CeptsForm

Senryu

2010-07-14T07:04:00.008-05:00

If Spring is for Haiku, then Summer for Senryu.

Updated 17 July 2010.

Senryu is new to me, but thanks to my friend, Robert Hanson, comes to my attention. Just as in haiku, senryu is an unrhymed three line poem of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. The difference is that while haiku requires reference to nature, senryu makes an ironic statement stemming from some observation of human nature.

An article in Rafu Shimpo, "The Joy of Senryu (July 12, 2010) comments on the strange neglect of senryu in the U.S. though now a hundred years old in the Japanese-American community. Various examples in Japanese and English translation appear in this article.

I am trying to follow suit.

We rally for food,
whole, healthy, sustainable -
risky business.

An old book argued
tv's eroding effects
in '73.

Our grandson read Time
for three years, now 17,
The Economist.

On Facebook twelve months,
the longest comment exchange
has been on taxes.

In the clouded sky,
no stars break the humid air;
so fireflies will do.

A new library,
bustling, and bursting with print,
dozens at their screens.
____

Copyright 2010 by Roger Sween

For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for specfic index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

The Mad Tea-Party

2010-04-05T08:56:00.004-05:00

A parody freely adapted from chapter 3 of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

(Scene: Alice finds the Hatter and March Hare with Dormouse asleep between them. They sit crowded together near one corner of a very long table set for tea.)

Hare & Hatter: No room! No room!

Alice (sits at the end): There’s plenty of room.

Hare: Have some wine.

Alice (looks around): I don’t see any wine.

Hare: There isn’t any.

Alice: Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it

Hare: It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited.

Alice: Is this your table? It’s laid for a great many more than three.

Hatter: You foreigners always move in.

Alice: What? I’ve never been out of Oxfordshire.

Dormouse (in his sleep): Talk English!

Alice: Exactly so.

Hatter (looks at his watch): What day is it?

Alice: 15 July 1862. Everyone knows that.

Hatter: Wrong! (to Hare): I told you butter would ruin the works of this watch.

Hare (dips watch in tea): I used the best butter.

Alice (looks at watch). It tells the day of the month and not what o’clock it is.

Hatter: Why should it? Does your watch tell the time of day?

Alice: If I had a watch.

Hatter: Just the same as mine.

Alice (politely): I don’t quite understand you.

(Hare pours hot tea on Dormouse’s nose.)

Dormouse (asleep): My remark, too.

Hatter: There’s too much change anyway. We need to go back to the way things were and meant to be.

Alice: As they were when?

Hare: They keep trying to change the Constitution.

Alice: What Constitution?

Hatter: Our rights! Don’t you know?

Alice (recalling school lessons): Certainly. Magna Carta, 1215; the Bill of Rights, 1685. Which time do you want?

Hare: I only wish it were a matter for wishing.

Alice (persisting): But, which?

Hatter: We would keep it 1685 as long as we liked.

Alice: Is that the way you manage time?

Hatter: Not I. It was last March that the Hare went mad.

Hare: He started it, singing in front of the Queen.

‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star!
When you here have gone too far!’

You know the song perhaps?

Alice: I’ve heard something like that.

Hatter: It goes on –

‘Up above the world you fly,
While the tax hits ev’ry guy.’

Dormouse (still sleeping, joins in):

‘Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle ...’

Hatter: I’d hardly finished the first verse, when the Queen bawled, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his head.’

Alice: So savage? I can’t imagine the Queen saying that!

Hare: So every since, it’s been 1685 at 6 o’clock.

Alice: So that’s why so many tea things are out here.

Hatter: That’s it. It’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles and whens.

Alice: So you move around as things are used up. What happens when you come to the beginning again?

Hare: Suppose we change the subject. Tell a story.

Alice: I’m afraid I don’t know one.

Hare & Hatter: Then Dormouse shall! Wake up!

Dormouse (drowsily): I’m awake. I am awake. (clears throat) Once there were three sisters who lived at the bottom of a treacle well.

Hatter: I want a clean cup. Everyone move on one place.

Alice (looks at the place she would take where the Hare has upset the milk jug into his plate): Mr. Hatter, you are the only one to get any advantage out of this move.

Dormouse (drifts off again; mumbles): From the well they learned to draw everything beginning with an “M,” ... muchness ...

Alice: I don’t think -- .

Hatter: Then you shouldn’t talk.

Alice (in disgust, walks off): I’ll never go there again. It was the most foolish tea party I ever was at.

(Hare & Hatter try to put Dormouse into the teapot as the curtain falls.)
____
© Copyright 2010 by Roger Sween.

For a review of Alice's adventures in Wonderland, see Read in 10.

For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for specific index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

Spring Haiku

2010-04-02T09:44:00.016-05:00

Tis the Season for ... Haiku.

Updated 22 May 2010.

Haiku is an old Japanese form of poetry; it's classic period ran through the 15th and 16th centuries. Basho, 1644-1694, regarded as the greatest exemplar of haiku, made the form independent as a stand alone when previously it had been the starting lines of longer forms.

What makes haiku a specific poetic form in the Basho tradition depends upon a few "rules." The poem has three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, references nature, and finishes with a surprise. Not everyone follows these rules, but I think they are essential and challenging to the art. Yet, even I sometimes bend them. Here is one of his famous creations that I translate.

Old pond sleeps alone
until little frog leaps in
and slaps the water.

Haiku is intensely popular to this day in Japan and has a following around the world. U.S. school classes often use haiku because its requirements prompt poetic consciousness among the young, and the limitations of the form make for simplicity and are relatively easy to follow while opening up creativity.

This spring, for the joy of the sudden flood of good weather after a long winter, the elements have prompted a series of haiku that I began in March. And they keep coming.

The season is Lent;
"it's not something lent," you say.
Tell again, what's Lent?

Winter shrinks slowly;
roofs, walks, decks emerge from snow.
March can be fooling.

While shoveling snow,
I spy two squills in bloom,
as promised, hardy.

The white-headed one,
commanding a barren branch,
scours, sharp-eyed, for prey.

The deer-run broke snow;
deep repeats caught spring-bound sun:
green curves snowy lawn.

In this age of pop-
ups, nothing beats the burst of
yellow daffodils.

Unseasonal spring
this April, aready the
windows are open.

Chives are green, Autumn
Joy sedum in green bunches;
peonies start red.

Spring cleanup begins.
Iron oak leaves clog bushes
and they keep falling.

Too long absent last
September, then rains delayed:
so much to do now.

Sifting the compost,
I harvest fungible soil.
Debris still remains.

Azaleas, tulips,
hydrangeas hot house in the
chancel: it's Easter.

Apple trees will bloom,
as always, for Mother's Day,
even if early.

Mrs. Robin in
flying flury bulds her nest
without adhesive.

She builds three nests
against the winds that take it
from under the deck.

Rains will come and give
her black essential mudding,
fixing home so fast.

Spiders often in the
shower: more thirsty species
in search of water.

Crabapple blossoms,
three weeks early downtown, bloomed
here for my birthday.

As never before,
the youthful hawthorn blossoms.
What a spring, this year!

Silvery traces
meander the patio.
Hostas beware - snails!

What is that perfume?
One bush overcomes the landscape -
Korean lilacs.

Time, a relentless
procession, is to me as
spring is to poets.
_____
Copyright 2010 by Roger Sween

For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for specific index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

Read in 10

2010-01-10T10:19:00.015-06:00

Books Read to Finish in Calendar 2010

Updated 22 February 2010

This listing follows the one began in Read in 08 and continued in Read in 09. It lists books in the chronological order I read them during the year. As before, I recount only those titles I read in full.

Ratings given follow the system established for the Red Wing Area Branch (AAUW) Book Club: 5-best; 4-top 20%, 3-middling, 2-less than average, 1-bottom. Other designations appear as BC – Branch Book Club selections. SF – Stratford Festival plays. YA-Title written for teenage or younger readers.

John Hassler, The New Woman (2005). BC Hassler was a Minnesotan through and through, one of the states most popular authors. By popular, I mean he attracted large audiences to his readings. I was fortunate to hear him three times over a 15 year period and to have a conversation with him at the last. He was in charge of those presentations, assured and practice in his delivery, but also modest about his accomplishments. Hassler wrote from a common background as though somewhere in the midst of the state; one series of his novels revolve around the city of Staggerford and its residents. Agatha McGee is one civic leader who appeared as a side figure in Staggerford (1977) where in Hassler's words, "she took over" and went on to star in novels of her own - A Green Journey (1985) and Dear James (1993). Miss McGee returns in this one, eighty-eight in 1998.

A couple of bad turns in Agatha's life move her to leave her big house on the river. She tries and then settles into Sunset Senior Apartments alongside some old friends and many strangers. The novel seems like three short stories knit together - a missing diamond brooch Agatha thinks stolen, a kidnapped child she shelters despite the law and her conscience, the formation of a support group for the depressed - but Hassler claims to have given up short stories. The overall plot unrolls Agatha's internal life, and this is where Hassler excels; he is a master of characterization and stories that follow from character. Agatha, used to being in charge as a teacher and Catholic school principal, exercising her deep respect for tradition and morality even over the resident priest becomes for readers someone more than her apparent past.

Now, I want to read the other novels. 4

*Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers (2007). After Gifts (2004) and Voices (2006), this novel is the third in Le Guin's series Annals of the Western Shore. Though I am a devoted fan of Le Guin, who has long inspired me, these books were unknown to me. I read Powers at once, savoring every word. Le Guin has said that "in art, the best is the standard," and she endeavors to fulfill that aesthetic.

In her novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), Le Guin contrasts different cultures with one another. In Powers, young Gavir experiences one culture after another. Gav and his older sister Sullo had been taken by slavers from their distant home and raised in the household of Arcamand, a patrician family of Etra, a city state, one among many. Their teacher was a slave who passed on his conservative learning and traditional understanding to Gavir so that the Arcas could provide continuing schooling for the children, both of the family and slave. As a house slave, Gavir had opportunity to devote to his learning and relationships within the household.

Suddenly the dark underside of slavery descends upon Gavir. His sister drowns, apparently due to sexual games of the young lords of the town. Overwrought with grief, Gavir wanders away witlessly and would have perished were it not for a barbaric hermit who shelters him. Afterwards Gavir spends time with a band of slaves, then as the seeming favored of Barna's Heart of the Forest. Barna advocates freedom for all, but acts otherwise as the man in control. Gavir moves on once again in quest of his origins, finds his own people, but realizes he is not one of them and seeks once more for a home that satisfies.

Ostensibly a fantasy because of the power of visioning the future, Le Guin uses each vivid setting and complex relationship of characters to illuminate the powers of self-discovery and identification. All this in the most excellent prose. 5, or close to it.

Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923). Cather set many of her books and stories in a western town, actually her childhood home of Red Cloud, NB, the same town with several different names. This time it is Sweet Water, once a booming pioneer terminal, that flourished with immigration and the coming of the railroad connecting Chicago to Denver and points west. The town is in decline, and the principals decline with it.

Neil Herbert, a young man growing up, tells the story. Because he is the Judge's nephew, he has an in with Captain Daniel Forrester and his younger, second wife Marian when they host parties. The Forrester's are the hub of rural society, and Marian is the most gracious of hostesses and women of the town. Neil attends to Mrs. Forrester with innocent awe, marvelling how she endearingly presents herself and takes care of husband, house and hospitality with light touches.

Midway in the story, the bank that Forrester had as a primary investment went bankrupt and the honorable Captain sold his other interests in total to protect all the small depositors from loss. When the Captain has a stroke, Neil does everything he can to care for him and ease the burden on Mrs. Forester. He finds, however, that her attraction to men younger than her husband risks her status in his eyes and her reputation in the community.

Cather weaves the story of individual personality against the backdrop of western expansion that took the hard work and sincerity of the pioneers to make it a civilization. "Lost" gains a double meaning in that Marian Forrester was always lost, a woman of subtle beauty and attractive manners who little achievement of her own. Without education, profession, or wealth of her own, she was necessarily dependent on men of prominence who became devoted to her because she graced their lives.

A short book, but a tragic one. 4, thanks to its writing and the power of suggestion.

Willa Cather, Old Mrs. Harris (1932). Willa Cather intrigues me. After reading A Lost Lady, I needed something more from her and took up a collection of her selected shorter fiction. At an estimated 21,000 words - 75 pages in this showcase - Old Mrs. Harris may be more of a long short story than a novella that one source defines for me as 30,000 words. Characters are few and interrelated neighbors; the action encompasses the events of one summer.

Cather attained the artistry of subtle, but powerful suggestion; and her treatment is what captivates and leaves me pondering how she so lightly tells a story that has more depth than appears on the surface. Her aesthetic, presented in the brief essay "The Novel Démeublé" (unfurnished). She calls her approach "the art of simplification," a creation that does the most with the apt economy of her critically effective language.

Grandma Harris, an elderly woman, bears the household of her daughter Victoria's family. She appears as self-controlled, unassuming and satisfied with next to nothing. When not attending to the family, she retires to her closet of a room, its single rocker and hard cot. She has a dress to wear, two hanging behind a piece of drappery, and one in the wash. That is enough along side the comfort of a clean apron any time she wants it.

The neighboring Rosen's, immigrant European Jews who treasure languages and books and without children of their own, attend to Mrs. Harris and her family, especially the teenage Vickie, who wants to go to college purely for the sake of learning.

Victoria Templeton seems as lost as Marian Forrester; however bothered and disappoint she may be, she lives a life without drudgery, just as Mrs. Harris wants and is able to achieve for her.
The concerns of these people for one another form the story thanks to the solicitous Mrs. Rosen, the yearning Vickie, and the accommodating Mrs. Harris, who knows her own fate and quietly moves on in complete, realistic acceptance of it.

I remain impressed: I give a 4, held from the top because of the obvious moral stated at the end where Cather betrays her own intention.

Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext (2007).
Baxter, a novelist, short story writer and teacher at the University of Minnesota, was unknown to me until the 2008 Minnesota Book Awards. I located his book in Garrison Keilor's bookstore, but it took a vaction to finish reading it. The idea of subtext - what is not said, but implied in one way or another - intrigued me as it had so fully in the Cather selections preious. This collection of essays, a couple published in earlier forms, gives the subject an analytical and impressive sweep.

Not all books on writing fiction work for me, some more than others while some not at all. Still, they attract me. This one really piqued my interest because it covered unknown territory, matters with my ignorance or with which I had disagreement or discomfort. Chiefly, my problem hinges on the handling of conflict. Most dramatic conflict I witness in various contempoary media stems from stupidity or misunderstanding that ought not to stand for real or significant problems. Such facile conflicts fail to interest me; in fact, they repel me. I expect more rationality and intelligence from people than forms the basis of the bulk of story-telling.

Baxter challenges my line of thinking and assumptions beginning with his second essay, "Digging the Subterranean." We all have areas in our thinking and conversation where we do not tread too deeply or for long. I know I dismiss certain things that I could think about more critically. I do so on the grounds that they are too complex for the moment, or too irreconcilable as dilemmas, or too far beyond available or possible evidence. If this situation harbors in me, who has a long history of self-examination, how much more are such refusals the case among people in general and therefore among my characters. This one idea lead me to analyze the whole issue of the relationships of life and fiction, their various domains and possibilities, and to begin to think through my current novel, At Last, I Depart, and its principal character Lady Frivovla of Allonor, afterwards known as the Consort. What are her assumptions, her suppressions?

Baxter references a lot of litterature in behalf of his observations and arguments, some of it high in my estimation - especially Borges, Cather, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Penelope Fitzgerald, Hardy, James, J.F. Powers, and Welty. Others, I have not been able to care for at all, but am willing to give another reading - chiefly Bellow and F.S. Fitzgerald. Many others I do not know at all but hear touted - Auster, Coetzee, DeLillo, Henry Green, Percy, and K.A. Porter. I know my education lacks the fullness it ought to have.

Baxter talks a lot about the importance of conflict as a means of capturing reader interest. The need in fiction, he says, is for the author not only to welcome conflict, but to walk straight into it. I recognize that Baxter states in hyperbole what is standard advice for fiction writers. The issue for me becomes a matter of what constitutes valid and significant conflict and what is conflict alongside other means of captivating reader interest. Much more is involved in reader interest than conflict. Basically we are entranced by language and a desire to know what happens next in the situations and to the characters that attract us. Even when novels are over and seeming resolved at some level, we want to know what happens next.

Medea's conflict consists of utter rage at being jilted so that she justifies Jason's abandonment as grounds for murdering his new woman and then her own children. For me the intrigue is the progressive argument of her justification as the grounds for action, something that has caused me, absorbed in cathartic sympathy with her, to weep. Othello's conflict consists of connived jealousy whereby he murders his faithful wife: I think he should have sought more conconclusive evidence and here feel intense anger for Iago's deception of Othello. Both shall have their due. Tokien's thousand pages hinge on one gigantic conflict of good against outrageous evil, but regardless of this intense fully fanticized plot, I pick up The Lord of the Rings at any point for the sheer pleasure of savoring the excellence of high quality writing.

What literature equals for me is my own aesthetic, not what I others say it is, but what I find it to be. I have more notes from Baxter's relatively short book than I do from many others of greater length and weight. He has informed me in ways that broaden my artistic horizons, yet do not totally convince me. Perhaps I misread him, but Baxter seems to defer to the trends of contemporary culture as current literature reflects them. Although he is excellent at permeating these connections, he gives way to them. He remarks that Hardy spends three pages on the description of Eustacia Vye's face in The Return of the Native, something he reluctantly admires. But we don't do that anymore: it is out of fashion. Did Hardy do it for fashion or effect?

By the by, I also relished what Baxter had to say about the current state of conversation and the lost attention to reading faces. He has been valuable to me, more useful than most books on the rhetoric of fiction. This contribution makes it a 4. Unfortunately, no index.

Olav H. Hauge, The Dream We Carry: selected and last poems (2008).
Hauge, 1908-1994, is a much-loved poet of Norway. Minnesota poets Robert Bly and Robert Hedin have been translating his poems into English over the years and collect those translations here. Bly makes some "improvements" in the alignment of Hauge's lines, but both are remarkably faithful to the originals. Such achievements are due to Hauge's style which is direct and as simple as the modest Norwegian language allows. Most notable, of course, is the wonderful, deeply tonal sound the poems make when read aloud in Norwegian.

Though the anthology is a small collection drawn from seven books and other uncollected poems over Hauge's lifespan, they reflect attention to nature and uncommon reflections stemming from everyday life. In very few words they lines pass from the mundane, pristinely expressed, to greater significance.

"Truth:"Truth is a shy bird/ like the Roc-bird who/ arrives when you don't
expect it,/ sometimes before,/ sometimes after. - page 31

"One Word:" One word/ - one stone/ in a cold river./ One more stone - / I'll need many stones/ if I'm going to get over. - page 49

However, beside the Norwegianness of the poems is Hauge's attention to the wider world, especially classic China.

"To Li Po:" ... didn't you have the whole world, the wind and clouds/ and happinesswhen you were srunk?/ Greater still, Li Po, is/ to master your own heart. - page 17

Mountains are hard to move around./ The roots of oaks pull back,/ who dares to tackle/ the great problems of the world?/ Oxen and elephans hold them on their backs ... - page 117

Many of the poems have become favorites for me. I want more Hauge. I want to regain my ancestral language. If not a 5, it's near to it.

Lewis Carroll, pseud., Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
Surely, I read this one in the past. I've had the Modern Library edition since high school and clearly remember reading "Jabberwocky" (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876) about that time. We saw our grandson, Benjamin, as the White Rabbit in a production of Alice in Wonderland where the director developed the dialogue direct from the novel and the stage directions clued from the narrative. That entertainment inspired me to review Carroll all over again.

Alice is one of those classic works, so popular in origin, and continuous of note for a century and a half that it influences our everyday expressions, and can inform our outlook on matters. Alice is also vague enough as a genre to allow diverse and contradictory interpretations such as the 1960s departure in its allusions to hallucinatory drug experiences relayed by a Oxford lecturer in robust mathematics and logic. Dodgson (Carroll) himself is the subject of much speculation as to his true personality, tantalized by vanished or suppressed volumes and pages of his diary.

I have since my own youth regarded that Alice trades on being a story of and for children, but either the children of Oxford were more adroit than they are at large or the novel is a cipher for adult satire and authorial gibes. I prefer the latter view. Since I finished the last chapters after reading The Art of Subtext (see above), I grew more aware of what is not being said in Alice and I looked for instances of conflict. Does Alice have conflicts? Yes, but they come in the guise of adventures.

Alice has mishaps that give her little anguish or pause as she goes on through a series of them that ultimately constitute a journey, but hardly a quest. None of these mishaps thwart Alice's essential childness; she falls from experience to experience with pluck but without anguish. We might view, as Dodgson did, that this is what children naturally do and constitutes their attraction for adults. He once wrote to Alice Liddell, "For I think a child's first attidude to the world is a simple love for all living things." Unfortunately, I have yet to read Mardin Gardner's The Annotated Alice (the definitive edition, 2000), or would have a wider context for my views.

I enjoyed the book immensely for its playful tone, interplay of miscommunications that rival Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, and exposures of fatuous talk. Alice brims with so much apt writing that I found myself identifying numerous potential epigrams in its text. Here his achievement reminded me of the manner of Baum in his best Oz books, wonderful and wise amusements without a hint of obvious artistry.

At the story's end, Alice's older sister stays outdoors thinking of Alice and dreaming herself as Alice had told her about Wonderland as though it were real. She wishes for her that in after-time, though Alice be grown with children of her own, she would retain "the simple and loving heart of her childhood." So might we all.

How can I do other than to give a 5 for something so exceptional, rich and lasting, to which I know I will return.

*Given to me by Cy Chauvin, who shares my taste in novels and well-knows what I like.
____
For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for specific index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

© Copyright 2010 by Roger Sween.

Read in 09

2010-01-07T11:51:00.009-06:00

This listing follows the one began in Read in 08 and lists books in the chronological order I read them during the year. As before, I recount only those titles I read in full.

Ratings given follow the system established for the Red Wing Area Branch (AAUW) Book Club: 5-best; 4-top 20%, 3-middling, 2-less than average, 1-bottom. Other designations appear as BC – Branch Book Club selections. SF – Stratford Festival plays. YA-Title written for teenage or younger readers.

Will Weaver, Memory Boy (2006). YA After a massive volcanic eruption in which civilization begins to crack, Miles, a teenage boy, and his family leave the Twin Cities in the hope of more security in northern Minnesota. Miles’ past experiences, as recalled, help them on to a safer place. 3

Sandra Dallas, The Persian Pickle Club (1993). BC The Pickles are not your typical quilting club; or, are they? They’ve been meeting so long in Harveyville, Kansas that by the dirty thirties days of the Great Depression, they have some second generation members. Queenie, who tells the story is one, and Rita, her opposite – a sophisticate from Denver – is a newcomer. Rita tries to settle in, but discovered bones of a murdered man divert her attention to solving the crime. Characters of the quilters, however, take prominence and Rita learns far more than she expected. A very delightful book. 4

Cormac MCarthy, The Road (2006). Few books are as gripping and excellently written as this one. The story of a unnamed man and his young son heading south in hopes of escaping an apocalytptic winter takes the breath away by sheer power of suggestive language and the horror of incident after incident. Though the premise is the same as Memory Boy above, McCarthy puts that naive book to shame. One of the best, an absolute 5.

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007). BC Two Afghani women, differing in age by a generation, background and early experience, find their fortunes come together in the brutal days of the Taliban. I grew amazed how Hosseini, with only The Kite Runner to his credit, could master this a compelling story with such command and meaning. The richness of Afghanistan’s history, peoples and poetic culutre comes through alongside the poverty and brutality. 4

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; edited by Vivien Jones, 1996). BC For years I put off reading Austen, whom I judged wrote for women. It took broadcasting her novels to get me going and realize how accomplished, insightful, and satiric she was. I think of Persuasion as her most accomplished novel until I read Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice that also jostle for first place. Her books always seem to be about money or the lack of it and the necessity of marriage for women who are not willing to settle for just anything. But they are all about character of which no two are ever alike. 5, of course.

Avi, Crispin: the cross of lead (2002). YA In the time of Edward III, the high middle ages of 14th century England, Asta’s son, known later as Crispin, finds himself not only orphaned but a public enemy and on the run. Puzzled and afraid, Crispin barely survives on his own until taken under the wing of Bear. This independent and enterprising older man helps him onward to further adventures and confident acceptance of himself. Too much razzle-dazzle for me. 3

Avi, Crispin: at the edge of the world (2006). YA As Crispin and Bear continue their precipitous flight from the feudal powers after them, I thought all would be resolved and Crispin would gain not only ability with his knowledge and self-acceptance, but some restoration of his rightful place in society would follow. Instead, much time is spent in the rescue of the mysterious girl, Troth. Disappointing. 3

Beryl Markham, West with the Night (1983; first published 1942). BC Markham was the first person to fly across the Atlantic, east to west, before Lindberg flew first west to east. We hardly ever hear of her, yet she was famous in her own day. Growing up motherless in Africa where hee father raised horses, she pursued her own education and interests and in mature years wrote of them. That writing is fantastic, vivid, arresting and beautiful. We learn of lion attacks, native wisdom, majestic racehorses, and the awesome grandeur of piloting through the bush. A stunning book, worthy of much greater attention. 5

Karen Cushman, Catherine, called Birdie (1994). Catherine is the spoiled teenage daughter of a feudal lord who does everything she can to avoid being married off to an old baron against her will. She tells her own story by running comments on the calendar’s day by day designation of which saint it remembers. The book is jaunty but often silly. I wished Catherine would get more of a grip on life instead of being saved by a deus ex machina at the end. Though a Newberry Honor Book, I give it a 2.

Karen Cushman, The Midwife’s Apprentice (1995). YA Brat, latter called Beetle, is as feisty as Catherine but slowly becomes more estimable. She begrudges her poor situation but finally by observation and clever initiative takes on more worth. It’s a slow process, but a quick read. This Newberry Medal Book gets a 3 from me.

