Semester finals, and a first foray into podcasting

Why am I here?

The original import of that question, asking it not in a cosmic but a straightforwardly literal sense, hit me a long time ago in the school cafeteria at GHS. It was finals week the end of second semester, and I was there to wait for a period when I had an exam to take. That was when it first occurred to me to question, in anything more than a bellyaching way, what I had been doing in school all those years. In some ways it is that questioning which I am still spinning out whenever I sit down to write on the sorts of topics that I gather here.

And it is in that literal sense of being located at school, too, that I was asking it again after I had given my last exam last week and finished whatever grading and planning I could find to do. The office didn't have any work for me to do. They suggested I check in the library, seemingly wishing we could all just leave and go outside, but stopping short of saying so.

In the event, there was a sub in the library, too, so there wasn't anything else we could make the executive decision to have me do. I'd already made some good headway on Exploring the Hobbit for my class which is still months away, so when I saw they had a copy of The Righteous Mind, I started reading that. Fascinating...

A few classes came in. A student came over and asked if I minded if he sat at the computer next to me. I looked around and saw plenty of open seats, said it was fine, and asked him in turn if I should make room for people who actually needed computers, since I was only reading. No, he explained, it was just that teachers usually weren't in that area. I mentioned that I was a sub, and he asked how I liked that, and so we got to talking. It seemed like he was not just being polite, that he really wanted to talk. I told him about my classes and the pros and cons of subbing, and I eventually got a question in about what he was working on--his computer was taking forever to log in after an update--so he told me all about his research essay on the death penalty. As his teacher had explained, it was as if he and his classmates had just arrived to a dinner party where the guests had been talking for awhile, so before giving his opinion, it would be best to listen first to what was being said--a version of Kenneth Bruffee's Conversation of Mankind, I would guess, though maybe the teacher had come up with the metaphor independently. But it seemed to have worked in this student's case: he had a carefully balanced exposition of the topic ready, with some pros and cons of his own to highlight, if the computer ever booted up.

Without going into too much of the rest of what we discussed, though, I just share this anecdote as an illustration of a point whose simplicity might cause us to overlook its powerful significance: that when possible, we should go ahead and do the thing we know to be right, even if it seems easier and totally harmless not to. I could have gone home, left by a side door, or probably even walked straight out the main entrance without anyone making a fuss, but then I would have missed out on starting that book and meeting that student.

It's a small example of the same thing Peterson loves to point about about Solzhenitsyn in the gulag, you see, but I'm afraid that if I say that up front, people will have trouble hearing it.

Another version of this story is embedded in the Alexander Schmid podcast, episode 016. His other episodes are mainly about the Iliad, but he plans to go on and discuss all the major epics he's been teaching for the past several years. Godspeed! Hopefully I'll get to talk on there regularly, and hopefully, too, there will be some people listening.

A source of metaphors for, and literally the grounds of, human nature: The Gene

In the essay "On Writing Stories" placed towards the beginning of his new book of essays, Philip Pullman says,

"So: where are you going to start, and what are you going to say?
There's an image here from science which I find useful when I think about this. Coleridge, apparently, used to go to scientific lectures to renew his sock of metaphors, and while I would never dream of saying that the main function of science is the production of metaphors for subsequent development in the arts, science is damned useful to steal from" (25).

Then towards the end of The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee takes up the same idea, only from the opposite end, as it were:

"You cannot read The Plague except as a thinly disguised allegory of human nature. The genome is also a testing ground for our fallibilities and desires, although reading it does not require understanding allegories or metaphors. What we read and write into our genome is our fallibilities, desires, and ambitions. It is human nature" (479).

Throughout the book, Mukherjee, evidently a tremendous reader as well as a brilliant writer, keeps drawing on poetry for chapter monographs, and dropping in lines of it here and there in the middle of paragraphs as a sort of trail of evocative bread crumbs.

I might take issue with the read of Camus' book, or rather the dogmatic statement shutting down other possible readings, but this is some other person's view he heard once, Mukherjee explains; and of course the quote is taken out of context from a 500-page, magisterial work of science and history, and idiomatically the phrase "you cannot read...except as..." depends a lot on tone of voice for how hard you want to push that opinion, how far you intend it merely as polemical, provocative. As for "thinly disguised allegory," well, that's simply a cliche. Particularly in the light of the Tolkien-Olsen strictures for definition and application of allegory, it's not so easy to pin down as the demotic use might suggest.

