Notes Towards Some Future Blogging

I'm in Guatemala as I type, soon to be leaving for El Salvador with the Harvard Learning Through Libraries project.

I remind myself to write about:

1. My strange reaction when I arrive in a Latin American country
2. How life is hard for most people
3. How crowded it is in Latin America, and what that says about community, loneliness, culture, etc.

So there.

You might want to imagine those blogs yourself, which will probably be better than what I'll eventually write. Like how a science fiction book is always better when you look at the title and cover and imagine what's inside, vs. the actual reading.

Thoughts on Poetry Part 1

Years later, when I look back at my time here in Cambridge, I'll remember it as one that was filled with poetry. I think I always wanted to be a poet. I remember a couple of poems I wrote as a kid called "Goat Coat" and "Price-Tag Bag" (see how clever? Those words rhyme!). And then I cranked out a lot of lyrics for punk/folk songs over the years, and finally threw in a couple of week-long summer workshops at the University of Iowa. But it's sort of like I've been circling around poetry without ever taking the full plunge. But I did this year. One of my four classes this semester was a poetry workshop, but psychologically it often felt like it was well over half of my entire workload--probably because I enjoyed it the most.

So what is it about poetry?

Well, for one, it's nice to birth new things into the world. That's what my poetry professor said one day when we were sitting in front of some of our new poems--that these were brand new to the world.

I like that. Maybe it's only marks on a sheet of paper, maybe no one but a few people will ever read it, but you've just added something to the world that didn't exist before. Reading literature is great, taking a philosophy course is fine, but in those endeavors you fill up your mind with someone else's stuff. When you write poetry, your only task to bring something new into the world. Not a bad thing at all.

I Loves Me Some Grade Inflation

Well, I got my first official grade for an assignment. It was a philosophy paper. I got an A-.

Grades really recede into the background here, as they should. My Arts in Education class is pass/fail, so I never think about it. My philosophy class has two papers and two grades, and I'm waiting for the second. Grades haven't come up once in my poetry workshop, and you get your grade after your final project in neuroscience.

I almost never think about grades. Most folks in the program don't.

As it should be.

In that pass/fail class, we recently turned in a big paper. No one would ever fail the course--unless you never turn anything in. So passing is a foregone conclusion. But when I wrote the big paper, I put in the same effort as I would a graded paper. I thought about it, organized it, outlined it, researched it, wrote it, rewrote it, edited it, and had other people proofread it.

In neuroscience you're not really accountable anything specific. They don't take attendance since it's a big lecture, you're never given a recall exam over the information, and you're never quizzed on the readings. No tests either. And yet, you go to all the lectures, you take notes, you do all the readings. Why wouldn't you? Would you pay thousands in tuition, blow off the work, and then "trick" a professor into giving you a good grade? What kind of sense would that make?

So back to my A-. Probably a classic example of grade inflation. Grade inflation is simply that: no one gets a C (unless you do nothing), and your poorest effort garners you at least a B-. It's not like high school or undergrad.

People who went to school before grade inflation like to complain about the current phenomenon. But really, who cares? Grade inflation is another way to forget about grades altogether, to the student's benefit. It's done me well.

Here's how grade inflation works, as far as I can tell: What used to be an A- is now an A. And what used to be a B+ or B is now an A-. And what used to be a B- or C+ is now a B+. What used to be a C is now a B, and a C- or D+ is now a B-.

By that scale, my A- philosophy paper was basically a B. Just like my grades in high school and college. Some things never change.

Luddite Postscript

Are you around my age? In your late thirties? Know anyone in their mid twenties? Here's how you can blow their mind: tell them that when you were in college, cell phones and the internet didn't exist. You wrote letters by hand on paper and mailed them to your friends. You talked on phones with chords in your dorm rooms. If you were out and needed to reach somebody, you found a quarter and a pay phone and made a call. When you did research, you went to the library, talked to librarians, and found sources by actually touching card catalogs and books and magazines.

I haven't been a full-time college student for fifteen years. Now I am. One big difference is that people can bring laptops into class. I don't think laptops even existed when I was in undergrad, so in the early 90s there was nothing but people, notebooks, and pens and pencils in a classroom. Now you can come to class with a laptop. As the professor talks and the discussion ensues, you hear the low rumbling of fingers on keyboards.

And I don't really like it. In my Arts in Education class about 10 of the 50 students bring their laptops. As the class proceeds, if you glance at them you see the glow of their computers on their faces. And if I think of those 10 students in particular, it seems like they are never really in the class. When they raise their hand to ask a question, I always think "oh, right, you're in here." Or when they speak it seems like they just stepped in the door. Somehow those with pens and notebooks are more present, have been more on task, have been more connected to the room. Us computerless folks haven't thrown up a barrier between ourselves and the goings on.

Sometimes I sit behind the students who bring their laptops, and I always see what I thought I'd see. They have three or four windows open, they check facebook, play games, and sometimes take some notes. Exactly what I would do if I'd brought my laptop. Which is why I don't.

Still a Luddite, Maybe More So

My life here at this Ivy League school of some repute includes a LOT more technology than my previous years. When I was teaching high school, I did have computers around, but the bulk of my days included students, books, and lots of conversation. Old school. But now I've got to do research on the computer systems, my assignments are due through the internet, I (sadly) bought my first cell phone, technology in education inevitably comes up a lot . . . on and on.

But I'm still not convinced. Here's an example.

