Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

I wasn't going to read this book.

At all.

In fact, my life has been so filled with school work that letting this one thing go seemed like a blessing. So I opened it up today so that I could post this having said that I tried.

Ooops.

What I found instead is that Dillard is a phenomenal writer. She writes prose the way mere mortals write poetry. Her paragraphs have rhyme and meter. Her prose flows in a way that makes it seem like some other medium entirely. The words are grotesque at worst and intricately detailed at best, but intoxicatingly easy to read.

What I'm trying to say is this: I guess I am reading this book after all. Please forgive me for being so far behind the curve.

Self-Actualizing Metaphors and Evolution of the Personal

I criticized this book last week because I couldn't see how it could be applied to my own life, as a student, writer, or general world inhabitant.

It turns out that if I had just gone on to finish the book, that would no longer have been a complaint. I was, in particular, interested in a tiny section in the back of the book, titled "Self Understanding." Self-understanding, like most other types of understanding, is an area in which I could use some work. My process, I think, would be more efficient if the curriculum were not constantly changing.

But in the context of the book and it's examination of metaphor and its unconscious purpose in our lives, self-actualization requires a conscious look at our use of language.

For me, it relates to the section of the book where Lokhoff and Johnson were discussing the placement of words within a sentence, where "I taught Harry Greek" implies better learning and more direct communication than "I taught Greek to Harry."

"Well, yes, officer, technically the cocaine was a drug procured for me."

This is a common complaint among high school composition teachers. Student spend too long getting to their point because they are trying to sound smart. It seems worth at least mentioning here that there is something wrong with the fact that we connote confusing and cyclical with "professional."

But if it is important to speak clearly, it is equally important, in terms of self-acceptance, to understand what rhetorical moves we are making when we speak complexly and why.

What I finally took out of this book was the knowledge that an understanding of metaphor (the why) and the resulting action (the what) can help me understand the movements my brain makes in between them.

And it doesn't get much more relevant than self understanding.

"I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like" and other books about this magical wordform

When I turned 18, my uncle gave me a book of metaphors as a gift. This is probably because he only sees me once every two years and I'm the only other member of our family that might find this book remotely interesting - and it is. But I also think there's a reason it's been relegated to bathroom reading in our household.

Besides its heartwarming and engaging cover, of course.

Metaphor, as our class text clearly states, is present in every level of our lives. It is in our turns of phrase and essay cliches as well as the fabric of our conversations. As a defense of the use of metaphor in writing as valuable and relatable, rather than lazy and trite, I appreciate this book.

But I don't think that is what the authors intended it to be used for, and, while I find their theory in general mind-bending, I don't particularly see how it applies to me as a writer. In fact, of our three texts, this one seemed by far the least applicable to my writing life.

I was strongly reminded of my literary theory class while reading this text: the magnitude of the importance of metaphor was staggering but distant. Unlike the frustration of Macrorie and the search for peace and learning of Pirsig, I did not connect with this book on a personal level. Where I lived the struggles of the other authors and sympathized (sometimes limitedly) with their experiences, the metaphor study seems too big to be narrowed into one application. It is more like the discovery of a theory than the development of a single rhetorical argument.

In summary, this book while profoundly cool, is going to require a large bit of class discussion before I really understand what it was trying to tell me.

The Long Trip Grinds To An End...At Last

At the end of section one when Pirsig first introduces the character of Phaedrus, he has this to say on the forgotten man's behalf: "His wife and family seem to have suffered most...No one really knew him."

The Phaedrus introduced in this opening section is a tragic character, but not a particularly sympathetic one. Now, here at the end of this book, I feel that I was done a disservice so innocuous at the beginning of my shared journey with Pirsig that I could not put together until now precisely why I disliked this book. This is not to say that I hated it, or that reading it was onerous, but that at the conclusion I felt the author himself had been condescending me from the beginning and I found it too impossible to believe that any writer could have such disdain for his own audience that I ignored it for the majority of the book.

I had hoped that this book would be a backwards glance, from someone who had experienced, healed and meant to relay his story. Instead, I felt chastised by a man who talked about the catastrophe of Phaedrus' struggle with a reminiscing fondness that makes me wonder if her changed at all. While that in and of itself is a fascinating topic (did the "new personality" differ at all from the old? was this a question of stability rather than logos?), the early sections of the book present an opportunity to look at the ways in which Phaedrus failed in his examination of the world, the means by which he drove himself insane. Instead, Pirsig waxes philosophical about the glory of Phaedrus' golden years and the genius of his philosophy. While Phaedrus' intelligence in unquestionably high, the pedestal Pirsig places him upon seems hollow. Phaedrus did not answer any questions, he simply performed an acrobatic leap over the commonly accepted line of questioning to ask his own.

In chapter 28, as Pirsig describes Phaedrus' helplessness and despair when confronted with his search for the bunk-bedders with Chris, I thought he might finally be coming around to an analysis of the failures of the Phaedrus character. And he does speak to the fear and uncertainty, but his narrative makes it clear that those  are secondary things, sacrifices for Phaedrus in the face of his search for Quality, and sacrifices for the narrator in his search for his own history.

