Solastalgia on Refuse: A Journal of Iconoclasms

My "poem" mixes a little #solastalgia (distress caused by degradation of one’s environment) into a lesson plan on strip vs. deep mining designed for Kentucky 3rd-graders  https://refusejournal.com/solastalgia/ 

The whole journal is fab-thanks @marginatalia Natalia Smirnov who writes:

Is the Refusal Turn something different than the previous turns, something that refuses to pay tribute to the canon and beat its many dead horses? Could this turn, rather than branching fractally off of the original DNA, instead turn on itself, begin to eat and metabolize and decompose its own material, like a cancer, an ouroboros, an auto-cannibal? 

More about the original

 Novelist and suicide Hubert Aquin in “Occupation: Writer” (Writing Quebec):

. . . if we are to be perfectly honest, the originality of a piece of work is directly proportional to the ignorance of its readers. There is no originality: works of literature are reproductions (which serve a purpose of course in a society with large amounts of spare time to kill and blessed, moreover, with pulp) run off from worn out plates made from other “originals” reproduced from reproductions that are true copies of earlier forgeries that one does not need to have known to understand that they were not archetypes but simply variants. A cruel invariability governs the mass production of those variants that go by the name of original works. History, too, copies itself. Originality is as impossible there as in literature. Originality does not exist; it is a delusion. 

qtd. in Marilyn Randall's Pragmatic Plagiarism (235) 

Lyn Hejinian and my "Good Ideas" class. . . .

 This morning I listened to Lyn Hejinian giving a Harvard Woodberry Lecture called Reinventing the Workshop. This occurred in 2014, and she clarifies that she isn't interested in workshops for the poet who speaks from his or her heart, though "profound experience" and "astute observation" are favorably mentioned. In contrast, she spends a lot of time on so-called procedural methods of making poems. These are poems in which the author function gets pushed out of primacy. (My heart!) (We are late to all the parties.) 

On the Harvard site that introduces this, she is quoted on this philosophy, which I might consider the topic of communal poesis--or the questioning of authorship--that constitutes the reinvention of the workshop in her lecture. Somewhere else, apparently, she has written, "The elements of expertise and inspiration that writers seek, whether in solitude or in the contexts of a workshop, are largely assumed to be requisite tools of an individual who can acquire and use them: the author. This workshop will query that assumption, and offer terms for imagining modes of composition in which authorship becomes a dubious proposition, and the grounds for establishing an aesthetic event become communal."

That expresses what she's up to here, though she doesn't say it quite like that. 

Anyway, after she has run through the Jackson Mac Low, Clark Coolidge and Caroline Bergvall work and created a group assignment for the audience--all recommended (by me, too, if you listen)--the students in the audience want to pin her down to her own work. How does she, Lyn Hejinian, "establish an aesthetic event"?

This is not exactly something she came to address, so naturally she is most interesting here. A little hemming and hawing. A discussion of a collaboration (with a visual artist) that didn't work, and of one with a poet that did. Finally she says (admits), "I have various ways of pushing myself out of the way in order to make work that's better than I am."

Various ways, huh? A student asks the million-dollar question: what is her "criteria" for recognizing that betterness?

A brief glance heavenward, then: "That I don't fall back on motifs where I'm just repeating myself or echoing what I was raised to think of like mellifluous sounds." 

Okay then. Of course, it's hard not to fall back on the old sounds, our ideas of sounds, not to mention our ideas of ideas.  But okay. 

Carte du Tendre

Carte du Tendre published on Poetry Project as cover of e-zine “To hear all the sky and the map”: Lines of Mapping.

Eco Poetics / Ecopoetics

Thinking about ecopoetics all the time, as we do now, I came upon this from Stephanie Strickland's collected works, How the Universe Is Made. I was struck still by the conflation of language, string data and enormous amounts of information with a glacier. From her V: Wavetercets / Losing L'Una (which is itself a reformulation of V: Waveson.nets / Losing L'Una) are tercets 223 and 224:

223
Words of others.
Lists and strings are fluid data structures.
The Glacier calving, enormous roar 

224
into a gray silent sea,
turquoise
lining.

