“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

This Saturday I will perform a solo work called Rite of the Butcher at the United Solo Festival at Theatre Row near Times Square. I want to take this opportunity not just to plug the performance but to write briefly about it from a perspective I do not usually share: not the aesthetics of the work, not its relationship to other forms of theatrical and embodied research, not the technique that underlies it or the poetic language that structures it — but its meaning for me personally. Why do I do it?

Creating a work like this not only doesn’t pay but costs money. I have paid the festival to produce me and several studios to house my rehearsals over the past year, not to mention videography and a few other purchases here and there: things like a carving knife, a pair of round blue glasses, and a hem on the cuffs of a pair of black pants. And beyond the monetary cost there is a huge number of hours spent mostly in the studio developing and rehearsing the score. Plus the administrative work of applying for venues like this festival and of doing publicity for the show.

I no longer think of myself as an actor because I have not performed in a work directed by someone else since 2005. I have no interest in auditioning or being shaped and directed as actors and dancers usually are. Even in collaborative ensembles I always found myself unsatisfied on an intellectual and artistic level. I simply don’t like embodying performance scores unless I feel that I have been in on their development since the beginning. That’s why I’ve never trained in yoga or martial arts for more than a few months at a time. It’s not mine.

This sense of “mine-ness” could seem greedy or controlling, except that the thing that is mine does not exist, it is not an object, it cannot be possessed. In fact it’s not really “mine-ness” so much as “me-ness”. I want to do what I am; to be what I do; to know what I’m doing; to understand how and why I am doing it. In other words, I want to be the creator and the doer simultaneously. That’s why I can’t be an actor or a director, and why I don’t think of myself as a theater person even though I spend most of my time either creating or writing about theatrical performance. That’s also why for the past six years I have worked either alone or with a single other person in a long-term collaborative partnership.

From 2002 to 2010, I didn’t like to think of what I was doing as “theater” because I associated theater with the moment of spectacle and with a relationship to a public sphere that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in. These days, perhaps due to my academic work, I have a much stronger but more complicated sense of the public sphere. It no longer feels ridiculous or absurd to want to appear “in public” as doing something: writing a book, making a presentation, or giving a performance. I no longer dismiss the public sphere as entirely dominated by consumerism, even if mainstream entertainment and advertising remain omnipresent and nearly omnipotent.

But still I do not like to think of this performance as a “show”. That word for me remains stuck in too many dangerous connotations: above all, the passiveness or at least separateness of the spectator, as if what I am doing onstage is categorically different from what each of us does in our daily lives. It is not. My movements are just movements. My songs are just songs. My words are just words. Do not look at what I am doing for its strangeness. Do not admire it as a decorative object. Do not ask what I mean to say but what it means that I am doing it. Ask why I am doing it and look in it for what you recognize as your own. I do this because the details of this practice are me; they are what I am. But we all have practices, we all entwine ourselves in the details of specific field, and this is what makes the world go round.

More and more I think it is fundamental to remember how much of our world is created and sustained by human activity. The more artificial our world becomes, the easier it is to forget this and to think that the world sustains itself. But the family, the city, the institution, the social movement, the corporation, the bank, the court of law, the country, the tribe — each of these is created through embodied practices. Each is sustained through human work, and each can be dismantled or transformed in the same way. What would happen if, when we looked at things, we saw the work that went into them? Not the performance, but the performer — not the building, but the builders — not the institution, but the people.

[Photos by Ian Douglas. Rite of the Butcher created and performed by Ben Spatz. For more information and other projects please visit Urban Research Theater.]

The iconic image of Seattle '99. All other photos (below) were taken today with my little phone camera.

I had only been living in New York City for a couple of years when the Bush government began a palpable build-up towards the war in Iraq. The 2003 protests were much larger, perhaps because there was a single clear and urgent demand uniting us and bringing us into the streets: Do not invade Iraq. But the urgency and poignancy of this demand was matched by a sense of inevitability as it became apparent that our country could and would start a war in Iraq despite our attempts to stop it.

Protesters and cops on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Despite the fact that I believe profoundly in a politics of social protest and radical democracy, I’ve always found it hard to participate on more than an occasional basis. On a personal level, I’ve often found the act of protest unsatisfying. It’s not precise, well-crafted, or efficient. I believe in it, but I’ve always want to be part of something more clearly defined, something within which I could have a clear role and a clear set of responsibilities. As a result I have pursued an artistic practice and eventually academic studies: areas where I could set long-term goals for myself and feel I had some chance of achieving them.

But I think I may have been wrong. Maybe social movements are, in their own way, precise and well-crafted and efficient. Maybe it is possible to find or make a clear role for oneself in a social movement. Maybe it is possible to set long-term goals. Maybe the problem for me in 2003 wasn’t that protest didn’t make sense to me but that it couldn’t provide me with a living. Now that I have a more stable income, at least for the time being, and now that my artistic practice is also more secure, I wonder again how my life and my work could be made to serve more directly political ends.

