Monday, November 30, 2009

Visual Metaphor: the Appearance of Seeing Beyond


This mirror hangs over a booth at a Brookfield diner called Rickyl's, and reflects the ceiling far behind the viewer.

At first glance the strange shape of its gilded paper mache frame makes it difficut to read its spacial position, and it's easy to see it as some sureal portal into another room rather than what it is - a simple, flat mirror.

Rickyl's is tucked away at the four corners area, behind Roccos. They offer great granola pancakes
--- Mar Walker

Friday, November 27, 2009

De Kooning's 'Woman I': perception or projection... scary either way


Standing under the brooding, dissatisfied gaze of Willem De Kooning's Woman 1 is a little unnerving. I was afraid of her in 1988 when I first saw her towering over me at  MOMA - New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the intervening decades, I've met a few women with the same expression, so I find her even more disturbing now.
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De Kooning painted Woman I from 1950 to 1952, so this work is nearly as old as I am.  She is larger than life size. When I first met her, those  huge eyes stared across a room which contained only non-objective paintings, so she was the only readable figure present. Yet she didn't seem out of place at all.  Dekooning built her with frenzied brush strokes and scumbling. Although he worked and reworked this painting obsessively for 18 months, the immediacy, the energy,  and the manic quality remain.
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Woman I is an amazing creature -  powerful, imposing, possibly malevolent, lost. Her great glaring eyes are intense and somehow, well, vacant. The top of her head is turban-like and  her long straight teeth are exposed in a lipless grimace. She has huge round shoulders, voluminous bullet breasts, and yet a delicate turn of ankle on parted legs. She's seated solidly with one leg forward and the other stretched sideways and backwards, as if she were trying to decide on a course of action.
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The brush strokes around and through her document passion, anger, vigor -  yet she seems solid and impassive, unresponsive to De Kooning's sustained spasm of creation. According to reports, he abandoned her after 18 months, as if in all that time he couldn't figure out how to please her. Later an associate Meyer Schapiro, convinced him the painting was finished.
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Every part of the painting's surface is full of vigorous bright brush strokes of thickly applied paint.  The idea of Abstrast Expressionist 'gesture painting' was to transfer the raw state of the artist's psyche directly to the canvas without the intervention of any preconceived notions of style or convention - either moral or artistic. Yet over 18 months, previous spontaneous expressions were being edited and superseded by more recent spontaneous decisions by De Kooning.
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A series of photos by Rudolph Burckhardt  shows Woman I at various stages  -- versions "no less compelling" according to Thomas Hess, than its current incarnation. Apparently she started with breasts bare, raised arms, head tilted back in a very spacial room with a clearly drawn window and objects in view beyond it.  Then the woman, the chair she is seated on, the window and a lamp - dance in and out of sight  - until, finally it's only the woman and the turmoil.
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If you are recoiling from this image, today in 2009 - remember when it was first shown in 1953, it caused quite a fuss on two counts. First the general run of folks thought De Kooning's Woman I was shamelessly vulgar, at least compared with June Cleaver and the passive demure wives of television. But it wasn't only Joe Public that hated it. Other Abstract Expressionists thought it was a step backwards -  a betrayal of the avant garde because it was representational and De Kooning's marvelous crazed woman could be clearly seen.
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De Kooning's rebuttal on his Women (and I think he painted four series of works called Woman)  was this: "The Women had to do with the female painted all throught all the ages, all those idols....It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light -- all this silly talk about line, color and form -- because that (the woman) was the thing I wanted to get hold of...."
Frankly, after all this time, she doesn't look willing.
-- Mar Walker

Sunday, November 22, 2009

We are getting old, but do we have think about it in advance?


The Blindness of Spring

We grow like the scent
of  gardens in soft rain,
in sweet perpetual increase.

----
We revel in sunlight
refuse to contemplate the dark,
view winter premonition
with aloof disdain.



