No ideas in this one but have decided that to keep my few followers I need to post regularly. Being too busy (which I have been) shouldn’t be an excuse; I could always post at least a one-liner once a week. Keep me to it.
I'm at the ‘writing up’ stage of my bit of the research (English in three London schools, 1945-65 -- Walworth School is my part, with Pat Kingwell). The task is somewhat tedious: you look at 30 bits of information and can write one sentence as a result. As a result it doesn’t flow, and the text is pedestrian -- I end up saying what happened but not what it means, why significant. That, I suppose, will be the next stage. And I imagine much of what I've written will be discarded as too trivial, too nitpicking or just too much. But I don’t think I can shortcut the process.
By Eurostar to Brussels last week - my first time except to change trains. (Return journey tedious -- 3 hours delay when train broke down, towed back to Brussels, check-in and security all over again, replacement train not ready. But the compensation made it all worth it: another return ticket to Brussels.)
I enjoyed Brussels of course, but one highlights was meeting two of my ex-PGCE students, John and Amy, now married and with a son and teaching at a British international school. On the train and in cafes etc read Camus L’Etranger in French - surprised how easy since I'm not very good. Fantastic novel -- hadn’t realised how good. (Read it English years ago -- can’t remember when). Inspired by that I found a great second-hand shop and bought some more Camus and also de Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution, which I also found I could manage. Great book, terrific writing. What made me get that was two things: (1) an interest in the French Revolution, arising from reading Burke and Carlyle (see label); (2) reading Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, which is about de T and his earlier book, Democracy in America, which I’d also looked at. Ancien Régime is a terrific read: intellectual force and lively, spirited writing. It has an argument that holds it together beautifully, and some polemical points for contemporary France (1850s).
There’s more but that will do for now.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Friday, 5 November 2010
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Comic artists and English
Foyles had an event with two of the biggest US comics / cartoon / graphic novel artists, Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware. The theatre it was held in (Cochrane Theatre by Central St Martins School of Art) was full so they clearly have a huge clientele over here -- including son Jim who took me along with his animator mate, Alex Potts.
Chris Ware in particular had things to say about drawing comics that struck me as consistent with my understanding of writing as they it be occurring in school English.
Kids want to draw/write fiction with exotic characters but can’t because they haven’t enough experience. Turn them therefore to their own real lives, and even away from fiction. An account of a gym lesson, according to Ware, could be far more exciting than anything from what we usually think of as imagination (and, I would add, would involve as much real imagination). This is what Harold Rosen and those who thought like him at Walworth School and elsewhere were onto in the mid-fifties, and it’s consistent with the advice and practice of, say, Ted Hughes.
As for process, if I got it right, neither is in favour of sketchbooks and rough versions (for writers that would be notebooks and drafts). For Clowes going out every day to sketch when he was learning to draw was a drag and brought no pleasure; similarly doing his strips in rough to work out the ideas. Both felt the final version lacked energy and drawing it was a chore, so they now go straight to the final paper (they specified the brand, size and gauge!). The experience is 100 per cent pleasure when you don’t know what’s going to happen two pages ahead. In English at certain times the orthodoxy drafts and revision and may still be. James Britton expressed the same objection to it as Clowes and Ware, and emphasised the value of what he called ‘shaping at the point of utterance’ (‘utterance’, obviously, being used to include written ‘speech’.)
Drawing/composition should above all be a process of discovery.
Ignore thoughts of your audience. You know in general the sort of people you’d like to read your stuff; beyond that just make sure it’s intelligible. The transaction is between you, your stuff and your medium, so concentrate on that.
Ignore form, don’t try to develop a distinctive style. Focus on the content and draw/write it whatever way you do.
When I have my own school I'll have these guys in to teach drawing comics (as Jim in fact does now), and I’d get the kids to speculate about the implications for writing.
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
Writing: more more
“I.e. there's a sense in which the writing does itself, or perhaps that when we write we're in a partnership with something else that's got its own ideas.” (Blog posting, 9 February 2009)
That something else is of course the language. What the language gives us is not just words (with all their associations, triggerings, resonances) but also runs, moves, lines, approaches, rhythms, progressions. It gives us packages, partly of constellations of ideas and meanings, partly lexical, prosodic etc – the sorts of vocabulary and sorts of rhythm that go with the theme.
Yes, as is mainly stressed these days, we get these resources from genres – genres give us ways of going about things. But the resources are often found in more than one genre; (b) genres aren’t as determinate as often made out and (c) despite the myth in some versions of English, we often don’t write in determinate genres, though genres always exert a pull on our writing: we manoeuvre amongst them, sometimes lining ourselves up completely with one, sometimes merely alluding to one by in passing.
That something else is of course the language. What the language gives us is not just words (with all their associations, triggerings, resonances) but also runs, moves, lines, approaches, rhythms, progressions. It gives us packages, partly of constellations of ideas and meanings, partly lexical, prosodic etc – the sorts of vocabulary and sorts of rhythm that go with the theme.
Yes, as is mainly stressed these days, we get these resources from genres – genres give us ways of going about things. But the resources are often found in more than one genre; (b) genres aren’t as determinate as often made out and (c) despite the myth in some versions of English, we often don’t write in determinate genres, though genres always exert a pull on our writing: we manoeuvre amongst them, sometimes lining ourselves up completely with one, sometimes merely alluding to one by in passing.
Monday, 9 February 2009
LATE, writing: more thoughts
I got the impression at Saturday’s LATE meeting (see yesterday’s posting), as I have done consistently since I started teaching in the 60s, that few English teachers, let alone other teachers, have a coherent model of writing: what it is, what it’s for, how it’s done and how it’s learned. (That’s the title of the course all teachers should take – but who knows enough to teach it?)
Yet when I think about it I can see every reason for our confusion: it’s such a complex business that it’s no wonder we find it difficult to get a theory clear enough and subtle enough to base a sound pedagogy on. (There are clear theories; it’s just that they’re wrong – or rather, usually, over-simple.) Writing seems always to be in an indeterminate zone, never one thing or the other. It typically involves a tension and a complex interaction between two states.
These are what strike me as some of the theoretical issues:
Is writing a sort of saying or a sort of making? Is that essay I've written me speaking? Yes and no. Could you take the sentences as my assertions? I suppose on the whole, yes; unless I've actively dissembled in my writing, the text more or less represents the sort of thing I would say and mean. But at the same time the text isn’t me speaking. Suppose I drop the essay in the street and someone picks it up hours later and reads it: what she reads is what the text says; whatever I may have intended, the text makes its points -- its points -- advances its argument, gets its logic right or wrong. When I was writing it I was doing a sort of speaking; but I was also making something that was going to speak for itself.
Is writing thinking or making? From one point of view it’s thinking/speaking that leaves a visible trace , a graphical realisation of those abstract entities, words and sentences. At another level I work on my writing as maker, not speaker, rearranging the words and phrases, inserting, deleting, rewording or radically reshaping – things I could never do in unaided thought or if in speech out loud.
But it’s not a simple business of first get it down (generate the trace), then shape it as an artefact. That’s where the two-stage model, ‘Draft – Revise’ , fails to capture what goes on, because already, while we’re still in the middle of getting it down, what we’ve written talks back to us and suggests what we might say/write/mean next; or it seems wrong and induces a rethink and fresh try – at the last word or phrase or at the structure of a whole chunk or the whole piece. Our output constantly re-enters the process as input in a constant feedback loop. We oscillate – sometimes every few seconds, sometimes at longer intervals -- between being writers and readers, generators and tinkerers, thinkers and critics.
Another complexity is in the thinking aspect – the coming up with the ideas. We tell kids, ‘Think!’ – but it isn’t a straightforwardly deliberate process that you can will. An aspect of writing that makes it particularly hard to handle, for the student and the teacher, is that it’s not to be delivered simply by effort (‘Try harder!’) but is dependent on having thoughts come to you. Either they come or they don’t is often our experience.
Thoughts come to me and words come to me (when they do). I'm writing a sentence and a phrase suggests itself. It doesn’t occur as the answer to my prayer for words that will express an idea I have, but as words that bring their own ideas with them, ones I hadn’t thought of. I write the phrase down, provisionally. Is this that I've written down something I'm prepared to say? It’s a phrase that ‘works’ within the context, but do I want to buy into it, stamp it with my imprimatur (whatever that is)? Typically, I think, I don’t decide one way or the other – I'm not sure -- but I let it stand: I like it, I like the idea it brings with it, I like the way it goes so I leave it to do the talking. And if someone were to ask me, ‘But do you mean what you’ve put down there?’ I wouldn’t be sure how to answer. 'I don't know -- I'd never thought of it.' Or perhaps, 'Before I didn’t, before I came up with it, because it had never entered my head, but now I think I do. Now it’s come up, yes, I suppose I do think it.'
