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Moonstruck                                                                          

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Moonstruck                                                                          

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Lift-off mid euphoric crowds

And heading for the moon,

third-time lucky

Chandrayaan,

is sure to be a boon.

Watched and feted all around,

The craft is fully lunar-bound;

The crowds do roar,

The rockets soar,

Above the troposphere, beyond,

Further, further, further still

Until all sound and noise are drowned.

In silence – nothing now is heard –

Alone,

in Time and Space,

Alone:

No other soul, nor thing, nor bird.

The Lander drops to come to rest

now down on lunar ground;

The darker side of Moon, pitch-dark,

The Rover has to light a light

To move across perpetual night

To push its lunar quest.

Fragments of the soil it pricks,

Sends pictures to the earth,

to deepen mysteries that we know

or know not of the sun and stars—

beginnings of our birth.

‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’  – TS Eliot, The Wasteland

- contributed by Harisimran Singh, INDIA

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Blast from the Past: This entry first appeared on July 10, 2021, and it was re-issued on July 15, 2023. Questions about this issue come up from time to time, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to re-release this blog entry. I know of no new research on this matter, though there are some dissertation studies that suggest kids aren't getting enough reading opportunity in class. Their solution seems to be that stamina is best built by having kids read self-selected books independently with a minimum of teacher guidance. They report that kids like this more than having traditional instruction. My problems with that include (1) research has not been particularly positive about those approaches and their impacts on reading achievement (enabling kids to read for longer but at lower levels of proficiency seems like a bad compromise); and (2) stamina is not always generalizable (some adults can immerse themselves in schlock novels for hours, but then struggle to concentrate and stay on task when told to read a 10-page science report for work). The point here is to do more than just encourage reading, but to encourage the types and amounts of reading that will allow students to gain power over their lives.

I'm curious. What does the research say about the lengths of text segments in a guided reading lesson? How many pages should kids read prior to our discussions third grade.
Shanahan response:
Great question. Unfortunately, in this era of the "science of reading" there is no research-based answer. No one, as far as I can tell, has bothered to study the question though it has been an issue for at least a century.

What do we know?

Studies of how kids do on reading tests show that there are real differences in the reading stamina they exhibit. Some readers start out fine, but as a test goes on, they wear down. They simply can't sustain the attention and energy required to read well for the full length of the test. Kids from different countries differ in their psychological endurance during reading (Borgonovi & Biecek, 2016). Another study found that text complexity and length interacted to impact reading comprehension - longer texts were harder than shorter texts and length multiplied the impact of complexity factors (Mesmer & Hiebert, 2012).

Why would that be?

Apparently, longer stretches of text can be more complex linguistically. For example, the longer a written argument the more elaborate can be its premises and the interconnections among its parts. Linguistic studies have looked at longer versus shorter texts and there is a tendency for greater linguistic sophistication, complexity, and subtlety in the longer ones.

That's cool. But it doesn't really help. The reason is that it has nothing to do with the role that length may take in teaching. It provides no clue about how best to chunk those instructional texts. A long text that is cut into three pieces wouldn't be linguistically simpler than it was originally, but such dividing might play an important role in learning.

There are also those studies showing that length impacts reading comprehension itself - how well the students understand the texts. All things being equal, comprehending a long text poses greater psychological demands on readers than shorter texts. Text length may affect memory, reasoning, inferencing, and even motivation.

But again, that doesn't help. That text length affects comprehension says nothing about how to enable students to do better with longer texts.

Back in the 1920s, when basal readers introduced teacher's editions with prefabbed lesson plans for the first time, the idea of dividing stories for discussion became a thing.

They didn't rely much on research in those days. I found a couple of old studies on dividing texts for discussion, and they reported conflicting results. One study said that asking questions throughout led to higher comprehension and another said it was better to group the questions at the end. The differences weren't great either way. Nevertheless, the basals broke stories into parts - with kids reading longer segments of text as they proceeded up the grades.

First grade stories were shorter than those aimed at older kids. And, the discussion segments were graduated, too. Beginners would read a page (perhaps 1 or 2 sentences) and then discuss. Older students might be asked to read 2-4 pages at a time, with considerably more words on each page.

Does that "gradual increase" approach work? Does it "stretch" kids out?

I suspect that it does and that we could do that better but could find no evidence either way.

Some authorities claim it is best to have kids read books rather than selections because of the need to build stamina. There is no question that reading 100 pages instead of 10 should increase the stamina building opportunity. However, it is kind of like working on somebody's running by starting with a marathon. The well-developed runners may love the challenge, but the beginners may be intimidated.

The idea here - as with other well-known endurance tasks - is that stamina is learned, and rarely results without intentional effort. The focus of the advice provided here is on the silent reading of students in Grades 2-3 and up.
Consistency
If you want kids to build reading stamina, they must read.

They must read pretty much every day.

However, this need be "accountable" reading. Developing the ability to sustain reading focus depends on more than just reading a lot of words. Here, I'm not talking so much about kids reading on their own as I am about having kids read in reading class, social studies, science, and so on.

Start with rather short sections of text: a sentence, a paragraph, a page. Monitor student success with these brief reads (I encourage kids to write answers to questions so I can determine who is comprehending well and who is not).

I often visit classrooms where kids aren't expected to read. Text is there, but it is read aloud round robin fashion with the teacher telling kids what it means. Or, even when a text is read silently by the kids, there may be little real effort to determine how well they understood what the text said or what barriers to understanding they may have confronted. Such reading is a task, it gets completed, but it probably contributes little to learning.

It's great if you can get kids to read on their own beyond this sanctioned reading. Have kids keep a book available for any down time in the classroom, such as when an assignment has been completed and they must wait for the others. Certainly, encourage and support kids' reading at home, too, making it a regular part of their own personal lives.
Increasing Demands
The amounts of text that students are asked to read should increase gradually.

This increase should take place in two ways. First, the text segments that students are asked to read prior to any discussion or other activity should be lengthened. Second, the amount of classroom reading expected each week should go up, too.

I'd suggest having a spring goal for second graders of about 400 words per segment. Early in the year, you might start out having kids read a paragraph and then discuss. Over the following 30 weeks you'd increase, a little at the time, the amounts of text that students would be expected to read.

My goal for Grade 3 would be 500-600 words at a time, and for Grade 4 perhaps 700 or 750.

