My blog has been quiet for almost a month! What happened?

Work, of course. And it’s been fascinating because my teaching job has taken me out of Busan and up the Korean coast to one of the busiest industrial centres, Ulsan. Ulsan is known as “the most energetic city in Korea” in a country where every street and building buzzes like a beehive. I’m organizing an English language course for a group of automotive engineers. Their company has decided that they must be bilingual. I had just posted an article saying that the only way Korea can withstand absorption by China is to become bilingually English and Korean, when the teaching gig came into the company I work for. No connection between my post and the assignment except the actual need.

It’s an admirable goal but it is an extra task for busy engineers working long hours to perfect the casting of magnesium engine blocks to spend more hours appreciating the ways English speakers use ‘going to…’ to talk about both physical travel and future plans. For me, it’s a wonderful opportunity to get to meet some of the brilliant engineers behind Korea’s surging industrial growth. I’ve already been taken on an enthusiastic tour of one of the engine block factories and watched molten aluminum pouring into cylinder-head moulds. I’m not sure my English lessons can live up to that for excitement…

Hopefully I’ll manage to keep things exciting at work and post on the blog! To calm myself, I like to look at this image of an x-ray of a calla lily - sorry, I have no idea where it came from other than Google Images.

I love the idea of someone x-raying flowers. How delightfully un-busy that must be. And the resulting image is serene and slightly spooky in its silence. Sigh…

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Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died a few days ago. When he retired a month earlier, he said,

“Invincibility is irreversibly established in the world. My work is done.”

That’s a beautiful exit.

I think he helped the Beatles cope with their sudden and massive fame; I’m not sure it made their lives any easier but their wonderful music improved. For that alone, we owe him a good wish as he sails out across the universe…

Rufus Wainwright’s wonderful version of the song is here.

Jai Guru Dev.

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…from my novel, The Invention of Pleasure:

She is walking in the house at night. In a room, she finds someone in bed. The person in bed is lying there calmly, maybe even asleep. She can’t tell if it is a man or a woman. It could be herself. Or a mother or a father or a husband.
She can’t stop herself: every time she goes for that walk, she can not stay away from the room and she can not prevent herself from going up to the bed. She walks up to the bed in the dark bedroom. She is standing by the bed and she looks down at the familiar body covered only by a white sheet. She can see now that it is definitely a woman’s body. She turns to see who it is, to see the face – her body is shivering with the warning not to look!

She can’t stop herself from looking, looking down at the face.

She woke up with a brutal, snapping jolt. Her body was clenched with the tension of the nightmare and sweat was trickling down her side, making her itchy with fear. She got up and walked to the kitchen and took a drink of water, as she did every time. Holding the cold glass, she walked into the studio and looked in the mirror at her haggard face: a gray thing.

‘Another monster,’ she thought bitterly. To dismiss the vision, she said softly and aloud:

“Darkness was on the face of the deep,
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

God’s giant face moved over the waters; he was pleased with his work, pleased with the world: his world. And the waters reflected up into the heavens his face: giant, mysterious, truly wonderful. Far below, the ‘deep’ was no longer the domain of darkness and the demons were driven away.

Into dreams.

She looked at her painting tools. It was 3 in the morning. She took Kate down and found a fresh canvas and bolted it to the easel. She didn’t bother with her painting clothes; she simply took off her nightdress and pulled the paint table around. The ancient goose-necked lamp was made of iron and it threw a strong even light onto the canvas and the spread of tubes and pots. The day before she had scraped clean the board so it was smooth and hard and ready. She opened the can of oil and filled the cup; a smell like leather filled her nose. Her hand went to the paintbrush pot and she chose a square, medium sized brush that she knew as well as her own fingers. The canvas, so flat and white, was an odd partner to the brush. Every time, facing the canvas, there was this moment of tension; she thought tightrope walkers must feel the same way. Or sailors looking at the sea from the harbor. She crossed her arms and felt her muscles for the strength she would need. The brush was between the first and second fingers of her right hand, its fat stem rooted back into her ribs. Her body felt warm and pure. Human.

She started to paint.

The undertones were burnt sienna, shadowy, earthy but sublime. She touched up the color with alizarin crimson because she knew the flesh of the face would need to echo the energy of the sun. Lou drew the lines of the face in deep red brown; into the hollows, she put the deepest green of the poets.

‘Remember the face that kissed you,’ Lou told herself.

