Writing and the Wickets of Croquet

In Chapter VIII of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, titled “The Queen’s Croquet-Ground,” Alice plays a game of croquet with some of the Wonderland characters. Croquet, of course, at least as played in the domestic, backyard game I am familiar with, is notorious for its confusion of rules, which reminds me of rules for writing.

“Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.”

Just so, as I sit down to compose, I must first compose myself, and decide which pose I should adopt. But the words soon reveal themselves to be live hedgehogs (spiny and fortified), the keyboard a live flamingo (awkward, to say the least).

“The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once in a minute.”

The Queen would be the reader, the grader, the scorer, but what’s she looking for in this game with so many rubrics on the field all at once? A fragment and it’s off with your head.

“‘I don’t think they play at all fairly,’ Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, ‘and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can’t hear oneself speak — and they don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them — and you’ve no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there’s the arch I’ve got to go through next walking about at the other end of the ground — and I should have croqueted the Queen’s hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!’”

Style is a way of putting the words to sleep, of arresting the croquet balls and mallets. Alice is talking to the Cheshire Cat, who has only partially reappeared, and who soon disappears, “while the rest of the party went back to the game.”

Mosaic Writing

McLuhan suggested we pay a price for literacy. There’s a difference between illiteracy and non-literacy. An illiterate person can neither read nor write written texts in his native language, while a non-literate person’s language has no written text, no alphabet.

It’s moving from non-literacy to literacy where a price is paid: “The visual makes for the explicit,” McLuhan said, “the uniform, and the sequential in painting, in poetry, in logic, history. The non-literate modes are implicit, simultaneous, and discontinuous, whether in the primitive past or the electronic present, which Joyce called ‘eins within a space’” (GG, 73).

Thus the “World Wide Web” may be promoting a kind of non-literacy, where the mosaic form of presentation dominates the chronological, the linear, the literate, where the literate means a fixed point of view: “This visualizing of chronological sequences is unknown to oral societies, as it is now irrelevant in the electric age of information movement” (GG, 72).
Yet, McLuhan reminds us that “only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic” (GG, 93).

So, what’s the price? For one thing, McLuhan said, “the divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page” (GG, 240).

And all the effort we’ve put into learning to read left to right, up to down, front to back – when presented with a mosaic, we don’t know where to begin reading. We may not know how to read mosaic writing. The Internet is a mosaic. And as we learn to read on the Internet, we may be losing our preference for, and the skills required to read, sequential writing.

Some excellent examples of Mosaic Writing include:
“Silence” and “A Year from Monday,” by John Cage
“Finnegans Wake,” by James Joyce
“Love’s Body,” by Norman O. Brown
“The Guttenberg Galaxy,” by Marshall McLuhan

A Year From The Use and Misuse of English Grammar

We learn grammar when we learn to speak, we know grammar, we pause where we want, when we want, pulling words like fish from our Pond of Vocabulary and stringing them on the line, one after another, one to a hook, using commas instead of periods when we don’t want to be interrupted, YELLing when someone is so rude as to keep on talking when we are trying to interrupt – we fall silent, dashed, a period of rigour-tunge follows (our tongues rigged with rules), then we bounce awake, trim our sails, for we’re surrounded in the Bay of Prescription, the murky waters of communication, with boats of advice all bopping this way and that (there goes the “Do This,” firing across the bow of the “Don’t Do That”), the pond stormy on a storm swept night if there ever was one.

In Wendell Johnson’s “You Can’t Write Writing,” (The Use and Misuse of Language, 1962, S. I. Hayakawa, ed.), we learn that bad grammar, baby, ain’t our problem: “The late Clarence Darrow, while speaking one day to a group of professors of English and others of kindred inclination, either raised or dismissed the basic problem with which his listeners were concerned by asking, ‘Even if you do learn to speak correct English, who are you going to talk it to?’ Mr. Darrow was contending…the effective use of the English language is more important than the ‘correct’ use of it, and that if you can speak English ‘correctly,’ but not effectively, it does not matter very much ‘who you talk it to’” (101).

This has implications for those who would aspire to teach writing, and Johnson continues, “The teacher of English appears to attempt to place the emphasis upon writing, rather than upon writing-about-something-for-someone. From this it follows quite inevitably that the student of English fails in large measure to learn the nature of the significance of clarity or precision and of organization in the written representation of facts” (103).

Grammar is the least of our worries, argues Johnson: “So long as the student’s primary anxieties are made to revolve around the task of learning to spell, punctuate, and observe the rules of syntax, he is not likely to become keenly conscious of the fact that when he writes he is, above all, communicating…his first obligation to his reader is not to be grammatically fashionable but to be clear and coherent” (103).

Hayakawa, in his introduction, has already explained his interest with regard to how people talk: “We are not worrying about the elegance of their pronunciation or the correctness of their grammar. Basically we are concerned with the adequacy of their language as a ‘map’ of the ‘territory’ of experience being talked about” (vii). And, ultimately, for the reader interested in more than mere prescriptions on how to write, emphasis is placed “not only on what the speakers said, but even more importantly on their attitudes towards their own utterances” (vii).

Hayakawa sums up his concerns as follows: “What general semanticists mean by ‘language habits’ is the entire complex of (1) how we talk – whether our language is specific or general, descriptive or inferential or judgmental; and (2) our attitudes toward our own remarks – whether dogmatic or open-minded, rigid or flexible” (vii).

Whenever I hear some self-appointed cop of language (or worse, someone with the badge of a degree), attempting to arrest a speaker’s tongue, putting it in the handcuffs of some prescriptive rule, I think about Hayakawa’s The Use and Misuse of Language.

But, unforlorn, I’m inclined toward and recline with an infuzen of John Cage, who sums the problem up nicely in his A Year From Monday (1969), which begins with “DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) 1965

        I.               Continue; I’ll discover where you

                            sweat  (Kierkegaard).            We are getting

rid of ownership, substituting use.

Beginning with ideas.            Which ones can we

take?            Which ones can we give?

Disappearance of power politics.            Non-

measurement.”

Related:

“You Can’t Write Writing”
Baseball and the Parts of Speech
Stanley Fish, Full of Ethos
Kicking E. B. White When He’s Down
The Bare Bodkin of the English Major
How to Teach College Writing to Nonreaders

How to Teach College Writing to Nonreaders

How should introductory college writing be taught to today’s nonreaders? E. B. White said to “make the paragraph the unit of composition.” But the paragraph is made of sentences, so why not start with the sentence? Francis Christensen did, and his original Notes Toward A New Rhetoric: 6 Essays for Teachers (1967), is today available as Notes Toward A New Rhetoric: 9 Essays for Teachers (3^rd Ed., 2007).  A preview of his “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence” can be viewed here.

“The teacher of writing must be a judge of what is good and bad in writing,” Christensen said, but “from what sources do they say ‘Do this’ or Don’t do that?’”

Christensen used a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach based on his “…close inductive study of contemporary American prose.” In part, his work was a response to the “many English teachers [who] abide by the prescriptions of the textbooks they were brought up on. This preference is one that I cannot understand,” he said, “since it means taking the word of the amateurs who hack out textbooks that talk about language (fools like me) as against the practice of professionals who live by their skill in using language.”

Christensen’s inductive study resulted in his new method because he realized that, for example, there existed “…no textbook whose treatment of grammar and syntax could cope with more than a small fraction of its [Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man] sentences, but I would venture the claim that there is not a sentence whose syntactic secrets could not be opened by the key fashioned in the first two essays [of his Notes Toward...].”

Christiansen’s descriptive method recognized that grammar knowledge does not necessarily result in good writing. But Christiansen’s descriptive method does not ignore grammar. He said, “…the rhetorical analysis rests squarely on grammar,” but that “it should surprise no one that no experiments…show any correlation between knowledge of grammar and the ability to write. One should not expect a correlation where no relation has been established and made the ground for instruction.”

But neither should that be used, he goes on, to argue “that the only way to learn to write is to read literature [because] what is true over a lifetime is not true of the fifteen weeks of a semester. In practice, this position throws the burden of learning to write on the student. It expects him to divine the elements of style that make literature what it is and apply the relevant ones to writing expository essays about literature – a divination of which the teachers themselves are incapable. If reading literature were the royal road that this argument takes it to be, English teachers would be our best writers and PMLA would year by year take all the prizes for nonfiction.”

But why shouldn’t students be made to take on “the burden of learning to write”? And why does Christensen make the assumption that English teachers are so well-read? They have that reputation, but how much reading, in the midst of a full load and stacks of student papers to get through, are they able to get done “over a lifetime”? Consider, for example, this typical Christensen observation, made from his inductive study: “…our faith in the subordinate clause and the complex sentence is misplaced…we should concentrate instead on the sentence modifiers, or free modifiers.” But how do we know that without making the same inductive study he made? Indeed, Notes Toward a New Rhetoric, in sum, while not at all ignoring grammar, recommends taking the inductive study into the classroom, reading literature to teach writing.

“Oh, teachers, are my lessons done? I cannot do another one.
They laughed and laughed, and said, ‘Well child,
Are your lessons done?
Are your lessons done?
Are your lessons done?’”

…from “Teachers,” by Leonard Cohen, 1967.

Related:

Baseball and the Parts of Speech
Stanley Fish, Full of Ethos
Kicking E. B. White When He’s Down
The Bare Bodkin of the English Major

Notes toward a New Rhetoric
Francis Christensen
College English
Vol. 25, No. 1 (Oct., 1963), pp. 7-18
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/373827

Where we go from Greil Marcus to Humpty Dumpty

I bought two books at the Rose City Used Book Fair last Saturday, the Li Po of the previous post, and “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music,” by Greil Marcus (1975). The Marcus is a first edition hardback in excellent condition, though it’s apparently not worth much to a book collector; I paid $5 for it. In his “Author’s Note,” Marcus says he felt an affinity for history writers who felt through their work that they belonged to a part of the struggle they wrote about, even if that struggle was long past. “Mystery Train,” Marcus says, was written from “the fall of 1972″ to “the summer of 1974,” a time when the struggles of the past merged with the struggles of the present. I’ve not read it, but I’m putting it on the top of the stack. I don’t know why I didn’t read it at the time it came out. I suppose because at the time I was struggling with a few other writers, and, like Dylan said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 1965).