Those would be good targets since they would enable most students to meet the demands of accountability testing (think of those text lengths as your end of year goals).

Remember the students must comprehend well. Let's say that your students read one paragraph at a time, and they've nailed it with good comprehension. It would make sense to increase the segments to 2-3 paragraphs. If they comprehend those, terrific. But if they don't, then you might have to drop back a bit and increase more slowly.

I would also strongly recommend that you let the kids in on what you are up to and talk about the importance of sustained concentration. Give them some guidance (it can help to say the words in your head, or it can help if you stop at the end of each sentence/paragraph and think about what that meant, then read some more). Encourage the students to talk about issues like mind wandering and how to resist that or what to do when they are not understanding.

Lengthening the segments doesn't change the amount of reading. A separate consideration is how to increase the amounts of reading expected each week.

Marathon runners in training increase their distances about 5-10% each week. Increasing the amounts of reading by 4-5% weekly across a school year would be almost imperceptible initially, but like compound interest, it would pay off in the long run. If students are in school 30 hours each week, then expecting 1-2 hours per week of real accountable reading doesn't seem onerous or out of line, even in the primary grades. (In fact, it sounds like too little!)
Harder Shorter Sprints
Another trick of endurance runners is that they punctuate their longer, easier runs with shorter more demanding ones. These sprints make them stronger.

Speed isn't our training issue in reading (though it can be a valuable outcome of this practice), but text difficulty levels are.

Let's say your third graders are reading off and on throughout their school day and in reading class they can handle 300-word grade-level text segments as well. I'd suggest once or twice a week having an exercise in which the students read one or two 50-100-word text segments from a fourth- or fifth-grade book.

I wouldn't just spring this on the kids, I'd tell them what I'm up to. Their speed is not the issue, but high comprehension is, so they should slow down as much as they need to and work hard to make sense of the text.

These "crunches" provide wonderful opportunities for learning. I'm certain the kids will want to talk about new vocabulary, or the sentences that really slowed them down, and what to do about those.

The challenge level of these exercises will provide students with a renewed confidence when they get back to more appropriately leveled texts.

There are lots of ways to organize these challenge exercises, but however you do it, think of the marathoner's mantra, "longer/easier, shorter/harder." When you are going to do a distance run or a long read, you want the workload to be relatively easy. Conversely, when you are trying to build strength - like taking on a much harder text - you want the amount of sustained work to be lessened.
Take a Break
If you want to build stamina in your students, then you must create an environment in which pressure and maximum effort is intermittent, not constant. Runners and cyclists work hard, but they also do cross training and take days off. The body can only take so much punishment.

What is true for the body is true for the mind.

Students need to be expected to work hard - sometimes. But they also need breaks and opportunities to engage less intensely.

There are lots of ways of organizing a school day. One that I would suggest is to look for those periods of time in the day that take the kids' heads a whole different direction - like art, music, or physical education. If your students are going to play active games in the gymnasium at 11:00AM, then why not schedule an intensive reading session just before that?

Or, after several weeks of increasingly demanding text segments punctuated with challenge drills, what if you just did a week in which kids were expected to manage their own reading with few external educational demands?

Good readers can read significantly lengthy texts while sustaining attention and holding key information in memory. They manage to do this not just with texts that they find easy or that they enjoy reading, but with those they will need to read to succeed academically and in other social and professional venues. Teachers should operate more like strength and conditioning coaches, helping students not only to know more, but to develop the stamina needed for success. Researchers also need to come up with better ways of accomplishing the stamina goal than the suggestions provided here.
References
Borgonovi, F., & Biecek, P. (2016). An international comparison of students' ability to endure fatigue and maintain motivation during a low-stakes test. Learning and Individual Differences, 49, 128-137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2016.06.001

Mesmer, H. A., & Hiebert, E. H. (2015). Third graders' reading proficiency reading texts varying in complexity and length: Responses of students in an urban, high-needs school. Journal of Literacy Research, 47(4), 473-504. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086296X16631923

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On Dividing Reading Texts up for Classroom Discussion | Shanahan on Literacy

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This blog entry discusses how we build reading stamina through guided or directed reading. Teachers should divide texts into shorter sections for discussion.

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Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash

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Beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project. Better than any royalty free or stock photos.

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This psychological thriller takes place at Cambridge University.

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Eerie atmosphere isn't enough to overcome an unsatisfying plot and sometimes-exasperating protagonist.

A blend of psychological mystery and gothic thriller puts a psychotherapist in pursuit of a serial killer on the campus of Cambridge University.

The author's second novel features a psychotherapist as its main character, as did his 2019 debut, The Silent Patient (whose main character makes an appearance here). This book's protagonist is Mariana, who has a busy practice in London specializing in group therapy. At 36, she's a widow, reeling from the drowning a year before of her beloved husband, Sebastian. She's galvanized out of her fog by a call from her niece, Zoe, who was raised by Mariana and Sebastian after her parents died. Zoe is now studying at Cambridge, where Mariana and Sebastian met and courted. Zoe has terrible news: Her close friend Tara has been murdered, savagely stabbed and dumped in a wood. Mariana heads for Cambridge and, when the police arrest someone she thinks is innocent, starts her own investigation. She zeroes in on Edward Fosca, a handsome, charismatic classics professor who has a cultlike following of beautiful female students (which included Tara) called the Maidens, a reference to the cult of Eleusis in ancient Greece, whose followers worshipped Demeter and Persephone. Suspicious characters seem to be around every ivy-covered corner of the campus, though-an audacious young man Mariana meets on the train, one of her patients who has turned stalker, a porter at one of the college's venerable houses, even the surly police inspector. The book gets off to a slow start, front-loaded with backstories and a Cambridge travelogue, but then picks up the pace and piles up the bodies. With its ambience of ritualistic murders, ancient myths, and the venerable college, the story is a gothic thriller despite its contemporary setting. That makes Mariana tough to get on board with-she behaves less like a modern professional woman than a 19th-century gothic heroine, a clueless woman who can be counted on in any situation to make the worst possible choice. And the book's ending, while surprising, also feels unearned, like a bolt from the blue hurled by some demigod.

Eerie atmosphere isn't enough to overcome an unsatisfying plot and sometimes-exasperating protagonist.

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A blend of psychological mystery and gothic thriller puts a psychotherapist in pursuit of a serial killer on the campus of Cambridge University.

