“Blackberry, Blackberry, Blackberry”

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Here’s what I’ve been thinking about, lately: Lately, I’ve been thinking about the way that research papers and dissertations and just general academic papers are written. I’m talking genre here.

I get that there is a set and recognized form to what is written. That the dissertation and – to some extent – it’s lesser variants, the thesis, the report, the critique, the essay, the explication, et al., have very explicit routes of explanation; the need for a lit review, a methodology, an introduction and conclusion, an argument, a hefty collection of data, an analysis, a findings. I recognize this route and have been writing along this route for much of my academic career. Frankly, I feel confident in my ability to move along the multi-laned highway of standard expository reports. It’s a process I’ve been expected to develop since my primary education, just like most other products of the American education system. And, I’m not going to kid myself that I’m some sort of rebel to the education mode of discourse. As a doctoral student and as an English teacher I am in a very literal sense interested in maintaining the processes that be within academia.

However, I also wonder about the idea of changes within the genre of academic writing. As students, we’re encouraged to explore and elbow out space for new areas of research. In education, this means (I think) aligning oneself within specific theoretical constellations and finding the areas for expertise within which one can develop a burgeoning catalog of recognized work. For example, being a Critical Freirean theorist interested in issues of game design and literacy within a secondary school context could be just the little planet for someone like me to plant a flag upon (not that giant of a leap, actually). That’s kind of what we’re supposed to do. However, what we’re not supposed to questions is how we do this. We (the academy) aren’t going to accept the kind of work that isn’t in the dissertation-derived mode of writing.

Dissertation comes from dissertātiō, meaning “discourse.” However, while there is a dialogue across different articles, books, and essays, I’m not seeing a dialogue within the actual discourse method. And while I continue to ramble about a dissertation like all of you actually care about the actual document – I see it as a symbolic representation of the kinds of academic text recognized as “legitimate.”

I look at postmodernism and the way literature both informed and responded to it. I’m genuinely thrilled by the way authors and literary works filter through the lens that postmodernism either provided or complicated (depending on what side of the bed you woke up). I like the fact that postmodern literature occasionally makes me scratch my head in confusion. I like that sometimes I don’t know how to read a page of text or that orientations in the writing shift and words and meanings collide. I like that the text is unbound and that there is a sense if possibility within a postmodern work. Each bound gem, like Saritas, its own Temporary Autonomous Zone. Similarly, I like the fact that digital literature is so much more than, like, text that is on a screen instead of on a printed page. I also like the fact that, like, this kind of experimental literature would find a, like, receptacle within which I could expel a Brobdingnagian gushing of “likes” in the way that lexicographers and grammarians bemoan.

I’m sure a bit of simple digging will yield the occasional journal or book that is written in a way that challenges the norm as far as discursive writing. The Magic of the State comes to mind as the anthropological antecedent to what I am thinking about. However, sporadic journals and publications existing on the fringe aren’t the kind of theoretical corpus I want to purely subscribe to. I’m looking for something more. I want to find the dialogue within the discourse. I realize that this desire is devoid of any kind of research into the topic, but, frankly, I’m not even sure where to start. The dissertation model is so inherent within the academy – like, all of it – that I don’t know what kinds of journals to look for discussions on this. Of course, such thoughts could pretty much be deracinated by some philosophical study or constellation of which I’m not aware of. Right now, I don’t even know where to, “like”, point the telescope.

The Black Cloud is (Still) All Around Us

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KCET Web Video about the Black Cloud:

We all know that air pollution is a major problem in Southern California. Last year, Los Angeles topped the American Lung Association’s list of cities with the worst air quality.

But air pollution levels vary depending on where you live. Students at Manual Arts High in South Los Angeles found this out by playing a game in their English class.

The Black Cloud Project is a game that a UC Berkeley professor and a high school English teacher created to help students understand global warming. Students at Manual Arts placed pollution sensors around their neighborhood in South Los Angeles and analyzed the data. They found that the carbon dioxide level in their classroom was ten times the normal amount, making it more polluted than the local gas station. Watch this week’s web exclusive video to find how the students at Manual Arts High fixed their CO2 dilemma.

