Today, Tuesday, 2/7/2012, is the 200th anniversary of Charles Dicken’s birth in Portsmouth, England, so it’s fitting to remember Thomas Gradgrind, teacher of facts, in Hard Times.

Also, listen to the TED talk by Tim Hartford, who presents the antithesis to the Every-Complex-Problem-Has-A-Simple-Solution-But-It’s-Wrong assertion that he calls the God Complex: There’s a simple solution to every complex problem, and it’s right.

Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy merchant who only believes in facts, is an ardent believer in the God Complex, but then he learns that a wise man knows he’s a fool and begins helping the poor.

Seeing Benicia Old Town Theatre Group’s preformance of The Voice of the Prairie and writing a response to the play is one thing you can do for extra credit. My review of John Olive’s play can be found at Benicia.Patch.com.

Lexi Hart as Frankie Reed and Dan Clark as The Watermelon Man

I encourage you to visit Sherman Alexie’s FallsApart.com. All my students of English 1, and this semester of English 370 as well, will remember Lester FallsApart from Smoke Signals, a weather forecaster who has been broken down at the crossroads since 1972.

When you visit, you should join Alexie’s email list, for if you do, you’ll start receiving emails, as you might suspect, that challenge you to think. In particular, the email I received today, the contents of which you’ll find below, squeezes the Petrarchan sonnet form down from 14 lines to 14 syllables with some interesting results:

Hey, folks,

Been working on this new little form. A little sonnet in the form of a couplet. First line 8 syllables, second line 6 syllables, mimicking the 8-6 lines in a stanza structure of a Petrarchan sonnet.

The two lines must rhyme and, as in the Petrarchan sonnet, there must be a thematic turn between the two lines…

So here are a few:

Simultaneous sun and rain,
I am addicted to pain.

That tree is ten thousand years old,
But doesn’t have a soul?

I don’t care if there is a God,
But I fear there is not.

Of course, I married my mother
And so did my brothers.

Shouldn’t we think more of the worm
Than of the predator bird?

Yes, I have often battled Grief.
Both of us used our teeth.

Rather than comments on Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which I unsuccessfully tried to understand while reading next to a pool in Monrovia, Liberia in 1968, the heat unbearably baking my brain, these are links to impossible “being”:

• There’s a new star forming about 4300 light-years away, a new super-massive star in our
  
  

  This galactic bubble is known as RCW 120. It lies about 4300 light-years away and has been formed by a star at its center. The star is not visible at these infrared wavelengths but pushes on the surrounding dust and gas with nothing more than the power of its starlight. CREDIT: ESA/PACS/SPIRE/HOBYS Consortia

  Milky way, that’s just too big to be possible given current solar evolution models. But that’s okay, since scientific models must be falsifiable to be valid and since scientists can improve their model by watching the star’s evolution during  the next 200,000 years. Or, of course, they can come up with an improved model sooner, which would be nice since 200,000 years is rather long. Wasn’t it about this long in the past that mitochondrial Eve began our current human race?

  and to nothingness:

• And Canadian poet Tom Wayman has formulated an answer to the student who asks, after missing a class, whether anything happened that involves nothingness and everythingness:

DID I MISS ANYTHING?

Tom Wayman
From: The Astonishing Weight of the Dead. Vancouver: Polestar, 1994.

Question frequently asked by
students after missing a class

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

I hope you had a restful and interesting summer.

Links to your class can be found at the top right of this page or you can go to QCounty.com, where the link path to my Solano classes is a bit shorter.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson with Chaser the Border Collie

If you haven’t heard about Chaser the Border Collie, you’ll be amazed. The link is to a short segment on ABC or you can find the complete video on NOVA’s website.

And if you have heard about him, I’d like you to contemplate how amazing Chaser is.  Here’s a dog who is able to associate arbitrary names, at least from Chaser’s POV since he doesn’t speak English, with stuffed toys, which are equally arbitrary from his POV.

Could you do this? Not knowing the context of the object you’re seeing, would you then be able to associate an equally arbitrary name with this object, and do this a thousand times over?

Sure you could, and probably in less time than Chaser — but maybe not.

Since a metaphor is a substitution that replaces one thing for another, Chaser is clearly a champion metaphor machine. It’ll be interesting to see how this research helps us understand and model the nature of animal thought.

I hope you had a restful and interesting winter break.

Links to your class can be found at the top of this page or you can go to QCounty.com, where the link path is a bit shorter.

I hope you had a restful, engaging, creative and memorable summer and that you’re now ready to get back to the wonderful world of English.

For information concerning your class, follow My Teaching Links at the right, or at the top right, to my Solano classes, Fall 2010 and your English class, either 1, 2 or 370.

While I've labeled this from the point of view of the reader who over time becomes more or less engaged, the POV can be that of a narrator or character. Indeed, once you understand the concept, you may find yourself applying it in the most inappropriate situations.

Key to my approach to teaching reading and writing to my English students, no matter the level or the focus — expository writing, short stories, narrative poetry, drama — is the checkmark story structure that I came across in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft when I was trying to understand my fiction and MFA creative writing workshops at Mills College. While most English texts and English professors seem to prefer a narrative approach to plot — we English teachers are, after all, comfortable with words — this graph, which has evolved some since Burroway, appealed to my physicist’s need to see everything mathematically — except, of course, true love.

Fundamentally, the graph displays in emotional space-time that if you (or a character) need to get from point A to D, there will be a bump in your road at B that will make you question your ability to get to your destination until you reach C, when all will become clear.

One might say, if one were sitting in one of my classes, reviewing my approach, that I take this checkmark story structure stuff rather seriously. Too seriously, some might say, in that I sometimes apply it in conversation as well, telling someone who just bared his soul that his conflict was in search of a turning point and moral resolution. As you might imagine, this can be a rather abrupt conversation stopper.

Kurt Vonnegut seems to have had a more whimsical view of this versatile structure as evidenced by an article in the Spring 2010 edition of Lapham’s Quarterly. On his abscissa, time starts with the beginning and ends with the end, which seems appropriate. Instead of the ordinate measuring engagement, his axis goes from ill fortune to

good fortune. Indeed, if one shifts the structure to the POV of a character, fortune seems like the right measure. I especially liked his depiction of a boy meeting a girl, which might be true love. And then there’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which a despondent young man turns into a bug. Less understandable is Vonnegut’s take on Hamlet and truth. For this he decides that it’s impossible to know when fortune is ill or good, so the play has nothing about fortune, ill or good. To attempt to understand Vonnegut’s humorous point, you’ll have to read the article.