Beyond the Renaissance

We’re cooking with gas now. The Renaissance started with some pretty good stuff. I mean, you could do a lot worse than the Ancient Greeks for culture, right? But hey, they were far from perfect. Before the Romans went and cocked it all up, the Greeks were working on perfecting, among many other things, a system for examining the natural world in a way that didn’t rely on superstitious explanations for things we had no explanation for. But they hadn’t quite gotten the hang of things yet.

When things really got cooking again during the Renaissance, we had an opportunity to pick up where the Greeks left off before they had to deal with that whole Dark Ages mess. And continue we did. Hence, the Neoclassical period. Get it? Neo=new, classics=well, classic, but specifically, “classic” as in “Classical Greek” period.

Embedded in the cultural revolution of the Renaissance, we were also experiencing the Scientific Revolution. Such a weird time though. Dickens really put it best in his opening for A Tale of Two Cities when he famously wrote, “It was the best of times, it was,” c’mon, say it with me, “it was the worst of times.” But did you know he wrote more words after those ones? Lots of them! The passage continues with, “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Then there’s a bunch more dichotomies like light and darkness, belief and incredulity and so on. Yup. That was the 18^th century.

Here’s my favourite illustration of that very split: in 1687, Newton published his Principia Mathematica. It’s like the Bible of math. A towering tower of reason. I’ve been writing solid for about an hour and a half now. Towering tower is the best I can do. Point is, a scant few years later  in 1692 we get the infamous Salem Witch Trials. Those things were going on at the same time.

I’m sure we could comb back through history and find all kinds of examples of parallel irony (that’s my new kind of irony I just invented) but I think it’s safe to say that Dickens was right in characterizing this particular period in this particular way.

Here’s another event that would suddenly alter the course of history in a fantastically drastic way: the invention of the steam engine. The beginnings of industrialism. And around the same time as that, the American and French revolutions in 1776 and 1789 respectively. The times are a-changin’ to say the least.

Just to bring things back around to the literary for a moment; the novel as a literary medium was starting to make itself known around this time as well. Thanks to the technology of printing presses and the cultural characteristics of a fairly wealthy and literate middle-class, the novel’s time was ripe. The renaissance had made us interested in humanity as a phenomenon and novels were the way to explore the development of character. They were long, thus allowing for a long-term narrative in which the character could experience a lot of things, react to them and develop. And they were written in prose, making them more accessible to the masses.

A good example is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Published in 1719, it’s the story of a sailor who gets stranded in and about the Caribbean for something like thirty years. He has lots of adventures amongst savage cannibals and  eventually returns to England to tell the tale. So we’ve got the theme of exploring new lands (still pretty big at the time) coupled with what would be perceived today as horribly Euro-centric style racism in its depiction of the native peoples he encounters.

On the other hand, Gulliver’s Travels is a Venn diagram’s dream come true for comparison with Crusoe. Also about an explorer, but highly speculative. Gulliver finds giants and wee folk on his adventures, but it’s all just Swift’s tool he uses to satirize English society. Between these two examples, we’ve got two versions of what this new long form prose medium was being used for: entertainment or critical, intellectual satire. As you  might imagine, entertainment won. Same phenomenon we’re experiencing today which explains why Community gets benched but we get another season of Celebrity Apprentice. Ugh.

For the next couple hundred years, the novel took off, but as a guilty pleasure. It was a way for folks to pass the time before HBO. Which will bring us to the Romantic period and the Victorians. Next time. ‘Cause I’m sleepy now and I still have a full day of teaching ahead of me.

 Tea time!

Better Living Through Movable Type

Previously on…

Chaucer single-handedly rescued the English language from terminal Frenchification. Tabernac!

I warned you about the over-simplification.

But here we are. Ready to plunge into what was probably the most significant era in our little journey. I’m kind of afraid to touch it. This is the era that if it were in a movie, it would be in a locked briefcase, and then a guy would open the briefcase, except the shot would be such that we couldn’t see what was inside. We’d only see the golden glow in the guy’s face as he stares into the case; his expression a guiless mix of awe, surprise, shock and mystification.

Okay. I’m gonna say it.

Renaissance!

Phew. Glad I got that over with.

Poor Chaucer. He really didn’t get to see any benefit from the printing press. It only went into common use after he died. And not by much in the grand scheme of things.