I.e. there's a sense in which the writing does itself, or perhaps that when we write we're in a partnership with something else that's got its own ideas.
It’s not a matter of either waiting passively for thought to happen (inspiration) or by an act of will thinking, making thoughts. As we get better at writing we get better at having thoughts come. It’s as if our general intention for the piece, a broad sense of direction, clears a path or indicates a runway on which thoughts can come in. We exploit associations and our familiarity with the sort of thoughts that go with a topic. (Genre comes in here, but that's another story.)
So part of writing is not having our intentions too set and, rather, being prepared to abandon – provisionally at least – the direction we started out in, so as to allow free play to associations and triggerings; and then being prepared to strike out in the unanticipated direction that’s offered itself and that promises to be more fruitful than the one we’d planned.
As for that ‘provisionally’, it’s a skill we learn, keeping an original intention on hold in the background without losing it while we attend to something different that’s arisen that may possibly be relevant but we won’t know until we’ve given it a run.
Working to a tight plan or a ‘scaffold’ or outline or genre frame would seem to preclude experience of that sort of coaxed inspiration and of the fluidity of writing in the course of shaping. Learning to write probably depends on being in charge of the whole piece on your own. Some ‘help’ can close off options. It may enable a product of some sort to be produced, a page of writing in an approved shape, but at the price of shutting out that aspect of the writing process that’s potentially most powerful – that its provisional crystallisation as text allows the mind to do things it couldn’t without this technology; to shape thoughts into structures that are more complex and more tightly organised than unaided cogitation could manage. Writing enables the mind to take off, to be liberated, to take its time, to make thought hang together, to bring in more stuff, to ring more bells. The pay-off is that we're able to produce chunks of continuous discourse more crafted, more coherent, more varied, more interesting, more remarkable than anything we could normally produce in unscripted speech. Our written voice can make people sit up in a way that our ordinary speech can’t – as Steve Martin eloquently pointed out in his keynote on Saturday.
The sort of writing know-how I've been referring to must come for the most part through practice – by which I mean experience of the real thing, copious practice at extended continuous writing in which the writer is in sole charge.
Steve Martin was right about this, as about much else. A large part of English lessons – a third, a half? (this is me, not him) – should be devoted to this (I know: ok, not starting tomorrow -- but some day, when sanity is restored). The amount that students are able and willing to do at home can obviously modify that: it will vary with circumstances. In a 1985 report on writing at three age-levels across schools in one Canadian school board, Pringle and Freedman concluded that by age 10 or 11 pupils should be producing ‘many pages’ of extended continuous writing each week. At the LATE meeting people were saying that writing was dominated by very short bits with very little experience of longer pieces. This had always been the case with chemistry but it’s shocking to find it so in English.
Yet when I think about it I can see every reason for our confusion: it’s such a complex business that it’s no wonder we find it difficult to get a theory clear enough and subtle enough to base a sound pedagogy on. (There are clear theories; it’s just that they’re wrong – or rather, usually, over-simple.) Writing seems always to be in an indeterminate zone, never one thing or the other. It typically involves a tension and a complex interaction between two states.
These are what strike me as some of the theoretical issues:
Is writing a sort of saying or a sort of making? Is that essay I've written me speaking? Yes and no. Could you take the sentences as my assertions? I suppose on the whole, yes; unless I've actively dissembled in my writing, the text more or less represents the sort of thing I would say and mean. But at the same time the text isn’t me speaking. Suppose I drop the essay in the street and someone picks it up hours later and reads it: what she reads is what the text says; whatever I may have intended, the text makes its points -- its points -- advances its argument, gets its logic right or wrong. When I was writing it I was doing a sort of speaking; but I was also making something that was going to speak for itself.
Is writing thinking or making? From one point of view it’s thinking/speaking that leaves a visible trace , a graphical realisation of those abstract entities, words and sentences. At another level I work on my writing as maker, not speaker, rearranging the words and phrases, inserting, deleting, rewording or radically reshaping – things I could never do in unaided thought or if in speech out loud.
But it’s not a simple business of first get it down (generate the trace), then shape it as an artefact. That’s where the two-stage model, ‘Draft – Revise’ , fails to capture what goes on, because already, while we’re still in the middle of getting it down, what we’ve written talks back to us and suggests what we might say/write/mean next; or it seems wrong and induces a rethink and fresh try – at the last word or phrase or at the structure of a whole chunk or the whole piece. Our output constantly re-enters the process as input in a constant feedback loop. We oscillate – sometimes every few seconds, sometimes at longer intervals -- between being writers and readers, generators and tinkerers, thinkers and critics.
Another complexity is in the thinking aspect – the coming up with the ideas. We tell kids, ‘Think!’ – but it isn’t a straightforwardly deliberate process that you can will. An aspect of writing that makes it particularly hard to handle, for the student and the teacher, is that it’s not to be delivered simply by effort (‘Try harder!’) but is dependent on having thoughts come to you. Either they come or they don’t is often our experience.
Thoughts come to me and words come to me (when they do). I'm writing a sentence and a phrase suggests itself. It doesn’t occur as the answer to my prayer for words that will express an idea I have, but as words that bring their own ideas with them, ones I hadn’t thought of. I write the phrase down, provisionally. Is this that I've written down something I'm prepared to say? It’s a phrase that ‘works’ within the context, but do I want to buy into it, stamp it with my imprimatur (whatever that is)? Typically, I think, I don’t decide one way or the other – I'm not sure -- but I let it stand: I like it, I like the idea it brings with it, I like the way it goes so I leave it to do the talking. And if someone were to ask me, ‘But do you mean what you’ve put down there?’ I wouldn’t be sure how to answer. 'I don't know -- I'd never thought of it.' Or perhaps, 'Before I didn’t, before I came up with it, because it had never entered my head, but now I think I do. Now it’s come up, yes, I suppose I do think it.'
I.e. there's a sense in which the writing does itself, or perhaps that when we write we're in a partnership with something else that's got its own ideas.
It’s not a matter of either waiting passively for thought to happen (inspiration) or by an act of will thinking, making thoughts. As we get better at writing we get better at having thoughts come. It’s as if our general intention for the piece, a broad sense of direction, clears a path or indicates a runway on which thoughts can come in. We exploit associations and our familiarity with the sort of thoughts that go with a topic. (Genre comes in here, but that's another story.)
So part of writing is not having our intentions too set and, rather, being prepared to abandon – provisionally at least – the direction we started out in, so as to allow free play to associations and triggerings; and then being prepared to strike out in the unanticipated direction that’s offered itself and that promises to be more fruitful than the one we’d planned.
As for that ‘provisionally’, it’s a skill we learn, keeping an original intention on hold in the background without losing it while we attend to something different that’s arisen that may possibly be relevant but we won’t know until we’ve given it a run.
Working to a tight plan or a ‘scaffold’ or outline or genre frame would seem to preclude experience of that sort of coaxed inspiration and of the fluidity of writing in the course of shaping. Learning to write probably depends on being in charge of the whole piece on your own. Some ‘help’ can close off options. It may enable a product of some sort to be produced, a page of writing in an approved shape, but at the price of shutting out that aspect of the writing process that’s potentially most powerful – that its provisional crystallisation as text allows the mind to do things it couldn’t without this technology; to shape thoughts into structures that are more complex and more tightly organised than unaided cogitation could manage. Writing enables the mind to take off, to be liberated, to take its time, to make thought hang together, to bring in more stuff, to ring more bells. The pay-off is that we're able to produce chunks of continuous discourse more crafted, more coherent, more varied, more interesting, more remarkable than anything we could normally produce in unscripted speech. Our written voice can make people sit up in a way that our ordinary speech can’t – as Steve Martin eloquently pointed out in his keynote on Saturday.
The sort of writing know-how I've been referring to must come for the most part through practice – by which I mean experience of the real thing, copious practice at extended continuous writing in which the writer is in sole charge.
