(pardon the SI reference, but there was this review of a memoir by Guy Debord's lover in The Nation, and it got me thinking about those cats and that lingo lately)
A lull in the flurry of Father Care and visit from Tricksy (Speed's SO), and I feel that blowing off a bit of serious writing on the Murdoch essay (which is getting entirely off the chain)to read some friends' blogs is just the ticket.
Yeh. So Princess at Flooded Lizard Kingdom wrote herself some New Year's Resolutions, and tagged a couple blogs reflecting on the spirit in which to think and write them. So, agreeing with her, as I often do, I got to thinking about mine. Late, I know, but things have been a tad busy here.
Some are making lists of intentions for their resolutions, some keeping themselves to the one. Having made lists called "To Do --> Ta Da," including master lists of Things To Accomplish This Year, or Things to Accomplish This Summer, including action items like "Meditate more," and "Recycle More" and "Fix Your Bloody iPod" (that one's from five months ago) ... You get the idea. I'm not making a list, and I'm not limiting to The One Resolution.
Rather. My deal right now is that I don't feel all that resolute, or resolved, or fixed like the North Star at all. I feel very drifty, very much unmoored, but not in an entirely bad way. I'm unsteady, and processing a relationship, and seeing some patterns, and getting ready to "let what does not matter truly slide." A Situationist sentiment if ever there was one.
(What. Is. Wrong. With. San Diego. Tonight??? It's terrible when football teams forget how to play football.) -- pardon --
I shall instead drift, maunder, detourn, announce some very general intentions -- because if you read this you probably know me, and if you know me, you know what my To Do list looks like. I would like to wander down to not so much what I will do or what I will stop doing in my life, and get down to what I really do not want anymore. Ever.
Emotional confusion so deep that I cannot articulate it, barely let myself feel it, and try to soldier on in spite of it thinking that I Can Be Strong Enough and Up My Game and then All Will Be Well. --- Dear PMRSC, this is the stupid thing you do. Of the stupidest things you do, this is the really big one, and a root cause of many others. Hence forth, Dear Woman, you/I shall Call a Foul a Foul from now on. Challenge the play, and the call, and point out that Creating Insecurity Where There Need Not Be Any is plain not cool.
Mistaking momentary good/kind/attentive/generous/reciprocal behavior for a desire to behave that way on a regular basis. (See above.)
Attempting to reciprocate said behavior/tone/emotional motif later and being ever so gently looked at as if I've grown a horn, broken a rule.
I shall remember that my friends are not insane, and that if they had seen/heard the actions behind this New Year's Refusal, they would have duly chastised the offender right quick.
Hence, I shall try to sniff out new and deepen old relationships in which I am steady enough to tell the truth, all the time, without hesitation. People with whom I can glow, because they know how to. People with whom I can be small and need some help, because they have been small and needed help. People who will Feel All the Way Right Now because there is no later anyway. Because, I don't have to shield myself from such people while attempting to know them intimately as humans. Which, I am writing to remind myself, is not possible. Those to whom telling the truth (be it gorgeous, silly, serious, or ugly) feels risky or wrong or stupid are people I do not need to know.
For instance, people who say that "the problem is that this matters to you," and when want to parse the meaning of "matter to." Pretty pedestrian phrase in my book.
No doubt by now, you have figured that much of the above is break-up related. It is. But it is also a Pattern with Enough Men to Be Worth Thinking Now. And it is a pattern shockingly similar to my relationship with my chosen profession.
Both those men and this profession hold out just enough positive reinforcement to keep me in the game. Both those men and this profession seem good and reasonable and talk in even tones and make very few sudden movements, even when saying the most ludicrous and soul-wrecking things. Both assume that I will (because I have) accept "working" below my full ability or evolution, and for far less "pay" than my talents and acumen are actually worth. Both claim a kind of passivity that is really a position of perfect control. Both claim a desire to critique or live outside of the usual hierarchies and yet reproduce them in the form and content of their activity or organization.
The academic world of Literature/Philosophy especially. Like a partly-engaged lover, these professions waste talent and can only continue to operate under the illusions/seductions candied out to graduate students. They are, however polite, abusive systems. They refuse the obligations of their own professed values. They are, by the way, quite. fine. with. that.
Harsh? No. The MLA and APA and ACLA have, for decades, bemoaned the recursive problem of needing graduate students to teach first level courses (because the profs are soooo bored with those ingorant kids), and knowing full and well that whopping lots of them are being told they're brilliant and the profession needs them ... to adjunct. And if you just publish a few peer reviewed articles, and maybe a book, and drive a couple hundred miles between schools, and refer to the trunk of your car as your office, get paid 1/3 of your full-time "colleagues," and live w/o health insurance for just long enough, and keep applying for full-time jobs, you might, someday, get one. What they do is burn up good teachers and scholars--and they can because there are so damn many of us. In short, newbies, if you are not in grad school in a top 20 school/department, for-get your professional aspirations. You are padding as far as they are concerned, the padding between them and the ground.
Fact is, kids, that universities CANNOT operate any other way at this point. There is nothing for it. The professors who teach or taught us, who went before us, who manage and defend the profession --- sold out a couple generations of intellectual and pedagogical talent. They did not stand up to this waste of good human time and acumen, and in fact, encouraged us to this impasse.
Hence, I shall not subject myself to that particular waiting game, either.
The feeling in me that says, "See Me, Just See Me" -- yeh, next I have that, I am out. Because living in a place where I spend a lot of energy refusing to feel that, I become a complete nut case.
Glowing, burning as much as I can, staying with people who let me and whom I can encourage to do so. Working in some place or way that feels that way too. That's 2009. That's where I'm going to go in 2009.
The books are there for themselves, now. They're not signs of my belonging/qualification. They are self-referentially existent and meant to better the conversations they will enter. They are now pure things, in the old Symbolist sense no one uses anymore because it's obligations are just too, like, real 'n' shit.
I am now a Writer of Independent Means, and I plan to enjoy that rare status/identity thoroughly.
I shall, in Fleur's words, "shit-can" the whole thing once those books are done and, like the 20's expat I would have been, hie mine self to Europe to drift and detourn my previous social identity, re-edit the Coming Soon trailer of my future so that making myself and other people more of their own good-glowy-rightness the new motif.
Any thing, or situation, or person/s that interfere with that will be promptly allowed to truly slide. It's time. Here (spirit willing) endeth the lesson.
Showing posts with label Education-al. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education-al. Show all posts
18.11.08
Composition 101: Some Suggestions from PMRSC
Never fails: I get to the end of a semester, and I want to (presumptuously, arrogantly) Redesign First Year Composition From the Ground Up for All Programs in the US!
The difference I see now in my first year students is that they are naive relativists rather than naive dualists; they are naively savvy about marketing and various televisionary fakeries; they are instinctive multicultural consumers (if not really culturally fluent); they are far less other-phobic than they were even ten years ago.
But, they still hate Comp textbooks -- no matter how hip those textbooks try to be.
And I have figured out why.
They're insulting.
They are basically hippified versions of "current events" and "current debates" that place the students in a "context" of competing voices of varying degrees of expertise and rhetorical cleverness.
And they expect the student to develop a cogent (if inexpert) essay on a controversial subject from this fractured and fragmented reading. OF COURSE, they're going to be tempted to A) retreat to received wisdom, or B) disengage via the "everyone's got an opinion" fade.
Because they're insulted. They're asked by their teachers to become rhetorically aware (if not savvy) cogent arguers in a context of floating bits of opinion. That is an insult.
I have two ways that I want to teach First Year Composition (and the rhetoric, research and argumentation classes, for that matter).
First, for a composition class in which we are working on modes of organization and their skillful combination, and mature style and rhetorical savviness: Teach the Personal or Creative Non-Fiction Essay. Use Lopate's poetics of the essay to get a sense of the rules of the genre, read good essays, analyze them for modes, style, voice, audience. Then write. -- I've used this one, and I know that for this level of writer, it works like a CHARM.
Second: Teach Comp I and II like a graduate class or an upper division class -- but simplified. Present some Seriously Readable Theory, create a real frame both philosophically and historically. Ground them somewhere. Then read arguments, even about the frame. But start them someplace other than Received Knowledge (no matter how tolerant and hip that reception may be). Analyze positions in relation to the frame, and for style, voice, cogency, audience. Then write.
High school writing does precious little, STILL, but ask students to return the Received Knowledge in a well organized and grammatically interpretable manner. It does not ask them to look beyond themselves.
This method would let them look because they would have a frame. Frames assist looking, after all.
In short: get rid of composition textbooks -- or make smarter composition textbooks.
Of course, we can't do this because so much comp is taught by grad students and adjuncts who are in no position to choose books or make their own due to inexperience or shortness of notice before employment. So, you know, ignore me.
The difference I see now in my first year students is that they are naive relativists rather than naive dualists; they are naively savvy about marketing and various televisionary fakeries; they are instinctive multicultural consumers (if not really culturally fluent); they are far less other-phobic than they were even ten years ago.
But, they still hate Comp textbooks -- no matter how hip those textbooks try to be.
And I have figured out why.
They're insulting.
They are basically hippified versions of "current events" and "current debates" that place the students in a "context" of competing voices of varying degrees of expertise and rhetorical cleverness.
And they expect the student to develop a cogent (if inexpert) essay on a controversial subject from this fractured and fragmented reading. OF COURSE, they're going to be tempted to A) retreat to received wisdom, or B) disengage via the "everyone's got an opinion" fade.
Because they're insulted. They're asked by their teachers to become rhetorically aware (if not savvy) cogent arguers in a context of floating bits of opinion. That is an insult.
I have two ways that I want to teach First Year Composition (and the rhetoric, research and argumentation classes, for that matter).
First, for a composition class in which we are working on modes of organization and their skillful combination, and mature style and rhetorical savviness: Teach the Personal or Creative Non-Fiction Essay. Use Lopate's poetics of the essay to get a sense of the rules of the genre, read good essays, analyze them for modes, style, voice, audience. Then write. -- I've used this one, and I know that for this level of writer, it works like a CHARM.
Second: Teach Comp I and II like a graduate class or an upper division class -- but simplified. Present some Seriously Readable Theory, create a real frame both philosophically and historically. Ground them somewhere. Then read arguments, even about the frame. But start them someplace other than Received Knowledge (no matter how tolerant and hip that reception may be). Analyze positions in relation to the frame, and for style, voice, cogency, audience. Then write.
High school writing does precious little, STILL, but ask students to return the Received Knowledge in a well organized and grammatically interpretable manner. It does not ask them to look beyond themselves.
This method would let them look because they would have a frame. Frames assist looking, after all.
In short: get rid of composition textbooks -- or make smarter composition textbooks.
Of course, we can't do this because so much comp is taught by grad students and adjuncts who are in no position to choose books or make their own due to inexperience or shortness of notice before employment. So, you know, ignore me.
15.11.08
MS. Wants to Your Opinion on What to Do Next!
Ms. Magazine Says:
Create universal, opt-out, sex education instruction including sexual respect and healthy relationships and communication. Discuss rape, domestic violence, and psychological abuse with both girls and boys. Include instruction on homosexual love as co-equal to heterosexual love. Analyze messages counter healthy love and sex in the popular culture. Make it a detailed, holistic, two semester course taught freshman year of high school. We should not assume healthy love comes naturally. We have no evidence for that. Our children should not end up in the Self Help aisle at forty years old, wondering why they can't create joy, intimacy, and real pleasure in their love lives. Love and sexuality are sacred: we should take them that seriously.
Click that link at top to tell Ms. what you think.