To say something is something else is to make a metaphor. To do so in light of a rich cultural system of meanings is to write an allegory (I still need to try to read The Fairy Queene and Macrobius and more Chaucer and make up my own mind about this stuff). I don't think anyone fully understands this process. The poetic making of metaphor or allegory rivals the scientific analysis and theorizing of genetics or evolution in complexity. In Mukherjee's account, proposing the metaphor of the gene as abhed, indivisible, as the biological counterpart of an atom of matter or a byte (bit?) of data, taking the philological as well as personal ("intimate") viewpoint as an inspiration for the story of the gene and aligning it with these two similar and crucial concepts which have unfolded in such astonishing technological developments and ideological ramifications--well, it all makes for quite a good book. And, as Pullman reminds us, we're free to read it how we will, and take from it what we will.

Reading Shakespeare in the fall, Woolf in winter

We went ahead with our Shakespeare in the fall and Woolf in the winter: Antony and Cleopatra in October, Macbeth in November, then A Room of One's Own in January, with a break in December to read Dickens' A Christmas Carol. We continue to meet in the downtown library 3rd floor boardroom. We continue to be mostly Steph and me and Paul, but the group is open to anyone. You don't even have to have read the book (because it turns out it's sort of difficult to do all the time, and who's to say, after all, what the threshold is for having read, as Brian likes to point out.)

Octavia’s role in the play, entrances and exits, the murder of Pompey, interruptions and unheard speeches were all things we discussed in October. In Macbeth we looked at motivations and ghosts, dreams and reality, Lady Macbeth and the witches and whose idea it was really to do, and do, and do, who does what and who's the victim. A Room of One's Own prompted some reflections on the frame narratives and the thread of thought interrupted at the beginning and perhaps returned to at the end.

Next in February we're reading A Brave New World. We'll meet on the last Saturday at 4 pm.

Signum Academy and the idea of online ed: open letter to Jordan Peterson

Seeing their call for preceptors in the summer of 2015 brought me back in touch with Professor Olsen at Signum University, and I was astonished at all the work he'd done there since he'd turned to it full-time. Without a PhD I'm not likely to get a chance to teach at that level, though since then I've spent some time working on an analogue to graduate-level courses for the young people I do get to teach. Such as it is: Signum Academy on Outschool. Perhaps I could do a lot more if I were to turn to this full-time, but I think I'd miss teaching, and a steady paycheck doesn't hurt, either, but who knows, it could grow to that point, or I could be driven to it by some other avenue. I'm still not clear how much was pull, how much push, in Professor Olsen's decision.

Having the imprimatur of the illustrious Alexander Schmid, then, I got onto another, Canadian longitude of the online ed world: the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. Fascinating!

Here is what I had to say after listening to about 30 podcasts:

Dear Dr Peterson:

A friend from St John's College put me onto your podcast, and I think it's tremendous. Thanks for bringing fresh attention to the value of reading great books! In a few of your talks you mention Tolkien, and elsewhere you discuss plans for an online university, so I thought you might like to check out Signum University, if you haven't already. It's the project of Corey Olsen, aka The Tolkien Professor, and I think the two of you might have a lot in common! One other refrain of yours is your interest in the connection between Marx and the postmodernists. I think it might be interesting to trace Marx's ideas backward in history, too, though: he was deeply influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach, of course, and the latter's ideas in The Essence of Christianity (translated by George Eliot, of all people!) seem to me very much in line with some of your own about reading the Bible in a psychological light. Lastly, as an admirer of Milton, you might be interested in Philip Pullman's works. His stories first introduced me to great books, and his essays and speeches on writing and culture rival your own! I share these with you by way of thanks for your recommendations to read and reread Jung, Solzhenitsyn, et al. Hoping they bring you encouragement and renewed insight,

Regards,

Wesley

Then just today I read in an email nanowrimo sent me that they suggest this reThinking ELA site, constituting a near-opposite pole to the great books I've been reading and their proponents I've been listening to. Which really speaks for itself, I think, so give that a listen, too.

A book I won't read

Taking the review at its word, the recently buzzed book on subbing sounds pretty skippable. I guess it got published mostly because the author has a lot of other books published already. Perhaps some of them even get read by people other than the reviewer conscientiously doing her article.

The idea of subbing as a day job to allow one to write, though, has to be one lots of people have had before. It could be the next best thing after barista or server. This other review suggests one can even become quite successful at it; the author has written for some of the major publications out there.

Reading, writing--it all remains a bit of a mystery, but somehow we're muddling along. I wonder how many subs write about it like this, and no one's the wiser.