Category Archives: rants

Post-Verdict Silence

1 Reply

Sometimes when listening to the echoes of history, breezes from the past are fully felt in the present. (Kirkland, 2013, p. 26)

It was difficult waking up this morning, sipping on coffee, and diving back into David E. Kirkland’s book, A search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men. I’d ranted earlier in the week to friends about how beautifully written and powerful this book felt.

Reading the narrative of Derrick and Shawn, their cypha, and the ways these young Black men “shattered silence with words” (p. 25), Kirkland’s work sings with an honesty and vibrancy that is often lacking in the academic texts I read. This morning, this was a book that felt particularly prescient in light of the verdict reached in Florida last night.

Picking up where I left off, the first passage I read was:

 According to most historical accounts, Black people, through the transnational commerce of Black bodies, were plucked from land and torn from language, parsed into postures of difference, sometimes literally chained to a procession of individuals who lived life and spoke language much differently than they. (p. 58)

—

I am trying to cobble together understanding. All I have are snapshots as clues for reconciliation.

Snapshot:

My social networks are trickling with rage, anger, and sadness. These digital tools are being tapped for in-the-flesh protest, action, and meeting to share bitterness and heartbreak. It’s a cycle that happens all too frequently and I have nothing new to add to the tide of disappointment and anger that carries me along today.

 

Snapshot:

In our CEE presentation yesterday, Cindy O’Donnell-Allen and I discussed how we framed Bob Fecho’s concept of “wobble” in our preservice teacher courses. One attendee of our session pointed out that when it comes to white privilege we are always wobbling; to not “wobble” with white privilege is white privilege.

Snapshot:

On Friday, Ally and I went down to Denver and saw the Hot 8 Brass Band. The venue was hot, half-empty, and the band seemed tired on this, the last night of their tour before heading back to New Orleans. At one point the band asked the audience to hold up a peace sign in memory of the many fallen Black men that are victims from unnecessary violence in America. The group listed a litany of names of men who died violently because of their race. Each name added to a list too, too long. As if in anguish, trumpet player Terrell “Burger” Batiste screamed “Trayvon!” as his bandmates continued the song. Batiste, who lost both of his legs when hit by a car in 2006, and his seven bandmates were some of the only faces of color Ally and I saw that night. I remember wondering what my fellow concert-goers were thinking and if they, too, were reflecting on race and violence and privilege in the sweltering club in Denver’s wealthy Cherry Creek area on a Friday night.

Snapshot:

I’m finding it difficult to parse the news and feelings of an unsurprising verdict with the work I do. Writing and thinking, lately, about young adult books (and their lack of historically marginalized protagonists) and games and “play,” the immediacy of racialized life in America feels distant. And yet, I think about the exasperation with which some of my students convey when I discuss race in a literature course or a class on teaching reading or a workshop on the uses of technology. I think about how I will honor the memory of Trayvon in these spaces in my own “search past silence.”

Being “That Guy”: Race and Violence Ruining Wreck It Ralph

5 Replies

I think it’s getting worse. I used to hold my tongue and nod along with everyone else. The problem is I’m tired of not seeing folks of color in films. I’m tired of picking “good” YA texts for the classes I’m teaching and seeing white privilege reinforced on every page. I’m tired of not seeing the lives and experiences of my former South Central Los Angeles students represented in the books we read.*

I’m pretty sure my students might be getting tired of me: I’m a bit of a broken record when it comes to race and politics of representation when discussing literature, popular media, pedagogy, NCLB, relational aspects of connecting with students.

Sometimes (often), I fret about whether it might be best to let it slide. For one class, let the “race-thing” not be brought up. For one movie, don’t let the first thing you say when you walk out of the theater be, “Well, that’s gotta be the whitest movie ever made.”**

But.

But I just can’t. It feels irresponsible not to.

