The Latest

Yearly, we teachers hear the “Digital Natives” in our classrooms need something more and different. New technologies, programs, and applications will improve our instruction, we’re told, and each fall the push begins to integrate new methods into our classes. The old ways have passed away, and the message is clear: keep up or risk irrelevance and invisibility. Resisting progress is announcing your mental arthritis, your denial of newer realities.

I do the best I can but have an ugly confession: I love the throw-backs, the students who don’t need the enticement and excitement of innovative technology or techniques, who rely instead on their own inquisitiveness and the computers they carry within them. They appreciate learning whether it’s technologically advanced or not. Everything new is old again, and vice versa.

A teacher’s biggest challenge is convincing students to care—in my case, to value books increasingly regarded as passé, dull, or irrelevant; to embrace reading accurately, thoughtfully, and discerningly; to accept the useful torture of writing; to enjoy rumination that questions (even undermines) original answers. You have to want hard work to do it well, and, while easier paths lead to quicker results, they often sidestep the labor that improves you.

Some students flog themselves through school because they see it as a means to status or professional success, but most need intrinsic motives, curiosity, a feeling labor rewards itself. Technology is supposed to motivate and sometimes does, but the students who want to learn hear real people speaking from every and any source. Those who don’t wish to listen regard all words, electronic or ink, as noise interrupting what they’d rather be doing. My job is to assert authors’ voices are valuable. Insisting may not be enough, but elaborate, stimulating, and entertaining technology often does little better and distracts students as much as it entices them.

They grow rare, these students who accept low-tech education, who look past apparatus to the stuff of learning. My eyes sting with tears when I meet a student who expects struggle and wants it, who loves the frustrating play of writing, who smiles encountering the delicate expression of deep truth, who occupies a character’s mind with his or her own, who hears ancient ideas echoing in the present, who leaps like a spark between unlikely poles, who tunnels like a blind mole immune to diversion, who finds splendor in faintly etched messages, who laughs, or cries, or angers, or warms, or cools, or gasps when encountering another mind. Of course, all these traits exist in technophiles too, but does technology assure sound scholarship, does it guarantee interest?

When I started teaching, I poked the ground with a straw and oil bubbled out. Perhaps that had more to do with youthful enthusiasm, but every effort produced more than enough response to sustain me. I don’t begrudge the effort of preparing lessons or dreaming up new and different ways to engage students. I like my students. But lately the ground appears to yield less. The proportion of effort to return has changed. For my students, life outside school is so much more exciting than anything I can serve up. Students race ahead. Keeping up seems more and more taxing, the gained learning less and less fulfilling. Style trumps substance.

Perhaps I’ve become the teacher who has passed the age of being cool and, now older than his students’ parents, is part of the place, another desk or chair. I’d rather not be. Who wants to be the person colleagues regard deferentially, the one whose antique experience inspires the sort of love generally reserved for decaying uncles? Who wants to be the genial holdover whose eccentricities must be borne? I want to be hip.

But I’m tired and wonder how the latest novelty will help.

Instant Success

So, the story goes a talent agent spotted film actress Lana Turner when she ditched a typing class for a coke at Schwab’s Drug Store in Hollywood. It was really the Top Hat Café, but the name of the place matters little. She was nothing and, in less than a moment, something. In another decade or two, few people will remember Lana Turner, much less the roller-coaster life she led from that point on, but other stories will certainly supplant hers.

American mythology swims in discovery stories. The slightest eventuality can make us—the friction between one numbered ping-pong ball and another, a brother-in-law who has a cousin who has a friend who has a cousin who has a brother-in-law who has an idea, the unaccountable impulse to shine a flashlight into the darkest corner of an attic just when you decide it’s too hot to stay, the bizarre eventuality that puts you in the seat next to a famous power broker in an unusually receptive mood.

The best American success stories involve work only incidentally, just twirling tumblers of a safe until it softly and inevitably clicks open. If the door of opportunity swings for a minute, an hour, a year, or forever, nothing can surpass that instant when you are free for life. That miracle.

At my age, the door of discovery seems welded, and I’ve never had the gumption for the savvy networking and clever positioning that lands people in just the right places when attention sweeps their way. Yet, as no effective solution prevents dreaming, I’m susceptible. My modest successes as a teacher, writer, and artist ought to be enough (and mostly are), but I still imagine being found.

When I meet with students about essays, they sometimes slump deeper as our conversation goes on and on and suggestions accumulate. They hoped for so much and thought this essay—at last—might make their undeniable writing talent clear and propel them to reliable success forever more. Sometimes, I’m tempted to say what one of my MFA teachers once said to me, “You didn’t really expect me to say, ‘I love it. Don’t change a word!’ did you?”

