writing and "teaching" writing

I have believed for several years now that I should not be teaching writing in my classes, because it's not my job. I teach philosophy, not writing, except to the extent that students need guidance in explaining philosophical ideas in writing.

I'm uncertain I still believe that it's not my job to teach writing. For one thing, I've accepted at last that the implicit form-content dualism of that belief is untenable. Writing is not a container, and ideas are not pre-existing stuff to fill it.

On Thursday, I went on a bike ride after finishing grading 108 student papers, and thought about how to begin teaching something about writing to my students. I began by telling them that reading student papers causes me great pain, because I empathize with the pain I can see in their writing.

I then asked about their pain and anxiety about writing, and when I asked them what they do in response, the first answer in each class was, of course, procrastinate. They listed a number of other responses: they stress-eat, lose sleep, plagiarize, rush through, or give up. I asked how well those strategies work out.

It's hard for me to understand this, because I write all the time. I love constructing sentences and paragraphs. I delight in playing around with words. It's easy. It's easier for me to write than not to write. I struggle to refrain from writing. (That's not entirely true. Some days I can't write easily or well. I just don't have any words. When that happens, I don't push it. The next day, it's back.)

It's also perplexing because I believe most people I come across who have to write as part of what they're doing dislike or even dread writing. How--or more to the point, why--anyone who hates writing becomes a successful academic is beyond my comprehension.

If I state everything I know about good writing, the dilemma of teaching writing is clear. What I know about writing is that good writers learn by copying good writing. Duh. You fall in love with a writer, read everything you can find by that writer, and attempt to write in that writer's style. Then you fall in love with another, and repeat. After 7 or 13 repetitions, your own writing has become a bad pastiche of these styles, and with any luck, someone tells you this or you notice it, and start taking out all the obvious thefts you can identify. You continue this, and add new stolen pieces and removing them, until you die. 

I have my students for a 15-week semester. I can tell them what good writing takes, but they typically lack even the basis of reading and mimicking good writing for years. This extends to fundamentals. Even correcting punctuation and usage on five-page papers is meaningless, if my students lack the habit and the models of conventional style.  

nano nano nano nano nano nano nano

Hey kids! It's National Novel Writing Month!

Is Doc Nagel engaging in this madness? You betcha! In fact, I'm writing a contemporary, quasi-autobiographical Don Quixote, crossed with Samuel Beckett and Charles Bukowski. For folks that know me very very well, this will make real and terrible sense. I think it's a little alarming to my Loveliest. Working titles have come and gone: Peripatetic, Peripatetics, Picaresque, Walk, and now, for what seems to be the settled version, The Solipsists. (Two solipsists walk into a bar...)

But to hell with it. I'm just jumping in, and whatever happens, happens. I'm having a good time writing about cats and walking.

I'm writing it in fragments, all in first person, that include letters, entries in a diary, and direct narration. There are two main characters, who have the same name, both have cats with the same name, are both in relationships with a woman with the same name, and who both have a best friend/cousin of the same name. At first, I had a hard time distinguishing the two main characters, their narrative voices, or their life stories. Then they became very clearly distinct, and now, they're losing distinction again. So, everything's going along swimmingly.

I am not sure their paths will cross. I kinda doubt it. So far, none of the identically-named cats, friends, or lovers are identical persons.

And this'll creep y'all out: so far, the lover has appeared on one single page. I know whose lover it is, and approximately when in his life she appeared, and disappeared, and when this event took place, but otherwise, of her(s), I've been entirely silent. This disturbs me, but it's how it is.

There's more madness. I wrote and recorded a song last night, when I meant to be writing, that I am calling "Quixotic." It's a whole lotta John Fahey goof.

There's yet more madness, but you don't get to see it.

imaginary and actual worlds

It makes no sense, e.g., to ask whether the Gretel of one fairy tale and the Gretel of another are the same Gretel, whether what is imagined for the one and predicated of her agrees with or does not agree with what is imagined for the other, etc... Within the same tale I can certainly ask such questions, since, from the beginning, we have a single imaginary world...

