« February 2005 | Main | April 2005 »

March 31, 2005

More Singapore

o my first night here I was jetlagged but still decided to go to a local movie theater to see the new Bruce Willis movie, Hostage (read the book...Robert Crais is a fine writer; check out his elvis Cole series).

And when I stepped up to the box office to buy a ticket, they had a computer screen flat on the counter looking up at me with a layout of the theater and asked me to select a seat. THAT'S COOL. Select your own seat to see a movie. Singaporeans love structure.

Along those lines, part of the previews was a little movie PSA (Public Service Announcement) that started off with a handsome man getting out of bed, putting on his shirt and leaving a lovely woman still lying partly under the covers. The cut to a Special Forces type military guy in green uniform, camouflage-streaked blackface, carrying a rifle and wearing electronics headgear. Then flash back to the man getting dressed, then cut to a family, then back to the military night scene, then a voiceover begins telling you how the Singapore Army protects you and gives you freedom to have a family and lay in bed in peace.

Tie that to the fact that every Singaporean male is required to have military experience before going into the private sector, and that helps explain some of the prevalent attachment to strucutre and hierarchy and non-matrixed authority in corporate groups.

Singapore is a singular city/country.

By the way, are we going to see a slew of April Fool blogs tomorrow?

*** All I want is a warm bed, a kind word, and ultimate power. Ashleigh Brilliant


--------

Posted by witnit at 10:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sitting Duck

--------

Posted by witnit at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 30, 2005

BabeWits


've added a new section to the side column: BabeWits.

At first I was going to include all the female blogs I come across, but then I realized that wasn't what first triggered the thought. BabeWits is not for the Wonkettes and Postrels and Hopes.

It's for the...well, I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but I start with Cake Eater Chronicles, Feisty Repartee, Fistful of Fortnights, and Just Breathe, AKA the Demystifying Divas.

The thing is, these women carve out distinctly intelligent women's voices, very female, in an environment dominated by males, and I just find something attractive about those voices.

Of course, if someone has a problem with the title BabeWits, please suggest a witty alternative for me to consider: WomenWits? (Arrgh) FemWits? (*choke*) HerWits? (Puhleeze!)

And please suggest who else I should read and add to BabeWits. I'm just starting this exploration. (And should I add Wonkette to this list? Somehow, she still feels like she is outside what being a BabeWit is, like Blue-Eyed Infidel.)


***The writer of this sentence, whoever he is, is a damned sexist!


--------

Posted by witnit at 4:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Oooooooooooo-Kay

--------

Posted by witnit at 11:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 29, 2005

Singapore, Rationalized!

y oh my! I don't remember which movie had this quote, but someone once said that the most powerful force in humans is not the sex drive but in the mind's power to rationalize!

First, the service on Singapore Airlines is superb. It's rare that you get flight attendants who smile in such a way that you know they enjoy their job and serving you.

So...I landed earlier than I thought, 11:45 am Tuesday because a Singapore Airlines attendant noted that my change of flight in Hong Kong was unnecessary. I could stay on the same flight and get there earlier. So that was, let's see, 4 hours Minneapolis ot SFO, 14 hours SFO to Hong Kong, and 3+ hours Hing Kong to Singapore.

And I slept about 6 hours. I did watch Closer (Uhgh! What an awful existential mess of a movie that has the kind of dialogue that screams "A WRITER is writing this." Then The Incredibles. Again. Worth it. In between I read a George Pelecanos novel (blood, drugs and guts in D.C. with Strange/Quinn).

So I arrive at the hotel around 12:45 and checkin and shower. I only have the rest of the day to see Singapore. The next three days are 12- to 14-hour working days. I go to a tour desk saying I want to get on the cable cars and visit Sentosa. So they say one starts at 3:30 pm. Good. So I can eat.

I also heard about something called the Night Safari where you tour a zoo at night and see night animals, I guess. So I ask if there is a way to do that too, since it's on Sentosa (I thought, but I was wrong.) So they say Yeah you can do both and get back around 10:00 pm. So I pay for both.

Then I notice that I can have a suit and shirts tailored while I'm here, so I set that up. They want me sized immediately, cause now I find out that I have to LEAVE AT 2:00 PM, just 30 minutes to eat and get tailored.

They say no problem it's practically next door (no). I follow a guy and realize I won't have any time to sit down to lunch, but he points to a Subway sandwich shop. Great. I'm in Singapore, with world-renowned great food and I have JUST ENOUGH TIME TO EAT AT AN AMERICAN-STYLE SUBWAY!

So I pick out fabric, get measured for a 3-button suit with two trousers and three shirts, give them my credit card for more than I thought, but still a good deal, I think.

By the way, unlike China and Taiwan, the former British colony Singapore is completely English-friendly. All the signs are in English. In fact, even though a majority of the population is Chinese, there is virtually no Chinese characters on the publis signs. Everyone is raised speaking English.

Okay, so I grab a quick Subway chicken sub sandwich (ugh) and rush to be on time for the bus. But, hey! I'm gonna see Singapore!

So one bus takes us to other buses where we wait. Good thing I brought my Pelecanos novel. Singapore is only about 30 square miles so I know we won't be driving for long.

Finally we get under way with about 30 of us tourists and a nice talky local. He tells us we have to drive up Mount Faber to get to the cable cars. Sound ominous. Turns out "Mount Faber" is 105 meters high. Whoopee!

The cable cars are an aweseome 95 meters above sea level. My fear of heights is not even triggered. We get to see the city, the port, the South China Sea, and some foggy islands in the distance. The cable cars hold up to 6 people and look safe enough. We land and get ushered into...

...The Sentosa Butterfly Park. Yay. Butterflies. But first we have to go through the museum part, with hundreds of dead, mounted beautiful butterflies, the kinda stuff I've seen before and took no pleasure in. I mean, DEAD butterflies? Ain't that some kind of oxymoron? I want to see an enclosed kinda greehouse with LIVE butterflies.

So I race through the DEAD exhibits and into the LIVE greenhouse...where there is about 1 butterfly per 8 cubic meters, and none of them are extra-large, like I would expect being so near the equator. (Oh yeah, apparently nobody felt that Indonesian earthquake, and no tsunami).

Anyway, I'm starting to get a bit of a hankering for those BIG and BLUE and SHINY BRIGHT DEAD butterflies...why do we only see those exotic ones DEAD behind glass? So I quickly run through The Butterfly Park (yeah, I guess the butterflies parked themselves outasight) and run into ANOTHER museum, but this time there behind the glass are...

...BEETLES! And these are LIVE and BIG and EXOTIC with PINCERS, like the Rhino Beetle and some kinda African beetle. And some even have a third protruding tusk-like thing bigger than the pincers arcing straight out over the pincers and I'm beginning to freak because these things are like 5 or 6 inches long, some with extra-wide bodies and...


So I run out and am gratified to see museum display cases of DEAD humungous beetles, and I thinkg that's a VERY good idea. No oxymoron there.

So I'm thinking that this is all very touristy and such but ultimately boring. Is the Night Safari going to be more of the same? I'm beginning to have doubts about the Night Safari.

Isn't that just like the mind? Here I am on 6 hours sleep heading for a mother of a jetlag experience within hours and relating my current tour with a tour I know nothing about and trying to rationalize doing both and thinking one will tell me how good the other is, and I have little idea how exactly STUPID my mind is right now, rationalizing as it goes along.

