Review: Reading City Life

Bruch, Partick and Richard Marback, Ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.

Reading City Life is a short anthology of readings for college students that focuses on something we all share no matter where we live: city life. We may not share city life in the sense of living on the same block; many Americans don’t physically live in cities at all. But we may share city life in the sense that we all read city life all the time. Listening to hip-hop music, watching television shows and commercials, reading magazines and newspapers, keeping up with fashion, being sports fans, or just participating in conversations with friends and family, one of the topics that’s always on the table is city life. (v) 

This slender volume is, as its title suggests, organized around urban experience and its attendant complexities. Comprised of essays, articles and memoir excerpts that consider the central theme from a variety of vantage points—inside, outside, personal, historical, sociological, meditative, activist and polemical—Reading City Life falls easily into the cultural studies camp of composition pedagogy, and the category of textbooks which wear their ideologies on their sleeves, from the choice of organizing theme to the pedagogical approach and editorial language, to the list of contributing authors.

The book’s trajectory goes roughly from local to global, through five chapters titled, consecutively “Cities and Neighborhoods,” “Cities and Crime,” “Cities and Suburbs,” “Cities and Race,” and “Cities and Citizenship,” and homelessness, graffiti, the Cincinnati riots of 2001, suburbs, talk radio and sweatshops all making an appearance in their pages—but while there is a logic to the organization, that logic is not essential, and given the large degree of overlap in the material itself, it would be perfectly possible for a teacher to skip about and reorganize in order to make the book/syllabus responsive to, say, current events.

Preceding each short text is an essay that summarizes the article, presents the authors’ subject position and credentials, and offers suggestions for thought while reading. Following each short text are two sets of questions, one designed to “stabilize” the text, which is to say make certain the student has read carefully and understood the ideas, the second to “mobilize” the text, that is to encourage application, response and critique. The authors and arguments presented will furthermore be familiar to anyone who has taken an interest in feminist, Black, urban and or cultural studies during the last twenty years, or is a reader of left-wing journalism. Angela Davis, Patricia J. Williams, bell hooks, C. Carr and Manning Marable all contribute, and even the more conservative voices present, such as that of LAPD police chief Daryl Gates, or Leonard Kriegel, who takes on (recent) graffiti as both symptom and cause in urban decay—adopt a relatively critical approach to mainstream media assumptions and representations of issues such as race, community and crime.

Bruch and Marback have made a concerted effort here to teach students to contextualize readings and representations in terms of authors’ subject positions, to provide training in careful reading, and to allow room for personal response as well as more dispassionate critical discussion. A teacher could rely on this text entirely for a syllabus, using the questions as prompts for in-class writing exercises and papers—or use it as a jumping off-point, bringing in more current discursive examples and mixed media projects, and as I’ve mentioned before, picking and choosing from its selections.

Another very interesting possibility, at least to me, however, is the degree to which Reading City Life, by making its own ideology so visible, could invite the student to study the book itself as a textual object. The preface, whose opening I quoted at the start of this review, instantly provides fodder for discussion and thought. The notion that even realities that may seem remote at first glance have a deep and possibly personal impact upon all of us—this breaking down of Self and Other—not only seeks to justify the relevance of this book, but also provides a starting point for considering the short texts the editors have included in relation to each other, and even their very inclusion in the text—and inviting the question of what has been excluded. It also provides proof that a thesis statement—if one is choosing to teach thesis statements— need not be dull and dry, that it can contain a provocative and only partially articulated idea, so that the rest of the paragraph or essay becomes devoted to exploring the thesis. The decision to include authors such as Daryl Gates and the LA Bloods and Crips coalition, alongside the more traditional writer-figures of scholars, journalists and novelists, could also generate discussion about authority and identity, as well as ideas for non-traditional sources of information and that information’s use and organization. (One idea that occurred to me as I was reading it, was, what if one asked students as a class to create their own book on city life, or campus life, or Columbia life, each of them a contributing author, with one short paper.)

The arguments for working with a textbook such as this are as compelling to me as the reasons not to, and many revolve around the decision to commit to a single, albeit rich and broad, topic. On the one hand, coming at the same issue again and again from different angles could allow for more in-depth thinking and writing over time, and give students a chance to reflect back upon previous essays when writing about any given one, possibly even begin to reflect upon and revise their positions, which in turn may be a fruitful source for writing. On the other hand, if the topic itself fails to engage—or if one as a teacher fails to engage—the students early on, then the rest of the semester, surely, could be a bust. To the degree that the content of a text like this might coincide with one’s own intellectual interests—cultural studies, women’s studies, Black studies, political science, even rhet/comp—it could benefit a teacher’s pedagogy; to the degree that it does not, well, obviously that may be detrimental. The specific choice of urban life and its representations as a topic does allow for special access, I think, to New Media and to mainstream media, and entertainment/pop culture and politics and youth in a way that may make it more useful in a new composition context than other sociological subjects.

