January 2008

Death and the Writing Instructor

Posted on January 6, 2008 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

A while back I wrote an article or essay called “Death and the Writing Instructor,” and since I had written it I sent it off to a journal, but I doubt it will see the light of day because I have seen almost no articles in academic journals on writing with titles like “Death and the Writing Instructor.”

I wrote it to try to explain to myself why teaching has more recently become quite hard for me, and I am thinking about it right now because tomorrow I start up yet another quarter as a Writing Instructor. This time Winter Quarter, 2008.

My argument—to the extent I had one—was that teaching is a temporal activity, having some how to do with the passage of information and thoughts and ideas of one generation to the next. It has psychologically something to do with what the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called “generativity,” and that has something to do with the psychological need to care for generations that follow your own.

This is sort of an obvious thing; many parents do seek to set up situations, one way or another, that might help their children out after they are gone. Think inheritances. But Erikson takes this out a step further and sees signs of generativity in social institutions, policies and laws established in the present with the primary intent of preparing the ground for future generations. Right now of course the prime example might be the attempt of organizations and governments to establish policies and to make plans to head off the massive upheavals that might result, for the next generation, from global warming.

So built right into the heart of education—of a certain kind—is the awareness of time or temporality. The teacher, so to speak, is in the middle of the stream standing on shifting sands. This is a precarious position I argue and full of potential for anxiety. For an awareness of the movement of generations necessarily implies awareness, no matter how low down and unconscious, of one’s own location in time and that this time is passing (along with you).

This may seem a grandiose notion of teaching and education, but it seems to be the one I am stuck with. And in this position, one might try to fight off the anxiety by just throwing up one’s hands and saying, “Après moi le deluge!” I mean, who the hell cares, since, if I am lucky, the crap that is coming down will come down after I am gone. One could develop a whole philosophic position from this, and it would be damn hard to argue against.

That might be the position I am tempted to take. But paradoxically, if I did so, while it might afford some relief, it would probably also take away the energy or the ideals that have fueled my work as a teacher so far.

Maybe tomorrow when I go back into the classroom I will look inside and figure out where I am, though mostly I will probably be pissed at the inadequate technical resources, taking roll, and having to turn away crashers.

Thank goodness!

Pelicans

Posted on January 3, 2008 by nicktingle — 2 Comments ↓

No rain. So we hoofed it out to the ocean, and caught some pelicans, who have been showing up lately in greater numbers, doing their thing.

Here they head for a wave; they glide in the updraft created right in front of the wave.

Here the wave is starting to break up on them and they head over it towards the next wave.

There they go! Over the Wave…

Off towards the next one. Just beginning to take shape and always following the leader bird.

I have been concerned about this egret–I am pretty sure it’s an egret thought not snowy or not yet snowy–since it has been hanging out a lot all by itself next to the golf course. I thought possibly it was injured. But today I saw it in flight, so maybe it’s ok. They walk with great delicacy.

Possible Rain

Posted on January 2, 2008 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

We need rain. During the fall, rain was predicted several times but did not eventuate. This time though they may be onto something. A storm is a-brewing. I find confirmation in the odd cloud patterns over Elwood.

And also looking back towards the mountains this strange piano key pattern of clouds, marching across the sky. This may portend something—at least a change is occurring.

And finally birds are behaving berserkly—moving inland—and driving home I came across this pack of crows, re Hitchcock’s birds, all strung out on a wire.

Tomorrow will tell the tale.

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While trying to find a name for those piano key clouds I came across a page with pictures of "rare" clouds. I swear if I ever saw this one anywhere near where I lived, I would run in side, and go to the basement or dig a basement on the spot and possibly pee myself while doing so:

Which Comes First: The Egg or the Shell

Posted on January 2, 2008 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I guess I was falling asleep, taking a nap maybe, and my mind started to roam. That’s a good sign, when the mind starts to roam; that means I am falling asleep. One day my mind started roaming, and I was like the Prince in Cinderella going around with that slipper trying to find the foot that fit it, except I was going around with an eyeball looking for a face that needed one. This should have been easy but it seemed like I found a lot of faces that needed eyeballs. I don’t know what happened because I fell asleep.

This time my mind was roaming and for some reason I remembered that Homo sapiens women are born with—or have present at birth—all the eggs, stored in the ovaries I suppose, that they will ever have. And then I wondered if this was also true of chickens, but got all confounded when I realized chicken eggs appear outside of the body of the chicken and the eggs of homo sapiens women do not because they have wombs.

So then I wondered how the hell a chicken produces an egg. Maybe a chicken does not have a womb but there must be some place in a chicken where the egg builds up like it does to a full egg size and then pops out. I was amazed that I had never thought of this before in my entire life. I had never given even a single second’s thought to this issue of chicken anatomy.

I have long felt the egg itself to be kind of miracle of food packaging. Here there is this neat, white (or some other color) sort of oval shaped thing with food right inside it. True, the oval shape makes for an unstable object. Square eggs would be better for the purposes of shipping since they could be stacked next to each other more efficiently than is now the case, but that might be a real pain for the chicken.

Out the window went my nap! My mind was no longer roaming. I consternated myself by suddenly realizing that I had never adequately reflected on the origin of an egg. So I went and looked it up on the web. Turns out—and I had never thought of this either!—that the egg shell while feeling hard to the touch is actually at the microscopic level a permeable membrane. Well, naturally, of course…the egg needs oxygen and were the shell not permeable the little chicken inside would die. That would be pretty much a self-defeating egg, one without a permeable shell. I could have concluded that pretty much deductively since growing things do need oxygen. But as I said I hadn’t ever given it a single thought.