Anyway, with the cable cars and butterfly park a bust, out next stop is...

Underwater World Singapore! That's right. Just like at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco or the Monterey Aquarium or any of several dozen places around the U.S. and hudnreds around the world...And who would have guessed how UTTERLY COOL IT WAS GOING TO BE?

I mean I was writing it off as a disappointment, but when we get inside it, we see beautiful tropical fish in big tanks and HUGE nautilus (I thought they were foot-long snails) and then there is this tank with a stingray and a HUGE Alligator Gar, a fish about 3-4 feet long with a big butt and a front-end like an alligator.

And then I turn a corner to see these HUGE seahorses that look like plants called Sea Dragons or something, some kinda chameleon ability with arms like green plant leaves,

...and next to that is a Morey Eel tank with these HUGE things sticking out of of large tubes.

Not a fish
Not a whale
Not a 15-foot snail
It's...A MOREY!

(Dean Martin is rollin')

And then we descend into a basement hall where they have Pirahna and a video showing them ripping apart a pelican (with cameras both mysteriously above and below the water line) leaving a feathery, bony carcass.

And then we get to ride a little people conveyer belt through the standard underwater plexiglass TUBE the "Sphincter Spotlight" I call it and sure enough we get to see the sphincter of HUGE fish and sharks and stingrays (which have a bunch of parallel ones) and i mean some of these big ugly fish average 4 to 5 feet in length and some of the sharks are actually 7 feet.

With huge sphincters!

And I leave that place rather jazzed, still rationazing that I will get out to the Night Safari. Then we get on the bus and jetlag hits and I'm...

..not doing it.

But I get a second wind, enough to write this mess without correcting the typos...

Let me know if it was worth it.

*** I could do great things, if I weren’t so busy doing little things. Ashleigh Brilliant


--------

Posted by witnit at 11:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 27, 2005

Next Stop, Singapore


fter several days visiting friends in Minneapolis (without a broadband connection or time to check the news), I have returned to San Francisco International Airport and find myself sitting in the Business Class lounge waiting for a midnight Sunday/Monday flight to Singapore for a few days of work. (Change of planes in Hong Kong.)

My plan is to watch a couple of movies before taking my new friend, Ambien, for an all-nighter. I arrive at 3:40 pm Tuesday. (Monday evening, U.S. time).

I will have a few hours to sightsee before sleeping again and getting into three days of morning-to-night work. I will try to post in the evenings.

Meanwhile, read the archives.

*** Why did no one tell me about this place, and how can we prevent others from discovering it? Ashleigh Brilliant


--------

Posted by witnit at 11:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 23, 2005

Harold C Goddard on Poetry

ne of the great reads on Shakespeare is Harold C. Goddard's The Meaning of Shakespeare. My God, what a teacher this man must have been! (Head of the English Dept. at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in the 1930s and 40s.)

Here are a few passages on poetry from Chapter 1:

Poetry is not something that exists in printed words on the page. It is not even something that exists in nature, in sunshine or in moonlight. Nor on the other hand is it something that exists just in the human heart or mind. It is rather the spark that leaps across when something within is brought close to something without, or something without to something within. The poetry is the spark. Or, if you will, it is what the spark gives birth to, something as different from either its inner or its outer constituent as water is from the oxygen or the hydrogen that electricity combines...

Imagination is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two--as if the birds, unable to understand the speech of man, and man, unable to understand the songs of birds, yet longing to communicate, were to agree on a tongue made up of sounds they both could comprehend--the voice of running water perhaps or the wind in the trees. Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets...

Poetry, the elemental speech, is the like the elements. Its primary function is not to convey thought, but to reflect life. It shows man his soul, as a looking glass does his face. There hangs the mirror on the wall, a definite object, the same for all. Yet whoever looks into it sees not the mirror but himself. We all live in the same world, but what different worlds we see in it and make out of it: Caesar's, Jesus', Machiavelli's, Mozart's--yours and mine...

To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and the technician, we are living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder and love and grow wise about life, but to control it...

Art is given us to redeem us. All we are in the habit of asking or expecting of it today is that it should please or teach--whereas it ought to captivate us, carry us out of ourselves, make us over into something more nearly in its own image...

"King Lear is a miracle," wrote a young woman who had just come under its incomparable spell. "There is nothing in the whole world that is not in this play. It says everything, and if this is the last and final judgment on the world we live in, then it is a miraculous world. This is a miracle play."

*** Colour, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science. Henry David Thoreau

--------

Posted by witnit at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

The REAL Power of Blogs

've made some stupid mistakes writing for this blog and have had to own up to them. But that's part of the whole point, isn't it?

As a graduate student, I had a professor who conducted his seminars in literature in a manner radically different from many of his colleagues.

He would give us a question and watch seven or eight of us to discuss and debate it for 90 minutes or so. At first, people would try to draw him in to give the "right" answer, and of course he refused. Furthermore, he wanted us to deal with the matter directly, without benefit of reading critical interpretations. (Every one of his colleagues had us read critical interpretations. Godawful stuff mostly.)

For example, in his Austen and Bronte seminar--where I finally learned how to read by having to deal with the precise and complex nature of Jane Austen's prose rather than what people had written about it--we gradually got used to presenting arguments, changing our minds, presenting revised arguments, changing our minds again, live, in the moment, over this or that passage in Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre.

One day, something remarkable happened. We were discussing whether Darcy's character changed in Pride and Prejudice, a topic that happened to be our professor's dissertation topic, and someone finally presented an argument that contradicted the professor's position...and changed the professor's mind!

He freely admitted that now he realized that he was wrong in his dissertation. What a great, revelatory moment. What a humble man.

I then realized that that was the precise nature of the forum he had provided for us--the ability to dispassionately advance arguments, entertain comments and criticisms in such a way that it was okay to change our minds and immediately advance a new argument. Without shame, without embarassment, without humiliation. In direct response to great literature, not secondary critical material.


And this goes to the heart of the REAL power of blogs.

Credibility in bloggers, especially political bloggers, is built on a foundation of integrity and transparency. On a willingness to advance an informed opinion, entertain immediate criticism and countering opinions, then immediately change one's mind based on that new information. And then to advance a new position, and be just as passionate about that position until someone comes up with another good reason to change one's mind.

And this fact also points to why the MSM (Mainstream Media) is forced to change or die. Their foundation has been built on gatekeeping, holding close to the vest, admitting error under duress, backpeddling, evasion, withholding the whole story...

...and now they are forced to be transparent. Poor, poor MSM. We're so sorry. Let's shed a tear for the MSM.

Thank God for blogs!

*** You can't just suddenly be my friend; you have to go through a training period. Ashleigh Brilliant


--------

Posted by witnit at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 21, 2005

4. How the Mind Works

ou can jump to Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9


Every teacher in every classroom should be aware that every student has a subconscious Censor, the Reticular Activating System. And they should be aware that they themselves have one as well.

In many ways, we do not act according to the truth. We act according to the truth as we believe it to be. And there is a particular danger when experts are certain that they know the truth. The human mind innately responds to "psychological certainty" by creating very real blindspots to evidence and arguments that contradict the certainty.

Anyone aspiring to be objective in viewing evidence and sorting through arguments needs to develop a degree of self-doubt in order to minimize the automatic and natural actions of the Censor in human mind.

