How to write a blog

For succinctness, for a window into a conversation with readers, for consistent updates, and for a generally pleasing look to the thing, I should take notes from Brenton Dickieson's A Pilgrim in Narnia. Check it out!

The Rooted Reader

Or, The Radical Reader--let's recall that radical also means going to the root of things. Here's a curated list of readings (or listenings--free audio of the great majority of great works is also easily found) for the autodidact who would stand before the world in wonder and eschew ideological pigeonholing:

Gilgamesh

The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer 

Works of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho

The Dialogues of Plato 

Works of Aristophanes and Aristotle

The Aeneid of Virgil 

The Bible 

Tao Te Ching and poems of Cold Mountain

Plutarch's Lives

Confessions of St Augustine

Beowulf

The Divine Comedy of Dante

Works of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Rumi

The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer

Works of Shakespeare

Montaigne's Essays

Cervantes' Don Quixote

Milton's Paradise Lost

Bach, especially St Matthew Passion

Mozart, especially Don Giovanni

Beethoven, especially Ninth Symphony and late string quartets

Lyrical poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, PB Shelley, Keats

Frankenstein, by MW Shelley

Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Beyond Good and Evil

Which brings us up more or less to modernity. While reading forward to this point, we might also go about reading and listening but also watching and playing back down toward the depths of time from the present moment:

Mythgard podcasts and courses

Atlantic articles

Music of Kendrick Lamar and Sufjan Stevens

Films of Miyazaki and Tarkovsky

Peterson's podcasts and courses

Haidt, The Righteous Mind

Mazzotta's Open Yale Course on Dante

Essays and fiction of Berry, Robinson, Nafisi, Pullman

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Wilson, Consilience

Video games from Uchikoshi, Itoi, Miyamoto

Essays and fiction of Morrison, Baldwin, Ellison

Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

Works of Piaget, Jung, Neumann, Frankl, Buber, Solzhenitsyn

St-Exupery's Wind, Sand, and Stars and The Little Prince

Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Essays and fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Borges, Tolkien

Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Works of James, Darwin, Marx, Freud

Works of Chekhov and Ibsen

Poetry and speeches of Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson

Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Tolstoy

Works of Hume, Burke, Smith, De Tocqueville

Red and Black and On Love by Stendhal

And so on, until we are right back where we started, left in awe, grounded and liberated at once. So that we can say, with the Soothsayer in Antony and Cleopatra:

In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.

Not that only books can do this, but they express themselves in the words with which to understand them, whereas other things express themselves, so to speak, in silence. As much as possible, we want to do this reading in the original languages, which entails learning them alongside our own. We want to acknowledge the progress and convergence taking place over time in some fields, like math and medicine, while wrestling, too, with what has been lost--or has become hard to recognize or to speak of, regardless of what language we try to use--like faith in religion or beauty in art.

To participate in the nature of things unmediated by articulate speech is of course possible--where else would our words come from? What else would they refer to? Consider the technological and even the social world (think of games, sports, music, dance). Perhaps these ways are even more profound than can be expressed in words, yet we are certainly enriched by close engagement with written works, via whatever media, as they give us practice  expressing ourselves to one another across time and space. These works guide us, individually and as communities, as nothing else can, in threading the needle through difference and sublimating the potential for violence into creative discourse, whether it be harmony or discord. In that sense, the word is literally, as well as metaphorically, eternal, life-giving. In the connections it draws us into, it is bound up with love. It trains judgment. It flexes forgiveness. The proof of these outrageous claims? We hope to live and breath it.

Inevitably, if you've read (or listened and all the rest) as far as this, you'll have a lifetime of reading opening before you, as we all have. Even if you've only glanced at the list, you may well have a bone to pick with the titles and authors on it and not on it, or perhaps with the idea of a list at all. Let it be a library, if you like. Either way, it's something for us to talk about!