Steve Martin was right about this, as about much else. A large part of English lessons – a third, a half? (this is me, not him) – should be devoted to this (I know: ok, not starting tomorrow -- but some day, when sanity is restored). The amount that students are able and willing to do at home can obviously modify that: it will vary with circumstances. In a 1985 report on writing at three age-levels across schools in one Canadian school board, Pringle and Freedman concluded that by age 10 or 11 pupils should be producing ‘many pages’ of extended continuous writing each week. At the LATE meeting people were saying that writing was dominated by very short bits with very little experience of longer pieces. This had always been the case with chemistry but it’s shocking to find it so in English.
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Yesterday’s LATE meeting
For reasons that are not greatly to my credit it’s many years since I went to a meeting of the London Association for the Teaching of English (LATE), but I turned up yesterday morning. In the old days LATE used to have the run of rooms in the Institute of Education for their Saturday meetings, or one or other poly. Now the institutions charge for rooms so LATE is dependent on the goodwill of school heads – which can actually be to the good: the school we were in yesterday, Netley Primary, was not just comfortable, with good rooms for workshops; it was also an uplifting example of education working well: the profusion of kids’ work on the walls and stairs, particularly art work, was inspiring. The main building was classic School Board for London, 1888 (I hope I've remembered it rightly), a type that in the original state could be scarily institutional, particularly the staircases (stone stairs, walls tiled below and painted above); but in Netley the stairs had been coated with a friendly reddish paint and the walls were white or cream and clean– and plentifully decorated.
It was a good meeting, I'd say 70 there. The theme was writing. Lots of good things in the opening and closing talks by S. I. Martin and Richard Andrews, but I want to comment here on some of the discussion in Sally Mitchell’s workshop. Sally was arguing for a view of writing as a way not just of showing understanding but of arriving at it: it should be generative, not just presentational. People in the group were sympathetic to that, but their interpretation of it seemed to be in terms of ‘thinking’ in essays -- understandably perhaps since Sally's examples were from university courses (Obviously, I'm just going by things that were said – I've no idea what most of us were thinking that never got said.) For instance, reading an essay one should have the feeling that by the end the writer was saying things that he or she hadn’t fully known on setting out on the essay.
Fair enough: I'd agree with that, of course, but I'd want to go much further and extend the notion of ‘thinking’ (or ‘learning’) through writing to include a wider range of mental processes such as making a memory sharper, imagining something more fully and getting a perspective on something. The sorts of writing from which we can emerge a bit changed include autobiographical narrative and description, stories and poetry, as well as essays. James Britton used to talk about writing and talking to ‘come to terms with experience’, which has an unfortunate suggestion of accepting some hard reality or compromising. Something like that, though, or ‘getting the measure’ of an incident or situation or state of affairs, really is what writing can do. Just getting something right, precise, ‘caught’ in words is of course also, because it’s so demanding, an effective way of getting more skilled in handling language.
In yesterday’s Guardian Review section Peter Porter, speaking of writing poems about his own life, said it was ‘a means [for the mind] of presenting the material to itself’. Just ‘getting it down’ right is ‘learning’ in itself; whatever the 'material' is has been brought into some sort of order, made to reveal its extent and shape. And this by no means applies only to distressing material – far from it: it can be getting the measure of how good something is and why. A lot of the best children’s writing of the 1960s (e.g. from the West Riding of Yorkshire – see Alec Clegg’s The Excitement of Writing) celebrated the pleasures of locality, family, friends, pets; or, with older children, worked out in imagination what it would have been like to be on a ship of the navy in 1805. (Cf Steve Martin’s exercises yesterday in looking at archives and imagining what it would have been like to be a South Asian sailor in the 19th century laid up in some God-forsaken London barracks.)
The essential thing that I'd want children to learn about writing is that it’s a means of exploration. And I'd like English teachers to be more aware that it’s in many sorts of writing and at all ages (or ‘Key Stages’ – hah! jargon! as opposed to Off-key ones?) that they can have a sense of discovery, realisation, having things get sharper.
I'd like to see a continuity, as well as the obvious leaps that have to be made, between the narrating and describing the kids do in Year 7 and the thinking and arguing they should be doing in their work on literature five and six years later.
It was a good meeting, I'd say 70 there. The theme was writing. Lots of good things in the opening and closing talks by S. I. Martin and Richard Andrews, but I want to comment here on some of the discussion in Sally Mitchell’s workshop. Sally was arguing for a view of writing as a way not just of showing understanding but of arriving at it: it should be generative, not just presentational. People in the group were sympathetic to that, but their interpretation of it seemed to be in terms of ‘thinking’ in essays -- understandably perhaps since Sally's examples were from university courses (Obviously, I'm just going by things that were said – I've no idea what most of us were thinking that never got said.) For instance, reading an essay one should have the feeling that by the end the writer was saying things that he or she hadn’t fully known on setting out on the essay.
Fair enough: I'd agree with that, of course, but I'd want to go much further and extend the notion of ‘thinking’ (or ‘learning’) through writing to include a wider range of mental processes such as making a memory sharper, imagining something more fully and getting a perspective on something. The sorts of writing from which we can emerge a bit changed include autobiographical narrative and description, stories and poetry, as well as essays. James Britton used to talk about writing and talking to ‘come to terms with experience’, which has an unfortunate suggestion of accepting some hard reality or compromising. Something like that, though, or ‘getting the measure’ of an incident or situation or state of affairs, really is what writing can do. Just getting something right, precise, ‘caught’ in words is of course also, because it’s so demanding, an effective way of getting more skilled in handling language.
In yesterday’s Guardian Review section Peter Porter, speaking of writing poems about his own life, said it was ‘a means [for the mind] of presenting the material to itself’. Just ‘getting it down’ right is ‘learning’ in itself; whatever the 'material' is has been brought into some sort of order, made to reveal its extent and shape. And this by no means applies only to distressing material – far from it: it can be getting the measure of how good something is and why. A lot of the best children’s writing of the 1960s (e.g. from the West Riding of Yorkshire – see Alec Clegg’s The Excitement of Writing) celebrated the pleasures of locality, family, friends, pets; or, with older children, worked out in imagination what it would have been like to be on a ship of the navy in 1805. (Cf Steve Martin’s exercises yesterday in looking at archives and imagining what it would have been like to be a South Asian sailor in the 19th century laid up in some God-forsaken London barracks.)
The essential thing that I'd want children to learn about writing is that it’s a means of exploration. And I'd like English teachers to be more aware that it’s in many sorts of writing and at all ages (or ‘Key Stages’ – hah! jargon! as opposed to Off-key ones?) that they can have a sense of discovery, realisation, having things get sharper.
I'd like to see a continuity, as well as the obvious leaps that have to be made, between the narrating and describing the kids do in Year 7 and the thinking and arguing they should be doing in their work on literature five and six years later.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Montaigne on writing
I've been looking at Montaigne’s Essays, because they’re so often mentioned as special. Dipping into one I thought how modern it seemed, yet I knew Montaigne was a French classic and even assumed in my ignorance that he was 17th or even 18th century. Not a bit of it: 1533-92 – a generation before Shakespeare. The Essays are lively, opinionated and personal; they seem to open the way for all sorts of developments in English, many of them centuries later. (I believe the line of transmission was something like Montaigne-Bacon-Dryden-Addison and Steele -- and then there’s no stopping English essayists.)
Here’s a chunk, from ‘On some lines of Virgil’. It’s about writing, one of the themes of this blog – of interest, perhaps, to those concerned with English teaching.
The essay is full of Latin quotes. Montaigne has earlier cited the lines of Virgil mentioned in the title, and he’s just quoted Lucretius. The words he refers to in the first sentence come from both. (It doesn't matter if you don't understand them; the point is the way Montaigne thinks about words. If there’s demand from the classics-thirsty I’ll be pleased to supply the Latin, + the provided translation.)
I'll offer some comments after the passage.
When I chew over those words, rejicit, pascit, inhians, and then molli fovet, medullas, labefacta, pendet, percurrit, and Lucretius' noble circunfusa mother to Virgil's elegant infusus, I feel contempt for those little sallies and verbal sports which have been born since then. Those fine poets had no need for smart and cunning word-play; their style is full, pregnant with a sustained and natural power. With them not the tail only but everything is epigram: head, breast and feet. Nothing is strained. Nothing drags. Everything progresses steadily on its course: 'Contextus totus virilis est; non sunt circa flosculos occupati.' [The whole texture of their work is virile: they were not concerned with little purple passages.] Here is not merely gentle eloquence where nothing offends: it is solid and has sinews; it does not so much please you as invade you and enrapture you. And the stronger the mind the more it enraptures it. When I look upon such powerful means of expression, so dense and full of life, I do not conclude that it is said well but thought well. It is the audacity of the conception which fills the words and makes them soar: 'Pectus est quod dissertum facit.'[It is the mind which makes for good style.] Nowadays when men say judgement they mean style, and rich concepts are but beautiful words.