Case in point: tonight I saw Wreck It Ralph. It was fun. The videogame references, the unexpected plot developments, the playful short film before the feature: it was better than its marketing campaign led me to believe. But then…

See, here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure every character is white (except for ancillary villains shown in a bad-guy support group at the beginning of the film… hmmm…). Ally pointed out that title character Ralph might possibly be something non-white. And that’s good, right? I mean he is the protagonist. Except that the attributes we learn about our hero is that he has halitosis, a penchant for making bad decisions, and oafish strength. Not exactly the apotheosis of a young person’s role model.

And then there was the police brutality. Without giving away anything in the plot, there is a part of the film where Ralph is detained. Though he’s already restrained in the sweetest possible way, the two cop-like figures take to physically accosting him. This is done for laughs. Like the part where Ralph can’t move so the cop tasers him in the face: funny, right?

I know. It’s just a movie. Let it go.

But.

But I just can’t. I think about the ways these humorous scenes slowly reinforce lessons about social behavior and normality for the packed theater I sat in. Mix the giggles from this scene with the giggles about the use of the word duty/doody and it’s not quite clear where the line is drawn. And if Ally’s right and Ralph IS supposed to be non-white … well then, congratulations, Disney: you just got America to laugh at police beating up a person of color.

This turned into a frustrated rant. Sorry. I am actually genuinely interested in a pedagogical issue here: when is it our responsibility as teachers to “turn off” the critical lens? Ever? Does it ever interfere with our other content responsibilities?

 

*This week, my class is reading and discussing David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy. I really like this book. It also, however, makes me wonder about the politics of queer identity in YA. Who gets to be gay in YA texts? Is this also a marginalized white privilege? (Future blog post about this at some point.)

**Film in question, by the way, was the Perks of Being a Wallflower. Seriously though, EVERY character was white. Seriously.

Containing Olive: Restraining a Dog’s Wild Heart and the Plight of Student Nature

1 Reply

I am sitting on my couch preparing to go yell at the dog because she is barking. I sit here thinking maybe today’s the day she finally gets out. I want to share my feelings of constant exasperation and trepidation containing Olive because I think she is helping me understand my growth as an educator.

This is Olive bossing around a Great Dane mainly because she thinks she can.

When we first moved to this house we are presently renting, Ally and I noticed that Olive spent most of her energy running beneath the backyard’s porch. The possibilities of rabbits and the dangers of spiders were too problematic. A trip to Home Depot and some not-so-fancy lumber now lines the porch to only occasionally prevent Olive from the subterranean hunt.

A week later I heard Olive barking outside and I made the trek downstairs to shush her only to find that she was no longer in our yard but in our neighbor’s. We extended our fence upwards and we have blocked off all crevices with cinder blocks. Yes, our fifteen pound beast clears four and five foot fences and can hop onto our counter if the proper morsel entices.

Next, Olive was slowly digging her way out of the front of the yard. More cinder blocks were purchased to line yet another fence.

One day I was sitting on the couch writing, much as I am now, when my phone rang and a woman’s voice asked if I had a dog named Olive.

“Uh, yeah, is there a problem?”

“No, no problem, she’s here with me.”

And that’s when I found out that the gate in our backyard had been jostled open. And the purchase of a MasterLock was added to the tally of costs required to contain Olive.

It’s not that Olive is unhappy here. I re-read this opening description and realize it sounds like maybe I’m a less-than-stellar dog owner and Olive is trying to get away. That’s not it. Olive’s nature drives her to do this. It is who she is.

Olive is a hunter and a jumper and a digger. This is how she learns. When she hears danger: dogs fighting, cars honking, people yelling, Olive runs towards the origin. There is no flight for Olive, only fight. Actually, let me clarify, there is only flight when Olive senses she is being chased. Because her favorite game aside from “Get Out of Captivity and Explore” is “Stay Just Out Of Reach of My Pursuers.”