Weird

So, this morning, after one hour of sleep and a week and a half of near-nervous breakdown, I had my best teaching experience since getting here: starting from error rather than trying to remove it seemed to work!

I had students write, in small groups, the worst opening paragraph to a paper they could possible come up with. We brainstormed lighthearted and in some cases “silly” topics: leprechauns who play Guitar Hero, facial hair, why presidential candidates should have to appear in swimsuits, and the history of dirt. And then I told them to put in every single example of “bad” writing they could think of: redundancies, cliches, sentence fragments, unsupported claims, informal language, spelling errors, subject/verb disagreement, disorganized ideas, you name it. And they—well, 95% of them—went wild.

They got to write their bad paragraphs side by side on the board and make corrections as the class called them out, and we talked about where the errors lay and what the effect was…for the first time, I had to tell *them* when class was over.

(This was following a day of playing Exquisite Corpse, by the way, which also provided a fun way to talk about how one sentence follows another, how a word can generate an idea, how accidental connections and coincidence can be fruitful, how words have more than one meaning. So maybe that laid the groundwork. I don’t know.)

Thomas, did I steal the error-based writing idea from you? Because if so, it’s a good ‘un. I recommend it to everyone.

One boy did raise his hand at the end and say rather sadly that he didn’t understand how this would help his writing skills. I tried to explain, but I don’t know that he was convinced, so will have to follow up on Monday.

Window

There’s a lot more I’d have liked to have said in my presentation. One area I wanted to explore had to do with post-modernism and teaching, about post-modernist, deconstructionist, New Media and experimental forms of production in the comp classroom—and how they relate to/could be an antidote to the strange sensation I have teaching comp, which is of somehow stepping back in time, and a time I never even really inhabited, at that.

The space itself—a windowless, cinderblock room in the basement of Strickland—felt so alien and stultifying the first time I walked in. It reminded me of no other room I ever taught or was taught in, except perhaps a room in the public high school in Albany, Georgia I attended for 6 months at the age of 14.Textbooks, too, seem to belong to that moment, and to a world of systemized, mechanized, thinking and learning I was never at home in.

So, I can see, could essaywriting itself. One of my happiest pedagogical/writing memories may have been choosing, from among a list of possible essay topics in a class with Mary Gordon at Barnard, a comparison between the voice of irony in The Good Soldier and the voice of faith in Diary of a Country Priest, and in that moment several of my intellectual interests being born. I remember someone saying to me, years later, paraphrasing Judith Halberstam, that desire cannot be willed, it either finds its object or it doesn’t.

And so even if there are a couple of students who find they love the material, or the subject, the more they delve into it, there are many more who won’t—not if it’s chosen for them—and how horrible, and how backwards, to force students to study what someone else finds fascinating, whether it’s a short story or a set of social arrangements or food practices on campus.

Are new methods of invention a way to reinvent the classroom and move away from an outdated physical and social environment that cuts off, that tries to force the world as it is now through narrow methodological filters that deny desire (need, exigence) as well as the accident, spontaneity, randomness that can better trip off desire than systemized instruction and production can?

From my prose poem Window:Everything. And it all wants out of the motherless box.

Compare and Contrast

From a student paper on Paul Bowles’ “A Distant Episode”:

“They treated him so bad. Especially when they cut out his tongue.”

When I first read this, I laughed aloud. And then I had the predictable intellectual reaction: oh dear, how do I fix it? Later, though, I returned to that initial, pre-intellectual response of laughter and realized that the root of the (all?) laughter was not contempt, but recognition.

One of the things I had found most perplexing as I asked my students to compare and contrast “A Distant Episode” with “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was the gap between what they and I found funny. Just as my humor seems sometimes too sharp-edged for them—they looked so shocked when I said in a moment of mock/real frustration at their lack of focus in group work, “You would of been a good class if it had been someone there to shoot you every minute of your lives—“ they found neither story remotely funny. A few looked at me askance when I laughed aloud at certain sections. Most of their essays and analyses, moreover, were hyper-serious, and they probably got that cue about schoolwork both long before me and also, ironically, from me. Certainly, I let it stand in this case, was so concerned that they get the meaning that I forgot about the humor, which might have been a way to help them find pleasure. I guess I felt in my heart that either you get a joke or you don’t.

Q: What did zero say to eight?
A: Nice belt.

