watch dis

Awesome Stop Motion Wall Animation - Watch more free videos

have done essentially nothing all day, except realize how much clothes I have that I don't wear. C's cleared some of her stuff out prior to her Israel move, so I feel inspired to get going on my own packing. two weeks to go.

say what one more time, I dare you

Holy shit I love this book. At least the first chapter anyway, we'll see how it goes. Even though I had my doubts when the author said one of the kids in the study was her son, the way she interviewed El and David about the influence of text and media in their lives and development into people in high school then 8 years later was brilliant. What an interesting time--we graduate having jumped through all the necessary hoops and then start living our lives and come to find out what was really important to have learned in the safety of those early years. Ironic that my Halloween costume is Uma Thurman's character from Pulp Fiction...

Incidentally, I met Quentin Tarrantino once--he's a big dude, and kinda scary.

I often bemoaned the fact that great thinking and learning could be done with popular media, and should be, as it's relevant and interesting to kids' lives. Why force them to read shit deemed "classic" if they don't care? Not to say that the classroom should be a movie theater or that we should leave classic texts out, but why be so scared to incorporate them? Especially when, as the interviews with El and David show, they are so formative to identity and social relationships?

I connected with these two kids/people on a number of points -- I consider myself to be a moral dissenter: I use plastic but I protest the hell out of Walmart. I take moral stances. I'm a critical thinker. I swear a lot. I read books and watch movies and talk and act them in my normal life, with friends. Like David, I enjoy living in a city rather than the tiny town I grew up in. I love to jam culture, and used to use adbusters in my classroom as much as I could get away with. David says, "I'm not part of Generation X, but I think these guys are sick of always having a plot line, or sick of things always having an inner meaning. I think every show has a point. But I don't think that it has to be a big one. I think life is like that. It doesn't always have a big point. Just lots of little ones." David and El seem to have a good grasp of what could make schools better and more real--teach differently, first of all. And use the media. Teach media literacy. El knows that for us, nowadays, "everything is presented in sound bytes, and black and white arguments, images, numbers--the death toll for the tsunami is rising, we see how horrific it is but we have no real sense or consequence of that, we're still here, whining..."

Am I a GenX kid? The lines are hazy. I was born in 79 but have two older siblings a decade ahead of me, and older parents (early 60's). I had not really considered the impact of what generation you are in terms of how you approach literacy and identity--boomers, GenX, hippies but obviously this makes a big difference--what the world is like when you begin and continue reading and viewing and discussing with others from the same (and different) eras. Wiki says "Generation X is generally marked by its lack of optimism for the future, nihilism, cynicism, skepticism, alienation and mistrust in traditional values and institutions." Huh. It adds that some relevant GenX movies include Singles, Reality Bites, Clerks, the show Friends, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Pump Up the Volume, all of which are rad except Friends.


David makes a good point about personality development--"you just change according to your surroundings, your age, your experiences, but that core personality that you start out with is still there..."

Another thought on travel, as both kids did some of that and reflected on it accordingly (and I'm trying to save up to go to Thailand, my first trip out of the country, and already live a good thousand miles from my hometown): "I can't live my life not knowing wht I would do on my own, completely, by myself. That's why I think travel is important...it allows us to invent ourselves outside of any context."

de gustibus non disputandum

“A specific reader and a specific text at a specific time and place: change any of these, and there occurs a different circuit, a different event—a different poem.” (14)

The central importance of this factor of the reader’s focus on attention is assumed in Coleridge’s famous statement about poetry: “the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasure activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.” Buy the ticket, take the ride, in other words. (Thanks Doc) 28)

“The reader responds to the verbal stimuli derived from the text, but at the same time he must draw selectively on the resources of his own fund of experience and sensibility to provide and organize the substance of his response. Out of this the new experience, the literary work, is formed (43)

“The writings of a Hitler might arouse powerful emotions of hate in a reader, but this would still be an efferent reading, which might, for example, lead him to rush out and engage in mob action.” (45)

“We are not vicarious or substitute Juliets…we are living in the world of the work which we have created under guidance of the text and are entering into new potentialities of our own natures.” (68)

