Author Archives: Steve

New Looks and New Approaches

I forgot that I can link to the College, now that the website has been redesigned by the great Jim Revillini. I’ve been unable to link because of the embarrassment I felt at the last design, which served very few. I still think the header’s too large, but things are moving.

The new College look also goes deeper, with new buildings, and a new approach to teaching and learning that digs into the guts of pedagogy and instructional practices that we call Ability-based. What’s it all about? It goes back years when we were admonished by our accrediting agency for our inability to detail how we differentiate General Education from other curricular areas. General Education can be defined broadly as those sets of skills, competencies, and contexts that “all” students at the college should demonstrate as members of an academic community and as members of the community at large. General Education is distinguished from specific degree-based cores. Long story short, the Connecticut public college system struggles to define a General Education core because of its “course-based” denotation. This many Social Science electives meets the core is the basic General Education argument, establishing Social Science as a General Education concern.

The path we followed was to define General Education as a set of abilities not as a clustered number of courses. The concept in practice can be difficult to conceptualize but promotes flexibility and problem solving in interesting ways. Communication is one of the broad areas we defined as a Gen Ed Area. Communication is conceived as subsets, which currently include writing, speaking, and listening abilities. Tunxis has defined 10 broad areas of Ability, which may shrink in the future. But here’s where the concept goes deep. The General Education Areas are now conceived as shared across the curriculum. English, Psychology, History, and even Math could all links exams, quizzes, and papers in their courses to the Communication area of ability. Professors in those areas would share responsibility for instruction in writing, as well as other Areas. If a Java programming course links to writing, then its instructor would share responsibility for instruction in writing given the context of the course and its particular method, providing instructional space for instructors to assert authority for their particular subject of interest as it involves the communication of ideas. People typically agree that students at a college should have their principle instruction in writing occur in Composition courses and that the skill will thereby be used by students in other courses. This we see as unrealistic, given that people in reality write in many contexts and for reasons a few writing courses can’t really cover.

In the professions people write, listen, and speak to one another as a matter of the day to day. To confine the instructional practice to a few courses reinforces disciplinary walls. The best teachers I had in college all encouraged us to use all our tools in better ways; they also taught the pen. They saw their way to instruct in more than just Anthropology and Trig; they didn’t see aesthetics as someone else’s job to convey. I still remember being dragged through speeches in a Childrens Literature course, grumbling that this was not a speech course. The instructor not only taught us how to engage texts, but also how to express what we learned through carefully drafted speeches. One of the best courses I ever had, providing a base for much of what I do now in and out of the classroom.

On Commonplacing and Hyperext

Susan Gibb persists into the text and into the analysis:

The idea finally hit, in the middle of making chicken’n’dumplings for dinner tonight: The Writing Space that’s held me hostage has now officially given me two endings for story #1. As mentioned before, that involves the “special link” in Storyspace of ?(n) — in this case, (n) being 2, or every other time it’s read. I was going to leave a loop and text-link one of the endings, but hey, what’s better than a couple readers arguing about how it ended when only you know that they read two different things? Hee-hee.

What’s interesting here is the implication for Story 1 that it has two endings and not one. But how can this be so? And boy do we love the concept of guard fields.

Well, why not? We may think about endings as being something important to talk about and to “prove.” Consider Lear and its problematic ending. Which one?

A better question may be why multiple paths, not alternative endings (which assumes a primary and secondary set), may be called for a given story. In fiction, endings may be “the start.” Where the story begins assumes that the ending has already been drafted given diagesis. A good example of this is Carver’s Cathedral, where the story has already ended and thus can be told by “Bub.” But enough about that.

I can think of three “important endings.” The first is Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, the second, John Porcellino’s Perfect Example, and Alice Munro’s, Walker Brother’s Cowboy. Solitude‘s ending bangs everything home with a literal whirl of provocative energy. Porcellino’s is a closing that is the very reason why we need story to remember and live (No, I don’t want to explain what I mean by that: the proof is in the work). And Munro is about as true as it gets because the reader is left on the inside to lick the edges of her world.

For Susan, it’s “the writing space” that gives. I know what she means, and it’s in such a description that Storyspace becomes organic, a natural environment where characters take different shape. She writes: “The last text box is never automatically the last. And never necessarily remains where it is within the story.” Like a wonderfully balanced router, the tool fits a given tale. This is nothing that needs proving. The tale will bear it out somehow.

I’m reading through Paths at the moment. I also have the Word version. This is fun.

Politics and Journalism

This article by Peter Wallsten from the Los Angeles Times and printed in The Hartford Courant is typical of what I would call “political or horse-race reporting.” It’s also reflective of news programming that concentrates of political strategy and campaign instruction, which may be a new idiom of the art.