I mentioned the timeline I drew on the board a couple posts ago. One of the main reasons I made it was to visually demonstrate the explosion of ideas the printing press enabled. I’m sure you get the idea but the timeline is practically empty up to about the 1440′s and then WHA-BAM! Era after era stumbling over themselves for the next 600 years in an ever-accelerating race to get to, I dunno, ultimate understanding of the nature of reality! Optimistic, I know. What can I say. I’m a morning person.

Okay, these blogs are not going to be taken over by William Shakespeare, but I am going to give him a shout-out for a couple reasons. Reason One: he invented modern English. I know you were dragged over what must have felt like the broken glass of his work in high school and you’re wondering wtf I’m talking about with this “modern” business. But seriously. With the exception of a bit of vocabulary and syntax, his English is our English. Despite everything we’ve been through, the language has remained relatively unchanged for the last four hundred years or so. Just look at Old English if you want to get some perspective on this.

And reason two: Shakespeare is a handy example of the kind of thinking people were doing during the Renaissance. Namely: Greek thinking. They had a rebirth of culture and literature and whatnot, but what kind of stuff did they have to base it all on? Why, the last big thing from before the Dark Ages of course: The Classics. I say Shakespeare is a good example of this because his plays are loaded with stuff like the “four humors”, astrology/fate written in the stars stuff and pagan imagery. All Greek.

So when <tee-hee> someone says about Shakespeare that it’s <wait for it> “All Greek to me!” They’re not wrong! Ha! And, I’m pretty sure Shakespeare gave us that idiom too. So there’s that.

And here’s my favourite bit: a return to a focus on humanism and figuring out all this consciousness business. If I may quote pretentiously from Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.”

Before you get on my case about formatting verse quotations, I blame WordPress.

But hey, we’re like gods! Sweet! Beats the living hell out of toiling away in some feudal lord’s fields, never knowing if you’re going to be bludgeoned to death by some bloodthirsty conqueror. I mean, that still might happen, but things are looking up!

Stuck In the Middle

Where were we? Oh yeah. Ten thousand years ago we were writing grocery lists and tax receipts on clay tablets. Then the Greeks get all philosophical and humanistic. Then the Romans conquer them, export their culture to a huge portion of the world, then totally drop the ball and lose all our stuff, thus bringing on centuries of cultural darkness.

Like I’ve been telling my students (and still am if any of them are reading this [hey, guys!]) it’s silly to think that we can draw a nice, neat line between epochs. The Dark Ages didn’t end suddenly with someone turning on a light. Later, we’ll get to things like the Renaissance and Neoclassicism which have very definite characteristics setting them apart from other eras. But he climb out of the Dark Ages was a kind of transition period for our language. Lemme s’plain…

Let’s go with the Norman invasion as our touchstone. In 1066, William the Conqueror, who had a perfectly legitimate hereditary claim to the throne of England, returned from his exile in Normandy (France, in case you didn’t know) and ended centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule. Anglo-Saxon, in case I didn’t mention it, is the Germanic ancestor of our language. In doing so, the fledgling English language got a more than healthy dose of Frenchification.

In fact, because the ruling class was now French, the official languages of power, trade and religious authority became French and Latin. The priests still liked their Latin. And you gotta admit, it sounds pretty bad-ass.

This drove English more or less underground. It was still spoken, but only by the common folk. The peasants, plebs and peons. But of course, you can’t put a fence around language. Some of the English vernacular trickled up to the aristocracy and plenty of French trickled down to the streets.

And things might have stayed that way with English slowly being taken over by a process of linguistic attrition, had it not been for a couple of key, historical events.

English was in serious danger of being completely absorbed by the language of the ruling class. Lucky for English, the ruling class became much less powerful thanks to a plague and the subsequent revolt. After the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt of the mid-to-late fourteenth century (1300′s), the peasants found themselves much more in demand and therefore wealthier than they had been for some hundreds of years. Hello, middle-class. Now we’ve got a population who have the means to educate themselves. Which, let’s be honest, is a bit of a luxury. Writing at the time was a fellow who would eventually be recognized as one of England’s first and greatest literary icons, Geoffrey Chaucer.