Karen Cushman, Matilda Bone (2000). YA Matilda is as oblivious of her station as Catherine and as slow to wake up as Beetle, but goes through the same slow progress. The medieval setting, which is why I read these books, comes through here, primarily regarding the primitive and nonsensical practice of medicine. 3, begrudgingly.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Children of Hurin (2007). Tolkien’s son, Christopher, has a lot to do with the restoration of his father’s work in sequencing more fully the legends and tales antecedent to The Lord of the Rings. This story, though appearing sketchily in The Simalrilian and Tales appears here as a novel. It has the ring of Tolkien’s awesome prose and proceeds as continuous high tragedy. I liked the pace and style of it as the unfortunate Turin works through Morgoth’s curse upon him and all his family. 4

Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing (1950). BC This was Lessing’s first novel and the only one I have read. I was surprised how good it is. We know the outcome from the beginning, but we don’t know why. By filling in the great blank of motivation and misunderstanding, Lessing captures our attention and interest into the complex of character, station, aspiration and regret between the Rhodesian farmer, his sorry wife, and the black servant who tends to her. 4

William Shakespeare, Macbeth (ca. 1606; Mowat & Werstine, 1992). SF I had not read Macbeth since senior year in high school nor ever seen it acted. However, we were going to see it at Stratford, and coincidentally the St. Olaf College President, a former English Professor, invited class reunion planners to his seminar on the play. The discussion of the Macbeths and their motivations increased our interest. In this read, Macbeth appeared to quickly fall to temptation while his Lady obsessed over it until her own doom foreshadows his due end. 5

Edmond Rostand, Cyrano [de Bergerac] (1897 ; Burgess, 1998). SF One of my long-time favorites, seen only previously on film and television versions. This more complete script makes greater sense, especially of Roxanne showing up at the battlefront and of Cyrano’s death scene. 5

Jean Racine, Phèdre (1677; Rawlings, 1961). SF Contrary to Euripides’ Hippolytus and Renault’s The Bull from the Sea, where Phaedra otherwise schemes, here Christian conscience wracks the stepmother. We can only understand Racine's drama by knowing the influence of Jansenism on his views. Consequently, because of all the rampant handwringing over Phedre's illicit attraction, I did not care for it as much. 4

Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters (1901; Dunnigan, 1964). SF I must have seen this some years ago because I vaguely remember it. It reminded me of Cherry Orchard in setting and interpersonal dynamics but with a different story line. Chekhov’s technique in these dramas was to unravel an unrelenting drama of stressful changes over time propelled by action that happens off stage. The power of a Chekhov play, though it was never fun to read or watch, grows on you with reflection. 5

Robert Lawson, Mr. Revere and I (1981; 1st published 1953). YA On his famous ride, Paul Revere rode a horse named Scheherazade. At first, she is the very proper British horse of a foppish regimental officer. Through rough circumstances, Scheherazade becomes a member of the Revere family. She tells all; though her prim voice continues, her attitudes change over time as she begins to see the merits of the colonists and their revolution. One of the best YA novels and historical send-ups I have ever read, and very delightful. 5

Edward F. Droge, Your Intelligence Makeover (2005). Droge, who eventually earned a doctorate, began as a poor student. Now he lauds learning and in this book proposes easy steps to demonstrate it. I found the book seriously flawed in concept and execution, starting with the diagnostic tests to gauge areas of strength and weakness. I read it because books of this kind appeal to me, but I cannot recommend it. 2

Burn this Book; edited by Toni Morrison (2009). Intellectual freedom is one of my primary interests, and when I saw this brand new book already remaindered for $4.00, I bought it at once. According to the subtitle eleven “PEN writers speak out on the power of the word.” They may be our shining lights – John Updike, Orhan Pamuk, Nadine Gordimer, etc. – but their contributions – mostly new with some older – are uneven, some with factual errors, some flat, some without much relevance. Considering all he went through with a fatwa on him, Salman Rushdie’s seemed weak. The exception was Russell Banks, “Notes on Literature and Engagement,” who contrasts novels of social influence with novels of insight thanks to authorial identity, a quality not to be sacrificed to public expectation. 3

Michael St. John Parker, The World of Charles Dickens (1999). This is really just a pamphlet, but amazingly informative in a few thousand words and apt illustrations. I think you would have to go to London to buy a copy; I was lucky that a friend made the trip and gave it to us. 4

Daniel G. Amen, Magnificent Mind at Any Age (2008). I read this in preparation for a session on brain research, but Amen has a lot to him. Magnetic resonance imaging has advanced recent brain science by allowing us to see activity inside the skull that we could approach before largely by introspection or behavioral observation. He tells the basis of his research, most of which gets at dysfunctions, but the bulk is solid advice for healthy living, brain development, and continued learning – all with “skills, not pills.” I put a chapter of this book to work in my article “Success.” 4

Sandra Dallas, The Diary of Mattie Spenser (1997). The discovery of a pioneer woman’s diary in Territorial Colorado leads to following her life over her first two years there. Then her aged granddaughter’s perspective gives satisfying context to what happened after. Mattie emerges as a spirited woman with high hopes from marriage and a new life. Hardship follows, but Mattie persists where many of the women and some of the men of her acquaintance do not. Children die; men go wayward, but Mattie survives. Dallas is excellent at character with engaging stories and convincing background. 4

Edmund Cooper, The Overman Culture (1972). Michael Faraday and his classmates live in a contrived world, populated with figures from the past. Not only are the children named after historic figures with Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill their contemporaries, but war with the Germans goes on somewhere outside their shell. Gradually, Michael and his chums determine they are flesh and blood while their parents, teachers and others are “drybones,” entities that cannot bleed. Their discovery of an abandoned library takes them farther on the path to learning the wider context to human existence, but not until their persistence leads to a confrontation is all explained. 3

Edmund Cooper, The Cloud Walker (1973). Humanity has been to the brink of self-inflicted extinction twice before. In the third age of humankind, Kieron struggles against the luddite ethos that endeavors to avoid the same past progression that leads to annihilation. Apprenticed as an artist, Kieron dreams of flying and experiments with kites and balloons. Only protection from his feudal lord keeps him from an inquisition’s imprisonment and worse. And only after Kieron’s tactical advantage of balloon-borne bombs ruin a fleet of pirate invaders does the course of history alter once again. 3

Edmund Cooper, Five to Twelve (1968). Dion Quern, born in 2025, rebels against the order of his world. A quirk of late 20th century feminism and attendant birth control has led not only to twelve female births for every five males, but a shift in power. Women are in charge and that power gives them control of longevity drugs. Dion is caught while burgling a woman’s apartment, but Juno likes his spirit and keeps him on as a sport for sex and then as a contracted partner because she loves him. Dion is never happy about his situation; he falls into plots against the female establishment, and bickers with Juno throughout the novel. Only when he has been brainwashed for all his crimes and without memory of his past does he experience a glimmer of future change. 3

For a further analysis of these three Cooper novels, click on Edmund Cooper.
____
For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for specific index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

© Copyright 2010 by Roger Sween.

Success

2010-01-01T11:59:00.006-06:00

What I Want from My Life

A Matter of Definition
For most of my conscious life, I have wanted to know, to pursue ideas, to achieve something significant and lasting, and to write. All these desires interrelate, weaving together. Whether actual accomplishment followed plagues me. Life satisfies me in its modicum of compromises at far greater measure than imagined in my romantic youth. I have become bourgeois in habit, a likely good citizen, but not with the original creativity once craved to the point of idiosyncrasy.

Neither do I feel I accomplished much in my 40-year profession in library and information services. I know I developed my skills and understanding and used them to give pertinent and reliable public service as a reference librarian and library director as well as learning direction and coaching in librarianship when an undergraduate and graduate instructor and professor. Yet, I always felt myself to be the principal beneficiary of what I experienced and learned.

As a library consultant and grant administrator, I was never in alignment with the prevailing assumptions and practices of my colleagues. Although I thought I played a pivotal role in the development of library services, I now view that nothing from those days lasts in the way I then envisioned it.

As a result, any hope for success has become a matter of personal satisfaction as though I now return to the romantic idea of egoism that had so captivated me when I was a teenager and college student. Ideals still command my attention, and if I am to achieve any measure of success, I must to be faithful to them: the best in art, equality in life, learning as our vocation, the work in life of making the ideal into the real. Thus far in my ideational world, I am not satisfied that I have done my part to further any of these matters.

What remains for me to do in my latter years? I do not care for wealth, fame, notice or recognition. I crave conversation that transcends the phatic but find it rare if not impossible. I seek thinking that is rational, reflective, self-critical and discerning but find it not only rare, self-justifying at best, a slave to emotion at worst, but seemingly smothering amidst the distractions of contemporary life. I find enjoyment and the reassurance of human competence in the endeavors of my creative forbearers and cumulative heritage of the past in the arts, in philosophy and science, in the expansion of knowledge and the ceaseless quest for it, and in the potentials of the human brain and mind.

Success for me is to make the most of my situation and opportunities according to my highest values.

What in Life Is Most Important?
I want to gain understanding and share it.
I want to do something good, worthwhile, and basic.
I want to leave something lasting at the end of my life.

Ten instances when I felt the most competent, confident, connected, and joyous:
Dates are approximate. In areas marked *, I served multiple roles as researcher, consultant, facilitator, author, editor, and publisher.
1. 1968 – Development of a methodology for teaching reference services based upon real questions, a core of 100 most frequently useful resources, and the practice of question negotiation to the accurate and efficient satisfaction of the questioner.
2. 1969 – “Lyman Beecher and the Lane Seminary Controversy,” a research paper submitted in the course on Puritanism in the graduate program on American intellectual history at the University of Iowa.
3. 1980 - Completion of the novel Phaeton Flight, the story of Frederic Hanreid, an information professional, and Prince Henry Cadly (afterwards Henry II) set in early 39th century Loria.
4. 1984 – Completion of the novel The Rodi. Vodar (afterwards Vodarodi I) discovers his unique place in the history of the Seidonese people; he becomes in his early twenties the founder of Loria, 3000.
5.* 1988 – Completion of background and issues papers for the Minnesota Governor’s Pre-White House Conference on Library and Information Services.
6.* 1997 – Development of the criteria and application process for awarding Minnesota technology grants to library systems.
7.* 1998 – Development of the Long Range Plan and application process for federal Library Services and Technology Act funds.
8.* 1999 – Development of the document on the recommended approach to and procedures for the establishment of co-located public and school library services.
9. 2002-2006 – Service as Administrative Assistant to the State Board of the American Association of University Women – Minnesota under two state presidents.
10. 2007 – Completion of the story “Inheritance.” Louisa Enders at 13 years travels with her two very different grandmothers and learns her actual ancestry as an American, the same summer WWI begins. Intended as Chapter 1 of Progress about the life of small town public librarian through the 20th century.

Five people I most admire, and whose traits I aspire to have:
1. William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. No one is superior to Shakespeare in the revealing poetry of language; even his “minor” plays are major to me. He never disappoints but grows with every renewed experience of his work.
2. Gordon Sween, 1911-1980. My father, who led a seemingly ordinary life, has become an exemplar for me due to his self-directed learning, rationality, sense of discipline, family loyalty, and exercise of responsibility.
3. Frederic Bolton, dates unknown. Dr. Bolton was one of my religion professors at St. Olaf College. A student of Reinhold Niebuhr at Princeton, Bolton influenced me with his thoughtful and rigorous approach to Christianity and Christian theology while being honestly critical, but kind and encouraging to a youngster struggling to come to grips with the intellectus quarens fidem (understanding seeking faith) issue.
4. Ursula K. Le Guin, born 1929. No contemporary author has written so elegantly and meaningfully for me and my interests in as consistent and beautifully articulate a fashion as has Le Guin. I rejoice that I once heard her in person when she said in reference to The Dispossessed, “I want everyone arguing and discussing over the meaning of what I wrote,” or words to that effect.
5. Patricia Anne Worringer Sween, born 1939. Patty continually impresses me with her understanding of other people, her generosity, and her evenness of temper in dealing with all whom she encounters.

Ranking of ten value areas:
At my stage of development, 70 years old this year in a life of reflection considering what lasts and what transpires, value areas do not mean what they meant to me at earlier stages. I cannot rank them first to last (1 – 10) appropriate to my current stage and for other various reasons; instead, I group them.
A. Faith in a higher power. This area is by theological definition of ultimate concern, yet faith, being the work of God in us, exists without my wanting, willing, or working for it. Ranking here perpetuates a falsity.
B. The areas harder to attain are all of equal high importance to me: Fulfilling relationships, individual accomplishments, making a difference in the lives of others, and legacy (understood as leaving something significant and lasting).
C. The lesser areas cluster to the bottom.
7. Health I seem to have by virtue of inheritance and caution; that is, I am lucky and careful. I do not obsess over my health and know that I will die, probably after a long time, probably soon.
8. Wealth, since I am comfortable with enough already.
9. Fame I regard as shallow and transitory.
10. Fun I regard as even more shallow and insubstantial in the ultimate scheme of things.

My plans for success in 2010:
I will attend more intentionally to how I spend my time on my primary ambitions. I will track my time and quantify it in regards to a schedule I currently regard as ideal in order to hold myself more accountable in aiming for greater success than I have had and thereby attain my chosen ends.

My ideal schedule of a 16-hour waking day has the following areas in priority order. I will try to sleep eight hours out of every 24 even though that is not often the case.
1. Major writing – 4 hours. This year I will finish the first draft of At Last, I Depart. In this novel, Lady Frivovla of Allonor grows from an innocent devotion to her sense of duty into a self-directing and successful champion of her own life. She becomes in time the consort of Vodarodi II King Loria and the progenitor of all the following monarchs for its ensuing thousand-year history.
2. Study/Pre-writing – 3 hours. This year I will do the work necessary to establish the bases necessary for two controversial equity issues: one is the ministry of same-gender couples in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the other concerns mission-based membership in the American Association of University Women.
3. Reading – 3 hours. I will read to completion more novels and other books than I finished in 2009.
4. Organization – 2 hours. I will gain a “house cleaning” and orderly control of my book collection and other files and prepare for the likeliness of moving to a different dwelling and possibly different city.
5. Miscellaneous – 4 hours. These four hours are the elastic cushion for all the routine and irregular instances of life that one must do or are more difficult to anticipate and control.

Note: I assume that most weekends and holidays fall outside the ideal schedule since these days are more interruptible because they invite both travel and interaction with others, chiefly family.

____
I am indebted to Dr. Daniel G. Amen, Magnificent Mind at Any Age (2008), especially chapter 10, “Make Your Own Miracles,” for guidance in thinking through this issue.

For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for specific index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

© Copyright 2010 by Roger Sween.

History

2009-12-18T12:37:00.006-06:00

My Own & As a Subject of Study

By the time I was a high school sophomore, we had world history. I was then fifteen and discovered that while I loved history, Jimmy Dickinson was probably the only other one in our whole class of sixty people that had the same regard for it that I did. The rest complained that history was boring, difficult, pointless, and stupid. History did not do any good for anyone, they said.

These attitudes surprised me, and I wondered at the vast difference between them and me: I found history exciting, far easier than geometry or almost anything else, pertinent and personal, and altogether enlightening. What made the difference?

If memory serves, I did not differentiate between subjects in my early years. Whatever I read seemed all connected, all aspects of the same mysterious need to know, all feeding the same imagination. Whether myths and legends, Oz books, stories of King Arthur or Robin Hood, biographies of authors, chemists, or explorers, The Book of Knowledge (1949) that Dad bought for us Sween kids, they all collided together in my mind. I think when we left self-contained classrooms, except for music or penmanship, and went to Junior High, discreet subjects emerged in the separated classrooms of seventh grade.

We had Miss Louella Watson for junior high social studies. She seemed old to us, plain and always dressed in blue, but I suppose she was in her fifties then. She could be stern, noted for running the silent detention room all those years. I admired her teaching, especially of American History, even if I never did grasp why Andrew Jackson was her favorite president. He seemed then as now always a roughshod spoiler to me.

She made history live for me and I reveled how different the stories of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were in her class from the few incidents we had heard repeatedly in the elementary years. I remember a test of hers in which she passed out pictures each with a number; we had sheets filled with the corresponding numbers. Besides the appropriate number on our sheet, we identified the content of the picture – proclaiming the Declaration of Independence, Conestoga wagon, panning for gold, or whatever. I think I did very well on that test; at least I enjoyed it.

Study halls were in the library, a mix of all upper grades put together in one room because they did not have a class that hour. With the large number of people, probably 50-60 at a time, we were under the control of the monitor. Chiefly you could not wander until the last 15-20 minutes unless to use the encyclopedias. I was reading books in the Landmark Series in those days, rather introductory biographies and histories, but opening doors for me. After I had read a book, I wanted to check it in the encyclopedia: I would go from Americana to Britannica to Colliers looking up the particular subject, related facts and cross references. When allowed to leave our seats, other dashed for the magazines, and I went to the book stacks.

Mrs. Charlotte Whitney, the school librarian, had been the city’s public librarian when I was a younger child. However, when widowed she went to the University of Minnesota in order to be licensed for the school. Mrs. Lois Palmer succeeded her at the public library. Both these women were friends of my mother and naturally took a close personal interest in me. They were always willing to talk about what I had just read, what I thought, and then recommended related books for me, held books for me, and in the case of the public library obtained interlibrary loan for me although in those days that service was specifically limited to adults. Eventually, I was reading at an adult level and most of my book reading came from the public library or books I bought.

When I look back at it from later years, all that reading caused the turning point in my life. Though I did not realize it at the time, I was learning more from reading than I was from any class. The pivotal book became Gods, Graves and Scholars (1st ed., 1951), a book about the history of archaeology. I had thought to be a scientist, possibly a chemist: Robert Boyle was my hero, and I had written a paper on him for Mr. Duane Armstead in the 7th grade. However reading about the sciences was one glorious thing, actually doing science and math was messy and tedious. Marek’s book helped me think through my real interests so that I gravitated from science to history via the temporary consideration of my life as an archaeologist.

I wanted to be a historian. Of course, I had no idea what a historian did except write histories, but whatever it was, I wanted it. I could not get enough of history. From then onwards, I read almost exclusively histories, especially remote history – the more antique the better – along with a slew of historical novels. Waltari, Schoonover, and Shellabarger were my favorites, but also The Count of Monte Cristo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, War and Peace and other novels with a historical setting.

For fun, I was tracing the ancestry of Queen Elizabeth I, something that I dithered over for several years given that the resources I had were all secondary and limited. Recently, a friend of mine from elementary through college years and after, remembered that in high school I knew the names of all the kings and queens of England from the time of the Norman Conquest to the present, both in order and by their successive relationships. Well, we have our specialties; I could not claim the same affinity for the presidents of the United States. It was not until I had American History from Dr. Erling Jorstad at St. Olaf that I experienced U.S. history as exciting as the days of yore.

About 1955, I had discovered Machiavelli’s The Prince (the Ricci / Vincent edition, 1954, in paperback) available at the local drugstore. This was the first book I read in which someone was doing something with historical knowledge and I began to write simultaneously the novel Frivovla the Well-Attended in which Prince Frivovla reads The Prince and develops a lifelong philosophy of basilaeism (on the duties of monarchy) which she exercises through various episodes of her life.

In 1957, I attended a Luther League assembly in Minneapolis and browsed the books being sold there. I bought Now or Never: some reflections on the meaning of the fullness of time by Walter Charles Schnackenberg, who was then a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran College. This 79 page booklet, selling for 50 cents, was number 4 of volume 1 in The Fullness Series, published by the International Young People’s Luther League. When I look back at it now, I am astounded that in those days, the Evangelical Lutheran Church aimed this kind of literature at teenage readers, despite the advanced concepts and German quotations. I had never read or imagined anything like it.

Schnackenberg warns in his preface that this book covers a difficult topic in a manner that is difficult to accomplish. Nevertheless, “this contribution seeks to lay out some working hypotheses on the approaches to the bastion of meaningful truth; it seeks to provoke discussion of relevant problems among interested Christians; it seeks to furnish for young people, directly or indirectly, a few signposts which will indicate where the battlefield is located, and to point out some weapons of the Christian faith which might be suitable in the struggle against disillusion and frustration as we find it in these times and these places.” Whew! I doubt that I knew at that time what “hypotheses” meant, but my practice for years had been to list every word I did not know and look them up. Besides the vocabulary, I could not guess what all the fuss was about. Weapons? Disillusion? These times?

Schnackenberg gave me a definition of history in the universal sense – all that has happened – and of history in the professional sense – concern with the past of what has happened and its sequence to the present, but not with the future that is outside our knowledge. Qualifications followed: not only is knowledge of history in its universality impossible, but human reduction of history into a subject of study is also necessarily limited. Here comes the part that has stuck with me all these years. History is the interpreted fragment of the discovered fragment of the recorded fragment of the selected fragment of the remembered fragment. Of course, I know now that the remembered fragment is prone to error and partiality, depending on viewpoint.

From that reading, I humbled myself in the face of all history that I took as the study before me and as the universal of all the history of existence that loomed behind me. I did not call history discovery at that time, but daily discovery was my experience. The larger part of Schnackenberg’s task in illuminating the “historical situation” puts history as the sequence in time within its eschatological and Christian contexts. I believe that I accepted that explanation without fully realizing its import, but such an account moved me along to further consideration of the philosophy of history.

Enamored as I was of Nietzsche as a college freshman, my reading of him included The Use and Abuse of History, translated by Adrian Collins (1957). Nietzsche’s contrary views always startled and made grasping them difficult so that I spent a lot of time with him that first year of college, even wrote a long paper on him to inform and resolve my thinking and to practice research reporting based on sources. Even then I was not sure of my own understanding. However, clearly just as in Thus Spake Zarathustra where Nietzsche expects more out of life than the ordinary, in this essay on history, he wants more enlightenment, utility and impact out of history. Nietzsche found the historicism of his day stultifying without transformative value. “Only strong personalities can endure history; the weak are extinguished by it” (1957, p. 32). Living up to Nietzsche’s visions proved quite a challenge.

Next came the call of Hegel’s Reason in History, translated by Robert S. Hartman (1953). By reading Hegel, I came to a fuller understanding of the Nietzschean reaction. Though Hegel declared that we must take history as it is, for him theory and theology overflowed that history and the evolution of history as a process. He failed to engage my attention and thought as Nietzsche had. When I read Hegel’s statement “World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom – a progress whose necessity we have to investigate” (1953, p.24), I thought, Yes, very well; I will continue to investigate. I stopped reading Hegel at that point and began my investigation, continuing unto this day.

My classmates had not stumbled into the adventurous discovery of history as I had. No wonder: textbooks and teachers constituted their exposure to it. I was on the path of intellectual exploration, a never-ending quest. In existential terms, I understood history (universal) as our nature, a nature far more mysterious than could be grasped but the only study worth a lifetime of effort (learning as our profession), always unfolding, always new, refreshed.

Many years later, after I had quit employment, a new Commissioner came to head the Minnesota Department of Education in a Republican administration. She professed a love of history and brought her old history books along with her into office. At that time, history was one of the state curriculum standards under development. As the controversies of what was valid played out in the standards revision, the Commissioner railed against revisionism in history. For her, history was fixed, unarguable and official. Too much Hegel, I thought; not enough Nietzsche. Obviously, she never read Schnackenberg.
____

For more context on my formative reading experiences, click for the post Acquisitions.

For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for those index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

© Copyright 2009 by Roger Sween.

Yargy

2009-11-24T17:22:00.005-06:00

A Humorous Look at Etymology

Yargy, the adjectival of the exclamation “yarg,!” itself a variant of “arg,” “argh,” “aarg,” or “aargh” is an archaism of polyglot origins. Rarely used since the Websterian lexicographic and orthographic reforms of the early 19th century in its American English survivals, its extinction in the rest of the world is sadly remarkable. Regarded by linguistic purists as slang of the lowest socio-economic orders, yargy has an honored and expressive past among the literate and sophisticate of all classes.

Denotatively, yargy refers to a task or event that is tedious, unpleasant or otherwise revolting; i.e., nauseating. Such references are clear in the Middle English gargy from the Norman French gargou, via the Old French gargouille, namely the throat. See gargle, gargyole.[i ] Yargy is readily found in several medieval pieces, particularly in the anonymous Kent and Sussex poets [ii] and in one unpublished fragment of Lady Katharine Swynford:

Ruls in our reye
And roted in the stree,
For wickede wederes
And yargy brokes and brynke... [iii]

That these uses continued down the centuries can be seen in subsequent references in such variant forms as:

At ten o’cock at night the whole cargo of the chamber utensils is flung out of a back window that looks unto the street or lane, and the maid calls “Gardy loo” to the passengers.—Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771)[iv]

Yargy, though of diminshed use generally, enjoys a plentitude of currency among Midwestern descendants of mid-nineteenth century Norwegian immigrants, especially from Valdres and Balestrand areas. The continued use of yarg! and its inflections has been found due to the cognate use in Old Norse of yo argene, the berserker battle cry of the Viking raiders, clearing their throats, expectorating or (says Henrik Lunde Larsson) vomiting on their victims.[v]

In a seminal work, Raji Pouri Bannashari has traced yarg to the proto-Indo European “ghargh,” a hacking cough. His efforts to further link the word to Cro-Magnon speech would have been a linguistic breakthrough, which unfortunately, he did not live to achieve.[vi]

i Cf the monograph of professor Hector de Sainte Genevieve, La Grande Gargouille et Ses Associations dans les Langages Europeens, Paris, 1865.

ii See the fine collection of Sir Reginald Rexroth-Jones, Expletive and Invective References in the Doggerel of the Sudbury Poet and His Circle, 1312-1343, Canterbury, 1912.

iii Ms. D777S77 in the private collection of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Efforts of Dame Angela Potter-Lamely to attribute these lines to Chaucer have not been accepted by other scholars of the Chaucerian canon. See her "Rules in our reye," Drawn & Quarterly, XCVI (October 1948) 312-337.

iv As quoted in The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, based on the original book of Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, revised by Bergen Evans, Ware, Hertfordshire, 1994 reprint of 1970 edition, page 449.

v See "Yarg og Oofta," Papers before the International Conference on Going Berserk, Nordic Council, 1955, 177-212 [Norwegian with English summary].

vi See his Glottal and Epiglottal Interjections among Gothic and Sanskrit Cognates and their Pre-Literate Origins, New Delhi, 1989.
_____

I wrote this spoof in the latter 1980s when our son, Kristofer Sween, asked me if I could find the origin of "yargy." Finding any origin impossible, I made up a “likely” explanation and sent the report to him. Kristofer turned around and shared it at a gathering of his friends who remarked on my information. When I found they had taken it seriously, I afterwards made sure to call it humor.

For retrieval of my posts with greater relevance, logic and precision than Google has yet to provide, see CeptsFormIndex for those index links.

I welcome all comments to blog articles. For personal comments to me, send to rogdesk@charter.net.

© Copyright 2009 by Roger Sween.

Presidents, Politics, Education

2009-11-11T07:51:00.011-06:00

Commentary by Roger Sween (c) Copyright 2009.

Today a view prevails that education is too important to leave to educators. Today, partisanship runs roughshod over most issues so that taking a civil approach to our challenges is a challenge itself. Recently, President Obama’s efforts to address schools collided with partisanship even before the public knew what he would say.

Education is the process by which we learn to learn and thereby make informed choices. Politics is the process by which we make choices in our association with one another. Therefore, education and politics have their foundational link.

At our national birth, the Continental Congress provided for the addition of new states from public lands, and dedicated the 16th section in each township for the support of schools. Subsequent federal interest towards education grew slowly as it did in other social areas.

Our federal government presently has responsibility to ensure equal educational opportunity for all and to improve the quality of that education through support, research and information. Presidents since Eisenhower have kept close to education and our public schools. Presidents have often gone into schools to speak to students. Our 40th and 41st presidents were the first to use television broadcasts beamed directly to schools across the country; their remarks distinctly differ. Transcripts appear in Internet copies.

Ronald Reagan talked before a junior high school audience, gathered in the State Dining Room, November 14, 1988, shortly before leaving office. He talked about the peaceful transfer of power in the recent presidential election, the U.S. as the world’s oldest self-governing democracy, our leadership in the world, and the onset of technological change. He urged students “that the most important thing you can do is to ground yourself in the ideas and values of the American Revolution.” He invoked God as the helper in our foundation, described the Founders as the descendants of the Pilgrims, and extolled the values of faith and family.

Except to refer to American Education Week, the words education and learning do not appear in Reagan’s remarks. He took ten questions on such topics as the war on drugs, his accomplishments, the federal deficit and taxes, minority educational opportunities, and gun control. These exchanges took twice as long as his remarks. Judge for yourself whether his answers are partisan.

George Herbert Walker Bush talked from a junior high school classroom in DC, October 10, 1991, near the end of his third year in office. He refers to the simultaneous release of the National Goals Report, a report card on current levels of student achievement. He challenged, “Education matters, and what you do today, and what you don’t do can change your future. ... Work harder, learn more, revolutionize American education. ... No excuses.” He referred to their teacher as an exemplar of study and success and pointed out successful students in their school.

In these prior occurrences, administrators and teachers likely made choices whether to invite the presidents into their schools. Such is the nature of educational decisions. We do not know whether non-educational influences affected those decisions. In the present case, we do know. Today as compared to eighteen years ago, it is easy via the Internet to whip up opposition when some partisan does not want someone else heard.

Unfortunately, some school administrators now play it safe, trying to avoid a “political football.” What have they to fear but being hassled? Do they not realize that the First Amendment is on their side? Do they not understand the Constitutional guarantees whereby students have access to free speech. Instead, they cautiously screen whether the potentially offending speech needs to be accepted, redacted, or ignored. Hooray for those who seize the teachable moment and stand behind it!

What do students learn about this approach to information? We must fear information, especially when disagreeable. We are not to make up our own minds based upon criteria that tests information. Authority is a better route to knowledge than thinking and learning for oneself after hearing, reflecting, discussing and deciding.

Let us be glad when parents are so concerned about what their children might receive outside the home that they want to know what that message is. Here is a vast improvement over parents who surrender their children to television or some other techno distraction. Certainly, parents have this right to have their concerns met. Minnesota Statutes protect the right by specifically allowing parents to opt their children out of curriculum components for some other agreeable substitute.

More commendable are those parents who realize that at some nearby point their children go into the world of give and take. Such parents have led their children in self-reliant thinking, the desire to know, and the ability to stand up for their ideas and beliefs.

By this means, the public enjoyment of freedom of speech does not dwindle before the wishes of some who are bothered by the same opportunity and need to deny it to others.

This commentary, slightly revised from the original, first appeared in the Red Wing Republican Eagle, 10 September 2009, page 4.

Roger Sween is a past president of the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education and of the Minnesota Coalition for Intellectual Freedom. He writes about ideas on CeptsForm and other companion blogs.

Equity Issue

2009-06-19T13:37:00.006-05:00

The Equity Issue & AAUW's Membership

I am a member of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), an organization that prides itself on learning, the study of issues, and civil discussion. Membership is currently putting these values to the test as it prepares to engage at its national convention in a full scale revision of its operating bylaws. Bylaws revision has come to us after the previous convention in 2007 voted overwhelmingly to restructure the organization and charge the Bylaws Committee to develop bylaws to carry out such restructuring.

After more than a year of work, publication of the bylaws and supporting material has opened considerable explanation, discussion and controversy. At the start, members have differed chiefly over a change in membership eligibility. What follows is one example of this interchange.

On April 27, 2009, Nancy Shoemaker of North Carolina informed me that she had seen an opposition piece dealing with the membership question on the blog Herban Sprawl. I decided to look at it and then to write a response. That piece follows.

What AAUW Is About
Thanks so much for raising these questions. I am grateful for every avenue to discuss them.
I am one of the people who joined AAUW out of attention to its aims, not because of any need to recognize my academic achievements. That was 20 years ago when AAUW changed membership eligibility to admit men. Since then, I have steeped myself in AAUW. I became the first male president of an AAUW branch and held other branch offices. I attended every state convention since 1989, including this last weekend. I served on state committees and under two state presidents as administrative assistant, a job broader than it sounds.