The Story of Cliff Young

In Australia a 600-km marathon is held between the cities of Sydney and Melbourne. Several years ago a 61-year-old man named Cliff Young showed up to run the race. The world-class runners thought he was some derelict that showed up in the wrong place because Cliff showed up wearing Osh Gosh overalls and galoshes. And he was obviously an old man.

[For a detailed story on Cliff Young, go here.]

When he told them he was there for the marathon, the professional runners asked if he had ever run in a marathon before. "No," replied Cliff. "How have you been training?" they asked. "I have cattle on my station [farm] and since I have no horses, I run around to move them along." The runners laughed.

You see, every professional marathoner knew with certainty that it took about five days to run this race, and that in order to compete, you would need to run 18 hours and sleep six hours. Cliff Young was clearly not up to their standards.

When the marathon started, the pros left Cliff behind in his galoshes. He had a leisurely shuffling style of running that targeted him as an amateur.

Cliff had no training. He did not know what the world-class runners knew. As you have probably guessed, Cliff won the race, but that is not what is astonishing. What is astonishing is that he cut one-and-a-half days off the record time.

How? Because of his lack of training, he didn't "know" that you had to sleep six hours. Cliff got up three hours early and just kept on shuffling along in his galoshes while the pro runners slept, and he finished the race in three-and-a-half days. He beat everybody. He was a sensation in Australia.

Now that world-class runners "know" that it is possible to run with much less sleep, and that they can conserve energy by adopting an easy shuffling jog, they have a new way of approaching long marathons.

We are like the pro runners. We act, not according to the "real truth" but according to some cockeyed truth given to us by some well-meaning or not-so-well-meaning "expert." For this reason, people that don't know the "accepted wisdom" are more likely to discover new aspects of life, create remarkable inventions, and break through into a new realm of consciousness.


The Censor

The conscious mind perceives, associates, evaluates, and decides. The subconscious mind stores habits and attitudes, and also stores what it believes to be the truth, irrespective of what the real truth is.

The primary job of the Censor is to Maintain Sanity. (It also creates drive and energy, and resolves conflict, both of which are connected to its need to maintain sanity.)

The subconscious stores "truth" (it is initially uncritical as to the validity of the stored truth). These "truths" are stored in the form of habits and attitudes that arise from facsimiles, the picture-patterns that we hold onto as anchor points in this world.

For example, suppose my parents told me (as they did when I was twelve) that "You can't make money doing what you love; you have to be practical." If I uncritically accept that picture, it makes its way into my subconscious and is stored as true. Now immediately the Censor goes to work building blindspots to anything suggesting that I actually can make money doing what I love. I only develop habits and attitudes that reinforce the stored picture.

Or suppose that my professors tell me that Shakspere of Stratford wrote the Shakespeare poems and plays. If I uncritically accept that picture, it makes its way into my subconscious and is stored as "true." Now immediately the Censor goes to work building blindspots to anything suggesting an alternate candidate.

Unless something happens to overcome the blindspots, I will accept the orthodox view because those anchor points have been established with which I am comfortable. AND if I go on to build a scholarly career on that picture, or to tie my finances in some way with that interpretation, then I will build further blindspots to block out any threat to my comfortable and lucrative foundation.

Of course, it's just as important that if I am persuaded that someone else may have written the poems and plays attributed to a Shakespeare that I do not attach myself to this new "truth;" otherwise, I will begin building blindspots to any evidence that contradicts my new "truth."

Why does the Censor build such blindspots? Because the Censor cannot abide insanity, meaning anything that contradicts my perceived truth. The Censor functions automatically and naturally. As long as I believe this "truth," I cannot accept anything that contradicts it. The Censor has maintained my "sanity" by requiring me to see only the stored truth. You can literally be looking at the opposite truth and NOT SEE IT. (Remember the F's?)

In other words, you can literally be looking at evidence that contradicts your interpretation of historical evidence and NOT SEE IT.

This phenomenon is evident when you lose your keys. Have you ever lost your keys, and after having looked everywhere you announce, "My keys are nowhere to be found."

Immediately, your Censor builds a blindspot against your actually seeing the keys. Why? Because you would appear foolish (insane) after having made your statement. So then someone else finds them (in an obvious place where you had looked several times), and you have to say something like, "OK, who moved them? They were not here when I looked."

This phenomenon is also evident when you judge someone. I remember being on a job and being told that a certain fellow employee was stealing from the company, but had yet to be caught at it. I began to see that employee's shiftiness. Her actions were obviously suspicious. Though I had once thought her kind and ethical, now she acted in a way that reinforced her untrustworthiness. Once the real culprit was caught, she regained her kindness and innocence.

Since stored "truths" build blindspots to reality, it seems to me that the scholars have quite a challenge in leading students into higher studies. For any statement or "truth" the scholar presents, the student may accept it in such a way that blindspots are formed against other, better "truths" or interpretations.

Thus it seems incumbent upon the scholar and scientist and teacher to convey a strong sense of only standing behind interpretations as a "best case" rather than "the one and only truth."


Let's review the job of the Censor:

1) Maintain Sanity - The Censor makes sure that you act like your self-image. It defines this acting as "sanity." When you don't act like "yourself" you develop anxiety until you either start acting like yourself again, or you change yourself (your self-image). That is, if you have a strong image of yourself as a Stratfordian, you have a harder time, even temporarily, trying on the "shoes" or point of view of an Oxfordian [one who believes that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, wrote the plays]. The stronger the image, the more you will subconsciously work to thwart a change to that image.

If you actually discover a good Oxfordian argument, you will suffer anxiety because of the conflict with your Stratfordian self-image. A good argument is then more likely to suffer a stronger attack. (The same holds true, of course, among staunch Oxfordians who come upon a good Stratfordian argument.)

Another example: If you "know" that you are not good in math, then if you do well on a math exam, you will suffer anxiety because doing well is "not like you." Your Censor then will correct for the error of success and you will do poorly on the next exam.

Why do poor people who win the Jackpot usually end up poor again soon after? Why do people who have little money and inherit a significant amount usually spend it all and end up where they started? Because they picture themselves as poor, so they must correct for the mistake of wealth.


Why do people who've been in prison for decades have such trouble adjusting to the outside world once they are released? Why will they commit a crime in order to be sent back to prison? Because freedom conflicts with their deeply ingrained picture of being an inmate. Freedom = anxiety.

To a staunch Stratfordian, a good Oxfordian argument = anxiety, insanity.

To a staunch Christian, a good evolution argument = anxiety, insanity.

To a staunch Leftist, a good deed by President Bush = anxiety, insanity. He must be lying.

That's why imagination is crucial to experience. We only attract ourselves to a state of consciousness once we can see ourselves in it.

In other words, a scholar and scientist and teacher needs to develop a kind of objectivity where deeply held beliefs are challenged and dislodged to form a more flexible scholarly consciousness.

2) Resolve Conflict - The Censor also helps us solve problems. In fact, once we understand the art of giving our Censor problems to solve (resolve), we can grow in remarkable ways.

The Censor won't allow us to hold two contradictory pictures of ourselves or reality. To experience two contradictory beliefs, pictures, or feelings is called "Cognitive Dissonance."

The Censor always works to resolve Cognitive Dissonance. Whenever we picture something as incomplete, we label it a "problem." The Censor works to make things complete, to resolve cognitive dissonance, to solve problems.

Thus, when a staunch Stratfordian faces a good Oxfordian argument, the Censor will either 1) dismiss the good argument in order to preserve the comfort of a staunch, entrenched position, or 2) let go of the staunchness and begin to allow a larger picture of reality to emerge.