His most famous work is The Canterbury Tales, which was his way of writing a kind of “day in the life” snapshot of all the different kinds o’ folks who were knocking about. The setting is a bunch of people, representing a fairly random cross-section of the English population who are on a pilgrimage together. They have a long walk ahead of them and to pass the time they decide to tell stories. Best story gets, I don’t really remember, but I think it’s something like a free meal and a foot rub at the inn when they reach their destination.

The point is, it’s a story about regular folk and written in the vernacular English of those same regular folk. And because of Chaucer’s popularity, the English language got the shot in the arm it needed to propel itself forward to, well, now.

Next time on Adventures Through Literature!: the printing press and Shakespeare. Both kinda big deals.

Greeks and Beowulf

Blah blah blah, the centuries roll on and eventually we get the rise of the Greeks. Hellenism. The classics and all that. There’s a reason why humanities students get all excited about the Greeks; they more or less invented humanism. Of course, anyone with a grade nine education (or anyone who watches, you know, movies) has some cursory knowledge of Greek mythology. They had a lot of gods and a lot of stories about them. Despite all that, the Greeks were very interested in human potential: what can we achieve? From this we get an explosion of inquiry into medicine, mathematics, literature, art, architecture, theatre, and so on and so on. You know, stuff humans do. Thus, humanities.

      A lot of what I’m writing about here can be organized around the idea of media, technology and the distribution of ideas. Power-up for the Greeks: they used papyrus to write their stuff down on. Widely available, cheap and much easier to carry around than clay tablets. But it rots. So we lost a lot of it. At least the ancient Sumerians had the courtesy to record their civilization on clay. That stuff endures like nothing else.

      Of course, despite losing most of what the Greeks wrote to rot and fire, much remains to this day. It’s pretty cool to think that because I have a smartphone in my pocket, I have access to the complete works of, well, everyone whose work is in the public domain, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

      Jump ahead again and assume that the Romans have taken over, absorbed all the great stuff the Greeks came up with and exported it to the far-flung reaches of their empire. Then those jerks had to go and fall.

      Because of the distinct lack of smartphones, we then enjoyed several centuries of awfulness. Things were so bad that the entire era is referred to as The Dark Ages. I put this together as a big timeline on the board for a class I was teaching and it was really something to see that for just under a thousand years, the only really good example we have of any English literature is Beowulf. I’m not saying it’s a bad story, but as an epoch, the Dark Ages was hardly what you’s call prolific. Stephen King writes more before nine in the morning and it’s just as gory.

      You see, after the fall of Rome, all the stability they provided was gone. Without an empire, there was no unity. Hundreds of tiny city-states fell to fighting one another for dominance over territory and resources. It was lean times and there wasn’t any room for frivolous things like “art” and “literature.” Sound familiar?

      Even the literature we did have served a very simple, practical purpose for the war effort. Stories like Beowulf were entertaining, sure, but they also spread the reputation of this king and that. And if the story was good enough, and the king was made out to be fierce enough, neighbouring rivals would think twice before attacking. Therefore, a king could sit comfy in his mead hall, just chillin’, instead of going off and fighting wars he might not win.

      Yeah, two posts in one day. These were already written though, so you might have to wait a day or two for us to crawl our way out of the Dark Ages. Worth the wait though. English gets its ass kicked and makes a comeback. S’pretty epic.

Kinda Like Looking Through Steve Austin’s Eye-Hole

Presented here is the first of a series of posts that have grown out of a series of lectures I delivered to my grade eleven English class. Riveting, I know. This just happens to be one of those times when I feel like there may be a few people out there who are looking for this kind of thing. So, here’s my perspective on the history of literature (hence the title).

Apologies first: it’s not overly academic (kinda part of the point) and it hugely errs on the side of broad stroke, big picture perspective (almost entirely the point). So my apologies if I neglect to give props to your favourite author of the era. How could he possibly leave out that guy?! It’s gonna happen. Sorry.

If there’s one thing you can count on staying the same, it’s that nothing stays the same. For whatever reason, man’s thirst for knowledge, the dynamic nature of the physical universe, or maybe even something far stranger than all that; things change. Moreover, anyone who’s taken even a cursory glance at the big picture of history will tell you that change begets more change in an ever accelerating pattern.

