Learning by Doing

The more a writer uses Tinderbox, the more the writer learns from revision and rethinking. This is not a hypothesis. With a few writing spaces open and explicit links open to scrutiny, the thought process changes.

And so I’ve changed a lot over the last few days. In my most recent poem, called describing the moon now, the focus has changed from narrative poem to something more kin to a nature walk, observational, referential, and wide angle. Originally, I wanted to trace how a note written a long time ago would make its way back to the end. But after some intensive revision, the necessity of this diminished. In some areas of the poem the note matters. In others, the language moves to objects and landscapes, people, and events in the life of the speaker.

I wanted a note to follow is an intention. But the energy is not following. In the poem, I have an image of the speaker considering images of old men cupping small flames in their hands. Going after this sort of surprise has become much more fun than trying to keep to defined narrative.

Wesch on Knowledgable

Michael Wesch of Kansas State has an article up on Academic Commons regarding new media and institutional impacts. Well worth the read. In learning institutions, how do we create “learning opportunity”:

To illustrate what I mean by subjectivities over subjects, I have created a list of subjectivities that I am trying to help students attain while learning the “subject” of anthropology:

* Our worldview is not natural and unquestionable, but culturally and historically specific.
* We are globally interconnected in ways we often do not realize.
* Different aspects of our lives and culture are connected and affect one another deeply.
* Our knowledge is always incomplete and open to revision.
* We are the creators of our world.
* Participation in the world is not a choice, only how we participate is our choice.

Even a quick scan of these subjectivities will reveal that they can only be learned, explored, and adopted through practice. We can’t “teach” them. We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).

My own experiments in this regard led to the creation the World Simulation, now the centerpiece of my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Kansas State University. As the name implies, the world simulation is an activity in which we try to simulate the world. Of course, in order to simulate the world, we need to know everything we can about it. So while the course is set up much like a typical cultural anthropology course, moving through the same readings and topics, all of these learnings are ultimately focused around one big question, “How does the world work?”

TEKKA

Mark Bernstein informs us that the new issue of TEKKA is up and running.

An excellent place to submit works in hypertext.

TEKKA is about enjoying new media. It explores software aesthetics. It’s something we need to discuss, and right now the cover charge is leaving too many people outside.

An interesting exam of tagging by Cathy Marshall

I’m convinced that tags provide us with a fine way to organize our own stuff. After all, I was a member of the Hypertext community before stuff-organizing was fashionable, back when faceted classification was an obscure idea attributed to an Indian librarian named S. R. Ranganathan. Even without facets, you don’t have to look very hard to see that people seem to function pretty well in a world full of things that they’ve organized all by themselves— grocery lists they’ve written on the back of envelopes and to-do lists based strictly on the satisfaction they get from crossing off things— without leaning on the tricks espoused by Lifehacking gurus like Danny O’Brien and Merlin Mann.

But I do need to be persuaded that tags are of use to strangers. I’m no Blanche Dubois of the data glut.

Poetry Questions

Susan Gibb asks two questions in reference to the Moon post.

1) Are you writing it into Tinderbox rather than Storyspace? 2) Does the necessary manipulation of the hypertext process hinder or help with metaphor?

1. I’m writing it in Tinderbox. I’m not using guard fields in the writing, though this would be interesting. But as the poem will be published on the web, I want a simple export into html and then will do just a little bit of javascripting for some of the required effects.

2. If I’m understanding the second question, I’d claim that metaphor as intrinsic to the work will develop in different ways due to links. Links can be they’re own layer of metaphor. If light is a link, then light may have some sort of binding quality. But it is like chess, as you must be able to see several steps ahead into the work and keep the paths in mind, hence the use of adornments.

Accidents

I’ve just received word that a good friend and colleague of mine, Art Adolfson, coordinator of our Math and Computer Science honors program is in the hospital after being hit on his bicycle by a car.

This is an excellent person. He will be on leave and should recover, which is good to hear.

Drugs

A snip from my home town news paper, the El Paso Times

EL PASO – Mayor John Cook vetoed a unanimous vote by City Council that earlier Tuesday asked the federal governemnt to seriously study the idea of legalizing drugs in response to the violence that has plagued Juárez.

In what is the third veto of his administration, Cook said the council’s position “was not consistent with community standards both locally and nationally. I urge council to reconsider supporting the original wording as recommended.”

Council voted 8-0 earlier today to approve a resolution that outlined 11 steps the U.S. and Mexican governments needed to take to deal with the violence that has resulted in more than 1,600 homicides in Juárez.

South-West city Rep. Beto O’Rourke added a 12th step, which asked the U.S. government to have “an honest debate on the decriminalization of narcotics.”

I’m with Beto. But would decriminalization really put a sock in this incredible violence?

How to Describe the Moon

I was at and over six lines of poetry for about three hours last night. I’m back at the top level of the hypertext poem, moving through line by line, but really as the process is more organic than a linear step-through.

Anyway, I got hung up on the middle portion of a 3 by 3 set of lines through which POV sets a time, a place, and an event. The issue had to do with the right way to describe the environment (moon, darkness) and the event but to avoid cliche and limpness. Here’s a case: everyone knows how the full moon looks or whatever moon happens to be in the sky. There a million ways to describe it or to set it, if description is merely meant as a device. But describing the moon with the writer’s particular eye doesn’t have to be such a big deal. After all, every voice has its take on the object. As I revised and thought and thought ahead with peripheral vision, it became clear that the moon was not a problem at all. Rather, it was the sea. Yes, water is in the lines too.