Consequently, I also became involved at the national level, attending association conventions from Providence (2003) onwards. I happen to be from a branch and state that for several years has worked for a more inclusive membership. In fact, our branch generated the bylaws amendment, further supported by AAUW Minnesota, to extend membership to those who have an associate or equivalent degree and AAUW passed in 2005.

I am now serving my fourth and final year on the AAUW Bylaws Committee, the group that revised the currently proposed bylaws for our restructured organization. We did as charged by the delegates at the 2007 convention to prepare bylaws for the restructured organization beginning July 2009. Many areas required action, but membership issues that have been under discussion for several years, attract the most controversy.

We are making changes for our organization in the 21st century. Other national organizations are doing the same. As the Bylaws Committee researched restructuring, we found lots of eagerness for information about positive changes, but few actual changes being made at the time except at the directorial level. The results of extensive member input in AAUW’s strategic planning process showed demand for a changed organization that will be leaner, efficient, and flexible, and up-to-date.

You are right that membership eligibility is an idea. I disagree that it is a bad idea, and I am not sure that the discussion of it is raging. Rage is a passionate, violent or insane anger, hardly a term that goes along with discussion. My experience or observation is that the discussion has become emotional because change is an emotional experience. Arguments pro the change and pro not making the change come from our understanding and our perspective. As we discuss, our shared aim is to widen our perspective and deepen our understanding so that we see the issue on mutual terms.

Membership eligibility is an integral part of who we are as an association. We come together in any association – family, church, a democracy, or whatever – for mutual benefit and benefit beyond our group. It is never exclusively about a person individually but about our togetherness. For AAUW and its bylaws, the membership question, as with all the rest of the bylaws proposals, stems from how we see our see our mission and the possible ways to achieve it. That mission, restated in our bylaws as purpose, is “AAUW advances equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, philanthropy and research.” In short, as we say, “Equity is still an issue.”

AAUW began in 1881 with a few college graduate women as a means to get together, support one another, and do things. Soon the newly organized group was doing projects that affected the provision of equal educational opportunity, raising funds, doing research, and granting money. They recruited new members, but at first only those members who graduated from colleges and universities that met AAUW’s criteria for provision of educational opportunities equal to men. In that specific regard, AAUW has long ago achieved one of its original aims. All of the activities begun by our association have evolved and expanded over the years.

Membership eligibility is one of our comprehensive bylaws changes, proposed chiefly to bring our membership in line with our mission. If our mission is equity, then our membership ought to be all those who support equity. Will this radically change membership? Not likely, but it could. Here are some reasons:

1. Who do we want to associate with? We want to associate with anyone who wants to work for equity for women and girls and in the manner we have traditionally done and by the activities on which we focus: advocacy, education, philanthropy, and research.

2. What kind of person is it that would join such an organization? Our associational mission is likely more demanding and long-range than many organizations. Potential members are those who know and understand the values of equity, that is equality of opportunity and equality in treatment regardless of gender, and thereby accept what it takes to achieve the aim. They will commit because they understand. Such people are educated, formally or informally, to be learners and thereby can grasp what the organization is about. Learners know their own limits and the necessity to gain new knowledge and understanding for the challenges ahead.

3. How do such people come to AAUW? We invite them, encourage them, recruit them. We explain our mission. Often we recruit those we know best, those of our own circles. When we meet new people, we may be hesitant or embarrassed to ask about their degree status, and so we never get to the invitation stage. Eligibility based on mission removes that hurdle we have placed on ourselves. We will free ourselves to invite people when we have conversational clues about their interests, understandings, and willingness, not their degrees. Since a third of US adult women have degrees – about 60 million of them – our chances of gaining more degreed women is quite good.

4. What will membership based on mission do for us? As an organization we will live its mission and gain a new recognition. We champion equity and we regard others as deserving of equitable treatment regardless of their status. Others will see us as appreciative of every member for their contributions whatever they may be. We will have greater opportunity to work with those who share our aims, close at hand, rather than out there waiting to get it. Others will see us as extending the value of joining in the company of those who are breaking the barriers to social and economic equity for girls, women and their families.

Yes, AAUW is about education, as is our tradition. But education is understood in the bylaws, not as a pathway to membership, but a pathway to equity. We educate ourselves, we work for the education of others. If a degree was the only equivalence of education and having a degree brought all by itself both equity and a 60 million member AAUW organization, then we would be talking about another matter. Unfortunately, the degree by itself does not perform in so automatic a fashion. More is needed and working towards mission becomes the means to fulfill that need.

The Herban Sprawl Reply [herbansprawl@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 3:43 PM
To: rogdesk@charter.net
Subject: Re: Herban Sprawl comment

Roger,

I have a policy that I do not edit comments, except for spelling and grammar. Yours is good, but it is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. If you can send me a comment that is a pithy 50 words or less, I'm happy to post it. I'm not soliciting long explanations. This is not an AAUW site. This is a woman's blog that is quite personal, highly opinionated and, from time to time, somewhat serious. If you can live with an abbreviated comment, then please do that for me.

If you doubt that this is a raging discussion, then you aren't listening. There are women in some states who will not renew their memberships if this change goes through. For myself, I think the
equity thing has gotten to be more important than the original intent of an organization for college-educated women to come together for mutual intellectual benefit and sociability. That's the reason I joined. That men are allowed to join doesn't bother me, but it wouldn't have been a priority for me had I been a member when that was decided.

Anyway, please feel free to resubmit something more appropriate as a brief comment.

The Herban Sprawler

Reflection and Response
Clearly I had held the wrong assumption. It seemed to me that when someone publicly raised a question that is a subject of controversy, they would want information on the topic. I troubled myself that I could legitimately condense what I had already said in a summary fashion into only fifty words. I therefore backed out as politely as I could.

From: Roger Sween [rogdesk@charter.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 11:47 AM
To: 'herbansprawl@yahoo.com'
Subject: RE: Herban Sprawl comment

Now that I have read the front end of your blog, I see that I missed completely the warning on size.

Sorry, but I assumed after reading the one portion that you were inviting discussion which to me means fullness.

Thank you for the invitation to reply with 50 words. I have mulled this for a day and come to the conclusion that my best approach is to treat the “Membership Issue” on my own blog where I can handle the complexity and length and keep it up to date.

My best to your endeavors.

--Roger

Index Links

2009-03-03T07:01:00.002-06:00

For the up-to-date index to all blog contents on CeptsForm and companion blogs - CeptsForm Library, Concept Reviews, and Loria Series - go to CeptsFormIndex.

The Big IDea

2009-02-28T13:50:00.007-06:00

Whose Intelligence? Whose Design?

Polls are showing large or majority preference for the teaching of creationism or its current iteration, “intelligent design,” alongside the theory of evolution. However good this proposal, problems remain. Given that the presumption on teaching intends the public schools, the first question becomes, where in the curricula?

Popular understanding sees creationism (the act of God as creator) as the explanation for the natural order. Creationism accepts that species have always existed as they are at present and that the Biblical record is inerrant and sufficient on the subject. Intelligent design offers that though it took ages to get to the present state of existence, current species are too complex to be explainable by the accidents of adaptation and natural selection. This complexity requires, therefore, the originating agency of intelligence at work in the universe. Creationists and design theorists do not necessarily agree on the issue.

Likely, the proponents of side by side teaching would like these subjects taught in science classes. To do this requires the application of scientific principles to the discussion. Science is based on theories that must explain existing observation and data and be subject to publicly verifiable tests of evidence, experiment, prediction and disconfirmation. Creationism and intelligent design cannot hold up to scientific requirements because they argue from revelatory authority and conjectural inference that do not account for all the evidence except in dismissive ways. Put the duo to the test in science classes, and they would not hold up. Do their proponents want that? Public school science classes are inappropriate venues for topics that are not scientific. Of course, we could radically alter the basis of what constitutes science.

Another possibility for teaching creationism and design theory is in some social studies or history class where students explore the function and effect of ideas in civilization. This approach is certainly preferable to science classes, because here the particular requirements of science give way to how ideas stand and have stood through time on their own. Such ideas do not have to be valid, just widely and long held. Ideas of a Creator or of a Design Agent are of long standing, and here the tests are ones of reason and the rules of logic while the evidence is the effect or consequence that such ideas have in practice. Unfortunately, since the enlightenment period, these ideas have not fared well under examination.

Bishop Butler in The Analogy of Religion (1736) casts doubt on the assumption that the God known through nature can necessarily be the same God known through revelation. David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (posthumous, 1779) questions how things in the world can be comparable to the world as a whole; logic stretches beyond its bounds when one of the things to be compared is beyond the world. Immanuel Kant found in The Critique of Pure Reason (2nd ed., 1787) that the argument cannot lead to a theologically significant conclusion about God since the attributes of God are beyond causation. These are some of the major intellectual difficulties to overcome. Do the proponents of creationism and design want to come up against such critiques where they would not always fare well? Nevertheless, this approach to the origin alternatives seems a welcome way to explore the character and roots of modernity. Of course, we could otherwise radically alter the basis of what constitutes logic and reason.

Perhaps, the best place to teach these various views is in a world religions class since creationism and design agency are basically religious ideas if not phenomenological ones. Sadly, few schools have world religion classes, but this issue might be just the motivation our educational system needs to make comparative religion more widespread. Here tests for relevancy, coherence and consistency exist, but on the surface anyone’s claim to revelatory authority is potentially as good as anyone else’s claim. Creationism and intelligent design (to the extent it is religious) would have a level playing field. Put them alongside the variants in creation mythology from all times and all places and let them rub shoulders with the creation stories in Animism, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Native American beliefs, Islam and whatever others are out there. Presumably creationists and design theorists would welcome this approach since one of the talking points for alongside studies is that it is good to consider alternative ideas.

Further, this approach also encompasses the varieties of Christian doctrine and teaching. Encounter a little Martin Luther or others among the reformers and soon discover that one of their reforms was to clear away the dominance of Aristotle (Metaphysics, Physics and Ethics) and the scholastics (Peter Lombard’s Sentences) from medieval theology and get to the scriptural root of the faith. They taught that we don’t need argument to find God; rather, God finds us through the intervention of the Holy Spirit. We do not see God because we first find a creator; rather, through God’s gracious action, the divine finds us, and therefore we see God as the providential author of all things. This alternative takes the security of faith away from dependency on good argument for, instead, faith in faith alone. What a happy resolution exists amid the whole confrontation between created nature and its evolution!

Because wide availability of religion courses remains unlikely, school children and their parents can pursue the side by side examination through study and reading. Good and wide reading sets up a useful dialogue within oneself, however neglected that process may be in practice. Where Darwin is the target, how many opponents have read his books and those of his successors? How many proponents have read them?

Alas, whenever the common aim is to prove the credibility of creationism and intelligent design against either science, reasonable thought, or sound belief, these ideas will always have a tough time. What merit creationism and design theory may have, they must win in the professional areas among scientists, philosophers and theologians before they become welcome and widespread subject matter in public schools.

When ideas cannot win out in the long run, they have to be propelled by political force or unexamined indoctrination. That, too, is an option, but certainly not a happy one in a democracy where harmless actions are to be the result of self-examination, scrupulous knowledge and not wish fulfillment.
_____
Roger Sween advocates the wary examination of received ideas by rigorous exploration of our cultural heritage through continuous, self-directed learning. For twenty years he repesented the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education on the Board of the Minnesota Coalition for Intellectual Freedom and maintains a large library to support his research and writing, a library that ‘has something to offend everyone.’

© 2005, 2009 by Roger Sween.

First published in The Carp #11 (2005), and here slightly revised, the article was written at a time when Intelligent Design was a strong force and even the President of the United States was saying school children should be allowed to consider the merits of the idea along side biological evolution in science classes. Though the ID proponents promised not to go away when they lost a court case, mass publicity attendant on them has disintegrated. Nevertheless, the ID and similar arguments on the appearance of species will continue to face the same arguments perilous to them as outlined above.

I invite substantive comment on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.

Bill Holm

2009-02-28T13:13:00.005-06:00

I’ve never been to Minneota, Minnesota, but somehow that town has intruded on my life.

My sixth grade teacher (1951-1952) was a young woman, Miss Matthews, whose hometown happened to be Minneota. She liked to travel a lot and sometimes told stories about being in places like the east coast where people in all innocence asked her if we were still having trouble with the Indian wars. When she told them she was from Minneota, Minnesota, they laughed; the name itself sounded ridiculous. I do not remember many specifics of the sixth grade, but that is one of them.

Notice of Minneota went by the wayside over the years, and it was not until around 1970 and living in Platteville Wisconsin that I met another Minneotan. Judy Megorden, our associate pastor’s wife, was also from Minneota. We and the Megordens got to be very good friends. Still Minneota in itself remained a remote, unknown place.

More time went by and I was visiting my close college friend, Rolf Erickson, in Evanston. He was a librarian at Northwestern University, and I often stayed with him when the American Library Association met in Chicago. Rolf had a huge battery of friends, partially social and partially from his extensive endeavors on behalf of Norwegian-American studies. On that occasion, we were invited to dinner with some of his friends and acquaintances, three of whom were editors at Scott-Foresman Publishing Company. In the course of dinner conversation, the host trotted out a magazine – either Atlantic or Harpers – and proceeded to read aloud the story or article about life in a small town, Minneota, and its characters. The editor was from there, as was the author, someone named Bill Holm.

The hilarity of the piece made two things clear. Bill Holm was a gifted writer who made the seemingly mundane come alive. A tiny town of a thousand or fewer, like Minneota, had as much to offer as New York City, however different they may be in particulars. I kick myself now that I did not follow-up on the spot.

More years flow by. In the fall of 1988, the Minnesota Library Association was meeting in Rochester. While I was involved in the session “How Do Librarians Lead?” the Reader’s Advisory Round Table sponsored “Meet the Author” with Bill Holm, who talked about his new book, a collection of essays called Prairie Days. I had to miss him. However, as some of us ate lunch together, Tom Scott, Director of Plum Creek Regional Library System, called Bill Holm to come over and eat with us. Not only did Plum Creek encompass Minneota in its region, but Tom Scott was a great promoter of Minnesota literature and had involved Bill Holm in some of the region’s program offerings.

So here was Bill Holm in the flesh, over six feet tall and impressively big, with a resonant voice and quick to give his views. In minutes he had a book out and was thumping it at is. “You must read this book,” he championed, and began reading us a section that was truly magnetic. The book was The Cape Ann, by Faith Sullivan, who at the time lived in Los Angeles, where her husband was a critic for the Times. Holmes may have known her from the Sullivans’ earlier years in Minnesota to which they would shortly thereafter return. I had now witnessed Bill Holm at his irrepressible best; or, so I thought.

Bill Holm, split his writing time with teaching at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota. SWSU had been founded in the latter years of my college career, just 30 miles down the road from my hometown. I was familiar with Marshall thanks to my uncle Odin Berge and his family who lived there most of the years I was growing up. If I had been older and had my MALS by then, I would have tried to get a library job there. But I was soon elsewhere.

Bill Holm had taught a year in China, 1986-1987, something I did not know until I heard him speak at a meeting of the Minnesota Association of Library Friends in 1989. He had a book coming out on his China experience and his talk was a wondrous mixture of the depth of Chinese culture, its intrinsic difference from our own, and the repression of ideas that the government held over everyday life. At one point, he even smuggled ancient Chinese classics from Singapore into China for his students. When I returned to my job at the state library agency, my first self-assigned task was to seek the possibility of getting Holm’s talk published by our office. “Book Smuggling” came out in Minnesota Libraries.

By 1989, I had become involved in the Minnesota Book Awards. After the Awards second year’s program, that fall, the committee decided it would work best to hold the event in the spring, and annually thereafter. Among the 1989-1990 nominees in the Biography category was Holm’s book Coming Home Crazy: an alphabet of China essays. The book received the award.
In our copy of the book, he autographed – “For Pat Sween and Roger too! Best regards from Minneota, Bill Holm.” I was now a full-fledged Bill Holm fan, but more was still to come.

Bill Holm was coming to Red Wing for a performance at the Sheldon Auditorium, and the worry of the organizers was the challenge of filling the 400-seat theater. I volunteered to help popularize the event which including writing an encouraging letter to the Republican Eagle that promised an event not to be missed. The place was packed, certainly due to the momentum Holm already gained in his career from appearing on Prairie Home Companion and other Minnesota Public Radio Spots. His torrent of fans swarmed in from all along the coulees of the Mississippi River Valley. And the show was a non-stop delight.

Bill Holm as a one-man show came on full force. He read his poetry and some choice poems of other poets. He told stories and anecdotes. At times, he harangued the audience over politics, but jovially or with irony, always with the staying suggestion that we could be better than we are. He sang. And he played the grand piano on stage with pieces ranging from J.S. Bach to jazz. I thought that though Minnesota is well-blessed with poets, and Robert Bly has the regard of the nation, likely no other Minnesota poet is as loved and popular as Bill Holm.

Later in the season when the Friends of the Red Wing Public Library wanted to start a book discussion group, I volunteered to facilitate a discussion of Coming Home Crazy. Scarcely a dozen people came, all women if I remember correctly. I compared this hardy core with the packed house at the Sheldon and thought of Holm’s view that we have too much entertainment and not enough enlightenment.

I stopped in front of my house and looked at it for a minute. Five bedrooms empty for a year, all the pianos, furniture, appliances unused. Twenty Chinese could have lived there, grown all their vegetables in the half acre of ground behind the house. My yard was bigger and more fertile than a great many Chinese farms. They would have raised a pig and a handful of chickens and fished the Yellow Medicine River clean of bullheads. The books would have been dog-eared and the pianos in need of tuning. They would have eaten the burdock that I poison year after year, and beaten the birds' time to get the mulberries for themselves. My hand-carved wooden chess set would be finger-marked from game after game. Yellow Medicine County, that I had just dirven through to get here, would be populated not by a few thousand farmers going broke and sinking into despair but by a million thriving inhabitants, all eating better than they ever had before. I blinked my eyes. -- Coming Home Crazy, © 1990, p.243.

In 1997, Holm received his second Minnesota Book Award for The Heart May Be Filled Anywhere in the World: Minneota, Minnesota, which also received that night the John R. Flanagan Award for contributions to the literature of the Midwest. He commented in his acceptance how he appreciated living in a state where the citizens held books, reading and poetry in such high regard. Even politicians did, he said, as he mentioned in particular, former Governor Elmer Andersen, a noted and generous collector, and former Senator Eugene McCarthy, a respected poet. After the tenth Awards program in 1998, I discontinued my association with the Minnesota Book Awards. Other work had overcome me, and I had begun to plan and prepare for the day I would leave employment in 2000.

That did not mean that I lost all contact with the Minnesota community of the book, as we fondly called ourselves. Besides, I did see Bill Holm one final time.

The state convention of the American Association of University Women met in Willmar in April of 2007. The evening entertainment featured Bill Holm, a program that was open to the public, piano and all. He exuded the usual energy, but seemed to be suffering from a cold. He looked flushed and sweaty. The program was necessarily shorter than that glorious night at the Sheldon had been, but he ran through his usual shtick with the addition of tales related to his ancestral home, Iceland, where he had purchased a house on the island’s northern edge. I remain amazed about that evening in the number of people he knew in the audience and with whom he bantered by calling to them by name.

I always thought that Bill Holm gave himself to life more recklessly than I ever would or could. We may amplify our lifes through the lives of others, but especially poets and other artists. I worried that he did not take care of himself as he in so revelatory a fashion leaped into the full flight of daily experience. I knew that he had heart trouble. Nevertheless, it was a shocking surprise when I learned yesterday as I drove back to Red Wing from Owatonna that upon a return from performing in Arizona, he had died on Wednesday, 26 February 2009, only 65 years old.

Once, I had seen Bill Holm at two events within one week. When he saw me in the audience at the second, he said, “Roger, what are you doing here? Haven’t you had enough?”

“I’m a Bill Holm groupie,” I said. He was not enough for me.

The Boxelder Bug Prays

I want so little
For so little time,
A south window,
A wall to climb,
The smell of coffee,
A radio knob,
Nothing to eat,
Nothing to rob,
Not love, not power,
Not even a penny.
Forgive me only
For being so many.
--Boxelder Bug Variations, © 1985, page 10.
_____
© 2009 by Roger Sween.

I invite substantive comment on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.

Anniversary

2009-02-25T07:30:00.003-06:00

One day at a time, they say,
Is how you get by;
But I, you know, look ahead
In years, decades, the end of
The century or millennium
To the new generation.

Now that we're older,
With experience on our bones,
I thought how fast those past
Years went by,
And what seemed so lengthy
Waiting for the treats of time
Has telescoped from this vista
To flashes of focus.

The future is always ours,
The past, too,
One to shape, the other to savor.
The hard part, my dear,
Is to live the present full
In seed, flower, and fruit
As though we are magicians
Of the everlasting now,
Or, at least, upon occasion
Conscious of the moments
That unfold in these little spaces
Between history and promise
Continuously.
___
© 2009 by Roger Sween.

I wrote this poem some years ago for our wedding anniversary, another offering on time, not previously published.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.

Tempora Labuntur

2009-02-24T07:36:00.005-06:00

Remember watery Kronos, that second-generation god,
a titan who devoured all his children, thus all of us,
at last dethroned by his sister-wife, Rhea, our mother.
She gave him a swaddled stone to swallow, not Zeus.
Him she hid until the deposition of one tyrant by another.

Thus the times were born, as antique ancestors say,
and the Ancient of Days became Old Father Time,
cloaked as fondly paternal, no longer voracious.
Bring on the Saturnalia! Each spent year, reborn,
becomes the next year’s lease. So goes the lie.
Tempora labuntur: The times, they slide away.

In Sumer, two millennia gone before the Hellenes
had sense to name themselves and spin creation stories,
some wide-eyed scribes found comfort in the cyclical.
Does not the horizon’s circle surround me, and starry figures
process round to begin again each year upon their start?
Sumer is dust; yet I, as though become one of them, adore
that circle the Sumerians segmented into sixty parts times six.
Tempora labuntur: The times, they slide away.

Sixty-minute clocks tame time to clicks and blinks,
but we malcontents zoned the earth, established times standard,
and fool ourselves with saving time and killing time.
As all you slaves, I pretend mastery over that shadow god,
King Kronos, at my side, always at the high noontide of now.
Calendars, schedules, almanacs, every time-mangling deception
dupes me into believing I superintend temporality by these tools.
Rather, revengeful time obsesses me even as Bartlett amply shows.
Tempora labuntur: The times, they slide away.

What lies beyond the slinky toy of time, the ends of which
stretch inexorably backward, onward without discoverable horizons?
Have I not for too long tended fitfully to a time
that fulfills only its own tendency?
Tempora labuntur: The times, they slide away.

I am become Tantalus, racked between history and mystery.
Time’s plethoric minutia dangle teasingly always beyond my grasp,
condemning me to never gather even the Stoic’s fruited truth?
While at my feet, nothing endures but the rush of riverine duration.
Tempora labuntur: The times, they slide away.
____
© 2008, 2009 by Roger Sween.

For some inward reason, most of my poems deal with time, and Tempora Labuntur is the most deliberate of them. Dwelling on the common expression, "time flies," when traced to its source, I found another meaning to tempora labuntur in Ovid’s Fasti (VI, 771-773), an extended poem on the holidays of the Roman calendar. Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis, et fugiunt freno non remorante dies: The times slide away as we grow old with silent years; without a restraining bridle, the days escape.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made to my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.

Learn Up Close

2009-02-24T07:01:00.003-06:00

We learn where we are.

Distance learning as an expression is a misnomer and by those words faulty in concept. Learning takes place immediate to learners, not distant from them. What the expression actually intends and ought to state instead is, learning at a distance from the originating resource.

In reality, “learning at a distance” has existed since the dawn of history when scribes first created writing and sent written knowledge down the street, over land and over sea. We can study the thinking of the pre-Socratics, dead for more than 2500 years and living then thousands of miles away. Contrary to some bit of techno-prejudice, we have not thought all these years of that study in its reach beyond time and space as “distance learning,” merely as learning.

The expression “distance learning” is one more insidiously pervasive example that the institutionalized dispenser of education whether school, teacher or other agency is superior to the individual learner without whom no learning is possible. A more exact term is distance education; that is, educational content provided to remote but connected learners by using some form of technology.

Distance education is the terminology used by such reference sources as the online EBSCO MegaFILE to article texts on the subject – 2,778 of them as of this date. The Library of Congress and all the world’s libraries that follow LC’s thesaurus of subject headings as a standard also employ distance education as the established term. You can Google “distance learning” in Wikipedia and the article you turn up is headed “distance education,” brought to you by automatic referral from the common, but flawed misnomer. For a recent update, see the text Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Foundations of Distance Education (4th ed., 2009).

No doubt, “distance learning” is amok in current popular and professional use. One professional organization, “if your work involves helping people learn wherever they may be,” is United States Distance Learning Association. The Center for Distance Learning, affiliated with the City Colleges of Chicago offers 90 courses in a wide range of disciplines. The Center for Distance Learning Research at Texas A&M University has existed since 1991. Presumably, the term is not widely questioned and unlikely to go away very soon.

Distance education as we know it today is an outgrowth of correspondence courses, the first on record having originated in 1728 as a method of teaching short hand with delivery by mail. With new technologies, especially electronic ones – radio, television, and computers – educators have adapted each to enrolling students and classes at a distance from the teacher. Now whole schools operate online and the Minnesota State College and Universities, the state’s public higher education system outside the University of Minnesota, has announced its aim of delivering 25% of its classes by distance education.

Of course, being in a class online, however valuable, fails equivalence to being in a class face to face. Asynchronous participation replaces simultaneity: students reply to one another through postings, not interactive conversations. Though formats vary, classes brought together online require time shifting and likely a greater commitment to pay attention to all the other participants, not just those who participate in the limits of class time. As participation levels increase, in part due to individualization and the comfort of greater anonymity, students can demand in total far more effort from the teacher. These burdens lead to how courses are structured and what is required.

Students will discover what suits their lives, schedules and psyches. They ought also attend to what satisfies their need and desire to learn. The learning counts most of all, not the distance or the technological abolition of distance.
_____
© 2008, 2009 by Roger Sween.

This article first appeared on the writing platform Helium.com and is here revised.

I welcome substantive comments on the content of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.

Reading Life

2009-02-17T08:15:00.003-06:00

Required Reading?

Actually, it only makes lasting sense to require reading of ourselves.

Of course, secondary schools and institutions of higher learning do require off-term reading when it suits their purposes and they find value in it. Students, enrolled in these institutions or such programs as honors, independent study, or advanced placement would know in advance and willingly embrace the requirements to read. The question is whether all learning institutions ought to require collateral reading. Practically, not all can; a reading requirement will not fit all purposes. But I will say, schools of any sort should expect their students to be readers and therefore encourage them in the reading life.

At basis, reading is a desirable skill, but that skill is varied. How we employ reading depends upon what we mean by it. Reading Wikipedia articles is one thing; reading War and Peace another. Reading, we should realize, is developmental; that is, we improve our reading ability and range of reading skills by reading. Yet, we leave to each individual learner to pursue the skills they identify as needed to succeed in life and those that they most cherish as enjoyable, enlightening, and meaningful to their psyches. From a humanistic point of view, reading energizes and furnishes the whole person and to read at the widest range is the ultimate practice of the learning life.

Success in reading may be defined as not only the ability to decode text, but the habit of using reading to continue reaching out to knowledge and experience through reading. As with my parents, one read mostly novels, about two a week most of her 90-year reading life, the other read primarily newspapers and magazines, but daily. Both were “well read” in their own terms, the book reader less outreaching than the reader of periodicals.

Someone once said, if you want to be a reader, chose grandparents that are readers. Many of us can credit the reading of family members to our own enjoyment and habits of reading. In my own study of hundreds of biographies to discover successful readers, I found the family example can help but does not even have the same influence on all brothers and sisters. Highly successful readers like the innovative travel writer Bruce Chatwin or the photographer Diane Arbus and poet Howard Nemerov, sister and brother, all became successful in spite of their parental examples. Reading often seems a highly personal phenomenon, one likely more suited to certain psyches and lifestyle preferences than to sheer ability.

For the successful reader in ability and habit, the ideal learning environment would be a broadly-stocked library with a few tutorial asides. Teachers, well-read themselves, would question, challenge, mentor and suggest connections to the readers they tutored. Readers would gather with one another under a tutor’s facilitation to probe questions and exchange thinking based upon the reading they had made their own.

Why is it then that though not all schools and colleges require collateral reading when almost all require attendance at lectures? Universities began in the days when books were expensive and rare. With the invention of movable type and commercial printing, the cost of books and other texts has fallen. Why then has the lecture system proliferated? Does the expansive lecture tradition mean that reading as the flexible and individualized vehicle to learning is for those few willing to do the work of reading? Reading is, after all, work.

Reading takes time. Since we all have the same 24 hours a day, reading time means scheduled time. The problem is not that we are busy; we can all be busy and most are. The question becomes busy at what. We choose to read by scheduling time to read which means giving up something else, often something distracting from the necessities of self-development and learning. For this reason, most readers will read by choice, not by requirement, and the poverty of contemporary life is not the inability to read but the refusal to follow through on the ability one has.

