And hopefully now to turn more to making the games read aloud project... As I talked about it with Steph, it seemed best to have two parts: story and commentary, or illuminations. As any good copyist should. Then again, as a sermon works on two levels, it could also be fun to intertwine them, and see which format people prefer. The other thing to try is visuals to go along with, videos or simple slideshows.
Again this morning trying to find Tim Rogers’ essay on Itoi and the Mother series, I wasn’t able to, but only so many places that cited him, which is strange, unless he’s trying to publish that writing somewhere else and doesn’t want it available for free in the meantime. An interesting thing one of those people writes, though, is about wanting to make worlds to have wonderful journeys in, but ending up making a game full of violence--much as Rogers writes about EB and makes a game called videoball--and coupling this with the student’s blog about the bourgeois world of Onett I think about Tolkien, of course, and how in all his world-building, economics receives the least attention or apparent interest, and language, story, and song the most--it seems like a natural progression away from language and into more visceral economics of feeling, products of pleasure and pain, which as we walk along that track, all the more important the reminders of words and texts become.
For all the information Tomato compiles in his legends of localization book and his various websites, the underlying claim he seems to want to make is only lightly touched upon here and there, coming through in brief moments of insight and analysis. I wonder if the Baumann book, or the other links on Critical Distance I turned up, do any more of this, which I also wanted to do, but if anyone has read it, I don’t know about it. The big fish himself, Itoi and all his manifold interests and talents, does come across more powerfully as a personality through all the explanations and history, which the LL book primarily is interested in--back to Tolkien’s distinction in the Monsters and Critics essay again, and St John’s philosophy of seminar--and the larger context of Japanese culture and the other games in particular starts to look more interesting, in turn.
Passing the aspirator, though, reflecting on the choices to pursue Spanish and literature, rather than Japanese and games, though perhaps they really do all lead back to certain perennial concerns or truths, I can’t regret anything that has led me to my life now, and chiefly because of the people I have met, the relationships and experiences together, for whereas books and games will always be there, these are more conditional, passing,a touch and go that is shared. For such a short-long time, as subjective and real. The pastor talked about his years in TV and video, work he did not want to do, before he found the job at Spokane’s church; and here am I, wondering how much of my talents are hidden and my light is spent these past several weeks standing in for elementary teachers, and what the next real job might be after this temporary work.
Sun is out, the first time in what feels like weeks. Thinking now of a couple of things: the long-term sub for fifth grade, or maybe fourth? The Karate teachers, American and foreign-born and the few times I actually went to Sunday School and they tried to talk to me, to teach me something, but I was mastered by a sensation of dread and boredom, fascinated by the light in the basement, colors on the walls, taste of the water fountain and the soda machine, sound of the dulcimer. They asked one confirmation class, what was something good or memorable from school this past week? and I told about going to the amusement park for physics--an impersonal event, as my personality was still so unformed that it seemed like the sort of thing that should qualify. On the retreat, maybe the same place we’d had outdoor ed back in middle school, the youth minister told us Mother Teresa and the Buddha/Dalai Lama and some heinous historical figure or other were all equally sinful with original sin, then shot basketball with us on a break and sang songs while one of the kids played guitar and got us all Jerry’s subs and pizza, like back when we’d drive to games with the soccer team.
Then how it became clear little by little that Ms Langone, the dark-haired young teacher, was not only striking but sexy, an object of attraction obvious to those with eyes to see; and though not a bad teacher, under the curse of all subs who lack basic authority yet seek to retain kids’ attention, she bawled us out on one or two occasions and then apologized subsequently, and taking me aside in the library made a special to make sure we understood one another, I suppose because my parents must have complained to her or the school and made it sound like I was sensitive and upset at being unfairly treated.
Finally coming up on the end of these pages, and then it will be back to loose papers to get hopelessly mixed up like my Phoenix boxes, which I could easily have corrected by either keeping them in folders or dating the pages, but must prefer in some way to strew around, relishing the disorderliness and fondly imagining straightening it all out one day. Again, a series of thoughts have come and gone since last writing, and I’ll try to reconstruct as much as possible of what might have been there: that humor and tragedy tend to represent the inverse of their tellers’ apparent state of mind, so that happy, comfortable people tend to tell tragic stories, and the most depressed people make the best comics--and this was supposed to be Jess’ thesis a decade ago now, so I’d better just quote her on it.
Then there’s Schmid’s article on cosmopoesis, as a competing vision of how storytelling or art works, or again Keats’ negative capability, maybe a closer alternative to sub-creation in that it offers a similar vision of humility, but defines that humility in a different way, probably without reference so much to God, and so indeed a negative, an absence.
