Dream of university life

 I was overhearing a colleague tell a student that his idea for a project on short stories was incoherent, because, Kafka, Borges, Faulkner, etc...  were too dissimilar.  There was no common thread. The student's idea did seem bad to me in that context. Then I had to go to another professor's office (not in my department.) She (second colleague) filled me in about the incoherence of this student's work. I noticed she didn't have a computer in her office, but when I told her this she pushed a button and a computer unfolded itself from the wall on its own little platform. I thought that was too much work, but now, in waking life, it would be a pretty cool design to have.  

Still asleep, in a metadream, I was telling someone about my dream of this short story project and consulting with other colleagues.  

Then I had to go to a third colleague's office, on another floor of the building. I took an elevator and found myself in a large open floor plan office; I asked someone where Annie's office was. It was there, I was told, and Annie herself soon appeared. Then we saw a large, whitish bison that had wandered into the building. I was wondering how it had climbed the stairs.  

luMpInG sPlitTiNg

 Language lumps and splits.  Lumping is making a big category.  Splitting is dividing categories up into smaller ones. These operations are arbitrary, in the sense that the size of the categories is arbitrary.  

Even concrete language is abstract. Even a "concrete" noun like cat is a word for a category, usually. 

Language characterizes, casts an attitude over something. It carries baggage, implications.  

The Bride and the Bachelors

 I've been reading this book, The Bride and the Bachelors, by C. Tomkins, that I picked up a few years ago in a used book store and found again in my office where many random books have taken up residence. It was published in the 60s, and devoted to figures of the avant-garde. It makes me realize what a wonderful period this was. Duchamp, Cage, Tinguely, Rauschsenberg, and Cunningham. There are many connections among theses figures, admirations and mutual admirations. Kenneth Koch makes a brief appearance.  

It makes me realize that the 60s is an avant-garde period. Aside from these five men, there was Ornette and Coltrane. I wondered why there is music, visual art, and dance in this book, but not literature. Well, maybe John Cage as a writer... What poet of that period would you put in this exalted company?  I would say Frank O'Hara, who is my favorite poet. Some would say Charles Olson.  Curiously, Tomkins speaks of him as "Olsen." It is a male dominated period, to be sure, and many of them were gay (a fact not mentioned by Calvin Tomkins.). Of course, the whole group of poet born around '26, with Ginsberg, Spicer, Creeley...  

I am starting now the last chapter, on Merce Cunningham. His central idea is to have music and dance going on at the same time, but not coordinated. They are not dancing to the music. Cage and Cunningham would go away from each other, and work on the music and choreography separately. This is brilliant. I think it is a great thing that I know next to nothing about dance, not because I am proud of my ignorance, but that it represents an area for growth for me.  

Anyway, reading this is like removing an obstacle to my creativity.  Rauschenberg, for example, is indifferent to criticism, and if someone says what he does is not "art," he doesn't care. What does it matter what you call it? He just wants to do it, whatever it is.  

Cheney

 The guy Dick Cheney shot by accident while he was vice-president has died. (At 95, unrelated to the accident, I'm thinking.). Anyway, that reminds me of a joke.

Cheney and the president (Bush) were out hunting, and Cheney accidentally shoots Bush. He calls 911 frantically as says "I've shot the president!  I killed him!"  The 911 operator tries to calm him and says, "First, make he's really dead..."  "Ok," says Cheney... 

BOOM!  

ITA

 I was taught to read with this in first grade, in 1966 or thereabouts. Then, in second grade, we made the transition to standard English orthography. All I remember was a book by Milne, like Now we are six, or maybe, When We Were Very Young. It wasn't hard to switch to normal spelling, since I already knew the principle of correspondence between sounds and letters. I wasn't a great student, and was "slow" at doing the stupid worksheets we had to do.  It wasn't until 3rd grade that something clicked in my brain and I became relatively smart. 

This fell out of favor with phonics falling out of favor. I think the best reading is with books that give children something of the materiality of language. That is why nursery rhymes, or Dr. Seuss, are very good. I remember too A Child's Garden of Verses.  

Aside from an ignorance of neuroscience, there is also an indifference to linguistics in the devaluing of phonics.  

We did new math, too, when we were learning. It was very abstract, and did not help me learn math.  It was trying to make simple arithmetic principles into graduate level number theory.  

Sold a story

 I read an article in the NYRB about a podcast about reading instruction.  Then, I listened to the podcast all in one day. That's the kind of rabbit hole I fall into on some weekends.  

It is about how certain ideas about reading derived from so-called "progressive" education lead children to fail to learn to read. The idea is that you should teach children to guess about what a word is rather than to decipher it phonetically.  But this ends up being a strategy used by people who don't know how to read very well. There is a whole industry devoted to promoting these guessing, or "cueing" strategies.  

The rhetoric of the kind of progressive approach is cloaked in "holistic" language that makes it seem nice. Whole word and whole language, etc... But the key take-away is that this approach ignores the brain science itself. Professors of education are not neuro-scientists, but perhaps they should be. 

The whole podcast is quite devastating.  The response by those who continue to promote this approach as been extremely lame.   

Phonics is associated with conservatives, and whole language with more "progressive" approaches. It made me think, too, of composition studies. A lot of the stuff in that discipline seems motivated by ideological considerations. 

Also, I'm thinking that language acquisition begins with prosody, and so little children are very good already at sound.  

1st poem of 2023

 

Poet, do you wash your clothes by hand?

Poet, do you hang them up to dry?

Poet, have your poems seen the wind?

Poet, have your poems seen the light of day?

Where did you learn that you weren't a poet

and what do you do to become one after all?

There's a guy on twitter posting semi-pretentious [or wholly pretentious] questions to poets, like how do your poems venerate the earth, so he inspired this poem from me.