Descriptions such as these are not produced by skilful hands but by having the subject vividly stamped upon the soul. Gallus writes straightforwardly because his concepts are straightforward. Horace is not satisfied with some superficial vividness; that would betray his sense; he sees further and more clearly into his subject: to describe itself his mind goes fishing and ferreting through the whole treasure-house of words and figures of speech; as his concepts surpass the ordinary, it is not ordinary words that he needs…. The same applies here: the sense discovers and begets the words, which cease to be breath but flesh and blood. They signify more than they say….
When I am writing I can well do without the company and memory of my books lest they interfere with my style.… But I cannot free myself from Plutarch so easily. He is so all-embracing, so rich that for all occasions, no matter how extravagant a subject you have chosen, he insinuates himself into your work, lending you a hand generous with riches, an unfailing source of adornments. It irritates me that those who pillage him may also be pillaging me: I cannot spend the slightest time in his company without walking off with a slice of breast or a wing.
For this project of mine it is also appropriate that I do my writing at home, deep in the country, where nobody can help or correct me and where I normally never frequent anybody who knows even the Latin of the Lord's Prayer let alone proper French. I might have done it better somewhere else, but this work would then have been less mine: and its main aim and perfection consists in being mine, exactly. I may correct an accidental slip (I am full of them, since I run on regardless) but it would be an act of treachery to remove such imperfections as are commonly and always in me. When it is said to me, or I say to myself. 'Your figures of speech are sown too densely'; 'This word here is pure Gascon'; 'This is a hazardous expression' - I reject no expressions which are used in the streets of France: those who want to fight usage with grammar are silly - 'Here is an ignorant development'; 'Here your argument is paradoxical'; 'This one is too insane'; 'You are often playing about; people will think that you are serious when you are only pretending': 'Yes,' I reply, 'but I correct only careless errors not customary ones. Do I not always talk like that? Am I not portraying myself to the life? If so, that suffices! I have achieved what I wanted to: everyone recognizes me in my book and my book in me.'
Michel de Montaigne (1993/1580-95), The Essays: a selection, translated by M. A. Screech, Penguin Classics, pp.299-302
My reactions:
1. What an independent mind, insisting on displaying himself warts and all, including (in this essay) all sorts about the lusts of old age. He often feels 20th century, his honesty and desire to be open reminding me of, say, Meursault in Camus’ L’Etranger.
2. His notion of writing seems to anticipate the Romantics: powerful language comes not from fastidious attention to language (artful rhetorical crafting, as practised by his despised recent writers) but from the pressure of thoughts and intentions.
3. ‘Concepts’, images, thoughts, ideas etc may not in reality have such a definite independent existence prior to their expression in language; nevertheless, Montaigne is onto a truth about our experience of expression. We often have a ‘felt sense’, as someone called it, of something pressing for verbal articulation and then, indeed, we go‘fishing and ferreting through the whole treasure-house of words andfigures of speech’, to find the formulation that fits. (Must look up what the French word was that translates ‘concepts’.)
4. On fancy writing, compare the architect Adolf Loos: ‘Ornament is a crime’. King's Cross, not St Pancras. A real modern spirit, there.
5. Like the Romantics (Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, e.g.) Montaigne values the language of ‘real life’ over that of books (though he can’t help himself imitating Plutarch).
6. His prizing of the Greek and Latin classics above the moderns. Although it seems that his knowledge of Plutarch, who wrote in Greek, came from a French translation (by Amyot), the power of Plutarch’s ‘concepts’ was such as to shape even a translator’s French into a language of unsurpassed power. For us, so much prose and poetry of quality have been written since antiquity that the ancient writers aren’t such an overwhelming inspiration. But in Montaigne’s time this wasn’t so – if you wanted to experience what language could do at full stretch, you went to Latin (which was Montaigne’s first language: his parents arranged it that Latin was all he was exposed to in his early years).
It wasn’t just a matter of language. As worked out in their writing, the thinking of the Greeks and Romans was more subtle, delicate and intelligent than anything to be found in French and English in the 16th century – or so it was thought. The education of a gentleman could only be in the ancient languages and literatures – what was the alternative?
I’m reminded of a book I read recently, The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy, that’s full of bits of medieval English writing, much of it by educated people. The writing struck me as like that of present-day ten-year-olds. Might write more on that, come to think of it.
Anyway: French as shaped by its native writers on their own offered too thin a resource; when infused with meanings carried across from classical texts, it became strong. (North’s Plutarch had something like a similar influence on English.)
Here’s a chunk, from ‘On some lines of Virgil’. It’s about writing, one of the themes of this blog – of interest, perhaps, to those concerned with English teaching.
The essay is full of Latin quotes. Montaigne has earlier cited the lines of Virgil mentioned in the title, and he’s just quoted Lucretius. The words he refers to in the first sentence come from both. (It doesn't matter if you don't understand them; the point is the way Montaigne thinks about words. If there’s demand from the classics-thirsty I’ll be pleased to supply the Latin, + the provided translation.)
I'll offer some comments after the passage.
When I chew over those words, rejicit, pascit, inhians, and then molli fovet, medullas, labefacta, pendet, percurrit, and Lucretius' noble circunfusa mother to Virgil's elegant infusus, I feel contempt for those little sallies and verbal sports which have been born since then. Those fine poets had no need for smart and cunning word-play; their style is full, pregnant with a sustained and natural power. With them not the tail only but everything is epigram: head, breast and feet. Nothing is strained. Nothing drags. Everything progresses steadily on its course: 'Contextus totus virilis est; non sunt circa flosculos occupati.' [The whole texture of their work is virile: they were not concerned with little purple passages.] Here is not merely gentle eloquence where nothing offends: it is solid and has sinews; it does not so much please you as invade you and enrapture you. And the stronger the mind the more it enraptures it. When I look upon such powerful means of expression, so dense and full of life, I do not conclude that it is said well but thought well. It is the audacity of the conception which fills the words and makes them soar: 'Pectus est quod dissertum facit.'[It is the mind which makes for good style.] Nowadays when men say judgement they mean style, and rich concepts are but beautiful words.
Descriptions such as these are not produced by skilful hands but by having the subject vividly stamped upon the soul. Gallus writes straightforwardly because his concepts are straightforward. Horace is not satisfied with some superficial vividness; that would betray his sense; he sees further and more clearly into his subject: to describe itself his mind goes fishing and ferreting through the whole treasure-house of words and figures of speech; as his concepts surpass the ordinary, it is not ordinary words that he needs…. The same applies here: the sense discovers and begets the words, which cease to be breath but flesh and blood. They signify more than they say….
When I am writing I can well do without the company and memory of my books lest they interfere with my style.… But I cannot free myself from Plutarch so easily. He is so all-embracing, so rich that for all occasions, no matter how extravagant a subject you have chosen, he insinuates himself into your work, lending you a hand generous with riches, an unfailing source of adornments. It irritates me that those who pillage him may also be pillaging me: I cannot spend the slightest time in his company without walking off with a slice of breast or a wing.
For this project of mine it is also appropriate that I do my writing at home, deep in the country, where nobody can help or correct me and where I normally never frequent anybody who knows even the Latin of the Lord's Prayer let alone proper French. I might have done it better somewhere else, but this work would then have been less mine: and its main aim and perfection consists in being mine, exactly. I may correct an accidental slip (I am full of them, since I run on regardless) but it would be an act of treachery to remove such imperfections as are commonly and always in me. When it is said to me, or I say to myself. 'Your figures of speech are sown too densely'; 'This word here is pure Gascon'; 'This is a hazardous expression' - I reject no expressions which are used in the streets of France: those who want to fight usage with grammar are silly - 'Here is an ignorant development'; 'Here your argument is paradoxical'; 'This one is too insane'; 'You are often playing about; people will think that you are serious when you are only pretending': 'Yes,' I reply, 'but I correct only careless errors not customary ones. Do I not always talk like that? Am I not portraying myself to the life? If so, that suffices! I have achieved what I wanted to: everyone recognizes me in my book and my book in me.'