I have read Marcus, though. I liked his “Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads” (2005), 225 pages on a single song written and recorded by Dylan in 1965. The song is on the “Highway 61 Revisited Album,” which I listen to almost every day if I’m out in the Ford, since it’s usually the only tape in the car. “Once upon a time,” the song begins, and you know you’re in for a story, and the rimshot gets your attention. Dylan said, though I can’t remember where, either in “Chronicles” or in the 60 Minutes Interview, it might have been, something like, that guy [Marcus] went a little far. Sure he did; that’s what’s so great about Greil Marcus.

I’ve also enjoyed Marcus’s “Real Life Rock Top Ten: A Monthly Column of Everyday Culture and Found Objects,” his Believer magazine article that began, according to Marcus in a Powell’s interview (2006), in The Village Voice “around ’86.” It moved from Salon.com to The Believer, I believe, in 2008. Anyway, I started reading it regularly in The Believer at some point, though I confess I don’t always get the contemporary references (“You never understood that it ain’t no good, you shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you…,” Dylan again).

I like the way Marcus blends culture and music, and though he probably doesn’t think about it as literature, he might be a kind of contemporary American Roland Barthes. He certainly does not think of rock lyrics as literature. In a 2002 “Online Exchange with Greil Marcus” at RockCritics.com, Marcus had this to say about his “approach”:

“You’re right about my approach, which is a matter of affinities – what I’m drawn to – and learning to follow affinities where they lead – in other words, to trust your affinities. I have no background in poetics. The difference between poetry and ‘rock lyricism’ – if by that you mean song lyrics – is obvious and complete: except for people who think they are poets, like Paul Simon, lyrics are meant to be sung, come to life when they are performed, take their weight and muscle and ability to move from music, and true songwriters understand this. They understand that the most intricate allusive subtleties will be lost in performance, superseded by another quality altogether, and that the most impenetrable banalities can reveal infinite possibilities of thought and emotion when sung. In this sense I think the best songwriters are less afraid of words than poets can afford to be.”

In the film version of Roddy Doyle’s “The Commitments” (1987), in a scene not in the book, Jimmy, who frequently fantasizes success by interviewing himself, toward the end of the film, has his fantasy interviewer ask him what he’s learned from his time as manager of the rock band The Commitments, and he replies with a quote from Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” When asked what the lyrics mean, the particular sticking point, according to a BBC analysis, being “the light fandango,” Jimmy responds, “I’m fucked if I know” (the film faithfully captures the flood of F words that fills and overflows the pages of the book).

Words have meaning, too much meaning, suggested Lewis Carroll. Indeed, one should not let another get one’s kicks for one, which is to say one should follow one’s own affinities. Just so, whenever I come across lyrics or poems I can’t seem to get, even after giving them the old college try, I think of Humpty Dumpty’s conversation with Alice about the meaning of things.

“I can explain all the poems that were ever invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet,” Humpty says, and he helps Alice unpack the portmanteau words in ”Jabberwocky.” Then later, Humpty offers this:

“‘The piece I’m going to repeat,’ he went on without noticing her remark,’ was written entirely for your amusement.’ Alice felt that in that case she really ought to listen to it, so she sat down, and said `Thank you’ rather sadly. `In winter, when the fields are white, I sing this song for your delight - only I don’t sing it,’ he added, as an explanation. `I see you don’t,’ said Alice. `If you can see whether I’m singing or not, you’ve sharper eyes than most.’ Humpty Dumpty remarked severely. Alice was silent.”

“The Works of Li Po The Chinese Poet: Done Into English Verse”

At the Rose City Used Book Fair yesterday, amid a bevy of well organized and decorous book nests, I bought another book of poems by the Chinese poet Li Po. According to the version scanned into Google Books, there were only 1,500 copies printed of the 1922 first edition.

My copy contains a “Note to the Orient Edition,” signed S. O., and dated Tokyo, November 3, 1935. The note reads, in part, “I have resisted the temptation to make revisions for the purpose of forestalling the charge of inaccuracy that may be raised by the Oriental reader. I firmly believe that my methods of translation described in the preface are well-suited to a work of this kind, which is primarily intended not for scholarly exactitude but for the poetic appreciation and enjoyment” (xi).

The note explains the title page, “The Works of Li Po The Chinese Poet: Done Into English Verse By Shigeyoshi Obata.” While the cover of the book reads “Translated into English Verse…” the sub-title on the title page, reading “Done into English Verse…,” suggests a purpose often at odds with scholarly or academic writing about literature. Obata wanted to produce something for reading pleasure. Yet there’s plenty here for the scholarly curious, including biographical notes and a bibliography showing where the reader will find other translations of the poems.

And what a pleasure Li Po is. I’ve been opening pages at random to the poems. Here’s one appropriate for this post, for I plan to read Li Po through our late spring and into summer, when I’ll hang my straw hat on a branch and let the afternoon breeze cool the curls of my hairy mind:

“A Summer Day

Naked I lie in the green forest of summer….
Too lazy to wave my white feathered fan.
I hang my cap on a crag,
And bare my head to the wind that comes
Blowing through the pine trees.”

The jacket flap of my copy explains that it is “…an unabridged reprint of the famous edition first published in Tokyo in 1935.” I’ve not found an image of my cover in a couple of cursory searches. It’s a hardback, no markings in the book, very good condition, the jacket cover in excellent condition all around. There is a signature in black fountain pen at the top of the map of China that lines the inside cover. The signature reads “Joseph,” but the last name I can’t make out. There are then, in the same black ink fountain pen, three vertically drawn characters in the upper right hand corner, falling between Manchuria and a unified Korea.

Special Host Spring Yard Photo Post

We’re going on a yard walkabout to check out Spring progress. This raspberry red rhododendron is a favorite, the way it fills the window, but it always makes me want some raspberry ice cream. I don’t know why, but I get these urges to take a giant bite off a raspberry bloom. 

You know you’re getting old when you enjoy sitting and rocking in the early morning sun, and you couldn’t care less if weeds get pulled or things get swept. The blueberry coffee cup is my favorite.

Once, when I was little, before I got my handle, I got stuck way up high. But if one is to get stuck, high is as good a place as low.

The Golden Chain tree is lovely in spring, though it looks rather ratty the rest of the year. Oh, well.

The raspberry bed has been moved to the back of the yard, behind the apple tree.

The piano garden is just getting going. It needs more sun. It needs a lot more sun, poor little guys.

This is just silly. I don’t get this at all.

Portland recycles. Don’t you just love the colorful cans?

We’re having breakfast on the deck. I’m famished after this yard photo post.

The End.

Update on the Universe; or, Where we “canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth”

Box seat holders at the Toads know that periodically we like to drop in on the physicists to see how the universe is progressing. Though it may be some 14 billion years old, fans will be happy to know that the universe is still in its early innings. Time for a hot dog and a bottle of that dark matter earthlings call beer.

But why can’t we enjoy the universe without the polemic diatribes of the scientists who must wear their atheist merit badges on their sleeves? In the most recent example, Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, Richard Dawkins comes out of the bullpen to write the afterword, and we find ourselves trying to stay afloat in some deep, dark matter, but it’s not beer.

“Over the course of the history of our galaxy,” Krauss writes, “about 200 million stars have exploded. These myriad stars sacrificed themselves, if you wish, so that one day you could be born. I suppose that qualifies them as much as anything else for the role of saviors.” But is Jesus about being born, or about the existential possibility of being reborn?* To get this, one must imagine a universe without shame. It doesn’t matter where you come from, who your parents were, the color of your collar. The universe does not come into play. Krauss has hit a foul ball.

Why the scientists can’t stick to scientific writing is one of the mysteries of the universe that neither Krauss nor Dawkins unravel. Consider, for example, Dawkins’s afterward. After a couple hundred pages of Krauss blowing winds and cracking cheeks in which he attempts to explain that King Lear was wrong when he said “nothing will come of nothing,” we find that indeed nothing has come of nothing, but that it may amount to the same thing as something coming from nothing, or the other way around. In any case, as early as 14 billion years ago, which is to say, in his preface, Krauss has already admitted, “we simply don’t know” and probably never will. As it turns out, the universe is really about funding.

We’ve never doubted, here at the Toads, that something can come from nothing (witness the 1969 Mets); neither have we doubted the reverse, that nothing can come from something. We’re going back to casting out 9’s, dividing the universe into 9 inning segments.

“We may not understand quantum theory,” Dawkins writes in his afterward, but then says, parenthetically and inexplicably religiously, “[heaven knows, I don’t] but a theory that predicts the world to ten decimal places cannot in any straightforward sense be wrong. Theology not only lacks decimal places: it lacks even the smallest hint of connection with the real world.” Yes, but why “heaven knows”? Is Dawkins kidding here? Or is this a slip of the atheist pen? And what about those ten decimal places? In a universe as old and big as Krauss has described, ten decimal places hardly seems significant at all. The assumptions of the argument lose their scientific credibility the moment its purpose is revealed to be conversion: it’s an argument of conversion, and it’s trying and tiring.

Note: For information about the universe, the Toads still recommends Robert B. Laughlin’s A Different Universe.

*“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:7-8, KJV).

Related:

David Albert’s New York Times book review of Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing.

Sea Monsters in A. C. Grayling’s Secular Bible; or, Humanity’s Greatest Endeavor

Progress Report: Our Disappearing World

Where Pigs Sing: “Pigsong,” by Frank Delaney

When I hear there’s a pig story in the offing, I think immediately of two of my favorite writers, P. G. Wodehouse, whose Lord Emsworth kept pigs, and E. B. White, whose Wilbur, of “Charlotte’s Web” fame, I can’t help but think of whenever I sit down to what another Wodehouse character, Bertie, of “Jeeves and the Bacon Fat Caper” fame, called the B and E, sometimes E and B, freely improvising on the jazz theme, but for our purposes here, sausage and eggs.

And yet, these singing pigs are not here sizzling in the pan, but if a pig really can sing, what has that to say about language? Perhaps many living and non-living things can talk, and we can hear them, animals and plants, acoustic and electric things, if only we try to listen. What is talk? What is language?