So I left the moon alone and went to strumming this next issue. Someone leaps from the rocks into the sea, which is out of eye-shot of POV (this is really all that happens in the lines at the moment, but more is waiting behind). How to describe all this, given that the moon and the sea are all going to play motif throughout the poem, and thus must have some “character” to invite the reader’s interest? After time, it hit me that I had been trying to describe the wrong thing: it shouldn’t be the diction of the water, but, rather, its sound. But something more than its sound, the bed it makes far far beyond the shore line.

Layers of the real are tough, given that experience is a simultaneous ambience, like water for a fish. Poetry acts as a filter, a sieve through which experience is poured. It’s also experience nurtured, like Charles Simic’s “ancient machinery” in Dogs Hear It that  

lumbers towards me
With all its rusty parts throbbing.

In this three hours, I found something I hadn’t thought was there or hadn’t figured prior. Throughout the poem, there’s an unwritten sound that is often not a sound. The sea or ocean water is there, but from one particular position, you have to sense it in one case with the ear, in another, with the eye, yet in another, the skin of your hands.

Hamilton on Indieflix

My friend Patrice Hamilton has a write up by Susan Dunne in the Hartford Courant today. The focus is on Patrice’s film Exposure. Dunne writes:

But the real star is the woman behind the camera, who is working on two new screenplays and, if she gets financing, would love to shoot them in the state. (Hamilton, who used her own short stories as the basis for this film, cheekily refers to herself by having one character say that another character’s drama “would make a good short story.”)

Encouraging filmmaking in Connecticut is a wonderful thing. It’s even better when that filmmaker doesn’t just fly in for a brief shoot but lives and works among us. Let’s hope Hamilton can keep making movies and build on this toward a meaningful second career.

This is an excellent point to make about state “industry.” The next several years should not just concentrate on the obvious brick and mortar economy, but also making opportunity for creative ecology. It would help also if reviewers paid more attention to their subjects and took them more seriously:

Tyler Knowlin, an actor from Manchester, is good as the UConn hoopster, and Anthony Vincent, from West Hartford, is good also, as a man who can’t get over his ex, even though he has a sweet wife and two kids.

Such a sentence softens the content of the film, asserts judgement against the actors without providing evidence to support, and misses Robert’s character path. This should be a profile of the writer/director.

Exposure is available on Indieflix.

Fluency

I’m deep into Maryanne Wolf at the moment. Her distillation of neuroscience and learning stages requires stepping back and pondering. I’ve been interested for many years in the physical/physiological apparatus of confusing, slippery things: memory, for example, consciousness. Much of memory is described in fiction and poetry, but what does the lamp inside the skull look like when we see a spider? How does the brain reproduce an old wound?

One idea that stands out in Wolf’s book is the idea of reading speed. This is not intended to mean “speed reading” but the amount of time required by the brain to process an encounter, with a spider or with a new word, its automaticity. “The fluent comprehender’s brain doesn’t need to expend as much effort, because its regions of specialization have learned to represent the important visual, phonological, and semantic information and to retrieve this information at lightning speed” (142). Wolf’s frame of reference focuses on young, learning readers, and how their brains operate during the course of learning. There are links between the time required to process a word and the brain’s ability to swiftly interpret the meaning of “footsteps in the dark” or “why that lion is drooling in my direction.”

The swifter the process of decoding and relational thinking, the more time the brain has for associative and creative thinking once the technical and physical ability have been mastered. In lots of ways, what Wolf identifies in brain processing matches pretty well with ancient and medieval views of the intellectual journey. Decoding equates to “literal or ‘implicit’ understanding” and so forth up the learning chain. Wolf’s technical description of the learning timeline and its saccades is an interesting generalization of the neuro-process and reminds me of Weinberg’s as applied to the big bang.

Staying with the text and mashing its implicit meaning is one stage in the process toward mastery or, what I would call, applied skill. Critical to fluency is attention, the amount of time we ponder over the text and the amount of time the brain function as an attending tool, blocking out the enemies of distraction. Wolf writes, “Our interpretive response to what we read has a depth that, as often as not, takes us in new directions from where the author’s thinking left us” (156). But this ability comes from, what Stafford called a “‘quality of attention.'” Interestingly enough, I began a series on reading hypertext with this very notion of attending to the surface, which takes immersive practice and, perhaps more, skill application because of the added layer of the link.

Wolf’s brain function timeline is an interesting generalization.

Strawberry Eyes

I have an adornment called Strawberry Eyes. This title references a line in a cluster of stanzas that captures the flavor of that cluster and distinguishes it from four others. Sometimes the clusters link, sometimes not to other clusters. Each of these clusters sheds a different light on the context of the poem, but this is, at the moment, only a visual apparatus, a means of keeping track of poetic narrative.

Sense should develop in each cluster as any poem might, specific detail gravitating toward the nut or idea at the heart or joint of something.

Oddly enough, there may be some morphological rhythm to work with. Like forests or something lost. In terms of something lost, you may remember a toy or an opportunity that still nags at you. You may remember a moment in the woods where everything worked. To regrasp all this, you might go for consonant gain or grays, blacks, shadow snags, lampless unsteadiness. Like trips down darkened stairs.