painted over it with a gloss medium that put a soft sheen over the textured surface.

So there it is, my little homage to Louise.

Writing from the Inside Out

2010-08-17T23:14:00.000-07:00

This is the pre-orientation week at my school. Part of the preparations for the year is a series of Back-to-School Workshops for teachers, and I volunteered to do a reprise of a workshop I did during July at the Summer Lab School which I had decided to call “Writing from the Inside Out,” based on a series of notions that I have gravitated toward during my 40 years as a full-time teacher and sometime writer. Taken together those notions form a kind of architectural framework for a pedagogical philosophy that I would describe as being radically simplistic. I think that in school students are often taught, in subtle and often unintentional ways, that writing is a certain sort of (schooly) thing that is done is a certain sort of (schooly) way for a certain sort of (schooly) purpose. This indoctrination seems to start in the middle elementary grades and gets progressively more severe as students progress through school, to the point where many high school students (and adults) feel not just that feel that writing is something that is not for them, or worse, that they hate it. "Writing from the Inside Out" is my shorthand for a process which starts with what is going on inside the minds of the students as opposed to the more prevalent process of starting with what the teacher's agenda might happen to be.

There’s a book I like a lot by Danny Gregory called The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be the Artist You Truly Are. It includes a short quotation from Howard Ikemoto that goes like this: “When my daughter was about seven years old she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college — that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said “You mean they forget?”

What I was driving at today, basically, was this: Writing is — or can be — a playful activity, a self-expressive activity, an exploratory activity, with satisfactions and rewards that come from no other source. It is potentially a powerful and relevant and, to use a word perhaps too often bandied about, transformative self-teaching tool at every grade level and in every discipline. But somewhere along the line we teach kids to forget that. We make it into a compliance activity and we remove from it most of the things that make it most satisfying and enjoyable. My argument is that we have to try to reclaim and turn students loose in at least some of the territory in which writing is about discovery and craft and the revelations that can emerge from purposeful play, and to recover some of the initial joy and energy and engagement that writing held for them before they arrived at school.

So I shared a couple of radically simple writing exercises, the first of which was a three minute poetry exercise I described in a post three and a half years ago. As the other teachers wrote at their seats, I did one at the board. As often happens when you write freely with no preconceptions, I surprised myself with what showed up:

Loss. Departures. The sun
setting, long shadows singing
their song of lament. Why this?
Why now? What recourse,
what will we have left
when the new day dawns?

I’m not going to go into all of the background, the ballast, that pushed these words out onto the board in front of me. Suffice it to say that I recognize in these words a fresh opportunity, and what I would see as fertile ground. There are things to play with here: the emotion, the images, the questions, the sequences of syllables. There's a poem waiting to emerge, or perhaps an essay, or perhaps a story, or perhaps something I can only sense but do not yet have a name for.

It's a beginning. There's interesting work yet to be done. I love being in that spot. I’ve been missing that. Having the chance to do the workshop gave me the spur to start writing again.

Summer is over. Next week I’ll be back in the classroom again after two years doing admin only. I’m really excited about it.

eBook or not eBook

2010-07-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

I've considered, from time to time, whether or not to go ahead and buy a Kindle or a Nook. There are some obvious plusses: books are cheaper if you buy them online, you don't have to carry a bunch of books around with you when you travel, and if you want to read something Right Now, you can have it in seconds. You might be saving a tree or two. And recently the prices have been falling, so that's an attraction.

But there's another voice in my head saying, basically, let's wait. I hadn't worked out the reasons behind that counsel, but the other day I found that D'Arcy Norman had been there and done that. Why do without an eReader? Let us count the ways:

They’re awkward. The digital tools that would make digital books worth the hassle, most notably copy and paste, are disabled via DRM.

And ebooks don’t offer analogs for the best parts of the experience of owning and reading dead-trees books. I can’t write in an ebook. I can’t dog-ear corners. I can’t flip back and forth. I can’t compare passages in different sections (or books) easily. I can’t slip pieces of paper in between pages. I can’t hand an ebook to my wife to read, or to a colleague. I can’t loan my copy to someone. I can’t give it away when I’m done. I can’t leave it in an airport for someone to find and read on their own trip.

Ebooks don’t feel right. They don’t smell right. They’re still not ready for prime time. I’m not sure they will be.

He's onto something there. The whole experience of having a book in my hand is a personal, textural, textual experience. I do all the stuff D'Arcy is talking about: marginal notes, crossreferences, dog-ears, flipping back and forth, passing them along. (I've got four books passed along to me on my desk right now, a little inventory of pleasures waiting to be tasted.)

I use the Kindle app on my iPhone and like that, to a degree. But the only time I really use it is as a fallback, when I'm stuck somewhere with nothing to read. I'm like having the option. I don't mind visiting. But I don't want to live there.

Followup, July 20: Here's a post by Leslie Gates doing an analysis of the pros and cons of each.

New Art

2010-07-09T22:53:00.001-07:00

A month or so ago I went to a joint exhibition at the Linekona Art Center and saw for the first time some monoprints by Linda Spadaro. I especially liked some of the effects she created using chine collé. I did not at that time have access to a printing press, but I had been doing a lot of pretty detailed doodling in my notebooks, and I thought I’d try to see what effects I could generate by combining the color glue-ons with black-and-white pattern drawing. I did a couple more or less like the one you see here, using Pigma pens of various sizes on 140 lb cold-pressed watercolor paper.

Shortly after the show, I found out about a Tuesday night printmaking course at the Linekona. I went to the first class, had to miss the second because I was attending a conference in San Francisco. Since coming back I’ve been to two more and I have to say I’m liking it a ton. This is the first print I made. It’s printed from two plexiglass plates on the surface of which there are various inscribed and superimposed aberrations. Materials include paper, cloth, masking tape, aluminum foil, watercolor crayon, and etching ink.

There are some things I like about this print. I liked the basic color pattern, the geometry of it, and some of the textures. But there are also a lot of things wrong with this print that even a tyro like me can see. The ink is not laid on evenly. Actually, you lay it on and then wipe it back dwon until there’s very little left. But one of the things I’ve learned is that any porous surface, like the cloth to the left, absorbs ink, and then when the pressure from the roller hits it the ink gets pushed out onto the paper in dark gobs, and unbalances or even messes up the print entirely. But hey, it was a start. I’m doing a series of prints from the same plate, trying new things with each print. And I’ve got a couple of other plates I’m working with as well. Eventually I’ll get a print I like.

Three Squared

2010-06-10T18:04:00.001-07:00

Here are three panels I've worked on this week.

I began this first one by gluing down four pieces of fabric onto an 18" plywood panel. (There is also, for no really good reason other than that I decided to try it, a bodhi leaf secreted beneath the swatch on the lower left side.) Then I coated the fabric with a blue-grey acrylic mixture, to which I added torn paper elements which were placed at least partially to obscure the seams between the different pices of fabric. One it was all dry, I used a wide, mostly dry brush to drag pigment along the ridges of the fabric in the upper left hand corner, creating the brocaded effect.

This is a pretty straightforward torn-paper-on-plywood-panel collage. (Twelve inches.) I tried to keep this one simple, limiting the color range and linking the shapes and colors in a way that emphasizes balance and clarity and coherence. Right now it feels like the most fully realized piece I've done.

This is a reworking of an older 12-inch panel that felt unfinished. I added the handwritten text (readers with eagle eyes may recognize the text as part of the Saramago excerpt I posted last week, the one about the relationship between the brain-in-the fingers and the brain-in-the-head.) This was by way of an experiment. I had some semi-transparent mulberry paper I bought last week and I wanted to check if it would a) take the handwriting in ink without tearing or bleeding and b) if it would become essentially transparent when glued down with acrylic medium on top of other materials. The answer in both cases turned out to be be yes, so that's going to become an element in future works for sure.

Each of these panels seems to me to have a sort of character, a wordless but thought-inducing presence. I'm interested in how much of one's emotional reaction to a work of art is a function of color. Last night I bought an aloha shirt. There were actually three shirts on the rack with the same design, but in different color combinations. Two of them I wouldn't wear on a bet. The third one was just gorgeous: the colors worked with the forms in a way that is emotionally complex and satisfying, sort of like the way this panel works the white-yellow-orange-red-brown-black continuum.

Ali'iolani

2010-06-07T16:18:00.001-07:00

Got a ride a week or two ago from a friend who dropped me off at Waialae and 6th near Sacred Hearts Academy and St. Patrick's School. Called my wife to come pick me up, and had about fifteen minutes to sit on the stone wall waiting, so I did a little pen-and-ink sketch looking up into Palolo Valley past Ali'iolani Elementary. The other night I had my watercolors out so I thought I'd try dropping some color in.

The End is Near

2010-06-03T18:35:00.001-07:00

The campus is empty today. Academy exams are over. Teachers are squirreled away in their offices finishing their grades. Outside, where there are normally people in movement all day every day, the birds have more or less taken over. The summer sun bakes down on empty fields. Over in the gym, someone is playing a ragtime recording, and the sound is carrying over to my office. Every once in a while a graduating senior will pop in to say goodbye. At the junior school, many teachers are packing up their rooms in preparation for the great migration, as all of our K-1 teachers move up the hill to the new K-1 facility.

Tomorrow we have our end-of-the-year meetings, followed by lunch at the President's house for those who are perhaps reluctant to let go of the year, or who want the chance to say good-bye before heading off to do whatever it is that they will be doing this summer.

I've always felt strange about the end of the year. The start of school is a pure pleasure, a fresh start, a time of anticipation and eagerness, a chance to renew ties and catch up. The end of the year is pleasurable as well, bringing closure and perhaps some sense of satisfaction, but it is also tinged with regret, both for being what it is (as opposed to what it might have been) and for the saying of goodbyes.

I've never been good at saying goodbye. I tend to shuffle and mumble and feel like whatever words I can come up with are inadequate to the occasion. If I can find a plausible excuse for ducking out, I'm gone. I was talking with Tim earlier today, and he was saying he likes to hold the idea in his mind that he will cross paths with everyone at some point later. I like to believe that too, even when it seems unlikely. There's a song by Eric Anderson that has a chorus that has stuck in my mind for the more than forty years since I first heard him sing it:

If it comes that our ways don't touch together
'Cause our roads you know they just don't meet again
I'd be pleased to know that you still think about me
I'd be pleased to count myself amongst your friends.
But now I only stop myself and wonder
If you ever think of all that's gone behind
Yes I wonder just how things are going for you
I wonder does it ever cross your mind.

That lyric, with its guarded optimism and its reflective wonderment, pretty well captures my feelings at the end of the year.

Of course, the all-time mega-über-maximum-full-tilt goodbye lyric is the Donne poem I was asked by my English teacher to commit to memory when I was a sophomore in high school myself. If there's a more artful and fully realized poem in the English language, I don't know what it would be.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
   "The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

The Cave

2010-06-02T22:25:00.003-07:00

I've been reading Jose Saramago's novel The Cave, and I've got to say, it's an artful and charming piece of work. Saramago won the Nobel prize in 1998, and while I had obviously heard of him I had not read anything he had written until this one. The Cave is set in a unnamed country in a vaguely delineated, vaguely dystopian future time. The main character is a potter named Cipriano Algor, who lives with his daughter in the country and delivers his wares every few weeks to to a somewhat sinister business and residential combine in the city referred to only as the Center. The first disruptive event in Cipriano's rather placid life — Cipriano is a placid man, a ruminative man, the kind of man to befriend a lost dog, and when he has done so, to name him "Found"and check on him in the middle of the night — comes when he is given notice that the Center will no longer be accepting his wares, because customers have stopped buying handcrafted pottery, in favor of plastic containers which are cheaper and less likely to chip or break. This initial disturbance is followed by a number of others, as Cipriano begins his journey from the life he once knew toward a re-invention forced upon him by circumstances.

What I most like about the book is the loose, bemused, allusive voice of the narrator, who has a tendency to string thoughts together with only the bare mininum in terms of punctuation or writerly punctiliousness about the niceties of sentence structure. Many of the passages interweave the narrative proper with what at first seem to be the more or less random thoughts of the narrator as he tells the story. But these digression. In this passage, for example, Cipriano goes to visit the grave of his dead wife, but we are treated along the way to a) an inventory of the locations in which Cipriano no longer experiences her presence (thereby suggesting the depth of his solitude), b) a little homily on the shortness of life, spoken by the narrator as if he were addressing his own character, c) a commentary on Cipriano's actions and what they imply about the nature of time, this time directed to us as readers, which segues into d) another meditation on the nature of writing itself:

Cipriano Algor approached his wife's grave, she has been under there for three years now, three years during which she has appeared nowhere, not in the house, not in the pottery, not in bed, not beneath the shade of the mulberry tree, nor at the clay pit beneath the scorching sun, she has not sat down again at the table or at the potter's wheel, nor has she cleared out the ashes fallen from the grate, nor seen the earthenware pots and plates set out to dry, she does not peel the potatoes, knead the clay, or say, That's the way things are, Cipriano, life only gives you two days, and given the number of people who only get to live for a day and a half, and others even less, we can't really complain. Cipriano Algor stayed no longer than three minutes, he was intelligent enough to know that the important thing was not to stand there, with prayers or without, looking at the grave, the important thing was to have come, the important thing is the road you walked, the journey you made, if you are aware of prolonging your contemplation of the grave it is be cause you are watching yourself or, worse still, it is because you hope others are watching you. Compared with the instantaneous speed of thought, which heads off in a straight line even when it seems to us to have lost its way, because what we fail to realize is that, as it races off in one direction, it is in fact advancing in all directions at once, anyway, as we were saying, compared with that, the poor word is constantly having to ask permission from one foot to lift the other foot, and even then it is always stumbling, hesitating and dithering over an adjective or a verb that turns up unannounced by its subject, and that must be why Cipriano did not have time to tell his wife everything that was on his mind, apart from that business about it being unjust, Justa, but it may well be that the murmurings we can hear coming from him now, as he walks toward the gate leading out of the cemetery, are precisely what he had meant to say. (32-3)

Throughout the book the sentences unfold in surprising and often delightful ways like this. It's not a book that seems to explicitly to be trying to be funny, but I often find myself laughing out loud, just because the story keeps taking minor, delight-ful turns. A little bit later in the book, the narrator delivers himself of a little mini-essay on a subject I've actually been thinking a lot about lately, as I have gotten more deeply involved in making art. One of the interesting things about art in particular, and innovation in general, is that so much of it occurs in the making itself, not in the planning. The brain can hatch a plan, but often the brain is better advised to step aside, let the fingers take over, and see what turns up. Saramago takes this somewhat familiar idea and literalizes it, postulating that in fact the fingers have brains of their very own:

Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen. Having sent an order to the hands and fingers, it believes, or pretends to believe, that the task will then be completed, once the extremities of the arms have done their work. The brain has never been curious enough to ask itself why the end result of this manipulative process, which is complex even in its simplest forms, bears so little resemblance to what the brain had imagined before it issued its instructions to the hands. It should be noted that the fingers are not born with brains, these develop gradually with the passage of time and with the help of what the eyes see. The help of the eyes is important, as important as what is seen through them. That is why the fingers have always excelled at uncovering what is concealed. Anything in the brain-in-our-head that appears to have an instinctive, magical, or supernatural quality— whatever that may mean—is taught to it by the small brains in our fingers. In order for the brain-in-the-head to know what a stone is, the fingers first have to touch it, to feel its rough surface, its weight and density, to cut themselves on it. Only long afterward does the brain realize that from a fragment of that rock one could make something which the brain will call a knife or something it will call an idol. The brain-in-the-head has always lagged behind the hands, and even now, when it seems to have overtaken them, the fingers still have to summarize for it the results of their tactile investigations, the shiver that runs across the epidermis when it touches clay, the lacerating sharpness of the graver, the acid biting into the plate, the faint vibration of a piece of paper laid flat, the orography of textures, the crosshatching of fibers, the alphabet of the world in relief. (66-7)

I don't know about you, but I think this is just apt and dead-on accurate and basically just way too cool, most especially that wonderful, surprising, disarming, elegant final parallel construction, culminating as it does in the metaphor of the alphabet of the world. This is writing which enacts verbally exactly what it is describing conceptually about the nature of invention and surprise.

May Workshop

2010-05-31T21:21:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I finished a three-day workshop (Saturday and Sunday of last weekend, Saturday of this weekend) and wound up with four new mixed-media collages in various stages of completion. The three square ones are about two feet across, which represents a step up in scale for me.

This first one is a study in browns and blue and gold. I started with a plywood panel I had gessoed and braced. The first thing I did was sketch in some basic lines and shaded areas using charcoal. That black and white area in the upper left is the visible remnant of that first move. Then I laid down the various torn-paper fragments, most of which I had prepared previously by impressing or painting loose geometrical figures on each one. I tried for a loose kind of linkage, which resulted in the largish triangular shape that dominates the left hand side of the image. There were a lot of hard lines on the lower right hand side, and I tried to soften them by rolling some thin white paints over that area, which created another sort of eco-zone when the over there. I tried to stay loose and not get too fussy. Now when I look at it it feels a little like an imaginative exercise in plate tectonics.

The second one is the least finished of the three big panels. I had it in mind that it was going to be multilayered from the start, and was mostly going to be about experimenting with surface effects. This is where it is now. I don't know where it's going to end up. It's a little angry and unsettled right now; but maybe that's okay. I began it by using gel medium to glue down aluminum foil over the whole surface of the panel, and then tried various ways of applying color, including paint, paper, oil pastels, and regular pastels. The honeycomb pattern of white over red was George's idea: to use some lacy paper I had brought along as a kind of stencil: laying it down, painting over it, and then peeling it back. The idea for the thin red lines also came from George. It was toward the end of the day and he was challenging me to make a move that would bring it toward completion. He suggested I look back through my materials to find something that could make a difference. By way of demonstrating, he began picking up and discarding stuff that I had on the table. He picked up a flexible plastic ruler I had there, bent it back and forth, and then pressed the curved edge against the red area, more or less where the line is now, saying, "You could use this as a stamp." Kristen had some red paint mixed on her palette behind me, so I tried that and it really helped pull the piece together.

This is the workshop piece that I was most happy with. I've had trouble working with yellow so I decided to just start out by laying out a lot of yellow on the panel, and I placed three large torn-paper elements on top. Then during the week, knowing I was going to be working with warm colors, I gathered up all the brown and orange and red and yellow paper and cloth I could find, and stamped a lot of the pieces with geometrical forms. Yesterday I just started laying them down and trying to link them together, making this more or less massive landscapy from I wound up with. The last thing I did, taking advice from the group, was to cover up some of the remaining pure yellow areas and softening some of the rest of them with darker paint. I like the overall effect, especially the way the light seems to pushing in from behind.