So it was with a bit of trepidation, resulting in only a tiny pig’s tail of technological frustration, that I delved into a bit of e-Pig fat and tasted a short story last night via Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader: tu-whit, “Pigsong,” by Frank Delaney.

There might be three kinds of people in our human world: masters, slaves, and those who escape entrapment of either of those two. But when we include animals, plants, rocks, and other things from our compost pile to the table of words, more interesting plots develop, and foil characters want out of their foils.

I have come to love compost. I love the sweet and awful smell of rotting food, decaying plants, moist loam and dirty, muddy soil, and I love to turn the compost pile over to discover mounds of lovely redish-purple worms at warm work eating their way through their Garden of Eden. Get a little closer and you can hear, hear the hum of the compost heap. I must have a bit of the pig in me. I think I can hear the pigs singing.

Frank Delaney, prolific Irish author, surely must lust for words as a pig honkers down to a late summer corn husk, must have some sort of language compost heap at his disposal.

What do pigs have in common with Ireland’s Saint Patrick? Well, for the answer to that, you’ll have to read the story: “Pigsong,” available at Amazon, (or, “Pigsong,” available at Barnes and Noble). Pigs are singing, waiting for listeners. It’s a story in which animals become human beings and tells of the origins of power, justice, and faith, and of independence, of cruelty and revolution to overthrow that cruelty. All this in a short story? Yes, well, it’s a fable, and so covers a lot of ground in a short space.

The source of stories that in turn explains the source of stories is a very old story, and continues to grow out of the compost heap made of words and fears and triumphs of songs and hate and love of cruel masters and creative workers in language that has been turned over and over by many a storyteller over the years. Frank Delaney is one of the best.

Related:

Frank Delaney: The Last Storyteller

Frank Delaney: Storytellers (about the series)

Magdalena Ball: Interview with Frank Delaney

Celebrating Earth Day at Berfrois!

Check out the Toads post at Berfrois for Earth Day!…

A Disambiguation of Living Alone

“Why are so many Americans living by themselves?” Nathan Heller asks in “The Disconnect” (New Yorker, April 16, 2012). “Today,” Heller says, “half of U.S. residents are single, and a third of all households have one occupant.” We’re in the world of the sociologist, but while this issue’s “Table of Contents,” titled “Journeys,” promises “How to be alone,” we don’t learn how to live alone: what we get is a review of books about people living alone and why, and why the number of people living alone is increasing, and we are given to reflect on what it might mean to live alone, and how living alone might relate to loneliness, and whether or not living alone really means we are alone.

I find the topic interesting for a number of reasons, but mainly because I have never lived alone. In one sense, living alone might be compared to driving alone. Rarely are we on the road alone; we are surrounded by other cars, usually bumper to bumper, and if there’s a mishap, a flat tire or a blown hose, we soon learn who our neighbors are. Likewise, unless we live alone like Jay Gatsby did, in a giant, empty mansion on acreage twenty miles out of the city, we might be able to say that we have a room of our own, but is having a room of one’s own really living alone?

In South Bay for a time we lived in a one-room studio courtyard apartment. There were six, one story apartments, connected wall to wall down one side of a lawn, shaded by a single, large pepper tree, across from six apartments down the other side of the lawn. On each side, between the lawn and the row of apartments, a small drive led down to the carports. There used to be scads of places like this in South Bay, and they were very popular. They were sometimes advertised as “efficiency apartments,” but were often referred to as “bachelor pads,” and, for a time, we were the only ones in our courtyard sharing one of the apartments.

During most South Bay “solid gold weekends,” if we were home, we might for a little while leave our door open to the courtyard, and our neighbors did, too. One day, everyone in their places with sunshiny faces, the girl in the apartment attached to our north wall let out a peace shattering scream followed by a jet like roar, “Get that thing out of here!” followed by another scream, followed by an apparition at our front door.

Her cat, the situation quickly emerging in ghastly gasps, had carried a live lizard into her apartment. Would I please help her get it out? Susan tried to explain to her that the lizard was a gift, from the cat, but the look she produced at this irrelevant and impotent suggestion quickly gave way to an aggressive look back toward me that said, “Help me, now.” Thus it was that I became for the next half hour or so an alligator wrestler, while in the end it was the cat that wound up carrying the lizard back outside.

Cats can live alone, though Susan’s never had one that would, and the lizard seemed happy enough to be scurrying back up the tree to tell his tale back home, and while I don’t think our neighbor ever left her door open again, I always felt her presence.

Sestina’s Radio

My left speaker falsifies me,
crackles, hisses, clichéd toad.
I turn my right speaker to you.
Surf wax fills the air,
wave tubes squeezed tight.
An unreal bird sings,

pierces my ear with a ring,
and to my radio welds me,
night’s station holding tight,
while in the surf singing toads
fill the ringing air
with songs of greyouts.

I try to explain these sounds to you:
above my left ear a toad sings,
caught in my curly bird hair,
a secret word brings to me,
from KJOB, sings this DJ Toad:
“Silence is noise for you tonight.”

My ears grow frightened,
and I look for sounds to you,
the coming of the toads,
the interventions of Sestina’s sting,
for alone she sings to me.
My ear receives whispers of air,

a clogged blogging air,
seashelled, wax watertight.
The toads begin to mew
in the alleys of my ears joyously,
a clear and concise ring,
the singing of the toads,

about nothing much to do.
No sound fills the air.
Nothing outside this radio sings,
its channel fixed tight
to sing only to you,
asymmetrically.

Only in my left ear sings this toad,
for me a secret aria,
while fades like light your voice.

See more Sestinas.

A Portrait of the Plumber as a Poor Speller; or, Wrong Word

When my father first asked me if I wanted to follow him into the plumbing trade, I’d already been helping him on jobs for several years. I knew the names of the tools, could boil lead and poor it into the rope packed pipe joints, run the threading machine, drill holes, dig ditches with the right fall.

But, no, I thought I’d go to school, I told him, and I knew he was disappointed. He could read blueprints, but he put no stock in books. I made my decision to stay in school because I did like books and reading and writers and the whole idea of becoming a writer, as out of focus as that picture might have been, but had I made the decision based on my ability to spell, I might have listened to my dad and become a plumber. Perhaps it’s not too late.

My friend Dan (we were first year teachers at the same school in Venice a long time ago), who just recently started blogging, over at itkindofgotawayfromyou, and reading this blog, surprised me with an email this morning, first wishing us a happy Easter, then pointing out a spelling error in my last post. I couldn’t dismiss the error as a typo. I’d made it three times in the same post. Nor could I blame it on spell-check. It was one of those words that fools spell-check, as it had fooled me. This isn’t the first time Dan has had to help pick me up after a misspelling fall. During that first year of teaching, I had asked Dan to read something I had written. He did, and when he gave it back, he said I’d typed “your” where I wanted “you’re,” though an error like that often might be a typo; still, the proofreading eye needs to spot the error, and not see what it expects to see. Some words need to be unpacked before we hang them to dry on the outside clothesline.

We all have a particular picture of ourselves, but seldom, perhaps, the same picture others have of us. I’ve always pictured Dan as a good speller, and it’s nice to know he hasn’t lost his eye for orthography, though I’m not sure spelling is a question of the eye. But the picture that portrays English majors by definition as good spellers is myth. And reading Dan’s email, I reminded myself, for some consolation, that there’s credible evidence showing some of our best writers were poor spellers. Standard examples include F. Scott Fitzgerald, who could never remember how to spell his friend and Nobel Prize winning writer Hemingway’s name (one m or two?), while Hemingway wasn’t a much better speller, and Faulkner was also a poor speller. Joyce, on the other hand, a good speller, enjoyed creating new words and puns by deliberately misspelling words. Theories of why some can spell and others can’t suggest the brain’s to blame.

It wasn’t long ago my friend Judy invited me to join a spelling bee with her. What treachery was this, I wondered. I knew she was an orthographic genius, and just wanted me along as a foil character. Still, I’m not really such a poor speller, probably just average, is all. I usually get it right, but sometimes lack confidence, and look it up, but find I was right all along. So I went with Judy to the spelling bee, thinking I might get lucky with a few relatively easy ones. No luck. I misspelled on my third word, while Judy won the bee.

My father could not have cared less if I was a good or a poor speller, if I one spelling bees are lost them. He was, on the other hand, somewhat conserned that I became a poor plumber.

Coda: Readers noticing some spelling errors in that last paragraph might be interested in Joseph Williams’s “The Phenomenology of Error.” It’s not about finding spelling errors, but it is about why some of us see writing errors others don’t, and why others are inclined to see errors we don’t. It’s about writing; spelling is about something else. Moreover, one might argue there’s only one misspelled word in my penultimate paragraph, the other two mistakes being simply wrong words, which, as it turns out, is the error Dan pointed out in my last post, a wrong word in the context, not a misspelled one.

Related:

E. B. White and the plumber

Writing Inventions

Writing strategy textbooks often move us quickly through the rhetorical modes before introducing argument, where we are invited to pick a topic of interest, something we’re passionate about, but then are asked to write a research paper, as opposed to a personal essay, presumably to distinguish between mere opinion and rigorous discourse, where claims are backed by reasoned evidence and assumptions are explained. Hot topic items are sometimes suggested: abortion, immigration, addiction, gun control, health care, same sex marriage, legalizing marijuana. Following a research paper rubric, we search for articles for and against our stance. Thus the project begins in dichotomy, seemingly necessary to building an arguable thesis. But we usually go into the research topic with preconceived convictions and deep-rooted assumptions, and we don’t learn much about the topic, writing, or ourselves in the assignment process. It’s an exercise in frustration and futility, for the canon of hot topics has been worked over like road kill squirrel picked clean by hungry birds. And writing instructors, hungry for something new to read and talk about, but finding the trite and stale canned paper, can only respond to the mechanics of the research paper rubrics, issuing tickets for standard English violations, citations for lousy references, deductions for technicalities – as they scan the paper highway for plagiarism. Instructive readers will at least be able to comment on how effectively we have blended references into our discussion, but the standard research paper is doomed from the start to what has become an up or down vote, the proofs multiple choices from an existing canon, the conclusion an echo of something that’s already been said. The result is too often a laboriously boring displeasure for writer and reader.

