From Word To Word

I had two experiences of sharing yesterday that, while seemingly different in many ways, taught me something about how it is possible to share or introduce a place, a subject that has been turning in my head since I returned from Manitoulin Island.

My friend Chris Land came by with his young daughter in the morning, and we had a chance to walk to a downtown used bookstore together in the afternoon.  Chris is not from Guelph and had never been to this particular bookseller, so I showed him around the shop a little, and we spent some time browsing, occasionally noting a book to one another or asking each other’s opinion on a title.  Chris bought Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was a fairly revolutionary text for me when I read it in university.  I bought two collections of essays: George Orwell’s Inside the Whale and Other Essays, and William Styron’s The Quiet Dust and Other Writings, neither of which were known to me before I saw them on the shelves.  We both left the store well pleased with our purchases.

In the evening, I went to help my mother move a desk from the house of Bob Brown, a mutual friend.  While we were there, Bob took the opportunity to show me a little of his unique garden.  It was not the first time that I had seen it, since the Browns allow me to pick their grapes every fall, but I am almost always picking when Bob is at work, so I have never heard him explain how unique some of the plants in his garden really are.  He cultivates only those plants that are native to southern Ontario, and he tries to include as many uncommon species as he can.  Not wanting to take these plants from the wild, he notes where developers will be beginning a new project, and takes any valuable specimens from these areas before the bulldozers arrive.  From among his many interesting edible specimens, too many to mention, he was gracious enough to give me some mayapple plants (podophyllum peltatum) for immediate transplantation, and to promise me some pawpaw tree seedlings (asimina triloba) for transplantation later in the fall.  Of the two, mayapples can still be found wild in various places in Ontario, but pawpaws are almost never seen this far north any longer. Along with the sandcherry bushes (prunus pumila var. depressa) that I am trying to force grow from seeds, these new plants will make an interesting beginning to a garden of local and edible plants.

In each case, I would suggest that what was being introduced was, more than anything else, a space, a specifically local space, a locality.  In the first instance, I was the guide; in the second, I was the guided; in both, what was actually exchanged between us was a familiarity with a locality, a familiarity both with the space of a bookstore or of a garden, and, through this locality, an increased knowldge of the broader spaces of literature and of southern Ontario flora.  The sharing is not really of literature or flora, of course, not as a whole, not even as the whole of what might be shared.  It iis the sharing only of those aspects of literature and flora that appear within a particular locality, a locality where one is familiar and is will to familarize another.  In the same way, my opportunity last week was not to introduce the Humphreys to Manitoulin, or even to everything of Manitoulin that I know.  Rather, it was an opportunity to make them familiar with a place where I am familiar, in order to introduce them to the experience of Manitoulin that is particularly mine.  They may gain a broader knowledge of Manitoulin through this experience, but this is not primarily what is being shared.  What is being shared is my familiarity with the locality.

I would argue that this understanding of sharing has implications far beyond physical space, because I think that it characterizes, or at least should characterize, every instance of sharing that takes the form of an introduction.  In terms of pedagogy, for example, I think that it is far more useful to understand the teacher’s function to be sharing in this way.  Clearly, despite frequent pretense to the contrary, the teacher is never able to introduce students to the entirety of a subject.  The teacher is never able even to introduce students toa ll of the possible knowledge of a subject that the teacher has to sharet.  The teacher is really only able to introduce students to a locality within a subject, a locality with which the teacher is familiar, a locality which the teacher can make familar to the students also.  This kind of teaching does not pretend to somehow cover a subject entirely, but to familiarize a locality of the subject in such a way as to cast light on the whole, which will always remain beyond mastery of both teacher and student.

In this sense, I familarize Chris with the bookstore so that he can carry out of it something that was always larger than the bookstore in any case: the text.  Bob familarizes me with his garden so that I can carry out of it something that was always larger than the garden in any case: the plant.  Without these localities, and without a familiarity with them, taught and learned, there would be nowhere to begin discovering the things that we need to carry with us.

Earlier this afternoon I posted on Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think“, an article that discusses the future of information technology from the perspective of a scientist in 1945.  It was for me one of those fabulous little discoveries that are the product of actually reading the web, and it has many elements that I would like to discuss beyond what I will be able to say in this and the previous post, but I will just strongly encourage people to read it for themselves and let these two posts be sufficient.

