Thursday, August 19, 2010
New Year Fall 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
More on that word!
We could use "shag" but that word has popular culture connections that trivialize the mutual act of bonding (let's ignore for now how lasting that bonding might be) that is the physical act of "making love" that we are talking about here. Although, as a resident of the Carolina coast, the dancing connotation isn't a bad one to me.
But let me propose another word, one with an older Anglo-Saxon origin. I'll check OED for both of them, but I know that, at least in written texts, this word is older. The word I suggest is "swive"--a word that implies a swaying, perhaps a wiving, a mutual movement of two bodies together. I even think of the word "swan"--which conjures up images of a famous rape--Zeus of Leda--but also makes us think of grace and ease of movement. To swive is to work together, not to do something or to have something done to you--an intransitive verb that does not take an object but requires two subjects. So, please, don't fuck with me. Let's swive.
Monday, June 21, 2010
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bike,
some like unicycles, while others just hike.
The flying fish glide,
without needing to ride.
But sometimes a bike’s what I like.
I wrote this to go with an image I pasted on Face Book, but couldn't resist adding it here, because I am rather proud of it!
Friday, June 11, 2010
Blogging vs. Face Book
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Dr. Woo Returns
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
World Lit Beginning Again 2010
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Another "Waste Land" Post
I love that word lacerating. It might make an interesting contrast with the basic premise of Mary Karr’s “How to Read The Waste Land So It Alters Your Soul”—although maybe getting lacerated is an altering experience, too? Is there something sado-masochistic about using this text with sophomores?
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Rainey also refers to a book by David Chinitz, T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, to support the statement about “Eliot’s life-long appreciation of popular song and his responsiveness to the seedy side of urban life that he owed to . . . [his background in a neighborhood that was becoming racially mixed]. . .” (3). I’m gratified to know this book exists, and am even happier to see that our college library has a copy. I’m looking for a way to segue from Eliot and the modernists, and our experiment in reader response, to African American and postcolonial theory, and I suspect that Chinitz can offer a key. (Interesting, though, that one of the glowing reviews on the back cover of Rainey’s book is by Chinitz!) I have always suspected that, as Rainey points out a few paragraphs later, “Eliot’s interest in ‘American slang’ and ‘the comic strip,’ his openness to vernacular culture, may go a long way toward explaining why . . . [his] poems . . . possess a colloquial vigor that sets them apart” (4). As Rainey asserts in another place in his introduction that I can’t find right now, Eliot has a reputation as an elitist, but he can be read as just the opposite.
A couple of Eliot’s statements in letters published in Rainey also strike me as interesting in terms of reader response theory. In a text Rainey labels “London Letter, September 1921” Eliot has just attended a Stravinsky concert and is making an intertextual connection (though he wouldn’t have used those words) between Sacre du Printemps and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a text Eliot himself claimed was an important influence on his writing of The Waste Land. In Eliot’s words, “In art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis. Even The Golden Bough can be read in two ways: as a collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation” (Rainey 189). This knocked me out, because, even more than some of the quotations we often hear from “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” this statement captures for me what The Waste Land does.
In a more well-known essay--"The Metaphysical Poets"--Eliot argues, "Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning" (199). Obviously, the elitism is there in the phrase "refined sensibility": some individuals are more capable of becoming the "catalysts" (to use Eliot's word in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" for the multitude of traditions that are out there. Nevertheless, Eliot seems to value ALL of the variety and complexity of the modern world. Rather than being pessimistic, perhaps his poem finds hope in this variety?
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
A Better "Waste Land" Web Site
“The Waste Land” Continued
In my second blog responding as a reader with my Spring 2009 "Approaches to the Study of Literature" class, I'm still on assignment #1, which asks readers to simply work on understanding the poem in the context of this particular community of readers—seventeen people, ranging in age from late teens to sixties (if you include me)—English, creative writing, drama, elementary education majors—did I miss anyone? I'm trying to write every day for this two-week period, keeping focused—obsessed, really. I'm also learning how to use the blog—this time how to save a document as a web page and post it on my blog. I'm still unsure of how to do this, so my last posting is filled with typos that I couldn't figure out how to fix—and this one may be, as well—but at least I can now take more time with composing an analysis. I am writing along with my students because I think teaching is all about staying fresh and learning with them, a philosophy sometimes mistaken for disorganization—which, in fact, turns into disorganization at times, especially when my personal life takes over the time I've mapped out for my intellectual life. But this ever-present threat of falling off the tightrope is real for students, too. My rationale for this project—at least one of them—is that at any given time, everything we're reading, the courses we're taking or teaching, personal relationships, chance encounters, all the whirling experiences of our personal history and our cultural influences, etc. all play into our "reader response" to a given text in a vast web of intertextuality.