The obvious answer, for me and for my students, is “Yes.” The fantasy of discovery begins with the world recognizing how deserving you have always been. For once in your miserable life, others will see you just as you wish to see yourself and marvel at how you’ve gone unnoticed so long.

At this stage I tell myself that my being discovered might be more like finding a sock under the washing machine when it’s replaced. As surprising as it might be—a mystery solved!—it’s rather academic. I abandoned the sock’s mate long ago, the mourning period passed long ago. The dream of fame, status, and repute as an instantaneous serendipitous confluence of fateful events suits younger people better.

I wish my little measure of acceptance was enough, but when others experience success—as they inevitably will—believing in your own deserving seems so much easier than believing in theirs. Hope, the feeling Emily Dickinson called “The thing with feathers,” still wants to fly, and against the stiffest winter wind. The little voice saying “Why not me?” never really quiets.

Some people will say that voice is crucial, that, to an American especially, the promise of success is akin to the promise of sunrise, another assurance of good things ahead if we ready ourselves for chance. “What would we do without our ambition?” they ask, “What would we say, after all, if we couldn’t say, ‘It might happen’?”

Maybe. More welcome, however, would be feeling you have success enough. These stories may be the sole means to make discontent tolerable or the greatest a source of discontent. I’m not sure. But waking up one morning accepting my own worth—feeling it’s real without ratification or verification—could be the greatest discovery of all.

15 Thoughts About Things (9-15)

The second half of the lyric essay posted on Wednesday 5/7.

9.

Embarrassing Moments sting most. Earlier this year, I was reading a passage from Huck Finn depicting a character named Sherburn who spews vitriol about mobs and vigilante justice. A student asked, “Does Huck say anything about Sherburn’s speech?” and, I said, “No,” trotting out my pet thoughts about Twain’s depiction of Huck as dispassionate and the strategy behind Twain’s approach. But another student raised her hand immediately and held it aloft as I held forth. When I called on her she said, “But what about…” and read Huck’s commentary on Sherburn.

In those moments I feel verdict-stricken. My eyes flit from face to face searching for signs of my humiliation. It adds proof such moments.

10.

We started many math classes with sets. The set of apples gave way to the contents of an imaginary person’s trunk or suitcase, which gave way in turn to sets of real numbers, of integers, of ordinals, of cardinals, of natural numbers.

In one class, we briefly discussed sets themselves, how they corral mathematical objects—which, typically, were not objects—and how “naïve set theory” led to axioms. One dimly remembered axiom dealt in an infinite collection of shoes and how choosing just the left was different from choosing among sets of socks so similar as to indistinguishable.

I must be getting it wrong. Others understood it perfectly or professed to. I felt lost in a museum crowded with objets d’art never neat enough to call a collection. Collections possess order you feel.

The absence of that feeling is chaos.

11.

Do other animals create sets? Does a gorilla group plants he might eat?

The finite items animals know—humans included—amass like drops of mercury in one puddle, but I wonder how well other animals remember the parts as ever being separate, whether they conceive of anything beyond what they presently perceive. Does a cheetah know which creatures have the least chance of escape or does the urge to chase rise like a message from elsewhere, a visitation of a singular order dictating that moment?

Other animals can’t see outside what they are. If they do not know the borders of the bubble they’re in, at least they can’t aspire to find it and pass through it. They can’t wish to be elsewhere. They want as we do, but want nothing more.

12.

I think sometimes about how hard and fast categories are to others and suspect theirs have more resolute and sharp edges. They contain things better. Some feel no need to move emotions between containers, and they worry less about where each belongs.

If there is a “belongs.”

13.

My older brother owned a hinged wooden box—he may have it still—where he saved objects he liked—a particularly good sand dollar, a lens from a microscope, a mermaid’s purse, a wooden nickel, some shark teeth, and some of his own teeth.

He can tell me what in this list is wrong. It come from what, knowing him then, makes sense. That box held other things that have migrated from my picture of him, and I’ll bet he could tell me those too.

I have no such box, though I have notebooks from fifth grade to graduate school, and fragments of writing from the time between then and now. I look at them so infrequently I recall motive better than their content.

If I got things down, I thought, they might stay. I thought, if I got things down, I might leave those things behind.

14.

The exact number eludes me, but less than one hundred copies of my book The Lost Work of Wasps exist in the world. I can’t know, of course, where they are at this exact moment, but often I imagine calling them back. I’ve heard little from their owners and assume some wincing reluctance prevents anyone saying much. I worry I’ve embarrassed myself again, and no one wants to alert me.