Anyway, the reason I laughed about those lines in the student essay was that their very wrongness—their understatement—was in fact perfectly right. It was in the spirit of the texts themselves. It was as though one of Flannery O’Connor’s characters were to discuss the poor Professor’s fate.

If I were a more experienced teacher, I’d perhaps have known how to use that as an opportunity (I will cut out my own tongue before I ever use the phrase “teaching moment.”) As is, I do feel rewired, a bit. That has been the message of the readings we’ve done of late, it seems to me, and of this class in general.

Rethink. Rewire. Self-question. Change.

Exigential Crisis in 5 Parts

Part 1

I’ve been reading over my blog posts and some of my fast-and-furious correspondence of late. And just now I noticed, in my rants, references to qualities I claim to have appreciated in teachers but which I myself utterly lack: gentleness, subtlety, restraint.

Can those be learned at my age, pedagogical gentleness, subtlety of affect, rhetorical restraint?

Can they be woven in to what I more naturally have?

Part 2

When I was fifteen and in the fifth form at Our Lady of Providence Convent in Alton, Hampshire, England, I refused on ideological grounds to go on the class trip to the zoo. The head nun said, fine. You can spend the day in the library writing an essay on why you are opposed to zoos.

I was bloody thrilled. I wrote and revised a very long and very passionate essay—the day passed in a dream.

And you could say the success of the writing was part exigence—a real situation, something I cared about, something organic and that could have an effect. But you could also say that it was the sheer physical pleasure of writing for me, the experience of being alone with pen and paper, and the cold silky surface of the table, and books and thoughts.So. Exigence. The need to write. Does that always arise from a rhetorical situation, or can it arise from the material joys of the action itself. And can everyone gain access to that? Or does exigence simple provide the occasion for tapping into what is there, for some or for all (I don’t know)?

Part 3

I’ve been thinking about the Amy Hempel story where she starts off writing a letter contesting a parking ticket from the NYPD (true ticket, true letter) and ends up via the properties of tangent writing about fear and flight and instinct.

Part 4

I worry about this blog all the time, the degree to which I go off on tangents, don’t remain focused on the language and practice of pedagogy. Part of it is trying to find pleasure in a frequent and mandated activity, part of it is habit, maybe part of it is laziness, certainly part of it is instinct—an inherited one. I always say my mother went off on a tangent in 1982 and we’re still waiting for her to make her way back to her original point. I do know that here, my own need to write is often simply not getting it. Week after week, I seem to have misunderstood the texts, or their relations to one another, or their connection to teaching or the pedagogical goals of our class.

And this makes me think of my own students, and feel like one of them, poor lambs. Week after week, I go in with material I think will surprise them in a good way, stir them, move them, shimmer with clarity and meaning. I guess the material’s not the thing, though.

Part 5

I just deleted this. Too much wondering, too removed from the text.

Native Grammar My Tender Buttons

I am reading a student essay in which grammar and punctuation are so unrealized that the syntax appears denaturalized and strangely beautiful. It reads like Lydia Davis doing Diane Williams doing Gertrude Stein. I love it.

Rhetorical Healing (Unfinished)

I know we’re not supposed to post morning of class–and I barely even have time to do it, as my little black cat Simone has been missing since Sunday night, and I’ve been out searching instead of sleeping, when I haven’t been working. But I have done the readings and found most of them the most fascinating of any we’ve done so far. Johnson, especially, for the Cixous, the psychoanalysis, the (hallelujah) discussion of pleasure and pain. (Not that I agree with everything, of course.)

Some pertinent snippets from my own bank of knowledge and experience:

Cixous identifies as a poet, never a theorist. As Johnson says, she “washes over” distinctions in writing. For her, poetry holds all. It is only in America she is treated/shelved as a theorist. (Credit for the understanding and final metaphor to my undergrad mentor, Catherine McGillivray.)

AWP Conference, Chicago, 2004. Eileen Myles and Mark Doty hold a joint talk on what it means to work/identify as an oppositional figure (queer, activist, poet) within academia. I snort. “Nothing. It means health insurance.” Naturally, I am now rethinking that.

Sarah Schulman asking to read my senior thesis on lesbian identity politics, direct action and physical risk–focused on the Avengers–and me being too scared to show it to her, because of her anti-academic stance, and an underlying sense that I had done something sneaky and violent in translating this experience and work for academic purposes. Her mentioning me later in My American History as someone who came to the Avengers to write a paper and ended up throwing stink bombs. A nice bit of rhetoric, but rather too neat. I was always interested in the throwing.

Dyke TV’s frustration at the review my recently graduated friends’ wrote of it, because the review was film/gaze theory-based and failed to see the show in a real world and more radical/activist context.

