Throughlines

At the Edge of the Woods

2009-12-01T13:12:00.001-08:00

Spent part of a sunny November afternoon in North Carolina on the back side porch, sketching the woods and the wood pile. Went back in later and added some color, then did some more work with the pen, then added color again. Got the basic structures down and then took liberties with the details. The picture gradually worked its way into shape. Something about the strong verticals and layers receding into the distance that's satisfying to me.

A Knack

2009-11-25T18:09:00.001-08:00

I remember when I was first married that when my wife went to make the recipes my mother had given to her, they never came out quite right. It wasn't until I compared notes with my older brother some years later that we both began to suspect that my mother had intentionally left out certain key steps or key ingredients in most of our favorite recipes. All of this came to mind as I was reading the November 23 issue of The New Yorker, which turned out to be The Food Issue. Normally that's not a topic I'd take a lot of interest in, but there's always a pleasant surprise buried in there somewhere, and for me it was this paragraph from Adam Gopnick's meditation on cookbooks entitled "What's the Recipe?":

Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense. What kids make depends on what moms know: skills, implicit knowledge, inherited craft, buried assumptions, finger know-how that no recipe can sum up. The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” [Mom's meta-message, no doubt, or rather more to the point, "You'll never be me."] “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.

I like that distinction between "learning how something is done and learning how to do it." I like that compact little phrase he came up with, " a knack posing as knowledge." And I like that last broadening, generalizing, clarifying sentence at the end, "The recipe is to spend your life cooking."

One of the reasons I've been reading the New Yorker religiously for forty plus years now is that it's one of the few publications which regularly features writing like this: writing that is thoughtful and artful and apt, no matter what the subject. Reading the New Yorker each week is one of the more dependable rituals of pleasure in my life. There's a terrific short story by Sam Shepard in this issue as well.

Five Minutes

2009-10-29T00:18:00.001-07:00

The Count

2009-09-22T23:27:00.001-07:00

Okay. Last year I read and enjoyed Carlos Ruiz Zafon's ambitiously overwritten blockbuster fantasy The Shadow of the Wind, and so a couple of weeks ago I read his new book, The Angel's Game, which I liked a lot for the first half and liked less as it wound up, mostly because things kept happening to the narrator which led to certain inescapable conclusions that the narrator, an otherwise intelligent man, seemed unable to process. It was annoying me as I was reading, and it is doubling annoying me to me now, because it reminds me of another book, the title and plot of which I have been wracking my brains to remember, spoiled in exactly the same way: it was simply not credible that the main character could be so incredibly dense about the situation he was in, and at a certain point you simply stop caring. It reminds me of watching Rin Tin Tin on television when I was a kid, and sitting there in my living room watching Rusty do something really stupid that was bound to get him in trouble so that the dog would wind up having to rescue him. And I'm talking to the screen, saying, "No! Rusty! Don't go in that cave!" I eventually gave up on that show as well.

Anyway, Zafon had his narrator make admiring reference, in one or two places, to The Count of Monte Cristo, which is one of those books that I have heard about all my life without ever having actually read. So, in the wake of my somewhat disappointing experience with Zafon's attempt to don the mantle of Dumas, I thought I'd go ahead and go back to the source. And so that's what I've been reading, in huge eye- and brain-fatiguing swatches, for the last week and a half. I bought an unabridged edition that runs to something over 1200 pages and am now, after perhaps 15 or twenty hours of reading, just about halfway through it.

It's been a while since I've been this deeply involved in an extended reading experience. (Maybe the last time was with Dorothy Dunnett's eight-volume Nicollo Chronicles, which runs to something over 4000 pages and remains one of the astounding feats of storytelling in my reading experience.) Dumas is an adept and witty storyteller, and he is certainly in no great hurry. I'm sure that has something to do with the fact that he was being paid by the word, so it was in his best interests to compile a great many of them. His descriptions of people and places are lovingly detailed, sometimes overly so, but I find most entertaining are the various situations in which he has his main character engaged in dialogue and repartee with the various individuals he is in the elaborate process of undoing. It's a complex story, and I am surely not the first reader who has had to resort to drawing a character map to try to clarify the web of connections.

So what's it like, being in the middle of a pulp fiction novel written 155 years ago? It's is sort of like being in the middle of a very delicious meal. You've already eaten your fill, but there's half of your food still on your plate, dessert is yet to be served, and they keep filling your wine glass. On the one hand, you know that this kind of gluttony can't be good for you; on the other hand, the food is just too tasty to pass up, so you keep loading your fork and shoveling it in, indigestion and heartburn be damned. Often when I put the book down it takes five or ten minutes for my head to stop swimming and for my brain to catch up to where I am.

I've got literally a dozen other books waiting for me on my desk, including an advance edition of a friend's novel which I am eager to get to. But it's going to have to wait for another week or so. The count is on the move.

Ku

2009-09-14T00:19:00.000-07:00

Found a paper supplier online that I like a lot. Small operation, run by a woman who is very friendly and interested in the work her customers are doing. Ordered about half-dozen decorative sheets that happened to fall mostly into shades of brown, some with calligraphy, others without. Wound up using pieces of pretty much all of of them in this mixed-media collage, 19" x 20", along with some charcoal, acrylic paint, tissue, gold foil, and some other scraps I had available. There's some metallic bronze paint on there as well that doesn't pick up well in a photo.

This is one of those pictures that works for me just as an arrangement of shapes and colors, but that also one part of my brain working on trying to invent visual narratives that account for and resolve structural elements. This one was fun to make, and still keeps me entertained when I go back to it.

It is also a sort of little brother to the larger (2'x3')panel below, which I was working on at a time as a friend of mine was losing his battle to cancer. Nagarjuna defines the Buddhist concept of ku as "neither existence nor nonexistence," and I remember a sensei once telling me that life that ku is the state that the soul returns to bto await reincarnation. When I began working on this piece, I didn't have any of that in mind. By the time I was done, I did. Jack, this one is for you.