We are in no position to tell others what they want, or even what they should want, while we all may value things that are not necessarily good for us. We need to invent, but to invent a solution, we must first see a problem. If we don’t see problems, we are not thinking. We are numb to our environment, unable to find the source of our limits. We must invent if we expect to think. But how can we uncover problems if we don’t know what we want? If we don’t know what we want, we’re unaware of specific antagonists creating obstacles. But how do we know what we want?

We lament that we are growing into a culture of non-readers, for reading is the [supposed] old way of learning what we want, but while The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a great novel, did Huck ever read one? Tom Sawyer, Huck’s good buddy, is the middle class boy who covets pirate book fantasies, the expert who has done his research. But Huck’s genius is that he thinks for himself. He’s able to think for himself because he knows what he wants, and because he knows what he wants, he correctly identifies his antagonists, and because he knows what’s in his way, he’s able to invent solutions. But what happens to Huck when he winds up in a research paper writing class? Tom skates through while Huck suffers the fantods.

Why is research so important to academic progress and success? One answer is specialization, but specialization leads, as Fuller explained, to extinction. And academics are becoming extinct, the ones who teach writing, anyway, as their peers in competing disciplines begin to teach their own writing processes, better suited to their own needs, better suited to specialization and funding requirements. In English class, the topic seems almost not to matter anymore. The topic of the English class used to be literature, the essay, language. But the contemporary English class seems to have no topic of its own, thus the importance of picking one, passionately freewheeling. Consider the following, from a recent Chronicle article, suggesting the research paper should be abandoned:

“‘After all, students exhibit the same kinds of mistakes at the end of their first-year composition courses as they do at the beginning, regardless of the type of institution or whether the course is taught by a full-time faculty member or an adjunct,’ Ms. Jamieson said. ‘Part of the problem, she added, is the expectation that faculty members trained in composition have expertise in the subject being researched, whether it is abortion, the death penalty, or gun control [and there you have it, the canon’s greatest hits]: Unless it’s in your field, you don’t know what a good source is and what isn’t’” (“Freshman Composition is Not Teaching Key Skills in Analysis, Researchers Argue,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2012). (Also see: “Skimming the Surface”; The Citation Project.)

But the problem as described seems to relate to topic, which we assume is specialized, for why can’t an experienced, general interest reader tell a good reference from a bad one, particularly in a “Freshman Composition” class? In any case, we don’t always start our writing with a topic. We begin with reading and taking notes as we read. As our notes begin to develop into thoughts, reflective, evaluative comments on what we are reading, our topic emerges. The research paper writing assignment, as it’s usually rubriced (red chalked – it’s where the English teachers got the idea to correct using red ink), teaches a way of writing that few writers actually use. It’s not the way we write. We don’t begin with topics. We begin with reading, and we discover what we want to say as we attempt to join the discussion, the conversation of a particular community, and we know who’s working in the community, and what they’ve said. We know where to find them, and how they talk. We don’t need to apply the credibility and reliability tests. That’s done through the process of peer review – so the myth goes.

Does specialization in the academy prohibit a common reader response, disallow generalized thinking? But not even English teachers can read everything, and perhaps it’s because they haven’t read everything that they might be quick to dismiss Wiki, blogs, et al., and insist, instead, on scholarly journal references, never mind the nonsense that also goes on in that arena (I’m reminded of “The Music Man”: “Just a minute, Professor [Hill], we want to see your credentials!”). Lack of experiential reading might also be why some insist on writing or grammar “Handbooks,” prescriptive and expensive tomes that become their own justification.

Claims are supposed to be debatable, to invite argument. Argument is a good. But specialization and the consequences of funding seem to be putting unusual pressure on the hallowed process of academic discourse and peer review. Three recent examples illustrate: “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” from the November, 2010 Atlantic, exposes fraud in the medical journal peer review process, and funding appears to be a significant source of the problem; “Kin and Kind: A fight about the genetics of altruism,” from the March 5th New Yorker, describes another debate, this one focussed on E. O. Wilson’s recent reversal of his prior stance on the explanations of altruistic behavior, a change of mind which has earned him the scorn of his peers – and, again, funding would seem to underlie much of the critical response; and “Angry Words,” from the March 20th Chronicle, summarizes the ongoing brouhaha in language study, and Geoffrey Pullum followed up, also in the  Chronicle, with “The Rise and Fall of a Venomous Dispute” - the title alone might sound surprising to the general interest reader of academic research papers. The three examples taken together don’t inspire much confidence in the processes at work, yet the comment discussion following Pullum’s short article is instructive in a number of ways. It appears that specialists and scholars engage in writing inventions of all kinds and don’t appear to have the market on credibility and reliability cornered. But it’s enlightening and heartening, and, perhaps, entertaining, to see that they are human and given to the human foibles inherent in argument and opinion, in the fight for truth, justice, and the Academic way.

Related:

Trilling’s “The Meaning of a Literary Idea”; or, the Essay as Argument: Why The Research Paper Should be Abolished

Opening the Patient in Open Access Week; or, the Great Research Hoax

Surf’s Up! at Berfrois…

Problems, Inventions, and Implications

Inventions are usually a response to a problem. A problem is something that limits or impairs access to needs, wants, or values. An invention solves the problem, granting or improving access. An invention might be a machine, an idea, or a new value. Inventions alter our environment and often present side effects, good or bad, that may or may not have anything to do with the original problem, and may or may not have been anticipated. Inventions can create new problems, and changes in our environment can change us, often in unexpected ways, change our response to our environment, change us externally or internally, physically, mentally, or emotionally, change our behavior and the way we think of ourselves. Inventions can change culture and change the direction of societal development. Sometimes, as in the case of synthetic biology, an invention takes on “A Life of Its Own” (Michael Specter, New Yorker, 28 September 2009). This “life of its own” we might call implications. Invention shares with experiment, discovery, and creation what it means to be human.

As machines, inventions have a shelf life, for they are subject to entropy, wear and tear, as well as obsolescence created by changes in the environment or by other inventions. It was Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, talking about the creation of the State (which begins as an idea), who said, “…the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention (Jowett, V-128, Book II, p. 60). What happens to the old machines when we no longer perceive the necessity? And if inventions are a response to a problem, what problem did the automobile solve?

Imagine life today without the automobile – not that you simply give up your car, but that the automobile was never invented.

According to Google Patents, the oldest patent using the word Automobile was filed in 1809, but not issued until 1902. The patent, by J. Ledwinka, “subject of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary,” but, “residing in Chicago,” was a design allowing for the independent functioning of the four wheels of the carriage. The patent improves the efficiency of the automobile, making it easier to operate. The terms Motor-car and Auto-car will fetch other, equally old patents from Google Patents.

The word “automobile” suggests a self-moving vehicle. A US patent for L. Bollee, of France, providing improvements for a “self-propelling vehicle,” was filed in 1896 and issued in 1898. This patent involves improvements to “…five principal parts: first, the motor; second, the frame; third, the transmission gear; fourth, the brake; and, fifth, the mechanism for engaging and disengaging the motor, for changing the speed of the vehicle, and for actuating the brake.” There’s no mention of a radio or radar detector.

Many of the patents surrounding automobiles suggest that most patents are inventions of improvement. The automobile itself, as an invention, isn’t a new machine as much as an improvement on older machines. The idea of a wheeled vehicle is very old, and may be said to leverage the underlying general principle of the circle, its latent energy (as Fuller’s piano top life preserver illustrates the underlying general principle of flotation, and his magic log illustrates the underlying general principle of the fulcrum, or leverage). Humanity’s first observations of round things rolling, seemingly of their own volition, perhaps needing a kick to get things going, seems to have set off a chain of inventions in what we now call a “snowball effect.” Society seems to be a tower of inventions, not all necessarily designed to improve our humanity.

Imagine life today without the automobile – not that you simply give up your car, but that the automobile was never invented. This is increasingly difficult to do because we may have lost sight of the original problem the automobile was designed to solve, and the automobile has itself created new problems for which it is the invention that appears to be the solution. This is why Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Related:

All Stung Over By Links of Googled Grace

Earth-Glass Half Empty or Fuller?: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Progress Report: Our Disappearing World

Earth-Glass Half Empty or Fuller?: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

“Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it,” says Buckminster Fuller, explaining the title of his 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in the chapter titled “Spaceship Earth.”

The whole idea is a metaphor, comparing the planet to a machine. Is Earth a machine? What are the implications of our thinking of the planet as a machine? If it’s a spaceship, who’s in control? Who’s the captain? Where is the crew, and what are their jobs, or roles? Where are we going?

We may think of an operating manual as not quite the same thing as an instruction manual, yet Fuller continues, “I think it’s very significant that there is no instruction book for successfully operating our ship.” So the manual, whatever we call it, should provide both physical and mental information for the user to successfully work the machine. In Fuller’s terms, this includes physical and metaphysical work, for “In view of the infinite attention to all other details displayed by our ship, it must be taken as deliberate and purposeful that an instruction book was omitted.” Omitted by whom?

“We are forced,” Fuller says, “because of a lack of an instruction book, to use our intellect, which is our supreme faculty, to devise scientific experimental procedures and to interpret effectively the significance of the experimental findings. Thus, because the instruction manual was missing we are learning how we safely can anticipate the consequences of an increasing number of alternative ways of extending our satisfactory survival and growth – both physical and metaphysical.”

Seeing Earth as a machine provides metaphorical instruction (seeing Fuller’s title as a metaphor provides rhetorical instruction). If we think of Earth as a machine, we justify certain uses of it, and these justifications explain our behavior. Our current thinking of machines includes the idea that they break down, or wear down (entropy). Property insurance contracts include the terms “depreciation” and “actual cash value.” The actual cash value of an old machine is its value new minus its depreciated value from wear and tear, damage, and obsolescence. Using this formula of valuation, what’s the current value of Earth? What would it cost to replace it (replacement cost)?

Thinking of Earth as a spaceship reorients our position. We need not think of going into space, outer space; we are already in outer space. We are already out in space. Are we lost in space? And are we running out of fuel? Are we beginning to feel entropic effects? Should we start shopping around for a new planet? A new spaceship?

