because we do not trust

What We Talk About When We Talk About Open Education

We might begin by defining open, or even education. But really it is the talking that matters here, the central dialogue that informs and sometimes limits or constrains the education space.  And when I write sometimes I mean, of course, usually.  And why is that? Our talk, our dialogue, about open education is framed by a misconception of technology and its relation to learning, as though the two need to be related, as though that relation is something to either celebrate or vilify. The dialogue about open education is not open. But if we choose to neither celebrate or vilify the relation between technology and learning, or better yet if we choose to interrogate that relation and perhaps argue that education is techne, that technology is not a result of, but the act of, learning itself, we might be moving closer to an openness, a breaking out of tired frames, that will allow us to see the next world.

And this frees us to explore what open education might be, the ways we might describe and enact it. So let us start with what it is not: closed, static.  That, really, is the world of the traditional classroom and its software counterpart, the learning management system: closed, separate, shelled, enclosed, limited to what its walls (or site boundaries) can contain.  Don't get me wrong: both physical and electronic classrooms of the traditional, architecturally closed type can be locations for beauty and innovation, contact zones of the richest sort.  But I'm not focusing on the exceptions here but the norms, norms that create opportunities and excuses for (anti)dialogue about (mis)interpretations of what open learning might be. Because the closed, traditional classroom is our comfort zone.  Admit it.  Even if we try new things, teach in innovative ways, we always are scratching against the known, traditional methods that served us, or our histories, well.  We reach beyond what we know but always look back, pedagogy as a pillar of salt. 

Maybe we need instead to return to a preclassroom way of thinking, unframe the way classes and courses and schools work and instead  try to remember the way learning works.  Close your books for this one. Minimize Delicious. Gray out that grad school screen of theory not put into practice. Come out here with me, sit on the grass, feel the warm afternoon sun on your bare arms, close your eyes, and tell me, tell yourself: where are you? What do you know about this place? Who taught you to be here? If you wanted to know more, such as where that dirt road in front of you leads, or why the dog barks but you cannot see it yet, how would you discover it? After you stand up to look around, what will you do?  

Think about a class you teach or have taught or even been taught.  Think of just one.  What was the point of it? If you had to explain it in just one sentence, how would you express it? Let's stop calling it a course now.  Let's call it a story of an idea. Did you get the idea?  How do you know when someone gets the idea? At which point of the story does someone start to get it? How does the story unfold?  Is the unfolding the same for every reader?  Is the story read, or experienced? If the learner experiences it, how do they engage or enter the story? How do they know it's a story that needs their engagement? 

You see, of course, what is happening.  And you might be thinking, this is not the way it goes in calculus, or in anatomy and physiology, or in psychology.  But why not?  Why can't we frame what we would traditionally call a course in terms of story? And see learners as participants engaging a narrative?  

Even the most formulaic narrative is an open system.  It has rules, it has details and a known story arc, but it still invites the reader's engagement.  Every story invites imaginative participation, the string of what ifs and might haves and me toos, of hope and regret and successes and missed opportunities.  And the end provided does not have to be the end the participant accepts; the story can be finished, but it can also be iterative, a set of possibility drills.

If we reconceive what we currently call courses as narratives, if we choose to create open systems for possibility focused on a single set of guiding ideas, we can change the face of what we currently call education.  If we create both focus and entry points, rigor and opportunity for engagement, we are creating a structure for what we could call open education.  And the way we talk about open education could change.

 

Donald Hall Doesn't Write Poetry Anymore

In a recent New Yorker podcast, the great poet Donald Hall discusses the cycles of his writing life, among others things. Elsewhere, someone has created a video for one of my favorite Hall poems, Names of Horses (text here).

 

ten memoirs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

I've read too many, good and bad.  And the ten I'd recommend are:

Matt Gallagher, Kaboom 
Brandon Friedman, The War I Always Wanted
Clint Van Winkle, Soft Spots
Craig Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute
Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq
Benjamin Tupper, Greetings From Afghanistan
Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away (really needs to be read with Evan Wright's  Generation Kill for the parallel scenes)
Ryan Conklin, An Angel From Hell
Peter Mansoor, Baghdad at Sunrise
Paul Riekhoff, Chasing Ghosts.