My favourite portion of Bush’s essay comes from the section where he is imagining a machine that might in the future enable people to manage what would essentially be digital libraries. The machine he imagines is very much like the personal computer, and the management system he imagines is like a personal internet, complete with hyperlinks, which he calls associative indexing and understands to be a more linear set of associations between texts.  These texts are all joined by a set of keywords, something like a tag system, and the texts can be joined by these words into any number of trails or paths through the mass of information that is the virtual library.

He then describes the function of the researcher in this new made of reading and writing, saying, “There [will be] a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master [will become], not only his additions to the world’s record, but [...] the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”

I love the metaphor of the trailblazer here, and its connotations have much to recommend it, so I cannot resist applying it in the context of the internet, which Bush only partially foresees.  The trailblazer is one who identifies a trail by leaving visible marks or blazes along the way.  The path that is marked is not necessarily the only one, because the choices of the trailblazer are to a certain extent personal and idiosyncratic, but in every case there is left a definite trail, leading from one point to another in order to facilitate others in making the same journey. Further, the word ‘blaze’ is from the same root as the word ‘blazon’, which means, in heraldic terms, a personal mark or arms that identifies the bearer.  Incorporating both senses, the trail-blazer is the one who marks a path for others to follow and who marks it with a sign that identifies the one who has made it.

In terms of the internet, I imagine a way for people to mark their paths through the web, not just the random wanderings that they happen to make as they explore the forest, but the habitual and useful paths that they discover by means of these wanderings, the pathways that might enable others to walk behind them.  Just as with a physical path, these digital pathways would never be essential or absolute.  Quite the opposite, because they would also identify the one who had made them, they would always be recognizable as a personal and idiosyncratic trail, but one that the trailblazer found valuable enough to mark and to share.

I do not know if the technology to do something like this exists already, but it should.  It should be possible for me to establish my own trails, my own links through the web, rather than relying on the links that others have made for me.  It should be possible for me to share these trails with other people and to follow the trails that others have made.  It should be possible for me, not merely to track where I have been, but to track my favourite paths, to take others along these paths with me, and to have others, even those I may never meet, follow the blazes that I have left behind me. These things should be possible because, as Bush’s argument implies, in a world as full of information as ours is, contributing to knowledge has as much to do with finding ways through the information as it has to do with adding to it.

I am tired of education.  What I want is an unending conversation: where people come and go; where the disciplinary boundaries are marked only by the interests of those who happen to be present; where there is food and wine, words and ideas, mingled; where there is no regard for marks, and credits, and degrees and careers; where everyone must be prepared only to teach and to learn; where the thinking and the speaking smolder like tobacco in a pipe; where the classroom is wherever we happen to be, on the porch, in the pub, or on the hiking trail.  I want people to take this kind of conversation so seriously that they live their lives in constant preparation for it.  I want it to infiltrate everything, no matter how mundane, so that there need be no end to it.

Through a series of events too tedious for me to relate and for anyone else to hear related, I have become interested in the question of how to develop or encourage or create online educational communities that would both make use of the new media that are available and also study this usage self-reflexively. What I want to see is the study of media expanded beyond the various academic and technical disciplines in which it is now confined into a wider and more integrated community of teachers, learners, writers, thinkers, practitioners, and researchers. I want this community to be a place where various media are themselves used to do the work of studying and critiquing media. I want it to encourage people to think media through media and to discover what might happen.

I find myself confronted, however, by the technical aspects of the project. The problem is that I have not yet discovered the medium, if it even exists, that would allow me to form the kind of community that I am imagining. The best option, at least initially, would likely be to use or misuse an existing tool to approximate what I want, but I do not know of a program that would even do this much. I have both blog software and Moodle courseware already available to me, but both of these approaches seem unsatisfactory for any number of reasons. The other option would be to have a tool written specifically for my purposes, but the costs involved would be substantial, even if I did have a clear idea of what this tool would look like, which I do not.

