Proust and the Squid

I've spent the last four days reading one of the best books about education that I've ever gotten my hands around. It goes by the unlikely name of Proust and the Squid, and the subtitle is "The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." Maryanne Wolf, the author is a cognitive scientist, an educator, a parent, and a formidably talented reader and writer. In this book, she manages to convey in a comprehensive and comprehensible way the status of our current understanding of reading as a process from pretty much every relevant point of view: historical, psychological, physiological, sociological, and educational. She appears to have read pretty much everything ever written or published that relates to the history and science of reading, and she manages to organize this mountain of data into a series of clear and funny and eminently readable segments that are intellectually satisfying and aesthetically pleasing. The book is divided up into three main parts: "How the Brain Learned to Read" (the historical analysis); "How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time" (the physiological analysis); and "When the Brain Can't Learn to Read" (the pedagogical analysis). Each of these parts is in turn divided into three chapters, which can be read more or less independently as self-contained essays ("The Birth of an Alphabet and Socrates' Protests," for example). There are about 30 very helpful illustrations that help the reader visualize the brain processes being discussed. The book is also sprinkled liberally with quotations from all sorts of sources — literary, scientific, and personal — that speak to or illustrate the themes developed in each chapter.

I've done a lot of underlining and highlighting and dogearing in this book, and have already had occasion, several occasions actually, to go burrowing back into the book to revisit a passage that had set ideas rattling about in my head. A couple of examples:

Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading. A little-discussed class system invisibly divides our society, with those families that provide their children environments rich in oral and written language oppportunities gradually set apart from those who do not, or cannot. A prominent study found that by kindergarten, a gap of 32 million words already separates some children in linguistically impoverished homes from their more stimulated peers. In other words, in some environments the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five. (20)

From a cognitive perspective, therefore, it is again not that the alphabet uniquely contributed to the production of novel thought, but rather that the increased efficiency brought about by alphabetic and syllabary systems made made novel thought more possible for more people, and at an earlier stage of the novice reader's development. This then, marks the revolution in our intlellectual history: the beginning democratization of the young reading brain. Within such a broadened context, there can be no surprise that one of the most profound and prolific periods of writing, art, philosophy, and science in all of previously recorded history accompanied the spread of the Greek alphabet. (66)

(A concluding paragraph from a section considering Socrates Objection to writing on the grounds that it would weaken the powers of memory of the Greek citizenry, which Wolf sees as an analogue to current debates about, for example, whether Google is Making Us Stupid ):

Questions from access to knowledge run throughout human history — from the fruit of the tree of knowledge to Google. Socrates’ concerns become greatly amplified by our present capacity for everyone with a computer to learn very, very quickly about virtually anything, anywhere, anytime at an “unguided” computer screen. Does this combination of immediacy, seemingly limitless information, and virtual reality pose the most powerful threat so far to the kind of knowledge and virtue valued by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle? Will modern curiosity be sated by the flood of pat, often superficial information on a screen, or will it lead to a desire for more in-depth knowledge? Can a deep examination of words, thoughts, reality, and virtue flourish in learning characterized by continuous partial attention and multitasking? Can the essence of a word, a thing, or a concept retain importance when so much learning occurs in thirty-second segments on a moving screen? Will children inured by ever more realistic images of the world around them have a less practiced imagination? Is the likelihood of assuming we understand the truth or reality of a thing even greater if we see it visually depicted in a photograph, film, or video or on “reality” TV? How would Socrates respond to a filmed version of a Socratic dialogue, to his entry in Wikipedia, or to a screen clip on YouTube? (77)

Recent reports from the National Reading Panel and the "nation's report cards" indicate that 30 to 40 percent of children in the fourth grade do not become fully fluent readers with adequate comprehension. This is a devastating figure, made even worse by the fact that teachers, textbook authors, and indeed the entire school system have different expectations from grade 4 on. This approach is encapsulated in the mantra that in the first three grades a child "learns to read," and in the next grades the child "reads to learn." After children leave the third grade, teachers expect them to have sufficiently automatic reading skills that enable them to learn more and more "on their own," from increasingly difficult text materials. Through no fault of their own, most fourth-grade teachers never take a course in teaching reading to children who have not acquired fluency. (135)

Jackie Stewart, the Scottish racing driver, won twenty-seven Grand Prix titles, was knighted by Prince Charles, and had one of the world's most successful racing careers before he retired. He is also dyslexic. Recently, he concluded a speech at an international scientific conference on dyslexia by saying, "You will never understand what it feels like to be dyslexic. No matter how long you have worked in this area, no matter if your own children are dyslexic, you will never understand what it feels like to be humiliated your entire childhood and taught every day to believe that you will never succeed at anything. (165-6)

That's a preliminary sampler. I will have more to say about spinoff issues in later posts. But this is a start.

One sometimes reads blurbs that say something to the effect that "This is a book which is a must read for every parent and educator." I've never had occasion to use that particular phrasing. Until now.

Intricacies, Frictions, Evasions

My school is now knee-deep in preparations for the visit of the WASC accreditation team which will be arriving in the spring of 2010 for its regular visit, which occurs every six years. Part of our responsibility to prepare for the visit is to conduct a self-study, and the part of the self study which has consumed a lot of our time so far is the creation of a compact "current reality" statement which we can share with various constituencies within the school community — students, teachers, faculty, admin, staff, and parents — in order to test our sense of who we are and get feedback as to what we need to re-think and what items should show up in the school improvement plan which will need to include in the report which will be presented to the visiting committee. During our work on drafting the current reality statement, we have found ourselves returning to a set of words which come about as close as any we can think of to defining the educational goals of the school within the context of the school's mission statement. The phrasing goes something like this: as a school our goal is to create environments which support flexibility, collaboration, and individual attentiveness.

I've already written one post, just as we were getting started with this process in June, which mentioned this particular formulation and went on to explore some thoughts I had with regard to collaboration. Today I have it in mind to try to work into the idea of attentiveness. It's kind of a subtle word. It means something more, for example, than "attention." Asking students, our ourselves, to pay attention seems to me to be a slightly different thing than asking them to be attentive or to practice the discipline of attentiveness. "Attention" is the direction of the mind's eye, "the concentration," according to the AHED, "of the mental powers upon an object." "Attentiveness," on the other hand, seems to imply the willed extension of attention to an object over time. "Attention" is an action of the mind; "attentiveness" is a habit of mind. There is an ethical dimension to attentiveness: to be attentive to manifest a certain attitude toward one's work, to accept a certain kind of responsibility, to be, well, "care-ful."

What might this kind of care, this kind of responsibility, look like in the classroom? Well, as an English teacher, I can offer the example of the discipline of reading poetry, which certainly demands of its readers a different sort of attentiveness that associated with most other kinds of reading. Denis Donoghue, reviewing in the current (September '08) issue of Harpers a book about the status of poetry in the modern world, comes up in his closing paragraph with this observation:

Reading a poem entails, to a special degree, the act of paying attention; we are required to concentrate our minds, not only to the extent we do habitually on words as they pass in ordinary life but as we are impelled to do on words in the intricacies, frictions, and evasions of lyric form. That so much in contemporary life encourages us to do otherwise—to accept things as they are, whether for the sake of ignorance or convenience—suggests, finally, why it is that poetry matters. (98)

I like that, especially the sequence about the "intricacies, frictions, and evasions" of poetry. Which is not to say that there aren't intricacies, frictions, and evasions everywhere we turn; the three words might serve as the title of a book about the current presidential campaign, or your school, or mine, or your family, or mine. But what Donogue is suggesting is that while in everyday life we mostly choose not to pay attention to the complexities, not to hold ourselves that responsible, if we wish to think of ourselves as good readers of poetry, we have to raise the bar, so to speak, we are "required to concentrate our minds" and to commit ourselves to a more elaborated and painstaking process of attentiveness. By way of illustration of what might be entailed is a handout that over the years I have been in the habit of giving to my English students. It is my own lightly edited and slightly elaborated version of a handout that was given to me in 1978 by Helen Vendler, who was my instructor that summer during an NEH fellowship program for teachers:

Some Ways to Scan a Poem

The quality of your reading of a poem has to do with the quality of the attention you pay to the poem. There are many things to consider when reading a poem, and it's probably not possible to do all of them simultaneously. That's one of the values of re-reading: it allows you to focus on one or two things each time. One term for such a reading is "scanning," which basically means reading with one particular question or purpose or element in mind. Eventually, with sustained, patient attention during the course of multiple scannings, you can arrive at a fully-rounded awareness of all of the elements of the poetic performance.

