Political discussion is just getting weirder and weirder. On Meet the Press this morning the President claimed that discretionary spending has gone down since 2001. This is patently false. He also claimed that prior to war, everyone thought that Iraq had WMD, a line that is and has been stumped continually. This was suspect. See this too.
images within images
Now that people have headed away from the Superbowl imbroglio, moving on to other tragedies, I’d like to suggest a venture back into it.
In sport there are moments or long lines of what might be termed naked excellence. I remember watching John McEnroe begin and end his career, going from brat genius to even-tempered old-timer, which created a relationship and conflict with the conventions of the court. The amazing six hour match in 1982 between McEnroe and Wilander, however, for the Davis Cup title is one of those moments where nothing moved but them.
Vinatieri’s excellence on the field proves that every game tells a story. The chair edges in the houses of sport’s fans are slippery with use.
Then there’s the half-time stuff, the fool’s game in between, the juggling for coins. I think there’s something to say about the audience (me) and the producers here in the positioning of things. It may be strange that pro ballers are paid nice chunks of dough. Deford and others have talked a lot about this juicy bit. Much like CEO pay. It may be outrageous. I think it is. Is maybe 200,000 not enough?
But the image does matter. When I watched McEnroe and Wilander play, I knew with every stroke that everything was in that match, the skill, the power, the commitment. It went way beyond entertainment but into the space of skilled struggle or excellence. Matching. The politics and the show disappear.
Then the kicker rises. Everything else disappears. Everything else becomes trivial. The half-time show proves this.
writing: the subject continued
I’ve been going through comp student lists of possible topics of study and am finding pretty standard stuff, which is fine. The question is what to do with an idea. I have one topic called: cars. Hm. What do with that.
Lots of things. Here’s one.
Thinking from the subject is a skill of extension, which is why I try to have students visualize with maps or clusters of ideas.
Consider this list which stems from autos:
Speed, marketing, fuel cells, vegetable oil, instrustry and the environment, the politics of transportation, urban planning.
All of these would be great topics of concern. For essay writers and poets by the way. I find the image of a person gassing up behind the local McDonalds quite invigorating.
Information Systems
Via David Appell. Stephen Wolfram made waves with A New Kind of Science, a book which I have yet to read through. The work is now online. I like the fact that the site has surface appeal but I think the form and structure of the project is thoroughly inefficient.
The designers put up an information system. But the book is not online, although the download feels as if a book is being squeezed through the digital pipeline. In my opinion, the designers should’ve thought in terms of lighter nodes, efficient hypertext structures, with less concentration on the book as metaphor but with hypertext as the metaphor and system concept. New kind of science, encumbered reading online.
Yikes.
poetry, death, and humor
It’s good to see another narratist aboard. Welcome Beverly.
A recent assignment in Creative Writing was to write a poem on death. The condition was to make it funny. We are working with lots of conditions. Anyway, the writers are going to have problems with this. Conditions interupt natural development of a line of thought, but they also force the writer to consider technique, to concentrate on an image that may gell later.
A poem on death could begin:
Death smiled.
or
Death came for me, then changed his mind.
Sounds like Emily Dickinson.
or
The dead man told jokes
or
Jim yelled, “Tell my mother to put me in clean socks.”
Then he jumped. Into another century.
That sounds like Soto.
Each line here is a decision.
writing: the subject
For writers, coming up with a subject can be backbreaking work. I’ve known Ph.D and masters students who’ve hit the brick wall of “the subject.” Some simply didn’t have one and the ticker just ran out. I used to give students “the subject” in composition but found over the semesters that this could lead to just as much mental suffocation as anything else. You could smell resentment in the clouds of chalk dust, too. Something about the classroom, the world of writing in college, the thought of essays and research papers kills human curiosity. Is that too grand of a statement? Too much of a generalization?
As the candidates for the Dem nomination go about their business regardless of politics, they have to push ideas. Every day. Multiple venues. Constant scrutiny. Talking, writing, convincing–all of these become their job for a few years. They have a subject, troublesome or whateveryone wants to hear. This is a cosmic version of the day to day for most of use, since everyday we have to communicate ideas, convince others, complete projects, and explain ourselves. This is routine. In a way, composition is about teaching the routine of the days to come where the ability to convince and explain becomes an issue of survival.
