Lazyteacher

I recently read Style: An Anti-Textbook by Richard Lanham and was impressed. It doesn’t have a load of useful or immediately effective info in it, but what it does have is a clear, well-argued claim that the best way to teach writing is to instill a love of words and what they can do. Lantham indulges in a lot of snarky and very fun scalpelling of “The Books”–the traditional composition textbooks– as well as of the common bureaucratic-speak and academia fog machine prose. But he kept coming around to the idea that Style is not so much a love of clarity in the sense of limpid mountain pools but in the expressive sense of a style that attends to the purpose of the writing. In this way, even crazy, pull out your armhair and stab yourself with a #2 pencil postmodern speak has a purpose: to proclaim the writer a member of the secret Illuminati of semioticians.

What does this mean for next year?

One thing I want to work on is finding ways to introduce a sense of playfulness in language. Sometimes that can be accomplished by showing models of this (such as this review of the Hulk and this one of The Happening or even this one of the book How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read). This I’ve done. The other is to try to play games. For instance:

• Will Shortz word games
• Scrabble
• Writing captions for the New Yorker cartoon contest
• Rewriting lyrics to songs
• Neologisms or slang dictionaries
• Online Word Games

Re: The Onion

Did you know you have 412 emotions? Simon Baron Cohen (Not this guy) and his crack team of researchers narrowed down the entire range of human feeling to 412 discrete emotions. In Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open, the pop sci author does a whirlinwind tour of brain science from the point of view of, well, a dude such as himself trying to understand himself. He explores emotion, memory, personality, and brain scans to shed light on what’s going on in our heads that we might not be able to quite access with our conscious mind.

The research on 412 emotions–meant to assist autistics who need to study human emotion like I need to study Spanish–reminded me of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics where he shows how to draw differing emotion-feeling faces by combining simple emotions.

Other researchers such as Robert Plutchik cobbled together cute little charts that dissect emotions. For instance, he explains that optimism = love + joy (apparently not madness + full belly) or that love = joy + acceptance (isn’t that contradictory? didn’t you need joy to have love? Is optimism just love with a lot more joy?).

Anyway, why would this matter for writing teachers? Sometimes I imagine that I’m half-Asperger’s (though my score on the Autism Quotient is actually ok) and emotions aren’t always easy for me to decode. It might be interesting to have students use one of these half-mathematical emotional theories to pre-write for creative writing. For instance, you could plan on writing a story about remorse and you would plan to dramatize how and why your main character would feel both sadness and disgust; writers would need to create separate ways of showing how those two emotions are manifested. The sadness might be shown by doodling cartoons of a favorite puppy over and over again and the disgust might come through in a telephone conversation with a friend where the main character constantly puts herself down.

Hopefully, the kids will come up with better examples than that.

I just finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union yesterday even though it’s been out for about 1000 years. Chabon and I go way back and it’s always been a strained relationship. I read Mysteries of Pittsburgh and was amazed by the prose style and fascinated by the way he was able to make a description sing and surprise. But I never loved it; it was always about admiration and amazement for me and never about a true head over heel lets-run-away-together enchantment.

This novel is a detective story/alternative history where the Jews were kicked out of Israel in 1948 and somehow land in southeastern Alaska for a few decades before the US decides to kick them out again.  The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a detective (a shammes in Yiddish) trying to find the killer of a junkie heroin addict killed in the flophouse he live in before the Reversion sends all the Jews scrambling. There are all kinds of hoary detective cliche’s (down and out detective, losing his badge, tough guy banter, gangsters, at least-spoiler!–his partner doesnt’ die).  Still, no detective story is so crammed full of scrumptious language.

In the acknowledgements Chabon notes his use of Yiddishdictionary.com and it shows.  Did you know shoyfer means phone in Yiddish? Well, actually it is a ritual ram’s horn blown on the Sabbath and so therefore it’s the slang term for a phone.  Yikes.  Still, even though there is a long, obsessed, devoted description of the magic properties of the Phillipino/Yiddish doughnut called shtekeleh which apparently Chabon made up.

But when it comes to description, dude can write.

A ganef wind has blown down from the mainland to plunder the Sitka treasury of fog and rain, leaving behind only cobwebs and one bright penny in a vault of polished blue.  At 12:03 the sun has already punched its ticket. Sinking, it stains the cobbles and stuccos of the platz in a violin-colored throb of light that you would have to be a stone not to find poignant. Landsman, a curse on his head, but he is no stone.

Such a great mix of hard-boiled fiction metaphor-twisting prose and that “violin-colored throb…”  Wow.

