Update on Loftyness

Well, I've done it. I've taken the first paragraph from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (the book we recently finished reading together in Oulipo) and applied to it the five loftyizing constraints from the previous post, first one at a time and then all at once. Each individually meets with some success, but the overall effect is quite convincing. Great fun! Please check them out:

Original, the first paragraph from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Germanic capitalizing, a "fair coin" flipped to decide whether or not to capitalize a given noun:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s Night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the World around you fade. Best to close the Door; the TV is always on in the next Room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your Voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Inverting, a "fair coin" flipped to decide whether or not to invert the subject and verb in a given sentence:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Every other thought dispel. Let fade the world around you. Best the door to close; the TV is always on in the next room. The others tell, right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! Disturbed I don’t want to be!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; louder speak, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope leave you alone they will.

Theethouizing, “you” has been changed systematically to “thee” or “thou,” and “your” to “thy” or “thine":

Thou art about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around thee fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise thy voice – they won’t hear thee otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard thee, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if thou preferst, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave thee alone.

Oloizing, “O” and “Lo!” placed at the start of randomly selected sentences and independent clauses:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Lo!, relax. O, concentrate. O, dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. O, best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Lo!, tell the others right away, “O, no, I don’t want to watch TV!” O, raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “O, I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Lo!, maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “Lo!, I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Adjectival inflating, every adjective replaced by its longest synonym appearing on thesaurus.com:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s uncontaminated novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every supplementary thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the subsequential room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s uncontaminated novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

The whole enchilada: all five constraints applied simultaneously:

Thou art about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s uncontaminated novel, If on a winter’s Night a traveler. Lo!, relax. O, concentrate. O, every supplementary thought dispel. Let fade the World around thee. O, best the Door to close; the TV is always on in the subsequential Room. Lo!, the others tell, right away, “O, no, I don’t want to watch TV!” O, raise thy Voice – they won’t hear thee otherwise – “O, I’m reading! Disturbed I don’t want to be!” Lo!, maybe they haven’t heard thee, with all that racket; louder speak, yell: “Lo!, I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s uncontaminated novel!” Or if thou preferst, don’t say anything; just hope leave thee alone they will.

And yes, they pay me to do this, folks. How awesome is my job?

Midsemester musings

We're about halfway through the semester now, and I have to say I'm enjoying teaching more than I have for a few years now. I love both of my classes and am having tremendous amounts of fun with both of them. The Calc III class is the most engaged math class I've had in several semesters: the students are eager, active, and awesome. And Oulipo...I don't know how we can fit so much fun into three fifty-minute periods each week. I wish we met for longer...

In Calc III I've been starting each Wednesday (the dreaded "hump day") with a contemplative exercise of some sort, much like the first, about which I wrote a few weeks back. The purpose of each exercise is to ask students to put themselves in a positive frame of mind, to reflect on something that's lifting them up and to cast aside something that's holding them down. Today I asked them each to write a simple haiku (no season indicators or "turns," just a simple 5-7-5 syllabic scheme) about their current state of mind. Though I saw a lot of counting on fingers, I also saw a lot of earnest scribbling. Though I don't collect a single word the students write in response to these simple prompts, I have no doubt most (if not all) of the students are taking the assignments seriously, and I hope that they're having salutary effects.

In Oulipo the most recent out-of-class assignment was to write a "lofty" poem elegizing a quotidian object. Each of us selected an everyday object that was then randomly selected by one of the others in the class. We were then each tasked with writing verse that we deemed "lofty" in some fashion, extolling the virtues of the object we'd been assigned. For many people "lofty" meant "classical," and several student wrote poems in a romantic style, with rime and meter appropriate to an 18th-century-or-earlier bard.

After we'd workshopped our poems and read a number of them out loud, we talked briefly about conventional devices we might make use of to "loftyize" a piece of non-lofty writing and as a group came up with the following:

1. Germanic capitalizing: selectively or systematically capitalize nouns throughout the piece.
2. Inverting: selectively or systematically invert the standard modern subject-verb order throughout the piece.
3. Theethouizing: selectively or systematically turn "you"s into "thee"s and "thou"s throughout the piece.
4. Oloizing: selectively or systematically insert "o!"s and "lo!"s throughout the piece.
5. Adjectival inflating (a nod to n + 7): selectively or systematically replace each adjective with its longest synonym appearing in an agreed-upon thesaurus throughout the piece.