This last one is a smaller panel I did at home with some of the leftover pieces of paper that were on my desk from preparing stuff for the previous panel. It did it fast, and I had a very clear sense of how I wanted the pieces to link up, moving from left to right. The two yellow pieces went on next to last, and the brown-and-black torn paper, as a sort of exclamation point. Nothing fancy, nothing very daring, but I like it. More than most of what I've done, it feels complete to me.

Poetry

2010-05-21T00:00:00.001-07:00

Pizza. Or perhaps
pizzicato. A place,
(piazza), a pie, a bit
of percussive play.
Purse your lips,
and push the air out:
poof. Like that.
What does that feel
like? Not like love,
not like languor.
More like impatience,
like petulance, like
disdain. Pfff. Yeah,
right. As if. Give
me a break.

Then what? We're still
here. Waiting. Like
a play, right? This is
the first speech.
A soliloquy. Perhaps.
An overture. A prelude.
To what we are waiting
for. The purpose. The
point. The purported
punch line. But

suppose there is no
payoff. Suppose it
simply is what it is.
Like life. Like waking
up every day and thinking,
maybe today it will all
become clear. When I
asked my mom, way back
when, for a palomino,
she said, "When my ship
comes in." She said,
"When I win the Irish
Sweepstakes." She said,
"Maybe someday."

I thought a lot about
that ship. I wondered
where on the ocean
it might be, how soon
it might come sailing
into port. How little
I knew of metaphor.
How much I've learned:
Pffft. Yeah right.
As if.

Process Reflection:

It's been a long time now since I just sat down to play with words. I seem to have become burdened with the self-imposed expectation that I ought to have something to say. That's as sure a road to writer's block as I know. Today I stopped in for a few minutes to visit with Tim's Writer's Club, and since it was there last meeting of the year they had pizza. Maybe because that seed had been planted in my mind, I felt like writing tonight.

I needed a place to begin. So I began with that: pizza. The word, the sound, the feel of the syllables. I just started playing with it, pushing it. After the first four lines I had a sense of the emerging structure and the possibilities posed by the syllables. (As you can hear, once you go down that road it's hard to turn off it.) Then I just tried to follow the thoughts that the syllables pushed up at me. Funny that my mom showed up. Not for the first time, of course.

Funny too: I did get that palomino, some years later. Two actually. I rode them for two years. Between the two of them they about killed my dream of horses. Be careful what you wish for.

Variations on a Theme

2010-05-13T17:55:00.003-07:00

Process Reflection:

I was working here within two self-imposed constraints: first that I would use exactly the same materials in each of the four collages; second that I would work on the concept of linkage, connecting one part to the next in a way that would make the development of each piece more organic and internally consistent. Two relevant quotations from my mentor:

Anyway, there’s an idea that I’m trying to develop here, which is that the forms work best when you tie them together. We call it linkage. Where it’s like you’re growing a form. So you always have to connect it, you don’t just pop it out there. The forms are always like branches on a tree, they’re always tied together. And it’s one thing you can do to help your compositions, is to link one form to the next, because it gives a sense of solidity to it, a feeling of connection. The biggest problem people have with composition is unity, is keeping the composition unified. If you just start plopping things out there, here and there, thinking that you’re balancing the composition, you may be balancing it in some way, you may be offsetting one thing with another thing in a way, but you’re also building into it opposition, and you can bring this kind of competition into the composition where the forms are fighting each other, and if you start juggling things all over the place, if you’re putting one thing over here and another thing over here, you’re going to have the real possibility that you’re going to get yourself into a bind. You’re composition is going to be caught and you’re not going to know where to go because you’ve got one thing over here and another thing over here and another thing over there and another thing over here and you’re not going to be able to connect them all, you see, it’s the connection that’s important.

I’m just trying to come up with some rules. Now these are my rules. They’re not your rules, they’re my rules. You can make your own rules. But the idea of having rules is that they give you a framework, they give you a structure to hang the composition on, to build with, so that in a way what you’re doing is you’re developing a system. And that system can be returned to, you can have some confidence in it because it works. It worked once, you can do it again.

Voice

2010-04-19T23:12:00.001-07:00

I seem to be picking up a lot of books these days and then putting them down again and not really getting back to them. There has to be something there on the page that makes me want to return. Sometimes it's an interesting situation or a compelling narrative. Lee Child's books usually start with both, and keep me turning the pages mostly because I get swept up in the plot. If there's not much happening with plot, there's another point of entry: voice. But voice is tricky. There's no one surefire way to be successful in creating voice, and there are a lot of ways to go wrong. As a reader I find myself drawn less to stylistically flamboyant voices (Holden Caulfield, in fiction, or David Foster Wallace, in nonfiction: much as I do admire them, they feel in some ways contrived; artfully contrived, but contrived nonetheless) than to more understated voices that are more subtlely revelatory of character.

For example, one of the voices I have admired for many years is that of Robert Finch, a naturalist on Cape Cod whose work I ran across while I was living in Massachusetts. Here are the first two paragraphs from "Into the Maze," the first essay in his collection The Primal Place:

One of the occupational hazards of living in a place like Cape Cod is not always knowing where you are. The sea fog that rolls in regularly over the mud flats and salt marshes is not entirely to blame for such chronic disorientation. Nor are the winter northeasterlies whose heavy surf and storm surges break through barrier beaches, destroy parking lots, silt up harbors, and claim waterfront property all that dislocate us.
Change is the coin of this sandy realm, and as long as we are not too close to it, such change delights us. The seasons flow in their rhythmic variety, a little out of sync with the mainland due to the ocean's moderating influence — which pleases our sense of separateness. With them come in the streaming tides of shorebirds, migrating alewives and striped bass, pack ice in Cape Cod Bay, spring peepers in the bogs, gypsy moths in the oaks, and tourists in the motels and restaurants.

Now, I can well imagine that some readers would read thus far and no farther. But I find myself already won over, ready to read on, ready to spend more time listening to this measured and reasonable and thoughtful voice. There is a precision in the deployment of words, an evident pleasure being taken in the shaping and sequencing of the constituent components of each sentence, an attentiveness both to the natural world and to its representation in words, that I find encouraging: I'd like to read more of this.

I bring all this up because I just spent a whole lot of this past weekend listening to just such a voice, that of John Ames, the narrator of Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. It's a book that has been around for a while. It's a book that I have heard good things about and held in my hands at the bookstore several times. But when I gathered, from reading the book jacket, that it was narrated by a Congregationalist preacher and consisted in some part at least of his reflections on the scriptures, I thought to myself that it was not really the sort of thing I was going to enjoy. (I should mention that my own experiences being raised as a Christian had rather too much to do with why I have spent my entire adult life as a Buddhist, and have been in no particular hurry to revisit the theological landscape of my upbringing.) But I recently got an email from my friend Nick recommending that I read Marylinne's new book of essays Absence of Mind. It turns out that that book is not available around here just yet, but I found a copy of Gilead on the shelf of my school library, so I opened it up to the first page and started to read and immediately got hooked on the voice.

John Ames, the narrator, is, it turns out, not just a preacher himself, but the son of a preacher, and the grandson of a preacher. He is, at the time the novel opens, 76 years old, and the father of a seven-year-old son. He has been diagnosed with heart disease, and is not expecting to live long, and has decided that he will take it upon himself to write an extended letter to his son, so that when the boy grows up he will some day be able to find out what sort of man his father was. The novel is that letter. It is written in the first person and addressed to the second person, the son, addressed as you throughout the book. There's a subtle and satisfying displacement at work here, because when I am as a reader find myself addressed as "you," I am in effect being asked to imagine myself as the grownup version of that boy, being given the opportunity to take the measure of the man, my father, who has labored on my behalf in the production of this narrative.

The great strength of the novel is in the character of John Ames. He's a thoroughly admirable man. That he is intelligent, thoughtful, self-effacing, compassionate, appreciative, and serious of purpose in a completely innocent way is evidenced by literally every word that comes out of his mouth. He is much concerned throughout the book with the attempt to understand, and to communicate what he does understand, about what his life has been, in the face of what can only be understood as deep mysteries. He's much concerned, for obvious reasons, about the whole business of fathers and sons: what motivates them, what they hope for in one another, how they fail one another:

I believe I'll make an experiment with candor here. Now, I say this with all respect. My father was a man who acted from principle, as he said himself. He acted from faithfulness to the truth as he saw it. But something in the way he went about it made him disappointing from time to time, and not just to me. I say this despite all the attention he gave to me bringing me up, for which I am profoundly in his debt, though he himself might dispute that. God rest his soul, I know for a fact I disappointed him. It is a remarkable thing to consider. We meant well by each other, too.
Well, see and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand, as the Lord says. I can't claim to understand that saying, as many times as I've heard it, and even preached on it. It simply states a deeply mysterious fact. You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there still might be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. (7)

He is also a man much given to appreciative reflection, and he is often able to articulate his sense of the heartbreaking beauty of the world in language which is both sparse and eloquent:

I walked up to the church in the dark, as I said. There was a very bright moon. It's strange how you never quite get used to the world at night. I have seen moonlight strong enough to cast shadows any number of times. And the wind is the same wind, rustling the same leaves, night or day. When I was a young boy I used to get up before every dawn of the world to fetch water and firewood. It was a very different life then. I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings. I always felt like an intruder then, as I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out the door. This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it has passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself. (74)

The long and the short of it is that the book succeeds, even in the absence of what might ordinarily be thought of as plot, because of the authenticity and the authority of the voice. That's not to say that nothing happens in the book. Plenty does, some of it rendered as memory, some of it as action in present time, action which ultimately puts all of John Ames's hard-won wisdom to the test. But what I find most admirable in the voice is the character of the man as revealed by it. He is doing all that he can, in full recognition that it may never be enough:

I'm trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many little things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all. I remember that day in my childhood when I lay under the wagon with the other little children, watching them pull down the ruins of that Baptist church, and my father brought me a piece of biscuit for my lunch, and I crawled out and knelt with him there, in the rain. I remember it as if he broke the bread and put a bit of it in my mouth, though I know he didn't. His hands and his face were black with ash — he looked charred, like one of the old martyrs — and he knelt there in the rain and brought a piece of biscuit out from inside his shirt, and he did break it, that's true, and gave half to me and ate the other half himself. And it truly was the bread of affliction, because everyone was poor then. There had been drought for a few years and times were hard. Though we didn't notice it much because times were hard for everybody. And I guess that must have been why no one minded the rain. There had been so little of it. One thing I do remember is how the women let their hair fall down and their skirts trail in the mud, even the old women, as if none of it mattered at all. And then the singing, which was very beautiful as I remember it, though I'm pretty sure it could not have been. It would just rise up with the sound of the rain. "Beneath the Cross of Jesus." All the lovely, sad old tunes. The bitterness of that morsel has meant other things to me as the years passed. I have had many occasions to reflect on it. (102-3)

This is a book that took me by surprise, and turned out to be, from start to finish, a more satisfying read than I had thought it would be.

Reality Hunger: The Hip Hop Angle

2010-04-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

This Too Shall Pass

2010-04-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

Got this link from Nick today. Gotta see it to believe it.

Writer's Workshop: Starting a Story from Scratch

2010-04-10T23:21:00.001-07:00

On Friday we had YA author Neal Shusterman as a guest at our school. He did a large-group presentation to 375 eighth graders, met separately with three grade eight classes, and then hosted a question-and-answer session with about 40 guests at the high school library after school. I had been given to understand that he was a very good speaker and worked well with kids; that impression was certainly confirmed on Friday.

In this post I mostly want to walk through a Writer's Workshop activity he led with one of the grade eight classes. It was a fun activity, it worked well with the kids, it conveyed some valuable notions about the writing process, and it strikes me as being highly portable. It's the kind of activity any English teacher might want to try as a change of pace, and it would be easily customizable to highlight whatever other topic or theme you might be working on at a given time. I like activities like this, structurally simple but conceptually rich. I'm writing it down partly to capture it for my own benefit, and partly so that if any of you want to play with it, you will have a place to begin.

Step One

Neal began by telling the students that we were going to write the beginning of a story together, but that we would start by doing a brainstorming activity. The idea was to try to pull the idea for a story "out of the clear blue sky." He explained that we'd start by brainstorming some titles, and that there would be only three rules: 1) it can't be connected to a title or story idea that already exists, 2) that it can have no names of real people, and that 3) it doesn't have to make sense.

So he began calling on kids, and writing their suggestions down on the board as they came up with them: "Aquarius Island," "Angry Rabbits," "Goats of Glory," "The Innocent Apple," "Writing in Mexican," "The Boy in a Dress," "The Girl Who Talks Too Much," "The Pig Lady," and so on. He kept encouraging kids to come up with more, and told them that the trick was not to think too hard.

Step Two

Once he had a list of about 40 titles on the board, he said, "Okay, these are good titles. But here's the deal, we're not going to use any of them. Instead, we're going to take words and phrases from what's here, look for random connections, and come up with a new set of titles." So he took a different color marker and began studying the list of words on the board, circling certain words in one title and certain words in another title, asking the students to help him find interesting or odd combinations. (He also told the kids, "Don't shout out. I won't use your suggestion if you do. Just raise your hand and I'll call on you." That was a subtle but very effective move, I think. It immediately established an expectation of how the exercise would play out.)

He kept working through the list of titles on the board until the kids had juxtaposed pretty much every word that was in every title with words from some other title or titles. Then he looked over the board and wrote down five of the "new" titles, which turned out to be "The Yawning Book," "iPod Dress," "Skater Monkeys," "The Angry Hand," and "Sinking Up." Then he asked the kids, "Why do you think I picked these five titles?" and the kids were quick to pick up on the fact that these titles all basically raise a question in your mind, they "make you think."

Then he had the kids vote on which title they thought they would want to work with, and the vote turned out to be heavily in favor of "Sinking Up."

Step Three

Neal erased the board and writing the title "Sinking Up" in the middle, and led the students through another brainstorming exercise. "When you think of the word "sinking," what comes to mind? What sort of things sink?" He drew a circle around the word "Sinking," called on kids to answer and generated a thought map of their responses (Titanic, submarine, water) on the board in blue marker. If the kids began to slow down, he'd re-frame the question or come at it from a different angle: "What else sinks?" "What things have to sink?" "What things never sink?" "What are things where it's critical, where it's a matter of life and death, that they don't sink?" "What about metaphorical kinds of sinking?"

Once he got done with "sinking," he, he took a red marker and then went through the same questioning process with the word "Up." At one point he asked when going up, which is usually thought of as being a good thing, would be a negative. ("You want to play against the obvious.")

Step Four

The final step was to begin translating the conceptual frame provided by the title into the specific events of a story. He began by noting that some of the symptoms of being underwater and being too high up, like on a mountain, would be similar: heart rate up, difficulty breathing, coldness, oxygen deprivation. Then he began thinking out loud, modelling the process of coming up with a story. "So let's say we have two characters. They're best friends. One is a mountain climber, one is a diver. And something goes wrong. What could the problem be? They could be stuck in a vessel. So what if we fool the reader? We get them to think they're underwater, but they're really on mountaintop."

So he takes a marker and writes a sentence:

"When we found the fuselage, we thought we had enough oxygen to get back."

Then he led the students in a brief discussion about that first sentence. "What information is given? What do we know? What do we want to know?" He continued adding sentences, and talking them over as he went along:

"Jim and I climbed in. Everything seemed exactly the same as the moment it crashed here. "This kind of cold preserves everything," Joe said. He'd done this kind of recon before. The bodies didn't bother him any more. Thinking back, I wondered if the guys who found our bodies would be bothered either.

And that's pretty much where we were when the period came to an end. Over a period of about half an hour we had gone from nothing at all to a story starter with characters, setting, action, dialogue, and questions to be explored. Along the way there was a lot of useful, thought-provoking discussion, and a lot of laughs as well. I liked how Neal modelled the act of writing, complete with the secondguessing and the crossouts and the wondering out loud. The students were left with a story they had helped to create, and they were invited by their teacher to try their hands at moving it forward and seeing where it would lead. Not bad for a half hour cold call with kids he had never worked with before.

Reality Hunger

2010-04-06T23:58:00.001-07:00

I spent part of last week reading David Shields' provocative manifesto Reality Hunger, in which he develops a multi-threaded argument that goes something like this:

The novel as a literary form is outdated and inadequate to the task of accurately representing life in the 21st century. The whole idea of authorship and ownership of ideas is itself a relic, embedded in a set of assumptions about reality that may never have been true, and certainly are true no longer. We've been stripped of our certainties. Reality in the 21st century is cacaphonous, it's an ongoing collision of voices and points of view competing for our attention. If the characteristic postmodern genre in art is collage, and the characteristic genre in music is pastiche (as in the layer and sampling in much hip-hop music), the characteristic genre in literature is the essay, but stripped of its pretensions artfulness and egocentricity. The form of the essay he envisions is exploratory and discontinuous and multilayered and, well, a whole lot like Reality Hunger.

The book is divided up, semi-arbitrarily into 26 chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet. (I say "semi-" because each chapter is in fact a purposeful, if loose, sequence connected to a theme suggested by the chapter subtitle.) Across these 26 chapters are divided, semi-arbitrarily, 618 sequentially numbered prose passages, the majority of which were borrowed or stolen or cribbed or bent or concatenated by David Shields from other sources. I read somewhere that it was originally his intention to present these passages without attribution, which would certainly be consistent with his overall argument, but that his publisher insisted on the footnoted references which appear in the back of the text. The sources themselves serve as a sort of intellectual credentialing: he's read and absorbed and is now recycling Thoreau, Barthes, Walter Benjamin, William Gass, Jonathan Rabin, Robbe-Grillet, Simic, Ozick, Geoff Dyer, and W.G. Sebald - and that's just a random sampling from the first page of nine pages of footnotes. I often found myself flipping back and forth as I read, to see if what I was reading was coming from Shields or from someone else. The cumulative effect was to get to know the inside of Shields' head, including the stuff bouncing around in it, in a way that would not have been possible, or would at least not have been similar, if he had simply trotted out his ideas as a single, coherently shaped (and therefore inherently artificial and un-realistic) argument. Which is, I take it, his point. Or one of them.

One idea that Shields returns to often is that the lines between fiction and nonfiction are much fuzzier than most of us are accustomed to believe they are, as in this passage (#106) attributed to Vivian Gornick:

Memoir is a genre in need of an informed readership. It's a misunderstanding to read memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting. Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand. A memoir is a tale taken from life — that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences — related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably a writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader.

