who challenge entry (updated)

Once More to Mount Crumpit

She thought every day since about the encounter that night so long ago. Shed heard the tinkle of glass against stone, sly and silent mutters. Thirsty, too, shed left the bed. Shed seen him deep in the shadows at the hearth, four cold moon prints squared on his back from the window. Shed seen him the next day all smiles, much like the smiles hed given the night before. Hed sent her away. Shed felt good getting into bed with that water, holy water, backing from the cold into the warmth of her brothers sleeping bodies, imagining the morning and the songs shed sing with love in her throat and thinking of the encounter and the miracle, of seeing a thing so wondrous.

She sat with her husband at a picnic table by a river running black with ice-melt from the higher country. Youve gotten too used to my cooking, she said.

His fingers were long and dirty from gathering wood. He held a fork above the sausage shed cooked over the grill. She got up, stood at the edge of the water. The water reflected the trees on the opposite ridge. She could smell the wood smoke from town on the wind. You were saying? But not about the cooking.

In all the rush that morning I told no one about the encounter, how hed been standing with his back to me. I wasnt scared. At first, Id thought dog then thought maybe maybe him and it had been. For a moment, when he turned his face, I thought I might cry out, but the monster turned to grandfather fast. That face through the lie. Did we ever lie to Bess and Linus that way?

She heard his fork strike the plate. She listened to him chew and swallow. Hed always been a loud eater, clumsy with his utensils. But he grew out of it, he said, made up for the lie. He brought all the gifts back, the food. Wed been singing to him all along.

And then he became part of us, she said. How could he go back? He built a house in the square. Set us on his knee after super and told us stories about the old days and about the morning his heart burst from his chest like a sun. It all became about the old days or nothing at all.

Did we ever pretend more than we should have? The kids are grown. Does it matter anymore?

A ball of cloud rose over the trees. It sank into the surface of the river. Evidence of the world dividing. She kneeled and lowered her fingers into the water. The water split, joined on the other side of each.

I went back to bed with the knowledge of him in the house, and this knowing grew and grew, as if Id stepped into a miracle first the size of a puddle then spreading to the width of a lake then an ocean, the kind of thought you drown in. Imagine it. Of all the houses and their people, I alone had seen him. Wed heard the stories and still tell them.

That he came back is all that matters, he said.

I know. But I went back to bed with that water, which I couldnt even drink because it had been drawn by him. I no longer had to believe because what I had believed became fact. I was too little to think beyond the moment, first the incredible fright then the kindness and the thought of a broken light in the tree, him fixing it. He came back as something else, bouncy, beaming, blowing happy notes, serving up the platters of steaming beast to us.

Her husband went to the cooler by the wagon and drew out a can. He sat and opened it, watching her. Its not the same anymore, he said. I know that. But should we lament this? He cut the meat, married, became mayor, died. It was a long time ago. Youre not what he was. All that matters is that I see you again.

Im not what he became, she said. But next year Ill come back, stir a small child from her cotton sleep and draw water for her, steal all that you own, then drive a poor old hound to the top of a mountain and wait to hear you sing.

or

What the Mothers and Fathers Did
Five happy children gathered around the tree to watch the lights to go on; its what they expected Christmas Eve. Father flipped the switch. Out of the soft, cold, and silent dark the tree bloomed volcanic red, yellow, white, the walls with their strings of ornaments washed now with the same light Mother remembered from her youth. The OOS followed. The WOWS. The smallest child, with little more than two strands of hair on her head, put a white hand to her mouth, her eyes the size of eggs.

Jee wiz, Timmy exclaimed.

Jimmy said, But can we open just one present, Mama?

No, Mother said with firm but gentle slyness. Its time for bed, child. Time for dreams. We have to give Santa room to play.

Red and blue-bowed presents spilled from under the tree. They were stacked on the couch. Stockings hung from the fireplace, thin and hungry as snake skins. Mother smiled at them, watching them appear and disappear in the blinking light. Father did too. The children were hustled to their beds, tucked in, kissed, told about sugar plums, reminded of the succulence of roast beast after song.

At two AM, as had been planned, Mother and Father woke to gemlight trapped in the lunar ice at the windows. They dressed quietly in jackets, hats, thick snowsocks and mits. The boots would go on later. They tiptoed downstairs, and at the sight of the blinking lights of the tree, at the sight of the glad variety of boxes, the opulent sheen of ornaments on the walls, Father said to Mother, You are wicked as plum wine.

Mother smiled at him. She slid a mitted palm down the thin bones of his face.

Then they got to work.