What I am realizing, and not for the first time, is that the things I most want are often the things that do not yet exist. I am not interested in the connections that are made through Facebook or Twitter or Digg, however interesting and useful these sites may be in their way. I am not interested in the connections that are not made through academic and educational websites that are basically textbooks by other means, though I have often made use of these resources. I am not even all that interested in the connections that are made through courseware websites, though I maintain such a site and make extensive use of it.

What I want are spaces where people connect over the work of the intellect, but this work is too often done behind the boundaries of institutions, disciplines, and intellectual property. Knowledge becomes hoarded behind these boundaries, so that careers can be advanced, and accolades won, and royalties received. Rather than forming the basis for a living community, the work of the intellect becomes the basis for disciplinary territorialism, political wrangling, and intellectual isolation. The space and the community that I want do not exist. I hope, however, that their prototypes do exist, scattered wherever they may be across the media landscape, and it is my intention to see if they can be gathered.

I was very disappointed in Miseducation, a collection of Noam Chomsky’s essays supposedly on education. The book is edited and introduced by Donaldo Macedo, and represents itself to be an analysis of schooling and education, which is why I bought and read it. I am very interested in how education, learning, schooling, teaching, curriculum, and pedagogy function in political and cultural terms. I was hoping that Chomsky would be able to contribute something significant to my thinking of these questions.

Instead, by far the greater part of the volume addresses issues of media misinformation, one of Chomsky’s most common, if perhaps also most necessary, themes. It is only the first two essays that speak to the question of schooling and education directly, and only the first that does so in any sustained way. What there is about education specifically is what you would expect of Chomsky, that is, schools play a central role in maintaining a system of control by socializing students to believe that supporting the interests of those in power is necessary to survival. So far so predictable, and perhaps so true, but I could have written as much myself. I had hoped that I would find a deeper and more systematic analysis of the educational system, in the same mode as Chomsky has critiqued the media, but I found instead some tangential remarks that were never developed into a coherent and consistent argument.

Of course, the fault here is not Chomsky’s. He was not the one who gathered these particular papers and chose to publish them under the title of Miseducation. It was not his intention in any of the collected papers to provide the systematic analysis that I wanted and that I was led to expect. The fault here is Macedo’s, whose Miseducation, unfortunately, is mostly a misrepresentation.

This will be one of those stories that begins too long ago, meanders in too many directions, and entertains no one but me. It does entertain me though, so am going to tell it, even if it ends in tragedy.

Last year, at about this time, I was preparing for the Survey of Literature II course that I was to teach in the fall. I was frustrated because my course on the novel had been cancelled, and I was bored with the format of the Survey of Literature II course, and I was thinking about both these things together when it occurred to me that the two courses cover almost exactly the same time period. So, I decided to teach the survey course as if it were the novel course and to introduce some new methods of evaluation, including a wiki of several hundred important novels from which the students had to select five texts and in which they had to post assignments on their selections.

Of course, once I had assembled this list of novels, I was acutely aware that I had read only a very few of them, so I set myself the task of reading as many as I could before the fall, a task that I am still completing in a desultory sort of way. Among the many novels I read that summer, I particularly enjoyed Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The energy, the intensity, the near-poetry of the prose sets it apart from all but a few of the novels I have read (Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer and Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers have something of this quality also), and the layers of internal and external allusion gives it a gratifying fullness of weight and depth (the kind of effect I find in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or almost anything by Salman Rushdie). Lowry’s novel also contains one of the most extraordinary sentences in the English language, one I am tempted to quote in its entirety, but it is so long that it would make a post in itself, so I will show some restraint.

I did not think again about the book for some time. I still had others from the list that I wanted to read, and none of my students chose to read Under The Volcano that fall, so it merely drifted with so much else in the soup of my literary unconscious. Then, this past Christmas, Dave Humphrey gave me a little book called The Film Club, written by journalist and film critic David Gilmour. The book is an autobiographical account of the unique film club for two that formed when Gilmour allowed his son to drop out of school on the condition that he would watch three films a week with his father. It is interesting to me mostly for what it implies about the nature of learning, but it also made one of those literary connections that I sometimes feel as an almost physical pleasure. During a list of films that he and his son were watching during a particular stretch, Gilmour mentions a documentary called Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcom Lowry, directed by Donald Brittain. He went so far as to say that it was perhaps the best documentary ever made.