Her brush came slightly off the canvas and she stood rigid; she wanted to feel the desire pulling at her like some unruly animal on a leash. She reached for the slippery pot of oil and juiced the brush. Her eyes were like a hawk’s when she was painting. She could see the brush clearly, see the oil picking up the color of the paint from the board; see the fierce, perfect tone of the cadmium mixing with the yellow ochre, flawed and worldly. What color, the result? She didn’t know the name but her eyes knew! Her fingers were rooted through her hand and arm, rooted through her shoulders; her fingers belonged to her eyes and mind.

“Look,” she said, to the dark outline. It was a command and the unpainted eyes of the Postman tried to look. She would have to make him look! She could feel her heart pressing out and moving out to the edges of her flesh; feel her heart beating in her hands. Lou began to furiously paint and the Postman’s face began to appear on the canvas. The hours passed and dawn came; only when his face was there on the canvas, did Lou collapse onto the frayed sofa. The Postman’s face was the last thing she saw as her vision faded. Her heart, soothed and with an even beat, moved back from the edges of her skin, back into her chest, pulsing with a slow rhythm soft enough to let Lou drift away on her own breath.

The demons fled; banished back to the deepest water.

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Television is, obviously, a drug - to be precise: a soporific. It creates a dull and continuous drone that makes its users think they are knowledgeable while they drift off into somnambulent trivia. Fortunately, TV has become so sleepy, so dull that it is ineffective and increasingly unnecessary.

Fine. But what about the web and, to be more precise again, news aggregators such as Google Reader. You may be using one of the other news aggregators but they all do the same thing: suck up your choice of the entire Internet and deliver it in one big hit list every morning. I used to scoff at the idea of the ‘personalized newspaper’; it seemed to be an odd and false concept for a public news delivery system. I agreed with McLuhan, who said that the newspaper was more a Mondrian-styled maze in which to get lost, not found. What you found in the paper newspaper was someone else’s interests, which was not all bad; it may even have been good and democratic.

But along came the web with its myriad places and along came the need (perceived, of course) to track all the sites of interest. Better to have the web delivered to my digital doorstep that to go searching. My aggregator, Google Reader, is Google-in-Reverse: my searches find me.

Like many users, I quickly ramped up my Reader habit: a few subscripted sites became a hundred, then, several hundred. Within a month, I was getting 2,000 links a day. I set aside time to look at, evaluate, sort and file the many possibly readable articles into the few that I would place in my ‘Today’ folder for actual reading. The folder bulged and my ‘Reader time’ expanded to two hours a day!

About the same time, articles began to appear from a host of dedicated bloggers (Scoble et al) expressing concern that we were caught in some kind of news aggregator time sink. It was simply taking too much time to stay on top of the news wave. To be informed was to be deformed - bent out of shape temporally!

Scoble and others suggested strategies, the most reasonable being to ruthlessly restrict your subscription list to a set number of sites that produce a realisitcally readable number of links each day. It seemed reasonable that the entire daily output of the web was worth an hour’s perusal in the morning. The solution was to cut back the Reader dosage.

At this point, for me, fate stepped in. I moved to Korea in order to teach English and, as a result, I was cut off from my dealer-Reader and I went cold turkey. At first, I felt lost, like I’d forgotten something important. Soon, however, the need to read the long list of links faded. In two months, I was established in Korea and I had time to cautiously open up Reader. I faced an hilariously huge number of links that had been faithfully delivered in my absence. I scanned them - if giving the screen a speedy glance before hitting the ‘Mark all as read’ button, can be called ’scanning’.

The interesting thing to me is discovering that I was actually interested in far less than I had signed up for. Now I am addicted again but it is to as pleasant dosage of about 20 sites. The most useful sites are those that pre-digest subjects of interest to me. For instance, Stephen Downes site gathers up pretty well everything of interest to someone wanting to blend teaching and technology. It seems to me that these ‘gathering sites’ are now even more critical in the face of info-overload.

What would be really useful would be fast forums of comment on the links gathered by experts. That way I could have access, have wide coverage but also get quick and deep insight into the selection. How can we build that into Google Reader?

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In Don De Lillo’s Libra, three CIA officers, discredited by the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, construct a plan to fake the assassination of President John Kennedy and energize America’s anger toward Cuba. Win Everett comes up with the idea; Larry Parmenter finds the political support and the money; T-Jay Mackey finds the men to do the work. In their dark world of angry dreams, the plan turns poisonously real, ensnares Lee Harvey Oswald as the ‘patsy’ and kills JFK.

The picture above, taken from the famous Zapruder film, shows the actual moment of Kennedy’s death in Dallas.

Here are three excerpts from Libra, in which the plotters set up the plan.

Win Everett:

A pickup came down the road and they rolled up their windows to keep the dust out. The driver gave a half-wave without taking his hand off the wheel. They waited for the dust to settle, then rolled down the windows. Win paused a moment before beginning to speak again.