Michel de Montaigne (1993/1580-95), The Essays: a selection, translated by M. A. Screech, Penguin Classics, pp.299-302
My reactions:
1. What an independent mind, insisting on displaying himself warts and all, including (in this essay) all sorts about the lusts of old age. He often feels 20th century, his honesty and desire to be open reminding me of, say, Meursault in Camus’ L’Etranger.
2. His notion of writing seems to anticipate the Romantics: powerful language comes not from fastidious attention to language (artful rhetorical crafting, as practised by his despised recent writers) but from the pressure of thoughts and intentions.
3. ‘Concepts’, images, thoughts, ideas etc may not in reality have such a definite independent existence prior to their expression in language; nevertheless, Montaigne is onto a truth about our experience of expression. We often have a ‘felt sense’, as someone called it, of something pressing for verbal articulation and then, indeed, we go‘fishing and ferreting through the whole treasure-house of words andfigures of speech’, to find the formulation that fits. (Must look up what the French word was that translates ‘concepts’.)
4. On fancy writing, compare the architect Adolf Loos: ‘Ornament is a crime’. King's Cross, not St Pancras. A real modern spirit, there.
5. Like the Romantics (Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, e.g.) Montaigne values the language of ‘real life’ over that of books (though he can’t help himself imitating Plutarch).
6. His prizing of the Greek and Latin classics above the moderns. Although it seems that his knowledge of Plutarch, who wrote in Greek, came from a French translation (by Amyot), the power of Plutarch’s ‘concepts’ was such as to shape even a translator’s French into a language of unsurpassed power. For us, so much prose and poetry of quality have been written since antiquity that the ancient writers aren’t such an overwhelming inspiration. But in Montaigne’s time this wasn’t so – if you wanted to experience what language could do at full stretch, you went to Latin (which was Montaigne’s first language: his parents arranged it that Latin was all he was exposed to in his early years).
It wasn’t just a matter of language. As worked out in their writing, the thinking of the Greeks and Romans was more subtle, delicate and intelligent than anything to be found in French and English in the 16th century – or so it was thought. The education of a gentleman could only be in the ancient languages and literatures – what was the alternative?
I’m reminded of a book I read recently, The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy, that’s full of bits of medieval English writing, much of it by educated people. The writing struck me as like that of present-day ten-year-olds. Might write more on that, come to think of it.
Anyway: French as shaped by its native writers on their own offered too thin a resource; when infused with meanings carried across from classical texts, it became strong. (North’s Plutarch had something like a similar influence on English.)
Tuesday, 23 September 2008
Stephen Dedalus on Moor Fields
Seeking elucidation in my confusions about Modernism I turned to Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson (1931 -- 1961 Fontana edition), the later chapters of which I hadn't read since my student days (if then -- I was not a diligent reader, or perhaps just not a fast enough reader to be an academic). I found the following (p.181), which seemed to express the idea I was feeling toward when I asked whether my writing for Rosen about playing on Moor Fields as a kid arose from an impulse to get a handle on the experience or, as I suspected, an urge to make sentences (or periods as they used to be called in Britain and still are in North America).
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Wilson mentions, James Joyce writes of Stephen Dedalus:
He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself :
--A day of dappled seaborne clouds.--
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours : it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose.
Something of that may apply to me, I think, though I didn't share Stephen's and Joyce's poor sight. Yes, I loved 'the rhythmic rise and fall of words', but what I loved about them was in part that they were 'mirrors' (the right word) for an inner emotional world. Which makes prose in that respect like music, which it plainly is; i.e. at one level it's not about what the words mean but about something else the unfolding of the ensemble does. It's this aspect that I think the 1960s English theorists neglected -- and because I tend to read prose as if it's working the way Stephen suggests, that may account for my slow reading.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Wilson mentions, James Joyce writes of Stephen Dedalus:
He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself :
--A day of dappled seaborne clouds.--
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours : it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose.
Something of that may apply to me, I think, though I didn't share Stephen's and Joyce's poor sight. Yes, I loved 'the rhythmic rise and fall of words', but what I loved about them was in part that they were 'mirrors' (the right word) for an inner emotional world. Which makes prose in that respect like music, which it plainly is; i.e. at one level it's not about what the words mean but about something else the unfolding of the ensemble does. It's this aspect that I think the 1960s English theorists neglected -- and because I tend to read prose as if it's working the way Stephen suggests, that may account for my slow reading.
Friday, 19 September 2008
Moor Fields and writing-- further
I said (previous Moor Fields posting) that I couldn’t agree with Harold Rosen that in writing about it I was ‘structuring my experience’ of playing on Moor Fields when I was 9. If I was structuring anything, it was a representation of that experience; the experience itself was something quite distinct from a piece of writing that I might do about it. It seemed to me that my experience had not originally registered and had not persisted primarily in words, though it might have been partly shaped by my literary experience.
(I'm aware there’s an argument to be made that even the original experience, or what ‘registers’ and leaves a memory from it, was constituted in language or some semiotic based on language:
“[Wilfrid] Sellars rejected any non-cognitive, non-linguistic conception of conscious experience and awareness: ‘all awareness’, he said, ‘is a linguistic affair.’ There is no such thing as simply taking in the world in experience, as if the senses themselves had some kind of magical ability to latch onto the world: this is the myth. Every episode of taking something in is really a case of conceptualising it, and conceptualising requires being subject to the norms which can only come with the acquisition of a language.” (Tim Crane, 2008, ‘Fraught with Ought’, London Review of Books, 30(12), 33-35.)
Nevertheless, I should have said that Harold was quite right in a more general way: in writing that piece, I wasn’t just producing a composition, doing something nice with words, I was doing something to my experience, or rather on my experience or in relation to it; I was going back to it and working on it, or with it. This work was mainly looking hard at it to ‘catch’ its character and important elements. ‘Putting the experience into words’ meant scrutinising.
Ted Hughes, commenting on the best children’s poems submitted to the annual Daily Mirror Children’s Literary Competition, remarked that they were typically characterised by fresh, sharp observation; the kids were looking at flowers and animals and people working as if those sights had never been described before.
To produce a symbolic correlate for an experience, for instance in words, involves looking at it hard and coming to know it better. In fact, can’t we even say that to penetrate and gain a deep knowledge of something means producing an equivalent in a semiotic medium? It’s most plainly true of painting. Van Gogh invented a new ‘language' of colours and brush strokes, one in which the world looked different from how it had ever looked before. But that’s not what he was most aware of doing; his letters make it quite clear that what obsessed him was what the corn was like. What he was doing, in his own eyes, was identifying the colour and texture of a field of cornflowers disturbed by wind and catching them in paint. The two were the same thing: to identify was to catch in paint -- or vice versa. Van Gogh knew there was something out there that existing visual languages had failed to register and to address which he had to innovate; but his focus was corn and cornflowers, not paint. Painting was the means of observation.
Writing about Moor Fields -- as Harold Rosen rightly saw -- was a cognitive operation, an operation on knowledge, on the state of my head in relation to the phenomenon; it could be said that as a result I knew the experience better, or differently. Moor Fields would henceforth feature somewhat differently in my inner landscape. ‘Sunsets, broad views, wind, street lighting, clear water, the way turf came up in whole sections when you pulled’, which I'd put side by side in a list for the first time in the writing, would from then on be connected, if only in some barely perceptible resonance.
Rosen’s general point -- a true one -- was that writing can have cognitive effects; it’s not just working with words, it’s working on something that’s already in some way in the mind (by virtue of its having featured in experience), in such a way that our knowledge of it is changed, refocused, selectively sharpened, rearranged. (I'm aware I haven't quite got that issue sorted out.) On occasion the change that the writing process induces can be important -- the writer can arrive at a new perception that makes a difference to his or her life; so that English teachers should always reckon with the possibility that the effects of writing can potentially be transformative and ensure that assignments and environment always open up opportunities for that to happen.
At the very least, what I think we learned from Rosen, Britton and Martin was that writing, if engaged in wholeheartedly, could be a process of exceptional intensity and could change one’s mind: we should not fritter away those few opportunities for intense cognitive activity by setting compositions that were trivial or merely conventional.
But Rosen et al, John Dixon, all that generation of theorists of English, also missed something crucial. At one point in my little composition I wrote:
‘from our fields we looked down particularly on one cluster of mill buildings with lines of sloping glass skylights, big ventilation cowls, a square dam walled round and a great chimney--the predominant architectural feature of Bradford was chimneys -- from which the smoke rose vertically and undisturbed above the buildings, above the trees at the back, above the distant glowing moors which seemed like the Scottish border, and into a grey and then a blue sky.’