I'm going to try these out on a piece of non-lofty writing, maybe something from Jon Rogawski's Calculus...? Results posted soon...

Read one, write two

Today's Oulipo class featured a constraint I made up in the middle class sometime last week but have only just now had a chance to try out. I call it "read one, write two," and it goes something like this:

1. One person begins the process by writing two lines of a poem, each on its own scrap of paper.

2. This person then passes the second line only on to the next person. This person then writes two lines of her own, passing only the second one on to the next person, and so forth.

3. At the end, the finished "poem" is assembled, made up of the various pieces, only half of which were "visible" to more than one person.

We had five rounds going at once, and though the bookkeeping took a little getting used to, we got the hang of it and managed to compile five 20-line poems between us. I've transcribed them below.

Ye, old hag,
why do you look at me so?
Do you not know
the love that's harbored within?
It only helps us to make nonsense out of silence.
The white noise under spoken tremors
is the most terrifying noise you'll hear
and the lullaby from the song on the radio
put us to sleep, like the video
of the man with the golden eye, daddy-o.
She spoke with both reverence and bewilderment,
"he's the smoothest street walker in town."
They say, though, he has a secret:
that once upon a time, he nearly got caught,
our hands upon the deer, illegally slain
the blood stained there and drying fast,
red as a cabernet sauvignon
to be shared with friends at the end of the week,
even when so tired you can barely speak,
with this, with them, the solace you seek.

Spring came too early this year,
we were too young; unready for the harvest,
and yet so old because all that we'd seen,
and each day a reminder of the ages we had
were reflected in the barman, who was mad
from all the ale he drank, he thought he was from Baghdad.
The drink was starting to affect his mind, you see.
Well, his mind along with his liver
were rotting, rotting away,
drinking poison day by day,
I feel my body giving over,
friends and lovers wash away
like suds off a car
washed in the middle of a hot summer day.
Instead of languishing in dismay,
if you must run, then run away!
Run off to the great unknown,
never to be seen again!
No, never to be seen again,
not ever in this world.

Whose great works were served to the throne?
There once was a barber from Rome
who quite enjoyed the company of loose women,
although you'd never know by how much he went to church.
Church, yes, but by night he wanders the murky forest,
hand in hand with darkness.
So trudge I thro' the tortured bush [?],
willows hang in gloomy mourning,
a shadow extending across the field.
The running water would not yield:
wounds so deep cannot be healed
prancing through the poppy field
stopping to watch the butterflies
flying in the air.
But when night fell, so did I;
a broken angel with battered wings
keeps moving forward, although winds blow through;
passing through the cold light of a sunny pale mid-winter afternoon
I saw a man standing in a meadow
and he said to me, "all is well."

Birds skip playfully through trees;
I find I have a sudden urge to sneeze.
The urge builds in the back of my throat,
undeniable, unbearable, I cannot resist any longer.
"Oh, Rowan!" she shouted,
the smell of catfish in the air.
Alive, they predict earthquakes.
Caught, killed, and fried, they are tasty.
Tasty to the one who eats meat,
a vegetarian's nightmare, a vegan's torture.
No, nothing at all, not but rotting meat,
for the ship had sailed  for endless weeks,
endless weeks of throbbing, busy crusading outward on a thin vessel,
looking for a reason to keep from looking
by distracting myself with television shows.
But every so often I begin to start looking...
at the old cafe, where she was once cooking.
And if I look hard enough, I can smell her dumplings.
Their aroma takes me to the kitchen of my 11-year-old self,
where all my dreams began.

A bottle of water under a chair,
to hydrate those who care to drink,
or care not, and drink none at all.
But drink too much? I hardly think
a slip of vodka, a drop of wine --
hardly enough to make me blink.
I've lived it all before, it's no lie.
We will play these games until we die,
and I will die singing songs, telling myself my body was my greatest tool.
There is nothing left to wait for
because I am in the front of the line.
Now the cafe barista asks for my order.
I said "bring me a cafe from Mordor."
The barista said, "we ran out of those in the last quarter.
Running businesses is hard, you see."
Working tooth and nail, and still no profit.
But who needs profit anyway?
Maybe a poor man like he
could live by a liverwurst sea
and eat cantaloup grown from a mulberry tree.