We read The War I Always Wanted and Soft Spots in my war memoir class last term, and the students loved (loved loved) these books.  Van Winkle and Friedman are great writers and pretty incredible, generous, men.  (Thank you.)

I keep waiting for the definitive book of poetry to emerge, the way definitive memoirs have emerged, something that could breathe the air of Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau .  But it's not here yet.  It might take another ten years -- who knows?  The muse will keep hounding someone and make it happen.

If you prefer fiction, Eck's Farther Shore is a good read.  And, in some spots, it's just beautiful.  The guys at On Violence have written about it.

an interview with Vic Manzano

Director on the move and decorated combat veteran Vic Manzano received support from Operation in Their Boots to produce his first documentary, The Way of the Warrior.  The focus of this haunting film is Rudy Reyes, a Marine veteran, author, and athlete.  

In mid December 2010, Vic took the time to talk about The Way of the Warrior, his larger calling in life, and his future plans.   

Vicmanzanointerview

Many thanks to Vic for letting me share the work (and conversation).  What a great, grounded person.  I can hardly wait to see what you create next.

Be sure to check his OITB blog, as well as the comedy we discuss in the interview.  And the film itself is available here or directly from OITB.  After you watch the film, please share it.  I think it speaks to the experiences of so many.

 

Thank you, Vic.  And of course, thank you, Rudy, for sharing your story with Vic (and with us).

Operation in Their Boots is a Brave New Foundation filmmaking fellowship project producing part of a documentary series about the impact the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are having on people here at home.  The OITB fellows' films  premiered in Los Angeles on November 9, 2010; all four films were made available on the OITB site that day.

Zainab Salbi: Women, wartime and the dream of peace

 

you really need to see Clint Van Winkle's documentary short

Seriously.  Watch it.  Then go to OITB and watch the rest.

 

the deep burden of #HeroTweets

I don’t know when I started noticing the number of servicemembers who breathed their last breath in Iraq or Afghanistan.  I remember that the New York Times would sometimes print the photographs and names, all of them clustered on a few pages.  Maybe they were presented that way for effect.  Look at them, so many, I thought when I first saw them.  The first time I actually pulled the pages from the paper and taped them to my office wall was the summer of 2008, when the US KIA count in Afghanistan crossed the 500 line.  The Times published all 500 photographs, names, hometowns.  I need to remember this, I thought as I carefully arranged the paper sheets on institutional beige walls next to Jarmusch film posters and letters of acceptance to Bread Loaf.  On a facing wall, already, was a large map of Iraq with a smaller Afghanistan insert.  And that was how we saw the wars at the time: Iraq was our major effort, and Afghanistan just a blip, a small engagement, obviously, since we never heard anything about it.  Marking the map were dozens of pushpins, one for each student who had come into my office and said I served there, tracing a road or river or curve of the geopolitical wire with their eyes or finger, one for each former student who had returned for a second or third deployment, one for each cluster of female servicemembers my best friend and I supported through Ladies of Liberty.

When my research-writing students started writing papers about the social consequences of our two declared wars, they discovered iCasualties, the cost of war counter, conflicting lists of war dead.  They asked questions.  Many of them did not know what casualty meant, all the nuances of language we use to describe and distance ourselves from war. 

A list is a safe thing. I used a to-do list and a grocery list today; both included items important and not so important, but they kept those things safe, on paper, out of my mind.  When it was time to think about the work to be done, the food to purchase, I referenced the lists; otherwise, I lived my day as it came to me.  In my experience, casualty and KIA lists have the same effect.  They contain important information, but I can choose when to look, choose to care or take action, choose to ignore them (something far too easy to do). 

