tinkering

I really like this video of Adam Savage talking about the importance of maker culture to the broader educational landscape. In particular, he argues for trying things and failing--and that making things helps kids do well in math, science, and other subjects. Taking things apart and putting them together again in different ways also encourages thinking in terms of systems and how they interact, rather than becoming too entrenched in a particular way of seeing things. 


Savage's take on tinkering also reminded me of this article on the virtues of being a generalist rather than a specialist, given that a diversity of skills and experiences will help employees adapt better over time. Now, let's get those liberal arts majors to a wood shop or laboratory.  

personal branding

Equal parts satire and survival skills, this post from a few years ago captures the essence of academia-as-performance art by laying out strategies for those all-important introductions that grad students fumble their way through on the first day of every new course.

My favorite bit of advice: "Never sacrifice originality and erudition for clarity."

for love or money

Reading, during graduate school, was about mastering a canon, attaining fluency in literary history and tradition, becoming conversant in the language of theory and criticism. It was often about proving oneself as a scholar and also, sometimes, about marking territory. Rarely did I read something without an eye as to what sort of use it could be put, whether as the foundation of an article, supplementary evidence for another project, or another milestone in the ongoing process of acquiring cultural capital.

Much of this is well and good and a perfectly normal part of the process by which academia replicates itself: of the many things I regret about grad school, the ability to have an intelligent conversation about most major periods of Spanish and Spanish American literature is not one of them.

Now that I’ve opted out of that world, though, my reading habits operate in an entirely different economy. If reading for graduate school was a primarily utilitarian activity, reading--particularly reading fiction--is for me now a more private, less commercial undertaking. Oh, sure, I still read to stay current in my field and to fill in gaps in my personal catalogue of Books That Must Be Read. And it’s hard to turn off the close reading habits acquired through such an intense engagement with literary study; I’m forever tracking narrative voices in my head and paying attention to plot structure and literary conventions and language as I move through a novel.

But I’ve regained that inimitable pleasure of sinking into another’s world through fiction, and I can once again do it merely because I love it. This is why, in part, I think the role of literary scholar never quite fit: I wanted literature to feed my soul, when the structure of academia insisted that I use it to make a living.

And although we do well to give commerce its due, it is good, also, to carve out a bit of space for the things we do first for love.

un recordatorio, tal vez un recuerdo

A former student, now a friend, asked me recently whether speaking Spanish feels too much like work when I’m out of the classroom and off the clock. Yes, it often does, a fact that saddens me. 

Despite that, Enrique Morente’s version of Federico García Lorca’s “La Aurora de Nueva York” breaks my heart and then heals it in all the right ways, reminding me of why I loved Spanish so much in the first place.

la peor de todas

A su retrato
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Éste que ves, engaño colorido,
que del arte ostentando los primores,
con falsos silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido;

éste, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido
excusar de los años los horrores,
y venciendo del tiempo los rigores
triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,

es un vano artificio del cuidado,
es una flor al viento dedicada,
es un resguardo inútil para el hado:

es una necia diligencia errada,
es un afán caduco, y bien mirado,
es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.

Always, in previous encounters with this poem, I admired Sor Juana's criticism of the role of women in art, principally their reduction to the state of muse.

Here, her sonnet echoes Luis de Góngora's plea to celebrate youthful beauty before it yields inexorably to the skull beneath the skin. Rather than write about the ephemeral nature of female beauty, however, Sor Juana addresses the artist who would preserve that elusive glory by way of paint on canvas. This "vain artifice" fools the senses temporarily, yet results only in an untrustworthy imitation of life itself. Unlike the final tercet of Góngora's sonnet, in which it is female beauty that becomes "tierra, [...] humo, [...] polvo, [...] sombra, [...] nada," in Sor Juana's poem, it is the representation itself that is but a cadaver, a shadow, nothing.

Part of the appeal of Sor Juana as a historical figure is the literary quality of her life: a woman so talented and intelligent, so beyond all expectations for her gender in that time and place, forced to submit to patriarchy and renounce all intellectual activity. It galls, even now.

In the context of her life, neither art nor science could save her, and maybe the unflinching observation of reality offered a cruel sort of solace. And yet, upon re-reading the poem, I want to believe that art does indeed offer a brief respite from the horrors of time. For a poet of Sor Juana's talent to describe art as nothing is disingenuous, to say the least. Perhaps, then, it is the nature of representation that we should take issue with. Religious orthodoxy is one sort of representation, as is an artistic tradition that relegates women to passive observers. At its best, though, art can do so much more than that.

looking north

A view from Sumas Mountain, the pronunciation of which marks how long you've been in Whatcom County. This isn't the iconic image of the lush, dense forests of the Pacific Northwest, but it is in many ways a more honest representation of recent human history here. Lowland farms in the distance, clear cuts in the foreground. Abandoned mines tucked away in stands of old-growth Douglas Fir on slopes too steep to log; shotgun shells, beer cans, and the detritus of target practice. Expansive views of the Canadian peaks, of the San Juans, of Mt. Baker, of the patchwork of logging and regrowth rolling over the distant hills.

Unlike the Chuckanuts or the trails of the Baker wilderness areas, Sumas isn't on the radar of most hikers here. It is a lonelier and perhaps wilder place, lacking the signed trails and clear land-use ethos of those areas taken out of intensive production and given over to recreational uses. For better or for worse, this is a working landscape, one that shows the price our living extracts from the land.

chick lit

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (2010)

Oh, how I wanted to like this book. Love it, even. I first ran across Egan’s name in the context of the dust-up over her comments about the genre known as “chick lit” after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. As Deena Drewis pointed out in her article, Egan’s comments about the “banal and derivative” nature of a lot of so-called chick lit were honest, if a bit ungracious. Drewis ends her analysis by suggesting that Egan’s advice to emerging female writers to “shoot high and don’t cower” is exactly the sort of thing needed to reverse substantial gender inequities in the publishing world.

Much to my disappointment, I hated the novel itself. The characters were leaden, the plot conventional, the narrative techniques stale. I get that the intended effect of the multiple narrative voices and loosely interconnected characters is a comment on the simultaneously alienated and eerily interconnected nature of life in the postmodern, socially mediated era, but come on. This trick’s been done and to much better effect, in my opinion. There were moments when I found myself rooting for the characters--and for the story that was in there somewhere--but mostly I felt like I was reading someone’s rough draft for what could someday be a compelling novel.

I’m OK with not grasping the magic of this particular novel. I realize that it’s hard for a woman to speak critically--especially about other women--without sounding like a bitch. And that to create art you need seriousness of intent. But it’s bothersome when taking yourself too seriously gets in the way of creating meaningful art.