And so, down among the roots or up amidst the branches, the buried lead, the dipping bait: this is by no means supposed to be an isolated endeavor; on the contrary, from these seeds--great works--we intend to do the work of growing seminars for citizens, cultivating teachers with classroom coaching sessions, and sprouting fresh thoughts in the clay of even the most recalcitrant students with personalized tutorials. Online and in person, in the shared pursuit of meaning, learning ensues. And at times, even happiness. Such is our experience, and we are happy to have the chance now to share it as widely as possible.

Contact

Reading Observing Orienting Talking -- A ROOT for every STEM to stem from

--Then we put some images on there, make a video out of it...What do you think of that as a draft proposal? Venture capitalists and charitable donors, we want to hear from you, too!

What's Old is New Again: Consilience and the Two Cultures

Steph and I have a joke that Spokane is still in the 90's. I think it's some combination of the architecture, the signs, and the neighborhood streets that remind me of when I was growing up, and the clothes and the people, of course, are a little different but in ways that are reminiscent of that time.

And so, since I like to read things for myself when people seem to be interested in talking about them, I got an old copy of E. O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which dates from the mid 90's, and reading it sitting outside after school or while subbing for classes that could work quietly, the spell was complete. It took me back.

He makes a good point about the hard sciences not being physics and chemistry but psychology and sociology, or even aesthetics and literary interpretation. This made me think about the hard questions people like to ask of intellectual celebrities these days, for Peterson, "Do you believe in God?" and for Pullman, "Where do you get your ideas?" Next to something like that, even the most complex question about black holes or epigenetics seems pretty tame.

The argument reaches a bit further back to C. P. Snow's lecture "The Two Cultures," and to periodic manifestations before that, well documented in the foreword to the Cambridge Canto edition: Ruskin, Arnold, Huxley... Basically, the claim is like in the title of the O'Connor story: Everything that rises must converge. Wilson draws on the image of the labyrinth, the serpent, though the flight of Icarus hovers unsettlingly near, too. Snow decries the concrete problems which collaboration between scientists and political and literary elites could address, but which persist and worsen while the intelligentsia pontificate. Poverty, dismal education, and catastrophic climate change/squandering of natural resources are the specters they raise and seek to dispel with reason. But to my mind, McGilchrist has set forth much the richer picture of human nature, and with it the more compelling call to adventure.

I walked to the river last night, musing on the god who works for six days and rests, and walks in the garden in the cool of the evening, calling to his work, made in his image... Poetry and metaphor, playful irony and earnest jest seem like the only honest way to answer the really hard problems.

Taking Stock

Well, another year drawing to a close here. The mixed joy and sadness of completing another whole from the freedom of fragments, mixed eagerness and anxiousness about the prospect of more free time to turn into open-ended work.

Where do things stand?

To go back to basics: The New School name never was going to work. Seat's taken!

What about ROOT, to play off STEM (or STEAM)?--Reading Observing Orienting Talking.

The old motto, too, is too much of a mouthful, and I like the way Frankl talks about it (cited in McGilchrist), that rather than the image of pursuing happiness, it makes more sense to say that happiness ensues from meaning. Peterson says much the same. But I do like the word synonymous.

And as for a physical building, an actual institution, much as that might be a good goal to strive for, there's also a great deal of learning that can happen already without it. Not just capitulating to what is already available at Khan Academy and Outschool and Mythgard, but primarily I mean directing people to all the books and original works of art which are freely available online. The real immediate task may be to give shape to a curriculum, rather than a school as such. Alex, Brian, and I have each been thinking about how to arrange for this to take the form of remunerative consulting, one way or another. Then again, I'm happy enough just subbing and thinking about this stuff as a hobby for now.

Tedx Spokane, though I didn't make their event, did give me an opportunity to formulate my somewhat more current ideas about this project. Their theme this year is Beyond Ourselves. Here's more or less what I pitched:

As a sub, I am invisible. As you can imagine, I hear some interesting things. When students do notice me, observing and hearing them, and they do look at me, what do they see? White, male, around 30, somewhat educated, assume correctly that I’m straight or wrongly that I’m gay, if any of that matters--but it seems to matter to people quite a bit these days. Not a person, of course, at most a teacher, but probably as a sub I represent to them unfettered freedom, unbounded possibility--the saturnalia impulse, mayhem and glee. Which is great, because what do teachers, all hopeful adults, see when they look at students, but just such boundless possibility? Potential for incalculable good or, more pessimistically, for grave harm.

