Author Archives: Steve

story, where things happen

Stories are cool, stories are fine. In my family, my son sits rivetted while my wife makes up stories on the spot. Stories about pencils, shoes, and planets. She is the “provider” of story. And then “this” happened and the boy laughs and laughs then asks for more. “Tell me a story about the couch,” he says. And she must perform.

To children the story is a basic way of organizing the world, and I’d submit that the need continues into adulthood. Why, because we encounter the world as a sequence, as if every next thing is waiting behind a blind corner, as Frog tells Toad. In Larry Fondation’s “Deportation at Breakfast” we get such a sequence of world building, of things waiting behind the corner. A man comes to a diner, finds that he must cook his own eggs, and ends up owning the joint for at least a day. Beyond that, there’s just conjecture.

The protagonist is “lured” into the diner with the promise of inexpensive food. The place appeals, “family-run and clean,” the signs “neat,” and the interior is “old-fashioned.” But the protagonist also has an appealing disposition. He sits at the counter, “leaving the empty tables for other customers that might come in.” He seems like a nice guy, just any guy looking for a clean place to eat. All fairly pleasant and normal. Stuff happens, though, after Javier takes his order. I love it that he orders the cheese omelette.

The eggs were spread out on the griddle, the bread plunged inside the toaster, when the authorities came in. They grabbed Javier quickly and without a word, forcing his hands behind his back. He, too, said nothing. He did not resist, and they shoved him out the door and into their waiting car.

On the grill, my eggs bubbles. I looked around for another employee–maybe one out back somewhere, or in the washroom. I leaned over the counter and called for someone. No one answered.

So, Javier gets taken. Next sentence, the eggs are bubbling. Perfect. So we have a normal scene interrupted by something extraordinary, an action that needs a response. Causality. Something has to happen here. Javier starts the eggs, gets taken, and thus leaves the eggs.

I could smell my eggs starting to burn. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. I thought about Javier and stared [no gazing here] at my eggs. After some hesitation, I got up from my red swivel stool and went behind the counter. I grabbed a spare apron, then picked up the spatula and turned my eggs.

Here the character jumps right into things and everything from here on falls into place. He returns to the counter to ring people up then goes back to finish preparing his own meal. This meal is interrupted by another party. Fondation writes

I thought of telling them I didn’t work there [curious the use of “there,” the story being told after the fact]. But perhaps they were hungry . . . I got busy at the grill.

The story ends with a sense of “taking over.” The main character will post an ad for help, and he reveals some hesitation about being in the restaurant business. But regardless of the total turnabout, the change that happens in the story, the eggs on the grill remain the causal agent. The guy’s got to do something and he ends up doing lots more. The story takes a common situation and turns it into something extraordinary, something that stays with the reader. It takes a regular guy and leaves him at a place he’s never been before.

poetics

Jesse Abbot writes

But that does not repudiate the possibilities within the postmondern and deconstructive delight in the absence of intrinsics. We should so delight — at the same time recognizing we are treading on sacred ground. We are not the ones inscribing and erasing – this is a cosmological operation of remedial creativity much larger than we can remotely conceive. I will begin my upcoming “syllabus” of Cosmological Revision Poetics around such willfully presumptive premises.

I’d like Professor Abbot to write more about his conception of poetics, which is, I suspect, a penetrating exposition, and, I’m also suspecting, very much in the tradition of William Blake, but this may be entirely presumptuous. There must be a reason why (and I mean that in the sense of “insight”) Jesse will be drawing forth soon, especially in the conglutination of poetics and cosmology. I wonder what the tools will be.

For me one of the most interesting things about “understanding” in general is the “problem” of language and continuity between inside and outside (what I know and see and what I say I see), the internal and the external, and the cohesiveness of human space. I remember Neha’s quote from Augustine coming from The Confessions about losing an understanding of phenomena by trying to explain them. In many ways explanations lead to confusion, which is why we attempt clarity with terminology and extensive definition or skate away from the phenomenological approaches that may seem quaint these days.

voice in fiction

LTS writes of voice in fiction

Voice, I have found, is not necessarily a single entity assigned to a writer, but something that is uniquely his or hers to formulate into a recognizable perhaps, but multilingual style creation of a skilled writer. We all have several voices, most noticeably the contrast between our content self and the one who is upset or angry. Perhaps another way of describing the difference is the way we are with friends versus the way we are with strangers, or in an environment in which we are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or intimidated.

