On some down time I’ve tried to read through the new National Security Strategy but it is difficult. In my mind, the words have no reference to anything real, which makes the document sort of weightless and strange, like some sort alien goo.
We want we want we want but can’t give with grins and silly waves and faces and words like democracy and obligation and fingers up at what
It always strikes me how you can read a weblog and suddenly realize that the author lives in a place you’ve never experienced. Yet the body of post speaks about activism, writing, and the Internet with such “shared experience” that “space” has been reduced to word and impression.
I like it.
What a great time tonight with the Narratives Group. The subject was patterns in music, art, and hypertext. We started with some study of Coltrane and Monk’s Sweet and Lovely and Blue Monk off the Carnegie Hall CD and followed how the “narrative” of the songs progressed as variations on themes, the essential structure extending from incredible manipulations. Then we moved on to photographs of Tom Friedman’s sculpture. It was interesting to listen to the group’s responses to each in piece in display, especially Zak, who got somewhat discomforted, saying, “It just doesn’t look real.” Taking common objects and repositioning them in space, time, and playing with their “nature” was just fun to engage with. Luminosity, weightlessness, density turned to hollowness.
Next we moved to Deena Larsen’s Samplers, paying particular attention to Firewheel. In reading hypertext, attention has to be payed not just to the reading environment, which will fade as new reading habits form, but to words in their multidimensional context and suggested patterns as the reader moves through an experience, establishing the sense of the speaker’s “joining” to the fire.
Thanks everyone.
At the college we’ve talking a lot about ability-based teaching and learning. Invariably, this had led to discussion about the diction of education as a matter of practice. What is an educational objective, for example? In the mean time, I’ve been having interesting conversations with students who are beginning to think not in terms of grades but in terms of abilities because of the way I’ve presented evaluations in British Literature and elsewhere, especially in the development of research projects. The core of the ability-based architecture is the articulation of active verbs, such as those modeled by Bloom in the famous taxonomy, which cashes verbs in a cognitive framework. Practically speaking, after observation comes analysis. How does a student learn chemistry? How do they grow into the domain of science? When can a student go beyond identifying relationships to drawing insight.
Here’s an example. On an exam, I asked students to identify a concept and to explain it in a particular context. The context was Romanticism. The concept was metaphor. The question is meant to provide students the opportunity to identify then to connect not to generate interpretation or argument. In working through the question, the student writes about Romanticism and about metaphor and I can guage to what degree the ideas square against the discipline and to what the degree the student is drawing insight from the material. In talking to students about how to improve in their precision, how to evaluate their own work, we get to engage in hardnosed talk about Barbauld, Blake, and Mill.
In his novel, The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, which he’s now calling an essay in fiction, Professor Sandoval has another feature of things to deal with: the idea of edges.
He enterprizes:
I’m laying awake at night thinking about studcuts for a shed, let’s say. Let’s say I want to make a 7 foot cut (about 213 centimeters) and draw a line for cutting. On which side of the line am I to cut for perfect length? The answer is easy. But the I’ve made the wrong cut several times because as I cut I momentarily forget which side establishes length, and I often can’t see with a saw where a cut begins in relation to the line because of the width of the blade, say at 3/32 of an inch, and the starting angle of the cut (my friends tell me this is why I need a miter saw). But the problem is not the reality of the shed, but where the edge actually exists in reality on the stud. The line also has width, thus a cut on any board is board + line width – extraneous piece.
I’m working on a survey of names in a phone book, each a link to a real human being. The phone book, filled with strings of text, is a hypertext of edges, each name an impression or image, a border completing the form of a human body. A library full of books with repeating titles. It’s impossible to cut two studs to perfect length. It’s also hard to fall asleep under these conditions.
Writing with a hypertext tool is a learning experience in and of itself. I think real learning is captured in the journey: you learn as you go and when you hit a snag, you figure the problem out, connecting what you know to what you don’t, and then entering a room with objects that look but really aren’t familiar. Knowing what a metaphor is is just a beginning. One of my mentors, Rick DeMarinis, wrote in a story that story is a great teacher. This is a complex and nuanced idea.
So it goes with spatial literacies. My son (aged 4) has a ball with video games, and so do I with him. I grew up with games and game-like spaces: tennis, football, Go Fish, and the walk to school. S is growing up with DVD interactivity, the PS2, and a world of manipulatable virtual spaces. His in-game “girl hero” has become a persona. My persona or alter-ego was GI-Joe. Our experiences with play are similar but different.