So read. Besides, you might as well be discriminating. Over 60 million books have been published since the invention of movable type.

© 2008, 2009 by Roger Sween.

This piece first appeared on Helium.com in answer to the question, “Should Colleges Require Outside Reading of their Students?” I have broadened the response in this revision.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.

To Know, Learn

2009-02-12T09:03:00.005-06:00

Link Education, Learning & Knowledge.

The ability to continue learning, begun through education, leads us on to the knowledge that we most dearly need.

Education, too often conflated with learning, is the process of moving each learner to greater knowledge and ability. The education process, begins as soon as a child is present, but does depend upon a rudimentary sensate ability to learn and continued willingness to learn, or assent. Educators are those who expose learning situations to a learner. Though perpetually thought of as teachers in schools or other formal settings, educators may also be others who operate with various intents and levels of explicitness. Educators typically include parents and other relatives, various professionals besides teachers, especially clergy, the communications media allowed or followed and later sought, and one’s peers that in time become all other personal contacts.

Learning is most dependent upon education in its early stages, but learners at all stages must assent to what is being presented otherwise what is intended in education is not learned. Learning, in time takes over from education, and thereby self-directed learners become their own teachers, which opportunity they may perform well or poorly. Learners may also learn from their own thinking by post-operative examination of what they have previously learned.

The processes of education that adhere in all societies tend to become institutionalized in rituals, programs, schools, libraries, museums and other agencies. We think of schools as most prominently established and central to education. Schools, largely through teaching or instruction, aim to impart a common base of knowledge, regarded as most relevant to the society. Hopefully, schools also purposefully embed that content with the process of learning how to learn. In this manner, educators eventually make themselves unnecessary when the learners in their charge have gained mastery and can go on to the next level of education or unto learning on their own. Successful teachers put themselves out of business, except than another wave of ignorance is due to follow those who move onward to further stage teachers and their own direction.

Accessible knowledge consists of what all minds know together with what anyone has known and recorded where those records still exist. Knowledge, also said to exist in full form in the mind of God, is another delightful possibility but outside the scope of this article. Thus in human terms, knowledge is both personal and immediate, but relatively limited, while knowledge beyond the personal is vast and of long duration. Over history, various people reputedly have known everything about everything, a limited possibility. What historians meant by the expression is that the learned had knowledge of what could be conceptualized and categorized into subject disciplines. According to this latter meaning, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1646-1716, receives credit for being the last person to know everything that a human could know. Since then knowledge has expanded with increasing velocity, and try as we might no one can know but a part of it all. Rather, we can know about a great deal.

Knowing everything, certainly, is not our real problem as we live our lives. Our problem, and still a challenging one, is to gain and maintain sufficient knowledge so that we can live humanely and well, fulfill our responsibilities, and enjoy the benefits of civilization.

Thus, education starts us on the path of learning by which we are equipped to gain knowledge and the abilities attendant to knowledge throughout our lives. Learning becomes a lifelong endeavor for a number of reasons. The more we learn, the more we realize the limits of our knowledge and the immensity of our ignorance. Knowledge continues to advance through discovery, new activity around the world, and reformulation of prior knowledge; therefore, matters we once knew no longer fit present reality as currently understood. Just as researchers and thinkers discover they have been in error or mistaken, we can admit our own failings, and must replace discredited knowledge with new information. Alas, we have a great tendency over time to forget or misremember what we once knew or thought we knew. The joy of learning is also a powerful stimulus, beyond any utility.

Chiefly, however, we need to learn because, as humans, we are the chief actors in our own lives and destinies. So much comes to us that requires us to learn what we did not know before. Knowledge furnishes and equips life – health, family, housing, location, aging, retirement – and work and recreation and civic responsibility and philosophy of life and religion if we have one, and so on.

What then is the task that education faces to prepare us as learners for the knowledge that is always pressing at our brains and waiting for our minds to integrate the previously unknown with what we already know? Here are a few major challenges.

Determine knowledge needs. Over time, we gradually shift from following the leading dictates of others as to what we ought to learn. Following an established path in learning is a safe mode in some guarantee of less error. The first messages are healthy doses of conservatism that suit us for life in the culture and society we inhabit. Soon, however, we follow our own preferences as we are no longer just receivers but seekers and initiate our own directions. How do I see my future at this point? What is it that I want to become? What are the requisite knowledge and skills to do what I need and want to do? Am I prepared to begin? How do I have to prepare myself in the short and long range? Where is the information?

Acquire the processes of self-direction. What is the available environment for my learning? What choices do I have? What resources, personal and published, that aid choices are available? Am I able to distinguish good advice, obtain it, and upon the information received make my own choices? How do I like to learn? Can I then effectively learn in my preferred manner what I need to learn? Do I have requisite information-seeking and judging skills? How can I get them, hone them? Am I disciplined? Do I look for achievement or ease? What will pay off in my present estimation in the long-term?

Determine accuracy or truthfulness. Does what I find fit what I know? Am I in error somewhere? What is the evidence for the information and how does it fit criteria for validity: up-to-date, authoritative, publicly tested, corroborated by other sources, appropriate to the question? What other questions does this new information open? Where do I go next? What choices do I make?

Whether inquiry-based learning will ever obtain much ground remains debatable at present. Although inquiry is how scientists and other scholars work, the approach is not the practice among most folk. State departments of education and school districts that have tried to implement inquiry as a means of authentic learning usually face a persistent public uproar until they have to give it up or state legislators put a stop to strategies of learning through questioning and testing information. Inquiry is messy, confusing, unbounded and questioning of traditional values, ones that parents and the public feel are endangered. Children can be at odds with their parents over such sensitive subjects as U.S. history, classics of literature, logic and fallacy, evolution, environmentalism, economics, sex education and a host of other subjects on which the public divides.

The debacle over inquiry vaults the politics of education, learning, and knowledge to the forefront. Individuals may learn all they want, despite obstacles. However whenever an environment based on learning and not teaching occupies public institutions, some constituents will fear those choices and muster complaints. Then those authorities, the ones who do not realize that the Bill of Rights grants freedom to all, will always make learning subservient to education and bind up its content. Limitations settle upon us, as knowledge becomes what some middle of the road position says it is.

© 2008, 2009 by Roger Sween.

This article, here revised, appeared in a slightly different form on Helium.com.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made to the email address, given above.

MY INTJ

2009-02-10T10:05:00.004-06:00

1. Discovering My Personality Type.

According to: David Kiersey and Marilyn Bates, Please understand me: character & temperament types; 5th edition. Gnosology Books, Ltd.; distributed by Prometheus Nemesis Book Company, c1984. 210p.

Kiersey and Bates base their book on the Myers-Briggs typology of 16 personality types that originated in the thinking of Carl Gustav Jung. Here, the instrument for identifying type, “The Kiersey Temperament Sorter,” has 70 questions that each ask for choices between two alternatives. Answers when tabulated from an inventory sheet translate to personality preferences.

They describe and compare each of the preferences that go into making up personality. These are preferences between:

Extraversion (E) and Introversion (I);
Intuition (N) and Sensation (S);
Thinking (T) and Feeling (F);
Judging (J) and Perceiving (P).

Choices between pairs of preferences may vary markedly or split evenly so that Kiersey and Bates allow for 16 additional types to the Myers-Briggs 16, so called X types. Not all students of personality agree on these X split types.

Kiersey and Bates describe four possible temperaments resulting from the combination of preferences. Temperaments, though not understood here as “functional” as Jung did, carry his descriptions and become operational or predictive as to how types deal with different issues and forces. They name these temperaments as:

the Dionysian (SPs) who must be free;
the Epimethan (SJs) who long for duty;
the Promethean (NTs) who must understand and control nature, not people;
the Apollonian (NF) who seek to become themselves.

Two chapters follow that discuss how differing types play out among partners and within the family where there may also be children. These are interesting and helpful in understanding and working with relationships especially when the relationship established itself without the benefit of prior knowledge in typologies and in what manner partners would find themselves. Equally illuminating is a chapter on the behavior and relationships of each personality type in work situations.

An appendix, pages 167-207, provides summary descriptions of the 16 profiles, apt and illuminating even after all the preliminary profiling and information. Previously, Kiersey and Bates attached each of the types with an occupational character, given below. Each of the types constitutes an approximate percentage of the U.S. population. Apparently, breakdowns vary among other nations and cultures.

ENFJs (Pedagogue; 5%) place people as the highest importance and priority;
INFJs (Author; 1%) are complex and reserved, yet empathic of and concerned for others;
ENFPs (Journalist; 5%) strive for the authentic and intense emotional experiences;
INFPs (Questor; 1%) have strong internal values and care deeply, but selectively;
ENTJs (Fieldmarshal; 5%) are driven to lead and provide structure for tasks;
INTJs (Scientist; 1%) live in an introspective reality, focusing on possibilities;
ENTPs (Inventor; 5%) want to exercise their ingenuity in the world;
INTPs (Architect; 1%) seek precision in thought and language and work through contradictions;
ESTJs (Administrator; 13%) are responsible, orderly and fond of following procedures;
ISTJs (Trustee; 6%) are dependable, as good as their word, and thorough;
ESFJs (Seller; 13%) seek sociability and promote harmony;
ISFJs (Conservator; 6%) want to be of service and minister to individual needs;
ESTPs (Promoter; 13%) are action-oriented;
ESFPs (Entertainer; 13%) are generous and fun to be with because they want to be with others;
ISTPs (Artisan; 7%) are impulsive and enjoy action in itself;
ISFP (Artist; 5%) express themselves through action in finished form (art);

As for me, I am an INTJ with a score almost as 100% on the INTJ inventories as you can get. I am absolutely as happy as can be with being INTJ because it not only coincides with my own level of self-awareness, but also helps explain why the rest of the world is not like me and never has been throughout my lifetime. It is a great relief, having regarded myself as markedly different through most of my childhood and life besides also treated as different by others, finally to find a pleasing and well-worked out explanation as to why this difference exists.

Where Kiersey-Bates and I coincide is in how I see myself:

The world of thought, developed through examination and logic, is more real and certainly preferable to the outside world.

Formal logic is useful, but secondary to intuitional coherence.

The long run is of far more importance than the immediate.

My proper work is theory, and theory is the studied precursor to action. However desirable it is for the ideal to become real, this desired realization of the ideal, given history, does not readily happen and may not happen.

Unfortunately, I cannot see learning as accumulative either individually or collectively. Rather the ignorance of individuals and societies is pervasive, recurrent and often regressive.
Many problems take a long time to think through. How preferable it would be to think about them in single-minded mode, but that is often not possible, since multiple problems confront us simultaneously.

I can live with a lot of uncertainty and imprecision thanks to tentative confidence in some basic principles undergoing development. Given enough time for investigation, analysis and thought I, or some others, will arrive at an eventual and positive resolution, even though that may be temporary.

Changing ideas means changing reality. Even when I see the need to change my thinking it is hard to do and often requires mulling time.

Authority is meaningless apart from an idea that is convincing.

Correlatively, most decisions about ordinary things have marginal significance and are easily made. Social conventions are easy to follow since they are arbitrary and matter little one way or another unless they get in the way of more important things.

I like people in general and have no skepticism of individuals until shown otherwise. I have always had only a very few close friends since the depth of relationship that is wanted requires sharing of values, ideas, and aims in a fuller dialogue than can be achieved from most acquaintances.

I am most fortunate to be in love with my best friend to whom I am married and to have wonderful children and grandchildren. I believe in the mutual nurturing of family members and am pleased to be surrounded by independent and responsible people.

As an INTJ, I may have in the past verged on the following but am glad I am not:

an ENTJ, because I have no desire to lead except in functional or intellectual capacities;

an ISTJ, because though I can handle data and detail, I want to chose it and not become mired in it;

an INFJ, because ideas are more comfortable to me than people (I could have become a theologian, but not a very good pastor);

an INTP (to which I see myself closest), because I focus on coherence not contradiction and want closure - even though I recognize its tentative nature - rather than seeking more data.

My typology weaknesses are:
I am no good at conversations that are phatic, composed of small talk or exchanges of everyday events, just to be friendly and establish relationships. If we’re going to talk lets talk about tasks, issues, and ideas.

I do not like games and am no good at them either as participant or spectator because they seem distractions from the important matters of life, and they require so much time and sometimes money to get good at them, resources better spent on more significant concerns. To me games are basically boring and ultimately wasteful.

I have a tendency to judge too quickly when I think other viewpoints or data are out of bounds or won’t make any difference. I see this as my worst fault.

I regret that I cannot narrow my interests or focus sufficiently to pursue one thing to the end. I try to discipline myself to complete work on a schedule, but I fail.

Usually, I have to think about important and new matters for some time before I can act, and that causes a time crunch down the line.

I’m engaged in nearly constant revision because the expression is not ever as full, clear, elegant and convincing as it could be.

I tend to spend time on the matter uppermost in my mind or current priority to the neglect of other things until they become a priority. This leads to last minute work, which I do not like, but has the benefit of having been in my mind for a while unless I forget it.

I tend to forget things.

My INTJ is part 1 of a 5-part look at my personality based on various approaches. See also My LifeKey (2), My Learning (3), My Thinking (4), My Solo (5).

© 2009 by Roger Sween

I welcome substantive comment on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to my email address, given above.

My LifeKey

2009-02-10T09:53:00.004-06:00

2. Discovering My Personality Type.

According to: Jane A.G. Kise, David Stark, and Sandra Krebs Hirsh, LifeKeys: discovering who you are, why you’re here, what you do best. Bethany House Publishers, c1996. 272p.

These three authors make a wonderful transition from the “better management through psychology” approach to values-based, kingdom of God-oriented personal worth and work. They do so by using their talents and skills as a writer, pastor, and management consultant with actual experience in the techniques the book outlines. As a team, they worked with their own congregation, a Minnesota Twin Cites suburban protestant church. This stance, a pronouncedly evangelical one, presents Biblical grounding and psychological foundations so that individuals see their gifts and connect with opportunities to use them in serving God and others.

Their aim for Christians is that more lives will be fulfilled with purpose and meaning because they have helped individuals see the match between who they are and what they do or may do. Service and satisfaction are the desired intertwined outcomes. They found church members curious about lives of fulfillment or bothered by changes, either external forces or their own anxiety to find a better fit by doing something different.

Often members do not recognize the gifts they have, do not value them, and do not use them as they might. Change begins in the Christian understanding that God created and values every individual and that God has work for each person to do. Members may accept this piece of doctrine, but regard their own part in it as insignificant and in no way special. By a combination of scriptural promise, scientific information, life examples, exercises and thoughtful self-examination men and women open to their LifeKeys. The battery of techniques used in small group settings come together in this manual for self-analysis and personal decision-making left to each person.

Holland’s hexagram of six areas of preference in work becomes the first approach. The preference clusters are the Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. Identification tables for each preference lead to an examination of experience in each of work area and rating what one liked most or where individuals feel most comfortable. These preferences are called “life gifts,” what we have been given for our lives in the world.

The Biblical bases of “spiritual gifts” follow as evidence of God working in people’s lives. Each gift is peculiar to Christian life and teaching with meanings distinct from their secular references where they may occur: Administration, Apostleship, Discernment, Encouragement/Counseling, Evangelism, Faith, Giving, Healing, Helps, Hospitality, Knowledge, Leadership, Mercy, Miracles, Prophecy, Shepherding, Teaching, Tongues, Wisdom. Questions help identify one’s experience of each gift, and suggestions offer guidance in how the gift may be exercised and strengthened. Afterwards, people rate their endowments in each gift and select their top five.

A section on the Myers-Briggs typology briefly guides people to identify their preferences among the E-I, S-N, F-T, P-J pairs. Profiles of each of the 16 resulting types follow. They identify the order of Jung-identified dominance among preferences and warn against a dysfunctional “trap” for each type. Types come with an identifying scriptural quote and outlines of church relationships:
Contribution to the spiritual community.
Leadership style.
Preferred environment for service.
Common confessions [that is, weaknesses].
Possible spiritual helps [ways of addressing the weaknesses].

In an exercise of values clarification, 51 values are stated and briefly defined on attached card sheets. The 51 range from “Accuracy: Being true or correct in attention to detail” to “Variety: Desiring new and different activities, frequent change.” People may include values not listed. The cards allow for sorting and prioritizing. By this process, individuals identify the top 8 that are “very valuable to me.”

In putting all these self-assessments together, the inventory asks people to consider their “passions,” where they are most eager and how they want to expend their energies. Concluding chapters take a “go slow” approach so that people give thought and reflection to themselves before they identify their mission in Christian life and plan how they will commit to it.

Where I match with Kise-Stark-Hirsh has its basis in that I am a Christian of the Lutheran persuasion and believe that I have had a blessed and fortunate life within the church that has been one of the major factors in my life. Although dutiful as a child and teenager, and although I attended a college of the Lutheran church, I have had a number of ethical and theological issues with the church over the years, most of which I have resolved. I was very studious about the Bible and church teachings as a child and remained active in Luther League and attended Sunday School until I graduated from high school. I was best friends with the pastor’s son, and his father encouraged me towards the ministry and most likely assumed I would go there. I certainly thought about it but regarded myself as too shy and incapable of performing the all the social requirements placed on pastors, especially Lutheran ones. Chiefly, I did not see myself as overtly evangelical and shunned intruding too much into the lives of others. Had it been offered, I could have gone to seminary and become a theologian and teacher. I might have done that, but it never dawned on me. I never really thought how pastors in the Lutheran church prepare to be pastors. Besides languages were always difficult for me and I doubted I could learn Greek, let alone Hebrew.

My alignment with Holland’s hexagram is in the obvious Investigative preference where possible activities include:
Inventing; for me, inventing systems and expressions of thought.

Researching; for me, learning and examining what our progenitors thought, especially philosophers and theologians, and what is thought about them.

Conceptualizing; that is, developing ideas and theories.

Working independently; which is obvious when you do thinking and research, though I do acknowledge the benefit of dialogue with others of shared interest.

Solving complex problems; which are, what shall we do in our contemporary lives and society in the light of the Gospel? This is an age old problem expressed as, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

My identification of my spiritual gifts readily named the top five (listed alphabetically):

Administration: the ability to organize to work efficiently for the Body of Christ.

Discernment: adept at recognizing what is and what is not of God.

Knowledge: the ability to understand, organize, and effectively use information for the advancement of God’s purposes.

Teaching: the ability to understand and communicate God’s truths to others effectively.

Wisdom: the ability to understand and apply Biblical and spiritual knowledge to complex, paradoxical, or other difficult situations.

For me, these five are interrelated aspects of one whole. The administrative ability is of information and ideas, not of organizational structures. The teaching ability may be face to face but is more likely communication through some media. Knowledge is more my forte. I recognize discernment and wisdom in myself, but discernment is a scary business bothersome to me by its potential for falsity and persecution; and wisdom shall ever be humanly incomplete though I most desire and seek it.

In practice, it is easier for me to find my niche outside of a specific congregation or denomination in the wider community. There the teachings of the church in the universal sense can be announced and explored as a basis for human behavior, human relationships, and social or political action.

Of course, I am an INTJ. “I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven.—Ecclesiastes (NRSV) I:13. Incidentally, Saint Paul by psychohistory gets typed an ENTJ.

The profiling fits me to a T, such as “Contribution to Spiritual Community:”

Envisioning systems to create a better world.

Breaking new ground, shifting paradigms, and changing the way people view things.

Designing or adjusting strategies and structures for future needs.

Thinking and acting independently from traditional or outmoded ways.

As far as values—those things I most deeply honor and must follow to achieve the life I want – I identified only 6 of the requested 8. Kise-Stark-Hirsh ask for 8 and a second 8 as they expect people to grow and shift their relative values over time. At my age and after decades of reflective introspection, I have settled on 6. My ranking as follows.

1. Learning—Lifelong commitment to growing in understanding. For me, lifelong questioning and growth of knowledge towards breadth and wisdom.

2. Independence—Wanting control of own time, behavior, tasks. For me, freedom and ability to probe and formulate.

3. Artistic expression—Expressing self through the arts: painting, literature, drama, etc. For me, high quality creative written communication that reaches others with meaning and significance.

4. Service—Helping others or contributing to society. For me, benefit the common good over time and distance.

5. Influence—Capacity to affect or shape people, processes or ideas. For me, positive impact on others learning, thinking, knowledge and understanding.

6. Friendship—Placing importance on close, personal relationships. For me, close and deep personal connections; these are necessarily few.

I thought it significant, that though the exercise asks for no more than 8 values, I could readily identify the six priority ones in the first pass. In part my selections are due to my own definitions of them. Service ranks high because it is for the common good, not otherwise listed as a value. Influence ranks because it means ideational impact.

As far as “passion” is concerned, it is hard for me to think of this characteristic other than where I focus my efforts. I am not passionate about anything in the emotional sense because I am usually and try to maintain a rational, reflective, objective, polite and sedate approach to life and its challenges. I do get quickly irate, however, over stupidity-based decisions, persistence in ignorance, the flight from problem identification, and the persistent desire for a simplicity that is less than the dimensions of reality. Unfortunately, none of these demonstrate positive passion. Nevertheless, I regard that my whole life has been in the service of human potential through discovery, learning, educated growth and informed decision-making. For these endeavors, I see myself a missionary.

Besides the weaknesses already mentioned, my preference for distance from most other people limits me. It is difficult for me to get too far engaged in my own congregation, though I have at times taught Sunday school, served on committees, been an usher (which I detested), led adult forums, and participated in many other forums, especially if they had intellectual content. Mostly, I find it exhausting to expend the effort to do things that ought to be done in due course in the church anyway. Within its bureaucratic structure, Lutheran congregations and the church-wide assembly can be more concerned about not giving offense than about doing the right thing. If I was better with people or felt I had more time, I might try harder. At my age, I feel myself in retreat to regroup, psychologically and intellectually, and choose the battles where I just might be able to do something productive.

My LifeKey is part 2 of a 5-part look at my personality based on various approaches. See also My INTJ (1), My Learning (3), My Thinking (4), My Solo (5).

© 2009 by Roger Sween

I welcome substantive comment on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to my email address, given above.

My Learning

2009-02-10T09:47:00.003-06:00

3. Discovering My Personality Type.

According to: Gordon Lawrence, People types and tiger stripes: a practical guide to learning styles; 2nd edition. Center for Applications of Psychological Type, Inc., c1984. Appendix A, “Introduction to Type,” by Isabel Briggs Myers, c1980. 101, A1-A14p.

Following from the Myers-Briggs type indicator, Lawrence discusses the relationship of types to learning in the school setting. Though all types are valid, teachers have traditionally done a better job of relating to some types than others. The variety of types in one classroom challenges teachers: the average breakdown of a random group of 35 students, as in a required class, is 7 IS, 3 IN, 18 ES, 7 EN. A study by Myers of 500 students who had not finished 8th grade found that 99% of them were sensing types. The bulk of the book consists of profiling types and recommending learning activities that various types will relate to, like, and thereby learn.

As an INTJ learner and teacher, how do I fare under Lawrence?

My mother used to remark that I was a poor reader until third grade, and she credited Miss Efteland (later Mrs. Sandberg) for turning that poor performance around. I puzzle over this difficulty because I grew up in an excellent reading environment. My parents were readers and always had a lot of newspapers, magazines and books around. Dad read to us almost daily, first the comic strips, but later poems, stories and eventually books. After I could read myself, I listened intently off to the side as he read Kon Tiki (1950) and The Journals of Lewis and Clark (DeVoto; 1953) to my brother and me.

I remember being impressed in first grade by things that other children knew, such as the names of colors, and the way they took to the alphabet and words on the page. I felt inadequate next to them in reading aloud sessions. In the second grade, Miss Wilson sent me down from the Bluebirds to the Bears, and I knew I was in disgrace. When in the third grade, policy allowed us the school library on a regular basis, and I could choose from a large pile of books put out on the table. Reading became an enjoyment and exploration in which I leaped at the invitation to partake. Besides, I could do it by myself, not out-loud and in public.

When I look at it now, those Dick and Jane readers were pedestrian where the biggest drama was Sally’s teddy bear disappearing as the family car containing it went up the grease rack. The books I had access to in third grade were more the equivalent of my favorite radio shows – Let’s Pretend, the episodes on Buster Brown, or The Inner Sanctum.

Reading became my major way of learning, and I gradually discovered that I was in charge of my own learning. Thanks to the books I read, I was ahead of the class in most subjects. I scored high in the Iowa tests because if I knew the topic, I didn’t read the sample test text, I went direct to answering the questions. Never studious in school – I was too busy reading – I never got grades as high as my two diligent sisters achieved. My real downfall came with 10th grade. I had signed up for all the college prep courses, and so many of them did not depend upon reading, but doing. The math courses bothered me because there was no discussion of why things are the way they are. I could abstract concepts from words, but the abstractions of geometry, algebra and trigonometry were pure and seemingly without referents. I tried to imagine how a line could touch a circle at only one point that had no dimension and felt I was going mad. Biology I got through thanks to Leonard Espeland, likely the best teacher I ever had, and Elizabeth Weber my lab partner. But the hands-on aspects of chemistry and physics became as frustrating to me as mechanical drawing and shop. I dreaded all the experiments that failed and the pressure to arrive at principles. I wanted the principles first. Couldn’t we just read about these things and discuss them. INTJ!

I was a failure as a school librarian because I couldn’t figure out why almost everyone wanted to talk, flip through magazines, and not read as I had done in my own high school years. Quickly I was off to academic librarianship and college teaching, then other types of library work, consultancy, and at the end graduate teaching.

One thing about teaching a foundations course in library and information science, which became my specialty, was that most of the students are INs or NTs, the same is I. I am far more conscious of differences in learning now, and try to give students a lot of choices and opportunities to converse and question. Still, clearly the approach is the overview, heavy on the reason why or the possibility of what might be.

My Learning is part 3 of a 5-part look at my personality based on various approaches. See also My INTJ (1), My LifeKey (2), My Thinking (4), My Solo (5).

© 2009 by Roger Sween

I welcome substantive comment on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to my email address, given above.

My Thinking

2009-02-10T09:40:00.002-06:00

4. Discovering My Personality Type.

According to: Allen F. Harrison and Robert M. Bramson, Styles of thinking: strategies for asking questions, making decisions and solving problems. Doubleday: Anchor Press, c1982. 202p. Index.

Harrison and Bramson found that as behavioral scientists, consultants and teachers that people approach problems in identification and resolution by ways fundamentally different from one another. Decisions follow from differing psychological bases as well. Therefore, they have concentrated on the “styles of thinking” that people use to attack and deal with issues.

Much of their work is based on the studies of C. West Churchman (The Design of Inquiring Systems, 1971) in the analysis of his five identified modalities of thinking. An inventory, developed by Harrison-Bramson, the InQ, offers five choices for each of 18 questions. Respondents rank the choices from 5 (most like me) to 1 (least like me). A scoring sheet calculates scores to each of the modes that translate to preferences in ways of asking questions and making decisions. These preferences are:

Sythesist (11%): Look for perspectives that link otherwise contradictory views and produce a “best fit” solution.

Idealist (37%): Look for shared goals among a group or society as a whole and that commonality, when recognized, will bring people together.

Pragmatist (18%) Look for whatever works based upon experience with the immediate situation, here and now, in order to get on with the task.

Analyst (35%): Look through examination and application of theory for a scientifically verifiable best way that is rational, predictable and stable.

Realist (24%): Look for verifiable facts on which people can or ought to agree in order to fix things.

In successive chapters, Harrison-Bramson, discuss each style as to its character, approach and methods or strategies for problem solving and decision-making. Since combinations of styles are also possible, one chapter describes the Synthesist-Idealist, and so on.

Harrison-Bramson aim at two objectives. People can learn the differences in the styles so they appreciate better their differences with others and can learn to work with them. People can also understand their own style more profoundly so that they can develop their strengths and know when they should correct, temper, or expand them by the processes of other styles. Another whole chapter is devoted to very clearly presented ways to employ thinking processes in each of the styles.

Using InQ, I show a strong preference for the Idealist mode and a moderate preference for the Analyst mode. I took the inventory at two different times with the same results as to style but slightly differing emphases.

As an Idealist-Analyst (IA), the Synthesist mode comes in third but not high enough to score as a preference. Generally, I have thought of myself as a synthesist, but this preference did not score distinctively high because I flee from conflict. Synthesists are on the lookout for conflict, identifying and articulating conflicts in order to bring opposing views together. Surprisingly, I scored higher as a Pragmatist than a Realist, through both were low. Philosophically, I have had a low opinion of pragmatism, regarding it as a valueless and unexamined expediency. But, this inventory showed on the first results an absolute neglect of the Realist position because I can only stand just so much minutia when they begin to crowd out principles from their deserved – and for me – primary consideration. The second time, scores showed a better balance and more attention to data at the further weakening of the Synthesist position.

Happily, I resonated with Harrison-Bramson’s characterization of the Idealist-Analyst combination as one who takes a broad, comprehensive view, and one who is a future-oriented planner. The IA seeks to achieve high standards and aims using the best possible methods. Therefore, the IA process takes time for examination and mulling over.