At first blush, it seems like it's a lot easier to write a paper with modern technology. I've got a computer, I can spell check, grammar check, find a quote online in seconds, juggle paragraphs and phrases with the click of a mouse, cut and paste to my heart's content. But I said things are easier with technology, and easier isn't the same as better. Like Wendell Berry says, he'll buy a computer for his own writing once someone surpasses Dante. Shakespeare wrote with a pen (or a quill and scroll or something). Some noticed that Nietzsche's writing declined once he put his pencil down and started to use a typewriter. Socrates was even worried about what would happen to our thinking once we shifted away from oral language and started to write things down in the first place.

So is my writing any better with all this technology? When you have to write with a pen, and it's a lot harder to go clean up a sentence (much less a paragraph) that you just wrote, does that mean you write more slowly, and craft your prose with more care? Does that have an overall effect?

Here's what I'm SURE used to happen when people wrote with pens and pencils: the used to sit for an extended period of time and get lost in their work. Now when I type a paper on my laptop, I type for 5 or 10 minutes, then I check my e-mail, then I write for another 5 minutes, then I check the score of the Bears game, then I write a little more, then I check out something on YouTube, etc., etc. I've asked other people if they do the same, including my whole philosophy class, and most everyone says yes. There's no doubt this is diminished thinking and diminished writing. On the rare occasion that I do attend to one topic for a protracted period of time, my brain begins to piece things together, my thoughts reach a much deeper and richer place, and I have a chance at getting somewhere original. No chance when I keep fracturing my thinking and writing with little detours to the internet.

It's Going to Get Sentimental

My sister Sandy and my 5 year-old niece Ally came to visit a couple weekends ago. I've missed them dearly, and it was great to spend 48+ hours with them. We went to restaurants, parks, the children's museum, walked Harvard yard, went to Boston Commons, read 14 children's books, and I hugged Ally so hard I may have broken some of her young ribs. She even spelled out "I Love Uncle Stevie" in Jenga pieces.

But then they had to leave, and there was a gaping hole in my east coast life. The gaping hole had always been there, but when they came and went it became very visible. I was bummed for a long time. I realized that having a "heavy heart" isn't really a metaphor, it's a physical descriptor. That's how it actually feels.

Stretching My Brain Like Taffy

I hadn't realized, when choosing my schedule in September, that two of my classes would split my brain in two different directions: Philosophy and Poetry. In my poetry class your encouraged to never state anything outright, which does make some sense. We turn to art forms for when our regular language fails us. If you can state something outright, you'd put it in a newspaper article or an encyclopedia. But when you've got a mood, an emotion, an impression, an inkling, a question, or a curiosity, and it's difficult to "get there" and describe it, then you've got to use some kind of artistic language. Poetry still uses words of course, but it uses them in unexpected and inexplicable ways, as the only way to communicate what you're trying to communicate. Which means your language has to be fracture and fragmented, or as Emily Dickinson would say, you have to "tell it slant." You need to be roundabout, weird, metaphorical, unpredictable. It's probably been a good exercise for me to learn to write this way.

But then I had a philosophy paper to write, which is the exact opposite. Nothing should be muddled, nothing should be poetic. Not only should you not use metaphors, my professor said philosophers even avoid synonyms because it can confuse meanings and argumentation.

And with these two classes running concurrently, it was very, very hard on my little brain. It was like when I flew from Tanzania, where I had been immersed in Swahili for a year, and landed in Spain. I walked up to the information table at the airport, meaning to speak Spanish (which I could at one time), though still stuck in Swahili land in my head. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came it. It was a language bottleneck, a glut that rendered me mute. I hadn't learned two languages, I learned two languages which canceled each other out.

And now I can't quite write a good poem OR a good philosophy paper.

Maybe I'll just go watch T.V. Those reality shows include lots of dialogue that is neither poetic nor philosophical. Which might be what T.V. is for.

Plato Made Me Miss My Train Stop

Early in the year I was reading Plato on the train back to my home. I was trying to sneak in some extra homework because time is always short in these parts. And the reading was so absorbing, I completely missed my stop. I took it all the way to the end, and then had to hop a train back. No mind though, I was enjoying that old greek and what he had to say. In fact, if you love reading, have you ever noticed that it's never a problem to have to wait for something? Is your plane delayed? Great, more time to sit down and read your novel. Got to the doctor's office early? No problem, more time to read. Imprisoned for the next 10 years? Good, you can finally catch up on that stack of books.

Fiddler Jones

Sometimes it's hard for me to get my work done because I've got too much else to do. Too much FUN stuff to do. I'll sit down to do some work, and then a friend will call to meet for a drink at The Burren, or a classmate will want a slice of pizza at The Upper Crust, or a neighbor wants to go for coffee at the Diesel. Or my roommates will want to carve pumpkins, or the New England leaves are changing colors, or I haven't played my guitar in awhile, or I want to call a friend in Chicago, or a comedian or a band or a play is in Boston that I want to see. What to do? It's easy: always choose them over the studying. Yes I'll study, yes I'll do well enough, but should I ALWAYS choose sitting inside a library and hovering over books, when something is calling right outside the window, just a block away?

Which is why "Fiddler Jones" by Edgar Lee Master's is one of my favorite poems. It's in his book Spoon River Anthology, where every person/character in town gets a page to talk about themselves. Most are petty, greedy, transgressive, or dishonest in some way, but a few tell us how to live. And Fiddler Jones is one (and for my money, the center of the book). He's a farmer who makes enough money to get by, but never gets ahead because, dammit, there's too much fun to be had. And he dies without "a single regret." Here's the end of the poem:


How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill--only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle--
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

Some Quotes About Art

"There are only three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are." - W. Somerset Maugham

"If I could say it, I wouldn't have to dance it." - Isadora Duncan

"I used to draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child." - Pablo Picasso