Ursula K. Le Guin: Telling It

“Interactivity in the sense of the viewer controlling the text is also nightmarish, when interpreted to mean that the viewer can rewrite the novel.  If you don’t like the end of Moby Dick you can change it.  You can make it happy.  Ahab kills the whale.  Ooowee.


“Readers can’t kill the whale.  They can only reread until they understand why Ahab collaborated with the whale to kill himself.  Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it.”

—from “The Question I Get Asked Most Often”



“Prose does not have meter.  Prose scrupulously avoids any noticeable regularity or pattern of stresses.  If prose acquires any noticeable meter for more than a sentence or so (just as if it rhymes noticeably), it stops being prose and becomes poetry.

“This is the only difference between prose and poetry that I have ever been certain of.”

—from “Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose”



"Nobody who says, 'I told you so' has ever been, or will ever be, a hero."

--Ursula K. Le Guin,
from "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie"

Rhine

Portal

Classroom Clay in the Wild

Three pieces from an experiment in last term's English 1A.

Blue View

Wistful about Orkney Diving

I'm missing Scotland and wishing that I'd been in good enough shape to dive the Scapa Flow in Orkney last summer.  I was there, but the commuting combined with old sports injuries had really done a number on my back and leg.  The long plane ride and the car-hopping across Scotland didn't help either.

(Still in pain, in process.)

Now, Northern California diving is world-class and wonderfully kelpy, but I'm feeling the pull of a missed opportunity, you know?

An Orkney view.

Homework

English 46A: Setting Up Paradise Lost 9 & 10 -----– Plus, Quick Quotations

Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”  
--Lord Byron, from Manfred (1816)

A.  Consider Books 9 & 10 of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a tragedy, as a blank verse drama, and what happens?  How can such a conceit aid us in understanding what Milton is doing, what Adam and Eve are doing, what Satan and God are doing?


B.  Who Wrote What?  What Else Ought We To Notice?

=1. Nought is there under heav’ns wide hollownesse,
   That moves more deare compassion of mind,
   Then beautie brought t’unworthy wretchednesse
   Through envies snares or fortunes freakes unkind:
   I whether lately through her brightnesse blind,
   Or through alleageance and fast fealtie,
   Which I do owe umnto all woman kind,
   Feele my heart perst with so great agonie,
When such I see, that all for pittie I could die.

-2. What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds?  Or to be smothered
With cassia?  Or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits, and ‘tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways.

-3. Tell fortune of her blindness;
Tell nature of decay;
Tell friendship of unkindness;
Tell justice of delay.
And if they will reply,
Then give them all the lie.

-4. When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least . . . .

-5. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike terror to my fainting soul.

-6. Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear She might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain . . . .

-7. “O place of bliss, renewer of my woes,
Give me accompt, where is my noble fere,
Whom in thy walls thou didst each night enclose,
To other life, but unto me most dear.”

Each stone, alas, that doth my sorrow rue,
Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint.
Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,
In prison pine with bondage and restraint.

And with remembrance of the greater grief
To banish the less, I find my chief relief.

-8. Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

-9. They looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Where's Jim Hawkins?

Marin Headlands:
just south of Rodeo Beach and north of Point Bonita.

Looks like part of Stevenson's Treasure Island to me.

(Some long time back now, I paddled in there.)

Sea and Sky

 The water was high today with tide and swell both working.

Rodeo Beach:
Marin Headlands, CA

Off Point Bonita

 The swell was working off the Marin Headlands.

Flotsam, Not Jetsam

Longing for a Road-Trip

University-Level Reading: Vision and Design

My English Department will need to re-design our Reading & Composition sequence to meet the new California laws requiring only One Year of courses to meet Transfer/AA requirements.  As we compose the new course outlines, I have one key question: Does our new sequence create, foster, and support university-level readers?  Writing follows reading; writing skills are dependent upon reading skills.  Will we train our students for competence and excellence at reading in sprints, in middle distance, and in long distance?  Will we be properly preparing City students for the demands of university work?  Can we not design with ambition and integrity and utility—all in the best sense—for our students?