Projects, v. and n.

Built into the word: a hurling forward. These have taken roughly a year and have little enough to show for themselves:

Plutarch's Lives

Pratchett's Discworld

I was intending at first to do something alongside the reading, made some brief notes for a podcast or lecture series, but that has not materialized...Vi Hart talks about how long it takes to actually make one of those videos, and how her Patreon allows her to work on them full-time, and I despair. Like being friends, it must be one of those things you have to somehow put yourself into before knowing if it will be any good, just for it to be anything at all. And I take heart.

As with the monthly writing projects, so these year-long reading ones: I dabble, I do them all at once, poorly, and pat myself on the back that I do any of them at all. Swing between that and being too hard on myself for not doing any better. Though I'll say it could be otherwise; it occurred to me just now, for the first time really got my attention, that I could stay home and write full time, at least for a year or so. See what comes of it. But I do like teaching, too. I would miss it if I stopped, like soccer, and get worse at it.

Then this coming year, Kierkegaard and Plato at the top of the stack.

Of course, we might suggest something smaller to begin with for those like me, bewildered again in the expanse of possibilities, looking out for something to do: perhaps watching Civilisation, Twin Peaks, comparing them to Infinite Jest?

Steph and I have been reading Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, off and on, Sunday mornings all year, making our note cards of new German words. On my phone in place of King James I've been working through part of Luther's Genesis. And poorly, poorly, I did read practically every word in Klaeber's Beowulf...

In trying to catch up now with Mythgard's new course on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I see that Gaiman says in his foreword to this copy that he'd started as a writer with a book on Adams -- talk about learning what you love! And that's the motto of the online courses, but perhaps it's also a good guide to the book I should be writing, a better one than the one I found at the used book store about Pullman. If there's going to be another go at adaptation to the screen, what better time to try releasing a short book of idyllic essays? In the wake of his own, no less.

Now Beowulf's done, I try getting up early at least as often to translate Figari, Art, Esthetic, Ideal. I think about psychology more than usual, since Alex put me on Peterson, another Patreonized entrepreneur. What about a short course on Wm James' Talks to Teachers and to Students? Something for all the English teachers who're told to teach something they're calling the Hero's Journey? My word. There is so much to work towards.

The kids asked me the other day who my favorite artist is, music-wise. I'll have to play them this or this before I go, good as the Charlie Brown Christmas album is.

Long awaited, first impressions: The Book of Dust, La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman

First, a few notes from the open Yale course on Milton: Anglican church politics and Protestant work ethic, contractual and economic language in the light of Milton’s poetics of power, his reception and critical prominence in the canon a tool of repression and of liberation (Woolf) -

Then, How much of this, how closely does this bear on  Pullman’s treatment of the great writer, his (Pullman's) conception of himself as a story-teller rather than a poet, a workman rather than divinely-inspired maker?

The whole topic of free speech and prophecy - can prophecy be free speech? - authority based on sentiment, on experience, rather than on coercive power. The infant (lit. 'not-speaking') depending on others, the nuns and the inn mirroring one another across the river--the flood foretold and prepared for which blurs the distinctions and suddenly pushes the plot into precipitate action. Profanity and corruption walking on three legs, but otherwise appearing friendly. The acorn with Bible-thin paper wrapped inside, the aura or aurora associate with Lyra’s name, the clockwise/ counter- imagery connected with problem-solving and seeing the world in a new way. The wretched league dedicated to betrayal of friends and family and subversion of the educational purpose of school. These characters who disappear - Mr Boatwright from the inn, Mr W the headmaster, Mr Taphouse the carpenter, and the curiously muted role of Malcolm’s real parents beside the allure of these other father-figures. The mysterious status of parents overall in the tale: Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter, the one kept away from his daughter by force, the other seemingly unwilling to care for her but curious about her significance once it becomes mythic, intertwined with her passion, which is power, and her chosen avenue the church. National names, Brytain, Swiss War, mentioned for the first time (her hair color changed from black to gold? Any other changes, questions of temporality and causality here?)

The primacy of the Oxford tutorial system recast as conversations with Dr Hannah Relf, even with or superseding the importance of their spying, the reading they do and discuss together. The metaphor of reading the alethiometer, the books of research, the literal reading of real books: Agatha Christie, Stephen Hawking, but not so far poetry--though they quote a hymn and call out the allusion to Noah. (Faerie Queene at the end).

Now, to eagerly await the next book, meanwhile reading all those this one mentions and re-reading this one!

Revisiting Coates and Copperman: open letter to Tony

Hey Anthony,

I had not seen this article, so I'm glad you sent it! I should probably read the news more...but there's so much to read.

I confess I skimmed a lot of the dense sections marshaling evidence. These were my favorite lines, towards the end:

It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.

The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump.

Prophetic mode, critique of journalism, reprise of history and politics--a tour de force. Thinking of Trump in terms of Jefferson and Jackson and tragic hubris, mingling democratic demonstration with a kind of collective playwrighting we are all engaged in without a care for the scapegoats, this is deep jeonk. And I think it even begins to suggest a way towards the mending of the ills Coates is mainly at pains to highlight: namely, more writing and thinking informed by all these sources, nourished by these experiences both intellectual and practical. And beyond the writing is the confrontation with history, politics, race and economics that it points toward. But also and especially, I think,  squarely questioning those overtones of the word "fallen", and prodding at the white conservative Christians who believe their fall can be redeemed, yet live and act as though that redemption depended, like everything else, on the color of the soul concerned. Trenchantly calling out major white liberals for blindness or cowardice, too, in their attempts to name the problem, Coates is even-handed in his diagnosis. I hope at least one of them replies publicly.