Obligatory whatnots

I've been posting somewhat regularly lately, and though today's not given me considerable fodder for a brand-spankin' new post (cross products in Calc III and an introductory discussion of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler in Oulipo), I thought I might mention a few ongoing whatnots.

Whatnot #1, CRTF...WTF? I've begun drafting a "contextualizing" document that might help folks who haven't been intimately involved in the process of crafting the current proposal understand exactly what in the hell those of us who have been intimately involved in the process of crafting the current proposal are thinking. Of course, I've come out semi-publicly (here and elsewhere) as having serious reservations about the proposal as it stands, so it's ironic that it falls to me to explain our reasoning.

I think at this point, the powers that be are concerned that given some of the language of the Strategic Plan (about more below) we're better off streamlining and "standardizing" our curriculum before someone else (*cough* GA? *cough cough*) does it for us.

Whatnot #2, This post by Teacherken of education-related blogging fame. (He's been a fixture in various places, including The Daily Kos.) The writing's on the wall, and it ain't pretty. As if I needed more reason to loathe AP exams. Students, parents, everyone: the AP system is fundamentally fraught with error of every kind. It's a wrongheaded hydra. We need to slay the damned thing. Of course, we're going to have to fight through ETS and friends to even get to it.

Whatnot #1 and Whatnot #2 bring me to...

...Whatnot #3, The Strategic Plan. I'm about 1/6 of the way through reading this sucker. I regaled (read: "bored/annoyed the crap out of") my Facebook friends with a line-by-line response to this damned thing a few days ago when I started reading it, alcoholic beverage in hand. It's awful, folks. It adopts the rhetoric of the corporate community, eyes intently focused on the bottom line, offering one way to the university system, and one way only: make us money or die. It's all about measurable production benchmarks (graduates are "produced," donchano?) and accountability to stakeholders. It's all about uniformity and portability and seamless transfer. It's all about standards. It's NCLB on steroids, repackaged for the 'teens. It's a godawful mess.

But it's the UNC system's lodestone for the next several years. It's our way through the woods. It's the house we have to beat, the inside straight we've got to draw into. It's our future.

I plan on finishing reading it this week sometime, provided I can find enough liquor. I'll post my thoughts about it here as I read it.

Constraint and contemplation

I thought I might mention a couple of the activities I asked my students to take part in today.

The first was a simple freewrite, with an even simpler summative exercise at the end. I asked my Oulipo students to freewrite for five minutes on the ways in which they've noticed their writing to be affected by constraint. Once they'd completed this freewrite I asked them each to identify three words which gave some indication of their freewrite's content and tone. They then shared these words on the board:

I joined the students in this exercise. I was intrigued that my three words ended up being "pattern," "unknown," and "death." The first was unsurprising but the last two were unexpected. I reasoned (if one can call analysis through freewriting "reason") roughly as follows: "we seek patterns in everything we see, including heavily constrained literature, because patterns have predictive power and allow us to extrapolate from the known present and past to the unknown future; perhaps the most compelling unknown is death...can the patterns we find in constrained poetry help us understand even this ultimate unknown?"

We'll have a chance on Friday to discuss the words above more thoroughly. So far we've only talked briefly in pairs about our ideas. I'm looking forward to these upcoming conversations.

The other activity I wanted to mention is a contemplative exercise I asked students in both classes to complete. Knowing full well that Wednesday is the longest and most stressful day for many folks in academia (students, faculty, and staff alike), I wanted to do something to help alleviate the stress. Yesterday, while sitting in the first session of my first faculty/staff learning circle since Fall 2011 (it's been too long!), I thought up the following activity, though I'm sure it's not original to me:

1. Take out two scraps of paper.
2. On one of them, write something that's stressing you out or bringing you down.
3. On the other, write something that's bringing you joy or making you smile.
4. Ball the first scrap up into a tiny origami boulder and chuck it into the recycling bin lovingly provided in the middle of the room.
5. Fold the second scrap neatly and tuck it into your pocket, where you're likely to find it once, twice, thrice, throughout the rest of the day, a gentle reminder of something you should be happy about.