1. Literally. What does the poem say or assert? What parts of it make sense on first reading? What parts of it create questions in your mind? What words don't you know? (Look them up.)
2. Structurally. How many parts does the poem have? What is the logic of the sequence of the parts? Is there a "turn" in the poem at one or more points? A shift in structure or logic? How does the poem up? Is there an implied antecedent scenario? How does the poem end? What's the effect of the ending? Where are the surprises in the poem?
3. Syntactically. What sort of sentences appear in the poem? (interrogatives, exclamations, apostrophes, etc.) What sort of phrases? voice? mood? tense? logical articulations?
4. Imagistically. Where and what are the images in the poem? What sorts of imagery are there? What patterns? consistent? coherent? developmental? drawn from nature? from culture? from literature?
5. Figuratively. Are there explicit figures of speech: similes or metaphors? Are there parts of the poem which can only be taken literally? which can be can be taken literally or figuratively? which can be only be taken figuratively? Are there perhaps several levels of significance which exist simultaneously? How do they reinforce or work against each other?
6. Musically. What sounds does the poem consist of? What patterns of sound? (rhyme? half-rhyme? assonance? consonance? onomatopoeia? How does the music of the poem reinforce, or perhaps work against, other elements in the poem?
7. Grammatically. What parts of speech get the most use? are they clustered in notable ways? does usage change over time (e.g. a passage from the definite to the indefinite article, or from concrete nouns to abstract nouns)?
8. Lexically. What kinds of words are being used? What sort of diction (mythological, allegorical, naturalistic, speculative, scientific, discursive)? Is there a logic to the selection of words?
9. Prosodically. What is the rhyme scheme? the stanza form? the total form? the metrical pattern?
10. Imaginatively. What is the founding imaginative act of the poem? (imagining the conjunction of Leda and Zeus? imagining models of human life? imagining that there are mental seasons paralleling the natural seasons, etc. What is the attraction of this act of imagination?
11. Tonally. What tone (or tones) is taken up by the poet toward his or her material? (the same content can be treated ironically, humorously, sublimely, parodically, etc.)
12. Aesthetically. What particular type of beauty is being aimed at? a "terrible beauty"? or a "touching" or "pathetic" or "invigorating" or "sublime" or "humorous" or "fanciful" or "whimsical" beauty, etc. And how is that effect brought about? What parts of the poem strike you as being particularly effective or "poetic." Where is the poem most successful, closest to its ideal self?
13. Generically. What subgenre does the poem belong to? In what way does it conform to the expectations of that subgenre? In what way does it deviate from them, reformulate them, overthrow them? (Some subgenres: ode, elegy, eulogy, panegyric, confession, definition, boast, farewell, etc.)
14. Allusively. References to other literary works, predecessors, poetic tradition?
15. Culturally. Is the poem orthodox or heterodox with respect to the received ideas of its culture (blasphemy, paradox, revolutionary ideas, etc.)?
16. Authorially. (That is, adopting the perspective of a writer reading as a writer.) What has the author done? How has the author done it? What steps in the writing process might be inferred? What did this writer do that I would never have thought to do? What "moves" can be observed? What would I have to do to write something which would have the structural and stylistic features of this piece of writing? Could I come up with a "recipe"?

Well, there are more, but this is a start. When you have ''scanned" the poem in each of these ways, you are more in possession of it than when you have just read it through. When you see how these scanned levels interact in a formal dynamic to make the poem happen on the page, you are on the way to a reading of the poem. After that, you can begin to connect this one poem to others by the same poet, then to others by other poets, then to tradition as a whole.

English teachers will recognize in this list many of the moves associated with the time-honored concept of "close reading," which might itself be described as "reading with full attentiveness." Two things occur to me as I look through the list and consider the imperatives implied by the interrogatives. The first is that very few adults, not to mention students, are in the habit thinking quite so broadly (and deeply: the road to depth being through breadth) about anything, much less poetry. It's just a hell of a lot of work, for one thing. It implies a seriousness of purpose that in our surface-oriented culture might very well come across as geeky and obsessive. But the second has to do with the essential nobility of the enterprise: to make a commitment to read this carefully, to be this patient, to pay this kind of attention, is to honor both the author and ourselves.

My father used to say, "What's worth doing is worth doing well." Donoghue's argument is that the reading and writing of poetry is important at least in part because it encourages us to practice and allows us to rehearse habits of mind which are of potential value to us elsewhere. I think they're both right; that quality is a function of attentiveness, whether in the reading of poems, or the building of houses, or the maintenance of friendships. And that's why it's important that my school, our schools, consciously make it their business to create environments in which attentiveness can be experienced and practiced by our students.

Mathematical Formulations

I was unfortunate in my allotment of high school math teachers. In sophomore year, I was assigned to the class of a man I'll call Mr. Unferth. He was the largest man I had ever seen. He started at the floor at six inches wide and rose six feet seven inches into the air in roughly a V shape. He had enormous thighs, a trim waist, and the largest arms I have ever seen on a human being: his biceps were the size of cantaloupes. He had been hired by my school, a small private school with a proud football tradition, to be the offensive line coach, and apparently the only place they could find for him as a teacher turned out to be the Geometry class in which we were stuck with each other.

Unferth was, I came to realize some years later, a man victimized by his successes. Physically powerful through a genetic endowment which had been honed by thousands of hours in the weight room and on the turf, he had little sense of nuance, not much patience (especially with dweeby little upstarts like me), and no flexibility whatsoever. I doubt that he had ever encountered an obstacle he was unable to simply push out of the way, and he was not given to compromise or self-reflection.

Unferth's teaching methodology was strict and unvarying. He would ask us to take out our homework from the night before. He would read, with a not inconsiderable effort, the answers to the homework out loud to us from the teacher's manual. We were to check our own work. He would then ask one of the students to read the section of the text which explained the next set of concepts and showed example exercises. That completed, he would tell us to do get started on the homework, which was always whatever sets of questions appeared in the text. We'd settle in to work, he'd settle in studying the football playbook, and we'd start with the review of the homework the next day. Occasionally, with evident reluctance, he would venture to ask if there were any questions, but the set of his chin and the intensity of his gaze as he stared about the room basically daring any of us to call him on it, communicated very clearly that he was merely being rhetorical. In point of fact, questions made him nervous, and followup questions just basically pissed him off.

The said thing is that I actually liked geometry, as far as the subject matter went. I generally got the concepts and enjoyed doing the proofs, the problem being that I had the really annoying (to Unferth) habit of skipping over some of the steps that seemed self-evident to me, and so when he sat down to grade my quizzes he was flummoxed if the sequence of steps I had on my answer sheet did not match exactly the sequence of steps laid out in the teacher's manual. And God forbid I should attempt to either explain myself or ask him for clarification. It was a very long semester. I ended up with a D.

Senior year, in another school, I had for my Trig teacher a Jesuit priest I'll call Father Brown, known to his students as "Pa Brown" or just "Pa." Pa was a shortish, balding, husky man with glasses and an enormous pot belly which hung over the sash he wore around his waist as part of his habit, which was inevitably wrinkled and covered with food and chalk stains. My memories of Pa are much clearer than my memories of whatever it was that he was trying to teach us about math. I remember that the book was a slender hardback volume with a red cover and that it was packed densely on every page with text charts and formulas and nothing else, not so much as line drawing. Pa's daily ritual was not unlike Unferth's, although Pa was a much smarter man, and his methods of intimidation more oblique. Once we were settled in class, he would call on a student ("Mr. Dlugos, come to the board.") and dictate a problem to be solved. Then we would all watch the student intently work through problem. Once he was done, Pa would begin the process of interrogation, checking to see if Mr. Dlugos was sure of his answer or wobbling (most often the case), and then giving the other students in the class the chance to show up Dlugos or, more often, compound his ineptitude with their own, keeping Pa amused and feeding into his talent for sarcastic invective. While I somehow managed to stay under Pa's radar, and wound up with a grade which was neither remarkably good nor remarkably bad, I can honestly say that I don't remember a single thing about that class except the word "extrapolation" and the mental picture of Pa himself, in all his dishevelment. The content of the course was all just routines and words and abstract concepts that melted into one another and vaporized, and which seemed to bear no relation to anything in the physical world at all.