Here are some features that describe the idiom:

1. Content is typically inconsistent with the headline
2. Content reflects party activity as the subject of the report
3. Quotes are reported as if they “were” the news

Let’s look at this a little more closely. The headline reads: “Democrats Get Tougher On Illegal Immigrants.” The first paragraph reads:

Top Democratic elected officials and strategists are engaged in an internal debate over toughening the party’s image on illegal immigration, with some worried that Democrats’ relatively welcoming stance makes them vulnerable to GOP attacks in the 2008 election.

While the headline suggests actual changes in policy positions by the Democrats, the first paragraph focuses on “the party’s image.” The debate is not about actual policy, but about a “toughening of the party’s image on illegal immigration” or what Wallsten refers to as “calibration.” The problem for this shift in “image-but-not-actual-policy” comes from “election results”:

Advocates of the change cite local and state election results last week in Virginia and New York, where Democrats used sharper language and get-tough proposals to stave off Republican efforts to paint the party as weak on the issue.

In Virginia, for instance, where Democrats took control of the state Senate, one high-profile victory came in the Washington suburbs, where the winner distributed mailings in the campaign’s closing days proclaiming his opposition to in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants.

In the article, Wallsten does call up one example of actual policy change that shows evidence that more than image politics is at play. He writes:

In Congress, a group of conservative Democrats, led by freshman Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, introduced legislation last week calling for more Border Patrol agents and a requirement that employers verify the legal status of workers. The proposal does not include measures to create a path to citizenship for millions of illegal workers, which in the past have been supported by Democrats nationally.

Significant here is the item left off the agenda which meets the theme of recalibration within the horse-race narrative: the “path to citizenship.” There is a missing context here though as to why the legislation is a “toughening” move and not “good or bad policy” when measured or evaluated against a list of standards: more agents (there are not enough) and “verification requirement” (verify how?). It would seem that this paragraph should form the bulk of the report if indeed the article were “about” the headline.

But then we bleed back into the “narrative”:

With polls showing broad discontent with the government’s handling of immigration, some Democrats are arguing that there are areas in which the party can toughen its image without moving too far away from its traditionally pro-immigration leanings – such as supporting heightened security at the Mexico border, opposing benefits for illegal immigrants and pushing for harsher penalties against businesses that hire illegal workers. (bolds mine)

I don’t understand the concluding list and why these “positions” constitute “pro-immigration leanings.”

The report is about demagoguery not about policy.

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Reading Milton

I get tough questions this semester, which is excellent and refreshing. I run off to find an answer or a solution, but when I figure it I can only give back a hint:

. . . if no better place,
Thank him who puts me loath to this revenge
On you who wrong me not for him who wrongd.

Here’s one of those areas where line breaks get in the way and where meter is beating sense, and also nonstandard orthography.

Thank, in other words, God for this, not me. Satan is beginning to rationalize.

Why? We can read “me not” as the end of the clause and put commas between “loath to this revenge” so the sentence would read “Thank Him who made me what I am for assailing you, who never did anything to me, sure, but it was Him who wronged.”

SIGs and Politics

Spazeboy writes in an older post:

The research paper is for American Political Economy, and the topic I’ve tentatively chosen to write about is “How do corporations/associations/industries mobilize politically to protect their business models?”

Isn’t this about researching the activities and influence of special interest groups or industry lobbies?

The Silva Rerum, the Weblog, and the Journal

In many of my courses, I have students keep journals where they log their reading and keep notes. Looking back at my description of the journal reminds me of the ancient practice of commonplacing. Weblogs, Tinderbox, and other tools are methods of commonplacing, which plays a role, I would have to say, in the history of hypertext, hypertextuality, and the concept of the memex, since readers, such as Locke or Milton would read, reread, and recall and collect ideas based the numerous works they might have been reading at any given time.

The “silva rerum” refers to a forest of things. The commonplace book has been referred to as a reflective journal, where, in practice, sections of work would be written down by the reader and commented on in a notebook, now, of course, in a weblog or a note tool.

In the first dialogue exchange between Satan and Beelzebub in Paradise Lost, we have Milton employing dramatic language, either self-directed or to his comrade. It goes like this:

If thou beest he; But O how fall’n! how chang’d
From him, who in the happy Realms of Light
Cloth’d with transcendent brightnes didst outshine
Myriads though bright: If he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope,
And hazard in the Glorious Enterprize,
Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd
In equal ruin: into what Pit thou seest
From what highth fal’n, so much the stronger provd
He with his Thunder: and till then who knew
The force of those dire Arms? (84-94)

The first words uttered are significant because they expose the magnitude of change that has occurred after the war in heaven. Just those few lines, spoken slowly, and in amazement (to suggest the kind of utterance it actually is) are key to the relationship the reader may have with Paradise Lost. “If thou beest he; But O how fall’n” can be read in all kinds of interesting ways, numerous affects, speeds, and expressivity, given the readers take on the situation.