But Fuller argues that “the physical constituent of wealth-energy cannot decrease and that the metaphysical constituent-know-how can only increase. This is to say that every time we use our wealth it increases. This is to say that, countering entropy, wealth can only increase. Whereas entropy is increasing disorder evoked by dispersion of energy, wealth locally is increased order – that is to say, the increasingly orderly concentration of physical power in our ever-expanding locally explored and comprehended universe by the metaphysical capability of man, as informed by repeated experiences from which he happens in an unscheduled manner to progressively distill the ever-increasing inventory of omniinterrelated and omni-interaccommodative generalized principles found to be operative in all the special-case experiences. Irreversible wealth is the so far attained effective magnitude of our physically organized ordering of the use of those generalized principles.”

Fuller is the eternal optimist, literally. His glass is more than half full; it’s continually running over. “Wealth is anti-entropy at a most exquisite degree of concentration,” Fuller says, but one must get his brain/mind dichotomy to be persuaded by the argument: “Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical. Wealth is the product of the progressive mastery of matter by mind, and is specifically accountable in forward man-days of established metabolic regeneration advantages spelt out in hours of life for specific numbers of individuals released from formerly prescribed entropy preoccupying tasks for their respectively individual yet inherently co-operative elective investment in further anti-entropic effectiveness.”

Systems check: Mind? Functioning near full capacity. Brain? Showing some signs of wear and tear. Coffee? Need a refill.

Update: This post selected at Berfrois for Earth Day!

Related:

• On Universe: A Conversation Between Thoreau and Bucky
• What Should We Keep? The R. Buckminster Fuller Archive
• Transition: From Walled-in with Thoreau to Take-off with Buckminster Fuller
• Progress Report: Our Disappearing World

Flannery’s Joy

A Bible salesman who is a non-believer, a confidence man, and a cad, outwits his most atheistic opponent in a twisted tryst game of leg up. The leg at risk is real, though symbolic of a self-image, the protuberance we can’t hide from others so we hide behind, that part of us we exaggerate in caricature fashion until it grows so large in our imagination it takes over our picture of ourselves completely. We are inseparable from our self-portrait, until the bible salesman comes along and steals it away, stripping us of our identity, that picture of ourselves probably no one else shares, anyway, or cares, in a flash of insight that does not blind but gives us vision, a gift, grace, what we need, not what we want, the lake in the distance green, the liturgical color of hope. And who better to present the gift from God than a Bible salesman? But it may not be the Bible we need, but no matter, for it’s not bibles he’s carrying in his case. The Bible salesman appears out of nowhere to resolve a theme of appearances.

We are deep in the heart of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic story, an inversion of standard romantic ritual, “Good Country People.” Ironies pervade the atmosphere, taking the place of the usual Southern humidity. The intelligent but naïve Hulga (she’s changed her name from Joy to better suit her self-image) falls prey to the Bible salesman’s pitch, and figuratively loses the virginity of her self-image, that part of her that no one touches, rarely even herself. He takes it off and keeps it. He’s persuaded Hulga that he loves her, and slowly extracts a kind of commensurate affirmation of her love for him, then he throws down the trump card, and, in spite of all the foreshadowing, if we’re reading the story for the first time, we are just as shocked as she at his next request, for in the gender role switching going on in the good country hayloft, she must now “prove” her love, not by allowing him to take away her virginity (that becomes, in yet another twist, the figurative reading, exaggerated to cartoon dimensions), but allowing him to take off her leg, literally, and he gets the leg up.

Flannery encouraged us to read literally, and not to think of literature as a puzzle to solve. That’s because she’d already done the puzzle solving for us, bringing us Joy.

Related:

Flannery O’Connor and the Coen Brothers

Susan Sontag and a Valentine for Flannery O’Connor

Where Flannery O’Connor meets Julia Roberts on Late Night Talk Shows

Theodore Dreiser and Flannery O’Connor were Neuroscientists, too

Sentence Fragment Run-on

Go. A sentence fragment. Having one must avoid. All the handbooks say. Danger. Caution. Draw ire. Pounce on error. Incomplete though. I think I thought I was running on. Stop.

Go. Thinking of writing post on sentence fragments, how they irk writer reader argument. Murky sirens fill air writing tinnitis. Word wringing. All writing no end to it antecedent. Stop.

Go frag for short. Correction reading for proof of fragments. A post of sentence fragments, a can of worms, the kind that spring in one’s face when one lifts lid. One who? You, Boing! Laughter. Practical joke fragments not funny not at all good writing. Nothing. Go on about nothing? Stop.

Go. Fizzles. Beckett. Master of sentence fragment, incomplete thought, dead end. Dead end. Deaden. Dud. Duds. Fizzling fragments. Not to mention run-ons. Do not. Stop.

Go. Mention them the run-ons go on get in line in front of the fragment and talk spend some time talking run-on go on run-on running on, wait, the comma splice just one kind of run-on remember fragments connecting commas the runaway the runaway the runaway reader the reader who ran out of the text through the margin and fell off the page. Stop.

Go comma splices stop in tracks fragment tool linearly linear. Early line. Line ear. Listen. To the fragments. Words falling, failing. Green to red. Color of hope to color of despair. Save. Transition. Stop.

Go. Mark it up here mark it up there: frag there, R-O here. Stop.

Go. Exceptions. For fragments or run-ons. Poetic license. Incomplete though. “The great head where he toils is all mockery, he is forth again, he’ll be back again” (Beckett, “fizzle 1”). Stop.

Economy of Emergent Stuff

Last week, over on SE Stark Street, a pothole the size of Devil’s Punchbowl emerged in the eastbound lane. Someone had erected a barricade that barely covered the problem. I told Susan a local state of emergency should be declared – call out the Guard. I might even be willing to get back into uniform and man the compressor truck, my old specialty. She scoffed at these ideas, yet several dangerous days passed before a detail was finally dispatched, during Friday rush hour, of course, to fill the gaping pore. I drove slowly through the detour, obeying the bright orange pylons, saw the road crew assembled like a team of dentists, one in the hole up to his neck, picking in the horrible cavity.

Portland was once the City of Bridges. Now it’s the City of Roses. Soon it will be the City of Signs. We see new signs popping up everywhere, like teenage acne on the urban landscape. One new sign currently multiplying rapidly is affixed below stop signs, and reads: “Traffic to the right does not stop.” What did we do before these signs were deemed necessary? There are signs, seemingly randomly distributed, posting a phone number to call to report rampant potholes. I did not see one, though, near the Stark Street Devil’s Punchbowl crisis of last week. James Joyce once challenged his contemporaries to walk across Dublin without passing a pub (though I think he considered the impossibility a good thing). Our challenge locally is to drive cross-town without encountering a roadblock. Yet the roads don’t improve. One new sign I’ve noticed, at the end of our block, reads, at the entrance to what we used to call an alley, “Caution: Unimproved Roadway.” The roadway is obviously unimproved, and the sign does nothing to improve that. In any case, are there any roadways in Portland that are improved? If we don’t soon become the City of Signs, it will be because the City of Potholes sticks first.

While the Stark Street pothole crisis still threatened locally, I happened to pick up the March 19 issue of The New Yorker and turned to James Surowiecki’s “The Financial Page.” I’m a regular reader of the feature, for in a single page Surowiecki is usually able to do for the economy what Robert Frost suggested poetry does for the soul: “a momentary stay against confusion.” But this week I came out of Surowiecki’s “Great Expectations?” feeling like I had just hit a pothole. “One good sign,” Surowiecki argues [that the economy is improving], “is that Americans are buying new cars again.” But where will they drive them, as the country’s road and bridge infrastructure continues to deteriorate, potholes proliferate, and the price of gasoline again threatens to spike? The age of the average car on the street today, Surowiecki says, is at “an all-time high,” suggesting a “pent-up demand for new cars.” But surely the fact that Detroit finally started making better new cars at least in part helps explain the improved longevity of the used car.

But the number of households is not increasing, Surowiecki says, a bad sign, for young people can’t afford to move out on their own, but “when this trend reverses there will be a spike in demand, both for housing, especially rentals, and for all the stuff that you put in a house.” Thus the economic recovery relies on thoroughly anti-Thoreauvian principles, for what we need are fewer, more efficient new cars, improved mass transit of all kinds, smaller, more affordable and more efficient houses, and less stuff, not to mention freedom from oil dependencies. Meantime, the potential of rising rents and the consolidation of available rentals in the hands of a few speculators may conspire to throw both the young and old to and from combined households. And why would a young person want to add to student loan debt the absurd cost of a new car loan? And how will they qualify for home mortgages with increasingly stricter requirements, saddled with their student loans? And then I came across another article, this one pointing economic blame at the same young for their alleged entropic and torpid inactivities.

Over at the HBR Blog Network, I found Sarah Green “stewing all week about a logically sloppy op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times.” Amazingly, the op-ed Green refers to, titled “The Go No-Where Generation,” blames the continuing poor economy in part on young people’s staying home, even citing a downturn in driver licensure as evidence, when, as the Surowiecki article also suggests, what we need of our young people is early licensure for the commute from the new home to the de-benefitted new job to afford to fill the new car with ever more expensive gas and the new home with new stuff. I quickly saw why Green stewed, for the op-ed invokes Steinbeck’s Joads as the prototype of the flexibly mobile go-where-the-jobs-are independent American worker – as if they had a choice. Besides, I was also reminded of John Grisham’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Painted House. Set in Korea War era Arkansas, the story compares and contrasts the stay-at-home, determined but economically doomed cotton farmers with friends and relatives who move up north and find jobs in the automobile factories, and who return to visit driving outlandishly expensive new cars. The irony, not found in the novel, is that not too long ago, the descendants of those local defectors to the north could now be found returning to the south to find jobs in Texas and environs as their manufacturing jobs in the north disappeared.

But what if, Sarah Green suggests, young people have decided on something new, an innovative idea toward value: “The choice young people face,” Green says, “isn’t whether to be jobless in Nevada or employed in North Dakota. It’s whether they’re going to drag themselves unwillingly into an unfair game or decide to invent a new one.”