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"How Hip Hop Changed the English Language"

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"How Hip Hop Changed the English Language"

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How Hip-Hop Changed the English Language Forever

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In just 50 years, rap has transformed the way the world speaks. Here are five words that tell the story of the genre’s linguistic power.

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From New and Selected Poems, 1992
Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver.
All rights reserved.

Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press from New and Selected Poems. Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver. For further permissions information, contact Beacon Press, 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2892.

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Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is … Continue reading &…

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George Saunders Reads "Love Letter" | The Writer's Voice: New Fiction from The New Yorker | WNYC

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The author reads his story from the April 6, 2020, issue of the magazine.

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I was taught how to read novels and poems by a brilliant poststructuralist critic called Stephen Heath. I have an image in my mind of Dr. Heath holding a sheet of paper-the hallowed "text"-very close to his eyes, the physical proximity somehow the symbolic embodiment of his scrutinizing avidity, while he threw out his favorite question about a paragraph or stanza: "what's at stake in this passage?" He meant something more specific, professionalized and narrow than the colloquial usage would generally imply. He meant something like: what is the dilemma of meaning in this passage? What is at stake in maintaining the appearance of coherent meaning, in this performance we call literature? How is meaning wobbling, threatening to collapse into its repressions? Dr. Heath was appraising literature as Freud might have studied one of his patients, where "What is at stake for you in being here?" did not mean "What is at stake for you in wanting to get healthy or happy?" but almost the opposite: "What is at stake for you in maintaining your chronic unhappiness?" The enquiry is suspicious, though not necessarily hostile.

This way of reading could broadly be called deconstructive. Put simply, deconstruction proceeds on the assumption that literary texts, like people, have an unconscious that frequently betrays them: they say one thing but mean another thing. Their own figures of speech (metaphors, images, figurative turns of phrase) are the slightly bent keys to their unlocking. The critic can unravel-deconstruct-a text by reading it as one might read a Freudian slip. And just as an awareness of how people unconsciously defend and betray themselves enriches our ability to comprehend them, so a similar awareness enriches our comprehension of a piece of literature. Instead of agreeing with people's self-assessments, we learn how to read them in a stealthy and contrary manner, brushing them against their own grain.

At university, I began to understand that a poem or novel might be self-divided, that its intentions might be beautifully lucid but its deepest motivations helplessly contradictory. Indeed, deconstruction tends to specialize in-perhaps over-emphasize-the ways in which texts contradict themselves: how, say, The Tempest is at once anti-colonialist in aspiration and colonialist in assumption; or how Jane Austen's novels are both proto-feminist and patriarchally structured; or how the great novels of adultery, like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary and Effi Briest, dream of female transgression but simultaneously enforce punishment for that transgression. Critical intelligence is made more complex and sophisticated by an awareness that literature is an always-frail ideological achievement, only ever a sentence away from dissolution. My own reading of literature was permanently altered by this new understanding, and my critical instincts (especially when teaching) are still often deconstructive.

But alongside Dr. Heath's question lies the looser, perhaps more generous usage preferred by writers and interested readers. When a book reviewer, or someone in a creative writing workshop, or a fellow author complains, "I just couldn't see what was at stake in the book," or "I see that this issue matters to the writer, but she didn't manage to make me feel that it was at stake in the novel," a different statement is also being made about meaning. The common implication here is that meaning has to be earned, that a novel or poem creates the aesthetic environment of its importance. A novel in which the stakes are felt to be too low is one that has failed to make a case for its seriousness. Writers are fond of the idea of earned stakes and unearned stakes; a book that hasn't earned its effects doesn't deserve any success.

A novel in which the stakes are felt to be too low is one that has failed to make a case for its seriousness. Writers are fond of the idea of earned stakes and unearned stakes; a book that hasn't earned its effects doesn't deserve any success.

I'm struck by the differences between these two usages. Both are central to their relative critical discourses; each is close to the other and yet also quite far apart. In Stakes¹ (let's call it), the text's success is suspiciously scanned, with the expectation, perhaps hope, that the piece of literature under scrutiny will turn out to be productively unsuccessful. In Stakes², the text's success is anxiously searched for, with the assumption that the piece of literature's lack of success cannot be productive for reading, but simply renders the book not worth picking up. The first way of reading is non-evaluative, at least at the level of craft or technique; the second is only evaluative, and wagers everything on technical success, on questions of craft and aesthetic achievement. Stakes¹ presumes incoherence; Stakes² roots for coherence. Both modes are interestingly narrow, and their narrowness mirrors each other.

Not to think about literature evaluatively is not to think like a writer-it cuts literature off from the instincts and ambitions of the very people who created it. But to think only in terms of evaluation, in terms of craft and technique-to think only of literature as a settled achievement-favors those categories at the expense of many different kinds of reading (chiefly, the great interest of reading literature as an always un settled achievement). To read only suspiciously (Stakes¹) is to risk becoming a cynical detective of the word; to read only evaluatively (Stakes²) is to risk becoming a naïf of meaning, a connoisseur of local effects, someone who brings the standards of a professional guild to bear on the wide, unprofessional drama of meaning.

Alas, each kind of reading tends to exclude the other. Formal academic study of modern literature began around the start of the twentieth century. But of course, for centuries before that, literary criticism existed outside the academy, practiced as literature by writers. In English alone, that tradition is a very rich one, and includes-to name just a few-Johnson, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot, Orwell, Jarrell, Hardwick, Pritchett, Sontag. One of the moving things about Coleridge's extraordinary book Biographia Literaria (the book that coins the term "practical criticism," which in turn became the watchword of academic close reading) is that what he is most earnestly trying to do-amidst the crazy theorizing and neologising and channelling of Fichte-is to convince his readers, through a series of passionately detailed close readings, that his friend and literary competitor William Wordsworth is England's greatest poet. That is what is at stake for Coleridge. It's one writer speaking about and to another.

This writerly critical tradition continues to flourish, both in and outside the academy. Of course, nowadays even nonacademic literary criticism (I mean criticism written for a general audience) has been shaped and influenced by formal literary study. Many writers have studied literature at university, academics and writers teach together, attend conferences and festivals together, and sometimes almost speak the same language (think of Coetzee's fiction and academic post-colonialist discourse, Don DeLillo's fiction and academic postmodern critique, Toni Morrison's fiction and academic critiques of race). The rise and steady institutionalisation of academic literary criticism means that the long tradition of literary criticism is now really two traditions, the academic (Stakes¹) and the literary-journalistic (Stakes²), which sometimes flow into each other but more often away from each other. Too often, Stakes¹ imagines itself in competition with, disdainful of, or simply inhabiting a different realm from Stakes², and vice versa.