Which is perhaps why I was so blown away when I opened the New York Times magazine in December of 2004 and saw the article which eventually gave rise to this slide show, showing the work of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. As the intro to the slide show indicates, Sugimoto had apparently run across a set of plaster models that were manufactured in the early 20th century to help students understand complex mathematical formulas. I was struck, then as I am now, with how beautiful the pictures are as pictures. But I was just blown away by the realization that somehow, in some way that neither Pa Brown nor any of my other math teachers had ever managed to convey to me, those inscrutable sequences of numbers corresponded to and could actually be made to generate three-dimensional forms. My experience with high school math made me into a math avoider. I used to count it as one of my successes that I managed to graduate from college without taking a single math course. Now I'm not so sure it was a success, and I wish I had come to my studies of math with a different set of understandings and a different set of mentors. I know enough about education and creativity and critical thinking at this point to understand that there is no reason why study of mathematics can not be inspiring and generative and aesthetically satisfying. It's not a question of whether, it's a question of how.

Hand Me That Tool, Will Ya?

To tell you the truth, I don't remember a whole lot about elementary school. I remember the faces of a few of my teachers. I have pretty clear memories of Sister Mary Vincent, my fifth grade teacher, mostly because she was about 110 years old and a variety of creative ways of expressing her displeasure, including one memorable instance in which she picked one of my classmates up by the hair, dragged him to the blackboard, and slammed his head into the board five or six times to put the fear of God into him.

One thing I do remember is that I was absent for a week or so during third or fourth grade, I think it was, when the class covered the process for deriving a square root. I remember coming back to school and having the teacher tell me I'd have to make it up on my own following the instructions in the text. I gave it a shot, and never did figure it out. It remained a conspicuous hole in my mathematics background up until the first hand-held calculators showed up in the early 70's, at which point deriving a square root became something any moron with fingers could do. Not that I can ever recall ever having the need; the derivation of square roots has turned out to be about as useless a math skill for the average person to possess as one can well imagine.

Reason I bring this up, yesterday I got to sit in on a joint meeting of the middle school and high school math departments, one of the first such meetings that has occurred at my school in many a moon. Todd and Will, the respective department chairs, had asked the teachers to read in advance a packet of articles relating to math pedagogy, and had arranged to have the 30 or so teachers divide up into groups, one group for each of the topics that the articles had covered. My group turned out to be the group discussing calculators, and it wound up being a very interesting discussion. The original focus of the discussion had to do with the reality that while middle school students are at this point in time allowed, even encouraged, to use calculators for routine arithmetic operations, students in at least some of the grade nine classes are forbidden to do so.

I haven't spent a lot of time (any time, actually) researching the arguments of the pro- and anti-calculator factions in education or tracking the history of the debate, which has of course been around ever since calculators became ubiquitous and cheap. But I get the gist of the conflict, and got a quick review of the core positions as the discussion unfolded. The anticalcs argue that use of the calculator gives kids an excuse never to learn the basic computational skills without which one will never truly understand, much less master, mathematical thinking. The procalcs argue that there are many very bright kids who are good mathematical thinkers who for organic or developmental reasons struggle with arithmetical operations, so that use of the calculator actually frees them up to go further and deeper at the conceptual level than they ever would be able to if they were forced to do the (likely to be faulty) arithmetic on their own. Out of the instance of the freshman program, larger questions emerged. What is the logic of allowing, or forbidding, calculators in the first place? Should there perhaps be a consistent schoolwide (K-12) policy or position statement that says when and why we are going to ask, or forbid, the students to use calculators? What are the mathematical non-negotiables? Are there some operational procedures — the derivation of square roots, for example —that the invention of the calculator has made irrelevant or unnecessary for students to learn? Is long division one of those operations? Multiplication? Addition? Where do you draw the line?

From there we bumped up to the next larger frame of reference: laptops. We are well on our way to the implementation of a One-to-One laptop program in grades 4-12 (as of this moment, only grades 11 and 12 remain technologically unenhanced.) Laptops have not only multifunction calcuators of various kinds wired in, they have very sophisticated mathematical modelling programs as well, like the one that one of our physics teachers used on the opening chapel ceremony, which was built around a theme of "hearts beating as one," to give a scientific demonstration of a drum head doing a complex series of simultaneous vibrations. The concept came across very clearly, despite the fact that there was perhaps no one in the audience, with the possible exception of the teacher himself, who could have done the math necessary to produce the demonstration onscreen. So when kids walk into the math room, do we tell them to check their laptops at the door? Do we define certain types of activities or lessons or assessments as being laptop-friendly or laptop-hostile? Bottom line, is telling math students they can't use calculators any more or less reasonable than telling English students they can't use word processors? Spellcheckers? Dictionaries? When is a tool a tool, and when is a tool a crutch? Answers may vary.

Finding My Way Home

It's been a month since I've posted anything. For the middle two weeks of that month I was on vacation, visiting my family in Florida and North Carolina. Now I'm in an extended transition into my new office across the quad from my old office. Most of the boxes of materials I had packed up have not been brought over yet, so I'm in a sort of in-between space, getting to know my new location, establishing some new routines, and re-establishing some old ones. This, for example. I'd like cultivate the habit of writing something every day. Sometimes I get into that pattern, and I like it when I can make it happen; but sometimes it just gets to be too much. One of the things that I noticed when I was traveling and not writing was that I was consistently having vivid and robust dreams. I don't know if that's a function of being on the road and out of my element, whether it's the stimulation of new sensory data that's putting my brain on overload, or whether it's some sort of spillover effect from not having the outlet of writing. But my sleep for the last three weeks has been fitful and punctuated by interconnected dreams. I wake up with a dream in my head, turn over, and fall back into the same dream transformed, bent, re-channeled. In the morning I wake up, and unless I make some effort to capture the dream and make some notes, within a few minutes all the images and all sense of narrative structure has fled.

While I was in North Carolina I ran across an article in the July 28 New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer called "The Eureka Hunt," (abstract here) in which he reflects on the sources of good ideas. At one point he talks about the importance of relaxation — even drowsiness — in generating insight:

The insight process…is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focussed, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. “The relaxation phase is crucial,” Jung-Beeman said. “That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers.” Another ideal moment for insights, according to the scientists, is the early morning, right after we wake up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active. Jung-Beeman said, “The problem with the morning, though, is that we’re always so rushed. We’ve got to get the kids ready for school, so we leap out of bed and never give ourselves a chance to think.” He recommends that if we’re stuck on a difficult problem, it’s better to set the alarm clock a few minutes early so that we have time to lie in bed and ruminate. We do some of our best thinking while we’re still half asleep. (43)

I know that it's true that a lot of the ideas I have gotten for poems have come in that half-waking moment. But I don't often have the self-discipline to make the effort to capture them when I'm just waking up.

But what I'm doing now is not entirely different. It's the end of the day. I could be, and soon will be, on my way home, but right now I have a little time to relax, the time and the inclination to sit here and type. And it's, well, pleasant, to be sitting her in my new office at the end of the day following the lines of thought that my fingers are spinning out for me.

The walls and the shelves of my new office are, for the time being, mostly bare. I've spent a lot of time the last few days sorting through materials, throwing out some of them as I was packing, and throwing out others as I have been unpacking. I've got books and files that I brought with me from Massachusetts when I moved here ten years ago, some of which I haven't looked at since then. Doesn't seem likely I'm suddenly going to need any of them soon. So once the rest of my stuff arrives, I'm going to be weighing each item in mind's eye and tossing what I don't really need. Travel lighter.

