Fantastic strangeness

My teenaged daughter, K., and I and a friend of hers, C., hit the next blockbuster, The Fantastic Four, as is our habit (to check out the blockbusters). And the thing that struck me was the audience in attendance, primarily made up of young children–on average from 6 to 10 years old.

Now, on the one hand, FF4 is marketed to children; it’s part of the culture of summer-fun stuff. The story, however, isn’t kid’s stuff, though the dialogue was definitely adolescent. You’d expect a lot of kids in the audience.

Interestingly, the previews, which we failed to miss, were definitely not tailored for the audience. I spent a lot of time during the previews making K. and C. laugh by imagining the questions the kids in the audience might be asking their parents:

“Mama, what is that mean guy going to do with that giant knife?”

“Papa, why was that vicious-looking nurse wearing garter belts?”

“Ma, is our car going to blow up like that on the way home; does it hurt to drown like that, too?”

“Father, does our nurse have an Uzi in her underpants?”

Reading lists

I’m currently working on a reading list for a friend. It’s a list of suggested readings build on two parts, foundational texts and advanced. The foundations include such authors as Augustine, Saîkaku, Montaigne, and Julius Caesar, while the advanced (in time) include Kristeva, Ong, and Feynman. The readings are world-oriented and cover intellectual history. This isn’t a list of favorites, but what I consider influencial texts across the areas of human concern and the human life-world, so we have poetry, politics, history, philosophy, architecture and science among the offerings.

So, you’re a canon builder. A friend comes to you in all honesty and asks for a “course” in the breadth of human making? What would your list include?

On reading the tea leaves, 7

Everyone needs money to live. Saying that reading often involves quality depends on who you ask.

Certainly the cashier at McDonalds makes less money than the doctor. But it could be true that the fry cook at the local diner enjoys his job more than the surgeon, who has a secret fear of the color of entrails.

But all of this should be taken as a given. Beauty may is in the eye of the beholder, as is quality. And certaining the notion of “skilled” reading depends on time, place, context, and country. The guy who’s just lost his job probably could give a rat’s ass about whether Dante is high art. Yet, if you ask the professor, the answer could be that even though there are many people out there seeking survival pay, Dante is still a great poet. Surely the college freshman’s attitude about Dante shouldn’t be taken all that seriously, given that typically they don’t know enough to be sincere about the subject (as in any other case like this), just as I can’t really be sincere in my judgement of black holes as being either a corny idea or flabergastingly exact and cool. (How can I claim to deny evolution if I am just not familiar enough with it to say yay or nay?) I am not a fan of the Beetles, but I know enough about music to know that the Beetles’ output is pretty darned amazing, and that their music over time is consistently competent. What range, what nuance, and talk about play with the landscape, and they did it over and over again. But I wouldn’t purchase a single bit of it.

Judgement in many cases has simply to do with agnosis. If you haven’t read Dr. Suess how can you judge the work? How many people decry the violence of video games yet wouldn’t know a console from a shoebottom. Some people claim that science can’t explain everything thus we need religion to fill in the holes. Right. So many mysteries and the size of the universe is proof of something.

In English studies (or for the English major, just to keep things in sponsorship), one of the most valuable forms of reading is called “close” reading. It’s the primary goal of foundational studies of literature and from that point all other things are derived. First you learn to study the text’s nuances, understand its literal meaning, it’s details, vocabulary, structure, then you move on to bigger and better things (wink, wink). You read a poem first for what’s on the page or waving through the air, then you move to figures of speech, implied meaning, form, influence, and the weird things that happen when you manually play the record in reverse (Abner, Abner, Abner or some such thing if you remember the old ELO trick). You take the surveys, a few major authors, then enter graduate school and hit the critics and the multiverse and experience what you don’t have time for in the basic undergrad curriculum. Check out the courses at major universities for what’s currently being taught for Ph.D. How about Piers Plowman in the original? How about a whole bunch of southwestern or Chicano/a fiction and history? Why not? How about a whole bunch of Chinese literature? It’s not just about the literature, depending on what that means; it’s also about the culture? This makes the question of Dante in Italian or English a little more profound. And what about Kafka? It was Borges who consulted the Oracle and walked away with a new kind of grin. Good luck knowing your multiplying selves.

