Two posts by a former Facebook friend of my wife’s caught her attention this evening. I was up in bed reading and about to fall asleep, when Megan came upstairs hopping mad. What she had to say was interesting and important enough that I thought I should share it all with you:
Picture from the CBS Story
Megan wrote…
A girl I went to college with, posted a news story about a Hispanic woman that came to the US illegally to give birth to her child. The woman did this so that she would now be a US citizen. The “college friend” was posting this to say how awful it is that “these people” are doing this. I can’t believe that people can be so insensitive and callous. Only after I watched this news segment did I realize how I feel about this situation. Her post led me to write the following, which in turn caused her to “de-friend” me:
It is interesting that you “liked” “don’t judge…you never know what a person’s story is…leave that up to God,” and then you put this up. I feel for this woman and all of the other women, men and children that live in a place we can not even comprehend. I would do everything in my power for my child and I not to be sent back to a horrific situation. If I ever even began to have a rotten attitude about an immigrant, illegal or not, I would quickly ask myself if I would live in the country they are so desperately trying to escape. I guarantee that answer would be “NO”. Do I have the answer for how the US should handle illegal immigrants and the financial issues that come along with the situation? No. But I do know that if God were to one day ask me how I treated people who were trying to come into a free, blessed, wealthy country only to leave a country of heartache, poverty and dead-ends, I would want to be able to say that I showed sympathy and did not turn them away.
One of my favorite "dorks." Possibly I didn't look so different as a youngster.
Here’s a strategy for writers or anyone who talks: communicate in memorable phrases. As sensible and obvious of a strategy as this might seem, it wasn’t something that occurred to me until the past year or two, that I ought to look for chances to write what some people might call a “golden line,” that I ought to try and make some sort of observation about what it is to live a life.
I don’t set out to write these golden lines. When I write, I mostly try to put the subject ahead of an action verb and then I pack in as many images as I can. By images, I mean something that might snag one of the senses the way a fishhook could pierce a nostril. If it’s a short story, I’ve got myself a few characters (usually more than I should have allowed in), a situation, and I try to get to know the characters as I watch what they do and say. What I’ve been noticing is that if I stay open to moments for memorable observation, once in awhile I can see where one might fit in. In Diaz’s “Wildwood,” here are a few lines I won’t soon forget:
That’s white people for you. They lose a cat and it’s an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon (372).
Happiness, when it comes, is stronger than all the jerk girls in Santo Domingo combined (379).
That I think of any text I encounter as a sort of teacher of writing is the result of my being in Dr. Allen Gee’s fiction workshop at Georgia College and State University. He didn’t talk to me specifically about how books can be my teachers, but what he did do was direct us to texts and then ask us questions designed to get us to see what was on the page. I spot several interesting lessons from the text-as-teacher, Diaz’s “Wildwood.” For example (what follows is me attempting to write a short and memorable line): If Junot Diaz’s story “Wildwood” is an English language Salad, then he’s doused it with a pretty massive helping of Spanish language dressing.” This isn’t at the present moment much of a lesson for me because I don’t speak any other languages. It is, however, a lesson for my teacher self. Why don’t my students (who often speak several languages) ever write sentences that make use of that part of their literacy identity? It’s a feature of their writing that I’m more responsible for than them. I think it’s my place to show them this sort of sentence is possible: “Sick or not, dying or not, my mother wasn’t going to go down easy. She wasn’t una pendeja. I’d seen her slap grown men, push white police officers onto their asses, curse a whole group of bochincheras” (367).
Wildwood, NJ
Junot Diaz is a simile super hero:
It went up in a flash, like gasoline, like a stupid hope… (367).
…the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton (377).
A tricky or problematic area of writing is figuring out who you are on the page, or who you are on the page in a certain piece of writing. In the pages of “Wildwood,” I’m able to revisit some important lessons. First off, I notice the allusions in the story, most of them references to pop culture. It used to be when I wrote that it would occur to me to try and explain something by invoking a sports, musical, or cinematic metaphor, AND I’d shut that impulse down. I’d flip my mental rolodex away from The Cutting Crew or Fletch, and head over into at least something as literary as Edgar Allen Poe or Edith Wharton. Here’s a couple lines from “Wildwood” that remind me there’s no reason to stay in the imaginary literary canon:
“A punk chick. That’s what I became. A Siouxsie and the Banshees–loving punk chick” (362).
Right after invoking The Sound of Music, Diaz writes, “All my favorite books from that period were about runaways–Watership Down, The Incredible Journey, My Side of the Mountain–and when Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” came out I imagined it was me they were singing about” (365).