“Some things we wait for all our lives without knowing it. Then it happens and we recognize at once who we are and how we are meant to proceed. This is the idea I’ve always wanted. I believe you’ll sense it is right. It’s the high risk we need. We need an electrifying event. You’ve been waiting for this every bit as much as I have. I believe that or I wouldn’t have asked you to come here. We want to set up an attempt on the life of the President. We plan every step, design every incident leading up to the event. We put together a team, leave a dim trail, The evidence is ambiguous. But it points to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate. … This plan speaks to something deep inside me. It has a powerful logic. I’ve felt it unfolding for weeks, like a dream whose meaning slowly becomes apparent. This is the condition we’ve always wanted to reach. It’s the life-insight, the life-secret, and we have to extend it, guard it carefully, right up to the time we have shooters stationed on a rooftop or railroad bridge.”

There was a silence. Then Parmenter said dryly, “We couldn’t hit Castro. So let’s hit Kennedy. I wonder if that’s the hidden motive here.”

“But we don’t hit Kennedy. We miss him,” Win said.

Larry Parmenter:

They returned to their food, their lunch. The voices and noise around them became apparent once more, a tide of excited news, a civilized clamor. George said something perfectly right about the wine, swirling it in the high-stemmed tulip glass. An attractive woman hurried toward a table, showing the happy exasperation that describes a journey through traffic snarls and personal dramas to some island of prosperous calm. There were times when Larry thought lunch in a superior restaurant was the highlight of Western man.

…

Larry couldn’t help laughing. It was all so curiously funny. It was rich, that’s what it was. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain rumor, suspicion and secret wish. George was laughing too. A wonderful woodwind rumble. They looked at each other and, laughed. They laughed in appreciation of the richness of life, the fabulous and appalling nature of human affairs, the good food and drink, the superior service, the wrecked careers, the whole teeming abscess of folly and regret. Larry felt flush and well fed, a little tipsy, all the right things. The Honduran ambassador said hello. A man from Pemex stopped to tell a richly filthy joke. It was a lovely lunch. It was great, rich, lovely and perfectly right.

Parmenter took the Agency shuttle bus back to Langley. Then he wrote a memo to the Office of Security requesting an expedite check on George de Mohrenschildt.

T-Jay Mackey:

Mackey gave them some background on the operation. Extremely dedicated men were behind it. The idea was to galvanize the nation into full awareness of the danger of a communist Cuba. Direccion General de Inteligencia would be exposed as a criminal organization willing to take extreme action against important figures who opposed Castro.

He told them a shooting was in the works, designed to implicate the DGI. He wanted Frank and Raymo to be part of it and he supplied some operational details. High-powered rifles, elevated perches, a trail of planted evidence, someone to take the fall. There would be five hundred dollars a month for each of them, commencing now, and a nice payday when the job was done. The men behind the plan, he said, were respected Agency veterans, deep believers in a free Havana.

He did not mention Everett and Parmenter by name. He did not tell them who their target was or where the shooting would take place. He would let details drop, here, and there, in time, as need dictated. The other thing he did not say was that they were supposed to miss.

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One Laptop Per Child is one of those wonderful ventures that seems to change the ground rules. Everyone wants cheaper computers, of course, but the promised price drop for the OLPC system was spectacular - an order of magnitude - and the reason for the reduced sticker was much better than bargain-hunting. OLPC promised a new type of technology that could survive the rigors of a developing country so that kids everywhere could get online and learn. World-changing. Wow.

By delivery date, the price had crept up a bit but that’s to be expected. The good news was that the OLPC vision encouraged other companies to step up and deliver cheaper, tougher little systems: Intel, Asus and others all said they wanted a piece of the Little Computer That Could market. Head Visionary of OLPC Negroponte yelped that the competitors were carpetbaggers crashing his party, his idea. Well, yeah! That’s what competitors do and they don’t even bother to say ‘thank you’.

Negroponte ran the Media Lab at MIT and OLPC has the same bravura quality that many Media Labs projects had - except OLPC is real! Media Lab was (and probably still is) all show, in my opinion. No one can begrudge brilliant grad students the right to try wonderful and wacky things; that’s what they’re supposed to do. But Newgroponte enlisted heavy hypers such as Stewart Brand to promote anything and everything at the Lab and soon it became the place that was about to deliver the future. Kinda like Artifical Intelligence was for a generation before (also a largely MIT event.) Like AI, Media Lab delivered very little.

