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!