The first thing I do, what used to be called a captatio benevolentiae, to gain their attention and sympathy, to begin to humanize us all: the production of some moderately articulate but above all warm and sensible statement of greeting, such as Hello, how are you? As you can see, your teacher (insert name here--Mandy Manning, for instance, the national teacher of the year, I subbed for her at Ferris once last year, and got to know her wonderful students and co-teacher Maria Luisa Ovellana-Westbrook) wasn’t able to be here today. My name is Mr Schantz (or Sr, or M). I taught for four years at a great charter school in Arizona, moved up here in 2016 to be closer to family and escape the desert, recover seasons. Prior to that...if they’re still listening, I’ll talk about something relevant to the class, like teaching English as a second language in Uruguay on a Fulbright exchange, or serving with AmeriCorps in a Boston elementary school, or teaching online courses about video games. But quickly I need to move on to calling roll.

I think about this a lot, as it’s in a way my main job. I meant to ask, were any of you students in the public schools here? Did you ever happen to study the WA state constitution at all? I was just looking at that, preparing to give this talk...I’ll come back to why at the end.

As a student, whenever roll was actually called aloud, as subs have to do it, I became highly self-conscious, imagining everyone’s attention was on me, which was absurd, but that’s how it felt, and that’s how it feels for the kids in the classes where I sub. I’m invisible, and they become visible. If I mispronounce a name, woe! Whereas as a teacher, taking the roll becomes invisible, and you’re able to get right into the class--greeting students by name, asking about their lives since yesterday, and when the bell rights, diving right into the big idea for class that day. Here’s mine:

Public schools will be fine. They will. As long as they continue to provide three simple things: access to technology, to books, and to other people. Really just the last, but it helps to tell stories in threes…

Schools can fail all the tests, teachers can walk out, students can become apathetic, even suicidal or murderous--the next day we’ll be back, asking one another how are you doing, what did you get on the homework and what questions did you have on the reading. What accounts for this resolute normality?

Technology - I started thinking about teaching and schools in earnest as a junior or senior in high school. It was around this time of year, when the weather’s getting nice, summer is around the corner, testing season, and it occurred to me that my teachers must already know as I did that I would do well on all the tests, so why did I still have to take them? What was the point? Why was I there? I started to write about it and still blog about teaching and learning...Slowly I realized what by now should be obvious, that with access to technology, we have access to anything we might want to know. Making technology available makes everything available. And we don’t have to understand how it works--we can look it up--but enough kids will want to that they will drive the advance of new technology, until the robots can do it better than we can. Not far off--then realizing we rely on this thing we don’t understand

Books - Before cell phones, I read books. Students still do, remarkably. Shakespeare, Harper Lee, August Wilson...I should mention I hated school. Bored. And this served me well, finding all sorts of things to read outside of class. Socrates, who was the wisest according to the Delphic oracle whose motto was “know thyself”, claiming he knew how ignorant he was, questioning. Montaigne, “what do I know” exploring that through essays and civic action. Holding these sorts of authorities up as models, but not being hypnotized by the author or their context--they, too, become invisible in the reality of their work. As Flaubert says, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”

Other people - “Love your neighbor” says the book not to be read in school, the topic not to be discussed--and so it attains that much more glamour, becomes that much more interesting, even tempting--and that’s what the first story in it is about, isn’t it? - Pullman. So it’s ultimately not content, nor even skills, that schools teach--they provide a good chance of learning these in the form of access to technology and books--but insofar as attendance is mandatory, what they teach is how to be around other people. Schools will provide this above all else, at least in states like WA where their funding is tied to attendance: article IX: paramount, ample…