“In our schools, the emphasis in the teaching of reading is almost entirely on the efferent stance. Comprehension in reading tests is assumed mainly to be of this type. It is not possible here to detail the methods of the teaching of literature in school and college that tend often to develop an efferent attitude, even toward the literary work of art." (79)

“We must recognize that the reader brings to or adds to the nonverbal or socio-physical setting his whole past experience of life and literature.” (81)

“Impressionist critics were charge with forgetting the poem itself as they pursued the adventures of their souls among masterpieces” (102)…"given the fact that a poem is re-created each time it is read, can we validly speak of anything as being the poem itself?" (104)

“Probably no work of art can suffice as interpretation of another work.” (136)

“The solution, as I see it, lies in rejecting the preoccupation with some illusory unspecifiable absolute or correct reading or ideal reader. Let us look at the reality of the literary enterprise, or “literature” as a certain kind of activity of human beings in our culture…we need to stress the basic affinity of all readers of literary works of art. The general reader needs to honor his own relationship with the text.” (140)

“The solution, as I saw it, is the education of a reading public that would appreciate aesthetic values and accord the serious artist freedom and support." (142)

In light of some illusory unspecifiable absolute or ideal reading, all readings are failures. The emphasis should be rather on a creative transaction, a coming-together of a human being (with all that implies of past experience and present preoccupations) and a text (with all that implies of potentialities for participation)."(144)

“Literary judgments—on, say, “Byzantium” or “Middlemarch”—are actually judgments on the potentialities of those texts to enable readers to evoke an aesthetic transaction.” (153)

“Another consideration: the reader undertakes to see the work as a whole, yet in actual literary transactions it may sometimes be some minor part that had intensely personal reverberations. A poem may live in the memory through only one phrase that suddenly embodies for us the ‘joy’ and the ‘juice of life.’” (160)

Hopefully by ending on this note, the method of this particular post becomes clear. I’m also ending with this last quote in hopes that it will generate a bulletin board of sorts—what pieces of text, phrases of books, lines in movies, have sparked you? For me, one of the strongest was from "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides: We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."

Adolesense

I've found that if I stop to post on every interesting chunk of Rosenblatt I will have no time for any other classes. Nevertheless,

In the 3rd and 4th chapters, she begins to address concerns as an English educator--schools are too often failing to provide contexts for students to experience a vital personal reaction to art in the form of text. Schools make a frame with no picture--students regurgitate what they think the teacher thinks of a story, and fail to give a real response. Things don't change because teachers uphold certain expectations (as do parents and everyone raised in traditional mainstream public schools) of what school should do and look like: writing traditional essays and answering multiple choice questions about who the main character was. Teachers have to value true literature experiences themselves, liberate pupils from self-defeating practices, give them freedom to wrestle with ideas and emotions, and not place so much value on a particular form of response.

"The study of literature should give the student the form of emotional release that all art offers and, at the same time, without strain or pressure, should help him gain ever more complex satisfactions from literature." (71)

"A poem or a novel should provide fresh insight. Readers, therefore, must be helped to develop flexibility of mind, a freedom from rigid emotional habits, if they are to enter the aesthetic experiences the artist has made possible." (98)

Rosenblatt does a decent job of capturing the upheaval of the adolescent mind--changing body images and obsessive self-consciousness, a desire to reflect what's "normal (and here I suggest more attention to media awareness in our curriculum is needed)," struggling to find independence and emancipation from familial structures. They need links to their experiences to be present in the books they read. They need to be emotionally and intellectually ready to reevaluate assumptions and cultural suggestions, and to adjust accordingly. This is how readers live in the world.

Easy to see why fundies are so scared.

I return to my question about whether or not some books may be universally accessible. I feel like Rosenblatt's saying yes. But not without a lot of trickiness.

The world on paper, part 1

"Only in times of war do we allow ourselves the liberty of thinking that other societies are composed of or led by '"madmen.'"