This is a poem layout from my old Metaphoratorium website and it lived on several versions of my websites dating from around 1998 or so.....  --Mistryel (Mar) Walker

Saturday, November 21, 2009

the delicate warm poems of Claire Zoghb


Last Thursday at New Haven's Institute Library, I heard Claire Zoghb read her poetry.

Hers is not a poetry that slaps or shocks. It is as unpretentious and human as an embrace, as welcoming as a smile, yet it's not a sappy sentimental sort either.  For this reading, Ms. Zoghb read from her first full-length collection, Small House Breathing, which took the 2008 Quercus Review annual book competition. These poems sit on the threshold - where one culture knocks on the door of another in a friendly way, and is welcomed.

Her gentle, quiet-but-knowing style of delivery complemented the words - the poems and the person being of one whole cloth, the one the essential expression of the other.

She has a new chapbook, Dispatches from Everest, to be released by Pudding House Press on a schedule to be determined. Her work has appeared often: YankeeConnecticut ReviewConnecticut River ReviewCaduceus, and CALYX, and in  Through A Child’s Eyes: Poems and Stories About War and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, (the last two are anthologies).

She's won a lot of awards:  she won the 2008 Dogwood annual poetry competition, was awarded two Artist Fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, and there were two Pushcart nominations.

If you have a chance to get to one of her readings, drive a bit, walk, ride the bus. Arrive, sit back, enjoy.

Ms. Zoghb lives in New Haven where The Institute Library can be found at 847 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT.  There is a poetry reading there each third Thursday. The Institute Library is a membership library and it is seeking members. For $25 a year you can borrow whatever you like and keep it as long as you need to. You can even mail it back.   Though membership involves a fee - the monthly poetry reading is free.
-- Mar Walker

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Poet, Playwright Allan Garry - difficult truths, well-crafted poems


Allan Garry brought the realities of his past life to the Wednesday Night Poetry Series this past Wednesday night. He read well, spoke well, brought a balance of darkness and light to bear on the difficult subjects of war and death.  (He writes about other things as well.)

Garry is a Vietnam veteran who recently returned to writing after a long hiatus. He served in a morgue in Vietnam, searching bodies for ID, trying to honor the lives of men he didn't know, trying to make sense of random slaughter, preparing the bodies for their return home. He began writing in college after his discharge, but stopped, only starting up again in the last few years.

 He is, he says, experiencing the benefits of 18 years of therapy to recover from his experiences with war and with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Much of what he had to say is so very current, with the endless treadmill of duty tours in our present wars.

His new play Gathering Shells, co-written with Crystal Brian, (who also attended the reading) has  been produced at the Long Wharf Theater and the Little Theater in New Haven, CT,  and will be produced at the  Abingdon Theater in New York on Dec. 3, 4 & 5.  Admission is free; seating is limited. For more information and tickets, call 203-582-3500.

Garry's poetry has been published in The Red Fox Review; the Pennypaper, Curbstone Press and Helix. He has read his work at Wesleyan University, Yale University, Trinity College, Connecticut College and a number of other venues as a winner of the Wesleyan University Honors College Connecticut Poetry Circuit. New poems will be appearing in the forthcoming issues of The Connecticut River Review, Connecticut Review and Avocet Review.

He doesn't have a chapbook yet, but his well-crafted poetry will surely find a home. If you get a chance to hear his work, don't miss it...

-- Mar Walker

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Bent Pin - my lit E-zine closes - but archive of past pages is online

Photo by Richard Nethercott:


My lit magazine online, Bent Pin, formerly Bent Pin Quarterly, has closed.  The problem is computer-related. Either software degradation or upgraded OS 10.6.2 incompatibilities with iWeb 08 or perhaps  hard drive sector  corruption or SOMETHING, caused the files that contained the editable nugget of Bent Pin on my computer to transform into a chaotic mess, missing page titles, running text down the side of the page, disappearing text or text boxes, missing titles or authors of works, missing artwork.... The back-up was in the same condition, BUT the previously published ezine pages on my iDisk are okay!  I don't know why this happened.  The problem in iWeb is, all my sites are in the program and I cannot find a way to update one site without the others. I have no desire to upload this confused mess and obliterate the archive of beautiful pages which still exists online.