That strikes me as a nice sentence. I like the concatenation of syntactic subordinations and additions: the chimney from which… , and then the adverbials with both repetition and variation: ‘vertically’ (adverb), ‘undisturbed’ (participle), ‘above the…, above the…, above the…’ (adverbial phrases) -- the last with a dependent ‘which’ clause; and finally ‘into a grey and then a blue sky’ (two adverbial phrases, the second with the conjunction omitted). I could also point to felicitous sonic effects: smoke rose glow, moors border , smoke sky -- and I like ‘smoke rose vertically and undisturbed above the buildings’ -- the two stressed monosyllables followed by three poly- and duo-syllables. What stops one calling that effect ‘aesthetic’ is that the sound connections also bring the meanings into connection.
So, yes, I agree that in the process I'm working on my experience -- reworking it, if you like -- but mainly I think I'm trying to write a good sentence. The urge that motivates writing may often be less the desire to learn (by making ‘more adequate representations’ as part, ultimately, of our adaptation to our environment in the interests of surviving and prospering) than the impulse to create satisfying verbal artefacts; in writing, the thinking (scrutinising, learning) may be less important than the making. It’s the distinctive nature of literary art that those early theorists of English never adequately faced up to.
(I'm aware there’s an argument to be made that even the original experience, or what ‘registers’ and leaves a memory from it, was constituted in language or some semiotic based on language:
“[Wilfrid] Sellars rejected any non-cognitive, non-linguistic conception of conscious experience and awareness: ‘all awareness’, he said, ‘is a linguistic affair.’ There is no such thing as simply taking in the world in experience, as if the senses themselves had some kind of magical ability to latch onto the world: this is the myth. Every episode of taking something in is really a case of conceptualising it, and conceptualising requires being subject to the norms which can only come with the acquisition of a language.” (Tim Crane, 2008, ‘Fraught with Ought’, London Review of Books, 30(12), 33-35.)
Nevertheless, I should have said that Harold was quite right in a more general way: in writing that piece, I wasn’t just producing a composition, doing something nice with words, I was doing something to my experience, or rather on my experience or in relation to it; I was going back to it and working on it, or with it. This work was mainly looking hard at it to ‘catch’ its character and important elements. ‘Putting the experience into words’ meant scrutinising.
Ted Hughes, commenting on the best children’s poems submitted to the annual Daily Mirror Children’s Literary Competition, remarked that they were typically characterised by fresh, sharp observation; the kids were looking at flowers and animals and people working as if those sights had never been described before.
To produce a symbolic correlate for an experience, for instance in words, involves looking at it hard and coming to know it better. In fact, can’t we even say that to penetrate and gain a deep knowledge of something means producing an equivalent in a semiotic medium? It’s most plainly true of painting. Van Gogh invented a new ‘language' of colours and brush strokes, one in which the world looked different from how it had ever looked before. But that’s not what he was most aware of doing; his letters make it quite clear that what obsessed him was what the corn was like. What he was doing, in his own eyes, was identifying the colour and texture of a field of cornflowers disturbed by wind and catching them in paint. The two were the same thing: to identify was to catch in paint -- or vice versa. Van Gogh knew there was something out there that existing visual languages had failed to register and to address which he had to innovate; but his focus was corn and cornflowers, not paint. Painting was the means of observation.
Writing about Moor Fields -- as Harold Rosen rightly saw -- was a cognitive operation, an operation on knowledge, on the state of my head in relation to the phenomenon; it could be said that as a result I knew the experience better, or differently. Moor Fields would henceforth feature somewhat differently in my inner landscape. ‘Sunsets, broad views, wind, street lighting, clear water, the way turf came up in whole sections when you pulled’, which I'd put side by side in a list for the first time in the writing, would from then on be connected, if only in some barely perceptible resonance.
Rosen’s general point -- a true one -- was that writing can have cognitive effects; it’s not just working with words, it’s working on something that’s already in some way in the mind (by virtue of its having featured in experience), in such a way that our knowledge of it is changed, refocused, selectively sharpened, rearranged. (I'm aware I haven't quite got that issue sorted out.) On occasion the change that the writing process induces can be important -- the writer can arrive at a new perception that makes a difference to his or her life; so that English teachers should always reckon with the possibility that the effects of writing can potentially be transformative and ensure that assignments and environment always open up opportunities for that to happen.
At the very least, what I think we learned from Rosen, Britton and Martin was that writing, if engaged in wholeheartedly, could be a process of exceptional intensity and could change one’s mind: we should not fritter away those few opportunities for intense cognitive activity by setting compositions that were trivial or merely conventional.
But Rosen et al, John Dixon, all that generation of theorists of English, also missed something crucial. At one point in my little composition I wrote:
‘from our fields we looked down particularly on one cluster of mill buildings with lines of sloping glass skylights, big ventilation cowls, a square dam walled round and a great chimney--the predominant architectural feature of Bradford was chimneys -- from which the smoke rose vertically and undisturbed above the buildings, above the trees at the back, above the distant glowing moors which seemed like the Scottish border, and into a grey and then a blue sky.’
That strikes me as a nice sentence. I like the concatenation of syntactic subordinations and additions: the chimney from which… , and then the adverbials with both repetition and variation: ‘vertically’ (adverb), ‘undisturbed’ (participle), ‘above the…, above the…, above the…’ (adverbial phrases) -- the last with a dependent ‘which’ clause; and finally ‘into a grey and then a blue sky’ (two adverbial phrases, the second with the conjunction omitted). I could also point to felicitous sonic effects: smoke rose glow, moors border , smoke sky -- and I like ‘smoke rose vertically and undisturbed above the buildings’ -- the two stressed monosyllables followed by three poly- and duo-syllables. What stops one calling that effect ‘aesthetic’ is that the sound connections also bring the meanings into connection.
So, yes, I agree that in the process I'm working on my experience -- reworking it, if you like -- but mainly I think I'm trying to write a good sentence. The urge that motivates writing may often be less the desire to learn (by making ‘more adequate representations’ as part, ultimately, of our adaptation to our environment in the interests of surviving and prospering) than the impulse to create satisfying verbal artefacts; in writing, the thinking (scrutinising, learning) may be less important than the making. It’s the distinctive nature of literary art that those early theorists of English never adequately faced up to.
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Moor Fields, experience and English
As a kid I played on Moor Fields, a piece of still unbuilt-on waste land on the borders of Wibsey and Great Horton on the hilly western edge of Bradford.
Recalling something I once wrote about those times but of which I hadn’t kept a copy, I turned again (as in a previous entry) to Harold Rosen’s writings, this time because he’d quoted my piece in a 1970 article on ‘The Professional Education of the Teacher of English’. I'd written it for him in 1963 as my first assignment on the PGCE course: write about a childhood memory. The assignment was Harold’s well-judged attempt to snap us out of thinking in English degree lit crit mode. But he also wanted to use our efforts to make a theoretical point about the teaching of English.
Here’s my composition, as he reprinted in; after, I'll explain what he wanted to make of it.
Fears were disappearing fast at this age. We were still scared of big and rough boys, but not inordinately; we were now prepared to take the risk of exploring their territory. We were sensual, keenly aware of smells of new mowed grass, bonfire smoke and tree bark, which we were now
continually in intimate contact with. We took a Wordsworthian joy (though we never talked about it) in sunsets, broad views, wind, street lighting, clear water, the way turf came up in whole sections when you pulled. My present mental images of times of the year date mainly from this period - late October with dark evenings and the smell of smoke and mist and air still warm; raiding gardens in the dark for wood and dragging it fearfully past lighted kitchen windows and through deserted allotments where cats ran about; then the smell of the smoldering mill band we used to light fireworks, and the huge untidy piles of wood, bits of canvas, branches, old doors;
the lights of the whole city spread out beneath us in the dark, with the last of the sunset silhouetting Beacon Hill or the moors over beyond the Horton Bank Top reservoir; and Saturday mornings at that time of the year were mild and smoky; from our fields we looked down particularly on one cluster of mill buildings with lines of sloping glass skylights, big ventilation cowls, a square dam walled round and a great chimney--the predominant architectural feature of Bradford was chimneys -- from which
the smoke rose vertically and undisturbed above the buildings, above the trees at the back, above the distant glowing moors which seemed like the Scottish border, and into a grey and then a blue sky. Then winter evenings, wet nights, cold, when the streets, snickets and allotments were excitingly stark and forbidding; we explored them in the knowledge that we would return to lighted windows and fires; or we would sit reading piles of old comics by candlelight in the hut where Mr. Livesey kept his painting and
decorating equipment. At night we would take forbidden short cuts across forbidden fields with horses in and through people's gardens; we would prowl round their houses and look in their dustbins and watch them through their windows; we would lie behind walls and listen to men talking and imagine they were plotting a murder.