What efforts and folly have I invested in containing this spirit that wants to run freely and recklessly for rabbits and birds and elusive fun? I think of that line: “blame it on my wild heart.” Olive needing to escape is irreparable because it’s not something that’s “broken” to begin with. And then I think about how much bending and repartitioning and locking and proverbial cinder-blocking we focus on within schools. It makes me worried that something like the achievement gap isn’t broken; it is inherent in how we have programmed the conglomeration of schools and geography and sociopolitical contexts of learning.

And I think about a student, David, from my first year of teaching. The first student I felt like I truly failed to connect with and then failed to keep track of once he dropped out. I felt like I couldn’t contain David within the walls of school and the meticulously crafted curriculum I was staying up late to develop. I remember using my conference period to cross the street to the gas station where I knew I would find David loitering and talking to him about why he was missed in class. I remember figuring out the phone number for the pay phone next to where David loitered and then calling that number when he wasn’t in class. And then having him hang up when he realized his English teacher was hounding him at a pay phone. And then having his name dropped from my and the school’s roster shortly after.

Not that what I was doing that first year was what I would call “highly effective” but I also felt like, as a schooling system, we were trying to contain and control a student like David in ways that were inevitably going to fail.

Last week, I spent forty minutes outside of a dog park trying to wrangle Olive back into human captivity.  She saw a squirrel and decided that it was way more interesting than any of the mutts she was stuck with and, on her second try, cleared the dog park fence and was free.

And then the next day, personifying Einstein’s definition of insanity, Ally and I took Olive back to the same dog park. Upon seeing another squirrel, Olive did the same thing again.

I understand Olive’s nature. It irks me to no end. It challenges me and I realize that my efforts to thwart Olive’s escape attempts are efforts to make her behavior conform to my own. It is convenient for me to have her stay in our backyard (and highly, highly inconvenient to have her running freely). When working with youth in classrooms, such calls for convenience and “domestication” are much more problematic. How have others worked toward dismantling the blocks and locks and timber that are set in place to restrain student nature?

 

Blogging, Frustration, and Perpetually Practicing Transformational Leadership

1 Reply

It’s well after 10, rounding the corner towards 11 actually, and it’s a Thursday and it’s late enough in the week where overwork shows in the corners and bags under my eyes. On the stereo Albert Ayler is blowing open heaven and I look at the papers to grade and reading to read and I try to squeeze Robert Frost’s words to fit my own minor apocalypse, because I have pages to write before I sleep/pages to write before I sleep.

I think about the backlog of calls I need to return and the emails that me-me-me for attention. In my ears still echo the words heard earlier this evening when President Obama told me, “You did that” as he helped proclaim the progress made in the country with regards to jobs, to energy, to education.

My rss feed buzzes with reminders of the trickling in blogposts I’ve assigned. Student work getting done late into the evening. My tired eyes skim and it seems like every other post is a self-exploration into the need to blog. It’s polished vehemence about having to write publicly, about writing words because some professor for some required course is making us write a helluva lot about I-don’t-know-what and I have to if I want to get a decent grade and be a decent member of society, about inspiration and  writers block and that menacing blinking and impatient cursor that snarls for you to get on with it already. [For the record, I am really thrilled with the posts and vlogs my students have made.]

All of this preamble is to say, I understand the tensions my students are voicing. Having to blog kind of sucks. The increasingly slower trickle of content on my site, for instance, is likely an indication that other commitments have taken me away from informal online chatter (and even, briefly, away from War and Peace and Cats). However, when I think about what I learned and what I taught, I think I was perpetually practicing. I was shown, as an 8th and 9th and 10th and 11th and 12th grader how to write the evil five paragraph essay. I was shown and practiced how to do this so I could eventually break the rules of five paragraph essaydom and, like, do something different within the essay format. Likewise, as an 11th grade teacher, my students and I practiced mimicking the work of Anna Deavere Smith so that we could look at how writing can help distill, facilitate, and shape local political discourse. When students do work in a class, isn’t that about practice for something bigger? Sure, that may not mean being a professional blogger, but it may mean staying afoot in the tricky landscape of educational policy, it may mean being able to understand and convey a point of view, and it may mean having to advocate through words and actions.