I guess I could swat my head against the wall a few times. I could curse and swear, eat a gallon of vanilla, drink rum, or throw things, maybe just wallow.But I am not going to do any of those things.

 the archive is at:  ______

UPDATE Aug 22, 2011 The archive and index are both moving - visit http://bentpinquarterly.blogspot.com

The photo (taken over a decade ago by a friend, Richard Nethercott ) of me looking through a sculpture in the Aldrich Museum's outdoor garden, sums it up well.  Right now I am trapped behind big impenetrable artifice of technology that is not working right at this time.
-- Mar Walker

Monday, November 16, 2009

Emptiness and effort - the ambition thing...


On the subject of ambition, I prefer to take a bit of a sideways view of things.  That is to approach via two seemingly incompatible but related ideas.

The first is emptiness -- desireless, nonjudgmental equilibrium, the one point which is the same as  expansive diffusion, nothingness. The simple contentment of sweeping or weeding or sitting or breathing, walking. Attentive, mindful awareness without judgement. This is not a religious statement or a new age statement. Just a way of thinking about being.

The other idea is effort that is expressing a deep unrelenting need to tweak and refine, which requires judgment and differentiation, to improve something, a painting, a bit of writing, a line of music, to bring it into alignment with an ideal, either internal or external.

What made me think about this is, the other day, I was sitting in a coffee shop and happened to be talking with the daughter of friend, a quiet girl in her late twenties. She was knitting, and seemed very content to be doing so.

"Everyone tells me how I really need to focus right now, to figure out how to earn a living, to make progress now on something, that I am at the age where that is what I should be doing," she said adding that she just wanted to be, and to be knitting.

Tell them you are a Buddhist and are into nothingness, I said without thinking at all.

Now, I have to backtrack because contentment is good for contentment, but perhaps it's not that good for achievement. This is a concept that is not in favor right now in the age of instant soup.

You can meditate everyday on being a musician or a writer,, and you might be feeling very contented about your affirmation. But if you don't actually sing, or write or whatever it is you hope to do - then you are not that thing at all, no matter how content you feel about it. A quote I like is "Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion." (from Jim Rohn as quoted by Tony Robbins on Twitter). To be really good at something does not involve a magic incantation. There is in fact, no such thing as magic.  To be really good at something requires effort and intelligent self-evaluation over a fairly long period of time. Another word for that is discipline.

Yet contentment in the moment is a valuable thing. I think there is a place for both emptiness and effort  in a balanced life.  There is a quote I like, that I think speaks to the relation of these two things, and thought I am not a Christian, and am not a theist, that quote is from a bible verse. (Ancient literature and mythology generally contain some truth, but is is human truth...) The quote is "Having done all, stand."   So here is where contentment and effort meet.  Do the work, prepare - while being in the moment, standing still.
-- Mar Walker


.Read a poem on the same topic: http://mmw113.blogspot.com/2009/11/poem-wannamakers-rising-from-inverse.html

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Robert Honeysucker, Danbury Concert Chorus & Strings, composer Maxim Vladimiroff shine in world premiere of 'Walden'

This time lapse picture shows composer Maxim Vladimiroff adjusting his music, as members of the Danbury Concert Chorus find their places for the second half of last night's concert. It was a world premiere of Vladimiroff's  new work Walden, the Poetry of Nature for baritone soloist, chorus, string orchestra and piano. The work was commissioned by the Danbury Music Center and its music director Richard Price.

A teaching conductor is a wonderful thing and Danbury has one in Price, who understands that people enjoy music more when they know something about it and know what to listen for as the music plays. With a new or unfamiliar work in concert  -- how does this happen?  His solution is simple: play it twice, with a little commentary illustrated by musical examples, wedged in-between.