And in his description of the beauty of the untouched west, he reminds me of my father, if my father routinely spoke to me like I was an illiterate child incapable of independent thought. I rebel, perhaps as the by product of my own generation, against the idea that the past was pure and simple and the future is ruining  all we have left in the world. The past had its beauty, simplicity, and glory. But it also had its brutality, complexity, and conflict. The narrator romanticises the past in the same way he romanticises Phaedrus, highlighting the beauty of something long past and pretending that those beautiful moments comprise a holistically better era.

Yoga Was Good For Me, But I Quit It Anyway

I'm beginning to think that most of the frustration I see in Pirsig (and Macrorie before him) comes from the frustration in my life right now.

Last night, in my Honors Seminar, we discussed section one of Pirsig's book - and came to drastically different conclusions that this Capstone class about the worth of a classical/romantic split and how well a dichotomy like this will hold up in the rest of the book. And I  realized that, in reading just one excerpt, everyone in the room took away very, very (very) different meaning. And that, as a class, we came to a collective agreement very different from discussion #1.

As I finished this section, our differences in discussion got me thinking. I know the frustration is in Prisig's book, and I know it was in Macrorie's. Both authors rage against an unseen foe who is slowly helping education and inquisition atrophy. But the anger is hard for me to see beyond. Their frustration rings so true to me on a personal level that I am almost unable to move beyond it and take in the other meanings in the book.

In one way, that is a nice, refreshing reaction, since almost all books should be read more than twice to get anything out of them at all, but in classes, my fixation on the author's frustration becomes something of a block.

I think that these books say something different to everyone who reads them because they are demandingly introspective. They seek the things that are upseting the lives of their readers and attempt to offer clarity. Unfortunately, a single good book is not, in and of itself, enough to inspire true clarity in a reader.

I really shouldn't have quit doing yoga...

I Am Only Self-Critical Enough to Know The Things I Hate

Things I want to talk about in this blog:
Being self-critical is really hard and really useful. Some people do it better than others. Why is this important for us as writers?

So, yeah. Being self-critical is hard, and not for the most obvious reasons (although, also for those, a little bit). It's far, far too easy to go too hard in the other direction, hence the title of this blog. My self-esteem is tied, in part, to my perception of my objective worth as a person but I am also the least objective person in the world on this particular topic. So my self-image is either "Goddess" or "Satan", with no in-between. For obvious reasons this can be both awful and excellent depending on my mood.

Prisig's writing is so remarkably self-aware that I want to accuse him of falsifying his memories of himself to make his less aware. He doesn't react with outward anger towards those around him, but he remembers feeling the angry impulse; he shows his own insecurity in his physical descriptions when he turns away from conflict or emotion he does not want to engage with. This transparence kept me reading long past when my interest in the subject at hand. If I could emulate any aspect of his strategy, it would be his transparent self-image.

That mentality is especially critical in writers, because our taste evolves far ahead of our abilities (in most cases, at least). So I know when my writing is bad and I can head how off the words sound, but I don't always know what makes them this way. To be so honest with ourselves regarding not only criticism but complements and goals would improve our writing a thousandfold. The self-affirmation that your work sucks and that it sucks slightly less than the one before can help you move forward in you life instead of dwelling on the negative. We are taught that these negative criticisms are comprehensive, that self-complementing is a weakness. The positive is a vital part of the creative process, because it moves the writer in the right direction.

After all, you don't really know a thing until you know how to do maintenance on it and take better care of it than just handing it off the mechanics (or technicians) whenever something goes wrong. Ex. I can't repair a computer, but I sure as hell know how to debug one. And manuscripts that you can't edit are worse than useless.

But the most important tool for writers is the one many people care for the worst and that is the most valuable application of Prisig's book for me: self-care. Without the writer, a book is just a lost idea, a conference paper waits for someone to have a distantly similar though, a poem stays in the inanimate objects that have failed to inspire. For Prisig and his son, the motorcycle trip is a journey of self-care



Also, Prisig rises earlier in the morning than anyone should ever feel compelled to.

Writing Is Hard, And Other Things I Sort Of Know

For me, one of Macrorie's most striking realizations is the sheer difficulty of writing. He seldom comes outright to say it, but all of his examples of poor  creative writing display the same problem: fiction is as prone, if not more so, to the pitfalls on Engfish. Vague, stilted writing is everywhere in fiction, particularly in young writers searching for their unique voices. As a writer searching for my own voice, a solid 98% of what I write is Engfish. Not all of it is irreparable, and I am a much better editor than composer, but the act of composition is still largely an exercise in imitation.

The poem he referenced on page 125 reminds me of poetry I read, and wrote, in high school. It sounds like genuine emotions that the writer was struggling to express by using someone else's form; the author did not yet have the craft for originality, so s/he used a pre-existing form as a vehicle for authentic feeling and in doing so reduced those feelings to trite cliche.

