Penny Hero (dot) Net

Part of the first comment at the end of The poet who could smell vowels, which celebrates René de Saussure’s life.

“Thank you so much for your deeply human portrayal of the man Saussure. So often, as you say, we do (or perhaps must) reduce these human idea-factories to a few memorable phrases or greatest-hits concepts. And I think Saussure, because of how widely racinated, how utterly necessary, his ideas have become over so many disciplines, is more vulnerable than most: we think we ‘know’ Foucault, have a grip on who Freud walked around as, don’t feel we need to worry that we might take Marx or Barthes out of context, while the Genevan philologist cited in every liberal arts term paper and dissertation on every continent remains just a surname in a few thousand footnotes. Now at least we can see him in color.”

–Antheia Laplante, Seattle, USA

It’s apparently 150 years since he was born.

Have I mentioned that I miss school? My regrets about not taking more math and science are now in fierce competition with my regrets about not going hard-core into critical theory.

(or titled “part 2 of the “hole in the wall” India literacy experiment post!”)

Google announced yesterday that it’s launching the Google Literacy project to help spread literacy and provide resources and lots of other stuff for teachers, parents, mentors, students, and just regular people (with internet access) to help do so.

While promoting literacy worldwide via the internet is not a new thing (just do a google search. basically every self-respecting university, and a number of big organizations also are working to create a more literate world), I think google’s visibility, their philosophies, and their resources can add a lot to this.

Google’s literacy project basically acts as a portal to some of its services, like book search, google scholar, and other things, all acting as a kind funnel and pointing to things related to literacy. It draws attention to literacy, education, and pro-actively does something about it in the google-way of doing things… by organizing information and making it more accessible.

That’s way more powerful than you’d initially think, really. Honestly. Because most people in “literacy initiatives” or projects try to open schools, try to gather volunteer support, write and publish, or they manually collect links to resources and re-post them. But google uses it’s own technologies to sort and find these resources for you, so there’s no manual lists of resources to sort and maintain, and all the results are current, relevant, etc.

Plus, making this kind of portal (rather than yet another technology/news/omg-cool-stuff! portal) shows what kinds of values Google celebrates and wants to promote.

So… India. The googleblog announcement talks about India, and how it has 1/3 of the worlds “literacy problem”. And just yesterday, I blogged about the hole-in-the-wall experiment from India, which showed that there was some exciting and active research going on involving literacy, technology, and accessibility to this education.

Coincidence? maybe. Awesome? yes.

Gotta read more.

But first, must go back to work.

“ New Delhi physicist Sugata Mitra has a radical proposal for bringing his country’s next generation into the Info Age”

I don’t wish to claim that this shows anything more or less than what it has shown, which is that curious kids in groups can train themselves to operate a computer at a basic level. In doing so, they also can get a generally good idea about the nature of browsing and the nature of the Internet … And, therefore, if they view these things as worth learning, no formal infrastructure is needed [to teach them]. (emph mine)

What he did was this: he mounted a camera in a tree, embedded an internet-connected computer in a wall in a “slum” area, and watched what happened.

He calls it “minimally invasive education” and believes that the key to promoting authentic computer literacy is “for teachers and other adults to give [kids] free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves.”

Wow. Yes yes yes.

Another cool point was that the kids taught themselves in groups. it seemed that being in a group was a major component to self-learning.

How’s that for authentic education based on collaboration, social-ness, etc. de-centralized learning, and all those other literacy and educational buzzwords floating around! woo hoo!

But it makes sense. People don’t learn by rote memorization or being forced to learn something. They don’t really truly learn material by sitting at a desk and forcing it into their brains. we learn by practicing, doing, asking questions, figuring stuff out. NOT by lecture. we learn because we have a question, a problem, or out of curiosity.

lectures can help us prepare for tests, but this kind of “figure stuff out” method is what gets you to really learn something.

The thing that’s way cool is that this shows that this type of ‘decentralized’ learning model isn’t all that expensive.

So what’s the real difference between adults and kids? Just that adults “can’t” learn new things? No. it’s more like the sense of curiosity and self-confidence just fades or grows out of them or something. So the key to always being able to learn is to retain your sense of curiosity and spontenaety.

