notes for a new school: May 2019

Monday, May 27, 2019

The necklace and the knot: Mary de Morgan's The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde

You guys can't envision the final collapse of capitalism? Incredible!

-- NPC in the Stoic Club, EarthBound

If you read much new writing about writing these days, or from the past generation or two, at least, you'll inevitably come across a statement along the lines: I realized I needed to read more books by women, or writers of color, or Latinx authors, or what have you. There has been a deserved discovery and rediscovery of the importance of diversity, and an equally inevitable resistance put up from people who continue to care about all the other very deserving works they might like to study, but which are diverse only in a narrow, intellectual way: the canon, which includes Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Montaigne and Machiavelli, Woolf and Wilde--but not nearly enough women or queer people, etc, embodied behind the ideas for contemporaneity to be OK with. And so what are reading? has become a loaded question. If you read old books instead of new ones, your social bona fides are suspect. If you expect people to read for pleasure at all, to have time to do something so decadent, your entitlement is probably showing. Whenever woke commentators even mention a thinker like Socrates--possibly one of the most woke people ever to wake--they can't help but do so in a way that broadcasts loud and clear the mentioner's utter lack of pretension, their distaste for any whiff of aristocratic valuations of thought or spirit; whereas on the other side, conservative and reactionary types have doubled down on their defense of the canon and their haste to align themselves with it, to appropriate it wholly, as if that were possible, within their ideology--which imagines itself, of course, to be free of ideology. It isn't possible, I think, because the value of art transcends political ends, but speech about art never truly does... But maybe my saying so in the first place only brands me a conservative despite my protestations to radical neighbor-love of a very idealistic, lefty sort--I just think the left jettisons the canon at their peril--while the latter half of the statement makes me sound like a total relativist, perhaps. I'd submit the Dude's critique of Walter is valid for much of what the popular right-wing apologists have to say: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."

Image result for princess fiorimonde de morgan

Image result for princess fiorimonde de morgan

Which is all a long-winded way of saying, I was browsing in Bloom's (Harold's, not Allan's) Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (though, to brazenly if tongue-in-cheekily acknowledge there might be differences in intelligence, and that some stories and poems might not be for everyone, probably already sounds borderline fascist to many of my fellow educators) and I thought I'd read some stories and poems by women. So I read some lyrics by Christina Rossetti, and then I came upon this fairy tale by Mary de Morgan, "The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde." In it, people are turned into objects, the beads on the magic necklace, and then finally the evil princess herself gets turned into one, and the others are all freed. They are all tempted by her, and its, beauty--the spell is cast by encircling the gold necklace with one's fingers--but she is finally tricked by a servant who claims that his necklace of acorns and stuff he found in the woods is more beautiful than hers. He knows the secret, you see, having been warned by the princess' maid, who then fell victim to the necklace after all. In her greed and incredulity, the princess agrees to trade necklaces, and so is caught as she goes to take hers off. One way of reading this, I thought, might be as a critique of capitalism, the golden collar par excellence, which has a tendency to convert its admirers into trophies. But if that's the case, the chain can only be cut once the capitalists are so glutted with their own wealth that they run after an authenticity, a natural alternative, whose attractions haunt them by their very commonplaceness. But that even so doing will only usher in a return to the status quo ante, a feudal model, basically a much less efficient form of capitalism where people are much less free, but feel much better about where they are. And in the rise of environmentalism and influencer-media, and in what is happening in public schools and halls of power, the crass ignorance of unions and populists alike, it strikes me that a good portion of this reading is borne out. Only who the brave and clever servant will be who finally cuts the cord, remains to be seen.

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Philip Pullman as teacher

A number of the pieces in Pullman's collection Daemon Voices touch on education in various ways. In fact, most of the arguments he makes in his essays come back to his deep love for language, and thus concern for the teaching of language. A teacher himself for many years, he wrote plays for the students to put on, which were later adapted into his first books for children. His feelings about national testing and slavish curricula will be familiar to anyone with common sense. Who, even if they bow to the necessity of testing, can help but at least see the appeal of the old days, when people were allowed to teach without it? Who can help but recognize that we need to recover something of that freedom and spontaneity?

His autobiographical sketch, I have the feeling this all belongs to me, recounts considerably more about his actual memories of teaching. He speaks there of teaching mythology; there and elsewhere, of teaching writing as a fellow-worker (Isis lecture). In other places, he expounds upon ways in which he comes to see the teaching system as one symptom of a larger problem (Miss Goddard's Grave, and perhaps even in his fiction).

In this short autobiography I haven't got the space to write about the thousand things that interest, delight, amaze, sadden, baffle, infuriate, or anger me. If I had the space I'd say something about the wholesale and vicious destruction of the public services in this country that's taken place over the past few years: especially that of education. If I were still a teacher and tried to do now the work I did for twelve years or so-and did well, I think-not only would I be discouraged, I would be forbidden. We now have a National Curriculum that lays down exactly what all children should be taught, and when they should be taught it, and insists on regular pencil-and-paper tests which seem to be checking on the pupils, but whose real purpose is to check on the teachers.

