Coming to terms with writing assessment theory – some thoughts…

I won’t try to add anything to this compelling review done here, and the critiques the reviewer made are accurate and make sense. I agree that she’s a bit too quick to dismiss White and Huot, and I would add that this method of assessing writing will be a hard sell in resource-strapped comp programs.

One critique the reviewer didn’t mention is the assessment context of which we are a part. I’m aware that this isn’t all that compelling an argument, but since for most departments this context is the one in which they exist, I’m not sure that this theory will have that much impact. Lynne is absolutely correct in noting that our power in comp programs would be increased if we could create such a paradigm-changing theory.  I’m looking forward to its arrival.

I’m especially curious about the themes she comes up with, meaningfulness and ethics. I’ve been looking at a term like meaningfulness as I try to understand just how engaged students are with writing projects, especially in literature.  I’ve thought about using a dialectic of sorts that opposes (sort of) mechanical accomplishment and engagement, but I’m not sure that’s the best theme.

If we use meaningfulness, would the rubric be something like this:

Criteria	Advanced	Competent	Developed	Beginning
Meaningfulness	Text’s connection to specific audience is clear, subtle, and powerful. Purpose is made compelling and respectful, with use of multiple, relevant references.	Text’s connection to specific audience clear, and purpose is made compelling and respectful.	Text connects to audience clearly, but audience could be better defined. Purpose is clear.	Text’s connection to audience is general, and purpose is unclear and perhaps non-existent.
Ethics	I’m not sure what goes here.	I’m not sure what goes here.	I’m not sure what goes here.	I’m not sure what goes here.

There are obvious flaws here (umm, the second row is blank), and I have not worked with Bloom’s taxonomy at all, but perhaps this approach has some merit.

More to come, of course.

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Calvino on Literary Lightness

I’m continuing the previous entry…

I’m missing reading sci-fi, so thank goodness for Calvino…

The guy is half-engineer (in the good way, not the ‘wannabe a fascist’ way), and his love of all types of literature is what makes this series of talks so interesting to read.

It’s funny that I semi-dissed DeLillo in the first entry, because Calvino here reminds me of at least a line from White Noise, the one in which the main character’s dad talks about merging with the lightness of the universe, the stuff of atoms and lightness. I’m fairly certain that in White Noise that line is meant to be sarcastic, since it’s written in the backdrop of a constant atomic bomb holocaust and the character isn’t necessarily one of the heroes (although I think that DeLillo likes him), and I shouldn’t really care, because DeLillo and Calvino are in the same territory here.

I’m confident about that connection because Calvino uses Lucretius, who I thought no one read before about 1995 (or more accurately between 500 A.D. and 1995). He finds examples of lightness everywhere, and he never dismisses heaviness (or “weight, density, and concreteness” (14)) in his argument, but he believes that lightness is a key to facing the new millennium, and I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound good, even as I listen to the Dropkick Murphys.

One more thing – throughout this series of lectures/talks/discussions/fireside chats he explores a wide range of literature, and he sets that range up here as he goes from folk songs to Shakespeare to physicists/natural historians (Lucretius) to finishing with Kafka. His next-to-last sentence is perhaps his most beautiful – “Thus, astride our bucket [reference to the Kafka story], we shall face the new millennium, without hoping to find anything more in it than what we ourselves are able to bring to it.” (29)

Amen brother.

Quickness as a literary trope, or WTF Italo?

With apologies to Calvino…

As I prepare for my semester in Rome, I’m trying to make certain that I’ve read everything I can get my hands on by our two main authors, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.  As such, I’m becoming a ridiculous fanboi of both, and I have this rather ridiculous conversation in my head: “Ooooh, Italo, you’re such a genius. Ahh, Umberto, you marvelous punter you!” (it’s probably obvious that I have no real idea what ‘punter’ actually means).  I’m determined to do some actual analysis, so here goes…

Calvino has always amazed me with the standard characteristics of what I’m come to think of defines the term “intellectual”:  his range of reading, his fluency in multiple languages, his dazzling innovation and creativity. Even with all these credentials, however, what I most admire about him is his incredibly open-minded approach to literature, and this set of essays just confirms that.

I’m not going to write on each of these essays (at least I don’t think that I will), but the first just made me want to respond to its sheer beauty. In each of these talks (which he died before he could deliver) he discusses a theme, using abstract terms as his base and then building a marvelous dialectic around each bolstered by close readings. One of the most interesting things about this approach to me is that he chooses what I would think are themes antithetical to what most folks would think of when they think of Literature (sorry Raymond Carver, RIP).  When most folks try to make the argument that literature is important, they rely on concepts like gravity and seriousness and weight and intellectual heft and not-exactly-sloppiness-but-a-greater-emphasis on , and while Calvino is far too smart (and gracious) to ever reduce even his own definition of literature to some essential notion he certainly rewrites the parameters to be closer to what he values.