Serious Noticing gathers essays and reviews written over the last twenty years. Most of them are long book reviews, published for a general audience in general-interest magazines or literary journals ( The New Republic, The New Yorker and the London Review of Books). These pieces belong to the journalistic or writerly critical tradition that comes before and comes after the academic critical tradition; they are marked by that academic tradition but are also trying to do something distinct from it. I like the idea of a criticism that tries to do three things at once: speaks about fiction as writers speak about their craft; writes criticism journalistically, with verve and appeal, for a common reader; and bends this criticism back towards the academy in the hope of influencing the kind of writing that is done there, mindful that the traffic between inside and outside the academy naturally goes both ways.

Edmund Wilson stole the phrase "triple thinker" from one of Flaubert's letters, and I want to steal it from Wilson. Such a threefold critic-writerly, journalistic, scholarly-would ideally be doing this kind of triple thinking; that, at least, has been my aspiration over the last twenty years, and probably since 1988, when I wrote my first review for the Guardian. Which is to say, in this book you'll encounter a criticism interested in both kinds of "what's at stake?" questions; I think that Stakes¹ and Stakes² have no need to look down their noses at each other.

I like the idea of a criticism that tries to do three things at once: speaks about fiction as writers speak about their craft; writes criticism journalistically, with verve and appeal, for a common reader; and bends this criticism back towards the academy in the hope of influencing the kind of writing that is done there.

What, ideally, does this kind of triple thinking look like? In his essay "Music Discomposed," the philosopher Stanley Cavell says that the critic's first gesture is: "You have to hear it." Why, he asks, do you have to hear it? Because, he says, with a deliberate risk of tautology, "if I don't hear it, I don't know it," and works of art are "objects of the sort that can only be known in sensing." And again, at the further risk of excessive simplicity and tautology, Cavell writes: "what I see is that (pointing to the object). But for that to communicate you have to see it too. Describing one's experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it." I like this emphasis. When I write about a novel or a writer, I am essentially bearing witness. I'm describing an experience and trying to stimulate in the reader an experience of that experience. Henry James called the critic's task "heroically vicarious."

Most of the time it feels pretty unheroic, to be honest; but it certainly feels vicarious. It's like playing, to a friend, a piece of music you really love. There is that moment when you stand next to this person, hopeful and intense as you anxiously scan your friend's face, to see if he or she is hearing the same thing you heard. How thrilling it is when the confirmation arrives; and how easily disappointed one can be (though we all learn to hide it) when the friend turns after a minute or two and says, "You can turn it off, this isn't doing much for me."

You are trying to get the listener to hear (or see) the same thing as you, to have the same kind of experience. Criticism is just such an adventure in sameness. The journalistic review-essay differs from the academic essay in the amount and quality of this sameness, the amount and quality of Cavellian "pointing at the artwork" that has to be done. After all, the review-essay involves not just pointing at something, but pointing at t while re-describing it. The analogy is less "You have to hear it" than "Listen, I have to play it for you on the piano." This re-voicing takes the form, overwhelmingly in book reviews, of paraphrase and quotation. It's disdained as "plot summary" and often it's done carelessly, so poorly that it is no re-voicing at all. But quotation and re-description are at the heart of the book review and at the heart of that experience that Cavell calls "creative."

This passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature. It happens in classrooms whenever the teacher stops to read out, to re-voice, the passage under scrutiny. Sometimes all we remember of a teacher is a voice, and that is as it should be. Academic criticism is wary of what used to be called "the heresy of paraphrase." The very thing that makes a review or essay into a vital narrative is discouraged in academic writing. We warn students-for perfectly good reasons-to avoid merely retelling or rephrasing the contents of a book. If you catch yourself doing that, we tell them, you're probably not doing criticism, you're not being analytical enough. But we should encourage students to do it better, for there is a quality of implicit intelligence in subtle paraphrase that is itself an act of analysis.

And besides, doesn't much academic avoidance of paraphrase have to do, really, with anxiety or snobbery? Scholars don't want to be caught in the act of primacy when they are supposed to have read the book a thousand times; God forbid that anyone should think we are encountering a text for the first time! Of course we all remember the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the twists and turns of Waverley or Vanity Fair or Under the Volcano! Don't we? Yet the journalistic review is an act of primacy; to paraphrase is to dare a kind of innocence; subtle paraphrase is a kind of wise unlearning. And paraphrase is witness.

I have called this kind of critical re-telling a way of writing through books, not just about them. This writing-through is often achieved by using the language of metaphor and simile that literature itself uses. It involves a recognition that literary criticism is unique because one has the privilege of performing it in the same medium one is describing. When Coleridge writes of Swift that "he had the soul of Rabelais but dwelling in a dry place," or when Henry James says that Balzac was so devoted to his work that he became a kind of "Benedictine of the actual" (a phrase he liked so much he plagiarized himself and also applied to Flaubert); when Pritchett laments that Ford Madox Ford never fell into that "determined stupor" out of which great artistic work comes; when Woolf complains that E. M. Forster is too anxious a narrator, too keen to interrupt his characters, "like a light sleeper who is always being woken by something in the room"-these writers are producing images that are qualitatively indistinguishable from the metaphors and similes in their so-called "creative" work. They are speaking to literature in its own language, a large part of which is metaphorical.

So we perform. And we perform in proximity, exulting in the fact that, dolphin-like, we are swimming in the element that nourishes us. Our prose is our connection to the work of art we are re-voicing. Art critics, music critics, dance critics- to change the metaphor-have to board the boat unnaturally or a little awkwardly, from the front or the bow; we get to board the boat ideally, as one should, from the side, amidships. We write as if we expect to be read; we write like the roses Eliot describes in "Burnt Norton"-roses 'that had the look of flowers that are looked at."