This particular week in February, I'm reading Intertextuality by Graham Allen (a book in Routledge's New Critical Idiom series published in London in 2000), a text that locates the roots of intertextuality in Saussure, Bakhtin, and Kristeva. Like "reader response" the concept of "intertextuality" is much more complex than most people—even academics—assume. In my Intro to Lit course, we've just discussed Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" (mostly talking about specific narrative action, narrative pace, suspense, and other elements of style—essentially doing the reader response thing—close reading directed toward the effect on the reader of syntax, word choice, etc.). I've assigned other war stories--Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation" and Haruki Murakami's "Another Way to Die"—Murakami connects to my World Lit course where we just read Yasunari Kawabata's novel Snow Country—a great read on the coldest day of the year in our little town on the southeastern coast of North Carolina. We're moving into literature of India in the World Lit course, and it was neat to run across a reference to Kawabata in a web article about Tagore. Spooky thing last week during conferences in the library—a creative writing student was talking about getting ideas for his short stories from his dreams, and as we turned to the text he was struggling to write a response to ( the Chinese classic "Monkey: Journey to the West") I had written in the margin of that page in my book a note about dreams. The same day, as I was reading Basho, a former student walked through the library coffee shop with a book on haiku under his arm. And, of course, T.S. Eliot—YES, I'M WRITING ABOUT THE WASTE LAND—was studying Sanskrit at the time he was composing parts of the poem, and Eliot includes references to the Buddha's fire sermon and the Upanishads, wonderfully intertextual with the short stories by Premchand and Tagore that we're discussing this week in World Lit.
I didn't plan this merging consciously, but it's all coming together in an interesting texture, a tapestry, in my mind. The connections I have mentioned only work for me, of course, since the other sixteen people who are doing the Waste Land project are not in that class. They're in other classes, though, and I encourage them to think about the way the various texts they are reading are weaving together in their brains. According to Allen, Roland Barthes puts it this way: "We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (13). (I might argue with the God part, choosing to separate the cosmic kairos of God from the socially constructed kronos of human culture, but I think Barthes means the human Author of a literary work here, anyway.) Of course, Barthes is the theorist who coined the phrase "Death of the Author" while Julia Kristeva first labeled intertextuality. At one point, Allen or one of the writers he quotes uses the word "tissue" to refer to an interwoven web of texts. That's an interesting word, hinting at a strength and delicacy at the same time. I think of both an organic tissue—our bodies—the brain that is our organ of thought as we think about intertextuality and weave our webs of tissues—comprise tissues within tissues—AND a fine, soft piece of paper used for blowing our noses or even more intimate purposes. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is the epitome of such a tissue of intertextuality, in ways that Eliot deliberately put there, long before the idea of intertextuality existed, but also—more importantly to me and my students at this point—in ways Eliot could never imagine, since we—as readers—are making meaning in a vastly different universe. If I read line 413 of The Waste Land correctly, Eliot implies that each of us is isolated within the prison of our own individuality. But the thinkers quoted in Allen's book Intertextuality argue just the opposite. Even inside the deepest recesses of our brains, we are never alone.
Waste Land #1
We read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in class today. What fun! This is a memorable group. Students are supposed to write about the reading experience, so I'm doing the same. (A link is at http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/ . I found it this time through Voice of the Shuttle: http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp --a great website for finding literary texts and articles about them. This isn't the same URL as the one in my original bibliography for this project, but it seems to be the same text.) We haven't read the commentary yet, and I resisted the temptation to clarify or to even correct misreading, since that's all part of making meaning, and I wanted to frustrate the process at first, to slow it down so we could see it happening—a few readers read translations from footnotes, but at some points we didn't even do that, and some readers wanted very much to read those footnotes! The Eliot virgins (a phrase filled with ironic [Freudian?] possibilities) have been asked to write without consulting anything but the poem. The rest of us are to focus as much as possible on today's reading. I started with Alex Marden on a hunch that he might be able to read the Latin—which he could. (Last year, a student I would not have expected to read either was able to read both the Latin and the Greek. He came in early as I h ad the text projected on the screen and rattled it right off. So much for stereotypes.) In good company with Shakespeare, Alex admitted to having no Greek, but, of course, most of us have no Latin either.
