New Post at Shoestring Serenade

Having finally given in to my mother's not-so-subtle hints, I've written a short sequel to "Pond Scum," which you can find over at Shoestring Serenade. Matt's sequel has been up for almost three weeks; clearly he is a more talented getting-off-your-duffer than I.

I do hope you enjoy!



P.S. As a teaser, the post for this blog that's been rolling around in my head and should be rolling out my fingertips, through the keyboard, and onto your screen soon will be titled "Why I Am Not the Grammar Police!"

New JWP Post Up...

...over at Shoestring Serenade.

The prompt this time around was Gabon, as in the country on the west coast of Africa. After much back and forthing with myself, I decided not to use it as a setting for a story. Although it would have been challenging (which is precisely the point of the JWP), I didn't feel comfortable writing of a setting I know absolutely nothing of. It was but a short hop from that conclusion to what I ended up writing.

Go check it out. It's weird and I'm not sure how I feel about it. But I put it on the internets anyway, so read, please!

The Use of a University Education

For M. Ire

We are done now. The first year. Graduate school. Completed, reached its terminus, capped off, put to bed. I am no longer the new kid in school. I'll have to find a new theme song for year two. Any good toddler's songs about the Terrible Twos out there?

As usual, however, I cannot leave well enough alone. Despite this semester's satisfying denouement, my mind worries away, picking at the scab that never quite healed from my undergraduate years. Namely: What's the point?

For me personally, an easy answer quickly shoots up its hand, begging to be called on, that insistently silent pickmepickmepickme chorusing at the back of my head. The answer, you ask? 

I love doing this. 

The pure joy of creation based not on a void but on the writings of others, writings I would likely never have encountered outside of academia. My amazement, still, that other people care about these things too. The serendipitous intertextuality that would have slipped by unnoticed had I not been required to read a lot of things in very little time, chosen by different professors for different reasons, ignorant of the sparks their choices set off when these seemingly unrelated texts/ideas/discourses come in contact with each other.

This joy is a flirt. It loves to tease with intimations of greater bliss, distant by just a paragraph, thesis, chapter, book, course. If I can bare the right idea at the right moment, all that has come before, all yet to follow will fall into place, revealing the beautiful anastomosis of human thought funneling through the ages and ending in my head.

That image doesn't serve, though. A funnel suggests guidance, from specific departure point to directed destination. It suggests a move from broad to narrow, from messy to neat. How incongruous with the truly disheveled state of my brain.

Let us therefore return to anastomosis. Biology, Geology: connection between parts of any branching system, as veinlets in a leaf or branches in a stream. How sublime the image. If only we could map our minds, not their physical thing-ness, but the invisible pathways burrowed by experience, education, interactions with others, and the odd predisposition. More than a fingerprint, more than a snowflake, this map would redefine unique to orders of magnitude beyond any usage the term has ever seen before.

As an undergraduate, I fought against the imposition of a predetermined blueprint on my mental map, although I certainly would not have put it in those terms at the time. I told myself and others that I chose English because I did not want to be an engineer, and from the moment I made that choice I wanted control of my education vested in my hands, not in hands divorced from my body and self. And the wound of leaving a school that I loved for a school I learned to care for scabbed over just a bit. I told myself that English was clearly the right choice, because it came easily and offered its bounties freely. And the scab grew.

So here we are,  with the never-quite-healed wound suddenly begging for fresh air. In my mental map, fresh air is but a figurative stand-in for honesty, so prepare yourselves for a cold northerly blast of honesty.

Engineering also gave me joy, although not so freely or easily. But I didn't try. I still wonder, what if I had? What if I had bulldozed on through, decided I could do it, gone for the gusto?

Let me be clear. I have no regrets, would change nothing, and wake up every day still excited about the academic road I've taken. But I must be honest about the roads not taken. They were hard; the effort frightened me. They were not guaranteed successes; I judge my self-worth against failures both felt and avoided.