When I was teaching, I was free to decide what I should do and how I should do it, and one of the things I decided was that the pupils in my classes should learn about Greek mythology. So I began to tell them stories about the gods and heroes. I had to find good versions to work from, because I wanted to get the stories right; I didn't want to simply read to my pupils, I wanted to stand up and tell them the stories face-to-face. So I used Robert Graves's two-volume version of the Greek myths, which was the fullest I could find; and the Iliad and the Odyssey in the Penguin prose translation.

I worked out a course that lasted a year. In the first term I'd deal with the births and origins of the gods and goddesses, and their natures and deeds, to use Graves's phrase, and tell some of the stories about Theseus, Jason, Oedipus, Perseus, Heracles, and the other heroes; in the second term I'd start with the origins of the Trojan War and then do Homer's Iliad from start to finish; and in the third term I'd tell the Odyssey.

It was important to tell, not read, so I had to prepare the stories thoroughly. I taught three separate classes of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, so I'd tell each story three times in a week; and I taught for twelve years, so I must have told each story thirty-six times. The result is that now I have all those stories entirely clear in my head, from beginning to end, and I can call them up whenever I want to.

(I did this once on holiday. We ate our evening meal in a restaurant, and my younger son, Tom, was finding it hard to sit still while we waited for the waitress to bring us the food, so I told him the Odyssey as a serial to keep him quiet. On the last night, when I got to that wonderful climax where Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, finally reaches his palace after twenty years away, to find it infested with rivals all seeking to marry his wife Penelope; and is recognised by his old nurse because of the scar on his leg; and gets Penelope to offer to marry any of the rivals who can string the bow of her husband, but no one can; and then Odysseus himself asks to try, and they all jeer at the ragged old beggar, but he picks up the bow and flexes it and with one easy movement slips the string into the notch and then plucks it like a harp, sending a clear note into the shocked silence of the hall. . . . Well, when I got to that, Tom, who'd been holding a drink in both hands, suddenly bit a large piece out of the glass in his excitement, shocking the waitress so much that she dropped the tray with our meal on it, and causing a sensation throughout the restaurant. And I sent up a silent prayer of thanks to Homer.)

Now as with my brother in Australia, the real beneficiary of all that storytelling wasn't so much the audience as the storyteller. I'd chosen-for what I thought, and think still, were good educational reasons-to do something that, by a lucky chance, was the best possible training for me as a writer. To tell great stories over and over and over again, testing and refining the language and observing the reactions of the listeners and gradually improving the timing and the rhythm and the pace, was to undergo an apprenticeship that probably wasn't very different, essentially, from the one Homer himself underwent three thousand years ago. And the more I think about it the more grateful I am for the freedom that allowed me to think about what would be best for my pupils and to design a course that provided it. I wouldn't be allowed to do it now.

And meanwhile, of course, I was writing my three pages every day. ...

But for whatever reason, the autobiographical sketch and Isis lecture were not included in the essay collection. I hope that an anthology or even a fresh monograph dedicated to education will come to light at some point. I made a copy of the version of the former piece, which used to be available on Pullman's website along with the Isis lecture. It's also archived on the wayback machine; and I believe it can still be found in Vol 65 (not 71, it turns out) of Something About the Author, which he wrote it for in the first place.

I would love to hear from people who had him as a teacher, whether at school or university, for more anecdotes. At a wonderful recent interview at the London Literature Festival, the question came up, organically it seemed, of what kind of teacher he was, but I wonder if a more painstaking investigation and research into the material wouldn't be worthwhile.

In that same interview, reaffirming what he's said before and in writing, he called for books of folklore, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes to be bound in gold and given to parents.

Some of the people I've talked to have taught his books. What about his teaching?

(this is another element of Tolkien-Pullman connection. Is there a study out there yet about Tolkien as teacher?)

And supposing we could get recordings of him telling stories--would it be anything like as effective as having the classroom teacher telling the stories aloud? Recall, he didn't read, he told them. The analogy is to physical books and conversations and screen-texts and online discussions. In gaining something with our access to the latter, we're giving something up--but we need not make this an either/or. We can focus on learning how to use online resources, not being captured by them; and can retain in-person interaction, for teachers and students have to have somewhere to be, transforming lost time into learning. Not every teacher a storyteller, but those who aren't can show their kids what storytelling looks like through such videos. Not every kid needing that, but those who don't wouldn't be forced, they'd have other options, like writing stories or making videos of their own...

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Letting Go of the Old School: On Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke

In preparing to launch into my own study of Xenogears, I've been reading around in this awesome Xenogears Study Guide and came across a section about works which were influential in the history of the game's development:

Takahashi was a pretty small kid, so he was better at study than sports. Chemistry and physics were his favorites, "but I was awful at math" he recalls in an interview on Sony's Website in 2002. For art he would sometimes get good grades, sometimes bad, depending on teacher. "I used to read a lot of manga and those science fiction novels with the blue spines from Hayakawa Publishing" he says, referring to the publishers of Japanese translations of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov, which have clearly influenced Takahashi.