Day 1 of teaching, a student says he likes to work with his hands. I try to use that to discuss the pleasure of reading , writing and intellectual work.

Just this morning, I read a student paper that is perhaps the best textual analysis of the lot. It’s by a young man who was home-schooled by fundamentalist parents, and reinforces my belief that Bible study both reveals and fulfills a deep lack in American education: full and pleasurable and rigorous engagement with language. I sometimes listen to Christian radio on road trips, just to check in. (Yep, still talking about abortion. Still talking about homosexuals, though now with compassion; God no longer hates fags, he just wishes they were different.) Anyway, I am often struck by the passion, focus and diligence with which callers into the programs approach Bible study: they memorize, they recite, they interpret, they ask questions, they examine symbols, they formulate arguments, they revel in image and sound and meaning. Everything we’d like them to do in, say, a writing class (well, except write), and which I try and get them to do.

And that’s where they find the pleasure in intellectual, word-based work. And it’s not so different from the way I learned to write, and argue, which was through studying literature, theory and other printed text. (Okay, not argue, that comes straight from Grandma Fallon, who used to LOVE it when the Jehovahs came to her door, so she could engage them in fiery and exhaustive theological debate.)

For many, Bible study and sacred language are things they have known all their lives, or something offered to them during a period of hunger, of suffering. I have often wondered what suffering a lack of reading leaves in people’s lives. In my years as an ethnographic market researcher, I visited hundreds of home across the country and economic spectrum. Perhaps 5 of them contained any books. And I have always suspected that there’s a wound, somewhere inside us, organized around all we did not get to learn and were not taught, and that Bible study, among other things, helps to heal that.

Hurtin’ Words

I may share this with my students as an alternative to discussing, say, hate speech as a way of looking at the material effects of language. Here is rhetoric designed to draw the elderly in, offer them a place, make them feel loved and welcome, but which physically hurts them.Interesting.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/us/07aging.html?hp

Nam myoho renge kyo

When Thomas was speaking of ways to get students to “own” error (not his words, but I think the gist) I remembered a creative writing exercise a talented friend, Amy Weiss, once suggested: get students to write the worst story they possibly can. Amy says the students always generate stories that are actually better than the ones they come up with when they’re trying to be “good,” because the pressure is off, their imaginations are let loose, and (like all of us) they really don’t know what they know.

So…what if I asked students to write a really bad paper? One chock full of egregious grammatical errors, unfounded claims, cliches, misuses of words, and the most boring, awkward, inappropriate and repetitious prose they can come up with? Then they could share that bad paper with the class, which would create general hilarity, and we could identify and discuss the errors, possibly workshop the papers, and they could have the task of going back and turning their papers (or each other’s) into better ones.

Disturbances in the Field (Or: A Particularly Catholic Unhinging)

In fact, it is this unreflective feeling on the nerves in our ordinary reading that interests me the most, the way we respond—or not—to error when we do not make error a part of our conscious field of attention. It is the difference between reading for typographical errors and reading for content. When we read for typos, letters constitute the field of attention; content becomes virtually inaccessible. When we read for content, semantic structures constitute the field of attention; letters—for the most part—recede from our consciousness.

Joseph M. Williams, “The Phenomenology of Error”

The reason I drink is to understand the yellow sky the great yellow sky, said Van Gogh. When he looked at the world he saw the nails that attach colours to things and he saw that the nails were in pain.

Anne Carson, Short Talks

There is an elision in the Williams quote between typo and error—one that is convenient, but troublesome, because error as a field lies somewhere in between typo and content, tucked sweetly between those sheets, attached to both, fleshily so. Aside from that, though, or perhaps because of that, the overall investigation that Williams undertakes interests me in several ways, as writer, as reader, as teacher and as student.

As writer, I am unable to read my own published work because of all the syntactical errors that float and loom and circulate there, and to proofread, too, because of an inability to fix my vision solely on the surface when I need to. Always I make a change for better meaning, or better sound, always I create a new typo, always I lose hold of the story, grasping onto commas and dashes, onto the nails (oh, stigmata!).

[Stigmata/Penitence story: When I was fifteen, I was friends with a much older boy who was in a punk/skate band called Stigmata Club. My parents went off to Copenhagen for their wedding anniversary, on an overnight trip, and I invited Stigmata Club to play—amps and slam dancing and all—in the sitting room of our rented house. The next morning there was a crease that ran the length of the sixty-foot rented carpet in the living room. I remember being down on my knees, crying, praying, and ironing the carpet, as the minutes ticked by toward my parents’ return. Miraculously, it worked.]