I’ve been called into too many principals’ offices too many times during my years as a teacher and had to call in my union representative (usually my good friend Travis … one in that aforementioned long list of folks I need to call) to know that being able to articulate and to provide evidence for an argument about the needs of my students is not only about CYAing but about leading as an advocate for students and for a profession that is contested.

I think this post is more to psyche myself up for the continual challenge of loving the teaching profession and loving–unconditionally–the students we face each day. As my students and I struggle to figure out how to produce and communicate, I wonder if we need to step back and create an education-focused Ze Frank-like invocation.

As a final note, in my Adolescents’ Literature course this week, we’ve been reading John Green’s Looking For Alaska. I wonder if, like the protagonist of LFA, my students and I should think about this journey as one towards understanding teaching, education, and the future our classrooms hold as another inquiry into the “great perhaps.”

“Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself…”

3 Replies

Why, hello there. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?

A few things have waylaid my updating of the ol’ Crawl. In particular:

  1. I revised and defended my dissertation.
  2. Did you skim #1? I finished dissertating!
  3. I helped organize the opening of a new public high school, Critical Design and Gaming School (CDAGS) in South Central.
  4. I dealt with the most stressful moving challenge ever and have relocated from Los Angeles to Fort Collins, CO.
  5. Ally and I adopted a fiendish canine.

Okay, so recognizing all of these things pretty much took place concurrently, any kind of free time for blogging or–as some of you know–socializing, texting, replying to emails, being a generally personable person to be around-was thrown out the window. Though I’ve been somewhat competent at juggling several things at once, the past two months have been pretty insane.

All that being said, I want to say, “I’m back” and offer a few extra notes about the above.

 On dissertating:

So the only extra thing I’ll add is that UCLA’s dissertation filing system is completely digital. This means that the rather classic committee approval page is no longer physically signed by dissertation committee members (they get to leisurely click a couple of buttons online). While this makes the whole process easier, it also felt lacking of the the tangibility of being done. So I made my own unofficial signature page.

 

On CDAGS:

CDAGS is going to be incredible. It will continue to be a part of my research and I am truly excited about the ways this school offers meaningful and equitable learning opportunities to the students of South Central. One interesting thing about the CDAGS: it is going to be on a brand new campus (sharing the space with two sister schools that, together, are called the Schools for Community Action). Aside from an interim principal and a minimal staff, the only people that have ever used this new campus are the several dozen displaced teachers from Miramonte Elementary School. (For the non-LA based readers, Miramonte faced several severe allegations of abuse at the school earlier this year; Superintendent Deasy, in response to parent concerns, removed all of the Miramonte teachers and had them housed at the new campus for the remainder of the year while a new stuff was temporarily in place as the abuse investigation proceeded.) It’s been interesting visiting the home of CDAGS. It looks like the teachers currently getting compensated to sit here and not teach are really good at working on puzzles much of the day.

 

On moving:

I cannot begin to recount how stressful, frustrating, and overwhelming the moving process has been. This warrants a longer post. I will say that the day of moving involved ransoms, shouting, and fires (literally). And while I am certainly going to miss L.A., I must say that our new Colorado friends and colleagues have made life in the quieter city quite easy to adjust to.

On Olive:

Olive was rescued by Ally and I because… well… just look at this thing and tell me you wouldn’t do the same:

We adopted Olive under the assumption that she was a beagle. She’s not. She’s part beagle, part Jack Russel terrier, and part  Linda Blair in the Exorcist. I’m not saying Olive is the spawn of Satan. But I’m also not saying she might not be a not-too-distant relative. To be fair, Olive is a pretty awesome puppy (she’s 6ish months old). The only problem is that her happiness is inversely related to my own writing and packing productivity, making the above list of things I needed to accomplish in the past few months a bit more trying. Olive loves a few things about her new home in Colorado: more space, the dog park nearby, and the assortment of rabbits, mice, and birds that she can chase.