We want to hear your voice! This is our chance, at last, to move forward again and make transformational change.Here's what I said:
The first issue of Ms. magazine in 2009 - which will hit newsstands just as President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in - will feature the best of YOUR ideas for moving forward to make the change we need.
What needs to happen next? We want to hear from you. We will choose the best ideas for change and feature your name and plan in Ms. magazine. And we will forward your ideas en mass to President-Elect Obama's site Change.gov so he and his transition team will be sure to hear our feminist voices.
As Barack Obama said in his eloquent election night speech, "This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change." But as he went on to say, change cannot happen without all of us working together.
Create universal, opt-out, sex education instruction including sexual respect and healthy relationships and communication. Discuss rape, domestic violence, and psychological abuse with both girls and boys. Include instruction on homosexual love as co-equal to heterosexual love. Analyze messages counter healthy love and sex in the popular culture. Make it a detailed, holistic, two semester course taught freshman year of high school. We should not assume healthy love comes naturally. We have no evidence for that. Our children should not end up in the Self Help aisle at forty years old, wondering why they can't create joy, intimacy, and real pleasure in their love lives. Love and sexuality are sacred: we should take them that seriously.
Click that link at top to tell Ms. what you think.
11.11.08
Women Profs, Adjuncts, Coporiversity
AAUP summarizes the structures of contingent faculty, including its feminization. This is not news. It is, however, still a matter of some urgency.
Brief response: private liberal arts college pays me $4000 to teach two classes in frosh-comp. Do some math: how many of those would I have to teach to keep a roof, food, and my own health insurance, own and insure a car, ...?
(And I kinda like this little job and this nice school with these fairly smart kids that lets me look for a job that would let me use my full range of scholarly and pedagogical talents -- which is the thing I want : to use all of it, that's all this life is for.)
Second brief response: the devaluation of women's labor in academe will ONLY change when women insist on the value of our labor, and the value of labor period.
Third brief response: you teach frosh-comp, involving reading comprehension, interrelational thinking, clarity of organization and coherence, basic grammar, discourse analysis, style and academic voice, critical thinking, rhetoric and argumentation, and research methods, on a nearly one-on-one basis, to students who have rarely if ever been exposed to that level and complexity of thought and work ---- and then you tell me that meeting that set of objectives is A) possible and B) spiritually fulfilling and C) NOT intellectually demanding.
Fourth brief response: "team players" and "family members" in business or academic departments are marks in a con. Free labor is good employers and bad for employees. If we are to live in a Corporiversity, let us not be Wal-Mart. The friendlier the rhetoric, the more dangerous the "request."
But, let us not live in a Corporiversity. This kind of institution is not that kind. The confusion is now, as it has been for the last 15 years, very very dangerous.
Fifth brief response: the worry in this summary that contingent faculty are structurally bad for undergraduate education is just plain and simple: those who are undervalued in monies, support, office space, access to benefits, and intellectual acumen in a profession of intellectuals cannot keep it up for long.
But, from the Admin's point of view, they don't have to. The husks they become are replacable with new graduates whose profs failed to hip them to the con, who are fresh and green and ready for harvest.
I don't adjunct for a living. I am adjuncting between livings. Imagine what will happen when I have an office and some security.
Imagine the benefit to those students.
No, wait, it's NOT about benefit to Students. Learning. Knowledge.
It's about efficiency and productivity. Both of which are qualities that do not pertain to Learning (inherently inefficient as involves error and correction, practice and experimentation) nor to Scholarship (ditto as involves creativity and rumination, critique and experimentation).
Careful, we are very near the university becoming as empty and fake as most financial institutions and securitized mortgage packaging with the students being the marks of the universities, taking out loans on an education the value of which will turn out to DEcline.
The appearance, rather than the actuality.
The REAL, people, does in fact affect reality.
Brief response: private liberal arts college pays me $4000 to teach two classes in frosh-comp. Do some math: how many of those would I have to teach to keep a roof, food, and my own health insurance, own and insure a car, ...?
(And I kinda like this little job and this nice school with these fairly smart kids that lets me look for a job that would let me use my full range of scholarly and pedagogical talents -- which is the thing I want : to use all of it, that's all this life is for.)
Second brief response: the devaluation of women's labor in academe will ONLY change when women insist on the value of our labor, and the value of labor period.
Third brief response: you teach frosh-comp, involving reading comprehension, interrelational thinking, clarity of organization and coherence, basic grammar, discourse analysis, style and academic voice, critical thinking, rhetoric and argumentation, and research methods, on a nearly one-on-one basis, to students who have rarely if ever been exposed to that level and complexity of thought and work ---- and then you tell me that meeting that set of objectives is A) possible and B) spiritually fulfilling and C) NOT intellectually demanding.
Fourth brief response: "team players" and "family members" in business or academic departments are marks in a con. Free labor is good employers and bad for employees. If we are to live in a Corporiversity, let us not be Wal-Mart. The friendlier the rhetoric, the more dangerous the "request."
But, let us not live in a Corporiversity. This kind of institution is not that kind. The confusion is now, as it has been for the last 15 years, very very dangerous.
Fifth brief response: the worry in this summary that contingent faculty are structurally bad for undergraduate education is just plain and simple: those who are undervalued in monies, support, office space, access to benefits, and intellectual acumen in a profession of intellectuals cannot keep it up for long.
But, from the Admin's point of view, they don't have to. The husks they become are replacable with new graduates whose profs failed to hip them to the con, who are fresh and green and ready for harvest.
I don't adjunct for a living. I am adjuncting between livings. Imagine what will happen when I have an office and some security.
Imagine the benefit to those students.
No, wait, it's NOT about benefit to Students. Learning. Knowledge.
It's about efficiency and productivity. Both of which are qualities that do not pertain to Learning (inherently inefficient as involves error and correction, practice and experimentation) nor to Scholarship (ditto as involves creativity and rumination, critique and experimentation).
Careful, we are very near the university becoming as empty and fake as most financial institutions and securitized mortgage packaging with the students being the marks of the universities, taking out loans on an education the value of which will turn out to DEcline.
The appearance, rather than the actuality.
The REAL, people, does in fact affect reality.
25.5.08
Why It Looks Easy to You
Much of academic work is like this: "Did You Publish Today?" at The Chronicle.
It is just so true. But, I post it since at the Chronicle, chances are only other acadies will read it.
Also, as if Cosmos were tickling the scillia of my inner ear: three nice jobs at small colleges and uni's have shown up, and M said to me yesterday, when I told him of the detachment registered about conference and book, "Hey, not every one has even a little dream. Especially a dream they're good at. Don't give it up."
One is a one-year non-renewable at Fontbonne in StL over in U-city. Nice hold-over if I get it.
So, for the summer, I do not give it up. Plus, because if they'll just Talk to Me, I'm in.
It is just so true. But, I post it since at the Chronicle, chances are only other acadies will read it.
Also, as if Cosmos were tickling the scillia of my inner ear: three nice jobs at small colleges and uni's have shown up, and M said to me yesterday, when I told him of the detachment registered about conference and book, "Hey, not every one has even a little dream. Especially a dream they're good at. Don't give it up."
One is a one-year non-renewable at Fontbonne in StL over in U-city. Nice hold-over if I get it.
So, for the summer, I do not give it up. Plus, because if they'll just Talk to Me, I'm in.
22.5.08
Murdoch Conference in Kingston UK
It's an odd feeling.
My paper on Murdoch and Irigaray is accepted to this kickass conference, organized by a kickass scholar, Anne Rowe, in a town near London that is so damn adorable I might never go into London while there. I'll run up to Cheltenham to visit with A and work on the Murdoch anthology for a few days, and likely meander about in the oh-so-soul-feeding English countryside, plus the happy goodity of A's company. She's such a big-sister/mom type with funky cool edges and a razor of a mind (she digs Ricoeur, I dig Ricoeur, it'll be fun to talk about his work too) that I always feel totally relaxed around her. Last I saw A was in Dublin with Lioness.
The conference: Intertextuality and Interdisciplinarity: Iris Murdoch. And here's where you can gaze pics of the town. Just the sort of place I like to be. Kinda like my little town, only British and older and cuter and smack on the banks of the Thames. Some of the local propaganda, too. And they brag about their shopping and food and coffee and beer, with which I have no quarrel what so ever. Several of the authors in the Murdoch anthology are attending, so I'm excited to get to meet them and visit. If their writing is any indication of their persons, this will be a lovely time indeed.
Normally, I would be buzzing-excited about this. But, here comes the odd bit. In composing the conclusion to the poetics book yesterday, I wrote a sentence that let the Whole Thing Go. It said that here at the end of this project, I see that the collateral goal (a real job at a real school) is no longer my concern. Yep. Just like that.
I now wish that I had written the whole book under that assumption because the conclusion is turning into a personal essay about many things, most them having to do with what all the several hundred pages before have to do with living life in this world under these conditions. A whole study on Irigaray and these poets written in a more affective mode would have been more fun than even this was (and it was Fun), and probably would have been more honest about the deep reasons literary scholars do what we do. It turns us on. Everything lights up.
That after scrapping a 20 or so page conclusion that tended in this direction but had lots to say about irony (chez Rorty) and the freaky way that the bad relativisim the conservatives used to bash PoMo intellectuals for is now their favorite tool, and then some stuff I'm keeping about love and bell hooks and disobedience and White. But, really, who in their right mind would want to read that? How many literary studies end with this summary-implications conclusion that makes you wonder why it was ever committed to the corpses of trees better left standing? Gah.
But something just gave out. Not hope really. Just, something akin to need, to identity. To an idee fixe whose time had run out.
So, here I am, fixin to go to England, to another conference, and I'm just about ready to get my soul out of the whole game. Maybe write stuff, but only because compelled, not because I'm knocking on the door of a club I likely cannot enter for reasons the MLA people know allllll about concering the cancer in our profession. And there's this book that people like a lot, and this conclusion turning into a exercise in non-attachement, and a sense that I have no other plan for my life.
Between now and my birthday in November, there will be another plan. In fact, that's my birthday present: I'm going to ask all my sharp, loving friends to help me dream up my new plan. What does PRSC do next?
My paper on Murdoch and Irigaray is accepted to this kickass conference, organized by a kickass scholar, Anne Rowe, in a town near London that is so damn adorable I might never go into London while there. I'll run up to Cheltenham to visit with A and work on the Murdoch anthology for a few days, and likely meander about in the oh-so-soul-feeding English countryside, plus the happy goodity of A's company. She's such a big-sister/mom type with funky cool edges and a razor of a mind (she digs Ricoeur, I dig Ricoeur, it'll be fun to talk about his work too) that I always feel totally relaxed around her. Last I saw A was in Dublin with Lioness.
The conference: Intertextuality and Interdisciplinarity: Iris Murdoch. And here's where you can gaze pics of the town. Just the sort of place I like to be. Kinda like my little town, only British and older and cuter and smack on the banks of the Thames. Some of the local propaganda, too. And they brag about their shopping and food and coffee and beer, with which I have no quarrel what so ever. Several of the authors in the Murdoch anthology are attending, so I'm excited to get to meet them and visit. If their writing is any indication of their persons, this will be a lovely time indeed.
Normally, I would be buzzing-excited about this. But, here comes the odd bit. In composing the conclusion to the poetics book yesterday, I wrote a sentence that let the Whole Thing Go. It said that here at the end of this project, I see that the collateral goal (a real job at a real school) is no longer my concern. Yep. Just like that.