It all makes for a fascinating but somewhat uneven read. It's not unlike a musical jam session. There a whole sequences when he will get going with a sequence of riffs that build upon and play off each other and it's like great jazz, surprising and heady and exhilarating. And there are other sequences which become too loosely connected or too random or which lead too far afield. Or maybe it's just listener/reader fatigue setting in, the feeling of being overwhelmed by too much information and too many ideas and closing down. Again, like life.

I found myself in agreement with maybe 30 percent of what he had to say, in strong disagreement with another 30 percent, and there's another 40 percent that just slipped through the cracks in my brain. I am not convinced, for example, that fiction itself is doomed as a major literary form, or that plot, as a literary device, is itself necessarily boring. James Wood has an interesting New Yorker review in which, having established Shields' argument and methodology, he then uses Shields' critique of the artificiality of fiction as a framework within which to consider The Surrendered, the new novel by Chang-rae Lee. I think he sums up my own reaction well when he says

His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken: it is always a good time to shred formulas. But the other half of his manifesto, his unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic.

Free Write

2010-04-01T00:47:00.001-07:00

I feel like writing tonight. I've been doing a ton of reading the last week or two, and I've thought at one time or another about trying to put together a post about each piece individually, but one of the reasons I haven't, and one of the reasons I've been posting more fitfully recently, is that putting together a post is of that nature is basically a lot of work. It's almost nine o'clock in the evening now. I'm nearly always in asleep at or near ten o'clock, because I've found that my biorhythms are happier if I go to bed and wake up at a regular time. When I was younger I could stay up reading or working until eleven or twelve o'clock and be the worse for wear the next day. No longer.

So anyway, I thought that rather than start working on a post with a purpose I'd do what I maybe most enjoy doing as a writer, what I used to ask my students to do back in the day when I was actually teaching (I'll be teaching a class again in the fall, thank god), what I have gotten away from doing for some reason as my sense of what I've been trying to do in Throughlines has become more formalized, which is, just write. It's not like there's ever a dearth of words. Writing, as I have come to understand it and value it, does not have to be a formal, purposeful activity. It can be, and perhaps ought to be, at least some of the time, more of a welling up, like a song.

Of course, this is not the way we teach writing in school, at least not most of us, and not most of the time. Writing as we teach it, and as students learn it, is about meeting certain kinds of formal and structural and logical expectations that have been preordained by our subject-area teachers. We're told what to do, we give it our best shot, and we get it back, most often, with a grade on it, based on somebody's rubric or standard. I had a conversation with a colleague today about exactly such a situation, about how a student she had been trying to help had given an assignment his best shot and it had come back with some dismissive comments and a disappointing grade. And as we talked about it I was feeling sympathy for the student and disheartenment about the situation itself. Why does school have to be this way? What is the point? Where else but in school is anyone ever going to hand you back something you have written with a grade on it? And why would we want to do that, anyway? And once it has been done, and the damage is evident, how do we redress it?

Just before I sat down to write I was reading Frank Smith's The Book of Learning and Forgetting, which I found out about on Wes Fryer's blog. It's a book with a lot of what seems to be to be very clear, straightforward, commonsense thinking about literacy, and here's what he had to say (well, a piece of what he had to say) on the subject of damage control:

Students who have "failed" school literacy instruction for 10 years have learned that they can't read and write, that they don't want to or expect to, that they are "dummies." They must be persuaded that none of these things is true, that they are as competent (and as worthwhile) as anyone else—and probably know a great deal about reading and writing. None of this is accomplished without skill and sensitivity in intimate personal relations.

Well, it seems my song has become less lyrical. I've somehow drifted into expository mode, which may well be my default mode. The starling croaks, the raven himself is hoarse. At lunch today I mentioned that I was waiting for someone to take the bit in his teeth and the woman I was talking to looked startled. I'm not sure whether because she was not familiar with the expression or because she knew it and was shocked that I was using it in that context. I often do not know what is going to pop out of my mouth until it has already escaped. Which is, essentially, the mode I'm modelling here. I started up there at nine. Now it's ten to, and I'm ending down here. But this, this texture, these words, these commas, these repetitions, they push themselves up from underneath, like seeds, like starts, like birds startled into sudden flight. Charming, I'm sure: Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, and thrice again to make up nine.

Peace.

Art and Idea

2010-03-28T21:35:00.001-07:00

Process Reflection: I worked on this panel this weekend. It's two feet square, divided into three vertical zones. I had already put a thin coat of white gesso on the plywood panel and sanded it back down to where it was nearly transparent. I prepared the panel by gluing 1" square strips along the perimeter on the back, and then taped off the middle area and used gel medium to glue down aluminum foil on the two sides, which I then used a roller to flatten out. I like the aluminum surface for the acrylics because it creates unusual and somewhat unpredictable effects when you put acrylic onto it.

I took the prepared panel to my Saturday morning class with George. During the class I used a couple of different-sized squeegees to lay down acrylic. I intentionally began with a quinacridone violet (which is more like a red) that I have never used, just to see what that the impact of that would be. On the other side I used an ultramarine blue. I tried to create a rough, irregularly textured surface that took advantage of the irregularities in the surface of the aluminum that had appeared when I glued it down. Then, at George's suggestion, I used my fingers to rub some pigment directly into the wood section in the middle, which I then wiped back off, leaving traces of color in the wood grain. I began with brown, wiped that off, then went back into it with the violet and the blue, and wiped those off. Someone remarked that the panel looked like the flag of a little-known nation.

I decided to work on the surface some more. I took the point of one side of a pair of scissors and began distressing the aluminum surface, which created scratches in some places, and tore the aluminum in others. Then I went back over the aluminum panels with a soft yellow acrylic, with interesting results that you can see here: the yellow settle into the places where there were cracks and tears.

I was sort of not sure what to do next. George pointed out, accurately, that the two outside panels were a little too much like one another, and that I might want to try doing something different on one side or the other. I brought the panel home after class and was thinking about that. One way would be to change the surface itself. I thought about burning it or scribing it in some way. But I also though thought I might try to add some collage elements on one side, and there on my desk I had some leaves from the bodhi tree that my wife had given to me. I tried several of them in different configurations before deciding that I like the look of a single leaf in the upper right. It seemed somehow to complete the sequence from the purely mechanical and metallic stripe on the left, the wood texture in the middle, and the more organic green and blue panel on the right. So I used gel medium to put that down.

It still felt incomplete. I remembered I had an envelope full of the shavings from where I had chiseled paint from a previous panel in green. I often try to use leftover materials from one painting in another down the line; it creates a kind of process linkage, a larger narrative arc between paintings. So over on the right hand side there were those triangular yellow spots where the aluminum had torn, that suggested the shapes of leaves, and the idea occurred to me to reinforce that suggestion by using acrylic medium to glue down the larger paint chips from before. I left it to dry overnight, then worked back into the left hand panel with some brown and blue paint today, used some alcohol on the surface as well to craze the surface a little bit more, then wiped back into it with a rag and lightened up some of the random shapes. So now it feels done to me.

We had an interesting discussion during class yesterday about some key concepts in painting - materials, technique, style, and subject - and how they stand in relation to one another. I think that in painting, as in writing, it is probably more usual for an artist or writer to start with subject, and then use various materials and techniques to deal with that subject in a certain, often predetermined, style. As a writer throughout my life, and more recently as an artist, I've been drawn to coming at it from the other direction: starting with the materials and the technique, and arriving at a subject as an end product of the process.

If you were to ask me what the subject of this painting is, now that I'm more or less done with it, I might be able to come up with some plausible line of thought about the relationship between the synthetic world and the natural world, or about the quest for enlightenment in a diffracted world, or about the centrality of the organic, or about the underlying interconnectedness of all things in the universe. In a sense all of those things are present, having emerged in my mind at least in the process of putting together the painting; in another sense, none of them are. It's just a panel with colors and wood and aluminum and glue on it. Gerhard Richter again:

Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form; and the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context - which presupposes, of course, that words are used to convey information about the idea and the context. However, none of this means that the pictures function as illustrations of an idea: ultimately, they are the idea.

The Big Short

2010-03-24T00:48:00.001-07:00

I'm a poker player. I've been playing poker semi-seriously, several times a month, for maybe 25 years. I even played online for money for a couple of years before the Bush adminstration, in its wisdom, made it illegal to do so in the United States. I've always thought that it was more than a little ironic that the government has been taking such an interest in the moral hazard that online poker presents to the average citizen, while at the same time doing everything in its power to support corporate high rollers by deregulating the banking industry and the bond markets, with results that are now all too familiar to all of us.

So it was with perhaps more than usual interest that I picked up, on Barney's recommendation, the new book by Michael Lewis, The Big Short. I've always enjoyed Michael Lewis: he's perceptive and he's funny and he knows both how to tell a story and how to pick stories to tell that have resonance and heft. The former principal at my school, who was one of the founders and instigators of a group of teachers devoted to the idea that teaching well was largely about helping students to think well, once remarked that Moneyball, Lewis's analysis of the paradigm shift in major league baseball was the best book on critical thinking he had ever come across. (I'm inclined to agree. If you're going to try take the team with the lowest salaries in professional baseball and make them win more games over a period of five years than any other team in baseball - which is what Billly Beane did with the Oakland A's - you need to come up with a new way of evaluating talent, and a new way of thinking about process. Of course, once you've invented the new paradigm, it's there for anyone to steal. Billy Beane's example had a lot to do with the World Series victories of the Florida Marlins in 2003 and the Boston Red Sox in 2004.) I started The Big Short on Sunday afternoon, read well into the evening, worked on Monday, and finished it on Monday night.

The Big Short is every bit as thought-provoking and revelatory - and funny, in a terrifying sort of way - as Moneyball. The difference is that Lewis is talking not about Our National Pastime, baseball, but about our Other National Pastime, which is Screwing People Over For Money. As in Moneyball, Lewis has structured his narrative about the subprime mortgage meltdown not from the point of view of the major players, the ones who pretend to know what they're doing, but from the point of view of outsiders, the relatively small number of people who saw it coming and did NOT succumb to the willful and self-serving acceptance of a completely illogical and unsustainable status quo. (Not that they weren't eminently self-serving in other ways.) Lewis is terrific at capturing the idiosyncracies of his characters in ways that reveal how it is that they were able to see what others could not or would not see. One of the key players in this drama is a guy named Steve Eisman, whose penetrating intelligence is combined with an unwillingness to suffer fools gladly. Two examples:

Working for Eisman, you never felt you were working for Eisman. He'd teach you but he wouldn't supervise you. Eisman also put a fine point on the absurdity they saw everywhere around them. "Steve's a fun guy to take to any Wall Street meeting," said Vinny. "Because he'll say 'explain that to me' thirty different times. Or 'could you explain that more, in English?' Because once you do that, there's a few things you learn. For a start you figure out if they even know what they're talking about. And a lot of times, they don't." (22-3)

Eisman had a curious way of listening; he didn't so much listen to what you were saying as subcontract to some remote region of his brain the task of deciding whether whatever you were saying was worth listening to, while his mind went off to play on its own. As a result, he never actually heard what you said to him the first time you said it. If his mental subcontractor detected a level of interest in what you had just said, it radioed a signal to the mother ship, which then wheeled around with the most intense focus. "Say that again," he'd say. And you would! Because now Eisman was so obviously listening to you, and, as he listened so selectively, you felt flattered. (139)

Lewis is also extraordinarily adept at using the thought processes of his characters, as they themselves try to wade through the murky waters of bureauocratic obfuscation, to explain in terms which ultimately do make sense such abstruse financial assemblages as LEAPs (Long-term Equity AnticiPation Securities) and CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations). And what emerges from the murk is essentially a systemic attempt to mislead people in order to be able to sell them a pile of crap:

The subprime mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified. A bond backed entirely by subprime mortgages, for example, wasn't called a subprime mortgage bond. It was called an ABS, or asset-backed security. When Charlie asked Deutsche Bank exactly what assets secured an asset-backed security, he was handed a list of abbreviations and more acronyms—RMBS, HELs, HELOCs, Alt-A—along with categories of credit he did not know existed ("midprime"). RMBS stood for residential mortgage-backed security. HEL stood for home equity loan. HELOC stood for home equity line of credit. Alt-A was just what they called crappy mortgage loans for which they hadn't even bothered to acquire the proper documents—to verify the owner's income, say. "A" was the designation attached to the most creditworthy borrowers; Alt-A, which stood for "Alternative A-paper," meant an alternative to the most creditworthy, which of course sounds a lot more fishy once it is put that way. As a rule, any loan that had been turned into an acronym or abbreviation could more clearly be called a "subprime loan," but the bond market didn't want to be clear..."It took me a while to figure out that all of this stuff inside the bonds was pretty much exactly the same thing," said Charlie. "The Wall Street firms just got the ratings agencies to accept different names for it so they could make it seem like a diversified pool of assets." (127-8)

The Big Short is first of all a terrific read. Sure, I play poker, but I have next to no experience in the world of finance, and came to the book with no expectations other than that I like the way Lewis writes. The book just blew me away and felt like at the end I had had a great reading experience but had also gotten an amazing education as to What Went Wrong, and why. The scary part is that there is no real reason to believe that it couldn't happen again, or that it is not already happening again, not in exactly in the same arena, but in some parallel form. As Lewis points out in his final chapter:

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest Maybe the best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor." The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market [the featured characters in Lewis's book] had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side—the entire financial system, essentially— had gambled with the odds against them. Up to this point, the story of the big short could not be simpler. What's strange and complicated about it, however, is that pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich... The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm, ... without exception, either ran their public corporations into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by the United States government. They all got rich, too.
What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions? (256-7)

Wait, wait, don't tell me! I know the answer to that one. And the answer calls to mind unfortunately, the oldest poker adage of all: If you don't know who the fish is at the table, it's you.

Worf is However Worn

2010-03-18T12:30:00.001-07:00

About 99% of the comments that show up on Throughlines turn out to be spam, and I just routinely delete them. Every once in a while, however, something so bizarre comes sailing in from cyberspace that it makes me sit up and take notice. Here is the full text of one such communique, which arrived this morning. It seems to me to aspire to be a representative of some emergent genre of 21st Century poetry. All I've done is add the line breaks. I hope that in passing this along I'm not unwittingly participating in some cabalistic plot to take over the world:

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(Later): So then at lunch Tim shares with me that one of his students has actually found out that the putative genre not only already exists, but has a blog devoted just to it. O tempora! Oh Mores!

Texts Without Contexts

2010-03-17T17:22:00.001-07:00

Very thought-provoking article by Michiko Kakutani here.

Sample paragraph:

Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.

Childhood Obesity

2010-03-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a video by a seventh grader at my school that won the C-SPAN StudentCam 2010 First Prize for Middle Schoolers this year.

Potted Plants

2010-03-14T16:44:00.001-07:00

Went for a walk yesterday down to the Honolulu Academy of the Arts. Stopped off to see the Printmaker's Exhibit at the Linekona. A nice selection of prints in a wide variety of styles. That was fun. Then went over to the museum and took in the current exhibit, From Whistler to Warhol, Modernism on Paper. A lot of dark etchings in dim light, so as to preserve what color there was. Not much there that spoke to me. Sat down toward the end in one of the courtyards to rest my legs, and did a little sketch of some potted plants. Dropped in some color when I got home.

An Honest Assessment

2010-03-13T22:21:00.001-08:00

One of the perhaps foreseeable but nonetheless disorienting effect of the proliferation of technology options over the last ten years or so has been to create radical differences in mental processing even among people who work together and are otherwise more or less on the same page (to use a leftover metaphor from the analog age.) For example, some of my colleagues regularly rely on Twitter, some of my colleagues (like me) have tried it and found that it hasn't "taken," some of them have never tried it and have no interest in doing so, and some of them have basically no idea what you're talking about when you mention it.

Likewise, some of my colleagues are avid blog readers, and some of them are mistrustful of blogs (as they are of wikipedia, in some cases without ever having bothered to read any of either). I continue to be surprised by the number of people, even among those who do read blogs, who have no idea what an RSS feed is or how a blog aggregator works. I've come to rely pretty heavily on Google Reader to keep me up to date. Ever time I find a blog I think I might want to keep up with, I subscribe through Google Reader and the posts just stack up in my inbox until I get to them. The ones I really do want to make sure I see first thing every morning, I have delivered to my email inbox as well.

One of the blogs I've been reading with interest for some time is the Bridging Differences blog, which has essentially been a long-term slow-motion conversation between two of our best-known and most credible educators, Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier. Some of their discussion lately has been about the new book that Ravitch has come out with, in which she publicly reverses her previous endorsement of the education reform movement based on "accountability and choice," and of the No Child Left Behind program in particular. In the early part of her new book, she says

As NCLB was implemented, I became increasingly disillusioned. I came to realize that the law bypassed curriculum and standards. Although its supporters often claimed it was a natural outgrowth of the standards movement, it was not. It demanded that schools generate higher test scores in basic skills, but it required no curriculum at all, nor did it raise standards. It ignored such important studies as history, civics, literature, science, the arts, and geography... I saw my hopes for better education turn into a measurement strategy that had no underlying educational vision at all. Eventually I realized that the new reforms had everything to do with structural changes and accountability, and nothing at all to do with the substance of learning. Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.

Well, duh. Anyone who has been in the classroom, as well as anybody who has been reading the papers (and/or the blogs) for the last ten years, know what happens when you put a high-stakes assessments at the end of the line. Since no one has the money or the time or the inclination to base those assessments on real work that students have actually done, it's a given that we're talking about some form of multiple-choice (and maybe short essay) test that is only going to measure subject area content recall and not give any sense of full range of student competencies, such as they might or might not be. Because it's got to be the kind of test that can be easily and inexpensively scored, it's going to target those things that are easily and inexpensively assessed. And because the stakes ARE high, any time that teachers might have chosen to spend on such critical but hard-to-measure skills and habits of mind such as asking good questions and connecting what you learn to what you live and conducting patient, extended trial-and-error investigations in the honest attempt to actually learn something on your own instead of waiting for someone to teach you the six easy steps — not to mention such touchy-feely but nonetheless desirable traits such as empathy and engagement and attentiveness and playfulness and, yes, joy —is time that cannot be spared, and so those things are going to get pushed right out of the curriculum, because, kiddos, IT'S NOT GOING TO BE ON THE TEST, and so it doesn't matter. And so we get down to the joyless task of covering what IS going to be on the test, and if the kids still don't do well, well, let's lengthen the school day and lengthen the school year to give them more of what didn't work the first place. And if all else fails and the kids are STILL not doing well enough on the test and the continued existence of the teacher's job and maybe the school itself depends on the fact that they do, is it any surprise that some teachers and administrators succumb to the temptation sneak into the storage room and change a couple of answers, just to get them over the line?

