Final Hours

Well, the summer slips away. I guess it ended a week ago for me given that we just finished our week-long Composition orientation for our new TAs (our program and department are still reeling a bit following the loss of one of our TAs, a 24 year-old poet who died days after being in a serious car accident on her way to the Blackfoot for a summer swim; another of our former TAs was also seriously injured. It certainly puts things in perspective).

I'll be in the classroom again in a mere thirty-six hours and I still find myself with a pair of syllabuses to complete. As I contemplate the new year, I find myself still thinking about your various workshops and all the great ideas we exchanged. I hope you all squeezed some happy, restorative hours out of the second half of the summer (and were able to work a bit on your summer reading list), and that you now look forward to your return to the classroom. Please stop by these parts from time to time to provide some testimony from the front lines: successes (and frustrations) in the classroom, questions, random musings, book and article recommendations, etc. Cheerio!

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!).

Students or Consumers?

Hi again. Some of you might be interested in this Carnegie perspectives article about the efforts and attitudes of today's students. It's ostensibly about higher education (and the article is connected with the PBS show "Declining by Degrees," which sounds wonderful and which, I believe, is being broadcast on our PBS affiliate this evening), but it appears to be relevant for all of us. The article discusses student investment (or lack of investment, rather) in their educations and the sense that grades are based on persistence rather than achievement. And it continues the conversations we've had in recent days about grading, evaluation, etc.

On the Nightstand

Greetings everyone! With a fortnight of MWP behind us and a fortnight to go, I thought I'd go with a diversionary posting today. Given that we're all "off" for the summer (just yesterday a neighbor used that phrase to ask what I'm up to -- egads. And then there's my mother-in-law, who always seems to wonder why we don't go "home" (to NY) for the summer, as if we're still "the kids," set free from college and on summer vacation), it would be fun to know what you have lined up for summer reading? I can never decide whether the concept of "pleasure reading" even applies to my life anymore; I enjoy almost everything I read, but it's also true that most of it is somehow related to my teaching. I guess one way to formulate the matter is to say either that everything we read is pleasure reading, or nothing is!

Anyway, at the moment I'm auditioning some novels for a Multicultural British literature class in the fall, so I've recently finished Monica Ali's wonderful Brick Lane and Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet, and have now started Andrea Levy's Small Island. My one unadulterated pleasure book this summer will likely be Andrew Sean Greer's acclaimed The Confessions of Max Tivoli (a former MFA student here at UM!). I've also been looking at Jon Katz's moving book about being a dog owner, A Dog Year, and, perhaps as compensation for having devoted three hours of my life to that Brad Pitt Troy movie recently, I'm contemplating dipping into Pierre Leveque's classic book on Greek history, The Greek Adventure. And then there's the stack of New Yorker magazines that accumulated when I was so busy during the Spring semester. Because I will obsessively read those from cover-to-cover, though, it'll be dangerous if I head in the direction of that pile! And then there are some of those titles that beckon from the Summer Institute bibliography that I might not be able to resist. And then, and then, and then ...

And you?

Plagiarism? Patchwriting?

I've continued to think about the plagiarism discussion we had at the end of the technology session last Wednesday. I forget who posed the original question about technology's role in both facilitating plagiarism and detecting it (Diane? Jean?), but it was a good one. The internet and electronic writing have certainly made the issue more opaque, and as a result I think we as writing teachers need to foreground it with our students more frequently (and in more varied ways) than we have in the past. And we have to do so in ways that respect the complexity of how we circulate and revise ideas & information, intellectual & artistic material, etc. (digital environments provide many good test cases for this). Collage, patchwriting, recycling, peer-to-peer file sharing, collaboration ... there are certainly a lot of interesting, ambivalent, and elusive terms and practices floating around these days. I think teachers and students would benefit from sometimes discussing plagiarism and originality in these terms, rather than soley in the context of academic crime and punishment. I guess what I'm saying is that it may be counterproductive, ultimately, if we too crudely distinguish between "originality" and "borrowing."

If you didn't catch it (and I may not have had the title entirely correct), here is a very interesting book recommendation for those of you who might be inclined to pursue the matter from a more theoretical angle: Rebecca Moore Howard's In the Shadows of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. The editorial description of the book goes like this: "Who's cheating whom in college writing instruction? This book argues that through binary privileging of the "real" author (the inspired, autonomous genius) over the transgressive writer (the collaborator or the plagiarist), composition pedagogy deprives students of important opportunities to join in scholarly discourse and assume authorial roles. From Plato's paradoxicaly dependence on and rejection of Homer, to Jerome McGann's dismissal of copyright as the "hand of the dead," Standing in the Shadow of Giants surveys changes and conflicts in Western theories of authorship. From this survey emerges an account of how and why plagiarism became important to academic culture; how and why current pedagogical representations of plagiarism contradict contemporary theory of authorship; why the natural, necessary textual strategy of patchwriting is mis-classified as academic dishonesty; and how teachers might craft pedagogy that authorizes student writing instead of criminalizing it."

By the way, here is another great resource for studying, discussing, and teaching plagiarism; it's part of the Washington State University website.