I'll end with a poem by Eamon Grennan from which his book Matter of Fact, which I read on the plane to Florida and re-read on the plane back, derives its title. Grennan is thinking about Cezanne, and about how the methodology of the the artist and the writer ("excavating form from facts") might be said to overlap. The poem consists of two sentences, a statement and a question, which taken together articulate and exemplify a process of writing that makes perfect sense to me. Yes, this is what we might aspire to be able to do. That Grennan succeeds so often at it is one of the reasons I enjoy reading him so much.

Cezanne and Family

When he was excavating form from facts—
finding the geometry of trees and Mont Sainte Victoire—
he was doing what I'd like to find
a byway to, translating ravages of daily dross

into an illuminated shape or two, simple as light
but holding all the prickly specific unspeakable
matter of fact, a grasping-at (think the thousand
cuts of colour), paint laid and layered, angling

into a new veracity), that offers a centre
but no easy symmetry, coming to a point, yes,
but letting the disorderly goings-on of nature
go on, undisciplined as they are

and no containing them. Could it be like families,
I wonder, the way they don't ever or rarely ever
make clear and formal sense, and yet the facts
add up and we stand there, astonished by them?

Dubus Two

My previous post on Andre Dubus was more or less by way of setting up this one, in which I’d like to talk about The Garden of Last Days, by Andre Dubus III. Father and son share a lot of the same writerly talents and inclinations. They both tend to write with great patience and attentiveness and compassion about the lives of ordinary people. They both have a terrific ear for dialogue and an ability to render the interior movements of the minds of their characters in a sympathetic and convincing manner. And though they might not necessarily think of themselves in exactly these terms, they both are in some sense archaeologists of America and the American experience in the late 20th and early 21st experience. If you had asked me a year ago what contemporary novel I might nominate for serious consideration as a candidate for Great American Novel, I would probably have suggested Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, in which McCarthy drew upon all that he had learned in his previous writings, restricted himself to a more traditionally structured plot line based on a smaller set of characters, came up with taut and yet flexible narrative style, and put together a quintessentially American odyssey which moved with originality and grace across all sorts of American archetypes.

If you were to ask me today, I’d have to say, Cormac, move over, you’ve got company. The Garden of Last Days is a remarkable novel. If not The Great American Novel, at least a great American novel. Which is not to say that it is a fun read. On the contrary, a great deal of what is to be found between its covers is painful and disquieting. Set in the five days before September 11, it focuses in on seven characters: April, a young woman is attempting to support herself and her three-year-old daughter Franny by working as a stripper in a Florida night club; Lonnie, one of the bouncers at the club; AJ, one of its patrons; his wife Deena; Jean, April’s elderly landlady; and Bassam al-Jizani, who is about to step onto the stage of history as one of the 9/11 highjackers. (Dubus based his characterizations of the highjackers on actual historical figures, but changed their names. He wants it to be clear he is not writing a historical novel as such. On the Norton web site, he has a short esssay in which he says, "I had no desire to write about September 11th. But to write stories is to paint our dream world, to move through shadow.")

The story rotates through the voices of these characters, taking us into their heads again and again as they move through a series of events in which everything they think they know about themselves is ultimately put to the test. None of these characters, with the possible exception of Bassam, has much of a vision beyond getting past today. They are ordinary people, trying to get something now to store up against a tomorrow that doesn’t look a whole lot better. There are very close detailed descriptions of the day-to-day and minute-to-minute lives of those who work at and visit the strip club. On one particular night, events spiral out of control in ways that change the lives of all of the characters forever.

Dubus is very good at putting us inside their minds as they reflect on what they are themselves unable to recognize as spiritual emptiness. Here, for example, is Lonnie, reflecting routines of the culture he inhabits:

You work till two, hang around and have a drink until three, then go home and try to sleep but you’re too wired and on edge so you flick on the TV and drink. You’ve got cable and two hundred stations but there’s never anything that holds your interest: a lion eating the cubs of the lioness he means to mount; a set of kitchen knives that’ll cut through Sheetrock before slicing your tomatoes with one stroke; music videos of black kids up in the cities with their goofy loose clothes and gaudy chains, their shiny cars and sun-washed mansions; a nun smiling serenely into the camera, quoting from the Bible—a book Lonnie meant to get on tape but kept forgetting to order; there was a cop show from when he was a kid that his old man watched because he liked the big-muscled wisecracking lead; there were shows dedicated to reducing the size of your waist and ass; shows on how to become rich without ever putting down one of your own dollars; there were cable news stations of executions in the Mideast somewhere, bearded men shooting people where they knelt in the soft ground of stadiums where on another day athletes would kick a soccer ball over the blood; there were sports channels, dozens of them, all those bright uniforms and flying balls and over-excited fans; and there was history: world history, United States history, even the history of torture devices—an Egyptian designed a hollow brass lion under which would be prepared a raging fire and it was built so that the condemned inside the lion, the one who screamed his last screams, would sound like the lion, its brass mouth open, and into this device the Egyptian torturer was confined by his king, eager to see how it worked. (249)

Lonnie is awash in data, in information, in imagery, but he has no means for sorting out what is significant and what is not. He is vaguely aware of the presence of religious fundamentalists “in the Mideast somewhere” without being able to process that information. He, like pretty much everyone else in America, is pretty oblivious at this point in time about exactly how relevant that seemingly random image in a seemingly random list is going to become in a few days.

Deena, like Lonnie, is stuck in a life she didn’t quite bargain for. She meets her husband AJ at work, and in short order is romanced and made pregnant and married. Here is her reflection on her swift descent from happiness to her own particular version of hell:

There was the justice of the peace and AJ training in heavy equipment, then working with Daddy. They bought this abandoned house AJ fixed up by himself. The baby grew and grew and she came to love this new direction her life had taken. She loved how much attention her mother and father gave her, how her mom would take her shopping for baby things and at night and on weekends Daddy would smile over at her the way he did when she was a little kid, as if she were the only girl ever invented. Before falling asleep beside her, AJ would say those three words to her and she’d say them back and she didn’t feel like a liar saying them but she didn’t feel them much either. Then they were in this house and she didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but it was a tiny house. They painted it in whites and yellows, but still, she couldn’t breathe in it. During the long days when AJ was at work and she was alone with Cole, his toys scattered over the floor so she couldn’t walk anywhere without stepping on one, she’d take him outside to play in the grass and she’d sit in a lawn chair and try to get some sun on her legs and face and arms. She’d skim her magazines and try not to eat anything. That’s all she wanted to do—eat. She didn’t want to admit it and felt like an awful mother even thinking it, but she was bored just taking care of Cole. She loved him more than she loved the pumping of her own heart; she loved seeing the faces he made—curious, angry, confused, even sad and full of joy; she loved the way he would turn his blue eyes up at her as if she were the only other human being who ever lived; she loved that he came from her body yet had his own; she loved his hair and skin, his ears, and nose, and knees, the way they turned in like hers; she loved his sweet-milk smell, she loved his high voice and how he couldn’t say his r’s; she loved how he climbed into her lap to watch a video, how he fell asleep against her breasts.

Still, she needed to go out and do something. Even working at Walgreen’s had felt like something; she was serving people who needed things when they needed them and she got paid to make sure they got them. She liked that part the most. Getting that check with her name on it and cashing it and having that money in her pocket she’d earned. She saved over two thousand dollars but had to give every cent of it to AJ to go toward this place. That gave her some sense of pride, though—it did. But now she felt her time out in the world was already over. They couldn’t afford day care, but wouldn’t her mother watch Cole now? At least a few days or nights a week? Was Deena really going to spend the rest of her life just taking care of others? Her son and maybe more children, and AJ, who, these past three years had become a tired, short-tempered tangle of wants and needs she alone had to see to: she washed, dried, folded and put away his clothes. She made the bed after he left it, wiped down the sink after he’d shaved there, all those dark whisker nubs pooling at the faucet she had to wipe off too; she made sure that he had his lunch packed—almost always the same thing, smooth peanut butter with strawberry jelly, two bananas, a bag of Ruffles chips, and a thermos of lemonade. If she made him tuna instead, or substituted apples for bananas, she’d hear about it that night when she heard about everything else she wasn’t doing right: Why can’t you pick up the goddamn toys off the floor, D? Why do you cook with so much grease all the time? Didn’t Cole wear that shirt yesterday too? Why can’t you keep a couple cans of beer cold in the fridge, Deena? You have any idea how hot it gets running heavy machinery in this fuckin’ heat? (268-70)

There's much to admire here from a strictly technical perspective. I am particularly taken, for example, with the despair-inducing qualities of "all those dark whisker nubs pooling at the faucet." AJ has his own sad version of events in this story as well; suffice it to say that his "short-tempered tangle of wants and needs" leads him down the path to his own version of hell.