Since I teach a course on documentary, and since Under the Volcano had impressed me so much, I could hardly leave this claim untested. I immediately began looking for Brittain’s film, but I could not find a copy anywhere. None of the video stores, not even my local and favourite purveyor of oddities, was able to find it for me. A search of the internet revealed that it was no longer available. I was almost in despair until one of the search results lead me to the bonus features of the Criterion Collection edition of John Huston’s film adaptation of Under the Volcano. Apparently, although Brittian’s documentary was no longer available in its own right, it was readily available on the disc of bonus features that accompanies Huston’s film. More importantly, the edition was available for free from my local library, less than five minutes walk from my front door. I was jubilant.

When I returned with my prize, I only intended to watch the documentary, for at least two reasons. First, I usually find only melodrama in dramatic films, which is why I prefer films that are intentionally unreal and ironic. Second, film adaptations of novels, in my experience, while sometimes good in their own right, most often fail to capture the mood and sensibility of their literary ancestors. Despite the force of these reasons, I had heard that Huston’s film was supposed to be classic, and I had it in my hand already in any case, so I watched it.

I have rarely, if ever, found a film adaptation that is so respectful of its source novel, not necessarily of the novel’s exact narrative events, which are largely reduced in the film, but of the novel’s spirit and temper. I felt as though the film and the novel had been made with the same fabric, the same materials, that their difference of genre was a distinction less important than their unities of tone and disposition. They seemed to be different iterations of the same artistic act, extensions of one another. I have seen better films, but I do not think I have seen a better adaptation of a novel to film.

Brittian’s documentary was also very good. While I would not perhaps agree with Gilmour that it is among the best ever made, it has an easiness of narrative tone and pace that makes it a pleasure to watch. There is a strong sense of affection for Lowry, but it never becomes idolatry. It is an affection that is always well aware of Lowry’s many frailties, an affection that remains despite these frailties, and perhaps also because of them. After all, the novel is so much a product of Lowry’s personal tragedies that it is difficult to feel its emotional force without also feeling the emotional force of the life it reflects. In this sense, Brittian’s documentary makes a very good companion to the novel, and to Huston’s film as well, and I am currently formulating some possibilities about a course format that would allow me to use the three of them together.

Anyway, I did not have occasion to think about the novel or its accompanying films again until I noticed that my wife had brought Gilmour’s The Film Club on our recent trip south. As soon as I saw it, however, I recalled again how much I wanted to teach the three Volcano texts together, and I decided to buy the Criterion Collection edition when I next had a few dollars to spend. Then, the very next day, while browsing a DVD store in a Georgia suburb, I saw a used copy of the very thing: John Huston’s Under the Volcano, with all the extras that I wanted and more. I believe that I might actually have exclaimed audibly at the coincidence.

The price was $36.00. I checked my wallet, though I knew before I opened it that I had less than $20 left to spend. I contemplated using the credit card, but I knew that my wife would not approve of such a flagrant disregard for our budget, so I walked resignedly past the cash register, empty handed. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me, a consolation of sorts, however inadequate. It is only appropriate, I reflected, where Malcom Lowry and Under the Volcano are concerned, that I should know exactly what it is I want and still be unable to obtain it. Of course, none of this will prevent me from ordering the thing when the budget next allows.

One of the few benefits of driving long distances with small children is that it is often necessary to distract yourself, whether from their continual screaming or from the fifth consecutive viewing of whatever cartoon movie is currently obsessing them. I usually accomplish this by reading.  Most of our recent drive to Savannah, Georgia was at night, when it is  impossible for me to read, and I did much of the driving myself, when my wife inexplicably claims it is unsafe for me to read, but I did have the chance to read Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Leonard Cohen’s The Favourite Game, and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. Hence the title of this post, which is probably also the name of a law firm somewhere or other.

I will not say much about any of these books individually, though I enjoyed each of them in its own way. Instead, I want to describe, if I can, how they came to inform each other for me, not because of any intrinsic connection between them, but simply because I chanced to read them together, because they became unified in my imagination by their association with the same journey.  I want to desribe what is, for me, the essential experience of reading.