They carried expectations through the kneedeep snow cover to a sled readied before hand. Inside, Father took down the stockings one by one: Jimmys, Pablos, Little Tikes, Timmys, then, finally, Cindy-Lous, biggest because she was the smallest, not more than two, named after her mother, who was in the kitchen filling a cooler with hashes and beasts and beans and puddings cooling for the mid-day feast. Mother and Father carried out the food.

Back inside, they took the glass balls from the walls, leaving just the hooks, just the wires. They ignored the eyes of mice.

Then time for the tree. Mother entered and found Father buried under it and struggling in the dark. She almost dropped with laughter. They froze, heard a sound from the bed room where the children slept. Silence crept out of the mouse holes. From some far away place, they heard the haunted, cold throat of an owl. After a moment, they carried the tree out the front door to the sled.

Mother waved across the square to Mother. More wore a Santa hat and waved back, raising her fists to the moon in excitement. She jumped up and down in the snow. Under the gaslamps and through the light snow that had begun to fall you could see the other Mothers, the other Fathers. There, Father burdened under boxes. There, Father with armloads of bags. There, Father with tags in his mouth, a sacked beast in a fist. He paused to wave at Father who now stood beside Mother, admiring the piles on the sled.

Did you get every stocking? Mother asked.

Yes, Father said. And you every morsel of food?

Every last crumb, you know the joke.

The snow fell thick now. The lamps began to dim with the new light on the snow, a bluer fire glowing over the mountain. The Mothers and Fathers joined at the center of the square drawing their bloated sleds groaning on their runners. They looked at each other as if meeting again after long years of separation, perhaps briefly taken by their own strangeness. Some shook hands, spoke softly. Some hugged. They pulled their loads to the stand of trees near the courthouse, hid the sleds under tarps and bedsheets. Then they waited for the children to wake up.

on tolerance

I’ve never liked the use of the word tolerance in public discourse because in my mind tolerance implies a superior/inferior heirarchy. Those who are tolerated get the short end of the flag pole, in other words. I tolerate is an ironic expression of power “over” someone.

Heterosexuals must tolerate homosexuals and so forth; gay men aren’t generally viewed as tolerating the straight. It doesn’t matter that logically such language and means of organizing are, in my mind, pointless.

To tolerate is, however, a better condition than outright hatred.

Now that the creation/evolution fight is back in full force all around the country with religion being presented as science, it would seem that even the slightest disagreement with the pious, in terms of religion or politics, is met with scorn, ridicule, and abstention from reality (and very little tolerance). A recent CBS poll claims that 55% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form. Current young earth creationists insist that the Grand Canyon was the result of the Biblical Flood. Intelligent Design proponents claim that nature is too complex to have happened via evolution. Nature demands a designer, they claim. Interesting “belief.” Belief for me is fine, but it shouldn’t be a part of a science curriculum. Belief is a matter of choice. Science doesn’t really ask anyone to “believe” anything, an idea which can be taken grossely out of context.

To tolerate ignorance is unethical. Why should I conclude that the Grand Canyon was forged a few thousand years ago and that humans were created by “God” in present form? What is the evidence for these contraptions? Where are the experiments?”

Right.

new media and learning

Susan Gibb at Spinning sums New Media 1: Perspectives up quite nicely in this post. Here’s a large slice of analysis

Perhaps one of the reasons that I more readily accepted the perspectives of the new media course is that it closely aligned the future with the past, tracing a historical record of narrative through art, language, literature and cinema. This (as has oft been seen here) is the manner in which I personally absorb new materialby relating it to the past or what is known and familiar, and building it up from there as well as applying it backwards in time to get at the roots. Snips of films, artwork through the ages, comic books, and computer generated productions such as video games and movies where computer animation was of primary importance were shown and explained in their use of media methods established by both the story and the particular advantages of their nature. The basics were throughout each medium; story arc, plot points of conflict, scene change, environments, and resolution, yet each was dependent upon a different means to get there.

Breaking down the story into segments of time and environment, lifting the layers to discover how they were interleaved to make it whole, seeing the work in its barest form and fully clothedthis is what impressed me most; this and the fact that it did not rob the story of its impact by seeing the parts disassembled.

From there, I took the learning back into my own world of what I consider realitythe trees, my home, the people I run into dailyand could look beneath the surfaces with some sort of x-ray eyes that penetrated to the core of common sights that otherwise are just existing without special notice taken.

To learn the nuances of one means of communication is to better understand the others. To learn them all concurrently is to understand the human mind itself a little better than before, and to question where it can go based upon where it has been.