Storytelling and Interpretation

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I just watched the film The Fall. It mysteriously arrived in my mailbox in one of the regularly received red Netflix envelopes, even though I don’t have any recollection of adding it to my ‘Flix queue. (To be honest, this isn’t at all as mysterious as I it sounds. I’ve come to accept the fact that my memory is pretty much shot. Hell, I’ve come up with amazing ideas and innovations only to share them with Rhea and be told I said the same thing months before. Now that I think about it, half the films I get from Netflix are a total surprise when I actually open them up.)

In a formal way, the film is about understanding and misunderstanding and frustrations found within communication. The young protagonist, Alexandria, spends significant portions of the film asking questions and chirping “Why”. The film, without giving too much away is a man in a hospital telling a story to a young girl. The story weaves into the fantastic in a way that would fit alongside the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the version to which Mr. Alan Moore has actually kept his name attached). A cadre of men has all vowed to kill the evil Governor Odious for the various wrongs he has committed. This group includes:

A Masked Bandit
The Indian
The Mystic
Charles Darwin
The Escaped Slave

As the patient tells his story, he extrapolates the details that intrigue young Alexandria, telling the story he senses she wants to hear: Oops, I thought she liked pirate stories. No? Well, in that case, one of the protagonists can’t even swim.

At the same time, the film primarily shows us the story being told as Alexandria imagines it. There are occasional miscues from the patient’s story. The “Indian” and his squaw are interpreted as from the country of India. The Masked Bandit initially resembles the girl’s late-father (his dialect quickly changes as the patient adjusts to the girl’s emotional needs).

Visually, the film is stunning. I remember being excited to see The Cell because of its unique visual texture. I was completely disappointed. Here, director Tarsem knocks it out of the park. Rich but not decadent, the film feels like reasonable journey into the abstraction of childhood imagination.

As I watched the film, I couldn’t help but think about how this reaffirms my belief in storytelling as an underused teaching strategy. It also reminds me of the potential misinterpretations that come from stories. Ultimately these are just as dynamic and powerful as intended explication.

Another Cheap Rehash: Will Oldham Interviews

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After seeing Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney become the illustrious Superwolf as part of the McCabe’s 50th Anniversary Show, I decided to dig out an interview long since swallowed up by the Internet. Below is a Q&A from a now defunct magazine followed up a profile done a year later (for another defunct magazine). The intro to the Q&A isn’t my best, but I am happy with where the actual interview went.


From leading the various Palace projects (Palace, Palace Brothers, Palace Music) to his current stint performing under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy persona, Will Oldham never seemed to compromise his challenging music or disparate lyrics. For this reason (or, perhaps in contrast to this reason) his new Bonnie Billy album comes as such a surprise. Sings Greatest Palace Music finds Oldham revisiting some of his fan’s favorite compositions and reinterpreting them as Bonnie Billy. For newer fans it’s a slew of new songs and for older fans it’s Palace completely recontextualized into commercial country music. Like all of his projects, it’s a drastic leap from his past. And Oldham isn’t apologizing.
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“New Ways of Living”

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Look, I get it. Most of you aren’t comic book readers. It’s a genre still too stigmatized to be really acknowledged or embraced by most. Though I think we’ll all talk about the medium’s merits when it comes to youth literacy, I think any discussion of comics will end there. And as much as you may not be interested in them, there’s one we need to spend some time looking at. It’s a collection of manga (gasp). It’s called New Engineering.

