Louise Gluck: "Task"

The profundity of our ignorance concerning the merit of what we do creates despair; it also fuels hope.  Meanwhile, contemporary opinion rushes to present itself as the intelligent alternative to ignorance: our task is to somehow insulate ourselves from opinion in its terminal forms, verdict and directive, while still retaining alert receptiveness to useful criticism.

--Louise Gluck

from "Education of the Poet,"
Proofs and Theories:
Essays on Poetry,
The Ecco Press,
1994

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?

Passages: Daniel Martin's Hyperactive Imagination

John Fowles' Daniel Martin is one of my absolute favorite novels. Here's one moment I like, a moment I recognize in myself, and such recognitions are surely one reason we read literature. I could quote Aristotle here, but I'd rather quote Fowles. Perhaps some of you recognize yourselves in this moment.

The meeting began to loom large. It was not that I couldn't imagine what might happen, be said and felt. As at so many potentially fraught junctures in my life I could invent too many variations, almost as if I lived the event to its full before its limited reality took place. All writing, private and mental, or public and literal, is an attempt to escape from the conditioned past and future. But the hyperactive imagination is as damaging a preparation for reality as it is useful in writing. I knew I wouldn't say the things I was already rehearsing; and couldn't stop rehearsing.