Susan grasps the “teaching team’s” intent in bringing the course and program forward to the Tunxis community. She tells the “plot” of the course. She grasps the importance of the conceptual nuance (and I think she remembers some of the sticky moments).

I commend her leadership and performance in the course and her willingness to learn and teach.

the cyborg teacher

The cyborg teacher is now an ongoing project that pushes the idea that technology for the teacher has always been a critical aspect of communication and involvement in the learning process and asserts that fundamentally people have always been dependent on tools, connected to them as we are to our organs. To say “cyborg” is to stretch the definition for the purpose of implanting an image into the way a speaker, interlocutor, or politician uses tools without thinking of them as tools but as a “part of” what they do. In other words, when men get up in the morning they usually go for their pants, put them on, and then forget that they are wearing pants throughout the day. Are pants a technology. Generally speaking yes, because they are an extension of some aspect of the human body: integument. What is it is less important than what kind is it.

My friend Joe Rodriguez, who drives around in his wheel chair and can only get about the world in that contraption, and who also draws his delicate work with his mouth, is extended by tech. Technology extends him “into” the world. The world surrounds him through the technology.

The classroom is itself a technology that I would argue is a virtual space, designed, organized, enclosed, no different than a space comprised of bytes; the classroom is a part of a larger education system whose parts are cooected to every aspect of American culture: home to road. The teacher and the student walk “into” the classroom from some other place and erect the theater of the system as they go about their business. The teacher stands at the front of the room, the student sits, listens, and writes notes. If a student leaves the room, he or she will walk down the hall and look into other “rooms” in which others are pretty much doing the same.

This illustration of the cyborg is mearly a test, a hypothesis, a means of seeing, not meant to be factual. It’s meant to be pleasant, perhaps a distraction; it’s meant to invite a game into the picture: to create learning spaces just as virtual as the classroom. What is this learning space: Interactive Fiction, of course. In other words:

>enter classroom

>x teacher
He’s short, has a strange glassy left eye, a little larger than the right (link to effects of stress). He’s wearing a blue shirt and green pants, both extensions of skin. He’s standing at the front of the room, waiting to be directed, asked, kicked around, like Nixon (link to Nixon). He’s got a little frown going under his nose (link to gallery of famous noses). He doesn’t look as if he’s ever combed his hair in his life, which is a lie.

>z
time passes

>z
time passes

>x teacher
He’s short et cetera.

>z
time passes

>

Alejo Carpentier and certain steps

The master and his translator at work on two visions of time and space

But what lay beneath us was even worse than the products of the shade. Under the water great riddled leaves waved like dominoes of ocher velvet, lures and traps. On the surface floated clusters of dirty bubbles, varnished over by reddish pollen, which a passing fin sent drifting off into the eddy of a pool with the wavering motion of a sea cucumber. A kind of thick opalescent gauze hung over the opening of a rock teeming with hidden life. A silent war was going on in those depths bristling with hairy talons, where everything seemed a slimy tangle of snakes. Strange clicking noices, sudden ripples, the plash of waters told of the the rush of invisible beings leaving behind them a wake of murky decay. One felt the presence of rampant fauna, of the primeval slime, of the green fermentation beneath the dark waters, which gave off a sour reek like a mud of vinegar and carrion, over whose oily surface moved insects made to walk on the water: chinch-bugs, white fleas, high-jointed flies, tiny mosquitoes that were hardly more than shimmering dots in the green light, for the green, shot through by an occasional ray of sun, was so intense that the light as it filtered through the leaves had the color of moss dyed the hue of the swamp-bottoms as it sought the roots of the plants. (160-161)

and

Each plateau had its own morphology, consisting of groins, sheer drops, straight or broken edges. The one not adorned with the incarnation of an obelisk or a basalt headland had a flanking terrace, beveled edges, sharp angles, or was crowned by strange stone markers resembling the figures in a procession. Suddenly, in contrast to this severity, a stone arabesque, some geographical flight of fancy, conspired with the water to give a touch of movement to this land of the unmovable. A mountain of reddish granite poured seven yellow cascades over the battlements of its crowning cornice. Or a river hurled itself into space and became a rainbow on the cutback stairway of petrified trees. The foam of a river boiled over enormous natural arches with deafening echo before it divided and fell into a series of pools emptying into one another. One sensed that overhead, at the summit, in this series of stairsteps to the moon, there were lakes, neighbors to the clouds, whose virgin waters had never been profaned by human eye.