But maybe the most interesting thing for me would be also to try to get those people who voted for Trump to actually read this article, to think through the argument and feel the force of these allusions. That would always be one of my big questions when we came to the Civil War and Reconstruction, trying to get the kids to think about how to even start to change someone's mind-and-heart who is raised to be a racist. I think we all understand on some level that when we go into that thought experiment, the someone is also us, at this moment of history, and not just a white Southerner post-bellum. On this topic, some of Studs Terkel's interviews with such recovering racists are illuminating. People are capable of reflecting, changing, healing in this way, and they are more than willing to bear witness to it if the right person asks the right question...

Honestly, it seems like part of what Coates might be confronting, as struck me in his Between the World and Me, is that the temptation to draw on religious language to identify problems must also remind us that religions have traditionally also claimed to provide people with answers to them, and may possibly suggest that they still actually provide the answer to many people. The Fall is bigger than politics, just as the American tragedy is part of a general human story. To deal with it, we need to turn not just to history and journalism, but to the Bible, to the poets, Blake, Milton, Dante... If people claim to believe in the Bible, for instance, we should read it with them and see what it says, and what they actually think about it; we should point them towards those poets and philosophers down through the ages who have been such subtle readers of it, and found in it things we can only wonder at. The same goes for the traditional beliefs of all the world's cultures, naturally, which we can't really start to understand without teaching foreign languages in a serious way. If public schools never read good books or take languages seriously, we can't really do that there, so in what space can that discussion take place? I wonder about this as I've started exploring online teaching and tutoring. Nothing really has come of it yet, but it's all potential.

I wonder, too, what Mr Copperman is up to in Teacher: Two Years. I take a lot of it to be him processing what he actually was doing there, and I'm intrigued by how little in the way of sweeping statements he comes out of it with, how much more modest his accounting turns out to be than the likes of Geoffrey Canada or the Freedom Writers or any of those charismatics. I agree that he slips in some generic Delta color; I think the chapter about the blues concert is the biggest let-down of the book. Elsewhere his writing is pretty powerful, but there, and when he quotes the kids' dialect, it is a little cringe-worthy. But I have tried a couple of times to say something about teaching in Phoenix, and so far I don't have much to show for it, so I respect and admire him for seeing his book through! He might let himself off a little easy in the end, softening the critique of his objective failure and trying to make up for it by attesting to his love for the kids--attempting to forgive himself. I think that's understandable, but I like that it's counterbalanced by the harsh statistics and hard-headedness of the scholar whose lecture he goes to there towards the end, who shoots him down and calls him hopelessly biased. Of course, this only helps confirm his point: Love is blind! It may be the only thing capable of redeeming guilt, this side of theophany.

Reading with Patrick should be something I can track down and read before too long. I'm glad you got to meet Stephanie, too! It was great seeing you. Until the next wedding, or whenever, let's keep reading, then, and keep in touch!

Unreal Beowulf

Spurred to write by news, but not about the news:

In the slaughter at the country music concert in Las Vegas or the school shooting down the road in Freeman, detecting echoes of Grendel's atrocities in Heorot. In the places supposed to be for joy and peace, the incursions of pain and hatred mark and mar. And soon enough, all will be forgotten, and in the case of the old poem even the language it is written in, unless people take the time to remember.

In some throwaway comments from the Tolkien Professor on the affinities between Germanic heroic verse and American hip hop, catching a glimpse of the relevance and red herrings of race as a focus for social justice. The celebratory focus on greatness in the midst of pain, the exultation in being awesome, as James likes to say it makes you feel awesome to listen to it, and this is universal. After all most of the music is bought by the white kids, and the poets and skalds were making it a thousand years ago in the cold North after their own fashion. So that would be something to share, together with the family histories, the migrations, poverty and richness that are more than skin deep.

In the No Fault Zone posited by the Nonviolent Communication Trainer, considering whether this means a No Story Zone, too. She had us tell stories of giving, times we were given something or gave something with no expectation of being able to repay. She had us sit in a circle and tell why we were there, then she told us her reasons: for her assumption was that we are all interconnected, meaning that we win or lose together. But all the tragic and comic stories from which our cultures derive their values run counter to that assumption. Heroes win or lose, representing us as ideals but not absolving us from making the same movement for ourselves. Our interconnections run only so far before attenuating or breaking down, so that what looks like winning in one country, or on one block, means losing over in the next. The same story being told in both places would have totally different meanings, supposing it could even be told, would even be listened to. Still, perhaps the story of the nonviolent communicator's ideals could be a story precisely about this movement between zones, a creation myth of the No Fault Zone, or a pilgrimage of getting out of one zone and into another, making it to the No Fault Zone--but perhaps as an infiltrator, a ravager, a stepper of the borderlands.

Smaller fish, too

In the past few months a handful of projects proceeded while others ground to a halt.

This blog, for example. Though Spef took the occasion to make a pdf of all of it so far on some magic website, for anyone who might like to get the full of the notes for a new school experience, I stopped posting on it. I just saw I had a draft for a post called Unreal Beowulf sitting here from sometime in the summer. Just that title, nothing else written. I think I will come back to it before too long with matter from my notes and be able to post it, words, absence thereof, and all.

I did write more, however, more on the memoir, more essay notes, and theorized a podcast with Pat for awhile there, writing three pages a day like I'm supposed to. Need to get back to letter-writing to people, before it's too late, meaning I forget again.

The Signum University work has been going well. Beowulf translation has been taking most of my time for writing since that course began. I had put in some kind of order the notes for an essay on Tolkien's translations, but that will have to wait again for now. But most exciting is the new partnership with Outschool, who wanted to provide homeschool parents with a Lord of the Rings class and reached out to the Tolkien Professor to get one. And here one is! And another on (or in preparation for) Pullman's Book of Dust, finally about to be released!