I see parallels in this inventory with Myers-Briggs where I am a strong INTJ. Certainly, however, I am less of an analyst in the collection of data, due to my judging (J) preferences, than I am an idealist, being iNtuitive (N), my dominant preference.

My Thinking is part 4 of a 5-part look at my personality based on various approaches. See also My INTJ (1), My LifeKey (2), My Learning (3), My Solo (5).

© 2009 by Roger Sween

I welcome substantive comment on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to my email address, given above.

My Solo

2009-02-10T09:20:00.005-06:00

5. Discovering My Personality Type.

According to: John M. Oldham and Lois B. Morris, Personality self-portrait: why you think, work, love, and act the way you do. Bantam Books, c1990. 438p.

Oldham is one of the members of the American Psychiatric Association who worked on revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., rev., 1987). From the identification of those disorders, he and Morris identified thirteen normal personality-style categories from which disorders are the extreme aberration. Although this method seems backwards, students of the human psyche have historically been interested in the ranges of behavior among personality types and the styles identified “are the common, utterly human, non-pathological versions of the extreme, disordered constellations identified in the DSM manual.

Between the optimum and disordered ends of a style, range various behaviors so that the dividing point between health and dysfunction fails exact definition. Nevertheless, productive and satisfying lives exhibit flexibility over inflexibility, variety over repetition, and adaptability over the incapacity to cope. Psychiatry focuses on the disorders. This book focuses on the healthy styles so that individuals will know themselves and appreciate the ways that those of the other styles act and express themselves that are also healthy but different.

These thirteen styles are:
1. Conscientious: People of strong moral principal and absolute certainty who will not rest until the job is done right.
2. Self-Confident: People of a quality born of self-regard, self-respect, self-certainty, showing faith in oneself and a commitment to self-styled purpose.
3. Dramatic: People who are all heart, full of feeling and emotion which they can transform to a high art.
4. Vigilant: People of heightened awareness to their environment, looking for what is awry, to announce and denounce it.
5. Mercurial: People who want to experience life fully in whatever it brings.
6. Devoted: People who care about the identified team to whom they are loyal, considerate, and helpful.
7. Solitary: People who need no one but themselves, remarkably free from involvements and emotions that distract others, to discover on their own.
8. Leisurely: People who, apart from their responsibilities, seek to be themselves and do as they wish.
9. Sensitive: People who seek a world, small and familiar, where they find comfort, contentment and inspiration.
10. Idiosyncratic: People who, whether eccentrics or geniuses, live lives apart from the conventions that most others follow.
11. Adventurous: People who will take risks and long leaps where others are cautious or afraid.
12. Self-Sacrificing: People who put other’s needs first and live to serve them.
13. Aggressive: People who move instinctively by force of personality to command.

These personality styles operate within six functioning domains. Styles show their characteristics in the domains and various domains are key to each of the styles. The domains are
Self: How one sees, thinks, and feels about their own self, their place in the universe and among others.
Relationships: How one regards other people as important to themselves. This is a dominant factor in more than half of the styles.
Work: How one regards what it is they do and how they about doing things, not just work but everything to which they give time.
Emotions: Includes moods, feelings, and emotional states, the place people give to them in their lives and their intensity.
Self-Control: How one governs themselves in meeting desires, temptations, and impulses before action.
Real World: How one regards the world, its existence and nature, and what is real for them.

Chapters define these terms and sizeable chapters on each style discuss the domains pertinent to each in turn along with characteristics, tips on dealing with others of the style in one’s own life, and exercises for making the most of the style. Half the chapter treats the flip side of the normal style, the corresponding personality disorder.

A Personality Self-Portrait Questionnaire is the entry to identifying the styles operating in each life. For 104 questions, one of three answers is possible: Yes, I agree; Maybe, I agree; No, I don’t agree. The maybe responses are for questions where the individual agrees with one part but not another of the same question. Through scoring, a self-portrait graph emerges.

For me, the Questionnaire produced the following results in order of importance. Ranking for each style is the number out of the top possible number.
Highest
Solitary: 12 of 14
Sensitive: 8 of 14
Conscientious: 10 of 18
Idiosyncratic: 8 of 18
Self-Confidant 8 of 18

Lowest
Vigilant: 4 of 14
Aggresssive 2 of 16
Self-Sacrificing 2 of 16
Leisurely: 2 of 18
Adventurous: 2 of 22
Dramatic: 0 of 16
Mercurial: 0 of 16

Resulting Personality Profile Functions in the Domains:
My dominant styles (as defined above) are I. Solitary (7), II. Sensitive (9), III. Conscientious (1), IV. Idiosyncratic (16), V. Self-Confident (2). I have noted those domains key to each style. I also briefly quote characteristics of each style especially pertinent to me in each domain.

Sense of Self.
I. (Key) self contained; own best resource; psychological gain from self; prefers own company.
II. Know self when not exposed to others.
III. Self is work; sets high standards of responsibility; no desire for ease.
IV. (Key) Determines own world; willingly breaks with tradition.
V. (Key) Self-esteem; self as purposive, meaningful, source of enjoyment.

Emotional States.
I. (Key) Dispassionate; prefers to observe.
II. (Key) Security in world of own; life-long personal attachments.
III. Seeks calm and reserve.
IV. Intensity is aesthetic, intellectual joy of comprehension.
V. Optimistic.

Control Level.
I. Heightened self-control; desire to avoid pain, impulse or spontaneity.
II. Self-disciplined to shape behavior and keep to self.
III. Self-discipline through knowing and reasoning.
IV. Feelings are internalized.
V. Self-contol.

Relationships with Others.
I. Uninvolved; need distance and time alone.
II. (Key) A few people or one; knowing others well relieves anxiety.
III. Steadiness over intimacy and romance; loyal to those they value.
IV. Not defined by others; risks loneliness when cannot connect.
V. Work at.

Work/Doing.
I. Self-directed; desire for concentration; avoid conflict, politics, competition.
II. Work is the nest; work at home.
III. (Key) Where shines; extends to all hours, intense, focused, detailed; never retires.
IV. Does best in own niche; neither ambitious or competitive in traditional sense.
V. Cooperative; flexible, non-hierarchical; needs to be effective.

Real-World.
I. Privacy provides a pocket for endeavor.
II. Prefer home; look forward to return when away.
III. Choices are between right and wrong; grey areas mean unfinished thinking.
IV. (Key) Perceive differently from others; curious; speculative, original.
V. World in own image.

Necessarily, one should be wary of behaviors that each style might bring with it and how a more varied life might be possible or beneficial. I, likely as others, appreciate those aspects of my life that comfort or please me the most in a self-reinforcing way. For me the following bear watching.

As a Solitary (I) and Sensitive (II) where the danger is to cut oneself off from others, I like people in general but more so in the abstract and at a distance than face-to-face. I crave friendship, but have high standards for it, and as a result have had few truly close and lasting friendships. Close friends I have had in the past, who have died, still haunt my thoughts. I work at keeping the friends I have but am not good at making new friends. I have trouble expressing myself verbally because I have to be sure of the right words; therefore, I prefer writing to speaking. Even though I know that social communication constitutes the bulk of conversation, I am no good at small talk. Instead, I converse most easily with people I already know, especially when the connection enjoys long duration. Often after an encounter with someone, I review what I said, and analyze all the things I could have said better. The reading, thinking and writing life depends upon solitude and the desire to be productive in these endeavors further rev up the demand to be alone.

Being Conscientious (III) risks also becoming obsessive-compulsive. I am far from that, except that I berate myself that I do not stick to one thing at a time until finished. In other words, I am obsessive about not being obsessive. When I cannot sleep, it is often because I review what I have said and done and mull over yet one more time how I could have done a better job of it in the first place. I endeavor to narrow my focus, but find it difficult to give up long-standing interests or concerns over issues that were ever important to me in my lengthening past. My long-term goal is to be free of all committees by the time I am seventy, but I still volunteer for new assignments that I regard to be of short duration. I realize that I will never understand everything or anything, but keep on trying to figure things out and do my best.

I have always been Idiosyncratic (IV), I realize, having felt the difference of being different since I was a very young child. Once at a birthday party for Dicky Connors – our mothers had been friends since being next-door neighbors as children – while the rest roistered in another room, I found refuge in a corner where I looked at his comic books. I was about 5 years old. Imagination became more vivid and preferable to actuality. Then also, reading proved more expansive than experience, history demonstrated more pertinence than a transitory present, thinking arose precursory to doing. Being so different bothered me for all my early years, but could not stop me from continuing on the same track. At about age 16, I embraced my uniqueness. Total alienation likely threatened. At one point, I even thought about becoming a Trappist monk, thanks to the appeal of the reflective life. Other people always rescued me, mostly at first caring relatives, games played with my siblings and in the neighborhood, classmates and other friends at school, Bible camp, Luther League, the prospect of college, and the widening circles of moving away from home. Ultimately, I learned the prevalence of differences among people and the need to find one’s niche in association with others. I could not participate, but astutely observe; I could not compete, but became a specialist in collaboration; I could not lead, except intellectually; I could not fight, except by argument (in the rhetorical or philosophical sense, that is not argumentative, but stating a position and defending it).

Fortunately, I learned to be Self-Confident (V), confident in the virtues of my own idiosyncrasies, without being schizotypal or narcissistic. I do border on narcissism (self-absorption): I am reconciled with my identity to such an extent that I dearly prefer my roster of styles to other possibilities. Clearly, I remain more in pursuit of understanding myself than of understanding and relating to others. Even in creating fictional characters, try as I might to make the leads different, there is always too much of me in them that I cannot expunge. In short, though other people interest me, especially those that provide models, I fascinate myself to a greater extent than others can command. Perhaps what saves me from psychotic narcissism, is that I have become primarily a questioner of received ideas and beliefs, even those I have about myself. I continuously ask myself, even about myself: Is this true and how do I know that? I have learned to live with ambiguity at worst, provisional truth at best.

I wonder, also, about the styles on which I rank the lowest. Does this mean these styles portend their own disorders.

Vigilant: Though very low in this ranking, I still exhibit this style’s characteristics, chiefly autonomy, caution in relationships, perceptiveness, self-defense in my own behalf, openness to criticism, and fidelity or loyalty. I am far from being paranoid which I would consider a laughable state, were it not so pathetic.

Aggressive: Since I am far from being feisty as Vigilants can be, I also long ago gave up any desire to be in charge or top dog. (What a horrible expression!) Though I have been the president or chair a few times of certain organizations, chiefly as Coordinator for nine years of the Minnesota Book Awards, basically as a facilitator. I have more often been the secretary or administrative assistant where I saw the real power resides to get things clarified and on track. I share no characteristics here, except the desire for order that to me is a matter of negotiated goals and standards, not rules. As condescending as I can be, I do not enjoy power over others.

Yet, neither am I Self-Sacrificing. Though I am willing to do a lot for the common good or the benefit of near and dear, I learned on the verge of adulthood that it is precisely the self, as the source of human worth, creativity and efficacy, that must not be sacrificed. My sense of doing good for others as altruists do is tempered by thinking of it as doing good for all, including the self as part of the whole. I share the characteristics Self-Sacrificing – generosity only to a certain extent, service as my arena of action, and consideration of others at least in being polite. I accept others though I will always reach some level of judgment about them (the J in my INTJ typology). I am humble as to my own lacks and willing to endure if the end is worth it, though I am not typically patient with the tedious, repetitious, or foolish. Also with this style, I am naive in every individual encounter, however skeptical I may be about people collectively.

The Leisurely style is not all the word implies; they do their bit, but are not overzealous, and clearly want their own thing and their own time, as they deserve. Though I share the right to be left alone, as a solitary requires, I recognize the obligations of being part of the whole. But neither am I passive-aggressive, though I do have my explosions of resistance, mostly against what I see as stupidity. I am willing to do my share. And as I resign from all committees, I do so on the grounds that what I have left to do has benefit for others; besides by age 70, I will have done my share of group work.

Neither am I Adventurous except about ideas. Even then, I move from some hierarchy of thought to a sequential change in a specific principle, issue, or tactic. I search for holism. Although a nonconformist in some things, I am modest in most regards as to the conventions of everyday life. My wardrobe alternates between black, gray, brown and blue as long is the blue is not too bright. I have one red tie for Pentecost and other high holy days. I fear being too wild or daring, a caution that has likely saved me from drugs and much other immorality. I take risks in speaking out on unpopular issues, but believe that one of life’s objectives is to minimize risk. Thus I am not anti-social, the extreme dysfunction of the Adventurous. Rather than wallowing in the virtue of independence, I see humans as essentially inter-dependent.

The Dramatic are those that are “the life of the party.” By now, you know that is not me. I had a secretary for some years, who often accused me of being dull. ‘I am,’ I said; ‘I am very boring.’ Whenever I showed up at work in a back suit and black topcoat, she would ask, ‘Where are you preaching today?’ I find the pursuit of fun a shallow one though remaining open to joy. Yet, clearly I am as far from the Dramatic characteristics as I can be. I do not repress my feelings, but I try to command them and allow them because of some originating and controlling reason. I limit color, as I said, more for aesthetic reasons than personal ones. I gave up on romance as traditionally understood, but see myself as a romantic as long as romanticism is the dramatization of ideas. As to spontaneity, I have said that I can be spontaneous as long as I can plan ahead for it. I flee from attention, except the attention to what I write, but then not too much. The idea of becoming famous and signing autographs would frighten me except that I think it highly unlikely. Compliments are nice, but only in moderation; mostly I appreciate the awards I have received for long-time accomplishments even when those efforts have sunk into the duff of time. I try to look presentable and am vain about body image, but with restraint. I’d rather be noted for what’s inside than outside.

Neither am I Mercurial. I seek the even keel. I can be intense about concentration, but live otherwise without passion, which I distrust. ‘Are you having a good time?’ a friend once asked me at a party. ‘Yes,’ I quietly answered; ‘Why do you ask?’ ‘Because,’ he said, ‘when you are having a good time or not having a good time, you act the same.’ I try to smile more, but am usually somber as I think things over. It takes me awhile to assess exactly how I feel and then whether or not I should feel that way. My heart is not on my sleeve, but in its chest cavity where it belongs. You know already what I think of spontaneity and fun. Though I sit at my computer at least six to eight hours a day, I remain active, but always after some end, trying to keep up a brisk pace. I retain an open mind, especially about ideas, but cannot otherwise just experiment for the sake of discovery alone.

The study of personality remains a precarious endeavor. I have looked for the scientific approaches over the astrological, ennegramatic, personality tree or other speculative treatments. Still, I accept that we have a lot more to discover and learn and so it is necessary to keep searching.

My Solo is part 5 of a 5- part look at my personality based on various approaches. See also My INTJ (1), My LifeKey (2) My Learning (3), My Thinking (4).

© 2009 by Roger Sween

I welcome substantive comment on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to my email address, given above.

Co-Location?

2009-02-03T09:49:00.003-06:00

Why Both School and Public Libraries?

From a lay point of view, questioning why we have both school and public libraries seems very reasonable and utterly logical. From the professional point of view, such questions, guaranteed, prove provocative if not exasperating. What if we ask, instead, what is the best way to give library service in a community? What do we want our libraries to achieve?

The facts in the matter are that there are many more schools, whether districts or buildings, than there are public library administrative units or buildings. And there are far more libraries than school and public ones. All libraries, except private ones, are the creations of publics, and as such they reflect what their parent publics want and need in terms of library services.

Of course, the realities are that libraries are only possible in ways and to the extents that their publics are willing to afford them. Large corporations spend millions of dollars on their libraries but always with the view that these expenditures are profitable. Yet corporate librarians will tell you, whether they are in a museum, a hospital, a government agency or a manufacturing conglomerate, that they always have to defend the value of and return from what they do. The value of information in the abstract is almost impossible to defend, and a research firm would much rather have one more chemist than another librarian when toting up the bottom line. And priority of interest prevails: the same community of 1100 people which may support five different churches cannot afford a single library.

Until we can offer people compelling research-based reasons for why a certain kind of library service is to a public’s advantage, we have to pursue a heavily value-laden path. That's what makes so difficult convincing people that a library designated to a specific mission can be most effective and efficient, that is - economic. To outsiders, libraries look alike – they all get Time Magazine; they all have dictionaries, encyclopedias and catalog access to their collections. What is the necessity, the public wants to know, of a library devoted to high schoolers and two blocks away one for the public? After all, when kids are out of school they go to the public library. Agreed. Some do, but many do not.

One area in pursuing information on which we do have considerable research from the 1930s onwards is on the high value of given the convenience factor and the detrimental cost of one's own labor as a barrier. This research harmonizes most obviously with individual observation and professional experience. My own testimony is that I once participated in an ad hoc faculty group on learning at a state university where, much to my surprise, I observed other faculty regularly exchange knowledge and publications among themselves to the exclusion of library use. All this sharing took place despite that their offices were built in wrap-around wings on two sides of the library, not more than 50 to 100 steps away for most of them. Convenience, or the perception of it, is the primary criteria by which most people choose the information they use; it has more impact than accuracy, currency, relevance or any other evaluative criteria. Thus, the closer you can bring information to its intended users, the easier you can make it, and the more help you can give directly to users, the more likely you will succeed in achieving satisfactory information use. More agony goes into the most apt sighting of a public library than any other building consideration; the strongest virtue of school library media services consists of placing them in the midst of the students.

Of course, I don't expect many people to believe this fundamental piece of library research. Most will not admit to the convenience principle, however well documented it is. Typically both users of libraries and non-users will tout how actively they pursue information in making decisions regardless of all the surveys that show library use somewhere between .5 and 1-3% out of the total of all information sources sought by the public. Co-workers and family members rank highest among sources because, need we say, they are close, readily available and trusted by information seekers – that is, convenient!

The most important reason for specific libraries dedicated to their users is just that: special treatment and specialized expertise devoted to and focused on the intended users. And of all the elements in library service, the essential one is staff. Nothing can substitute for a school library media professional, educated to quality service and giving that service on a par that is integrated with the best of other faculty.

This is not to say that in no case should a school and public or any other combination of libraries be combined. The point in sharing of services is that they reflect the needs of the whole community to be served, that they be planned to handle the number of issues that arise in jointly operated services, and that the issues be addressed and settled or answered in advance of a decision to co-locate. Problematic issues include questions of funding, governance, and staffing among other service questions; combined libraries fail most frequently over these issues when they are not resolved in advance.

Libraries, after all, stem from sharing with one another; otherwise we would each have our own stuff. We need to approach all questions of library service within terms of sharing, both among our users and with other libraries and other non-library sources.

A final word of advice: approach issues of joint libraries calmly as an idea to be explored. In providing library services, we have always to look at what is to be achieved, who is to be served, how they are to be included in the decision process, and what the evaluation will be. Joint library planning takes steps that represent the community of interest, that communicate between all affected parties and with the public. Potential partners have to examine what they can contribute to the whole and how they will continue to pay their share in order to accomplish the greatest total of which they are able.

The experience in Minnesota is that since 1990 when the law was changed to allow for joint school and public libraries, only one--already pre-existent--organized under these provisions. After almost ten years, only one other followed, and in that case a tornado obliterated both school and public library so they had motivation to start from scratch. Many other communities addressed co-location and eventually decided to remain separate, most in very small towns where co-location is especially appealing. Still, however, the seemingly obvious logic of combining libraries goes on. It can't be turned aside without the interested parties pursuing for themselves the steps they need to take to make it work, and thereby learning a lot more about libraries, their nature and services.

Welcome them.

Roger Sween wrote this article as a “think-piece” while a library development consultant in the Minnesota state library agency. He has been in his career a school librarian, an academic librarian and professor of library science, a public librarian, a freelance information broker, and a constant user of libraries throughout his life. This version has been revised over the original.
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© 2009 by Roger Sween.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to my email address, give above.

US v. ALA

2009-02-01T07:42:00.005-06:00

Libraries in the Rehnquist Decision
United States v. American Library Association 539 US 194 (2003)

*Note: The following presents collapsed statements from the Rehnquist decision upholding the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and are given here without quotation marks or ellipses. Quotation marks and ellipses are used in the dissents. CIPA required all schools and public libraries that received certain federal assistance programs to install filters against pornography.

Rehnquist for the 6 to 3 plurality begins.

To determine whether libraries would violate the First Amendment by employing the filtering software that CIPA requires, we must first examine the role of libraries in our society.

Public libraries pursue the worthy missions of facilitating the learning and cultural enrichment. Libraries should provide books and other resources for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves.[1]

To fulfill their traditional missions, public libraries must have broad discretion to decide what material to provide to their patrons. Their goal has never been to provide universal coverage. To this end, libraries collect those materials deemed to have requisite and appropriate quality.[2]

The librarian’s responsibility … is to separate out the gold from the garbage, not to preserve everything.[3]

Public library staffs necessarily consider content in making collection decisions and enjoy broad discretion in making them.

Internet access in public libraries in neither a traditional nor a designated public forum.[4] Firstly, the Internet did not exist until quite recently, nor been held in trust for the purposes of assembly, communication of thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.[5] We have ‘rejected the view that traditional public forum status extends beyond its historic confines.’[6] Nor does Internet access in a public library satisfy our definition of a designated public forum. To create such a forum, the government must make an affirmative choice to open up is property for use as a public forum.

A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to prove a public forum for the authors of books to speak. It provides Internet access, not to encourage a diversity of views from private speakers,[7] but for the same reasons it offers other library resources; to facilitate research, learning, and recreational pursuits by furnishing materials of requisite and appropriate quality. …As Congress recognized. the Internet is simply another method for making information available in a school or library.[8] It is no more than a technological extension of the book stack.[9]

Most libraries already exclude pornography from their print collections because they deem it inappropriate for inclusion. It would make little sense to treat libraries’ judgments to block online pornography any differently. Moreover, because of the vast quantity of material on the Internet and the rapid pace at which it changes, libraries cannot possibly segregate, item by item, all the Internet material that is appropriate from all that is not. Neither can it provide access to only those it chooses without excluding an enormous amount of valuable material. Given that tradeoff, it is entirely reasonable for public libraries to instead exclude certain categories of content.

Stevens dissenting
“Rather than allowing local decisionmakers to tailor their responses to local problems, [CIPA] operates as a blunt nationwide restraint on adult access to ‘an enormous amount of valuable information’ that libraries cannot possible review.[10] Most of that information is constitutionally protected speech. In my view, this restraint is unconstitutional.

“The unchallenged findings of fact made by the District Court reveal fundamental defects in the filtering software. …The effect of the overblocking is the functional equivalent of a host of individual decisions excluding hundreds of thousands of individual constitutionally protected messages from Internet terminals located in public libraries throughout the nation. …The District Court expressly found that a variety of alternatives less restrictive are available at the local level. …These findings are consistent with scholarly comment on the issue arguing that local decisions tailored to local circumstances are more appropriate than a mandate from Congress. The plurality does not reject any of these findings.”

Instead the plurality “relies on the Solicitor General’s assurance that the statute permits individual librarians to disable filtering mechanisms whenever a patron so requests. …Until a blocked site or group of sites is unblocked, a patron is unlikely to know what is being hidden and therefore whether there is any point in asking for the filter to be removed.”

Souter dissenting joined by Ginzburg

“I agree in the main with Justice Stevens. …I also agree with the library appellees on a further reason to hold the blocking rule invalid. …The rule mandates action by recipient libraries that would violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of fee speech if the libraries took that action entirely on their own. I respectfully dissent on this further ground.”

Prepared by Roger Sween.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at the email address given above.

[1] This is a quote from ALA’s Library Bill of Rights.
[2] William Katz, Collection Development (1980) 6.
[3] F. Drury, Book Selection (1930) xi.
[4] As defined in Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. 473 U.S. 788, 802 (1985).
[5] International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. v. Lee 505 U.S. 672, 679 (1992).
[6] Arkansas Ed. Television Comm’n v.Forbes, 523 U.S. 678.
[7] Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of University of Virginia 515 U.S. 834. (1995).
[8] United States Senate, Report No. 106-141 (1999) 7.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ante, at 11.

Science

2009-01-31T07:11:00.003-06:00

The High Cost of Science (and everything else)

Some say the evidence for global warming is clear; others say the issue is a hoax. Either way public policy lies in the balance. As with other differences, experts and politicians disagree. While most of us hanker for certainty and clear direction, ready answers elude us. The real issue is do we want to pay the price of making up our own minds?

We can choose to learn nothing, do nothing. What is the worst that can happen? Let some one else decide. Is not that why they are the leaders so they have the burden of decisions and we followers can go about our business?

But if they are the leaders, they are so by our forbearance or election. In a democracy at the root, we decide. We decide based upon either interests or information. If decision is to be on the basis of interest alone, representative government implies that we know our own interests in an informed way and have made some effort to determine how acknowledged interests are best represented. Either way, we need some kind of answers, at least to the questions we ask ourselves.

Do I know where to look for answers? It is very popular to blame school age students for their lack of knowledge on science, geography, history and other subjects. However, recent surveys by the National Science Foundation and other agencies indicate that the adult-out-of-school population suffers the same deficiencies. Fewer than half of American adults understand that the Earth orbits the sun yearly; only 9% know what a molecule is; 25 million Americans cannot locate the United States on an unlabeled world map.

These questions are not difficult and are easily answered by most commonly available almanacs, encyclopedia yearbooks, dictionaries, or online sources. Because ignorance is not so terrible to admit, you can go to a library and ask any question in the strictest confidence. All it takes is a little curiosity, energized by frequently asking, “Do I know what this means?” and then not suppressing the question without followup.

When looking at the evidence do I know how to judge it? Commonly we weigh accuracy by whether the information given squares with what we already know. When we do not know enough either we have to learn more which is always a good thing, or we have to gauge the trustworthiness of the source that informed us. But when we think over where we go for the information we trust, it is typically to those convenient to us – family, friends, co-workers, and likely the Internet. Major studies of information seeking behavior for 75 years have consistently shown the same thing: in matters of information (that which we otherwise do not know), convenience trumps all other criteria for evaluating the worth of the information. Most of us are not ready to test the information in front of us by seeking more than one source, particularly sources with differing perspectives and different kinds of authority. To do so likely leads us from just two to three sources or more.

When I must judge conflicting information what is the method? Accuracy is more than counting noses. The skills required depend upon our abilities to spot accuracy due to multiple factors – currency, the credibility of the source, internal consistency with the known facts, objectivity in reporting, and the bringing together of mutual supporting sources. Also consider why contrary information fails to explain a problem or hold up to testing. Majority information is likely informative, but the razor that information has to pass over is the ability to make sense by itself without reference to any extraneous outside idea.

Why does method require the absence of ideology? If something is true, it is necessary apart from anyone wishing it true. Recent articles in The New Scientist and other professional journals suggest that science suffers a bad rap because it so often uncovers bad news. Viruses are developing ahead of our ability to control them; the melting arctic endangers polar bears; the magnetic pole could shift in such a way that the solar wind would strip off our atmosphere. The most difficult matter in science as in any human endeavor is to probe the falsifiability of an idea or theory; we are so eager for our proofs that we do not look for the one example where the subject in question fails the test.

Are we to seek simplicity or distrust it? The answer is yes. In science or any knowledge, we are to use our best tools, whether intellect or instruments, and seek the most elegant and necessary of answers. Frank Herbert in his novel Dune (1965) has one of his minor characters say, “The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.” Likely true, but we are none of us in possession of the truth. The International Journal of Science Education reported in 2006 that when three sets of adults were exposed to differing presentations on science, each group wound up with more positive views towards science, irrespective of their own choice, but a less scientific one, that science is infallible. After all our efforts, science is only the best knowledge we have at this point. The adversaries to policy corrections on global warming know this and note that we have been wrong about science before – that the sun revolves around the earth, for instance – so we can be wrong now.

What do we do when uncertainty remains? We keep on searching. Real learning is constant. We watch the most relevant, balanced and pertinent programs, follow the hard news first, visit the library and consult the sources that do not come into our own home. We visit museums and take in lectures. We examine what we know and do not know. We have discussions that exchange real information.

Debates over science and the appropriate policy actions will continue as long as the U.S. is a democracy that wants to stay in the forefront of creativity, knowledge, and liberty. As citizens we can do our part, as best we can. For democracy, no one has found a substitute for vigilance.
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Roger Sween specializes in the art of questions and their answers and therefore in the science of information-seeking behavior.

© 2009 by Roger Sween.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be sent to the email address given above.

July 4th

2009-01-30T10:51:00.005-06:00

The Peculiar Fourth: a commentary.

Our national days vary in the ways they honor and memorialize features of our civic life. They range from the most individual, Martin Luther King, to the most symbolic, Flag Day. Yet, they center on an origin fundamental to the rest, the 4th of July. The 4th is our most peculiar celebration.

It is peculiar because we celebrate it with fireworks, firepower, parades, martial music and pyrotechnic speeches. It’s been this way since the beginning, even before the beginning when on July 3, 1776, John Adams imagined how future celebrations would be.

It is peculiar because what the 4th of July commemorates is a document, and the resolution that document supports. We don’t even celebrate the ratification of our constitution, as some other nations do, in the way we herald the Declaration of Independence. That declaration, its particular content, and the actions that share in turning its principles into reality are more than memorable. They are the organic foundation of our way of life and the key to every other national holiday.

We may know a little of the chain of events that drove the thirteen colonies to come together in the Continental Congress, beginning September 1774, and to work out common actions. As John Adams wrote home to Abigail, “Yesterday the greatest Question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps, never was or will be decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony 'that these united Colonies, are, and of right ought to be free and independent states.' You will see in a few days a Declaration setting forth the causes, which have impelled us to this mighty Revolution, and the Reasons which will justify it.”

The Continental Congress accepted the one path to which the spiraling conflict with the British had driven it: independence. After amendments of its own, the Congress passed the declaration that its committee reported to them. In time all delegates signed it, including those not present at its hearing and one other seated weeks after the others had signed. What they endorsed and published, upon threat of execution for treason, was a statement of political principles or truths, so widely held as to be self-evident.

All are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights the governed institue governments, but when governments abuse their authority and exercise undue tyranny over rights, it becomes the right and duty of the governed to throw off the oppression.

Twenty-seven statements, offered as facts, substantiate how the King of Great Britain, George III, referred to only as “he,” acted in a tyrannical fashion contrary to the implied ideals of civil government and a free people. Two consequent paragraphs round up the situation: this same king has failed to hear cause for redress. The colonies have no choice but to sever their ties of allegiance and pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honor in defense of their independent status among the nations of the world.

One could say that the rest is history, except that ours is neither an automatic history nor a finished one. Though Jefferson and his compatriots had become imbued by natural law (Newton and those who made him popular) and natural rights (chiefly Locke), how these ideas are to work out in political and practical ways has taken the following decades of discussion, trial and refinement.

Are we not still on the way to equality while securing the blessings of life, liberty and happiness? And how have we been persistent to attend to the responsibilities of informed consent in our governance? How have we ever settled questions of rights and justice in representative government when minorities and shifting majorities continue to clash?

To most suitably and profitably address the promise of the 4th of July and thereby rightly celebrate it, first dive into the Declaration of Independence itself. Copies are abundant. Savor its meaning and act upon its living impact. May we be more enlightened from our borning document than from any rocket’s red glare.
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© 2006, 2009 by Roger Sween.

First published as “A peculiar Fourth warrants some investigation: commentary,” Republican Eagle (June 28, 2006) 4, and here revised.

I welcome substantive comments on the content of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made to the email address given above.

Values

2009-01-29T10:57:00.005-06:00

The Value of Values

Values are in contention with one another in our society and world. Of that observation there is no doubt even though, at some core, values hold us all together. Some will say that antagonistic extreme positions exaggerate our differences and that the middle majority retain the central position as to the values question. Efforts to sort this out elude easy solution despite continued attention to the subject. Nevertheless, some perspective, however limited, is necessary.

Ideally, values comprise a system of qualities of intrinsic and applied worth, expressed in principles, that are severally and interdependently desirable and beneficial to the people individually and collectively who live under that system. So said, the values bundle needs some unraveling to see if this definition really means what it pretends. The question then becomes how a values system applies to us as persons and citizens. Finally, what ought we to do about that application?

We can identify values by thinking about our human situation in order to discover what quality underlies or should underlie good ways of living together. Good ways, simply put, means everyone benefits and no one gets hurt. The thinking approach to values, we call philosophy. Presumably, everybody has a philosophy of life based on personally integrated values whether they have thought them through or been less rigorous about determining the meaning, consistency and excellence of the values adopted.

Such rigor is not for everyone, and the prevailing way of integrating values into one’s life is to absorb them by living in the received culture. While philosophy exists to determine, examine or clarify values, culture nurtures its values by example and reinforces their adoption through approval of the appropriate responses and disapproval of the inappropriate ones. Cultural anthropologists have found that though every one of 5,000 existing cultures has a value system, all values are relative to the particular home culture and that there is no such thing as universal values. As expected, this professional principle of cultural relativism is also in dispute. While some values may be dysfunctional to social and human well being, universally everyone expects treatment with respect.

Religion or recognition of the spiritual dimension also portends values. I say portends, since not all spiritual expressions come across in the same way as to claims on the lives of their believers or explicitness as found in their history of teaching, dogma, or doctrine. A common element of spiritual systems, however, is that they draw upon sources or revelations that are outside the human experiences of thinking or making empirical discoveries about the world and our lives in it. Thereby values gain another context: we ourselves are not the sum and substance of value; some greater entity outside us, yet still somehow related to us is that sum and substance.

Though these three prominent ways of getting at values – the philosophic, cultural and religious – exist and may be the major ones, they are not the only ones. Besides, of course, these methods overlap. We can think about each approach and develop philosophies of them; we can enrich each avenue to values by our cultural traditions and its history of informants; we can peer beyond human limits through religion as to purpose and holism. Though few of us are professionals, especially concerning technicalities, in philosophy, culture, or religion, we are likely to inhabit each approach and can gain from their methods what we have the will to pursue.

When we look about our resident situation, we find that all three approaches to comprehending values, their systems, and imports fail to bring us into cohesion. Part of the problem is that the United States and most of what we have in the three value-determiners before us is not like most of the 5,000 cultures in the world. They are small, bounded, authoritarian, established, and homogenous. We are large, globally enmeshed, democratic, new and changing, and diverse. The very freedom, individualism and expansiveness that we prize and espouse undercut the stability that value systems are supposed to bring to a society. So, we curse one another for the practice of our values and do not have the wit – collectively at least – to find our way out of this troubling achievement.

As a nation, we have so little cohesiveness because we are a bundle of contradictions. We debate, but the debate causes dissension. We adjudicate for justice, but the decisions divide. We multiply choice, particularly in the economic sphere, and are amazed at the lack of taste, decorum, and civic involvement. We accelerate abundance and then surprised by pollution. We expect even grade school children to take the loyalty oath of the Pledge of Allegiance, but fail to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship. We promote globalization, but fail to see ourselves as citizens of the world.

Let us admit that life is complex, but we all start from the same irreducible base. Every individual must sort out their responses to life in five areas. These are the physical conditions of earthly existence, the existence of the self as a distinct entity, the presence of other people, our cultural inheritance, and the possible future. Everything else stems from these five. One may ignore the areas as they choose, but such unconsciousness does not do away with their pressures upon us.

This framework admits that whatever one’s particular culture may be, it has its influences on each of us. But because of the mix of the five areas, no one area is exclusive, and it is dubious to pinpoint any one area, culture included, as dominant when they all interact. We have a difficult enough time fully understanding and directing ourselves with whom we have the greatest proximity and the most control and presumably the fullest knowledge.

Values are the basis on which we consciously or habitually by integration make choices in taking one line of thought, belief or action over another. Values are one cultural product yet remain open, as long as an individual wills it, to personal examination, clarification and redefinition before being adopted, but more significantly after being adopted. Articulated values at variance with the culture when acted upon tend to make critics, rebels, deviants or criminals. Cultures, depending upon the nature of the variance, exert a range of pressures from raised eyebrows to executions in order to gain conformance.

In the physical arena we have issues of the appropriate long-term use of finite natural resources, of population size and viability, of health and of responsibility for the environment in which we cannot but live. For ourselves we face numerous life choices that hover around individual identity, potential, achievement and happiness; here no one can do for us what we must do ourselves. Concerning others, our relationships flow from the private and interpersonal to our roles in the neighborhood, community, economy, political associaton and for the common good. Cultural inheritance, let me emphasize, is a treasure trove of the past up to the very minute during which humanity experienced what we face and need to know if we have wit to learn in order to benefit from such heritage. An evolving culture is open to all of history’s enrichment. By comparison, the future may stretch on as long and potently as the human past, but exactly in what manner we do not know. With such uncertainty comes less clarity and the tendency for less thought and neglect. Thereby, we may be engineering our own extinction and need to consciously chose and create that future most desirable to us.

We cannot address questions of the value-base of culture and society unless we share some working principles. As a career information professional of forty-plus years, I offer the following for consideration.

It is better to know than not know.

·Knowledge, the product of knowing, is imperfect and therefore individuals’ search for truth (the knowledge that is perfect) is unending.

·Consequently, we need to be modest about our own knowledge, and reflective on our own limitations.

·Ambiguity about the certainty of our own knowledge requires psychological security, the realization that our conclusions, though our best at present, are tentative.

·In seeking knowledge and examining our own conclusions, we need criteria, which criteria are also subject to continued examination and improvement.

·Whatever criteria of coherence, currency, verifiability, correspondence with others may be, we must continually test knowledge against experience and attune ourselves to the results.

·We need to be alert to all human weaknesses, especially among ourselves – laziness, distraction, and self-deception – and realize that our knowing requires learning as a continuous endeavor.

·Learning may have its automatic features, that is, learning by living, but the greatest potential for learning comes from focused attention and endeavor to identify and overcome our persistent ignorance and mistaken nature.

In brief, we live profitably by knowledge that we must seek while being humble about what we already know.

I have tried to look deeply into the values question and find that primarily, we are not geared in the mass to share in any but the most token way a commonality on values. Most of our institutions pivot on an assumption of inherent human disagreement and not on the desire for solutions. Our laws arise out of factions where agreements come by compromises at best or overpowering at worst. All these efforts continually model that someone is right while someone else is wrong and that taking up the cudgels, even if the cudgels are words, is the answer.

The answer, the only answer, to our fundamental differences is to be in conversation. Despite the enormous problems identified, global, and often out of our hands, we have plenty of opportunities to do what we can in our spheres of contact to make amends. We can know others face to face, make more friends than enemies, work together for mutual understanding and problem solving, show respect, listen and speak in turn.

In this manner we have a better means to enter the complexity of existence as it is, where always (let us be informed) there is another side. And by conversation, we can find ourselves more fully through our relationships with others. The principal freedom we have and value is the liberating freedom to be neighborly.
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© 2007, 2009 by Roger Sween.

Roger Sween admits the heavy influence of his family of origin, a preference for reading as learning, certain formative books read when young, a particular Lutheran rendition of Christianity, a penchant for introspection, rationality and judgment, a love of history as the holistic discipline, and the career frustration that most people do not make routine use of the abundant information and intellectual resources available to them.

First written at the Editor’s request and published in Practical Thinking, v.1 no.2 (December 2005) 1-3. Practical Thinking was a joint publication of the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education and the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum. That article is here revised.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to be at the email address given above.

Why Read?

2009-01-28T07:08:00.006-06:00

Twenty Answers to the Question

1. Reading is for everyone because it is not all one thing.

2. Many kinds of reading exist: people read different things for different reasons, and they read differently at different times, including at different times in their lives.

3. People read for fun, to amuse and occupy themselves, to be up on what others are reading and talking about, to learn and know things, to explore themselves, to travel outside themselves and away from their locations, to gain from other’s lives, thinking or imagination what they have to say beyond one’s own experience.

4. Reading is at times technical, practical, entertaining, adventuresome, playful, silly, poetic, serious, matter-of-fact, fantastic, mysterious, symbolic, mystical, argumentative, political, informative, worshipful, philosophical, historical, questioning, advising, model-making, or many other dimensions.

5. Because reading is individualized for different people, readers read what they like feel good while reading, feel rewarded for having read and enjoy themselves during the process of reading and afterwards as they think about and talk about what they have read.

6. There is little point in reading what you don’t like. Enough other things exist to read than to spend time with something that doesn’t make you want to read it. Even things you are told you have to read and may not like, you can often find something else that substitutes for them.

7. Reading is a lifetime skill, except that you cannot predict what kind of reading you might need or want to do in the future.

8. Reading is developmental, that is, you gain reading ability by reading, and there is no other way, no short cut, no way to know reading except to read. Some things are easy to read, and some things are hard. The Constitution of the United States, for example, is at the 22d grade level or senior year in college; if you want to be good in reading at that level, you need to just keep on reading.

9. Because reading is developmental, for most people the practice of reading will readily put a person’s abilities beyond the average for their age level. Those who have reading difficulties, when they are detected, can also become a successful reader.

10. Reading is more fundamentally human than any technology. Reading is older than paper, older than the English language, older than printing presses, older than computers and the Internet. We will still have reading should all the newspapers, magazines, books, and love letters disappear.

11. People either want to read things by themselves and mull over them in their heads or read them as part of a group and talk to others about them. Both ways make sense.

12. Reading is portable, cheap, flexible and beneficial. Be prepared: have something to read with you at all times.

13. Reading can become habitual. Of course, reading is not automatic; readers have to set aside time to read. Since we all have the same 24 hours a day, reading requires choosing when to do it. No one time fits all.

14. Reading is discovery. Anything not yet read is a deep, dark unknown, and we are often reluctant to pick up something new because we don’t know if we’ll like it. So look it over, examine the clues—cover comments, introduction, contents listing, beginning pages, here and there in the book. If it seems promising, give it a try; if that doesn’t work, go on to something else.

15. Reading has a tendency to continue ever onward, and it is impossible to read everything, even everything that you might think is important and good to read. Reading proceeds by choosing what to read, and there are plenty of guides to what to read next, but the best one is what your own reading suggests.

16. Reading is a basis of relationships, between classmates and friends, within families and between parents and children, between students and teachers, between co-workers, between neighbors, between members of the same organization, among and between faith communities and within civic communities.

17. Reading is the basis of most work from the 20th century onward in knowledge-based and information-oriented societies.

18. Reading is a basis of learning and of continued learning across the lifespan. And reading is independent of any institution except bookstores and libraries, both of which only exist to help you find what you want.

19. Reading is the key to our past, both the immediate past and of ages past. Then people—some like us, some more informed and wiser—took the time to write down their experiences and their thoughts for our benefit. If we want to, we can take advantage of what they had to say.

20. Reading is an investment in one’s own personal future. Reading is stocking up stories, information, knowledge, narrative and expression for the times we need to draw on what we’ve read, to remember, talk, think, figure out, know and consider some challenge or some future state of being from the fund of past reading experiences.
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© 2001 by Roger Sween.

This listing of 20 responses to the question Why Read? by Roger Sween was written in response to a request on reasons for high school students to read asked by Jane Prestebak and first posted on the MEMO-L listserv in November 2001. The MEMO co-presidents subsequently with permission distributed the list at the pre-conference on reading at the American Association of School Librarians that fall. At the request of Judy Bull MEMOrandom (February 2002), the newsletter of the Minnesota Educational Media Organization, published the list with permission.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this bloog. Personal comments may be sent to me at my email address given above.

Classics

2009-01-27T09:54:00.003-06:00

The Classics Question

The question of the role of the classics is hot right now. This issue is not new. As long as there has been literature, the audience has been at odds as to what is worthwhile and what is not. But in time, certain books and certain authors gain canonical influence; we regard them as the standards.

The argument over the classics is without resolve and difficult to bring to application; the facts evade and challenge any easy generalization. Instead of a quantity approach as to how many people read what, let us start from quality, an approach based on admitted observations and values. Here the predisposition is that some books are better than others are, and accordingly, it is better for readers to pay attention to them. Cues come from a couple of authors who are
“classic” in the original sense; they wrote in Latin and came from the first class of citizens.

Cicero, an industrious provincial, so rigorously applied himself to study and self-improvement that he became the most noted Roman orator of his day. In so doing, he gained great political influence and suffered many enemies. In his later years, he labored to preserve the republic against dictatorship and to pass on to his compatriots the learning inherited from the Greeks. Towards the end of On the Orator, he says

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain forever a child. For what is the gain in human existence, unless it be woven into the lives of our ancestors through the records of history? – De Oratore, III, 120 (55 BCE).

Quintillian, an admirer of Cicero, came along a century later. He headed Rome’s foremost school of oratory, the first to be paid at state expense, taught the Emperor Domitian’s grand-
nephews, and received from Emperor Vespasian the designation “Professor of Rhetoric.” In retirement, he wrote The Training of the Orator that is in part a technical work. Of greater value is his declaration on the principles of education, including character formation from earliest
childhood, and reviews of prior Greek and Latin literature.

…I have already said that some profit may be derived from every author. But we must wait till our powers have been developed and established to the full before we turn to these poets. Similarly, at banquets we take our fill of the best fare and then turn to other food that, in spite of its comparative inferiority, is still attractive owing to its variety. …But until we have acquired that assured facility of which I spoke, we must form our minds and develop an appropriate tone by reading that is deep rather than wide – Institutio Oratoria, X, 1, 58-59 (ca. 95 CE).

The values implicit in the classical approach are that each individual lives in the long run of history, shares an inherited culture, and develops in association with the others who surround and interact through everyday life. So to mature into the society and to equip oneself for the fullest opportunity and development, learners will necessarily, as appropriate to them, hone in first on the best sources of the human experience to gain knowledge and understanding. Since young learners have no way to know what is best for them, it is left to their seniors to responsibly lead the way.

You can see that the classical position is based upon an enormous assumption: parents, teachers and other exemplars know their duty and will tend to it. In fact, the upper classes
of Rome often left their children in the hands of unlettered slaves, just as today children are babysat by an indifferent television. And so we must admit that routine reading has always been a minority activity, and intensive reading of the classics, as Quintillian wanted, an activity with an even smaller minority.

We are hard pressed to find any book that is shared among the population as a whole or among any majority of it. The 39 books of the Old Testament canon, a library of varied writing in itself, likely come closest, but even this possibility does not quite fill the bill. When was the last time any random group of people launched into a discussion on the anguish of Job, the bravery of Esther, the tragedies of King David, or the wondrous poetry of the Psalms?

We are so imbued with notions of equality; as educators and librarians we want everyone to have every opportunity and consequent success in equal proportion. We castigate ourselves when we fail at this goal; we hang back from initiatives unless they are going to reach everyone. Yet what can we do in the face of the undeniable realities that daunt us?

Are the classics in decline? Quintillian 1900 years ago thought so then. Yet they do not go away in total. In 1998 an advisory panel to the Modern Library imprint of Random House selected the 100 best English language novels of the Twentieth century. See Newsweek (3August 1998) 64-65. That August I owned 69 of the 100 and my local public library had a comparable number, though a different mix of titles. However, the combined public libraries of the southeast region had all but one. That was Henry Green’s Loving (1945), not a title on the tip of anyone’s tongue.

A standby guide for library acquisitions is The Readers Adviser that over the 20th century grew to 6 volumes comprising approximately 45,000 entries. All of the titles listed in a full range of subjects are judged to be “the best” of their particular field or genre. Another more focused
volume, Literature Lover’s Companion (2001), calls itself “the essential reference to the world’s greatest writers – past and present, popular and classical.” It touts the works of over 1000 authors from Homer, 9th century BCE, to Ben Okri, a Nigerian, born in 1959. Five to eight titles represent most authors. These two guides recommend items for first purchase in greater number than most libraries hold.

We need also to recognize that one influence of the classics is an indirect one, through their effect on the writing of other authors. About twenty years ago, two Minnesota state university professors surveyed entering students at Mankato state as to their favorite authors. Hands down, the favorite was Stephen King. These students as seniors answered the same survey four years later to show how their tastes had changed. And the favorite was Stephen King, a discovery that brought considerable alarm to academics. In 2000, King published “a memoir of the craft” On Writing. In an appendix, he credits his reading of other authors as making him a writer and lists about 100 entertaining books. Most are contemporary to King, but among them are Heart of Darkness (1902), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), As I Lay Dying (1930), Brideshead Revisited (1945), A Death in the Family (1957) and Our Man in Havana (1959).

Currently, Francine Prose, a well-established writer, but no Stephen King as to popularity, harked back to Quintillian’s emphasis on intensive reading by pointing out how a number of classic authors achieved their successes. Her appendix of 115 titles in Reading Like a Writer (2006) is definitely more literary than King’s and shares only two titles with his preferences, Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From and Richard Price’s Freedomland. Among the older titles Prose lists are Sophocles’ Oedipus in the Young translation, the medieval Song of Roland in Sayer’s translation, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two by Austen, now enjoying a great revival of interest, start off the 19th century – Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Curiously, she also lists Loving, the absent title mentioned above, along with another of Green’s novels, Doting.

That King and Prose have two entirely different takes on reading and writing is typical and highlights the basic situation. We are so overrun with good books that the constant question remains: how do the classics fit in?

While many choices as to title emphasis are possible, I recommend the following overall principles and objectives.

• Everyone should come to understand that relatively few books out of the millions published have lasting influence.

• Books of the past have more than historical importance when they speak to the continuance of human experience; these books continue to affect and change lives.

• These books provide a common ground to understanding ourselves amongst others.

• As works of art, classics are meant for enjoyment, not study, and never picked to pieces.

• Because such books last through time, one can reread them during a lifetime with increased pleasure and greater understanding.

• To whet the appetite for such reading, families, libraries and teachers need to provide, model and encourage quality choices as their charges develop their own personalities, interests and abilities.

• Worthy titles are those that provide readers both enough attainment for satisfaction and additional enticement for more books.

• Everyone should recognize that it takes more than a lifetime to read all the most highly recommended books.

• Everyone should learn how to pursue and obtain more books than are readily or easily available.

I believe that to some extent, we all work towards these ends. The challenge is to do it more consistently, with more resources, and more enthusiasm.
_____
“The Classics Question” appeared in an earlier version in MEMOrandom, v.16 no.4 (January 2007) 6-7, and is here revised.

© 2007, 2009 by Roger Sween.

I welcome substantive comments on the content in this blog. Personal comments may be sent to me at my email address given above.

Quality

2009-01-27T07:33:00.004-06:00

Questions of Quality in Reading

In education, we aim in summary at two comprehensive ends for all learners. The two goals are the fulfillment of human potential and the attainment of humanity’s cultural heritage. Certainly potential and heritage, being vast and complicated, are long-term and seldom fall nicely and completely into place for any individual educator during their temporary time with the learner. Further, since the individual psyche thrives on its own individuality, no educator can actually command learning. Rather, education as a life process needs first to be won and then gradually surrendered to the self-direction of the learner. Never mind that the human potential and the human heritage are mutual; everyone has to sort out the intricacies of these particular relationships for themselves.

Reading, nevertheless, is central to the process of learning and has the principle virtue of being an educational engine in itself that is more diverse, more companionable, and more lasting than any other single educator.

From a practical point of view, the existence of so many million books pressures each reader to spend their time on the select few titles most beneficial to themselves. ‘Select few,’ means a few thousand compared to sixty million trade editions since the invention of printing.[1] Select reading always exists thanks to the reading choices every reader necessarily makes. Choice is inescapable and exists along a continuum from refusal to read or inattention to reading – each no better than the inability to read – all the way to the most active and dedicated of lifetime reading plans.

People make choices beneficial to themselves in lots of different ways. Hopefully, their reading selections develop along the lines of informed and judicious selections. Still the process of making productive choices can be difficult and full of challenges. For some, obstacles discourage reading and block the way to exercising choice. Parents, teachers, library and media professionals are all educators who work to overcome and remove obstacles for the benefit of the learner in their charge.

Learners can be educated as to the options in their choices, but not all with the same realization or to the same extent.[2] Not all learners become readers in the same way or at the same level. Whatever our desires that every person learn, every learner read, and every reader excel, likely no society has ever had a preponderance of readers in any full sense. Take together considerations of deliberate, planned, regular, persistent, serious and deep reading, and you will find few that measure up to this totality. Still we try to do the most we can amidst the whole population. At the height of reading achievement are those readers who become writers.[3]

Questions of what reading is worth seek some foundation of what is meaningful enough to win and hold potential readers. Many are the values offered on behalf of reading’s importance: reading engages, reading extends beyond experience; reading transmits heritage; reading plumbs the depths of being. In every value named, reading goes beyond bare humanity, humanity in association with others, and humanity as lived. Reading enriches; that is the short of it. At least, such a claim is reading’s promise and potential.

Of course, reading is non-existent without readers, and through each of those previously valued interactions, the reader discovers and experiences each value as known and made real. Yet each transaction between reader and text differs. When two or more get together to compare responses and understandings as to what they have read, they discover their varying readings. It is the same text, exactly, but the reading experience is not the same for everyone. Further, the experience upon successive readings is not the same, especially as the years go by. As readers age, mature, and change, they will not bring their same selves to the text each time.

I read Baum’s Oz books when I was ten years old, lucky to find them in my small town public library. At that time, critics already considered the Oz books as mediocre because they doomed any series to be questionable merit. Later in life, the children’s literature class I took surprised me: I learned how poor Baum was considered to be. I wondered how this could be since I especially remembered some of the titles very fondly. Fifty years after my first reading, the year 2000 was the centennial of The Wizard of Oz, and Baum once again enjoyed the passing attention of the day. I decided then to re-read or read new all his books. Seeing them as an aged critic myself, I noted their general unevenness and several flaws. But at their best, those that had been my favorites in 1950 were still my favorites despite the decades.

Out of fourteen Oz novels that Baum wrote over a twenty-year period, three titles emerged in my estimation as better than the rest—The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), The Emerald City of Oz (1910), and The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913). What I admired about these three from the intervening perspective of reading hundreds of novels, myths, legends, fairytales, and works of fantasy and science fiction was Baum’s élan that breathed itself into the achievement of each favored book. These three are truly innovative and Baum does not copy himself, except as to the background that grows richer. The characters are ingeniously individual, robust, and likeable. Baum shows great humor and delectable irony. The stories come to surprising and satisfactory endings that contribute to the environment of the whole series. While Baum entertained and amused me when I was ten, at sixty he gave me a finer aesthetic enjoyment with the same texts. To me this makes unarguable that reading is a unique experience for every individual at every time of their reading.[4]

The particular learning I have come to over the decades of reading a great deal of varied texts is that a person comes to prize some works over others because they are better. “Better” means that some books demonstrate ”qualities” or ‘characteristics that qualify’ them in such a way or ways as to set them apart from the general mass of readily available reading material. The qualities speak to or evidence the particular values that the reader has come to hold in some kind of hierarchy. Just as the reading experience varies with the reader, judgments of quality are also going to vary. Popularity, timeliness, excitement, consciousness-raising, the attraction and relevance of any of the numerous disciplines of knowledge, and the pursuit of hard or theoretical truths all have their appeal. The book market is alive with variables from the blockbuster bestseller to the most abstruse treatise, and they all find their audiences, however mammoth or minute those audiences may be.

Critics, mostly of the professional variety, based on their preferred aesthetic or critical theory, will argue that certain named works are good, less good or otherwise lesser all the way to bad. Choosing-up sides as to good and bad books is a human activity; everyone likes to be on the good side, the right side. Certainly, criticism has its values when it provides tools for looking at texts and helping to evaluate them, but no criticism is the textual work in itself. Always, the piece of literature must speak for itself and not through the filter of someone else’s criticism.

As we educators go beyond the mechanics of reading to the content of reading, we take various approaches to point to the merits of literature so that maturing readers use those sample qualities as they will, may or can in making their own judgments. Given the difficulty of imposing standards of right and wrong in anything, let alone reading taste, let us examine the use of good examples and model behavior, a method whose sanction is as old as Aristotle.

First, give heed to wise old Montaigne. His father had Montaigne’s tutors submerse the infant in Latin and allowed no spoken French within earshot until by the age of six the child had gained such proficiency in the language that the only way to test him was to require him to turn bad Latin into good. This Montaigne, whose essays have set the standard for that genre, said,[5]

Teachers are for ever bawling into our ears as though pouring knowledge down through a funnel: our task is merely to repeat what we have been told. I would want our tutor to put that right: as soon as the mind in his charge allows it, he should make it show its fettle by appreciating and selecting things – and by distinguishing between them…

Bees ransack flowers here and there: but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram. Similarly the boy will transform his borrowings; he will confound their forms so that the end-product is entirely his; namely, his judgment, the forming of which is the only aim of his toil, his study and his education.

Readers are of two kinds, those that are nurtured and those that read despite nurturing or the lack of it. Nurturing is the only thing that we can hope to have any control over. As far as early reading is concerned, there is little substitute for oral tradition from early childhood, or in the womb, as some say, and for parents and other family members reading to children. Happy and productive is the family that adopts a routine reading ritual. All this telling and reading to children, which is likely continued, supplemented and expanded in schools and at public libraries, has an aim. We aim to exemplify reading in its humanness, pleasure and cognitive content prior to and alongside unraveling the mechanics.

The aim of the mechanics of reading is that learners become able to read on their own and to pursue their own reading as they will. Primary school readers move beyond their first books and begin to fill out reading wheels with a growing variety of literature types. They distinguish poetry, fairy tales, biographies, and other kinds of fact books from one another. They are learning the bases of the structures of literature as they discover them.

Such discovery learning is not new; you can find it in Socrates. When I left college in the early 1960s, instead of the whole class reading the same text, some English teachers had their classes read half a dozen novels divided among the students. The class then discussed what makes the novel a novel as they reached for the elements common to those six titles. I’ve never found such methods very widespread; whatever the virtues of this discovery system, it requires more preparation of the teacher and expects more attention from the students. Serafini warns of the dangers, difficulties, and experience required on the part of teachers and students to conduct such profitable examinations. I recommend his article highly.[6]

Mostly what Serafini warns about is the omnipresent possibility of the teacher insisting on his reading of the text as the correct reading. The same thing may happen in stifling student discovery in a study group activity where some students dominate others or students as a group seek to discern the mind of the teacher and please that one in charge. Searafini worries too that the current emphasis on high stakes testing is inimical to students developing their critical senses and their examination of quality measures in what they read. These judging skills are marked down as of little importance in the tests or are not easily tested.

