Echo Bridge, Waban, Massachusetts

The rock looked inviting.

Rocks, as I am sure you know, do not often look inviting. But this one did. Its cold, rough, mossy surface jutted out over the Charles River. It was bathed in sunlight.

I had not been exploring Hemlock Gorge very long, but I wanted to sit. And I wanted to read in the sunlight. What did it matter that I was wearing a business suit and a light trench coat, and had a laptop bag with two books slung across my shoulders? The river spirits wouldn’t care how I was dressed.

The soles of my shoes slipped and I was afraid of falling in. But, settling myself on the rock, I looked out at the river. I felt like child again, in a world of unlimited possibilities.

I pulled Ahead of All Parting from out my bag.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to
   endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The First Elegy”, Ahead of All Parting (Stephen Mitchell, trans. and ed.)

The river spirits heard as I sang out the first four of the Rilke’s Duino Elegies in their entirety.

After sitting for a time, I slipped my way off the rock, careful knowing things break. I walked along the river bed, using trees and rocks as handholds, avoiding poison ivy. Looking just at the leaves, I don’t think I would have recognized it. I recognized it more from the vine snaking around the trees, with the roots digging into the bark.

I finally reached the bridge. While doing an errand for a client at the bank on Monday, I had to drive the area where Route 9 meets Route 128. Although I have been to that area, I had never seen the Hemlock Gorge Reservation. Had I not had that errand to run, I may never have. I saw the stonework bridge, with its big barrel spans from the road. When I saw the stairs leading up the side of it, I figured it was a railroad bridge.

Some whim told me to climb up. And I followed it. There were no railroad tracks, nor road. The bridge is a pedestrian walkway.

I stood looking over the Charles River, thinking of poetry, thinking of this bridge as a picturesque setting for a scene in a novel. I looked up to the sky and thought of the opening stanza of the Rilke’s “First Elegy”.

A woman stooped by the stairs on the other side of the bridge. Her red dog with its hoary muzzle trotted over to me. I knelt down. He sniffed my hand, circled me and then presented his head. I petted him while the woman walked over.

“Excuse me, ma’am, does this bridge have a name?”

She smiled. “Yes, this is Echo Bridge.” She told me how it was part of the old Boston aqueduct system, how it had just recently been employed after the recent troubles eastern Massachusetts had with its drinking water. She walked off.

I thought about shouting off the edge of the bridge and seeing if anything happened except scaring a number of birds.

“Oh, I forgot to mention,” she called to me. “There’s a little wooden platform on this side of the bridge. That’s where you’ll get the echo.”

I had explored that platform on my walk. I had thought it strange, but it gave a handsome view of some of the nice mill buildings.

Standing there, I wished I had a volume of the poetry of W.B. Yeats. I wondered if my voice would complete his “Man and the Echo.” I heard my own voice come back to me as I recited two poems by Keats from memory. First, “Ode to a Nightingale” and then one of my newer favorites.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
  Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
  Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain:
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
And think that I may never live to trace
  Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
  That I may never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
  Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of a wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

–John Keats

In This Essay

The Mystery of the Messy Notebooks: Why Agatha Christie’s method was utterly deranged by Christine Kenneally, Slate, April 12, 2010.

Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making by John Curran

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Letters on Life: New Prose Translations by Rainer Maria Rilke (Ulrich Baer, ed. and trans.)

On Monday, I was reading Slate. What inspired me to read it that day, I am not sure: it has not been one of the sources that I regularly turn to for my news.

Perhaps because I want to be a writer myself, I have always found it fascinating to listen to stories about how artists, musicians, and authors create their work. Without any real study, the descriptions of the creative process stick with me.

For example, years ago I listened to part of an interview with Michael Stipe of R.E.M. (Perhaps the entire band was being interviewed, my memory is vague.) I remember nothing about that interview, save this one thing: R.E.M. records the music without Michael Stipe present and then they give him the rough cut on a tape. He walks around listening to the tape again and again until he is able to put words to the music.

But I am glad that I decided to read Slate this week. Otherwise I would have missed a great article about the writing process that Agatha Christie employed. If you can call how Agatha Christie wrote a “process.”

A Little Here, A Little There, Maybe a Little Lost

John Curran studied 73 of Agatha Christie’s notebooks and published a book on them that after reading the article in Slate I desperately want to read, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making.

Christie did not work sequentially through one notebook. According to Christine Kenneally’s article, Curran was able to trace three notebooks that Christie used for “at least 17 years and 17 novels.” She would write her thoughts in whatever notebook was nearest at hand when she needed to write, as long as it had empty pages to fill.

And Christie did not separate her writing life from her personal life in the notebooks. Grocery lists and bridge scores adorn the pages. Her husband’s calculations and notes are there too, as well as her daughter’s penmanship exercises.

Though not a method I would like to employ, Christie’s method has me captivated. Did the search for bits and pieces of story through multiple notebooks remind her of devices she’d used previously? Remind her of ideas she had had long ago and discarded only to realize how they could be employed now?

Two Pens

I envy Curran the opportunity to study one his beloved author’s notebooks. What wouldn’t I give up if someone gave me the opportunity to study Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters and notebooks? How could I even begin to ascribe a value to seeing his writing process, watching his chipping the raw stone of an idea down until it becomes a fully sculpted poem?

But I will need to learn German first, if that dream has any chance of becoming a reality. (It’s on my to do list after mastering Italian.)

Although I do not much care for the book Letters on Life, I am grateful for having read the introduction. In the introduction, Baer describes the poet sitting at his desk and staring at two pens: one dedicated to his Muse, exclusively for use in crafting of poetry; the other dedicated to life, used for correspondence and grocery lists.