I don’t know if voice has a lot to do with style or the crafting of a piece, but I do know that it’s a tough thing to rationalize or put into explanatory language. It may be something that just is. It may be something having to do with point of view, the way a persona “sees” the world in the narrative. It’s also hard to come up with examples of voice in a fiction that demonstrates “itself.” Here are the first few sentences of The Signing by Stephen Dixon

My wife dies. I kiss her hands and leave the hospital room. A nurse runs after me as I walk down the hall.

Here the narrator, the protagonist, tells us only what happens, so what dominates the entrance into the story is event and cause and effect: “this happened; I did this.” We will learn in the story that the “the voice” isn’t about rationalizing, explaining, or commenting. At this point I would say that the story as a whole must sustain the “point of view” and the mannerism of the narrator in his telling. He must have mannerisms, a way of talking, moving, and seeing. Here’s some of the dialogue

“They want you back upstairs to sign some papers,” he says.

“Too late. She’s dead. I’m alone. I kissed her hands. You can have the body. I just want to far away from here and as soon as I can.

. . . .

“Do what you want with her body. There’s nothing I ever want to do with her again. I’ll never speak her name. Never go back to our apartment. Our car I’m going to let rot in the street till it’s towed away. This wristwatch. She bought it for me and wore it a few times herself.” I throw it out the window.

Consistent. Speedy. A particular use of words and phrasing. “I’ll never speak her name. Never go back . . . Our car . . .” and so forth. This voice just works.

Linking from a writing journal is going to be cool, dude. This is the stuff.

nature and Romanticism

We’ve jumped into discussions of nature in British Literature and talked a lot about the opposition of civilization and nature and connected this to certain associations of value. Isaiah’s response to Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell goes directly to this notion of value–the tossing off of “culture and sophistication” for a purer approach. In the course we do a lot of back and forth between the 18th century and the present and “look for” Blake in the present. But it isn’t an easy thing to do because of the complexity of rhetorical analysis, media, and the assumptions we make about truth, belief, and reason.

For example, a reader on Time’s Person of the Year issue writes

Bush’s determination and steadfast personality are what makes this President special. There is no pretense or sophistication about him. He is authentic.

“Authenticity” is associated with non-sophistication. The translation is President Bush is “closer” to his “nature” than the cityslickers who are corrupted by society, those overcome by pretense, sophisticated coffees, athiesm, and the chains that Rousseau referred to. This is, regardless of politics, a powerful image, a fixture of Americanism and the tendencies we’ve been discussing.

The subject is not what is real or what is truth here, but what we buy.

social geography and advertising

The use of social geography in this Toyota ad in Time is interesting as a compound metaphorical representation of multiple spaces compressed into a single image. Here we have a space, the interior of a vehicle, which contains entertainment, domestic, storage, and play space. Van as “locations.” Van as abstract mapping of place “onto.”

vehicle_image.jpg

practical teaching and learning

I like this. The group is generating good spreads of discussion on games, teaching, learning, pedagogy, history, and new media essentials. Coonce-Ewing links to this article from W-M, Susan Gibb is digging into Silent Hill and Suttree (in my mind one of the great American novels next to Twain’s Huck Finn), and Professor Timmons is digging it too with this post.

As concerns the broad issue of learning, education in the United States supports different kinds of life narratives, the most fundamental being “I’m born, go to school, get a job, retire, and die” with a wide variety of variations. Along the way, I have a few choices to make and sometimes choices are made for me. I may be 15 and not know what I want to do when I grow up so I do what the friends do or take the advise of a wise councilor and become a lawyer. Education supports–and needs to support–the institutions of a given time and place. In the US we have a legal system that helps the country stay its course, thus some piece of the education pie must provide space for the instruction of lawyers and some space of the cultural pie must give them a place to operate. The space where the lawyer and the judge operate needs an architect and a carpenter and all of these people need some means of getting to their jobs and thus the cultural hypertext grows and grows and grows. Everything is connected.

Along the narrative, I might have an inclination to become a game programmer or a snowplow driver.

When we talk about education as a phenomenon, we need to talk context. The Great Lettuce Head tells me, though, that I need to watch out and take care. GLH says that everyone is a student of something. Perhaps there’s someone trying to learn to roll a joint. This is an act of learning. Or, perhaps this is a better example, a person needs to learn how to clean the carburator of their snowthrower in order to get the thing started. They could 1. read the manual 2. call the mechanic 3. watch someone else 4. approach the job by trial and error 5. use a shovel and fantasize about the wonders of technology in all its shapes and sizes. Some people would say that this kind of education is “training.” I could learn how to use photoshop and that would be the same as knowing how to work with machines. Some people know how to build the machine from scratch, though, and this kind of learning is “education,” the kind you have to pay big bucks for. Some people might claim that these two definitions are different. I don’t.