As student, I do love it though when an error is identified for me, when I feel for a moment less alone in the language (in which I long to live alone). when someone appears and guides me through, when I have a chance, briefly, to play penitent. (Okay, not always; sometimes I am filled with rage and resentment. But not when it’s done gently, or with humor, by someone who seems aware of and interested in the meanings I am trying to generate.) Correction and demonstration are forms of attention I find nourishing, if only for the temporary spot (macula, stain) of clarity they offer, and—

As teacher. Certainly the students I’ve been working with seem to like the flat-out instruction on a one-to-one basis. In class, though, at 8 a.m.? Forget it—as I discovered on Friday. Actually, I wasn’t even trying to teach grammar, but it was the closest thing to a traditional, back-to-basics lesson plan I’ve tried, a review and exercise organized around quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing. Went over like a lead bloody balloon. Even the Twix I passed around didn’t help. I’d be terrified to try and teach grammar or syntax to a group.

I wonder whether all of the “contempt” Williams identifies is felt for the errors themselves, as he believes. Is the anger directed, really, at the error, or the erring—or is it fury and frustration at the culture itself, and in particular at an educational culture that has 1) failed to teach children grammar at the developmental stages at which they might be most swiftly able to absorb it, 2) created an economy and culture that prizes social mobility and makes higher education essential to said mobility, and 3) thus sends its heavily indebted students into higher education and only then sets about teaching them how to write in any depth. College instructors are then forced to choose between teaching what, according to the prevailing research, cannot be usefully taught, and pretending that it does not matter, this thing that is at once a potential source of meaning and beauty and a deeply class-inflected skill that they possess but their students do not.

This is the problem of Comp that I stumbled smack into on the first day of training, and where I’ve been stuck, flailing, ever since. (According to Richard Lanham in The Economics of Attention, I’m a moralizer, and maybe he’s right. Certainly I thought as I was writing this of Ford Madox Ford: “It is all a darkness,” and he is speaking of morality as well as perception when he says it). Anyway, the sum total of the advice I’ve received on the matter is, “Oh, everyone goes through it, you figure it out, learning curve, on the fly, don’t do anything you don’t want to, do what makes you comfortable (nothing makes me comfortable) blah blah blah…” And so we all go shuffling, stumbling, through the gate.

The debates around teaching writing also interest me in how they differ from teaching other arts. We’ve seen several instances, in this class and in 8005, of using other disciplines, from modern visual and conceptual art to record production, to envisage new ways of producing text. But what about the methods of instruction in those fields? I know nothing about the pedagogy of painting, or of music or even, say, sound engineering. But why does the kind of rote learning and practice that is still a basic part of instruction in those arts not apply? (I’m thinking of learning scales, perspective, practice, the rules in order to break them and so on.) The Hartwell essay and probably the field of linguistics in general (about which I know nothing) would point to the nature of language itself.

But language is not writing; writing is not language.

[When I was 22, I knew a much older woman, a brilliant, funny, terrible alcoholic. I remember her saying to me on the phone one night, “This conversation is deteriorating into language.” That was probably the first deconstructionist joke I ever heard.]

Williams’ own argument seems to be predicated on some very particular assumptions:

1. the primacy of personal space
2. the privileging of logos and the conflation of writing with speech (thank you, Derrida), as when he equates linguistic error with social error (406)
3. a not unrelated utilitarian attitude toward language, which poses some problems for someone like me…

I believe in grammar in a kind of blind and loving and fearful faith, and I can’t teach it because I don’t know its face. I was never formally trained, and before it I feel humbled and fed. I appreciate Hartwell’s distinction between grammar and usage, and find it helpful, although I’m not sure I was taught usage, either, or what usage really means. I can say that I find myself reading and correcting style, which he also addresses, trying to train students’ ears. That’s why I have them do close reading of texts, that’s why I have them copy out quotes, that’s why I have them read aloud and do “listening workshops,” in which they have to try and recall verbatim a line, a word or a phrase from each others’ work, so that we can then discuss why that fragment and no other stuck.

Look at the nails, I seem always to be saying, can’t you see them? Can’t you hear them? Maybe a little less Catholic here than Yentl. From what I read this week, it’s a futile endeavor, anyway: the arguments against grammar and against reading for error, with their research and their charts and exercises, seem most compelling.

Am I just afraid that if I step out of this chapel of language the door will slam shut behind me? And what, anyway, if it did? What has it ever got me, this constant sacrifice of story after story upon the altar of language, except a loss of what briefly appeared to be momentum? And more to the point of Pedagogy: how can one so trapped in the habits of faith, the most binding of which is doubt, teach?