One way to track this change and its impact on civilization is to look at the history of media and story. The thing about us as a species is we not only ask why things are, but we often bother to record the answers. So, presented for your reading enjoyment is a super-brief survey of the history of story, literature, media and culture as I see it.

Cavemen weren’t very bright. And I mean that with all affection. After all, without them blazing the trail, where would we be? I mean, they were human, so far as they had their stories as evidenced by small artistic artefacts and cave paintings, but relative to the several hundred millennia they were wandering about, they left very little behind. Also, as far as anyone can tell, there wasn’t really much wealth to go around. We had what we needed to survive, and sometimes not even that. We travelled around in clans of about thirty people and the division between the poorest and the richest of them was a necklace made of the very finest polished rocks. Oooooh. At the end of the day, the clan chief slept in the dirt with the rest of the plebs. There were no Occupy movements.

It only took a few million years and few thousand miles of very brave migration, but eventually the climate shifted in such a way that a tiny band of hunter-gatherers found themselves in some nice, fertile river valleys with soil so rich you could, as they say, plant a brick and grow a house.

We owe so much to the mud found in the flood plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now called Iraq. You could throw a handful of seeds on it and reap a pretty decent crop. You could pour it into frames and bake bricks. And you could write on it. In short, all the ingredients of modern civilization. When we did finally settle down in the river valleys about ten thousand years ago, we found that agriculture yielded way more stuff than hunting and gathering ever did.

Here’s a fun fact I read somewhere that may be completely false but is really cool if it’s true: if I spread my arms, and their entire width is the timeline of humanity, the tip of one fingernail is the bit with permanent settlement and agriculture. Kinda makes you feel as though we’re still in the middle of a very recent experiment.

Having more stuff led to two things: a population explosion and a newly minted upper-class who were very keen on making sure their wealth was kept track of. Trouble is, when you have more than you can see at any one time, keeping track of it is tough to do. Hence, writing. So the vast majority of the first written records we have are bureaucratic in nature. Who has what, who owes who, taxes, bills, etc. Really riveting stuff. Fortunately for book lovers everywhere, an excess of wealth also creates a leisure class. Or at the very least, folks who have enough time on their hands to spend it on the frivolous activity of writing poems and stories. The first biggy is The Epic of Gilgamesh. I happen to like historical fiction, which is exactly what “Gilgamesh” is. Probably based in fact, but it goes to such fantastical places that I have a hard time swallowing all of it as literal truth. The long story very short is that the city-state of Uruk is having a hard time with their king, Gilgamesh. He’s two-thirds god, super good-lookin’, super-strong and kind of a dick. So the gods create a “wild man” called Enkidu who can be his pal, foil, wingman, what have you. It’ll keep him occupied and prevent him from terrorizing his own citizens.

Interesting side note; it’s in this 5500 year old story that we get the first glimpses of the Old Testament flood story and the Garden of Eden. Also, I think modern politicians could take a serious look at what the ancients thought of as a good leader.

The prologue to the story is really just an introduction to who and what Gilgamesh is and why he’s so awesome. Before the biographer talks about the city Gilgamesh built and how strong he is and how pretty he is and how scary he can be, he talks about how wise he is. He’s been places, seen things and knows stuff that the common folk don’t know. Anti-intellectualism can suck it.

Next: we fast-forward to the Greeks! Huzzah!

Wherein I Solve All Issues Surrounding Freedom of Expression

Damn. Set the bar too high again. How’m I gonna live up to that one? Could change the title I suppose. Then I gotta mouse all the way up to the title field. Ugh. Guess I could just have a go at fulfilling the promise. Here it goes:

Scarred for life. That’s how I felt after seeing the trailer for “The Human Centipede.” That I’d be scarred for life. I might be right too. It’s been, what, a year? And the scar is pretty faded, but there are still images that come back and smack me upside the head when I’m not looking. And that from the trailer. By the way, thank you, Apple Quicktime Movie Trailers for that one. Jerks.

Then this morning during my morning net cruise, I see a link for the trailer to the sequel. A sequel I knew was coming but was still deeply disappointed to see actually happen. Really, humanity? Really? So what do I do? Watch it, of course. Der. And you know something? Didn’t bother me nearly as much. It’s exactly like having a five-year-old boy come up to you with a booger on the of his finger. And he’s shoving it in your face and you’re going, yaaaargh! Go wash your hands! Then he does it again a couple minutes later and you’re all, this again <accompanied by major eye roll>? Seriously, kid, go wash your hands. You’re gross.