I'm glad that Ravitch has not only come to her senses but also had the courage to publicly make the argument that we are on the wrong track, not only in her book but in other venues as well, as she rides the tide of publicity for her book, as for example on NPR. She has, of course, been taking a tremendous amount of heat for having done so.

I think it is unfortunate that the Obama administration seems to have bought into the same set of deeply flawed assumptions about the efficacy of high-stakes testing that the Bush administration foisted upon us. There's a pretty good wrapup of the criticism that is now being leveled at the unfortunately named "Race to the Top" initiative, including a video clip of an interview with Ravitch, on the eSchool News site, one of the more recent and more interesting additions to my aggregator.

As if it weren't bad enough, all the wasted time and energy and money that has gone into the development of the state standards, we are now entering a period of debate over the newly released draft version of the Common Core National Standards. Before we go marching down that road, I'd hope that we'd get around to addressing the questions that High Tech High's Ben Daley posts on his blog:

• Can somebody point to a state where the standards and accompanying standardized testing regime has led to improved schools?

• If such a state exists, why don’t we merely adopt that system at a national level? Shouldn’t we scale up what works?

• If, as I strongly suspect, such a state does not exist, why will that which has not worked at the state level magically start working at a national level?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against high standards as such. What I'm against — on philosophical, pedagogical, and experiential grounds — are two notions: first, that we will ever arrive at a set of standards that we can, or should, agree on; and second, that we can get away with high-stakes assessment on the cheap. You want real high stakes testing? Give kids real work to do in their community, and have them stand up in front of the community when that work is done to present it. That means that the members of that community have to be willing to stop what they are doing long enough to listen, to evaluate what they see, and to give detailed and honest feedback. If you doubt that this is realistic or that it can be done, I refer you once again to Ron Berger's An Ethic of Excellence, and to the work that Ben Daley and his colleagues are doing at High Tech High.

The Divided Self

2010-03-11T22:09:00.003-08:00

It's a windy night in Honolulu, a little before 8:00, and I'm trying to guesstimate how much energy I have left before I fall into bed, something I could do right now happily enough. One part of me wants to stay up long enough to write something for Throughlines, especially since I've got a little streak going, ten days and counting, and I don't want to fall off the wagon. Another part of me wants to lay out the paints and hook up some music and get into the alternate zone that painting induces, what Gerhard Richter was talking about when he came up with the line I quoted the other day: "Painting has nothing to do with thinking, because in painting thinking is painting." Part of me wants to go over to Chess Cube and play a couple of games, but that feels dangerous right now because I'm sleepy enough that I'm almost certain to blunder away a game or two, like I did last night. And part of me would just like to go down to the mall or the beach and wander around and actually experience what it means to be out in the world on a windy spring evening on a tropical island.

I had a lot of good conversations at work today, with colleagues, with a prospective teacher, with a group of teachers planning for a curriculum re-assessment. We're nearing the end of our preparations for the visiting team which will arrive on Sunday to assess our status as a school and decide whether we deserve to be accredited, and if so, for how long. We've been two years preparing for the visit, and I've been in charge of the preparations. I'm feeling good about it, and am looking forward to meeting the team and doing what I can to be of help to them while they are here. Of course, I'm going to feel even better on Wednesday evening, after the visit is over and I can turn my attention to many other things that have been piling up on my desk while I've been checking and filing the exhibits and tracking down materials and lining up meetings. I've gotten a lot of help from my colleagues and I think we're as ready as we're ever going to be.

So that's it for tonight. Not much hear to nourish the brain or the heart, gentle reader. My apologies. Maybe tomorrow I'll write about math. I've been conducting a little study, and it's probably time to figure out what I've learned and what I need to look at next.

All Over Coffee

2010-03-10T22:05:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I mentioned that I had been reading, and very much enjoying, Paul Madonna's book All Over Coffee. What I didn't say that I was working carefully through book, panel by panel, and that I had not yet reached the end. Today I finished it and was delighted to find an an 11-page Afterword, an extended process reflection which explains not just about the origins and mechanics of the drawings, but also about the stages of Madonna's career as an artist and the various surprises and challenges along the way. It's always tempting to assume, when you see a well-designed product, that whoever put it together must have just sat down and tossed it off. Madonna explains how at one point, before the idea of doing a comic strip occurred to him (I cringe when I write "comic strip;" calling Madonna a comic strip artist is like calling Anton Chekhov a storyteller; it's may be true, to a degree, but not sufficient), he had been working for some time, on a graphic novel that just wasn't working out. And once he did get started on the strip, he found that success bred other challenges:

Over the next few months, people began to recognize me while I was out drawing. I got everything from "Hey, you're that coffee guy!" to people knowing my name and other work I had done. The Chronicle continued to publish readers' responses where the letters of hate produced letters of love, and a debate picked up with me on the sideline watching. I had never experienced anything like it with my work before. A high school English teacher began using the strip in his class and had students write to the paper. One of the letters read, "People don't want something that makes them think." Disheartening, but no surprise. A reader wrote and asked if I was "trying to make them feel stupid." I didn't know where to even begin with that.
I did my best to listen but not get derailed by people's opinions and suggestions—which came hourly—and just keep on track with what I thought worked.

He goes on to detail the considerable challenges associated with producing seven days a week to produce four strips, which eventually led to hard decisions to cut back, first to two daily strips and a Sunday strip, and eventually just to Sundays. He also talks about the process by which this book, a selection and distillation of the work he had done for years, came about. A I write this tonight, I find myself thinking about the texts from two of the strips. I should explain that each strip consists of a drawing of a physical space (often the interior or exterior of a building or set of buildings) in or around San Francisco, superimposed upon which are a series of rectangles in which the words of a short narrative or conversation or meditation appear. There is usually no direct connection between the scene depicted and the words, but there's often an eerie, oblique sort of correspondence between what is being said and what is being depicted.

The narrative panels on page 148 — superimposed on drawing of a path leading into some tree-bespeckled foothills, partially in shadow — read, in sequence:

"And if you're going to do this," she told herself, "You've got to remember,

there are going to be bad times,

and times that you forget what you were thinking

and why you made this choice.

The second, on page 149, over a drawing of a rather ornate and stately residence on a city street, reads,

She suspects secret maps of the city exist.

Maps that aren't sold in stores.

Maps that chart seemingly normal sites

behind whose doors

lives more exciting than hers are led.

Many of the vignettes in this book work like this. They are about moments: the moment a thought arrives, the moment the light strikes the side of a hill or a building in a certain way, the moment when

There's only the sun and a feeling

that you're simultaneously doing all the right things

and completely wasting your life. (75)

(Interested in seeing more? Check out this page from Madonna's web site.)

Just Thinking...

2010-03-09T21:58:00.002-08:00

I was just thinking, not that it really matters, but...

Honolulu has is the ideal place for a bike infrastructure. It's a small city. You could bike from anywhere to anywhere in maybe twenty minutes. The weather is nice year round. We're choking on cars. Gasoline prices are higher than just about anywhere in the U.S. And biking is good for your health, assuming you could bike without taking your life in your hands, which is the risk you take now. So why, several years after a referendum vote showed strong support for coming up a master plan for bike paths, is there still nothing going on?

In Disrupting Class, Clayton Christenson and Michael Horn hypothesize that by 2019 half of all the courses taken by high school students in the U.S will be online courses. A lot of the school administrators I've spoken with think that number is highly inflated. I think it's low. And I think it's going to change everything. As Will Richardson pointed out to a group of educators at a terrific presentation at NAIS, "If you're not feeling uncomfortable, you're not paying attention."

I've found a chess site I like better than Instantchess. It's called Chesscube. It's free, it's got a bigger display, and you get to choose who you play, instead of having random matches. It also has a more robust set of statistics archives for the games you've played. If you're a chess player and have trouble finding games in the 'hood, check it out. Thanks to Michael Goeller for the nudge.

Chang-rae Lee's new book is out. I've been reading an advance copy slowly all winter, because I'm not in a hurry to have it end. It's a tremendous book, more ambitious and technically accomplished than any of his three previous books. All of which I liked, but this book is something else again.

Another cool book I've been reading is called All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna. It consists of elegantly drawn pictures of the San Francisco area, matched up short prose meditations and snippets of dialogue and near-poems. Apparently he's been publishing these things in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sundays for a while now. Not living there, I had no idea. But the book, which I picked up when I was there two weeks ago, is way cool.

I'm liking San Francisco. I've been there often enough now (three times) that I'm starting to know my way around the downtown area. Love the galleries, love the architecture, love the scale and the pace of the city. Don't much like the weather, but I can cope.

Haven't been reading or writing any poetry for months now. Have to do something about that. There was a good poem by Hayden Carruth in the Writer's Almanac this week. And today there is a poem by Allison Joseph today which reflects on the disappearance of that most old-fashioned vehicle of communication: the letter.

I'll close with two quotes, both of which I heard at the TED Conference this year.

Robert F. Kennedy:

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product…if we should judge American by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Colette:

What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.

Process Reflection: When I was living in Massachusetts in the 70s and 80s, one of my favorite columnists in the Boston Globe was Mike Barnicle, who would write human interest stories that were set in the streets of Boston and often told stories in innovative and highly dramatic ways. On occasion, he would pump out a column of more or less random thoughts and observations, under the generic title of "I was just thinking, not that it really matters, but..." (See a teaser from an archive site here.) I've been doing a lot of labor-intensive posts this week and I had really busy day at work today, so I thought I'd loosen up a little, and so what you see is what I got. The difference between me and Barnicle: he found a way to be funny, and pointed. I'm just flailing about. And ironically, this was a harder post to write than most of the others. Plus for some reason I'm having trouble getting it to post to Blogspot. Sigh.

Whereof One Cannot Speak...

2010-03-08T23:11:00.001-08:00

When I was at NAIS last week, there was an alumni gathering on Friday evening, and a former student (not one I had had in class, but one who I knew because he was friendly with some of my students) came by and we began to talk. I asked what he was doing, and he said he was working. He had planned on going to graduate school, but had become disillusioned with the cliqueishness and artificiality of the discourse in the upper levels of his chosen discipline. I told him that his experience bore out my own. I was an English teacher (which is to say, a student of language) for 40 years. In my heart of hearts, that's probably still what I am, although it's no longer what I do, exactly. But my own experiences with graduate studies in English convinced me that a lot of what was going on was clever people trying to invent an exclusionary language so that they could recognize one another and conduct esoteric discourses that only members of their particular club could understand one another. It didn't seem to matter to them that much of what they had to say was, in essence, gibberish. It was elevated gibberish, and the fact that they had mastered it was proof positive of their status as intellectuals. I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the game. It made more sense to me then, and it makes more sense to me now, to be talking about literature in terms of plot and conflict and theme and characterization than to be talking about, say, the historicity of narratology. The funny thing is, writers don't talk like this. You can read interview after interview with first-rate writers and never see the words "historicity" or "narratology," much less the combination of the two.

Recently as I've been trying to learn something about art, and I've come to see that the same dichotomy exists between those who actually make art, and those whose business it is to try to explain what that art is supposed to represent. Critics have a pressing need to come up with words and theories, and while it is certainly legitimate, and sometimes helpful, for a critic to be able to help you see what you had not seen before, there is always the danger that in their search for the penetrating analytical insight will lead them into semantic and syntactical thickets from which neither they nor their unfortunate readers may ever be able to escape.

As I've mentioned several times recently, I've become interested in the German painter Gerhard Richter, and a month or two ago bought a book entitled Gerhard Richter, Large Abstracts, published by Hatje Cantz. It's a beautiful book, and the plates are just gorgeous. But a book like this needs words, lots of words, and someone has got to supply them. One of Richter's most devoted critics, and one of the essayists featured in this volume, is a man named Benjamin Buchloh. Herr Buchloh is certainly a capable writer, and very devoted to his subject. And he sees the problem, he really does. Early in the essay:

Indeed, it is in this context that the the fundamental question of this essay can be posed more clearly: If none of the previous structures and semantic resources of abstraction can be considered as operative in the present, and if neither scientificity [sic] [??] nor social revolution, nor musicality, nor linguistic analogue can be claimed as abstractions correlatives any longer, in what time of communicative register—if any—can Richter's abstractions generate perceptual, cognitive, or semantic experience?

That's essentially a way of saying, "In the absence of anything explicable, what the hell am I supposed to explain here?" But he's got a job to do, and he's game for it. The problem is that once he gets warmed up, he has trouble keeping his balance. He doesn't seem to be able to stop himself from coming up with stuff like this:

As much as the universal delegitimization of the aesthetic had been at the center of Duchamp's project and the aesthetic of Fluxus, and as much as both had had a tremendous impact on the formation of Richter's pictorial project, infinity and the infinitesimal are only one half of the dialectic of Richter's abstractions. The other half is the incessant search, in each painting, and in each microstructure of a painting, for the singular constellation of material, procedural, cognitive, and perceptual forces in which an infinity of different subjects can discover an infinitesimal set of subjective differentiations outside of any preordained formal, social, political, or aesthetic order. Richter's abstractions address an infinity of subjects in perpetual search for a singular moment of an actual differentiation that would counteract the subjects continuing and total abstraction from it proper capacity to differentiate experience. (17)

It's not just his problem. In the same book, fellow critic Gregor Stemmrich stumbles down the same steep and winding path:

This does not mean we should presume there is a fixed concept (or program), but, rather, that his painting should be experienced and thought of as informed (in-formed) by a mobile horizon of critical questions and related reflections and idiosyncratic dispositions. (24)

No representation is per se immune to not being grasped as an integral determining moment of reality in which illusion turns out to be the condition of possibility of the appearance of something that itself only appears in the medium of appearance, which thus, at the same time, should be understood as the medium of life. (27)

The sound of the color can, even if it is only latent or optional, exhibit an emotional quality; the effects of light, even if it is only through reminiscence of other paintings, a spiritual quality; and the complexity of the arrangements, distributions, and superimpositions, a psychological quality, even if it is only a versatile one. In the process, these various qualities can affect one another so contingently, can call on and assume each other in alternation and, at the same time, produce spatial effects so that their entire effect is brought to bear as an atmospheric mood filled with internal tension. (28)

While I was in San Francisco, I stopped by SFMOMA and found another book, a paperback entitled Gerhard Richter (October Files) and edited by the apparently indefatigable Herr Buchloh. Books of art criticism are not usually thought of as sources of comedy, but I've got to say it was pretty funny to read through this sequence, in which Buchloh, interviewing Richter, keeps on blowing up balloons, which Richter keeps on sticking with pins:

What about the objectivization of the process of painting itself? You paint your big big pictures not with an artist's brush but with a decorator's brush; isn't this all part of the anonymization and objectivization of the painting process, along with permutation and "chance," color relations, and compositional organization?

Certainly not.

The change in instruments of production doesn't imply that the production of the painting is once more critically called into question?

It changes the pictures only in one respect: they get louder; they are not so easily overlooked.

I was talking about the instruments—that is, the instruments also influence the perception of the picture. The fact that a monochrome was painted with a roller decisively influences the perception of the work. And in these big paintings here, where the brushstrokes suddenly turn into a decorator's brush marks, they take on a new dimension that I would describe as a quasi-mechanical or anonymous quality.

Not in this case. A brush is a brush, whether it's five millimeters wide or fifty centimeters.

So in the in the two yellow Strokes, their giant size doesn't add a new dimension?

That's something different again— they only look like two strokes of a giant brush. In reality they were painted with a lot of little strokes. Here, on the other hand, it's all genuine, so to speak.

But here in the two big paintings a new dimension comes in, no only through sheer size but also through the fact that the techniques and the act of painting have been carried to the limits of the possible.

The physical limits?

Yes, but also the limits of perceptibility of the act, as an act of painting. And there another dimension opens up in practical terms—a dimension that is not regarded as subjective.

These are just as subjective as the small ones; they're just spectacular, that's all.

Spectacular they certainly are, even in a small format. In my catalog text, I tried to describe how in your abstract painting the system is always "on show," as it were— that they always have a certain declamatory, rhetorical quality. One always gets the feeling that you're showing the various possibilities just as possibilities, so that they simply stand alongside or against each other, without performing any other function.

Like making a speech that doesn't mean anything?

Yes—

A speech full of eloquence and uplift, which everyone falls for because it sounds good, which fulfills all the formal requirements of a speech and actually communicates nothing?

It doesn't sound good if you describe it that way, but you could put it differently, by saying that someone is delivering a powerfully emotive speech in order to give an analytical presentation of the resources of language, emotive persuasion, and rhetoric. That is, you are making the spectacle of painting visible in its rhetoric, without practicing it.

And what would be the point of that? That's the last thing I would want to do.

In closing, it seems to me that critics are better advised to say what can be said, and to avoid trying to say what cannot be said. Writing and thinking and art are not congruent, or even always parallel, enterprises. It's a point Richter himself makes repeatedly, in various ways, in the 2009 Writings 1961-2007:

Painting has nothing to do with thinking, because in painting thinking is painting. Thinking is language—record-keeping— and has to take place before and after. Einstein did not think while he was calculating: he calculated — producing the next equation in reaction to the one that went before — just as in painting one form is a response to another, and so on. (15)

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the think in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view. (33)

Talk about painting: there's no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualites that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can't be said but are always the most important. (35)

There's a lot of stuff going on around the edges of this discussion that I'm still trying to figure out. But, to place one stake in the ground: In art, as in writing and in teaching, I'd argue for an orientation toward process articulation rather than an orientation toward product explication.

Image credit: http://images.worldgallery.co.uk/i/prints/rw/lg/8/0/Gerhard-Richter-Abstract-Painting--1992-80993.jpg

Two by Two

2010-03-07T20:38:00.001-08:00

Today I put what I think might be the finishing touches on two panels I've been working on. They're about 18" square and are part of a series that began back here. In fact, as you can see, the first of the two is actually a revised version of the last one in that series. I got the idea for the horizontal bar from a diptych that Scottie Flamm had on display at my school's carnival art show in early February. She had built up her paintings in layers of color and then scratched back into the painting in such a way as to create a band that looked like maybe some kind of computer music or abstracted language. I liked that effect, and I thought it might work well with the panels I was working on, especially since I had done a lot of layering and overpainting as I had put them together.

I wound up using a chisel-bladed x-acto knife to cut back into the surface and reveal the layers beneath, and tried for some consistency of shape rhythm, but some variety in how deep I worked into it.

About a week ago I finished another two-part invention. These were the result of an attempt to meld painting and collage in a more balanced way than I had been doing. I worked on the two of them simultaneously, thinking they might add up to a diptych, but I actually like them better individually than as a pair.

I'll close with a quotation from Gerhard Richter. I've been doing something of a study of his work, both what he has to say about it and what others have to say about it. (I find that I much prefer the former, of which more later.)