But that’s supposition. Perhaps the embarrassment is the owners’—they never opened the cover (though they meant to) or fear the contents will compromise the version of me they prefer. “Too serious” or “Too much information,” they may be thinking.

Or it could be the book has already become a forgotten satellite zipping around me, broken so there’s no talking to it and no purpose in its assembly of parts.

I try to categorize the book, placing it in “Things To Be Proud Of,” but I put it there by publishing it myself… the classification won’t stick. It will only ever truly fit in “Things Unsettled,” a set stuffed to bulging.

15.

One of the preparations linked to “That last Onset” in Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” is the speaker’s having “willed my Keepsakes—Signed away / What portions of me be assignable.” The arrival of the fly, another presence is what seemed a complete and finite scene, calls every “portion… assignable” into question.

Even without the added fly, the moment relies on faith. Sorting matters doesn’t change them, and our neatest piles lay inert. Their only heat—the thoughts and feelings in the hands that arranged them—cools quickly.

Some order belongs only to the maker.

15 Thoughts About Things (1-8)

I’ve written another long lyric essay this week, so I’m posting it in two parts to avoid trying anyone’s attention. Ultimately the second half will land on top of the first half because that’s how blogs lay out. I’m sorry about that, but my excuse is that lyric essays are meant to be rearranged.

1.

In the 1970’s, a game show called “The Pyramid” (in various dollar amounts) asked contestants to label a category by offering items from it. For instance, you might say “hammer, square, tape measure, drill, screwdriver” and I’d guess “Carpenters’ Tools.”

In the big prize round, the categories reached strange dimensions, and the contestant or a celebrity helper would lead his or her partner to guess “Things A Mother Says,” “Things You Do To Escape Prison,” or “Things You Accidentally Leave Behind on Vacation.”

Watching a team climb the pyramid excited me, but the reorganization of reality opened my young brain to see everything as part of categories, simple ones like “Things To Do Before Going to Sleep,” and “Things I Want to Study” but also darker ones—“Things I Wish I Could Forget” and “Things That Lead to Overpowering Feelings of Personal Futility and Worthlessness.”

2.

Thoreau says, “Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” The “Chopping sea of civilized life” he says, requires a “a great calculator” to navigate fully. We can’t trust to any innate sense of direction because, having abandoned it so long ago, we’ve lost it.

Out walking in a city you see so many people engrossed by smart phones, and, on a crowed L car with no seats remaining and most people standing, you find only one or two passengers not using some device.

I think sometimes of all those devises hold. Were they books, tape recorders, short wave radios or primitive mainframes, pedestrians might be dragging overburdened carts behind them, and every L train would sink on its tracks, paralyzed by friction.

3.

Recently I said that, if I could choose a religion, I’d pick Buddhism, and someone laughed. “You know Buddhists are supposed to live in the moment, right? You know they don’t believe in guilt?”

Maybe she’s right, maybe I carry too much to exist immediately.

4.

Being part of “People Who Create Categories” means you live between giant blocks of experience. It’s never just one thing you’re looking at or thinking about. It’s a condition. You can feel squished.

5.

As the utility of memory fades, our searches become more complicated, though easier. Finding the virtual storage site of an individual detail through Google requires knowing how to call it forth, and, having called it, we let it slip back into smoke. In grade school, my teachers advised me to use a dictionary to check the spelling of words, but sometimes I couldn’t spell the word well enough to find it quickly. When I did locate the word, it became another of many similar searches, each difficult to distinguish and remember.

6.

Only feelings persist, a vague sense of familiarity as words move from pile to pile, useful for what they are and where they lay in an ocean of associations.

7.

Having a middle school girlfriend meant gathering conversation in advance. Though I had no literal notecards, I’d have a pocketful if I’d written everything down. She might lose interest, I thought, if I didn’t always know what to say, and so I spent time between meetings mentally rehearsing. All the back of the class witticism, the cafeteria gaffs, the teachers’ lunacy became filed away bits.

And if she said anything outside my store, I would look to others: “Stories About Misidentification,” “Stories About Parents,” “Stories About the Unfair Nature of the World,”

“Stories Explaining the Source and Strength of My Desperation.”

8.

This is that too.

Haters

One of my former colleagues used to teach The Great Gatsby as one of the most overrated books in history. When I asked whether he worried about spoiling the book for students, he said one shouldn’t kowtow to others’ opinions, and teachers need to regard books as whetting stones to sharpen students’ evaluative skills. If he sincerely hated the book, he asked, wouldn’t it be dishonest to insist on their appreciating it?