That’s what I’m feeling towards what’s-his-face who’s making these movies. Again? Really? But it did get me thinking though. Thinking enough that I tweeted a semi-rhetorical question: As a civilization, can we put any reasonable limits on freedom of expression without negating the priciple and its benefits altogether?

I’m a big fan of freedom of expression. I think it’s vital for a healthy culture. I want to be clear on this because someone once accused me of wanting to ban the first movie. And I was all, well yeah, it’s gross. That’s the point of allowing people to express themselves; so other people, like myself, can then look at what that person has done and go, WTF, dude?! That’s horrible! And if many people do that, then we as a culture have defined our limits of what we’re willing to put up with. And then we demand that that person knock it the hell off.

This time around, I’m being a little more reflective. And thanks to the grand interconnectivity of the webbers, my tweet became my Facebook status, which was seen by an old friend of mine who then quoted H.G. Wells in saying (and I’m totally paraphrasing here) that once we’ve had our basic needs met, we start mucking about with ideas and art and such and then eventually we lose our thread and apparently start drifting towards some pretty depraved stuff.

And he’s so right. I mean Wells and the friend who had the presence of mind to quote him. Seems pretty obvious that when a culture gets too comfy with itself it starts getting pretty depraved. Throwing people to lions and whatnot. So I’m thinking, can’t we achieve a balance? Can’t we have the leisure afforded to us by our wealth without getting all human centipede-y?

I know this doesn’t deliver on the promise in the title, but the best I can do is make another request of you (do this right after not killing yourself): make beautiful things. And before you say it, I know it’s important to explore and understand the dark as much as it is the light, but let’s see what we can do as a culture about not creating or supporting what I think is very aptly called “gore porn.” Just all kinds of no to that. It serves no purpose, does no good and may ambush some poor bastard who’s just cruising the trailers on the Apple Quicktime site and do him irreperable, psychological damage. Much appreciated.

PS. I understand the movie is about a guy who sees the first movie and really gets off on it. This premise led a certain someone I know to say something like, “So, what? He’s masturbating into a sock while watching the first movie? A sock that’s been sewn onto another sock?” We both laughed a lot.

death is in the air

Dudes, how do I even begin? Like this I guess:

The guys were over for band practice. It was going really well. We’re writing a whole new set of material and changing up the way we play together. It was a bit stumbly at first, but we were hitting a really nice groove tonight.

Then my daughter comes downstairs with the phone in her hand. It’s for me. On the other end is a young lady whom I taught several years ago. She’s asking if we can meet for coffee sometime next week. We decide on a time and place and that’s that. Last time we had a chat it was in the hospital because she had tried to kill herself. Yeesh.

I swear, minutes later my phone pings with an email. It’s a friend of mine saying that a young lady he’s been, I don’t know, father-figure-Obi-Wan-Kenobi-Dumbledore-mentoring for the last while has up and killed herself.

Dudes, I’m a bit weirded out.

Would you all do me a personal favour and not kill yourselves, please? I know it’s asking a lot if that is what you really, really want to do. But I implore you to explore the alternatives. Hell, there are some magnificent drugs available, both legal and less than legal, if that’s what it takes.

I don’t understand depression. And I don’t mean that in a “I just don’t understand what those fuckwit Republicans are going on about” kind of way. I mean I don’t understand it in the sense of I can’t wrap my head around being so far gone that you would actually yearn for eternal nothing. I mean, we’ve all contemplated death. Most have probably even entertained the idea of taking the reigns in that endeavour. But to actually, for real and true be committed enough to kill yourself? I don’t understand how a person gets there.

But I want to. Understand, that is. Because maybe that will mean the difference between life and death for someone who’s reached out to me for help. ‘Cause apparently that happens. A lot. Recently.

So until I figure it out, don’t anyone go offing themselves.

Much love to all of you.

Teaching Creativity Itself

This is it. Puttin’ my money where my mouth is. Gotta work within the established curriculum in a way that allows me to teach something that is nowhere directly stated in any course’s overall expectations: creativity. How could we have missed that one? How is it not recognized as a distinct intelligence (a la Garner’s famous eight-ish)? I mean isn’t creativity at the heart of every, single thing we ask our students to, you know, create?

