Extra Credit Project: "Mountain Laurel"

Here's my extra credit project. I did go off into the wild and wonderful for several afternoons, but I decided to do a creative project instead of the optional journal entries. So I composed a photobook/poem for my project.

When I was writing this and taking the photos, I was thinking about the Greek myth of Daphne and her transformation into a laurel tree. I came across this photo the day after you gave us the optional assignment, which sparked that rumination:


I was specifically thinking of the way going into nature is a reversion for Daphne, where she steps away from specifics and details and returns to something base and primal. I was thinking that such a process would seem almost incoherent, because it would be grasping a larger, transcendental state that was almost impossible to quantify in conventional language. To that end, I included photos taken while I was piecing together the poem into the final project because they were just as much a part of the thought process as the words themselves.

I had my point-and-click camera instead of the Sony DSLR (which is awaiting repair after beach sand got into the shutter over the past summer), but I think the photos came out pretty good. I'm not an incredibly technical photographer; I prefer to focus on natural images and compositional details instead of light boxes and darkrooms. My poetry is kind of the same way; I think the form should support the function. (Thank god...or Walt Whitman...for free verse.) I'm not sure if the specific form of this poem does that effectively or not, but I think there's something interesting there.

I used a free web photobook application called Picaboo because it creates digital photobooks that can be shared. I think it's some kind of a vanity press thing, but I was mostly interested in the online storage and linking functions. It had somewhat limited design options, but there was enough to make things workable. (The fonts, though...ick...)

Anyway. Here it is. I hope you find some pleasure in looking it over. I enjoyed writing it and will probably continue rearranging and playing with it. Click the photo for a link to the viewer; once there, click each page for a zoom view of the text and images.



(Click on the above photo for a link to the following: http://app.picaboo.com/WebView/Project.aspx?clientID=7e10c4349514e7395447b7c0a4715f07&version=109326&siteID=ViaPreview)

Literary Break #3: Jane Austen's Fight Club

I know Jane Austen is a British author and all that, plus she predeceased Emily Dickinson's birth by more than a handful of years, but she's been on my mind as we read Dickinson's poetry.

Possibly because of the common misconception of Emily Dickinson as something of a weird Regency/Victorian recluse...a fragile hothouse bloom shut away from the world at large under the protective wing of family...traipsing about in white clothing and never leaving the confines of her home...pressing greenery into herbarium albums and living the life genteel...

I think her reputation could use some of this:

Jane Austen's Fight Club - watch more funny videos

13 April // I Dated Walt Whitman...

...more than once. Maybe several times. First there was that disappointing guy in Symbolic Logic, who talked like Kierkegaard but acted like Nietzsche. (All I can say in my defense was that I was nineteen at the time.) Then there was the poet/barista/political activist who referred to himself in the third person in his writing, a la To A Common Prostitute. (Nineteen was a really tough age.)

What do these guys have in common with a great poetic voice of our developing nation? Well, I harbor a lingering suspicion that Walt Whitman was, in fact, very much one of THOSE guys; the ones who suck you in with earthy intelligence and honest creativity, then gradually let you down with an incredibly narrow egotism and self-promotional streak. For this reason I find it hard to read a lot of his poetry without seeing it as America (As Viewed Through The Lens Of Walt Whitman).

I don't know. I guess all poetry is filtered through the perceptions of the poet. And I actually really enjoy most of Walt Whitman's poetry in both form and content. Honest. I really love I Sing The Body Electric, When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer and To A Stranger. There are some things he writes that really resonate with me. I just wonder sometimes if his portrayals reflect more about his own interior world than any deep, universal observations of human nature.

Plus, just like Guy #1 and his philosophy...or Guy#2 and his poetry...every time I read Whitman's writing, I can't help thinking about what a jerk he was.

And in other news...

...someday I hope to be famous enough that my listless secretarial notations will be scrutinized by a rabid team of superfluous academics:

"Walt Whitman: The poet as federal worker" (Washington Post)

"You can clearly interpret from Ms. Clemens' comma splices and haphazard spelling, as well as her iconic 'hanged woman in business suit' figures penciled in the margins, that she was disdainful of the aforementioned 'multiple memo' process; perhaps a subtle commentary on the redundancy and mass production of the standard capitalist model? Additionally, several pages of the financial committee minutes from 2008-2009 have the phrase 'blah blah blah' scattered throughout, which is obviously a very dry Marxist critique of free market economies."

Maybe one day we will have entire think-tanks dedicated to analyzing Toni Morrison's text messages or Jonathan Franzen's grocery lists.

Lit Break #2: Bibliophile Heaven

It's usually at this point in the semester...with only a month left of classes...that I begin feeling pretty stressed because, as always, I've somehow managed to meander away from set assignments and deadlines. I always make the mistake of getting caught up in what I'm studying while forgetting to pay attention to the limitations and restriction inherent in an academic schedule.

Following a line of inquiry or a train of thought to its completion feels very natural to me. That's how I learn, but sadly that's not how college is set up. We study in chunks and excerpts, according to a predetermined guideline. We memorize facts and study generalities we have no frameworks for understanding, then move on to write papers and take tests.

I always forget to move on. I get caught in the details and the complexities. The last month of class is generally the time I find myself turning the last page of the collected works of some forgotten poet, then realizing that I am late turning in that paper on medieval lais. I don't learn slowly; I just need to learn completely and in context. By the time I feel that I finally have enough information to competently comment, the deadlines for tests and papers have generally passed.

So April is a flurry of catching up and activity for me. It's always horribly busy and overwhelming. This is the reward I always keep in mind for completion. I took it one day when I had absolutely nothing to do but read books, drink tea and listen to music. Even though this is from the winter festivities of a few years ago, having freedom to read and learn outside of guidelines always feels like Christmas.

Walden Thoughts (Instead of Class)

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves…I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains...” -- Conclusion, Walden

One of the things I love most about Walden in particular (and Thoreau's work in general) is that each new reading brings revelatory understandings and connections; it is never the same work that I pull from the bookshelf. When I first read Walden in my mid-teens, the sections about the flaws in standardized education versus true learning were what caught my eye. When I read Walden in my mid-twenties, I was absorbed by Thoreau's deliberate savoring of the moment and the messy social constructs that constitute human experience. When reading Walden this last time, it was the forward thinking manifesto hidden in the conclusion that held my attention.

With very few exceptions, it seems to me that complacency is something most people struggle with. We either become mired in the safe and expected, or we struggle with a lack of reliability and security; we become our routines or we struggle against them. For me . Seven years ago, I decided to quit my job and leave school (packing up all my belongings, finding a new home for my cat and turning off my phone), instead taking a risk and accepting an opportunity to move to Northern Ireland. My erstwhile father had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away the year before at the age of 48, so thoughts of unrealized opportunities and ignored potential were strong in my thoughts. I remember telling my mother that I was leaving

I sometimes find myself standing in front of the mirror in the mornings, brushing my hair and meeting my own eyes in the glass...on days like that I am thinking about myself and my life; where I've been and where I'm going...the things I've done and what I have to show for those experiences...and it often occurs to me that I have somehow

16 March // Transcendentalists, Learning & Unschooling

Not to advertise this fact too loudly...but I have a pretty big crush on the Transcendentalists.

It's been going on since I was in my early teens; I remember reading Thoreau's Walden and Emerson's Nature for the first time as part of a homeschooling summer reading group, underneath the apple trees in my backyard. Before I had really experienced life and could even fully understand what they were talking about, I was deeply drawn to their way of perceiving the world and how they chose to interact with it. Passages like these (all from Emerson's Nature) permanently captured my imagination:

"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches." (Emerson, Nature)

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." (Thoreau, Walden)

"To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood." (Emerson, Nature)

"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" (Thoreau, Walden)

For a homeschooler raised in Appalachia, this was the essence of my educational life. We had tried strict homeschooling with our small group for the first few years, but gradually everyone seemingly fell into unschooling; a discipline which stresses supporting and encouraging children in their natural ability to educate themselves. Parents moved away from the pedanticism and pedagogies of institutionalized education, instead allowing their children free reign to experience the natural and sensual world. Unschoolers believe that the inherent interests and curiosities of children naturally lead to a quest for the knowledge necessary to perpetuate those skills and desires.

To give an example: since all knowledge is connected (not naturally separated into neat disciplines and categorizations), eating a particularly delicious apple pie could lead an Unschooling child to study historic recipes and cooking traditions stretching back to ancient Persia...or to research the organic structure of ingredients and chemical reactions that occur in baking...or to fractional mathematics involved in doubling and reducing recipes...or to the agricultural roots of tree propagation and pollination...or to consume particularly beautiful works of literature and art regarding a sensual appreciation of foodstuffs...all these are possibilities. Perhaps a precipitating interest could lead to a more abiding passion, where a child learn they love culinary arts or organic chemistry. However, all these wonderful options stem from a precipitating interaction with a natural experience that is child-like and pure.

This freedom of educational thought and experience in the natural world is the direct descendant of the Transcendentalists, who were the first to stand up to the experiential limitations of historic educational institutions. It's a lesson I've internalized to the point that it is incredibly hard for me as a college student to go back to the standard divisions and discipline of education. To this day I find disconnected and dry lectures limp, disciplinary distinctions ridiculous and deadlines/busywork/limitations suffocatingly restrictive. There have been times in recent years where I have skipped lectures because the bloodless and uninspiring group dissection of a reading would take the color out of it forever for me. (Most recently a dispassionate group discussion session with three people who hated Mrs. Dalloway, one of my favorite novels ever.) Over the years I have taken a lot of flack for this, but it's become something so intrinsic to me that I don't know if I could change to this other way of operating, let alone if I would even want to.

Walt Whitman has a lovely poem that I think captures the essence of this feeling:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

14 March // Melville's Benito Cereno

It's interesting that this last decade has seen another revival of interest in Melville's lesser-known works. As someone who has a tendency to lump his entire oeuvre into over-saturated Dead White Male Author territory, it is surprising for me to find unexpected relevance in Melville's forgotten pieces. Especially since I number among that guilty party: the whole Moby Dick/Old Man and the Sea/Jaws finite man versus infinite nature thing doesn't really do it for me, so my eyes kind of glaze over at the mere mention of Melville.

(This is slowly changing for me. I think Bartleby the Scrivener is awesome, in that it pretty much perfectly captures to ennui and malaise of corporate America. Speaking of which, Crispin Glover's turn as Bartleby in the 2001 cinematic re-imagining was pretty awesome. And creepy.)



(Also: "I would prefer not to" is totally and weirdly a Bukowski penchant...a la 1987's Barfly...)



Anyway. Back to Melville.

I recently came across this quote from biographer Andrew Delbanco, about the pertinence of Melville (specifically Benito Cereno) in a post-9/11 America:

In our own time of terror and torture, Benito Cereno has emerged as the most salient of Melville's works: a tale of desperate men in the grip of a vengeful fury that those whom they hate cannot begin to understand.

That correlation is one that is very interesting to me, given the racially/culturally-charged political issues that have dominated American life in the last decade. (A topic I think I'll be writing a long response on later.)

In the meantime...I found this really neat new media writing reworking Benito Cereno. It's basically the entire story via Twitter, as told in snippets of 140 characters or less. It's called "The Good Captain" and was created by artist Jay Bushman. Click on the image for a link to the project (@ http://jaybushman.com/the-good-captain).