Diaz alludes to Bon Jovi and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead
If you teach English or you’ve been taught English, or you’ve had an editor recently, I wonder how many times you’ve told somebody or been told by somebody that you must be consistent with point of view or verb tense. I know “watch verb tense” or “inconsistent POV” is something I wrote on students’ papers back in the day when I was teaching writing without being a writer myself. Often when tense or point of view is brought up, it is a relevant point of consideration, but there’s no Moses rule that states a writer can’t change verb tense of point of view. Diaz’s story is a good example of what’s possible. He beings his story by addressing the reader directly, using “you,” which to my way of thinking, makes the POV second person: “…but then she called you again, louder, her I’m-not-fucking-around voice, and you mumbled irritably, Si senora” (360). Before we get to the switch to first person, Diaz shows us how to make a narrative leap in time, a move that allows us to skip everything that is boring and irrelevant: “Before the winter is out the doctors remove that breast you were kneading and its partner, along with the auxiliary lymph nodes” (362). We’re still in second person “you,” and as a writer, you only need the little phrase “Before the winter was out” to take the reader with you to what’s next. There’s no need to talk about the rest of the winter, all those days when all that was happening was that people were sitting around and watching television. Then Diaz make the switch to first person: “A punk chick. That’s what I became.” The story continues. I know what’s going on. I can’t stop reading. I don’t close the book thrown off by a shift in pronoun use.
The Pen / O. Henry Prize Stories 2009
There’s a bunch in this story to see, but I’ll just share one last little lesson this story offers, a super easy one to at least consider: when you start a piece of writing in a certain place, (mental, intellectual, geographical) sometimes the best way to end it to return to that place. Diaz begins, “It’s never the changes we want that change everything” (361). Fifteen or so pages later, after the narrator’s mother has been diagnosed with cancer, after the narrator has run away, returned, and then been sort of shipped off to live with her grandmother, she tells us, “So much has changed these last months, in my head, my heart.” Nothing has happened to the narrator that she ever would have wished for, but yet, she is different than she was. If you’re lost for an ending, come back to your starting place. What new is there to say?
Diaz, Junot. “Wildwood.” The Pen / O. Henry Prize Stories. Ed . Laura Furman. New York: Anchor Publishing, 2009. Print.
When I started to make the mental move from basketball coach to writer (not that a person couldn’t be both) the two writer/teachers I began to read were Donald Murray and Peter Elbow. Many of the professors and teachers around me let me know that these two men were considered to be from the “expressive” school of composition and that if I followed their methods then my classroom would not be a place for political and social change. In the years that have followed, I have not found the warnings about expressivism’s lack of political impact to be true.
In the writing classrooms I inhabit, my students write in what Murray called a daybook (think writer’s journal) and they use Peter Elbow’s guidelines for sharing their work with one another, and what happens after that often takes on political implications for the classroom and beyond.
What follows are my notes for the reading of a text I choose because I’m thinking about technology, multimodal texts, and how those terms relate to the act of writing. The text did its work of giving me more to consider, but it also got me to thinking about the social and political change that occurs when people read and write together, whether this happens passing sheets of paper back and forth, posting on Facebook, or creating websites. If you have any doubt about a blog’s ability to spread any sort of message, take a glance at the map that goes with this blog and check out the location of some of its readers. Whoa.
Here are some “Golden Lines” and some of my thoughts related to Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” 56:2 CCC. December 2004.
“Never before has the proliferation of writings outside the academy so counterpointed the compositions inside” (298). My students write regularly on blogs and I have them form groups to investigate an issue within writing studies, write a collaborative research paper, and present it to the class via a multimodal text. While those are activities within the courses I teach, I also talk daily about scholarly sources, signal phrases, parenthetical citations, and an MLA works cited page. I was just walking to class and thinking about how few of my students will use these “skills” (what else to call them?) after college. I was also thinking how rarely I use those skills in my writing. If I were a teacher and writer mostly publishing in scholarly journals, I would use these features of writing a lot, but I think of myself as a novelist, a short story writer, and an essayist. Most of the reading I do does not contain parenthetical citations. I hang onto to teaching that part of writing because my students are mostly just getting started at the university and I imagine that they will have to do this sort of writing to successfully navigate the university. If the latter is true (that students will read scholarly sources and write research papers) then I think the quote from the Yancey article that begins this bullet is an observation worth consideration.
“How is it that what we teach and what we test can be so different from what our students know as writing?” (298). I want to take my students beyond what they know as writing. I want them to think critically about the texts that bombard them. I want them to equate writing with thinking, to begin to see the phrases that ripple across their mind as revisable thoughts.