Beyond Faults and Ideas

2009-09-11T00:51:00.001-07:00

A number of factors have conspired to keep me bumping into the work of German artist Gerhard Richter. Tonight in the art section at Barnes and Noble I happened upon a book of his late large abstracts. The book was more money than I was prepared to shell out on a Thursday night, but when I came home I went online and went back to the pretty terrific web site devoted to his work, which includes a whole section of video interviews with curator Ulrich Wilmes, who has helped Richter stage a number of recent exhibitions. There was one video in particular where Wilmes got talking about Richter's way of working that interested me enough that I went to the trouble of transcribing some of his remarks:

Richter told me that for him the perception of his paintings, or the act of perceiving the painting, is always the same. It doesn’t matter if you have a realistic painting or if you have an abstract painting. The process is the same; the understanding of course is much different, because for a realistic painting we have the language, we can describe what we see, we can name the things that are on the painting; whereas in the abstract works we have no language...

Richter always says it’s pretty easy for him to start a painting. He’s not scared of the vast void of a white canvas. So he puts on a layer of some color, of some forms, that he really doesn’t much care about. And then, the process is that it’s becoming more and more complicated. In a certain way he also mentions that he is a kind of a prisoner of the painting, and the farther he gets the more complicated it becomes. You see that it’s a kind of process where he is reaching some point where he thinks, "Well, this looks pretty good." And then he stays with it for hours, for days, even for weeks, and then it’s finished. And he says, “If I understand it completely, then it becomes boring," and he tries to change it. But the final painting is then when
he has the feeling that the painting is something that’s better than him, that’s beyond his faults and his ideas, and that there’s nothing left for him to do with the painting.

Two thoughts here. I'm interested in the question of what's going on in you in your head when you look at a painting for which you "have no language." I've noticed in the (abstract) painting that I have been doing in the last few months that while I am definitely thinking hard as I work, I am not using words, there's not even an internal dialogue taking place inside my head. There are kinesthetic decisions being made from moment to moment, guided by the eye and to some degree by the hand, but it's thinking that is not like any other thinking that I do. It's actually somewhat disorienting to enter into that mental space and then come back into a world where words - conversation and reading and writing - are there, waiting to take over.

I'm also interested in they way that Richter echoes, by analogy, one notion that the quotes I posted yesterday seemed to be endorsing, which is that at some level the artist and the writer are both trying to "set themselves afloat" in a medium which has the potential to take them someplace beyond themselves, "beyond faults and ideas", and into something more deeply mysterious and satisfying.

This is the opportunity that I fear we as teachers can so easily deny to our students if we encourage them, in our wish to be of help, to rely on formulas and rubrics. There is nothing wrong with those things, in their place. They are useful in laying the foundation and in helping student understand basic moves. But if we do not also create spaces within our course structures for exploration, for play, for the encounter with complications, for the chance to surprise themselves and produce something that goes beyond their expectations, we're confirming in them the sense that too many of them already have that writing is simply a tool for demonstrating mastery of concepts in the context of competency tests, and denying them the chance to discover that its greatest satisfactions lie elsewhere.

Image credit:http://kottkegae.appspot.com/images/richter-cage.jpg

Seven Quotations in Support of an Argument

2009-09-09T23:35:00.001-07:00

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space. - Andy Goldsworthy

For me, writing starts with a line, or some imagination, or some notion, and I just go with it as far as I can. You set yourself afloat on the language. - Thomas Lynch

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. — Kurt Vonnegut

Write from what you know into what you don't know. - Grace Paley

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. ... Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. - E.L. Doctorow

The difference between any genre or entertainment writing and art is
that the entertainment writer knows before the first word is written
what effect it will have on the audience or what ideas or thoughts the
audience will take from it. In science fiction, there's a vision of
society, a political implication, a sociological implication; they
create a work to make a political or philosophical point, and/or they
write to produce an effect of escapism, to take the reader away. Either
way, there is a preconceived end effect or message, and the object is
constructed to achieve it. That is the entertainment writer's process.
The literary artist works from the other end. She does not know, before
the work begins, what it is she sees about the world. She has in her
unconscious, in her dreamspace, an inchoate sense of order behind the
apparent chaos of life, and she must create this object in order to
understand what that order is. It's as much an act of exploration as it
is an act of expression. - Robert Olen Butler

If I look back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It's a wonder I can think at all... - Paul Simon

1984

2009-09-08T23:02:00.000-07:00

Imagine this: one day you will be able to type your homework on a thin molded-aluminum keyboard inlaid with fingertip-sensitive white plastic tablets in the same configuration as in a typewriter, using barely any physical effort at all, even resting your palms or the inside of your wrists lightly on the desktop, if you choose, so as not to fatigue your arms. The letters you type will appear within in a white rectangle, roughly the size of piece of paper, on a screen on the desk in front of you.

The keyboard on which you will type will not be connected in any physical manner to the screen on which the letters are appearing. The screen will display in the background whatever picture you have selected, from among a virtually infinite number of choices, to place on it. Appearing to hover above that picture will be little rectangles and little pictures, and, over to the left of the screen, on a sort of electronic totem pole to the left of the screen, a lengthy set of symbols of many shapes and colors.

Each picture and symbol on the screen will be a portal to other visual and aural experiences, some of which reside in electronic reservoirs within the unit housing the screen, and others of which – magazine articles, songs, movies, artwork, whatever your imagination can conjure – will be delivered to your screen via electronic cables connecting your screen with other screens very much like it all over the planet.

Access to these experiences will granted by means of a small oval device sitting to the right of your keyboard. Although it does not appear to connected to the screen either, it has great power. You will need only to note the position of a black arrow on your screen. If you move the device on the desk, you will see that the onscreen arrow will move in exactly the same direction at exactly the same speed.

If you maneuver the onscreen arrowhead so that it appears to be hovering over an onscreen symbol, and then press down with your index finger on the top of the device on the desktop exactly twice, a larger rectangle will suddenly appear at your summons, on the screen in front of you, displaying exactly the information you were seeking. You will be able to move any picture or symbol which appears anywhere on the screen any where you want it, and, once you have learned how to use the device, to resize them or duplicate them or cause them to disappear..

Anything you see on screen, you will be able to print onto paper, exactly as it appears, in black and white or full color, without leaving your seat. Anything you see onscreen, including your own face and your own voice, you will be able to share with anyone you like anywhere on earth.