All of this navel-gazing, by definition, is highly personal, applying only to the exact traces of emotion, motivation, and knowledge that only I can follow from the start of my university journey to this exact moment.

What then, as the title promises, would I say is the use of a university education?

I have no idea.

Instead, I would offer faith. In lots of things, mostly very small, and always having to do with the notion that every moment may burn another connection, create a further anastomosis which belongs to you and you alone. However insufferable the circumstances, however unbearable the people around, however questionable your motivation, however incompetent the system, something happening right there could be the thing that fills out a tiny corner of your mental map, and you may never know that that's how it happened, but you will reap the benefits of being a more complex person, which will some day allow you to combat all the insufferable, unbearable, questionable, incompetent elements of this crazy kaleidoscopic world in which we all must figure out how to communicate across the differences that divide each of our mental maps from each other.

Joint Writing Project II

Matt, my joint writing project buddy, and I have moved our joint writing pieces to Shoestring Serenade. We've both been enjoying this experiment and plan on keeping it up for the foreseeable future. This week's piece was inspired by the following prompt: Something to do with a letter.

I took the opportunity to write from a perspective wholly divorced from my real-life self. Strangely enough, the easiest voice I found to impersonate was a slightly creepy coffee shop manager. I'd rather not dwell too much on what that reveals about my own psyche, but I'll do the next-best thing and dwell on the experience of writing in a voice with which I do not sympathize and with which I would not wish to be associated.

In the mess of writing advice that has somehow gotten into my head, although I couldn't tell you where it came from, the old adage about writing what you know pops up incessantly. Coffee shops certainly fall into my what-you-know category, so a character defined by his position in a coffee shop is actually a pretty safe choice.

As concerns his vaguely slimy personality, I have a different explanation. I've decided to make Shoestring Serenade my personal challenge, my chance to explore the ideas I have about how literature works. Don't fear; I have no delusions about writing literature. I just wonder, with all the literature that I read, about the author's relationship to the text. It was this very line of wondering that got me excited about reading de Man on autobiography this past semester.

I read that essay in Dr. Becker-Leckrone's course in literary theory and criticism, which I think should receive full credit for my new-found interest in creative writing. Reading de Man, and Derrida, and Lacan inspired me to find a voice, one uniquely my own, for my critical writing. What better way to do so than to write in a wide range of voices, try them all on for size? And what better way to try them on than to write fiction?

So without further ado, I present again: Shoestring Serenade. I hope you enjoy.

Pond Scum, Part I

The trouble started with the food supply. Not supply, really. No, the trouble started with the food shortage.

The pond had always been covered over with algae, a layer that obscured where water ended and land began. In the marshiness around the pond, the distinction between land and water was academic anyway. But marshiness won't fill a hungry belly the way algae does. So in surveying his home, the irregular pond with its tall reeds and wind-whispered surface, Apple Snail tended to notice the algae in the way we notice roofs on our houses and windows in their frames. We only truly notice them when they're not there.

And the algae was most certainly not there. It had been so plentiful. It had been an ocean contained in a pond, a life-sustaining, viridescent sea of sumptuous banqueting.

Now, in its place, swam a sea of fellow snails, sharing all of Apple Snail's alleles, down to the one that patterned his left side with flesh tones above and a half-circle below, making his left profile look for all the world like a half-closed eye. No matter the time of day, Apple Snail seemed sleepy, only partially aware of what was going on around him.

Maybe that's a true impression. Maybe he wasn't hip to what was going on. But how often do we all fail to face a problem until its many faces get up in our face and demand to be seen?

All those faces, exactly like Apple Snail's own, had finally gotten his attention. He had reproduced asexually all through the spring, because it seemed the thing to do. And then, whenever his offspring had matured a bit, they started reproducing asexually, and what had been something to do became something he had to do to keep up. It wouldn't be right if one of his clones out-cloned him. No, not right at all.

All these clones were taking their toll. And Apple Snail had no idea what to do about it.

Until she showed up. Another apple snail, but with a shell rippled and colored like freshly churned butter. Butter Snail laughed when Apple Snail told her his name.

