. . . so now that you're thinking . . .

"Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest.

 Flannery O’Connor

Literary critic Josh Romain has said this gives us a model for thinking of fine writing; fine writing should make the reader spring back as if snakebit.  Any gauge of fine writing must assume a field of energy between the writing and its reader.  That field of energy might not provoke anything as violent as the effects of snakebite, but it ought to engage a reader actively, not passively.

Anyone who puts words on paper must consider the desired field of energy and how that field might affect a reader.  If you write a grocery list, you want your reader to get the groceries.  If you write a music review (Lady Gaga), you want your reader to share some of your enthusiasm for her work.  If you write contentions regarding your latest reading assignment, you want a fighting response from the teacher.

How do you envision and describe the field of energy between the text and the reader?

. . . thinking about thinking . . .

Katherine Merritt writes:

Thinking is the process in which a person searches through past memories and stored information to draw conclusions about the topic at hand.  It’s amazing how the mind stores so much.

Mark DiMeglio writes:

Thinking takes no form, unless one is aware of the format of an idea. . . . Thinking is the act of cognitively re-visiting an idea, or re-forming an idea.

Like Anglo-Saxons and their “word-hords,”  our task involves looking at thought as it surfaces in words which can be known, repeated, and understood.  I want us to take some time to think about thinking.

Many of you think of thinking as synonymous with consciousness.  However, does simple consciousness constitute thinking.  For example, I am aware of the excruciatingly hard back of the chair I sit in.  Does awareness equal thought? 

As you work through the works we read, how do you understand the relationship of words and thought.  Can thought take place without words?  Can you share your thoughts without words?  Can we define “thought” without discussing words and language?

the Charlie Burrus memorial post

Hunter Cesinger said...

This video relates to our writing in many ways. Just as there are four basic forces in the universe (Strong nuclear, Weak nuclear, Electromagnetic, and gravity), there are four basic forces in writing " (Phrases, Words, Vowels, and Consonants)." For our universe to exist as it does and perfectly support life, these forces must be perfectly balanced. Similarly to achieve perfection in our writing we must learn to balance these four forces.

September 5, 2011 1:50 PM

We talk this year about connections:  the apple tree in “Game of Catch” connects to Genesis 2-4, which connects to the tree in Separate Peace.  As Hunter suggests, I want to explore the interrelatedness of all human endeavor by discerning connections between particle physics and our exploration of language.  All things in the universe are somehow connected; the word “universe” advertises that unity.

So what?  You will read and write the rest of your lives.  Many of you will make your livings reading and writing.  All of you will have to thread your way through written and spoken statements, some of which may contain misinformation or distortion.  For instance, when a political candidate makes claims about science, how do we seek and find the truth of the matter?  As Hunter understands it, discovering elemental particles, whether physical or linguistic, is the way to get at understanding and build articulation.

Many of you have puzzled over the claim that nothing “human can be alien”; all things human are connected.  This does not mean I must experience something directly to comprehend it.  I do not have to murder and pillage in order to comprehend murder and pillaging.  I read the Iliad or Beowulf to comprehend terror and its outcome.  The first hundred lines of Beowulf remind us that human beings throughout time have built towers and halls of clever fashioning.  A tower or hall tempts wreckers to pull it down.

http://us.paceacademy.org/~dondupree/English10/beowulf1.html

(This post is dedicated to Charlie Burrus)

. . . the Higgs Boson and our search for prepositions

Mainly, I think of sophomores as noble, though incomplete, creatures who stride with giants and preen with gazelles.  My one quarrel with the species is its polite acceptance of authority.  The other day when I showed a little clip on the search for the Higgs Boson, everyone received it quietly, but no one raised a peep about its appropriateness in sophomore English.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_HrQVhgbeo

 Standard model theory of the universe speaks of four forces and posits the Higgs Boson as a binding particle which prevents any gaps in the system.

As we move forward this week and next, we pay attention to four elemental forces in language:  vowels, consonants, words, and phrases.  Our language builds on these forces and the way they combine to form articulation.  As we pursue writing and articulation these next weeks, I hope you will raise more questions and accept things a little less readily; do not hide your skepticism under a sophomore’s innate politeness.

I just don't get it . . .

A student asked me why we try to link Separate Peace to the Iliad to 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel.  Fair question.  The human drive to make connections represents a drive toward greater understanding of and familiarity with the world.  If you move more easily through the world next May than you do now, tenth grade English will have done its job.

On a practical level, any practice, whether writing or speaking, which makes you more articulate will lead to more assured success in college.  When you walk into that first semester humanities seminar at Harvard, if you can argue your point of view forcefully and articulately, you will reap rewards.  Teachers hate to put this crass spin on things, but there it is.  I would like to say articulate living is happier living, but you would chuckle behind my back.

Thinking through the opening quotations . . .

What is [the] end game? It is captured in the words of Terence, or in his Latin name, Publius Terentius Afer. He was a black man, born in Carthage of African descent, about 200 years B.C., brought to Rome as a slave by a master who, struck by his intelligence, gave him access to a first-rate education and later freed him. Terence went on to become the most popular playwright of Rome in his day. At one point, he wrote: "I am human. Nothing human can be alien to me."

This is the universal truth. We may never know what a tiger feels slipping through the jungle or a dolphin as it swims the ocean, but whatever another human has felt, we can feel it too. Ultimately, it matters little that I am an aging Chinese-Uruguayan in West Newton: Shakespeare's lines written in Elizabethan England, Thucydides' chronicles of Greek wars two thousand years ago, Li Po's poems from the T'ang Dynasty, Isabel Allende mourning the loss of her daughter, Ralph Ellison's invisibility in mid-twentieth century United States, all speak to me as surely as Maya Angelou's words at the begin-ning of the twenty-first. This is because we are all members of the same species. We are humans.

                                                                                 --Michael Chu