Phew! It’s been a busy few months and I apologize for this blog being out of commission. I’m excited to return here and wipe off the cobwebs at the American Crawl.

Reflections on #aera2011

Leave a reply

After a couple of days to recover, I wanted to share a few thoughts on another AERA conference. Though they do not represent everything I saw within the conference, I think they speak directly to what needs to be improved.

 

Lack of twitter

While I didn’t expect a twitter feed as lively as #dml2011, I was disappointed by the lack of engagement with the not-so-new medium. With nearly 15,000 people and the usual phone-book sized directory of sessions, Twitter is an ideal way to personalize the conference experience, engage in networking, and collaborate. Competing hashtags, a lack of free wifi & spotty service in the main hotels, and a limited number of tweeters made the conference generally disappointing in terms of social networking. One person tallied roughly 20-25 attendees (total) were contributing tweets from the conference.

And having a mobile app that does little more than act as a clunkier version of a directory doesn’t bring AERA any closer to connecting to a “social imagination.”

 

The problem with CHAT

The problem with CHAT isn’t really a CHAT problem at all. Instead, it is much more a problem of depersonalization and decontextualization of the research at AERA. I described AERA to several people as a giant five-day show-and-tell. While there is meaningful research being contributed, what happens as a result of AERA? More directly: we have 15,000 experts in the same place, at the same time, and all largely wanting to engage in conversations about education; why can’t AERA be productive, active, and responsive?

And so, I found myself participating in a working group that largely revolved around discussing CHAT-related sessions at the conference. Don’t get me wrong, when I understand CHAT, I find it really interesting. I’ve described it this way to a friend recently: “CHAT is a theory about everything and nothing. It’s kind of like the Seinfeld of learning theory.” In any case, geometry has never been my strong suit, and a conversation about CHAT eventually devolves into a conversation about triangles (literally). I couldn’t help but feel the tension of having flown across the country to engage in dialogue with the best of academic researchers only to have this be a conversation about triangles.

[btw, I’m amazed there is no wikipedia entry for CHAT … get some grad student to get on that!]

 

The “It’s so nice” syndrome

I spent a healthy portion of my time with the UCLA IDEA Council of Youth Research. I can say that they were the true highlight of the conference, representing both cutting edge research and calling those that saw their work to enact change.

However, I heard several conversations throughout the conference that described the research of teachers and students in ways that was tokenizing. Specifically, a conference attendee described hearing students talk in ways that matched current researcher rhetoric. The students were described glowingly and the attendee said it was “so nice” to hear these students speaking so clearly. I’ve been on the side of the discussed students before as well; teachers presenting and interacting at AERA fare little better than students. While the Council argues for students and teacher to be engaged in the process of research, we are still more subject than peer at AERA. It is difficult to imagine a research community that will treat practitioners and youth as legitimate partners if their experiences and voices are not more fully developed within the conference. I’m pretty sure I’ve ranted about this when reflecting on past AERA conferences as well.

Monday morning had one of the best sessions of the entire conference: four different youth-oriented research groups from across the country presented their findings. It was powerful and meaningful work and it was all voiced by high school students and teachers. Of course, it was the only session like this and a morning sessions towards the end of a conference (in New Orleans of all places) didn’t yield record crowds. Yes, it’s a step forward for AERA to have sessions with students, but with this sliver of a door open, it’s time to budge open full swing. How about, instead of a single, round-table session where students are literally competing for audience members, we make this a regular part of the conference. What if sessions had students and teachers as discussants? Or are we not as concerned about relevance when it comes to our work? Summarizing a question Ernest Morrell asked at the end of a session on Saturday, what’s going to be more important at the end of the day: directly interacting in research with teachers and students to improve education, or getting another citation in a peer reviewed journal?