The police begin a long process of peaceful arrests.

I had barely arrived in Zuccotti Park when the 3:00pm march began. The crowd flowed uptown as a line of police kept our chanting and placards confined to the sidewalk. “ALL DAY! ALL WEEK! OCCUPY WALL STREET!” Not one but several double decker tour buses passed alongside the protesters. We cheered at them and sometimes they cheered back. The mood was festive. “BANKS GOT BAILED OUT! WE GOT SOLD OUT!” A woman with a tape recorder briefly interviewed me: “Do you feel proud of these people?” Yes.

We filled up the entire sidewalk, making it difficult for non-protesters to get through. There were cameras everywhere. One man spoke into his own tape recorder, calling the crowd “inspired and eclectic.” He was right. Although there was a substantial portion of visibly punk-influenced protesters, they were not the majority. There were plenty of older folk and a range of dress styles including a few people in suits. “TELL ME WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE! THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” From where I stood the group seemed predominantly white, but by no means entirely.

I was surprised when I saw in front of me that the protest was headed up onto the Brooklyn Bridge. I had thought we would circle back to the park or perhaps head up towards Union Square as I knew happened recently. What was the plan here? Were we going to walk to Brooklyn? What would we do once we got there? But it didn’t really matter. A point was being made. We were walking. We were appearing. I wanted to be part of this appearance. As I told the woman with the tape recorder, I don’t have any expectations, but I do have a hope. I hope this is the beginning of a new social movement.

I followed the line of protesters onto the pedestrian walkway and we began to cross over the bridge. Then, slowly, I began to realize that there was another group of protesters below us on the other level. They were down there with the cars. And the cars were stopping. At first traffic was reduced to two lanes, then one. Finally it came to a halt. “WE ARE THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT! YOU ARE THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT!” At least two hundred protesters jammed the bridge, making it impassable. It was an electric moment, one that seemed not to have been anticipated either by the protesters or by police.

Detained protesters are lined up on the side of the bridge, separated from the rest.

We were taking over the bridge.

From the pedestrian walkway, I watched the other group below. Those of us above were protesters, but we were not breaking the law. They were. It was our job to witness whatever happened to them.

Police vehicles line up on the bridge for mass arrests.

After several minutes the police began to arrive from both sides on the lower level. No one was in any hurry. I heard someone ask: “How do you de-escalate a situation like this?” The answer: You don’t. The protesters wanted to walk to Brooklyn. They were not going to turn back. And at a certain point the police would no longer let them. “WHOSE BRIDGE? OUR BRIDGE!” Soon the police had set up barriers around the protesting group. Cops and protesters faced off. From above, we watched.

The police began to arrest the protesters on the lower level of the bridge. It was unceremonious and simple. They didn’t need any cause beyond the fact that the protesters were blocking traffic. Yet how could this end? Surely they were not going to arrest hundreds of people? Then I began to understand that this is exactly what they were going to do.

“THIS IS A PEACEFUL MARCH! THIS IS A PEACEFUL MARCH!”

Traffic was completely blocked on the outbound side of the bridge.

Or perhaps they would not be officially arrested, but merely detained. Separated. Hands bound behind their backs with white plastic zip-ties. Lined up sitting against the side of the bridge. Trucks and buses called in to bring them away. The bridge cleared for business as usual.

It was obvious that this was going to take hours. Hours in which outgoing traffic would be halted, causing jams throughout lower Manhattan as everyone leaving the city had to take an alternate route.

From above, we watched.

Police escort protesters off the pedestrian walkway.

Some protesters were very angry at the cops for doing this. Some of them were yelling that it was our right to be on the bridge because the bridge is a public space. A few were screaming at the cops and calling them Nazis.

I didn’t feel any anger at the cops. I don’t consider the police force to be entirely aligned with the interests of the rich. We do not live in a police state. From what I saw today, the cops behaved respectfully, even if their attitudes were verbally and physically aggressive.

I understand why there is a law that says you can’t block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s not a bad law, as laws go. The point isn’t that protesters should be allowed to do whatever they want with impunity. The point is that protesters can choose to break the law peacefully but firmly in order to draw attention to their cause.

But what is the cause?

Organizer hands an activist newspaper to the driver of an inbound car.

No single demand is being made by the protest movement that has become known as Occupy Wall Street. I think that’s a good thing. The demands of this seedling movement are too broad and fundamental to be captured in a single demand or even a list of demands, at least so far. The Tea Party did not begin with a single demand. It’s a party, a group, a community. It has pulled the Republican party to the right. Can this new movement pull the Democratic party to the left?