3) Create Drive and Energy - Suppose you set a goal to remodel your kitchen. Suddenly you have a "problem." The picture or vision you have does not match the reality. You experience cognitive dissonance and your Censor moves into action to resolve the problem, to create wholeness. You must do one of two things: either give up your vision or remodel the kitchen.

This form of anxiety is actually creative drive and energy. In other words, to be creative is to deliberately throw your life out of order (setting a goal or creating a vision) so that the Censor gives you creative drive and energy to get your life back in order (accomplish the goal or vision).

Many people avoid setting visions and goals, or accepting new interpretations, because they confuse creative drive with stress. To grow intellectually means to continually revise yourself and your models of reality. This is why a true scholar does not require students to "lock on" to particular literary interpretations, or require students to work primarily with critical interpretations of literature rather than the literature itself.

Real scholars will help students thoughtfully explore alternative models, without prejudicing them or threatening them with academic censure.

More to come in 5. How the Mind Works.


*** I x V = R (Imagination times Vividness equals Reality) Lou Tice


--------

Posted by witnit at 9:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Starve the Dog

lue-Eyed Infidel wants to starve her dog to death, in a post that will make you laugh uncomfortably.

Now that I know that in America, many many people (mostly liberals) are totally fine with starving living things to death - specifically, living things with "rights", which would imply some sort of sentience or consciousness or soul but apparently that includes vegetables - I've been thinking of all sorts of practical applications of that belief.

*** Why aren’t you more grateful when I prove how wrong you’ve been? Ashleigh Brilliant
--------

Posted by witnit at 9:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 20, 2005

Constitutional Amendment Meme

uppose in your lifetime you could get passed one Constitutional Amendment that would most affect the U.S.A. in the way you most wanted to effect a change. What would that be?

The history of Federal involvement in American education is the history of the steady decline of American education, especially literacy in its true sense. As Richard Mitchell points out, "In its highest sense, literacy is a profoundly destructive talent. It is destructive certainly of all received opinion; it is destructive of all orthodoxy, all traditionalism, and, therefore, from a government's point of view, it is very undesirable."

And as Walter Karp showed us in Textbook America,

Something had to be done quickly or democracy might one day break out. Educational leaders quickly worked out a solution. Let the secondary schools teach the children of workers what was fit only for workers. As Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, sternly advised the Federation of High School Teachers: 'We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.' Since there was no way to stop 'the masses' from entering high school, the only way to meet the crisis, in short, was to prevent them from learning anything liberating when they got there.

The EduWits websites listed to the right of this post speak volumes as to the pernicious influence of government in schooling. And even though for years I thought that there was a way to change that influence through vouchers and charter schools and the like, the government still has its sentimental tendrils on education.

Therefore, I would want to see a Constitutional Amendement along these lines:

AMENDMENT XXVIII

Section 1. The Federal Government and its agencies are hereby prohibited from any involvement, legal, judicial, and financial, in formal public education or formal private education of the citizens and residents of the United States, except as noted in Section 3.

Section 2. The Federal Goverment and its agencies are hereby prohibited from financially supporting any programs, institutions, think tanks, colleges, universities, foundations, or any other legal entity involved in formal public education or formal private education of the citizens and residents of the United States, except as noted in Section 3.

Section 3. The sole exception to this amendment is that the Federal Government may require education for non-citizens who enter the process of becoming U.S. Citizens.

*********

So what's your one Constitutional Amendment?

*** What the public schools practice with remorseless proficiency, however, is the prevention of citizenship and the stifling of self-government. When 58 percent of the thirteen-year-olds tested by the National Assessment for Educational Progress think it is against the law to start a third party in America, we are dealing not with a sad educational failure but with a remarkably subtle success. Walter Karp in Why Johnny Can't Think

--------

Posted by witnit at 2:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 19, 2005

25-Word Challenge

uch thanks to Feisty Repartee for the honor of hosting this week's 25-Word Challenge.

The rules are simple:

1) Use the Comments to continue the story using exactly 25 words, no more, no less.
2) No back-to-back comments, but commentators can come back as often as they like.

I will close out the story sometime Sunday evening.

Ready? Here we go:

"You slaughtered my family," Moira shouted, standing tall on the rolling deck of the black pirate ship. She brandished her sword. The pockmarked Captain laughed.

--------

Posted by witnit at 7:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 18, 2005

Getting Ready for the 25-Word Challenge

ho would have guessed the incredible weight of responsibility I would incur by accepting Feisty Christina's offer to host the 25-Word Challenge?

I will be spending my day (between meetings with managers from Taiwan, Singapore, and Korea) crafting the 25 words that will launch tomorrow's challenge.

Sharpen you wits and be prepared for swashbuckling action, feisty repartee, bodies galore, and perhaps a smidgeon of romance!

*** It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move into an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks. Gustave Flaubert


*** Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. Mark Twain

By the way, here's the schedule so far for upcoming hosts:

March 26 - Down For Repairs
April 2 - Moogie's World
April 9 - Phin's Blog
April 16 - Lady Mac's Musings
April 23 - Politickal

April 30 - The Boiling Point
May 6 - Lollygaggin
May 14 - Meanderings
May 21 - Thunder and Roses
May 28 - Bobo Blogger

June 4 - Bad Bad Juju


--------

Posted by witnit at 6:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2005

The U.S. Army Wants Richard Mitchell

few days ago, I received a letter from the U.S. Army, specifically the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas, requesting permission to use material from Richard Mitchell's Less Than Words Can Say. They want to make 2200 reprint copies and 150 CD ROM copies of Chapter 3, "A Bunch of Marks."

I suppose since Richard Mitchell gave me express permission to reproduce all of his writings on the website I created, and stated his desire that all of the material be made freely available to everyone without charge, even reproduced or plagiarized if they so desired, I did so.

I wrote back granting them permission to reprint any and all of Richard Mitchell's texts at The Underground Grammarian website.

By the way, I have created Word documents and PDFs of all the texts that anyone can download here. This is mainly for teachers who want to distribute Richard Mitchell's writings to students. (Ignore the request for donations.)

If you would like to read what the U.S. Army is having their college students read, I have supplied the text below. Enjoy!

--------

Posted by witnit at 7:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Bunch of Marks

till, skill in language does provide a better hope of survival; it even wins wars, for struggle on the field of battle is a dramatic version of strife in the minds of men. Long before the first trigger was pulled, Hitler fired off a shattering salvo of words. He pounded his fist and shouted: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein F?" Don't make the mistake of thinking that his listeners muttered back an uncertain "Ach so, gewiss, gewiss." They shouted back, "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein F?"

The cannonade roared across the Channel and shook the cliffs of England. Fortunately for us all, England, although unarmed, was not unready. The answering barrage rings in our ears still: "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat." Battle was joined. Hitler's words sent the Wehrmacht crashing to the outskirts of Dunkirk but Churchill's words sent schoolboys and accountants and retired fishmongers down to the sea in their little boats and over the water to the beaches of Dunkirk.

While that may be an incomplete account of the war, it is not an inaccurate one. It was a war of words and speaking just as much as a war of iron and blood. If the fighting was sometimes noble and brave, it was because certain words were in the minds of men. If the fighting was sometimes stupid and vicious, it was because certain other words were in the minds of men. Whatever else Churchill may have been doing in those days, he was always providing the English with words. With words he formed their thoughts and emotions. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills," said Churchill. Millions answered, apparently, "By God, so we shall."