The philosopher Ted Cohen, in his book Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor, quotes from a paper written in 1949, by another philosopher, Arnold Isenberg. That paper was called "Critical Communication." According to Cohen, Isenberg undermines the common notion that by describing an artwork, the critic is producing a reason in support of his or her value judgement. It's not about producing reasons, says Isenberg. All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork-by re-describing that artwork-induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work. This way, in Isenberg's phrase, the critic can achieve a "sameness of vision" in his or her audience (i.e. a sameness of vision between audience and critic). Ted Cohen goes on to point out that this is actually a brilliant description of the use of metaphor: "When your metaphor is 'X is Y' you are hoping that I will see X as you do, namely as Y, and, most likely, although your proximate aim is to get me to see X in this way, your ultimate wish is that I will feel about X as you do." So the critical act is a metaphorical act.

For Cohen, identification with someone or something else is essentially metaphorical. The critic says, in effect, "I will work to enable you to see the text as I do," and does so by enacting a sameness of vision, which is an act of figurative identification-because it is as if the critic were saying, "I will get you to agree with me that the tiles on that roof over there look just like an armadillo's back; I will get you to see those roof tiles as I see them" (or whatever simile one has in mind). All I would add to Cohen's commentary is that if this "sameness of vision" is effectively metaphorical, then the language of metaphor-the writer-critic's own use of metaphor-must be the embodied language of that process, the very enactment of it: a sameness of vision which is in some ways a sameness of writing.

All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork-by re-describing that artwork-induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work.

In that spirit, I'll close with two examples of sameness of vision, sameness of writing. The first is from Virginia Woolf's biography of the art critic and curator Roger Fry; the other from my own experience. Woolf describes hearing Roger Fry give a public lecture in London-a stiff, formal affair, with the critic in evening dress and holding a long pointer.

All that he had done again and again in his books. But here there was a difference. As the next slide slid over the sheet there was a pause. He gazed afresh at the picture. And then in a flash he found the word he wanted; he added on the spur of the moment what he had just seen as if for the first time. That, perhaps, was the secret of his hold over his audience. They could see the sensation strike and form; he could lay bare the very moment of perception. So with pauses and spurts the world of spiritual reality emerged in slide after slide-in Poussin, in Chardin, in Rembrandt, in Cézanne-in its uplands and its lowlands, all connected, all somehow made whole and entire, upon the great screen in the Queen's Hall. And finally the lecturer, after looking long through his spectacles, came to a pause. He was pointing to a late work by Cézanne, and he was baffled. He shook his head; his stick rested on the floor. It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable. And so instead of saying, "Next slide," he bowed, and the audience emptied itself into Langham Place.

For two hours they had been looking at pictures. But they had seen one of which the lecturer himself was unconscious-the outline of the man against the screen, an ascetic figure in evening dress who paused and pondered, and then raised his stick and pointed. That was a picture that would remain in memory together with the rest, a rough sketch that would serve many of the audience in years to come as the portrait of a great critic, a man of profound sensibility but of exacting honesty, who, when reason could penetrate no further, broke off; but was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there.

It is all here, in this beautiful passage: criticism as passionate creation ("as if for the first time"); criticism as modesty, as the mind putting the "understanding" into abeyance ("he was baffled"); criticism as simplicity and near-silence ("It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable"); criticism as sameness of vision and re-description ("was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there"). Fry "found the word he wanted," but Woolf, using narrative much as she does in To the Lighthouse, withholds from us what that word exactly was; slowly, gradually, "found the word he wanted" cedes to wordless humility and the fierce but unuttered conviction that "what he saw was there": a movement whereby the audience began to experience what Fry saw.

A few years ago, I was in Edinburgh, and went with my father to hear the pianist Alfred Brendel give an illustrated talk about Beethoven's Piano Sonatas. We were late, and arrived at the hall breathless and sweaty. But all was serene inside. Brendel sat at a table, with a concert grand piano behind him. He talked-or mumbled, rather-from his lecture notes, peering down at his text through thick spectacles. He had a strong Austrian accent, unaffected by decades of living in England. Every so often he would turn to the piano to play a few bars, as illustration. But something remarkable occurred when he quoted: even to play a short phrase, he became not a quoter but a performer, not merely a critic but an artist-critic: physically, he had to enter the trance-like state in which he performs whole concerts (his customary shudderings, phantom mastication, closed eyes, swooning and tilting); he could not blandly quote the music, in the way that you might read a line from French without bothering to put on the "proper" French accent. He had to become, as it were, French.

In this sense, he could not quote. He could only recreate; which is to say, he could only create. It was intensely frustrating to hear, again and again, three bars of the most beautiful Beethoven, perfectly performed, only to have them break off and be replaced by the pianist's inaudible Viennese mumbling. Play on, play on, don't talk! I soundlessly urged. The mumbling quickly became of no interest or importance; I was living for the next pianistic performance, I wanted to swing from beauty to beauty, high above the dun currents of the prosaic. His "quotes" overwhelmed his commentary; he was approaching Walter Benjamin's idea of a book entirely made of quotations.

Perhaps the analogy with literary criticism is not quite perfect, because the literary critic lacks this precise ability to inflect his chosen quotes as the musician performs his. But let Brendel's wordy mumbling stand for a kind of literary criticism condemned to exteriority, a writing-about rather than a writing-through the text, a flat commentary, banished from the heart of the creative. And let Brendel's performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating, stand for the kind of criticism that is a writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness.
Listen, I have to play it for you on the piano.
___________________________________

Excerpted from SERIOUS NOTICING: Selected Essays, 1997-2019 by James Wood. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux January 14th 2020. Copyright © James Wood 1999, 2004, 2013, 2015, 2019.

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James Wood: What is at Stake When We Write Literary Criticism?

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I was taught how to read novels and poems by a brilliant poststructuralist critic called Stephen Heath. I have an image in my mind of Dr. Heath holding a sheet of paper-the hallowed "text&#82...

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The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins | Poetry Foundation

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I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

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The Namesake: A Novel [Lahiri, Jhumpa] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Namesake: A Novel

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In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

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Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. An accurate online text.

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Important note regarding the Institute:
The Institute is responsive to public health recommendations and complies with State and school regulations. At the present time, we expect participants to be fully vaccinated or to have a medical exemption.

avigating one's way through adolescence has never been easy, and never harder than it is today. As concerns grow about the emotional and physical well-being of adolescents, study after study shows the central importance of a relationship with a caring adult to a young person's development. Parents and students seek out independent schools, with their small classes and involved faculty, to offer these relationships.

The Stanley H. King Institute offers a model of teaching counseling and listening skills to teachers, advisors, administrators, and other school personnel. Our goal is not to train professional counselors, but to help teachers strengthen and deepen their relationships with students. Participants learn to help students with the range of developmental issues, as well as to recognize serious psychological difficulty and seek appropriate help.