It would not be hard to describe the basic politics of the people gathered at Wall Street. They are against corporate globalization and the ever-increasing, unjustifiable gap between rich and poor. Surely most of those gathered there also support environmental sustainability, green technologies, feminism and anti-racist politics. But there’s plenty of room for disagreement as well. And when it comes to putting these values into practice through specific social policies — that’s a whole different question.

I wonder if an action that clearly breaks the law, such as stopping traffic on a Brooklyn Bridge, does imply the need for a clearer demand. To peacefully occupy Wall Street is one thing. Such an occupation could go on indefinitely. It could last for days, months, even years. It could become the epicenter of a new social movement in the United States, something that hasn’t been seen for decades. A city within a city. A beating heart for a new body politic.

AWAKEN! Protesters coming off the bridge.

Blocking traffic is something else. We are the people. Ultimately, when united, we hold all the power because we are everyone. We can shut down the city. We can redistribute the wealth. We can create a federal works program. We can rebuild infrastructure. We can regulate the banks. We can pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We can release nonviolent offenders. We can forgive student debt. Because if “we” is everyone, there’s no one else to stop us. But “we” do not agree on all these things. We have different perspectives, different values, different ideas.

Who occupied the bridge? I’m not asking for the names of individuals who were there. I’m asking who these individuals represent. The idea that a small group can represent a larger one is tricky, dicey, delicate, but absolutely essential. We will not have pure consensus among three hundred thousand people, let alone seven billion. Some form of representation is essential.

So who was it that occupied Brooklyn Bridge today? Was it a bunch of left-wing New Yorkers? Was it the NYC branch of a global anti-tyranny movement that started Tahrir Square? Was it the face of democracy? Was it the people of the United States of America? Was it you?

Eventually the police came and cleared us off the pedestrian walkway as well. By the time I left perhaps a quarter of those on the lower level had been arrested. I wonder if they are still there now, as I write this, in the process of being arrested. More importantly, I wonder how many people will be back tomorrow and the next day. Increasing numbers, I hope. More every day. Until we find out what this moment really means for this city, this country, this world.

(More details and photos here.)

Writing is hard work. It takes practice. A student who came to office hours this week asked me if he would ever become a better writer. “Keep writing,” I told him. “If you want to become a better writer, you have to keep doing it.”

Writing is defining. I am currently in the home stretch of completing my dissertation. I have a defense date scheduled, and a date for when my completed draft is due. Although I am juggling duties as a Communication Fellow, an adjunct instructor, a graduate student, and a future faculty member, with this deadline looming in front of me, my primary identity has lately become: Writer of words. Many, many words.

Writing is exhausting. With so much of my mental and verbal capacities being consumed by the dissertation, I find that I don’t have much time or energy for other writerly duties. Like writing blog posts.

Writing is a process.

Writing is note-taking, lists, and scratch-pads.

Writing is revising, with helpful comments from friends.

Writing is reading, and integrating other people’s ideas.

Writing requires breaks, nourishment, and reward. I personally enjoy coffee, a tasty snack, and the New Yorker magazine.

Now, back to work!

A friend told me recently that it was a tradition for Jewish children introduced to religious study to be given honey, so they’d associate it with sweetness and joy.

I’m teaching a class on “The Advanced Research Essay,” which is really a workshop on how to write a thesis paper. I’m leading this workshop as I work on finishing my dissertation, and halfway through the semester my students and I are very much in the same boat.

They’ve finished their annotated bibliographies, they’ve worked hard to assimilate and categorize books and articles on their topics. Now they have to pull their heads out of the waters of research, and turn to their thesis—go from broad and inclusive to incisive and narrow focus. At this stage in my research, I became a bit obsessive-compulsive. Asked a simple question like “What are you studying?” I’d use a word like “empathy” and have to run through a trail of citations from Kant to Hannah Arendt. Grad school can do this to you, and as a fellow fellow and I said last week, second exams train you not to make succinct claims without following every word down the rabbit hole. I think this is partly what accounts for the logic of titles that Alessandro pointed out. The colon is like “towards”, (another class title and dissertation title favorite). Rather than making a statement, or asking a question, we say we’ll go in a direction, or go around. We’d never dream of, you know, declaring something. That would be so…pedantic. I’ve been trying to think of the most daring titles I admire. The Great Gatsby: it dares to say its protagonist is great, and also to tell you its subject is just a guy. And, The Human Condition. Not On the Human Condition, or Towards the Human Condition: fill in the blank. So, we’re not all Hannah Arendt and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I realized that during their annotated bibliographies, not only had my students lost a lot of hubris, but they’d also lost some of the idiosyncratic attachment and associative logic that brought them to their topics in the first place. So, I went back to The Craft of Research, by Booth, Colomb, and Williams, my grad school freshman text, and pulled out a fill-in-the-blank assignment:

1. Topic: I am studying _____.

2. Question: Because I want to find out ______.

3. Significance: To help readers ______.

Many of my students exhibited what I recognized as insecure-student syndrome, rattling off the now ingrained phrases and logic of their readings. We had to talk about real, idiosyncratic questions; and in getting to the impetus for their work, we sometimes realized the original question, or deep unease that made the private string of lights under this tent of citation, was too personal to talk about in class. That too was worth recognizing. “Death and literature” is indeed a naïve topic for a career, but maybe interests should be on a larger, less sophisticated scale than career strategies. If not, there are so many jobs which do not provoke the question “So what are you working on?”