Like just about everything worth doing, it’s easier said than done. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: the biggest obstacle is not what you might expect. It’s not the parents or administration (I, for one, have a very supportive principal). It’s the students. Put simply, they resist doing anything that doesn’t match their training. They feel comfortable with chapter questions. Which was okay. When checking for understanding in grade three. Time to move on.

So I went ahead and started a creative writing unit with some of my students. These guys are around 16 or so and in a grade 11 “college” destination English course. They’re not so much into the poetry or Shakespeare. That’s okay. Neither am I.

Side note about that: I had the pleasure of seeing Jian Ghomeshi speak at a conference a few days ago and he had a lot to say about pop culture. Mainly that we need to stop calling it pop culture and recognize it for what it is: culture.

But the creative writing unit is really about creativity itself. How to rekindle it and apply it. I, by the way, am functioning under Sir Ken Robinson’s definition of creativity: the process of developing ideas that have value. I especially like the “value” bit at the end. As in, creativity isn’t just about colouring outside the lines. That might just mean you’re shitty at colouring and need to develop your fine motor control.

There’s also a “discipline” angle to being creative that’s very important. The analogy is this: creating something on the piano obviously has to entail more than just sitting down at the keys and hammering away. There are scales and techniques and whatnot that need to be learned and practiced for a long time before you can create anything that anyone would want to listen to for more than a few seconds. 

So submitted for your perousal is the text from the handout I’ll be giving my class today. It’s a kind of middle step that follows some reading and precedes some fine tuning and polishing. Whatcha think?

A Series of Instructions That Will Result in a Kick-Ass Short Story if Followed Precisely

 

As I have explained, creativity is about so much more than just colouring outside the lines. In this exercise, I will lay out the outline of the picture. You get to decide what colours to use. Metaphorically speaking. Remember: being creative means being in the process of developing an idea that has value. Follow the instructions below, use your judgement, and your story will be better than what you would have done if I had just said, “Write a story about some stuff and things.”

 Do the following things in this order:

-          write a scene that introduces your main character

• do not tell the reader anything about him
• if you want him to be a mechanic, don’t say, “Jimmy was a mechanic.” Instead, have Jimmy trip over his greasy overalls on his way to the bathroom

 

-          write a scene that shows the reader what a normal day for this character is like.

• send him/her to work
• have them have a conversation with their Significant Other
• establish your setting
  • try to specify what city or country they’re in and what year it is without actually saying it. Make reference to a famous landmark and/or historical event

 

-          write a scene with an Unusual Event

• either your character comes into possession of an unusual artefact, is approached by a stranger, is kidnapped, set on fire, chased by goblins, fired from his job, etc…
• most importantly, it needs to be clear that a Problem needs to be solved

 

-          write a scene in which your main character makes his/her first attempt to solve the problem but finds they are entirely unqualified to do so and therefore fail miserably

 

-          write a scene in which the character gets a better handle on the situation and prepares themselves for a second attempt

 

-          write the scene where the main character, newly prepared makes their second attempt to solve the problem, but discovers a previously unseen obstacle that Complicates Things (failure number two)

 

-          write the scene in which the main character regroups once again and prepares for their next attempt

 

-          write the climax of the story

• this is the scene in which the character very nearly fails to resolve the problem, but somehow manages to succeed in the end
• for extra-super-bonus-admiration points, make it so the problem is resolved, but not in the way the reader might have expected (extra-major-super-DUPER points if you subtly foreshadowed this twist earlier in the story)

 

-          write a brief “falling action” bit where your main character runs into something or someone from their “old life” and is amazed at how that kind of stuff used to bother them so much

Additional Instructions

 

-          Use lots and lots of paragraphs. Every time someone new speaks, the setting changes, the wind blows, you feel like it or otherwise have any reason to start a new paragraph, do so.

• Each bullet point in the instructions above could amount to several short paragraphs

-          No, you can not write a story about a pot-head. I’m sick of reading them, so you can’t write one. I won’t read it.

-          Do NOT ask me how long the story has to be. You have to follow all the instructions. That’s how long it has to be.