Basaam, the outsider, the anti-American, is the one character who has a spiritual perspective and larger aspirations in his life. He is a complex character who is simultaneously repulsed and attracted by what he sees of American culture. But his spiritual vision, such as it is, is inextricably linked to vengeance and violence. Here, from a passage late in the book, are his observations when, one day shortly before the highjacking, he finds himself at Harvard. He observes an American couple outside the library, and the girl he is watching smiles at him as she passes. Almost against his will, he is drawn inside:

High shelves across from him rise meters in the air. They are filled with books. He can smell them, their dusty pages. Their thick covers. He has never been in a place such as this, but there is the feeling he has—many times. All the people, quiet, working together but separately on similar tasks, the rising ceiling, the carpet beneath him—a mosque.

Basaam feels at the farthest edge of falling into a new knowledge, but who are these people to give a building of books the same respect as the holy place for the holy one? Look how they are stored with such precision and such respect when there is only one book to be read.

These stupid people. Look at them, their faces lowered to these pages, studying only the life of this world, preparing to rise within it, to rise in their unbelief to power they will use against his brothers and sisters. So often he has asked himself why do these kufar have so much power? Why have they been given all that they have?

… The kufar couple are sitting at a small table. They face one another. The woman’s foot rests on the man’s bare knee, and he reads as if he is not close to this woman, as if this means nothing. He is large. He is an athlete of some kind, and Basaam has often practiced against men his size, many times with Imad. The hand on the forehead, the jerking backward, the thrusting into the sking below the ear. He could do it now. He could walk into their area, stand a meter behind the man, pretend he is looking at the high window and its afternoon light, the ‘Asr prayer coming soon, very soon. She may look up at Basaam and smile again, so warmly as before, and he would strike, the blade pulled from the boy’s neck before he even feels the hand upon his forehead. The blood that must come. Her screams. Her eyes the eyes of one who can see now. (435-8)

I’ve quoted these passages at length simply to give some sense of the intensity of the inner lives of these characters. I once had occasion to tell Andre Dubus (the father) that many of his characters seemed more real to me than the people I actually know. This morning I happened to be reading Sven Birkets and ran across this passage in his essay “The Reading Life” (the introductory essay in Reading Life): “I don’t think I exaggerate if I affirm that I have been as much affected by D.H Lawrence’s Rupert Birkin, or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay... as I have by any number of flesh-and-blood people in my life... Woolf has made me privy to her perceptions and emotions, to the rhythms of her thought-process; through her represented consciousness I have known the grain of her most private awareness... I wonder who I have ever known in this way and what I have known. Is it necessarily inferior to the speculative half-knowing I have had with some of my work colleagues?"

Not every writer has the ability to bring us in close, to bring us inside the minds of others in a way that makes their lives seem whole in a way that gives perspective to our own. When it does happen, as in The Garden of Last Days, it makes for a profound reading experience.

Dubus One

Somewhere around 1979 I attended the Boston Globe Book Festival at the Hines Auditorium in Boston. While I was strolling from booth to booth, I happened upon a display of books from Godine publishers. In subsequent years I came to know them as a firm which published quality editions of interesting and varied works by writers overlooked by mainstream publishers, but at this time I knew nothing of them. I picked up several of the books on display, and was impressed with the physical construction of the books themselves: the texture of the paper, the way they were bound. They were books that invited you to hold them in your hands and turn the pages.

One stack of books also caught my eye because of the cover design. The books were large-format paperbacks with grey covers. On the cover of the first was a black-and-white photograph of a doorway with a two-panel door just slightly cracked ajar. On the cover of the other was another black and white photograph an empty bed: two pillows and a wrinkled sheet. The title of the first book was Separate Flights: A Novella and Seven Short Stories. The title of the second was Adultery and Other Choices. I picked them up, read a few passages here and there, and purchased both. That was my introduction to the works of Andre Dubus, who has for years been my most frequent answer to the question “Who is your favorite writer?”

Dubus is perhaps most often, and most accurately, described as a modern master of the short story. He is a writer of formidable erudition with a strong sense of craft, and yet his stories are anything but studied. His characters are the people you know, the people who live on your street, and their lives are ordinary and yet complex and profoundly mysterious in the way all of our lives are ordinary, and yet, at the heart of things, unfathomable. I heard him read on several occasions, and spoke with him after a reading one time for about fifteen minutes. When I asked him about his writerly heroes, he mentioned Chekhov, Gina Berriault, and Nadine Gordimer (“I worship at the hem of her garment.”) The day I spoke with him he was dressed in blue jeans, a t-shirt, and cowboy boots. In conversation, as in his fiction, he came across as smart and funny and down to earth.

Some time later I found an interview that he did on tape with Kay Bonetti, in which he elaborated on what he learned from Chekhov, and how he learned it:

I read Chekhov's “The Peasants,” no, it's just called “Peasants,” And I thought, that's strange, because he said he couldn't write narrative. How did he do this, because it's a thirty-page story, which covers one family, and its peasant village, and one year, and by doing that also painted a big canvas of what peasant society was like right after the freedom of the serfs. It's one of the best stories I've ever read and I finished the story and I said, well, if he did all that in thirty pages, he must've used compressed action so I re-read it immediately and I said, by god, it's all scenes. And each scene dramatizes more of his theme. He has a wonderful scene with two little girls, maybe five, six, seven years old, showing their innocence and their beauty and showing the effect of their sordid - not intentionally sordid, but sordid by circumstance - environment. They are told by their old granny, who has to keep the family going on nothing - if she gets a fish she'll make a soup out of it and save the head - they're told by granny to keep the goose out of the cabbage. The girls are lying on the slope of a hill and doing like Charlie Brown and his friends, looking at cloud formations, and one of the girls is the daughter of a woman who has and maintains her faith throughout the story. And she's telling the little girl about god and the angels, and then they start rolling down the hill and playing, and all of a sudden the grandmother comes out and beats them, because the goose got in the cabbage. Now the grandmother's reacting violently and unwisely, but she's also reacting that way because it's food. The little girls come in and it's a particular Russian religious day, I forget what season or what day, in the Russian Orthodox church, but they were not allowed to drink milk that day, and the girl who doesn't have religion says to the other one, "If Granny drinks milk will she go to hell?" she says "Yes, she'll burn," So they put some drops of milk in her bread and water and go back to the stove - they're always sitting on the stove in a Chekhov story - and watch her. And it's done. And that is part of a story. And I, and many writers, would have written that story. So I finished reading "Peasants" for the second time and I said, "Andre, you're thirty-something years old, I think it's time to learn how to write. I'm going to learn to compress, I'm going to learn to make transitions, I'm going to re-study Chekhov" and I really studied him rather than just read him for pleasure. And that's what I did, I started working on compressing and that is why I'm here. Yeah, he's one of my gods, and my two living ones are Gina Berriault and Nadine Gordimer, who I think write better short stories than anybody alive in the world.

What Dubus is saying here gives some sense not only of his sense of and concern for craft, but also of what is perhaps an even more important aspect of his consciousness as a writer: his compassion, his concern, not always directly stated but always present, for the spiritual welfare of his characters, even when, especially when, they are in trouble. He’s a writer for whom writing itself is in fundamental ways a spiritual discipline, as he states in this excerpt from a short essay written as an introduction to a reissue of his first book:

At the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul.

I have read and re-read Andre Dubus may times throughout the years, used his stories in my classes, and followed with great sympathy the trauma of his accident in 1986 when he was injured on the highway when he stopped to aid a motorist, and the painful unraveling of his personal life in the aftermath of that disaster, much of which is detailed in his 1991 collection of essays entitled Broken Vessels.