 

The future and beyond

A non-Council of Youth Research highlight for me was seeing the members of the New London Group discuss what is in store “Beyond New London.” While the academic Lollapalooza was fun, at the end of the day, it left me curious about what’s next. When actually addressing what is “Beyond” in terms of the future of literacies, the group did little more than shrug. Likewise, the working group I was involved in, “Intervening for the Future,” while a useful group for intellectual conversation, puttered more with the concept of intentional intervention; should we or shouldn’t we? Not that I’m thrilled with a book like this, but I do wish AERA had a bit more forward-thinking, on-the-ground engagement at this year’s conference. I do see the research of my colleagues and I as moving beyond New London “stuff,” and the Council provides me with a sense of optimism and possibility for the future, but these are tangential groups and not all mainstream practices within AERA.

 

School Reform for Dummies: The Problem with Steve Lopez’s Column, the Future of Manual Arts, and How to Cut a School In Half

9 Replies

This is going to sound overly pessimistic and cynical, but it’s hard to read an article like this and not grit my teeth.

The anecdotal stories of layoffs are a useful tactic to maybe get the public to understand that there are faces and names to the teachers that are continuing to be cut and villainized in the current political rhetoric.

However, the article points to the inequity of cuts and to the general (more than usual) messy situation of layoffs in LAUSD. Hamilton students are in tears and parents are shocked by the loss of teachers they loved. This is something new for these students.

At Manual Arts, I want to applaud the continuing efforts of students to fight for teachers they are losing. But the picture is muddy and isn’t getting clearer any faster.

Here’s what would have been different if Steve Lopez had written about Manual Arts:

  1. there wouldn’t have been a sense of surprise: amazing teachers–like my friend Peter Carlson–have received layoff or Reduction in Force (RIF) notices every single year. It’s not even a surprise.
  2. students have been trying to be proactive in fighting for their education for a long time: Student walkouts became a persistent aspect of how students tried to fight for their teachers and for their education. These were both effective and detracting; some students felt like they were able to engage in public discourse that directly affected them; some students were able to miss a whole lot of class.

 

And before reading further, you might want to compare the general data–particularly the College Opportunity Ratio (COR)–for Hamilton and Manual Arts to see how these RIFs will play out.

 

Both images come from the UCLA IDEA’s California Educational Opportunity Report.

A Timeline for Dummies

Manual Arts is also a great microcosm of the mess in the district. If you want to know what the plight of public education looks like, here’s my best play-by-play of how it’s played out in … oh six months at my school:

November: Our sixth principal in the six years I’ve been here quits. [This is a highly politicized event that divides the campus. To leave things simple: I felt that Principal Irving was an effective leader in his professional role and I see his departure as a loss for our students. Not everyone will agree with me.]

December: Rumors of reconstitution and heavy RIF numbers are shared in weekly union meetings. It becomes clear that the QEIA grant funding that was paying for nearly 20 teachers and other faculty positions at the school is not being renewed next year. [This is a highly politicized event that divides the campus: some teachers blame our school’s network partner and leadership staff for the fact that we did not meet benchmarks that we set. Some teachers blame the school district for imposing benchmarks on us that we did not meet. In any case, these are real jobs that we had saved with these funds… because of these saved jobs, it looks like Manual Arts did not have a lot of RIFd teachers at our school, which directly impacts what happens as a result of … the Reed Settlement.]

January: The Reed Settlement is Approved. Anticipating the many layoffs that will likely occur under the current doomsday budget, 45 schools that would be impacted the most are placed on a list that would protect them. [This is a highly politicized event that divides union. To leave things simple: the settlement protects RIFd teachers at some schools but disrupts campuses that are not typically affected by these layoffs – schools in affluent in communities, schools that don’t have newer teachers, school that are probably doing academically better … probably schools like Hamilton High School.