I’m comparing, of course, but I can’t help but think of DeLillo and Pynchon (and their follower Frantzen), whose novels to me seem to glory in the sheer incandescence of their prose in ways that I think bely Calvino’s desire for “Exactitude.” In my mind (and one of the reasons that I love or at least enjoy) their novels is because of that punk rock sense in which it seems as if we are one chord or lyric or plot line (perhaps) from falling/plunging/diving joyfully into some sort of abyss, a place that looks infinitely more interesting than the place we’re at now.  (Of course I’m listening to the Distillers as I write this).  Perhaps it’s my child of the punk rock movement ethos, but that glorious sloppiness feels marvelous and worth falling into, and a mark of a type of genius that can keep from ever crossing that line beyond the point of no return.

Even Eco falls into this trap, I think, at points, particularly in The Name of the Rose, as he brings in the Inquisition and then burns down the library in his thirst to show just how badly some forces want to remove comedy from the world. He doesn’t need my absolution, but I don’t blame him – the Inquisition was brutal, everything he stands against located in an organization he loves and that has provided him with a structure for his own life. Although I’m certain he doesn’t see the conclusion in this way, the implications are absolutely clear, and what’s at stake is brutal.

I’ll go on to discuss “Lightness” here. And at this point I’m fairly certain I’ll end up talking about all of them…

West by God…

Great weekend hanging out with my brother and friends in West Virginia.  The weekend prompted me to think a bit about the decline and fall of the rafting industry, or, perhaps more accurately, the mergerization of the outdoor industry. Companies like Ace and Class VI have been moving away from their focus on rafting and working on capturing the most tourist dollars they can by keeping their customers on site.

They don’t do this by locking the parking lot. Instead, they offer clients, who have come a long way at a decent expenditure of money in paying for gas, opportunities for outdoor activities on their property, or with subcontractors. They run programs like horseback riding and mt. biking, of course, but they also do other things like canopy tours in the big trees in the Gorge (not old growth, but still massive) and fine dining. They have made some significant capital investments in these projects, of course, but for the most part they have been successful, as the industry has shrunk from 32 companies at its prime to 3 or 4 (I couldn’t actually figure out the exact count, although I’m sure the Park Service could).

The old-timer in me wants to whine and moan about the loss, and I definitely miss my old company (MRT RIP), but those good old days include bucket boats, guides not performing at their peak, whimsical and often hysterical management decisions, and companies that didn’t necessarily human life in the ways that one might expect (See Rivers, West Virginia whitewater rafting outfitters).

I never understood this reputation until I guided out west. A river manager who I applied for a job to (and ended up working for a bunch) said, upon looking at my application, “so, you worked in West Virginia, where they like to hurt people.” I nervously laughed, thinking this was some insult to the good people of the state, but he then explained to me that West Virginia guides tended to want their customers to have bad swims so that they could laugh at them, and while that had never been my leifmotif, or that of anyone who I hung out with, but I was never a full timer, always a weekend warrior who at best worked all the days of a vacation from my corporate gig, and I had witnessed some people not react as vociferously as I might have liked to try to rescue people in bad situations. This attitude was strictly a New or Lower Gauley one, but still, it was potentially damaging, and something that made me uncomfortable.

So, the move to a more corporate world (if we define corporate as being bound by rules and regulations) might not salve the anarchist in the raft guide/rock climber/adrenaline junkie soul, and might not be somehow true to what we perceive as the essential spirit of the wilderness, but it more accurately captures the American relationship with nature – a brief, glorious time of Edward Abbeyish immersion, one that perhaps glorified both the wilderness and the boys (and the movement was horribly male at its inception) who played in it but that now mimics our desire to inhabit the ghosts of those who came before, avoiding the physical labor and danger but whooping it up when the ‘fun’ comes.

Perhaps I’m more bitter than I originally thought.

Frantzen

I’m about to finish Strong Motion, and I’m finding that I’ve most enjoyed the parts where Frantzen is preachiest…something’s wrong with that…

Quick plot synopsis, and something that makes me think that if we cared about such things as greatest American novelist anymore (thank god we don’t) he’d be up for the nomination:

1. Main plot line follows the Holland family (esp. Louis, the youngest son), who have a complex relationship with money, both old and new
2. The wife, Melanie, has recently inherited 22 million dollars from her grandfather (through a step-wife), based on money from a chemical company…
3. the chemical company has been deep injecting toxic wastes into wells in Massachusetts (their corporate headquarters)…
4. mini-earthquakes have been the result…
5. a seismologist who falls in love with Louis discovers this, and even though she and Louis are broken up (at the time), they research it…
6. the company sorta, doesn’t really, get into trouble…

This novel definitely feels like DeLillo or Pynchon (maybe Gaddis?) – beautiful work crossing plot lines, interesting side plot with a pro-life preacher who we’re never really sure is what he says he is – he’s definitely pro-life, but even though I want to read him as a bad guy, Frantzen never really goes there…

• some marvelous readings of identity in here (a list of women that Renee could be) and American history (framed mostly in terms of the energy needed to walk from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh – despite my lame description, it is powerful)…
• As I said at the beginning of this post, I like the novel best (it feels less forced, for what that’s worth) when Frantzen is preaching at us. That goes against my standard reading preferences, and part of the reason I love sci-fi is the lack of preaching…
• Of course, by preaching I mean long rants or diatribes that feel as if the novelist has jumped out of all his characters’ skins and is just talking directly to us (but trying to disguise that, somehow)…

More notes here…

And Frantzen was ahead of his time…