One of the essays in that volume, entitled “Under the Lights,” might serve to exemplify the resilience of spirit that Dubus not only aspired to but was able to attain as a writer. It describes some of Dubus’s experiences with the game of baseball, which he loved, and at one point focuses down on one particular memory he had of a minor league star named Billy Joe Barrett, who

one night in Lafayette…hit a baseball in a way I have never seen again… It started as a line drive over the second baseman, who leaped for it, his gloved hand reaching up then arcing down without the ball that had cleared by inches, maybe twelve of them, the glove’s leather fingers. Then in short right field the ball’s trajectory sharply rose, as though deflected higher and faster by angled air, and the right fielder stopped his motion toward it and simply stood and watched while the ball rose higher and higher and was still rising and tiny as it went over the lights in right field.

Dubus juxtaposes this memory against something he had read as a boy in a book by Joe DiMaggio to the effect that if you stay in Class C or D baseball for more than one year, you should quit, a sentiment that had outraged him forty years ago and was still bothering him at the time he was writing the essay, which concludes:

DiMaggio was wrong. I know that now, over forty years after I read that sentence. Or, because I was a boy whose hope was to be a different boy with a new body growing tall and fast and graceful and strong, a boy who one morning would wake, by some miracle of desire, in motion on the path to the garden, I gave DiMaggio too much credence; and his sentence lost, for me, all proportion, and insidiously became a heresy. Which I am renouncing now, as I see Billy Joe Barrett on the night when his whole body and his whole mind and his whole heart were for one moment in absolute harmony with a speeding baseball and he hit it harder and farther than he could at any other moment in his life. We never saw that ball start its descent, its downward arc toward earth. For me, it never has. It is rising white over the lights high above the right field fence, a bright and vanishing sphere of human possibility soaring into the darkness beyond our vision.

Apropos of Nothing

Today's Sunday Times crossword puzzle (by Pamela Klawitter) has a "Chain Reaction" theme in which the clues had sequences of words with certain words left out. The chain of words, when the missing words were filled in, consisted of words which each be could be compounded or used in conjunction with the next: food court case closed circuit board foot locker room service road hazard light, and so on. A clever idea for a puzzle.

Or for a few moments' recreation, as in this little circular list I compiled on a scrap of paper this morning:

House Wine
Wine Glass
Glass Jaw
Jawbone
Bonehead
Headmaster
Master Class
Classroom
Room Service
Service Charge
Charge Card
Card Shark
Sharkskin
Skinflint
Flintlock
Lockstep
Stepfather
Father figure
Figure Study
Study Hall
Hall Light
Lighthouse

Attentiveness, Flexibility, Collaboration

The narrative which follows is one chunk of a somewhat longer piece of writing I've been wrestling with in which I am trying to pull together a number of different threads of connection around the concepts of attentiveness, flexibility, and collaboration. I'm working with a group of teachers at my school on a task force which is directing the self-study we need to conduct in order to prepare for the visit of the WASC accreditation team, scheduled for the spring of 2010. We have been framing our conversations in such a way as examine and reflect upon the ways in which the school provides and shapes environments which promote attentiveness, flexibility, and collaboration both on the part of the teachers and on the part of the students.

I got to thinking about Tim Kelly during a conversation with a student at the end of this year when I was trying to explain the whole notion of 21st century learning skills why I believe that process skills and habits of mind (including, of course, attentiveness and flexibility and collaboration) are closer to the heart of my mission as an educator than, say, memorization skills or test-taking skills. We wound up talking for a while about grades and the logic of grades, which got us into a discussion about competition for grades, and then about competition more generally. And that's when I found myself talking about Tim Kelly.

Back in the 70’s, when I was first out of college and just beginning to teach and to raise a family, I met Tim. Tim was a musician, a piano player, and we used to get together pretty regularly for a couple of years there to play tennis or basketball or chess. We were fairly evenly matched in all of those endeavors, and the competition was enjoyable for both of us.

We were not fairly evenly matched musically. Tim had been playing piano since childhood and actually had musical talent to start with; I had started playing guitar only a few years before and had, as far as I could see at that time in my life or at any time subsequently, no real musical talent at all besides a certain pigheaded stick-to-it-iveness. When Tim said we should get together and jam, I was skeptical, but willing to try.

In our jams, Tim took on the role of servant leader. He favored a style of musical collaboration he called modal improvisation. He would create simple melodic structures that I could follow with my limited assortment of chords and my crudely executed scales, and then create little openings within the structure for me to improvise. After I had rather quickly exhausted my repertoire of licks within one of those spaces, then I’d switch back to rhythm chords and create similar spaces which Tim would fill with elegantly elaborated little rills and trills and arabesques. We spent hours together whiling away the Time in this manner. Even though we were mismatched in terms of talent, we were able to create something together that had some sort of aesthetic quality and that satisfied both of us.

Once we had been playing music in this way for some months, Tim and I began to talk about whether we might be able to transfer this experiment in collaborative exploration into our other areas of interest. At the time I was teaching in a small elementary school, and I had a key to the gym. On Sunday mornings a group of us would get together and play basketball. Up until I had met Tim, basketball had existed in my mind as a purely competitive exercise. There are historical and psychological and familial reasons why I had turned out to be a fierce competitor at this time in my life, but up until that time basketball was for me what chess had been for Bobby Fischer, an opportunity to impose my will upon the opposition, to keep the pressure on until I could feel the opponent’s ego break. Not that I always, or often, succeeded at that. I wasn’t that good. But that’s what I was trying to do, and that’s where I took my satisfaction, when I was able to achieve it.

Tim helped me to start thinking differently about that. He suggested that we try playing basketball as a form of modal improvisation. We would contrive to put ourselves on the same team, and then we would try to play together in such a way as to raise the aesthetic level of the game. We would work together with great attentiveness and patience, trying to run our pick-and-rolls smoothly and to perfection, trying to find the right angles for the elegant pass, trying to make the game something that was satisfying not so much for its result as for its shape, its architecture. We began making a conscious effort to rely less on one-on-one moves and more on collaboration. The best move one could make in our re-framed hierarchy of basketball values was not the corner jumper or the reverse spin move but the artful assist.

This way of playing, this mindset, changed the experience of being inside the game. It gave me access to more and different kinds of pleasure during the game, and de-emphasized the result. The primary criterion for success was whether we had played well together. If we had, we felt good about the game, even if we had lost. If we hadn’t played well, we were sobered and disappointed, even if we had won. After the games were over, we often were not even sure what the score had been. Our post-game conversations would involve re-creating and re-living our own little highlight film of the moments where the game had gone right.

The old sports cliché is “It isn’t whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game.” I had heard that throughout my life, but Tim was one of the people who helped me eventually to understand how that might actually work in practice.

This is a narrative which is most obviously about collaboration. But it's also a narrative about flexibility — being able to shift your orientation and redefine your goals within a system with which you are already familiar — and about attentiveness as well. What you choose to attend to, what modes of attentiveness you have available to you and how you select from among them, has everything to do with what you wind up deriving from an experience.

It's been interesting, over the last few weeks, to see how powerfully these three concepts interact with one another. More to follow.

Tumbling

Discovered a new site yesterday, via a link sent to me by my son, to a mini-blog engine called Tumblr. It's a blog genre I hadn't heard about known as a tumblelog or tlog. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of some of the more sophisticated blog engines, but it's very clean and easy to use. It took me about ten minutes to get set up my account and put together several posts. There are some nice features, including the ability to create private groups whose members can post to one another, using the blog as a kind of shared workspace. Might be useful in certain classroom environments as well.

Wordle

Chris Lehmann had a post today about a word-cloud utility called Wordle. I decided to try it with one of my favorite poems, W.S. Merwin's "Search Party." It's a poem I often share with my students, inasmuch as it speaks to the condition of being a lifelong learner. It's also got a Hawaiian connection: Merwin lives on Kauai, and maoli is the Hawaiian word for "native" or "natural" or "true."