That was how Walden was presented last night at St. James Episcopal in Danbury, and it's well worth hearing many many times. It may well be a true masterwork of this composer.  It's the kind of composition where the sound is so beautiful - the sonorities alone can tear up the eyes and transport.  The baritone soloist was the extraordinary Robert Honeysucker, the chorus was the Danbury Concert Chorus, the strings sections were from the Danbury Symphony Chamber Players, the pianist was the composer himself.  During the first performance, Honeysucker read the text before each of the six movements of the work - (Spring, The Motions of a Sail, Nymphea Odorata, Autumnal Colors, Leaves and What Beauty!)

While all of the performers got hearty applause after the work was first heard - when the composer was brought up, the whole audience cheered, whistled, and stood up almost as a body.  Vladimiroff, an unassuming and personable soul, who has worked for three different churches in the area over the last decade and taught herds of children besides, has a lot of appreciative fans, including his mother (Tattiana?) and father, (Sergei Vladimiroff, a concert pianist)  his wife Leisa and two sons, Damien and Luca who were all in attendance to cheer him too.

But then it was time to learn a little something about the piece - Richard Price reminded us of his philosophy and brought Vladimiroff up to talk a bit about Walden.   As he mentioned each concept Price lead the chorus in an example from the work.

After a very animated intermission, the house fell silent to hear Walden played as a piece, without any reading of the text between movements. And here the arc of the work could be taken in.  And somehow in this last performance, Honeysucker was carried away with the work and delivered something marvelous and transcendent. The chorus too, having already performed it well  - had lost their nervousness and let go with truly solid gorgeous performance, as did chorus member Patricia Scharr who had a short section of solo notes. Everything was just right.

Three other wonderful choral works graced the program - Choose Something Like a Star by Randall Thompson, Shenandoah arranged by Donald Erb and Swansea Town by Gustav Holst.  It was a great night, and played to a packed house. People were standing in the back, and close parking was hard to come by. Thanks to all who contributed. It was a wonderful show.

Want to commission a Vladimiroff original or arrange piano lessons: http://VladimiroffMusic.net
-- Mar Walker

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Books: The Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliott in Bethel, CT

Friday the 13th, 2009.
   Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries, is reserved, a compact man with interesting tattoos and a slightly tenorish voice - a man easy to picture as a masochist. He read his clean, brisk prose last night in puffy suburban Bethel CT (at Molten Java at 102  Greenwood), with a quiet voice as  even as the surface of his narrative.
questions:
   He read three sections in all, fairly conservative sections of the book, and took questions after each. The audience seemed very interested in the memory aspect of "memoir."  Elliott said his some of it was taken from writing done as journalling at the time the events were occurring, so the details were not drawn from distant memory nor imagined after the fact,  but were written down fresh from the experience itself. He said he'd done of lot of editing and that the writing in its present form was many steps away from the first writing.
   The audience also asked how difficult it was to do the the kind of extensive self-revelation that The Adderall Diaries contain. Elliott said that getting used to revealing your secrets was a gradual thing, and that he'd previously written several novels where he used material from his life. He compared the process  to a transvestite's coming out. First, Elliott said, the man puts on a dress when he's home alone. Then, after a while, he puts it on and wears it out for a quick trip to the store.  A few months latter, he's out dancing in it, and can hardly remember when just putting it on was a big deal.
odd fly buzzes in the ointment:
     Elliott's  reading was interrupted in the middle by the owner of the neighboring bookstore (at 104 Greenwood Ave). (The bookstore folks own the building where the coffeehouse and the bookstore are located.) She'd been sitting in the back, waiting for him to mention books for sale.
   She interrupted to announce officiously that there would be no book sales, as Molten Java's lease had a non-competition clause with the bookstore.  Of course Molten wasn't selling the books, the author was.  For her part, she had no copies of his book to sell in her store.  So it seems her only object was to thwart the income of one author selling directly to his public, and to piss off people who had formerly been her customers.
    After a final section of prose was read, the company left the coffeeshop and went to the pizza parlor across the street where we ordered pizza, and drinks, talked and many of us bought a book directly from the author. Art will out, landlords notwithstanding.