Imagine, however, that Churchill had been an ordinary bureaucrat and had chosen to say instead:

Consolidated defensive positions and essential preplanned withdrawal facilities are to be provided in order to facilitate maximum potentialization for the repulsion and/or delay of incursive combatants in each of several preidentified categories of location deemed suitable to the emplacement and/or debarkation of hostile military contingents.

That would, at least, have spared us the pain of wondering what to do about the growing multitudes who can't seem to read and write English. By now we'd be wondering what to do about the growing multitudes who can't seem to read and write German.

Speech is tremendously powerful. It moves our minds and makes the path of history. It is, furthermore, perhaps the most complicated skill we have, and the uttering of words and sentences is only its beginning. When we speak, we do many other things simultaneously. We turn our heads and lift our eyebrows and wiggle our fingers and get up and walk about. We find exactly the right place from which to say this thing, and we go over to lean on the mantelpiece to say some other thing. We choose the appropriate pitch and volume for every sound. We sprinkle our speech with nonverbal sound effects, snorts and mm's, sighs and tsk's, and especially pauses, which are as important to speech as the rests to music. We change the shapes of our mouths and throats and alter the very tone quality of our voices. All such things, and innumerably more, we do quite automatically, and with such devices we suggest immeasurably more than the words can say by themselves.

Writing, on the other hand, is just a bunch of marks. It is not speech written down, and it lacks almost all the expressive devices of speech. It simply isn't "natural" in the way that speech is natural. For the natural expressive devices of speech, writing provides only a few pathetically inadequate gimmicks. We have some marks of punctuation and some graphic tricks, like capital letters and underlining. We can find an occasional word or expression that may remind a reader of the sound of speech, you know, and drop it in here and there. An occasional genius learns to write dialogue that we can almost hear and even to devise long passages that sound exactly right, but in general writing is even further from speech than notation is from music.

Like music, speech has a tune, and we have only the meagerest ways of indicating on the page the tune to which our words are to be sung. Commas, for instance, are pretty good as indicators of tune, and so are periods. They usually call for bits of melody that every native speaker of English sings in pretty much the same way. Question marks, however, indicate only a certain "family" of tunes, for any question we can make in English can be sung in many different ways to convey many different meanings. All these gimmicks, nevertheless, even the quotation marks that suggested a certain way to sing "family" in the last sentence, can't come close to a realistic approximation of the tune of English. And even if they could, they still wouldn't tell you which word was to be said slowly and deep in the throat and what sentence was to be delivered while leaning on the mantelpiece. As a way of recording speech, writing is a dismal failure.

It doesn't matter, though, because the recording of speech is not the proper business of writing. The proper business of writing is to stay put on the page so that we can look at it later. Writing, whether it be a grocery list or The Brothers Karamazov, freezes the work of the mind into a permanent and public form. It is the mind and memory of mankind in such a form that we can pass it around to one another and even hand it on to our unimaginably remote descendants.

Language is, essentially, speech. Writing is a special case of language. Discursive prose is a special case of writing. Written, discursive prose may be almost three thousand years old, but it is still our most recently invented use of language. It is no coincidence that the Greeks who first devised discursive prose also constructed formal logic and were the first to provide for their unimaginably remote descendants a visible record of the works of their minds. Thinking is coherent discourse, and the logic and the prose require one another.

The mind is a rudderless wanderer blown here or there by any puff of breeze. If I mention watermelons, you must think of watermelons; if giraffes, giraffes. The very rare genius can keep his mind on course for a while, perhaps as long as a whole minute, but most of us are always at the mercy of every random suggestion of environment. We imagine that we sit down and think, but, in fact, we mostly gather wool, remembering this and that and fantasizing about the other. In our heads we recite some slogans and rehash the past, often repeatedly. Even in this foolish maundering, we are easily distracted by random thoughts, mostly about money or politics but often about sports or sex. Left to its own devices, the mind plays like a child in well-stocked sandbox, toying idly with trinkets and baubles and often doing the same thing over and over again until some slightly more interesting game presents itself.

If we want to pursue extended logical thought, thought that can discover relationships and consequences and devise its own alternatives, we need a discipline imposed from outside of the mind itself. Writing is that discipline. It seems drastic, but we have to suspect that coherent, continuous thought is impossible for those who cannot construct coherent, continuous prose.

"Writing," Bacon said, "Maketh the exact man," as we all know, but we ordinarily stop thinking about that too soon. The "exact" part is only half of what writing makes; the other half is the "man." Writing does indeed make us exact because it leaves a trail of thought that we can retrace and so discover where we have been stupid. At the same time, though, it makes us "men," grown-ups who can choose what toys we want to play with and who can outwit the random suggestions of environment. In his writing, then, we can judge of at least two things in a man--his ability to think and his intention to do so, his maturity. An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages.

To understand the importance of writing for people who want to have a civilization, it is useful to compare discursive prose with poetry. Poetry is much older than prose, but since we have been taught to think it a form of "art," we regularly assume that prose comes first and that poetry, a much trickier business, is "refined" out of it with pain and skill. Not so. Many of the qualities that make poetry what it is are far more "natural" to any speaker of a language than the devices of prose. Like speech, poetry is metaphorical and figurative, elliptical, often more expressive than informative, synthetic rather than analytic, and concrete rather than abstract. Speech may not often be good poetry, whatever that may be, but sometimes it is. Little children devise poetic expressions quite naturally, and there seems to be no culture, however "primitive" we may think it, without its traditional poetry. Even the wretched Jiukiukwe have poetry.

The Jiukiukwe, like all other human beings, have some practical uses for poetry. In little verses, they can remember without effort the signs of a coming storm and the looks of the worms that cause diarrhea, just as we remember how many days there are in April. In poetry, or in language that is like poetry, they perform the social rituals that hold them together. That's exactly what we do when we recite the traditional formulae of recognition: Good to see you; What's new?; Lovely weather we're having. All such forms are permissible variations within the limits of established rituals that we all perform just because we're here and we're all in this together. We can remember and recite those ritual greetings just as easily as we can sing Fa-la-la-la-la and come in on the chorus--all together now!

(Digression: Why do we devote so much idle talk to the weather? Everybody knows, of course, that the weather is a "safe" subject, but that doesn't answer the question. It provides two new questions: Why is the weather a safe subject? and, Why do we devote so much idle talk to safe subjects?

The weather is right there in the world of experience. Even assistant deans pro tem can see that it's raining. When I meet the assistant dean pro tem on the campus in the rain, I am likely to assert, in one way or another, that it is in fact raining. He is likely to confirm this observation, after his fashion. We have used language where no language is needed, to indicate what is in the world of experience. To point out the rain to each other seems about as useful as mentioning the fact that we are both walking on our hind legs. That may be exactly why it's useful. We have taken the trouble to name something that needs no naming, thus acknowledging our kinship while still being careful not to evoke some other world in which our kinship might be questionable. Should I greet the assistant dean pro tem by announcing that power corrupts, he may well reply, "Absolutely!" and we will have evoked some other world, a world we'd rather not explore just now with the rain dripping down the backs of our necks. Twain probably had the truth in mind when he said that everyone talks about the weather but that nobody does anything about it. In fact, we talk about it precisely because we can't do anything about it. It permits us to establish our membership, which is polite, but it doesn't require that we look at each other's credentials too closely, which might be rude.)