In those passages of Macrorie's where he gets at this struggle, at what I think is the heart of his arguments, I can truly empathize with the students he writes about. It ties in beautifully with my own Capstone project, in fact, as I was working on the early pages of my novel draft as I worked on finishing Uptaught. It was painful. When I write I feel like I am unlearning clunky, outdated style with every sentence. Sometimes it takes me a page to find a tolerable vein in which to continue. Sometimes it takes until the final paragraphs. Writing is an excruciating practice for me, where the pride of composing a series of pages that say exactly what I mean just barely outweighs the incredible frustration of failing over and over to get even the most minute details to come across with any subtlety. It is a level of communication for which I was not trained and which I have struggled to master alone.

As for the book as a whole, I found its frustration with the university system to be a clarifying experience for many of my own frustrations but ultimately unhelpful as a guide towards better teaching. Macrorie's class structure was innovative for his time and clearly worked well, but it sounds like every other advanced composition class I've taken. Macrorie never seemed to explain how his system would benefit other writing classes and disciplines. My main (and really only) complaint about this book was that Macrorie seemed more interested in venting his anger at the system than in finding a multi-lateral solution, if one can even be found. He talks about his early text book attempt critically, recalling how he uses a half-baked system with no successful examples to defend his methodology, yet here he advocates for a system that shows success, but only in one field. He offers ideas, such as examining the assignment's constraints before blaming students for awful papers, that could easily be expanded, but the methodology he focuses on (having students write for themselves) is difficult to work into specified writing curriculum such as tech or P.R. writing. I feel like Macrorie has an excellent system who's full reach is underdeveloped in this book.

Other thoughts on Uptaught:
I don't know how I feel about the racism metaphors. I feel like no matter how horribly teachers treat students they will never approach the systematic rape of culture that was (and in some ways still is) racism in the U.S. Macrorie was stretching with this one.

Ménage à trois: Thoughts on the Third Way Pt. 1

Author's Note: My copy of Uptaught arrived this afternoon, just in time to coincide with the worst of my current head cold. At the time I am writing this, I am only on page 55. Provided the Black Plague lifts its grasp on our house, I will be finished with the reading and in class tomorrow. If not, it is because I have no desire to be a living contagion for the rest of you.

On to business, I suppose what comes most readily to mind as I begin this book is the last of my Honors College classes at this fine University. The class is called Honors Read and the objective is for my class to decide on one (or two) new texts for the next year's freshman seminar. While this in undoubtedly among the most noble of calling's for MSU students, my classmates (and by extensions, I suppose, myself) are more than a little pretentious and plenty self-involved. We took this class because we, like Macrorie, knew something was missing from our Texts and Critics curriculum and by God we knew how to fix it.

The first week of classes has been filled with unlearning our own preconceptions of what makes books worthwhile and good and what things we desire in our literature. Like Macrorie and his students, we need to let literature happen to us, at least for a little while, rather than telling our books and our classmates what is best. I anticipate this will be tricky because it requires a combination of certainty that our book (or film, article, or paper) is a great fit for the class, and the open-ended faith that Macrorie learned to teach his students, the willingness to welcome discomfort and alien presence into our lives and allow it to change us. 

I am better by far at certainty than I am at flexibility, which is why Macrorie's writing gave me pause.

What he encourages his later students to do to find their voices is to relax themselves and let the writing happen to them. The idea that not only does everyone have a story, they have the capacity to share it is sadly as alien to me as it was to the teaching student who told him that writing could not be taught. Like Macrorie’s students, I have grown up believing that a bad writer could become passable, maybe even tolerable in a field he enjoyed, but never good.

What Macrorie’s Third Way achieves is a system for encouraging storytelling as an extension of feeling rather than a method of composition. The difference being, as visible in his approach, that his students are all storytellers in one way or another, but few of them believe in their ability to be compsers.

Compositions are great art. Beethoven was a composer. Shakespeare was a composer. Joe Shmo might amount to a hack if her works for it.

But we tell stories all the time. Fairy tales for children who won’t fall asleep. White lies to our parents or teachers. Fishing, hunting, drinking, partying, living stories.

For me, the power of Macrorie’s message is that we should not harness people skills of memorization and composition, but give them a chance to set their stories down and unravel them, to find out what makes them good and enjoyable.

To end, I will leave you with this. As a freshman in college, I was appalled when, in my first class with a teacher (let’s call her Professor A), I received my first essay and it was bleeding red. I was a champion essay writer. It was my thing. I did not fail essays. Frantic, I flipped to the back, where the rubric was, and found a cheerful (for all the blood colored ink) 92% with lavish praises for things I had done well. That was the first time I had ever really received constructive criticism on a paper. High school teachers, I have come to assume, can’t labor over “sufficient” papers to make them excellent, so they gave me my “A” and sent me onto the next level. Professor A took every opportunity to make me a better writer and I appreciate that “good” writing was never enough for her. She, and later professors, subscribed to Macromie’s disdain for dead sentences and pushed me beyond her own rubrics and onto better papers.

Author’s Note, the Second: Here, I end my now bizarre rambling’s, because my Nyquil is making the screen do funny things.