"What a misnomer!" Her laughter rippled too.
"Whaddaya mean?"
"All these other snails, they're your clones, right?"
"Ummm." Apple Snail looked around, making sure she wasn't talking about some other snails that might have snuck into the pond while they had been chatting. "I guess so."
"Apple Snails are gonochoristic, One-Eye! You can't be an apple snail if you clone yourself. We real apple snails have to have sex to make more of us." On the word sex, her voice dropped, as though she was keeping a secret from the rest of the snails.

She needn't have bothered. Apple Snail was more observant than his clones, who all seemed a little slow. They only paid attention to the algae in front of their faces. But even with his observant habits,  Apple Snail only knew a bit about sex, mostly from overheard conversations between the excitable ducks that sometimes bathed in the pond, scattering algae and snails with every frenzied wing-flap. Sex involved at least two ducks, maybe more, and sounded just as frenzied as the flapping. Hell, maybe the wing-flapping was sex. Except that Apple Snail was pretty sure sex included a she-duck and the ducks talking about sex were all boisterous drakes.

So Butter Snail wasted her breathless delivery of the word on a clueless audience. Equally wasted were the huge eyes she batted at Apple Snail as they chatted. Apple Snail was finally moved to ask, despite his worries about the improprieties of drawing attention to someone's personal tics, if she maybe needed a rinse or if he could help her get something out of her eye, maybe with his long toothy tongue.

Butter Snail didn't answer, just batted her eyes again. Apple Snail didn't find that very helpful. Really, Butter Snail was being far more helpful than even she knew. Apple Snail needed to get used to being confused, and quickly. For now, there was a woman, and this woman had brought sex to his recently barren pond.

Check out Matt's take on this issue of the JWP! 

Joint Writing Project

My good friend, Matt Ireland, and I have decided to embark on a Joint Writing Project (JWP). This JWP will serve two purposes: get us both writing and get us both writing outside of our comfort zones. For Matt, I don't think that latter purpose means too much, as he seems comfortable across any number of genres (see his blog for proof). For me, that latter purpose means I write fiction.

For this first issue (episode? attempt?) of the JWP, we have selected a prompt which I will not share with you. I don't want to ruin anything before you get started reading. I will share, though, that I drew heavy inspiration from David Sedaris for my story. Writing about people scares me, so I went with writing about animals. Sedaris has proven that it can be interesting and effective, both qualities I aimed for.

Please navigate on over to Matt's blog (I'll include a link with every issue of the JWP) and check out what he's written. I promise it'll be worth it. (Matt, don't let me down!).

High Tech Fence-Sitter

March is shaping up to be technology month. I just finished Clifford Stoll's High Tech Heretic, and now have plenty of brain food for the next few months.

The book is largely outdated, which becomes excessively clear in his laundry list of failed technologies. In the belligerently-named chapter "Arrogance of the Techies," Stoll condemns those who "waste enormous resources by making grandiose predictions," including that "network computers would work without disks by hooking up directly over the Internet" and that "electronic commerce, based on cryptographic payment systems, would bring a whole new model for doing business." Done and done.

So Stoll misses the boat on a few things. A few others, though? I wonder if he is not frighteningly on the mark. He insistently returns to the theme of the varied quality of real-world vs. virtual-world interactions. Although not always explicit, this theme peeks its imaginary head out everywhere in a digerati version of whack-a-mole. The technocrats predict that the web will spawn unity, prosperity, and an ever-larger and ever-more-diverse community. Stoll takes great delight in poking that balloon to siphon off its overblown predictions.

Over a decade after this book's publication, though, I don't think either camp's got it quite right. I worry that this is one more instance of my interminable waffling, but I'll break out the maple syrup and forge ahead anyhow. The forging will be into a cornerstone of Stoll's argument: that computers have no place in education, particularly for young children.