This is all I know of the poet’s method. And it may be a fiction.

I wonder if I had looked further in Letters on Life what I might have found on Rilke’s method. The book lifts excerpts from Rilke’s massive correspondence and arranges them, without context or addressee, into sections. Perhaps there was a section on craft that I missed by trying to read the book sequentially, rather than using it as Baer had intended.

The Terror of the Blank Page

Although I know little about the process of Rilke but much of his work, those elements of knowledge are reversed when it comes to Stephen King.

Since college some of my friends who write have been recommending that I read On Writing but I have resisted. A snobbish sentiment long prevented me from reading it. Although he is a New York Times Bestselling Author, I think of Stephen King’s work as pulp writing. I admit this is a prejudiced opinion: I can claim to vividly remember reading only one story by King, about a laundry press that develops a taste for human blood, and may have read a few other stories from that collection.

I am glad to have had the good sense to challenge my prejudice at least in regards to On Writing. And I think that I may further challenge it by borrowing my girlfriend’s copy of Hearts in Atlantis.

Stephen King sits down every day and writes. He carries a book with him wherever he goes because he is as passionate about reading as he is about writing. Although I don’t know if he writes long hand or on a computer or how he organizes his drafts, I doubt his method resembles the one employed by Agatha Christie. After he finishes a draft, he puts in a drawer for months — a technique that even Horace advises — until he has half forgotten the story.

The advice that I’ve read in On Writing is the same that I’ve read in The Lie That Tells a Truth by John Dufresne or The Writing Life by Annie Dillard or an article by Andre Dubus in The Writer Magazine from the 1960s which was reprinted recently or The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp.

Glue your ass to a chair and write. Face the terror of the blank page and realize it is not so terrifying.

Whatever method you use — whether it resembles Agatha Christie’s or a more orderly method — nothing will happen unless you put pen to paper or fingers to keys.

Since dedicating myself to fulfilling my dream on April 2nd — 12 days ago now — I have written 8 of the last 12 days. From those eight hours of work, I have grown my novel from the seed of three handwritten pages to 55 handwritten pages.

And if I can keep this up, perhaps my oeuvre will rival Agatha Christie’s: 66 novels, 22 plays, over 140 short stories, and many poems.

The covers were all rolled in on themselves. I knew all the pages would be stuck together. The first book I picked up was On Love and Barley: The Haiku of Basho. And it dripped like a wet sponge.

Despite the grief at having lost hundreds of dollars worth of books, I found comfort in picking up the works of Basho. Although he could have had a comfortable life as a military officer or a small official, Basho renounced that to become a poet, to teach poetry, and to travel. His disciples built him a modest hut and planted him a banana tree. In fact, they built him several huts throughout his life because each was destroyed.

All Basho owned was some clothes, his hut when he had one, his banana tree, and his art.

I have long admired Basho’s poetry and the sparseness of his life. Back in college I remember, perhaps after spending time reading Basho, saying that a trunk full of books, a trunk full of clothes, a pen and paper, and a sleeping bag was all that I should ever need.

Quite against my choosing, my life will be more spare. More spare materially, but perhaps more full.

Perhaps because I picked up Basho first and I remembered my old ideal of living a life around my art instead of around material goods, I was not too grieved by the loss of my books. There were some losses I will grieve.

Many of the papers I wrote in college and course readers and other miscellany were soaked through.

The next book I picked up was priceless. As a Christmas gift, I received a dual language edition of Rilke’s poetry, in the original German with Russian translations. A hardcover book, I had had some hope that I could save it and set it in front of a space heater. When I looked in after it the next day, it looked swollen and beyond saving.

Another priceless book, a dual language edition of Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics in Italian with English translations by Robert M. Durling, sat in the water. I have two copies of that book, though only the ruined one is accounted for right now and the other may share the other’s fate. What I do know is that I received the one that was ruined as a gift from my favorite college literature professor, Dr. James Biehl.

Then I picked up Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. While sad to lose that book, I chuckled. How appropriate a book to lose. As I picked up books and papers, tried to guide water to the sump pump, I felt there was something Sisyphean in the effort. And beyond the effort of clean up, I thought of other Sisyphean tasks.

Will I work to earn money to buy these books again only to worry that they may get ruined again? Or will I use this opportunity to create my life more consciously, to consume less but enjoy more?

Perhaps even Sisyphus can smile.

In This Essay

“Do School Libraries Need Books?” from Room for Debate, The New York Times, February 10, 2010

“The Library, Through Students’ Eyes” from Room for Debate, The New York Times, February 14, 2010

“A library without books” by David Abel, The Boston Globe, September 4, 2009

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, by Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic, July/August 2008

I remember reading in The Boston Globe last September that a private school in Massachusetts had given up its collection of books. I was aghast.

That Cushing Academy gave away collection of books, turning its library into a digital media center, continues to bother me.

Since reading that article, I have thought a lot about the role of libraries in our society. I have library cards for three different library systems here in Massachusetts. I joined the Boston Athenaeum, a membership library, last December after writing about them in a December 11th’s Weekly Review.

Libraries are important places. Digital technology cannot yet replace — and I hope never will — brick-and-mortar libraries.

I love going to physical libraries. I love browsing the stacks.

One afternoon while wandering through the shelves, I came across The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke a collection of fragments from Rilke’s letters, collected into thematic chapters by Ulrich Baer. Without the serendipity of walking through the stacks, I would never have found the book because I would never have thought to look for it.

I walked into the Boston Athenaeum on Saturday to visit again the art exhibit I reviewed last week, An Artist + A Poet. Walking around the new acquisitions displays on the first floor, I found Young Rilke and His Times by George C. Schoolfield. Again, I never would have thought to look for this book but I’m glad to have borrowed it.

