Author Archive for Olga

Flowery Writing

Published
by
Olga
on March 16, 2010
in Process and Revision
. 0 Comments

I had big writing plans for the weekend, including my cac.ophony post. After spending the whole Sunday drafting a conference abstract and having no topic in mind for my blog post, I ventured out into the rain… Around 11 pm I found myself buying flowers at a local grocery store. I always confuse florists when I randomly pick up individual stems rather than completed bouquets. And then I usually say no to the easy filler of Baby’s breath. No such fluffy nonsense in my Ikebana!

Photo credit Ikebana Arts Studio

Ikebana is a form of Japanese floral art whose major premises are minimalism, symmetry, and organic composition. The stems must be positioned at designated angles, and they must be visible, not hidden in a vase. For this purpose, Ikebana arrangements are made in a kenzan, a flower holder consisting of many closely positioned spikes upon and between which the stems and twigs are placed. If kenzan is not a part of a larger container, it can be placed in one that is best suited for the given arrangement.

Ikebana has a very rich history and philosophy that I have never had a chance to study; for instance, in the most basic composition three stems are slanted in certain ways to symbolize the relationship between heaven, earth, and human being. When I work on my flower arrangements, I don’t usually think about these higher meanings. But I do enjoy every step of the process from selecting flowers to finding the right surface and background in my apartment for the finished arrangements. I wish I could say the same about writing.

And yet last night Ikebana taught me something really valuable about writing: concentration and discipline cannot fully preempt chaos. There was a moment when my major stems were in place, but the arrangement wasn’t appealing. It didn’t express what I intended it to express. Usually by the end of process, I’m pleasantly surprised that the final composition is more exact and beautiful than I imagined it to be. This was not the case yesterday!

I was upset, but then reminded myself that I wasn’t fully done, that there were several small flowers and leaves I could add to reshape the arrangement. Not really having faith in my actions, I cut my remaining thin stems and began sticking them into the kenzan. Magically, my imbalanced composition was transformed into a (not exactly minimalist) cascade of yellow daisies!

Now I have to go back to my conference abstract, and I so hope it will be transformed in the same way.

Literature Becomes Electric

Published
by
Olga
on October 30, 2009
in Media, Resources, Technology, Twitter and literature
. 0 Comments

“Everyone is reading short-form text. Literature has not made that jump.” This is a key line from a recent NYT article “Serving Literature by the Tweet” which concerns a new literary magazine Electric Literature. The name of the magazine startled me at first, as I’m a big believer in the old fashioned way of reading literature precisely as a long-form text printed on a page where I can make notes in the margins. The editors of this new magazine, Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, make their texts available in multiple mediums: print, Kindle, e-book, iPhone, Twitter, and even audio books. They publish such well-known authors as Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard.

As I continued reading the article, I realized, despite my initial reservations, how promising this project really is. For instance, the authors are asked to select a line from their work to be animated and posted on YouTube. This is a new and very creative form of literary expression that allows for imaginative possibilities and, as Michael Cunningham pointed out, “maintain[s] the integrity of the written word and extend[s] its range.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPqOy2rvfqM[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJieivqFQs[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSf_4vxWmxg[/youtube]

I was reminded of a few students in our in-class workshops in the past few weeks whose eyes were constantly on their iPhones. The same happens on the subway, in gym classes, etc. As much as I’m reluctant to accept the pervasive presence of the electronic world, I must admit that it can indeed create what Rick Moody has called “new envelopes for [literature’s] message.”

Writing Spaces

Published
by
Olga
on May 15, 2009
in Audience, Feedback and Process
. 6 Comments

From where I sit
Creative Commons License photo credit: Olivander

Aside from its main mission to establish a relationship between academic and business discourses, this year’s Symposium has, in my view, peripherally addressed another notorious bifurcation of academic and creative writing. Perhaps Peter Elbow’s proposition to ignore audience for some time can be hard to grasp in the context of business letter writing. It does, however, resonate fully with our experience with more expressive writing forms, those that convey a personal voice and in turn strike personal notes in the audience.

Listening to Elbow, I recalled a Q&A session with Orhan Pamuk. To my question whom he imagines as his audience when drafting his autobiography, he quickly responded “myself.” He explained that thinking about potentially disapproving readers would hamper his authenticity and creative effort. Another writer, whose personal journals have been a subject of my scrupulous analysis these days, connected his inability to write truthfully about his life to his typewriter, seeing it as his immediate audience.

But a self-invitation into a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf has famously called it, is something we seek also when working on projects less posh than a poetic autobiography (though a psychologist can easily make a case that a dissertation is a piece of autobiography); I’m referring to such prosaic items of academic life as seminar papers, articles, and dissertations. For me, an important take-away from Elbow’s speech was that the process of composition happens in very similar ways for writers engaged in creative and academic projects. Whether one is working on a novel or dissertation, the vocabulary to describe the writing process would be the same ranging from such romantic concepts as exploration to such terrifying buzz words as writer’s block.

In both cases, receiving effective feedback from, alas, audience, at later stages of the composition process becomes essential as well!