All these things are sort of “common sense”, but now there’s some sorta scientific “proof” that this is true.

I just wish that we had an educational system that matched research like this. individual teachers who model their classrooms around these ideas are awesome, but when they’re forced to “teach to the test” or their kids will fail and they’ll lose their funding… it just hurts everyone.

Anyway, gotta get back to work… just didn’t want to forget to write about this.

I’m insanely stoked. Mark Danielewski is coming to Portland, and I get to leave work a little early to drive up there and see him. My plan is to get House of Leaves and The Whalestone Letters signed if possible, and buy Only Revolutions while I’m there. God I hope I’m brave enough to actually talk to him and ask him to sign my books. It was hard enough to be brave when I was part of CWS and meeting authors every month (omg, Dinner with Sherman Alexie!)… you’d think I’d be over my shyness by now.

Credit Where Credit is Due: Cepcion introduced me to House of Leaves a long time ago, and while I haven’t ACTUALLY finished it yet, it’s disturbing and powerful all the same. Amazon.com has a good editorial review that talks about the meta-novel structure and the crazy “sometimes you have to hold the pages backwards and in the mirror to read it” typography, or you can google Mark Danielewski and read about his crazy blue hair and social-networking++ way of getting fan participation for his new book, Only Revolutions.

I was a member of the Only Revolutions forums, but not an active participant because I joined way too late, and kept telling myself that I wanted to finish HOL before getting more involved… little did I know that time was running out.

So… according to the Only Revolutions Website (careful, lots of sound and animation!), he’ll be at Powell’s Books in Portland at 7:30pm TONIGHT to read from his new book!

I’ll be there.

Will you?

I feel a tiny TINY bit bad for those awesome sites who’ve long maintained archives of public domain literature (Gutenberg, C.U.T., and this UK library to name a few), because now they’ve got some serious competition. But at the same time, now they don’t HAVE to maintain those libraries. They probably weren’t making a lot of money off of them anyway, so now they can use those resources for something ELSE.

From the end-user and lit-geek’s point of view, this is HELLA amazing to have access to ALL PD books all in one place… amazing and “why didn’t they do this before?” because Google’s got the resources and the culture to maintain a stable, permanent, growing library. No downtime, no difficulty finding anything… if one of the little guys’ libraries was incomplete, or their servers went down, it’s Bad… But that’s not going to happen any more! I think Google taking this on is a step in the Right Direction toward an open exchange of all kinds of Knowledge. Something tells me that’s part of Google’s vision of the internet. :) Maybe. :) Just a gut feeling.

Anyway, muahahahaha. Now I can read the FULL TEXT of Alexander von Humboldt Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe from 1871 or something else equally cool like old old OLD grammar handbooks. (GOD this would have helped me when i was researching the history of punctuation last year or that old history project I did on the integrated circuit back in high school.

Finding OLD OLD texts in the library was a bitch… first your library has to own the book (or know a library that owns it and send for it), and then you have to go FIND IT… and then you usually have to carry it around. Screw that. I’m not that strong and I used to have to walk to campus… and with my research, I needed to read a TON of old books that almost NEVER were in any kind of electronic form. Thank you Google for giving this to the world so that no one else will have to feel my back breaking pain ever again.)

Anyway, I’m excited about this. Even if I’m a little tiny bit sad for the littler guys who maintain their own PD libraries. This is going to destroy them all, even while it makes literary geeks like me very very happy.

Guess how much work I’m going to get done today… heh.

Anyway, here’s the official google blog post all about this.

Articulating Lawrence’s theories deadens them in the novel. the metaphors become dramatizations of his obscure language rather than open metaphors with the suggestion of what he’s writing about.

Similarly, The Rainbow is only successful because Ursula’s story is unfinished and unresolved. We don’t know what happens to her–only that she has the potential to become a nietzchian woman and able to find true Lawrentian fullfillment in the future. Lawrence must leave that open for the potential to exist. As long as she remains unarticulated, she comes to represent reader’s hopes for themselves and their own potential for change and spiritual growth.

Not just change on an individual level, but through the individuals who change, the potential to change the social structures which are clearly unbalanced and over-masculinized according to Lawrence and Feminists.

Andrew Harrison. “D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Perfervid futuristc Style” and the Writing of the Body in The Rainbow“. Writing the Body in D.H. Lawrence. Paul Poplawksi ed. Greenwood Press: Connecticut. 2001. p43

Essay examins and summarizes Galsworthy’s attack on The Rainbow, Futuristic style of writing in the Ursula sections. Galsworthy attacks Lawrence’s reiterative style. Essay examins how we gain insight into Ursula’s sections.

“balance through imbalance: the rainbow” the moon’s dominion. gavriel ben ephraim. p129.

description of lawrence’s oscilation toward deeper meaning… “the central experiences of the novel’s characters are structured, not in any neatly logical sequence, but in powerful contradictory waves…. perceptions occur, are contradicted, and are then reformed: the characters move slowly, cumbersomely, toward advancing their inner selves.”

translating inner into language: “the teller plays a special role… for only an authorial voice can translate the nonverbal inner experience into language…. events are narrated from within, the teller describes the hidden causes and consequences of actions through a technique of narrational inscape.” (131) what follows is a summary of tom’s deficiency due to him being molded by women all his life. lacking male confidence.

continues with other relationships examining their balance and imbalance and the mechanics of why it is like that.

other idea: oscillation dramatizes the slow pace of emotional and spiritual revelation and transformation. illustrates that the back and forth is never finished. that it is a process that needs constant maintenence and work.

The following are things I don’t want to forget, insights that I need to re-articulate, and possible points of tension/discovery that I might use in my essay on DH Lawrence.

Examination of HOW Lawrence is a modernist

• like Conrad, he’s reacting against old writing styles and cliches and conventions. Content and form changes, but conrad is more impressionistic and symbolic in his attempt to understand the unconscious mind. Lawrence attempts to articulate the unconscious and put into words the inner workings of human emotions and what he believes modern technological de-humanization is stripping from our human experience. (Look at his essays for where he says we are at fault and western world of materialism is bad etc. maybe…)
• critical or complicated relationship between human beings and the change that the modern world brings to them. Technology intrudes on the brangwens, and it is in part good. it brings success, opportunity etc. individuals can search for their Great Meaning in more places.

Lawrence’s ideas in terms of identity and the “social-construction of the soul” (my term)

• different characters find their individual meaning in different ways. Tom=land. Lydia=her secretiveness? Will=art/archetecture. Anna=children. Ursula=literature/school?
• all are still driven to love someone and be with someone else to find meaning. their different identities come into conflict or create tension with the other. (Anna and Will’s object/need-more struggle… Anna “wins” which difuses their relationship. Only after he finds a bodily object identification and feels empowered through that, does it reinvigorate.

Problems with Lawrence’s attempt to articulate what he and Lawrence both seem to realize is not articulatable.

• Conrad uses dense stream of consciousness symbolism and delayed decoding, imitates the thinking of a human being that suggests the effect of discovering and knowing the unconsciousness.
• Lawrence invents a new language to try to articulate what can’t be articulated in our language. I think this is very problematic. In my own reading, after reading his theories, it virtually “killed” the impact of his novel because what had previously been metaphor and subtle became direct and explicit. It just “felt wrong” in that way that can’t be clearly articulated. begs the question… how could lawrence think that he would be capable of doing justice to the unconscious pre-language workings of the human soul.

Other:

• Lawrence’s relationships are an oscillation between being the drive to be independent, and the drive to be with someone else and find meaning through someone else. Lawrence theorizes this in a metaphysical/psudoscientific way in his essays and believes in the magnetic fields etc. but the oscillation and back and forth is key. creates a living changing conduit that contributes to the health of the Relationship as an entity.

I’m currently using bittorrent to (illegally?) download an audio book reading of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”.

How’s that for technology intersecting with the English major?

I don’t even like American Revolutionary texts… but I saw it in my search results, and it had more than zero seeds, so… the English major in me had no choice but to download it.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m so tickled by this.

Paul armstrong says: power and justice are incompatible (page 5 on my preview)

possible that *shock* the two women characters are the only two heroic/incorruptable characters because they are inherently powerless, and transparent conduits through which male power travels… until the death of the two men in antonia’s life.

antonia as a female politician essay.