For more than fifty years, teachers from independent schools across the United States and beyond have gathered for intensive, week-long residential workshops led by experienced mental health and counseling professionals familiar with the independent school world to learn how to listen in a new way.

Students look to teachers all the time for guidance, whether they are aware of it or not. Whether we are aware of it or not in any given moment, we are guiding them by our responses, our actions, and our inactions. Students' needs are both evident and hidden, and they seek adults who can handle feelings and experiences they sometimes can't. The Institute teaches participants how to listen deeply and to respond in ways that promote learning, meaningful relationships, and responsible behavior.

The power of the Institute is not only in its formal curriculum, but also in the relationships among the participants. Whether we are gathered in the large group, looking more closely at issues in a small group, or listening to each other in pairs, our work is about learning to connect in ways that help students. Along the way, we, too, feel more connected to each other and to our work.

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MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR _____________ Registration for 2023 is open. Details on the Dates & Application page. Important note regarding the Institute: The Institute is responsive to public health recommendations and complies with State and school regulations. At the present time, we expect participants to be fully vaccinated or to have a medical exemption.

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William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope: 4

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May the verse be with you! Inspired by one of the greatest creative minds in the English language - and William Shakespeare - here is an officially licensed retelling of George Lucas' epic Star Wars in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. The saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lor...

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The One Word Discussion Strategy — Mud and Ink Teaching

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Take students into a deep dive discussion of any reading assignment by just using 6-8 words isolated on a Google Jamboard slide. This is a student-centered, critical thinking rich discussion set up that you have to try!

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Jonathan Roumie reads "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins 

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Jonathan Roumie reads "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins 

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“God's Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins - Classic Poetry with Jonathan Roumie

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Emily Dickinson: A Trial of Love and Writing

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Emily Dickinson: A Trial of Love and Writing

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This is a three session online discussion that starts October 9, 2023.

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Emily Dickinson's "Master" Documents: A Trial of Love and Writing

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In unmarked and now unrecoverable hours in the years between ca. 1858 and ca. 1861, Dickinson wrote a series of epistolary and poetic works to a figure she referred to only as "Master." Yet what we do know about these mysterious works is that Dickinson preserved them in her own private archive until her death in May 1886.

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Cambridge University Institute of Continuing Education

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Cambridge University Institute of Continuing Education

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Institute of Continuing Education Madingley Hall Madingley Cambridge CB23 8AQ

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This is event is being presented in person and online.

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Academy Award-nominated actress Rosie Perez hosts a historic, multilingual gathering of major and emerging Caribbean and Latine writers from the new anthology Daughters of Latin America - including Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, acclaimed memoirist and screenwriter Esmeralda Santiago, and others. Spanning time, styles, and traditions - and expertly curated by Sandra Guzmán - Daughters of Latin America is a dazzling collection of essential works from 140 Latine writers, scholars, and activists. Witness this celebratory summit of literary voices representing a multitude of languages, geographies, and diasporas - a major event in world literature to kick off the Unterberg Poetry Center's 85th-anniversary season.

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As a nonprofit community and cultural center, The 92nd Street Y, New York relies on support from people like you. Your donation today helps us continue connecting you to the programs you love, no matter where in the world you are.
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Daughters of Latin America: An Anthology Reading / Hosted by Rosie Perez With Giannina Braschi, Sonia Guiñansaca, Sandra Guzmán, Jamaica Kincaid, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Esmeralda Santiago, Elisabet Velasquez and others - The 92nd Street Y, New York

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Online and in-person. Rosie Perez hosts a historic, multilingual gathering of major and emerging Caribbean and Latine writers from the new anthology Daughters of Latin America.

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Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking

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Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking

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Annual Workshops and Conferences of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard

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e e cummings reads "Somewhere I Have Never Traveled"

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e e cummings reads "Somewhere I Have Never Traveled"

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ee cummings reads "Somewhere I have never travelled..."

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Charles Astor Bristed (1820-1874) was the favourite grandson of John Jacob Astor (the first American multi-millionaire, and the Astor of the Waldorf-Astoria). After gaining a degree at Yale, Bristed entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1840, graduating in 1845. "An American in Victorian Cambridge" is a richly detailed

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Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction by Derek Attridge

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Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction by Derek Attridge

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This is the first introduction to rhythm and meter that begins where students are: as speakers of English familiar with the rhythms of ordinary spoken language, and of popular verse such as nursery rhymes, song and rap. Poetic Rhythm builds on this knowledge and experience, taking the reader from th…

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"I think the novel has to stay attached to life somehow. It has to share the terrain of life.

[You] build a novel. You have to build it like a building so that it stays standing when you're not in it.

That's where I wanted to get to. Not a feminist space, and not even particularly a sort of gendered space, but . . . a female sentence, a female paragraph, a truly female writing that is not a response to men and the ways in which women have been constructed, and that isn't motivated by anger or injustice or anything else.

Freedom, when it comes, is nothing if it leaves people un-free behind you."

Rachel Cusk, The Art of Fiction No. 246, The Paris Review, spring 2020 edition

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Rachel Cusk | Biography, Books, Videos, Podcasts, Quotes | Faber

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Rachel Cusk is the author of Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life's Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and non-fiction.

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Poetry by Maureen N. McLane — Maureen N. McLane

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Maureen N. McLane has published seven books of poetry - Same Life, World Enough, This Blue (Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry), Mz N: the serial, Some Say (Finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and for The Believer Award in Poetry), What I’m Looking For: Selected Poems,

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Everybody In The Place - An Incomplete History of Britain 1984 -1992 by Jeremy Deller

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Introduction

Our lives are more and more determined by technologies, in particular by technologies that allow us to communicate with one another more cheaply, more rapidly, and across greater distances. In such circumstances posing the question about how to live in a technological world is unavoidable. If we are interested in finding an answer to the question posed above, Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy is a book that has still much to say to us. So what does this book have to say fifty years after its publication to a global society that has undergone such radical changes?

The book contains at least two intuitions that have the potential to change the way we relate to one aspect of our lives that has become more and more important: our relationship with technology and specifically with communication technology. I will sketch out a path that has the potential to avoid the two extremes of technological enthusiasm and total Luddite rejection of technology.