I now wish that I had written the whole book under that assumption because the conclusion is turning into a personal essay about many things, most them having to do with what all the several hundred pages before have to do with living life in this world under these conditions. A whole study on Irigaray and these poets written in a more affective mode would have been more fun than even this was (and it was Fun), and probably would have been more honest about the deep reasons literary scholars do what we do. It turns us on. Everything lights up.
That after scrapping a 20 or so page conclusion that tended in this direction but had lots to say about irony (chez Rorty) and the freaky way that the bad relativisim the conservatives used to bash PoMo intellectuals for is now their favorite tool, and then some stuff I'm keeping about love and bell hooks and disobedience and White. But, really, who in their right mind would want to read that? How many literary studies end with this summary-implications conclusion that makes you wonder why it was ever committed to the corpses of trees better left standing? Gah.
But something just gave out. Not hope really. Just, something akin to need, to identity. To an idee fixe whose time had run out.
So, here I am, fixin to go to England, to another conference, and I'm just about ready to get my soul out of the whole game. Maybe write stuff, but only because compelled, not because I'm knocking on the door of a club I likely cannot enter for reasons the MLA people know allllll about concering the cancer in our profession. And there's this book that people like a lot, and this conclusion turning into a exercise in non-attachement, and a sense that I have no other plan for my life.
Between now and my birthday in November, there will be another plan. In fact, that's my birthday present: I'm going to ask all my sharp, loving friends to help me dream up my new plan. What does PRSC do next?
14.5.08
The 8th Grade Final Exam (meme)
If you teach, you've been sent this through the web-vine. I you study, you should just know:
88888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
Below is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
8th Grade Final Exam: Salina , KS - 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph.
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of 'lie, 'play,' and 'run.'
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. Long at $20 per metre?
8. Find the bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name event s connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865.
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication.
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals.
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.'
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.
11.5.08
New LangPeeve
"We have to incent new technologies to address..." the end of the sentence does not matter because we see that by "incent" you mean "encourage" and that you're verbbing "incentive" and trying to get close to "incite" without the mob-psychosis connotations.
Though, in the case of technologies and social/economic redesign that might keep the global ass whipping Mother Nature (as Kali) is soon to deliver from actually slapping us back into the early 19th Century (and earlier in many parts of the world), I would encourage you to use the word "incite." As in, "We need to incite new..... forms of life real damn fast."
Roll this around on your tongue: "Teaching should incent curiosity," or "Both faith and ethics should incent generosity," or "Sunday news programs do not incent the seriousness of thinking required of the electorate at this moment in our history."
Now, make up a few of your own with this new transitive verb and feel how they sound to you. Do any of those sentences make you WANT to get up and do whatever it is they suggest?
No. Because "incent" lands in the mouth like a tablespoon of solid lead.
"Incent" is slightly less infelicitious than "incentivize" (which just screams: oh i want to sound smarter than i am), but let me just say that both words appear in the Random House Dictionary (not any of the snootier dicts) -- which, RHD is not exactly the gatekeeper of American usage.
As with the use of "impact" for solving the affect/effect distinction, this is just a cheat and not sign of real linguistic invention. As with "impact" this use comes out of the business communities. As with "impact," this makes my teeth itch.
Just learn to use the words we have. I love that this mongrel language of ours is flexible, creative, responsive to the zeitgeist, includes the words "D'oh!" and "sussuration:" but for the love of all souls;
invent more effective and affective, smarter and prettier words.
Though, in the case of technologies and social/economic redesign that might keep the global ass whipping Mother Nature (as Kali) is soon to deliver from actually slapping us back into the early 19th Century (and earlier in many parts of the world), I would encourage you to use the word "incite." As in, "We need to incite new..... forms of life real damn fast."
Roll this around on your tongue: "Teaching should incent curiosity," or "Both faith and ethics should incent generosity," or "Sunday news programs do not incent the seriousness of thinking required of the electorate at this moment in our history."
Now, make up a few of your own with this new transitive verb and feel how they sound to you. Do any of those sentences make you WANT to get up and do whatever it is they suggest?
No. Because "incent" lands in the mouth like a tablespoon of solid lead.
"Incent" is slightly less infelicitious than "incentivize" (which just screams: oh i want to sound smarter than i am), but let me just say that both words appear in the Random House Dictionary (not any of the snootier dicts) -- which, RHD is not exactly the gatekeeper of American usage.
As with the use of "impact" for solving the affect/effect distinction, this is just a cheat and not sign of real linguistic invention. As with "impact" this use comes out of the business communities. As with "impact," this makes my teeth itch.
Just learn to use the words we have. I love that this mongrel language of ours is flexible, creative, responsive to the zeitgeist, includes the words "D'oh!" and "sussuration:" but for the love of all souls;
invent more effective and affective, smarter and prettier words.
27.4.08
Intellectual Generosity
I shall meander.
It's raining, I'm procrastinating. My horse, Seeker, seems to have a bad case of either mites or mange. This is distressing. I want the rain to come harder so he'll just come in the barn and I can work on him. If not, I shall coax with treats. Poor enormous baby. There has been Much Rain here, and I have been lax in my springtime attention to him. Not good karma.
Several conversations have arisen in the last months about intellectual generosity, collegeiality, and the like. MC and I have shuttled poems and essays back and forth for review, commenting at length, as acadanerd friends do. She's lamented the dearth of such generosity in her department even in conversation. This is the department where she hopes I am hired by the way. I suspect this is just SOP for most places. She says of this aspect of collegeiality that she holds it above most others. I wonder, hard and often, what it is with colleagues that they take their differences of literary period, or critical school, or philosophical position, or favorite color to lead as if by force of logic to intellectual stinginess. I am not the first to wonder this, I know. Common Knowledge's response to this is one that I intuitively dig: irenic scholarship --> peaceful and peace-making. Do you, really, have to agree with me aforehand in order to read my work attentively, or even responsibly, or listen and speak together? It helps, that makes it easier, but we didn't get in this biz to do easy. I maunder on. Writing of substance on this would be fun to do.
My grandfather's dementia (Greek for mind-away, isn't that, well, poetic?) deepens. It's just regular old wear and tear on the brain (plus decades of highly functional but impressive acoholism). He's cheerful enough and all, and physically healthy for an 87 year old, but the other night he asked my mom why her mom wasn't at dinner with them. Well, grandma's been dead and in an urn on top of her piano for six years. Fleur said, "Well, she's gone, Daddy." Grandpa asks, "Fine, but when will she be back?" Dementia does not do metaphor of any kind, not in his head (in some it's all metaphor all the time). But, what does one tell him? Truth? That might be devastating, given that he sort of cracked in half when she died. She's out playing bridge? No, because he's very good at obsessing about anticipated events: a visit from one or all of us, his wife coming home, a trip to the grocery store. He would just get stuck on, "She's coming back soon," and never go to sleep wondering where she is. What's fair and kind?
I sent a recent suite of poems to friends for comment. They're all entitled "conge" (should have an accent aigue on that last e: Konzhay), which is a no longer practiced French genre of farewell poem, usually written shortly before death/exile/etc. I'll bet they were all the rage during the Terror. This is my new toy, my Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms which has tons of terms and concepts in it that don't get much play anymore (see: ghostword -- tempting isn't it?). I've been pulling things about and writing from/around them. Very fun. ---- Anyway, I found this word for this genre and four poems came out. They're farewells of sorts, to situations or states of being, not people or this life. Very "post-lyric" and whatnot. Straight ripped a couple moves from J. Graham because I'm writing about her work these days (plus she mimics freaking Everybody at one point or another, love it!). Well, L over in Holland is forwarding the suite on to a friend who works for (or edits??) Yang. L hear's Pound in these poems (which, wha??, but OK). So, Yang's former editor translated and published, for instance, Michael Palmer, Luis Zukofsky, bunches of Objectivists and Language poets. DUDE! Thanks L! Now that, people, that's intellectual generosity. You return some karma to me, you get some karma for you. Whether they take it or not. But do let's observe that so far I have a Much higher acceptance for my poetry in, ahem, Europe than in the US. And just what the ? is up with that?
It's raining, I'm procrastinating. My horse, Seeker, seems to have a bad case of either mites or mange. This is distressing. I want the rain to come harder so he'll just come in the barn and I can work on him. If not, I shall coax with treats. Poor enormous baby. There has been Much Rain here, and I have been lax in my springtime attention to him. Not good karma.
Several conversations have arisen in the last months about intellectual generosity, collegeiality, and the like. MC and I have shuttled poems and essays back and forth for review, commenting at length, as acadanerd friends do. She's lamented the dearth of such generosity in her department even in conversation. This is the department where she hopes I am hired by the way. I suspect this is just SOP for most places. She says of this aspect of collegeiality that she holds it above most others. I wonder, hard and often, what it is with colleagues that they take their differences of literary period, or critical school, or philosophical position, or favorite color to lead as if by force of logic to intellectual stinginess. I am not the first to wonder this, I know. Common Knowledge's response to this is one that I intuitively dig: irenic scholarship --> peaceful and peace-making. Do you, really, have to agree with me aforehand in order to read my work attentively, or even responsibly, or listen and speak together? It helps, that makes it easier, but we didn't get in this biz to do easy. I maunder on. Writing of substance on this would be fun to do.
My grandfather's dementia (Greek for mind-away, isn't that, well, poetic?) deepens. It's just regular old wear and tear on the brain (plus decades of highly functional but impressive acoholism). He's cheerful enough and all, and physically healthy for an 87 year old, but the other night he asked my mom why her mom wasn't at dinner with them. Well, grandma's been dead and in an urn on top of her piano for six years. Fleur said, "Well, she's gone, Daddy." Grandpa asks, "Fine, but when will she be back?" Dementia does not do metaphor of any kind, not in his head (in some it's all metaphor all the time). But, what does one tell him? Truth? That might be devastating, given that he sort of cracked in half when she died. She's out playing bridge? No, because he's very good at obsessing about anticipated events: a visit from one or all of us, his wife coming home, a trip to the grocery store. He would just get stuck on, "She's coming back soon," and never go to sleep wondering where she is. What's fair and kind?
I sent a recent suite of poems to friends for comment. They're all entitled "conge" (should have an accent aigue on that last e: Konzhay), which is a no longer practiced French genre of farewell poem, usually written shortly before death/exile/etc. I'll bet they were all the rage during the Terror. This is my new toy, my Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms which has tons of terms and concepts in it that don't get much play anymore (see: ghostword -- tempting isn't it?). I've been pulling things about and writing from/around them. Very fun. ---- Anyway, I found this word for this genre and four poems came out. They're farewells of sorts, to situations or states of being, not people or this life. Very "post-lyric" and whatnot. Straight ripped a couple moves from J. Graham because I'm writing about her work these days (plus she mimics freaking Everybody at one point or another, love it!). Well, L over in Holland is forwarding the suite on to a friend who works for (or edits??) Yang. L hear's Pound in these poems (which, wha??, but OK). So, Yang's former editor translated and published, for instance, Michael Palmer, Luis Zukofsky, bunches of Objectivists and Language poets. DUDE! Thanks L! Now that, people, that's intellectual generosity. You return some karma to me, you get some karma for you. Whether they take it or not. But do let's observe that so far I have a Much higher acceptance for my poetry in, ahem, Europe than in the US. And just what the ? is up with that?
2.4.08
So ... Confused: Salander Art Mess
If you care to, read this. Art dealer gets into fraud (?) suit over attempts to change valuations in the art market because Old Masters auction for less than pop art.
I'm processing. There's almost too much going on here.
I'm processing. There's almost too much going on here.