From school I remember the teachers, the playground, and the building. I remember the atmosphere in the hall at prayers at the end of the day, and the way we had to walk round the edge of the hall. I don't remember much about what went on in lessons, but I remember the classroom and the sort of decorations we used to have. Plants of all sorts were very popular; nature was considered a most important topic, and sticky buds and conkers were always welcome for the nature table. The other important things in education at the age of nine were Where Things Come From (a map of the world on the wall with strings leading to oranges, rubbers, empty cocoa tins, pictures of elephants and seals, all laid out on a table and getting moved so that the strings went slack and got tangled) and Our Lord's Land, from one of the big educational magazines; pictures of soft looking Englishmen with beards and striped robes and donkeys; little white houses with a woman with a pitcher on her head; and then the multiplication tables. Geography was characterized by pictures of cotton plants, eskimos, and Africans in dug-out canoes; it was very unreal, particularly those pictures which showed one ageless-looking child from every land, each in national dress, including
a Welsh girl; to me all except the English child were in fancy dress, and I couldn't believe that these clothes were what they actually wore.
The cloakrooms and lavatories are quite memorable -- dark green paint, low hooks on iron stands and cracked wash basins with special taps you had to press that you only found in schools.
One of the few incidents I remember was when a jet flew overhead -- it must have been one of the early Meteors-and Kenneth Widdowson shouted 'It's the North Koreans' and got under his desk. That had me quite worried.
Harold had been at the Institute of Education for only a year or two and I assume was still pretty much following the intellectual lead of James Britton, the head of department, who at the time was claiming that the job of English was to help pupils make sense of or ‘come to terms with’ their experience. Britton’s articles expounding this view made a plausible case; he’d found, for instance, that junior school children had greatly enjoyed a poem he’d read them about a shepherd who has to leave his warm fireside and go out on a snowy night to look after his flock; the poem worked, he claimed convincingly, because it gave expression to a deep theme of even urban children’s experience, the comforts of security and the need nevertheless to venture outside the zone of familiarity and safety.
Although he doesn’t go into that in his article, in the seminar in which he gave back our essays Harold presented a version of the same argument. What we’d been doing, he explained -- and continued to explain in different contexts throughout the year, as did Britton in his lectures -- was ‘structuring our experience’; experience that had been ‘structured’ could be done more with, was more of a resource for thinking and judging. At the time I sort of went along with it but didn’t really get it and didn’t have the confidence to try to articulate my confusion and doubts. But in retrospect I can see that I had two reservations, both of them right.
First, my experience wasn’t structured or restructured by the writing. It was still there in memory unchanged except for the usual loss and distortion -- though it’s probably true that over time the aspects of the scene that I’d put into the writing thereby got confirmed in memory to the exclusion of others. What I'd structured wasn’t experience but language, leaving the ‘experience’ unaffected. Rosen almost seemed to be making a naïve error.
The second reservation relates to pedagogical principle. If this process of selecting experiences and structuring them through writing (or talking, he added) was so valuable developmentally, what about all those experiences we’d never get round to processing in that way? How many memories could we get through in a school career’s English lessons? Were some experiences in more need of being ‘structured’? (They had an answer to that, at some point: Yes, those that caused us more perplexity -- but on those grounds my playing on Moor Fields at the age of nine would hardly qualify as needing the treatment.) And what about all those people in the world who had had English lessons before writing about remembered experience became a key element? Were they doomed to be deficient, like souls who had died before they could be redeemed by the birth of Jesus?
I don’t think that act of writing sorted anything out in my mind. The reason Harold liked it wasn’t because it had changed my consciousness but because it was, relatively speaking, a nice bit of writing. Its value, if any, was as a literary artefact, not as the trail of a valuable mental readjustment. What lay behind it was my literary reading as much as my memory. In fact I'm prepared to believe that the experience itself had been to some degree structured from the start by my reading, which had been full of accounts of boys doing things away from adults in dramatically appealing settings -- natural and built environments; weathers, seasons, times of day. I was probably being William and the Outlaws.
It was a besetting fault of English teachers like me in subsequent years that we fooled ourselves into believing, or at least claiming, that what we valued in children’s writing was their ‘organisation’ of experience, with consequent benefit to their souls, whereas actually our criteria were straightforwardly literary. What we purported to see as psychological readjustment was in fact literary artifice.
What a precarious base of ‘theory’ on which to go out and teach English. Fortunately, it was supplemented, I presume, by some more reliable feel for what was worthwhile. While it’s clearly true that, in some ways and on some occasions, in writing we do something new to the contents of our heads, no one could ever satisfactorily explain to us why this memory rather than that should be chosen or show that any particular psychic or cognitive benefit had been gained by a particular experience of writing. And the Institute position had no good explanation for why I was right in valuing my second years’ poems about a Viking ship burial.
Nevertheless, I believe that the impulse behind that position was sound. In insisting that what writing could do for an individual was potentially much more than developing an acceptable style Britton, Rosen and Nancy Martin were right. Writing was educationally valuable as more than a clerkly or academic skill for future deployment. The argument about bringing into order something that in the mind was disorganised or vague or ill-defined led us at least to operate with some sense of the difference between trivial and worthwhile writing; we were in far less danger than previous teacher generations of regarding belletristic whimsy or pretentious and insincere (yes) Times-like pontificating, or for that matter escapist adventure and pony stories, as acceptable products of our teaching.
Recalling something I once wrote about those times but of which I hadn’t kept a copy, I turned again (as in a previous entry) to Harold Rosen’s writings, this time because he’d quoted my piece in a 1970 article on ‘The Professional Education of the Teacher of English’. I'd written it for him in 1963 as my first assignment on the PGCE course: write about a childhood memory. The assignment was Harold’s well-judged attempt to snap us out of thinking in English degree lit crit mode. But he also wanted to use our efforts to make a theoretical point about the teaching of English.
Here’s my composition, as he reprinted in; after, I'll explain what he wanted to make of it.
Fears were disappearing fast at this age. We were still scared of big and rough boys, but not inordinately; we were now prepared to take the risk of exploring their territory. We were sensual, keenly aware of smells of new mowed grass, bonfire smoke and tree bark, which we were now
continually in intimate contact with. We took a Wordsworthian joy (though we never talked about it) in sunsets, broad views, wind, street lighting, clear water, the way turf came up in whole sections when you pulled. My present mental images of times of the year date mainly from this period - late October with dark evenings and the smell of smoke and mist and air still warm; raiding gardens in the dark for wood and dragging it fearfully past lighted kitchen windows and through deserted allotments where cats ran about; then the smell of the smoldering mill band we used to light fireworks, and the huge untidy piles of wood, bits of canvas, branches, old doors;
the lights of the whole city spread out beneath us in the dark, with the last of the sunset silhouetting Beacon Hill or the moors over beyond the Horton Bank Top reservoir; and Saturday mornings at that time of the year were mild and smoky; from our fields we looked down particularly on one cluster of mill buildings with lines of sloping glass skylights, big ventilation cowls, a square dam walled round and a great chimney--the predominant architectural feature of Bradford was chimneys -- from which
the smoke rose vertically and undisturbed above the buildings, above the trees at the back, above the distant glowing moors which seemed like the Scottish border, and into a grey and then a blue sky. Then winter evenings, wet nights, cold, when the streets, snickets and allotments were excitingly stark and forbidding; we explored them in the knowledge that we would return to lighted windows and fires; or we would sit reading piles of old comics by candlelight in the hut where Mr. Livesey kept his painting and
decorating equipment. At night we would take forbidden short cuts across forbidden fields with horses in and through people's gardens; we would prowl round their houses and look in their dustbins and watch them through their windows; we would lie behind walls and listen to men talking and imagine they were plotting a murder.