So, like legions of other Murrow alums, I’ve been spending time thinking about just what it is exactly that makes me feel like I want a bust of Mr. Bruckner in my living room. Many of us appreciate the important teacher figures from our pasts, but what of the folks who didn’t necessarily teach us long division or what the Rococo period was about? What of the learning that comes from that dispersed thing known as educational leadership?– from administrators, of all people?

The first thing to mention about Mr. Bruckner is just how old school he was, in a new school kind of way. He was a truly progressive educator who didn’t need to appropriate slang or wear a whistle in order to “connect” with young people. He rose up the ranks in the New York City school system (back when it was still a Board of Education, and not a Department) as a social studies teacher, became assistant principal at Dewey High School, and eventually opened Murrow in 1974.

Edward R. Murrow High School is known for the many progressive aspects of its structure and approach, but Mr. Bruckner himself came across as a pretty subdued, non-controversial guy. You’d imagine that a principal who allowed students freedom of choice in their academic pursuits, outlawed bells and hall sweeps and detention and sports teams, gave students the benefit of the doubt when it came to unstructured time, and fiercely defended music and arts programs might be more of a hippie crusader in moccasins than a buttoned-up older gentleman in neat tweed suit jackets. Not so.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Still, those are the facts. When the Times published a short article about his memorial service, I started honing in on what I found so unique about Mr. Bruckner.  The photo that accompanied the article did it; Mr. Bruckner, with his arms folded, his red name tag jutting out from his jacket, listening intently to three students surrounding him, all of whom look like they’ve got more than one bone to pick with the guy. That was his usual posture—arms crossed, ears open, completely committed– and it wasn’t rare for Mr. Bruckner to be outnumbered. I stood in front of him this way many times, standing with my friends and shooting off at the mouth about something or other, while Mr. Bruckner stood stock-still and listened—sometimes with a bemused smile, sometimes with a look of mild judgment. Perhaps the man closed the door to his oblong office (where he also taught his 7:30am AP American History course) and privately screamed into a rattan pillow—if he did, we never caught on.

The man was consistency itself, and I’d guess that he realized just how important that was to us, to see him standing by the main entrance every morning as we entered clutching our bagels. He was an eloquent man of few words, but clear actions. Students at Murrow were allowed to lounge in the hallways during “free” periods (which weren’t called “periods” at all), but if we were obliviously sitting next to a clump of trash, Bruckner would suddenly swing around a corner to pitch it in the garbage, reminding us at once that he was boss, it was our building, and no task was too insignificant for him– or us.

Mr. Bruckner’s death crystallized for me even further when I read an article penned by one of my former English teachers at Murrow, Katherine Schulten. Ms. Schulten is now editor of The Learning Network, and she identifies five poignant lessons for educators that she took from working with Mr. Bruckner.  The final one, “Kids come first,” coupled with her description of Mr. Bruckner—kindness, intelligence, commitment and vision—packaged up exactly what I’d wanted to say all along. How remarkable to observe someone with so little (discernable) ego, a fellow who never went out of his way to strut his feathers and yet implemented such a strong vision at the same time. To be an educator who skips the bloviating and lingers on the students while constructing a school culture that follows his thoughtful concepts– and then he hangs out long enough to really see it flourish and sustain? A term that Mr. Bruckner himself taught me is the only one I can think to use: rara avis.

Ms. Schulten’s article got me thinking: as someone who routinely stands in front of clusters of young people and some days finds the crown of educator a very difficult one to wear, ignoring Mr. Bruckner’s legacy outside of its most general terms shouldn’t be an option. Sure, the life of an adjunct lecturer and Communication Fellow is very different from that of a high school principal, but that’s no excuse to disregard the challenge that his example puts forth. I heard the news about Mr. Bruckner’s passing during the crowded and frustrating end-of-semester crush, when students were filling my  inbox with frantic emails arguing about grades, contesting plagiarism charges, pleading for forgiveness. Some days it’s incredibly difficult to maintain empathy, priorities, and focus—the kind of focus, I realize, Mr. Bruckner persisted with, day in, and day out, for so many years.