Does a calving glacier destroy information?
I'll give that a gray, but not silent, yup.

"Delphi" on Missing Witches' Beltane Episode

I sent my old poem "Delphi," about Vestal Virgins, to Risa and Amy at Missing Witches and they clapped it on the end of their Beltane May Day episode. Nice to have it in a magic feminist realm, though it was published long ago on a site.... Check out the episode here--and visit the fantastic back catalog. Missing Witches are doing the goddess' work. 

Poetry Month Sez Who

Ralph Emerson:

The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is...to be surprised out of our propriety...to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.....The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.

Teaching, Not Teaching M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!

The first time I assigned NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, a book for which I practically needed a trigger warning the first time I heard of it, I did not want to get it wrong. 

I'm hardly a perfectionist as a professor. My pedagogy hero is Count Leo Tolstoy, who once wrote:

To teach, to bring up a child, why, it is a chimera, an absurdity, for this simple reason, that the child is much nearer than I am, or any grown man, to the true, beautiful and good to which I undertake to raise him.

I take comfort here, especially when discussing complex texts that are meaningful to me with a room of nineteen-year-olds. I was never confident about explaining Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin and James Joyce and Helene Cixous, anyway. In my class, you don't have to like anything, but you have to know the general facts and you have to have a grounded opinion on what a text is, have to be able to connect it to a few other things you know. 

Still, back in 2017, considering the teaching of Zong!, I conscientiously gathered my notes and proceeded to read the truth to the youths. I got the students to read, then made them write to several prompts that would turn into a -- yes -- a paper. They had to get it, and they had to get it my way. 

But at the end of the semester, a few of the students who came to my office hours regularly were still puzzling over their papers -- or simply trying to ensure As. One afternoon, four of them had gathered and we began reading the poem together. We were in a large adjunct bull pen at the Bronx campus that sits in the middle of the Economics department. One fellow read, then another, then we decided to read it in pairs, then to split it up and read it in columns, overlapping, singing, really. An athlete, a musician, a philosophy major, and a senior who just needed an English credit to get out raised their voices. There were no adjuncts around, to my dismay, because the result seemed to me very beautiful, but when a few of the Economics folks peeked over the safety glass that encaged us, I was proud.

This semester, I'd learned my lesson. Rather than "teaching" Zong!, it's been all reading. Little chunks at first, then larger chunks, and, yesterday, the passages at the end, the part from the printer foul-up. 

At first three of them were reading downward--one for the left column, one for the right, and one for the center. Some admiration, some complaints. (Fine.) Then we were all reading--one third of the room to the left column and so on. After we'd done a page it was as if we'd emerged on a new beach. Some of the students still were not happy with the text--not clear, not connected--but others were joined to it, intrigued, excited. when I suggested we record ourselves and send it to MNP herself, they were thrilled. 

Et voila. 

The next morning, I'm not sure this is good enough for her. Not yet. But posting here and will start digging around to reconnect to her on Twitter, where we once followed each other, or to get her email another way. Maybe we will revise--I guess, a la Tolstoy, I should let the class decide.  

Hey! Upon receiving a hilarious email from a student last night, some notes on how to discuss rhetoric, discourse without resorting to a phrase like "good manners."

NOTES. 

Late last night, I received this email from a student:

Hey,I'm looking at my schedule and trying to determine where our class will be meeting. Under the tab on the scheduling software labeled "schedule details" it says: "Location: None Building: None Room: None"

One bad email can get a person thinking. Even one not-so-bad email can wreak havoc on relationships. Considering the new freshman's words, written hours before embarking on his college career, I remembered James Paul Gee's famous line, "All discourse is like an identity kit." My student's identity kit might make him come off as sloppy and rude to a mean(er) professor. And, since the student's style was not at all unusual, I was hoping to use his words as a lesson. Hey.