Poetry is a profoundly conservative use of language. It conserves not only values and ideas but the very language itself, so that even some grammatical forms that ought to have disappeared long ago are still around and useful for special effects. Even crackpots who want to simplify and modernize English cannot bring themselves to say: Thirty days has September. It's amazing, but that actually sounds wrong, almost as wrong as: Six days shall you labor.

Prose is progressive and disruptive. It must subvert or elude the poetic qualities of speech to go about the business of logic and analysis. Discursive prose is essentially antisocial, subject to constraints and regulations that would be unsuitable, perhaps even rude, in speech. Writing is an audacious and insolent act. When we write, we call the other members of our tribe to order. We command their attention. We assert that what we have to say is valuable enough that they should give over their idle chitchat about the weather. It had better be.

When we choose to address our friends and relatives in discursive prose, it must be because what we want to say requires the special powers of discursive prose: logic, order, and coherence. The mere appearance of discursive prose promises those things. When I meet the assistant dean pro tem in the rain, I send and expect signals of fellowship. When I read his latest guidelines for the work of the Committee on Memorial Plaques, I hold in my hands a promise of logic, order, and coherence, and equally a promise that the language I read will be constrained and regulated in such a way as to engender those things. There is no Rule in Heaven that language has to be logical, orderly, and coherent any more than there is some Law of Nature that requires football players to stay within the lines. You can grab a football and run to Oshkosh anytime you please; you just won't be playing football. Your language can be illogical, disorderly, and even incomprehensible--in fact, sometimes it should be so--but you won't be writing discursive prose.

Ordinary speech, like poetry, is a kind of art; discursive prose in particular, like writing in general, is a technology. Clear, concise writing is a result of good technique, like an engine that starts and runs.

Good technique requires the knowledge and control of many conventional forms and devices. They must be conventional because writing is public and enduring, and the path of its thought must be visible to other minds in other times. Like the conventional "rules" of any technology, the rules of writing have come to be what they are because they work. You do well to keep the subject of your sentence clearly in view just as you do well to keep your powder dry and your eye on the ball. These things work.

Furthermore, although such things are matters of technique, they are derived not from some concern for technique but because they go to the heart of the matter. You keep your eye on the ball because it is the ball, and the meaning of the game is known only because of what happens to the ball. You get no points for cute panties. You keep your eye on the subject because it is the subject, and not just grammatically. It is the subject of thought, and the sentence is a proposition about it. We do not think by naming things but by making propositions about them. Nor do we think by making propositions about unnamed or unnamable things. Any writer forgets that from time to time, but a learned rule of technology calls him to order. The rules of the technology of discursive prose are simply aids to thought, and to learn the conventions of writing without learning the habit of thought is impossible.

Fools and scoundrels say that the time of writing is past, that Direct Distance Dialing and the cassette recorder have done to writing what the internal combustion engine did to the art of equitation. They point out, quite correctly by the way, that the ordinary American, once released from the schools, can go through all the rest of his life without ever having to devise a complete sentence. Even the thousands of forms we have to fill out call only for filling in blanks or checking boxes. This freedom from writing, in fact, doesn't always have to wait on our escape from the schools; fewer and fewer schools require any of it at all. This is, they tell us, an age of technology, and that what we need to know is how to program computers, not how to devise grammatical sentences in orderly sequence.

As it happens, computers work by reading and devising grammatical sentences in orderly sequence. The "language" is different, but that's how they work. Their "rules" are far more stringent and unforgiving than the rules of discursive prose. When we read a sentence whose subject and verb don't agree, we don't reject it as meaningless and useless. We may shake our heads and sigh a little, but we know what the poor fellow meant, and we go on. When the computer "reads" a "sentence" with an equivalent error, it simply spits it out and refuses to work. That's how we can tell which are the machines and which the people; the people will swallow anything. And you will swallow anything if you believe that we can teach all that computer stuff to whole herds of people who haven't been able to master the elementary logic of subject-verb agreement.

The logic of writing is simply logic; it is not some system of arbitrary conventions interesting only to those who write a lot. All logical thought goes on in the form of statements and statements about statements. We can make those statements only in language, even if that language be a different symbol system like mathematics. If we cannot make those statements and statements about statements logically, clearly, and coherently, then we cannot think and make knowledge. People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.

Chapter 3 from Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell

--------

Posted by witnit at 7:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 15, 2005

Judge Strikes Down Marriage Ban

an Francisco, CA (WitNit Newswire) -- A San Francisco Superior Court judge declared California's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional Monday, saying it violates the "basic human right to marry a person of one's choice.''

Judge Richard Kramer gave legal vindication to Newsom's rationale: that the state's 28-year-old law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman is arbitrary and unfair.

"No rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners,'' Kramer said in a recent interview. "In fact, based on my reasoning, no rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to two people, regardless of gender and sexual orientation."

Asked to clarify these remarks, Judge Kramer stated, "Sure. Marriage is about love between people. It's arbitrary and unconstitutional to declare a limit to the number of people who should marry."

This is good news for Bob Menage, Joe Trois, and Jane Puckermen of San Rafael. "The three of us have been in love for a long time," said Jane. "We should not be denied our constitutional right to marry if we want to. Who can be against love?"

California expects an influx of immigrants from Utah.

Judge Kramer didn't stop there. "Who's to say what the limits of love are? I love my cat, Oscar. He's a person to me. If I want to marry my cat, or my horse, or my toaster, I have the constitutional right to do so. Love is love, and the State has no business getting between me and my kitty, my pony, or my appliance."

Meanwhile, the Federal Government is reconsidering California's bid for succession from the Union.


--------

Posted by witnit at 8:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2005

Random Morsels

his week's Penguin Dope Slap goes to China. Take that, China:


Can't they just leave well enough alone? More rattling sabers against Taiwan. (I guess this concerns me now that I make trips to both countries.)

China's parliament enacted a law Monday authorizing force to stop rival Taiwan from pursuing formal independence, sparking outrage on the self-governing island and warnings that the measure would fuel regional tensions.

The ceremonial National People's Congress passed the law despite U.S. appeals for restraint. It came a day after President Hu Jintao called on China's military to be ready for war and followed a 12.6 percent increase in the country's defense budget for 2005.

Odd News:

Blog Patrol:

*** Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens. Montaigne

--------

Posted by witnit at 3:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 13, 2005

"A Meeting of Minds" Meme

ou may recall Steve Allen's old show, Meeting of Minds, where historical figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Aquinas and Cleopatra would talk together around the table. Of course, Steve would get to talk with them as the moderator of the discussion.

Here's the meme: Name the five historical persons who you would like to spend an evening with (and have them spend it with each other) knowing that each one would truthfully answer all your questions. You might consider a mix of philosophers/religious figures, musicians, artists, writers, politicians, scholars, scientists, etc.

Now. The first five you think of. They have to be dead.

Here are mine.

1) Edward de Vere aka "Shakespeare" (writer/dramatist/poet)

2) Pythagoras (philosopher)

3) Mozart (composer/musician)

4) Shams-i-Tabriz (Persian mystic)

5) Benjamin Franklin (scientist/statesman)

That would be a hell of a conversation.