The video game has allowed him to practice reading with a purpose not just reading “to read.” If he can’t read, he can’t play. They’ve allowed him to critically decode abstract objects, such as icons and buttons. They’ve offered an opportunity to experience, evaluate, and chose between multiple kinds of spatial representation in order to make different decisions. In one game, he must toggle between 3 different representations of the same space–2D top-view, 3D elevation, and 3D 3rd person POV–in order to orient himself to and make decisions about a particular objective in a game. This has generated an interest in mazes and maps, including a card game that “teaches” geography.
Here’s an issue. In trying to understand a perceived weakness in a sectional story arc in Sandoval, as he’s working the hypertext to generate story and illustration of certain pet ideas of his, I keep wondering when certain dramatic issues should declair themselves. The answer should come from the creative drive of the writing, but often I have to break out of Sandoval and think “out” of him.
In some ways it’s a spatial question. 5 or 10 text spaces: is that the arc span? Sandoval dealt with the night lab issue by thinking about “what happened” and somehow a relationship between two other characters came from it in the illusion of creative performance, a relation that only became known because this and that actually happened in the story. (But I could be speaking still as Sandoval, or as Ejay Mariposa).
Space and pulse (time and rhythm) are thus concurrences. In other words, 10 text spaces could form the width of a poem in hypertext or the width of a necessary event in a character’s life.
Working with WordPress has been very nice over the last year or so, especially with the issue of comment spam. I’ve had a few spam comments waiting in the wings here and they’re relatively easy to do away with. But the latest versions have been odd as spoofers. The URIs are legitimate, but the messages are clunky declaratives, and sell or profer nothing. At least the older stuff attempted material sales, like pills and sex. For its dark side, spam has a purpose, but I can’t figure what the purpose is of my latest visitors.
We’ve headed into the Victorian Period in BL. We’ll be dealing with Mill and E.Browning. Links are key here. One of the fun things about teaching this side of literature study is identifying and talking about linked notions, things that appear to be constant among a set of writings and watching how ideas develop in other voices, in other times, and belong to neither. The cognitive elements have to do with identification, drawing relationships, differentiating voices, and evaluating styles.
We know that, simply speaking, certain writers (and cultures) display a bias in their conception of non-trivial direction: up is good, for example. Where is heaven? And where does Contemplation travel? The treatment of the concept of well-being, this platonic reconcepting of movement toward the good, of experience, being, and person hood–Mill’s idea of finding the “whole person” through a certain kind of action, freedom of thought, variety, and originality–has a lot to do with Blake’s devil speak in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Wollstonecraft’s arguments for progressive education and against nurtured restrictions. How much does this have to do with “literature” versus “thinking” about cool ideas versus literature as cool in and of itself? What do we do with Mill’s arguments against Calvinism? What does it matter that certain ideas form threads through the years to be embodied in the literary voice and in the objects we experience, such as toasters, Global Positioning Systems, squirrel traps, and book shelves?
As W.H. Auden wrote:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
This “stupor” is a special thing. So is the “affirming flame.” Mill writes:
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery — by automatons in human form — it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
This series of Mill elements–the perfectability of people, the implications of a “good path” and human “tendency” for action which can be traced back to Barbauld’s “Contemplation,” who finds her way to Saturn and wonders at the unknown beyond it, the scorn for imitation and custom (later to be seen in Ms. Warren), the trouble with the figure of man as machine–is also “our” series, isn’t it? Filaments that form a pattern. Red pill or blue pill?
The context is time for Sandoval in The Life. And environment. In session today, which was hard to get out of, Sandoval was trying to fix a POV problem, a POV problem that had to do with verbs.
I’m still trying to fix a pulse problem with the plot of the novel in a certain area and a lot of the fix as it’s developing has to do with Sandoval referring to links, as if he’s going to time the pace of the action against various references to hypertextuality itself–these are time references, since each text space in the hypertext could very easily connect to out-of-sequence instances which could vary or play with the theme of time. Hypothetically, I could drum up a scene:
Let’s say we have a first person POV and he’s describing how as a boy he leaves one house and ventures through the woods to another house to play with midnight labs (this sentence is a revision). When did this happen? “One time I . . .” Or “A few weeks into winter I . . .” Rather than think of this as a flashback, the POV treats it as a necessary step toward a culmination, and since the link has yet to be woven into context, “flashback” is premature. One reading of the novel would be flashback, while another reading of the novel would resort the event as an outcome of cause and effect. (The fact that he’s at the kennel at the moment and I don’t know what happens there is POV at its most bothersome–although, now that I think of it, only moments ago rewriting sentence 1 of this paragraph, a solution has presented itself: midnight labs.)