Sometime after our count passed 500 in Afghanistan, the Times stopped printing those clusters of photographs.  The whys behind that warrant investigation.  But they stopped, and my only exposure to the lists for almost two years came in bursts, through student references to the lists in research reports or anecdotes related by veterans and activists. I’d lost people, my own people, men I knew and loved, to other wars or warlike actions.  I did not like to think about what was happening in the Middle East, and lists of people I did not know made it easy to skim, look for ages (such a range, and so many so young), hometown (a handful from places I knew), branch of service (so many Marines, and so many Army Infantrymen), essentially reducing the list to categories.  I am a database person; I think that way, and any list I scan will become a set of categories, potential tables, with links and relationships.

But people deserve better than this, deserve to be seen as more than another tic in a category box.  I knew this.  Maybe it’s one reason I eventually stopped looking at the lists altogether.  I kept the old Times pages on my wall, something I now realize was a way of keeping the numbers down.  There would always be only 500, in my office at least, as long as the pages stayed up there.  They acted as a false totem, a false reminder of what was no longer true.

Then, in the summer of 2010, I started following James Gordon Meek on Twitter.  I’d been tweeting since 2007, but this year, as part of the preparation for my war memoir course, I started following a range of Twitter users focused on war, DoD activity, the war memoir, military intelligence, policy, and milblogging.  Meek was one of these people I followed.  And his stream is interesting, based in large part on his own experience as an embed and as an active reporter for the NY Daily News.  But sometimes, when I least expect it, he’ll also include in his stream a KIA report.  No backstory, no emotion, just a single name, date, branch, hometown.  That’s it.  When I first noticed his KIA reports, I noticed because he had posted a stream of them.  Several people killed in a single day.  The national news had not covered it.  I started noticing, waiting for the next tweets.  But of course I never knew when the next post might arrive, as we do not know when the next servicemember will run into bad luck.  The irregular rhythm of the KIA  tweets made them unpredictable, so each new one caught me off guard.  I saw each death as itself, one person, at war, now dead.  Not someone in a list. 

They still catch me off guard.  I see them and catch my breath.  Say a prayer for the family.  Pause.  It literally stills me, if temporarily.

So this weekend, Meek reported:

• USMC LCpl James D. Boelk, 24, Oceanside, CA, KIA 10/15 Helmand prov #Afghanistan. W/3-5 Marines, 1st MarDiv, I MEF.
• USMC LCpl Joseph C. Lopez, 26, Rosamond, CA, KIA 10/14 Helmand prov #Afghanistan. W/3-5 Marines, 1st MarDiv, I MEF.
• USMC LCpl Alec E. Catherwood, 19, Byron, IL, KIA 10/14 Helmand prov #Afghanistan. W/3-5 Marines, 1st MarDiv, I MEF.
• USMC LCpl Irvin M. Ceniceros, 21, Clarksville, AR, KIA 10/14 Helmand prov #Afghanistan. W/3-5 Marines, 1st MarDiv, I MEF.
• SGT Eric C. Newman, 30, Waynesboro, MS, KIA 10/14 Akatzai Kalay #Afghanistan. W1-38 CAV, 525th Battlefield Surveillance Bde.
• Army KIAs: SGT Carlos Benitez, Carrollton, TX; SPC Rafael Martinez, Spring Valley, CA; PFC Tramaine Billingsley, Portsmouth, VA.
• Next 3 were KIA by IED 10/14 "b/w Moqur & Darreh-Ye-Bum #Afghanistan." They were 24, 36 & 20, from the 7-10 CAV, 4th INF DIV
• LCpl James D. Boelk, 24, Oceanside, CA, KIA 10/15 Helmand prov #Afghanistan. W/3-5 Marines, 1st MarDiv, I MEF.

And this morning I replied to him: “there's a deep burden in your reports, the endless listing of these people now lost. thank you.”  This little essay, if that's what it is, is the part of the reply tweet I left out. 

Name, age, hometown, date.  Simple, powerful, final, details.  In response to a follower, he tallied the ages from October alone:  Ages of US #Afghanistan KIAs this month: 19 (4), 20 (4), 21 (3), 22 (6), 23 (3), 24 (2), 25, 26, 27, 29 (2), 30, 32, 34, 36, 48.

On Twitter, Meek is @meekwire.  Follow him.  You need to be surprised, reminded, of the immense sacrifices made every day, the ongoing list of the lost, one by one by one.