Thinking of the line from Gee, I began kicking around the identity/discourse angle. Blogger Natasha Wickenheiser has clearly done some work in this area. Here she rounds up these excellent quotations from Gee’s Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics. Wickenheiser, an English prof in Bloomington, can be found discussing Discourse and many other cool topics on her Wordpress blog, Scrapbooked Inquiries.

1. “[Language] is not just about how you say it, but what you are and do when you say it” (525).
2. “At any moment we are using language we must say or write the right thing in the right way while playing the right social role and (appearing) to hold the right values, beliefs, and attitudes. Thus, what is important is not language, and surely not grammar, but saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” (526).
3. “A Discourse is a sort of ‘identity kit’ which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize” (526).
4. “Discourses are not mastered by overt instruction…but by enculturation into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse (Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1983)” (527).
5. “After our initial socialization in our home community, each of us interacts with various non-home-based social institutions–institutions in the public sphere, beyond the family and immediate kin and peer group” (527).
6. “I believe that any socially useful definition of ‘literacy’ must be couched in terms of the notion of Discourse. Thus, I define ‘literacy’ as the mastery of or fluent control over a secondary Discourse” (529).
7. ““Classroom instruction (in language, composition, study skills, writing, critical thinking, content-based literacy, or whatever) can lead to meta-knowledge, to seeing how the Discourses you have already got relate to those you are attempting to acquire, and how the ones you are trying to acquire relate to self and society” (532).
8. “It is sometimes helpful to say that individuals do not speak and act, but that historically and socially defined discourses speak to each other through individuals” (539).
9. “Children from non-mainstream homes often do not get the opportunities to acquire dominant secondary discourses–including those connected with the school–in their homes, due to their parents’ lack of access to these discourses” (541).
   
   

My student was telling me an enormous amount about their identity--family and immediate peer group--as well as their confidence in their discourse--as well as where their composition professor falls in this realm. The only problem? Their assumptions are wrong. They're playing on university turf now. As Gee intimates, there's no half-way mastery of a discourse.

On a related note, Wickenheiser has a blog post on Lisa Delpit, an education theorist grappling with student identity and the politics of teaching the "dominant" discourse. In Other People's Children, Delpit writes that teachers 

“must understand that students who appear to be unable to learn are in many instances choosing to ‘not-learn,’ as Kohl puts it, choosing to maintain their sense of identity in the face of what they perceive as a painful choice between allegiance to ‘them’ or ‘us.’ The teacher, however, can reduce this sense of choice by transforming the new discourse to that it contains within it a place for the students’ selves.”

The thought of a student rejecting arcane prescriptions that have nothing to do with their lives today fills me with as much pain as it does admiration. I'd do the same thing, of course. There are discourses I've said hell no to. But when money and class come into the equation, as they generally do, race is along for the ride, and this white lady has been painfully conscious of the conundrum (and not terribly articulate about it) on several campuses. Forcing my white-lady discourse on others was most concerning, especially when I was teaching creative writing to a few fabulously creative kids with rotten grammar in New Jersey. 

I think of the kids still. All the Yeats I gave them. Ugh. Hey.

In speaking of the earth, a poet beats the New York Times (again)

This week The Times devoted their Sunday magazine to a single article, which I only scanned, about how we (they?) didn't address climate change last century. Now some of my Facebook friends are arguing about the essay and about the real (real) cause of our failure to fix. I think it's too late for all of it, and maybe impossible anyway, and our only recourse is poetry.

Fortunately, poetry is quite a recourse. Poets.org has just published a brill pair of stanzas on and around the topic from Marcella Durand. Read from The Prospect here; below are a few lines that work like a surgeon on the situation, opening its ugliness cleanly to take stock.

                                                          I finally understand

what we’re doing, in this moment of glowing darkness I understand 

       what I put in the water I drink the water and if together 

       we are all getting hot we are making it hot and I must find 

       my way to the water 

The other night someone asked if I had a blog.