Sometimes students ask which books I hate, and I say my job depends on people liking books—it doesn’t pay to put down anything anyone else might enjoy. They roll their eyes. Other English teachers aren’t so diplomatic, they say. A student always names some teacher who doesn’t like any of the assigned texts and tells them so.

Okay, so my answer is self-serving. I’m trying to tell the truth, though. Even great books contain clumsy moments, and some parade tiresome characters that—especially the fourth or fifth or fifteenth time around—wear readers’ patience. Some works colleagues and students enjoy don’t do much for me. Our tastes are different, I figure, or they see what I can’t.

I don’t enjoy conversations about “bad books” the way others do. Incisive observations are wonderful, but it’s hard for me to love sneering, especially in young people. Students who insist this or that literary masterpiece is worthless launch into well-rehearsed tirades, and I listen patiently—I agree with some of their critique—but some can’t seem to find anything else to discuss. I fight the temptation to turn the equation around and ask where the trouble lies, in the book or in the reader?

Academic legend has it a literature professor asked just one question on a semester final: “Which book in this course did you dislike, and what personal failing in you does your answer reflect?” I’ve wanted to re-enact that final.

Our culture’s pathological addiction to judgment complicates my job. Creating rheostats from my students’ on-off switches (or like-unlike buttons) may be my biggest challenge. We express feelings of comfort or discomfort—that’s natural—but I hope reading is more than thumbs up or down. You should know a book well and interpret its contents in light of the author’s aims as you criticize it. Your response should be as ranging as it is penetrating.

A few years ago a colleague and I taught two sections of the same course containing the same book. He was open about not having read the novel before the other teacher (me) proposed it, and he didn’t disguise his disappointment in it. His class loathed it, railing against it with particular glee until their locker conversations poisoned my discussions. I started playing desperate games of “Now you see me now you don’t.” Since the characters were flat, I’d try to teach the book as a parable; since the plot wasn’t exciting enough, I’d stress how unconventional its structure was; since the ideas were too obvious, I’d address the genre of which the book was a part; since nothing in it was worth writing about, I’d approach it through fun activities only peripherally connected to analyzing the book’s content. I was, in other words, a complete apologist, begging them to examine something they’d already rejected.

I failed. Miserably.

The experience was so exhausting, in fact, I became determined never to teach the novel again. But, as students before seemed to enjoy it, and as its themes and approach seemed tailored to a course I teach, I decided—reluctantly—to try. The class showed the same sensitivity to the book’s flaws, and I encouraged them to identify and discuss its problems. At one point a student even reported how much my colleague hates the book, and I tried to examine those objections without compromising the 50 pages remaining. At every stage, I stemmed their negativity, stopped them short of dismissal.

Perhaps that’s not fair. Discouraging independent thinking is the last thing I teacher should want to do, and dislike is a legitimate response to literature.  In this case, my teaching was also dishonest. Having been alerted to the book’s problems, I see little else now. My justification, however, is that many students are too good at censure and need to practice appreciation more.

Appreciating isn’t at all the same thing as liking, nor is enjoyment the same as enlightenment. I could consider myself a success if my students appreciate books that aren’t their taste or, for that matter, my taste. From my perspective, if you can see what others value, it’s possible to understand your objections and learn something about the book… and you. Maybe I’m pretending, but I like being a diplomat. My disguise will be worth it if, hiding my opinions, students feel free to develop their own.

Exercise #87

This exercise may be less about the task and more about the workings of a nocturnal brain.

A crown of sonnets or sonnet corona is a sequence of sonnets, usually addressed to one person, and/or concerned with a single theme. Each of the sonnets explores one aspect of the theme, and is linked to the preceding and succeeding sonnets by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as its first line. The first line of the first sonnet is repeated as the final line of the final sonnet, thereby bringing the sequence to a close. An advanced form of crown of sonnets is also called a sonnet redoublé or heroic crown, comprising fifteen sonnets, in which the final binding sonnet is made up of all the first lines of the preceding fourteen, in order.

Write a “heroic crown” of sentences using the definition above, substituting words for lines.

1. New nights bring new angles of moon and darkness, and—between sleeping and waking—black and glowing shadows attack and retreat like great fronts of weather.