• After reading this, don’t ask me how long the story has to be just to be a smart-ass. I won’t appreciate it.

-          No one dies without foreshadowing. In fact, try to avoid killing anyone at all. It’s just bad story-telling. It’s way harder and more interesting to deal with a character rather than just blowing them away with a really cool gun.

-          Action stuff will only work if you’ve done the work of making your reader care about your main character. Then you have to make them truly suffer. Otherwise it’s really boring.

-          Your characters can swear. You can’t. Understand that difference.

-          If your story ends with some variant of “it was all a dream,” I will be annoyed that you wasted my time. Then I’ll put a rejected stamp on it and refuse to give it a mark until you change the ending.

-          Even after you’ve followed all the instructions I’ve given you, the story will not be finished. It will be your first draft. There is still all kinds of stuff we can do to it to make it even better.

-          Type and save a draft of your story. It will be much easier to do the kind of editing I have in mind later.

-          This will only be as difficult as you make it. It will be really, really hard to write a story (or do anything creative at all) if every time you sit down to do it you:

• Check/use your phone
• Start fiddling with some other electronic device
• Ask to go to the washroom
• Pull up a Youtube video, then act all surprised and angry when it fails to load, then spend the next fifteen minutes complaining to everyone around you about how the “internet in this school sucks”
• Mess with other people
• Allow other people to mess with you
• Do not have anything to write on in front of you nor anything to write with
  • There is very little I can do about any of these things. Which is to say, overcoming these obstacles, small as they are, is up to you

 

 

The Plot Thickens

Just read an article about how DNA can actually be altered by a child’s wealth or lack thereof. And here I thought nature v. nurture was a fairly simple thing.

As I understand it, there are genes that can be “turned up or down” in a developing fetus depending on the mother’s environment. Scarcity of food, for example, can prepare the kid on a genetic level for fewer steady meals. A less clean environment can kick the kid’s immune system into overdrive.

Ironically, the trouble is that in the Western world, these kids have access to way more calories and a cleaner environment than these thirty-thousand year old adaptations were evolved for. So, instead of a race of super-people who need less food and never get sick, we’re getting generations of kids more prone to obesity and auto-immune conditions. Sicklier poor folk. But not for the reasons one might think.

My concern is that this added level of complexity will make it more difficult for legislators who are more inclined to use actual science to drive policy to create legislation that will help the less advantaged.

At the very worst, a really ignorant person might never look beyond the surface and just see a bunch of sickly fat people, assume the poor really are just genetically inferior and are therefore beyond help so why bother.

The world is weird and complicated and I’m starting to think more and more that Occam, though well intentioned, was full of shit.

This is Very Telling

I asked some students to do a project. It’s basically a character study of Holden Caulfield, but done as though they’re his psychiatrist and need to diagnose him. This one kid finds some paper on my desk that is meant to act as a big checklist of symptoms. I used to use it as part of the assignment, but had chosen not to copy and hand it out this time. Anyhoo; this kid finds it and asks if she can have it. I say sure. She goes away for a bit and asks me if it’s okay that she fill out the checklist first so she can narrow down what afflicts our troubled protagonist. I ask her if it sounds like a good idea to her. She says she doesn’t know. That’s why she’s asking me. I ask her if what she’s proposing is more or less stuff than I was asking her to do in the first place. She says more, she guesses. Then she blows my mind. She says that despite it being more work, she’s worried it’s not okay because it will make her job easier.

So let’s get this straight: kid finds resource that will enable her to solve problem. Kid realizes usefulness of resource and thinks she’s somehow cheating if she uses it. If I had asked her to drive a nail into a board, would she feel like she was cheating if she asked to borrow my hammer?

This kind of thing is happening a lot and I don’t know what it means yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s very significant. I think it’s a very clear symptom of exactly the kind of thing my new bestie Sir Ken Robinson has been talking about: the tendency for public education to pound out all capacity for creative and/or lateral thinking and problem solving.

Imagine if we actually managed to achieve what appears to be our goal: homogenization. As a global culture, I think it’s safe to say we’re facing some pretty large-scale challenges, the solutions for which will depend on some really creative thinking. If we continue to educate our kids in a way that makes them question the validity of totally valid strategies, then we are in some very serious trouble.