Category Archives: lit

Border Crossing: “In a Network of Lines That Intersect”

Leave a reply

During one of my courses, the instructor encouraged us to have “if not a whole foot, at least a toe” inside some sort of primary or secondary school setting. Of course, still being a teacher, I don’t really have a hard time getting a foot into that door. On the other hand, and this goes back to the previous border crossing post, such foot or toe dabbling doesn’t occur very frequently from the other side of the fence (most teachers don’t wade all that deeply into a research pool – I think there are a lot of explicit barriers that shy teachers away from considering this as viable).

What’s more, in addition to still being connected to schools in general, I think there is an importance in staying somewhat outside of the academy in some sense. That is, get outside of the academic head space once in awhile. One of my concerns about diving into this PhD program, in addition to ensuring I have time for my students, is that for the next few years I’ll only read texts and books purely about education. Yes, it is my primary interest at the moment, but I think it’s important to place oneself in a body of literature that moves outside of traditional educational boundaries. This is what the Beyond Pedagogy group was aimed toward. When going through the Masters program, I can’t underplay the importance the Chronicles played. Similarly, the inquiry that came out of it probably wouldn’t have been the same without knowing the Gaviero was out there somewhere. Aside from acting as some sort of geeky refuge, such “non-required” reading helps provide the kind of outside perspective that helps provide the impetus for new ideas. Think of it as like one’s reading vegetables – they’re good for you!

As anticipated, the workload for these classes is substantial. However, I’ve set aside In Praise of Shadows and The Invention of Morel as occasional buoys in a sea of Ed. Theory.

“Trapped in the Armor Of Language”

1 Reply

Despite my previous efforts to move past reflecting on David Foster Wallace’s death, I spent part of my lunch today listening to this reflection on the life and work of the late author. I’ve enjoyed Michael Silverblatt’s show in the past. However, today I found myself (with headphones on) leaning in closer and closer to a speaker that wasn’t there. The closeness and emotional veracity of Silverblatt’s words was striking. Despite being in front of a library, munching on pizza, I was transported next to Silverblatt as he reminisced about the writer.

More importantly, the discussion about Wallace’s essays illustrated that part of the allure for the reader (at least for me) was that Wallace was an expert at making the invisible visible. Through his work a lobster festival is seen from a completely different perspective. Ditto a state fair, a filmmaker, a presidential candidate, tennis players & recovering addicts, and even the mundane such as having to move a car from one side of the road to the other due to municipal codes. I say this having sat through the first four hours of a yearlong sequence on qualitative methods and design. Perhaps the key fact that was expected for the students in this class to take away is the role of the ethnographer to make the invisible visible – Wallace may be better an example at this than many of the case studies we’ll be investigating. His is a route towards illumination I’m interested in treading.

Similarly, Wallace talked about how defining “terms” on Silverblatt’s show would take him about 6 hours. And though Silverblatt asserts that this would be done in a hilarious manner (and he’d probably be right), it cuts to a central frustration with language. Wallace effectively tried writing himself out of a novel while also making the experience so intensely personal that it feels as if he wrote it just for you – yes, this conceit is cribbed from the show. However, he literally becomes trapped within this behemoth of a novel. He probably never really escaped it. [As an aside, looking today on Amazon, Infinite Jest was the #60 top selling product – I think it peaked last week. In any case, I can’t imagine how many people will be trying to read through this thing as a result of his passing.]

In a seminar about language issues, I made an assertion in class about how language primarily limits intentions and communication. That although its primary function is one of communication between two or more people, it literally cuts away at the pure essence of meaning in some sort of abstract way. While it protects it also denies. Lastly, as a result of looking at the Beyond Pedagogy texts, reading Valis for the first time and generally spacing out when I should be taking notes, I’ve been thinking about the aborigine concept of “dreamtime” or a dream world. About how such a place could likely exist both in and out of the modern day world. About how there’s something about Eskimos and words for snow and western limitations with words like “magic” and how that all kind of vacillates between structured thought and language-less ideas like the flickering of a light between “real time” and “dreamtime” until the flickering stops flickering like a strobe-light slow motion kind of thing and it becomes really clear (at least for a second) that both places are the same and it’s us – like “us” in some sort of socio-cultural way – that are leaving some things “invisible” and that the balance between dream and real is one most of us aren’t ever going to really negotiate.

I’m still working this out.

The DFW-Plex

Leave a reply

So for the past two weeks I’ve been secretly reading tons and tons of blog posts, articles, obits, and tributes to David Foster Wallace. This has significantly affected my productivity – I literally spend significant portions of my free time reading what other writers and bloggers have to say about a writer that could have written circles around them on any day of the week.