One of the most significant changes that has taken place in society since McLuhan is the so called digital revolution in which information converted in binary code becomes more important even than physical reality. Summarizing Nicholas Negroponte's book on the digital age, we can affirm that "bits are more to us than atoms."[i] Many, such as Crawford, Turkle, and Carr argue [ii] that the digital age is not the paradise it was promised to be. Technology makes us feel more alone (Turkle), more distracted (Crawford), and sometimes incapable of real human connection. Indeed, some claim that the internet is making us stupid as well (Carr). Authors such as Carr, Turkle, Crawford, Lynch, Lopez, and others expose the fact that the much-anticipated digital age has importantly undermined our humanity.

I shall claim in this article that two of McLuhan's intuitions might open a path to counteract the dehumanizing aspects of our "smartphone shaped" existences. This path may lead us back to Socrates' ideal of an examined life.

The Main Argument of The Gutenberg Galaxy

The Gutenberg Galaxy is a book about the effects of the introduction of a movable type press on practically any- and everything conceivable, from politics to economy, from science to art, from society as a whole to the individual's perception of time and space. McLuhan's book is based on a core argument: the human being's five senses are organized as a whole into a sensorium. The internal organization of the sensorium functions according to laws that prioritize one sense or group of senses over the others. These laws, according to McLuhan:

a) change in relation to a given communication technology;

b) govern the way in which the individual perceives and appraises the world;

c) and therefore give shape to the whole cultural landscape of a given culture.

All this means that if you communicate only orally (i.e., if you live in a culture that has not discovered writing), your sensorium will be organized by laws that give priority to hearing and touch over that of sight. This, in turn, leads the individual to perceive and appraise the world in a way that is not only influenced but completely shaped by this priority. This means that persons from cultures where the oral way of communication organizes the sensorium by hearing and touch live in a world that McLuhan repeatedly describes as "magical."

It should be noted that by "magical" McLuhan means inhabited by obscure forces that act unpredictably. Examples of oral magic can be found in many different cultures that range from the daily life of the Azande tribe to the Homeric hero. Evans-Pritchard describes in colorful detail how the Azande attribute every "unfortunate event" in their life to witchcraft [iii]: "If blight seizes the ground-nut crop, it is witchcraft; if the bush is vainly scoured for game; if women laboriously bale water out of a pool and are rewarded by but a few fish it is witchcraft." A Zande boy hurts himself knocking his foot on a stump. He was careless-argued the anthropologist. The stump wasn't placed there by witchcraft. But it was witchcraft that made him careless-argued the Zande boy.[iv]

Homeric characters lived lives dominated by gods. Their action was unpredictable, capricious, and often malevolent. Moeller, for instance, holds the view that Homeric heroes cannot be fully held morally responsible for their actions and reactions because the gods somehow take hold of them. The Homeric hero perceives the gods as forces driving him irresistibly, like Heracles who slaughters his own sons after being induced by Pallas to believe they were his enemies, or like Helen irresistibly drawn to Paris by Aphrodite.

What it is that causes a particular hero to take a certain course of action are mysterious personal forces acting at the same time as the hero's actions.[v] Both in the example of the Azande boy and the examples of the Homeric heroes, an unseen malevolent force acting at the same time as the event or action is seen as the true cause of it. This is due to the fact-McLuhan seems to suggest-that the auditory field is characterized by simultaneity: different sounds are all perceived at the same time. Sight, by contrast, is successive: things are seen one at a time. Magic can only happen in a simultaneous field, one that doesn't allow the perception of cause as prior to effect. A lineal perception of time-McLuhan argues-allows seeing causal, mechanical, and logical connections between events. Priority given to sight thus destroys the very core of the magic conception of the world. Heracles slaughtered his offspring due to some temporary psychiatric condition that you can find in the DSM-V, such as a brief psychotic disorder associated with hallucination and violent behavior, and the Zande boy was really careless, in a culture dominated by the visual field.

In other words, the communication technology a given culture uses determines how individuals belonging to that culture perceive the world. The way in which the individual perceives the world in turn determines the whole cultural landscape in which the individual lives in terms of values, social organization, beliefs, practices, etc.

Western Culture and Some Critical Remarks on The Gutenberg Galaxy

In The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan tries to apply his theory regarding the organization of the sensorium as shaper of cultures to the whole of Western civilization after the introduction of movable type press in the fifteenth century. What the Canadian thinker tries to accomplish is, in fact, to give an account of how Gutenberg's invention has molded Western culture in any and every aspect. The Gutenberg Galaxy takes the shape of a collection of seemingly unrelated essays, some describing a facet of Western culture before Gutenberg and some after.

McLuhan is not the only one suggesting that technology tends to shape decisively both culture and society. Harold Innis in his Empire and Communication [vi] suggests that it is impossible to think of a human society organized as an empire without a communication technology that allows messages to be interchanged across long distances. Walter Ong in his Orality and Literacy [vii] describes the psychology of the oral man. He also depicts how the psychological structure of the oral man changes when writing is introduced.

Seen from the point of view of established disciplines, the book is hard to classify. Is it a history book that investigates a past event, namely the introduction of a movable type press? Is it a psychology book that attempts to unveil the effect of a new technology on the individual's perception of space and time? Is it a sociology book that tries to shed light on how social change results as the product of the introduction of a new technology? Is the book an examination of how literature reflects social change? If you read the book as a specialist in one of these disciplines and you believe in rigorous boundaries between different specialties, it will certainly disappoint you for its lack of rigor. Gutenberg's Galaxy is a far away galaxy in the sense that it is far from being a piece of traditional scholarship.

McLuhan's book, if you're a scientific-minded scholar, is disappointing also in that one of its main theses was proven false. He hypothesized that the culture in which he lived, heavily determined by television, had noteworthy similarities with oral cultures, where everything is temporally simultaneous. From that he deduced that cultures in which patterns of orality still survived would have a comparative advantage with respect to cultures determined by print.

If television and other electronic media are rearranging the sensorium of the people of the whole planet in such a way that the whole culture of the globe becomes basically oral, it is obvious to predict that those ethnic groups who practice orality and don't have to learn it anew like the West had to, will attain political and economic supremacy. This didn't happen. We haven't seen the Azande or any other oral culture dominate the world through television.

McLuhan's Lasting Intuitions

That said, McLuhan's insights have the potential to be the basis of a more humane life in the digital age. I will focus on two. I'm going to call the first of the two the principle of transparency, and the second the principle of inseparability.