The writer has to rely on technique whether the project is given or invented. Where does the college student go to find the subject? The thing that they will examine, the idea that will keep them going till the semester is over and they depart for more writing and thinking?
Life.
glh scope
The glh is trying, or attempting, to cover four courses in this space including the addition of notes pertaining to a reading group entry and, later on, discussions of hypertext. It’s a lot to cover. The cats are set. Composition posts will go under “rhetoric,” British Literature under “British Literature,” Creative Writing under “writing.”
I see the comp course, both comp 1 and comp 2, as fitting into the large heading of rhetorical theory, under the broader header “how do we persuade and do we explain and why.”
In comp we’re starting with a fundamental process that will fit into a time scheme of about six weeks for the first paper so that we can kill two birds with one stone: lots of discussion of developing ideas and enough analysis to work in some concepts necessary to grow on for later work.
1. Topic development and using a procedure for working to a finished work.
2. Analysis of concepts.
The concepts for those students who are going be trickling in around here will come in mutiple forms: what forms of persuasion will we be after in the course, studying in other words; how definition forms a foundation for disputation, analysis, and connecting with an audience and understanding their needs; and textual analysis.
how to read a literary magazine
Reading a literary magazine can be fun. This is one way of reading one.
Get a copy of Confrontation and just start reading. Read the poems. Just read them. One of the pieces will catch your eye. Linger on the one that catches your eye. Read it again. Make a note of that author.
When you’re done, keep going. Maybe something else will catch your eye. Pause on that one and make a note of the author.
You won’t enjoy everything. But a poem will catch your eye. Stop on that poem. Make a note of the author. Go out and buy the author’s books, if they have any.
That’s basically it.
the image
The last stanza of Geoff Brock’s poem The Last Suburbia (see New England Review, Spring 03) goes this way:
Cicadas hum their scratched-brass elegies
as dry, unhinging winds shake the tall trees.
And all around me, winged seeds descend.
Throughtout The Last Suburbia, the reader will find very few abstractions, such as the word “beautiful.” Beautiful is a classificatory word not a description. It’s also a loaded word, meaning that when we use it something else is usually going on. Beautiful comes “after” experience. Once we figure out the insect, then we can figure in what slot to store it: worker or warrior, winged or just legged. Some, I guess, would argue that “beautiful” is an aesthetic term.
Two people are watching a sunset in El Paso, Texas. To the west the land is black, the sky aflame with orange and red illumination, the view as wide as Connecticut itself. You can see individual trees miles away on mesas or hills.
“Wow, that’s beautiful,” he says.
“Yeah, sure is,” he number 2 says.
In this case, neither he nor he 2 are trying to write a poem; they’re reacting to “the experience.”
Brock writes these stanzas to begin the poem:
You’ve come to lie here by this stand of ash.
The hard clay path behind you is a long
abrasion arcing away, over the swell
and down toward unseen rows of houses where
neighbors settle for dinner and their children
chatter and their dogs dig toward open fields.
There’s something to learn here as we pause and wait “over the swell.” Can you see the rise and the fall, the arc in the arrangement:
. . . over the swell
and down . . .
The trees, the clay path are with us. The reader is experiencing the space. The path points back toward things outside of view, which we can also experience: the houses, neighbors, children, dogs.
The poem may be about grief. But that last stanza is loaded with stillness, even though there are seeds in the air. The falling seeds mean a lot. Beauty means nothing.
found things
Wanderlust is after something in her house. She writes,
So I dusted, scrubbed, mopped, and polished every square inch to fall on my “Ah-hah!” moment, and I finally did find it. A little piece of rock, hiding shyly behind my closet door, just waiting to be put on a pedestal. This tiny, but beautiful pink rock, streaked with shades of grey, speckled with even tinier pores that the wind and the rain left behind, and all the other bits and pieces that it took under its wing.
Here the author gives the rock character. It hides “shyly,” “waiting to be put.”
The author is “experiencing” the rock. She’s also investing in it. That rock could tip the scales of things. Only problem: the word “beautiful.”