2. Weather penetrates even dreams, rain pouring so suddenly it soaks my clothes, and the loss of comfort shocks.

3. Shocks like these stir in a mind like a muddy field already filled with loose roots of leaning, menacing trees.

4. Trees loom when the dreaming brain can find nothing to turn them into.

5. Into empty hours come worries budding.

6. Budding and building and knotting, fears proliferate in brain soil like planted eyes.

7. I don’t know if a promise to face them in waking hours is anything more than another wish.

8. Wish the rain would stop, wish I might, into sodden hours, bring sun.

9. Sun might do more than hopes could.

10. Could I control my thoughts, write a forecast my brain could then enact, what a difference that would make.

11. Make another metaphor and I create more fabrication… another trouble of mine.

12. My inventions lie deep in my nature.

13. Nature in the outside world happens without care or compulsion, saying endlessly, “ It’s as simple as….”

14. As the planet makes its required revolution, so the world becomes new.

15. New weather shocks trees into budding—I wish sun could make my nature as new.

A Defense of Studying Literature

When people call physics and chemistry “hard sciences” they refer to those subjects’ basis in mathematics and quantitative reasoning. In the lengthy definition of “hard,” such subjects fit best with 7a,“1. firm, definite; 2. not speculative or conjectural: factual; 3. important rather than sensational or entertaining.”

By that definition, my own specialty—reading, thinking over, and writing about literature—is decidedly soft. Many people probably assume the earlier definitions of “hard” don’t fit English either. Because literature classes don’t require mastering complex and rigorous physical laws, they aren’t seen as being as difficult as classes involving equations, graphs, and experimental data. Literature is fuzzy, subject to slippery interpretations and airy whims. You can say anything about a story, novel, or poem, the reasoning goes, so what you say is insubstantial, variable, and, on some level, false. Some people think English teachers should grade easier because there’s nothing really to grade. If you can’t do numbers or master analyzing figures, it appears you’re better at bullshit than anything else.

As might be expected, this sort of thinking makes me defensive. Anyone who has read Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Dickinson, Woolf, Joyce, Pynchon, Wallace, and countless others knows literature aspires to considerable complexity. Some works offer challenges equal—in their own way—to calculus, advanced economics, or quantum physics. The absence of hard information creates distinctive burdens. Nuanced interpretations rely on sophisticated understanding of language, fine differentiation, scrupulous decoding, and resourceful observation. Saying something new about texts pored over for hundreds of years isn’t easy.

Nonetheless, some might say less is at stake. People see literary analysis as arcane. No one calls an English teacher for an emergency opinion on Jane Austen, so we’re all diddling, expending valuable mental energy on silly pursuits. Nothing we talk about or write about is real because none of it is practical, none required. If I say understanding the human condition is real and necessary, a boon to living if not absolutely essential, some may say, “Yes, but it’s fiction, right? It’s invented, not the granite foundation of existence.”

I wish people understood hard sciences the way I understand literature, as a way of seeing, produced by a distinct sort of curiosity providing one valuable angle on reality. How did the quantifiable become so privileged? How did it become the preferred means to truth—and sometimes regarded as truth itself? When did we begin believing exclusively in the explainable, the graph-able, and the hitherto undiscovered minutiae of physical processes? How can the definitive be all we should notice? When did we decide only knowing certainly matters?

Sometimes I think everything we call “hard” in those terms—the factual and verifiable—is actually the lowest lying fruit, subject to mechanical processes of discovery requiring more discipline than invention, more scrutiny than inspiration, more brute data-picking than art. I know that’s not so. Experimenters rely on insight as well. They follow hunches about where and how to look. Scientists and mathematicians require creativity also. I see that.

These hard subjects are clever and rigorous, but I want to beg respect for my own specialty and request acknowledgement of literature’s effort to seek truth. If humans only find answers to the questions we think to ask, shouldn’t we ask all sorts of questions and address reality from every angle of inquiry, hard and soft?

The other day, a senior at my school said, “I’d like to go into medicine, but I’ll probably end up studying English instead.” Her assumptions were ready to be read. She knows she may have to settle. Medicine may be too hard, and English is simpler. Maybe, but even if that were so—and it shouldn’t be—the value of any study can’t rest on how easy or difficult it is. Academic disciplines arise from what they add to understanding, how they train minds, educate, and humanize.

I’d argue this country produces as many bad scientists as bad English majors. And our educational system as a whole fails when it ranks pursuits as fruitful and less so, as real and unreal. Of course the world needs scientists and mathematicians, and, because rigor probably has scared people away, it’s important to urge others to fill those roles. But we also need brilliant people who can accommodate soft thinking and appreciate elusiveness and uncertainty and—dare I say it?—beauty. Education will be healthier if it can recognize the value of complexity without groping for definitive, hard answers.