We can talk about the art of reading without ever picking up a poem. I found this list from the Army’s website just to make a point about “reading” and the idea of “reading for.” Why would it be suggested that leaders read Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization?

Celebrations

My son, Samuel Mark (his name is actually quite literary, if you can guess the riddle), is now 4 years old today. Congratulations Sam.

He was presented clay as a gift and the first thing he did was roll it all into a Katamari.

On reading the garden

Here’s Susan Gibb on reading

As I weed, I am thinking about how I am reading the soil, the dill, the crabgrass. All the years of gardening have taught me to recognize most weeds and vegetables from the time they are only about an eighth of an inch high. I know that weeds sprout and grow faster than most desirable plants, and can soon overtake the especially slow-growing herbs. I used to use a trick in sowing rows, tossing in a few radish seeds along with the rest because they come up quickly and will mark the rows easily before the rest come up. It works, but this tool was interfering with the slower basil; radish grow so quickly that they push everything out of the way, and by the time you pull them, you are as well destroying the basil. The tool then becomes a blockage to good growth, it is in the way.

On reading the tea leaves, 6

In higher education the teaching of reading is woven into its own curriculum and throughout the academy. Biology teachers are concerned that their students are able to read the text book, thus the sciences have made prerequisites that involve reading instruction a part of their own. This is a good because it reinforces the practical essence of what reading instructors profess about the importance of reading at more and more critical levels. Success in biology can be traced back to students’ ability to remember what they read and apply analysis to problems in science, which depends upon a certain amount of competency that is often taken for granted.

For success in school, the ability to grasp the text book is important across the curriculum, from biology to Computer Science, and in this cross-curricular context, we use the term literacy to describe, classify, and critique degrees and types of competency. Simply put, there are many levels of literacy (or knowing the letters), which is what is being extended here by Michael Mateas in an essay that makes good sense. Part of the issue here has to do with the culture of “knowing about something,” which is an awfully broad angle to take. To claim “a” literacy is to claim competency. But this also involves the politics of knowledge and tradition, of which Dante as man and “European” has often been at the center. What to teach, how to go about that teaching; what to learn and how to contextualize that learning within a tradition; what to leave in and what to leave out, the politics of the canon of thought–these questions aren’t limited to the humanities. The debate over which is the better theory to explain nature is a hot topic today in math and physics. What are the assumptions we make about how to teach reading and writing to college freshman? How does “how we teach” shape our concept of the human and the idea of liberal education. Do we limit definitions of literacy to suit our professions or positions? Are our conclusions really beneficial or are they protectionist or just plain wrong? These days we have to develop objectives and outcomes that define technical competency, which is not an easy job. At the same time, within the academy, we must also assert competencies that maintain the rigors of traditional as well as emerging areas of study.

With all this we can come to some conlcusions about reading that I would maintain are obvious:

1. All people are readers in the broad sense. The gardener reads the garden; the traveler reads the landscape; and the engineer reads the particular system.
2. In the professions, people maintain various reading competencies given their relevant knowledge contexts.

1 and 2 are treated as amorphous spaces which are indistinct but are classified culturally and qualitatively in a democracy. The burgerflipper, who reads the complicated space behind the counter, is just as much a part of the culture as the doctor, who reads the body and the germ, and it isn’t my place to assign value to either. Nor is it my job to assert human worth to a particular place of rest or work. Other people do that all the time. Yet, taking such a phenomenon will make for a good start in on reading #7.

When friends come to call

What’s this? Is this Jayne Pynes come calling at this weblog, commenting in this post? Yes, it is. And thus some background.