One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is total idiocy.

Spare the Rod?

2010-03-06T21:18:00.001-08:00

Disclaimer: Saw this picture, which got me thinking. Am not advocating anything here, one way or another. Just trying to follow a line of thought.

Here's an arresting image from the cover of a 1931 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It was posted on the Art Educator's Blog as one of the a sequence of covers by J. C. Leyendecker, who apparently was an influence on Norman Rockwell.

What are we looking at here? There's an elderly woman who has a nine or ten year old boy (presumably her grandson - she looks too old to be his mother, one can hardly imagine this kind of punishment being meted out by an employee of the family) straddled across her lap as she spanks him with a shoe. He's crying, but even as he's crying he seems to be reaching out toward the spilled jam on the floor which is presumably the reason he is being beaten. The puppy behind looking on woefully from behind the chair seems to be a tonal cue: this scene is to be read as sad, but cute. Amusing. Something to chuckle at, perhaps. In 1931.

I cannot imagine that such an image would be created today, nor, if it were, that it would appear on the cover of any major American magazine without provoking a firestorm of protest. Seeing this picture 70 years later is a reminder of how much our culture has changed in its grounding assumptions about how children should be treated. There was a time in America when spankings and other forms of corporal punishment were completely acceptable, even endorsed, in the home and at school. The principal of the elementary school I attended in the early 1950s, run by the Sisters of Charity, of all people, had a wooden board with a handle in her office, and she frequently used it to paddle the behinds of miscreant students. And that wasn't the worst of it. I wrote a poem, some years ago, about one of my clearest memories from fifth grade. With the exception of one minor invention (Carolyn Halstead was not in my class, but she was the sister of my best friend up the street who went to the same school as I did, and I decided to give her a bit part in this drama), it is pretty much an exactly literal rendition of the events I witnessed in class. This would have been, let's see, probably 1957:

Sisters of Charity

Sister Mary Vincent was 80 years old,
and wore rimless glasses to keep her aim
with the thimble she had attached to a string.

(She was good with that thimble: she'd mount
it on her finger and let fly from fifteen feet:
thwack! She'd never miss.) Well, anyway,

when Ermino Spadino, the janitor's son,
turned around to pick up a pencil
Carolyn Halstead had dropped on the floor,

she let loose with the thimble as she swept
down upon him, and in raising his arm to fend her off
he brushed her habit with his hand.

"How dare you hit a religious?!" she screamed,
and grabbing him by the hair, she raised him
from his seat and dragged him to the board,

against which she smashed his head again
and again until he could no longer stand.
Then she dropped him back into his seat

and strode to the front of the room.
Glaring at us, she straightened her rosary, took up
her catechism, and went right on with the lesson.

The last week or two for some reason I've been thinking about a lot of questions the answers to which tend to present them along a continuum. I've even had some dreams where I'm visualizing a series of essential questions with sliders attached to each one, sort of like a Likert Scale or an equalizer turned sideways:

The numbers to the right could be replaced by questions of the sort that come up all the time but do not present themselves as being amenable to binary yes-or-no, black-or-white answers. A short list of questions that have come in readings I've done and discussion I've had just in the last week or two would include:

What's more important in teaching and learning, content skills or process skills?
Content -------------------------------------Process

What is my responsibility to those less fortunate than I am?
Nothing at all ------------------Give all I have away.

When is it acceptable to sacrifice the life of one person to save that two others?
Never ------------------------------------------ Always

How much of what we do as teachers should be oriented toward developing a respect for alternate points of view and tolerance for ambiguity?
Not our job -------------------- Only job that matters

Are human beings by nature essentially good or essentially evil?
Right Wing --- Conservative ---Moderate ---- Liberal --- Left Wing

When is it acceptable to strike your child?
Never ----------------------------Anytime you feel like it.

The useful thing about sliders of this sort is that they invite you to think about where you would place yourself on a continuum, and what reasons you would be able to articulate for doing so. The not-so-useful thing about them is that of their very nature they are one-dimensional and perhaps encouraging of glib thinking. It's clear to me that all of the questions above, for example, are related to one another in complex psychological and philosophical ways, and that the "answer" to any one of them would most often start with some variation on "Well, it depends..."

With regard to spanking, I'm opposed to spanking on principle, because I think spanking conveys in a perhaps unintended by nevertheless very powerful way that ultimately differences of opinion are enforced by violence. That's what I took away from my year with Sister Mary Vincent, the old battle-ax, and it's just about all I do remember of my year with her. And I don't think that's that's the kind of memories we want to be searing into the minds of children. On the other hand, I have seen all to often that parents who cannot bring themselves do discipline their children create havoc in the lives of their children, their own lives, and the lives of everyone with whom they come in contact. Spanking may be extreme, but I wouldn't want to say it is never called for. Would I take a shoe and beat my grandchild with it if they got into the jam? No way. But there are more subtle gradations. Is it okay to gently slap the hand of an infant reaching for a knife, or a flame? Especially if s/he was doing so after considering and deciding to ignore a verbal "No?" Now, I'm not so sure. I did it with my own children, who as adults now seem none the worse for wear. Kids do need to learn that sometimes "no" really does mean no, and it seems to me a lot easier to inculcate that message with a young child before they get old enough to see every occasion of decisionmaking as a gateway to boundary testing followed by prolonged negotiations.

So, it's a bit of a muddle. I don't like what I see in Leyendecker's picture. But I think it serves to pose a question worth thinking about.

Stoner

2010-03-05T17:03:00.001-08:00

No, it's not what you were thinking. It's actually a novel, written in 1965 by John Willliams, about the life of a young man who was born in 1891, grew up on a farm, went to the university, fell under the influence of literature, became an English teacher, lived a relentlessly ordinary life, and died in 1956. It is the most ordinary and the most revelatory of stories, told in a straightforwardly realistic (and deceptively artful) manner by its author, John Williams.

I first read about Stoner from on Scott Esposito's Conversational Reading blog in December of last year. It soon became one of those titles that keeps popping up in your mental landscape until you say to yourself, well, I guess I'm going to have to give it a shot. The straw that pushed me to it was when my friend Tim asked me if I had read it. I said no, but I bought a copy the same day and started in. I'd say that this is a book you'd want to read if you have an interest in literature, or in teaching, or in the notion of a life's trajectory and what one might reasonably hope to have accomplished or experienced at its termination. If you have an interest in all three, I'd say, well, you're going to have to give it a shot.

The main character, William Stoner, is not larger than life. If anything, he's just a smidgeon smaller than life. He's a pleasant man with a good heart, a man of limited abilities who is able to adapt to the circumstances of his life, but ultimately unable to transcend them. In other words, in the words of the Beatles, for example, he's "a bit like you and me." I'm tempted to say he's like Dilbert without the humor, but that's actually doing Stoner an injustice: whatever he is, he's no cartoon. He's a fully realized, sympathetic character, and if his life never turns out to be what he might have wished for or what we might have wished for him, it is not without its dignity or its compensations. John McGahern, in his introduction to the book, quotes the author commenting on his creation:

I think he's a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a really good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing. He was a witness to values that were important. (xii)

There's a passage right in the middle of the book that I'd like to cite at length because it describes a critical moment in Stoner's career as a teacher, after he has been at it for a while, when due to personal circumstances in his life he begins to open up in ways that do begin to change his sense of himself: who he is and what he is capable of:

He was ready to admit to himself that he had not been a good teacher. Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom. He had hope that time and experience would repair the gulf; but they had not done so. Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance. And the consciousness of his inadequacy distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much a part of him as the stoop of his shoulders.

But during the weeks that Edith was in St. Louis, when he lectured, he now and then found himself so lost in his subject that he became forgetful of his inadequacy, of himself, and even of the students before him. Now and then he became so caught by his enthusiasm that he stuttered, gesticulated, and ignored the lecture notes that usually guided his talks. At first he was disturbed by his outbursts, as he he presumed too familiarly upon his subject, and he apologized to his students; but when they began coming up to him after class, and when in their papers they began to show hints of imagination and the revelation of a tentative love, he was encouraged to do what he had never been taught to do. The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and hear showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print — the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

He was both saddened and heartened by his discovery of what he might do; beyond his intention, he felt he had cheated both his students and himself. The students who had been able theretofore to plod through his courses by the repetition of mechanical steps began to look at him with puzzlement and resentment; those who who not taken courses from him began to sit in on his lectures and nod to him in the halls. He spoke more confidently and felt a warm hard severity gather within him. He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence. (112-113)

This passage interests me for several reasons. First of all, it is a fairly elegant and eloquent illustration of something that every teacher at some point must learn if s/he is to be successful and happy: that students respond to and respect what is genuine and what is true, however weird or geeky or odd it may appear to them at first. You have to be who you are, unapologetically and unfearfully. If you try to be what the school wants you to be, or what your parents want you to be, or, worst of all, what you think the students want you to be, you're doomed. You have to have the courage of your confusions as well as your convictions, and be willing to own up to both. Of course, any statement that general might be dismissed as a cliché. What I like about the novel is the way in which it particularizes the realization in a way that is itself true and convincing in the context of this one man's life.

Second of all, the passage is freighted with a great deal of emotional tension, not just because of the sadness that this new realization engenders in Stoner, but because any alert reader will understand immediately that with the new realization will come new complications. Stoner was himself, despite his limitations, not unaware that the love that he has hidden is in fact, if not exactly illicit, certainly dangerous, as love always is, and as it eventually, in this story, turns out to be.

Third, and this is perhaps less obvious but central to my own orientation to reading and writing, I think the passage is beautifully rendered. The beauty in this case is not a function of elegance or ornament or stylistic excess of any sort whatsoever, but rather from its simplicity, its lack of affectation or pretentiousness or self-conscious artfulness. The whole novel reads like this, effortlessly, smoothly, compatibly. It's a very good book. You should give it a shot.

The Red Thread

2010-03-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

Saw this animation by Kazuhiko Okushita at TED and it blew me away. It's even better the second and third time you watch it. There's a really cool narrative line that I didn't catch the first time. This is just a stunning example of what you can do with a line (if you're just insanely talented and imaginative and technically adept.)

TED

2010-03-04T00:27:00.001-08:00

I've been meaning to post something about the Ted Conference ever since I got back. It would take me weeks to even attempt to cover everything, so I thought I'd at least post something in the form of a little photo essay. The tag line for TED is "Ideas Worth Sharing," and this year's umbrella them was "What the World Needs Now." I've got to say that the founding premise of TED - that it would be a good thing to bring together people with interesting ideas and give them a forum for sharing them with others - both in person and by way of digital archiving - strikes me as incredibly simple and valuable and brilliant and worth celebrating. I've also got to say that this was one of the best-organized events, top to bottom, I've even been part of.

The conference was held at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, seen here from the top of a nearby building that I went to one evening for an after-hours jam session by the group Ethel, a string quartet which was the house band for the conference. They performed at the start of each morning and afternoon session all week.

The main conference hall was inside the center, and the stage was designed as a sort of attic with lots of odds and ends on display. In the center of the main stage was an enormous closed-circuit TV screen so that you could watch whoever was presenting close up even if you were in the balcony.

This, for example, is the stuff on display just on the right hand side of the stage. That human head is something like six feet tall.

I wound up watching most of the sessions from the balcony, which was less crowded and offered a more panoramic view. I did this drawing of what I could see from my angle of vision during one of the early presentations.

The emcee was Chris Anderson. If anyone reading this blog has any connections with Canton, Massachusetts and is getting the willies looking at this picture, that's what I was getting during the whole entire conference. The resemblance of this guy to a certain long-time baseball coach in Canton was really weird.

This is from the second floor of the conference hall, near the entrance to the balcony, looking back down at the first floor. They had juice bars and barrista bars in six or eight different locations at the conference. They also had breakfast and lunch tables set up. You could get something to eat any time you wanted it pretty much all day long. Outside you can see some of the tents they set up as social areas. Each social area had its own food dispensaries, comfortable tables and chairs, and closed circuit TV, so you could hang out there to watch the presentations if you didn't want to be in the main hall.

My own personal favorite place to hang out was the bookstore they had set up on the second floor. They had a ton of interesting books related to TED themes on display (and for sale), and then there was the lounge area you see here, again with its own hi-def widescreen LCD panel.

There were a bunch of amazing performers during the week. Here you see David Byrne performing with Ethel backing him up. That's Thomas Dolby on keyboards, who was onstage with Ethel all week long. Other performers included Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant, and Andrew Bird.

The talks started at 8:00 in the morning each day and went straight through every day until 6:00, after which there were donor-sponsored dinners at various places, including a block party in Long Beach where they roped off the entire block, booked all the restaurants, had the (free) desserts and the drinks out on carts in the street, and a live band to entertain:

Every day started off with a "TED University" session, which was basically 15 three minute talks in 45 minutes. They invite people to speak, get 300 applications, and choose one out of eight, on every imaginable subject. The morning and afternoon sessions were grouped loosely by themes, of which there were twelve: mindshift, discovery, action, reason, provocation, invention, breakthrough, boldness, imagination, play, simplicity, and wisdom. I wound up seeing something like 100+ presentations, about 40 of the 18 minute variety that they post on the site, and another 60 or 70 three-minute talks.

I took a ton of notes that I have not had the chance to even review yet. After a while it all kind of turned into a pleasant blur. Looking back, the four presentations that have stuck in my mind were a talk on climate change by Bill Gates; a talk by Mark Roth, a scientist who was describing how they are beginning to figure out how to chemically induce the kind of metabolism slowdown that allows someone, every couple of years, to survive being frozen, and what will eventually mean in terms of stabilizing people at accident scenes so they won't bleed out until they get them to the hospital; a talk on Justice by Michael Sandel, who teaches a course of that name at Harvard for which the lectures are all available online (he also just came out with a very good book (same title) that I'm reading now; and an amazing talk by a 13-year-old girl named Adora Svitak who came and chided the attendees, as representative adults, for giving currency to the word "childish," which she felt was an unfair and inaccurate word to characterize the capabilities of small people. She just thought that kids deserved to be taken more seriously than that. That girl rocked. Another really good presentation was by Natalie Merchant, who sang a bunch of songs from her new album which is devoted to putting late 19th and early 20th century poems to music. Ken Robinson was also back again in fine form.

This is all by way of a beginning. Yet knowing how way leads onto way, I don't know if - or when - I'll be back to this subject. But boy, was it great. Thanks, Youngblood.

Out Stealing Horses

2010-03-02T18:33:00.001-08:00

I remember reading somewhere, maybe in one of Sven Birkerts' luminous essays on reading, that while we eventually wind up forgetting the details about what we have read, what does tend to stick in memory is the feeling of what it was like to be inside of a particular book. I think that's true. I finished reading Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses about two weeks ago, and I'm already starting to have trouble remembering the names of the characters and some of the details of the plot, but I don't think I'll soon forget the gestalt of the book, the mental state that it generated in my mind as I was reading it, which I would describe as a kind of serenely focussed attentiveness. The story is narrated by a 67-year-old man who has retreated, at the end of his life, to live by himself in at the edge of the forest wilderness. The plot, which I won't get into, has largely to do with the formative events of his life which emerge in a series of flashbacks, and ultimately serve to account for how he has come to be this particular person, with this particular voice, and this particular set of preoccupations.

What I most enjoyed about the book was precisely that: this voice, this character, being inside the mind of a character who thinks and speaks like this:

The dead spruce has been trimmed and cut up with the chainsaw into manageable lengths about half the size of a chopping block, and I have transported these chunks three at a time in a wheelbarrow and tipped them onto a heap on the ground outside the woodshed, and now they are stacked in a two-dimensional pyramid almost two metres high against the wall under the eaves. Tomorrow the work of splitting them will begin. So far, all is going fine, I am pleased with myself, but this back of mine has had enough for today. Besides, it has gone five o'clock, the sun is down in what must be the west, southwest, the dusk comes seeping from the edge of the forest where I was just working, and it is a good time to call a halt. I wipe off the sawdust and the petrol and oil mess sticking to the saw until it is more or less clean and leave it to dry out on a bench in the woodshed, close the door and cross the yard with the empty Thermos under my arm. Then I sit myself down on the steps and pull off my damp boots and rap the wood chips out of them and brush the bottoms of my trousers. I brush my socks, give them a good beating with my working gloves and pick the last bits off with my fingers. They make a nice little heap. Lyra sits watching me with a pine cone in her mouth, it sticks out like an unlit cigar of the really bulky type, and she wants me to throw it so she can chase after it and bring it back, but if once we start on that game she will want to go on and on, and I haven't the energy left. (89)

There are many passages like this in the book, descriptive passages which are laid out in patient, accumulative manner. There's an essential centeredness, conveyed by the pacing, the deliberate sequencing of images and events, the just slightly idiosyncratic forms of expression ("Besides, it has gone five o'clock"). It recalls Hemingway ("I wipe off the mess... sticking to the saw until it is more or less clean an leave it to dry out on a bench...") but softer-edged and less obsessive ("... pick the last bits off with my fingers. They make a nice little heap."). This is reportorial writing, but the clarity of the expression implies a certain kind of appreciative attentiveness on the part of both narrator and writer, turned outward to the world.

There are other passages which display the same attentiveness, but turned inward. The narrator is a patient and knowing student of his own mind, its inclinations and their origins. Here he reflects on his attitude about physical work, and the sources of that attitude:

What I do, which I have never let anyone know, is I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy that until I fall into the proper rhythym, and the task reveals itself and grows visible, and that's what I have done for as long as I can remember, as if the secret lies in how the body behaves towards the task at hand, in a certain balance when you start, like hitting the board in a long jump and the early calculation of how much you need, or how little, and the mechanism that is always there in every kind of job; first one thing and then the other, in a context that is buried in each piece of work, in fact as if what you are going to do already exists in its finished form, and what the body has to do when it starts to move is to draw aside a veil so it all can be read by the person observing. And the person observing is me, and the man I am watching, his movements and skills, is a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time when I was fifteen, and he vanished from my life forever. (69-70)

This is a passage that gets just an enormous amount of work done in a short space: it's about work, it's about attentiveness, it's about his father, it's about his own personality, it's about being a student, it's about the craft of writing and about the art of living well. And even after I've forgotten everything else, I'll remember lying on my sofa in the living room, my eyes moving over this passage, and feeling the writing, feeling at one with the character, and feeling, although maybe not saying it to myself in so many words, "This is really great."