The other night someone asked me if I had a blog, and I've been thinking about the question, off and on, ever since. I told him about this blog, but I as easily could have told him about the poetry blog on blogger, Ab Chaos Poesis, which is mostly for the daily draft poems during poetry month, but now is a warehouse for links to other poems I've written and published on the web. Or I might have told him about Ab Chaos Iter, the wordpress travel writing blog started when writing for Travel Weekly and other trade magazines, now mostly abandoned.

No doubt this fellow was only trying to be polite. He couldn't have cared that I have three blogs, four if you count the one started just after marrying that I can't even find any more. (How many abandoned, ignored blogs are also forgotten by their authors?) So I conflated them and told him about the poetry blog but told him its name was Ab Chaos Lex. Lies still come very easily to me. And just today, after wasting a lot of time on my phone with the news, I thought I should take a look at the blogs, since it's been a while.

In a perfect world, my three blogs would be one blog, this one. I still like the name, its lifting from Finnegan's Wake, its play off my own name, and it reminder of my old sneaking certainty that Chaos is not only the mother of this world (thank you Hesiod) but its substance, too. Particularly these days, when the most powerful man in the world (what a world) has a little problem with mood swings.

But mood swings are a cinch, compared to chaos. As Hesiod wrote:

Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, [110] and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. These things declare to me from the beginning, you Muses who dwell in the house of Olympus, [115] and tell me which of them first came to be. In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all¹the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, [120] and Eros （Love）, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether²and Day, [125] whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods...

Still Chaos isn't what I was thinking of when I opened my computer today. All afternoon, I'd been flipping through my phone's Washington Post app, squinting at the news and thinking of the limits of love (fairest among the deathless gods). Hate is not generative, as everyone knows, whereas love is--that's agreed upon. Even though it "overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods." Or maybe because of that overcoming. Still, love is not much better than hate in the face of the world described by the Washington Post.

No, in the face of this news, we need poetry. Lots of poetry. So I scooted around the web and landed upon this recording of a poem by Charles Bernstein, "Ballad Laid Bare by its Devices." It begins:

Somethin’ ’bout sound

Repeatin’ in degree

        A voice not mine

Singin’ as a we.

I've heard him read the piece, written for the 2017 MLA convention, and found a fulsome pleasure in its full displeasure. This urbane New York language poet mockingly considers the ballad while creating one, dropping his gs all friendly-like, and using it to critique a little post election pain as well as the current disaster in the academy. He even references my very fave Malcolm X speech.

A ballot says, this is what we want.

A bullet does that too.

A ballad’s just lousy fantasy 

Goin’ out from an us to a youse.

The effect was painful, for this listener. Toward the end, he recites lines from "Lord Randall," an actual border ballad that pretty well sings his song (mine too):

I ha been to the wild wood; mak my bed soon; 

I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie doun. 

Oh, yes, I am poisoned; mak my bed soon 

I’m sick at the heart, and fain wad lie doun.

We are poisoned here, and maybe we always were, or maybe it's been rising like the temperatures, the oceans; the border ballad lines (from two different stanzas) fit well. In all, cycle of the poem somehow cradles the incredible exhaustion of this moment, verse and voice vexed. And though I recommend listening first, here is a text of the poem, located on Critical Inquiry.

(Maybe the reason I don't blog is that, when I do, I write about three blogs, politics, Hesiod, squeeze in the name of Malcolm X, conclude on a poem by a male poet and still feel like I haven't begun.)

We knew Jefferson was "friend to neology"; Lincoln, too

In researching the section on definitions for my comp class, I wanted to check on the Jefferson quotation about new words for America. In 1820, the retired President Jefferson (home on his plantation with his slaves) wrote to retired President Adams, "I am a friend to neology. It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony.” (The entire letter is here.) 