This would be a commonplace entry, involving reflections on the theme of reading, drama, and performance. Typically of the commonplace is its organization. It’s not just meant to collect thoughts, but those thoughts are meant to be found, revised, and rethought. Why collect otherwise; why should we write notes at all unless those notes serve some larger purpose?

Oppositions are important to Milton, to religion, and to polemic. Hell, for example, as place, state, and staging ground will rear back at the end of the text after Adam and Eve are removed from the place, state, and staging ground of Paradise. For Satan, hell is both a place to fall into, physically, sensually, and a state of mind or frame of reference. Satan will not repent. He says:

. . . Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (249-254)

Satan possess hell and refers to the mind as a “place,” habitable, motile: the state argument.

On his decent to Paradise, Satan observes the beauty he will never have back, this in Book 3. The idea of hell as mind follows the action. Thought follows Satan and all the torture that can bring with it:

Satan from hence now on the lower stair
That scal’d by steps of Gold to Heav’n Gate
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view
Of all this World at once. As when a Scout
Through dark and desart wayes with peril gone
All night; at last by break of chearful dawne
Obtains the brow of some high-climbing Hill,
Which to his eye discovers unaware
The goodly prospect of some forein land
First-seen, or some renownd Metropolis
With glistering Spires and Pinnacles adornd,
Which now the Rising Sun guilds with his beams. (3.540-51)

Satan’s wonder is like a scouts, who, tapping a hill sees a new landscape. This passage, much like the expression to Beelzebub, recalls that sense of observed change and surprise.
In Book 4 we read doubt in Satan and identify the surfacing of regret:

Yet not rejoycing in his speed, though bold,
Far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast,
Begins his dire attempt, which nigh the birth
Now rowling, boiles in his tumultuous brest,
And like a devillish Engine back recoiles
Upon himself; horror and doubt distract
His troubl’d thoughts, and from the bottom stirr
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more then from himself can fly
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue. (4.13-26)

The commonplace observation should reveal the structures of the work. This last passage closes the state argument, at least for now and in this section. “The Hell within him” is an echo of “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Satan carries “himself” with him no matter the place.

The Persistence of Time

Why is it that in filmic comedy time has become such an important player?

Characters come and go in Heroes, which has in the past few weeks lost some of its edge, the narrative blurring around problems with inertia and focus. It’s a simple problem: ensembles can, without a cohesive focus, produce spaghetti, a sense that while players may be significant their connective tissue is mere trickery. Too many coincidences force a conclusion.

Redemption’s possible though. The theme, the connective tissue, may indeed be time itself, while death plays the role of plot or fork. The fork may have to be the key frame.

This is just a quick jot.

Hypertext and Thinking

At Hypercompendia, Susan Gibb describes an interesting process:

Just when you think you know these people you find something out and you click open a writing space and you tell everyone else about it. Its free association at its finest and Ill read and reread until I know all there is to know about what they’ve been hiding from me.

I’m not sure about “free association” (which may be a correct descriptor), but I do know that the tool is promoting thinking in different ways than the linear environment. In terms of writing character, Neil Gaiman has mentioned the knowledge character’s feed the writer, an idea that is difficult to convey outside of the influence of the muse. Numerous fiction writers have written about the phenomenon.

In another sense, “writing” as a descriptive action is a generalization. Thinking is a better generalizer. Good writing on many levels is good thinking. In this sense writing is simile.

On Interpretation

A wonderful examination of the “question” of riddles in the Exeter Book by Adam Roberts at The Valve (links/blockquotes in original). Here’s a nice snip:

So let’s take it as a single, one-line riddle. Here it is, followed by Kevin Crossley-Holland’s concise translation

Wundor wearð on wege: wæter wearð to bane.

On the way, a miracle: water becomes bone.

Scholars agree that answer to this riddle is: ice. Scholars don’t always agree on the answer to any given riddle. For example, various OE riddle experts have looked at Riddle 74 (‘I was once a young woman,/a glorious warrior, a grey-haired queen./I soared with birds, stepped on the earth,/swam in the sea—dived under the waves, languid amongst fishes. I had a living spirit’) and variously suggested cuttlefish, water, siren and swan as the answer. By comparison, and remembering that the answers to these riddles are nowhere written down or ‘officially’ tabulated, ‘on the way, a miracle: water becomes bone … ice’ looks relatively straightforward. It’s a nicely satisfying and poetic image, too.

But here’s another answer to the riddle:

Climbing Cooper’s Hill, and looking back at the curve of the Thames in the bright, cloudy light: the afternoon sun polishing away all grey or blue from the water until it is white, its edges sharpened by the angle of illumination, looking like nothing so much as a mighty rib-bone gleaming, set in the flesh of the land … and I thought to myself yes, water becomes bone.

The answer ice identifies two points of similarity (hardness, colour) with bone; but this vision of the Thames identifies three (colour, shape, setting). Does that make it a ‘better’ answer to the Exeter Book riddle?