In fact, Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke was directly referenced in Xenogears in the naming of the character "Karellen" (localized as "Krelian" for U.S. audience) who, according to Soraya Saga on Yggdrasil's Periscope Club BBS back in 1999, was the name of Takahashi's favorite character in Childhood's End. The title of "Guardian Angel," given to the character Citan Uzuki, was another reference. Clarke's idea for Childhood's End began with his short story "Guardian Angel" (1946). 2001: A Space Odyssey is referenced with the "SOL-9000" computer that houses the Ministry, and also in Xenogears: Perfect Works with the discovery of Zohar - a monolithic artifact - on Earth in 2001. This event, with some rewrites, was later used as the opening cinematic in Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht...

(So I guess I'll need to brush up on my Nietzsche and Kubrick soon, too). Naturally, I made a visit to the library at once and got a copy of Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke. Somehow, I'd made it this far never having read anything of the SF master, and while I am in awe of Karellen/ Krelian, I don't know that I would have found the book as interesting if I weren't already fascinated by the game. This could just be me, but it poses an interesting problem for this whole project of mine, in which I'm attempting to bridge the worlds of reading books and playing video games in the hopes that learning itself will continue to flourish by the exchange.

Related image

I can well understand the appeal of Karellen for the young man who, in partnership with his wife, would create Xenogears, writing the alien into the game as Krelian. Clarke's Karellen is brilliantly mysterious and intriguing as the spokesman for the Overlords, the benign, seemingly all-powerful race which makes contact with Earth in Clarke's novel. The most interesting thing about him, though, is his secretiveness, hinting at some purpose which, until it is revealed, keeps us turning the pages. Once it is out, though, even more than once we've finally seen Karellen's physical form, he really diminishes in impressiveness. Perhaps, as we learn more about the Overlords' true place in the cosmos, Karellen also gains in pathos, but I would have needed a little more, I think, some hint that he feels the insufficiency of, and wants to do something about, this purpose, to really have Karellen keep my sympathy.

As we're told, though, the Overlords are inscrutable to our sensibilities as we, with our uncanny potential, are to them.

So ultimately what left me unimpressed with the book was the absence of a party corresponding to Fei and his compatriots in Xenogears. There isn't much of an arc for any of the other characters besides Karellen; they all seem like ciphers more than fully realized personalities. There are flashes of something great here, but it never feels like a great novel: the whole paranormal thing is grandiose, if a little stilted; the recapitulation of Jonah is clever, but what message does it convey, really? The rewriting of the past through the future, in the underlying myth of the Garden of Eden, is too pat, delivered as a punchline rather than developed as it would deserve, thematically, through, say, a more engaging Jeff, admirably sketched but too late and too underdeveloped as a young protagonist, or Jean, his mother, who gets so little breathing room as a character beside her cad of a husband.

I guess my question, then, is what it tells us about the creators of Xenogears, that they were so into this book? Of course, they're hardly unique in that, and their borrowings from all sorts of places are well-documented, but still, it might provide a helpful lens into the problems with characterization which the game, too, suffers from at times.

To pivot to the overarching project here again, though: it really seems to me that Clarke is onto something, metaphorically if not literally, with his Chestertonian/Lindsayan interest in the paranormal playing such a critical part in his story. That is, we might be profoundly limiting ourselves in unthinking acceptance of our traditional notions of human potential, and how best it might be nurtured. I deeply disagree with the loss of individual personality and emotional relationship Clarke imagines as prerequisite for some incomprehensible telepathic advance, but from his foreword to the 2000 reprint he seems to disavow some of that, too, later on. Nevertheless, if a school is conceived solely as an incubator for social-emotional comfort, a place where the state provides not only meals and shelter but psychological care as well--and all signs are that this is where we're heading, rapidly--then the utopian experiment Clarke trots out in his island Athens (and Sparta) seems like a good corrective, or at least worth a try. The way I see this actually playing out, however, is more as an add-on rather than an alternative to the social school status quo. That within the parameters of the home-surrogate environment our benign caretakers seem to be establishing in law and practice, there is actually an opportunity to find all sorts of unsuspected breakthroughs, if kids on their phones or devices are allowed to play and learn largely at their own pace. They need not go to some elite artistic colony; they will be there already, if it exists, and if they want to. It will just be a matter of making sure that there is material out there worth their while, and likely to challenge them to reach the full and free deployment of their talents. Something like that, anyway, it is the aim of the new school/Night School to provide.

Monday, May 6, 2019

Bookwarm Games: Xenogears

Delve into Xenogears in the follow-up to the EarthBound series (episodes 1-33) of Bookwarm Games discussions. This page has been updated weekly as new episodes were released, alternating with its sister project, Gamecool Books: The Subtle Knife.

For the list of chapter titles and links to the script (now defunct, but just plug them into the wayback machine), thanks to StarcraftSquall at the Xenogears: God and Mind Script page.

For many of the reading recommendations, and for more on historical contexts and sources, recognition goes out to the remarkable Xenogears and Xenosaga Study Guide pages, by A.C.

We're still building out the course pages over at our humble Video Game Academy. Until then, here's some other good resources: