From Word To Word

I have long been reflecting on the role of the teacher within the traditional educational institution, because I have increasingly found that my beliefs about teaching and learning have come into active conflict with the role that the institution would like me to occupy and the role that my students most often expect me to occupy.  The question that arises for me most pressingly is essentially this: If, as a teacher, I subvert or reject as much of the goals, the rhetoric, the formalities, the expectations, and the mandates of institutionalized schooling as I am able, what do I actually bring to my students?

I would suggest that I really only have two things to offer my students: 1) I can offer the personal narrative of my own learning, the story of what and where and how I have learned, the story of how I have come to think and believe as I do; and 2) I can offer the network of other such narratives, written or oral, technical or personal, that I have experienced.  This means that my purposes as a teacher must also be twofold: 1) I must try to make as transparent as possible the narrative of my learning, its sources, its contexts, its growth, its development, its provisionality; and 2) I must try to make as available as possible the network of my learning, encouraging my students to engage with this network in the ways that are relevant to their own learning.

This process, despite how it may appear, most decidedly does not involve the abdication of my role as teacher, but only the elimination of the proscriptive and prescriptive aspects of schooling.  I remain, as the teacher, the one who is responsible to lead students into learning.  I abandon only the necessity of doing this within a set curriculum and of maintaining the illusion that I have mastered the subject that I am teaching.

Teaching that is primarily the imposition of a set curriculum by a supposed expert, whether driven by a government, a corporation, a school board, a university, or an individual teacher, can only ever result in schooling, never in learning.  Conversely, teaching that abandons altogether the function of the teacher, removing the experience, knowledge, learning network, and model of the teacher, will never encourage learning at all.  As a teacher, I must always be between these two poles, not teaching a subject or a curriculum, but teaching myself as a model of learning, a model that is valuable precisley because it is mine and irreplaceable, even if it must always recognize its faultiness, and frailties, and its limitations.

The Dinner and a Doc group watched James Scurlock’s Maxed Out this past Saturday night.  The film, which explores the problem of consumer debt in the United States, was released in 2005 to little fanfare, but has recently seen renewed interest in light of the role that consumer debt has played in producing the current economic climate.

The film effectively exposes some of the lending practices that either prey on borrowers or that provide them with access to more credit than they can actually service.  It does not always translate well into a Canadian context, since many of the practices that it criticizes are not legal in this country, but its central concerns about the consequences of too easily available consumer debt remain valid.  In particular, it draws attention to the difficulties inherent in the fact that lenders make more money from those who can only barely service their debt than from those who can pay down their debt quickly, where the ideal clients are those who are so indebted that they can pay only interest and can never actually eliminate their debt at all.  Since these are the economics of lending, even lenders who are not intentionally being predatory have a tremendous incentive to offer increasingly risky debt, especially when some of the risks of bankruptcy are mitigated by being able to sell bad debt to third party collectors.

While Maxed Out addresses these kinds of lending issues well, it does not really explore the role of borrowers in the problem of consumer debt, leaving the impression that borrowers bear little or no responsibility for their indebtedness.  The implicit assumption of many of those interviewed in the film seems to be that most people will simply use the maximum amount of credit available to them as a matter of course, that the majority of people cannot be reasonably expected to refrain from using credit once it is extended to them.

If this is the case, however, and I think that it may well be, it is a significant problem that deserves exploration in its own right, because it poses the question of why it is that the average person in North American culture is unable to manage their debt wisely.  The film offers only one part of an answer to this question, suggesting that lending institutions encourage indebtedness in order to maximize profit, but this encouragement amounts only to enabling behaviours that must find their impetus elsewhere.  To locate the sources of these behaviours, I might begin by looking in the following directions:

1. A culture of consumption that defines worth and status in terms of what we consume – I expose myself to debt because it buys me status in the eyes of those around me.

2. A culture of indulgence that celebrates excess and ridicules discipline – I expose myself to debt because it is easier and more socially acceptable to indulge my desires than to discipline them.

3. A culture of immediacy that cannot defer gratification – I expose myself to debt because I cannot wait until I can afford what I want through other means.

4. A culture of entitlement that believes it has a right to its lifestyle and its standard of living – I expose myself to debt because I believe that I deserve to have everything that other people have.

5. A culture of amusement that can only occupy itself through expenditure and consumption – I expose myself to debt because it buys the entertainment that removes the need for me to occupy myself.

6. A culture of expertise that recognizes only the work of the expert and the professional – I expose myself to debt because I have to hire experts to do what I am afraid to do myself.

7. A culture of possession that insists on private ownership – I expose myself to debt because I will not borrow, trade, or share.