Context is important for almost everything. The education institution reflects the culture. In this view, systems are interpreted using metaphors of order, such as that of the body politic or the well-oiled machine. We need engineers so there’s a School of Engineering at the University. We need people to know Milton . . . oops, cut that one out. Or should we leave that example in? Anyway, when someone alters the system, say, proposes that we aren’t going to do homework anymore, other “react” to that change as an element of disorder, and disorder is bad. But is “order” realistic in the human context.

Of course, all of this is pretty macro and general because it doesn’t take into account other types of system disruptions, such as discovery and natural disaster. Education throughout human history has served many masters: prophets, kings, shamans, deans, fathers, gods, mothers, bullies, managers, politicians, theoreticians, students, and madpeople. In college, we see how programs evolve, fail, or just disappear. We see the thought process behind new courses and new hires. We see things change and we see things stay the same. We have seen the teacher who uses the same syllabus for thirty years and when called on it simply shrug off the critique as if they know best. We see the teacher in constant flux, that one over there with hair like wire and eyerims red as a fresh rash. We see fads come and go. We see reintroductions of ideas thought long dead.

I put approaches into two broad classes, both of use in context: “procedural education” and “improvisational education.” I don’t think these classes should be taken all that seriously, but I see a major conflict in education these days with how we deal with learning communities in spaces that are rigid and categorical. This doesn’t mean that nurses or lawyers shouldn’t be taught how do to do their important work in a rigorous “rote” based curriculum, since procedural and fact recall in these areas is critical. But it does mean that problem solving is becoming more and more necessary for more and more numbers of people. Malcolm McCullough in Digital Ground writes it this way

By now it is common knowledge how recombinant communities of knowledge workers remake older chains of command. The postindustrial conception of design has promoted a more interdisciplinary approach to the building of information technologies.

In particular, an emphasis on communities of knowledge has legitimized more emphasis on context . . . .This is because knowledge workers do not follow procedures so much as expertly play their contexts. Without an ability to improvise in context, people who are merely following official prescriptions are utterly lost as soon as they stray from known conditions . . . (150-51 italics mine; see original for notes)

Professor Timmons knows that this “improvisational approach” is inherent in games themselves, i.e., chess and, I would hazard to say, Milton reading, both in their development and in their contextual use, and much commentary on games in education is “about” this rich quality of solid hypermedia to involve complexity, surprise, and discovery at many levels.

How to teach Milton using the techniques, environments, and analytics of new media? Well, that’s a good question. Why teach Milton using blah blah blah? That’s another good question.When to teach Milton with blah, blah, blah?

Should I ask these questions or just freakout?

homework and less homework

Susan Gibb passes this little tidbit along to me concerning some policy changes at St. John’s in Marlborough. Interesting news. Source The Telegraph.

St John’s sees itself as at the forefront of radical educational change and Dr Hazlewood is testing a futuristic project devised by the Royal Society for the Arts which rejects the notion that a teacher’s job is to transmit a body of knowledge to pupils.

The project aims instead to encourage pupils to “love learning for its own sake” and the project is intended to replace the “information-led, subject-driven” national curriculum with one based on “competences for learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information”.

The point of schooling, the RSA says, is to acquire competence not subject knowledge. It believes that exams only impede pupils’ progress.

At St John’s, which has 1,450 pupils aged 11 to 18 – 250 of them 12-year-olds – replacing first-year subjects with “cross-curricular projects” of the kind that used to be popular in primary schools was the first step. Allowing the pupils to mark each other’s work was the second. Scrapping homework is the third.

The policy statement on the St. John site still claims homework as a regular part of study, though. In my opinion, if the above report is accurate, I’d claim that this is actually a good idea.

There is a place, however, where homework isn’t given. That’s college. There’s really no homework “given” in the classes that I teach. People, in order to get by, simply have work to do. They can do it at home or in the Library or at Starbucks.

romanticism, periods, and the trimmings

In this little hypertext essay I formulate a reading of Anna Barbauld’s poem A Summer Evening’s Mediation. It’s what I would call a “personal response” because the poem dramatizes something in my own experience about the notion of time. But it’s from the poem that an elongated reading develops on certain issues that can be asserted as Romantic, a label I’m uncomfortable with but have to use because of the tradition of literary study. So we go with Romanticism in Britlit 2.

We started class last evening with introductory discussion and some comment on Barbauld and a few ideas that we will be concentrating on for the remainder of the semester. But it’s always a good idea to return to the discussion and draw more out of it via “contemplation” or “reflection.” The ideas are huge and complex and draining.