Having read much of his non-fiction, a chunk of his short stories and still working my way through the beast, I was more than saddened to hear of his death. I even struggled through two thirds of that damn book on infinity before realizing I was barely understanding any of what he was writting. It’s gotten to me more than I thought it would. And yes, I’m a bit tired of the forwarded college speeches, recycled stories, reflections on his teaching, analysis of references to suicide in his writing, and links to his appearance on the Charlie Rose show. I’ve reacquainted myself with all of these through my blog perusing travels. However, the most interesting artifact to come out of this is the copy of his college syllabus. There was a point while at UCLA, that I regretted not attending the Claremont Colleges (I’d applied and been accepted for early admission to Pitzer) solely based on the fact that “THE DFW” taught there. I’ve exhausted by DFW-related blog reading. Let the other forms of procrastination return.

“Just-only problem, being-published after readers their complexity good see even-though-they-come-to, but how publishing before publisher convince possible?” Or You’ve just finished reading Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff

Leave a reply

 I don’t really know where to begin. No, Your Name Here isn’t a book to be categorized as BSRAYDEKWTDWT – you start at the beginning and work your way to the end – but it is a book you don’t know how to process. And even that’s not quite right: it’s entirely linear. There’s a beginning a middle and an end (kind of). Rather, there are a few of each.

That awkwardly unavoidable question
And so comes the rather inherent question any book is supposed to rely upon as a selling point: What is it about?

The problem is I don’t know where to start. Let’s see, here we go: You (and a bunch of other “You’s”) are reading different books on an airplane [You – yes, you – brushed up on your Calvino, didn’t you?]. One of these books is by that author Helen DeWitt, Your Name Here. Another is Lotteryland by one Rachel Zozanian. There’s a hotshot film auteur on the plane. All of the books have Arabic characters (not people, but, like, you know … letters). Any sense of overarching narrative is then disrupted by a series of emails between Helen and Ilya or their respective counterparts: Rachel and Alyosha (or Alexander or Dmitri or Kaplan or etc).

I’m the first to say that this book isn’t for everyone. I’ve handed the first chapter (excerpted in N+1) to a friend only to be told it’s garbage. I’ve tried (on countless occasions) to get Rhea to read The Last Samurai. She got a third of the way through, which I consider a success. I kind of feel like Mike at the beginning of YNH when he talks with his friend: “No, no, you have to read it, it’s fucking great, there is Greek and Japanese, but it’s motivated.” Alas, I wonder how large the audience for a book I can’t even describe will be.

I learned quickly during my jaunt of freelancing not to describe a band by comparing it to other bands (“Dude, it sounds like the Strokes and Aphex Twin got in a fight in an 8-bit version of ‘From the Aeroplane Over the Sea,’ bro.”). However, think Calvino meets Adaptation meets 8 1/2 meets Tristam Shandy (starring Steve Coogan!) meets smut, meets TTYL meets, well, Lotteryland all integrated with a few hefty ‘Hooked on Arabic” lessons.

I had a great time reading Your Name Here. I’d look up from the text every handful of pages thinking, “Good god, Helen [Rachel, Ilya, the Body] is doing it! I can’t believe she’s pulling this off!” I also continuously wondered if the book will actually be published as it is or in “a more-or-less direct and therefore awkard translation” from an email in the text: “In modern literature there are quite a number of famous books which are as difficult to understand as yours, the only problem is that although after publication readers come to appreciate the complexity of these works, before publication how can the publisher be convinced?” In some ways, a book about an author looking to complete and publish a book fits rather nicely as a digital file for anyone to stumble across. At the same time, I want to root for Helen and for the book to make millions and get huge film advances and for her to publish the many other books she alludes to have already written. I am an insufferable and selfish brat and I want to be another second person narrator in another unfinished book by Helen and her Thompson-esque co-author.

And yes, you can still get your copy here.

Books for Perusing and the Introduction of a new Genre: BSRAYDEKWTDWT

3 Replies

As usual, I’m juggling 4 long-ish books at the moment (and the unyielding commitment to finish Infinite Jest, even if it’s only at a 2-3 page-a-day pace).

However, I’ve also been regularly thumbing my way through a handful of books of shorter material. Thought I’d share some of the highlights of these thumb-intensive texts:

Separations by Marilyn Hacker – Intense collection of poetry from the ‘70s I found for cheap. The slightly torn dust jacket with the creepy Magritte painting makes me consistently pick this up. I usually end up rereading the first poem in the collection and freaking out at the fact that I bought this at the same time that I’ve been listening to a an album that quotes from this collection (that would be the supremely great Alopecia by Why who turns the following line into a dirge-like call to arms: “Billy the Kid did what he did and he died”).