Process Reflection:

This started out as a six-sentence exercise, but got away from me. It arose from an idea that came up in a discussion today at school with Chris and the others connected to our professional support group. A group of teachers was discussing Daniel Pink’s TED Talk on motivation, in which he argues that the key factors in motivation are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. It occurred to me as we were talking that the laptops that our students carry around with them are uniquely powerful devices for encouraging and facilitating exactly these three inclinations, if only we could learn, or re-learn, to see them this way. The problem is that the students have grown up with the technology and take it for granted, using it primarily as an entertainment center and portal for everyday communication. They don’t see it as transformative, they don’t see it as a wonderful gift, they see it as a given, which is to say they don’t see it at all. Even digital immigrants like myself have lost the ability to fully appreciate the nearly miraculous power now at our fingertips. So I began this exercise in an attempt to force myself to just see all of this as if it were new, as if I had not seen it before.

The question that the discussion, and the exercise, raises for me is the question of responsibility: given these amazing tools, ought we not feel some responsibility to use them for good, or, in the words of Daniel Pink, “to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves”? If I were walking in to teach a class tomorrow, which alas, I am not, that would be the first question I'd be tempted to start off with. Followed by others: What would that look like? Have you ever seen it? Would you like to see it? If you wanted to do it yourself, what would you have to do first?

Six by Three: September Song

2009-09-02T18:41:00.000-07:00

September Song

The air sharper, and the slant of light
more oblique. The sunrise belated,
the evening arriving ahead of time.
Yes, the afternoons still bake the blood,
the wind still ripples green grass. But
now underneath the trees the shadows
congeal, the cool breeze breathes,
leaves titter and fly. What we know,
we still know. But for how long?

Process Reflection: This is the third post in a row that has arisen out of my choice to submit myself to a very simple formal constraint: six sentences. As of August 2, I've been writing in my journal again, after gap of eight months. And that's having the effect of providing me with, well, compost. Yesterday when I sat down to my journal and wrote the date, I began with this:

September is a word, an idea, a constellation of connotations: the start of the school year, the end of summer, the autumnal equinox. If I think of my life optimistically and shoot for 80 years of relative health and productivity, then I'm just edging into September even as I write this.

So today's little poem is a sort of distillation of that idea, an attempt to bend the idea to the constraints of the form. What gave me pleasure in the writing of it were the unexpected sequences of words that presented themselves.

The picture is taken on campus, where I work. In the background, my home. In the middle, the building I work in. In the foreground, shadows in the fading light.

Six By Two by Soulcraft

2009-08-28T13:46:00.000-07:00

The best book I read this summer was Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, written by a former technical writer and think-tank participant who decided to leave the groves of academe for the more soul-satisfying surroundings of the motorcycle shop.

He makes a thoughtful and well-grounded case for engaging ourselves, and our students, in physical work as well as the more abstract ideational and social competencies that are now broadly endorsed as “21st Century Skills.”

He argues that one of the benefits of engagement with the real world of material objects is that it is both educative and chastening; by way of illustration, he says, “The musicians power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience; her musical agency is built up from on ongoing submission… to the mechanical realities of her instrument… I believe the example of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely, that it arises only within concrete limits which are not of our own making.”

He points out that the hard-edged realities of the physical world demand of the craftsman, “a certain disposition toward the thing you are trying to fix. This disposition is at once cognitive and moral. Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration. I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending to no less than creating.”

The book is thought-provoking, good-humored, erudite, and very well written. If you’re interested in a taste, there’s an article by Crawford derived from the book here.

Six Sentences

2009-08-27T17:18:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon a web site devoted to Six Sentence Stories today. After a long spell in which everything I thought about writing looked either too big to attempt or too small to matter, six sentences seems like just enough to bite off and chew. So by way of working myself back into writing shape, and by way of celebrating day one of the new school year, here's one for today:

I’m becoming better at reading the tea leaves. That little cluster over there, for example, looks a lot like the knot that Aristotle refers to when he says, in his Metaphysics, “To have stated well the difficulties is a good start for those who wish to overcome them; for what follows is, of course, the solution of those very difficulties, and no one can untangle a knot which he does not see.” And that long thin open space over there at the bottom, may very well the gap between what we might wish for and what we are actually going to get. The dark moist sheen on the threaded leaves in the middle is in all likelihood the visual analogue of the first-day spirit of optimism which will, by the end of next week, have dried up and blown away. If you stick your nose into the cup and breathe in the fat green smell of the tea leaves, it will probably bring to mind for you, as it did for me, the image of a man and a woman in straw hats, knee deep in a rice paddy, bent over their work as the sun sinks toward the mountains beyond them. And, there, at the bottom of the cup, the leaves are forming a tiny bridge, the one that sooner or later we're going to have to try to cross.

House of Blues

2009-08-06T23:54:00.000-07:00

So here's something new and different. This is a work which has been through a lot of changes. I just kept slapping stuff onto it and into it and it eventually got completely overloaded with odd details that didn't hold together, so I worked back into it with a grey wash I thought would be transparent but turned out not to be. Then I worked out the geometrical elements and started pushing different layers of blue into each element, and the blues began sort of talking to one another around what I came to think of as the central houselike structure. (The blues are a lot more vibrant in the painting than in the reproduction.) So now there's a horizontal conversation going on between the brighter colors and more random shapes across the middle - perhaps a conversation about the geometry of domesticity - and a different set of more muted dialogues in the intersecting watery and airy blue planes.

BTW, I found myself last night, more or less by accident, on a web site devoted to Joseph Giunta, a Canadian painter I had never heard of, but who is my new hero. He's the guy I want to be when I grow up.

Olive Kitteridge

2009-07-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

So the other day I ran into Tim at Satura’s and after we had talked for a while we both headed over to Borders. I was looking for one book in particular, which they didn’t have, but Tim was browsing on their rack of featured books and he turned and asked me if I had read this one. I went over and looked at it, a yellow paperback entitled Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. I hadn’t, but the blurbs indicated that it was a novel told in thirteen linked short stories, and there was a sticker indicating it had won the Pulitzer Prize, so I told Tim I’d take a crack at it.