Frank Delaney On Blogging…

Frank Delaney, whose novel The Last Storyteller, just out in February, I reviewed back on Feb. 27, was featured in a Trib Local interview this morning, and what he had to say about blogging, I want to celebrate, “fur and feathers” and all. One of the questions asked of Delaney was, “How strong is the pulse of literary fiction, criticism and serious examination of literature in the 21st century? Who are today’s shining literary lights?”

Delaney replied: “Great question! People have been saying for generations, ‘Oh, the novel is dead.’ Well, it ain’t – nor is that wonderful American invention, creative nonfiction, nor is biography, nor is political writing. And as well as the books, the commentariat is alive and well. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that it’s healthier than ever, because we now have this wonderful new creature, the Literary Blogger. I’m a massive fan of this gorgeous animal, with all its fur and feathers – for a number of reasons. My main complaint about the general direction of literary criticism over the last century has been – and Joyce is a case in point – that it tended, in its lofty tone and often impenetrable language (not to mention occasional vendetta behavior), to be antidemocratic, to keep certain areas of literature to itself, whereas my own passion is for as many people as possible to be reading as widely as possible. The Literary Bloggers have no axes to grind, they’re not protecting their reputations, they don’t fear being sneered at by other critics, they’re reading what they want to read, writing what they want to write, and they don’t want to keep what they enjoy to themselves. They want to share. They want to expand the constituency of reading. They want to hail and applaud good writing. To my mind this is a very significant development – uneven, I grant, here and there, but, dammit, not as uneven as the generations of formal literary critics, and the blogging intention is so good and so worthy of loud vocal support that you can call it truly a new and, to my mind, incomparably welcome development in the world of reading and writing.”

Reference: Librarian’s Shelf by Lisa Guidarini – An Interview with Ireland’s Pre-eminent Storyteller Frank Delaney, March 16, 2012, by Virginia Freyre, Algonquin Area Public Library.

The Sea Far Away

I was trying to recall Ezra Pound’s line, “And men went down to the sea in ships.” Fine, wonderful line, except that’s not what he said. What Pound said, opening “Canto I,” I now recalled, looking it up, was, “And then went down to the ship.” And I was going to say, that if Pound had lived in the South Santa Monica Bay in the 1960’s, he might have said, “And boys went down to the ocean on surfboards.” But that doesn’t quite work now that I’ve corrected my recall. Pound’s sailors “Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea,” while the South Bay surfers of the 60’s, some watermen, some bleached a weak blond on a clean towel far up on the beach, where the waves couldn’t reach them, but still all caught up in the ancient tides that played on the radio and that licked at the western edge of Los Angeles, paddled out on surfboards and set skegs to waves.

Pound does, in “Canto I,” mention a “sea-bord,” and “A man of no fortune,” and this might describe most surfers of the era (sea bored and poor). Still, Pound’s opening in a remote way does invoke the sport, the art, of surfing, for one catches waves not at the beginning of the wave’s life, but at the end of the swell, as it nears the beach: thus, “And then….” And then paddled out and turned around and caught waves back to the beach. Surf: Pound’s “…water mixed with white flour.”

The waves always look smaller from the beach, and from the waves, sitting on the board, the beach looks, as Pound said, “…not as land looks on a map but as sea bord seen by men sailing” (“Canto LIX”).

So what happens to the surfer sea bored? Just this, from Albert Camus’s essay “The Sea Close By”: “I grew up with the sea and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable. Since then, I have been waiting” (172).

Related:

Albert Camus on the Economic Collapse

Sunset photo, Kodachrome slide, around 1970

From an old role of surfing slides, taken around 1970 – looks like a late Rothko.

Swimming Pools

“Swimming Pools,” a Rothko Exercise

Progress Report: Our Disappearing World

Someday, all of the telephone poles will have vanished. They are gradually, slowly disappearing from view as the wires they hold aloft are placed underground or the signals they link go wireless. Does this mean we are improving? Is the human condition better or worse or the same as we found it yesterday, or better or worse than in 1854, when Thoreau’s Walden was published?

“What is the most important thing we can be thinking about right now?” Buckminster Fuller asked (7-8). Forgiveness, some might say, reading today’s news. Bucky invented new words. Perhaps we should come up with one that means the most important thing we can be thinking about right now.

Jaime Snyder, in his introduction to Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, suggests, remembering his conversations with Bucky, his grandfather, the most important thing we might be thinking about right now is tomorrow. Thoreau would have probably answered the question differently. He might have answered, “Today, this moment.” Thoreau probably would have said now is the most important thing we can be thinking about right now. News of right now hits so hard and quickly these days that we seldom seem to have the chance to think of anything else. Yet what passes for news today seldom seems all that new; it seems more like a rerun from something we heard yesterday. And one wonders how one might make a difference, now or tomorrow.

Fuller’s outlook regarding what we should be thinking about now was different from Thoreau’s because for the first time in our history on this planet we had reached what Fuller called, in his idiosyncratic style, “earthians’ critical moment” (8-9). This moment, which we are still experiencing, might be summed up with the title to one of Fuller’s books, mentioned in Snyder’s introduction, Utopia or Oblivion. The fallacy of the false dichotomy did not seem to bother Fuller. He seems to have believed that we are literally down to one of two choices.

Yet Fuller never lost his optimism, as his “trim-tab” metaphor illustrates. Fuller was a sailor, and sailing metaphors often serve to explain his concepts. Fuller explains that “there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder [of very large ships; he uses the Queen Mary as an example] called a trim-tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim-tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim-tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, ‘Call me Trimtab’” (11).

The landscape, both urban and rural, will be improved with the disappearance of telephone poles. But the old poles symbolize communication, that we are wired, connected, ready to dial. In the past, the poles symbolized progress. Now, they symbolize retro. But there’s something, too, about the poles that I’ll miss. One finds in them symbols and signs, and the linemen are like musicians with their musical triplets connecting across the high wires. There’s a kind of beauty to the poles that only a human could have created and only a human might miss. Telephone poles and newspapers: a disappearing world. What will take their place? And how will we make a difference? Perhaps these are the questions we should be thinking about right now.

Related:

• On Universe: A Conversation Between Thoreau and Bucky
• What Should We Keep? The R. Buckminster Fuller Archive
• Transition: From Walled-in with Thoreau to Take-off with Buckminster Fuller
• What we will miss when newspapers disappear

Yet More on the Disappearance of Newspapers; or, Welcome to Spring Training!

I went out this morning to snag The Oregonian from its usual pitch somewhere across the front drive area, but it was nowhere to be found. It was a lovely, solid gold morning. The car windows were a bit frozen still, but the blue and yellow sky was promising the answer e. e. cummings suggested the earth provides to the “how often” questions posed by the “prurient philosophers…,” “science prodded…,” and “religions…squeezing…”: “thou answerest them only with spring,” cummings said.

So I took his answer and coffee cup and sauntered off into the back yard to soak up some morning rays. The grape I had moved yesterday from the back fence to the old patio looks like it likes its new home – more sun!

After a few Thoreauvian moments spent contemplating the grape, the sun, the greens, blues, and yellows of the fine print spring morning, I went back inside to report to Susan the disappearance of the newspaper. She of course, in her offline logic, accused me of cancelling it. I did not cancel it. I like the newspaper.

Susan tried the phone to circulations or delivery or somebody, got busy signals, but then, looking out the nook window, exclaimed, “There’s our newspaper!” “Where?” “On the car window!”

“Wow, what a pitch,” I said, “and Spring Training is underway!”

Related:

What we will miss when newspapers disappear

Where Richard Rodgriguez meets Bartleby, the Scrivener

Rothko at the Portland Art Museum

The Rothko installation yesterday at the Portland Art Museum felt claustrophobic. The fabric covered faux walls created a maze of high vertical columns separated by narrow horizontal spaces, forcing the large Rothko paintings, which I’d been curious to see close up and in person, too close to one another, like pictures taped to the wall in a grade school classroom art show, parents and friends crowding in to see.

These large Rothko pieces, the ones he painted toward the end, are best viewed from a distance in proportion to the size of the piece, but everyone wanted to see them both up close and far away, myself included. I was surprised to find the paint so thinly applied on most of the large pieces. In some, I could see the weft of the canvas. Of course, I was standing too close, bringing both my amateur eye and my reading classes to the subject. One result of everyone wanting to be at once near and far, combined with the cloistered installation, was that viewers kept crisscrossing in one another’s view. But the crowded effect also created the feel of being part of an audience, which I appreciated.

Why does the museum have the feel of a church, viewers whispering as if performing the Stations of the Cross, usher-guards at every corner like nuns ready to pinch the ear of the tinkerer? Of course, my sensing a reverent whisper could have been the result of my asymmetrical hearing condition, which creates a peculiar point of view not shared by the whole audience. This distorted point of view is important, though, for doesn’t everyone suffer some asymmetrical perspective, the result of imperfect tuning, a slant eye, a limp? The Portland Art Museum has a generous age 55 senior ticket limit, and I had snuck in at the senior rate in spite of my youthful looks, the ticket-seller discretely not asking to see my ID. Once in the show though, my senior frailties began to make up for the reduced ticket price.

From a distance, immediately my favorite Rothko was a green over blue rectangle about 10 feet high and 14 feet wide (the museum info-cards inexplicitly did not show dimensions, just date and title – though most of the later Rothko pieces are simply numbered or “untitled”).  From a distance, this blue-green was filled with luminous, almost phosphorescent, watery colors like we find in Monet’s water lilies, yet when viewed close up, I saw brown splotches in the green, dull beige drops on the blue, the color of ordinary dirt. I was also surprised at the way the rectangular boxes of color swirled and clouded at the edges, like a broken ocean wave, like surf. But as I browsed around, I soon realized that every combination of colors was represented, reds and blues, oranges and yellows, purples and greens, and I liked them all, and did not need a favorite.