Uncultured Oafs?

Published
by
Olga
on April 20, 2009
in Audience and To Ponder
. 0 Comments

A recent NYT Op-Ed piece addresses a curious issue of what it means to be perceived and self-perceived as an intellectual, and the expectations and anxieties associated with it. The author, Calvin Trillin, a graduate of a prestigious university, is concerned about “whether or not [he is] an uncultured oaf.” He has found a good way to evaluate his intellectual and cultural inclinations: by comparing his likes and dislikes to those of his highly respected intellectual friend James. He was particularly glad to learn that James shared his admiration for a recent dance performance. BUT the reviewer of the performance “implied, without using these precise words, that the program had been designed to make modern dance palatable to, well, uncultured oafs.” He concludes the article, pondering, “What did that say about me? What, for that matter did it say about James? Is it possible that I’m such an uncultured oaf that the person I’d always considered the most cultured person I know is also an uncultured oaf?”

Surely, once we receive a particular degree or become a part of a particular profession, we immediately set expectations and become anxiously self-conscious about fulfilling them. In various ways, academic settings tend to enhance our sensitivity to whether we come across to our audiences – and to ourselves – as uncultured oafs. The article brought back memories of my first year in graduate school when I felt like a total impostor in a circle of aspiring young scholars. I was also reminded of the eagerness with which beginning graduate students sometimes imitate the convoluted and often incomprehensible academic prose they read.

Trillin wants to do away with the very label of uncultured oafs, it seems to me, as most of us want to do away with the bifurcation of high and popular culture, or academic and real worlds. Have we all been successful?

Missing Connections

Published
by
Olga
on March 26, 2009
in Audience, Fun, Internet and New York
. 2 Comments

Continuing with my subway theme and in light of our next Symposium topic, I found myself being very self-conscious of my eavesdropping on a conversation on the F train last night. What never fails to grab my attention in public places is Russian speech.   So there they were – a couple, in their thirties, discussing … and this is where I get tongue-tied because I couldn’t quite get the context of their conversation. I heard, “She goes to all the popular places in Moscow. … Why they’re together is a mystery to his parents, and to hers as well!” And then, oh how I hoped the guy would repeat the subject of “was the biggest mistake of my life. It was, really was the biggest mistake.” I was reminded of a wonderful passage from Rachel Cohen’s essay “Lost Cities”:

Walking in cities is an accumulation of small fragments of loss. A woman you want to keep looking at turns a corner; two people pass and you hear only, “It cannot be because of the child”; you look through a window at a drawing that looks like a print you have seen somewhere before, and it’s obscured when someone pulls a curtain across the window; a woman turns ferociously on the man standing next to her, but by the time you reach home you can no longer remember her face. – “Lost Cities”

Craigslist, of course, has attempted to assemble those fragments of loss in its “missed connections” section. Do you ever read that stuff? Doesn’t it make for a fascinating research topic?

A Subway Rendezvous

Published
by
Olga
on March 4, 2009
in New York and To Ponder
. 1 Comment

Like most of us, I commute to Manhattan almost every day. Usually, the fiery F train doesn’t keep me waiting for more than 10 minutes. Not too long ago, I was at the 57th Street station. It was late evening and most people on the platform looked tired. My favorite violinist started playing Ave Maria. He usually has something resembling a stereo at his feet that provides accompaniment to his melody. It’s admirable to watch him play, always with the same glow on his face, regardless of whether it’s stifling hot or freezing at the platform.

That evening there was a guest appearance. Another subway violinist, (this one was “off duty” and seemed to be doing the same thing we were – waiting for the train) greeted him and sat down to listen. In a moment, he turned to his friend and suggested, “Let’s play Chardish together and they’ll give us money.” I had seen each of them many times before, but they had never performed together. And now they played in complete unison, as if they had rehearsed in advance. Every note of one violin was perfectly doubled and amplified by that of another. Perfect harmony and no train on either side of the platform!

They finished and we all applauded! But there was an impression of confusion on people’s faces: there was only one hat to throw money in. Most of us hesitated, partly because we read hesitation in the faces of others, and suppressed the impulse to give anything.

We all have exceptional subway stories to tell. This impromptu performance is one of mine, beautiful in its spontaneity and sad in its outcome. One of the things that struck me was that no words were needed for an exceptionally balanced performance to take place- the musicians did not say a word to each other as they were playing, most likely for the first time together. At the same time, unspoken language could destroy — right there, in a mere moment — our basic instinct to express gratitude.

How do we deal with writer’s block again?

Published
by
Olga
on February 10, 2009
in Feedback, Language, Low-Stakes Writing, Writing Instruction and literature
. 2 Comments

Students often approach me to get advice on how to overcome this writing disaster. I got bored with my old explanations and ‘googled’ it only to find an extensive and impressive list of solutions on Wikipedia. “Challenging negative thoughts about one’s skill or ability to write” – isn’t this a good one? This ‘challenging’ can be immeasurably difficult if one’s experience with writing hasn’t been very positive in the past. Let’s rethink again the amount of red ink we spend on each paper and the tone of our comments!