8. A culture of independence that understands dependence on others as weakness – I expose myself to debt because I will not accept assistance from family and friends and community.

There are probably many other aspects of our culture that would help explain why we are so consistently irresponsible in our use of debt, but I think these are sufficient to demonstrate that no legislation will be capable of addressing these kinds of issues.  It may well be possible to legislate stricter lending behaviours, but there are no laws that will mitigate the social pressures that induce people to misuse whatever debt that is extended to them.

Once again, as I always do, I would suggest that the solutions to this problem are primarily communal and familial.  It is necessary for us to create families and communities and neighbourhoods that are alternative micro-cultures in the midst of a macro-culture that will always remain beyond our ability to change.  Rather than merely decrying the practices of lenders, we must find ways to encourage and support each other to live a different kind of economics, one that values what the community produces, one that affirms the role of sharing and borrowing, one that celebrates the amateur and the communal.  By removing the cultural pressures that encourage us to consume, we will also, I think, remove the pressures that encourage us to take on unnecessary debt.  This is not an easy task, of course, but it is one that will become increasingly necessary as the effects of our current economic situation become locally felt.

I am not certain that the world needs another recipe for beef stew, but I did something by accident today that has received such high praise that I might as well record it somewhere.

The first part of the accident was that I happened to have a fair amount of sausage drippings that were left from another meal, so I used them to saute the sliced onions, crushed garlic, minced ginger, and diced tomatos.  When they had softened, I fried the beef in the mixture, then stirred in cubed potatoes, carrots, turnip, and squash.

The second part of the accident requires some explanation.  I hate the texture of liver, but I also hate just trashing anything, so a few weeks ago I experimented with making some beef liver stock.  Since this stock was already in the house, and since the stew seemed a likely use for it, I added two cups of it to the pot rather than use plain beef stock.  When everything had come to a simmer, I added celery salt, parsley, bay leaves, and thyme.

Two hours later, the tomatoes and the squash had melted nicely, so the broth was very thick.  The beef was tender, and the root vegetables were still mostly whole but soft enough to mash with a spoon.  The sausage and liver flavours were beautiful.  Now, if only I would have had a draught stout to go with it.

This is the first chapter of a children’s novel that I am writing. I have several chapters completed already, but I will post them only as I get far enough in advance of them to know that they will not require any more revisions for plot continuity and character development. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Chapter One:
In Which Some Introductions are Made

Once there was a town that had been small for a very long time but was getting bigger and had just become that comfortable size that is the greatest time in the history of any town. It had some little shops, and a skating rink, and a town hall, and some lovely old churches, and several schools for children of different ages, and a small university for the oldest children. It did not have a loud highway running through it, or big factories, or superstores, but it did very well without these things, and no one felt the need for them.

Near the edge of this little town, there was a street called Devonshire. It followed a stretch of railway track that made its way from the main line toward the town’s old train station. It was mostly an ordinary street except that it had been built on both sides of the track rather than just on one side or the other. This meant that the trains ran down the middle, and the cars drove on either side, so the children sometimes had to wait a long time for the street to be clear enough to visit their friends across the way.

Though the street was a little different, most of the houses on Devonshire were of a regular sort. They were small, square, and brick, and they had become a bit shabby over the years. Their windows and doors needed paint, and their roofs looked leaky in places, and their fences leaned one way or the other as they chose. Because they were small and in bad repair, they were also inexpensive, and so the people who lived in them tended to be of two sorts: those who were down on their luck but were working very hard to make the best of things, and those who were down on their luck and were giving up hope that things would ever get better. The houses of the first sort seemed a little neater, even if the roofs still leaked, but the houses of the second sort had trash on the lawn, or burnt out porch lights, or broken bicycles in the driveway that no one bothered to fix.

There was one house on the street, however, that was not at all small and not at all shabby, even though it was very old. It had been the farmhouse when the whole street and everything around it had been farmland, and it had gradually been closed in, first by the railway that was laid along the road, then by the station that was built for the nearby town, and then, all of a sudden, by all the little houses that were built as the town tried to become a city.

The farmhouse was made all of grey stone, and there had been additions made to it several times, so that it had an irregular sort of shape, some parts having two stories, and others parts having three, and the little part at the back having only one. Its windows were also of different shapes and sizes, and the roof was at different angles depending on the place, so the house looked like it had been thrown together over the years without any thought as to how it might look, which was very likely the case.

Not only was the farmhouse the biggest house on the street, but it also had the biggest lot, which was big enough for five or six houses. Everything was surrounded by a stone wall that kept all but the tallest of people from seeing over it, so the house always seemed a bit mysterious, especially to the children of the street, who made up all sorts of stories about it.