In this same letter, he goes on to what always occupied him, vestiges everywhere of the Declaration of Independence: America was an improvement on England. New words come to us because they are valuable to the living people, to the pursuit of happiness, and if the Brits can't see that, too bad for them: 

dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage. society is the work-shop in which new ones are elaborated. when an individual uses a new word, if illformed it is rejected in society, if well-formed, adopted, and, after due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries. and if, in this process of sound neologisation, our transatlantic brethren shall not chuse to accompany us, we may furnish, after the Ionians, a second example of a colonial dialect improving on it’s primitive.—

In many wonderful ways, TJ roared the call of the new, the expansion of the mind. 

Today found this Paul Dickson article from the Saturday Evening Post, "In the words of the Presidents," that illumines Lincoln's views on our American phrasings versus the old word-depositories. The passage is painfully connected to our time in other ways as well, in these days of two Americas. I'll leave it here:

During the July following his inauguration, Lincoln sent a message to Congress opposing secession threatened by Southerners. The message said in part, “With rebellion thus sugar-coated they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than 30 years, until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the government.” The Hon. John D. Defrees, the government printer, was disturbed by the use of sugar-coated. He finally went to Lincoln, with whom he was on good terms, and told him that a message to Congress was a different affair from a speech at a mass meeting in Illinois—that the message became a part of history and should be written with that in mind. “What’s the matter now?” Lincoln inquired of the printer. “Why,” said Defrees, “you have used an undignified expression in the message.” He read the sentence aloud and suggested Lincoln replace the word.
“Defrees,” replied Lincoln, “that word expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to change it. The time will never come in this country when the people won’t know exactly what ‘sugar-coated’ means.”

Exhausted Yet? Cut up Machines, Code Poetry and More

First, Nada Gordon explains the world to us. 

(2019 note: Actually, this is just her reading a funny poem about art at the Whitney over ten years ago. I was there. It was sort of a Ken Goldsmith celebration.)

Here Nada Gordon wanders her kitchen and explains the realm of lyric-loathing -- lyric as "whipping girl" -- that brought us flarf. She discusses being educated by the critique of the lyrical subject, and the resulting decision to create lyrical voices out of shards, borrowed language and collage; she claims that flarf really carries the torch for poetry. She says, basically, We are dedicated to saving poetry and keeping it alive. The whipping girl, the lyrical subject, is now revived by flarfists as a zombie. (Which is pretty well what the first link is doing.) 

See what I mean? Trying to find something new can drive a poet crazy. Which is generally where a poet likes to be. And has been for a century, but we'll just start with the Fifties. 

From the 2017 Getty show on Concrete Poetry of the 50s, 60s and 70s. 

1975 performance of "Peter Innisfree Moore" by Jackson Mac Low, a poem/song/dance created by finding 960 words in the Fluxus photographer's (Moore's) name and using chance operations to express (also musical notes, dance moves, etc.)

Nice roundup of experimental poetry from textext.com.

A link to the Language Is a Virus cut-up machine. 

Check "Recombinant Code Poetry" at the bottom of the options on this archived page from Beehive.

Fantastic link re: L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E P-O-E-T-R-Y.

And, a propos of something related, syllabus from hypertexter Stephanie Strickland. 

To think about Strickland and the proliferation of options, it's nice to remember Raymond Queneau, who created a flip book of sonnets in which the lines were cut so that the reader might create 190 million poems. Then he went and titled it Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Randomization designed to destroy narrative and kill author/birth reader. Yes.

Queneau's pals formed Oulipo, hoping to create artificial constraints that would remind us of the real ones we live with all the time. My favorite take-away has been the N+7, a process that replaces every noun with the seventh noun following it in the dictionary. Here is Spoonbill's N+7 machine.  Here are a few examples.  

17 GOOGLE poems linked on Huff Post.

Czech poet and mathematician Ladislav Nebeský (b. 1937) (whose father was murdered by the Nazis in 1940) began as a concrete poet and ended as a binary poet.  Here are "8 Planar Binary poems." And here are his "Non-Written Words."