From school I remember the teachers, the playground, and the building. I remember the atmosphere in the hall at prayers at the end of the day, and the way we had to walk round the edge of the hall. I don't remember much about what went on in lessons, but I remember the classroom and the sort of decorations we used to have. Plants of all sorts were very popular; nature was considered a most important topic, and sticky buds and conkers were always welcome for the nature table. The other important things in education at the age of nine were Where Things Come From (a map of the world on the wall with strings leading to oranges, rubbers, empty cocoa tins, pictures of elephants and seals, all laid out on a table and getting moved so that the strings went slack and got tangled) and Our Lord's Land, from one of the big educational magazines; pictures of soft looking Englishmen with beards and striped robes and donkeys; little white houses with a woman with a pitcher on her head; and then the multiplication tables. Geography was characterized by pictures of cotton plants, eskimos, and Africans in dug-out canoes; it was very unreal, particularly those pictures which showed one ageless-looking child from every land, each in national dress, including
a Welsh girl; to me all except the English child were in fancy dress, and I couldn't believe that these clothes were what they actually wore.
The cloakrooms and lavatories are quite memorable -- dark green paint, low hooks on iron stands and cracked wash basins with special taps you had to press that you only found in schools.
One of the few incidents I remember was when a jet flew overhead -- it must have been one of the early Meteors-and Kenneth Widdowson shouted 'It's the North Koreans' and got under his desk. That had me quite worried.
Harold had been at the Institute of Education for only a year or two and I assume was still pretty much following the intellectual lead of James Britton, the head of department, who at the time was claiming that the job of English was to help pupils make sense of or ‘come to terms with’ their experience. Britton’s articles expounding this view made a plausible case; he’d found, for instance, that junior school children had greatly enjoyed a poem he’d read them about a shepherd who has to leave his warm fireside and go out on a snowy night to look after his flock; the poem worked, he claimed convincingly, because it gave expression to a deep theme of even urban children’s experience, the comforts of security and the need nevertheless to venture outside the zone of familiarity and safety.
Although he doesn’t go into that in his article, in the seminar in which he gave back our essays Harold presented a version of the same argument. What we’d been doing, he explained -- and continued to explain in different contexts throughout the year, as did Britton in his lectures -- was ‘structuring our experience’; experience that had been ‘structured’ could be done more with, was more of a resource for thinking and judging. At the time I sort of went along with it but didn’t really get it and didn’t have the confidence to try to articulate my confusion and doubts. But in retrospect I can see that I had two reservations, both of them right.
First, my experience wasn’t structured or restructured by the writing. It was still there in memory unchanged except for the usual loss and distortion -- though it’s probably true that over time the aspects of the scene that I’d put into the writing thereby got confirmed in memory to the exclusion of others. What I'd structured wasn’t experience but language, leaving the ‘experience’ unaffected. Rosen almost seemed to be making a naïve error.
The second reservation relates to pedagogical principle. If this process of selecting experiences and structuring them through writing (or talking, he added) was so valuable developmentally, what about all those experiences we’d never get round to processing in that way? How many memories could we get through in a school career’s English lessons? Were some experiences in more need of being ‘structured’? (They had an answer to that, at some point: Yes, those that caused us more perplexity -- but on those grounds my playing on Moor Fields at the age of nine would hardly qualify as needing the treatment.) And what about all those people in the world who had had English lessons before writing about remembered experience became a key element? Were they doomed to be deficient, like souls who had died before they could be redeemed by the birth of Jesus?
I don’t think that act of writing sorted anything out in my mind. The reason Harold liked it wasn’t because it had changed my consciousness but because it was, relatively speaking, a nice bit of writing. Its value, if any, was as a literary artefact, not as the trail of a valuable mental readjustment. What lay behind it was my literary reading as much as my memory. In fact I'm prepared to believe that the experience itself had been to some degree structured from the start by my reading, which had been full of accounts of boys doing things away from adults in dramatically appealing settings -- natural and built environments; weathers, seasons, times of day. I was probably being William and the Outlaws.
It was a besetting fault of English teachers like me in subsequent years that we fooled ourselves into believing, or at least claiming, that what we valued in children’s writing was their ‘organisation’ of experience, with consequent benefit to their souls, whereas actually our criteria were straightforwardly literary. What we purported to see as psychological readjustment was in fact literary artifice.
What a precarious base of ‘theory’ on which to go out and teach English. Fortunately, it was supplemented, I presume, by some more reliable feel for what was worthwhile. While it’s clearly true that, in some ways and on some occasions, in writing we do something new to the contents of our heads, no one could ever satisfactorily explain to us why this memory rather than that should be chosen or show that any particular psychic or cognitive benefit had been gained by a particular experience of writing. And the Institute position had no good explanation for why I was right in valuing my second years’ poems about a Viking ship burial.
Nevertheless, I believe that the impulse behind that position was sound. In insisting that what writing could do for an individual was potentially much more than developing an acceptable style Britton, Rosen and Nancy Martin were right. Writing was educationally valuable as more than a clerkly or academic skill for future deployment. The argument about bringing into order something that in the mind was disorganised or vague or ill-defined led us at least to operate with some sense of the difference between trivial and worthwhile writing; we were in far less danger than previous teacher generations of regarding belletristic whimsy or pretentious and insincere (yes) Times-like pontificating, or for that matter escapist adventure and pony stories, as acceptable products of our teaching.
Saturday, 13 September 2008
Imagining EveryVille
I liked this challenge, set by Aaron Betsky, director of the Venice Biennale online architecture competition:
Produce a proposal “for ‘a new exurban community’, in EveryVille; an imagined place that has emerged somewhere around the intersection of Avenue Z and X Street, just to the south-west of the intersection of Highway I and the Beltway around Megalopolis, around 20 kilometres from the city’s core.” (Architectural Review, September)
Betsky’s introduction goes like this:
EveryVille: Community beyond Place, Civic Sense beyond Architecture
Imagine every town. Remember where you grew up, a place shaped by your first walk, your first love, your first amazement at color and form and other people; your first humiliation when you couldn’t find your way or weren’t part of the group. Recall the sights, the sounds, the dirt on the street, the wind rustling through the trees, the day the garbage was picked up and the day before that, the trip downtown or to the airport, the place where what you knew slowly shaded over into an uncharted territory that itself receded the older you became.
Maybe you still live in this city, or visit it because your family is there. Maybe you never lived there but grew up in the countryside or in a high-rise. Deep in our culture, however, is the notion that a small-scale community, whether by itself or as the neighborhood in a larger city, is at the core of what connects us not just to a place, but to a sense of community.
‘Discuss’ would be my instruction to the class in the English lesson in which I introduced this extract. I would mean, as always, not just ‘Talk’ but ‘Get writing--use this as a start and think, remember, imagine and perhaps theorise on paper.’
Again as always, the writing, finished at home, will then circulate if the writer’s willing, and lead to more discussion and enter the collective memory and shared culture of the class, perhaps to be referred to in passing three months later or to give rise to something in another student’s writing, along with other stuff read from the Architectural Review and relevant bits from novels and autobiographies about places.
It goes on but I find the rest less interesting.
Produce a proposal “for ‘a new exurban community’, in EveryVille; an imagined place that has emerged somewhere around the intersection of Avenue Z and X Street, just to the south-west of the intersection of Highway I and the Beltway around Megalopolis, around 20 kilometres from the city’s core.” (Architectural Review, September)
Betsky’s introduction goes like this:
EveryVille: Community beyond Place, Civic Sense beyond Architecture
Imagine every town. Remember where you grew up, a place shaped by your first walk, your first love, your first amazement at color and form and other people; your first humiliation when you couldn’t find your way or weren’t part of the group. Recall the sights, the sounds, the dirt on the street, the wind rustling through the trees, the day the garbage was picked up and the day before that, the trip downtown or to the airport, the place where what you knew slowly shaded over into an uncharted territory that itself receded the older you became.
Maybe you still live in this city, or visit it because your family is there. Maybe you never lived there but grew up in the countryside or in a high-rise. Deep in our culture, however, is the notion that a small-scale community, whether by itself or as the neighborhood in a larger city, is at the core of what connects us not just to a place, but to a sense of community.
‘Discuss’ would be my instruction to the class in the English lesson in which I introduced this extract. I would mean, as always, not just ‘Talk’ but ‘Get writing--use this as a start and think, remember, imagine and perhaps theorise on paper.’
Again as always, the writing, finished at home, will then circulate if the writer’s willing, and lead to more discussion and enter the collective memory and shared culture of the class, perhaps to be referred to in passing three months later or to give rise to something in another student’s writing, along with other stuff read from the Architectural Review and relevant bits from novels and autobiographies about places.
It goes on but I find the rest less interesting.
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