So when I am prompted by dissatisfaction with the resolute normality of school, managing to make boring and banal the most human of activities, learning, then I am learning the most. To ask, to seek what to value, how to live. School’s a joke. It’s life or death. Anytime you have something big enough to contain such contradictory multitudes, we should perk up our ears--there’s a story there. And especially if some people take it seriously, while others treat it like it’s a joke, there’s bound to be strong passions on both sides before long, as the buried significance is either pressed down or comes to the surface. Or when some take it as a literal truth and earnestly act on what it says--taking notes, studying,, caring about grades and even about learning--while others take it as a metaphor, a simulacrum of a lifestyle in a society that has systematically negated their importance, as a lie--perhaps a noble lie, but more likely a dirty one.  For explaining the joke, for my tendentious exegesis on the matter, thank you for listening.

If you’d like to get beyond yourself at a leap, get a job as a sub, work when you want to, they always need more.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other: From The Master and his Emissary

So interesting to follow the intellectual ferment of the day some! Peterson promoting this book, this book excoriating Pinker and Chomsky, the latter of them holding court on Democracy Now... Here are some of my favorite parts of McGilchrist's magnum opus.

In the section Music and Time, having observed that "It has been said that music, like poetry, is intrinsically sad": "The relationship between music and emotion is fascinating, and to some degree baffling. Suzanne Langer said that music not only has the power to recall emotions we are familiar with, but to evoke 'emotions and moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before.' Music seems, in other words, to expand the range of possible emotions limitlessly because the emotion experienced is so bound up with the peculiarity of the work that mediates it, yet the lexicon with which we are obliged to describe the feelings remains frustratingly limited. Thus the 'sadness' of a piece of Bach will be quite different from the 'sadness' of a piece of Mozart, and 'sadness' in the Matthew Passion will be different from the sort of 'sadness' we might discern in The Musical Offering..."

And he goes on to discuss individual movements in the St Matthew Passion! This passage gives a sense of the breadth of culture and research which have gone into this book, distilling out the compelling case for the relationship between the hemispheres, and between the structure of the brain and the development of culture. The arguments about music and language make me think about Tolkien, his evocations of music, pity, and etymology, and the status of his mythology for beginning to accomplish just the sort of realignment between the Master right hemisphere, associated with imaginative empathy, as well as spatial depth and musical wholes, and the Emissary left, the wordy, categorizing, atomizing and unfolding usurper whose messages are meant to be reconnected and given meaning within that larger whole from which they receive their material without knowing it--Socrates' daemon, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Pullman's night fishing in the half-light of Keats' negative capability, etc.

More, in the section on the direction of writing: "Although both oriental and Western languages are generally read from the top down, so that at the global level they still conform to the right-hemisphere preference, at the local, sequential level they have drifted in the West towards the left hemisphere's point of view. This process started with the move to phonetics. While 'almost all pictographic writing systems favour a vertical layout....practically all systems of writing that depend exclusively on the visual rendition of phonological features of language are horizontally laid out.' ...[Greek] continued to be written right to left until the seventh century BC. However, at around this time a fascinating change occurred. Between the eighth and sixth centuries, Greek began to be written in what is known as boustrephedon, literally 'as the ox ploughs,' which is to say going to the end of the line, turning round, and coming back - alternating direction line by line. By the fifth century BC, however, left to right was becoming the norm, and by the fourth century the transition was complete, and all forms of Greek were being written left to right."

He connects this with Athenian democracy, Platonic philosophy, and the rise of currency. It reminds me of Barzun's fascination with the shape of the book vs the scroll--how scrolling makes sense for organizing horizontally units which are vertical, whereas a book organizes in vertical layouts units which are horizontal. I've often imagined a book in which each line could be stacked vertically with branching possibilities like harmonies, whether through hyperlinks or by some mystical suspension of the reader's boundedness to spacetime.