What made these stories seem true was the man who lived in the house, who looked strange enough for any story the children might think to tell. He was a little older than middle age, and he had long, grey hair, which was normal enough, but he wore shabby, old-fashioned clothes that looked like they came from someone’s attic, and no matter what the season, no matter what the weather, he always had on a black, three-cornered hat, like the pirates in stories wear, all battered and worn around the edges.

Because he always wore this hat, the children called him Mister Hat, even though they knew that his name was really Mister Owen. They did not know whether to be afraid of him or not. They had all been told by their parents that they were not to speak to strangers, which is a very good rule, and Mister Hat was quite strange indeed, and he lived in a mysterious house besides, but he also smiled at everyone when he passed them on the street, and he would touch his hat with a little bow to them, even to the smallest of the children.

If they had asked their parents about him, the children might have learned that Mister Hat was even stranger than they thought. Even the adults who had lived on that street the longest, and some had lived there for many years, could not remember a time when Mister Owen had not lived in the old farmhouse. It seemed as though he had always lived there, and it seemed as though he had always been old, or, at least, that he had always been as old as he was, which, as I said, was a little past middle age.

When the adults bothered to think about Mister Owen at all, they would always say how odd it was that he never seemed to get any older, but nobody really gave it too much thought. Mister Owen kept mostly to himself, and the adults mostly forgot that they even had such an odd neighbour. The children, however, never forgot how odd their neighbour really was. They loved his peculiar clothes, his slow and royal walks, and the way that he would touch his hat to them as if they were not children at all. When he walked through the neighbourhood, they would run ahead of him and wait in line for the little bow he always gave them, so that it looked as if Mister Owen was a general reviewing some motley regiment of toy soldiers, or perhaps a giant of a king making a parade among his tiny subjects. He seemed to enjoy their attention, saying a grave “Good day” to them now and again, and most often taking his walk in the afternoon, just after school was finished for the day, so that he could be sure of meeting the children as they came home.

One girl in particular, whose name was Lindy, loved to watch for Mister Hat. She lived just to the right of his house, close enough that she could hear the creaking of the big iron gates at the end of his driveway whenever he opened them. Whether she was playing in her backyard or doing schoolwork or helping around the house, Lindy always listened for the creak of those gates, and when she heard them, she would race to the end of her driveway so that Mister Hat could give his little bow and perhaps wish her a good day. Even though he dressed strangely, there was something about Mister Hat that made Lindy feel happier whenever she saw him, and she was quite sure that he was not as crazy as people said he was. When he passed her on the street and they exchanged their little greeting, she would be cheerful for the rest of the day, doing her chores without complaining and singing to herself as she did her schoolwork, but if she heard that she had missed one of Mister Hat’s walks, she would be so disappointed that she might forget her chores or her homework altogether, so that her mother would sometimes ask what had gotten into her.

Some days, if Mister Hat took his walk early enough in the afternoon, and if there was a long while until supper, Lindy would follow him a little, making sure to stay out of sight. She would often follow right to the end of the block, across the one-way street, and through the little park with the band stand and the fountain, until Mister Hat crossed the main road, where Lindy’s mother did not allow her to go. It was not that Mister Hat did anything so very interesting that made Lindy follow him. He would just walk along with his slow, firm steps, very tall and grand, sometimes twirling his silver-headed walking stick, and sometimes smoking on the pipe that he kept in his jacket pocket. He never stopped to do anything at all and never said anything more than “Good day.” Still, Lindy felt that there was something mysterious about him, as if he might suddenly turn into a bird and fly away or disappear into thin air, if only she watched him long enough. Of course, he never did either of these things, but Lindy liked to think that he might all the same.

Now, just because Lindy imagined these sorts of fantastic things about Mister Hat, I would not want you to think that she was the kind of girl who spent all her time daydreaming, for she was quite the opposite. She was on the whole a very responsible girl, especially considering that she was only twelve years old at the time of our story. She was usually very good about doing her homework and helping around the house, and she had even begun babysitting for some of her neighbours, who would tell Lindy’s mother how lucky she was to have such a dependable daughter.

Indeed, Lindy’s mother, whose name was Missus Merton, often had to remind Lindy that she did not need to be quite so serious all the time. She would see Lindy reading in the livingroom or practising on the old piano, and she would tell Lindy to go and play with her friends. So, Lindy would go, just to make her mother happy, even though she would much rather have played by herself.