[Oh yeah, despite being either the lowest or second lowest performing school in the district (depending on if you count Jordan’s missing API data from last year) … Manual Arts was NOT on the list of protected schools. Our administrative team was efficient enough in the past with shielding our staff from layoffs that we did not look like a school that will need to be protected. Instead the RIFs from other schools will burden our school on top of the RIFs we will already have. This will be very bad as we shall see.]

February: District RIF projections are around 5,000 teachers, we are told our school will move to a traditional calendar, Manual Arts is requested to create a plan to show the superintendent why we should not be reconstituted­–all staff reapply for positions. [This is a highly politicized event that divides the campus. Several teachers–myself included–are seen as colluding with our network partner and are not seen as trustworthy.]

March 8: One of our network partners, WestEd, announces that they will not be involved with our campus in the near future. [This is a highly politicized event that divides our campus. Blame is placed on our other network partner.]

March 11: At an afterschool faculty meeting, our teachers are told that we will have 32 RIF teachers. In addition, (and partly because we are going to a traditional calendar) we are losing 50 other teachers, 10 long-term sub positions, and 8 district intern teachers. Yes, we are losing 100 out of 190 teachers. Oh yeah, and our expected enrollment next year is anticipated to be the same.

March 15: 32 Manual Arts teachers receive certified mail letters that let them know they are being laid off next year; they are neither surprised nor clear about what this means in terms of what will actually happen (RIFs are projected and some are rescinded in the past). Steve Lopez writes about the shock at Hamilton High School.

March 18: Students begin demonstrating at Manual Arts. Reports of walkouts and sit-ins trickle into texts and facebook updates throughout the day. [Update: brief coverage of student efforts here.]

Without adding too much more commentary, I want to point out how the snowball has been rolling into an avalanche throughout the year. Morale, unsurprisingly, is at an all time low at our school; we are still a big question mark in terms of our future. It could be minutes or days until we know about if our school is reconstituted. A mass exodus of teachers–those RIFd and those that have just had enough–is expected at the end of the year. I also want to point out how all of these events are layered in meaning. With each major announcement, the school roils in finger pointing. Calls for unity are voiced; a union election is wedged throughout all of this, as are the Public School Choice results, as is an election that affects the School Board, as is a new incoming Superintendent next month, as is an ongoing attack on unions and public education. The results compound rhetoric and confusion. At the end of the day, how will any of this help the 3400 students that will be walking into our classrooms at Manual Arts next year. Or tomorrow?

 

Cutting Down The Instructions and a Wilde Diversion

6 Replies

So, I’m reading The Instructions. Only a handful of pages in and I’m excited about the journey this book is intending. I also like the feel of this book. Like other McSweeney’s publications, it’s a beautifully designed item.

Its physicality is the very argument against e-readers. At the same time, the book is staggeringly big:

With my laptop, notebook, and mishmash of teaching materials, it literally doesn’t fit in the bag I bring to work each day. This is, indeed, a compelling argument for e-readers (especially considering that an iPad is a typical component of my daily arsenal).

Did I mention that there is no digital copy of The Instructions? As much as it would make this situation much easier, I like that I have to hold the pages as Levin’s Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee intended.

So I bought another copy.

I bought a copy that was to be slaughtered for the greater reading good. It arrived a surprising, innocent white. And once again I was captured by the intense beauty of The Instructions as Object. I almost turned against my original blue copy until I noticed the strangely askew sticker placement on the back.

And the hacking began.

I first cut the book from its hardcover, and found suitable chapter ends with which to cut the book. Now in five digestible tomes, I can cart the book in fragments.