Yuichi Yokoyama doesn’t draft narratives or tell stories in any traditional sense. Each story is a basic exploration of a specific theme or motif. Take the collection’s first story, “Book,” for instance [image above]: over the course of 18 pages, Yokoyama provides a near wordless fight that takes place in a library. No explanation of the source of conflict. No descriptions of protagonists or antagonists. Nothing but the essence of a fight. However, as the pages go by, it becomes clear that Yokoyma is establishing a clear grammar for how action is expressed. The text is difficult. Sure, there are only sound effects as far as actual words (these being translated at the bottom of the page beautifully: “BIRA BIRA BIRA sound of paper falling” or “DOSU DOSU sound of swords going into tatami mat”), but the reading of the story took me far longer than other comic books, graphic novels, etc. Seriously, this book of almost no text has a huge importance on my understanding of literacy. A great analysis of the fighting sequences in the collection can be found here.

More thrilling are the four Engineering stories included in the collection. Again a simple premise: people building stuff. However each page shows an entire world or ecology being constructed. First a machine rolling down extreme rock shards, or flooding an area, or building a huge pile of blocks. Next, individuals insert trees or roll out a huge tarmac of earth, or paint the details of a river, or who knows what. Being involved understanding the logic within each Engineering endeavor is thrilling. Where are these being built? What is the purpose? I am reminded of Zoom for no particular reason.

At the end of this collection, Yokoyama provides a sparse commentary for each story. These too only add to the allure of the minimalist yet dense collection:

BOOK
I wanted to explore the appeal of the formal qualities of the book, as an obect made of layers of paper. By throwing books, the protagonist is able to make his escape from assailants, who have their swords drawn. The book overcomes the sword.

Or

ENGINEERING 4
In a barren area in the middle of noweher, spring water begins flowing, and eventually becomes a river. Only the sound of construction and water are audible in this uninhabited land.

Or

WHEEL
People riding spinning wheels are falling form a building. There is a flower garden on the roof of the building. The buildings in this area seem to be built either on moats or on water.

Notice in this last one the emphasis on “seem.” I’m thrilled by this uncertainty. Often times I’m not entirely sure what is happening in a given panel or even whole series of pages. There’s a dream-like quality that nestles in these pages.

When I wrote more about music, in the past, I was usually drawn to the kinds of artists that created genres and lyrics and compositions that inhabited their own spaces. Tom Waits never ventures far out of a world of tin cans and calliopes that is truly his own. Likewise, Robyn Hitchcock is constantly identifying the taxonomy and politics of a world of fungus and vegetables and idyllic perversion. Deerhoof dabble in a form of pop music that is all too much their own. And can someone please explain Cliff Edwards to me? Amazing. In any case, Yokoyama illustrates the everyday actions and lifestyles of a world that’s not our own. It’s an intense process that continues to reveal the intricacies of our own lives. As a comic artist, there is no specific commentary or ideology being prescribed beyond the SHURURURURU or MOKU MOKU MOKU of constructed landscapes. But then again, I can’t imagine any other comics that so mordantly succeed at making the “invisible visible.”

Excellent! Looks like there is another Yokoyama book coming out next month.

[note: the images here are cribbed from places on the unreliable world of the ‘nets. Sorry in advance for when they slowly become big red x’s.]

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

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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”

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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.

Border Crossing: Introductions (Yam Knot Lyke Druthers)

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So it’s a late Wednesday night, which means my classes for the first week are finished. (Yes, it’s nice to only have classes two days of the week. No, it’s not so nice to have 8 straight hours of classes in one afternoon – and it won’t be any nicer once B-track reconvenes).

In any case, I’m not here to whine about the amount of work and reading I’m in store for. Instead, I wanted to talk a little bit about what happens to everyone during their first day as a student or at many a job: making introductions. When meeting other teachers, the exchange is usually something like:
-So, what do you teach?
-Oh, me? I teach 11th and 12th grade English. And you?
-I’m stuck with some huge Algebra 1a classes and one section of geometry.
-I’ve heard that those Algebra 1 classes are big this year. That’s too bad. I bet we have some overlap in students with your geometry class.
-etc.

Both parties have connected, recognized that they may have something further to say down the road and the conversation could either end there or not. In any case, I digress. The point is that when teachers meet, they introduce themselves by discussing content area and grade taught and location they teach at. With some variation, this seems par for the course.