29.1.08
DHS and US Campuses
It might be a good thing that I'm not on a campus right now. But it does mean that there's lots I don't know about them these days, because I'm not reading every issue of The Chronicle, I'm writing and living. The good thing about that is: I don't have a job to lose over this. But, um, yo goddammit, this is not cool. Michael Gould-Wartofsky's "Repress U" about the police state being established at college campuses in order to root out terrorism in the homeland.....
Read it if you're not already hip. It's amazing. Not surprising, but amazing.
Well, here's the thing. Were I a terrorist, rather than merely a smart person who disagrees some of my federal government's policies and actions, I would not be organizing protests, or teaching poetry, or going to school here to try to convince the comfy kids at the Name Schools to help me destroy America.
If I were a terrorist, I would be blowing up or fanning anthrax over those very universities. I would be killing the next generation of imperialists as fast as I could. Because dudes, it is not hard to drive right up to a student union, or tool around campus in a maintenance truck. Not for these guys.
Teaching Irigaray and Emerson and talking about the Frankfurt School will not destroy America.
Please, dear DHS, chill out. Go get the bad guys. The profs and poets and the students are not the bad guys.
But, if you'd like to take that budget for TALON and whatnot, and invest it in higher education, be my guest.
And, this is not about the bad guys.
Read it if you're not already hip. It's amazing. Not surprising, but amazing.
Well, here's the thing. Were I a terrorist, rather than merely a smart person who disagrees some of my federal government's policies and actions, I would not be organizing protests, or teaching poetry, or going to school here to try to convince the comfy kids at the Name Schools to help me destroy America.
If I were a terrorist, I would be blowing up or fanning anthrax over those very universities. I would be killing the next generation of imperialists as fast as I could. Because dudes, it is not hard to drive right up to a student union, or tool around campus in a maintenance truck. Not for these guys.
Teaching Irigaray and Emerson and talking about the Frankfurt School will not destroy America.
Please, dear DHS, chill out. Go get the bad guys. The profs and poets and the students are not the bad guys.
But, if you'd like to take that budget for TALON and whatnot, and invest it in higher education, be my guest.
And, this is not about the bad guys.
Is Gen X Raising Our Children in Barns?
This note on Civility in the Classroom from Local University:
- Learning cannot effectively occur in a chaotic environment of disrespect and incivility toward one another.
- Learning is an active enterprise characterized by the sharing and discussion of ideas.
- It is your responsibility to maintain classroom behavior that is professional, courteous and sensitive to the rights of others.
- Get to class on time. Entering late disrupts the class for the instructor and your classmates and is just plain rude!
- Raise your hand and ask to be recognized. Do not interrupt.
- Leave personal stereos at home or stow them in your backpack. Do not use them during class. This is both rude and disrespectful.
- Turn off your cell phone. Calls and text messages can be returned later.
- If you have a problem or a question that requires discussion, make an appointment with your instructor during his/her office hours. Your instructor may have a class immediately before your class, after your class, or both. Catching them in the hall on the way to class or while leaving class is not a good idea in most cases.
- If you disagree with something, do it in a tactful and professional way. Yelling and screaming will get you nowhere.
- Treat everyone in the class, including your instructor, as you wish to be treated.
This is not a service industry.
Being in any of these ways out of line in my classroom gets you right up and out of my classroom. Why? Because part of my job is to make sure that all the other "customers" in that room get their money's worth. And, frankly, because I just do not have to put up with your crap, dear.
10.12.07
Reality Check
Have you read Starhawk too? Did you wonder where in the world this would go, in a practical way? Did you make the mistake I often make of dismissing something just because it doesn't fit into your current personal paradigm? Well, let's all cut that out. Read this. I'm not asking you to donate to this project. I'm just saying: it seemed far out to me and now it's a practical reality. Shows how silly that J in my Meyers-Briggs tag can be. And cheers to all the real Culture of Life types out there!
Dear friends,
Many years ago, I wrote a book called The Fifth Sacred Thing, that envisioned a transformed, diverse and green San Francisco in a world divided by war and ecological collapse. I go back to that story a lot, these days, as both the worst and some of the best aspects of it seem to be coming true.
That San Francisco of the future is a place where streams flow freely through garden streets lined with fruit trees, where celebrations and rituals honor a multiplicity of cultures, where humans have learned to heal and live in harmony with nature. Now, I spend a lot of my time not just writing about that vision, but trying to make it a reality by teaching the skills of ecological design. In 2002, together with Penny Livingston-Stark, I began teaching Earth Activist Trainings, because I saw so many enthusiastic, deeply committed people on fire with the desire to change the world, but often without a clear sense of what the solutions are.
Over the last six years, Earth Activist Trainings have loosed hundreds of fired-up permie potentizers onto the world, seeding communities across the globe with the skills and knowledge of regenerative design. Here's just a few of the things they've done:
Disaster Relief and Bioremediation:
In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, EAT alumni became core organizers of the grassroots Common Ground Relief efforts, ran the trauma support and counseling program at the clinic, and started a bioremediaiton project to clean toxins from soil using microorganisms, plants and fungi.
Sustainable Development in the Third World:
Rainwater catchment in Bolivia, a model permaculture farm in Brazil, community development and tsunami relief in south Indian fishing villages, sustainability programs in the rural Phillipines, women's programs in a permaculture institute in the West Bank of Palestine.
Urban Permaculture;
Rejuvenating a community garden in the Bayview, the poorest area of San Francisco; living and working in the L.A. Ecohouse, growing food in the projects of Miami, transforming intersections into gathering places in Portland; model backyard gardens and community power-down programs in Iowa City; youth programs in poverty stricken downtown Detroit.
And much, much more than we can fit on this page.
You know as well as I do that the world is at a crucial turning point right now. Finally, the general public gets it that climate change is happening and the waters are rising around us. But we still haven't begun to make changes on the scale and with the speed that's needed. The media is full of green news and the stores are full of green products, but we can't buy our way out of looming ecological collapse. No one technology or technique can save us.
That's where we come in. There's a pressing need to train people in the art of designing flows, links and connections, creating systems that meet human needs while healing and regenerating the environment around us. And that's just what we do.
Please help us continue this work. We have three residential courses planned for 2008, an Urban Permaculture course over a series of six weekends, a new Youth Course, and a Sustainable Skills Tour with our newly built EAT bus.
To do all this, we need your help. EAT has had generous funding which has allowed us, in turn, to be generous with financial aid. For each of our courses we've provided ten to twenty thousand dollars of work trade and scholarships, which in turn makes it possible for activists and low-income students to attend. But that funding is now at the end of its cycle, and we need help from new sources to continue being able to say 'yes', not 'no', to those who want this training.
Many of you are out there, right now, doing your regenerative activism on a daily basis.
(Thanks!) And you may not have a lot of financial wealth to share. But, please, think about the value of Earth Activist Training. And think about how desperately we need more activists of this caliber. Then, give whatever you can. The results of even a small pledge of $10/month will be exponentially effective in the big picture. Because every dollar you donate will help train more passionate, intelligent people to cleanse the soil, heal the water, share their skills, and restore the balance – in countless and priceless ways.
Please consider a donation right now of:
$1700 (provides one full scholarship for a two week course.)
$800 (subsidizes one work trader)
$100 - $250 (provides some hands-on supplies for a course)
Just to be clear, we welcome donations of every size and kind. Large. Small. One-time. Quarterly. Annual. Sporadic. We gratefully accept it all. Make a monthly pledge for exponential impact. Join the EAT Mycelium Fund Monthly Giving Circle.
And now we invite you to choose the way you will contribute to this most necessary educational endeavor.
Donate online at http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html <http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html >
or send checks to
Earth Activist TrainingPOB 251Sierraville CA 96126
Thanks! Your generosity is a crucial part of the solution.
Starhawk Earth Actiist Trainings
www.earthactivisttraining.orgwww.starhawk.org
P.S. Don't worry—I haven't stopped writing. In fact, my holiday gift to you is an expanded, updated vision of San Francisco of The Fifth Sacred Thing . It's too long to send, but you can find it at www.starhawk.org/ < http://www.starhawk.org/> . Look on the left sidebar for "Latest Essay".
Dear friends,
Many years ago, I wrote a book called The Fifth Sacred Thing, that envisioned a transformed, diverse and green San Francisco in a world divided by war and ecological collapse. I go back to that story a lot, these days, as both the worst and some of the best aspects of it seem to be coming true.
That San Francisco of the future is a place where streams flow freely through garden streets lined with fruit trees, where celebrations and rituals honor a multiplicity of cultures, where humans have learned to heal and live in harmony with nature. Now, I spend a lot of my time not just writing about that vision, but trying to make it a reality by teaching the skills of ecological design. In 2002, together with Penny Livingston-Stark, I began teaching Earth Activist Trainings, because I saw so many enthusiastic, deeply committed people on fire with the desire to change the world, but often without a clear sense of what the solutions are.
Over the last six years, Earth Activist Trainings have loosed hundreds of fired-up permie potentizers onto the world, seeding communities across the globe with the skills and knowledge of regenerative design. Here's just a few of the things they've done:
Disaster Relief and Bioremediation:
In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, EAT alumni became core organizers of the grassroots Common Ground Relief efforts, ran the trauma support and counseling program at the clinic, and started a bioremediaiton project to clean toxins from soil using microorganisms, plants and fungi.
Sustainable Development in the Third World:
Rainwater catchment in Bolivia, a model permaculture farm in Brazil, community development and tsunami relief in south Indian fishing villages, sustainability programs in the rural Phillipines, women's programs in a permaculture institute in the West Bank of Palestine.
Urban Permaculture;
Rejuvenating a community garden in the Bayview, the poorest area of San Francisco; living and working in the L.A. Ecohouse, growing food in the projects of Miami, transforming intersections into gathering places in Portland; model backyard gardens and community power-down programs in Iowa City; youth programs in poverty stricken downtown Detroit.
And much, much more than we can fit on this page.
You know as well as I do that the world is at a crucial turning point right now. Finally, the general public gets it that climate change is happening and the waters are rising around us. But we still haven't begun to make changes on the scale and with the speed that's needed. The media is full of green news and the stores are full of green products, but we can't buy our way out of looming ecological collapse. No one technology or technique can save us.
That's where we come in. There's a pressing need to train people in the art of designing flows, links and connections, creating systems that meet human needs while healing and regenerating the environment around us. And that's just what we do.
Please help us continue this work. We have three residential courses planned for 2008, an Urban Permaculture course over a series of six weekends, a new Youth Course, and a Sustainable Skills Tour with our newly built EAT bus.
To do all this, we need your help. EAT has had generous funding which has allowed us, in turn, to be generous with financial aid. For each of our courses we've provided ten to twenty thousand dollars of work trade and scholarships, which in turn makes it possible for activists and low-income students to attend. But that funding is now at the end of its cycle, and we need help from new sources to continue being able to say 'yes', not 'no', to those who want this training.
Many of you are out there, right now, doing your regenerative activism on a daily basis.
(Thanks!) And you may not have a lot of financial wealth to share. But, please, think about the value of Earth Activist Training. And think about how desperately we need more activists of this caliber. Then, give whatever you can. The results of even a small pledge of $10/month will be exponentially effective in the big picture. Because every dollar you donate will help train more passionate, intelligent people to cleanse the soil, heal the water, share their skills, and restore the balance – in countless and priceless ways.
Please consider a donation right now of:
$1700 (provides one full scholarship for a two week course.)