*** When I discover truth, I will tell you, if telling you still seems important. Ashleigh Brilliant


--------

Posted by witnit at 6:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

What Have the Americans Ever Done for Us?

f you haven't read this one yet, now is the time. Gerard Baker is a columnist for The Times in London. He gets it, and states it eloquently:

ONE OF MY favourite cinematic moments is the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian when Reg, aka John Cleese, the leader of the People’s Front of Judea, is trying to whip up anti-Roman sentiment among his team of slightly hesitant commandos.

“What have the Romans ever done for us?” he asks.

“Well, there’s the aqueduct,” somebody says, thoughtfully. “The sanitation,” says another. “Public order,” offers a third. Reg reluctantly acknowledges that there may have been a couple of benefits. But then steadily, and with increasing enthusiasm, his men reel off a litany of the good things the Romans have wrought with their occupation of the Holy Land.

By the time they’re finished they’re not so sure about the whole insurgency idea after all and an exasperated Reg tries to rally them: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

I can’t help but think of that scene as I watch the contortions of the anti-American hordes in Britain, Europe and even in the US itself in response to the remarkable events that are unfolding in the real Middle East today.


Read the whole thing.

Via Gut Rumbles.

*** People have always drawn this line between people who are technological, and people who have heart or are emotional. To me, there is no distinction. James Cameron

--------

Posted by witnit at 5:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 8

art 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8


Illusory Limits

Styles: Isn't there a desired sense of finding the limit? Finding what is precisely the limit of a technology?

Richard: Yes, this is one of the great illusions under which we all labor, that somehow all things are in process, and not just in process, but also in progress, so that at some point there is a culmiination. We imagine that at some point, the universe will, as it were, click into place.

The last star will be discovered; the last physical law will be known; the last...well, you make your own list. This obviously has to be an illusion. Why do I say it obviously has to be an illusion? Well, I think I would go back to Wittgenstein, who I think was here before us earlier.

I think at one point Wittgenstein speculates on whether or not language itself is finite, and of course concludes very easily--he didn't speculate very long--that language is not finite for the following reason. If language were finite, then there is some presumable ultimate utterance.

You and I could perhaps discover it today, and then having made the ultimate utterance, that would be an end of language and everything would be repetition thereafter. However, once the ultimate utterance is discovered, then we can make an utterance about it, which then becomes the post-ultimate utterance, so that there can be no end to language anymore than there can be an end to numbers.

And since technology essentially is language, concretized in certain ways, the same has to be true of it. The ultimate reach of our technology, whatever it is, will simply suggest more reaches. The real problem of being a human being, it may be the thing that vexes us and disorders us so much--we know that we have limits, but we have no way of knowing what those limits are.

I can remember when I was a kid, no one had yet run the four-minute mile, and everybody was looking forward to the four-minute mile. And now, I guess somebody did, and we said, "OK, great," but we did not say, "No, that's it, right there." And now someone has run faster. Now, can this go on forever? Obviously not.

Will somebody run the mile in zero? No, this is not going to happen. Somewhere there is, and we imagine this, somewhere we imagine a boundary, like the speed of sound or some such thing. But we recognize that even to imagine that boundary is absurd. That would require us to say that somewhere there is a natural law which says, "Human beings can move only so fast," so we are clearly limited, but we have no boundaries.


Styles: Wittgenstein says that what we can say we should be able to say clearly, but he also says, "What we can't say?

Richard: "?we shouldn't say at all?

Styles: "?we have to pass over in silence."

Richard: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muß man schweigen? schweigen? excellent word.

I'm troubled by that. I'm a big admirer of Wittgenstein because I'm an admirer of smart people, and he is certainly a smart person. But it seems to me, in fact, that most of what we say is what we cannot say. What he meant by that, I'm inclined to suspect, was a kind of very logical positivist sort of thing.

That is to say that certain of our utterances have no meaning, not that they are true or false, but they have no meaning, and when the poet tells us "Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth, this is all you know and all you need to know," we say, "Bull, come on I need to know quite a lot more than that."

Nevertheless, we do say that truth is beauty and that beauty is truth, and we do mean something by it, but we really cannot say it, as we cannot say it in the sense that we can say this be of all in bodies--and I think Wittgenstein wanted to remind us--"Don't shoot off your mouth and be silly." But I think that he was wrong.

It is the business of language to be silly in that respect; it is to make that world about which we really nicht sprechen. There is "no speaking of it," and I think that Wittgenstein's influence, largely because of that very sentence, has in some ways been very baleful.

It has indeed undergirded the notion that literacy is the matter of writing a letter of application for a job. This is essentially to say the same thing, and it also has led to a kind of disintegration of our sensitivity to metaphor.

I wrote recently a sardonic article about somebody and his influence on somebody else, and in the course of it, I used a metaphor. I talked about a meeting in the main street of a small town in the West, where somebody faces down the angry rabble. And furthermore, says that his friend, Pete the Persuader, has just passed into town and maybe they had better talk to him.

Now Pete the Persuader was a little metaphor in this story for this person whom I was quoting. Somebody knew the man, the original, and sent him a copy of the article, and he wrote back saying, "Well, of course I can't be held responsible for what some zany Superintendent of Schools in Tulsa thinks my words mean; however, the future is coming and we can't hide our heads in the sand."

He did say that, but at the end of his letter, he reached the summation of his defense. He said, "Furthermore, I've never been in Tulsa in my life." Now I ask myself, what kind of man is this? How is this man thinking? Does he imagine that I imagined that he was in Tulsa with a six gun on his hip? What on earth is going on here?

Well I know what's going on. The man happens to be what's called a futurist, and he's terribly interested in an imagined society where there is no literacy but still where people are very knowledgeable because they will punch up computers in some way or another. And I think he has immersed himself in the kind of non-metaphoric language that is very popular among us. This is nothing new; it has always been around; it's always been possible.

You remember that Dr. Johnson, who was frightened by the coming of the Romantics--he was frightened by a lot of things, I guess--objected that their language was prosaic and ordinary and that if poetry continued in their tradition, it would end up sounding that way.

And he invented a little example of what poetry would be like in the future because of the romantic poets, and his little quatrain is easy to remember:

I put my hat upon my head, And walked into the Strand, And there I met another man, Whose hat was in his hand.

And that's the entire poem. Now Johnson was wrong about the future of poetry, poetry didn't become that and never will become that, but a lot of language has, in fact, become that.

Styles: Our prose has become that.

Richard: Our prose has become that and there is this very pedestrian literalness in our prose and even our understanding. I have students who cannot?cannot sometimes make any sense of a metaphor.

I had a marvelous example in a class recently on the King James translation of the Bible. Somebody had read, they all had read the Book of Ecclesiastes; didn't find much in it; seemed to be saying all the same thing all the time. They couldn't really distinguish where the text was any different from anywhere else.

I said, "You noticed that the heart of the fool was in the House of Mirth." "Oh, yeah, yeah." "Well, what's that about?" "The same thing, you know; it's in favor of good; it's against evil." And I asked a very simple question, "Now, what exactly is the House of Mirth?"

Complete silence in class. "Is it a house?" Baffled silence continues. Finally he said, "Well, probably not." Probably not. Get that. Probably not. Well this engendered quite a long discussion and finally someone suggested, "It's not really a house at all. It's just a way of talking about something else, and the heart isn't a heart at all either."

And it took a whole class to get at the metaphor, a very simple metaphor. They don't think that way and they haven't been taught that way. They have been taught, What is reading? Reading is that process which leads to comprehension score, and they didn't think that was a fair question because it wouldn't appear on a comprehension test.