And then teaching Spanish long-term again for a teacher on maternity leave, so I get to see another public school quite different from the ones where I was posted most of last year. More on that later.

A couple of interesting places for Spokane to have: the whole neck of the woods around church, which includes a Montessori school or two and this campus of a Japanese university; and the Spanish conversation club that meets at Lindaman's, by Manito Park, where a lady from Andalucia who had recently gone back on a three-week vacation there was showing everyone postcards and reminiscing about eating boquerones on the beach. Something that I liked about these two sites is the second-language feel of some of the English. I admire whoever wrote them.

So, between the bigger fish and the small fry, life's good I have to say.

Spocurious

As a raspberry bush producing its berries, I wonder my words:

 

If there is a path to the rock pool, and if so who made it, and if not, how did they get there to make the rock pool.

If anyone breaks the no camping sign rules, and if not why they have so many signs posted, or for what radius around the sign its rule is valid.

If anyone follows the walk your bike sign rules.

Who goes to Kendo, that they have such a big building there by the river.

Tucked in a book, the receipt from someone else who read it, and movies at the library--who is that person who read it, and who is it watching them all. What did they think?

When everything has stories to it, how do you decide which ones to read, or to tell? For yourself, hopefully. Do you get to say some are better than others? Maybe so long as you give evidence. Do you have to always worry you haven't found the best ones? Maybe not if you have all the time in the world.

Do they always have to translate into words? Maybe pictures and music are ways to tell them, too.

Experiments outside Laboratory

So the housekeeping continues: I sat in church today, maybe in the same seat from the first time I ever went at the end of last summer, feeling the newness wearing off and not minding, since it meant I liked it there enough to keep coming back, and borrowing books from Rev. Todd, and talking to Aria and them about reading and talking about Harry Potter, and Hobbit Camp, and running into Taylor from Spark up there to give a White Privilege/Supremacy workshop, and writing memoirs with people.

These books generated further reading, of course; these meetings further talking; and all of it might or might not turn into writing, in the llama book if nowhere else. From Romero's language about building the kingdom I thought, of course, about Pullman's about building a republic. Despite all the stuff about whiteness, or because of it, that I hear at church here and at the philosopher's talk downtown, I am reminded how little I care about politics, but how much I appreciate free speech and a free press--as long as it includes free silence, to read and write in. Or to walk down to the river the steps of the park built above the power plant, built by white people or at any rate owned by some, I figure.

If I affect a laconic, western style in these first-person paragraphs, put it down to reading Doig, The Last Bus to Wisdom, with the Literary Freedom book group at Auntie's. This might be their website? But to find them, you almost have to look at the paper calendar they give out by the register, which I love. A good question about love knowledge: do you only truly get to know people who care about you, and whom you care about? Are kind people the only people you can know authentically? If so, what a problematically circumscribed authenticity! But without pretentious preening, the book does fit into that classic American literary conversation with the likes of Huck and Antonia, sort of.

Still, I'd like to make it possible to find information about things like that book group more readily. Or Laboratory, which I heard about by word of mouth twice in one day, and had never heard of before--or at least, it didn't register. Their event last night wasn't starting till 9, though, way too late for the likes of me; besides, I had to help Steph with Mario, holding this or that tool, looking for a dropped bolt, while she fixed her car. Sounds like Spark will host some writing on local authors and such like goings on on their website. And I still aim to write for Love and Outrage a poem or two about the rainbows down there, or by Corbin Park, or above Kendall Yards, or in that image I just posted from Shell. Here's hoping.

It's weird. The library is still my ideal for this work of connecting people to books, to art, to culture, but as long as there is material somewhere along the line, there has to remain room for the serendipitous, too. Looking for a copy of Totoro that has gone missing, I found Pom Poko instead!

Tolkien's minor poems "and the happy summer days" THE END

(From some ideas pointed out in our Preceptorial for Beyond Middle Earth)

‘What do you know about this business?’ the King said to Alice.

‘Nothing,’ said Alice.

‘Nothing whatever?’ persisted the King.

‘Nothing whatever,’ said Alice.

‘That’s very important,’ the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: ‘Unimportant, your Majesty means, of course,’ he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.

‘Unimportant, of course, I meant,’ the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone,

‘important—unimportant—unimportant—important—’ as if he were trying which word sounded best.

Some of the jury wrote it down ‘important,’ and some ‘unimportant.’ Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; ‘but it doesn’t matter a bit,’ she thought to herself.

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out ‘Silence!’ and read out from his book, ‘Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.’

Everybody looked at Alice.

‘I’m not a mile high,’ said Alice.

‘You are,’ said the King.

‘Nearly two miles high,’ added the Queen.

‘Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,’ said Alice: ‘besides, that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now.’

‘It’s the oldest rule in the book,’ said the King.

‘Then it ought to be Number One,’ said Alice.

The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily. ‘Consider your verdict,’ he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice.

‘There’s more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,’ said the White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; ‘this paper has just been picked up.’

‘What’s in it?’ said the Queen.

‘I haven’t opened it yet,’ said the White Rabbit, ‘but it seems to be a letter, written by the prisoner to—to somebody.’

‘It must have been that,’ said the King, ‘unless it was written to nobody, which isn’t usual, you know.’

‘Who is it directed to?’ said one of the jurymen.

‘It isn’t directed at all,’ said the White Rabbit; ‘in fact, there’s nothing written on the outside.’ He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added ‘It isn’t a letter, after all: it’s a set of verses.’

‘Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?’ asked another of the jurymen.

‘No, they’re not,’ said the White Rabbit, ‘and that’s the queerest thing about it.’ (The jury all looked puzzled.)

‘He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,’ said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.)

‘Please your Majesty,’ said the Knave, ‘I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.’

‘If you didn’t sign it,’ said the King, ‘that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.’

There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.

‘That proves his guilt,’ said the Queen.