$800 (subsidizes one work trader)
$100 - $250 (provides some hands-on supplies for a course)
Just to be clear, we welcome donations of every size and kind. Large. Small. One-time. Quarterly. Annual. Sporadic. We gratefully accept it all. Make a monthly pledge for exponential impact. Join the EAT Mycelium Fund Monthly Giving Circle.
And now we invite you to choose the way you will contribute to this most necessary educational endeavor.
Donate online at http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html <http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html >
or send checks to
Earth Activist TrainingPOB 251Sierraville CA 96126
Thanks! Your generosity is a crucial part of the solution.
Starhawk Earth Actiist Trainings
www.earthactivisttraining.orgwww.starhawk.org
P.S. Don't worry—I haven't stopped writing. In fact, my holiday gift to you is an expanded, updated vision of San Francisco of The Fifth Sacred Thing . It's too long to send, but you can find it at www.starhawk.org/ < http://www.starhawk.org/> . Look on the left sidebar for "Latest Essay".
20.11.07
Dublin, the last month, joy joy
Justification for writing this post: so far today I have dated, organized, and sent A all the most recent versions of essays for the Murdoch book, downloaded most of the Challenging Cultures of Death papers for future reference and noted to self that one of the presenters NEEDS to send some work to Common Knowledge like right fucking now, tallied up cash burnt in Dublin and winced and made grateful for the adjuncting job, downloaded and organized about twenty PDF files of essays on St.-John Perse in preparation for swimming in Amers for about two months, and popped a frozen pizza in the oven in order to fuel the bod. But, I'll have to replace the pizza because I'm at Speed's girl's house and its not mine (tho she would tell me not to worry about it). Which, also means I need a shower so I can get to the store.... but anyway. So now I can catch me and you up on the last month. This will, I warn, be a bit impressionistic.
Henry and class reunions: I was watching the Twain Award for American Humor on PBS last night and welled up because Billy Crystal got all properly honored and seeing people properly honored breaks my heart in the good way. But, I have to say that Henry Rollins deserves the Twain Award. His speaking tours are the punk Twain, all observation and storytelling that crack us up, points out the outrageous and gets outraged over it, and constantly attests to the frail and fierce amazement that is the human being, all of us. Someone nominate the guy, someone rightly connected. --- Also, he'll tell you stories for three solid hours and then some if you sit there the whole time, and you should. And he's just so stars and garters hot. But, thanks to all that, I missed my 20th reunion. 11:30 was just too late for my sated self to even think about "catching up" with "old friends" I haven't known for two decades. Which, turns out, was spot on as my horoscope has recently ordered me to shed, forget, burn and otherwise disappear all things covered in the past. I know the people who will travel with me now and tomorrow, the rest is gone for good reason. This applies to much more than reunions, but that's where the horoscope and the choices slammed into each other. My history is less, less, and less important. What that might mean for poems is a mystery.
Brief stint of teaching. And you know that drill.
Felt something tick loose and melt in my heart for M-dreds. This will be complicated, but who am I to pass up the gift of a man's sweetness and the chance to be sweet to him? So, as much time crammed in with him before the dead run of travel and smartness.
Off to U of Indiana to hear His Holiness speak. Two gorgeous points there besides the Buddha 101. Point the first: DL addressed the students in the crowd of 15,000 of which there were many. The last century was his century, he said, his time and the time of his generation and by and large they'd made a bloodbath of it, a power struggle, a mad-sad scramble to shore up and secure and who cared much who got hurt? This century, he said to the students, is yours, your time. Make it, he ordered, a century of dialogue and healing, of sharing your toys. YES, sir. Then he asked for the teachers, of which there were many. Teach compassion, warmheartedness, loving-kindness, teach the bravery and flexibility needed for these students to go into their stewardship well ready. Well, you got it, DL!!! Totally worth the eight hours round trip in the car. Jasmine and Scorpio 2 were lovely companions, and my thanks for her making that trip real. On the way home, Jasmine played me a CD of songs she'd recorded some years back, and I have to say: Admire this woman. Stuns me blinking that she's not giving more of her life to that work. I know why, and I grieve it.
Home quick, pack quick, teach a class, set up some subs for classes, and blammo, I'm in O'Hare on Tuesday for an eight hour layover. Thanks to the dead run, I was without the ambition to get to a museum, so I hung out there, and layed about on the floors of empty gates to read Murdoch papers and contemplate the new fact that no matter how long you lie down on an airport floor, it will not, not ever, warm up. At last, Lioness arrives. At last, we're ready, we're gathered, and soon we'll be a little changed.
First, compliments: Lioness is one easy gal to travel with. This is important, as travelers know. I'd come to prefer traveling alone over companioned travel since at least that way, and missing someone to talk to, I could have experiences that mattered to me. Advantages: lots of talking to locals, no debates about sights/food/events, no whining, lots of getting over one's innate shyness. I tend to do travel as a walkabout, start with a plan, nix the plan for Oh Look That's Neat. Drives other people a little nuts. Disadvantages: only mine own brain to locate fun, no one to say "ooooh" and "ahhhh" and "wow" to. Lioness is the antidote to all this. Faced with the spartan accommodation of hostel Ashfield House, she noted that she was not happy and said narry another word. Just leave your shit in the uncomfy room and get outside, she seemed to say, Temple Bar and the culture and nightlife are One Block away. No whining, excellent intuitions about food (the Moroccan El Bahia was to live for -- have the rabbit), honest responses to experiences (totally freaked out by the saint's heart in iron casket nailed to wall of Mary's chapel in Christ Church -- as well one should), a great ability to go with the flow and make sure one's companions are comfy -- also, let's one sleep when one needs to.
Halloween in Dublin is a city-wide affair. We were hungry and jetlagged, but could see that there was merriment to be had on a grand scale. Probably hetero college boys in drag for the night, a sight homophobic American boys just would never provide. It's not Samhain in any nostalgic or somber sense, but a kind of quiet Mardi Gras. They do drink. This is true. But they don't drive, and they don't think stumbling about bombed out of one's head is cool. Roving bands of singing men, however, are cool. Pubcrawls are also rather interesting tours of the city and its history, so you get to drink and learn on the way. Very Irish, have fun and get smarter.
Thursday, oh do let's walk across the city from Trinity College to St. James Gate. Nice walk. You get away from the city centre and out into lived-in Dublin. A sense of class strata, of local flavor, of real life is to be gotten this way. Guiness tour. All I will tell you about this is that the first room with the pile o' barley, the wall o' hops, and the fall o' crakling clean water from the Wicklow range ... just go stand there and breathe. Almost makes you sad it gets cooked into beer --- almost. Cleverness here, the museum in the old brewery is built around a six story tall glass structure in the shape of a .... wait.... pint glass. Snarf. The beer IS better, crisper and somehow sunnier, even the stout. The view from The Gravity Bar is not to be missed, 360 of the city and big chunk of the county. Dramatic clouds over soft Irish mountains and the whole bit. Silencing. Thence to Christ Church, you know God and booze on Thursday like you do. As mentioned, hearts nailed to walls, but also the organ in full voice, which made me stand still in my cells. Because they're Irish, the first chapel is to the musicians. The ruins of the first building date to 1030. Grock that, Americans. I did a classic PRSC move:walk around the church, follow the line of a spire up and up with eyes, miss the step on the stairs a...n...d plant it. Caught myself on my knee (skinned) and hands (skinned) and noticed that the new shoulder didn't even wiggle! As we left, we in fact and under oath did witness an old woman with her cat feeding and watering the pigeons next to the church. Oh, you bet we got pics. But Lioness has all those for now.
Friday, Challenging Cultures of Death begins. Mary Condren gets props for the opening statement in which she wove 3 millennia of death culture into the theme of making life culture (mercy not death) in a mere 25 minutes. And it was downhill from there. With the exception of the artist (looking her up, hang on) talk, I was up to here with the feminist platitudes, the uncritical notion that the earth and Nature are kind and loving mother figures (have you seen hyenas eat? how does magma fit into this symbolism?), and girls are sweet and fluffy wells of kindness. Whatever. Good is not as gendered as all that. It's one of those feminist generation gap problems. I'm afraid that when women do wield state power ... it's not their gender that determines how they do so. It's their ideology, and that can be feminist or not, ethical or not, merciful or not. Sooooo, yeh, Rwanda is what I have to say to that, and Katherine the Great, and Cleopatra, and give me a break. A bit too naively essentialist some of the work on Friday. Which left me feeling flat and a bit worried on my b-day, so we ate at Ely where the wine is glorious and the food is astonishing, and declared a b-day do-over. But, at lunch we ate at Cafe en Seine, which is a riotous fantasy of 19th Century Paris (should have taken some pics, didn't, sorry). On the walk there with other conferencers, Lioness lost me by following some gal who looked just like me. Here, I'm an exception. There, I'm a type. Hilarious!!!
Saturday: oh, so, much, better, now. YAY for b-day do-overs. Yay for friends who say "but of course" when one whines that one's birthday was not as yummy as desired. So, the conference picked up its rigor and got on with it. When it comes out read The Pharmacotic War on Terror -- this man, Larry George, is brilliant on the deep flow that makes this particular amalgam of conflicts important to maintaining a sense of stolid identity (which is a big part of the stakes in a more and more interdependent world). The rest of that panel also cracked my head with goodness, as in the cat who needs to publish in CK and so forth. Lioness and I wound up on the same panel so we got to see each other work for the first time. Great that. Lioness was flustered by a technology failure, but rocked it with her Texan grace nonetheless, explaining how progressives manage to work the system in Texas politics and stay sane. Very cool. I managed to do ten minutes of my paper without getting lost and without really looking at it all that much. The other panelists were heavy on the theory and have cracking game. The conference put a premium on the discussion and the Q&A, which was right and refreshing. There's one question I didn't get to answer, so here's my answer.
Question : You put so much emphasis on memory and imagination, the past and the future, that I want to know where now, where the present goes? What merciful concern do we have for the present?
Response: Awesome question!!!! My practical response is that Now is the only place for action. One must be carefully attuned to Now in order to create or offer anything of real value in cultural and political production. It is for the sake of us, here, now that I'm putting so much emphasis on getting life-centered and merciful kinds of imagination front and center in the Humanities. This will make our souls the richer and more flexible, and that can only make our being in the world more merciful, here and now, for us and our others. Au meme temps, it is the business of the Humanities to remember our traditions, our knowledges, and to question them, AND to follow the implications of those questions into the future -- the Hums are thence, quite precisely, revolutionary (or can be when they are not mere academic), and that work takes place now. My model is Modernist, it's Eliot and Pound muttering "make it new" and Postmodernist with Irigaray raging "a future that is not a repetition of the past." It is, only, by knowledge, attenuation to now and its needs-manifestations-meanderings-pulsions, and imagination in the sense of serious play that we will be new now and open history to a future is not the past over again. There.
And then, dinner with A at this great joint just down the street from The Bank, and Lioness and Carrie totally hitting off. Peter catching up with us and being all suave and kind and charming, Master Traveler and PoMo International Cosmopolis kind of cat. I've missed A even though we're working on the anthology together. She's warm and generous, and talented. Did my up a portrait whilst waiting for supper. Post-haste to the after conference reception, with song and story and blessings. How human, how wise to engage the soul at a conference trying think and live out of death and into mercy. But, there was leftover wine, so a gaggle of us who'd coalesced were invited to abscond with it. Which we did.