That turned out to be a good move. It’s a terrific book, although not one that I would recommend to every reader. The main character, Olive herself, is a woman of late middle age who might be quite accurately be described with a term I have not heard in active use since I was in grade school myself: an old battle axe. She’s a big woman, a formidable woman, a judgmental and opinionated and often angry woman. One of the considerable accomplishments of this book is that the author manages to make Olive, and the many complex and often deeply scarred characters who surround her, an object first of fascination and ultimately of sympathy.

Elizabeth Strout depicts Olive using very tightly controlled third-person narrative that allows us access to the movements of her thoughts in a very subtle way. Here she is, for example, escaping for a moment into a bedroom for a quick rest on the afternoon of her son’s wedding:

Olive’s dress—which is important to the day, of course, since she is the mother of the groom—is made from a gauzy green muslin with big reddish-pink geraniums printed all over it, and she has to arrange herself carefully on the bed so it won’t wind up all wrinkly, and also in case someone walks in, so she will look decent. Olive is a big person. She knows this about herself, but she wasn’t always big, and it still seems something to get used to. It’s true she has always been tall and frequently felt clumsy, but the business of being big showed up with age; her ankles puffed out, her shoulders rolled up behind her neck, and wrists and hands seemed to become the size of a man’s. Olive minds—of course she does; sometimes, privately, she minds very much. But at this stage of the game, she is not about to abandon the comfort of food, and that means right now she probably looks like a fat, dozing seal wrapped in some kind of gauze bandage. But the dress worked out well, she reminds herself, leaning back and closing her eyes. Much better than the dark, grim clothes the Bernstein family is wearing, as though they had been asked to a funeral, instead of a wedding, on this bright June Day. (62)

The passage reveals a lot about Olive’s ambivalent feelings about her own situation: her size, her masculinity, the look of the dress itself, as well as her more acidly one-dimensional criticism of the poor Bernsteins, who after all were only trying to do their best as well. Olive is frequently willing, as most of us are, I suppose, to forgive her own limitations (“at this stage of the game, she is not about to abandon the comfort of food”) even when she is unwilling to forgive the trespasses of others. Much later in the book, after an emotionally challenging episode, Olive finds herself out walking in the park, and her thoughts, although much different in content, are revealing in much the same way:

A bright haze hung over the river, so you could barely make out the water. You couldn’t even see too far ahead on the path, and Olive was consistently startled by the people who passed by her. She was here later than usual, and more people were out and about. Next to the asphalt pathway, the patches of pine needles were visible, and the fringe of tall grasses, and the bark of the shrub oaks, the granite bench to sit on. A young man ran toward her, emerging through the light fog. He was pushing before him a triangular –shaped stroller on wheels, the handles like those on a bicycle. Olive caught sight of a sleeping baby tucked inside. What contraptions they had these days, these self-important baby boomer parents. When Christopher was the age of that baby, she’d leave him napping in his crib, and go down the road to visit Betty Simms, who had five kids of her own—they’d be crawling all over the house and all over Betty, like slugs stuck to her. Sometimes when Olive got back, Chris would be awake and whimpering, but the dog, Sparky, knew to watch over him. (157)

Here is a woman who is bitterly dismissive of “these self-important baby boomer parents” to whom it has apparently not occurred that there might be something just the least bit odd about leaving her baby at home to be watched over by her dog.

But Olive has another side to her as well, a reflective, appreciative, even philosophical side that emerges most often when she is alone, as in this passage, again at the park:

There was beauty to that autumn air, and the sweaty young bodies that had mud on their legs, strong young men who would throw themselves forward to have the ball smack against their foreheads; the cheering when a goal was scored, the goalie sinking to his knees. There were days—she could remember this—when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure. Maybe it was the purest she had, those moments on the soccer field, because she had other memories that were not pure. (162)

There are many stories and many characters in this book, and it’s a book with virtues beyond the stylistic expertise I have made note of here. Many of the stories take sudden and dramatic turns into completely unexpected territory, and there are several scenes which are true and beautiful and yet very painful to read. So it’s a visceral, often disorienting book. But I thought it was terrific.

Dunn on Creativity

2009-06-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

One of the local high schools hosts a second-hand book fair every year. It's a pretty big deal, and runs from Saturday to Saturday. Monday afternoon after work I went down and picked up some things, including a book of poems, Loosestrife, by Stephen Dunn, whose understated, good-humored, philosophically grounded poems have always given me pleasure. Here's one poem that addresses - and embodies - the creative process in a way that intuitively feels right to me:

Poetry

It makes no difference where one starts,
doesn't every beginning subvert
the tyrannies of time and place?
New Jersey or Vermont, it's the gray zone
where I mostly find myself
with little purpose or design.
An apple orchard, an old hotel—
when I introduce them
I feel I've been taken somewhere
I've been before; such comfort,
like the sound of consecutive iambs
to the nostalgic ear.
Yet it helps as well
here in the middle, somewhat amused,
to have a fast red car
and a winding, country road.
To forget oneself can be an art.
"Frost was wrong about free verse,"
she said to me. "Tear the net down,
turn the court into a dance floor."
She happened to be good looking, too,
which seemed to further enliven her remark.
It always makes a difference
how one ends, aren't endings where you
shut but don't lock the door?
Strange music beginning,
the dance floor getting crowded now.

Golden

2009-06-23T15:49:00.000-07:00

This is a drawing I've been working on of the Lutheran church across the street from my apartment. Several times a year the gold tree comes into bloom and then drops its yellow petals all around. Whenever that happens it makes me think of fall in New England. There's also some other weird reverberation going on that has something to do with the iconography of churches, and the presence of this island of traditional small-town structure surrounded by condominiums and city traffic. Something about it speaks to me in a very quiet voice in a language I don't quite comprehend.