“At best, it could help foster a world peace never known before” (301). We weren’t blogging in my courses yet, but this sentence reminds me of my own classroom, where the Jewish immigrant from Russia became best friends with the Muslim student from Pakistan. These students wrote about the world was set up for them to hate one another but our classroom at St. John’s University became a space where they could work together and become friends.
“At this moment, we need to focus on three changes: Develop a new curriculum; revisit and revise our writing-across-the-curriculum efforts; and develop a major in composition and rhetoric” (308). Sentences such as this one cause me to wonder my place in Writing Studies, as a professor with an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English Education. Writing Studies sounds like something to which I can belong while an Undergraduate Major in Composition sounds more like something within which I will always be slightly unqualified to teach, at least when it comes to my terminal degree.
“In composition, we need to learn how to read and write e-texts–synthesizing, questioning, evaluating, and importing from them–databases and catalogues, hyper-texts and archives, Web essays and portfolios” (318). If you are already trying to teach students to be critical–to question information as it comes toward their thinking–then I don’t think this seems like such a big step, at least the first part. Read and write online, perhaps watch various online video including documentaries, and apply Yancey’s “synthesizing, questioning….” As I write this, I hear many of my students telling me how much they hate the “critical lens” assignment. Many of my students are being asked to do something they despise in whatever they mean when they say “critical lens.” I don’t think reading and writing have to be things to be dreaded.
With regards to technology, especially something such as a set of Power Point Slides, “If we continue to partition it off as just something technical, or outside the parameters governing composing, or limit it to the screen of the course management system, or think of it in terms of the bells and whistles and templates of the PowerPoint screen, students in our classes learn only to fill in those electric boxes–which, in their ability to invite intellectual work, are the moral equivalent of the dots on a multiple choice test” (320). I think the E-Portfolio has the strong potential for becoming the new five paragraph essay, a prefabricated form which limits thinking.
It’s Daniel Keller’s oral essay, “Lord of the Machines…” that really does it to me: gets me as excited for what the writing classroom could be, as excited as I was the first day that I realized that all I really had to do to to get students interested in the class was to allow them to read and write and share their own words with their classmates. I wonder how old Daniel Keller is, not enough to look this up, but I see a lot in his oral essay that appeals to who I am, including clips of dialogue from an old favorite movie of mine, Office Space. There’s a lot else in Keller’s essay too: music that must come from what he knows and loves, more movie cuts, and funny and surprising research that states 33% of people admit to having assaulted their computers and 70% of people admit to swearing. I have sworn at my computer many a time but so far no assaults that I can remember.
What’s so exciting for me is to consider all that could go into a piece in the spirit of the oral essays Selfe shares. What does each student care enough about that they would pursue knowledge on the subject, figure out how the subject connects with who they are (for example, wherever it was that Keller tapped into his knowledge of The Office), and bring together all that thinking into a multimedia/multimodal text.
With my excitement comes the dampening thought of all the problems I already face when it comes to the writing and thinking my students and I do that doesn’t happen in a Word document. Okay, my students use Windows Movie Maker for a project. Where should we put this video? On You Tube? I can’t require students to make their work public. It could be dangerous, an invasion of their privacy. And how will I collect all this work as artifacts of our writing and thinking and my teaching? The hard drive on my computer is already too full. I’ve already transferred kilos and kilos of bits onto an external hard drive, but now I can’t access that material unless I drag it along with me. I am vaguely aware of the notion of cloud computing, which means to me that I can have storage “out there,” accessible to me from anywhere, but at the moment I don’t know how to make that technology work for my students and me.
I could go on about these problems; surely fill pages and pages with what I know how to do but can’t bring to my students because of one obstacle or the other. I think I can sum up a lot of my troubles in this way: okay, I can do that (insert sound, video, oral essay, etc) but where am I going to put it? How are my students and my students only going to access it?
Golden Lines from Selfe’s Article and Thoughts if I’ve got them:
“Writing as Not-Speech” (Selfe 627). At the moment, all my courses are first year writing courses. This course is required of just about all the students. I already do everything I can think to do to say that writing isn’t just writing; writing is thinking. I give examples such as, “Okay, there’s someone you’re romantically interested in. You’ve spoken to them. They are looking at you. Your opening has got you at least that far. Now what?” My examples aren’t contained to what could sound like a pick up line. I tell my students about my phone calls to the state of New York about my denied tax refund. I had to think about structure, purpose, and audience. I’m surprised how much time Selfe has to spend showing that there is more to a composition class than sentences written onto a piece of paper or typed into a Word document.