Lioness records it well:
- the trinity college campus feels like the platonic university - it's so grand and stately and lovely. we expressed our admiration by getting quite drunk on five bottles of red wine with some folks from the conference late saturday night. yes, folks, i'm telling you that we were a small horde of completely smashed critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and other assorted nerds drinking red wine and solving all the world's problems on the green (well, near it - it was damp out) at trinity college. that's a memory that will last me all my days.Oh, here's to the birthday do-over! Cheers, y'all. Thanks for accidentally conspiring to make that just about perfect.
Sunday, I was bit rough around the edges, but got some real decisions made about the anthology with A, took a nap, and then wandered Temple Bar with Peter and Lioness to eat and walk a bit. Found the oldest shop in Dublin, Est. 1607. Yep. While Lioness at one point exclaimed that she was in desperate need some rectilinear organization, I freaking loved the medieval meanderyness of the streets and the buildings. Just too charming and poetically logical, all kinds of time crammed together, and the kindest laid back people. Go there, go there as soon as you can.
Academic Job Search Resources
Yeh, it's a dry title, but Google just dredged up this site, Ted Jobs, and while the site is focused not at all on the Humanities, the Faculty Job Seeker's Resources is FAN-ASSED-TASTIC. If you're looking, or advising a graduate student headed into the fray, start here. It's quite the helpful.
I'm still working on the Dublin post. First, there are com/con paragraphs to assess. Woo-hoo.
I'm reading Cortazar Blow Up and Other Stories and Hesse Pictor's Metamorphosis, and really want to develop a class on the 20th Cent. fable/fairytale. I just feel that would be great fun. These two, plus some Calvino, a little Marquez, Roy, some of the PoMo work over FC2, Maso.... we could go everywhere and think about everything.
Oh, and the local news says that the yearling cheetah that escaped is back home with mama in the zoo. Couple days ago, two men were arrested for aggravated flight when they stole formula, diapers, and toilet paper (or something) from a Walmart and then fled the police for half and hour before their tire blew ... shades of Raising Arizona. Couple weeks ago, some college kids were buying a hefty load of pot, two of them took the dope and RAN, leaving their friend to be beaten and tortured by the dealer with ... ... fresh Tollhouse cookies. Yep, they burned the kid with cookies. Crime in Walden. Oh, well, not so Walden, an 11 year old was sentenced to 60 years for the rape and near fatal beating of an 8 year old, and a substitute teacher is under indictment for statutory rape of an 11 year old boy. Lately, it's all News of the Weird around here.
And we just really have to stop being so psychotic about sex in this culture. We really, really, do.
I'm still working on the Dublin post. First, there are com/con paragraphs to assess. Woo-hoo.
I'm reading Cortazar Blow Up and Other Stories and Hesse Pictor's Metamorphosis, and really want to develop a class on the 20th Cent. fable/fairytale. I just feel that would be great fun. These two, plus some Calvino, a little Marquez, Roy, some of the PoMo work over FC2, Maso.... we could go everywhere and think about everything.
Oh, and the local news says that the yearling cheetah that escaped is back home with mama in the zoo. Couple days ago, two men were arrested for aggravated flight when they stole formula, diapers, and toilet paper (or something) from a Walmart and then fled the police for half and hour before their tire blew ... shades of Raising Arizona. Couple weeks ago, some college kids were buying a hefty load of pot, two of them took the dope and RAN, leaving their friend to be beaten and tortured by the dealer with ... ... fresh Tollhouse cookies. Yep, they burned the kid with cookies. Crime in Walden. Oh, well, not so Walden, an 11 year old was sentenced to 60 years for the rape and near fatal beating of an 8 year old, and a substitute teacher is under indictment for statutory rape of an 11 year old boy. Lately, it's all News of the Weird around here.
And we just really have to stop being so psychotic about sex in this culture. We really, really, do.
18.9.07
Irigaray Circle and The Last Couple Weeks
Rest, as Jason Bourne's mantra goes in the novels (which, are super good stories in their own right and rather like not at all the excellent films), is a weapon. And my cache got low. Two weeks at nearly a dead run, and much too much socializing. Good socializing, but too much for this sometime introvert.
The introversion is necessary because while I'm in NY at the conference, or on a plane, or in a classroom, or catching up on grading , or crash-prepping courses due to travel (all of which count as extrovert activities for me), friends are going into labor, breaking their wrists, worrying over dissertations and motivations, quitting a crap tenure track job, and me in a widening fondness for an interesting man, and my brother is moving to a new shot at some Nice Green Cash in Arizona.... so, I had a few other things to process and offer energy to whether directly or vibrationally. So, once again, my debt to Hotel Hill-Ries in the Bowery. Y'all are too good.
Plus, in the world o' books, McFarland's Editor Cat is being a little funky, and not in the groovy way. We're still talking, which is good. But, we're sort of moving through discussions one little step at a time that could felled in one graceful swoop with a full proposal. Sewwww, I've dived into All That. Nearly there. Just a few more notes on audience and competition, and the selection of a couple essays as samples, and Editor Cat will simply have to, by force of conscience, commit to this anthology. Meanwhile, I'm nervous. What's with the string-along, and especially when between 12 and 15 people have a stake in this book, and lots of them are Amazing Young Scholars, and what's the matter here? So, a bit busy with that, too.
And stressing in a background kind of way about that and the other book, and wondering: Did I get ahead of myself ? Seriously. Like maybe, way ahead and in much too much of a hurry by which I will be crushed like an old cricket by a spry cat? We shall see.
Et, aussi, des bonnes nouvelles! Five of the ten Motif Series poems will be published in Arabesques (see the roll, it's on there somewhere), which is hip, and peace making, and international 'n shit. V. Excited there. -- perhaps also a hint about which of the sorts of poetry i write the world wants to eat.
But, all That aside: this year's Irigaray Circle was simply amazingly tasty. My compliments to the organizers for the depth of the panels and for keeping up that relaxed-and-smart atmosphere the meeting had last year. It's good to be part of a good community. And a moving circle now: the conference will go to Hofstra next year, and then either to Wash U or Webster U, or more hopefully to Paris on the suggestion of Claire Potter. It's dicey, in some ways on the French side there, but she's willing to try to make arrangements, make sure Irigaray hears these engagements and celebrations of her work before she, well, dies. She is of that age, healthy though she is now. Plus, you know, I like these people, and several more are about to become correspondents, and yay.
As always, everything was smart, every paper was rich. But, we had a minor revolution that nearly made me jump up and cheer. Elizabeth Grozs's paper! (of which, must have copy) What a RELIEF. I did whooop a little when it was over, but tried to keep my voice down.
Here's the gist: title "The Ontology of Sexual Difference." Yep, that's what she said. A new account of the real, one that makes it quite clear, thank you, that sexual difference is the reason that there is complex life, that if in the real it is two that makes our life (and with it the symbolic &c.) even possible, then a merely accurate symbolic and metaphysics would be of two, by two. This point is made, gently but pointedly, into a defense of Irigaray's work against recent (or constant) and mistaken (!) critiques of it as homophobic, eurocentric, or colonialist. Why? Because except in a few rather discrete moments, Irigaray is not doing social politics. She's doing ontology, which has implications for social or cultural politics, but is not that, not addressing those valences of our experience. On the political and symbolic valence: Sexual Difference inflects those differences but is not the same category: it's not like race, or religion, or ethnicity, or sexuality, or ideology. Sexual Difference is, eventhough it is also constructed.
"Sexual difference," saith Grosz, "is the generator of the new ... is the failure of identity and sameness ... is overcoming in a Nietzschean sense." It is "the failure of death." (squirming with happiness)
There are connections to three D's going on this thought: to Derrida, to Deleuze, and to Darwin.
Sexual difference is a kind of ontological rhizome (my prhase, I'm summarizing a bit messily), and thus our connection to Deleuze (or one of them). Sexual Difference is everywhere a kind of moving substrata of other differences and runs across or through cultural expression and social organization.
It is sexual difference that "opens life to chance, to contingency, to possiblity." This is for Grosz both a Derridian and Darwinian point. In Derridian differance, opposities (and remember, a binary is just one and it's opposite, a unity, G so perfectly says) have to be placed into play and slippage, into connotation, to discover their sameness and at the same time open up to real difference, two genuinely not-like terms, and once that happens, meaning MULTIPLIES and becomes undecidable -- that is, life becomes possible. Where the unity of the One and its abject is not at all life (and here see Derrida or my paper for Dublin) -- it's that insidiously smart attempt at closure that the whole PoMo geist points out just ain't so and my haven't we been mistaken.
Now, in an analogy I admire for its adventure, Grosz moves to Darwin to point out that in science (one method for encountering the real, or trying to), or in evolution chez Darwin, there are several aspects of difference at work, or play. One: there's just plain old biological or sexuate difference. Boys and Girls. And the fact of that difference allows for RNA and DNA to do their thing and create infinite variation. That is, "Sexual difference, the genuine interaction of two in difference, multiplies difference infinitely." And there goes your critique that we can't get from two to the many. Wham. Two means many. It's in a world without, or rather that fails to acknowledge difference (twoness), and its operations that we can't get to the many. REmember, binary is just one. (gah)
Bonus, in Darwin we have the little discussed theory of sexual selection (not nearly as closely examined as, say, natural selection, fittest, etc.). Herein, Darwin points out that our physical characteristics are not ONLY about getting food, defending from predators, or surviving sudden environmental ruptures: they are ALSO about getting other members of our species to want to have sex with us. That is, on a real level, to want to engage in that difference. Yep. She's not kidding. (and my notes get sketchy in the places where i was utterly tuned in, so take her word for these things, not mine)
Sexual selection, argues G, drives genetic creativity. The simplified example: giraffes have long necks because they help to reach leaves, thus to survive in the dry seasons, BUT also because GIRAFFES FIND LONG NECKS SEXY. See?
Now, me here, that feedback loop in nature might be mild, but in culture it's very strong, We have the symbolic and imaginary to deal with and deal in and make and manipulate. We encode what we find sexy (or nice, or moral, or true, or right) into the symbolic and then enforce it, which then shapes what we find sexy, and affects how we interact in our difference. This, of course, is why IRigaray's critics are concerned. But, G points out, Irigaray interventions in the symbolic are only openings, cracks, possibilities WE will have to exploit and explore and negotiate because all (ALL!) she's done is point out the hidden fact that the real, or it's philosophical correlate ontology, is sexed. From there, the imaginative work (yes, she uses the word) is up to us, as Irigaray has said, each starting from where we are: in our moments, contexts, bodies, sexualities, and so on and on. We will have to do the inventing of forms of life more suited to us, and once we get clear on SD and the way it inflects or cuts across (and morphs in relation to) other differences (like, the butch-femme spectrum in many lesbian communities: a scale of relative masculinity and femininity, partly symbolic, partly a nod at the real, partly just real, and also evidence of differences infinite creative capacity), the more effectively we can create life and lives that allow us our becomming, our own evolution. Since, an ontology of sexual difference is an ontology of becoming, where ontologies of identity are of stasis -- which the real (and the imaginary or the symbolic) do not do, after all.
Or something along those lines and far more coherent than this remembered summary. This paper has to get into print soon, and I'll be just sooooooo waiting for it.
Oh, and people liked my paper too, and some didn't, and you know how that goes. The paper was the Irigarian reading of Graham's poetics, and the responding question, picking up on the ethical/spiritual thingy, asked: Well, that's all very nice, but isn't this harder done than said? Which, well, yes, quite. Not a compelling reason not to try, and fail, and try, and fail, and keep on with it in becoming, which is, you know, contingent, and open-ended, and non-linear, and imperfect, and the only honorable choice, and whatnot.