-- Mar Walker

Friday, November 13, 2009

POEM: Intensive care (from Inverse Origami, 1998)


Intensive Care

It's you, there, under the sickish lights
the mint walls, the turquoise bedpans.
Strangers with syringes interrupt
your feverish sleep.
your pale familiar face and matted hair,
your tubes and tethers.
Come home. Just come home.


 
from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

What art can reveal

Writing prompt: If you joined the circus, what act would you most want to perform?

If I joined the circus I would certainly not want  to be the fire-eater. I already have enough heart-burn for two or three people.  The trapeze is too far off the ground, the fat-lady and the bearded lady are both unjustly reviled by many. The face painters have to listen to bratty kids , the knife thrower can never get enough insurance and the bareback riders wear little tutus that ride up their behinds.  Putting your head inside the lion's mouth is fool-hardy at any age.

If I could join the circus today, I would be the snake charmer. So many things are hidden, uncoiling their motives only when poised to strike. Like a skillful snake charmer, I would use a little music, a metaphor or two, a little color maybe, to coax a smooth, indifferent reptile out into the light so  its true nature can be examined.
-- Mar Walker

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Dog and Cat Kiss: Interpretations differ - what's your take?

Many folks look at this photo and see a pretty little dog and cat kissing. What we see depends a lot on what we expect. I live with these two characters and what I see are two rivals inspecting the competition.  My pets are companionable but not affectionate with each other, and are often jealous of, or at least very interested in the attention or tidbitts the other gets. In this photo, I think they are checking each others cheeks and breath to see if one has eaten anything the other has missed, checking each others physical status and mood. This sweet little kitty often bites the dogs ears, lips or toes to drive her out of a spot of sun that the cat wants for herself.  The dog, who is aware that direct aggression on the cat is not an option within this pack, for her part will secretly steal the cat's food whenever she has the opportunity.

We often find it necessary to anthropomorphize or romanticize animals, especially when describing them to children, but they have their own agenda and motivations which differ greatly from our own.  This is the cause of a lot of injury.  A child assumes this is their beautiful stuffed toy to hug and drag about by an ear or a limb.  The cat, dog, rabbit, hamster responds with teeth to this attack, ends up euthanized, not beause they were evil or dangerous -- but because their owners were irresponsibly ignorant of their needs and nature.  When any dog is left alone with a small child and injury results it is most usually the fault of the supervising human being. If you own a gun and your toddler shoots someone with it, you are negligent and you get a fine. If you own a dog, and someone is injured, you might pay damages, but in the final tally its the poor dog that pays the price for your lack of objective knowledge about nature.
-- Mar Walker

Sunday, November 8, 2009

iPhone App Art with a homecooked sound track






Yes, is true that I like to fiddle around with materials and with technology. This is a video slide show of art made on an iPhone. Click on the photo to watch the video.

ARTWORK: The slides were created in SpinArt a $1.99 cent IPhone app.
MUSIC: The sound track is made in three distinct tracks each recorded driectly into iMoive HD (the old iMovie) For one track I used "mouth percussion" on another I smacked the TV remote against a lamp, on a third I improvised a tune (me singing). Then I manipulated each track using IMovie's audio editor applying pitch changes, delay and reverb i varying proportions and doing a little graphic equalization until the three tracks together had a sound I liked. It's short so give a little listen....  I kind of like the effect even though it's different from both my acoustic songs and from the classical music I used to do.
-- Mar Walker

Poem: Wannamakers Rising - from Inverse Origami

This is a poem from my first chapbook, Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding. (Puzzled Dragon Press 1998) It's about the progress of personal growth.    Wannamakers is or was a big department store in downtown Philadelphia.