What is more interesting about Negroponte, however, is the fact that he moved on to the OLPC project - from hype to (potentially) hero. But the surrounding hype for the first deliveries of the OLPC systems suggests the hero still needs his hoopla. An article on ABC’s website comes with the picture above: a grateful little Peruvian looking up at us as though we are on a mission from God and there to grant her the right to live in our plugged-in world. The article copy gushes about how lucky these kids are.

We can only hope Negroponte and the OLPC venture is real and delivers workable systems to the kids that want and need them. Unfortunately we can’t tell - the media are giving us the ‘God-blesses-America-and-America-blesses-you’ version.

It would be wonderful to see some real journalism about OLPC:

What does it cost? How do kids in Peru get one? Does it work? In what language? And what happens when it breaks?

Perhaps most interestingly of all:

What are the kids doing with the systems?

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…from my novel, The Invention of Pleasure:

He sat down and she cut a piece of cake and put it on the best plate she could find. She gave him a silver fork and a soft linen napkin. She wished she had coffee but she poured him a cool glass of water in her last remaining unchipped glass.

“Sometimes water is best,” she said putting it all in front of him. He ignored the fork and devoured the piece of cake. He made an ‘umm’ sound that she liked. She didn’t know how to feel: young, old, smart, stupid, glad, sad. She would be happy to feed him the entire cake, piece by piece, until it was gone and something was magically resolved. After a second piece of cake and draining the tall glass of water, he sat back and touched the package, which had been resting on his lap since he sat down. With both hands, he raised it up.

“Can you hold this for me? Just for tonight?”

“Yes,” she said. He was looking into her eyes and waiting for more questions; but Lou knew she would hold the package for him, so why bother asking questions? He understood and nodded. He handed it to her and said, “It’s heavy.”

She took it and was proud of her strong tanned forearms. Her bedroom seemed the safest place. On the bedside table there was a lamp and a copy of Shakespeare. It was a beautiful version of all the plays and poems printed on thin onionskin paper, bound in blue leather and held in a strong slipcase. It was old and worn like a relic from a rich library and it looked too luxurious for Lou’s house; she slipped the book out of the case and was pleased when the package slipped in perfectly.

“Can’t beat Shakespeare,” Lou said, “for pretty well anything! Even a hiding place.”

The Postman was standing in the kitchen, near the sink; he was looking into her bedroom. He moved towards her but she walked out of the bedroom and he followed her into the living room, her studio.

“I’m not hiding it,” he said. “I’m just asking you to hold it for me.”

She reached back and took the tie out of her hair, letting it loose, turning around quickly. His eyes followed her hair sweeping by like a big wing.

“The truth?” she said. His eyes came back to hers: “Careful! I was taught by nuns.”

“You’re not Catholic, though,” he said quickly and confidently.

“No,” she said. “For some reason my stupid father thought I would get a better education in a Catholic school! I hated the nuns! English nuns were the meanest people on the planet!”

“No, no! French nuns are the worst! Québécois nuns: they’re small but very nasty! I know lots of dirty songs about nuns if you want to sing some day. French songs.”

She laughed and said, “I hear you’re a separatist.”

He shrugged, as she knew he would.

“That’s the same shrug Trudeau has.” He said something in French about Trudeau; she asked him what he said.

“I said, ‘Trudeau is a nun.’”

“I hope you’re not an FLQ,” Lou said. She knew he would say nothing and that’s what he did. “Maybe you’re like Robin Hood,” Lou said. “Do they have him in Québec?”

“On TV,” he replied and he sang a line from the show’s theme song.

“That makes Trudeau the Sheriff of Nottingham, I guess,” Lou said and the Postman laughed; any worry gone from his face.

“Every pauper is a prince,” he said, touching his chest. He was smiling and still playing along with her joke: “We must fight to save our kingdom from the…” – struggling to find the right word in English.

“Usurper,” Lou said. The Postman looked at her and shook his head to show that he didn’t know the word. She said: “The one who takes your land.” They silently watched each other for a long moment. Lou was remembering an angry young man and the way he had used that nasty word. “Usurper,” she said again, “the one who takes your home.”

They were in the studio near the kitchen and Lou pointed at the cake. “Why don’t you take the rest of the cake? Even if you are an FLQ!” He just looked at her for a while. Usually she could hear the clock and count the seconds but, now, the world was silent.

“I have to say something,” he said.

She was wide-eyed and waiting when he said, “I have to say that you are very beautiful.”

Did she know it was coming? No. Did she want it? Yes, of course, she wanted it. But she was stunned anyway. She looked down through her body; she wasn’t looking with her eyes but with some other vision and she could see her organs and her arms and hands and feet and her legs. He was saying something else; she didn’t hear because she was wandering around inside her head and body. Her body had turned away from him and now she heard his words coming from behind her.