The Rothko exhibit is chronologically arranged, and I had entered from the end. Still, the sense of development, of an expressive evolution, from recognizable shapes to abstract color fields over the course of the artist’s life was easily realized and a pleasure to see. I particularly enjoyed the early pieces, unknown to me, women on a beach, people in a subway, one small piece of several large women, the circle of women reminding me of Matisse, the female form beautiful in a near-realistic rendition of shapely fat. I looked in these early Rothko pieces for some sign of things to come. A middle piece contained just vestiges of shapes. I dared to guess at the shapes, but I’m not sure this is allowed. Rothko’s end period is laced with shadow, grays and blacks, purple stripped of its nobility. I thought of Beckett and his late characters, seniors all and barely still citizens of some bizarre place, blind and hobbling, but still trying to express what they see or feel, nothing, and what nothing looks and feels like, and what nothing tastes like, and smells like, and sounds like.

Practically ruining the entire installation, and inviting dilettante comment, into which I happily step, the museum posted a quote above the entry pavilion, something to the effect of the subject of modern painting being the painting itself. This is the reductio ad absurdum of modernist criticism, and is often applied to poetry, music, whatever. If nothing else, the Rothko paintings are about money, which suggests some attempt to persuade someone of something. This is one peculiar experience of the museum, where art gets institutionalized, its importance inflated to the size of zeppelins floating aimlessly above the heads of the crowd.

The Art, Woe, Slop, and Toe of the Book Review

In an era of sinking readership, closing bookstores, the disappearance of newspapers, and Google making us stupid, who cares about book reviews? The book review is the grownup version of the book report, the nefarious writing assignment where students first learn to plagiarize. Publishing is in a hard market, as they say in the insurance trade (rates up, coverage down), but book reviews have softened, a bummer for the pros, happily for the amateurs. We tried our hand at a book review the other day, having read the book with a review in mind, The Last Storyteller, by Frank Delaney.

Reading with writing in mind changes the act of reading, for we are no longer Salinger’s coveted general interest reader, who reads and runs sans comment. We loiter in the margins, jotting down questions we’d like to ask the author. We’re going to have to say something about what we read, or say something about how we felt while we were reading, but putting into words how we feel about a book is like putting on a tie, and we drift away from the text, ignoring the general book review rubric, if there is one.

The book review is as good a place as any to begin to think about purposeful writing. Writing with a purpose implies an audience, and if one is to stand before an audience, particularly a hostile (or perhaps worse, an indifferent) group, with any hope of persuading, some strategic plan might prove useful. To some, writing with a purpose might take all the fun out of the sails.

Ah, but what’s the purpose of the average book review – to wrestle the writer to the ground? A book reviewer might think like a reporter, an investigative reporter, even a detective of sorts, trying to solve, not a crime, but a puzzle, perhaps. Some readers don’t like puzzles. Puzzles can make one feel stupid, and, as Rene Char said, “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.” But how much worse for the bird when what the reviewer wants to do is shoot her from the tree with a slingshot?

A brief summary of one aspect of contemporary book reviewing may be found in an SF Gate article by Heidi Benson (untitled, on-line version, July, 2003). I’m familiar with The Believer book reviewing philosophy she describes, having been a Believer subscriber since almost its inception, but I’d not heard of Dale Peck, quoted by Heidi as an example of a snarking, negative reviewer, so I read Peck’s review (referenced by Heidi) of Rick Moody (Moody I’ve read only in The Believer – I’ve not read his novels), which begins, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation,” and continues, later, “I mean to say only that he [Rick Moody] is a bad writer. But bad writing has consequences.”

But, in part, it’s those consequences that Peck’s review is about, not Moody. Though Peck does a professional job of explicating samples of Moody’s prose, what he really wants to argue is that the modern novel as developed by the later James Joyce and company is responsible for what Peck sees as today’s literary mess (exemplified by Moody). In short, I assumed, Peck values realism, maybe naturalism, and for a good reason: he thinks literature could be more instrumental in solving contemporary problems if it were more purposeful and accessible, if, in short, it were more meaningful, if it were about something other than itself. Peck concludes with a vengeful rant against the modern novel, as follows:

“All I’m suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid—just plain stupid—tomes of DeLillo.”

Fine, but I’d never heard of Dale Peck, so I looked up one of his books on Amazon, but I was so appalled, nay, horrified, by the excerpt from the Publishers Weekly review showing on Amazon that I had to shut down my computer and go for a walk. I’m back now, from the walk, but I still can’t believe that the Peck who wrote Body Surfing is the same guy that wrote the New Republic review. And, of course, since I am an actual, real, natural, old-time body surfer, boogie boarder, and surfboarder, I’m more than horrified at Peck’s book, I’m annoyed and disappointed, for he has, literally, defiled the surfing term with his title over that book. (And there’s my review of Peck’s book, which I’ve not read and will not read.)

Still, though, there’s a lesson there too, for the reader and the book reviewer in me (if he’s still there, after all this), for wouldn’t we agree that Stephen King is a terrible romance comedy writer? Of course not, because King doesn’t try to write romantic comedies. But one’s preference for romance comedy doesn’t make Stephen King a bad writer. Nor does my being appalled by the Amazon review make Peck’s book a bad one. We shouldn’t criticize something for not being what it was not intended to be. But if that’s true, then we shouldn’t fault Peck for criticizing Moody’s intentions. But this is where things get hard, for we don’t have time to read everything, so what should we be reading? Some criticism can be helpful. Criticism should help us understand the author’s intentions. And, once that’s done, help us understand how effectively those intentions were carried out. Good writing then becomes that which achieves its objectives, even if we don’t happen to like those objectives. n+1 wrote something up on Peck in April of 2004 which would seem to have put the matter to rest. Once again, of course, I’m way late to the party, and I’m not sure if I’m catching up or falling farther behind.

Where we Freak Out! and blame it on the cat

Ever wonder where questions like these originate, questions like “What’s got into you?” or “What’s eating you?”

Turns out, these questions might be literal, not figurative at all.

What’s got into you, literally, according to an Atlantic article arriving via snailman yesterday, is cat parasite. You know the one, the reason moms-to-be should avoid cat feces. I’m not making this stuff up. You can read about it here: “How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy, by Kathleen McAuliffe, about Jaroslav Flegr, a Czech evolutionary biologist, who argues that the cat parasite “may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons.” It’s one of those articles where you come away yelling, “I knew it! I knew this all along”!

Flegr’s hypothesis goes something like this: the cat parasite can’t reproduce in the human, so it needs to get back into the cat. Enter Frank Zappa and Suzie Creamcheese, for the parasite then tries to manipulate the host into releasing it back out into the wild, into the cat, thus driving the host to Freak Out! level. Well, that’s the idea (lay version), and it’s getting credible attention from the scientific community.

And not only that, but another article just in from Jonah Lehrer, my favorite neuroscience journalist, talking about E. O. Wilson’s turnabout on altruism, a reversal that has Dawkins and his supposedly Darwinian cohort up in arms, for the survival of the fittestists can’t explain altruism from their cornered point of view. As Jonah says in the article, “This is science with existential stakes.” Dawkins’s view is that genes are selfish, that human behavior is driven only by self-interest, by the will to survive. The opposing viewpoint, which Wilson seems to be inching toward, is that human behavior is driven at least as much by cooperation, and that the idea of cooperation might even exist at the gene level.

“Kin and Kind: A fight about the genetics of altruism,” the Lehrer article, is behind the New Yorker paywall, but I don’t have my hard copy yet, but I couldn’t wait, so I read it in the digital version, but which you need a subscription for, but I rarely go there, preferring the hard copy, and I couldn’t remember my user name and password and had to email Help (Freak Out!), resulting in about half a dozen emails, all of which took me longer than reading the article, and I began to wonder if the cat parasite wasn’t at work.

Note: On Wednesday, February 29th, at 3 P.M. E.T., Lehrer will answer readers’ questions in a live chat. Follow link to New Yorker site.

Related:

E. O. Wilson’s Happy Ant in Mary Midgley’s Primate Picnic

Now is the Science of our Discontent: E. O. Wilson and the Sacrifice of Science

Frank Delaney: The Last Storyteller

Framed within the foreshadowing of an Irish griot’s fantastic folk tales, Frank Delaney’s The Last Storyteller mixes myth with the mirth and mire of 20^th Century Irish reality. The book is full of stories crisply told, characters sketched and fully drawn in telling dialog, telling about how and why and when and where certain things happened, all in a narrative-descriptive flow that runs like a river, every story a stream that pours into the same thirsty human river.

The foreground of most of the telling takes place in the 1950’s. But seemingly eternal are the Irish themes that haunt the characters: hunger, poverty, and violence both inside and outside the home. And divorce (an emigration from the home), remorse, and the anger and temper and guilt that accompany these human emotions.

But a few jokes get told too, one about a snail who sells encyclopedias (a door to door snailsman), another about a talking frog, for example. How these get mixed in with a story that includes a history of the Irish Republican Army is well worth the read.

The text, 385 pages in hardback, is composed of eight parts, including a story-closing epilogue (it’s not a novel that ends on a cliff), and 150 chapters. The short chapters clip along like a train ride crisscrossing the river of stories.

There’s a love story, of course, which involves its distant cousin, jealousy: “See Ireland as a village and you will completely understand,” our narrator, Ben MacCarthy, tells his children, for the main story is a memoir told by a professional Irish folklorist (a kind of Irish Alan Lomax), written to his children.

Is the narrator reliable? In other words, are the stories true? It’s true he keeps what he calls “a record,” the folklore a subtext, for he creates his own back-story, and then explicates it himself.

“I mean to tell it all. Nothing held back. Think of it as the higher purpose for this family memoir. If that’s what we’re calling it. Some memoir. In which your father seems, with icy calculation, either to have lost his mind or abandoned his principles. Or both. Let me begin with the planning.” But this is the beginning of Chapter 116. In any case, like Ben’s mentor mythmaker, John Jacob O’Neill, Delaney “never for a second lost the original thread.” For all along Ben seems to be apologizing for something. Actions have consequences, and some actions simply can never be reversed, and some actions, like seeds, seem to have their source in other actions.

How is it that Ireland produces so many great storytellers? Well, they’ve a story to tell, that’s for sure. So Delaney joins Joyce, Beckett, Edna O’Brien, and particularly Roddy Doyle, whose own trilogy, The Last Roundup, provides yet another view of the Irish century. Perhaps the single thread that links these writers together is explained by Ben, talking about the Irish storytellers: “…they cared only for the telling.”