Romanticism as a Concentration on Values
Generalizing a set of writers across a substantial amount of time is dangerous, but if we take Barbauld and Blake we can outline values with which these authors engage. What does Barbauld value in Mediation. Who carries the action of the poem? Contemplation. What does Contemplation do? Contemplation flies into space and goes as far as the imagination allows in “her” journey. But contemplation isn’t necessarily considered “logical,” “rational,” or “methodological.” Contemplation is free to fly, to roam. Freedom to think can therefore be called a value in the poem, which, of course, can be linked as a notion to the Big Ideas of the day (and to ours), as in the freedoms souht through revolution. But is Barbauld’s a special kind of freedom? The freedom to think beyond the known, perhaps, to think beyond restriction, especially those permitted by the cultire for women? We’ll see the same thing in Blake, a sense of liberation brought on by the freedom to let the mind go, to move beyond conventional restrictions, such as those permitted by standard written or artistic forms.

Romanticism as a Cultural Tendency
What do writers prioritize in their works? Do they prioritize a fascination with inventiveness, freedom, intuition, emotional reaction, imagination, with the profits of mysticism, with working and playing beyond the boundaries, with people as cultured, as savages, as team players? Do they ask questions in their work about what is humanly possible, what can be done vs what should be done? The slogan “Be all you can Be” is a particular Romantic expression or shares an exuberance about human potential and capacity with certain ideas expressed by certain writers in the period, a sort of “spirit of the time.” It appeals to us; it could be an advertising trick; but as an expression of something having to do with the human self it is “true.” That is, Huygens, a successful demonstration of inventiveness, mathematics, and imagination is “about “expanding the human horizon.” We see farther through Huygens. We’re seeing the surface of Titan. We’re, therefore, through Huygens following the same path that Barbauld imagined in her poem. Wow. She used pure contemplation whereas we can build the craft to go there.

Romanticism as Politics
Some people when told what to do do the opposite. The teenager aches for age, while the old man laments his brittle bones. Youth, age, ignorance, innocence, experience, what we lose as a consequence of life–all play out in the work of the Romantics. Thus Romanticism plays with certain aspects of the human condition. We get old. Is this something to envy or fight? We don’t know. Should we use our brains to learn as much as we can and shed the restrictions of not knowing? We live in collectives. Should we shape those collectives on Utopian or on more pragmatic or “naturalistic” models? The revolutionaries of France and America all brought the enlightenment view of Modeler, Dreamer, and Maker to their work of shaping their collectives. It is for this reason that the struggle continues because, in the political view of People, we are yet Romantics and all the decisions we make about war in other countries, the spread of democracy, and the economy are all influenced by decisions and documents pulsed into our lives by the fathers and mothers.

games, where’s the story?

John Timmons comments thustly on a reaction to Halo 2 by David at Buzzcut:

But is this just part of the reality of play with many games or is it just an expression of frustration and/or disappointment?

Some people might argue that a first person shooter with a good story is about as possible as a dramatic porno movie. That is, who’d watch it without the porno? Who’d say, “Wow, without that sloppy stuff this’d be a damned good film.” A little beside the point, but there you go.

In John’s demo of Deus Ex and Medal of Honor I noted that “story” had been woven into DE as a spur to accompany levels of complexity. There was no guarantee that the story would be fulfilling beyond the surmounting experience or that, in any case, one player would care about it while some other player would be influenced more by circumstances, filial relationship, or darkness. I didn’t see enough of MOH to really grasp a sense of story beyond the intro mission. These describe my ignorance of the game but also the sense that I get of how story is involved in action games rather than those of adventures.

In chess we have a story behind the play–two kingdoms going at it, an image of perpetual conflict, triumph or stalemate resolves the story. All chess games, it could be said, are different, but all chess games are the same because they are, in any instance of play, “the game of chess.” An infinite game with infinite variations but restricted to a simple set of rules or computations. But there’s more. I used to play chess with a friend after tennis. M could whip me on the court so chess was my revenge. It was more than just the rules. And more so than my own frivolous revenge. It was a way for us to discuss, vent, siesta, and drink beer. My father would look over our shoulders and tell us what dumb moves we were making. What’s more, we’d shift the rules a bit to include a graduation of push-ups per taken piece–five for pawn, 50 for Rook, 75 for Queen, and so forth. So chess also became another way to workout.

It’s hard to talk about chess as just a set of rules. Chess is an infinite space. John Timmons is fascinated not just by how games change space but how space changes games, finding things in Deus Ex that he’d never encountered in prior play because of how “the situation of play” altered decisions. When we watched Susan Gibb play her hand at Silent Hill I saw another game being played beyond the one I’d had going. Variations on a theme. In a way we’re not studying games, but we’re learning a lot nonetheless about what makes for interest and complexity in serious play.