“What?” she asked abruptly.

“I said: I have to go. Thank you for your help.”

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…from Lensculture.com:

Myoung Ho Lee, a young artist from South Korea, has produced an elaborate series of photographs that pose some unusual questions about representation, reality, art, environment and seeing.

Simple in concept, complex in execution, he makes us look at a tree in its natural surroundings, but separates the tree artificially from nature by presenting it on an immense white ground, as one would see a painting or photograph on a billboard.

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Teaching is a performance art. The whole show in the classroom stops if the teacher stops. So we have our lesson plans planned out like scripts; they skillfully modulate the time , enabling teachers to present the lesson, elicit participation and then, turn things over to the students for ‘pair work’ or ‘group work’. Like all performances, some are better than others.

In the two months I’ve been teaching for 6 hours each day in a classroom, I’ve had my good days and less good days when I plod page-by-page through the coursebook. On the good days, I have the course material in my mind and I know what the book says but, more importantly, I’m aware of some larger concept behind the immediate lesson and I manage to bring that out. The good students recognize the energy and excitement immediately and get on board and we all go for a wonderful two-hour ride that I think can be called ‘understanding’. What a feeling!

But…

I’m suspicious that the performance – even on a good day, perhaps especially on a good day – is mostly for my benefit. When things go well in the classroom, I feel great. But is the classroom there so I can feel satisfied with my performance or is it there so the students can learn? The more I understand the actual nature of the classroom and the more I talk to other teachers caught up in the business and pleasure of teaching, the more I believe the classroom is an arena designed to prepare teachers to improve their performance, without actually improving the learning.

The learning is an unknown territory. It is happening in some way in the student’s mind. The performance of the teacher is, of course, designed to demonstrate some ideas, to illustrate some examples, to motivate the student to think about the ideas and examples and to relate those ideas and examples to materials from their own lives. We no longer believe in lengthy sessions of memorizing rules of, say, grammar. We have instead, a little bite-size morsel of the ‘rule’ and lots of gap-fills and role-play and other learning activities. It’s all monitored by the teacher whose passage among the groups and pairs is marked by sudden silences and nervous looks. What sticks in the mind of the students is largely unknown.

At my school – a respected English-language school in Busan – students are ‘level tested’ in a five minute interview; it seems too short a time to be accurate but if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, you’ll know that we make our decision about someone’s capability in the first 10 seconds and then spend the rest of the interview time justifying our choice. Unfortunately, the accuracy of our decision is not directly proportional to the speed with which it is made. So we test more as a useful organizational tool for student distribution to the various classrooms; the student may be in the right room or not.

How do we find the learning in all the teaching?

All I have learned by being in the laboratory of the classroom for the passed two months is to let the students decide what they want to do. In the Level 3 and 4 classes I teach, I ask the students if they want to begin each class with short talks given by students on any subject or with warm-ups from the book. There’s usually a long pause… then the overwhelming choice to give short talks. The results are interesting: engaged, unscripted speeches and discussions of subjects such as ‘women’s rights in Korea’ or ‘the increase in unnecessary cosmetic surgery’. Half the class is busy talking and arguing in English. Perfect.

And a few anonymous complaints at the front desk: too much ‘talk’ and not enough ’teacher’. Some students love the role of audience member, watching how well the teacher is developing his or her performance. It’s fine to have students as critics but we would prefer them to be creators, wouldn’t we?

Still, in language teaching there’s the tug between fluency and accuracy. The short talks given by students and the questions they engender, are great for fluency. And I know teachers who toss the coursebooks aside and simply chat like this for an hour or two. That maybe good but it is still teacher-dominated in disguise. We need a way that lets the lesson be driven by student interest and, at the same time, somehow brings forward the shape and pace of organized learning.

A teacher can be a performer or a baby-sitter but neither is right. There’s another role for teachers but I’m not sure what it’s called - something closer to spotter: we’re lucky to catch the learning going on and acknowledge it, maybe amplify it, so that it can happen again and more easily.

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Writing is re-writing (as Brian Moore said) and reading is re-reading. Nothing proves this more than Shakespeare’s sonnets. Here is Sonnet 94:

They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they must do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow-
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flow’r is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flow’r with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Now try reading it aloud several times. It makes more and more sense.

You will have your own understanding; for me it is about the power of lovers and the power of kings; the danger of both. It begins with the blunt truth: power can hurt people. But it also says that power can be restrained, maybe cold, but just! Then, it shifts and whispers darkly about betrayal, or at least disappointment.

Poetry at full power. We must read it.

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