Periodic Inventory

2009-06-23T15:46:00.000-07:00

The shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, the neon signs in a foreign country whose language we don’t speak, the shape of a cloud that Hamlet and Polonius both saw one afternoon in the sky, the sign Bois-Charbons that (according to Andre Breton) spells Police when seen from a certain angle, the writing that the ancient Sumerians thought that they could read in the footprints left by birds in the mud of the Euphrates, the mythological figures that the Greek astronomers recognized in the connectable dots of distant stars, the name of Allah that the faithful have seen in an open avocado and in the logo for Nike sportswear, God’s fiery writing on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace, sermons and books that Shakespeare found in stones and running brooks, the tarot cards through which Italo Calvino’s traveler read universal stories in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, landscapes and figures recognized by eighteenth-century travelers in the veins of marbled rocks, the ripped notice on a billboard reinstated in a painting by Tàpies, Heraclitus’s river that is also the flowing of time, the tea leaves at the bottom of a cup in which the Chinese sages believe they can read our lives, the shattered vase of Lugan Sahib that almost became whole in front of Kim’s incredulous eyes, Tennyson’s flower in the crannied wall, the eyes of Neruda’s dog in which the unbelieving poet saw God, the He kohau rongorongo or “speaking wood” from Easter Island that we know holds a message undeciphered to this day, the city of Buenos Aires that for the blind Jorge Luis Borges was “a map of my humiliations and failures,” the stitches in the cloth of the Sierra Leone tailor Kisimi Kamala in which he saw the future alphabet of the Mende script, the wandering whale that St. Brendan took for an island, the three peaks of the Rocky Mountains that outline the profiles of three sisters against the western Canadian sky, the philosophical geography of a Japanese garden, the wild swans at Coole in which Yeats unriddled our transience — all these offer or suggest, or simply allow, a reading limited only by our capabilities.

- Alberto Manguel, Reading Pictures: What We Think About When We Look at Art (7-9)

Two Million Minutes

2009-06-19T17:57:00.001-07:00

I was recently at a conference where I saw a presentation by Robert Compton on the theme of Two Million Minutes, which is roughly the amount of time a student spends in grades 9-12. Compton is a self-made multimillionaire who now has the luxury of time, which he uses to travel and to make films that dramatize the condition of American education in the context of worldwide education. The statistics are sobering. According to Compton, there are 54 million high school students in America, 194 million in China, and 212 million in India. And his argument is that in addition to being dramatically outnumbered, American students are drastically underprepared. His core argument — and it would be a hard one for me to refute, based on what I see going on around me — is that American students don't seem to even realize that they are in a competition, much less how far behind they are. In his presentation he presented what he called America's four great education myths:

Our kids are more well-rounded.
Asian education is rote memorization.
Our kids are more creative and more innovative.
U.S. education is the best in the world.

He then presented data, student schedules, and samples of student work that demonstrated fairly convincingly that all of these statements are in fact based on false assumptions and misinformation. He then showed us an edited version of his film, Two Million Minutes, (trailer here) in which he profiled two American students, two Indian students, and two Chinese students. The American students, although stars in their own worlds, did not come off well.

In yesterday's post I quoted Galen Guengerich's meditation on "the steadiness of days." Gungerich uses the Twitter prompt "What are you doing?" as a framing device for an investigation of the ethics of time. I walked out the Compton presentation more convinced than ever that as
educators we have to engage our students in some discussion about what time might mean, and how they might use it in a way that enables them to create value. Taken in this context, the seemingly innocent "What are you doing?" might turn out to be the most essential of essential questions.

Time and Materials

2009-06-19T00:30:00.000-07:00

The library in my school gets both ArtNews and Art in America. When the new ones come in each month, I usually page through them to see if there's anything that catches my eye. This month there was a notice of an exhibition of abstracts by Gerhard Richter, and I liked the one pictured so I wound up looking at and downloading some others. Then last night I was at Barnes and Noble looking in the poetry section to get a gift for a friend and I ran across a new book of poems by Robert Hass called Time and Materials, which, it turns out, has won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.) I turned to the title poem and there, as a subtitle, were the words "Gerhard Richter: Abstract Bilden" (Bilden being the German word for "pictures"). I took that as some kind of a sign and wound up buying the book.

When I was thinking about doing this post, I looked online to see if the text of "Time and Materials" might be available, and while the whole text was not, there was one site which quoted part of the text, and it turned out to be in the context of a sermon by a Galen Guengerich, the pastor of a Unitarian Church in New York City.

Now, I'm not usually a sermon-oriented person. But this sermon, entitled "A Steadiness of Days," was pretty interesting. How many preachers have you heard recently who would be likely, in one sermon, to reference not only Robert Hass, but Twitter, Technorati, Wired writer Clive Thompson, astrophysicist Richard Gott and (my all-time favorite writer) short story master Andre Dubus.

It turns out that Guengerich has posted pretty much ALL of his sermons online, and I've bookmarked them for future reference. I'll conclude this post with the closing paragraphs from his sermon, which include the Dubus reference:

To be sure, many religions seem fixed on the ends of the earth—either the creation or the apocalypse, or both. But enlightened faith thrives not in the miraculous but in the mundane, the steady unfolding of days. I recall a scene described by the late Andre Dubus in his book titled Essays From A Movable Chair. Dubus was an award-winning writer who had lost his leg in an auto accident. He tells about making sandwiches on Tuesdays for his second- and seventh-grade daughters and taking the sandwiches to school. He writes:

On Tuesdays when I make lunch for my girls, I focus on this: the sandwiches are sacraments. And each motion is a sacrament, this holding of plastic bags, knife, of bread, of cutting board, this pushing of the chair, this spreading of mustard on bread, this trimming of liverwurst, of ham. All sacraments, as putting the lunches into a zippered book bag is, and going down my six ramps to my car is. I drive on the highway, to the girls’ town, to their school, and this is not simply a transition; it is my love moving by car from a place where my girls are not to a place where they are; even if I do not feel or acknowledge it, this is a sacrament. If I remember it, then I feel it too. Feeling it does not always mean that I am a happy man driving in traffic; it simply means that I know what I am doing in the presence of God.

If I were much wiser, and much more patient, and had much greater concentration, I could sit in silence in my chair, look out my windows at a green tree and the blue sky, and know that breathing is a gift; that a breath is sufficient for the moment; and that breathing air is breathing God.