That’s one weakness I find in my own Internet research. There is so much information out there, that unless I know what I am looking for, I have trouble finding anything at all. Reading from the Internet encourages us to read shallowly and seek a particular piece of information and continue on.

We have become sifters.

But when we enter a library, we are looking for knowledge in a broader sense than we are when we begin an Internet search. When we begin an Internet search, we are looking for answers to specific questions. When we enter a library, we are looking for answers, yes, but I think we are open to letting those answers inspire additional questions in ways we aren’t on the Internet.

All the same, I am no luddite. I know that the Internet is changing the way that we think and organize information. Perhaps libraries will become obsolete.

But I hope that we continue recognize the value of books and libraries. There are no pop-up advertisements in books, nor banner ads in libraries. Just as online, there are other things — more books, though, rather than more sites — vying for our attention in a library. Yet, I find myself able to become immersed in a book in a way that I have never seen translated online.

I hope that we keep these quiet bowers.

What are your thoughts? Share them with us.

Do libraries hold any special memories for you? Have you moved completely online? Do libraries have a future, or only a past?

To one of my saints, my dear friend, Emily Baum, with the deepest appreciation.

In This Essay

On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (C.D.N. Costa, trans.)

Late Bloomers by Malcolm Gladwell, The Annals of Culture, The New Yorker

On Dying Young by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy

William Stafford, Poet, Wikipedia

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell, trans.)

Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell, ed. and trans.)

The Second Four Books of Poems by W.S. Merwin

“Is there anything I can do to cheer you up?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Just show me a writer — a poet, preferably — who did not a pickup a pen before he was 27 or 30, who amounted to anything, who history remembers.”

These conversations are common.

I expect the normal, well-intentioned platitudes. Often I begin to despair because I have not dedicated myself to my writing. I begin to think that my time is up. “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it,” Seneca whispers. “Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.” And I begin to think about how I have not invested my time well.

Rilke writes, “…if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all.” Haven’t I been living without writing? I have not worked on my novel in weeks. Or have I been existing and drifting? Do I really feel that I could live without writing?

“William Stafford,” she says.

“Rivers of Ink, All on Good Poems”

I had never heard of William Stafford before she mentioned him. So, I did what any self-respecting twenty-something with an Internet connection would do: I turned to Wikipedia to get a quick overview of the man’s life.

Born in 1914, his first work a prose memoir was published in 1948 called Down in My Heart, when he was 34 years old, and his first major collection of poems in 1962, when he was 48 years old. Eight years after publishing his first collection he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

That last honor is better known today as Poet Laureate.

And I began to think about the dualities in Rilke. He writes in his Letters to the Young Poet that one should not write unless one cannot do otherwise. Yet, in a prose excerpt that Stephen Mitchell includes under the title “[For the Sake of a Single Poem]” in Ahead of All Parting, Rilke writes:

Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) — they are experiences. … For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
–Rainer Maria Rilke from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge quoted in Ahead of All Parting, page 250.

Am I wasting my investment? Or am I burying the seeds deep within the soil of my being so that at the end of summer I will find that I have a rich harvest?

Though his first poems were published when he was 48 years old, he “composed nearly 22,000 poems, of which roughly 3,000 were published.”

Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?

This question is the subtitle of Malcolm Gladwell’s article, “Late Bloomers.”

It is a great question. When did our obsession with precocity start? Is it a simple function of our culture’s obsession with youth? An alluring thought but it is not so simple. I know yoke linking genius and youth is older. Beethoven’s father claimed that Beethoven was younger than he was so that Beethoven’s genius would be viewed as to the genius of Mozart.

John Keats died at 25 years old, leaving behind some of the most perfect poems written in English. I have written before about my own feelings of inadequacy when I think of measuring myself against Keats. But who wouldn’t feel that same inadequacy? Keats himself died thinking he was a failure.

John Keats may have been twice blessed. In addition to his talent, he had what many of the late bloomers had. A patron.

Patrons & Saints

Gladwell points out that for many artists and writers, there is a long period of experimentation and development before their fully ripened power emerges. If it were not of patronage of friends and family, Paul Cezanne may never have risen to greatness.

Keats is not the only of my favorite poets whose poetry flourished because of patronage.

Two others jump immediately to mind. Petrarch had a career in the church that had no real duties, allowing him to write while collecting a small salary. Rilke had numerous patrons who believed in his talents enough to give him lodging and food, and sometimes money, that he could write and develop his mind.

In the end, our fascination with youth and poetic inspiration may be a puff of smoke. University of Chicago economist David Galenson, interested in both poetry and painting, decided to look at the major modern poets and their major anthologized works and evaluate the idea of poetic inspiration as a young man’s game. While some poets’ early works were anthologized he found others whose later works were honored:

Forty-two per cent of [Robert] Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For [William Carlos] Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For [Wallace] Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.
– Malcolm Gladwell from “Late Bloomers”

In addition, Malcolm Gladwell points out that Mark Twain was 49 when he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe at 58.

Perhaps great art only comes when patrons are there to support artists and writers. When I was in college, one of my dearest friends, Peter, would say to me in his thick German accent, “Matthew, I wish I was rich. If I was rich, I would pay your expenses so you can write. You need to write, Matthew, and you need to publish. I will start a publishing house just to make sure your work gets out there.”

Hope

After reading about William Stafford and reading “Late Bloomers,” I think for a little while. She asks what I think of the article. But I cannot address it directly. Instead, I share with her this poem.