Numerous Facebook groups have already popped up paying tribute to Mr. Bruckner, and an accompanying campaign to have the street outside of the school renamed in his honor would be a fitting memorial to a life’s work that thrived at the humble intersection of Avenue L and 17th Street. An equally moving tribute is represented by the many students who, like me, have been newly considering just what was in this special sauce and where  we might apply it ourselves. I’d suspect that it won’t just be about picking up that lone piece of trash in the hallways, but also about that particular blend of action and patience. Still, it’s an educational riddle worth committing time to: how did he do it? And how can we?

Image from the blog post Watercooler Confidential, "Death by PowerPoint." Click image for original post.

Government malfeasance and bureaucratic incompetence step aside: there’s now a new reason for the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s a product made by Microsoft. According to this widely circulated article in the New York Times, the over-use of PowerPoint, Microsoft’s sleep inducing presentation software, is the new menace threatening the success of the US military adventures in the Middle East. The article cites a growing number of high-ranking military officials who are increasingly critical of the communication platform. The greatest threat to clarity for many of these officials, the paper reports, is not the muddled mess of circles and arrows pictured above, but the emphasis on hierarchical thinking, which, according to several military officers, even those who frequently use PowerPoint, tends to dumb down and generalize the information being conveyed.

“Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable,” said Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, adding “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control.”

This complaint is, of course nothing new. Edward Tufte makes the near identical argument in his 2003 essay: “The Cognitive Style of Power Point: Pitching Out Corrupts within.” That essay includes a remarkable discussion of how NASA’s over-reliance on PowerPoint may have inadvertently been responsible for the failure of the Space Shuttle Columbia upon re-entry February1, 2003, claiming that reliance upon bulleted information led to a kind of sales pitch mentality, which obfuscated the real threat posed by the debris impact shortly after launch. “The language, spirit, and presentation tool of the pitch culture had penetrated throughout the NASA organization, even into the most serious technical analysis, the survival of the shuttle,” said Tufte.

Could this very well be what happened in May of that same year, when military and administration officials decided to invade Iraq in search of WMDs? Indeed, the actual decision to invade was obviously a cynical fait accompli, manufactured by The White House and Downing Street, but one can only imagine the great number of PowerPoint pitches that made that decision possible, not to mention the number that followed the invasion which helped to justify the continued presence of US troops in the absence of any chemical or nuclear weapons.

Each semester I teach a workshop on presentation basics to several groups of Business Department students here at Baruch, and, despite the continued uncritical reliance upon PowerPoint, or perhaps because of it, it seems like students are beginning to figure out that the templates Microsoft provides are maybe not the best place to begin their presentations. When I tell students “PowerPoint is for your audience, not for you;” when I try to explain the importance of presenting information visually in a clear and objective form; and when I make the suggestion that maybe they avoid using PowerPoint entirely, I don’t receive nearly as many looks of angry consternation as I used to. Perhaps, just like the generals interviewed for the Times piece, these students have been the victims of one too many redundant, unimaginative, and narrow-minded PowerPoint presentation (often from their instructors) and maybe, just maybe, they’re ready to move beyond the tyranny of the bullet-point.

Either way, there is at least one place where the use of PowerPoint may be expected to lose some of its attraction. I just found out that Edward Tufte has been hired by the Obama Administration as a member of the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, to help investigate and clearly explain the impact of the $787 Billion economic stimulus package passed last year. If only we could now get him to explain credit default swaps to Congress.

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 unbalanced 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.

I first read these stories in an experimental prose writing course a bunch of years ago, and the concept of these one-to-three page gems intrigued me. I was reminded of these stories this past semester, when, through my work supporting Advanced Accounting, a Communication Intensive Course, I found myself confronting palm-of-the-hand speeches. When I first learned that students had only two-to-three minutes to present their assigned material, I was skeptical. Two minutes to discuss a contemporary concept in accountancy?

As the semester progressed, and I struggled to help students condense the finer points of recording intangible assets on balance sheets, I necessarily focused on the benefits of these l’il speeches. Just as Kawabata’s stories are deeply complex while also being succinct, shorter speeches have the same potential. Translator J. Martin Holman could be talking about ACC 4100 speeches when he writes of the relationship between Kawabata’s small stories and his longer works:

“The palm-of-the-hand story appears to have been Kawabata’s basic unit of composition from which his longer works were built, after the manner of linked-verse poetry, in which discrete verses are joined to form a longer poem, the linkage between each dependent on subtle shifts as the poem continues.”

While longer speaking opportunities are still crucial for our students, these palm-of-the-hand speeches can give students a better familiarity with the basic units of composition required for larger speeches. I used to think of two minute speeches as a good exercise in summarizing, editing and brevity, but they do have their structural benefits, as well.  According to Holman, Kawabata mastered this form using certain elements (the same ones that would make any Palmist speech exiting); “juxtaposition of images,” “unique perception,” and “intriguing and memorable” plots– not reductions, but distillations of larger worlds.