Then I found out that the chicken does not create the shell; the egg does. The egg or oven generates the genetic information necessary to build up the shell around itself; otherwise it could not develop, lacking a womb in which to do so. So the ovum builds its own womb so to speak.

I still cannot conclusively answer the question: which came first the chicken or the egg. Actually I hate chicken egg questions, like the nature-nurture questions, as being mostly a waste of time, fit material for philosophic pedants, I suppose. This I call bad philosophy. But I think I can now say conclusively that the ovum comes before the shell and the chicken with the ovum inside of it comes before the ovum, and in this way I can conclude that the chicken does come before the egg in the case of any particular chicken or egg. But the chicken egg question—as a philosophic matter—is not about any particular chicken or egg that ever existed or ever will.

So there went my nap.

A Good Night’s Sleep Part ?

Posted on January 2, 2008 by nicktingle — 1 Comment ↓

In my ongoing pursuit of a good night’s sleep, I have been led to check into circadian rhythms. One might think that going to sleep in darkness and waking when the light comes up is “natural.” I suppose it is, but also very complicated.

Circadian rhythms are produced endogenously. They are built into the body, per se, and not the result of an external stimulus, such as the sun coming up or alternately going down. They were discovered by a French person who noted that a certain flower opened and closed its leaves when left completely in the dark in the course of a day cycle.

Or in other words, if a person was locked in a room with 24 hour light, he or she would nonetheless, with no cue from the sun, begin to feel drowsy and sleepy at one time and wakeful at another.

The clock is said to go in a 24 hour cycle, though this is not accurate since the idea of a 24 hour day is but a human convention. More accurately one might say that the rhythm goes though a complete cycle from one sunset to the next, even though the rhythm is not stimulated by the sun setting.

This rhythm is found in all sorts of plants and animals and evolutionarily speaking must have arisen from some relation to the movements of the sun.

Why I have to wonder—did it become necessary for the body to internalize the mechanism of the cycle. What ever the reason, it did.

Whatever the reason when a certain time of day is reached, say night, the biological clock sets in motion the release of the hormone melatonin which is said to induce sleep. But this clock does respond to some degree to external stimuli; when for example the seasons change the clock resets itself to synchronize with the changes in light and dark.

Some believe that some sleep disorders may be related to screw ups in the circadian rhythms. Jet-lag is the prime example; people traveling from the US to China may take a week to readjust the clock. They feel awake when it is dark and sleepy when it is light. Some believe that work at the genetic and cellular level may help with people whose clocks seem permanently screwed up.

Another factor leading to screw ups may be the electrical light bulb. Most likely in the pre historic past, when there were no light bulbs, your average cave person went to sleep when the sun went down and arouse when the sun came up. This would make sense—a perfect synchronicity between sun and the biological clock.

Others argue that the winter blues may in part result from the abruptness of the time change produced by the artifice of Day Light Savings Time. These people are pretty serious and believe that a good deal of mental distress, even illness may be produced by Day Light Savings Time.

Personally, I dread each year the arrival of Day Light Savings Time. Perhaps my sense of fatigue is produced by the government of the United States that instituted Day Light Savings Time so people would have more time to shop. Perhaps my mental health is being destroyed by big business.

Zero Plus Zero Nothing Is

Posted on January 1, 2008 by nicktingle — No Comments ↓

I can’t quite figure what’s the big deal about a new year. Maybe having lived through 62 of them I am jaded or something. But really one is just adding a number to a number as in 2007 plus 1 equals 2008. It’s just counting. Hardly a reason for celebration. I guess people will take any occasion to get drunk and act irresponsibly. But this number thing seems to me a pretty feeble excuse.

And hell people don’t need a reason to get drunk and act irresponsibly. They do it every day for no reason at all, except of course for whatever reasons they might personally have. I expect just as many people will get drunk and act irresponsibly in this coming so called “year” as did in the last so called “year.”

Come to think of it but “year” is a pretty strange word; it’s “ear” with a “y” stuck in front.

Also this changing of the year number makes it more difficult for me to remember what year it is. In one of my little bureaucratic chores, I sign petitions, maybe 200 or 300 hundred a so-called y-ear, for students wanting to substitute a class for a class sort of thing, and for the first 50 of these or so I won’t remember what year it is. I will be sitting there, scratching my head, and I will have to call out to the people in their little offices round about, “Anybody know what year it is?”

And somebody will yell back, “It’s 2008 or 7 or 99 or whatever year it is.” Thank goodness somebody usually knows, and after a while it will stick in my head because I will keep hearing on TV that it’s 2008, as if that was something important to know.

I still don’t know what century it is and it’s been a new century for seven so-called years. In class teaching, I will keep referring to the turn of the century by which I mean 1900, for 1900 will always be the turn of the century for me and I will have to correct myself and say, you know the last century, the twentieth century, not the twenty first century the one we are now in.

I find it odd to be alive in an “ought” year. When I was a kid, people said things like back in “ought eight” the cotton didn’t grow or something like that. Or do you remember the big flood of “ought seven?” I don’t hear people speaking these days of “ought years.” I wonder if the old timers called 1900 “ought ought.” Do you remember the big wind of “ought ought?”

It would have been cool to say "ought ought." But I missed the occasion probably because I didn’t know what year it was.

So now I say goodbye to one ought and hello to another ought. Which metaphysically speaking adds up to nothing.