The Most of It by Mary Ruefle – Another female poet, but this is actually a collection of (often very) brief prose. The stories are of the wacky, you’re-not-supposed-to-be-able-to-do-that variety. I’ll admit I was a sucker for the book’s design. That the content is just as solidly crafted comes as a sort of awesome bonus.

Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon – Hundreds of single sentence news items that ran in the French newspaper Le Matin during the early 1900s. The power of these sentences (as one demigod Luc Sante describes in a fantastic introduction) is the way Feneon reveals and builds suspense through the end. Each story reveals another aspect from the seedier side of France – sex, drugs, violence, car accidents, abuse, are the norm. Here’s an example drawn entirely at random: “Le Verbeau his Marie Champion right on her breasts, but burned his eye, because acid is not a precision weapon” (page 83). You’ll either love it or you’ll feel the need to read one more to be fully convinced … so here you go: “The tramp Bors, all bloody, was on the road near Acheres. He had been on the receiving end of his friend Bonin’s truncheon” (page 107). There are more than a thousand of these collected. So good.

Hall of Best Knowledge by Ray Fenwick – I’m still not sure to make of this one. Every once in a while you’ll get a book that you just don’t even know what to do with. These get filled into the category of Books So Ridiculously Awesome You Don’t Even Know What To Do With Them (BSRAYDEKWTDWT). I don’t mean that the content is necessarily confusing. I mean that when you pick up the book and riffle through the pages you literally don’t know how you are suppose to use the book. What is the book’s function? How am I supposed to engage with this text? Examples of this include the Dictionary of the Khazars (I actually only own the female copy of this text), the Internet and Everyone (as recommended by Ms. DeWitt), and A Humument (I own two different versions of this one). Usually these become some of the most interesting books in my library. I have a feeling the Hall of Best Knowledge will be joining their ranks soon. From what I’m able to grasp, each page is a dense synergy of design, image, and text. Some are narrative based some are just head scratchers. The collection is baffling. I can’t get myself to read/look at more than one or two of these at any given time. I set the book down frustrated, inspired, and dumbfounded that there’s nothing that even comes close to the originality of this collection.

Helen DeWitt’s Name Here

Leave a reply

Helen DeWitt’s newest book is available! Online! Now!

This is terribly exciting news. The Last Samurai is easily one of my favorite reading experiences. And before your eyes roll, the book suffers only in that it shares a title with the groan-inducing film to which you think it is related. It’s not. Read it.

Anyways, Ms. DeWitt’s newest book, apparently a collaboration with journalist Ilya Gridneff has yet to be officially published. However, the first chapter was made available in the latest edition of n+1 fueled my anticipation for its release. And now, Ms. DeWitt has offered the entire text sans images of Your Name Here as a hefty PDF for a measly couple of bones through PayPal here. I also recommend perusing her blog through the rss reader of your choice on a regular basis.

Directions for enjoyment:
1. Electronically direct $8 of your savings to Ms. DeWitt.
2. Download the PDF that magically arrives in your inbox.
3. Print out PDF – hopefully abusing the office printer in your location of work. Or your partner’s location of work. Or (as a last resort) Kinkos.
Enjoy.

“They reestablished for him the world in which he wished to exist”

2 Replies

Thursday’s Beyond Pedagogy meeting, though a bit noisier (due to our temporary move) resulted in the kind of inspiring dialogue that’s been fairly consistent throughout a fairly non-consistent set of dates, books, and group members.

For this book’s go-around, Mark ventured to facilitate. He asked everyone to provide a single sentence for discussion (providing individual phrases and words didn’t make it into our schedule).

Below are the sentences discussed. Please add any thoughts, additional sentences, or insight you’d like to the comments below.

Our next book is the unflappable Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Meeting details here. See you there?

Selected sentences from Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism:

“If with Catholic belief, you don’t accept one article of faith, you are not a Catholic” (page 217).

“As painful as it is, thought reform would never have a lasting effect if it did not offer a new and appealing sense of identity as its reward” (page 385).

“The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right” (page 433).

“It means that you realize your crimes are very big, and that you are not afraid to denounce yourself …. that you trust the people, trust your re-education, and that you like to be reformed” (page 31).

“He found himself more willing to listen to others’ opinions, more patient, and less quick to ‘get in anger’” (page 64).

“Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, ‘the language of nonthought’” (page 429).

“In discussing tendencies toward individual totalism within my subjects, I made it clear that there were a matter of degree, and that some potential for this form of all-or-nothing emotional alignment exists within everyone” (page 419)

Further Evidence of the Greatness of Comic Books

Leave a reply

Fine, fine, it’s not a standard superhero comic, but Crossing Midnight is a prime example of what I’ve been loving about comics lately: crazy storylines, conceptually riveting art, and occasionally brilliant dialogue. Hardly lowbrow at all, in fact. Here’s a brief exchange from the current issue, Crossing Midnight #18:

– You seem troubled, Master Hara. Are you having second thoughts about our strategy?
– No. But I’m no fighter, Lord Rinkin. I don’t know if I can do any of this.
– Do you know the origami sculpture called the Dragon?
– No.
– It is extremely intricate. And in making it you must pass through many intermediate forms. Some of these transitional stages are very beautiful. They look like end points in their own right. The seated man. The rose. The open hand. I apologize for the labored analogy. But life folds each of us into many curious shapes before we finally become what we are meant to be.