Enlightened religion is a way of life that humbly accepts the sufficiency of each moment. It embraces the steadiness of the days as they unfold, and the purpose we can fulfill within them, and the sacrament of gratitude we can express through them. Presenting us with time and materials, it asks: “What are you doing?”

That's a sermon that makes sense to me.

Connecting What Has Been Separated

2009-05-27T14:35:00.000-07:00

A colleague recently sent me a link to a short audio file on which Jeanette Winterston talks about the importance of art, even in (especially in) times of trouble. I checked online to see if there was a text version of the speech, and, being unable to find one, I transcribed it myself. Here's her argument:

People sometimes ask me if I think that art is a luxury, of course I don’t think that, but then they ask me to justify art sometimes, especially in the light of the recent atrocities in the world, terrorism and bombing. “What can I do about that?” they say, “Doesn’t this prove that art is really a luxury, a peacetime activity.”

I’ve been thinking about that, and I do have a response, and this is it. Again, it’s part of a larger piece, but it’s something that is worth thinking about, I believe.

We have to make a distinction between the acute crisis, of the terrorist attack, an acute crisis that needs medicine and emergency help, and the chronic crisis that lies underneath it. When the crisis is acute, the media rushes in, politicians gather, news programs and documentaries are everywhere, and it would seem absurd to talk about art in such circumstances. But when the acute crisis is past, and the people who have been hurt and wounded and shocked and disillusioned are looking for hope, are looking for vision, are looking past the platitudes of politicians, then art can speak. And it is to this chronic crisis, this underlying problem in our lives, that art can speak.

We urgently need to change the way that we manage our world, our corporate culture, our international relations, our treatment of the natural world and its eco-systems. We know we cannot go on living as we do, and yet we go on living as we do. Books, paintings, music, theatre, are there to prompt us to think differently, and to see life differently. And when we free up our imaginative life, we are free to imagine a very different kind of world, and that is what is needed, and we’ve never needed it more urgently.

In a world economy that depends on separations, art asks us to make connections. President Bush pretends that emissions in the U.S.A. have nothing to do with drought in Africa, that McDonalds’ hamburgers have nothing to do with deforestation, that a U.S citizen using 88 times more resources than a citizen in Bangladesh has nothing to do with environmental depletion and third world poverty.

So how can reading a poem or looking at a painting or going to the theatre possibly help us to see things differently, or do anything about the things that we see differently? Connection is not just about connecting the obvious. It is about connecting things that are not immediately obvious, and this is what art does. Some people make a mistake, and think that if art is going to be relevant it has to be directly political, that its subject matter is everything. That is to miss the point. It’s not a question of subject matter, it’s not a question of what art is about, but what art is, by its very nature what art is. A work of art — books, theatre, pictures, whatever — isn’t just about something, it is something, and the something that it is connects what has been separated.

Think of a work of art that has meant something to you. Now, let it rest in your mind for a moment. You will become aware that one of the things it did was to make a join, to bring things together, to allow your own mind to re-form in a different way. Sometimes we say, “I’ve never thought of it like that,” or “I never felt like that,” or “That made sense of my experience,” or “That made me laugh, that made me cry.” These emotions, these understandings, these realizations occur when what was split off is brought back together. Art’s business is to take all kinds of disparate elements and fuse them into new wholes. This is not an imposition; art is not colonialism. It is a revelation, a sense of things appearing as they are.

Don’t mistake me. I don’t believe in a static objective reality that is out there. I believe in shifting, changing patterns of energy; the shifting, changing patterns of energy that we’ve begun to apprehend in nature and in the very molecules and atoms and DNA of our bodies. Nothing is solid; nothing is fixed. But this movement, this energy, is not chaos. Science is just beginning to unravel the patterns and shifts and connections that seemed so impossible and implausible. But art intuitively understands these patterns and shifts and connections, because that is exactly how art functions too. And I believe that one of the reasons we go back and back to art, why we don’t give up on it, why people go on making it and wanting it, is because through art, we recognize life’s intrinsic quality, that everything is connected.

Sure Shot

2009-05-27T14:33:00.001-07:00

Plus One (Deep Purple)

2009-05-25T16:38:00.000-07:00

This is the piece I'm working on now. I don't know if it's done yet. It's come a long way from where it began. The surprising part of the process came from an idea I stole from a woman called Mary Todd Beam who has several very useful books on art technique published by North Light. One idea she suggests is to use contact paper on the surface of your painting and then lift it at some point to reveal the negative space. I had started with a large panel (the painting is 24" x24") with a gloss white surface I had painted over with black gesson. Then I cut a large circle of contact paper, laid it down on the panel, and painted over it, mostly in browns and greens. I was actually thinking about letting it stay there, but I was at a workshop on Saturday and my teacher was encouraging me to see what would happen if I peeled it off. What I had not anticipated was that in so doing I would also peel off most of the black gesso, which (unsurprisingly, in retrospect) stuck to the surface of the contact paper rather than the smooth white surface of the panel. That left me with a large white circular space with black flecks on the panel, and a circular black plastic with white flecks in my hand. So I just glued the contact paper back down, wrong side up, and found myself looking at this rather startling celestial presence. I began adding collage elements with torn and cut paper, but there was still a pretty glaring contrast between the circular shape and the rest of the elements in the picture. So I stopped working on it, but kept turning it over in my mind.

After I got home. I started thinking about night sky and pulled out a tube of dioxazine purple that's been sitting in my drawer forever and I began doing thin washes of purple and working back into it with orange and blue and purple watercolor pencils, wetting them down, glazing them over, and doing it again. The whole process brought me back into that intermediate zone between abstraction and landscape. I don't know if it's done yet. I like the deepening effect of the multiple layers of thin color, and I think maybe it needs one more area of focus, one more surprise. But this is where it's at now.

Further Explorations

2009-05-25T15:30:00.000-07:00

I'm settling into something of a rhythm with the artwork I'm doing. I've set up a workspace in the guest bedroom, and I'm still playing around in the zone between collage and representational art, using acrylics, watercolors, cut and torn paper, photographs, and illustrations. Recently, inspired by the work I see every day on the terrific web site Urbansketchers, which publishes new drawings daily from sketchers all all over the world, I've been doing a lot more sketching as well.