Wannamakers Rising

We'd like to rise
on the gliding stair
of effortless progression
a smooth escalator ascent
over a receding panorama of display.
More often we grope blindly
up sweaty
closed stairwells
steep and demanding concrete
followed by
emergence.







from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

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Friday, November 6, 2009

Repackaging the familiar for a novel view

Anything, no matter how plastic, ubiquitous or overstated, can be framed purposefully to evoke something different or new.  This photo was taken at night, with a phone, while waiting in line for the drive-up window....

As I was writing the graph above - I  saw a very clever  TV ad by American Express that uses this 'reframing' idea. In it,  more than a dozen or so common scenes and/or objects were reframed as smilie faces or smilie frowns. The audio featured a gorgeous cello line, no shouting or flashing, and many of the changing pseudo faces required watching the screen intently.

The process was oddly involving, surprising, delightful - intriguing even, more than most shows these days.  I have a better impression of the advertiser for mounting such a clever ad campaign.   Reframing is a neat trick. Well done.

-- Mar Walker

Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

A Cubist Memoir

 A response to Gertrude Stein's book "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

Gertrude Stein is a cubist name dropper! After introducing herself to readers as one of only three true geniuses in her acquaintance, she, as Alice B. Toklas, drops the name Gertrude Stein one to fives times on nearly all of the 252 pages in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. While it is autobiographical, it is most certainly not about Alice B. Toklas, who 'sits with the wives of geniuses.' Instead it is Stein's own extremely self-reflexive cubist memoir which comments on itself, calls attention to its own materials and production processes, is obsessed with surface, is cyclic rather than linear and offers simultaneous views over time of both its own structure and its autobiographical vignettes. A genus? Yes, indeed.

As Stein clearly states, she is interested in surface versus interior, the outside of things as differing from the inside.  "She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal," she says of herself on page 119. So with a wink, she writes, with the name and voice of her companion, her own story, dotes on herself as her lover and companion would and tabulates her own talent's progress in the voice of her mate.

Besides surfaces of name, there is also the narrative's surface - what was done and what was said, told with "the refusal of the use of the subconscious," and without emotiveness.  In this way she allows readers to make intellectual conclusions about the emotional nature of the narrative rather than offering a directed vicarious experience of it, so that experience of her life in print is essentially intellectual and analytical rather than emotional. Of writing this way she says "...that listening to the rhythm of his (the dog's) water-drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional and the sentences are not."  --- In order for this to be so, one must detach from immediately experienceable emotion in any one sentence, so that the emotion becomes apparent only after the whole of the paragraph is perceived in the mind.

Stein's narrative is not linear but cyclic and gives one the feeling of moving ahead and at the same time going back. Stein was a friend of Picasso and Juan Gris and notes Marcel Ducamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase: on page 113.  It was not surprising to see it mentioned, as it had already come to mind by the second or third time the dinner where the painters sat opposite their paintings was described. This odd familiarity caused a hasty look back to see if I'd lost my place and was rereading the same paragraphs. The same thing happened in other places: the incident where Maitisse gets fried eggs rather than an omelet, the description of William Cook driving a taxi and of Gertrude Stein driving a car for the American Fund for the French Wounded, and the many returns to Paris. Each mention seemed familiar, out just a little off from the last time, with sometimes more and sometimes less of the incident visible, like one of the iterations of the figure's limbs as it descends the stars and seems to move, in Ducamp's painting.

Stein hints at her fascination with lulling repetition and the glint of surface: "It was this summer that Gertrude Stein, delighting int he movement of the  tiny waves on the Antibes shore, wrote the Completed Portrait of Picasso."  In the end, the tide of surfaces recedes and leaves a bit of truth dry on the shore. Stein admits many had badgered her to write an autobiography. In turn she badgered Alice B. Toklas to write one instead.
"About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it." (pg. 252)
 Of course, like Defoe's work, it is about a stranded traveler and his companion. Yet it is about quite another thing than it purports to be and it glides along tongue in cheek, a surface cleverly concealing and revealing simultaneously.
--- Mad Mar Walker
Original date: Sept. 2003

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

James Moffett: The Universal SchoolHouse

What is the role of education in society? James Moffett addresses this question in his controversial book  The Universal SchoolHouse in which he proposes the abolition of compulsory education in the United States. This book created a stir when it came out back in 1994 and is now out of print.  You can still get a copy on bay, alibis, at amazon etc.

