You don’t even have to read this. But if you choose to read it, start anywhere—right, absolutely anywhere—that you’d like. It’s all the same.
Three weeks ago I began writing (and did actually post part II) of what I thought might become a three-part series of posts for this blog. This won’t be the first time that I’ve started a post this way, “I was going to do…but now I’m doing…” But this time will be a bit different, because I’m being a bit more honest about the “because” of the thing.
This is principally a post about what has happened to me recently. To tell these more recent stories, I’m going to draw upon some others. Of course, you can say, instead, that this is an elaboration on the “mesh” that I first started to work with here (explicitly in terms of literacy) about five weeks ago. That’s also true.
Or just have an unhealthy pastry and read for fun; as I hope to demonstrate, you can’t predict how this might affect that work that you do.
I’ve considered telling some version of this story for this class more than once before. In my eleventh grade English course (AP Language & Composition), we used the Norton Sampler, a collection of essays for just such a course. In the first unit we read Virginia Woolf’s “Death of a Moth” and Anne Dillard’s “The Death of the Moth.” We were asked to write a short two-to-three-page essay comparing the two essays, and then we’d read Anne Dillard’s “How I wrote the moth essay, and why,” which was also included in the book. Our teacher really importuned us to wait until we’d finished and submitted our own essays before we read this second essay. Under really any other circumstances, or at any other time, I’d have gone out of my way to read Dillard’s essay—immediately—but for some reason, at that time, I chose not to. In fact, I went out of my way to not read it, inserting blank paper in the gap between the last page of Dillard’s first essay and the second, so I couldn’t possibly get an accidental glimpse of this essay I wasn’t supposed to read yet.
Although he at first appeared every bit the sagacious pedagogue he wanted people to think he was, it didn’t take me very long to realize that Mr. Baker wasn’t very special. He never even handed back the essay I wrote—probably never even looked at it to grade. We read/wrote these essays in October; on the day of the final exam in June, he handed-back essays to some of us (not to me but to one of my friends). Hers had no markings anywhere except for a small red check mark on the cover page. We also never read “How I wrote the Moth Essay,” and he collected the Norton Samplers very shortly after we turned our papers in. It was such a disappointment.
I met Meta Ann (Anne Dillard) on the way back to Pittsburgh from a conference in State College when I was working on a presidential campaign during my first year of college. It didn’t even occur to me that I should ask her how she wrote the moth essay or why, or to even tell her this whole story. I told her that I’d read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and that I recognized her from the jacket photo, which was true. We talked a bit throughout the trip, but mostly I left her alone.
Thinking about this again at the end of last semester, I searched on google for a .pdf of “How I wrote the Moth Essay” and I found one, a facsimile from the Norton Sampler. I downloaded it and printed it out, and I put it in a pile of things that I wanted to read, although I never read it. This wasn’t for any particular reason, although looking back I’m inclined to say that I just don’t care that much about it. I don’t know if I’ll ever read it. One way or the other—if I read it or if I don’t—it probably won’t ever be a big deal, and this won’t ever be a great story.
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I had a midterm conference with Olivier de Montmollin last Friday. Conferences were scheduled at one-hour intervals (9am, 10, 11, etc.) on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of last week, but I was out of town on all of those days so he scheduled me for Friday at 9am; there were no other conferences scheduled for that day, and neither of us had other meetings or classes. We discussed my term paper explicitly for about thirty minutes total—coming back to it productively only when we had something to say—and we spent three more hours talking about all kinds of other things, including, for awhile, our aggravations with “cultural studies,” as infuriatingly invasive—and as “useless,” we agreed—as it has become.
And another thing happened. I’d been meaning to ask if I could interview him about literacy for this class, but I had been avoiding it at every opportunity. But heard so many of his stories without ever having to formally “conduct an interview.” I found out what he liked to read, how he thinks about literature, school, family, society, politics too. We talked about what he calls “lateral thinking,” across disciplines, time, things you’ve read without having any idea where they might take you and how they ultimately shape the way you think. In more than one way, I’d found the missing piece of my literacy interviews (and just in time to revise for the midterm portfolio).
That almost didn’t happen. I’d tried to special-schedule my midterm conference with Prof. Vee for that same morning. I couldn’t because she wasn’t going to be on campus that day—but what if she was going to be? What if I had scheduled a 10am appointment. d have had to leave much earlier than I actually did. We wouldn’t have discussed my work for that class in as much detail, and I couldn’t have done the work I wanted to do for this class.
It’s like a conversation I had with Paul Kameen a few weeks ago. In a rush across campus and in a hurry to class I saw him (for the first time in a year) on the steps outside of the Cathedral. At once, without thinking, I blurted out, “Dr. Kameen! I’d been meaning to email you. Do you have some time this week or next to talk, possibly, about two things, really? First, I have some project ideas that I’d like to discuss with you, and second, I’d like to interview you about literacy for a class I’m taking,” and I explained that some more. The point is that I never would have emailed him, and we never would have talked. I never would have read “Metaphor and the Order of Things” (Kameen) or “A Hermeneutics of Difficulty” (Salvatori), because I never would have had access to his copy of Audits of Meaning, a small-release festschrift from the 80’s that I’d never have found or looked for on my own. Salvatori’s essay helped me think about my “what is literacy for?” essay, which I’m very happy with.
I might not have taken de Montmollin’s class, or Vee’s, and I wouldn’t have talked to any of these people if I’d been abroad this fall as I’d originally planned. I might never have become an English major or taken an anthropology class if not for Clare Connors, who I had as an instructor for seminar in composition my freshman year, a class I wouldn’t have had to take if I’d done better on the AP test, and I might have done better if I would have had a serious teacher in eleventh grade. This isn’t to say that things work out for the better or for the worse, or even to say that they work out except in the sense that time progresses in one direction and the future comes from the other. How could I know? And how could I have known?