Here's a selection of work I completed two or three weeks ago. Got four or five more I'm working on now.

Lesson Design III - Willingham

2009-05-25T15:27:00.001-07:00

This year I've been subscribing to an interesting and valuable resource called The Marshall Memo. Each week I get an email with an attachment which contains wrapups of current articles selected by Kim Marshall on educational topics. A recent edition of The Marshall Memo featured a couple of very interesting articles by Daniel Willingham, one of which is called "Why Students Don't Like School." I don't agree with everything that Willingham has to say — for one thing, he's death on the very same process orientation I've argued for in many posts — but he's definitely a thought-provoking writer with an interesting angle of vision. Reading the article led me to his book of the same name, which I've been enjoying.

Each of the chapters in his book is phrased as a question. In Chapter 3, entitled "Why Do Students Remember Everything That's on Television and Forget Everything I Say?" Willingham develops a deceptively simple argument, which he summarizes at the end of the chapter as follows:

If we agree that background knowledge is important [a central point of one of his earlier chapters], then we must think carefully about how students acquire that background knowledge — that is, how learning works. Learning is influenced by many factors, but one factor trumps the others: students remember what they think about. That principle highlights the importance of getting students to think about the right thing at the right time. We usually want students to understand what things mean, which sets the agenda for the lesson plan. How can we ensure that students think about meaning?

Willingham follows this summary with a listing of "Implications for the Classroom," which actually winds up reading like a set of guidelines for lesson design. Since that's what I've been considering in several of my last posts, I'd like to proceed by reproducing his list, but with my own commentary.

Review each lesson plan in terms of what the student is likely to think about.

Willingham has concerns about a lot of project-oriented learning, on the plausible grounds that students who are doing projects are likely to spend more time thinking about the process ("How do I make this Powerpoint slide spin into view?" vs content ("What are the implications of Gertrude's marriage to Claudius?"). He argues that well-designed activities get the students to think about the core concepts of the discipline, not the process skills, or perhaps more accurately, moreso than the process skills.

Think carefully about attention grabbers.

This injunction is actually a followup to the first. All teachers are at times tempted to do oddball things to get student's attention. If you show up for a lecture on Ancient Rome wearing a toga, you're going to get attention, all right, but while you are delivering the lecture are the students thinking about Ancient Rome, or are they thinking about you and whether you are wearing pants under that toga? It's going to make a difference in what they retain.

Use discovery learning with care.

For similar reasons. Willingham: "Discovery learning has much to recommend it, especially wehn it comes to the level of student engagement. If students have a strong voice in deciding which problems they want to work on, they will likely be engaged in the problems they select, and will likely think deeply about the material, with attendant benefits. An important downside, however, is that what students think about is much less predictable."

Design assignments so that students will unavoidably think about meaning.

Willingham's example is that if in a unit on the Underground Railroad you ask students to bake biscuits, they're going to spend more time thinking about flour and milk than about the experience of the runaway slaves. It might be better to ask students to think about the question of how the runaway slaves got food, and then try to find out the answers.

Don't be afraid to use mnemonics.

There are some skills and concepts (multiplication, the distributive property) that you need to have in memory in order to be able to think well about the task at hand. If there's no other way to do it than through memorization, it makes sense to give kids memorizing tools.

Try organizing a lesson plan around the conflict.

I'm reminded of a presentation I saw at NAIS last year by Brian Greene, in which he argued that you can teach any scientific concept more effectively if you like it to story. The example that he used, and that framed his whole talk, was to explain string theory as the latest chapter in a long-standing argument between those physicists who see the universe as being made up of stuff, matter, as opposed to those who see it being made up of events, energy. String theory is a way of resolving the conflict by saying that it's made up, at the sub-sub-atomic level, of both, in the form of vibrating strings. I'm not sure if I have the exact terms of the debate framed correctly, but the point was that the lesson was framed around a conflict, a story.

Willingham argues in this same section agains the notion that one of our goals as teachers is to "make it relevant to the students":

"If I'm continually trying to build bridges between students' daily lives and their school subjects, the students may get the message that school is always about them, whereas I think there is value, interest, and beauty in learning about things that don't have much to do with me... Student interests should not be the main driving force of lesson planning. Rather, they might be used as initial points of contact that help students understand the main ideas you want them to consider, rather than as the the reason or motivation for them to consider these ideas."

As I said at the start, there's a lot here that one might choose to argue about. But I am pleased that Willingham has chosen to join the conversation.

Bus

2009-05-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

Lesson Design II - The Logic of Sequencing

2009-05-04T18:21:00.001-07:00

As a followup to my last post, I'd like to re-present a lightly revised version of piece I put together several years ago, before Throughlines existed. The argument I made at that time is that the art of teaching resides not just in the design of lessons, but in their sequencing. A poorly-designed sequence will give the students the sense that this happens and then that happens and then something else happens, with no apparent logic or connection. In a well-designed lesson sequence, students will know - or at least be given reason to believe - that there is a logic to what they are doing and why they are doing it. Even if they don’t completely understand the logic while they are engaged in the sequence, if they sense a connection, then each part of the sequence strengthens the other. For example, if students come to know that a group discussion activity is usually a rehearsal for a writing assignment to be given later, they often pay a different kind of attention to what is being said in the group than if their sense is that there will be no followup.

The logic of any particular sequence is inevitably shaped by the assumptions and intuitions of the teacher, which may in turn by shaped by any number of factors including (but not limited to) the teacher’s personality, previous teaching experiences as a student, previous experience as a teacher, and goals for the course, as well as such external factors as departmental or parental expectations, community demographics, and so on. More important yet are the needs of the students and the interactive dynamics of each particular class.

Some grounding assumptions for what follows:

• The most important goals of education are not content goals but process goals. You don’t judge how well-educated people are by what they remember. You judge them by what they know how to do, and how well they do it. As B. F. Skinner says, “Education is what’s left over after you’ve forgotten what you’ve learned.”