Looking at the first page of the poem, I love the image of the Sibyl deliquescing in the jar. Wonderful word, deliquesce. Rotting, but in a delicate way, reduced to juices. Not delicious, but the sound suggests it. Delicious, delicate deliquescence—the way of all flesh. Googling the word, I first realized that I had misspelled it, leaving out the c—Did you mean deliquesce? Google asked—and it didn't help my frame of mind that I can't recall my university ID number, one that I have typed hundreds of times, a chilling experience at my age, so I couldn't use the OED Online. But then I found a fascinating website (fascinating how many fascinating words have an s and a c back to back) at http://www.drbilllong.com/MoreWords/Deliquesce.html --actually by someone who takes pride in constantly losing senior citizen spelling beesand who has a degree from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, a school I had just mentioned this afternoon in a conversation with David Johnson, who is in the class that is reading The Waste Land. In a round-about way, I am providing free labor to Gordon Conwell, serving as a reader for Bill Haddock's doctoral dissertation. Bill Haddock is my pastor.Dr, Bill Long's website doesn't mention Eliot, but on one page, I saw something about The Great Gatsby, another text we've read in English 205. So the world gets curiouser and curiouser. BUT OF COURSE THE WORD DELIQUESCE ISN'T EVEN IN ELIOT'S POEM; IT'S IN THE FOOTNOTE, WHICH I MADE STUDENTS AVOID!
So with all of this, I haven't even passed the first page.
The readings were the best I've heard in several years of using The Waste Land as an elaborate experiment in reader response theory. I don't think we'll be able to top Matthew Khalil's Rhine maidens anytime soon, and Justin Garrity thundered well. Not that the other readings weren't just fine. It's always interesting to note where misreading happens, though—e.g. the word person accidently substituted for prison in one line and not another in "What the Thunder Said" and a few places where readers read through the white spaces between "stanzas"—not just errors where the reader doesn't know the vocabulary—that's not very interesting—but where an ironic layer of meaning comes out of some warp in the texture of the transaction between reader and text—that is interesting.
In the Reader Response approach we ask: Why does a particular misreading occur and with what implications? For example, Eliot's lines read, "I have heard the key / Turn in the door once and turn once only / We think of the key, each in his prison [the reader said person] / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison [the reader pronounced prison correctly this time]. . ." (411-14). The error makes sense, since a person would be thinking within his or her person—to equate that person with a prison is an idea that takes more thinking. Does Eliot's text imply that we are imprisoned within our bodies? Does this indicate a dualism, with body and person two separate entities? When I typed the lines at first, I left out the repetition of turn once in line 412 and had to go back and put it in. Is it ironic to say turn two times with a conjunction (and) in between, but emphasize that it happens only once? I look at the pronouns in these lines and wonder, who are the referents of the pronoun We? There's a hall of reflecting mirrors implied here, I think—I'm thinking of you thinking of me thinking of us thinking of the key.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Japanese Literature
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Chinese Literature
Chinese Literature
Friday, January 16, 2009
My favorite poem by Philip Levine
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Philip Levine
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/levine.php
World Lit--Still Reading "Monkey"
I think one of my core values feels something like that as I fumble around for it in my mind right now. We often wonder what would have happened if we'd made a different decision, some minute move to the left or right, taken the road not taken, kicked off the butterfly effect, how our lives would have been different. But I wonder. Could it be that eventually all roads would have led to the same place, the place we were supposed to be? How fatalistic--how Calvinist--does that sound! But it doesnt feel that way--feels downright Arminian! Gets to the paradox of how human free will and God's omniscience and timelessness can coexist--and explains how I can get from the fascination with an Asian concept that I don't quite get to the familiar comfort of Christianity by way of a circuitous mathematical pathway that seemed wandering and circular but was as sure as the straight line of a magic square.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
WE DID NOT FEAR THE FATHER
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwwayneup/3046905939/
World Lit: Journey to the West
The more I read "The Journey to the West" the more I enjoy it. The instructor's guide to the Norton Anthology of World Lit makes an important point: "In Chinese the phrase 'monkey of the mind' refers to the mind's ungovernability--its constant speculations, strategems, and shifts" (2). Tripitaka, on the other hand, finds strength in weakness and from the Buddhist point of view is the one who gets it right. But--Dear Monkey!--how we love his energy and his tricks!
Friday, January 9, 2009
ENGLISH 205 DISCUSSION
Our discussion of Hemingway kicks us off nicely and relates well to the next reading, which will be F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. My favorite story about Hemingway and Fitzgerald is the one Hemingway tells in A Moveable Feast (probably pure fiction in what purports to be nonfiction) where the two are in a men's room and they compare sizes. Of course, since he is telling the story, Hemingway is bigger. Goes along with the submerged sexuality (part of that iceberg he talked about) in the story.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Father From Asia
Father, you turn your hands toward me.
Large, hollow bowls, they are empty
stigmata of poverty. Light pours
through them, and I back away,
for you are dangerous, father
of poverty, father of ten children,
father of nothing, from whose life
I have learned nothing for myself.
You are the father of childhood,
father from Asia, father of sacrifice.
I renounce you, keep you in my sleep,
keep you two oceans away, ghost
who eats his own children,
Asia who loved his children,
who didn't know abandonment,
father who lived at the center of the world, whose life I dare not remember,
for memory is a wheel that crushes,
and Asia is dust, is dust.
--Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons"
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
Monkey Journey to the West
Here's a web site with an article and some visuals of Monkey.