As I cut into the literary flesh I was reminded of El Gaviero who, in one of his earlier adventures – perhaps “The Snow of the Admiral” – also brought along only tattered fragments of greater books due to size and space. I also drew inspiration from the recent reading of Skippy Dies; the edition I read was spliced across three paperbacks housed in a handsome box, making it ever the easier book to transport. A similar appreciation was felt for the same version of 2666.

Finally, searching for the appropriate places in the text to sever text from text, to create neat piles of books, I scanned the top to see if cutting specific signatures of the book would be feasible. This did not meet my preference for separations at the end of chapters so didn’t pan out. However, I was reminded – in tracing this line of thinking – of a fragment of a literary anecdote: while doing an undergraduate fellowship at the Clarke Library, I was shown a book that was unique in the library not for its content than for its state of being. As one of the foremost collections of books by, from, or related to Oscar Wilde, the book in question (though its name is of course lost to the ineptitude of youthful obliviousness) was a gift from Wilde to his lover at the time. However, after receiving the book, Wilde’s companion rejected Wilde. The book, now owned by the Clarke Library is a treasure in that the top signatures of the book were never cut; the pages could not be opened without these being cut. The book is an artifact of a relationship run stale; Wilde’s gift nothing more than a weighty reminder of a past romance, nothing to be consumed or to even pretend to have opened.

But then comes the spinsterish head of academia: I believe a researcher expressed an interest in reading this particular copy of the Clarke’s collection. Does the library cut open the book for the needs of academia? Or preserve the book’s unrelinquished secrets in the spirit of historical veracity? Honestly, I don’t remember what decisions were made. The story itself comes as little more than a literary reverie.

A diversion, I realize, but one that brings me back to pure fascination of books in their dusty, hefty, and sometimes unwieldy physicality.

How I learned to stop worrying and just drop $40 to become a more efficient writer

1 Reply

Just over a week ago, I defended my dissertation proposal for my Ph.D. Though I intend to more fully describe the proposal, my plans for implementation, and how you can be involved, I wanted to here describe the writing tool that I relied on. To be as blunt as possible, Scrivener is perhaps the best forty dollars I’ve spent in my professional career.

Through breaking down a larger document into smaller files, folders, and subfolders, Scrivener fits the ad hoc nature of my writing style. Frequently, I would find myself jumping from amending the proposal’s rationale to tweaking a few lines in the lit review to jotting out a section of the appendix. I started writing my proposal importing a handful of useful articles and a few paragraphs and papers I’d previously written that helped guide my writing. Scrivener allowed me to morph these scraps as needed throughout the months I spent writing the 80+ page proposal I ended up with.  For instance, I started the bulky literature review chapter with notes on the areas I intended to review. These were in a single text section. However, as these areas grew, I broke them into the five sections you can see in the image above. These too, in turn, were expanded to allow me to more closely focus on various nuances within the areas I was reviewing and collapsed later for fluidity.

Scrivener allowed me to expand and collapse text and folder as needed, move sections around, and keep many of my needed PDFs, images, and notes within an eye’s view. Being able to edit with two text windows open within Scrivener meant compiling my bibliography while writing, or looking at various drafts simultaneously.

Oh yeah, and it’s really, really easy to use. Pretty much everything I do with Scrivener is covered in this single video.

I also want to note that I don’t feel like I come anywhere near to utilizing the many features that come included in Scrivener. However, it significantly frees up my time between drafts and allows me to work quickly through larger documents (I’ve used it for most papers and articles I’ve written in grad school). It would be nice to see something Scrivener-like that becomes more collaborative (I really enjoy working with Google Docs with others, and can see Scrivener working well in this context). I definitely don’t get compensated for raving about Scrivener, and I paid for it (their ease with which they allow me to put it on the multiple computers I use is also appreciated). I get questions, occasionally, about the software I use when writing. I begrudgingly stuck with Endnote because I’ve already invested in learning its interface. Scrivener is intuitive and has become an essential component to my productivity.

[Note: A significant update to Scrivener recently came out. I have not yet looked into the additional features.]