Consequences
I have warm memories of the Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (and Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thurdsdays) last year reading Writing/Teaching and Re-reading Poets, for some, and of the thawings that occurred last spring as I sat around reading Hyperobjects and The Ecological Thought, all at the expense of studying for Organic Chemistry, which I didn’t do very well in as a result. And it feels nice today to have torn through How To Read an Oral Poem and The Theory of Oral Composition, which, unusually, I picked out and read for an immediate and clear purpose (I have a prospectus due on Tuesday).
(Why do I say “thawing” above? Because I was thinking like Tim Morton back in high school, and I’d almost convinced myself that I couldn’t be doing serious scholarship thinking that way and that I should stop. And how did I discover him? Why because I hated reading Lawrence Buell’s environmental criticism when I was taking Troy Boone’s class last spring. When I searched “Buell” on Amazon—just because—I got also Morton, and I bit because of the buzzwords “philosohpy” and “ecology” together on the (very attractive) cover of Hyperobjects.)
In the reading I did this weekend on oral poetry, I’ve thought about literacy, poetry, drama, rhetoric, stories, and method—Antigone, Beowulf, Queen Mab; St. Augustine, Coleridge, Heidegger, Alfred Whitehead, Bakhtin, and Lyn Hejinian—relationships between reading and writing, ecology, and color—things I’d begun working on well before I’d begun any of my current projects. The phrase “Composition and reception are really two sides of the same coin.” (Foley, HROP, 20) sticks with me, because I’ve realized this previously, and now I remain tuned for discussions of South Balkan oral poetry and aural composition, which I’d never previously wanted to investigate. I’m leveraging work I’ve done before towards something new, which allows me to leverage the work that I’m doing for a required term project towards new knowledge and projects I might do later. That’s also not to say that I’m leveraging everything I’ve got towards this particular task; for example, I haven’t thought once in this context about W.C. Williams or The Silversun Pickups.
This is the very intentional ending of all of this writing. In this class, I’ve grappled with how exactly I want to use this blog (upon which I remarked so superficially in my 300-word midterm blog portfolio); I’ve considered the many “ways” that I could try to participate here—where I could stand, what kind of things I’d have to say, how I’d say them, whether I’d like to mean them, and how I’d move in and out—of the gap (that I wrote about some in my “what is literacy for?” essay) that I am—and all of us—are working from. I discussed this with Prof Vee in conference.
Fundamentally, I don’t know what to do. How can I (as a teacher or as a student, a peer) anticipate what might be something good/better to discuss. Early on, I made some assumptions about what this blog would be, so that I’d have place to stand when I’d have to use it. First, I’d assumed that this enterprise should somehow be different from other daily writings that I’ve been asked to do in other classes, but I wonder now why I ever thought it should be. Shouldn’t I be doing the same work here—trying to figure out what I’m trying to say—doing the work that I need to do? And if that work happens to help someone else with the work that they’re trying to do, then we have a discussion. In Paul Kameen’s class, I’d write about a page for discussion every day, and I’d turn it in to him at the end of class, but I’d only share those things that jibed with the general tenor of the discussion in which we were all (as a class) engaged. How is that different here? We’re all at liberty to read what we want to read, as we understand it, to take it away, and to make use—each of us—of what we can. That goes without saying for everything that we do—that’s literacy, individual and community. So what about anything else? (Elyse is thinking along similar lines in her post for this week.)
It reminds me of an epigraph that I used in a first draft of an essay (“Politics in the Socratic and Contemporary Academies”) in my first ever college English Literature course just over one year ago. This is not the particular epigraph (this is a longer passage), but it’s from the same post on Stanley Fish’s NYT Opinionator blog:
The urgency presiding over the occasion was not the urgency of doing something, but of understanding something, and everyone agreed that the project of understanding was an endless one and that the best we could do in two days would be to expose areas of concern that had not yet been recognized or adequately formulated. The comment heard most often at the end of a session was, “ You’ve given me a lot to think about.” Music to the academic’s ears.
The spirit of the meeting was nicely captured by a reported telephone conversation between one of the panelists and his young daughter. She asked, “What have you been doing all day?” The professor of law replied, “Talking about the Constitution.” But, she persisted, “What have you been doing ?” She couldn’t quite get her mind around the idea that just talking all day could be doing something, and many members of the public, not to mention a boatload of legislators, are with her. But that’s what we do when we’re doing the job properly — talking (or writing about) issues without ever coming up with a policy proposal or with an argument for supporting a party or a candidate.
Indeed, doing more than talking would be a betrayal of the enterprise, which might move one to ask why an enterprise so unproductive of measurable, practical results should be supported. Why should funds be authorized to bring 29 scholars to San Diego so that they can sit around all day gabbing and eating unhealthy pastry? There is no good answer to that question, nor should there be.
I hope that I haven’t misrepresented my point or Stanley’s here. We’re talking about mostly different things, which is okay. I’ve now re-read that post, and I’ve re-read the essay I wrote then. I’m reflecting. And I’m thinking about how this is like my conversation with Olivier, talking about academic work and “lateral thinking”, and in a (meta) way, too, this is an example of that.
Prof. Vee and I discussed my blog posts in conference. She told me that I should think about how I want to use the blog, and I have here. This post has been largely a recollection of that thinking, and it has been an explanation. Most of my previous posts are lengthy and “recondite”(meant as an impressionistic allusion to Part II). Then it’s appropriate that this has been my longest post so far—more than twice as long as the others—at almost 2600 words—and I am okay with that (no part I, II, III fiasco).
By the way, as far as I’m concerned, parts I and III are still forthcoming—whatever that might mean.