There’s a note to continue the novella with a Quixote part 2 inspiration, as that was the one concrete bit of critique I’ve got so far, courtesy of Ken Baumann, to either cut it into stories for submission or lengthen it into a full novel; then there’s another note that might go with it, but I can’t actually read or remember it now: Sof or 50 p it starts, then a scribble that might be b, p, or qu -aces, faces? Facets? Sophistry? It might be about who the likely Duke and Duchess should be in the continuation, which should actually probably involve the big brother at college a little more, and the change of location that comes with spring break.
Back on the comedy question, I have the cryptic note Isildur's bane, which simply refers to that condition in which what one takes for a comic end--the war over, the enemy defeated, and a stroll through Gladden fields--is reversed, thanks to that very overconfidence, into a tragic one quite suddenly--bit then of course, that turn in turn will operate to the greater comedy--but, of course, not for Isildur, or at least, not in any way that will like likely seem very meaningful for him in that moment. Hence Isildur’s Bane.
A distinction between a philologue and a philologist, I don’t know how philologically sound--the former intending to mean one who loves language simply, an amateur, and the latter to denote the professional, the serious scholar. Obviously I’m the former, and I like that Prof Olsen at least pretends to be, so as to help blur the distinction or at least bridge the divide. And academia.edu does, too, of course.
In our car ride to Winchester, Steph and I got to have a long talk about some of this, and I hope the notes I took and the recording we might eventually make about it will help carry on that conversation, but just getting to have it was nice in itself and probably means much more, ultimately, than any of the content I might write up or podcast coming out of it later. She thinks it would be fun to do team-teaching together, and I think we might as well just open our own school while we’re at it, as so many of the kids are attending Running Start anyway. And on the practical side of things, seeing how a class of 50 kids can work beautifully in a fourth-grade with team teaching, incorporating a range of levels, Special Ed, English learners, behavior issues, race and poverty, and creating a wonderful culture. It owes much, obviously, to the veteran teacher who has set habits and ensures they are respected: counting down, ringing a bell, turning a rain stick, asking for attention and getting an answer, raising a hand. There is the simple urgency of actual quiet on everyone’s part in a room of 50 rather than 25. And yet for a manageable circle or seminar, half have to go to work on computers, simply to make room for the rest to fit around the carpet and pass Brian the brain under the eye of the facilitator(s) and on a level with us.
And the paradigm ought not be fun and seriousness, but rather shallowness and depth, as a way to talk about what actually happens during learning, and whether the lesson has been a success, that is, worthwhile. Because the other sub came in, and once no teachers were there things quickly got much looser, sure, but it was also due to her not following the lessons that were left, but doing her own; that had been discussed with the other teacher before her sudden parturition, but the lessons themselves were so simplistic, disconnected from the rest of what was going on with the paragraph writing, fractions, and successful leader projects, and then the accompanying work was so intensive without giving them anything to connect to--work without meaning, the kind I remember so well from my own schooling, as if all along I’d only had substitutes for real teachers--and perhaps that’s the sense in which we might also think of it, not sub as in under, but sub- as in substituting for, creation. And just as we stand in relation to the students, it bears repeating, perhaps higher beings stand in relation to us, without leaping directly to the highest, indeed, our humility should be still more chastened by ascending slow degrees, or exponential ones, and never reaching that Asymptote.
If there is anything that compares to the liberatory power of literacy and reading for pleasure, it is surely grasping the concept of ratio. No better way to trace the start of the age of reason than this--more objective than the moral conscience or self-consciousness, less fraught than the pituitary effects of adolescence observable through the body. Unless it might be the realization of liberation as a goal worthy in itself, and love for it as worth the effort of pursuit. For kids like those who, probably living without mother or father, with inclinations to steal things like school supplies or things out of neighbor’s desks, which I did also, and no desire to do well in class but a great hankering to be allowed to have recess when all the kids who had done their work were allowed to, suddenly showed an interest in understanding how to solve a problem with mixed numbers when that condition came clear, maybe the first thing is to recover a more robust picture of goodness and virtue, as freedom to play, not as obeying rules, until those inner rules can get some roots connecting them with such culture as could still abide. So telling them myths and stories of heroes and adventures, as Pullman would do, but not always reading these out of old books, either, but actually telling them as something living. And surely there are plenty of stories they could tell in turn. Already seeing some glimpses of these, in the moments when they go to hide in the bathroom, or at the threshold of the doors to the blacktop greeting the teacher and the principal, holding the door for them, and encountering that glance between them, that flash of insight and questioning how far to trust it, but certainly there’s something there, a kind of community and family that counts for most of the waking hours and physical presence permitted us to share, and so little wonder if the impermissible should also break through here and there. The only thing to do is accept it, question it and see it with care, and with love to go on our way, coming in and going out into the sun and snow, wind and winter, spring, summer, and fall.