Finally, McGilchrist arrives at a similar concern as Mukherjee: metaphor and its relation to the truths recognized by science. Throughout, he has referred to a tale by Nietzsche, he claims to be unable to say just where he read it, but it sounds a great deal like the parable of the vineyard owner in the Gospels, which he does not refer to, to my recollection, and like Hegel's dialectic, which he does, particularly the master-slave sections. In likening the hemispheres to a servant and his master, considering "alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole, and so on - it seems like a metaphor that might have some literal truth. But if it turns out to be 'just' a metaphor, I will be content. I have a high regard for metaphor. It is how we come to understand the world."

Embodied there in the language and style is the crux of the argument, I think: that science must, even if it doesn't realize it, bow the knee to poetry, which underlies it and orients itself in turn humbly towards the unknown; that in this stance in awe of the world meaning can arise which is individual, true, and yet admits of being shared. It's an invigorating, astonishingly convincing, treasure trove of a book. Read it!

See episode 16 of Bookwarm Games for some thoughts on the implications for postmodern art and theory.

More Upbuilding

We looked a bit before at the prefaces to the series of Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses. Here's the closing paragraph in the last of them, One Who Prays Aright:

We have spoken about struggle. Struggle is usually not joyful; when one person is victorious, the other is crushed--alas, it sometimes happens that both the victor and the one overcome have lost. But this struggle is marvelous, well worth being tested in, eternally worth praising, since here they both are more blessedly victorious than when the lover's argument is transfigured into increased love. Are you saying, my listener, that this discourse is not easy (one who is being tested may find it poor and bland compared with the sufferings)--the struggle itself is not easy either. If someone wants to beguile himself by anticipating the quiet outcome of the struggle, its happy understanding, then this is no the fault of the discourse. The victory is still a victory only in a certain high and noble and therefore metaphorical sense, but the pain is literal. When the hour of victory is coming, we do not know, but this we do know--the struggle is a life-and-death struggle.

What has happened here? Questions without question marks, long convoluted periods and parenthetical asides, direct address and self-reference--much of what we find throughout the Discourses, we find also in the pseudonymous works. This voice which is Kierkegaard's own is no less earnest about his direct endorsement of the Christian worldview, and elaborating what he takes that to mean, than his other voices are in their philosophical treatments of the search for such a "happy understanding". Yet after hundreds of pages, this is where he winds up: lover's arguments as a likeness, nobility as a metaphor, and pain as literal, taking his stand on the inscrutability and the certainty of the life-and-death struggle to be a Christian.

At places in this one he sounds like Nietzsche: "The strong man is warned not to misuse his power against the weak, but the weak man is also warned not to misuse the power o prayer against the strong. It may well be that a tyrant who misused his power, a deceiver who misused his shrewdness, never perpetrated as atrocious a wrong as the one who cowardly and slyly prayed in the wrong place, prayed in order to advance his will, flung himself into the weakness of prayer, into imploring misery, in order to shatter another person" (384). What if Kierkegaard was the more prescient of the two, and better saw the path the religious perspective would be bound to take in the wake of modernity? Not the death of God and revaluation of all values, but the hollowing out of the church and every social institution as human potential became freed to be concentrated in this acute inwardness, not unlike these philosophers', only much less educated, connected, instead of to tradition, to social media, but among the resources there encountering, perhaps, a blog or podcast or app that makes us aware of just such heartfelt prayer underlying the once-oppressive and hypocritical churches, just such nobility as the highest aim of even democratically-conceived states which have since succumbed to empire and slipped thence into corporate control.

We eagerly await the next series from Peterson, for instance, whether on Exodus or on the Tao te Ching, once he's had enough of the celebrity-atheist debates and book tours. We agree with his acolytes on much, but stop short of the Pelagianism they seem to endorse. All for the importance of consciousness, of metaphysics, and of the innateness of certain values and the kind of mythological storytelling with which we share them, we would point out something about the way the Christian story introduces charitable interpretation as a ground rule, independent of artful captatio benevolentiae. And thus it not only instructs us to love others, but shows us how: by loving their stories.

More videos up this week