What I love about Chabon is that he’s so clearly a lit fiction writer with those sensibilities and brings them into the realm of popular lit. He’s not always easy to read but his challenges tread a good line between litera-cha and popular lit.  There’s talk of a movie version with Cohen brothers directing which could be beyond amazing. I’m not sure who get to be Landsmen–Harrison Ford? Phillip Seymore Hoffman?

As a teacher, I want to clip out some passages as good description models–especially to show how he is able to create surprising metaphors that are nevertheless clear. I’m also interested in how he uses the Yiddish vocab. Could their be an assignment where you get a set of dialect terms or jargon terms and you have to use them to tell a story? I love the idea of the play of language as it’s own character. It would be an advanced skill for students but amazing if it works.

Other resources:

• Spiked-online Review
• NYT review
• NYTRB Review

I’ve always loved Stephen King, even when I knew better. I read It. Even the whole set of Richard Bachman books. The English teacher-y side of me has always tried to tell the rest of me to cut it out, but it wasn’t very successful. I don’t even dig horror that much, but the parts of King I liked were the characters. They felt real and had inner lives that I bought into. The descriptions felt crisp without being overwritten. It was reading that had an effortless quality to it. I recommend it to my students all the time.

So, how can I use King to teach writing. What can we learn from him. In his book on writing called On Writing (natch), he tells this story.

[Gould] started in on the feature piece with a large
black pen and taught me all I ever needed to know about my craft. I
wish I still had the piece – it deserves to be framed, editorial
corrections and all – but I can remember pretty well how it looked when he had finished with it. Here’s an example:

Last night, in the well-loved gymnasium of Lisbon High School,
partisans and Jay Hills fans alike were stunned by an athletic
performance unequaled in school history: Bob Ransom, known as “Bullet”
Bob for both his size and accuracy, scored thirty-seven points. He did
it with grace and speed … and he did it with an odd courtesy as well,
committing only two personal fouls in his knight-like quest for a
record which has eluded Lisbon thinclads since 1953….
(after edit marks)

Last night, in the Lisbon High School gymnasium, partisans and Jay
Hills fans alike were stunned by an athletic performance unequaled in
school history: Bob Ransom scored thirty-seven points. He did it with
grace and speed … and he did it with an odd courtesy as well,
committing only two personal fouls in his quest for a record which has
eluded Lisbon’s basketball team since 1953….

When Gould finished marking up my copy in the manner I have
indicated above, he looked up and must have seen something on my face.
I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was
revelation.
“I only took out the bad parts, you know,” he said. “Most of it’s pretty good.”
“I know,” I said, meaning both things: yes, most of it was good, and
yes, he had only taken out the bad parts. “I won’t do it again.”
“If that’s true,” he said, “you’ll never have to work again. You can
do this for a living.” Then he threw back his head and laughed.
And he was right; I am doing this for a living, and as long as I can keep on, I don’t expect ever to have to work again.

I love that. And the best part of it is that it’s not so obvious to a non-writer why the second part is better. Students can learn a lot from combing through the changes and realizing why the 2nd version is better. The Tom Wolfe shot at F. Scott is relevant here. Sometimes we rock because of what we refrained from putting it in rather than from what might have been shoveled onto the page.

Still, with kids it’s really only half the issue. Some kids are constantly overwriting and use way more words than is necessary: the prose is clogged with weasely words and extra doodads that should be shunted off to the recycle bin. But other kids write small. They have very few words, little description, not a whole lot of detail, and suffer from a deep lack of something. These kids are harder to reach for me.

I want to tell them to live harder and put more in. Go crazy. Read Howl. Make mistakes. Write badly…as badly as humanly possible. It seems much more pitiable to me to be neither a putter-inner nor a taker-outer but a not have anything in at all-er…How do we help kids make more?

He says we are prediction-making machines.

It felt a little like the part in Freud’s Dream Book when he explained that all of our dreams are exercises in wish fulfillment. And then he tells a story in which a woman’s dream, no matter how hard he pushes or pulls it, just doesn’t can’t won’t become a wish to be fulfilled. Until. Until, he realizes that the woman knows all about his theory, secretly loathes him, and therefore her unconscious spit out a dream that defied his theory just to spite him. But, of course, now his theory emerges. Stronger than ever.

Genius.

Still, Hawkins’ book does make me think (sigh). How hard is it to get a machine to make a prediction of what will happen based on what the machine experienced in the past? Is that what the crazy kids at Numenta are up to? And more to the point as a writing teacher. Should I think more about how I can have kids be more deliberate in how they think about their writing as prediction, as playing with the expectations of readers and finding ways to meet them and then surprise them. Somehow knowing when to do which?