Frank Delaney is currently creating a podcast reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Delaney appears to be one of those rare, erudite scholars who are able to communicate across cultural and idiosyncratic experience or educational boundaries to share common and important stories. There’s no doubt about his storytelling credibility, and it’s on full display in The Last Storyteller (published this February by Random House).

Available from Amazon,

or from BN.com,

or from IndieBound,

or buy local, from Powells.

On Universe: A Conversation Between Thoreau and Bucky

Thoreau: “What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!”

Fuller: “Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs.”

Thoreau: “Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.”

Fuller: “This is the essence of human evolution upon Spaceship Earth. If the present planting of humanity upon Spaceship Earth cannot comprehend this inexorable process and discipline itself to serve exclusively that function of metaphysical mastering of the physical it will be discontinued, and its potential mission in universe will be carried on by the metaphysically endowed capabilities of other beings on other spaceship planets of universe.”

Thoreau: “I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.”

Fuller: “Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.”

Thoreau: “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions.”

Fuller: “Only as he learned to generalize fundamental principles of physical universe did man learn to use his intellect effectively.”

Thoreau: “The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe’s Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay.”

Fuller: “We are faced with an entirely new relationship to the universe.”

Thoreau: “Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.”

Fuller: “Can we think of, and state adequately and incisively, what we mean by universe?”

Thoreau: “Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask.”

Fuller: “But the finite physical universe did not include the metaphysical weightless experiences of universe.”

Thoreau: “The universe is wider than our views of it.”

Fuller: “The universe is the aggregate of all of humanity’s consciously-apprehended and communicated experience with the nonsimultaneous, nonidentical, and only partially overlapping, always complementary, weighable and unweighable, ever omnitransforming, event sequences.”

Thoreau: “In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

All quotes, juxtapositions around universe, taken from Thoreau’s Walden and Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

Fuller, R. Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. First published, 1969. New edition, Baden/Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2008/2011 [Edited with Introduction by Jaime Snyder]. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Boston: Beacon Press, July 15, 2004 [Introduction and Annotations by Bill McKibben]. Print.

Related:

• What Should We Keep? The R. Buckminster Fuller Archive
• Transition: From Walled-in with Thoreau to Take-off with Buckminster Fuller
• Walden: From “The Pond in Winter” to “Spring”
• On the ice with Thoreau
• What some others have said about Thoreau’s Walden
• A Monstrous Metaphor Fished from Walden Pond
• A Sixth Way of Looking at Walden: Deliberately Seeking Simplicity
• It is told in sounds in Thoreau’s Walden
• Epizeuxis, epizeuxis, epizeuxis! in Thoreau’s Walden
• Reading Directions for Thoreau’s Walden
• Mapping a Reading of Thoreau’s Walden
• Unpacking the Aphorism to Pull Out the Pith
• On Thoreau On Clothing
• An Economy of One’s Own

What Should We Keep? The R. Buckminster Fuller Archive

The R. Buckminster Fuller Archive is now maintained at the Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.  Stanford provides access to the archive via the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection. Readers can create an account (free) at the registration page of the Stanford Library site.

The Welcome Page of Stanford’s Fuller Collection provides a gloss of what is included: “The R. Buckminster Fuller Collection documents the life and work of this 20th century polymath, and contains his personal archive, correspondence, manuscripts, drawings and audio-visual materials relating to his career as an architect, mathematician, inventor and social critic.”

But that brief, explanatory note is just the tip of the pyramid, for Fuller’s Archive is a gargantuan pack rat’s dream, or nightmare, depending on your point of view. Stanford librarians spent six years cataloging Fuller’s stuff. Hsiao-Yun Chu, who worked on the project, explains why it took so long: “…his former archivist estimated the weight of the archive to be ninety thousand pounds” (8). Pounds of what, exactly? The rat was “polyphagous” (6), apparently: “…not only every piece of paper touched by Fuller, in chronological order [thus Fuller’s name for it, the “Dymaxion Chronofile”], but newspaper clippings, recordings of speaking engagements…tons of papers, thousands of hours of audio and video footage, and hundreds of models and assorted artifacts” (6). Imagine never throwing away a receipt, a bill, a cancelled check, a napkin on which you’ve outlined your next invention, for the archive also includes, according to Chu, “…outgoing and incoming personal and business correspondence, receipts, greeting cards, business cards…photographs…the ephemera of his life” (7). Fuller lived from 1895 to 1983, a full life, and it’s probably just as well that he never saw Facebook or Twitter.

Why the obsession? Chu says that the archive “is a central phenomenon in Fuller’s story, arguably the most important ‘construction’ of his career, and certainly the masterpiece of his life” (6). There is, of course, a paradox, for the archive seems anti-Thoreauvian in its lack of simplicity, a value Fuller shared with Thoreau. Yet the filing system was simple. Things were filed according to “when,” not “what.” Fuller argued, Chu explains, that if he could remember “when” something had happened, he could find “what” he was looking for (9). And we shouldn’t necessarily look for the kind of economy of scale sought by business plans, for, as Chu says, “The amassing of the archive was a lifelong creative act that can easily be seen as a masterpiece of conceptual art” (9). Yes, but we can imagine the work of art being wrapped by the artist Christo, for what do we do with all our stuff, and what should we keep?

But maybe there was another reason for Fuller’s obsession to collect everything: synergy. Fuller defined synergy as “…behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s separate parts or any subassembly of the system’s parts” (78). There isn’t anything in any of the separate parts of the Fuller Archive that predicts, explains, or contains R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller, like the universe, “…is synergetic – unpredicted by its separate parts” (79). And the archive would also seem to fit into Fuller’s definition of universe: “…the nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping, micro-macro, always and everywhere transforming, physical and metaphysical, omni-complementary but nonidentical events” (68). Who’s got the tab?

Not only have I failed to keep much in the way of a personal archive of any kind of obviously worthless stuff, but I’ve thrown away potentially valuable personal archival material, at least twice, that I now miss and regret tossing, including a collection of letters written when I was on active duty, and a big storage box of old writing, assorted notebooks, college papers, that had been sitting in the basement for years. Not that Stanford would ever have shown an interest, but some close to me have indeed expressed a bit of frustration at my giving up perhaps prematurely what the family might someday have shown an interest in. So it goes. But still, what should we keep?

Not too long ago, the consequence of a grade school reunion, an old friend sent me a clipping from a 1964 El Segundo Herald (see insert, above left). So far, I’ve not thrown it away, but it doesn’t exactly constitute an archive, and hopefully we can see it’s not really me, synergistically speaking.

Fuller, R. Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. First published, 1969. New edition, Baden/Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2008/2011 [Edited with Introduction by Jaime Snyder]. Print.

Chu, Hsiao-Yun. “Paper Mausoleum: The Archive of R. Buckminster Fuller.” New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller. Eds. Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto G. Trujillo. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009. 6-22. Print.

Transition: From Walled-in with Thoreau to Take-off with Buckminster Fuller

“We can never get enough of nature,” Thoreau says (297), yet we will soon have turned the entire planet into garbage. But, as Slavoj Žižek has said, we must learn to love garbage, for it reflects our imperfections (Examined Life, at 1:04:40). “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds,” Thoreau says, in the Walden chapter titled “Conclusion” (303). He was aware of the pun. In “The Ponds” chapter, he says, “I detect the paver. If the name was not derived from that of some English locality, – Saffron Walden, for instance – one might suppose that it was called, originally, Walled-in Pond” (173).

“The universe is wider than our views of it,” Thoreau says (299), yet he’s limited to worldwide travel in wooden boats. But he’s aware of the limitation, and the ambiguity of his predicament: “The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing” (299). Travel, for vacation or business, amounts to the same thing, for we cannot vacate ourselves, but must bring us with us on any trip. Thus Thoreau proposes that we travel to “whole new continents and worlds within [us], opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought,” for “there are continents and seas in the moral world” (300). And why should we make such a trip? “How worn and dusty the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world” (302). He “will pass an invisible boundary” (303). How will he pay for the trip? “Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul” (308).

“What is the most important thing we can be thinking about?,” Buckminster Fuller asked his grandson on the way to LAX (8). Thoreau comments, as if riding in the backseat of the car, “My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose, dress it as you will” (308).

And a planet is a planet, Fuller might have responded, and how will we address it? “What are men celebrating?,” Thoreau asks (308). Thoreau was not a specialist, and he celebrates, in Walden, his non-specialist skills, the ability to cross over the boundaries of disciplines. This is why there are so many ways of looking at Walden, and why Thoreau (like Fuller) was an inventor – his vision was not walled-in by the format of a specialized discipline. Buckminster Fuller was also a non-specialist who avoided the traps of specialization and categories (because, as we will see Fuller explain, specialization leads to extinction). And specialization leads to artificial categorical definitions of all kinds that place claims on individual lives: “This ‘sovereign’ – meaning top-weapons enforced – ‘national’ claim upon humans born in various lands leads to ever more severely specialized servitude and highly personalized identity classification,” Fuller says. “As a consequence of the slavish ‘categoryitis,’ the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions ‘Where do you live?’ ‘What are you?’ ‘What religion?’ ‘What race?’ What nationality?’ are all thought of today as logical questions,” yet, Fuller says, “These questions are absurd” (p. 31). The specialist is the go-to man, yet Fuller says, “All universities have been progressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable” (25), dangerous assumptions, for, as Fuller says, “society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking” (24).

Thoreau was a comprehensive thinker, but he only glimpsed, in his criticism of the railroad, the damage that was to occur, or how worldwide poverty would belie his dictum, “Love your life, poor as it is” (307). He would have been appalled at the costs we’ve incurred, the lack of generalist and comprehensive thinking. Thoreau’s Walden was published in 1854, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in 1969. The juxtaposition of the two works (though published 115 years apart) creates a dialog between Thoreau and Fuller, a conversation that might suggest answers to where we’ve been, where we might have gone, where we appear to be headed, and where we still might have the possibility to go.

Fuller, R. Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. First published, 1969. New edition, Baden/Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2008/2011 [Edited with Introduction by Jaime Snyder].

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Boston: Beacon Press, July 15, 2004 [Introduction and Annotations by Bill McKibben].