There are clear positives and negatives to assigning such a short presentation, but on certain days, the luxury of having a lot of time to concentrate on just two minutes of material did seem like a very Palmist exercise. Students themselves, however, don’t always see the merits of this, and, rather than viewing it as the essence of their art, are more apt to view the assignment as the gnat buzzing around their schoolwork.  How might it be possible to elevate and enliven these palm-of-the-hand speeches to the place that Kawabata realized they deserve?

The workshop was designed to inform us about how to teach students to engage with secondary sources in many different ways other than just to support or back up an argument. For example, sources can be used “as a primary focus of analysis, to establish a problem or question worth addressing, to supply context, background, or information, to provide key terms or concepts, and to grapple with another opinion or interpretation.”

We had two brief exercises: first, we read an article (Stanley Cohen’s “Folk Devil and Moral Panics”) to identify the ways in which the author uses his sources; second, we drew a diagram illustrating our strategies to handle the secondary materials that we use in our own writing project, the technique introduced by Mark Gaipa. Gaipa’s article (Pedagogy 4.3, 2004) suggests a variety of strategies that are illustrated with cartoons: picking a fight, ass kissing, piggybacking, leapfrogging, playing peacemaker, acting paranoid, dropping out, and crossbreeding.  I found that the drawing exercise indeed helped me relieve my anxiety dealing with sources, so I am thinking of using it as an office-hour exercise for my students. It might also be helpful for those of us who are writing a dissertation and having a hard time handling source materials, oftentimes feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. I knew drawing was often used in therapy, but I’d never realized its power before I had the exercise in the workshop.

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!

From Pauvre Plume (originally from Fairbanks Daily News-Miner)

Let’s face it, I was stalling; instead of prepping for my looming dissertation defense, I was skimming news bites on the Internet. I stumbled upon the obituary for Nicholas Hughes – the son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – who had recently committed suicide. The online obituary held little information about Hughes himself, but made much of his famous parents and manner of death. Struck by the lack of biographical detail, I turned to Wikipedia for a quick gloss on who he was and what he’d done. The Wikipedia entry had little more to offer: a few details about his work, a quote from his sister regarding his love of nature and his struggles with depression, a mention of his dual British/American citizenship.

Most striking of all, the Hughes entry was flagged for possible deletion on the grounds of “general notability”. The Wikipedia community was invited to discuss whether Hughes was important enough to warrant an entry of his own, or whether the entry should be deleted completely. The discussion was brief but vigorous, reflecting a vocal range from lofty academic to colloquial chat. There were those who suggested that his only claim to notability was as the son of two (in)famous literary icons; he was at best a footnote to their Wikipedia entries. Others felt Hughes’ research and scholarship had been completely misrepresented, not to mention mislabeled; he was not a marine biologist, but rather a fisheries biologist with a broad range of applied research behind him. A couple of discussants huffily questioned whether the sensationalism surrounding his death (he committed suicide as did his mother and stepmother) was enough to warrant his presence on Wikipedia. Some found the timing of the whole deletion discussion tacky. After all, the man had just died; couldn’t we spare him a moment’s attention before confining him to oblivion?

I found myself completely sucked into the discussion, as the participants negotiated Hughes’ virtual right to life. Who do you have to be, in order to be? What does it take to become visible — and stay visible — in a socially constructed world? Especially a world that precludes physical embodiment? As we explore virtual community in all its shapes, forms and permutations, how do we co-construct presence and absence? And what does it mean when we do so?

Postscript: Are you wondering what happened to the Nicholas Hughes entry? After a roughly a day’s debate, the decision was made to keep him as an independent entry. A general call went out for more information, and as of this writing, the sketchy “stub” that initially drew my attention has tripled in size. Hughes is now more “present” on Wikipedia than before the threat to his virtual existence. Present, but perhaps not completely visible there…There still is no picture of Hughes posted to his profile.

After our last general staff meeting, I went to the BPL workshop organized by Dusana. It was a most useful discussion we had, in the course of which, among other things, we talked about rehearsals in danger of  turning  into group therapy sessions with students. People had  brilliant ideas about balancing things out and setting aside a given amount of time in the course of each rehearsal to help students wind down. (Our own Zohra has a special technique, which we all found excellent, but, since she has the copyrights, further inquiries should be addressed to her. )

On this note, I would be curious if anybody else has a take on this. I personally find that I can relatively quickly gauge the inner dynamics of a group and vibe with them. It is the pedagogue in me who is watching the students, and  I act in the way I feel would be most productive to them. At times, I assume authority, but mostly I act like a peer who is very approachable and understanding about their issues and concerns (and, at times, they have a lot of those, related to their course, their professor, assignments, etc.). What always works is showing a great deal of respect to them. Once you grant them this respect, they will act up to it. However, besides being humane, I do not have any other more specific way of creating the atmosphere, so to say. Some people play a game, I thought about getting a bunch of fresh flowers in the rehearsal room, just to liven things up. (In my rush, I keep forgetting it, of course.)  Any other ideas? I know that professionalism is key here, but I do not think we jeopardize it by patting our students’ souls a little bit, do we?