The last thing I want to do in this post is pretend that I never question my writing abilities. What can and in my case does effectively dissolve this negative thinking is reading. Somehow, as I move from sentence to sentence, even in the most familiar of pages, I’m made aware of my skill to think, to feel, and to formulate my thoughts and feelings in language. Once I’ve consciously gone through this process, I feel inspired to write.

The Wikipedia page includes a list of “dramatic depictions of writer’s block,” among them Shakespeare in Love and Stranger than Fiction. I’d add another list – literary depictions of writer’s block. And, perhaps, one more – professional writers’ strategies for overcoming writer’s block. Here is how it goes for Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” How is this for a first-day low-stakes writing activity?

Audience or Interlocutors?

Published
by
Olga
on November 24, 2008
in Audience and Pedagogy
. 1 Comment

A lot of what Bernard L. Schwartz said about audience awareness last week resonated with me. He mentioned the significance of both transmission and reception in the communication act, stressing the latter as being perhaps too often overlooked. Listening attentively is a skill; hearing what the speaker intends you to hear is also a skill.

As teachers, we’re usually concerned with both transmission and reception; we want to make our presentations clear, our questions thought-provoking, our assignments challenging, and our evaluation encouraging. In many ways, teaching is a performance, and to deliver it effectively we work on our presentation skills. In all this, of course, we conceive of our students as audience: we hope they would receive what we have transmitted or respond to what we have posed as a question. And, there is usually no delay in learning how our message got across. As soon as we hear, read, or simply see their responses, we know whether the message went through or got lost in translation.

As much as I enjoy the performative side of teaching, I think there is a difference between treating students as audience or interlocutors. The word ‘interlocutor’ has interesting etymology; it comes from Latin interloqui, which means “to speak between.” It implies active engagement in dialogue, but even more perhaps – the initiation of dialogue. When students write papers or give oral presentations, they still follow our prompts. They want to succeed, impress their teachers and fellow students, get a good grade, right? In all this, they are still living up to the expectations of others.

I wonder if by asking them to create their own expectations (not without good models, of course) – by preparing a sample assignment or facilitating a discussion on a topic of their choice—we can hope for a more dynamic learning environment. We’ll be creating a new context for learning critical thinking, mastery of the material, and presentation skills. In this sense, I think, blogging provides a great medium for experiencing interlocution. But we’ll also be asking them to assume responsibility that comes with authority. A cliché? I agree, but I am thinking of those times when students, sometimes unwittingly, make offensive comments. When we call their attention to that, they usually smile or blush and apologize (they can also try to justify their thinking and ignite an argument). What I see in this is an attempt to hide experience behind innocence. “I’m just a student. I can be excused,” they seem to be saying. Well, I wonder, can we offer them a role other than “just a student” and do so in a non-punitive way?

Teaching Grammar Effectively

Published
by
Olga
on October 9, 2008
in Language and Pedagogy
. 3 Comments

I’m currently teaching an English course whose main learning objective is to improve written and oral communication skills of international students.  Basically this translates into ESL instruction.  In fact, the school puts tremendous emphasis on ‘correctness.’ I try to incorporate a grammar component into almost every written and oral assignment.  At this point, despite the fact that we have spent the first 4 weeks on most fundamental topics – subject verb agreement, run-ons, fragments, and sentence structure – my students are making egregious numbers of mistakes in their papers.  I certainly understand that they’re grappling with lots of new issues on both compositional and grammatical levels, and, as the semester progresses, they’ll gradually become better equipped to discern their errors.  But I wonder what can I do as an instructor to help them get to this place sooner?

So far, I have tried to vary our contexts for discussing grammar.  I select sentences from their papers and we correct them as a big group; sometimes they do the same in small groups. The traditional technique of giving a lecture/presentation followed by in-class exercises is another method I tried, especially because I know that many of these students are used to this type of instruction.  So, I try to make it easier for them to process new information in this familiar way. I have also assigned an error log, and of course they’re responding to each other’s writing, paying particular attention to grammar and usage.

I still wonder if there are other effective ways to teach grammar.  Suggestions would be much appreciated.

Reading the Cold Air: Negative Social Vibes and Hot Chocolate

Published
by
Olga
on September 18, 2008
in Interpersonal Communication and Symposium
. 1 Comment

One of the great points that stayed with me after our last Symposium was a Japanese concept of “Read the Air,” introduced by Yukiko. Emphasizing different non-verbal components of communication, it obliges us to be conscious of our and our interlocutors’ body language and mood, as well as our surroundings. Apparently, this subject has been of some interest to the scientists. It turns out that reading the air is not only something that we do, consciously or not, but also something that affects our physical sensations. There was an interesting NYT article “A Cold Stare Can Make You Crave Some Heat” by Benedict Carey about a scientific analysis of the effect of social rejection or the ‘cold stare’ on people. It was found that when feeling disregarded or dismissed (verbally or not) in a social situation, people perceive a decrease in the outside temperature. Next time you get that coffee or hot chocolate, think whether it’s really a caffeine craving.