All of Which was better than the turkey sandwich I bought at the "deli" in the Newark airport, and the unfamiliar whinging noise the plane made for a few seconds during take-off, and the fact that I'm at odds with an economy in which everything costs more while being crappier.
But, there's a bunch of 20th C Lit gigs up this year, so maybe next year I'll be able to afford more crappier stuff and talk about poetry and theory three days a week. Applications Ahoy!
The introversion is necessary because while I'm in NY at the conference, or on a plane, or in a classroom, or catching up on grading , or crash-prepping courses due to travel (all of which count as extrovert activities for me), friends are going into labor, breaking their wrists, worrying over dissertations and motivations, quitting a crap tenure track job, and me in a widening fondness for an interesting man, and my brother is moving to a new shot at some Nice Green Cash in Arizona.... so, I had a few other things to process and offer energy to whether directly or vibrationally. So, once again, my debt to Hotel Hill-Ries in the Bowery. Y'all are too good.
Plus, in the world o' books, McFarland's Editor Cat is being a little funky, and not in the groovy way. We're still talking, which is good. But, we're sort of moving through discussions one little step at a time that could felled in one graceful swoop with a full proposal. Sewwww, I've dived into All That. Nearly there. Just a few more notes on audience and competition, and the selection of a couple essays as samples, and Editor Cat will simply have to, by force of conscience, commit to this anthology. Meanwhile, I'm nervous. What's with the string-along, and especially when between 12 and 15 people have a stake in this book, and lots of them are Amazing Young Scholars, and what's the matter here? So, a bit busy with that, too.
And stressing in a background kind of way about that and the other book, and wondering: Did I get ahead of myself ? Seriously. Like maybe, way ahead and in much too much of a hurry by which I will be crushed like an old cricket by a spry cat? We shall see.
Et, aussi, des bonnes nouvelles! Five of the ten Motif Series poems will be published in Arabesques (see the roll, it's on there somewhere), which is hip, and peace making, and international 'n shit. V. Excited there. -- perhaps also a hint about which of the sorts of poetry i write the world wants to eat.
But, all That aside: this year's Irigaray Circle was simply amazingly tasty. My compliments to the organizers for the depth of the panels and for keeping up that relaxed-and-smart atmosphere the meeting had last year. It's good to be part of a good community. And a moving circle now: the conference will go to Hofstra next year, and then either to Wash U or Webster U, or more hopefully to Paris on the suggestion of Claire Potter. It's dicey, in some ways on the French side there, but she's willing to try to make arrangements, make sure Irigaray hears these engagements and celebrations of her work before she, well, dies. She is of that age, healthy though she is now. Plus, you know, I like these people, and several more are about to become correspondents, and yay.
As always, everything was smart, every paper was rich. But, we had a minor revolution that nearly made me jump up and cheer. Elizabeth Grozs's paper! (of which, must have copy) What a RELIEF. I did whooop a little when it was over, but tried to keep my voice down.
Here's the gist: title "The Ontology of Sexual Difference." Yep, that's what she said. A new account of the real, one that makes it quite clear, thank you, that sexual difference is the reason that there is complex life, that if in the real it is two that makes our life (and with it the symbolic &c.) even possible, then a merely accurate symbolic and metaphysics would be of two, by two. This point is made, gently but pointedly, into a defense of Irigaray's work against recent (or constant) and mistaken (!) critiques of it as homophobic, eurocentric, or colonialist. Why? Because except in a few rather discrete moments, Irigaray is not doing social politics. She's doing ontology, which has implications for social or cultural politics, but is not that, not addressing those valences of our experience. On the political and symbolic valence: Sexual Difference inflects those differences but is not the same category: it's not like race, or religion, or ethnicity, or sexuality, or ideology. Sexual Difference is, eventhough it is also constructed.
"Sexual difference," saith Grosz, "is the generator of the new ... is the failure of identity and sameness ... is overcoming in a Nietzschean sense." It is "the failure of death." (squirming with happiness)
There are connections to three D's going on this thought: to Derrida, to Deleuze, and to Darwin.
Sexual difference is a kind of ontological rhizome (my prhase, I'm summarizing a bit messily), and thus our connection to Deleuze (or one of them). Sexual Difference is everywhere a kind of moving substrata of other differences and runs across or through cultural expression and social organization.
It is sexual difference that "opens life to chance, to contingency, to possiblity." This is for Grosz both a Derridian and Darwinian point. In Derridian differance, opposities (and remember, a binary is just one and it's opposite, a unity, G so perfectly says) have to be placed into play and slippage, into connotation, to discover their sameness and at the same time open up to real difference, two genuinely not-like terms, and once that happens, meaning MULTIPLIES and becomes undecidable -- that is, life becomes possible. Where the unity of the One and its abject is not at all life (and here see Derrida or my paper for Dublin) -- it's that insidiously smart attempt at closure that the whole PoMo geist points out just ain't so and my haven't we been mistaken.
Now, in an analogy I admire for its adventure, Grosz moves to Darwin to point out that in science (one method for encountering the real, or trying to), or in evolution chez Darwin, there are several aspects of difference at work, or play. One: there's just plain old biological or sexuate difference. Boys and Girls. And the fact of that difference allows for RNA and DNA to do their thing and create infinite variation. That is, "Sexual difference, the genuine interaction of two in difference, multiplies difference infinitely." And there goes your critique that we can't get from two to the many. Wham. Two means many. It's in a world without, or rather that fails to acknowledge difference (twoness), and its operations that we can't get to the many. REmember, binary is just one. (gah)
Bonus, in Darwin we have the little discussed theory of sexual selection (not nearly as closely examined as, say, natural selection, fittest, etc.). Herein, Darwin points out that our physical characteristics are not ONLY about getting food, defending from predators, or surviving sudden environmental ruptures: they are ALSO about getting other members of our species to want to have sex with us. That is, on a real level, to want to engage in that difference. Yep. She's not kidding. (and my notes get sketchy in the places where i was utterly tuned in, so take her word for these things, not mine)
Sexual selection, argues G, drives genetic creativity. The simplified example: giraffes have long necks because they help to reach leaves, thus to survive in the dry seasons, BUT also because GIRAFFES FIND LONG NECKS SEXY. See?
Now, me here, that feedback loop in nature might be mild, but in culture it's very strong, We have the symbolic and imaginary to deal with and deal in and make and manipulate. We encode what we find sexy (or nice, or moral, or true, or right) into the symbolic and then enforce it, which then shapes what we find sexy, and affects how we interact in our difference. This, of course, is why IRigaray's critics are concerned. But, G points out, Irigaray interventions in the symbolic are only openings, cracks, possibilities WE will have to exploit and explore and negotiate because all (ALL!) she's done is point out the hidden fact that the real, or it's philosophical correlate ontology, is sexed. From there, the imaginative work (yes, she uses the word) is up to us, as Irigaray has said, each starting from where we are: in our moments, contexts, bodies, sexualities, and so on and on. We will have to do the inventing of forms of life more suited to us, and once we get clear on SD and the way it inflects or cuts across (and morphs in relation to) other differences (like, the butch-femme spectrum in many lesbian communities: a scale of relative masculinity and femininity, partly symbolic, partly a nod at the real, partly just real, and also evidence of differences infinite creative capacity), the more effectively we can create life and lives that allow us our becomming, our own evolution. Since, an ontology of sexual difference is an ontology of becoming, where ontologies of identity are of stasis -- which the real (and the imaginary or the symbolic) do not do, after all.
Or something along those lines and far more coherent than this remembered summary. This paper has to get into print soon, and I'll be just sooooooo waiting for it.
Oh, and people liked my paper too, and some didn't, and you know how that goes. The paper was the Irigarian reading of Graham's poetics, and the responding question, picking up on the ethical/spiritual thingy, asked: Well, that's all very nice, but isn't this harder done than said? Which, well, yes, quite. Not a compelling reason not to try, and fail, and try, and fail, and keep on with it in becoming, which is, you know, contingent, and open-ended, and non-linear, and imperfect, and the only honorable choice, and whatnot.
All of Which was better than the turkey sandwich I bought at the "deli" in the Newark airport, and the unfamiliar whinging noise the plane made for a few seconds during take-off, and the fact that I'm at odds with an economy in which everything costs more while being crappier.
But, there's a bunch of 20th C Lit gigs up this year, so maybe next year I'll be able to afford more crappier stuff and talk about poetry and theory three days a week. Applications Ahoy!
22.6.07
Random Synaptic Activity
A Reverie, not even serious, and likely thought all through by someone already.
It's lovely what happens when my mind let's itself go slack for a second and forgets to be distracted from list-making n' such. This morning: I am amazed at Hegel. No, not because I'm reading him again, nor reading about him anywhere at all (which, is a pity). Because that's just what I pinged on while brushing my hair, readying to go pick up the newly de-dinged/de-smashed and painted '92 Nissan I drive (or will once i can voluntarily control the inner muscles of my left arm). It's 1804, and The Phenomenology of Spirit has been exuded from H's head. This is one of the major sources of the Myth of Progress, the MasterNarrative to beat all MasterNarratives -- that things just get better because they can't do anything else. Hold that thought.
Which, is wierdly ego stroking even for a Romantic because if you're in the dialectical flow of Spirit, are its tool for expression, then you are utterly justified in your endeavor because It Cannot Be Stopped. And so, just bit down the road, Shelley and Thoreau are unacknowledgebly legislating the world, and meaning that phrase in dead earnest.
Problem: History is also people, and progress is not necessary or inevitable: Germany's historical sidetrack, American apartheid under Jim Crow, but also The New Deal and iPods. So, flash forward, PoMo Marxists like Jameson and the Report on Knowledge: MasterNarratives (of which H's is one sterling type) are all falling apart because Immovable Movers, Necessity, Origins, and Solidity of All Kinds are so much being maliciously dismantled by bored French philosophy students as they are crumbling under the weight of the 20th Century in all its dimensions.
Now, as Hegel also noticed, but glossed over for the sake of presentation, in the process of the dialectic, when B arises to oppose, test, and sublate with A into a larger and more comprehensive incarnation of Spirit, well, things get hairy and unstable. People start talking about the End of History and of Times and of Crossroads in the Future of Being and all that. Because..... History is also people and the choices they make and/or are led to make.
So, even if you are an anti-romantic like Hegel, get on about your business: choose and know that you are chosing, that it matters even when it's a contingent choice. How could it not be? You don't know everything and the flow of becoming won't hold still no matter what you do.
But, what I want to know is: Why didn't Nietzsche thump him harder for this tidy story H told? By which I mean: all metaphysics in which Inevitability plays c/overt roles are deeply suspect. Even PoMo Marxist metaphysics.
And now, more coffee for yours truly.
14.6.07
The Death Drive in the Humanities: A Living Rant
Opening Salvo: The next issue of the PLMA features an(other) article mordantly entitled, “The End of Post-Colonial Theory,” or similar refrain (sigh). They author's didn't go with "death of," but that's what they meant, and we know it. We’re all in the last stages of grief over post-colonial theory’s parent, Theory. I’m not sure that we’ve laid new sod on the graves of Fiction, Poetry, and Art as yet but I can hear the truck rumbling through the cemetery. Which prompts me to ask: why is it that the most interesting thing we can do lately, especially in literary studies, is die? When did we all turn into well-dressed Goths? Why is it that the established scholars, critics, writers, theorists keep screaming that we’re over, 86ed? I, for one, would like to see this death drive die. Death is boring. Being so common and all. I declare a moritorium on ravens.