Stoll convincingly lays out a depressing future in which teachers are passé and children interact only with monitors, not each other. To the best of my knowledge, that future has not come about. Computer usage in kindergartens and elementary schools seems to be balanced with an understanding that each room still needs desks, books, art supplies, and teachers. In all fairness, I base this assumption of how-things-are on one particular instance of how-things-were-in-one-instance. I recently participated in Nevada Reading Week by volunteering to read to several classes at a North Las Vegas elementary school. The librarians were beyond helpful, recommending books at the 3^rd and 4^th grade levels for me to read and inquiring after my own favorite childhood books. Armed with their suggestions, I wandered down the hall to the first classroom I was slated to spend time in.

No one was there: the room felt oddly hollow with so much evidence of students, but nary a student in sight. My guide, herself a student, said they must be having computer time, so we toodled around the corner into an extra-wide hallway filled at one side with computer terminals, each partitioned from the other. The teacher seemed ambivalent at my presence, calling the students to group on the floor around the chair where I would read. She gave them no instructions for whatever project or game or lesson they were completing on the computers. Frankly, I have no idea what these students were doing before I arrived, but it felt odd that the computer activity could be so easily interrupted for me, a volunteer who could stand to wait for a good stopping point.

Perhaps it is unfair, but I do wonder what pedagogical purpose the computers played for this 3^rd grade. They were not unduly ruffled at abandoning their workstations, but neither were all of them bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the prospect of sitting quietly and listening to me read at whatever pace I chose. In fact, the only moment during the session that the whole class seemed interested came during our post-reading question-and-answer period. I myself was highly interested in how many of these tots asked about college: what was it like, did I ever get bored of reading, why did I go to college. They were desperate for answers from me, a real life human who had Gone To College. They showed a desperation that simply wasn't there as they sat at their terminals or listened to The Penguin and the Pea.

To cut this long story short, the next class carried a completely different vibe. In this 4^th grade classroom, there were no computers, only desks with students quietly doing their work. The teacher asked them to finish what they were working on, then gather around my undersized reading chair. The students all did so, with a certain--and expected--amount of silliness and feet-dragging. They listened respectfully while I read, and were eager to join in when I proposed an interactive reading involving lots of winking and sound effects. But, just like the previous class, they were most animated when the time for questions arrived. My personal favorite: "Can I go to college and be a professional skateboarder?"

Again, these students were desperate for information. The information they sought wasn't generalized, however, nor was it available in Math Invaders or Word Twist. It was personal, it was experiential, it was responsive to their queries. Like the best storybook, I could give them my point-of-view. Like the best edutainment, I come in multimedia: I operate through sound, picture, language, references. We are our own tiny universes filled with both knowledge and hypertext.

So my take-away message may seem to confirm Stoll's argument that students need live teachers, not web interfaces. But that's not quite where I'd go with my message.

Because my experiences and my answers and my tiny universe was shaped by computers, for good or ill. Computers have given me tools to aid my writing, to increase my pool of potential metaphors, and to showcase my thoughts in this very blog. But just as so much that I could fit into a conversation just won't fit into this blog, everything a student--hell, a person--can learn cannot be contained by a computer or the internet. But then, it can't be contained by a book, either.

Ultimately, I think Stoll focuses far too much on the 'how' question, to the exclusion of 'what.' How did I learn? From books and wide-ranging foreign travel and well-read parents. What did I learn? A lot of things, all of which I'm grateful for.

But here's the ultimate ultimate, the tiny doubt that got me questioning Stoll's argument. What I didn't learn young was computing and how I could have learned it was by having computers around to tinker with. So many of my successful engineering friends talk about playing with computers from a young age. I don't mean playing computer games, I mean playing with computers: their innards, their programs, and their languages. I can only wonder how differently my ill-fated attempt at an engineering education might have turned out with similar childhood experiences. I believe enough in myself and my interests to know that literature would have prevailed in the end. But maybe those engineering courses wouldn't have felt so much like being sucker-punched in the gut.

Computers and internet and technology as the answer? No. Computers and internet and technology given some due for shaping people's lives in positive ways? For sure.