The Principle of Transparency

According to the principle of transparency, an age in which communication technology is changing is open to a new self-understanding in a way that other ages are not. McLuhan, although too prone to express his thoughts in an oracular and fragmented (annoying) way, nonetheless knows that if he wants to be taken seriously he has to answer a very simple but essential question: "Why now?" In other words, why only now in history do the effects of communication technology on culture as a whole become visible? Why didn't, for example, Plato or Descartes or Kant notice that communication technology, by means of a restructuring of the sensorium, affects the whole cultural life of mankind?

McLuhan answers with surprising simplicity to the above question: "Perhaps the reason for the omission [of noticing the effects of communication technology on culture as a whole] is simply that the job could only be done when two conflicting forms of written and oral experience were once again co-existent as they are today."[viii] Maybe McLuhan was a genius, but the historical context in which he lived was unique in giving him the possibility to see what no one before could. Television and radio bring back into the cultural life of the West forms of life that are typical of oral and tactile societies. The very fact that two forms of experience, the written and the oral, are conflicting and co-exist, opens the possibility of a new kind of cultural self-awareness. A culture, i.e., a historical context, in which conflicting communication technologies co-exist becomes aware of the effects of those same technologies on itself, and therefore is transparent to itself.

To summarize, according to the principle of transparency we live in an historical context that is transparent to itself, that is to say, self-aware of the effects of technology on itself.

The Principle of Inseparability

The principle of inseparability refers to the fact that according to McLuhan we have to reject something very deeply rooted in our comprehension of communication: the possibility of separating form and content. According to McLuhan, the "medium is the message." One possible way of understanding McLuhan's line-which I find the most convincing-is the following: a given communication technology, a medium in McLuhan's terminology, has effects on society as a whole. These effects are produced almost entirely by the introduction of a new communication technology, regardless of what is actually communicated through it. For instance, books change our way of perceiving space not because something is written in them such that we have to perceive space in a new way, but because reading in a sequential line changes the way we use our eyes. This change brings with itself a new understanding of space itself.

From the point of view of the change brought by reading books in the understanding of space, what is written in a book, its content, is altogether indifferent. What matters is the fact that books are read.

Another example of the inseparability principle can be drawn from Harold Innis. Empires need writing. For an empire to function as empire, it requires that relatively dense messages with a great amount of instruction, orders, lists and so on reach long distances in relatively short spans of time. Power cannot be exerted over long distances without writing. It is not important whether the empire is good or bad, whether the orders given through writing are just or unjust. For an empire to exist it does not matter what is communicated through writing. It is important that writing exists as communication technology. These two examples may not explain fully McLuhan's line. To better grasp the point, it might be helpful to point out the alternative understanding of communication technology: the instrumental conception. According to that conception, a technology is a mere instrument. Content is the leading force in this conception. If the content of the communication technology is good, human life will flourish. If the content is bad, then human life will become corrupt. If we transmit good television, we will educate the masses. If we transmit pornography, we will pervert them. In other words, communication technology is a neutral vessel. This is a conception according to which it is possible to separate the content and form of a given message. But this ignores the very thesis that McLuhan and others have so thoroughly articulated: that a given communication technology has effects on culture in itself, regardless of what is communicated through it.

It should be noted that the inseparability principle comes with a somewhat counter intuitive corollary that applies to our daily lives: communication technology cannot be used innocently. The more we use technology, the more we are somehow also used by it. As an example, we can think of how our smartphones have extended our work time. We bought a smartphone as a useful tool that should make our life easier (with a smartphone and Google Maps you won't get lost anymore), but we may find ourselves answering emails from our boss at odd hours (which leads to a reduction of the quality of time we spend with our families).

The Examined Technological Life

It is obvious that in the Canadian thinker's book you won't find any easy answers. Our epoch is so strongly marked by a continuous revolution in the way new technologies shape our daily lives and our way of communicating. So why read it now?

According to McLuhan's principle of transparency, there are cultures or historical circumstances that are particularly aware of the effects of communication technology on themselves. Only cultures in which different communication technologies compete are granted such an awareness. This is particularly true of our present time. So, if McLuhan is right, then today we have the possibility of being even more aware of the effects of technology on our lives than in McLuhan's time, precisely because today we have even more competing technologies.

If the principle of transparency leads to a general awareness of the effects of technology on society as a whole, then the principle of inseparability grants us the possibility of being aware of the effect of any single new technology. The principle of inseparability becomes then a conceptual tool that allows us to analyze at what cost we become a user of certain technology. What kind of friendship is a Facebook friendship? What kind of discussion is a Twitter discussion? What does it mean to have Netflix in our homes? Might it result in the disruption of family life?

The two great intuitions of McLuhan's invite us to ask broad and deep questions about our culture as a whole and about our private lives as influenced by media. Both of them put us on critical alert: technology comes with a price.

This way it is possible to envision a form of life in the digital age in which technology is neither condemned in an a priori fashion nor a-critically embraced. I speak about a form of life in which the question regarding where technology is leading society and the question regarding the effects of any single new technology is consciously and deliberately cultivated.

Thus The Gutenberg Galaxy is an introduction to nothing less than a form of life. A form of life that doesn't take for granted any easy answer to the question of technology and thus rejects both Luddism and technological enthusiasm. In its wake I envision a life of relentless questioning. In short, it fosters a form of life that revives in the digital age the Socratic ideal of the "examined life."

[i] Cf. N. Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015), 11‒13.

[ii] S. Turkle, Alone Together (New York: Basic Books, 2011); M. B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); N. G. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).

[iii] E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), 63.

[iv] Ibid., 66.

[v] C. Moeller, Sabiduría Griega y Paradoja Cristiana (Madrid: Encuentro, 2008), 31‒51.

[vi] H. A. Innis, Empire and Communications, Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007; first ed.: Oxford, 1950).

[vii] W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New Accents (New York: Routledge, 2002; first ed.: 1982).

[viii] M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 1.

Fr. Federico Ponzoni, Ph. D. was born in 1974 in Milan where he studied Philosophy at Università degli Studi di Milano and was ordained in The Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo in 2007. Since then he resides in Santiago de Chile where he earned his Ph.D. in Intercultural Education at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. He is currently Adjunct Professor in the faculty of Philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica where he also serves as a chaplain.

Posted on January 29, 2016

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