Flarf starring Sharon Mesmer. 

And my favorite Vito Acconci.

Don't forget Alan Sondheim. 



"All art should become science, 
and all science art." 
(Friedrich Schlegel)

Benjamin on Ads and Crit

"What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says -- but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt..."  -- Walter Benjamin

Stephanie Strickland, hypertext, authorship, final versions

I just happened upon this wonderful essay by Stephanie Strickland, "Poetry in the Electronic Environment." Ostensibly she is describing how she composed her hypertext poetry book, True North, using the "electronic environment" of hypertext, but she deals with other crucial matters as she goes.

She is (sorry, but it's true) poetic on the topic of the Web and the "great freedom" it affords us. She points to it as our best example of hypertext, the "almost biological" entity that is always "proliferating links." Only connect, as the Romantic Forster implored (and as two male financiers have quoted to me. Surprising me. Way off topic, but you never know where literature lurks, longing to link. With you.) As she writes,

"[Cyberspace] is characterized as tidal sea, web, sky, and solid. Thus, people surf it, send out web-crawlers to explore it, gophers to tunnel through it, engines to mine data from it, and they fly through and above it in game simulations. They establish "home" pages in it, as though it were rooted, although at their own location distance has disappeared--New Zealand, New York, St. Paul, equally present, and equally speedily present."

And this, for perspective, is from a talk given in Minnesota in 1997. Even during these heady days, she is hardly fanatical. She wryly adds,

"All these metaphors suggest a great freedom of movement, but electronic space is also where you lock up, if the power goes down, if the network crashes, if your machine fails to harmonize with its software. Maybe space metaphors are not the right ones to choose; maybe time is more to the point, and you will think so as you wait for your host connection, or wait for sound to download, a graphic to paint."

Ironically, just as I was moving (appropriating) (stealing) (sharing) this text, Safari locked down and, for two days, I lost this, her essay, and a dozen windows I'd opened to look and think about conceptual writing. As if to prove her true. (She is powerful.)

Considering hypertext, she connects with the "truly radical" method of Emily Dickinson, ever preserving alternative versions of her work. An inability to commit -- neurosis -- becomes a genius for keeping the world open, suspended, engagable -- write-able. She gifted us with a multi-dimensional space, and offers a hint at what is to come. Strickland urges us to explore

"how to shape our intuitions about digitized data, how to learn to "read" meaning in geometries of representation, how to understand more fully the meaning of numbers, number-systems, and the modes of number-use which we are invoking to incarnate data, literally to construct virtual bodies."

The author is dead, long live the author.

And here is the link to order True North Hypertext. 

ZZ Packer

A great first line can be wonderfully galvanizing thing. Sometimes they don't entirely pan out; other times they are fair harbingers of pleasures to come. Such is the case in the first line of the ZZ Packer story, "Brownies," assigned for tomorrow:

“By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie troop 909.”

I've found a video of Packer reading the story, in case any of you want to hear it from the horse's mouth. Check it out if you like. In any case, do get through this excellent tale of youth and groups and race and many other matters--we'll be discussing first thing.

Writing about Thinking

One of the first things I heard in grad school was from Rosellen Brown, who tried valiantly to warn me away from the "sitting and thinking" story.

I didn't take the warning completely to heart, though I knew it was serious and applied to me. Hence, no doubt, my own fiction output.

Now I find that I have the same basic discussion all the time with my college students. Through one of them this semester, I came across this exercise from the beloved Chuck Palahniuk. In the essay, Nuts and Bolts: Thought Verbs, Palahniuk offers up an incredible discipline in examining these problematic thoughts--these insights so crucial to us as writers and so deadly boring to our readers. The essentials are below:

...pick through your writing and circle every “thought” verb.  Then, find some way to eliminate it.  Kill it by Un-packing it.

Then, pick through some published fiction and do the same thing.  Be ruthless.