I wonder, because I don’t see departments admitting fewer grad students, full of verve and hope, to teach Grunt Work 101, contributing to a flooded, and therefore, a buyer’s job market bogged up with hopeful if deluded or unqualified or untutored candidates. It would seem that these death rattles are not intended to, or are prevented from the effect of, dissuading the bajillion idealists who keep majoring in and dedicating their lives to the Humanities, incurring over a thirty year term as much as $200,000 dollars in debt counting interest and marching over the cliff of their own talent or lack of it to their doom. On the advice of their advisors, mind you.
What is so mortally ill other than conscience? The thing with melancholics is that they mistakenly believe there is something special, personal, about their death. Nothing could be further from truth. The per capita death rate is a steady 100%. Melancholics are essentially interested in the uninteresting.
Nor do I see those young scholar apprentices writing morbid essays staging these alarmingly grievous debates. I see them, even errant and beleaguered adjuncts, cooking up new and sometimes revolutionary scholarship and art all the time – though less of it than they might. I wonder, are the established scholars just tired? Exhaustion would be understandable. Ours is not the eat-cake-have-it-too vocation many civilians fantasize it to be. We are simultaneous scholars and writers, advisors and teachers, managers and worker bees – ours is not a forty-per gig. That we occasionally get a summer to think or relate to our families can hardly be grudged, though not world enough and time for many of us to recharge our shiny little lights.
Point the first: Every school of thought, like every person, runs its course. At the end of its course, it does not Die. It evolves, into spirit or dust or both. It’s not that we Can’t Do That anymore, it’s that we emerge to Do That Differently or, one hopes, to Do Something Else. That the new activity does not yet have a name is no concern. Labels come long after invention, just as gravestones are properly engraved post mortem. That so many of us/you are surprised by the natural cycles of intellectual evolution, and thus over-react to them, is embarrassing.
Point the second: Given point the first, I would like to advise any established and thereby exhausted scholars that, should you have used up your imagination for new ventures in thought or critique or creation -- Get out of the damn way. If your subject of preoccupation is that you find yourself without preoccupation– it’s time to hang up your glasses and pour yourselves one. I go so far as to say: it’s your ethical duty to quit, retire, take that trip to Belize or Tibet you’ve dreaming about, visit your cousins, become political activists -- whatever. This is your duty to the Humanities, your profession, your vocation, your grad students.
In my learning, the one constant is this: the Humanities have always been about attending to and remembering our past traditions, examining them for limitations or errors or missed opportunities, and imagining our futures: the futures of our subjects, and futures of being human beings. Both critical and imaginative, preferably at once. Not just ironically, but with the vital force of our sincerity and desire. If you’re not up for that double duty, go lie down. No one will call you out your grave for your honesty and realism. We will honor you for your courage.
YOUR Theory, Art, Fiction, Poetry may be dead (though I don’t think so), but the next generations needn’t dedicate themselves to playing ghost in the graveyard. Unless, perish the thought, unless that’s what you want?
Maybe all that sex back in the 80s and 90s wore you out? Can’t find your creative or critical vasodilator or hormone replacement therapy? Fine, hie thee to the undiscovered country. Sad. But fine. You were our teachers, our inspiration. But, really, if all that is thinkable now is expiration, insert the morphine drip and get honorably on with it.
Point the third: Is it possible that these comas, these periods of unconsciousness, these doldrums, this collective melancholy is partly a result of the structure of our professions now? Or should I say the simultaneous corporatization and de-professionalization of our profession? Yes, I should.
It’s not hard to understand how, caught between that Scylla and that Charybdis, our tenured and established colleagues might drop out of the game. I mean, among those who grew up in the old game who really feels up to the fight of correcting the new game? The game in which students who probably shouldn’t be admitted to Gradual School are admitted because they’ll teach Grunt 101 tolerably well and write masters theses soon consigned to the digital oubliette of the UMI database? The game in which schools employ so many migrant adjuncts that the energy of our new generations of scholars is given to surviving commutes over adventurous scholarship? The game in which the Humanities are considered, more and more collectively, service departments little more distinguished or erudite than campus writing centers? This is not the anti-oxidant fruit smoothie of our collective well being. If you were tenured very nearly just for obtaining your doctorate, how could you, really, imagine our way out of this deliciously non-nutritional carbo-cluster?
Point the fourth: It’s also possible that, as with melancholics, you/we are just expecting too much of life at the moment, and that, because things aren’t Super Exciting you/we are feeling a bit blue and put out? Are you/we just exaggerating? Quite possibly.
Coupe de Grace: That there isn’t yet a new Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, a new Kenner, a new Derrida, a new Rorty, a new Fox-Genovese, a new Spivak, a new Perloff, a new David Foster Wallace or Carole Maso or Jorie Graham doesn’t mean that there will not or can not be (wait, Graham IS a new Eliot, Wallace is a new Joyce, Maso is a new Woolf – and all quite alive):-- except it’s harder to be A Genius when mostly a deprofessionalized corporate drone.
Are you really dying, established professoriate, Theory, whoever? Choose. You can die, which is restful and calm; or you can live, which is restive and cacophonous. But choose. Do not be so ungracious as to sing your own elegies. Sing the odes of the next generations instead. Some of us struggle lively to put that food for worms to the service of imagination. Theory and criticism will catch up again with the situation on the ground. It’s as inevitable as nevermore.
UPDATE: This at Harvard UPs Off the Page.
I wonder, because I don’t see departments admitting fewer grad students, full of verve and hope, to teach Grunt Work 101, contributing to a flooded, and therefore, a buyer’s job market bogged up with hopeful if deluded or unqualified or untutored candidates. It would seem that these death rattles are not intended to, or are prevented from the effect of, dissuading the bajillion idealists who keep majoring in and dedicating their lives to the Humanities, incurring over a thirty year term as much as $200,000 dollars in debt counting interest and marching over the cliff of their own talent or lack of it to their doom. On the advice of their advisors, mind you.
What is so mortally ill other than conscience? The thing with melancholics is that they mistakenly believe there is something special, personal, about their death. Nothing could be further from truth. The per capita death rate is a steady 100%. Melancholics are essentially interested in the uninteresting.
Nor do I see those young scholar apprentices writing morbid essays staging these alarmingly grievous debates. I see them, even errant and beleaguered adjuncts, cooking up new and sometimes revolutionary scholarship and art all the time – though less of it than they might. I wonder, are the established scholars just tired? Exhaustion would be understandable. Ours is not the eat-cake-have-it-too vocation many civilians fantasize it to be. We are simultaneous scholars and writers, advisors and teachers, managers and worker bees – ours is not a forty-per gig. That we occasionally get a summer to think or relate to our families can hardly be grudged, though not world enough and time for many of us to recharge our shiny little lights.
Point the first: Every school of thought, like every person, runs its course. At the end of its course, it does not Die. It evolves, into spirit or dust or both. It’s not that we Can’t Do That anymore, it’s that we emerge to Do That Differently or, one hopes, to Do Something Else. That the new activity does not yet have a name is no concern. Labels come long after invention, just as gravestones are properly engraved post mortem. That so many of us/you are surprised by the natural cycles of intellectual evolution, and thus over-react to them, is embarrassing.
Point the second: Given point the first, I would like to advise any established and thereby exhausted scholars that, should you have used up your imagination for new ventures in thought or critique or creation -- Get out of the damn way. If your subject of preoccupation is that you find yourself without preoccupation– it’s time to hang up your glasses and pour yourselves one. I go so far as to say: it’s your ethical duty to quit, retire, take that trip to Belize or Tibet you’ve dreaming about, visit your cousins, become political activists -- whatever. This is your duty to the Humanities, your profession, your vocation, your grad students.
In my learning, the one constant is this: the Humanities have always been about attending to and remembering our past traditions, examining them for limitations or errors or missed opportunities, and imagining our futures: the futures of our subjects, and futures of being human beings. Both critical and imaginative, preferably at once. Not just ironically, but with the vital force of our sincerity and desire. If you’re not up for that double duty, go lie down. No one will call you out your grave for your honesty and realism. We will honor you for your courage.
YOUR Theory, Art, Fiction, Poetry may be dead (though I don’t think so), but the next generations needn’t dedicate themselves to playing ghost in the graveyard. Unless, perish the thought, unless that’s what you want?
Maybe all that sex back in the 80s and 90s wore you out? Can’t find your creative or critical vasodilator or hormone replacement therapy? Fine, hie thee to the undiscovered country. Sad. But fine. You were our teachers, our inspiration. But, really, if all that is thinkable now is expiration, insert the morphine drip and get honorably on with it.
Point the third: Is it possible that these comas, these periods of unconsciousness, these doldrums, this collective melancholy is partly a result of the structure of our professions now? Or should I say the simultaneous corporatization and de-professionalization of our profession? Yes, I should.
It’s not hard to understand how, caught between that Scylla and that Charybdis, our tenured and established colleagues might drop out of the game. I mean, among those who grew up in the old game who really feels up to the fight of correcting the new game? The game in which students who probably shouldn’t be admitted to Gradual School are admitted because they’ll teach Grunt 101 tolerably well and write masters theses soon consigned to the digital oubliette of the UMI database? The game in which schools employ so many migrant adjuncts that the energy of our new generations of scholars is given to surviving commutes over adventurous scholarship? The game in which the Humanities are considered, more and more collectively, service departments little more distinguished or erudite than campus writing centers? This is not the anti-oxidant fruit smoothie of our collective well being. If you were tenured very nearly just for obtaining your doctorate, how could you, really, imagine our way out of this deliciously non-nutritional carbo-cluster?
Point the fourth: It’s also possible that, as with melancholics, you/we are just expecting too much of life at the moment, and that, because things aren’t Super Exciting you/we are feeling a bit blue and put out? Are you/we just exaggerating? Quite possibly.
Coupe de Grace: That there isn’t yet a new Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, a new Kenner, a new Derrida, a new Rorty, a new Fox-Genovese, a new Spivak, a new Perloff, a new David Foster Wallace or Carole Maso or Jorie Graham doesn’t mean that there will not or can not be (wait, Graham IS a new Eliot, Wallace is a new Joyce, Maso is a new Woolf – and all quite alive):-- except it’s harder to be A Genius when mostly a deprofessionalized corporate drone.
Are you really dying, established professoriate, Theory, whoever? Choose. You can die, which is restful and calm; or you can live, which is restive and cacophonous. But choose. Do not be so ungracious as to sing your own elegies. Sing the odes of the next generations instead. Some of us struggle lively to put that food for worms to the service of imagination. Theory and criticism will catch up again with the situation on the ground. It’s as inevitable as nevermore.
UPDATE: This at Harvard UPs Off the Page.
10.6.07
Rorty Died???
Oh, hell. Obit 1. Obit 2 by way of comments. Obit 3 in which it sounds as if I shouldn't have argued against him so much, and yet, I had to.
He said, close upon his death:
Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law." -- from H's obit below.
Man. Ouf. My condolences to the family, the friends, to JP whom I am sure is broken hearted. While I was one cautious of Rorty's rhetoric, which I think often overly ironized his purposes, we have lost one of our finest voices for thought, and, on some readings, for hope.
Richard, to you a quick and easy return.
And, take heart, another generation arrives.
The New Repbulic (gets at why i was hestiant)
Come to remember, I once had a rowdy-grand convo at an Old 97s show at Trees (which is also dead now) re:Rorty. It doesn't matter whether you agree, it matters whether someone's work makes you think harder.
1.6.07
Impasse No Longer
The review is complete. Yes, when I know I'm going somewhere, I get there fast. And will make me both freinds and enemies. As a good review should. When it's out in the world, later this year, I'll let you know.
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