 

 

notes on the war memoir, part 2

Part of a series of lecture-notes-in-process.  I'm using this space as a place to think through themes in the class I'm teaching this term.

In comments as part of a 2005 panel discussion at the PEN American Center, the Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail remarks that writers in wartime should take an xray of the war to turn it from a tragic event to an aesthetic event.  This suggestion is layered with difficulties and genre shadows, to which I will return later in this series of notes.  But first realize that Mikhail has a scientific mind.  I did not realize the extent to which this was true until I spent time with her, observing her explanations, responses, and way of navigating conversations ranging from art and literature to history and self determination.  She notices with a precise, unsentimental, almost clinically detached, eye.  She weighs and measures situations,  translating nuances for clarity, balancing the equations of the logical, sensory, and emotional. Politics might frame her equations, might determine which operands she can put to use, but she selects elements of the story to include, then determines their placement and function.  

The aesthetic is not the beautiful but the perfectly, beautifully noticed, the event itself a laboratory for the emotional and psychological lives of its agents and subjects, for what transmutes the logic of life in wartime.  And she introduces the key figure of the xray -- a machine as eye to see past the surfaces of things, a way to detect hidden normalcy or abnormality, the structure of things.  To take an xray of the war is to see past its surfaces, its superfice, to its structure, looking for its logic, its normal or usual structures so opposed to the structures of life outside wartime.  To take an xray of the war is to try to see its disease, our dis-ease with it.

Mikhail suggests the wartime writer repurpose tragedy as aesthetic field.  Not to shock, or for shock value, though that might be an unavoidable effect, not to seek out tragedy or darkness in order to brood or make some political or personal point, but rather to recognize war as a tragic situation and seek ways to perfectly notice and record the elements of that situation, share an expert interpretation of the personal xray of war.

The tragic wars of Iraq -- trace them, as far as you can, for that region, since Babylon -- have served as fodder and field for endless memoirs, psalms, and poems, Mikhail's The War Works Hard and Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea  just a subset of them.

One memoir of this most recent war in Iraq (which is not yet, in spite of official pronouncements, over) that most closely matches Mikhail's ethos is The War I Always Wanted, written by the American Brandon Friedman, who served as an Army officer in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  While at least a dozen OIF memoirs I've read tend to either glamorize or sentimentalize violence and loss, and perhaps understandably so, Friedman takes a more clinical approach to noticing, selecting, and reporting.  The narratorial voice he adopts affects a detachment that serves as psychological buffer (perhaps more for the reader than author), "as if [he] had no personal stake," and this gives him an opportunity to invest scenes with both visceral intensity from the center of the action and a sense of the xray.  He repeatedly metareports on multiple levels of engagements and his perception of them, commenting on their gamic or filmic quality.  At some moments he simply reports that he and his men are "technically in combat, but in reality [they are] just shivering guys standing on a mountain, talking about life and wondering if it will end soon."  The human condition provides the frame for the artificial -- but no less real -- construct of the theater of war.  The human mind, as reported by Friedman-as-narrator, somehow holds the two frames in balance, seeing both the surface construct and its xray twin, the human reality that will later "start to work on your head."

 At another moment in TWIAW, Friedman is part of an armored column advancing toward Hillah, and he notices an Iraqi man walk out of what presumably is his home, dressed for work, and start to walk toward Hillah.  In the war construct, the armored column is the normal event, the man dressed for work abnormal.  After all, artillery is set to fire; we are at war; people without (or with) Kevlar and helmets should be afraid.  But in the frame of the human condition, the Iraqi man carries on as though the war is not happening, or is at least not an impediment to what else needs to be done.  It is as though the man has taken his own xray of the war, his personal war situation, and seen that his life, his work, continues regardless.  "I don't know who was crazier, him or us," Friedman comments.  "But it struck me that, of the two of us, he was the one taking part in the more natural act." 

I could go on and on about these powerful vignettes Friedman offers and their accumulated resonance in the text, which leave the reader with the sense that she has accumulated some great insight just by noticing.  Which of course is not what happens.  Friedman has xrayed the war and created from it a memoir that doesn't celebrate his insights and diagnoses as much as teach them by a gradual unveiling. 

Part 3: unfinished notes on Friedman+Virilio up next, after I sleep on them a few nights more.   

notes on the war memoir, part 1

The battlefield has ever been a “field of perception,” a field for projection, a source of conceptions of the heroic, of mythology, ways to frame history, conquest to conquest.  In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Paul Virilio suggests that the “war machine appears to the military commander as an instrument of representation,” transforming Abel Gance’s definition of cinema as a machine of war into a metaphor.  The machine of war, then, becomes a visual communication apparatus, with visual functions along the echelon.  If the commander sees the machine of war as instrument of representation, the soldiers at the front become parts of that machine; they are no longer separate from their tools; even “the function of [their] weapon is the function of the eye.”  They are not just agents of the machine, enmeshed in war; they are the only witnesses to discrete events, moments that go unrecorded in the larger histories but impact those larger outcomes nonetheless.  They see what the commander cannot see, do what for the commander is a necessary abstraction.  They act on commands and make them concrete, using available means to complete their tasks.

When the battles are over, the dust settled, the bodies buried, the histories written, commanders go on to the next abstract task.  This is the way the machine works.  But what of the soldiers, for whom everything concrete has become a memory, or a dream, or a nightmare?  How do they reconcile their experiences and altered selves with a public fed on mythology and abstraction?

Before the war machine was public cinema, it was a public abstraction, an idea.  Countries sent warriors to battle, sometimes nearby, sometimes far away, and people knew about war either from direct experience or an indirect relation of it (word of mouth news, heroic poetry, and later letters).  The reality of war, the horror, the long moments and days of boredom, the slogs to the next battle(field)s, the soldiers certainly knew, had experienced.  But those at home and away from the front were left to imagine, wonder, ignore, or forget.  (More on forgetting later.)

The photographs of the Brady studios included those at home as part of the visual experience of war for the first time, creating in the public perception memories of something they had mythologized but never seen.  These stark images allowed the public an entry point to see war in pieces, in visual fragments.  And from these fragments the public was free to form new mythologies, poetry, history, based on their projections, based on their limited yet legitimate perception of war.  Scenes of war became war for them.  The part became the whole, a perceptual synecdoche.

The solder’s memoir, on the other hand, is a shaking loose of select moments and scenes, maybe safe ones, maybe the most unsafe, the ones he cannot otherwise shake or release, a spot of his experience standing as itself, not as the whole story to the teller but one tantalizing or terrifying or defining moment he needs to tease out, puzzle over, reflect on, try to find a way to bide. 

But public perception of the war memoir is not like the soldier’s perception of it, not at all.  The public is again seduced by the charms of synecdoche, telling itself: so this is what war is like.  The seduction of the simplistic view becomes an intense burst of misunderstanding, misperception.  The public memory of war is at best a mix of the larger view historians tend to take and the misperception of select first hand accounts of battle. Such memories are malleable and easily forgotten.  Virilio, however, suggests that the public’s memory of war should not be discounted as illegitimate; he argues that “the memory in question is not like that of a popular culture based upon common experience: rather, it is a parallel memory, a paramnesia, a mislocation in time and space.”  The war machine as field of perception is not limited to those directing and participating in it.  Publics interacting with, or cooperating in, the collective parallel memory of war complete the continuum from abstraction to direct experience to indirect experience to metonymy back to abstraction.  In this model, the rhetoric of the war machine is infinite, with memoir an essential link between direct experience and metonymy.

(For those suddenly interested in Virilio, his book Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light is another fascinating read.)

art in the face of war (trailer)

looks amazing.