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with is color.
– W.S. Merwin

When I first read “Separation” by W.S. Merwin, it came as a revelation. “Separation” is a perfect poem. With economy and dazzling imagery, W.S. Merwin captured an experience, shared it, and forever changed the way I think about loss.

We talk a little bit more. I build up my courage. I ask her if she would like to read one of my works. She says nothing would make her happier.

When you set my heart
ablaze, how did I not know
you would taste of smoke?
– Matthew Koslowski

She smiles. “I like yours better.”

I am ambivalent when there are too many good things over the course of a week.

My attention is caught among trying to sift through all these different news articles and bring you some of the best that I can find. I want to share all the interesting things that I found but if my attention is strained trying to find them, your attention is just as strained because of the information with which you are trying to keep up yourself.

I hope that you will enjoy the articles that I have included here.

Do you have suggestions on how I can make the Weekly Review more interesting or more useful? Please comment below. I want you to enjoy the Weekly Review and get something out of it. I don’t want to be another aggregator that you ignore.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Ready for Take-Off!
• School Reforms
• How to Think
• Edgar Allan Poe and the Frogpondians
• On Whose Merit?

Ready for Take-Off!

• For Octogenarian Pilot, Sky Is The Limit: an Interview of Anne Osmer by Melissa Block, All Things Considered, NPR

Anything is possible, and you are never too old. If you don’t believe me, ask Anne Osmer. She began taking flying lessons after she turned 80. Yes, you read that right she began flying lessons after 80. She’s now 83 years old and took her first solo flight.

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School Reforms

• Why Tests Make Me So Angry by John Spencer, Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Ban Homework and Lengthen School Days by John Spencer, Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher

The other night, I sat out a dance to talk with Erin, a teacher’s aide for the deaf, who I met recently. We talked about school reforms and she had some interesting insights. She suggested, since we are no longer a predominantly agrarian society, that we should eliminate summers and instead institute six weeks of school followed by two weeks of break, or some similar rotation. After each six week segment, kids who did not fully understand the concepts could receive remediation — literally, a remedy for their misunderstanding — much sooner than having to wait until summer school an having failed once.

My friend John Spencer writes in these two essays about what he sees wrong with education. I don’t agree with everything that he says. For example, he thinks that we should lengthen the school day but I disagree. I’m more inclined to agree with Erin about altering the school year and keeping the days short. I remember seeing an article a while back that said the schools in the foreign countries that we are constantly pointing to as beating our students have a different schedule for breaks but less hours each day.

The human brain is like a muscle. Repeated practice of certain skills strengthens those areas of the brain. But, the brain can also suffer fatigue which makes its attempts to retain less effective. We need to make sure we take a balanced approach.

I just picked up two more books by Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities and The Shame of the Nation. Perhaps after I read them I will have a few more ideas on school reform myself.

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How to Think

• Critical thinking? You need knowledge by Diane Ravitch, The Boston Globe
• 10 Surprising Books That Will Transform Your Writing by Demian Farnworth, Copyblogger
• How to Read by Brian Clark, Copyblogger
• Reading Practice Can Strengthen Brain ‘Highways’ by Jon Hamilton, All Things Considered, NPR

While I thought I would find information relevant to improving my blog on Copyblogger.com, I did not think that I would find articles applicable to a classroom.

I am glad that I was wrong.

In “10 Suprising Books That Will Transform Your Writing,” Demian Farnsworth mentions one of my favorite books, Letters to the Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and another I’ve wanted to pick up, The Complete Odes and Epodes of Horace. Some of the other books on the list are the kind of business books that you would expect to find on a site about blogging and turning a profit from your blog.

At the end of the article, Farnsworth writes

The more you have in your brain — both from study and from direct experience — the more fresh, new, killer ideas you’ll come up with.

And that reminded me of an article I read back in September in the Boston Globe, which I linked to in one of my longer posts, Children Left Behind in which I tried to cover too much and everything got diluted. But Ms. Ravitch reminds us “Critical thinking? You need knowledge,” that the ability to draw conclusions requires us to synthesize our direct experience alongside our indirect experience to what currently analyzing.

Have you ever met someone who knows everything about a particular topic, the minutest of details, stuff that only real adherents would know, but who knows nothing else? Those people are a little boring, aren’t they? They also cannot see beyond the scope of their interest.

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Edgar Allan Poe and the Frogpondians

• The Raven in the Frog Pond: Edgar Allan Poe and the City of Boston, an exhibit at the Boston Public Library
• Claiming Poe: An Interview with Paul Lewis by Kathleen Burge, boston.com
• The Death of Edgar Allan Poe by Robin Young, Here&Now, NPR
• Quoth the Poet by June Wulff, The Boston Globe
• Embracing Poe by Jan Gardner, Shelf Life, boston.com

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston. He would not have been happy to admit it.

For a long time we Bostonians have not wanted to admit he was a son of Boston. I think we are still upset that he called us “frogpondians,” after the Frog Pond in the center of the Boston Common.

Dr. Paul Lewis, curator of the exhibit “The Raven in the Frog Pond,” thinks that Poe was referring to the writers and publishers around Boston when Poe spoke of “frogpondians.” Dr. Lewis conjectures that

…when he thought about those writers, he thought that they were cause-driven in their writing. So they were constantly croaking out in defense of their causes.
–Dr. Paul Lewis quoted in “Claiming Poe” in The Boston Globe

Now, 160 years after the author’s death, Boston is trying reclaim Poe as their own. With the talk of Boston Noir that I’ve seen in the pages of the Boston Globe — a new genre name for Boston’s rough and tumble, tragic stories of working class city dwellers that includes work such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle to The Departed — I can understand why we would be giving Poe a second look.

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On Whose Merit?

• In AP effort, students soar – and teachers unions flunk, Editorial, The Boston Globe
• It takes a village to educate a child by William Irvin, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe
• Merit pay unfair and divisive by Anne Wass, President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe
• why merit pay is the wrong way by John Spencer, Musings of a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Obama Administration Pushes Merit Pay by Claudio Sanchez, All Things Considered, NPR
• Compromise can compensate for misguided merit-pay ruling, Editorial, The Boston Globe
• Merit pay forgets some factors by Bill Bell, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe
• Whose needs come first in schools? by Scot Lehigh, The Boston Globe

I have written about my disagreement with merit pay for teachers previously. This will be a contentious issue for some time.

The issue has been in the news a lot around Boston since August. A non-profit in Massachusetts won a grant from ExxonMobil to reward teachers for their students’ performance on Advance Placement exams. The Massachusetts Teachers Association said that the payments violated the terms of the teachers’ contracts and they could not take them.

I am on the side of the Massachusetts Teachers Assocation. I have read Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards and I have worked two sales jobs in which I could earn bonuses. The incentive of earning bonuses did not motivate me to work harder. And I have seen it cause co-workers to consider compromising on their ethics to earn the extra money.

I cannot more elegantly summarize why merit pay is a horrible idea than by recommending you watch this TED Lecture, Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.

Here’s the big secret. All of our social science proves that incentives only work on clearly defined tasks. So, if the task is to get a student to pass a test, incentives would motivate the teachers to teach to the test.

If the task is to raise intellectually curious, independent minded, responsible adults, then incentives will not work.

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Whenever I first think about traveling, I am struck with the horror that I cannot bring my whole library with me. How do I decide which books to bring? When I travel, I am on a strict budget. I could easily spend my entire budget on books. That’s true at home as well as abroad.

So, I try to bring books with me. Enough books to keep me entertained for the entire trip. I always resolve that I am not going to buy a single volume while abroad. This is a resolution that I know I am going to break even as I am making it; however, in making this resolution, I buy fewer books than I otherwise would.

I had begun to explore the poetry of W.B. Yeats before I went to Rome in 2004. Reading Yeats, I felt I found someone of a similar bent of mind, who looked for the mythic elements of life but also saw that the mythic elements are not enough to strip life of its banalities. Perhaps I had not realized that when I was packing for Rome. Whatever my reasons were, I decided not to bring The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats to Rome.

And that may have been a blessing in disguise.

Mystery and Melancholy of a City

When I traveled to Rome, I felt more homesick than I had expected to feel. The summer before when I traveled to Florence, I had the time of my life. I felt alive in Florence in a way that I never had before.

For my senior capstone project in art history, I had decided to study Giorgio de Chirico. He did not stir me as greatly as some other figures did. But at that time I was looking to blend two of my interests: Italy and Surrealism. Although I thought of myself, and still do think of myself, as a Renaissance art historian — such as I am allowed to call myself an art historian after being out of practice for four and a half years — I wanted to stretch my mind and work on a project beyond my primary interest.

I had expected to find myself a home in Rome the way I had in Florence. And although I knew Rainer Maria Rilke and had read his Letters to the Young Poet, I had somehow glossed over what Rilke wrote of Rome:

…Rome (if one has not yet become acquainted with it) makes one feel stifled with sadness for the first few days: through the gloomy and lifeless museum-atmosphere that it exhales, through the abundance of its pasts, which are brought forth and laboriously held up (pasts which a tiny present subsists), through the terrible overvaluing, sustained by scholars and philologists and imitated by the ordinary tourists of Italy, of all these disfigured and decaying Things, which, after all, are essentially nothing more than accidental remains from another time and from a life that is not and should not be ours. Finally, after weeks of daily resistance, one finds oneself somewhat composed again, even though still a bit confused, and one says to oneself: No, there is not more beauty here than in other places, and all these objects, which have been marveled at by generation after generation, mended and restored by the hands of workmen, mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value; — but there is much beauty here, because everywhere there is much beauty.

– Rainer Maria Rilke from The Letters to the Young Poet (Stephen Mitchell, trans.), pages 46 to 47

I have a lot for which to thank Rome. I saw my first operas — Carmen and Don Giovanni — in Rome. My first night of salsa dancing was in Rome, organized of one my language teachers for the school.

And I discovered a poem by W.B. Yeats that I had not known before, and may never have otherwise discovered.

Nostalgia for the Finite

I spent a fair bit of time at a bookstore that had an English section. Although I thought about buying volumes of my favorite works in Italian — in fact, I did buy Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair — I felt stupid whenever I tried to read in Italian.

The project of learning Italian had taken on such immense proportions that I had began to feel as if I were lost at sea. I slipped into melancholy in one of the world’s greatest cities. I slept for twelve hours a night, often arriving late for the lessons for which I had already paid.

With the discontent I was already feeling, I decided to retreat to English-language books. I bought The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III and W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems edited by Timothy Webb.

Despite this, I did make progress in Italian that summer.

The Disquieting Muse

The back material for The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats states that it

…includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon.

I had read that several times. But somehow the words had never really set in. There are poems that Yeats himself abandoned, discarded saying that although his mind had made them and he had toiled to make them seem of a moment, they were not worthy of him.

As I read through Selected Works, I came across a poem that delighted me:

The friends that have it I do wrong
When ever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.

–William Butler Yeats from W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems, page 62.

This poem brought me a lot of comfort. In going to Rome, I was trying to remake myself, to expand my horizons, and learn about other people and other cultures. Some of my friends were jealous that I was traveling abroad, that I had won an award from the Humanities-Classics Department to help with the trip, and I felt that they wanted me to stay in the United States. Yeats helped me realize that some of my jealous friends were afraid that I would leave them behind.

But I also realized that even as he approached death, Yeats was trying to create himself.

I picture him sitting alone in his tower, a pen in his hand, going through each volume of his works striking out those poems that he did not want to be canonical. Did he agonize over the choices? How many poems did he strikeout? Did he revise poems that he’d already published?

“This,” he mutters to himself in between coughs, “is my last chance to remake my song book. This is my last chance to remake myself.”

NOTE
All the headings in this essay are variations on titles of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?
–Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy” from The Duino Elegies (Stephen Mitchell, trans.)

Saturday evening I felt overwhelmed.

My problems are not major. I have a roof over my head, food to eat, friends to pass time with, and a job. Though, in this economy, who can be sure of their job security? If this recession has done one thing, I hope that is has realigned people’s values to those things that truly matter. But my problems still distract me.

The Devil on my shoulder asks, “What have you got to complain about?” I start belittling myself and try to bury my problems. But some part of me remembers this piece of simple wisdom:

In the bottom of your shoe, even a small pebble is bigger than the whole world.

I looked through my address book for someone to call. The Devil kept whispering that I didn’t want to burden my friends with my problems, that they have real problems and that I was being whiny.

As I scrolled through my phone, each name with its own story, I thought about who I could turn to and who I could not; who were truly my friends and who were merely acquaintances.

My best friend Jenna has heard these problems all before. Although she’d have happily listened again, I wanted to turn to other friends. Besides, I had spent the afternoon with her.

I had already called another of my dearest friends, Tanya, earlier.

Other names and other stories. More memories of time spent.

Rather than calling friends, I decided instead to spend most of the night cleaning the clutter in my room. I broke down some of the towers of books I had built up. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats formed the base of one tower. I remembered a poem in the volume that, although sad, I find great comfort in. In remembering the poem, I decided to turn to myself and to my books.

The Sad Shepherd

There was a man whom Sorrow named his friend,
And he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming,
Went walking with slow steps along the gleaming
And humming sands, where windy surges wend:
And he called loudly to the stars to bend
From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they
Among themselves laugh on and sing alway:
And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
Cried out, Dim sea, hear my most piteous story!
The sea swept on and cried her old cry still,
Rolling along in dreams from hill to hill.
He fled the persecution of her glory
And, in a far-off, gentle valley stopping,
Cried all his story to the dewdrops glistening.
But naught they heard, for they are always listening,
The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping.
And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
Sought once again the shore, and found a shell,
And thought, I will my heavy story tell
Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
And my own tale again for me shall sing,
And my own whispering words be comforting,
And lo! my ancient burden may depart.
Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.
–William Butler Yeats

And, in reading “The Sad Shepherd”, I remember that the Devil was once an angel. Now, if only he would help me transform my sorrows into a poem such as Yeats’s.

Each week, whenever I’m reading The Boston Globe, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal — almost exclusively online these days — I try to take note of interesting articles to share here.

And each week, I find there is both too much and too little to share.

I feel like my ability to filter which stories will be interesting and which won’t be is not getting any better as the weeks progress. I hope, though, that you are enjoying the pieces that I do choose to share.

And, further, I hope that if you find anything interesting that I missed you’ll share it with me in the comments below.

These Things Caught My Eye

• The Sparrow Takes Flight
• Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!
• The Danger of a Single Story
• Is This the Bar to Raise in Public Education?
• Snow on Rilke
• The Speed of Thought: Forming Words
• Et Tu, Brute?

The Sparrow Takes Flight

October 22nd, 2009 through November 8th, 2009

• The Sparrow at Stoneham Theatre, Stoneham, MA.

A girl returns home after ten years. As she reintegrates into the school, her telekinetic powers appear. Why did she leave? And what does it mean to the community that she has returned?

I saw the opening performance of this play. The staging was excellent. In one scene, when a woman is hanging from the rafters, to show the difference, the actors who were on the ground laid down on the stage.

Pictures played a large role. When the town is gossiping, the actors would gather holding pictures of houses and talk and dance while holding the photographs.

Dance also played a big role in the performance. Emily, the girl with the telekinetic powers, takes flight one night and the actress does a lovely ballet-like dance to express Emily’s joy at being in the air.

If you’re in Massachusetts, do yourself a favor and go see The Sparrow.

Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!

• The 50th Anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum, The Guggenheim Museum Website
• Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!: A Life Magazine Online Gallery
• Brilliance – and wrenching struggles: Guggenheim show captures Kandinsky’s tragic arc by Sebastian Smee, The Boston Globe
• Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky (M.T.H. Sadler, trans.)

Apparently the 50th Anniversary celebrations started in May of this year. I just saw it on Digg on Wednesday night.

As a Bostonian, I have very specific dislike of New York. Well more specifically, a very specific dislike of a very specific baseball team. I have never been to the Guggenheim. This is perhaps something I should soon remedy.

Especially with a retrospective of Wassily Kandinsky’s work. Kandinsky wrote an amazing book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art that I read in college. I’ve been meaning to reread it and with this exhibition, I’m not sure I will find a better time.

The retrospective is setup along the spiraling ramp that most people are familiar with when they think of the Guggenheim. The paintings were hung in chronological order through the various periods of Kandinsky’s life.

The review by Sebastian Smee makes an interesting point that I would like to see. At one point, Kandinsky’s spiritual style seems to die. Around the time he joined the Bauhaus, the spiritual paintings that sought to paint symphonies and feelings, turn into angular graphic design projects. And you see that change as you walk up the ramp.

What happened to him to provoke that change?

The Danger of a Single Story

• The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Adichie, TED Lectures.

I had never heard of Chimamanda Adichie until Wednesday night. I was on TED exploring and her talk was featured on the front page. And I’m glad that it was. I was so moved by it that I embedded it right into this post.

This past summer I met Sandi, a poet, at a writers’ conference. When I first asked her where she was from, she was a little dodgy in answering the question. She explained that if she tells people she was born in Africa they bring all this baggage and all these expectations. By being dodgy about where she was from, she freed me from having those expectations.

Though, I do try to enter situations with as little in the way as possible of preconceived notions. Each of us develops heuristics, mental bridges that allow us to travel quickly without having to go deep into the valley of the unknown, that allow us to assess a situation quickly. We are able to say to ourselves, “OK. I know this, I am familiar with this. Let’s go.”

But in some situations ignorance is power. When using heuristics, we can fall victim to the fallacy of familiarity. One thing that I have found incredibly liberating in my own life is having the strength to say to someone, “You know what, I don’t know the answer. But I am sure I can find it out.” I would rather admit my ignorance than demonstrate it.

Is This the Bar to Raise in Public Education?

• Mass. Panel Calls For Increasing Mandatory School Age by Monica Brady-Myerov, WBUR.
• Law urged to make teens stay in school by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe
• Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among Dropouts by Sam Dillon, The New York Times
• Project Dropout

Tuesday night and Wednesday morning I was thinking about my blog and expanding it to be more useful. I am thinking of adding of Resources Page that will include links to interesting sites and I thought immediately of Project Dropout a joint production of WGBH, Boston’s PBS station, and WBUR, Boston’s NPR station.

Project Dropout was an interesting investigation of the dropout problem in Massachusetts. They spoke not only with administrators and policy wonks, but found actual dropouts and discussed the choices they had made.

Anyone considering dropping out should listen to and read through Project Dropout. Give weight to the reports.

On my drive into work on Wednesday, I heard a segment on WBUR by Monica Brady-Myerov, one of the principal reporters from Project Dropout. She was reporting on a new proposed law that would raise the dropout age in Massachusetts from 16 to 18.

I am not sure how effective this law will be unless a structure is built around it. And I am glad that I am not the only one who is thinking along these lines.

My gut instinct tells me keeping students in school until age 18 is the right way to go if we can address underlying reasons that cause them to drop out and create programs that address their need. – State Representative Martha M. Walz (D-Boston), quoted in “Law urged to make teens stay in school” by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe

I would like to thank Representative Walz. Without addressing the underlying reasons that causing students to dropout, the problem will persist even if the dropout age is raised. If kids do continue to be physically present in the classroom, they could already have dropped out mentally and intellectually, the education equivalent to the living suicides Herman Hesse talks about in Steppenwolf.

The full proposal, which I would like to read if I can a link to it somewhere, recommends that caseworkers be brought into the school to discuss options with children considering dropping out and re-engagement centers to address the concerns of people who have already dropped out.

What I don’t hear is people clamoring for more teachers and smaller class sizes. If a teacher has to address 40 students per class and has five classes per day, that is 200 students each day that filter through the door. If we are going to have to hire people at all for this proposal, no offense to the caseworkers, but I would rather see that money go to hire more teachers.

Snow on Rilke

• Reintroducing Rilke by Moira G. Weigel, The Wall Street Journal
• The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition by Rainer Maria Rilke (Edward Snow, trans. and ed.)

Although the review was published on my birthday, I did not see this review until this past week.

If I have not said this before, I am amazed at the arts and lifestyle coverage I have discovered in The Wall Street Journal. If I have written it before, my incredulity has only grown.

I am a passionate devotee of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

While I can tell you, for example, that I discovered Elena Ferrante by walking past a row of her books in Barnes&Noble one day and found the cover of The Days of Abandonment intriguing or that I discovered Andre Gide because I was assigned to read The Immoralist in my Modern and Postmodern Philosophy course, I cannot tell you how I came to first discover Rainer Maria Rilke.

If I dig back in my memory, I have faint memories of reading that August Rodin had a poet for a secretary, that August Rodin’s emphasis on Things came to poetry through Rilke. Perhaps I have more to thank my art history professor for than I first realized. Though it is equally possible that I remember those references because I was already reading Rilke when I read those biographical details.

Most of the Rilke I have read has been translated by Stephen Mitchell, but I have read translations from Edward Snow. I have never sat down and compared the two translators.

This book is going to be another survey of his work, poems chosen from his different works but not a translation of his complete works. Which disappoints me: I want to read every poem that Rilke published. “Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing what it hopes will become the definitive English-language edition of Rilke’s poetry,” writes Weigel in her review. Her statement here is too broad in light of the limited scope of the collection. How can any survey hope to be the definitive edition?

Certainly I could accept that Snow is aiming for the definitive introduction.

The day after reading this review, I wandered, accidentally, through the poetry section of my local Barnes&Noble. And sitting on the shelf there were four books that called out to me. One I have forgotten already; one was Snow’s new Rilke; one was a collection of lectures that Robert Frost gave; and the last was The Shadow of Sirius a new collection from another favorite poet W.S. Merwin.

More things for me to spend my hard earned money on, gentle readers. There never seems to be an end to new books I wish to read. I cannot even speak to the physicality of the book because I know if I had picked it up I would have been unable to have put it down.

The Speed of Thought: Forming Words

• In Milliseconds, Brain Zips From Thought To Speech by Jon Hamilton, NPR
• Smart People Really Do Think Faster by Jon Hamilton, NPR

Of the two links, I heard the first segment, “In Milliseconds, Brain Zips from Thought to Speech” on the radio on the 18th. But the second link, which I almost find more interesting, I found as a related link at the bottom of the first article on NPR.org.

One area of neuroscience I find particularly interesting is the study of neuroplasticity. The brain continues throughout our lives to change and evolve, to grow new neurons and rewire itself. That is what enables us to continue learning throughout our lifetimes.

This is an exciting time for neuroscience. We are still figuring out what areas of the brain due what. Even as recently as ten or fifteen years ago the idea of neuroplasticity was dismissed, saying that we were born with a finite set of neurons and that was all we ever had.

Beyond just building connections and deepening connections, we can also increase our raw ability to think. We can speed up our brains processing power and we can do it throughout our lives. One researcher, Dr. Richard Haier “says thinking is like running or weightlifting. It helps to have certain genes. But anyone can get stronger or faster by working out.”

Maybe there is something to playing Brain Age after all.

Et Tu, Brute?

• 10 Latin Phrases You Pretend To Understand by Kevin Fleming, Mental_Floss

Caveat lector! Another fun article I found through Digg. Ten common Latin phrases. How many do you know, or think you know, before reading the little blurb under each?

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
– Aristotle

A few days ago, one of my friends set her Facebook status to, “But bear in mind that a person’s worth is measured by the worth of what he values.”

This simple act amused me. And moved me to think. I had had cause — not just cause but causes — to think about my values before she had put up that status. I realized that my life has been out of alignment. Specifically, I have not been giving enough attention to one trait I deeply value: playfulness.

Moving to Travel and Moving to Dance

Although reading is one of the ways in which I play, this past week I have not focused on it. In starting this blog, I have added work to my already busy weeks. The blog started as a work of joy, which I think is apparent in the conversational tone of my first few essays, then became work, which I think was apparent in my last post in which I tried to cram too much into 1,300 words.

I put unrealistic deadlines on myself to read, to take notes, and to produce thoughtful essays. All while trying to be more social. Even when I tried to spend time with friends, my mind was on my blog. And although I was attending many dances, I forgot the spirit of play and the spirit of dance are the same:

“There is a difference between motion with the objective of changing plane and motion with the objective of dancing. All those forms of energy that are moving to dance, or traveling to wander, are joyous manifestations of energy. On the other hand, all those forms of energy that have us moving to get somewhere tend to become frantic, and have a quality of urgency that moves us faster and faster until we simply can’t go fast enough to accomplish the object.
–Alan Watts from Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation, pages 53-54.

Rather than dancing for any of the other muddled reasons I may have had, I have spent the past week dancing to dance.

Better Living Through Play

Ask my best friend: I am inclined to taking things to grave, high seriousness. Ask any of my friends. Ask anyone who knows me even in passing, in fact.

Rarely, I take nothing seriously. That can take several forms from a gentle irreverence to a harsh sarcasm. These periods when I take nothing seriously usually follow a bout of taking things too gravely. Bouts of forgetting that although everything is serious nothing need be grave.

I have been thinking about play and spirit for weeks. I was reminded of the importance of play many weeks ago when I listened to “Play, Spirit, and Character” on Speaking of Faith on WBUR. The program moved me.

Since first listening to the program — and then downloading the podcast and listening to it again, as well as forcing my best friend to listen to it — I have tried to strike a balance between seriousness and irreverence. The harsh sarcasm, I imagine, I can do without. A playful sarcasm? That is my sincere goal.

The Lesson of Red and Orange Leaves

Autumn is my favorite season. I was born in October and may have a congenital affinity. Or maybe it’s my love of apples. Each Autumn I learn the lesson of the red and orange leaves over again. Each Autumn I relearn that any traveling can be a dance.

I had certain, specific destinations in mind. I would get into my car and I would drive. Surrounding me would be all of this green. But the green is green. Although I know in my heart the green of a pine tree is different than that of an oak or a maple — and that any two oaks or two maples will be different — green is green and the space I am traveling through an impediment to being where I want to be.

Then Autumn arrives.

This branch here is a crimson red. That branch a series of different oranges that ends in a flash of yellow. This branch is vermilion. That branch is auburn. And that one beyond it is golden.

When the trees lining the highways and the streets of Massachusetts change color, I cannot ignore the world around me anymore. There is more there there. All of a sudden, the drive to work becomes an opportunity to feast my eyes on glorious colors. All of a sudden, the drive to work takes on elements of a dance. A dance in a very crowded dance hall. A very slow dance in a very crowded dance hall with police and traffic accidents.

Taking Time, Taking Joy

The essays I wrote in which I discussed specific works of literature — “The Prestige in Poetry”, “The Songs of Solitude of Rainer Maria Rilke”, and “Of Steppenwolves and Hedgehogs” — were joys to write. I enjoy engaging with a text directly. And I have found that rather than dealing with a whole text, this space allows me to take on one part of a novel, one full poem, or a part of several poems.

I am going to continue writing weekly. I will still comment on education policy and write about literature. My focus will be writing on literature. But rather than trying to be gravely serious and authoritative, I’ll remember that I still have much to learn and still have much to experience.

In fact, I am thinking of trying to write twice weekly by adding a weekly round up of interesting links on education and literature on Fridays.

I need to set more realistic expectations for myself. And, though I wanted to take a break from educational policy this week, my friend did send me a link to a Boston Globe op-ed piece, “With kids, all work won’t work” by Peter Funt. I will say that all work doesn’t work for adults either. As I have so recently found out.

And because of that, I will make time for and take joy in friends, dancing, cooking, drinking wine, listening to opera, drinking hot apple cider, and picking apples. And watching the leaves change.