Styles: Perhaps they would have even more difficulty understanding what Heidegger means by language being our House of Being.

Richard: Oh yes. This would not be because the word being, you see, is entirely a metaphor, and it has no meaning whatsoever for them. They understand about living. They know they're alive; they're pretty sure of that; but if one would ask them to distinguish between their living and their being, I don't know where they would go.


Styles: Would they go to language?

Richard: Well, no, they wouldn't. They would go to silence. Isn't that interesting? I never thought of it that way, but that's where my class went in the face of the House of Mirth?Silence.

********

End of Interview

Note: I compared the text of the first five parts to the audio supplied to me and made a number of significant changes--additions of text not in the transcript, altered punctuation and emphasis to clarify meaning. You may want to reread these.


--------

Posted by witnit at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 12, 2005

Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 7

art 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8


Honest and Dishonest Writing

Styles: You mentioned earlier that the audience, the question of the audience, is all important in understanding writing. Particularly when we teach, we say, if we understand with you that language is communication or should not be communication, that we write to other people, but I've often thought that we write for ourselves first, and only thereafter to other people.

And that as we understand that we are writing really for ourselves in this process of self-discovery is the important issue. We learn thereby to write, but also learn thereby that there is something called the spirit of the law as well as the letter of the law, to borrow Jesus's term.

Richard: Yes, I think that is true. Eliot somewhere distinguishes the three voices of writing; that voice in which people speak to each other; the voice in which one speaks to oneself; and the voice in which one speaks to God. And he uses this distinction to make elaborate categories of various kinds of poetry, as I remember. That is, nevertheless, a useful distinction. There is some discourse that is the discourse between us. There is some discourse that I suppose in a way is discourse to God or something like that.

Styles: Prayer.

Richard: Well, not just prayer, but even to think "I should ever live to see such a day," or "What a beautiful morning" when you walk out all alone. There's no one to whom you speak really, but the kind of discourse that we do spend our time with in school, certainly, is the discourse of the self speaking to self. This is the appropriate audience.

Now this raises some interesting questions when students are attentive to it. They say, "Well, look if really my job is to be the self, speaking to the self, I don't care about these dangling modifiers, so why should you?" That raises intriguing questions, because eventually one has to somehow convince students that, in some deep sense, you shouldn't care about the dangling modifiers.

But if those dangling modifiers are, as they so often are, impediments to clear thought, then we do care about them a lot, not because they are dangling modifiers, but because they are impediments to clear thought. And that the so-called conventions of writing are there because writing is not speech, and because it doesn't have the resources of speech, and they serve as convenient crutches, in fact, to this pale imitation of speech; but they?re more convenient ultimately. They are essential.


Styles: Alfred North Whitehead says somewhere that style is the ultimate morality of the mind. I think that's pretty heavy phrase.

Richard: Very heavy?I wonder what he means. I like it.

Styles: Earlier you said that somehow these issues of style, clear writing, being able to share what we have as clearly and quickly and efficiently as possible, is a matter of morality. Just to what extent can you understand this style being the ultimate morality of mind?

Richard: Well, of course, I don't know exactly what he means by style, but I think I do know what most of us would mean by honesty, and when we write, it is a good opportunity to practice dishonesty.

Now by that I don't merely mean an opportunity to say that which is not true. Of course we do that and this is certainly one of the great uses of literacy is to lie and lie in a big and very effective way.

But rather I mean that we do that which is not our own; that when we fall into writing, and we say, "Oh, I am writing writing, and writing goes a certain way, and it sounds a certain way, and it says a certain thing," that we can easily become imitators. And imitators, even of other imitators, which is to say, that we are not making our own judgments--and after all, if we don't make our own judgments, then in a sense, we aren't even living our own lives.

There's another kind of dishonesty that arises from this desire to imitate which is perfectly natural to us all. I can remember the last time I taught writing, I had a horrible experience because somebody asked me about topic sentences, and I said, "Oh yes, topic sentences. Right, I've heard about those. Yes, a topic sentence is part of a paragraph; it's somehow the thing; it's the gist of it, or the beginning of it, or something like that, and I guess the other sentences all sort of hang on it in a way. Yes, that's truly nifty, topic sentence, isn't it?"

However, I couldn't tell them how to come up with a topic sentence. I went home and it occurred to me, you know, I've written I can't tell you how many essays, articles, reviews, all sorts of things, and I have to write all the time as much as I hate it. And never in my life have I been conscious of writing a topic sentence, and I was quite convinced that there would be no topic sentences in any of my writing.

I haven't looked, by the way, and so I don't know if that's true. However, I was paralyzed for almost six weeks after that. I couldn?t write?I couldn't write. I'd start to write and I'd say, "Wait a minute, how can I write this? I don't even know the topic sentence of this paragraph."

Now when we give ourselves to idols like that--it is a kind of idolatry--we fall into the deepest sort of dishonesty. See, if I had fallen into it at that point, I would have said, "Well, now wait a moment; I'm going to learn what a topic sentence is, and I'm going to do it right, and I'm going to do a topic sentence for every single one of my paragraphs, and I'll make a topic sentence outline and so forth."

So that very often our very ways of instructing people in how to write, generate these sluts of dishonesties. Especially when we teach, you know, there's a certain kind of sentence, a periodic sentence, and then there's a nice balanced sentence, and here are some nifty examples.

Well, I don't know how bad that is; it is fun to try those things out, but after all, no writer writes writing. Nobody sits down to write writing. He sits down to write something else; he just has to do it in writing.

In composition courses we dwell so much on writing that people start thinking that that's their job. "Oh, I am now to write writing" and they violate themselves in some way, I think.


Styles: Well, one of the things that we do, of course, is to convert writing into a technology. They say that there is a technique for doing this. In the most fundamental sense, writing is a technology.

Richard: Yes.

Styles: In the root sense of the term, not thinking of the buried metaphor of the term, do you think it's the logos text, it's the wording of the text, and somehow or another, if we can give vent to the root meaning of that technology, it's a liberating thing.

Richard: It is clearly a technology, and it should be a technology, but it is a technology that's obviously without limits. You know the technology that builds us engines has certain limits built into its very nature. The technology by which we write--and in order the to prove this to yourself all you have to do is look at the vast differences that are possible in writing--seems to be open ended.

Yes, there is a technology; yes, there are rudiments; yes, they work; they count; but there seems to be no end to how far these things can be applied. I would think that I imagine the ideal student, yes, although I've never encountered this one but some day, the ideal student would look upon learning the technology of writing as a gateway to a tremendous undiscovered realm, and it is generally undiscovered.

Is there going to come a day when the last possible piece of writing is done? Is the universe going to click at some time? That's it, that's it' we have now finished with the technology of writing? No, this will never happen, so the possibilities are marvelous and they're terribly exciting.


Styles: You mentioned the limits of technology and this being an unlimited form, writing, a technology without limits. In our world today, we constantly are wondering, "Gee, is there going to be a limit to this technology that we have?" in other ways, thinking about practical machines.

Richard: Yes, I wasn't really thinking of technology in general. I was thinking of a technology of the wheel or some such thing. I mean, how round can a wheel be? But a limit to technology in general, of course, is equally unimaginable, except of course that we will, I suspect, destroy ourselves with what we do know before too long.

Richard Mitchell Interview Pt. 8


--------

Posted by witnit at 6:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack