On Happiness

A prerequisite, I think, is that you ought not to be intelligent.

I remember once, having sprained an ankle, I couldn’t sleep because of the throbbing pain, and while so beset in the midnight hours my empathies stretched out to all those other wretched souls writhing in pain far worse than my own. I cried for the victims of all sorts of cancers, bemoaning their tortured fates, squirming from their ache in cold, hygienic, marbled hospital wards. I knew very well that my sprained ankle, such a silly ailment if there ever was one – the bane of the clumsy – could compare in no way to the agony felt by the really ill. It is in our own moments of suffering that we can have empathy with the suffering of others, and I’m sure many a man has felt similar compassion when he found himself in a situation of discomfort.

The intelligent man, the honest man, need no autobiographical moment to evoke empathy. The artificial construct of the imagination, yeah the knowledge of life (that life is a series of experiences many of which are toil and suffering), is enough to create in the intelligent man, yes the honest man, sympathies with people he do not know but for the anthropomorphic moulding of his imaginings. Of course, one can be intelligent and deceitful and lie to yourself; assembling a padded cage of denial. Yet, one has to wonder whether such a man can authentically be called intelligent.

However, if you are a wise man, i.e. honest and intelligent, you will always be aware that your own happiness rings as a foiled mocking note against the unheard cries of the suffering. For this reason, I believe, the intelligent man cannot be happy. An intelligent man that welcomes self-deceit cannot be happy for his own lies taunt him; the intelligent man that in honesty accepts the true state of affairs is unhappy too, for the truth of others’ suffering flies in the face of his own comforts and pleasures.

The solution is to be either a simpleton or a sadomasochist. As for the former, that’s not much of a choice. A simpleton ambitious for intelligence will not know the life of discontent that awaits him until he has acquired sufficient intelligence and once he has acquired it, it will be too late; for one can seldom return to your former state of stupidity. As for the latter, you need to be of that tandem-disposition. Being only a sadist will not ensure you durable happiness, since it is only a matter of time before some suffering befell you too. And being a masochist only will not cause enduring happiness either, for some fickle good fortune tends to smile, occasionally, even on the most unfortunate of creatures. Only a sadomasochist, and better yet a stupid one at that, who is preferably void of intellectual ambition, can truly be happy this side of Heaven. Ironically, it is Heaven, of all places, where the sadomasochist would suffer most, and not be happy.

C-R-A-P-ify Your Graphic Design

Robin Williams spells out the four basics of effective graphic design in her book The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice. The following from Daniel H. Pink's A Whole New Mind (2006):

1. Contrast. "If the elemenst (type, color, size, line thicknesses, shape, space, etc.) are not the same, then make them very different."
2. Repetition. Repeating visual elements "helps develop the organization and strengthens the unity" of your brochure, newsletter, or letterhead.
3. Alignment. "Nothing should be placed on the page arbitrarily. Every elements should have some visual connection with another element on the page."
4. Proximity. "Items relating to each other should be grouped close together."
   

19th & 20th Century American Poets

This coming semester I'm teaching 19th and 20th century American poetry. This will be the first time for me teach American poetry. The landscape I need to cover is quite daunting – two centuries of profound poetry within a mere 14 weeks! (The semester is 16 weeks in total, but two weeks are allocated for mid and final exams.) It feels somewhat silly to cram two centuries of American poetry in less than four months, when any of these poets, take Eliot for instance, can easily occupy a semester on his own.

I’ve decided to teach it as an “introduction” to 19th and 20th century American poetry, and will cover as many of the big names as possible. Currently my syllabus outline will look something like this:

Week 1: Orientation
What is Poetry?
19th & 20th century America (The Highlights)

Week 2: Romantics
Edgar Allen Poe

Week 3: Two Great Voices
Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman

Week 4-6: More Originals
Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, E. E. Cummings

Week 7:
Working on the first research paper

Week 8:
Midterm Exams

Week 9-11: Modernism
Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot

Week 12-14: Race & Gender (Some Important African American and Female Poets)
Marian Moore, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou

Week 15:
Working on the second research paper

Week 16:
Final Examination

I will also spend a substantial amount of time reviewing poetic devices and figurative language to aid in the quality of the research papers. So far as I can gather, the two research papers the students will write for this class will be a first for many of them, hence the week each I’m allocating before the hand in date for each research paper. Since plagiarism has become such a rampant phenomenon, I’m going to try to keep it hands on with these papers – guiding the students through the process.