Long Time Gone

2010-03-01T23:26:00.001-08:00

So it's been more than a month now since I've posted anything here. I've got excuses, sure. I spent a week in Long Beach at TED and a week in San Fran at NAIS, and the week in between was the week of our the once-yearly curriculum day at our school, which it was my responsibility to plan and host. I've been reading some terrific books as welll: Stoner by John Williams, Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, Justice by Michael Sandel, Day Out of Days by Sam Shepard, Chang-Rae Lee's book due out next month, some art monographs on Gerhard Richter and Giorgio Morandi and Jasper Johns, and bits and pieces of a lot of other things as well. I've seen literally dozens of speakers and taken pages of notes and had generally way more mental input in the last three weeks than I have had time to process, and more to the point, more input than I have been able to figure out even where to begin writing about.

My dilemma as a blogger: the little things seem hardly worth writing about, and the big things seem too daunting. And so one day after another slips by without the sine qua non: a beginning. So that's what today's post is about, essentially, lowering my standards, as Hobbes once said to Calvin, to the point where they've already been met. I've been here before. I'm here again. I'm going to try to be here again tomorrow, maybe string together a couple of minimalist posts to get my writing rhythm back.

Diamond Head

2010-01-27T15:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was fifteen minutes early for a meeting at Case Middle School so I stood on the lanai looking out over the rooftops toward Diamond Head and put together this little (3"x 5") sketch. I started with the building in the left foreground, sketched in the outline of the mountain, and then just worked the other little pieces - buildings, trees, rooftops, one at a time. I tightened up some of the linework and added some of the blue ink lines during the meeting (while I was listening), and then dropped in a little more blue on the mountainside and in the sky with colored pencil when I got home. I've worked a lot harder on things that didn't come out as well. This one pleased me.

Questions

2010-01-27T15:10:00.001-08:00

Recently I ran across a link to The World Question Center on the Edge website. Each year the editors posed a question and invited answers from a wide variety of contributors, which are posted on the site. It's a pretty cool site in that it gives you a window on the generative thinking of many thoughtful and articulate writers, and challenges you to consider how you might go about answering the questions yourself. The 2008 question, for example, has answers from 165 different people, including Alan Alda, Joan Baez, Freeman Dyson, Brian Eno, Howard Gardner, Steven Pinker, and Clay Shirky.Here's a listing of the questions for each year:

1998: What questions are you asking yourself?
1999: What’s the most important invention in the past 2000 years, and why?
2000: What’s today’s most important unreported story?
2001: What questions have disappeared?
2001: What now?
2002: What’s your question?
2003: What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?
2004: What’s your law?
2005: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
2006: What’s your dangerous idea?
2007: What are you optimistic about?
2008: What have you changed your mind about? Why?
2009: What will change everything?
2010: How is the internet changing the way you think?

Excellent

2010-01-25T17:59:00.001-08:00

A week or two ago we had visiting speakers on campus from High Tech High in San Diego. One of them, Ben Daley, had strong praise for a book entitled An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students, so I decided to check it out. It's one of the best books on education I've come across. Berger is a public school teacher (and, I think not coincidentally, a part-time carpenter) who has an extensive practical knowledge of exactly how powerful project based, student-oriented learning can be. His book is an artful balance of clear, specific examples of classroom practice and passionate, informed advocacy for the creation of a classroom environment which places students learning at the center by giving students the chance to do real work for real purposes. But, he argues,

Thinking that projects or critique or portfolios are a magic solution to anything is as silly as thinking high-stakes testing will turn things around. Only as a part of a strong classroom culture or school cultkure are these tools valuable. Culture matters... Students adjust their attitudes and efforts in order to fit the culture. If the peer culture ridicules academic achievement—it isn't cool to raise your hand in class, to do homework, to care openly about school—this is a powerful force. If the peer culture celebrates investment in school—it's cool to care, this is just as powerful. Schools need to consciously shape their cultures to be places where it's safe to care, where it's cool to care. They need to reach out to family and neighborhood cultures to support this." (34)

That's easily said of course, and only common sense. The real strength and beauty of Berger's book lies in how he demonstrates, with example after example, what this might look like and how one might go about achieving it. Berger has not only worked with his own kids in his own classes, but he has also spent a lot of time visiting teachers in other schools, many of them initially skeptical or downright hostile, to share with them the work his students have done and to help those teachers start down their own path to innovation. As his title suggests, his main point has to do with the quality of the work:

We can't first build the students self-esteem and then focus on their work. It is through their own work that their self-esteem will grow. I don't believe self-esteem is built from compliments. Students who are struggling or producing lousy work know exactly how poor their performance is—compliments never seem genuine. All the self-esteem activiites and praise in the world won't make them feel like proud students until they do something they can value.

Berger gives lots of examples of projects and theme-based investigations. He talks about the use of models, about the value of multiple drafts (and how to establish that value with students), about the dynamics of critique, and about the importance of making student work truly public. As I write this, I am fully aware that this perhaps does not sound like revolutionary or very interesting stuff. But in his book, it is, and what makes it so is the forcefulness of his examples and the clarity of his presentational style. At one point he talks about what he went through, over a period of years, drafting and re-drafting plans for the house he was to build for his family. The house he eventually built was, as he says, not the grander, more decorative house he originally envisioned. "I kept the original features, took my wife's advice on changes, and shrunk the house down. It was now just a two bedroom, one bathroom house. But a very cool one." That's what this 150-page project feels like to me. Berger has kept it simple and kept it clear, and it is, ultimately, just another book on education. But a very cool one. I'd read it if I were you.

Postscript: I found myself thinking about Berger's argument about the importance of culture when I was reading another book this weekend, a book called King's Gambit, Paul Hoffman's very well-written and entertaining book about chess. While framed as a personal narrative of sorts, it has whole digressive chapters about the psychology of chess, and tournament play, and about chess in pop culture and literature and in history. Discussing the near-total domination of the Russians at the highest levels of chess, he writes:

The Soviets dominated international chess not because they snatched children from their homes and drilled them in the Leningard Dutch Defense and the Volga Gambit, but simply because they had, as the world champion Anatoly Karpov once put it, "such a lot of people playing chess." The game also had a social status that made it far more than a pastime: cultured Muscovites might spend a Sunday afternoon at a chess match instead of the Bolshoi. If a society exposes everyone and values the game, more people are going to catch the fever and pursue it until they're world-class. (94)

(Later, he points out that "at its peak, in the early 1980s, the Soviet Chess Federation had four million members; the United States never boasted more than 95,000").

Be Sharp

2010-01-17T18:51:00.001-08:00

I have a suggestion to make: draw the sting out
as probingly as you please. Plaster the windows over
with wood pulp against the noon gloom proposing its enigmas,
its elixirs. Banish truth-telling.

That’s the whole point, as I understand it.

    - John Ashbery, "Boundary Issues"

Of the ancients, the less said, the better. That was then, this
is the beginning. Let's agree on principles, on plaster, on wood pulp,
on wire. Let's put a line out there, let's traffic in particularities
and not get worked up about the word, the weather, whatever.
Let the letters themselves line up in silence and stand for nothing
but what they are: an G, an E, the shadow of an F, maybe. So what
if C flat is really not the same as B sharp? It was a good joke,
a random thought, and perhaps the more apt for being imaginary.

At the museum the sign said, "Paint what you can't see; see
what you see." No real attribution, not that it matters much.
The point is there's a point there, which I take to be,
there's no point in mere replication. The world speaks for itself,
more eloquently than you or I might hope to say on its behalf.
And yes, it's tragic, and pointless, it leaves us dumb. And so
we turn our attention back inward, we tap a little rhythm
on the table and let ourselves drift back: that day at the farm

when the log came sailing over the wheelbarrow and opened
a hole over the eye, standing stunned and blood everywhere.
Surprise. And later, lesson learned. Or that time on the ladder,
when the wood under the crowbar suddenly splintered and
out you sailed, pinwheeling to the oh so solid earth. That one
hurt too. That's the thing about composition: you start over there,
but what with one thing and another you wind up with windows,
with wells, with nothing that adds up to much, and then its over.

Train Coming

2010-01-14T16:59:00.001-08:00

In a recent post, Will Richardson references Allan Collins and Richard Halverson’s new book Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, and cites a review of that book which says

Allan Collins and Richard Halverson’s compelling argument for rethinking education may be encapsulated thus: We are not going to fix education by fixing the schools. They are a 19th century invention trying to cope in the 21st century…If schools cannot change fast enough to keep pace with the advances in learning technologies, learning will leave schooling behind. Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology urges education stakeholders to envision a new kind of education that decouples learning and schooling.

This is a topic that has been on my mind for some time. Last year, as I was reading Clayton Christensen's Disrupting Class, I ran across a jarring projection:

The result of these four factors — technological improvements that make learning more engaging; research advances that enable the design of student-centric software appropriate to each type of learner; the looming teacher shortage; and the inexorable cost pressures — is that ten years from the publication of this book, computer-based, student-centric learning will account for 50 percent of the "seat miles" in U.S. secondary schools. Given the current trajectory of substitution, about 80% of the courses taken in 2024 will have been taught online in a student-centric way. (102)

I've seen other estimates that by the year 2016 half of all high school courses taken for credit will be online courses. Now, I don't know how exactly these estimates were arrived at, or how accurate these projections will turn out to be. But if the estimates are even marginally correct, we in the brick-and-mortar world of education are in for a real revolution. It seems to me that there's a train coming down the track, bearing down upon us and threatening to flatten us, but we've got our backs turned to it and our earbuds on and we don't seem to see it or hear or or talk about it much.

Last night at my school we had some visitors from San Diego's High Tech High doing a presentation to local private school heads and board members, and one of them, Ben Daley, was the first person who I have heard say out loud what I have been thinking. The main difference was that my metaphor was a freight train, his was a tidal wave. And he joked, in all seriousness, that a year ago those people who did pay attention to this prediction laughed at it as being unrealistically overestimated, whereas now the people who are laughing at it are doing so because they think it's unrealistically underestimated.

If it's true, if it's even possible, that in five years, or ten years, students anywhere in the country will be able to create their own courses of study and sign up for credit-bearing courses online, then the obvious question is "What are they going to need schools for?" Thinking about "a new kind of education that decouples learning and schooling" forces us to think about pragmatics as well. Why would students bother to show up for school when they can study at their own time at their own pace at home? Why would parents want to pay upwards of of ten or twenty or thirty or even forty thousand dollars a year for private school tuition when their students can learn on their own for a whole lot less? What will the proper function of a school be when it is no longer necessary for students to attend schools?

There are answers to these questions, but I'm not hearing or seeing them being articulated. So maybe that's something I'll work my way around to somwhere down the line.

Image via Glenbourne at Home on Flickr.

Grades, Learning, and Motivation

2010-01-09T21:33:00.001-08:00

The other day the principal at my school sent along a query from an administrator from a school in California who was asking for a response to some questions about grades and how they impact student attitudes toward learning. They are good questions, and I decided to take a shot at answering them. The answers I have come up with are provisional and represent my attempt to come up with something that makes sense to me. They certainly don't represent an official statement of school policy. And even as I re-read what I have written, I see places where I could come up with equally plausible arguments which would contradict much of what I am saying here. But, for what it's worth, here's what I wrote. Or a version of what I wrote, I've taken the opportunity to do some elaborations here.

1. How does your grading policy enhance or compromise your school's educational philosophy or mission statement?

Well, it has the potential to do either, or both. We have had many discussions on campus over the years about grading and its impact on the learning process. Some teachers go out of their way to avoid or de-emphasize grades (using portfolio assessments, for example, or simply maintaining an atmosphere of purposeful vagueness with regard to grades) on the grounds that they artificialize they learning process, providing extrinsic motivation at the expense of the intrinsic motivation we might aspire as educators to enhance. Other teachers — and I would count myself in this group — feel that grades, despite the potential downside, do provide immediate feedback to students about their performance, letting them know what they are doing well and what they need to work on. Furthermore, grades represent a language that everyone understands, a sort of universal currency. Even if they don't agree with the logic of the grading system, and even if what the grade may actually signify in terms of performance may vary from school to school or class to class, everybody understands the logic of A, B, C, D, and F. Grades are, for better or worse, the common currency of quality evaluation in school. They are expected, and there is no easier way to drive some students (and some parents) crazy than to withhold information from them about their grades. (I have a few stories I could tell of my own in which I found myself at loggerheads with teachers who I felt were not being transparent about their grading procedures with my own children, thankfully now all grown and apparently none the worse for wear.) My own practice has been to give grades early and often, but to allow students who are so motivated to revise and resubmit any work for which they feel the grade is not satisfactory. Discussion about grades, the logic of grades, the criteria on which grades are based, the design and evolution of the rubrics in place, the distinction between importance of the grade itself and the importance of the work, the process, and the product: all of these subjects provide opportunities for purposeful dialogue with students about what quality is, how it can be assessed, and how it can be achieved.

2. How do you differentiate between formative and summative assessment in your school? What kinds of assessments do teachers at your school value?

Our summative assessments are essentially our final exams at the end of each semester, which are mandated in every department except English. All other quizzes, tests, exercises, and assignments are in essence formative: they are mean to convey useful information to students about where they are and what might come next. We have for many years used a modular schedule in which most classes meet either three or four days per six-day cycle. This schedule creates holes in both teacher and students schedules, and those holes provide many opportunities for students to visit their teachers privately and meet with them in conference to review their work and decide on next steps.

3. What kinds of pressure does the school feel from parents about grades? Is this a problem in your school?

Parents of course are concerned about grades, but my experience as a teacher at this school and also as a public school teacher in Massachusetts has been that parents are generally very open to dialogue and willing to cooperate with the teacher in trying to figure out how to support the student's efforts to do well. When a student is not doing well, or does not seem to be interested in doing well, we try to focus on the reasons for that. We try to maintain a focus on the student and not on the grade, and students and parents seem to respect and respond well to that.

4. What do you see as impediments to authentic learning in your school?

There's no question that some students get themselves worked up about grades, and impose stresses upon themselves that are related to their assumption that they have to get into a certain college or they have to have a perfect GPA. When students wind up walking themselves out onto that ledge, teachers and counselors and deans all make an effort to talk them down. So yes, that's a problem, but it's not the biggest problem. Frankly, I see two large impediments to authentic learning in most schools. The first is those teachers, fortunately a minority, who insist on ramming content learning within their own discipline down the throats of kids on the dubious assumption that the students "need" to learn this material in this way in order to be successful in college and life. I don't buy it. I would be hard put to identify any one particular set of skills or competencies, beyond the ability to read and write and cipher, that are truly essential. I'm not saying kids don't need skills: they do. But the skills one kid needs to be happy may be completely different than those another kid is going to need. One size does not fit all, nor should it. Throughout my lifetime as a student, a parent, and a teacher, I've been actively opposed to the "my way or the highway" school of pedagogy, precisely on the grounds that it is an impediment to authentic learning.

The second is the impact of pop culture in the US today — including pro sports, rap music, reality TV shows, Ultimate Fighting, online gaming, and so on and so on and so on — which is in itself inauthentic, and which makes a dedication or even an accommodation to academic success publicly unacceptable to our boys and young men. A young man today can win the admiration of his peers by being an athlete or a rock star or a surfer or a stoner or a gamer. A young man who is an aspiring scholar or writer or scientist is going to have a much rougher road to hoe with his peers, and to ask that student to have an authentic experience in learning is to ask him to work against the social and interpersonal systems that define him. I'm overgeneralizing perhaps. But not by much. It's certainly not impossible for such a student to succeed, even succeed brilliantly, but such successes are much less frequent and much more dearly bought than they should be in a country that prides itself on its tradition of individualism and free choice.

5. What motivates students to learn at your school and what role do grades play in that? Are there structural/systems pieces that support student motivation outside of grades? What are those?

I think the pedagogical goal is to create environment which honors the individual student and gives that student the chance to ask, and to keep asking, what I consider to be the core questions that generate learning: Who am I? What do I care about? What kind of a person do I want to be? What's my responsibility to others? What do I hope to accomplish? How can I do that? We should ask students to revisit and reflect on these questions in various ways all the way from Kindergarten to Grade 12. I think that getting students engaged in taking those questions seriously essentially makes questions of motivation disappear. Students who aren't motivated tend to be students who can't see the connection between what they care about and what they are doing in school. As educators we should try to help them find that connection, every day, in every subject.

6.What are the emotional issues for students with very low and/or very high grades? How do you address those?

Students with high grades sometimes seem to get stuck on maintaining a high GPA as opposed to maintaining a high curiosity quotient. That can create emotional and attitudinal problems. But again, I don't think it has to. If those students are also addressing the questions I just ran through, it can help to defuse the problems. Students with low grades have other issues. Again, I think it's best to talk with the student about what's going on and work from there.

On The Road Again

2010-01-03T22:08:00.001-08:00

Went to see The Road, finally. It's only playing at one theater in Hawaii now, and I figured if I wanted to see it, I'd better see it before it disappeared. The theater was empty but for a couple of middle-aged couples and a couple of guys behind me who probably only decided to see it because Avatar was sold out again. On the way out after the movie, one of them said to the other, "You know what the best thing about that movie was? The popcorn." The other laughed ruefully in agreement.

I didn't see it that way, but I can understand their disappointment. Judged simply as a movie, an entertainment, there's not much to go on. There are only a few characters, very little dialogue, not much in the way of action, and it's dark. Really dark. It comes by the darkness honestly. The novel is an exercise in the exploration of physical and moral darkness, and implicitly (in the movie the point is made perhaps too explicitly) against the light individuals may choose to carry against it. But McCarthy's novel is carried and made convincing by its language, and the language is a distillation and extension of the style McCarthy has been honing throughout his life as a writer. Take away the language, and you strip the story of its most of its resonance. Unless you manage to find a way to substitute something else for the language. And in cinema, what you've got instead of language is images. That's what made this movie fascinating for me to watch, to see how close, given the inherent problems, the movie could come to re-creating the impact of one in the realm of the other. I'm reminded of a line from Robert Frost where he says (of the attempt to convey spirit in terms of matter, which in this context seems apt) "That is the greatest attempt that ever failed." Take the following passage from the book, for example:

They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon a roadside gas station. They stood in the road and studied it. I think we should check it out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about them. They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps. The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The pumps standing with their hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact. The door to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use. Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in the door. A metal desk, a cash register. Some old automotive manuals, swollen and sodden. The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof. He crossed to the desk and stood there. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father's house in that long ago. The boy watched him. What are you doing? he said.

This is a very pictorial description, and in the movie this scene, or the first part of it, is rendered exactly. (There were in fact very few surprises in the movie. The scenes they choose to include were often perfectly literal transcriptions of scenes from the book.) But what is a director to do with a line like "The weeds they forded fell to dust around them," and the chains of association that go skittering through the mind after reading those words? Or the line about dialing the number of his father's house? In prose, that line is both revelatory and reverberatory: it's a conscious choice that reveals a subconscious inclination with origins that we can perhaps infer. But there's no way to make it work in the movie. (In this case, in the movie the phone calls gets left out entirely.)