I love this quirky little how-to clip, mostly because the audio doesn’t match up to the video, making poor Leila look like she needs her own mandated visit to the house of corrections. But I can relate to Leila and her message, and I’m willing to admit that I stumbled upon this video in a moment of desperation, when I was brainstorming different approaches to this question of encouraging solid eye contact in oral communicating.

As most of us have probably discovered by now, when we’re providing feedback on speeches, merely repeating “you need to make more eye contact” doesn’t do the trick. (And really, why should it?) Most of the speakers we work with know full well that eye contact is something they should shoot for—they’ve seen this on speech evaluation forms and read about it dutifully in their Intro to Public Speaking class way back when. But if they commit this same “offense” in every presentation they make—staring at the PP screen, or at the floor, or at their hands, or note cards—when does the practice actually come in?

And, just as importantly, how do we invigorate our own approach to this thorny delivery snag? Some days, “make more eye contact” becomes the easy go-to, that dull phrase you know you’ll probably say before the student even begins. But isn’t commenting on eye contact just another way of saying that they didn’t make a connection with their audience? If we wanted to get all Eckhart Tolle on this post, we could extend it into the idea of being fully present (which has plenty of resonances in actor training). We all know how magical it can be when someone gives really great eye—that mixture of confidence, care, and connection– but how is it best learned?

I’ve tried a few new things in my recent quest to investigate the power of the Connecting Eyes. In the classroom, I’ve become more emboldened to push away the chairs and try out some of the better eye contact exercises that I know of, forcing people to get used to going eyeball-to-eyeball. Some of these exercises transform the room into a sort of communications gym class, which is a little hard to get used to, but not a bad thing at all. Does this have more successful outcomes in student performance? Hard to tell, exactly. But it certainly increases comfort and community among the students.

And during my BPL sessions with student groups, I’ve changed my approach. Instead of allowing the students to run through their entire presentations before I provide my feedback, I now occasionally stop them mid-stream, prompting them to re-do an entire section, this time focusing on, say, sustained eye contact. I know some of you out there have run your practice sessions like this for quite a while, but I’m just now catching on to its real benefits. I had been skeptical of the logic of isolating one element and potentially distracting the speaker with it, but I’m now thinking of these sessions as true rehearsals; if they can’t “run through” their work multiple times, what are the chances that a pattern of poor delivery will be broken?

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks.  According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”

What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes?  Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.

Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition).  If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project.  For details on how the technology works, click here.

This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network.  reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process.  All of us together are smarter than we are added up.

Brilliant work.

(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TpmJgSfZ_8[/youtube]

He even wrote a song about his:

When I’m writing, my “little hater” tells me I need to find a fifth or a sixth corroborating piece of evidence before I can make a claim, and even after I do, the damn thing still comes out tentative.  He sometimes makes me think that the idea that I just came up with can’t be anywhere near as good as I originally thought because, well, I’m the one who came up with it.  Someone else probably wrote something similar somewhere else, and I just haven’t seen it yet.

I’ve about had enough of this bastard getting in my way.

Sometimes, when I need get a post up on this blog, I start writing about interests that I don’t get to explore when I write reports, papers, proposals, or emails.  It’s possible to tie almost anything into that topic taped up there across the header.  “Write what you know” isn’t useful just for getting our students to break through their shells.  It’s also a useful way to put your little hater on his heels, get the engine revving, and start a conversation.

I think journal writing can be a great learning tool and not just in a composition classroom.  We know that many professors do not see the value in encouraging students to relate their personal experiences to the readings.  And, journal writing is certainly not a common practice outside of the composition program.  But it is no news that the making of new meaning is always connected to the previously gained knowledge and experience, to the things that go on in the students’ lives currently.  Why not let our students make that connection not always on the spot in the classroom, but in their personal writing space? 

  I hope that Blackboard discussions would be valuable for my group of Great Works students.  Some of them need a lot of support in language areas, and they are the ones who would probably benefit most from these online discussions.  However, I’m afraid they would also be the least forthcoming participants.  Can those of you who have experience initiating blogs suggest ways to reach out to most diffident participants? 

However, I think I made connections between my own academic work and the work with MBA students this spring and a few things clicked into place more clearly. I don’t know how long I’ve told students, “writing is a process.” (Imagine you are hearing that mantra from an annoying professor, battered at you in a sing-song-y voice.) But I think it sunk in a little further for me. After watching 11 groups of successful medical professionals present solid Powerpoint presentations, that nonetheless still needed revision, and watching them watch themselves on video, the light went on. Prior to this they had already submitted the paper versions of their business plans, and felt well prepared. But in addition to the videotape making clear the various nervous tics they had while speaking, or that they engaged the slide screen far more than they did the audience, it also helped them see the entire scope of their presentation, how well its various parts fit together, and where they needed to change the emphasis. They could clearly see if their argument needed bolstering with evidence in some areas, or increased clarity in others.