Except that they are all novels, the three books are really unlike. Erewhon, written in 1872, is a utopian fantasy about a young explorer who discovers an entirely different civilization in an unnamed country. The Good Soldier, written in 1915, relates the complex and tragic relationship of two couples as the convalesce in Europe. The Favourite Game, written in 1963, is an experimental narrative of a young Canadian Jew coming of age in Montreal. Each is from a distinctly different time and place, real or imagined, with a distinctly different subject, written in a distinctly different style. They are not even joined by any conscious choice of my own, since The Good Soldier was the last of the novels I had assigned myself to read for a course, The Favourite Game was taken from my shelf on a whim, and Erewhon was found in a thrift store while on the trip.

Even so, because I happened to read them all together, all within the confines of a single trip, these three dissimilar novels began to inform each other for me. I began to see in them thematic unities that I would probably not have seen had I read them separately. All three, for example, are in their different ways concerned with exposing the superficiality of social conventions. Erewhon pointedly satirizes the social, economic, religious, and legal conventions of pre-Victorian England; The Good Soldier exposes, not without a certain sympathy, the facade of the culture of the English gentleman just prior to World War I; and The Favourite Game depicts a young man’s struggles with the facile social conventions of upper class Canadian Jews in the time preceding the volatility of the 1960’s.

There are many dissimilarities here as well, and it would take a good deal more time than I am willing to give in order to establish between these novels the kinds of connections that would be acceptable to an academic standard, but this is not the point for me. The point is that these connections always appear when I read books, listen to music, or watch films in proximity, and that the appearance of these connections cannot be solely attributed either to the texts themselves or the imposition of my own imagination. The novels, as I have already argued, are not themselves alike, so they clearly do require me to impose upon them the thematic unities that I see in them. Yet, each of these novels, as a singular and irreplaceable text, is capable of supporting only a limited set of readings. There are limits to the unities that I can legitimately impose upon them.

The result, then, is an experience that will always be unique in the world. These singular texts produce singularity. They are read in conjunction with each other, perhaps for the first time; read in the context of a road trip from Ontario to Georgia, perhaps for the first time; read simultaneously with Noam Chomsky’s Miseducation, perhaps for the first time; read by this singular reader, certainly and always again for the first time. This singular experience produces what can only be a singular reading that cannot now or ever be reduced to its component parts. I will never again be able to think of one of these novels apart from the others, or to think of Black Mountain, North Carolina apart from the three of them together, or to think of that experience apart from what I am writing now.

These kinds of experience are what reading is for me.  They are, in themselves, essentially, what reading is.  They are why I read.

In the past few days I have had two almost identical conversations. The first was on Sunday was with a friend of mine named Amy Hersey, who was very excited to learn that I can and dry produce each year. She wanted to know if she could come help me make strawberry jam this spring, because, as she confessed, her mother had never taught her how to do those kinds of things. Then, yesterday, as I was standing in line at the grocery store, I struck up a conversation with a woman ahead of me, who confessed that she bought boxed maccaroni and cheese because she had not the least idea of how to make a cheese sauce from scratch.

These things alarm me, not because everyone needs to make their own jam and their own cheese sauce, though I think everyone should, but because it is indicitive of how much practical knowledge is no longer being passed from one generation to the next. As our society has increasingly emphasised the importance of formal schooling, and as that schooling has become increasingly directed toward producing members of the professional workforce, the other sorts of learning that used to occur in the home and the neighbourood have become neglected. We have become accustomed to purchasing almost all of our products and services, even when these products and services are entirely inferior to what we could make ourselves. We no longer grow or preserve produce; we no longer cook or bake; we no longer work wood; we no longer sew.

The excuse we give, of course, is that we do not have the time to do these things ourselves, and to some extent this is true. Now that I have two children, I no longer bake bread or make pies as often, and I have never been much of a tailor, even if I can do my own mending. But there are some things that I would not give up, the things that are most meaningful to me, like canning and cooking, and it should concern us, it certainly concerns me, that we are so busy that we can do nothing of this sort any longer, that we do these kinds of things so infrequently that our children never learn from us how to do them.