On the other hand, introductions in the ol’ I.T. means – aside from your name, area of study and year – describing your areas of research and interests. I can genuinely say I am interested in the research and interests I’ve heard my peers discuss. I’m really thrilled. If anything, the interest to specialize in specific areas of practice that – at least ideally – should reverberate in the halls of Manual Arts and its ilk is exactly the kind of fervor I’d want to see in a school’s faculty.*

Like the program I’m in, I’m a big proponent of praxis. It was the verbalized and underlying goal of my Masters/credentialing program. However, as far as adapting theory into regular practice, it’s not the kind of activity you see many teachers taking up. Sure, curricular design is something that we’ll do here and there, but it pretty much stops there. As teachers, most of us wait to receive faux-research articles from our administrative team for us to balk at. The impetus for actual theory being discussed by classroom teachers is lacking. (Yes, these are sweeping generalizations.)  As such, this week’s series of introductions reminds me that this push towards praxis is all too one sided. Further, it shows me something to initiate back at Manual: a precedent for discussing my current research interests. Hopefully my colleagues will take up the challenge.

*Speaking of specialization, I’m pretty sure Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller would pretty dissapointed with any talk of the sort.

In case you were wondering…

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This Daily News database of all LAUSD salaries is accurate.

If you’re wondering how I feel that anyone can search and find out to the cent how much money I make, I can’t say I’m angry or upset. Frankly, teacher salaries have never been much of a secret. The real value here is peeking into what’s happening with all those many, many employees out of the classroom in the behemoth of a tower on Beaudry.

The articles connected to the database are worth a look (hey, guess someone’s stock might be rising in light of the constant LAT job massacre). In particular, I’d like to draw your attention to the article titled: “LAUSD administration swells 20 percent from 2001 to 2007.” It should be noted that this good ol’ swelling took place just about a year after Ray Cortines handed over the keys as interim Sup. to Roy Romer. Cortines came in, cleaned up shop, urged Romer to reduce the Central District, and pretty much watched Romer do the exact opposite. I know I’ve linked to the interview Travis and I did about a million times at this point, but look at these choice quotes from Cortines when we talked to him last year:

I came to the district in a very difficult time; the board was firing Dr. Zacharias and not handling it well. The Board asked me to stay on and I said I would stay on until June. We agreed that I would reorganize the district, cut the central office, move to decentralization, balance the budget, and create stability. We did that. And we did that in about nine months in the year 2000.

And

I envisioned a collegial kind of relationship in the decentralization of the district. Not that you don’t need a central office – you do. But you certainly don’t need Beaudry. Roy [Romer], instead of getting rid of anybody every time they weren’t doing their job, he just moved them down or up a floor. I don’t do that.

And he certainly doesn’t “do that.” If the article is to be believed, Cortines will be making significant cuts in the coming months. Praise be. Talk to just about any teacher and they’ll scoff at the kinds of “insight” and “aid” and “assistance” that most out of the classroom employees are able to offer. Beaudry is a sinkhole of financial waste in the eyes of most of us here on the front line. Fortunately, I still feel like I have a peer in Cortines: “This is not a good central office,” concedes Senior Deputy Superintendent Ramon Cortines. “It’s not inviting to parents and the community. Parking is atrocious; getting here is atrocious.” That’s from another choice Daily News Article.

Economics 101!

And while we’re on the topic of this database, where are my Econ teachers at? I’ve been thrilled thinking about the kinds of amazing lessons and service learning activities that this database offers. I’d think students would be able to offer great analysis comparing their teachers’ salaries compared to the services rendered to said students. I suspect their would be a disparity between the teachers they respect and the salaries they earn. After all, the teachers I see putting the most time into their students’ well-being don’t have the time that other teachers do to get additional salary points, teach intersession, or eek out that oh-so-valuable z-time that others are so skilled in getting. Hmmm … smaller paycheck might equal more committed teacher? Blasphemous talk if I’ve ever heard it. Someone call Steven D. Levitt!