Mr. Moffett's proposals are innovative and represent the kind of "out-of-the-box" thinking he hopes would be engendered by an ideal education; but there are many pragmatic and philosophical matters that will prevent any widespread embrace of his proposals.

In the opening paragraphs he begins his assault on the status quo with a handful of assertions and assumptions:
  • 1) Compulsory education is the antithesis of the democratic ideal of freedom and should be abolished.
  • 2) Education is currently delivered via "agents of the state" and is somehow sinister and repressive.
  • 3) The production of an educated workforce for the maintenance of commercial venture is a less than lofty goal.
  • 4) Standardization through a common curriculum is in no way to be desired in public education because it will have a detrimental effect on future citizens by stamping out the capacity for diverse thinking, which might be considered a survival contingency for that society as a whole.   
  • 5) Current educational practices will in only a few decade, be considered primitive, obsolete.

Compulsory education verses freedom for minors

    If compulsory education were suddenly abolished in the United States as is advocated by Mr. Moffett, its chief result would be not be freedom from restriction and standardization.  Its end would be freedom from knowledge for a large portion of the next generation. Without compulsory education, future citizens would be free indeed - free to be as blissfully ignorant as their parents would allow.

    In fact his proposal would result in completely disenfranchising those who are already least likely to get a good education from the current system. For parents with resources and a commitment to educate their children, home schooling or private schooling would be options. For their children, little would change. But children of parents without either time, concern or finances would have six or seven extra hours a day to soak in all the rebellious angst they could get from a peer culture largely created by inherently avaricious corporate enterprise in the media of television, movies, music, and music videos. This diet of sexuality and spleen could be supplemented with intellectual excursions into the whinny politics of victimhood, via "talk radio," and a certain strain of performance oriented poetry where being a victim is rewarded by a higher score - and also by the undocumented web sites of various Internet pundits (like me) whose notion of the term "credentials" stops with a photo ID drivers license.

Agents of the state or flotsam on the tide?

    Really, I cannot see teachers as agents of the state as Mr. Moffett implies. I could easily see them as a too-willing professional in-group committed to the current prevailing fashion in "educational" thought and further influenced by the goals of local parent-teacher organization. Sometimes teachers seem to inadvertently indoctrinate students with the prevailing popular "ism" of the day as if it were a verifiable scientific fact or a moral imperative. The approach sometimes seems to be one of "mission" rather than inquiry.

    The possibility of diverse thinking and originally on the part of teachers is hampered, partly by curriculum but also by the need for a sanitized "political correctness" in the face of bullying, lawyer-brandishing parents and school boards.  If teachers are agents of the state they are somewhat hogged-tied lot.  They do remarkable work despite impossible demands for documenting paperwork and endless blame heaped on them by parents - some of whom regard the public school system as a convenient baby-sitting service, and an demands for homework as an imposition. While I agree that this arrangement is repressive and perhaps sinister, the "state" is not the only culprit.


Goal - the educated worker or the well-read lay-about?

    What exactly is wrong with educating with an eye to the needs of business as long as that is not the only consideration?  Everyone needs to earn a living or generate capital in some way or other. After all, if we all planned to spend our welfare money on Heidinger and Prost - who'd pay taxes to support us?

    The ideal of a free democracy and of an informed, involved citizenry originated in the Greek city-states. There, the well-rounded citizen was quite free indeed to develop his intellectual capacities as a sort of intellectual parasite - supported as he was by an enormous population of slaves.