We Were One (part B of the intersection of memoir and journalism)

 In the Preface to We Were One, Patrick  O'Donnell thumbnails a moment in which a Marine asks him what he will write about.  He responds, “[t]hat I was with as band of heroes and I am going to tell the truth about what happened here.”  He explains to the reader that he had intended to “write the history of their war,” but he also invests his project with a larger aim, to share a history that will allow the reader to decide whether these Marines are “the next 'Greatest Generation'.”  The Greatest Generation theme recurs, in extended form in Colonel Shupp's farewell speech at Camp Abu Ghraib, on Lima's return to Pendleton when “veterans of the greatest generation praised the Marines,” and when the author asserts that “[t]he individuals [he] met in Iraq, especially in the Marines of the 1st Platoon, showed me clearly that they truly do constitute the next Greatest Generation.”  And maybe the comparison is meant to be an honor, though the two wars have little in common.  But when a writer promises to allow the reader to decide and instead makes the decision for the reader, it seems dishonest.  The rest of the book, the transaction of time and text for meaning, catharsis, history, whatever it is the reader wants out of a war history, is cheapened.

Back to the “we.”  We Were One opens with a preface, and then a prologue that serves as an action snapshot and backstory of sorts.  The first 155 or so pages is a story composed from oral histories O'Donnell collected before he joined the platoon in combat.  Those chapters are choppy, not straightforward history, with too much attention paid to the individual accounts rather than smoothing them into a coherent, fluid story.  In a typical scene, scattered narrative moments are interrupted with descriptive detail in quotes, followed by “recalls X” or “X remembered later.”  This oral history narrative quilt, so to speak, could have been stitched together for better effect with footnotes to give credit to the individuals whose memories were used.  With a mix of quoted memory and unquoted narrative, the reader is left to wonder where the unquoted material came from, and whether the text is straight history or creative nonfiction.

When O'Donnell finally enters the story, and the lives of the platoon, again, the insertion is awkward.  On page 156 he announces his arrival, and the arrival of first person (at least in spare moments), in a two-paragraph italicized section.  Why italics?  Why not just start a new chapter at that point?  These might seem arbitrary quibbles, but for at least 11 chapters I had wondered when the author would join the Marines on their missions, whether he was already with them but practicing a sort of author evacuated style, or whether the stumbly quote/narrative method would persist to the end of the book.  It was a relief to finally have an author in a history with “we” in the title, though to a large extent it is as though he still does not exist in the scenes he describes.  This, again, leads the reader to distrust the scenes, the facts of the scenes; if a participant can selectively remove himself from the situation, what else has he removed?  What are the facts, and what are the fact facts?

His time with the platoon was brief – only a matter of days – and the house to house action he describes in Fallujah seems less vivid than other first-hand accounts I've read, maybe because the author seems so intent on avoiding first person.  His sharp focus on making these Marines the next Greatest Generation, a focus he admits he developed before he ever met them, is sharper than the story he could have actually told.  Only 59 pages of the 231 page book tell a story that includes the author in the “we.”  The rest is second hand. 

In the Generation Kill extra, Evan Wright, when prodded by the Marines on the stage, recalls what he told them all writers do:  “charm and betray.”  Maybe as their “combat historian” and interviewer O'Donnell won the confidence of, maybe even charmed, the warriors he describes.  And maybe the Greatest Generation label he forces these Marines to live up to, seeing them through the lens of history rather than as the makers of a new history, is the betrayal.

notes on the intersection of memoir and journalism

Something interesting happens almost halfway into the "Conversation with 1st Recon Marines" released as a special feature in the Generation Kill DVD boxed set.  Six Marines and the journalist who was embedded with them sit in chairs on a stage, laughing and talking.  And then Evan Wright, the journalist, asks an open question: “what is the responsibility of a journalist in war?”

Brad Colbert responds, “I think it's really changed.  I know what they're supposed to be, and I know what they are [in] actual reality.  They are supposed to be completely unbiased, and present what they see as they see it to those that are not able to experience it firsthand.  Unfortunately, …  there's no fact facts.”

 This role of the war reporter has shifted, maybe, with embeds and the different kind of first-hand account an embedded reporter is able to share.  The war journalist does, as Colbert suggests, share the story with those who are unable to experience it.  But the embedded journalist is more than a witness; he not only observes the action; he is part of it, he engages it, participates in it.  And though his official role is observer, reporter, filter, the one who mediates war reality for readers far removed from the war experience, he also suffers the illusion that he is one of the warriors with whom he is embedded.  Sometimes, that illusion extends to the title of his account, as in Patrick O'Donnell's We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah.  

