Newsflash: Bad Writing is Expensive

Did any of you happen to catch the news of the National Commission on Writing's third report? It focuses on poor writing in the public/business sector, asserting that (surprise, surprise), bad writing costs (literally) a lot of money. You can check out the ABC News version here. Embedded in there is the announcement that "the commission is calling for more Congressional funding for the National Writing Project, a professional development program for teachers, and what [Bob] Kerrey says are proven methods for improving writing instruction in classrooms."

Top 5 Lists

Near the close of Sue's workshop, someone (Diane? Dunie?) mentioned that it would be useful to have students scour a text like that excerpt from Walker's Winter Wheat and locate what they consider to be the best verbs in the piece, and then to have them justify their choices. That sounds like a great exercise -- another way of "defamiliarizing" a grammar and style session. It also made my mind free-associate to Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, in which his character is constantly composing "Top 5 lists" related to music and girlfriends. To that end, and especially since I've been lapsing into academic-speak in recent posts, how about a little frivolity again?! Thinking of Charlie's musical memories morning meeting (ah, Eric is alliterative on this holiday weekend!), what songs would you include in your Top 5 Most Melancholy/Sad songs of all time? You can interpret sad in either a musical or a lyrical sense. I mentioned Neil Diamond's "Coldwater Morning" in response to Charlie's prompt, but I might also include Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year," the Beatles' "Yesterday," Michael Murphy's "Wildfire," and, oh, how about something like the Greensleeves melody, which always moves me in deeply melancholy (but also consoling) ways. "Puff the Magic Dragon"?!

Simply Similes

I've also been thinking about Sue's workshop and that Mildred Walker excerpt. Sue's exercise so wonderfully made us aware of the craft and the architectural genius involved (at the sentence level, at the phrase level, at the word level, etc.) in beautiful prose writing. I don't want to ask a question that induces you to leaf maddeningly through your collection of Toni Morrison novels, but can you think of any individual pieces of writing, or sentences, etc., that you might be inclined to use in a classroom either to celebrate the glories of writing, or use as illustrations of some sort?

I'm again invoking To the Lighthouse, but I often think that there can't be a more astounding simile-writer than Virginia Woolf. For example, think of how richly you could mine the following passage. It's that moment when Mr. Ramsay, in an endearing if ultimately unsucessfully way, tries to make amends with his son after having spoken to him harshly. The passage then moves into a positively stunning example of descriptive writing (amateur nature photographers like myself will appreciate the concluding image):

"Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands when charging at the head of his troops, Mr. Ramsay rather sheepishly prodded his son's bare legs once more, and then, as if he had her leave for it, with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening air which, already thinner, was taking the substance from leaves and hedges but, as if in return, restoring to roses and pinks a lustre which they had not had by day."

If I could write just one sentence like that in my lifetime, I would die happy ... :)

On Adjacencies and Primary Colors

Hi everyone. Well, we're down to our last week together! There are so many ideas circulating at this point (i.e., in my head, around the room when we're together, etc.), for which I'm grateful. One of the things I always love about teaching literature courses is the way connections, themes, images, etc., communicate across disparate texts over the course of the semester -- and seredipitously, for the most part, which makes it all the more exciting and organic. I'm feeling the same way during this Summer Institute; I guess you could say I have my own internal "word wall" at this point. One of the words/notions bouncing around my head right now is "adjacency." It may be because it showed up in that William Gibson article (see below), but I think it has also in various ways been relevant to nearly every one of your workshops so far (the adjacencies of words and images in technical writing and computer writing, the adjacencies of parts of speech, the adjacencies of peer review, etc.). Bryan had his own take on this during his performance poetry workshop when he described poetry being about, in one sense, just putting words next to each other to see what happens. It was great the way he went from word adjacency, though, to material and bodily adjacency: i.e., by having us rotate pieces of paper around the room, by having our voices join the voices of our colleagues on those pieces of paper, by having us share words, build connections, help articulate each other's thoughts, etc. We each became collage artists during that session.

I think the notion of "adjacency" also somehow connects with one of my other favorite notions of the moment: defamiliarization. I flash back immediately to children's books and Rina's workshop when I think of this one, but it's another term that has seemed to inhere in all of the workshops so far. I guess good teaching is almost always in some way about defamiliarization. I don't know how relevant this is, but during Rina's workshop I mentioned Tolkien's wonderful essay "On Fairy-Stories." Here's a snippet (and I always think of movies like Toy Story 2 when I think of seeing primary colors as if for the first time):

"We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses -- and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish. Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining -- regaining of a clear view. I do not say 'seeing things as they are' and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say 'seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them' -- as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity -- from possessiveness."

By the way, I would add to Rina's collection my favorite children's books of the moment: Karma Wilson's and Jane Chapman's Bear Snores On ("Two glowing eyes / sneak-peek in the den. / Mouse cries, "Who's there?" / and a hare hops in. / "Ho, Mouse!" says Hare. / "Long time, no see! / So they pop white corn. / And they brew black tea.") and Lloyd Moss's Zin! Zin! Zin! a Violin ("Flute, that sends our soul a-shiver; / Flute, that slender, silver sliver. / A place among the set it picks / To make a young sextet--that's six"). These books are like sheet music that produce a different song every time I read them out loud. And they're all about "putting words next to each other to see what happens"! To think that a year ago -- when someone mentioned the title at the 2004 Summer Institute -- I didn't even know the book Goodnight Moon!

Lyric You in Lilacs

I don't know if anyone else was rather taken by the poems Bryan read to us on Friday, but here is one of them, Nikki Giovanni's "Kidnap Poem":

kidnap poem

ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
you to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see
play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in the red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were a poet i'd kid
nap you

-- Nikki Giovanni

Collage Artists

I just stumbled upon an interesting little piece by William Gibson in the current edition of Wired. Gibson, of course, tends to be "out there" at times, but you can make the case that he has also been prescient in some ways. Anyway, it's worth a quick read. In reflecting on his early days as a writer ("Confessions of a Cut-and-Paste Artist"), Gibson writes that "I already knew that word processing was another of God's little toys, and that the scissors and paste pot were always there for me, on the desktop of my Apple IIc. Burroughs' methods, which had also worked for Picasso, Duchamp, and Godard, were built into the technology through which I now composed my own narratives. Everything I wrote, I believe instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data." Later in the piece he argues that "our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all -- it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital."

We had the collage aesthetic on our minds during Cathy's presentation (e.g., with the discussion about the collages that are created on bulletin boards, when flyers for missing children compete with post-it notes, concert posters, for-sale signs, etc.). The multi-genre essay borrowed a bit from the collage aesthetic, too, no? Gibson's language and thoughts also tend to pick up some of the ideas in the plagiarism and "patchwriting" posting below. And certainly these are ideas that are capable of rattling we writing teachers (for better and for worse, probably!).