Of course, school media and public librarians are in excellent positions to do a lot for younger readers in their development of strong reading habits and developmental reading abilities. It always seemed to me as I was growing up that I was the fortunate one of the gods because I had the same two personal librarians from birth to age eighteen, and both of them knew me. One was in the public library and the other in the public school. They always showed great interest in what I was reading, were ready to exchange a few words or a lot of words about what I read, and with greater acumen than Amazon or Netflix does today could recommend other items of interest to me and answer my questions. As time went by, they set books aside for me that they knew I would like. The public librarian even broke the state rules and requested interlibrary loan for me even though in those days this service was not available to children.

I think it was those dyadic conversations at the check-out desk that made all the difference for me in my life. I was always fortunate to always find more books I wanted to read than I could read. The pervading idea that books are wealth proved inescapable. I came to realize, likely after high school, that I had learned more from reading books from the library and those of my own purchase, than I had from textbooks, class time or and from all my teachers. This concept may be a dangerous one, but I found it unavoidable. My range of ideas, attitudes, knowledge and habits had come from books, not from classrooms. To me the books, especially the ones I favored and continued to think about, seemed the most determinative.

Many books go out of date and lose appeal when readers grow as suspicious of their worn exteriors as their fallible contents. Best sellers peak and pale; you can look at the history of bestsellers over the history of the United States and see the vast numbers of titles that once attracted the highest interest. Most of them have few readers today. Yet some books have long staying power, not for everyone necessarily but for some respectable readership. To attract readers and bolster them with quality examples, the challenge becomes to acquire for their choosing most of the best that one can. You cannot dictate readership, but you can enable it by concentrating on quality in selection.

Quality evidences itself in two principal ways. One is the extrinsic quality of affect, that is, certain books pull at and impress certain readers in ways that by emotional result touch or change them. The other is the intrinsic quality of construct; the way the message, as delivered, becomes appreciable in itself. These two kinds of qualities are not mutually exclusive, though they vary in proportion. Many readers seek affect; fewer construct. And it is easy to relish the affect of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, even when you are twenty, as I was, and miss the construct until later, or to be overwhelmed by the construct in Huckleberry Finn and miss the affect until later. Alas, many of us are not mature enough to absorb a book as we might just because we have read it before were ready to appreciate it.

Often I worry about Silas Marner and other dreaded “classics,” which so many of us in my generation had to read and hated. Well, ‘no literature was ever written to be studied.’ (I believe I paraphrase Winston Churchill.) What would those of us in the silent generation think now if we read George Eliot again? At about 200 pages, Silas Marner doesn’t take long to comprehend.
_____
© 2009 by Roger Sween

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at the email address above.

[1] See my calculations in “The Reader as a Self-Directed Learner,” Update newsletter (August 1999) 5-10.

[2] Robert Scholes in The Crafty Reader (2001) discusses ways in which readers gain the abilities to decode and follow the crafts that authors employ in different genres and styles of literature.

[3] Compare “Why Bother?” aka “The Harper Essay” (1996) by Jonathan Franzen in How to Be Alone: Essays (2002).

[4] See also two others who have written extensively on their childhood and youthful reading: Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life (1997) and Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built (2002).

[5] Michel de Montaigne, “On Educating Children,” The Complete Essays I:26 (M. A. Screech) 1991, p.169, 171.

[6] F. Serafini, “Getting Beyond ‘I like the book’: Impediments to Quality Literature Discussions.” 2/13/05. http://serafini.nevada.edu/WebArticles/Lit/LitDiscussions.htm.

The Gift

2009-01-26T07:50:00.004-06:00

Language Is the Greatest Gift

A gift, something given, is by derivation from “to give” something unmerited and outside of our control. The word itself came into Middle English from gipt in Old Norse. Most gifts, even the commonplace ones of care and concern, habit, food and other necessities, come to us as inheritance from our parents or so many others who have endeavored and gone on before us in the eon past. If we know our pioneer ancestry or recognize even a slice of history, the contributions of the past, given to us, come to mind. The most extraordinary gift, however, and the one that is at the basis of all the rest is language.

Thanks to language, we construct and communicate the sense and meaning of our experiences. Orality precedes and turns into literacy, a process still underway after thousands of years. From language and its written form come concepts, the creation and transmission of community and culture. Knowledge becomes a human enterprise, and we are on the road to civilization. The possibilities and choices for learning accumulate and grow, then explode. So, too, do politics and bureaucracy, speculation and religion, science and superstition, literature and the conscious appreciation of the arts. Throughout endless permutations between thought and talk, we lose track of any conscious ability to separate mentality and verbalization.

We tend to take language for granted likely because the absorption of it is osmotic and with little seeming effort. An excited two-year old runs at us to announce, “I builded a tower!” The tot first follows the regularity of most English grammar, but in easy time soon learns the exceptions. It is built not builded, went not goed, and so on. We soon grow so comfortable in our native tongue, that we only get riled over it when we think it threatened by another language or variations in our preferred way of using words. In forty-plus years as an educator, the most hostile discussion of my experience was a group of highly educated colleagues arguing over bilingualism. Rosalie Maggio tells that when she toured promoting her book The Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage on talk radio shows, such examples as gyp and welsh that she used to illustrate ethnic slurs brought hostile callers phoning in and accusing her of “changing the language.”

Few metaphors about language surface in common consciousness beyond the stories of the Tower of Babel and the visitation at Pentecost. These andirons either side of the living and uncontrollable fires of language reflect a desire for one language for all. At Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), God confused the words of those seeking to reach heaven by their own merits, and populations scattered over the earth. At Jerusalem (Acts 2: 1-13), an outpouring of the Spirit allowed foreigners, gathered together from throughout the known world, to hear all the others in their own language. Languages, which serve as instruments of commonality and inclusion, also in effect exclude those not of the lingua franca.

The desire for one language, preferably one’s own, has a long history. Among others, Sumerian, Sanskrit and Hindi, Chinese and Mandarin, Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, Spanish, and today’s English have all had their turn and wide influence. While efforts to keep Latin global, concoct formal languages such as Esperanto, or promote the simplifications of Basic English carried on the desire for a universal language, all fail. With the exception of American Sign Language, mathematics, and computer languages, all of whom have their “native speakers,” living languages require speakers living and interacting in the language of that linguistic culture. Consequently, languages change and by their evolution stay useful. Individual words may become archaic and die, but the language thrives.

However much we may take our given language for granted, with the treasure of language comes a great responsibility. And without a universal language, we must attend to the one we have. Language may evolve as much by naive deviation from some standard as it does by informed or creative intention. Yet, language use, if it is to serve as a vehicle of common understanding, requires certain rigor, accuracy, and honesty. We can wink at the innocent ignorance of the young student’s mangled definition: “Puberty is the stage between childhood and adultery.” Unfortunately, we often find, as expressed by Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, someone who uses the language “more to blackmail than to teach.” We live in an age of such blackguards, who whether for the low purposes of consumerism or the high purposes of political advantage, twist the language with misrepresentation and contrivance.

Expressions such as contract with America, core mission, culture wars, death taxes, digital divide, distance learning, family values, Judaeo-Christian, pro-life and other tortured anti-concepts contort language to mean something beyond what the words actually say. Along with these slights of tongue, even the dictionary definitions of conservative as traditional and liberal as advocate for human rights have become hacked to pieces and distorted from their established meanings. It is though Humpty Dumpty’s argument with Alice on the other side of the looking-glass has come to life.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Mastery in language – let us prefer proficiency - is a developmental skill; that is, a skill developed through practice. First, the language that has come to us from beyond our knowledge and wish, has charge over our understanding. Language, as the product of populations long before our time, is still the shared experience of the society in which we find ourselves. By personal cleverness, we may introduce new words and extended meanings into the common vocabulary, but they have no accuracy except as they bring us together in meaningfulness instead of separate us.

Otherwise, we return to the babble of Babel, a word that in origin means confusion.
____
Roger Sween, who gave up employment to read and write, finds himself captured by language and witness of its first-hand progress among five grandchildren, who range from toddlers to teenagers.

“Language: The Greatest Gift” was first published in The Carp, No. 20 (February 2008) 3.

© by Roger Sween 2008.

Retirement?

2009-01-25T15:31:00.001-06:00

28 August 2000

Dear Lynn,

Thank you for asking about my retirement so I can think about these things some more. You know, I do not like the idea of retirement and do not use the word. I tell people I have not retired, but that “I quit employment.” They go blank, so it is better to tell them “I am a freelance writer.”

A friend told me one time, a few years ago, that on the average, a writer in the United States earns $1900 a year. I don’t know what this means. Possibly, there are an awful lot of people scribbling away, and they bring down the average; or, the business of earning one’s living by the pen is fraught with difficulty. I believe both to be true, but especially the latter.

Although modern society supports a large segment of its society whose medium is reading, writing and thinking, and who pays them for it, my own experience is that it is not an easy thing to get into. One has to be focused and willing to sacrifice to get there. Biographies of artists, scientists, authors – intellectuals in general – are stories of drudgery and struggle against the odds. Rare are the fortunate few who have places already made for them: more typical are the poets I’ve met who grumble that they support themselves at temp jobs while they squeeze out a few drops of poetry which may ultimately earn them a very few dollars.

We are a society of extremes: a small percentage produce best sellers and movie scripts that go for millions. The vast majority are on the margins. I’ve marveled that the typical press run is 1200 to 3,000 copies, the same as it was in the infancy of printing, five hundred years ago. The main difference is that now there is a larger volume of published titles and in more areas of specificity.

My own path is that though I wanted to be a writer and be paid for thinking, I made choices that meant I was soon involved in other obligations that made the free-lancing life too risky. Raising children and paying mortgages seems to override a lot of independence, creativity, and the time required to be productive. And, of course, we humans occupy a range of different personality types. I find myself unable to dash off anything but have to think about a topic or question for a long time and do a lot of re-writing before I gain satisfaction with what I have done. Only then, can I set aside my self-criticism and with some ease go public.

Instead of freelancing as I might have wished, I occupied myself with several years of mulling my thoughts and experimenting with ideas under the promise that by planning-ahead I would some day come to the position to do what I always wanted to do. That day has come. I’m subsidizing my own future. Whether I ever earn anything by reading, writing and thinking is no longer important for me – I don’t have to – reading deeply, thinking critically and writing creatively are the important things. Still, nothing is automatic, and the last months have taught me the value of routine, forethought and self-discipline.

Perhaps, all I’ve said is too idiosyncratic. Plenty of people are busy reviewing books, writing essays and magazine articles, consulting, and doing the other profitable things that revolve around reading, writing and thinking. I’m glad to have had a library career, where I was always close to intellectual work, to the emergence and flow of new ideas and means of expressing them. That’s where I had a chance to develop my learning and thinking skills. Even though my everyday life for close to forty years was not always what I exactly wanted, I felt I was on the right track.

I still do.

Take care,

Roger

Jubilee

2009-01-24T09:37:00.007-06:00

The Great Jubilee of the Library of Congress [an alternative history]

Chapter I: Beginnings.

President Nancy Kassenbaum in the first act of her second term appointed under the co-chairs Vice President Bill Clinton and Speaker of the House Pat Schroeder the National Commission for the Bicentennial of the Library of Congress, three years hence in the year 2000. This history of library services during the last 200 years in the United States is but one product of that celebration, which we have come to call "The Great Jubilee." For no other act of Congress in its concept and execution has had greater impact on the people and civilization of the U.S. than that which established the library.

This is a history of how our system of library services stems from the foundation of the Library of Congress, and how the impetus of that institution has molded our civilization so that at the core of our education, our literature, our industry, our technology, our lives it is the very nature of libraryness that has made our nature and shaped the American character and way of life, making both character and way of life markedly different than they are anywhere else in the world.

In 1800, formal schooling was important to most American families, but they had relatively limited expectations for it. They wanted their sons, and usually their daughters as well, to acquire the rudiments of reading, writing and calculating – enough to read an almanac or the Bible, understand a property deed or reckon an account. New England, often called the "land of schools," had schoolhouses, paid for by local taxes, spread across its countryside. Elsewhere schooling was thinner, supported by varying mixtures of private, local government and church arrangements. Far to the South and to the West they became comparatively scarce. Nowhere was school attendance compulsory.

In all rural communities children old enough to do serious work took whatever schooling they might get in the winter months between the end of harvest and the start of planting. They were often kept at home whenever their parents needed their labor, so that those from hard-pressed families attended very irregularly, and some were still struggling through elementary reading and arithmetic in their late teens. Children as young as two or three went along to school with their older brothers and sisters, less to learn than to get them out from underfoot in busy households. Schoolmasters -usually young unmarried men who took the job on before settling on a trade or taking over a farm – faced a heterogeneous mixture of ages from "infants just out of their cradles," as the Massachusetts educational reformer Horace Mann obsered, to "men... enrolled in the militia." Schoolhouses were small, poorly kept structures, usually built near roadsides on barren, unwanted corners of land. In most of them, pedagogy stressed memorization before understanding, and the custom of reciting aloud often made their interiors a constant buzz of discordant voices.

In 1800, most white American children between five and fifteen spent a few weeks, up to a couple months, in school every year. Some never went at all, and in the back-country communities illiteracy was common, with many who "could neither read nor write, did not send their children to school."

The substantial majority of white American men, perhaps as many as three-quarters, had acquired enough schooling, sometimes with instruction at home, to be able to read. A slightly smaller number could write, the result of traditional practices that taught reading and writing as separate skills. American women lagged behind men in literacy; girls were more often kept from school. Slaves were kept unschooled and illiterate by conscious policy and in many Southern states by law. To be found reading, or trying to learn, could be positively dangerous for Southern blacks.

For a rural people, by the standards of their time, Americans were strikingly literate, surpassing most of the nations of Western Europe. But this did not mean that they were a country of great readers. Some of them, due to their meager instruction, read slowly and haltingly. Most Americans did not read much or at all; their cramped houses, scantily illuminated by a candle or two, made reading at night difficult. Books were relatively expensive and usually bought to fill only pressing needs. Bibles, hymn books, primers, spelling books, arithmetics and almanacs – books which guided worship, elementary instruction and the planting of crops – made up almost all of what country storekeepers stocked on their shelves and inventory takers recorded of household libraries. In Kentucky, "a newspaper ... was almost as scarce among the country people around us as the Sibylline leaves." New Englanders read more than Southerners and Westerners, but even in the countryside of Massachusetts, no more than one household in ten or twelve received a newspaper, and most families owned only a few volumes and "the year's almanack." Middling and prosperous city people, and some of the great farmers and professional men in the countryside, often read much more. The gulf was less profound than in societies with mass illiteracy, but it was real enough – in some communities almost a "matter of centuries," Francis Underwood thought.

Amidst early American pragmatism and the desire to read for the good of work and the good of the soul, the need for a library for Congress can readily be traced to the very foundation of the new nation, and the founders who brought it into being. For they were, by and large, gentlemen, that is patricians, educated, and with enough leisure to be be readers. In all, thirty-four of the fifty-five delegates finally seated at the Federal Convention were lawyers. More lawyers would have been present but for peculiar circumstances. Lawyer Patrick Henry declined to serve and later claimed he "smelt a rat," while attorney Richard Henry Lee also refused a place on the Virginia delegation in deference to his duties at the Continental Congress (meeting in New York).

Thus almost two-thirds of the delegates had cut their eyeteeth on Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, John Taylor's Elements of Civil Law, and Sir Edward Coke's celebrated Institutes of the Lawes of England; or, A Commentary upon Littleton. Perhaps lawyer Abraham Baldwin was the typical delegate in more ways than one. He came to Philadelphia late, but stayed until the last rap of Washington's gavel. Harvard-trained with "a compleat classical education," this Georgia attorney pursued "every other study with ease." Another member of the Georgia delegation said Baldwin was of "an accommodating turn of mind," and "well acquainted with Books and Characters."

Every lawyer on the Convention floor knew William Blackstone's Commentaries as well as his own handwriting. This familiarity caused Hamilton to allude to "the celebrated Judge Blackstone" when the debate concerned the focus of national power. Hamilton paraphrased Blackstone's remark "that the power of Parliament is absolute and without control" when he argued for a similar sanction in the Constitution. Eventually, the small-state delegates retreated and agreed that the Constitution, with its legislative branch as the working agent, "shall be the supreme Law of the Land." Blackstone's influence from the Commentaries is also evident in Article III, where treason is defined as "levying war against" the United States "...or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." The words are straight out of Blackstone's chapter on treason, which he adjudged to be the most heinous of all crimes.

Books and a knowledge of historical characters were the mainstays of the American public man in 1787. Although delegate-lawyer John Dickson said during the August 13 debates, "Experience must be our only guide," what he meant was not personal knowledge but the valuable precepts of history that every man present had gained through reading. As bookbinders from Boston to Williamsburgh learned, their customers for standard legal works were often gentlemen who were not interested in being admitted to the bar. For lawyers as well as laymen, books served as practical tools for that generation nurtured to manhood during the colonial crisis from 1765 onward. Nearly all of them knew the ancient writers on history, particularly Thucydides, Tacitus, and Livy. Probably half the delegates were able to read Cicero, Demosthenes, Aristotle, and Polybius in their ancient forms. In all likelihood, they had some acquaintance with Grotius Law of Nature and Nations, as well as the volumes by Vattel and Pufendorf bearing the same title. Many delegates were familiar with works on moral philosophy (an adjunct to legal study) by the Scotsmen Francis Hutcheson and Adam Ferguson. Every educated American had read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations by 1787. Less popular but revered by lawyers and laymen alike was Jean Jacques Burlamaqui's Principles of Natural Law, in Which the True System of Morality and Civil Government is Established, a standard work in American law offices that spread natural-law doctrines well into the nineteenth century. As Isaac Kramnich has noted, the Americans interested in improving mankind late in the eighteenth century "were much more likely to base their arguments on natural rights than historical rights." The fifty-five men at the Federal Convention actually preferred to involve both bases.

Clearly, most of the delegates gathered in Philadelphia were scholars of one sort or another. James Wilson, who spoke more than any other man during the proceedings, was a learned Scot trained at St. Andrews but Americanized in short order, and perhaps as well-read as any man at the Federal Convention. As a country filled with immigrants or the offspring of European immigrants, what was already unusual about America was that so many people read books. A contemporary Englishman who visited the new nation reported: "Whatever is useful, sells; but publications on subjects merely speculative, or rather curious than important, lie upon the bookseller's hands. They have no ready money to spare for anything but what they want; and in literary purchases, look for the present, or future use."

Indeed one reason Philadelphia was an attraction to the delegates was its libraries. The first Continental Congress met "in the Carpenter's Hall in one room of which the City library is kept & of which the Librarian tells me the Gentlemen make great & constant use," Madison was told in 1774. "Vattel, Burlamaqui, Locke & Montesquieu seem to be the standards to which they refer." By 1787 the situation had changed but little. The Free Library Company and American Philosophical Society collections were a quick walk from the delegate's desks, so that nowhere else in America was there such easy access to the collected knowledge of western civilization.

Moreover, the convention delegates were far ahead of most of their fellow men in terms of education, both formal and informal. A great deal of their leisure time was spent reading, and they read with much discernment. Two of the best-read delegates, Madison and Mason, were not lawyers and Mason's formal education was sketchy. Not all of the lawyers had attended the colleges at Cambridge, New Haven, Philadelphia, New York, Princeton, or Williamsburg, but most of them had a diploma from these institutions – Harvard, Yale, King's College (renamed Columbia in 1784), the College of New Jersey, or William and Mary. A few attended the Inns of Court or Inner Temple in London. These facts alone set them apart, for fewer than 2 percent of all Americans in the thirteen states had any formal education at all. Even so, Americans early on had stressed literacy in their daily, Bible-reading lives, and nearly every visitor from Europe was soon struck by the fact that even chambermaids and husbandrymen owned copies of Pilgrim's Progress or often read newspapers between their chores.

The revolution itself had been a great learning experience. By the time thirteen states had set up their own governments, lasted through eight years of war, and stumbled into a threadbare peacetime economy, the men chosen to be state legislators, councilors, congressmen, commissioners, justices of the peace, and other public functionaries had picked up a good deal of on-the-job training that required more than practical knowledge of the world. As the English bookseller noted, Americans keenly sought information "for the present, or future use."

On January 24, 1783, over seventeen years before the Library of Congress was established, Congressman James Madison presented to the Continental Congress "a list of books proper for the use of Congress." The books were never purchased. But Madison's comprehensive list of books for the intellectual nucleus of a legislative library is an outstanding example of his belief, shared by Jefferson and other founders of our nation, that if men possessed enough knowledge they would be able to solve the problems faced by the new nation.

During the latter half of 1782, the primary issues before Congress concerned finance, commerce, prisoners of war, western lands, and international affairs, including the alliance with France, the hoped-for terms of peace, the unsatisfactory relations with Spain, and the treaties with the Netherlands and Sweden. Most of the subject classifications in Madison's report reflect the needs of Congress for the guidance of authoritative works on these topics.

Madison certainly did not derive the names of authors and the titles of their books from a single source. Besides the modest library of James Madison, Sr., the private libraries of Donald Robertson, the Reverend John Witherspoon, and the Reverend James Madison suggest themselves, as do various institutional libraries, chiefly the Library Company of Philadelphia. Again Madison may have acquired much information by browsing in Philadelphia bookstores and scanning advertisements in the gazettes of that city. Among the volumes that attracted Madison's attention were the "near 4000" that Colonel Isaac Zane, Jr., had purchased from Mary Willing Byrd, the widow of Colonel William Byrd III, and brought in October 1781 to Philadelphia for sale at Robert Bell's bookstore near St. Paul's Church on Third Street.

During January 1783, when Thomas Jefferson was rooming at Madison's boarding house in Philadelphia, the two men surely conversed on the subject of a reference library for Congress. Many of the books Jefferson enumerated for his own desired collection parallel those of Madison.

Although neither Madison nor any other delegate in Congress could have known the exact number of titles and volumes in print by 1783, a reconstruction of Madison's list with full bibliographic information totals approximately 550 titles in about 1,300 volumes. Although the bulk of titles cover law, political philosophy, exploration and travel, history, and economic statistics, the list includes Encyclopédie Méthodique (Panckouke et al.) begun in 1782 and to include 192 volumes, a number of works on language, especially European, but also Richardson's A Grammar of the Arabic Language, 1776; Halherd's A Grammar of the Bengal Language, 1778; Ferguson's A Dictionary of Hindostan, 1773; and Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language, 1771.

In time, of course, the rule of the patrician elite was supplanted by a popular democracy, but one cannot blame the democratic movement alone for the decline in regard for intellect in politics. Soon after party division became acute, the members of the elite fell out among themselves and lost their respect for political standards. The men who with notable character and courage led the way through the Revolution and with remarkable prescience and skill organized a new national government in 1787-88 had by 1796 become hopelessly divided in their interests and sadly affected by the snarling and hysterical differences which were aroused by the French Revolution.

The generation which wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution also wrote the Alien and Sedition Acts. Its eminent leaders lost their solidarity, and their standards declined. A common membership in the patrician class, common experiences in revolution and state-making, a common core of ideas and learning did not prevent them from playing politics with little regard for decency or common sense. Political controversy, muddied by exaggerated charges of conspiracies with French agents or plots to subvert Christianity or schemes to restore monarchy and put the country under the heel of Great Britain, degenerated into demagogy. Having no understanding of the uses of political parties or of the function of a loyal opposition, the Founders surrendered to their political passions and entered upon a struggle in which any rhetorical weapon would do.

Not even Washington was immune from abuse and slander. However, the first notable victim of a distinctly anti-intellectualist broadside was Thomas Jefferson, and his assailants were Federalist leaders and members of the established clergy of New England. The assault on Jefferson is immensely instructive because it indicates the qualities his enemies thought could be used to discredit him and establishes a precedent for subsequent anti-intellectualist imagery in our politics. In 1796, when it seemed that Jefferson might succeed Washington, the South Carolina Federalist congressman, William Laughton Smith, published an anonymous pamphlet attacking Jefferson and minimizing his qualifications for the presidency. Smith tried to show how unsettling and possibly even dangerous Jefferson's "doctrinaire" leadership would be. Jefferson was a philosopher and, Smith pointed out, Philosophers have a way of being doctrinaires in politics.

The characteristic traits of a philosopher, when he turns politician, are, timidity, whimsicalness, and a disposition to reason from certain principles, and not from the true nature of man; a proneness to predicate all his measures on certain abstract theories, formed in the recess of his cabinet, and not on the existing state of things and circumstances; an inertness of mind, as applied to governmental policy, a wavering of disposition when great and sudden emergencies demand promptness of decision and energy of action.

What was needed was not intellect but character, and here too Jefferson was found wanting: philosophers, the pamphleteer argued, are extremely prone to flattery and avid of repute, and Jefferson's own abilities "have been more directed to the acquirement of literary fame than to the substantial good of his country." Washington – there was a man, no nonsense about him: "The great WASHINGTON was, thank God, no philosopher; had he been one, we should never have seen his great military exploits; we should never have prospered under his wise administration." Jefferson's skills lie in "impaling butterflies and insects, and contriving turn-about chairs." No friend of Jefferson or of the country should "draw this calm philosopher from such useful pursuits" to plunge him into the ardors of politics. Jefferson's merits "might entitle him to the Professorship of a college, but they would be as compatible with the duties of the presidency as with the command of the Western army."

In the campaign of 1800 all inhibitions broke down. The attempt to score against Jefferson on the ground that he was a man of thought and learning was, of course, only one aspect of a comprehensive attack upon his mind and character designed to show that he was a dangerous demagouge without faith or morals; or, as one critic put it, of "no Conscience, no Religion, no Charity." It was charged that he kept a slave wench and sired mulattoes; that he had been a coward during the American Revolution; that he had started the French Revolution; that he had slandered Washington; that he was ambitious to become a dictator, another Bonaparte; that he was a visionary and a dreamer, an impractical doctrinaire, and, to make matters worse, a French doctrinaire.

The campaign against Jefferson became at the same time an attempt to establish as evil and dangerous the qualities of the speculative mind. Learning and speculation had made an atheist of Jefferson, it was said; had caused him to quarrel with the views of the theologians about the age of the earth and to oppose having school children read the Bible. Such vagaries might be harmless in a closet philosopher, but to allow him to bring these qualities of mind into the presidency would be dangerous to religion and to society. His abstractness of mind and his literary interest made him unfit for practical tasks.

Nevertheless, Jefferson was elected, becoming president in order to appoint the first two Librarians of Congress and to suggest books for purchase and addition to the library. As President, Jefferson was frequently asked for advice of all kinds. One correspondent, John Norvell, is typical of the number asking for recommendations on books and how they might best pursue their own learning. Norvell wrote in May 1807, "I should be glad to have your advise of the proper method to be pursued in the acquisition of sound political knowledge. Is it essential that much history should be read? And if it be, be so kind as to mention those authors which should be read; as likewise those writers on political subjects, who may be studied to greatest advantage."

Here, in part is Jefferson's reply, which he says must be of very short notice. He mentions 14 titles in all, several of multitple volumes, and opines on each.

I think there does not exist a good elementary work on the organization of society into civil government: I mean a work which presents in one full & comprehensive view the system of principles on which such an organization should be founded according to the rights of nature. For want of a single work of that character, I should recommend Locke on government, Sidney, Priestley's Essay on the First Principles of government, Chipman's Principles of Government & the Federalist. Adding perhaps Beccaria on crimes & punishments because of the demonstrative manner in which he has treated that branch of the subject. If your views of political enquiry go further to the subjects of money & commerce, Smith's Wealth of Nations is the best book to be read, unless Say's Political Economy can be had, which treats the same subjects on the same principles, but in a shorter compass & more lucid manner. But I believe this work has not been translated into our language.
History in general only informs us what bad government is, but as we have employed some of the best materials of the British constitution in the construction of our own
government, a knowledge of British history becomes useful to the American politician. There is however no general history of that country which can be recommended. The elegant one of Hume seems intended to disguise & discredit the good principles of the government, and is so plausible & pleasing in is style & manner, as to instill its errors & heresies invisibly into the minds of unwary readers. Baxter has performed a good operation on it. He has taken the text of Hume as his ground work, abridging it by the omission of some details of little interest, and wherever he has changed the text to what it should be, so that we may properly call it Hume's history republicanised. He has moreover continued the history (but indifferently) from where Hume left it, to the year 1800.

Norvell, who was only seventeen years old when he wrote to Jefferson, learned the journalistic trade in Maryland, studied law as well, and in 1817 purchased the Lexington Kentucky Gazette. Norvell moved to the Midwest, became involved in Michigan politics, and ultimately served as U.S. senator from that state from 1837 to 1841.

With Jefferson we continue the next chapter of this history. For when the British burn Washington in the War of 1812, Jefferson, always destitute for cash, offers to recover the loss of what library Congress had so far amassed, by selling his own collection to the nation. A partisan debate on the question followed.