My main textbook will be Perrine’s Sound & Sense (Thomas Arp & Creg Johnson, 2008). It include poems of most of the poets I want to look at, gives very good material on reviewing poetry and has a section devoted to writing about poetry. I will probably supplement poems from Norton’s Anthology of Poetry and supplement material from MAP.

Any suggestions?

The Liminal Michael Jackson

Reposted from my main blog: Skryfblok
[Image Source: Rasha]

I’ve avoided the Michael Jackson-saga on purpose. What is there too add? Then I started to think* about what a liminal being Michael Jackson was.

Isn’t Michael Jackson the epitome liminal being? What is Jackson’s ethnicity, what’s Jackson’s gender, what’s Jackson’s “age”? Throughout his career, Jackson seemed to transcendent such labels. Of course he is African-American, but we all have to agree that it is not that simple. Jackson did not look African-American. Imagine an alien being visiting Earth and seeing the Pop-icon for the first time. Seeing Jackson’s ethereal white complexion, silky wavy hair and chiselled-coned nose, the alien visitor would never have been able to guess Jackson’s “ethnicity”. Although politically incorrect and slightly distasteful, there is a reason why we find the following humorous: “Michael Jackson was born a poor black boy, but became a rich white woman.” Regardless of having fathered numerous children, many people still question his sexual orientation. In fact, he is has become an almost asexual being. And towards the end of his life, it would seem that he refused to age, not merely outwardly, because of the many plastic surgeries, but rather inwardly; as if he became a psychological Benjamin Button.

The great essayist James Baldwin wrote in the essay “Here Be Dragons” the following:

The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.

All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; the blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt; and sex and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair–to all of which may now be added the bitter need to find a head on which to place the crown of Miss America.

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated–in the main, abominably–because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

Indeed, Michael Jackson became a freak – a liminal being in who we projected “our most profound terrors and desires”; and that’s why we hated him so much. That’s why we loved him so much.

* My thoughts about Michael Jackson’s liminality was spurred on by an article I started writing recently on the similarities in liminal spaces in Samuel Taylor Coleridge epic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Tales of the Black Freighter: Marooned”, the comic-within-a-comic, in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. [Previous posts on Watchmen here and here.]

An Informal Report of my Academic Journey over the Last Year

(Image from John May's The Generalist)

Below is an informal report I wrote for a postgraduate workshop at my Alma Mater, which I was not able to attend. Another attendee read it, and apparently it was well received. Some professors even asked that it be forwarded to them, to my surprise. I guess there is something about such candidness about ones frustrations that's worth sharing . . .

Dear fellow scholars,

As you might know, I’ve accepted a position at an English Department halfway around the world, in the obscurities of the Orient; therefore, my attendance at the postgraduate workshop on the 5th of June is impossible. Nonetheless, I would like to give an informal rendition of my scholarly progress (or lack thereof) in the pages that follow. To take inventory in this way of the past year will most likely be of personal benefit. I hope that such a written account may also somehow be of value to some of you.

Last year, I registered for a PhD in “Algemene literatuur- en taalwetenskap”, with the intention to focus on Creative Writing. (My Master’s degree research also concerned Creative Writing.) My personal proviso for starting with a PhD was that I must be able to do something with it afterwards. The PhD should work for me; and not merely be three, four, five years of philosophising, culminating in a thesis gathering dust in the university library. Not that contributing to one’s science is not a worthy pursuit in itself. However, with no guarantee of future employment at an academic institution in South Africa, a formal academic pursuit must have other practical applications.

I started to read up on characteristics that would probably be necessary for anyone that wishes to be successful in our fast paced and changing world. Two books I want to mention are: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink (2006) and 5 Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner (2008). The former resonated much more with me, although the latter also added value to my contemplation. Both authors are of the opinion, whether directly or indirectly, that the act of storytelling will be a progressively more valuable skill. “The ability to encapsulate, contextualize, and emotionalize has become vastly more important in the Conceptual Age,” writes Pink (2005:104). He links this to giving “meaning” to the world. In less academic style, Bruce Jackson in The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories describes it as follows: “Stories are the way we domesticate the world’s disorder. Facts are incidental” (2007:150). Pink also mentions “Symphony”, which echoes Howard’s “The Synthesizing Mind”; both concepts concern the ability to bring seemingly unrelated ideas together into a sagacious construct. Howard (2008:46) argues that the “ability to knit together information from disparate sources into a coherent whole is vital today”. The creative writer has the ability to bring disparate things together, to create a “coherent narrative” (Howard, 2008:47); for this reason, Creative Writing is a highly relevant pedagogical pursuit.

These arguments, among other reasons, persuaded me that research in Creative Writing could indeed allow my PhD to “work” for me. So began the next (achronological) phase of my journey . . . what exactly will I research?

My special interests were in Creative Writing (pedagogy), Creativity, and the changing world in which text is becoming increasingly more digital – just think of Google’s ambitious endeavour to scan in all existing book titles – also, the interaction of text with other media (images, audio and video). Regarding the latter, Prof. Franci Greyling and Prof. John Gouws suggested that I read up on Intermediality and the study of Rhetoric, respectively. Both of these sciences could prove valuable means for tracking the interaction of text with other media. Another theory I considered is the Meme-metaphor which has become somewhat of a fad of late, to describe pop-phenomena like the viral spread of cultural ideas.

(Note that I’m using the term “text” to refer specifically to the written word and within my sphere of interest, even more specifically to refer to creative texts as pursued in Creative Writing; i.e. novels, short stories, poetry, etc.)

During the first couple of months after my registration I was playing hopscotch with some of the following ideas:

• With people reading increasingly more online, how should creative writers adapt to this new e-text environment?

• Because of multimedia and the Internet, it has become the norm for text to be combined and juxtaposed with other media. What effects do such text-media combinations have on the reading of the text? What skills ought a creative writer have to create such combinations in a successful, creative and cohesive way?

• How ought the pedagogy of Creative Writing change/adapt to stay in step with the requirements of an increasingly digital way of interacting with text, be it in the form of electronic palm readers, e-books, audio-books, online text (blogs?), and other text-media combinations?

Such were the questions that I juggled with. However, when I arrived in Korea the sudden realization of my milieu and geographic location hijacked my thoughts. Shouldn’t I make the most of this opportunity in Korea? Ought I not make use of this unique setting as an occasion for distinctive research? Practically immediately my love for poetry jumped into the limelight. I’ve been reading anthologies of Korean poetry, some in Korean, but mostly with English-translations for some time now and devouring the verses with a great appetite. On occasion I would translate some of these poems into Afrikaans with much satisfaction. Subsequently my academic ponderings shifted to the creative translation of poetry. I’ve been involved with creative translation in the past as part of the South African government’s Lingo-project (http://www.lingo.org.za/). How about doing a thesis on the process of performing creative translations of Korean poetry into Afrikaans? This new idea excited me and for several months I seriously considered it; doing some initial reading on the translation of creative work, for example André Lefevere’s Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint (1955). (If I remember correctly this source was suggested to me by Prof. Hein Viljoen.) Another noteworthy read was an insightful essay by Brother Anthony of Taizé, a scholar known for his translations of Korean poetry into English. I even started to ponder some Korean poets I’d like to look into, for example Mi Dang, Hae In Lee, Ku Sang, Ko Un and Heo Nanseolheon.

Eventually, however, I came to the realization that this research idea is not practical. My grasp of the highly ambiguous Korean language is just too limited to commence such an endeavour. To really do the research justice I would first have to spend at least a year or two officially learning Korean; this does not fit within the time frame of my intended studies. In the meantime I will still continue my informal translation of Korean poetry. Who knows, it may bear fruit in the future.

Finding myself back at the proverbial drawing board I’m admittedly a little frustrated. I’ve resumed my pondering of my initial possible research questions. I’ve also recently found, what I hope will be, a key source with regard to Intermediality. During my initial research on this topic I found hardly any useful sources on Intermediality and Literature. It was no surprise to me, of course, that I wouldn’t find anything on Intermediality and Creative Writing. Nevertheless, my hope was that if I could find a good Literature link, I could still employ the source by means of academic reverse engineering. (When I did my Master’s degree research in Creative Writing I often had to “reverse engineer” literature theory for use in Creative Writing theory.) However, my luck changed for the better and only just a couple of weeks ago I found a prospective source: Literary Intermediality: The Transit of Literature through the Media Circuit (2007), edited by Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi, which I ordered online at a somewhat ridiculous price – nearly R400! Although this book focuses primarily on Literary Intermediality as manifested in cinema, theatre, and MTV, there is a small section devoted to the Internet. I hope that this will be a springboard from which to build my research towards what is still a very vague exploration of the future of Creative Writing and the future of the pedagogy of Creative Writing.