There were morning hoarfrost, icy depths, opalescent banks, and hollows filled with the night before twilight. There were monoliths poised on the edge of peaks, needles, crosses, cracks that breathed forth mists; wrinkled crags that were like congealed lava–meteors, perhaps, fallen from another planet. We were overawed by the display of these opera magna, the plurality of the profiles, the scope of the shadows, the immensity of the esplanades. We felt like intruders who at any moment might be cast out of a forbidden kingdom. What lay before our eyes was the world that existed before man. (186)

Carpentier’s description has an incredible momentum and sense of disciplined precision. This is rock-hard control, image to image. The Lost Steps, from start to finish, is a lesson in narrative relentlessness.

This is Carpentier’s “unexpected richness of reality,” his realization of the “Baroque as human constant,” his “proliferating nuclei.” What strikes me in the novel is the way Carpentier lays the language over even the roughest of things like gold or silver foil, brushing it into the creases, molding it into the folds.

comments: Indian Rain

A few comments on “Indian Rain,” a poem in progress by Neha Bawa. At a recent writing group, we had a nice dicussion of Neha’s poem. What stood out to me was the underlying image “for” longing in the piece, brought home by the final line, which is:

Someday I will be home again.

Home in the poem is exotic and erotic in its descriptive suspension, a place with

Drops of silver lolling
on soft white flesh

The past and its images are suspended in memory; but there’s always a suggestion for the “exile” that the light of memory can be corrupted. Is this poem, therefore, a means of “keeping” the memory of home close, a form of active remembering?

Regardless, I’d love to see the author dig past some of the abstractions, as seen here

I have seen days when the clouds rolled in
thick and black as the desert night;
Clouds that made the peacocks sing
and spread their feathers in majestic dance.

Unfortunatly, I don’t understand “majestic dance.” Here the image is arbitrary. We could, in other words, interchange “majestic” for “beautiful” or “amazing.” The poet sees an image remembered, but “majestic” is interpretive rather than experiential. Nobody sees “majestic.”

But what an overall sense that the poem conveys. Neha has a keen sense for the honesty of poetry.

immersion

From Susan Gibb

I found myself totally immersed in the story (to be covered in another entry) and anxious to move through the dense fog and woods, past dead vans and pickup trucks, to follow a road into a town where some great secret was waiting to be revealed, questions answered–the usual goal or mission-oriented purpose of “my” journey. The element too of point of view, and user involvement to the point of becoming the character will also be covered later.

Just for the sheer joy of control–and this is what appeals to me most, and why I should never, ever, ever have gotten my little fingers on the keyboard in the first place–and the wonder of what will happen next, as indicated by a fadeout to transition in a new scene, was more that most–but not all–books can provide with the turning of pages. The heart-stopping excitement of having a creature suddenly pop up in your “visual space” and threaten your protagonist would be hard to emulate by words alone (again, it’s been done by Poe and many others) and there’s only the pause button to relate to the closing of the book and if you can manage to think of it in time to save your ass.

Follow her series here.

pullulation, II

In fiction writing, we never know when an idea will come or what’s waiting “around the corner,” as Tobias Wolff examines:

I was on a bus to Washington, D.C. Two days I’d been travelling and I was tired, tired, tired. The woman sitting next to me, a German with a ticket good for anywhere, never stopped yakking. I understood little of what she said but what I did understand led me to believe that she was utterly deranged.

She finally took a breather when we hit Richmond. It was late at night. We rounded a corner and there beneath a streetlight stood a white man and black woman. The woman wore a yellow dress and held a baby. Her head was thrown back in laughter. The man was red-haired, rough looking, and naked to the waist. His skin seemed luminous. He was grinning at the woman, who watched him closely even as she laughed. Broken glass glittered at their feet.

There is something between them, something in the instant itself, that makes me sit up and stare. What is it, what’s going on here? Why can’t I ever forget them? Tell me, for God’s sake, but make it snappy–I’m tired, and the bus is picking up speed, and the lunatic beside me is getting ready to say something.

Interesting things penetrate the crazy world of the everyday. It’s an amazing image. It makes us think about “what’s around the corner.”

pullulation

J.I.Abbot writes in the comments to this post

But to discourage antiseptic approaches to such work, teachers might urge students to compile all sorts of texts and objects in their lives – as a good habit with a lot of applications. Then the officially mandated portfolio will not be such an unnatural and merely “educational” phenomenon.

I like this idea. The portfolio as a body of work of all sorts is essential, especially when texts connect and refer to one another. One item, say a description of a process, links to another, say, the coded rendering of that process.

Portfolio is one way of telling a story. Where was I? How far have I come? How did I get here? What things have I connected?