© 2009 by Roger Sween.
____
I had thought to write an alternate history on the relation of books and learning in the United States on the occassion of the Bicentennial of the Library of Congress, but got only this far.

I am indebted to the following sources, especially those with *.

James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (1974).

*Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: the colonial experience (1958).

John Y. Cole, Jefferson’s Legacy: a brief history of the Library of Congress (1993).

Robert D. Heslep, Thomas Jefferson and Education (1969).

*Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963).

Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello / Jefferson and his time; v.6 (1981).

John C. Miller, The First Frontier: life in colonial America (1966).

*Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (2nd ed., 1956).

Russel Blaine Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776-1830 (1960).

S. Alexander Rippa, Education in a Free Society: an American history (1984).

**Clinton Rossiter, 1787, the grand convention (1966).

*Robert A. Rutland, “Well Acquainted with Books”: The founding framers of 1787; with James Madison’s list of books for Congress (1987).

To His Excellency Thomas Jefferson: Letters to the President. Compiled and edited by Jack McLaughlin (1991).

Lawrence C. Wroth, The Colonial Printer (2nd ed., 1965).

Read in 08

2009-01-22T10:41:00.003-06:00

When I became a librarian in my early twenties, people startled me by making confession that they did not read enough. Surprised as to why I should be told that, I quickly replied, ‘Neither do I.’ I don’t hear confessions any more, but I still flagellate myself that I do not read all that I intend to read. Worse, because I quit employment in 2000 in order to devote more time to reading and writing, I now worry that I will not live long enough to read everything I intended. Often, I joke with people that I have caught up to the 12th century.

In order to read more, I long ago gave up ephemeral activities. I was never interested in sports, not even as a spectator, I stopped watching commercial television, I skip most sections of the daily newspaper, but never the feature articles. Decades ago, I taught myself that if I start a book and it fails to grab me, I am free to quit it. Because of this choice, most of the books I read rate high with me.

I always have something to read with me, the expression in our family being, ‘You never know when you’re going to be caught in a flood.’ So, we carry our flood books. Because of some specific project, I research and read task-fulfilling stuff almost all the time, but when it comes to reading books generally, I fail my own expectations. Most of the books that I read to the finish are ones that I intend to read on an emerging priority basis or that I read in those hours, often between 2 and 4 a.m. When I cannot sleep, I regard tossing and turning as too wasteful. Because I am in a book club, I read a number of books that I would not otherwise choose.

Books Read in 2008 (listed chronologically).
Note: The ratings given follow the book club’s: 5-best; 4-top 20%, 3-middling, 2-less than average, 1-bottom. BC – Book Club selections. SF – Stratford Festival plays. YA-Title written for teenage or younger readers.

Amy Ephron, One Sunday Morning (2005). BC Though compared to Edith Wharton sendups on the social elites of 19th century New York society, I found this brief novel shallow, stupid, and boring. 1

Penelope Lively, The Photograph (2003). Gift* A landscape historian finds a picture of his deceased wife holding hands with her sister’s husband. He does not rest until he discovers what was going on. This quest starts a chain reaction among all those involved. Excellent treatment of character and manners. 4

Diane Lee Wilson, I Rode a Horse of Milk White Jade (1998). YA A young Mongol girl, fascinated with riding and horses, impersonates a boy and by chance is trusted with carrying a secret message to the great Kublai Khan in China. A well done historical. 4

Brian Aldiss, The Dark Light Years (1964). Though I had read the short story that spawned this science fiction novella, the story intrigued me all over again. Aldiss is profound in contrasting human assumptions with alien existence. 5

Ayn Rand, ...Answers (2005). Since Rand’s death, her executors have resurrected a number of unintended books from recordings made of her speaking off the cuff. This one organizes by topic her responses from question and answer sessions following formal speeches. Though Rand was an early influence on my life, and although some of her answers are stimulating, many show her as extreme, violent, merely opinionated, and irritated. I take this collection as revelatory in its chance randomness but lacking in sufficient context. Valuable to students of Rand but cannot be rated.

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum (2005). BC Though Erdrich is a noted Minnesota author, this book is the first of hers I have finished, so I take that as a sign that it is easier. An authentic native drum so captivates an appraiser of antiquities that she steals it from the estate. The magic of the drum haunts her until it brings its own return to its place of origin. A beautiful story that crosses half the U.S., generations, and peoples also, thereby, fascinates. 4

Alfred Duggan, Growing Up in Thirteenth Century England (1962). YA Duggan treats a microcosm of Edward I’s time by profiles of the teenage children in three upper class families. Perhaps this makes sense since these had the most options, but I would have liked to see something more bourgeois. A clear picture of feudalism emerges, most of it comparatively grim. 4

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (1975). BC An English woman in colonial India finds her life suffocating and to escape it spends more and more time in the palace of the local prince to disastrous results. I had expected more, but the story turned very flat. 2 Another novel with a similar theme, The Holder of the World (1993), by Bharati Mukherjee, I found far superior because of its meaningful merit and evocative movement. Give that one a 4.5.

George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1900). SF Though straying from the historical, Shaw’s comedy of the aging Caesar mentoring the teenage Cleopatra is a joyous romp of satire in the face of puritan traditions and illuminates the true worth of magistracy. 5

Lope de Vega, Fuente Ovejuna (1619). SF Previously unknown to me, the prolific maker of Spanish classical drama, regarded in Spain as second to Cervantes in their literature, was a later contemporary of Shakespeare. In this play, the residents of the village “Sheep’s Well,” rise against their vicious feudal overlord and kill him. All face death until the clement understanding of Ferdinand and Isabella reprieve them. As insightful to the time of its setting and time of its writing as any Shakespeare drama. 4

William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598). SF Of interest to me is how Shakespeare’s minor plays, some of them very neglected, are so fascinatingly wonderful. LLL is a courtly piece in which the King of Navarre and three of his fellows swear off women in order to devote themselves to study. Then arrive the Princess of France and three of her women. As the principals match up, the women test of the seriousness of the men’s interest and find them faithless. A messenger intrudes with the report of the King of France’s death; the Princess is now Queen, contrary to all history. So the play abruptly ends with this conceit of loss, though they men are set tests for a year and a day, upon which the women shall return to see what is proved. Yes, a slight story, most elegantly told with a hilariously silly subplot. For Shakespeare, this is a 3, overall in literature a 4.

Euripides, Trojan Women (415 BCE). SF Along with Euripides’ Medea, this is one of the most gripping and terrible tragedies I know, not excelled after 2,425 years. The women of Troy, soon to be sent into slavery, and the anguished Helen each have their say bringing the play step by step closer to grief until Hecuba, widowed of King Priam, and bereft of all her sons faces the final disaster. 5!

William Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well (1623). SF As one of the “problem plays,” the problem here is that Bertram refuses to recognize his marriage to Helena so that she must win him by obtaining his ring and bearing his child when he deserts her. Most interesting is that Helena and the other women are heroic while Bertram is a cad. Another 3, 4.

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). BC Do you know of Mr. Rochester, the brooding master of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre? Rhys wrote a prequel of Rochester’s earlier life and his wife’s origins in the slave-holding Caribbean. She is the crazy woman who burns down the hall at the end of Jane Eyre. Now you know why. Though a slender novel in size, WSS is profound as an artistic deconstruction of the pretense (or naïveté) of imperial fiction. 4

Vince Starrett, Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933). In a series of chapter sketches, Starrett treats Holmes and Watson analytically as though these characters had real lives, and thereby explains away the inconsistencies in their stories. Entertaining even if you are not a Baker Street Irregular. 4

Kiran Desai, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998). The young son of a middle class Indian family is a disappointment to them. He has a low-level postal job and no ambition. Suddenly he goes off on his own to live in a tree in an abandoned orchard. His joyful solitude lasts until the neighborhood discovers him as a “holy man” and his notoriety spreads. Chaos follows. Desai has a wonderful way of writing with subtlety of connotation and verve of expression. This one was a great delight and I must explore more of her books. 4

Ursula K. LeGuin, Lavinia (2008). LeGuin has been among my favorite authors for 30 years. In her mature writing through this period, she blends exquisite prose, inventive situations, and depth of portrayal that always succeeds. In Lavinia she takes a slight reference near the end of the Aeneid to Aeneas’ Latin wife and builds a whole, marvelous story around her that is visionary, feminist, culturally significant, and artistically satisfying in the finest sense. A 5 once again.

Steven Saylor, Roma (2008). I came to Saylor through his early books on Gordianus the Finder, an early version of detective, who at first appealed to me as an industrious man able to step outside his illusions. His grunt work for Cicero in various cases, though critical of that articulate Roman, illuminate society in the years of the “great men” Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. Though Roma’s subtitle is the novel of ancient Rome, it is not so much a novel as an episodic series of stories and novellas that dramatize key episodes from the city’s prehistoric location to Augustus’ foundation of empire. The novelistic elements are two – two family histories that weave in and out of the major events and the evolution of Rome itself as a polity and culture. Though containing enough pettiness among the characters to wear me down, Saylor always vaults his homework into tensions that reveal as they intrigue. 4

Nancy Freedman, Sappho: the tenth muse (1998). Though Sappho’s poetry exists in scraps and a vaporous mystery surrounds her life, numerous books seek to make her into a whole person. This novel is one that I owned for several years before I got around to reading it. Freedman, new to me, writes with elegance and power and consistently uses metaphor and simile as no one I have read before. My only complaint was the heavy doses of eroticism and subsequent jealousy among characters that detracted from Sappho as a poet, feminist, and intellectual of her day. I wanted to believe that Sappho invented the concept of romantic love, a woman far in advance of her time and place. 4

Penelope Lively, Consequences (2007) Gift* Lively takes refreshing approaches in her various novels. This one tells the story of three generations of women through the 20th century. Each – mother, daughter, granddaughter – must seek her own path and relationships and thereby exercise both will and choice among the chance opportunities that life and history deal out. What a beautifully conceived and executed book of verity and significance! 4
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*My friend, Cy Chauvin, and I have exchanged books at holiday times for several years. Because we share many of the same interests, including appreciation of the novel of manners, several of Cy’s gifts have been Lively books in this genre where she excels.

© 2009 by Roger Sween.

Obama

2009-01-19T06:22:00.000-06:00

Voting for candidates implies we have criteria.

Voting for a candidate is akin to marriage, though more of a general and limited partnership. Nevertheless, decisions once enacted, we voters and those we elect are going to be together for a while. Thus, voting, not to be taken lightly, ought to be well-considered. When the president-elect takes the oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he promises to do so “to the best of my ability.”

Ability becomes the major reason for choosing the president, as with any candidate for office. And with ability comes principles; the best candidate who will do his best must be found to deliver to the utmost on principles. For our political life together as a nation, the United States Constitution frames both the requisite functions and those basic principles explicit to the conduct of every serving president.

Whether we citizens, who constitute the electorate, vote for what the Constitution so clearly specifies depends initially upon our familiarity with and practical allegiance to this basic organic instrument of our national life. Despite such an essential pronouncement as to how we ought to carry out our responsibilities as electors, we seldom regard our candidate selection as if the Constitution even existed. The typical quadrennial cycle of nominating and electing a president proceeds and has proceeded historically without much reflection on the Constitution and as if no attendant criteria exist.

Tacitly, we presume to be choosing the best possible candidate as we advance through the nominating and election stages. Accordingly, what are the bases for our choice and where are they articulated? A 2008 book by Alvin S. Felzenberg, The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t), questions the past rating systems; a step towards criteria. In a popular article, presidential historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, uses the records of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, to identify ten “Secrets of the Great presidents,” Parade (Sept. 14, 2008). Let us welcome these two new steps towards criteria among a very sparse literature. Such contributions to our central political decisions are all too rare.

Yet, any election process so unreflective and absent of clearly articulated criteria amidst so heavy a responsibility does not seem to befuddle us at all. Amazingly, the U.S. Presidency, widely regarded as the highest office in the land and the most important in the world becomes occupied largely by whim and often by accident. Think how lucky we have been, for the most part.

The history of the presidency is though the nation has gone on a journey and successive presidents have chosen a route that turns out to be a rollercoaster ride. We have selected presidents that vary widely in their abilities and principles. We have elected and then re-elected men to the presidency even when they gave little evidence of being either able or principled in the ways the Constitution asserts. As an electorate, we have made terrible mistakes and then in utter foolishness stood by our mistakes either out of an exaggerated sense of loyalty or mere psychological inertia to consider alternatives.

Our Constitution’s Article II sets out the major responsibilities of the President as executive, Commander in Chief, appointer of executive staff and commissioner of officers, namer of justices, reporter to Congress and initiator of legislation, conductor of foreign affairs and negotiator of treaties. The President must enforce the laws. All these duties presume the ability to deliver them.

The Constitution enumerates a number of principles, both generally in how its functions separate into branches and its powers share out among branches, and specifically in such pronounced places as the preamble and the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights. All these principles presume the ability of presidents to understand them and subsequently seek their full effects.

And so we come to Barack Obama. Why should I vote for him as opposed to his chief contender? Obama embodies essential principles that are at the bedrock of our common good; Obama exhibits profound abilities that the office requires and the times necessitate most emphatically.

1. Obama recognizes that the president serves all the people. He transcends all the ties that have bound candidates in the past. He has moved beyond the obvious of affinity, ideology, and particular issues.

2. Obama understands that equality before the law is the door to the opportunities that the United States holds in store for all.

3. Obama grasps that security is two-fold, consisting of peace with attendant harmony, and economic well-being, widely shared. Security of this kind is necessarily global.

4. Obama realizes that he is part of a much larger apparatus of government in which he has a key responsibility to lead by initiative and deliver by facilitation. He knows the Constitution has a well-established basis of shared power. He is neither so egoistic or foolish as to think that it is up to him alone.

These four principles, so well held in his psyche and persona, set the stage for the unfolding of his abilities. Without abilities, a president can have all the principles he can identify and muster, but they will come to naught.

5. Obama can bring people together in agreement and common action. This ability, his most practical and practiced skill, is an outward one. Therefore, we may see it as his most obvious and beneficial skill, but concord comes from and integrates the other principles and abilities.

6. Obama has a fund of knowledge from study, reading and experience that informs his thinking and shapes his consciousness. Consequently, though he is relatively young, he is wise. Translated to action, such wisdom means he knows alternatives and can choose soundly among possibilities. Internally, he knows the boundaries of his own knowledge, when to seek more information beyond his current limits, and therefore when to turn to others for their specialty and expertise.

7. Obama can distinguish among the relative worth and applicability of the advice that he seeks and receives. As Machiavelli alluded in The Prince, that tract of political praxis, the good of a surround of wise advisers is lost on the fool.

8. Obama delegates. He knows the inescapable truth that he cannot descend to every detail and in executive fashion must depend upon others to do their assignments, make decisions within overall aims and directions, and be responsible to him in their work, reporting and advice.

9. Obama encourages, accepts, and integrates challenges contrary to his own knowledge and experience. He recognizes the fallibility of human capability and therefore seeks his own enlargement through correction. Those of received minds miss this central virtue; they regard it as inconsistent or weak. The ability to change the mind far exceeds mere flexibility as the learner moves on towards greater capacity through correction and growth.

10. Obama has presence. The expression, “he is presidential,’ becomes him. In these times, we desperately need someone who not only fits the demands of executive office, but also shows in even his most casual moments that he fills the expectations of presidency. Assured in his own psyche, he inspires confidence, trust and hope of those who recognize his gifts and competencies.

Much more can be said, but this little roster of principles and abilities are at the core of the one who will lead, inspire, and in his turn, challenge us as well.
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“Ten Reasons Why I Voted for Obama” prompted this article in December, but appears here for the first time.

©2009 by Roger Sween.

Kernel

2009-01-18T15:51:00.000-06:00

Voting is the tip of democratic association. All the rest lies below the surface.

The kernel of democracy consists of association for the good of the whole. That association must necessarily be an active one to be most effective; for in a democratic association the members have their say in decisions made and policies followed. We cannot grow a democracy without attention to these requirements. Inattention leads to all the fractures that prevent, delay or ruin democracy’s promise to flower and bear much fruit.

Though evolutionary, democracy is never automatic and must be won and kept by endeavor. Democracy has its philosophy or principles but rises effectively from practice and by practice thereby expands. The democratic principles that we inherited from England had one beginning in the Magna Carta of 1215. By 1776, when we declared our independence, the franchise for voting was as restricted and without equal representation in the burgeoning states as it was in mother Britain, 3% of the population. Our national wrangles, lasting decades, had first to resolve before black men could vote by virtue of constitutional Amendment XIV (1868) and then women’s suffrage by Amendment XIX (1920). Not until Amendment XXIV (1964) did we eliminate the scourge of poll taxes. In 1971, eighteen-year olds obtained the right to vote by Amendment XXVI.

The struggle for as full a democracy as we can give ourselves has relied in great measure on those who already have the vote then granting the same participation to others. Expansions of the franchise came about, as shown above, but usually with great reluctance amidst strenuous argument, alarming protest and dreadful repression. Read of our climb in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States; see the docudrama Iron Jawed Angels.

Our history lesson for today and every day is the recognition that democracy can be nothing less that the shared, participatory experience of its citizens. We may well congratulate ourselves over the recent election thanks to the efforts to turn out the vote and vote in welcome numbers. But voting is not the cause of democracy. It is the result. Much more needs to be done to be fully democratic; much more is expected.

We must regard others as well as we regard ourselves. We must put aside our prejudices and accept that to be human is to have rights. We must see that liberty is the quality that sets free our being, not just safeguards our privileges and pocketbooks.

We must shoulder our responsibilities. Democracy, especially a representative democracy such as ours, calls us to be learners so that we may be knowledgeable to be equipped for apt decision-making. Learning means examination of our own ignorance and questioning of our own preconceptions. It means the work of study and the devotion of time to study. Prior to voting, we need a firm grasp of the duties of the office and criteria as to how candidates will be able to fulfill that office. We need to share our learning and views with others so that we do not fool ourselves by always seeking those who agree with us when together we could be wrong.

And we should find time to work for democracy. Advance worthy candidates. Take a turn in office. Contribute to causes. Promote the rights of others who do not yet share as equally as we do.

Democracy can move onward, but it takes more than a super-majority.

This article is revised from one published earlier on Helium.com.

© 2008, 2009 by Roger Sween.

Fourth Branch

2009-01-18T14:42:00.000-06:00

We are the fourth branch of government and thereby must act accordingly.

“You cannot fool all the people all of the time.” We take this statement, attributed to Abraham Lincoln, as a basic premise of our government. Another is that we have protected our freedoms for over two hundred years though a balancing or separation of powers; therefore, we are in no danger of losing our bases.

Due to the widespread belief in these two secure dicta, let us consider that we excuse one another and ourselves from doing our duty. We do not examine ourselves as to the possibility of our own mistakes. We do not see the signs of our own failings. Simplicity and convenience will always entice us humans when life requires the harder work of study and informed decision-making. And a democracy, especially a representative democracy such as ours is, calls for us to do more than trust and rest.

Yes, we are at fault. We elect people to high office who are not up to the task; and then, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, we trust them enough to elect them again. Why do we do this, and how can we do better once we find and admit the error of our ways?

We have missed a major point. Three branches structure our government, we have consistently been taught and told. Those three branches can go about their business, and we can relax. A close reading of the Constitution shows otherwise. Article I vests all legislative powers in Congress. Article II vests all executive power in a President. Article III vests judicial power in the federal courts. However, from the preamble’s statement, “We the people do ordain and establish” onwards, the Constitution throughout its provisions vests us as citizens with our role. We generate the rest of the government.

You have heard that the Constitution separates powers between its branches. Actually, power is shared; functions of those powers are separated. The Constitution separates and specifies the functions of the branches, but the powers overlap. For example, citizens elect their officials; presidents appoint judges and the Senate confirms them; Congress establishes and funds the lower courts, with the approval or veto-override of the president. Citizens contest laws and court judgments, including appeal, and seek other redress and changes in unsatisfactory laws, and so on. While each branch has extended its powers over the years, our most significant question is whether the power of the public has kept pace with those of the other three branches.

The separation of functions and sharing of power makes our particular form of government a deliberative one in which process precedes action. When past actions do no stand the tests of time and reflection, later deliberative processes can change them. In deliberation, the most salient matter is knowledge. Historically, extension of public participation, such as emancipation, direct election, and suffrage came in conjunction with the growth of education and the public provision of educational opportunity.

However, education and the opportunity for it do not translate automatically to knowledge. Education provides some basis for knowledge, but a living and useful knowledge results from personal, individual intention with and attention to one’s own need to know. We have to want to learn and then seek to learn; learning takes more than being a passive bystander. The rudimentary introduction to knowledge that comes in childhood and youth must lead to a life of constant desire to know and consequent information-seeking behavior that gains that knowledge. Otherwise, knowledge erodes, loses applicability and resiliency, and goes out of date with its continuous displacements by new knowledge. Without critical awareness, we become fooled too easily, usually by our own ignorance.

Many signs that general public knowledge is not up to the task of democracy exist; one of them is especially horrific. The widespread current practice of election by raising and spending fortunes to convince the voters exemplifies citizens’ abdication of their function in democratic elections. Another is low voter turnout, only 62% in the recent national election. Not only does the ability to raise money threaten democracy more alarmingly than the indirection of the Electoral College but also it flies in the face of citizen responsibility. It is not any more the candidates’ responsibility to make themselves known than it is the citizens’ responsibility to know and determine choices between the candidates in primaries, conventions and general elections.

As we are the fourth branch of government, discernment is our major citizenship responsibility. The third week in March that includes March 16, James Madison’s birthday and Freedom of Information Day, is Sunshine Week, celebrated for decades in my state (Minnesota) as in few other states. We all believe in open government that is equitable and honest, free access to information, and the systems that support these democratic values.

The proponents of open access to government information point out a variety of polices, funding issues, and restrictive practices that obstruct access. Yet the basic problem is public ease and disinterest and the continuous preference for what we think we know versus examination of the unknown portions of our ignorance. Accordingly, we must all wrestle with these very human limitations. Otherwise, as Lincoln also said, “We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth.”

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Revised from an article previously published on Helium.com.

© 2008, 2009 by Roger Sween.

Accord

2009-01-18T09:22:00.000-06:00

Lessons Learned from Election 2008

What is politics but the shared process of conducting our lives together. By politics, we seek, reach or accept agreement. Of course, politics is often a struggle since we do not always agree so agreeably. However, we do relish in our finest hours those conclusive moments as in a presidential election when after lengthy struggle, we acknowledge the outcome we collectively reached. Accord rejoices in the practicality of peaceful and productive transition; otherwise, we would bloodily clobber one another in the streets.

On the 2008 election night recently past, the excellence of John McCain’s concession struck us as did Barack Obama’s victory speech. Both contenders for the presidency articulated the same fundamental values that we share as a people. Upon their words, we become suddenly refreshed because our candidates conversed and quickly shared their conversation. Though they spent sixty days in arguing their differences, now they reciprocate in praising one another. These all too infrequent occasions of public declaration are far more significant than mere, stale convention. They reiterate the bedrock of our common political existence: despite the divisiveness of partisanship, we as a people have reached a decision, this time a clear one.

The decision is a historic one, McCain acknowledges; a defining moment, says Obama. We are a country of opportunities where all things are possible. We have needed to right injustices, but have made great strides; America can change. Times are difficult with enormous challenges ahead. We are all Americans regardless of our diversity; we must and can come together. The USA inspires patriotism, and we can resist the partisanship of the past. We never quit: we can do what we must; yes, we can. As a nation among the nations of the world, our greatness shines out to others because of the enduring power of our ideals.

And in a capstone and conclusion, McCain and Obama call upon God to bless us as a people and nation.

Would it not have been better to reach this fundament of accord at the start instead of the end of so protracted a campaign? Why did we behave as if “campaign” meant real armed skirmishes and forced battle? Why is it that so great an accord on the fundamentals of our political existence stays bottled within us until finally, in the desperation of no other alternative, we see our differences as minor to necessary unity? Why do we spend so much time in division and angry discord? A common explanation is that politics is rough and tumble, yet only if we make it so. Are we not, for the most part, adults, who need not wrangle as we often see feisty children do? Can we not learn the lessons that ought to come with maturity?

We have observed the readiness of some partisans to boo even the harmony expressed by their own champion. Alice Walker in her “Open Letter to Barack Obama,” November 5, 2008, rightly attributes to our fear, humiliation and pain the damage that we do to one another. She wisely says, “learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.”

Let us work and become our better selves, acting upon the concord expressed in the wondrous words of our leaders and turn them into reality. How different we may become in our polity!

We closely read the U.S. Constitution and our state’s constitution. We read them at least annually to remind ourselves of who we are. We see our place in energizing these old yet living documents. Alongside the executive President, the legislative Congress, and the judicial Supreme Court, we are the fourth branch in our systems of shared power and responsibility. We are in the thick of government, not apart from it. We as a people set into operation the other branches’ functions and can shape their actions.

We see that government, especially in our rights extolled, is a matter of mutual respect and service. We serve, and in turn, others serve us. The breadth of politics, beyond the limits of mere voting, awakens our thoughts and actions. We want candidates whom we choose on the bases of their ability and principles. We set criteria for those we elect and study candidates to make the best possible choices. We share our study with others in neighborly conversation. We monitor our representatives as they define, address and solve problems on our behalf. We communicate critically with those in office so that they know our expectations and they relate to us what is possible for the whole body politic.

The communications media become our true ally. They exercise their extraordinary press freedoms with as much honesty, objectivity and resourcefulness as they can muster. They provide pertinent evidence and deeper analysis that challenges our thinking and enlarges our knowledge. We cannot live without a daily dosage of meaty reporting and features and the significant issues of the times, current and ensuing. We test our quest for knowing deeply and acting rightly against what both challenges and deepens our understanding. We change and shape our minds with reason.

Ultimately, we realize that we are one people, whom neither a distant government nor intrusive government can save. Instead, we discover the common ground that best serves us all and allows us each to fulfill our potential. Civility has become our mantra as well as our practice. We savor and extend our own abilities; we appreciate the benefits of others’ abilities. We are giving and grateful in receiving.

We become puzzled how life could have been any different in those days before we put a knowing accord foremost in our lives.
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This article is a revision of one first appearing on Helium. com. I remain indebted in origin for many of my ideas to Aristotle’s Politics, especially the early sections of Book III on citizenship.

Contemporary texts used are widely available on the Internet. I used McCain’s concession speech from Politico (http://dyn.politico.com/), Obama’s victory speech from The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/), and Walker’s letter to Obama from The Root (http://www.theroot.com/).

© 2008, 2009 by Roger Sween.

Background

2009-01-18T07:35:00.001-06:00

Concepts and Concept Formation

Updated 10 February 2009.

Where do we get our ideas? How do we test and develop those ideas? How do we share them? What effect do ideas have; that is, what difference do they make?

These questions have stirred me for a long time. Mother took me to the public library at an early age, and Dad read aloud to us four children. These routines made me a dedicated reader from childhood, a habit I have not yet abandoned. Reading and other experiences led me to bouts of imagination and questioning. No doubt early discovery of myths and legends led me to wonder and speculate. I asked questions that Dad answered, ‘There is no way to answer that.’ In his 70s, he asked me similar open-ended question. When still young, I had learned to ponder, a trait typical of the very mature, who have lived through considerable history.

Though my first choice of profession was to be some kind of scientist, perhaps a chemist, I was never very good at the messy sciences. I would rather read about biology, chemistry and physics than do them. I read Gods, Graves and Scholars (1951) when I was twelve years old, and suddenly archaeology appealed to me. The possibility of discovering the long-lost past excited my imagination. Subsequently, history, historical novels, and biography preoccupied me. By the time I reached sixteen years, I knew I wanted to be a historian. I majored in history at college, but the environment that I studied in turned me into a philosopher. Why am I as I am? Why are things as they are?

In time, the possibilities of employment forced on me a practicality. History jobs were few. I had taken a library education minor as work insurance, and that choice began my career in the information field for most of the next forty years. By the time I became a university librarian and library educator in my twenties, I saw that my real work was in adult learning. I identified myself as a lifetime learner; my first responsibilities provided for and fostered other people’s continuous learning.

My life as a reader provoked another thread, attention to writing. The Kudor Preference Test (9th grade?) showed that the interests I favored aligned most closely with authors or real estate agents. Another person in the class had the same results. Go figure! Sure enough, I have been scribbling bits and pieces for years, trying novels, poetry and essays. During the years I was a state-level library consultant, I wrote several extensive reports, planning documents, curriculums and policy pieces. I am quick to respond to issues with letters to the newspaper and more extensive commentaries.

For several years, efforts to narrow my attention have focused on the following major interests:
concept-formation
informed conversation for community building and public participation
information-seeking behavior
information policy
philosophy of adult learning
self-directed learning
role of books, reading, libraries in learning

In short, how do ideas originate, become adopted, evolve, and spread?

Thus concepts, their formation and examination are the subject of this blog.

For additional information on Roger Sween, see also the 5-part series of posts "Discovering My Personality Type." They are: My INTJ (1), My LifeKey (2), My Learning (3), My Thinking (4), My Solo (5)

© 2009 by Roger Sween.