“Marty imagined fish, jumping in the moonlight…”

“Nancy recalled the way the wine tasted…”

“Larry knew he was a dead man…”

Find them.  After that, find a way to re-write them.  Make them stronger.

 Check the whole thing out here and give his exercise a shot--if you dare. 

It is said that TheCastle, while being an indisputably great book, seems pointless to read after a while. And I admit that, although I am officially reading it this week and am pretty delighted by it, I have not been driven to pick it up every day, as I recently was with The Goldfinch and The Son. It makes sense: Franz Kafka's story is one of incompletion, in which a man named K. (even his name is incomplete) arrives to a mysterious, unplace-able town dominated by an impregnable bureaucracy known as, of course, The Castle. A few pages in, it is painfully yet wonderfully clear that he is not going to reach his grail. Why should I finish the book if our hero’s hopes are to be brutally dashed?

All the more a reason to think about its beginning. In the beginnings, we usually find the ends. In fact, the first chapter is the only one from The Castle ever published by Franz Kafka. So let’s take a look at its first paragraph:

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.

As the book goes on, the Castle above grows even more illusory and empty, and the gaze lasts a long time, but, oh, that gaze. That is the crux of it, this gaze peering into the mist and darkness. And what a great way to beckon us on to read and learn more.

The other beginning I’m thinking of this week is from our textbook, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. In “The School,” Donald Barthelme begins:

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that . . . that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems . . . and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the bet. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

With Barthelme, as usual, I enjoy him too much to make critical sense. But it’s safe to say that we are meeting a man through his voice, we are hearing a story through a man. And though a man isn’t telling us about his day, his life, we are learning all sorts of important things about him.

This is especially a speaking voice, one that repeats itself a bit, that doesn’t quite end, and that is depressed by the death of trees but this depression, well, maybe . . . (it’s hard not to mimic the rhythm in part) maybe that’s not the most adult response to take to the blight. So we worry a little for the children, and wonder if he, their teacher presumably, knew anything about trees before handing out thirty of them. I at least am curious to read on, to see what other disasters follow at this poor school. 

A few notes about grading

In the old days, I used to proudly announce that I don't believe in grading creative work. It was part of my training. I went to schools where whatever I turned in to a CW class was given an A. And I can assure you, it wasn't because all my work was excellent. 

Over time, however, I've come to see that treating students as if they are all young geniuses who might be harmed by being corrected or edited is silly and maybe even lazy. In fact, such teaching isn't teaching at all but a great disservice. There is plenty to learn about writing, and plenty to call "mistakes" -- even though the mistakes might become something quite powerful if you really push them. But first you have to know what you're up to. 

This is why we draft and workshop. We draft, change, discuss and even argue about fiction in the classroom. (It's always good when there is real disagreement, as there was on Friday.) And I insist on small group workshops as you develop your stories. Mostly I am guiding you toward an understanding of fictional strategies--your own, your classmates', Ernest Hemingway's, and Selah Saterstrom's. Because I work on the theory that all writing is revision, I want you to be able to see what you do as mechanical even as we all know that good writing is inspired and can't really be quantified. Here, we have to quantify it. And I have to give grades. 

So for your stories I give one grade for the story and one for the mechanics--your grammar and punctuation. (Those quotations!) They are averaged together for your total grade, so poor punctuation can cost you. The first three stories won't count as much as the two you work on for the portfolio, but super low grades can be a problem. That's why I allow revisions to improve the grade.  

20 Lines A Day, Genius or Not

As mentioned in our first class, you will benefit enormously from a daily writing habit this semester. Just getting something (practically anything) on the page every day will help build your confidence with writing of all kinds. Daily writing will also result in an array of words, sentences and ideas to be foraged for the stories you're working on this semester.

I've always liked Stendhal's instruction to himself (partly because it's French, I admit it):

 Vingt ligne par jour, génie ou pas. 

However, one of my students this semester has done that pithy phrase one better. That's right, a student blogger has created a post full of smart ideas and links to others thinking about daily habits and especially daily writing--so do check it out.