‘It proves nothing of the sort!’ said Alice. ‘Why, you don’t even know what they’re about!’

‘Read them,’ said the King.

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. ‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked.

‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’

These were the verses the White Rabbit read:—

   ‘They told me you had been to her,
    And mentioned me to him:
   She gave me a good character,
    But said I could not swim.

   He sent them word I had not gone
    (We know it to be true):
   If she should push the matter on,
    What would become of you?

   I gave her one, they gave him two,
    You gave us three or more;
   They all returned from him to you,
    Though they were mine before.

   If I or she should chance to be
    Involved in this affair,
   He trusts to you to set them free,
    Exactly as we were.

   My notion was that you had been
    (Before she had this fit)
   An obstacle that came between
    Him, and ourselves, and it.

   Don’t let him know she liked them best,
    For this must ever be
   A secret, kept from all the rest,
    Between yourself and me.’ 

‘That’s the most important piece of evidence we’ve heard yet,’ said the King, rubbing his hands; ‘so now let the jury—’

‘If any one of them can explain it,’ said Alice, (she had grown so large in the last few minutes that she wasn’t a bit afraid of interrupting him,) ‘I’ll give him sixpence. I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.’

The jury all wrote down on their slates, ‘She doesn’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it,’ but none of them attempted to explain the paper.

‘If there’s no meaning in it,’ said the King, ‘that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any. And yet I don’t know,’ he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye; ‘I seem to see some meaning in them, after all. “—said I could not swim—” you can’t swim, can you?’ he added, turning to the Knave.

The Knave shook his head sadly. ‘Do I look like it?’ he said. (Which he certainly did not, being made entirely of cardboard.)

‘All right, so far,’ said the King, and he went on muttering over the verses to himself: ‘“We know it to be true—” that’s the jury, of course—“I gave her one, they gave him two—” why, that must be what he did with the tarts, you know—’

‘But, it goes on “they all returned from him to you,”’ said Alice.

‘Why, there they are!’ said the King triumphantly, pointing to the tarts on the table. ‘Nothing can be clearer than that. Then again—“before she had this fit—” you never had fits, my dear, I think?’ he said to the Queen.

‘Never!’ said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard as she spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his slate with one finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily began again, using the ink, that was trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.)

‘Then the words don’t fit you,’ said the King, looking round the court with a smile. There was a dead silence.

‘It’s a pun!’ the King added in an offended tone, and everybody laughed, ‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’

‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

‘I won’t!’ said Alice.

‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

‘Wake up, Alice dear!’ said her sister; ‘Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!’

‘Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!’ said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, ‘It was a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it’s getting late.’ So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

...

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm#link2HCH0012

Liam posted this as a counterpart to the poems we've been discussing from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, the Annotated Hobbit, and the Book of Lost Tales--all fairly minor poems, though it would be extreme to say, like Alice of the White Rabbit's evidence, that they were totally worthless. He liked my suggestion about the theme of words' power in the different spheres of Bimble Town: how it functions as advertisement, with the biting satire of the See Britain First campaign

(and he noted that Tom Shippey worked in the ad business once!) and then again as beautiful, potentially dangerous, enchantment--and to my reference to Prufrock he added one more by Atwood:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/44212 and https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/32778

And perhaps--probably--even to take the little time to copy this out and bring it to some slight order is to make too much of it, when you think of the real, effective power of words in, say, political speech or in academia, which I only scratch the surface (or is it the ears?) of here, but I like to, once in a while. The gusty bus no es discapacitated.

Plato's Republic and Zombies

For books 7 and 8, we talked about the appearance of math in the curriculum of the philosophers, and looked at some of the strange things that are said about that--how Agamemnon couldn't have counted his own two feet, and how division is spoken of as multiplication by the adept to preserve the unity of one. Four of us were there: Paul, Rex, Steph, and I.

We wondered about this dialectic which seems to consist in going out of and returning down into to the cave; how analysis and unity are experienced in thought and practice; how war and violence relate to philosophy, to math, and to the other arts; about the new words that are coined (and the space where a word should be for the science of solids that precedes astronomy), like 'timocracy/timarchy' for a theoretical government based on love of honor; and how these governments are related to individuals, and whether they are mixed, or cyclical; we raised the mystery of unconscious thinking and intuition beside the emphasis on reason, as another possible interpretation of the relationship between the cave and the sunlight; we considered the case of a man without working memory, imprisoned in an eternal present...we might have thought of it a little like this, too?

I got started on the Idiot so I can talk to people back in the desert about that. But then also this week I finally started in on Mr Eppeldauer's book, ZWARM--highly recommended! We used to talk about it when I would go back to GHS and sub, and he would be typing away at it. Here are some thoughts so far:

The logotherapeutic quality of writing comes through strongly, the transgressive images of sex and violence overlapping with dreams of ordinary life from before the unstated catastrophe which has locked the characters up in the cave, in the dark--this terrible inversion of the Platonic image, where outside in the light is dramatic death, and the only way out is Dantean down.

June: Housekeeping

Here in a few days and then a month more we'll be wrapping up Republic, and then on to Dante!

http://theaterofwar.com/ looks like a major success in the city, and http://www.rpgresearch.com/ a modest one here in the area. Their big Tolkien moot is coming up in mid-July.

The Signum U Mythmoot sounded awesome. Videos are up. And writing tutoring should be rolling out in Fall!

Meeting with some local authors--writing on that should be up on Spark's site soon.

And we got a piano to go with Steph's drums! So far we can play the Legend of Zelda melody and what we call jazz.

And Plato!

We talked last time about lies in the poets, the premise of the city-state, and the education of the guardians by music and gymnastic--all your basic book 3 topics--and also made this noble playdough unicorn ox with the ring of Gyges on its shoulders.