In the actual world, nothing remains open; it is what it is. The world of imagination "is," and is such and such, by grace of the imagination which has imagined it; a complex of imaginings never comes to an end that does not open the possibility of a free development in the sense of a new determination.        -- Husserl, Experience and Judgment, p. 173

Most of the chapter I read today was about the temporal unity of objects and worlds that is necessary for relation and comparison to take place -- which I won't get into here. But this page, and especially the reference to imagined worlds, caught my eye, for a couple reasons.

The first connection was to something I'm cooking up as another writing experiment for NaNoWriMo this year. We can ask questions within the same tale, Husserl says, of whether Gretel is the same Gretel. Sure: and in fiction, you can strain realism to the breaking point, or past it, by making these questions the center of the story. I was working on that, in a way. (I promise I haven't written a word of the novel; I have some notes on how I want it to go.)

Now I'm wondering how that kind of problem in fiction could be turned around by having two different stories taking place, with two characters with the same name. Especially if the stories each raised questions about whether the character was the same character within the story, what would happen if both stories, with a character of the same name, each raised those questions? (Comedy of Errors does this to some extent, if you take the two plots as two stories in this way. And obviously, The Bald Soprano knocks this mutha out of the park.)

The other connection I drew is to the notion, in fanfic, of writing within a particular "universe."

There's an important difference. For fanfic writers, as I understand it, "universe" refers to the basic characters, the presupposition of that universe being founded upon what has been written by the originator(s), and the basic furniture of that universe (i.e., if they have space ships, they have space ships; if soap is unheard of, then, to quote Husserl, "it is what it is," and there's no soap).

These ideas aren't so far apart, though. What Husserl means by nothing remaining open in the actual world is that, for there to be any relation and comparison of objects in the actual world, there has to be an objective, unified time to that world -- it simply must be in the same actual world. It's ambiguous: does that mean this world is like a story? Or is this world more like the fanfic concept of a "universe"?

long time, no blog

After bouts of stomach flu and grading, I'm having an average weekend.

Following a gratuitous Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet reference, I shall return to struggling with my conscience and my philosophical consciousness over whether and how to proceed with writing a paper to submit to Studia Phaenomenologica's special issue on "the phenomenon of the body/phenomenology of embodiment." Submissions are due November 15, which essentially means I have to write it this month, because this November will be taken up with organizing, rallying, picketing, and other union activities, and, just maybe, a new National Novel Writing Month project.

This may be insane.

I may also have little hope for publishing something in this special issue, especially given my predilection for iconoclasm. In this specific instance, I'm thinking of re-working a lot of the text I wrote in August, which I now call "the goofy paper," that says that "the body" is the fetish of existential phenomenology. I started writing it intending it to be my submission to SP, but soon I was basically just venting about Michel Henry.

I believe that the chance of being published in a serious academic philosophy journal is inversely proportionate to the quantity of snide dismissive remarks one makes about honored members of the academic establishment. So, a lot of what I wrote directly about Henry will have to be redacted. Also, I'll probably follow my friend Valerie's advice and change the section heading that currently reads "fuck" (even though I cite my source for the term in a footnote, which gives it a proper academic setting).

I'm having trouble getting over the idea that I would be trying to get published and doing what people think of as scholarship. I've always had misgivings about academia, but was pretty active in a few circles for a while, largely because I felt I had to be. But I gave up on being anything like the usual type of scholar in 2002 when I was screwed out of a tenure-track job, and I haven't tried publishing anything in a peer-reviewed philosophy journal since then, either. I like to think this was in part a matter of principle, since so much of academic philosophical writing does nothing for anyone but the authors themselves. Not having a real academic career, I told myself, I don't have to make any Faustian bargains with the academic world.

It's hard, too, to face the fact that I need to be more visible in that world, in case I suddenly find I need to scramble for a job - a job I know I'm an increasingly poor candidate for as 1996 fades away in the distance. Ph.D. degrees have freshness dates.

As usual, or a little more than usual, another major obstacle to getting started is that I can't settle on a font.