Watching them, I realized that the only way their presentations could make it to the ‘next level’ so to speak, was by going through this final review and revision process. Not only that, for these students especially, I was truly more of a coach and facilitator than anything else. It was a combination of my experience, their experience, the videocamera, and their own critical review of themselves, that really made the process worthwhile. I wouldn’t say they didn’t need me, but it was the process and the assemblage of them, me, the camera, and the review, that was essential.

Composition 101 has long been regarded, almost without question, as the “required writing course.” Yet, students don’t really learn how to think more critically in these courses and therefore continue to churn out, in all of their coures, poorly written essays with lukewarm thoughts and little substance.

Creative writing courses, on the other hand, are regarded as “electives”–courses that only “artistic” types take or, mistakenly, a way to get an easy A. The creative writing course, however, seems to strive towards effective communication, analysis, argument and thesis development, critical thinking, eloquence, articulation, and correct writing.

In a typical creative writing class, students will read difficult works of fiction and poetry. They will be asked to discuss the most minor details of these works and be able to back up any statement they make with not only textual references but also with interpretive skills that may call on what they have read before.

Additionally, students will “workshop” their classmates’ writings, applying the same critical and analytical skills that they will have gained by reading and discussing published works of literature, both contemporary and canonical.

(During a typical workshop, the student whose work is being discussed is not allowed to speak until the end, at which time she may ask questions. I find, however, that most students want to defend their writings or say, “This is what my writing means,” a practice that I discourage.)

A good creative writing teacher will not allow her students to merely say, “I really liked this” or “I didn’t like this.” Students must say why. The writing workshop is an exercise in close reading and critical commentary. I make my students read and comment directly on their classmates’ writing before the workshop. They must come to the class prepared to speak. The workshop, therefore, requires that students both write and orally communicate their thoughts.

And I don’t let anyone hide. In a typical workshop, a student will have articulated his or her thoughts an average of five times. If four workshops are conducted in a two hour class, each student will have spoken 20 times.

There certainly are enough MFA in Creative Writing graduates to fill the demands of the writing curriculum at American colleges, but I can already hear the cries of our composition-rhetoric colleagues protesting that creative writing is not a critical or academically rigorous discipline. I read more during my two-years as a MFA student than I have as my four years as Ph.D. student in English. A typical Tuesday assignment (for Thursday’s class) from my creative writing professor was: read George Steiner’s After Babel, Robert Lowell’s Imitations, Stanley Burnshaw’s The Poem Itself; find a poem and translate it in the three modes of translation according to Steiner; find three different translations of Dante’s Inferno and report back on which translation is more effective and why based on content and prosody (prosody being my professor’s seemingly harmless way of saying “every poetic device,” so you had better scan the poems before coming to class because you might be asked about how a certain trochee affected the poem); and email, by Wednesday midnight, a three-page essay on one poet in The Poem Itself and how you might read this poet according to After Babel.

On Thursday, we would discuss all of this and more. We would read and analyze our classmate’s translations. We would have to eloquently articulate our thoughts and integrate, into our conversation, our readings throughout the semester.

We polished our poems before we photocopied them for our professor and classmates. We went over them endlessly, revising and perfecting, taking into account the comments of our teacher and classmates and our own developing artistic and critical sensibilities. We questioned our revision choices; sometimes we went back to our original plans. But we were revising, and we were revising in a way that was intended to please us, not to get a higher grade.

For us, revising was high stakes: it was on a level that was critical, personal, artistic. The revisions we made seemed to change the world, or our places in that world. It seems to me that this is the way writing, critical thinking, and communicating ought to be taught.

It is with unbelievable difficulty that my ideas arrange themselves into any sort of order in my head. They circle there obscurely, they ferment to the point where they stir me, fire me, cause my heart to palpitate; and in the midst of all this emotion I see nothing clearly; I cannot write a word, I must wait. Imperceptibly, the great movement subsides, order succeeds chaos, everything finds its proper place; but slowly, and only after a long and confused agitation.

This passage reminds me of some advice Johannes Brahms is supposed to have given once regarding composing. You should begin work on a piece, he said, but then set it aside for awhile without thinking about it. Upon returning to the piece later, you will often discover that some of the problems that first presented themselves have been worked out, and you will have a clear sense of how to proceed.

From a psychological point of view, Rousseau and Brahms both highlight the importance of the subconscious in the creative process. In their view a successful composition is fashioned, in part, outside the realm of conscious intention. I wonder if there is any place for this creative “non-practice” in college composition courses. Perhaps there are ways to foster a productive subconscious creativity with practices that extend beyond the act of writing itself.