For book 4, we had our stalwarts Paul and Rex back again to tackle the definitions of the four virtues and the three parts of the soul that emerge from the search of the city.

pass it on to someone who would like it

Fancy fliers courtesy of Steph and Erika

More open letters: Rev Todd and the Tolkien Professor

Sent versions of the other May posts to their respective authors, but to these teachers I had to address myself as well:

Questions for Narnion (the professor's loremaster avatar)

Eagle sounds?

I think I am mostly just happy to be here--excited about catching up (finally!) on all the podcasts so far, and appreciating the audacity and fun of this project--and so I wanted to throw a question out there. Since I just listen to these sessions instead of watching live, I have been wondering: What's going on with the bird-of-prey sound effects? Do they come about at specific times, when you say some magic words, or are they generated totally randomly, or something in between? I'll try to come up with a better question next time, but this has just been niggling at me...

--

'Not your Shire'

Seems like an important phrase we keep coming back to. Here are some of the ways I have been turning it over, possible perspectives on it. See if you think they are interesting/valid at all:

- Something in the world has changed, objectively; this Shire infiltrated by rings and -wraiths is not the Shire which was yours. That Shire existed, but is now gone.

- That Shire you conceived of was never a thing. Your Shire only seemed safe and comfortable to you in your own ignorance of the truth. Thank goodness for an outbreak of obvious strangeness to set you straight.

- You have a misunderstanding of ownership which leads you to apply a possessive where it doesn't belong. This Shire is not your Shire, for all your maps and walking songs, sort of like the light of the Silmarils was not Feanor's, for all his craft and lore; or again like those mushrooms were not your mushrooms, just like those pears weren't Augustine's pears.

- Not only does the Shire not belong to you, but you don't even belong to the Shire; your home is elsewhere, and you must give up the Shire you love not once but repeatedly, now and after the scouring, and leave Middle-Earth entirely. We Elves can feel you on that.

--

And for the atheist preacher

Like I said, I just wanted to send you a note appreciating and responding to your sermons. These past few weeks seem to make up a kind of series on Christian roots and UU flowerings, or in the language of the dialectic, on the movement of the idea through its successive encapsulations in faith and reason, both in your personal history and the bigger picture. Fascinating stuff!

I always try to take notes on the points you make, but the talk on the Centurion in particular got me thinking: it seems to me that what you say about the Roman Centurion representing authority and Jesus crucified representing the oppressed is true, but that in practice no one is fully in the position of either the one or the other. We each have something in us of the authoritarian, so that given certain kinds of power, we are bound to make mistakes and even commit frauds and do violence; we each have something in us of the oppressed, too, and suffer from the control and cruelty of others or of circumstances. Looking at it like this, the remarkable thing about that moment is that the Centurion recognizes that surely this man was the son of God, but that identification with the sufferer has to cut the other way, too: the suffering Christ is at the same time Christ Pantocrator....I don't know if that seems all that profound, but your way of talking about it made me realize that for me the challenge of faith is not just the paradox of God becoming man, the Word made flesh, but of the completely innocent, completely sinless human being who is also perfect in power, with ultimate authority. Taken as literally or as metaphorically as you like, these are difficult and interesting topics to turn, turn, turn, seeing them now in light and now in a healthy shadow.

Thanks for your time, and I'm looking forward to the next in the series!

More May-mess

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
- Hopkins

And out of the llama notebook where I make my psychological observations, since Brian sent me off in the footsteps of the poet and of Piaget, here are some notes from the Taproot Talk:

5/20
Then again Sharma Shields the writer laying bare her imperfections in search of deeper understanding of who she is, and in the belief that this Spokane community’s mutual support for the arts will continue to grow and will benefit from the knowledge. She touched on the video game--King’s Quest--that inspired her to read Greek myths and start writing her own books, from reading them upside down in the crib, how her Grandma’s South Hill farm where she would play outside became the Target, how her parents’ cabin on Kilroy Bay became the turning point in her depression, the place where she kept her promise to herself to write. And she has seen counselors, beginning with a mostly deaf one who told her to enunciate very clearly her passionate emotions, group therapy, spoken in front of more groups than our little gathering at Spark about her work and her drunk driving that cost her the Lilac crown and didn’t stop there, these lies she told and now this truth, knowing it was wrong and trying to make it right, but which gave her the drama, the story, which surely every writer and everyone must sometimes wish to make real, and not only in telling the story--she touched on the ineffability topos the Dante lecturer mentions, praising her own imagination, whatever else she might be dissatisfied with about herself, she is proud of that, and even if it doesn’t always make it to the page, it’s great up here. She had her images of family pictures and favorite books, and wanted sch a collage from each of her friends present, but of course another side of the ineffability topos is the impossibility of doing everything we might want, even such a small project as that, much less reading everything there is to read once it were done, like plumbing the self to complete knowledge in stories; whereas though she did not speak about it, that very silence at the end of all efforts, the mystical mystery of religious prayer or meditation practice, might be able. I held my question about story-telling or only -inspiring in video games, since it seemed like it was time to close, but maybe I’ll send her an email as well; Steph wanted to ask her about working on her publications. She also reminded me about her answer to one good question about the possibility of prevention or mitigation of others making her mistakes--what could someone have said? Not to say, Don’t do this, because they’re going to want to experiment, but to tell true stories, a la Pullman, of what she has experienced.