Mr. Froebel’s Cabinet of (scripted, abstracted, spiritual) Wonder

2 Replies

This post serves as a general stomping ground for comments and lingering thoughts about the latest Beyond Pedagogy text, Inventing Kindergarten.

Though our meeting had a slightly smaller turnout than previous ones, the dialogue was all the more engaging. That being said, Mark was kind enough to offer his notes from the meeting. Below are his unedited, running notes throughout the exchange – the excessive question mark use is all his! (??????)
And yes, this blog post’s title is an homage to one of my favorite books about one of my favorite places.
Mark’s Notes:

PAULA’S comments and ideas:
teachers undervalue the importance of media design (how the book was designed)  EXPOUND – ??????
Walt Whitman (leaves of grass… book making – a lost art)
a little whitewashed… how did these kindergarten ideas affect other cultures…
was it really “creative” “abstract” – tolerating ambiguity
reminiscent of scientific behavioralism…
embodied literacy – not so cerebral…
infantilizing high school students – thru rules

OCTAVIO’S comments and ideas:
has to finish his dissertation
were Vygotsky and Froebel contemporaries
how education is compartmentalized….  the need for Interdisciplinary approach (connections)
experience is important…
play as a form of inquiry… (theatre as play)
???Where do video games fit into this????
basic skills fit into the larger context (LIFE) need to align experience with literacy
part of it has to be by design – what if life is the design????

ANTERO’S comments and ideas:
universal connectivity… Glass Bead Game (interconnectivity)
student of everything (LIFE) – Renaissance person…
lost in high school is a sense of play…

???Adult over play??? magic is lost, pedagogy is hidden for the kids ???? How do you balance transparency of pedagogy with sense of magic or wonderment…?????
consumerism destroying the purity…
intellectual play

Leisure Reading, Film Literacy, and Two Mentions of Literary Monkeys

1 Reply

With B-track back in session, a daily silent reading period of 15-20 minutes in each of my classes means I’m able to tackle some of the random books I’ve been accumulating. Strange as it may seem, I get through a bit more leisure reading while I’m full-on teacher mode than while I’m off track with way more free time.

When I first read the description of The Film Club By David Gilmour, way back in December, I immediately preordered the book – the premise was good enough to be a must-read: Gilmour allows his 16 year old son to drop out of school with one simple caveat. The son has to watch three films a week with his father. This is the closest that the son gets to a legitimate education throughout his high school career.

While The Film Club spends more time than I’d prefer dealing with relationship issues: miserable breakups, growing pains, crazy girlfriends, and more miserable breakups, the discussions of the time spent watching film is entertaining.

As an educator, I was particularly interested in this early passage: “I didn’t waste any time. The next afternoon, I sat him down on the blue couch in the living room, me on the right, him on the left, pulled in the curtains, and showed him Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). I figured it was a good way to slide into European art films, which I knew were going to bore him until he learned how to watch them. It’s like learning a variation on regular grammar.”

Though I’ve only taught one official Film Studies class (an intersession course that ranged from Style Wars to Buster Keaton), film literacy and its necessary “grammar” are the skills I continue trying to develop in my 11th and 12th grade English classes. Likewise, the conflicted dissimilitude of Antoine Doinel is perpetually present in many of my seniors; standing on the precipice between student and not-student, these are students marinating in uncertainty. Maybe a screening of The 400 Blows is worth a shot?

In related news, Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys was a fun, silly yarn. I admittedly picked this up because I’m a sucker for the book design, but the book has me interested in pursuing Ruff’s previous books.

Currently really enjoying Chip Kidd’s The Learners (a sequel to the underrated The Cheese Monkeys). I suspect I’ll need to go back to the Beyond Pedagogy texts after this one, to stay on top of things.

Oh and I’m only a third of the way through Infinite Jest but the hyperbolic praise that the book’s garnered is becoming more solidified with each page read. (As I was looking up the book – I noticed that the current version of the text is only $6.29 on Amazon. Though not the edition I’m reading, this is an absolute steal. At slightly more than 1100 pages long, the cost breaks down to about sixty cents per hundred pages. I can ascertain it’s a text that will keep you busy and cerebrally entertained.)

Note: Though this isn’t technically a 101 post, it’s been tagged as such for personal reference. Pay no mind.