Rather than play with friends, Lindy preferred to climb the steep stairway to the attic, through the boxes of summer clothes and Christmas decorations, to the dormer window that faced the house where Mister Hat lived. It was not what some of you might think a very nice place. It smelled musty, especially in warmer weather, and it was a little dark, even with a reading lamp, and it had more than a few spiders. It was also cold in the winter, so that Lindy had to wear a sweater and wrap herself in blankets just to stay warm, but despite all of these things, she loved the dormer. She loved it because it was quiet and because it was dark, but most of all because she could just be by herself.

She also loved it because she could look out across Mister Hat’s garden, which was quite beautiful, especially in the spring and fall, even though Mister Hat did not keep it very tidy. It had almost a forest of trees all along the stone wall, more trees around the house, and an apple orchard at the back, which Lindy could hardly see from her window. It also had some broad, open spaces that looked like they had once been better tended, with flagstone walkways, and benches, and statues, and a big stone arch that had ivy growing up it. Everything was overgrown with bushes and plants, but it was still beautiful in a wild sort of way, and Lindy liked the view from her dormer window very much.

In the summer, however, the attic would eventually become so hot that Lindy had to go out to the backyard elm tree when she wanted time alone. The elm grew very close to Mister Hat’s wall, so she could climb to the top of the wall and sit on it, dangling her feet over the side as she watched the squirrels and the rabbits in the garden. Because of the trees in Mister Hat’s yard, she was well hidden from view, and she spent much of her summer holidays reading in this very spot, which perhaps accounts for the fact that she just happened to be there one day when a most peculiar thing happened.

> Next Chapter

Sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes, I read a book that should be made into a film, a book that would be as good or even better in a visual medium.  The first such book that I remember, though there may have been others that I have now forgotten, was Matthew Lewis’ Gothic romance, The Monk, a tale about a perfect Priest who descends into everything from murder to incest to pacts with the devil.  There have been several other books that I have since imagined on the screen, most notably Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which Harold Pinter, I later discovered, had already made into a film that starred Anthony Hopkins as the priest, precisely as I had always imagined.

I bought another such book for a quarter yesterday: Kingsley Amis’ The Green Man.  I have long claimed to dislike Amis, though this opinion was based solely on my reading of The Biographer’s Moustache, a novel that lacks the substance even to justify the time it would take me to critique it.  The Green Man, however, is something different and, to my taste, something better.  It is not great literature, certainly, and it has many of the elements that I disliked in my first reading of Amis, but it is at least good fantasy, much better than most of the offal that the genre usually affords, and it is, I think, the perfect sort of story to adapt into film.  It is essentially a ghost story, though it also has some elements of a mystery story and of the satirical comedy story that Amis writes most often.  It is effective because the ghost story is engaging enough that it does not ever permit the narrative to stagnate too long in the satirical elements, which, in turn, never permit the ghost story to become a mere genre horror.

The story centres around a middle-aged, egotistical, vaguely alcoholic innkeeper named Maurice, whose life circulates around keeping his hotel running smoothly, on finding his next drink, and on convincing his mistress and his wife to join him for a threesome.  None of this should be surprising in an Amis novel.  Maurice’s more or less average life becomes interrupted, however, when the inn’s storied ghosts and monsters, which have been quiet for a hundred years or more, return to haunt him.  The resulting events contain enough mystery, suspense, horror, comedy, and eroticism to make any and all movie producers drool into their martinis.

So, what I need is for somebody to write the screenplay of The Green Man, and of The Monk as well if it can be managed.  I am most definitely not the person for the task.  Assuming that I had the interest, I lack even a basic knowledge of the form, and my writing style is not exactly conducive to writing popular entertainment.  Someone else will have to do it, and that someone may as well be you, so consider yourself commissioned.

The poem that I posted most recently was actually written several years ago, but it expresses an emotion that I have been feeling very strongly over this Christmas season, an emotion that I usually describe as a desire for the text.  It is for me, at its strongest, a consuming eroticism, a need, not just to read and to write, but to somehow devour the text, to ravish it, or perhaps, to make myself more properly the object of this encounter, it is a desire to be myself devoured and ravished by the text.  It is a desire for more than the physical text itself, for more than what this text might mean, for more even than the act of reading, but for something beyond these things that I do not quite understand.

I have been feeling this desire so strongly over the past month or more because I have been too occupied to satisfy it, even if my occupations were enjoyable.  I have been doing my holiday baking, and I have been cooking for the various family gatherings, and I have been making toys as Christmas presents for my sons, all things I love to do, and yet they have come at the cost of time for any serious writing and for any reading at all.  I want nothing more, at this moment, than a week of solitude, just to read.  I want to be drowned in reading.  I want to be buried in it.  I want to be entombed in it.  This is my desire for the text.