May the Fourth Miscellany

The panelists ranged over the Hero’s Journey (see handout, doubling for fanning myself with) and archetypes, three act structure and ring structure, screenwriting tropes and characterization and rhetoric and deconstruction and design principles and historical context, and several times I got up to visit the snack board and gulp water, for it was the warmest day of the year, and I’d been out in the sun at the farm fair all afternoon besides, putting up a happy front for the kids though I felt like a bit of a hypocrite,--but where it all ended up, between fielding intricately thought-out questions and the nerdy tidbits de rigeur on lightsaber colors and whether Han shot first--this went completely over Steph’s and my head--and with deft facilitation moving through such a madcap congeries of topics while providing for the insecurities of the personalities, who had dedicated such care and thought to these problems and analyses, being laid bare and brushing up against one another now awkwardly, now meanly, so that I lost heart and never asked my own question about the Force and freedom, as the requisite points were made about good and evil portrayed as black and white at first in episodes 4-6, then in the prologues giving us an anti-hero balanced by despicable pandering slapstick, and now with the sequels gritty grayscale, which to me missed the whole point: that this is a mythic story, told in images as Tolkien’s is in words, and that the choices of the heroes do matter more than the banality of evil or innocence of the Empire’s citizens or the Rebels’ complex justifications--where we ended up was that aside from all this stuff, the movies are just so fun--awesome--playable and replayable, not as Catholic-serious as Tolkien’s myth but presumably laughing Buddhist--but so on a note of nostalgia for earliest distinct aesthetic experiences, loving reminiscences of watching at a theater or drive-through or in a basement on a VCR so many times the tape broke, that this is as important as and inseparable from the way the films resonate with myth and cultural desire and wish-fulfillment...So what kind of argument is that? Was the question, why is this good storytelling, or what does this teach us about storytelling, remotely addressed, much less answered, or did I just come away with a summary of some bibliographies for unwritten books? As if I of all people needed such a thing, what! The irony! It left me wishing there had been a true, open seminar or a frank lecture series rather than this mishmash panel discussion, with us little Leia- and Luke-slaves and the mighty totemic Jabbas raised on their stage dais, with that off-putting if interesting drama of their egos, angsts, and over-compensation, particularly that of the rhetorician-philosopher, being played out up before us. Still, edifying all around, to one permitted to listen feeling smug and superior in the front row, to glean psychological insights, unintentional-turned-intentional, over and above the billing, besides the intriguing nuggets that Thom Caraway teaches a Tolkien course at Whitworth; that the prologue and the whole saga might be narrated by R2; and that in the main divergence from formulae--that the ordinary world is the special world, that home is already or soon to be destroyed--however conscious or slavish his writing and work may be in other respects, Lucas has given us something wonderful, original, profoundly true--and so much damn fun.

Plato in the spring, second meeting

From the end of book 1, Socrates speaking to Thrasymachus blushing:

"I have not dined well, however— [354b] by my own fault, not yours. But just as gluttons snatch at every dish that is handed along and taste it before they have properly enjoyed the preceding, so I, methinks, before finding the first object of our inquiry—what justice is—let go of that and set out to consider something about it, namely whether it is vice and ignorance or wisdom and virtue; and again, when later the view was sprung upon us that injustice is more profitable than justice I could not refrain from turning to that from the other topic. So that for me [354c] the present outcome of the discussion is that I know nothing. For if I don't know what the just is, I shall hardly know whether it is a virtue or not, and whether its possessor is or is not happy.”

We snacked on summery picnic food and wondered what Socrates was doing: answering this new demand for praise of justice' inherent worth against the praises of injustice by considering a city as a way to see the individual better? We were joined by Paul and Nate this time, and also ranged over the Ring of Gyges' relationship to the One Ring and the parameters for music/poetry and the sorts of stories about gods to be told in this city.

Whereas the thing I did not do,

Continued not to do, was to write or make things, aside from these connections, which are well and good, but hardly that one thing needful. For all these groups and consolations of company, events and the possibility of eventually writing about more and more ever accumulating and ever receding, it has not happened. Camp Nanowrimo seemed like a good idea back on the first of April, but all month I did nothing on the spring semester of the Book of Annotations but ponder and make plans. For the short story workshop I managed a paltry handwritten page, and for the memoir class likewise, only because there was a deadline there in each case, or perhaps out-thinking myself, supposing that if it was only for a deadline, there was hardly any point in more sustained effort over more time. So that if I had more time, all the time in the world, I actually might write every day as I ought to, rather than for imaginary deadlines and chance encouragement of groups. That seems like the way to find the balance, still, to write every day as I want to, and to share it with whomever is interested, by association or broadcast to the interwebs. To write it by hand, in a notebook of small pages Steph found, with a llama on the cover, or on the backs of pages for school as I like to do, only doing a better job of keeping them together, or on the various documents open on the computer, or here blogily, linking to them all, but writing somehow, and then making it freely available. (Donations accepted (preferably in kind (food, drink, or conversation:))).

Abundance of groups, and La sombra del viento/The Shadow of the Wind

As William James' psychology yields AA, so my reading and writing and thinking, such as it is, has been pretty well channeled now into irrigating a plethora of social gatherings, with only the right balance between them left to be figured out. My groups:

We went to Bellwether a few times recently even when it wasn't for MathJam,

then of course there's this summer's course starting shortly at Signum,

and the local Smial of Tolkien Scholars, from whom I asked to borrow some books for it,

and whom I also invited to good old Drop in & Write at Spark,

who had me sit at a table today at Auntie's for awhile, where I found out about a group reading The Shadow of the Wind,

which led to INWG, a writing group that meets at Frankie Doodle's--apparently they have good cinnamon rolls--

but then there's another reading group meeting to read books in Spanish, which I heard about at the Spanish conversation tertulia at Lindaman's which has been going on for some 25 years,

but I only just heard about it at the potluck at church, where I've been participating in a memoir-writing class...

and this discussion group I just started as a sister seminar to the ones in Phoenix.

That's it for now, but there's Hobbit Immersion Camp to think about for summer!