That much said, director John Hillcoat has worked very hard to create a visual style for the movie that does in fact serve as a plausible visual analogue for McCarthy's prose. It's a beautiful movie to watch, for all its darkness. The world it creates does look and feel like the world McCarthy has created. The problem is, if anything, the dark grandeur of the burning planet generates more appreciative attentiveness than the human drama being played out. Maybe that's the point, I dunno.

And Robert Duvall has a wonderful ten minute cameo as an old man they encounter on the road. I didn't realize he was in the movie, and I didn't recognize him at first, underneath the layers of makeup — wrinkles, bad teeth, a beard, and cataracts — that transformed him into reality-wracked old-timer, but as he went into his spooky monologue over the campfire in the evening something in the intonations of his voice and the tilt of his head made me say, "My god, it's Duvall." And sure enough, it was.

Anyway, I'm glad I saw the movie. And the main impact of it was to make me want to go back and read the book again.

(Why "again" in the title? Because I wrote about the book before, here.)

Surfaces

2010-01-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

I've been working on a series of panels the last few months. I originally got the idea from looking at some work by Alan Leitner, a Hawaii artist who does large abstracts that have these amazing surfaces. Then, as I have written about before, I got interested in the work of Gerhard Richter, whose abstracts are constructed layer by layer by layer. So I started working on plywood panels, a foot and a half to two foot square, with the idea of just trying to explore surfaces and layers and textures. I had seen Scottie Flamm, another Hawaii artist, working on a painting at the Bethel Street Gallery one day, using color worked into a thick medium that turned out to be Venetian Plaster. So I got myself a gallon of that and began using it with serrated putty knives to create underlayments that I could then go back over with layers of color of various degrees of transparency. Yesterday I spent a couple hours mounting the panels on bracing made of square hardwood dowels. Now instead of feeling tentative and flimsy they look and feel more solid. Here's four from the current sequence:

Sketches

2010-01-01T14:38:00.001-08:00

Visited the Honolulu Academy of Arts yesterday to take a second look at the Hokusai exhibit, which I had gone to see earlier in the week. One of the things I like best about the Academy is the way it is laid out, with a number of small courtyards. I've been trying to get back into some kind of rhythm with drawing and writing, so I sat and sketched two views inside. The first one is not very convincing; the whole middle section with the columns doesn't represent well. But the second one has a little bounce to it, and comes close to capturing the combination of light and order that I find there.

Spinning the World

2009-12-31T13:08:00.001-08:00

Two years ago October I wrote a post in which I gave some examples of one of the stylistic devices which often creates a certain kind of rhetorical intensity: the list in parallel. This other night as I was reading Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, I was arrested by two passages. Sol Soderburg, a trial judge in the New York City court system, is thinking back, somewhat ruefully, to his first days on the job, his naive aspirations:

He was a man who believed in the absolute of the law. He would be able to weigh and dissect and ponder and make a change, give something back to the city where he'd been born He always felt that he had skirted the city's edges and now he would take a pay cut and be at its core. The law was fundamental to how it was imparted and to what degree it could contain the excesses of human folly. He believed in the notion that even when laws were written down they ought not to remain unaltered. The law was work. It was there to be sifted. He was interested not just in the meaning of what could be, but what ought to be. He would be the coal face. One of the important miners of the morality of the city. The Honorable Solomon Soderberg...

He had walked in, his very first day, with his heart on fire. Through the front entrance. He wanted to savor it. He'd brought a brand-new suit from a swanky tailor on Madison Avenue. A Gucci tie. Tassels on his shoes. He approached the building in a great swell of anticipation. Etched on the wide, gold-colored doors were the words THE PEOPLE ARE THE FOUNDATION OF POWER. He stood a moment and breathed it all in. Inside, in the lobby, there was a blur of movement. Pimps and reporters and ambulance chasers. Men in purple platform shoes. Womean dragging their children behind them. Bums sleeping in the window alcoves. He could feel his heart sink with each step. It seemed for just a moment that the building could still have the aura—the high ceilings, the old wooden balustrades, the marble floor—but the more he walked around, the more his spirits sank. The courtrooms were even worse than he remembered. He shuffled around, dazed and disheartened. The corridor walls were graffitied. Men sat smoking in the back of the courtrooms. Deals were going down int the bathrooms. Prosecutors had holes in their suits. Crooked cops roamed about, looking for kickbacks. Kids were doing complicated handshakes. Fathers sat with smacked-out daughters. Mothers wept over their long-haired sons. On the courtroom doors, the fancy red leather pouching was slit. Attorneys went by with with battered attaché cases. He ghosted past them all, took the elevator upstairs, then pulled up a chair at his new desk. There was a piece of dried chewing gum underneath the desk drawer. (254-5)

Soderberg's early initiation into disillusionment eventually leads him to a diminished but more realistic sense of his own role within the context of a system whose dysfunctionality threatens at every moment to overwhelm him:

At the words of times he thought, I'm a maintenance guy. I'm a gatekeeper, a two-bit security man. He watched the parade come in and out of his courtroom, which Part he was in that day, and he wondered how the city had become such a disgusting thing on his watch. How it lifted babies by the hair, and how it raped seventy-year-old women, and how it set fires where lovers slept, and how it pocketed candy bars, and how it shattered ribcages, and how it allowed its war protesters to spit in the faces of cops, and how the union men ran roughshod over their bosses, and how the Mafia took hold of the boardwalks, and how fathers used their daughters as ashtrays, and how bar fights spun out of control, and how perfectly good businessmen ended up urinating in front of the Woolworth Building, and how guns were drawn in pizza joints, and how whole families got blown away, and how paramedics ended up with crushed skulls, and how addicts shot heroin into their tongues, and how shopkeepers gave back the wrong change, and how the mayor wheezed and wheedled and lied while the city burned down the the ground, got itself ready for its own little funeral of ashes, crime, crime, crime. (256-7)

One thing that interests me here how McCann has resisted the temptation to make this list more poetic or verbally flamboyant than it is. This is not McCann's inventory, not a writerly list, but Soderberg's. Such force as it develops along the way is by way of calling attention not to the the writer, nor even to the criminal justice system, but to to frame of mind of Sol Soderberg. It's an efficient means of characterization. And it turns out that all of this description of the discouraging tedium of daily life at court is by way of setting up a special event, a special day, a case that comes his way that in allows him for at least one moment to step see and experience himself differently.

That contrast is mirrored in the book as a whole, which is itself an accumulation of very precisely rendered if not always heartwarming details, all of which turn out to be by way of accounting for the circumstances and identity of a new character, introduced in the last chapter, whose story is product, the momentary culmination, of everything that has gone before. It's a remarkable story, and a very satisfying book.

Up on the Wire

2009-12-30T11:46:00.001-08:00

I may be one of the last people on the planet to have found out about this, but friend of mine sent me this video yesterday morning. Later in the day, as I was browsing through the New York Times online, I noticed this op ed piece about the cyclist, Danny MacAskill, and the impact that the video, which according to the article is "the Top Favorited sports video in YouTube History," on McAskill's life.

What interested me about the video is not so much what it shows, mind-boggling as that may be, but what it implies about what isn't shown: the the 10,000+ hours of practice, the falls, the miscues, the injuries, the pain. I've never quite grokked the skateboarding ethos: kids on the street spending hours and hours obsessively practicing a set of skills that have no practical value and often constitute an considerable annoyance to those within earshot. For what, exactly? But out of every thousand kids who waste amazing amounts of time on something they'll never be much good at, and at the expense of learning something else that might actually serve a purpose, for them or somebody else, there are always perhaps one or two guys like MacAskill who manage to raise their skill level in whatever idiosyncratic discipline they are engaged in to the point where it's somehow transcendent, inspirational, even somehow spiritual. The Zen of Bicycling.

I've spent a lot of the last few days deeply engrossed in Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. I think it's a terrific book, broad and deep and profound in many ways, and I'll probably have more to say about it in days to come. But the reason I'm bringing it up now is that its inspiration, the founding event that gives rise to the entire imagined world of the novel and that intersects the lives of each of its characters, is the story of Philippe Petit, who had his fifteen minutes of fame in 1974 when he snuck in to the World Trade Center Towers, stretched a tightrope between them, and spent 45 minutes on the wire in full view of thousands of people. Colum McAnn uses that act of imaginative daring as a kind of symbolic reference point both for his characters and, inevitably, for himself inthe writing of the novel, a high-wire act of a different kind. One of the risks the McAnn takes is in the range and depth of his characterizations. Major characters include an Irish Catholic Missionary, a New York socialite grieving the loss of her son in the Vietnam War, a prostitute, a trial judge, and the funambulist himself. McCann often writes extended passages that get deep inside the minds of each of these characters. Here, for example, we are in the mind of the tightrope walker as he steps out onto the wire:

On the night of the walk it took them ten hours to string the furtive cable. He was exhausted. He hadn't brought enough water. He thought perhaps he mightn't even be able to walk, so dehydrated that his body would crack on movement. But the simple sight of the cable tightened between the towers thrilled him. The call came across the intercom from the far tower. They were ready. He felt a bolt of pure energy move through him: he was new again. The silence seemed made for him to sway about in. The morning light climbed over the dockyards, the river, the gray waterfront, over the low squalor of the East Side, where it spread and diffused—doorway, awning, cornice piece, window ledge, brickwork, railing, roofline—until it took a mighty leap and hit the hard space of downtown. He whispered on the intercom and waved to the waiting figure on the south tower. Time to go.

One foot on the wire—his better foot, the balancing foot. First he slid his toes, then his sole, then his heel. The cable nested between his big and second toes for grip. His slippers were thin, the soles made of buffalo hide. He paused there a moment, pulled the line tighter by the strength of his eyes. He played out the aluminum pole along his hands. The coolness rolled across his palm. The pole was fifty-five pounds, half the weight of a woman. She moved on his skin like water. He had wrapped rubber tubing around its center to keep it from slipping. With a curve of his left fingers he he was able to tighten his right-hand calf muscle. The little finger played out the shape of his shoulder. It was the thumb that held the bar in place. He tilted upward right and the body came slightly left. The roll in the hand was so tiny no naked eye could see it. His mind shifted space to receive his old practiced self. No tiredness in his body anymore. He held the bar in muscular memory and in one flow went forward.

Wow. I could write for the rest of the day about all of the stuff that's going on there. But I guess the thing that I like the most is the pacing, the patience, the precision, the focus of the description. McAnn's careful focus and balance precisely mirrors that of the man he is describing. He's in the zone, and he's bringing us into it as well.

What the tightrope walker is doing, what MacAskill is doing, what McCann is doing: they are operating at a very high level of technical expertise with a terrific concentration and focus. I like that. I respect that. It makes me feel good to be a part of it, even as a spectator.

Too Much Happiness

2009-12-29T11:11:00.001-08:00

On the recommendation of several friends, I've been test-driving the Amazon Kindle app on my iPhone, and I've got to say I'm impressed. It took me about half a minute to download my first two books: Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness, and a book called The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, which is one of a lot of books available for free via the Kindle app interface.

Reading a book on the iPhone couldn't be easier. You navigate to the opening pages via the usual tap-to-select process. Once you're on the page, you tap on the right side of the page to move forward, on the left to move back, or in the middle to bring up a semi-transparent command bar that allow you to change text size or color, navigate to a specified page, or perform various other operations. You press and hold on a word, and a little dialogue bar comes up that allows you to either highlight or annotate that word. Turn the phone sideways, and you can read in landscape mode. If you want to lock it so that it stays in landscape (or portrait) no matter how you turn the iPhone, you can do that as well.

The screen is very clean and readable and easy on the eyes. The text comes at you in manageable chunks, and you can set a print size that gives you more text per screen, or less, as you prefer.

This sample image is for some reason more pixelated than the actual one on the iPhone screen, which is very clean and sharp. And it has the great advantage of being readable whether you are in daylight or in darkness. Last night I went to pick up my wife from class and was sitting outside in the car for perhaps fifteen minutes. Normally I would have tried to read a book, and would have been angling it to catch the light from a streetlight and squinting at it as I craned my neck. Instead, I sat there with the phone resting on the steering wheel for stability, finished one of Munro's short stories, and began another.

Alice Munro, let it be said, is one of the most capable and assured writers on the planet. She's got what amounts to perfect pitch as a writer. Her characters are ordinary people, in the throes of the dilemmas of ordinary life, and her renderings of them are deft and clean and dead on. But despite the clarity and simplicity of her writing style, she is remarkably adept at revealing the inner depths, the psychological complexities of her characters, in a manner that is acutely perceptive, often devastatingly so, and yet also compassionate. (The middle paragraph in the passage shown above is not atypical: how quickly the young woman is sketched, and how efficiently her character is nailed down in the sequence "Broad shoulders, thick bangs,tight ponytail, no possibility of a smile.")

Munro is not a satirist. She does not condescend to her characters. She is a scientist of the imagination, a writer whose powers of observation are deployed in the service of understanding. She's certainly one of the wisest writers I know.

Creation and Recreation

2009-12-28T16:00:00.001-08:00

As the New Year approaches, I've been thinking, and writing in my journal, as I generally do at this time of year, about how things are going and what resolutions I might be inclined to make if I were the sort of person who believed in making New Year's Resolutions. It's not that I'm irresolute; it's more that experience teaches that New Year's resolutions are no more likely — indeed, probably less likely — to "take" than resolutions made under less arbitrary circumstances. If as a result of the fact that I a find myself short of breath one day I resolve to eat more and exercise less, the logic of that resolution is surely more compelling than the logic associated with turning over a new leaf simply because of a calendrical change. Or so I suspect.

But the process of reflecting upon what changes might be warranted at any given moment is surely a worthwhile, value-creating exercise. And in attempting it this year I have found myself thinking about derivations, specifically about the relationship between the words "creation" and "recreation," insofar as they apply to the larger ethical and philosophical question of how we (I) might best spend our time on any given day, or hour. I'm old enough now to sense that my time is running out. I've already outlived my father, who died of a heart attack at 61. I lost a friend and colleague at the start of this school year. I've been really lucky these last ten years in Hawaii, and I know that my luck won't hold out forever. So as I approach the new year, and even as I approach each new day, I've got a voice in my head saying, "What are you going to do with this day." And often, it seems that the question of what to do with it comes down to a question of balance: what proportion of the day for creation, what part of the day for recreation.

I look at work as value-creation. In work, whether it be the work I do at my job or other kinds of product-generation like writing or drawing or painting, I am trying create something of value, something that be a source of benefit or pleasure either to me or to somebody else. Play, on the other hand, is not directly oriented toward production, but toward immediate enjoyment. For example, I play a lot of online chess. Over the past few months I've average perhaps an hour or an hour and a half a day. I enjoy it, I really do. I sit down at the computer and the time just flies by. But it's pure recreation. It serves no purpose; it creates no value; it gets nothing done. Granted, practice has made me a better player, and perhaps by myelinating those neural pathways I'm making some little contribution toward forestalling the early(er) onset of Alzheimer's. But even if I were to become a grandmaster, what good does that do anyone? And once I am dead and gone, how will that particular accomplishment have added in any way to the quotient of value and happiness in the world? And so every time I fire up the computer and sit down to play, there's this Puritanical little voice in the back of my head saying "Don't you really have anything better to do?" And the answer is, "Sure." Almost anything I might choose to do would be better than playing chess, if the criterion of judgment is productivity.

Fortunately or unfortunately, there are other voices in my head as well. Like the one chirping variations on the theme of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." We can't all be productive all the time, right? Isn't there room in every well-governed life for a judicious mixture of creation and recreation? Sure. So how do we do the math? What's the calculus of productivity? What's the ethics of recreational responsibility?

And then there's the derivation question. The root form of "create," it turns out, according to dictionary of Indo-European Roots in the back of my trusty American Heritage Dictionary, is "ker," which means "grow." It comes from the Latin Ceres, who was the goddess of agriculture, responsible for the growth of grain. Cognate words include cereal, increase, and crescendo, and more distantly, adolescent and sincere. So that's a nice little cluster of words with positive connotations. But how do we get "recreation" from re-creation? Perhaps there is some sense in which making something the first time is work, but "making it again" is just for fun? Is "recreation" somehow therefore a mere shadow or vestige of "creation?"

All of which puts me in mind of the last stanza of Robert Frost's Two Tramps in Mud Time:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

And now that I read and re-read those lines, I'm conscious of the cognitive dissonance they create in me. I find myself gritting my teeth and resisting, in the reptile part of my brain, the forced logic of these lines. Frost sounds here like a scold, like a schoolmaster. He's going for profundity, but, but you can't get there if you leave out the "fun." In his best poems his playfulness and his work do balance and reinforce one another. This poem, on the other hands, feels too fully willed, too self-consciously worked out, for me. I hear the words, but I'm not convinced by them. But I can still relate to what he's trying to examine here: Avocation and vocation. Love and need. Work and play. Creation and recreation.

I'll spend some time the next few days thinking about the role that chess is going to have in my life during the New Year, whether I should perhaps give it up on the grounds that it is insufficiently creative, or whether I should set some sort of arbitrary limit upon my time playing on the grounds that balance is a good thing, or whether I should just do what I feel like and to hell with it, on the grounds that life is too short to worry about it.

Red Cliff

2009-12-22T11:53:00.001-08:00

Yesterday afternoon we went to see John Woo's Red Cliff. It was a pretty straightforward historical epic, telling the story of a group of Chinese warlords who unite against Cao Cao, a prime minister who has made himself into a warlord and is on the verge of establishing himself as the absolute ruler in China. It's beautifully filmed, well-acted, and interesting to watch throughout. I could have done without the last two minute scene, which felt sentimental and false and out of sync with the rest of the movie in much the same way as the very last scene in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, but overall I thought it was very well put together.

What really gave me goose bumps, however, was when, at the end of the movie, as the music was playing and the credits were rolling over a black screen, the words to a poem appeared, a couple of lines at a time, at the bottom of the screen. On Saturday I had written a post in which I made reference to Su Tung P'o, the 11th Century Chinese poet who, for karmic reasons still in the process of manifesting themselves, has suddenly has made his appearance in my life, via references in the poems of W.S. Merwin and Jim Harrison. And I had spent some time on Sunday and Monday tracking down what materials were available to me in on the net and in our school library. And the very first thing I had run across, on Poemhunter.com, was the very same poem that I was now seeing scrolling in front of me at the end of this movie:

Battle of Red Cliff

The Yangtze flows east
Washing away
A thousand ages of great men
West of the ramparts —
People say —
Are the fabled Red Cliffs of young Chou of the Three Kingdoms
Rebellious rocks pierce the sky
Frightening waves rip the bank
The backwash churns vast snowy swells —
River and mountains like a painting
how many heroes passed them, once ...