It's a simple exercise, but in both classes it elicited a great response. People in both classes gleefully threw their stressors into the recycling bin in a hail of discarded worry. ("This feels really therapeutic," said one of my Oulipo students.) I noticed smiles and nods from many folks as they put their happy thoughts away. The activity took three minutes out of class time, but I believe it went a long way to establishing a sense of community and a more relaxed state of mind in which we would all be a bit more receptive to new ideas. I might have to make this, or something like it, a regular Wednesday occurrence.

CRTF and Ikea

A segment on NPR's Morning Edition this morning summarized my thoughts on the ongoing curriculum review perfectly. The "Ikea Effect" refers to the observation "that people attach greater value to things they built than if the very same product was built by someone else" (see the linked-to article).

I think I've been blind to the current CRTF proposal's shortcomings largely because I've been very intimately involved in the process that's led to its crafting. Late last week I "came out" as a non-believer to one of my most trusted colleagues (after having come out here a few days sooner), letting her know that I no longer feel that our proposed curriculum is an improvement on the current one. It's less complicated, but simplicity is not superiority, and it's not even clear that the simplicity will result in gain to faculty (in terms, for instance, of lighter workload or reduced faculty oversight).

It is clear, however, that the simplicity will likely result in loss to students: the proposed curriculum is decidedly less interdisciplinary and intentional. Though I don't believe we should prescribe every student's course exactly, I believe some prescription is important. For instance, I feel strongly that the outcomes of the ILS Intensives be met, no matter the way in which they are met. My ideal curriculum would be one in which every department, without exception, structures its major concentrations in such a manner that every student completing a concentration would automatically take two writing-intensive courses and one information-literacy-intensive course. The proposed curriculum, once we've reinstated the requirement of a second course in a science (quite broadly defined) and once we've reinstated the requirement that every student complete every course in the Humanities sequence, will look little different from the existing one. The only changes will be the removal of intensive requirements, the removal of ILS Topical Clusters, and the removal of LS 379, the transfer colloquia that help students transferring to UNC Asheville adjust to our campus and its functioning. These are all at least somewhat significant losses, in my view.

But, as it is, it looks like we may be heading forward to implementation quite soon. It may very well be that when the documents are drawn up and sent to the Faculty Senate's Academic Policies Committee, that body will shoot them down. (Hope springs eternal...) We'll see, probably sooner rather than later. By me, I'd rather take another year to put something prettier together, something more focused on students' needs than on faculty members' perceptions of efficiency. I'd love to see a curriculum where we look closely at the sacred calf of Humanities (it ain't perfect, people; far from it!) and where we ask all departments to seriously reevaluate their major curricula and not simply say "we ain't budging."

A guy can dream, can't he?

Perverbs

Today's Oulipo class started off with Didi leading us in a constraint she'd read about for today. According to the Oulipo Compendium, a perverb (created by Oulipian Maxine Groffsky) is "the result obtained by crossing proverbs." For example, "if we join the first part of 'Red sky at night, sailor's delight' to the second part of 'It never rains but it pours,' we obtain the proverb 'Red sky at night, but it pours."

We spent a little time making up a few of our own perverbs, building off of a list of proverbs we brainstormed at the outset. Here's a list of several we came up with, including some extremely twisted (lexically and topically) ones:

Sailor’s delight, horse in the mouth.
It never rains, but houses shouldn’t throw stones.
An apple a day shouldn’t throw stones.
Loose lips gather no moss.
A bird in the hand keeps the doctor away.
Spare the rod and sink ships.
Early to bed, early to rise, sinks ships.
A stitch in time catches worms.
You can lead a horse to water, but he catches the worm.
Spare the red sky rod and at night spoil the child; sailor’s delight.
An apple a day is worth two in the bush.
An ounce of prevention is a penny earned.
An ounce of bird catches the worm.
Keep calm and spoil the child.
Those who live in a penny spoil the child.
Haste makes moss.
Haste makes worms.
Loose lips gather sailors.

The students' task for Monday: write a holorhyme and a snowball.

My task: find a good .txt file full of profanity to use for the homovocalism generator I wrote in Mathematica.

You're welcome.