--

Now, on reading The Shadow of the Wind. To be more careful--and note that spoilers follow--, this came before, from the event at Auntie's for Get Lit where authors read about a teacher they wanted to thank, and a teacher reminisced generously of his idealism and his students in the public school in the Delta, so that I thought of City Year and Anthony at KIPP. Leaving a flyer at the register about Plato in the spring, I happened to pick up a calendar of other events going on, and saw that there was a group meeting the coming week to discuss The Shadow of the Wind, a novel I happened to have at home, albeit in Spanish.

So I read it as quickly as possible, starting that weekend. I don't know where or when I picked up that copy, but in other ways my chance encounter with the book and the group fit in nicely with the story it told, about a mysterious book and its author and readers. As fast as I skimmed along, not bothering to look up all the words I did not know, I still couldn't quite finish it in time, so that I first made the others tell me what happened, how it ended, which was satisfying, and then agreeable to nitpick together. Other questions we discussed were the setting, the ways characters might represent more than themselves, and the portrayal of evil, but the most interesting thing about the book, when it was asked how each reader's perspective made it a different book for us, was how we characterized it as a historical, literary mystery which is also a love story, and a love letter to a certain kind of reading--that total entregment of oneself, losing oneself in the book, not analyzing or comparing it but being swept along by the story, and how our language about this experience does have so much in common with romantic love: how we feel it first in youth or adolescence, how it becomes more difficult to recapture, becomes more complicated with the years; but also how as a writer, it is a kind of wish-fulfillment, to represent a book, a bookstore, a writer, a reader, so devoted to the work. And for me this is even where the question of good and evil is most interesting: why would one say "there are worse prisons than words," or call a place where books are so beloved, so that visitors are enjoined to remember them, a cemetery of forgotten books, when the words are for freeing people's imaginations and their hearts from inherited violence, the books for reconnecting them to one another and opening as far as possible their secretive memories to the light of day? To me, of all the killers and egoists and beaters, that impossibly romantic writer spurning his readers and burning his books is the most evil, and, again, the most interesting, and perhaps a good deal more so before he is redeemed.

Plato in the spring, first meeting

We looked at the movement of the characters and the different conversations, and asked, What happens when you talk to Socrates? There seems to be a tension between wanting and not wanting to talk, wanting to stay and go. Then on Socrates' question as to justice, What is it? we wondered about how a definition might be dramatized in conversation and a consideration of particulars rather than explicitly pinned down in a single general formulation...and we ate cake, with fizzy fruity drinks! Steph and Paul and I were there--feel free to join!

Legos and the four friends

We had a lovely intergenerational service today at church where these two topics came up, reminding me of some notes I made awhile back and never shaped into a post.

Briefly: the four friends were walking in the forest. They came to a tall tree and stopped to look up in amazement. The elephant said, "Ah, I remember tending this tree when it was only half as tall as me, and look how tall it's grown. And that was a long time ago, maybe fifty years or more." The monkey said, "Ah, I remember tending this tree when it was only twice as tall as me, its beautiful leaves shining in sun and shadow. And that was a long time ago, maybe a hundred years or more." The rabbit said, "Ah, I remember tending this tree when it was a sapling, swaying in the breeze. And that was a long time ago, maybe two hundred years or more." The bird said, "Ah, I think I planted this tree, planted it here in the ground from a seed I carried in my beak. And that was a long time ago, maybe three hundred years or more." And as each one spoke, the others nodded thoughtfully. They were so moved by the conversation and by their fondness for the great tree, they decided to plant another tree like it nearby, to commemorate the tree, that day, and their friendship...

A young woman told this story from memory; she noted that we might have heard other versions, or would find others if we looked, as it was very widespread. She also said we might spend hours or days or years discussing it if we were studying Buddhism, but that for her it suggested how good it is to share what we know and to listen compassionately, and how diversity can contribute to creativity.

Then the pianist played "Everything is Awesome" for the offertory. The sermon was titled The Power of Legos, touching on their equal appeal for boys and girls, their teaching of cause and effect and physics, and about compromise, starting over, breaking and rebuilding, apologizing and having to work together to make it better, playing, making unexpected discoveries, and something John Green said about imagining people complexly. We could go on and on with stories about the toys and about the kids playing with them--a version of this was repeated again--but that was the main thing. Plus, they're fun!

We watched a short lego movie in lieu of a benediction, but the sound wasn't working. I can't find it now, but it was along these lines.

I'm not sure why spell check thinks legos is a misspelling. It must have something to do with marketing.

What, would you say, is the greatest story ever sold?

Basically, now that creative work is collapsing into advertisement, the story you tell about your product comes to have precedence over the product itself, but also over every other story.

There might be an analogy here between this and the stock market, except I don't know how that works: the huge fees companies pay to advertise themselves is like a futures market of insane greed and optimism, an investment in the advertiser’s ability to seduce the minds and influence the actions of statistically significant and specific portions of the global population. But could it also be a concession to the beautiful, to aesthetic delight, in some cases?

The good news: we are readers, not only consumers. There is a kind of power this gives us to influence corporations by our actual purchases, but then there is also the business structure of streaming websites which now make actual artistic content available for free thanks to the revenue from advertising--or the fact that this artistic content is itself advertising. The alternative models, paid subscriptions or targeted donations tied to a relationship with the artist or to bonus special content, seem to be really more for status or convenience, when leaks and ad-blocker are so ubiquitous as to make even what should cost money become free in no time.

Think also of the cost of producing the artistic creations of our time, films and video games, and the advertising portion of this which consists in sections of the unfinished work itself: trailers. They are their own advertisement; they collapse into one another in that way, too. It may be that the experience feels somehow less real without the honest possession by fair exchange, but this may be only a convention of thought, a metaphor of legitimacy deriving from ancient custom. Patriarchy, virgin births, matter for faith.