    We do not however, live in a pure direct democracy like a  Greek polis. We live in a representative democracy with a capitalist economic system.  Is an educational system to serve the development of individual alone?  Does it not serve the society as a whole?  When teachers are in demand, do universities rally to produce them? When engineers are scarce - is it wrong to find that programs to encourage an interest in science and math pop up suddenly at the elementary school level?

    I expect that somewhere later in Mr. Moffett's book, I will find more references to the spiritual development of the individual in order to provide the most contingent value to the society as a whole. And that society's economy does not run on educated sincerity alone. Avaricious enterprise loathed and maligned by many, (including me), has an important place. Without it economies fail.  If it need s workers who can read and write good English, perform basic math and who actually show up for work when they say they will - are these capacities so at odds with freedom or "spiritual" development? Freedom from what? Self-discipline?

In this economic climate - it's a lot easier to see that those sometimes onerous jobs, now notable by their absence, do contribute something. But a versatile, self-empowered individual educated for change rather than a magic disappearing career at Bear Sterns, (may it rest in peace)  might weather the economic storm and find meaning in something other than a job. Hmmm.


Melting pot or soup pot...

    Mr. Moffett seems to feel that standardization through a common curriculum is in no way to be desired in a public education. He asserts that it has a detrimental effect on future citizens by stamping out the capacity for diverse thinking, which might be considered a survival contingency for that society as a whole.

    Yet common instruction in no way guarantees a common outcome. One assignment generates as many odd lines of thinking as there are students. Common material does not guarantee common conclusions.

    It is true that a healthy, viable capitalist democracy requires both structure and freedom. It wants order and knowledge as vital underpinnings to generative chaos. Where does a society's general, common knowledge come from?  Where do we get our ideas about what behavior is acceptable when we are not at home? In this era of fragmenting demographics, where there will be no majority only substantial, multiple minorities where commonalties of culture, language, ethnicity, religion, deportment, attitude, intention and assumption can not be assumed; where do we learn how to act? School? Church? Music Videos?

What exactly will hold us together as a society if a common core of learning and experience is no longer provided by the public school system?  In reality media sources in television and video games now provide part of that core. Watch cartoons with a child. There is a lot of moralizing and moral framework set out in cartoons. Yet without schools we'd have an over abundance of superhero myth and too little of practical day to day life experience inherent in the daily discipline of homework.

    When considering the merits of compulsory education for such a society, in fact for any society; a balance must be sought between the need for an educational core that lends itself to societal cohesion on the one hand and freedom for individuals on the other. Both are needed.


A note on the likelihood of systemic change

    Unlike Mr. Moffett, I doubt that much will have changed in structure of our public educational system in the next couple of decades. In fact it has been two decades since his book first came out. It's more of the same in public education. Our system features a multi-layered structure of authority which is  incredibly resistant to the kind of sweeping changes Mr. Moffett envisions. 

    On a unit by unit basis, each of thousands of school systems across the country is a purely local phenomenon governed by a locally elected school board. Naturally local boards are steeped in prevailing local politics. These boards are held in check by squabbling voters. Just try changing your school's sex education policy to see this effect in action.  School boards are also notoriously jealous of their power, and are quite unlikely to vote themselves out of existence

    In addition to local forces of inertia, there are state and federal mandates and funding incentives, all of which require reams of documenting paperwork. These are beyond the per-view of local boards to repeal. Indeed, these sometimes overbearing demands for local spending were not crafted by a single mind for a single purpose. They represent a haphazard crazy-quilt of educational policy, sewn together item by item, by congressmen and senators in a series of unwieldy political deals. Undoing any of these mandates is an equally arduous process.

    Finally, besides the local governance, the state and federal regulations and funding incentives - there are the national teachers unions, which are well financed and armed with attorneys.  Often it seems that the positions taken by large unions have more to do with the union's need to maintain its power, than with the philosophical visons of its more forward-thinking reformers.

-- Mar Walker