• My students don’t need to know what I think. They need to learn how to articulate what they think. A corollary assertion is that direct instruction - that is, lecturing - is the most efficient and least effective method of instruction.

• Students are inherently interested in themselves and in one another. Activities and assignments which are linked to their interest in one another are more likely to go over well.

• Students learn in lots of different ways. Some learn visually, some learn interactively, some learn by talking, some learn by writing. Too much of any one mode of instruction or interaction in a classroom is deadening.

• Ideas don’t appear of out a vacuum. The “aha!” moment doesn’t just happen. (Well, perhaps once in a great while it does, but it’s not the norm.) Ideas emerge from sustained thought, dialogue, and interaction. Some students know how to ask good questions and brainstorm answers. Many do not. All can benefit from regular practice in the process.

• Writing is not simply or most importantly a vehicle for conveying thought. It is also a perhaps the single most powerful for generating thought. Students need to be given lots of practice in learning how to use this tool effectively.

Here, then, is a hypothetical - but not atypical - sequence of events set in a high school English classroom. It assumes that the students have come to class having completed a common reading:

1) At the start of class ask each student write down two relevant, significant questions about the reading.

2) Students share the questions they have written with a partner (or, depending on class size and time available, two partners) and discuss. "Are they the same? Are they different? How? Between them they should agree on one question to share with the class.

3) One student from each pair of partners goes to the board and writes the question.

4) Give the students three minutes to scan the list of questions and decide individually which ones are in their judgment most significant and most relevant. (This is how the class will decide the order in which we will address the questions in class discussion - most significant questions first.)

5) Poll the class. Each student is allowed to vote twice. Write each question on the board; students who have voted for that question raise their hands. Record the votes.

6) Tell the students that at the beginning of class tomorrow they will have a written quiz in which they will be asked to write a clear, precise, plausible answer to one of the questions listed on the board. The question will be chosen at random from among the top three (or four, or five) vote-getters. The class discussion about to take place will be a chance to brainstorm answers, share ideas, think through the possibilities.

7) The remainder of the class is a Harkness discussion in which the teacher does not take part. Students work through the questions, sharing ideas, considering possible answers, looking for passages in the text that might be relevant to those answers.

8) At the end of class, tell the students that if they need any additional information or need to think through the questions further, they can do that work on their own for homework. They have to be prepared to answer any of the questions, but they will actually be asked to answer only one. They don’t just don't know which one.

Day Two:

9) At the beginning of the class, roll a four- or five-sided die to see which question they will answer. (Any other form of randomization would work as well: pulling numbers out of a hat, drawing from a deck of cards, whatever.)

10) Students take the quiz, writing out the answer to the question in class. If economy and precision are currently on your agenda, you might give each student a file card and ask them to limit their answer to what can fit on one side of the file card. This technique has the side effect of making step 17 (below) a little easier.) Collect the responses and put them aside.

11) Ask the class to return to the text and approach it from another point of view. (One way to do this is to ask them to consider the possibility that while everything they have said so far is true, it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Their task is now to consider how to get to the heart of the matter.) Students work in groups of four for ten minutes to come up with an action plan for their group: what process can the group design that will allow them to go deeper?

12) The groups share their plans orally.

13) The groups now have five minutes to decide whether to use their original plan, borrow one from another group, or come up with a new plan that combines features of both.

14) The remaining fifteen or twenty minutes of class the students try out their plan: they try to arrive at a deeper understanding of the text using the process they have selected.

15) Homework assignment: "Write a reflection paper in which you discuss your group’s work today: what your group did, what conclusions you came to in the group, whether the process satisfied you personally, why or why not, anything that in retrospect you would do differently if you were starting this process over."

Day Three:

16) Collect the homework, and hand out a sheet on which are printed four of the answers to yesterday’s quiz. (In the interests of objectivity and anonymity, it might be a good idea to type these up using selections from another class, and without names on them.)

17) Students must read the four sample responses and rank order them in terms of their overall effectiveness. "Which one is, in your judgment, the best answer? The second best, and so on?"

18) Students then meet in small groups and compare rankings. "Tell which one you picked as best, and explain what you see in the piece that you like. See if the others in your group agree. Then see if your group can agree on the number one choice. In five minutes I will ask your group to report. If you agree, tell which one you have picked and why. If you disagree, report on the nature of your disagreement."

19) Debrief: Ask for reports from each group and collate the results, listing on the board various individual criteria as they emerge.

20) There is now a list of criteria or standards for this assignment on the board. Ask the students to scan the board and decide on which two of the indicated criteria are most relevant and significant. They get to vote twice. Once the exercise is completed, each criterion has a certain number of votes. Number the list in order of votes. Ask the students to write the prioritized list in their notebooks.

21) Lots of ways to go at this point. One would be to hand back their first drafts ungraded, ask them to re-draft the answers in the light of the new criteria, and finish them for homework. Let them know that you're going to grade them using the rubric generated in class.

22) Remember those reflection papers you collected (Step 16)? How might you use those to set up a new sequence of activities for the next reading?

This three-day cycle of activities makes an attempt to integrate reading, writing, thinking, and speaking in ways which are interconnected and self-reinforcing. There is also, by design, a range of interactive modes: small groups, large groups, teacher direction, teacher distance. (Notice there is no direct teacher-delivered instruction about content anywhere in the sequence. The students are doing the heavy lifting.)

There's nothing magical about this particular set of moves; the point is that it's a threaded sequence. Each of the small group discussions, for example, leads to another step in the overall process, at the end of which there’s an assignment which gives the students a chance to demonstrate that they can produce a response that meets the criteria they themselves have established. Sustained engagement in the process is self-rewarding. Students who have followed the whole process attentively should have a very good sense of what is expected, and the grades which will ultimately arise out of the process should be satisfying both to the students and to the teacher. In fact, the grade becomes at least in part a means of verifying or authenticating the process understandings the students have been working to master. Notice that I have said nothing about the content of the reading. It doesn’t matter. Whatever content is at issue will be covered in some depth as a result of the design of the process: having the students ask good questions, brainstorm through the answers, articulate their ideas, set standards of excellence, and then revise their writing with those standards in mind.