And as for the building that the kids did together the other week during the fundraiser, when the legos were all spread out on the floor, samples of their creations were on the tables, with little index cards bearing their names--one name on each card, as an older woman pointed out, and many of their products bearing swords or guns or lightsabers. In her time it was cowboys and indians, she said apologetically, but it's the same old story. She wondered if we'll ever get beyond it.

What is this? A couple examples of internet-enhanced reading

(What is this? Obviously a hat. No, it's a snake that ate up an elephant. No, it's an ugly dress for a ballerina. No, it's Ditto. No, they're some siblings in their blanket fort. No, it's a Manta Ray. No, it's a piece of designer furniture. No, it's something evil coming out of the wall. No, it's a roller coaster. No, it's a pizza melting. No, it's whatever you can imagine. Seventy four years of The Little Prince.)

In a general way, though they say writing by hand helps people remember what they write, isn't the whole point of writing that you don't have to remember it? and so, the more media to enhance the books, the better, I say. The book itself, after all, remains; only around and around it a richer culture of impressions and allusions, associations and memories, interconnections and interpretations is formed, and we might need strong fingers to dig down through all that dirt and sweat a bit to turn that compost--but what a joy it is to play in that garden!

And as much as reading, it becomes part of the fun to make our own contributions and appreciations, even occasionally sprinkling in a few new seeds to add to the loam. So I hope that part of the Hobbit Camp involves inviting the kids to make their own podcasts about what they've learned from reading together, their own stories they've been inspired to write, drawings they've drawn, and even some words of poems in ancient languages of their own.

Open letter to Fred Schrumpf

Dear Fred,

I'm a substitute teacher, but in the course of this year I have had two long-term assignments, first at Glover and currently at Stevens, which have brought your work to my attention, and I would really like to get a chance to talk to you sometime. My questions revolve around what substitutes can do to better engage students under the paradigm of restorative practices, and how you feel the conversations around Help For Billy have gone. I feel bad that I missed the opportunity to join in on the book study, but I did recently borrow the book and found it provocative reading.

I hope this finds you well,

Wesley

---

is what I wrote. Here is more of what I would want to discuss:

Help for Billy? Help for Mrs T! What is the consensus on this science, especially of the brain? Where is the line between behavior and trauma, and how can these be bridged? Between learning and relationship? Just detach is the final word, which is strange given the equating of love and attention throughout the book--what is the status of such conditional love? What consequences or beyond-consequences does projecting such inexhaustible attention-love and patience have on the teacher--especially when not seeing the results of the labor ultimately bear fruit? On the learning of whichever, if any, students in the class are not pre-conditioned by complex trauma? What if relationship is not so much a prerequisite for teaching as it is an inextricable element of teaching? Otherwise the pyramid dictates that instruction and intellectual practice should become a vanishingly small part of the school week, inverting the current ratio of classroom to specials time: math and literacy will be the specials, and therapy of one sort or another the bulk of the time spent in school. “A perpetual physiologic state of dysregulation” 58 and “subconscious mind will work to sabotage” 65 make this a paradigm self-defeating not only for the student, but for the teacher, too, as teacher--collapses into surrogate parent, childcare provider, foster--and especially for the substitute teacher, who has not been able to build any relationship with the students...A Christian paradigm of love? But even if I don’t yell at them, I don’t live up to it, quality of mercy is strained, and I am a hard-working hypocrite, at best!

And pyramids based on Maslow’s hierarchy, just remember, are metaphors, icebergs to remind how much is beneath the surface, not piles of blocks to bury a dead king in. A living paradigm, rather, a braid or tree, even a house might be more illustrative. Not beyond consequences, but facing the natural follow ups, logical ramifications. Looking squarely at your beliefs--asking, how has that choice gone for you? Rather than, how could you do that?--and the scales may fall--even if a great deal of fear, insecurity, anger remains to be worked through--a logical and loving question can touch, and not only a mantra of safety or validation of the negative or false or aggrandizing perceptions. And a great source of courage or determination might only come with taking responsibility for the next generation, one’s own children, to give them something better. Non-profit industrial complex--alarm bells triggered for me when a book is published by an institute rather than a university or even a publishing company honestly dedicated to its market. Critique implying I could do better? Humbly submitting that working as a sub is doing something, as well as giving time to writing about all I would do. Massive overhauls to peel away the band-aids, to make relationship and teaching rather than professional esprit de corps and bureaucratic data-collection the main job of the schoolteacher, and learning the activity of the student, rather than regulating behaving or undergoing therapy--and freeing up the resources to provide that therapy, or perhaps better, to simply give a lot of money back to people, and to redistribute it so they can spend time with their kids with less stress, if the science really is so clear on that or not--anyone can tell that time with family and friends is preferable to work and school, and that much more is learned in these interactions than from lessons anyhow. So flip the classroom off, give everyone a computer and an internet connection, and be done with it; a teacher and a therapist or counselor in every classroom.

Joe’s take: on the spectrum Relativism- Dogmatism with the phenomenological approach as the mean, understanding the culture and language with which to even begin a conversation, not labeling it all trauma and washing hands of it. Tending to be white folks at the one extreme, black folks at the other, and all genuinely caring, wanting to provide something: love, coddling or abrasive, but neither by itself can change the behavior without first going deeper to questions and coaching around the child’s own values, sense of self, goals, and trust of self, love of self, before and beyond that of anyone else, however well-intentioned. Not keep your eye on the ball, but which way was it spinning? Not ice cream sales and shark bites, but the seasons, the weather, the beach--facile interpretations of statistics, but what sorts of outcomes were there from these reading groups anyhow? What was he doing, teaching this book or interrogating? And how different from a great book, where the two are synonymous! Trauma of a kind, after all, is the goal of exercise of muscles: growing stronger.

Something like this.