Think back to those years, Chou Yu —
Just married to the younger Chiao —
Brave, brilliant
With plumed fan, silk kerchief
Laughed and talked
While masts and oars vanished to flying ash and smoke!
I roam through ancient realms
Absurdly moved
Turn gray too soon —
A man's life passes like a dream —
Pour out a cup then, to the river, and the moon

So that was a weird moment. Funny how sometimes there are these unanticipated convergences, one thing connecting with another. Su Tung P'o wrote his thoughts down nine hundred years ago, and here we are today, still turning them over in our minds, noticing the same things, asking the same questions. Absurdly moving. I wonder who of our contemporaries the denizens of the world will be reading in the year 2909, and which stories of ours will have lasted long enough to inspire their moviemakers. (Acknowledging, of course, the extreme unlikelihood that there will be, by 2099, anyone around to do the reading or make the movies, or that even if there are such people, the these technologies will any longer exist, or will, like the masts and oars of Cao Cao's armada, be vanished to flying ash and smoke.)

A toast then, to the river, the moon... and to my new and ghostly friend, Su Tung P'o.

Avatar

2009-12-21T11:41:00.001-08:00

So yesterday we went to see the 3-D version of Avatar, which has arrived on a blast of the kind of hype that only a movie which wound up costing $460 million dollars seems to be able to generate. The movie has been heralded as epochal, game-changing event in the history of moviemaking. (There's a terrific recent profile of director James Cameron by Dana Goodyear in the October 26 New Yorker which makes a plausible case for that.) It has also been observed that Avatar has a five-hundred milllion dollar body and a ten-cent brain. There's an element of truth in both points of view.

Certainly it is the most amazing and consistently riveting visual experience I've ever had in a movie theatre. Even when what you're watching doesn't really hold up to logical scrutiny, it's gorgeous to look at, and there was never a moment in the movie where I found myself drifting off or reacting to anything other than the amazingly complex and richly imagined world unfolding in front of my eyes. Whatever else you might say about James Cameron, he has succeeded in putting together a movie that goes, technologically, where no movie has gone before. And it's going to make billions, so you can't fault him on having bad business sense either.

The plot is another matter. Certainly it's no worse than a thousand other movies that have been made along the same lines. There are certain buttons that moviemakers have learned to push. The are certain story lines that just get repeated over and over again because they work, because they resonate with human psychology at some basic archetypal level and elicit a very predictable response. There are no new stories. However, there's a difference between telling an old story in a way that makes it fresh, and telling an old story from a list of plot conventions so mechanically that you can almost feel the boxes being checked off. James Cameron has made his list and he's checked it twice, or maybe twice times twice times twice. Ordinary guy gets sent to alien world. Check. Has to establish his street cred with the humans already there. Check. Humans want to exploit natural resources of the alien environment. Check. Our hero gets sent undercover into the alien world and immediately faces danger. Check. Is saved by native girl. Check. From that beginning, you can go ahead and make up you own list of where we're going with this, and by the time you get done with this movie you'll find every single item on your list will have been checked off. There is nothing new under the Pandoran (or Pocahantan) sun.

Which is not an argument against seeing the movie. If there were ever a movie that qualified as a must-see, Avatar is it. It is, as advertised, just mind-blowingly, amazingly, awesomely impressive entertainment experience. There are chase scenes and fight scenes and taming-the-wild-beast scenes that are going to be talked about and admired - and, perhaps unfortunately, imitated - for years to come. You just don't want to think too hard about it after you leave the theatre.

The Old Questions

2009-12-19T21:46:00.001-08:00

Funny, both poetry books I pulled off the shelf at the library the other day (the other one is In Search of Small Gods by Jim Harrison) by poets nearing the end of their allotment of days on this planet, have poems referencing Su Tung-p'o. Even though the two writers could hardly be more different in their styles and preoccupations, they are both reading Su Tung P'o with attention and appreciation. Here's Merwin's tribute:

A Letter to Su Tung-p'o

Almost a thousand years later
I am asking the same questions
you did the ones you kept finding
yourself returning to as though
nothing had changed except the tone
of their echo growing deeper
and what you knew of the coming
of age before you had grown old
I do not know any more now
than you did then about what you
were asking as I sit at night
above the hushed valley thinking
of you on your river that one
bright sheet of moonlight in the dream
of the waterbirds and I hear
the silence after your questions
how old are the questions tonight

Friday Before Vacation

2009-12-18T15:56:00.001-08:00

Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say on a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day
That's the island greeting that we send to you from the land where palm trees sway
Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun to shine by day and all the stars at night
Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii's way to say Merry Christmas to you

Somehow the lyrics to this song mean more when it's a bunch of kindergartners belting it out. I'm ready for the Christmas break. I imagine you are too.

Inheritance

2009-12-18T10:21:00.001-08:00

The other day, in the context of a process reflection on a poem I had attempted, I had reason to speak of a dictionary I have had with me for fifty years. Yesterday I was in the library looking at the new books on display, thinking I'd see if there were anything I might want to read over vacation, and there was W.S. Merwin's 2008 volume of poetry The Shadow of Sirius, in which I discovered this poem, testimony to what a writer who knows what he is about can do with a dictionary as a jumping off point:

Inheritance

At my elbow on the table
it lies open as it has done
for a good part of these thirty
years ever since my father died
and it passed into my hands
this Webster's New International
Dictionary of the English
Language of 1922
on India paper which I
was always forbidden to touch
for fear I would tear or somehow
damage its delicate pages
heavy in their binding
this color of wet sand
on which thin waves hover
when it was printed he was twenty-six
they had not been married four years
he was a country preacher
in a one-store town and I suppose
a man came to the door one day
peddling this new dictionary
on fine paper like the Bible
at an unrepeatable price
and it seemed it would represent
a distinction just to own it
confirming something about him
that he could not even name
now its cover is worn as though
it had been carried on journeys
across the mountains and deserts
of the earth but it has been here
beside me the whole time
what has frayed it like that
loosening it gnawing at it
all through these years
I know I must have used it
much more than he did but always
with care and indeed affection
turning the pages carefully
in search of meanings

I'm taken with the arc of the poem, the way it moves. We start in the present moment with the dictionary at hand, move into the memory of being forbidden to touch it, and from there into the imagined past as Merwin tries to account for its origins. (I particularly like the way we are moved so quickly and seamlessly into the mind of Merwin's father as he reflects, in looking at the dictionary, that it would "represent a distinction just to own it confirming something about him that he could not even name." There are books that have spoken to me in exactly that way when I first held them in my hands.) Back into the now, looking at the cover worn "as though it had been carried on journeys," and then the elegant little dismount at the close, with Merwin's recollection of "turning the pages patiently in search of meanings." It's a poem about a book, a poem about a son, a poem about a father, a poem about being a writer and about knowing your tools. Smooth as sunrise, this one.

Westward Ho

2009-12-17T12:15:00.001-08:00

For the last few semesters I've taken Eliza up on an invitation to visit her American Lit Nature class when they are reading Robert Frost. This year, as I was going through my files in preparation for the visit, I ran across a copy of the poem that Frost read at the inauguration of John F Kennedy in 1961. Maybe it was because I had just finished reading Barack Obama's terrific Nobel Prize Acceptance speech that had me thinking about the connections between poetry and public policy. But I think that it is a measure of how much has changed, and how far we have come, that Frost felt comfortable reading a poem on a national stage in 1961 for which he would be roundly, and rightly, pilloried today.

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

I can remember reading this poem 30 years ago and not having the visceral negative reaction which it now evokes in me. How remarkable, how amazingly tunnel-visioned, this meditation on ownership appears to be now, how smugly self-enclosed this notion of "we" is, how much misery and suffering is elided in the oblique phrasing of "the land vaguely realizing westward," how snobbish the characterization of the land as being "unstoried, artless, and unenhanced" before "our" arrival.

I wrote earlier this week about Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. One of the many pleasures of that book is the number of set pieces, conversations between characters whose core beliefs are at odds with one another in ways that exemplify the perennial fault lines that have defined social and political relations throughout history. Here, from late in the book, is part of a conversation between Erasmus Kemp, the self-centered and self-righteous son of of a British merchant, and Redwood, a British army officer in charge of a garrison in Florida. Redwood is in a classic bind that has driven many men, before and since, to some combination of cynicism and alcohlism. The two have just come from a parley with at which a group of settlers, led by the British governor of the colony in Florida, have been negotiating with the leaders of the Creek Indian tribe in hopes of exacting gifts of land. Over a glass of wine, Redwood asks of Erasmus:

   '... Tell me, what did you think of the business today?'
   'Much of the time was taken was taken up with ceremony. It was interersting for me, of course, who have not seen these Indian customs before. They were all decked out in their best beads and feathers.' He laughed a little saying this.
   'So were you I suppose?'
   'What do you mean?' Erasmus said, staring.
   'Campbell in his dress uniform. Watson in his best broadcloth and silver wig and you, as always, irreproachably turned out. Just a question of fashion, really. Theirs suits the climate better."
   Obscurely displeased at this comparison, Erasmus made no immediate reply. Redwood waited a moment, then said, 'You were talking of the Calumet ceremony, the peace pipes. I have seen it often. They have come singing and dancing to their ruin with those pipes in their hands all over America.'
   'It is hardly ruin, Redwood — you are exaggerating. They will be left in possession of large tracts of land, as I understand the matter from Colonel Campbell.'
   'For how long? We daren't do otherwise at present, or they will rise against us and sweep us into the sea. Campbell is a reasonable man in his way. He knows the Creeks and has a feeling for them. But he is set on getting a favorable treaty — his career hangs on it, and it makes him wonderfully single-minded. That Indian who spoke today, who complained of trade prices, he wasn't so wide of the mark.'
   'Not wide of the mark? He accused Watson of breaking promises he had never made. He wasn't even talking of Florida, but of Georgia.'
   'That is is the point. He has seen thousands of land-hungry white settlers pouring into the Georgia back-country from Virginia and the Carolinas. Many of them have crossed the treaty line and fenced the land on the other side. Nothing has been done to stop it, and nothing will be done. And why? You know the answer as well as I do, Kemp. I suggest you know it much better. You have been having a look around, haven't you? This is prime land, and there are fortunes to be made out of it — but it is worth a lot more with no Indians on it.'
   Redwood sat back, smiling with the slightly bitter carelessness characteristic of him. There were brief soudnds from above them, steps on the stairs, then silence. 'And it is hardly necessary to us to use force of arms,' he continued. 'They are prevailed upon to cede their lands by treaty. Trade is the thing that has undone them, this great blessing of trade. Watson tells them they should be grateful for the advantages of trade. Campbell tells them they should give up their land to their English brothers for the sake of the trade goods they will get by it. They have hunted these lands for centuries without ever knowing that what they needed for happiness were muskets and looking-glasses and beads and bits of printed cotton. Now they are persuaded that they cannot live without these things. Strange, is it not?'
   Erasmus smiled, but without much warmth. What he had taken for a good-natured, rather thoughtless expansiveness, seemed quite other to him now: Redwood obtruded his views more than a man should, without first making sure they were welcome. And what he was saying was perverse, subversive even. Trade brought benefits to both sides — so much was common knowledge. Erasmus had always disliked people who took a view contrary to what was broadly agreed upon by men of sense...' (479-80)

There you have it, in a nutshell, the reality behind what Frost describes blithely as "the land vaguely realizing westward." Rich men utterly convinced of their own superiority, unable to conceive of even the possibility that their might be another point of view, relentlessly pursuing their own self-interest at the expense of those who they believe themselves to be saving.

Two of the things that I most admire about Barack Obama are first, his willingness to concede that neither he in particular nor the United States government in general has a monopoly on the truth, and second, his willingness to say that out loud in the face of his many critics who want nothing more than to characterize every conflict as a matter of, well, black and white. One of the most subtle and telling passages in Obama's Nobel speech comes when he says that the promotion of human rights must be "coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with oppressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach — condemnation without discussion — can only carry forward a crippling status quo."

"The satisfying purity of indignation." There's a phrase that describes with telling accuracy a lot of what you hear in the media today. My hope this holiday season is that cooler heads may eventually prevail.

Prompt Response

2009-12-16T22:40:00.001-08:00

Okay, so here is a poem I worked on today using a prompt from Ken Ronkowitz's Poets Online site. Two prompts, actually. The current prompt is to write a poem about a sacred place, but the December 11 post from the Poets Online Blog - a different but connected site - suggested that readers try a triolet, so I thought I'd try to both at once.

Ever So Humble

Fifth floor. Four rooms. A small lanai.
Some bookcases, an easy chair.
Not a lot to be reckoned by:
Fifth floor, four rooms, and a small lanai.
But when the darkness floods the sky
On winter nights, I have my lair:
Fifth floor. Four rooms. A small lanai.
Some bookcases, an easy chair.

Process Reflection: When I think of sacred spaces, I don't have to go far. I live across the street from one of the most beautiful campuses on the planet. But I wanted to start even closer to home. Which is to say, AT home. I like our apartment. I have been liking it even more since returning from travel, which is one of the nice things about travel.

Formally, this was sort of a fun puzzle. When you work in forms, you have to work back and forth from the free lines to the constrained lines. In this form, lines two, six, and eight made me sweat some. Since two and eight are the same line repeated, it has to be a line that works in two slightly different ways. And it has to end in a word that can be rhymed in line six. Originally line two read "Some furniture, some books." But there aren't a whole lot of words that rhyme with "books," and none that I could use. I tried half a dozen other lines before hitting on this one. Then I wound up having to break out my old Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, the one my high school English teacher said every student should own, and which I had re-bound some twenty years ago when it started to fall apart. It's no longer even my dictionary of choice, that being the American Heritage Dictionary, but it does have the singular advantage of having a little rhyming dictionary in the back. I might have found my way to "lair" without it, but having it there in front of me helped.

Chess

2009-12-15T22:53:00.001-08:00

I don't know when exactly I started playing chess. I know that I learned the basic moves from my mother when I was perhaps seven or eight years old, and used to play with her, or with one of my visiting cousins, on those rare occasions when I could talk someone into a game. The problem with chess is that unless you belong to a club or have a large pool of possible candidates to play with, it is hard to find an opponent at your level. Chess is a game, like table tennis, which has such a range of skill levels that it's very hard to find a good match. A good C level player is going to beat a recreational player consistently, but get crushed most of the time by a good B level player. The B level player stands no real chance against a master, and the master isn't going to win very often against an international grandmaster. So it's hard to find someone with whom you can have a game which isn't a drubbing on one side or the other. It wasn't until I got to college and made the acquaintance of two college professors who liked to play that I began to play with any regularity. But I enjoyed playing with those two, and came to enjoy the focused, microcosmic gestalt of the chess board. It's an interesting little world down there, with its patterns and its formalities and its surprises. One comes to understand and appreciate the distinction between strategy and tactics, and to learn how pieces with remarkably different individual capabilities can be made to work together. Or not.

During my first year of teaching elementary school in Massachusetts, I organized a little chess club as an afterschool activity for my fifth graders. That was in 1971. The following year was the year of the Fischer-Spassky showdown in the World Chess Championship, the moment in my lifetime when suddenly a chess match was big news and was being followed all over the world by newspaper and television reporters. My kids were mesmerized. Membership in the chess club doubled. Suddenly, chess was the in thing. In 1973 I moved from my (small) elementary school to our (large) brand new Middle School, and some of the kids who moved with me wanted me to keep the chess club going. Word got around, and soon we had 20 or 30 kids after school twice a week coming to chess club. It turned out that several other local middle and junior high schools had chess clubs as well, so the next thing I knew I was president of the South Shore JHS Chess League. Those were interesting years. During the season, I'd take a group of kids in my car once a week to a neighboring town and we'd play a five-board competition. Many of my players also got hooked up with the USCF which was sponsoring local tournaments on weekends. Attendance was way up due to the Fischer-Spassky phenomenon. Because the students were playing, I often wound up playing in the adult sections myself.

Fast forward forty years. It's 2009, and technology has solved the problem of finding people to play. There are a number of sites which allow you to play online, either against a chess program, or, my preference, against real people in real time. I've become a big fan of Instantchess.com. When you go to the site and log in you are started off with a rating of 1500. It's a regular ladder format. You are matched up against other players online at the time, and you can choose whether or not you want to play them. If you defeat a higher-rated player, you get more points than if you defeat a lower-rated player. If you lose to a higher-rated player, you lose less points that if you lose to a lower-rated player. The interface is easy to use. To move a piece you just drag you just drag it from where it is to where you want it to be. You can choose play in various time formats. My favorite is Rapid Chess, in which each player is allotted fifteen minutes. If you run out of time, no matter what the position on the board, you lose. You can sign in to play as a guest, but if you choose you can also pay a subscription fee and be a regular member, in which case it keeps stats for you and allows you to save favorite games so that you can review and/or analyze them.

Here's a screen shot from the end of a game I played last week. I have just played my rook from f1 to d1, and Abu has a problem with his bishops.

I've gone through several stages in my experience with Instantchess. I often will subscribe for a couple of months and play for an hour or two a day until the whole scene starts to get old. Sometimes I let my subscription lapse, then resubscribe a few months later. But I always wind up coming back. It's just too much fun. What I like about chess: there are no excuses. There is no luck involved. Either you play well or you don't. If you screw up, it's on you. It's a very pure game in that respect. In the beginning I tended to be streaky, winning a series of games and running my rating up to 1700 or 1800, and then going on horrendous streaks where I would play like a patzer, making blunder after blunder and seeing my rating sink away. During the last two months, I've been more consistent, my rating hovering in the neighborhood of 1850. (Some of the players online have ratings above 2400.) I've been playing the same openings oten enough now that I remember the patterns and feel them in a way I hadn't before, and in a way that it is very tedious to try to learn from books. If someone makes a move that gives me a little advantage, I've learned how to take that advantage and drive a wedge into it: a little space here turns into a pawn advantage there turns into a positional advantage there that turns into an attack that wins a piece. Theoretically. But there's always the humbling meltdown that comes when you least expect it. The other day, for example I briefly cracked 1900 for the first time, at which point I went into a free fall all the way back down to 1760 in a matter of a day and a half. Now I'm trying to stabilize.

Anyway, for those of you who have been wondering what I've been doing on all those days I never got around to posting anything on Throughlines: now you know. And for those of you closeted chess aficianados who can't get anyone to play you, now you know where to go. In fact, I've got some free prepaid one-month subscription vouchers. If you're interested, let me know and I'll send one along.