Jayne (and correct me if this is true–are you done with the Rhet/Comp Ph.D?) is one of my oldest and best friends back in El Paso, along with her husband, Pat, a potent historian and Ph.D candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso. The history goes farther back to Catholic church and other familiarities. All of us were very close in undergraduate and grad school and had lots of adventures. My wife and I still cringe at the image of a heavy ladder almost taking off Jayne’s legs during a paint job at our old house.

Moves have separated us and yet while separated we’ve maintained contact (somewhat) and hope to hook up again for more games in the future. It’s tough with children on both sides and growing families and lots of work to keep everyone busy. And now Jayne tells me she’ll be hitting the classroom at Coronado, one of our nemeses in high school.

Thanks for stopping by, Jayne. Come back and often.

On reading the tea leaves, 5

One of the things I want to stay away from in this series on reading is the idea of a Victorianesque high and low quality to the act and object–good books, bad books, good poetry, bad poetry. That there is high and lowbrow, and for those who would take issue with this, then you can certainly take me to task about it. But if I’m walking through the desert, lost or perfectly compassed, that’s where I am. What else should I want to see?

Then why Dante, who everyone claims is great. The answer is, why not Dante? And if not Dante, what? The Rosanne Barr show? Facade? Why was I in the desert in the first place? That’s a perfectly fine question to ask, it would seem to me. There has to be a reason. Was it a test? The hero’s journey on a small stage? I walked the mountain and braved the heat to burn myself down to a glowing orb of life, free of spoil and smut. The many reasons why we read for me isn’t at issue here. I don’t find McCarthy a pleasure to read (how could one find pleasure in a world where all the trees have been cut down around the Lorax’s fluffy beard) ; One Hundred Years of Solitude is a fantastic experience; and Borges, my favorite, isn’t something you come at lightly. This is more about experience, not judgement, although I will have to come to some sort of conclusion about the object.

Some people will talk about the pleasures of gardening and yet will avoid all the hard work it takes to keep phlox alive in that spot where you want the color and the smell to shape the experience of designed landscape. Is there something wrong with a person who yanks the phlox out, thinking it’s a weed? Yes, from my end. To someone else, the stuff’s a pain in the ass and would therefore prefer the coreopsis. Some people go head over for sushi (in the old days a means of preserving food), but for me, its current form is tastless and nothing compared to a good spicy mole. Then again, should I become more discriminating about modern food (or photography for that matter)? Is sushi not for more refined or cultivated tastes? Am I missing something? Or are people who go on about sushi just food snobs, who eat cuisine rather than oatmeal, who know better about health, and who sneer at poptarts. About this, I can only contemplate.

The fact of the matter is, my boyhood book case shaped my reading habits and I can’t really do anything about that (so the fair was Dante and Edgar Rice Burroughs). The environment that surrounded the city of El Paso also shaped the way I read New England. Because of where I grew up tacos were closer at hand than pan-seared bass from Chile and I couldn’t appreciate Robert Frost until I saw the ice on real birch trees. In addition to place, my friends also helped shape “experience.” We had Dante and Tarzan, but we’d also sit around and talk about the books we read. It wasn’t sophisticated talk: it was more like, “Oh yeah, Tarzan could kick Conan’s ass.” Then we’d draw from the hero’s actions to prove it and do a form of textual analysis. We’d argue. We’d wonder about the fictional world. And where are some of these friends now? I have no idea. But I can still remember the arguments.

So, what will it be: Bethoven’s 7th or Tom Jones?

The object of reading

In a prior post, I’d written that my friend Susan Gibb might have been referring to a thing called “skilled reading.” But I must retract the use or implications of such “quality” terminology. Why, because “skilled reading” may imply too much of the “object” in its interpretation. Here’s what I mean: let’s say we have 2 things that people typically read: Dante’s Inferno and Stephen King’s The Stand. Does the former need more of a “skilled” approach than the latter? Or does this complicate matters and bring in a reading “ethic”? Obviously, one must have the terminology and concepts down to understand a Nature article on some discovery pertaining to quantum gravity or what they often talk about over at The Panda’s Thumb. But in terms of Dante and King, does such a hierarchy apply . . . yet?