And so, most recently, I thought of a novel idea (or at least a probable title) that might encapsulate many of my initial questions: “Future Books, Future Writers”. Catchy, isn’t it? Except that research on the future, especially a future so closely related to phenomena like the Internet, is highly problematic. By the time my research is done, it would probably be already outdated because of the extreme pace at which new inventions occur and online innovation transpires. Just think of such current occurrences as blogs, Facebook-profiles, online publishing and e-books. While these things are common today, a couple of years ago they were hardly known. A more appropriate title, although less appealing, may be “Changing Books, Changing Writers”. Nonetheless, I’ve lately started searching for material on “future books”. An astute entry to the topic is Sam Vaknin’s essay “The Future of the Book” . I’ve also come across The Institute for the Future of the Book with whom I hope to network. In a pleasant twist of fate the Creative Writing and Graphic Design departments at the Potchefstroom Campus has as their new project “Transgressions and boundaries of the page” – regarding artist’s books. I’ve decided to join this project and work on some kind of digital or multimedia book. My reading, although still somewhat haphazard, will now also possibly include material on the history and development of books, such as:

• Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

• Eliot, Simon, and Jonathan Rose, eds. A Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

• Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery, eds. The Book History Reader. Second ed. London: Routledge, 2006.

• Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery. An Introduction to Book History. London: Routledge, 2005.

from a short list compiled by Prof. John Gouws for the aforementioned project.

This then, dear fellow scholars, has been my journey over the last year – nearly to the day. I registered for a PhD in May 2008. I find myself having come full circle, but hopefully this cycle has not been a downward, but rather, an upward spiral.

Good luck also with your own journeys and may the workshop on Friday be most fruitful.

Sincerely,

Creativity Myths

The following quotations are from R. Keith Sawyer's Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (2006:18-27):

Myth: Creativity Comes from the Unconscious

“...scientists have discovered that creativity is mostly conscious, hard work . . . Rather, in both the sciences and the arts, the most creative innovators also tend to be the most productive.”

“Creativity can be explained without invoking an unconscious muse. Rather than a mysterious unconscious force, the explanation of creativity lies in hard work and everyday mental processes.”

Myth: Children Are More Creative Than Adults

“This myth originated in the 19th century Romantic-era belief that children are more pure, closer to nature, and that society gradually corrupts them as they grow to learn its customs and ways.”

Myth: Creativity Represents the Inner Spirit of the Individual

“Contemporary artists who simply paint or sculpt because they enjoy the process, or artists who just paint images that look cool to them, nonetheless have to come up with a message-oriented explanation to satisfy the market’s demand for an artist’s statement.”

“We now know that you can’t explain creativity as the expression of a person’s inner spirit. Scientists have discovered that explaining creativity requires us to know a lot about the cultures, society, and historical period.”

Myth: Creativity Is a Form of Therapeutic Self-Discovery

“...researchers have discovered that engaging in creativity is one of the peak experiences in a person’s life . . . Some activities that we call creative are indeed therapeutic . . . therapy is not all there is to creativity; we need to go beyond this myth to explain creativity.”

Myth: Creativity Is Spontaneous Inspiration

“The scientific explanation of creativity shows us that formal training and conscious deliberation are essential to creativity. . .”

Myth: Many Creative Works Go Unrecognised in Their Own Time and Are Only Discovered Decades Later

“There are remarkably few examples of works that were ignored during their creator’s lifetime that are now thought to be works of genius.”

Myth: Everyone Is Creative

“The American ideology of democracy is the deep-rooted belief that everyone is equal . . . This ideology leads us to fear making value-laden distinctions, so we tend to believe that everyone is creative . . .”

“...creative works are evaluated . . . fields decide which works are more creative...”

Myth: Creativity Is the Same Thing as Originality

“In the United States, we tend to equate creativity with novelty and originality. But the high value that we place on novelty is not shared universally in all cultures . . . In most cultures, rituals forbid improvisation.”

“There is no such thing as a completely novel work.”

Myth: Fine Art Is More Creative Than Craft

“Our culture is biased toward the fine arts—those creative products that have no function other than pleasure. Craft objects are less worthy; because they serve an everyday function, they’re not purely creative. But this division is culturally and historically relative. Most contemporary high art began as some sort of craft . . .”

“The shift from craft to art happens over and over through history. It’s always a social process, not a result of individual talent alone.”