“Digital networks, for example, have provided routes for the increasing numbers of communications that now cross geopolitcal, cultural, and linguistic borders, and because of this situation, the texts exchanged within such networks often assume hybrid forms that take advantage of multiple semiotic channels” (Selfe 636-37). I do my blog post. I see on my map that people from several continents read my post. How did my blog collect that information? Is this an invasion of privacy? I copy and paste an image from Office Space I find online into my post. Have I committed copyright infringement? If I write only text, don’t I lose a lot of potential readers? Aren’t most online readers drawn to links, pictures, and video? Isn’t it amazing, that I write a reflection on the documentary Food, INC and the next day I get a comment from a farmer who defends the way soybean seeds are protected by seed companies? It’s so much to manage. It’s so invigorating and overwhelming.
“Aural Composing Sample 4: Daniel Keller’s ‘Lord of the Machines: Reading the Human Computer Relationship'” (Selfe 640). I show my students a clip of a documentary on the big screen in front of the class. I ask them to consider audience, purpose, structure, and payoff. By “payoff,” I want them to ask, “What is the reward supposed to be for watching this film?” What rewards are there supposed to be for reading what I write? What rewards should their be for me when I write? For some reason, my computer overheats and shuts down after about ten minutes. I want to use my computer because all my browser favorites are on there. I know about “Delicious” (probably spelled wrong), a social bookmarking tool that would enable me to access my online “favorites” from any computer and even share them with others. Delicious is a Yahoo thing. I have an old Yahoo account but I can’t remember the password. Should I get another email address so that I can use the Yahoo related social bookmarking tool? Just how much time am I willing to spend managing all my accounts and passwords? I think Mozilla, my preferred browser, might remember my passwords for me. Now how does that work?
“I do want to argue that teachers of composition need to pay attention to, and come to value, the multiple ways in which students compose and communicate meaning, the exciting hybrid, multimodal texts they create–in both nondigital and digital environments–to meet their own needs in a changing world” (Selfe 642). Students needs? I keep forgetting to put in there that I often have to push (such an ugly word) students to consider what they want to know and what they ought to think about. This was done for me countless times! There was/is so much that I haven’t thought of. My teachers (both in person and in the form of texts) showed me that there was more out there worth knowing about than I had imagined. The main reason I blog and try to learn about multimodal texts isn’t so that I can be the best teacher. I do this because I think of myself as a writer, and as a writer I imagine us heading deeper into a world where readers sit with laptops glancing at texts, or else fidgeting with some sort of controller, maybe a wireless keyboard, looking at their television screen and alternately watching videos and clicking on texts they want to read. I’d like to have a voice in that world, even if it’s a voice that convinces them to take a break, go find a quiet place, and crack open a novel written on paper or lie under a tree and load up a digital novel on their Kindle. (or whatever all those are called today) When is my WordPress editor going to stop telling me that “multimodal” is misspelled?
Whether I’m reading the latest news in the New York Times about the BP oil spill or watching a documentary such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, it doesn’t take me long to feel about as angry as I can get at the big oil companies. It’s another sledgehammer blow to Louisiana and her neighbors, where the environment is getting shellacked as if it’s a chocolate covered raison and families’ livelihoods are drowning in the murky brown sludge. In the NY Times, Jill Abramson quotes a fisherman who says, “I’d rather have another hurricane than this.”
Just as I start to get good and worked up imagining all the ways these companies can be prosecuted, I think of something about my own life that reveals my hypocrisy: three days a week when courses are in session at St. John’s University where I teach, I drive 124 miles round trip back and forth to work. Don’t I do about as much as one individual human being can do to use oil? Just before the days that gas went from around $2 a gallon up to over $5, I stopped renting, and bought a house up Interstate 95 from Queens. Up in Connecticut was the only place—and this was with extra help from a relative—where my family could afford to purchase a home.
People are asking me why I don’t take the train. I did once: the Metro North to Grand Central, a short walk to the “F” train in Manhattan, out to Central Queens, and another half mile walk up the hill to campus. Door to door it took me three hours one way to get to my office. I don’t see me extending my two and a half hours a day on the road in my car to six hours on trains. I’ve put my house up for sale, in part, so that I might move closer to where I work. This would save me money and by buying less gas, I suppose I would lesson one little pin prickle of the thirst this country has for oil. But considering that plan now, it feels like a pretty measly step on my part that doesn’t cause me to feel like any less of a hypocrite.
What follows are my notes for the reading of a text I choose because I’m thinking about technology, multimodal texts, and how those terms relate to the act of writing. The text did its work of giving me more to consider, but it also got me to thinking about the social and political change that occurs when people read and write together, whether this happens passing sheets of paper back and forth, posting on Facebook, or creating websites. If you have any doubt about a blog’s ability to spread any sort of message, take a glance at the map that goes with this blog and check out the location of some of its readers. Whoa.