Search Party


By now I know most of the faces
that will appear beside me as
long as there are still images
I know at last what I would choose
the next time if there ever was
a time again I know the days
that open in the dark like this
I do not know where Maoli is

I know the summer surfaces
of bodies and the tips of voices
like stars out of their distances
and where the music turns to noise
I know the bargains in the news
rules whole languages formulas
wisdom that I will never use
I do not know where Maoli is

I know whatever one may lose
somebody will be there who says
what it will be all right to miss
and what is verging on excess
I know the shadows of the house
routes that lead out to no traces
many of his empty places
I do not know where Maoli is

You that see now with your own eyes
all that there is as you suppose
though I could stare through broken glass
and show you where the morning goes
though I could follow to their close
the sparks of an exploding species
and see where the world ends in ice
I would not know where Maoli is

Here's the resulting graphic via Wordle:



Here's another based on Billy Collins' "Journal":



Fun stuff. Thanks, Chris.

Duh

Well, my man Icky has correctly pointed out that my previous post, entitled "Cellophane," isn't really about cellophane at all, but about Saran Wrap, or whatever the generic term for Saran Wrap is. The package I'm looking at is from Safeway, and the material is described as "clear microwaveable stretch 'n cling wrap," which is as a descriptor is clear and specific but certainly compact and certainly not elegant. In any case, Icky, who can be always counted upon for corrective feedback, once again delivers the goods:

Cellophane is made from wood or cotton pulp. You guessed it. Cellulose. It is the clear, stiff stuff though which you could see those powdered sugar donuts you got in desperation at Shaw's. It is the stuff that goes "pop" if you push a pencil through it. I can picture you trying to wrap a sandwich with it as it crinkles and springs back into its original flat state. Also, it is completely biodegradable, although the alkali and carbon disulfide solution that the pulp is dissolved in can create disposal problems. And did you know that if the viscose (as it is called) is extruded through a spinneret the resulting fiber is rayon.

The only reason I wrote the piece in the first place was because Icky had written me an email busting me about the post I had written the day before in which I had included cellophane as an alliterative, if admittedly somewhat arbitrary, element in a list of 13 possible blog post topics. "Sure," he wrote, " You are going to write about cellophane. It has been bubbling up, waiting for the last moment to emerge fully formed at which point you'll call on Erato and bestow it upon the world. I bet you don't know diddly (and that ain't Bo, rest his soul) about cellophane."

So I decided to write about cellophane, in order to prove a point, and in doing so I wound up proving his point, and not, alas, mine.

It's not that I didn't know what cellophane was, of course. But while I was writing and after I had written I had not so much as a clue that my brain had tossed up the wrong set of associations for the word. It's like when you play chess and you scan the board and see that there's one move that is going to lose a knight and you look for another so you go through your progressions and forty seconds later you wind up making the move you had already seen and discarded. Your opponent snaps up your knight and you say, "Yes, of course, duh, I knew that."

Doesn't generally happen to the good chess players, of course. But to the rest of us mortals, it's back to square one. All you can do: try again.

Cellophane

For Icky

is a clear plastic sheeting
used most often as a wrap
for foods (fruits and vegetables,
casseroles, slices of pizza,
other things that might go
stale or be subject to contamination
by dust or other airborne
pathogens)
in order to keep them fresh
in the refrigerator.

comes in a box about
a foot wide and two inches
square, wrapped around
a cardboard cylinder
an inch and a quarter
in diameter. On the edge
of the lid of the box
is a serrated metal strip
against which you can pull
what you have taken from
the roll in order to tear it
in sort of a straight line.

presents itself, as many
transparently mundane
objects do, with a multi-
tude of metaphorical
possibilities, most of which
hermetically sealed
shall remain obscure.

Elsewhere

Well, that was two weeks that went by fast. I don’t think I’ve gone two weeks without a post to Throughlines since I started it more than a year and a half ago. It was my intention then, and it is still my intention now, to use the expectation of regularity implied by the maintenance of a blog to force myself into the discipline of writing more regularly. So where I have I been, and why, given my personal and professional belief in the power of writing as a tool to generate and extend and deepen my thinking, have I been AWOL for so long?

The easy thing to say would be that I ran out of things to write. That’s what my students sometimes tell me. But it isn’t true for them—although they may truly believe it is—and it isn’t true for me. I’ve actually got a baker’s dozen ideas teed up in the antechamber of my mind, just waiting for me to show up and send them aloft: the attentiveness post, the Tracy Chapman post (“There’s a fiction in the space between…”), the reading-response posts (Clay Shirky, Kim Stanley Robinson, Virginia Woolf), the Xina post, the Nickel Back Rock Star post, the end-of-the-year open letter to my students that I sometimes write and did not get around to doing this year, the post about Buddhist philosophy and the game of poker, the posts about salad and certitude and cellophane and survivalists.

So no, it’s not that. And it’s not that I’ve been too busy, although busy I have certainly been with end-of-the year meetings and projects and papers and celebratory events. There’s been time, and there have been times when I could just have easily have fired up the word processor, as I have done today, as play online chess or go for a walk or do a crossword puzzle or spend yet another hour trying to hone my nonexistent piano-playing skills.

There’s just been a… resistance. A resistance to sitting down to write, a kind of cocooning, a turning inward, a closing down which falls somewhere on the continuum between laziness at the one extreme and self-medication at the other. I wasn’t ready to write. I’ve even been having trouble reading with any consistency. I’ve been disconnected. I’ve been adrift. I’ve been elsewhere.

And now, it appears, I’m back. I sit here on this Monday evening, staring at the screen now nearly full of the words that have fallen into place under my fingers, now that the internal pressure of not writing has finally built up to the point where it actually got me to sit down and open up a blank MS Word document and start with… something. And I guess, for me, that’s the best thing about writing, which is that while it’s never easy for me to get started, once I do, I enjoy what I’m doing, and when I’m done, I am able to take some small satisfaction in being able to look back over what has come to be and say to myself, “There. There’s that.”

Close to the Shore

It’s almost the end of the year. Nine days of classes, three days of exams, and it’s over. It’s always a little bit of a shock when the end finally arrives. This year I’m facing an even greater level of separation anxiety, because as of June 9, after 39 years in the classroom, I’m moving into a different zone. Our school has a K-12 supervisory position with the perhaps overoptimistic title of Director of Instruction. (Perhaps a more accurate title, and one with which I’d be more comfortable, is Director of Instructional Services.) The current occupant of that position is retiring, and I’ve been selected to take her place. That’s going to be an interesting challenge.

We have a very large school, with something like 3800 students K-12, and a school culture that encourages students—and teachers—to ask good questions, to seek out their own answers, and to make their own choices. In an environment where so much of the decision-making is pushed down to the classroom level, and from there to the level of what is good for the individual students in any particular class, it’s a real challenge to frame discussions that enable us to see the common core of what we believe, what gives our school its sense of itself, and to support curricular initiatives which seek the center as well as those which expand the horizons.

Many of those discussions are ongoing. There are initiatives already in place targeting such systemic challenges as sustainability, community service, social entrepreneurship, differentiated learning, K-1 arts-based education, learning environments, technology integration (including a one-one laptop program which will soon reach from grades 4-12), project-based learning and authentic assessment, and global education There are long-established but still-ongoing community dialogues about critical thinking and spiritual and ethical values. There is the upcoming HAIS/WASC self-study and evaluation which will occupy a lot of our energies over the next two years.

It is going to be my job to help support and sustain all of these discussions over the next five or ten years. It’s going to be a challenge to keep from being pulled in too many directions at once. I’m also a little leery about leaving the classroom. The best part of my day, every day, for a very long time, has been the time that I’ve spent with my students. Now I’m going to be spending my days in a much different way, farther removed from the classroom but with a broader perspective and a wider range of contacts throughout the school. I’m savoring these last few days close to the shore before heading out into uncharted waters.

The End of Education

Wes Fryer posted this very elegantly put-together video entitled "Learning to Change." It makes an intriguing argument in favor of "the end of education, and the beginning of learning." Check out the cast list at the end of the film.

Tolstoy V: Audience

Yesterday I wrote a little about Carl Dennis. Unknown Friends whetted my curiosity enough that I went back and got a copy of Practical Gods, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. There, among many other poems of interest, I was please to find this meditation on Anna Karenina, which I offer both as a further example of his poetic style and as a sort of guest appearance to wrap up the series of posts I myself was doing in response to Anna Karenina. I like the patient way in which Dennis works back and forth between how he thinks about what he has been reading and how he connects all of that to his life at the moment, and then opens up, toward the end, into the larger questions suggested by the title: if we were to think of ourselves as being characters, who we would imagine to be the audience for the lives we are living, and would they be pleased with us?

