What Was I Saying...?

Every once in a while, a phrase will perfectly crystallize what's going on in my head, and this morning I had such a phrase come to me.

"My life has had the poetry sucked out of it."

I couldn't tell you exactly what led to that phrase, but there are pointers. For instance, we were listening to the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast on the drive in this morning, and Kennith Hite was on as a guest, rattling off all sorts of interesting biographical details about Ambrose Bierce as well as probable literary influences on his work, and I remembered thinking, "I used to know stuff like that. I used to care about stuff like that. I've lost it all. Where did it go?"

Then, and this is the weird one, I was looking at the Keurig coffee maker in our office here. It has a digital display that gives you the option of instructions in English, Spanish, and French. For some reason, I take great delight in pushing the French button, so instead of "To begin put a K-Cup into the slot and lower the handle" the readout says something like "Pour commencer mettre un K-Cup dans la fente et abaisser la poignée." I don't know why I should take delight in such a thing, but I do.

And this morning, as I pressed the button and read out the display in my usual broken French, I thought "Wouldn't it be awesome if the instructions on all gadgets were in French? Every trip to the vending machine would be a brush with poetry."

And then came the phrase, "My life has had the poetry sucked out of it." And it has. I've had so much crap flying at me from all directions that all of my mental energy has been devoted to just coping and keeping the plates spinning. Work has been full of crisis. Family and friends have been full of crisis. My "extra-curricular activities," whether FurTheMore, attempts at art, or just mindlessly blowing up pixels on the computer, I've only engaged with the 10%-15% of my brain that I could free up for the task. It's not just that I'm not getting much enjoyment out of them, I'm barely even there for them.

The good news is, this is a diagnosis, not a life sentence. Having made this realization, I can turn my attention towards fixing the problem. It will require some re-prioritizing and probably no small amount of things ending up on life's cutting room floor, but it's necessary. There is a life I know makes me happy, and a life I know makes me miserable. Right now I'm wading into the latter and forsaking the former due to circumstance. It's time to push back.

-The Gneech

PS: Even pirates need poetry.

Point and counterpoint from Arts & Letters Daily...

Point: Wall Street Journal: The Real-Life Jane Eyres

Sometimes the situations that governesses found themselves in were truly hellish -- read about the governessing experiences of sisters Eliza and Everina Wollstonecraft and weep. More often the misery was subtler, a kind of emotional claustrophobia. It was hard to live in the house of people with whom you might have nothing in common. It was frustrating not to be able to determine your future, from what you might eat at meals to what you could do or say. Charlotte Brontë gives Jane Eyre an eloquent soliloquy expressing this almost inchoate restlessness, this "silent revolt": "Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer."

Counterpoint: Times Online: The Day Feminist Icon Alice Walker Resigned as My Mother

"Her circle were questioning power relationships and whether a mother had any more knowledge than a child. Some friends of hers were living on communes. I know those kids and they're totally screwed up.

"Some were sexually abused, all kinds of bad stuff happened, but even those who survived intact don't want to create communes for their children. They didn't want to be raised by 10 different parents — again, it was this ideological thing trumping the maternal instinct."

Towards the end of senior school, an ecstatic Rebecca showed Walker her offer letter from Yale. Instead of celebrating her daughter's success in landing a place at one of the world's top universities, Walker asked her coolly why she wanted to go to a bastion of male privilege.

Point: The New Criterion: The Age of Educational Romanticism

Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers' unions.

In public discourse, the leading symptom of educational romanticism is silence on the role of intellectual limits even when the topic screams for their discussion. Try to think of the last time you encountered a news story that mentioned low intellectual ability as the reason why some students do not perform at grade level. I doubt if you can. Whether analyzed by the news media, school superintendents, or politicians, the problems facing low-performing students are always that they have come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or have gone to bad schools, or grown up in peer cultures that do not value educational achievement. The problem is never that they just aren't smart enough.

Counterpoint: Wired: Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

However, this technique never caught on. The spacing effect is "one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning," the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American Psychologist under the title "The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research." The sorrowful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if people continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if, centuries after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by holding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing effect thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had frustrated humankind since before written language: how to remember what's been learned. But instead, the spacing effect became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.

-The Gneech

From rhanlav: The World is Awesome.

And it is!

-The Gneech

Snagged from trpeal and worth checking out:

The Snowflake Method for Writing

-TG

Long, but very worth it.

Snagged from chipuni.

-The Gneech

Apparently, the original of L.C. Tiffany's Mermaid is in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Next time I go to MFF, I'm going to have to go on a field trip to see it.

-The Gneech

Snagged from rigelkitty, a little essay from Ben Stien which some of you will love, and some of you will hate. :)

-The Gneech

Stolen from higginsdragon, it's my life in a nutshell!

-The Gneech ("Boggle, boggle, boggle.")

Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair

...and...

The Art of Animal Drawing by Ken Hultgren

...suggestions courtesy of John Nunnemacher. Thanks, dude!

-The Gneech