So far I have read five chapters of Olson's book and am impressed at the vastness of writing's implications, touching on primitive cultures, the Reformation, Early Modern Science, heresy, Classic Greek civilization, art, memory, the alphabet, etc, all accompanied by a slew of writers and researchers. Unfortunately my own thoughts about writing are a little cranky right now, as the blog that I was working on about Olson somehow disappeared to the Island of Lost Documents. Thought I had saved it....nonetheless I am flipping through my heavily highlighted pages to toss up what I thought were the most salient and interesting points. Again. Actually, this has happened to me several times, I write what I think is a fantastic blog and somehow between composing and publishing, my mojo gets cross-modulated and I end up having to start from scratch. After the first two times, I began to realize that whatever crap I had written about my life or whatever was still there, it just had to be written again, and sometimes the second writing yielded better results, a clearer alphabetic picture of what I had in my mind anyway. I've always used writing as therapy, so I'm with Olson when he says Carruthers' assumption that "writing something down cannot change in any significant way our mental representation of it" is completely false, but her ideas about memory and writing as mnemonic arts sound interesting.

I wanted to think about my own concepts of writing and speaking before going on, in hopes that maybe Olson addresses them at some point. I am tempted to believe that words have a certain power on their own, and that saying words or phrases often can increase or decrease their power depending on the context in which they're used. The book spends considerable time discussing religion, specifically the Reformation. I was raised in a "Reformed" church, although I never really delineated our catechism from other denominations, I knew Calvinism and predestination had something to do with it, so I wasn't too jazzed. However, I do sporadically attend an Episcopalian church and feel a spiritual difference in myself, especially when reading from the prayer book, repeating ancient words and phrases, together, to God. Don't get me wrong, I have major beefs with organized religion and think that many, many terrible things have been done by Christian white men in Jesus' name, but this kind of communication does has transformative powers. After all, the Word was God and the Word became Flesh, right?

Another example--I attended the anti-Walmart rally in my neighborhood the other day. This was a case where a large number of people had a message to convey and did so by physically coming together, holding signs, maybe chanting...the cool thing was while I stood there, countless cars honked and waved at us, some giving the thumbs-up or yelling encouragement. They didn't know me, but they knew the context, the neighborhood, the story, the implications. I didn't know the people in the cars, I didn't know the people I was rallying with, but we all came together and communicated our message, without orality or literacy, really. And that feeling, the community-feeling, almost made me a little teary, a group of people trying to stick it to the corporate a-hole, supported by strangers of the same mind.

Anyway, the first page of Olson's book was fantastic--all the examples of just how significant and ubiquitous writing is. He makes his case clearly, and I like the quote on page 3, "The assumptions about literacy that we may have to abandon are not worth holding in any case. Indeed, they underwrite poor social policy and poor educational practice." Those are two compelling reasons why we should be discerning. The idea that literacy is not all it's cracked up to be is a frightening one. A cultural anthropology prof in undergrad once raised a similar question about agriculture (a dangerous suggestion when you teach at a school in the middle of Iowa) and if overall it was really a good thing. Seems like any new idea or invention is met with resistance and fear...it's no wonder we consider unfamiliar cultures "savage" or "heathen." I admire Olson for couragously posing ideas such as "Literacy is functional if one is fortunate enough to obtain such a position and not if not" (11) while also reminding us that the relationship between functional literacy and personal/social competence is not necessarily synonymous. In Chapter 3, Olson dissects the theory of Piagetian development as applied to cultural progress, pointing out that "all stable cultures are mature," and that a pyramid model of cultural stages would not have Western culture at the top. The voices being heard in the world for the last thousand or so years has been primarily rich white men, but more voices are being raised and listened to now.

Whether we're talking about literacy, orality, technology, writing, speaking, performing, whatever, what we're really talking about is thinking. I think, therefore I am. To do is to be. It's very basic and yet very complex. What with all the various facets and options of communication today, and all the information being thought, conveyed, and acted upon, it's no wonder we're causing the global warming. We make meaning, search for answers. I haven't read or seen this, but it was on Oprah....anyone?

"Whereas spoken utterances tend to indicate both what is said and how it is to be taken, written ones tend to specify only the former." (pg. 91) Ch. 5 described how texts are to be , and Olson discussed many deep ideas such as the functionality of non-literate cultures, the concept of verbatim and how it relates to memory, and how we construct truth. Rosaldo's claim that "what is true is what one can get another to accept, not an objective account of a pre-existing fact," is certainly evidenced in our world of truth and lies. And again, ethnocentrism is echoed on pg. 100, where Olson writes, "It is we, modern literates, who hold special beliefs about reading and interpretation that make other orientations to writing seem faulty or primitive.