Audience

When I take the time to read slowly, the words sink in.
If I hadn't rushed my reading of Anna Karenina
The first time through, focusing on plot, not nuance,
I might have been able to say why Karenin,
On the night he discovers his wife loves Vronsky,
Gives her a cool lecture on the proprieties
And hides what he feels, how the bridge of his life
Has suddenly fallen away beneath him.
Why does a man who's tumbling into the void
Want to tumble in silence, without a cry? `

Now as I drive to visit a friend in the country,
Listening as the story is slowly spoken on tape
By an actress with all the time in the world,
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It's clear to me the invisible beings
Karenin imagines watching him from their balcony
Would be embarrassed by any display of feeling.

As to why Karenin's selected an audience
That judges on the basis of a cool appearance,
Good form, good show, and neglects the soul,
This must be what it means to live in St. Petersburg,
City of courtiers and court ambitions,
And not in Moscow, its country cousin,
Noisy with laughing and crying families.

I'm glad the friend I'm driving to visit
Lives hours away in a country village.
No doubt the silent invisible ones
A tolerant woman who won't reproach me
For driving slowly, who’ll be glad to learn
I’m takng my own sweet time for reflection.

It's a shame no one enlightened steps forward
To tell Karenin he's a character in a novel
Where no one's commended for preserving his dignity,
Only for shouting and weeping and tearing his hair,
For throwing a book of philosophy out the window.

It looks like I'm one of the fortunate few
With leisure to listen, leisure to ask myself
If all the invisible beings watching my life
Hail from Moscow. And I'll have leisure this evening
To ask my friend her honest opinion
And to weigh her answer.
And then it's time to ask if the life she's living
Pleases whoever it is she imagines watching
And whether they watch from duty or sympathy.

Life would be easier, I'll say, if our audience
Were a single person, like Dante's Beatrice.
Just the thought of her silently looking on
From across a stream was enough to brighten a path
Otherwise forlorn. But how can Dante be sure,
My friend will ask me, that he knows her wishes?
What if they don't all show in her face, or only show
As if veiled by mist, and he sees them darkly?

Dogears

It's been my habit, for many years, to turn down the corners of pages of certain kinds books and magazines. Not all of them, by any means. Novels, for example, I generally prefer to leave intact. In novels I will write brief, unobtrusive marginal notes—in pencil—or use Post-its or tape flags. The only novels I really work over are the novels I teach, which get the whole treatment: dogears, highlighting, underlining in various colors, Post-its, tape flags, page points, marginal notations, lists of page number references written on the inside covers.

Mostly it's my poetry books that are dogeared. On my first run-through of a book of poems, I like to read fairly quickly and loosely, turning down the corners of poems I want to come back to. Once I've read through the whole book, I go back and re-read, much more deliberately, the poems I have chosen. Depending on how that goes, and how rich the re-reading is, I sometimes go back again and read the rest of the poems to see what I might have missed the first time through.

Each year at my school we give awards in each subject area at an evening assembly for the awardees and their parents. (There's also, during the nomination process, a yearly ritual of hand-wringing and second-guessing about whether or not we should in fact be giving awards, and what message the giving of awards conveys to those who receive them and those who do not, but I'm not going to get into that in this post.) In recent years, the English Department has chosen to give the award winners, in lieu of a plaque or trophy, a book. Recent award books have included Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, Tobias Woolf's Old School, Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit, and Ted Kooser's Home Poetry Repair Manual. This year, the suggestion was made that the teachers might each select be asked to suggest a favorite poem, so that the selections could be bound into a sort of personalized anthology. So it's been my pleasant duty, over the last few weeks, to have been in charge of the somewhat laborious process of accepting the nominated poems, preparing the typescripts, arranging for the school to procure the copyright permissions, and putting together the anthology.

In order to secure the copyright permissions, it turns out that one needs not only the author and title and ISBN number of a particular book, but the actual page number on which the poem appears. In many cases, it wasn't that hard. Amazon's makes most of the relevant information available online; their "Look Inside this Book" feature is invaluable since they almost always include the table of contents, which allow me to get the necessary page numbers without leaving my desk. Some books, however, are not (yet?) so indexed, which is why I found myself driving, one evening last week, to the brick-and-mortar Borders at Ward Center in Honolulu, on the off chance of locating the page numbers of the two remaining books on my list: Wendell Berry's Given and Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven. Against all odds and expectations, there they both were on the shelves, one last copy of each book, with the relevant poems both appearing on page 18. In a small gesture of propitiation to the gods of serendipity, I wound up buying the Gilbert book, as well as a new collection of poems by Carl Dennis called Unknown Friends. Although it would take a mighty sharp eye to make the discrimination, those are the two books whose pages you see turned down in the picture at the head of this post.

Of the two poets, Gilbert is the darker and more idiosyncratic. His poems are often meditations on ambiguity and discontinuity, on the way pleasure shades into sorrow, love into loss, belief into betrayal. My favorite of the poems in the book, after "Failing and Flying," a poem which was nominated by two of our teachers, was this one:

Homage to Wang Wei

An unfamiliar woman sleeps on the other side
of the bed. Her faint breathing is like a secret
alive inside her. They had known each other
three days in California four years ago. She was
engaged and got married afterwards. Now the winter
is taking down the last of the Massachusetts leaves.
The two o'clock Boston & Maine goes by,
calling out of the night like trombones rejoicing,
leaving him in the silence after. She cried yesterday
when they walked in the woods, but she didn't want
to talk about it. Her suffering will be explained,
but she will be unknown nevertheless. Whatever happens,
he will not find her, despite the tumult and trespass
they might achieve in the wilderness of their bodies
and the voices of the heart clamoring, they will still
be a mystery each to the other, and to themselves.

The poem is a pretty good example of Gilbert's manner and preoccupations. It is direct and accessible, but it is also artful: there are nice little surprises embedded in the way particular nuances are conveyed: her breath "like a secret alive inside her," the "tumult and trespass they might achieve in the wilderness of their bodies." It's also, like many of the poems in the book, alert to and explicitly concerned with the ways in which we fail ourselves and each other.

Carl Dennis shares some of the same preoccupations, but his style is much different. His poems are less obviously "poetic." He has a very smoothly modulated conversational style that often relies on anecdotes that are arresting and often gently, ruefully humorous:

The False and the True

The story she told at their first meeting,
Last spring in the health food store,
That she'd just returned from a year at a school
For Buddhist nuns outside Benares,
Turned out to be falst, the jade barette
That loosely gathered her waist-length hair
Made in Detroit. But his feelings for her
Revealed the partial truth behind them:
That she'd dreamed of going, and would have,
If she'd been able to save enough for plane fare
And didn't have a daughter in high school
Here in Erie County and a job at the hospital.

As for his tacit hint that his quiet demeanor
Was a sign of a peace-loving character, that was true,
She later discovered, though his conversion to peace
Happened more recently than he'd suggested.
Just a month before, in fact, when his doctor warned him
His ulcer was worse, and no wonder,
What with his years of quarreling with his colleagues
In County Health. But who can blame him,
She wants to know, for his outrage
At their lax enforcement of pollution laws?

It's true she still hasn't told him about her brush
With cancer last fall. True he's been silent
About the operation scheduled for spring
To repair a heart valve. But if their silence
Has cast a shadow between them,
Each knows the other knows that the odds are slim
They'll have more than a score of years together.
Meanwhile, here they are,
With time enough to list the efforts they'll make,
If given a chance, for the other's sake,
Many of them ambitious and meant sincerely.

There's no individual line here which would call attention to itself as poetry. But theres a precision to the delivery and pacing of the whole poem that I find very convincing. There's no waste or fluff here. The story is told is compact and funny and true to life.

Once I get done with the dogears, I can usually tell how much I liked a particular book by seeing how fat it is at the top. I liked both of these collections a lot, for different reasons.

Cognitive Surplus

Will Richardson posts this (sixteen minute) video today Of Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, making an innovative and encouraging argument about what he is calling "cognitive surplus":