Of course, an embedded journalist's account of time spent at war is also a memoir.  It is an untangling of things remembered, whether from jotted notes, typed dispatches straight from the tip of the spear, or emotional memory, and in that sense it is no different from any other war memoir written by a soldier, a war-zone civilian, or a contractor.  (It's the wave of frank Blackwater memoirs we'll never see that might prove most tactically revealing and psychologically interesting, but don't hold your breath.)  Except that the journalist's memoir has to appear sanitized, wiped clean of the memoirish elements and instead more cleanly nonfiction, real, true.  How does the journalist separate a historically valid account from emotional truth?  Is one truth, or one reality, more valid than the other? As Colbert suggests, “there's no fact facts.”

True stories hiding in the silence: Clint Van Winkle's Soft Spots

Clint Van Winkle''s Soft Spots is unlike any other war memoir I've read.  Let me type out loud here and try to unravel some of what makes it unique, from form and structure to its emphasis on the act of writing and the role of memory.

So what is it that most war memoirs do, or include?  The trajectory tends toward the linear: prewar aspiration, or lack of it, sometimes only a few months back, sometimes as early as childhood or even a family legacy; the decision to join or engage; training; news of deployment, sometimes with delay, sometimes as an early surprise; separation from loved ones; usually, the death letter; first moments in country; buildup to first hostile engagement, then the engagement itself; the cycle of downtime to engagement; countdown to return; the journey home, in whatever form it happens to take, whether literal or psychological.  This list is like any attempt to describe what tends to happen in any genre; it glosses too much, omits beautiful anomalies, pretends to see only surfaces in narrative.  The war memoir is a dislodging of remembered events, of fragments, and trying to make sense of them, share that sense, reflect, in the act of publishing create a sort of shared or communal reflection.  Students of the Western tradition are enculturated to make sense of events via linear narrative, so we present our memories that way, neatly, with a beginning, middle, and end.  So I pretend to see those linear narratives in a reductive way.  That is, of course, not all they are.  They comprise the real, lived history of these years, something I deeply respect.  But my pretense, gloss, omission, is a way of seeing what is devastatingly unusual about Van Winkle's narrative.  

Soft Spots includes the elements of the regular trajectory, but the presentation is not linear.  Instead of a before and after, this narrative offers a fragment of backstory followed by a persistent present that includes memory fragments as they actually appear: not ordered, not sensical, but randomly associative, mixed in with lived daily experience, mixed histories that do not occur as flashbacks but as the now and the past remixed in real time.  Each moment has the potential to be disturbing, hallucinatory, always part of a relentless larger narrative.  The Marine who so beautifully notices Bedouins “in long white robes” who “appeared to glide over the ripples of sand as they moved away” or a city that seems to be “either sinking into the sand or had recently risen from it” cannot conveniently forget the details of his time in combat.  Early on, before his unit has seen combat, he considers the reality of disassociation, wondering “where [he] would be hiding, mentally, when all that happened.  Where would [he] take [his] thoughts in order to accomplish the mission?”  He cannot help but notice every small detail, sometimes even imagining past what actually happens; why should the reader expect that he would forget, or stop remembering, what he noticed once he returns to the United States?  The memories continue to dislodge. Some recur, reassemble, reconfigure, almost like kaleidoscope fragments reshaken for a new view.  The Marine left behind.  The Iraqi girl.  He “could not look away” in Iraq, and he cannot look away when he returns to the States.

And this creates a harrowing narrative of moments, days, months, in the mind and through the eyes of one veteran brave enough to recount and share part of his story.

Of course, he shares his story through writing, through text, words on a page, pages the reader will later turn, fold, mark up, return to.  Writing is a material presence in this memoir, from the early moments of the unit's deployment.  The Marines with whom Sgt. Van Winkle serves have “names you could write home about.”  He keeps a notebook with him; in the front part, he writes notes he needs for missions and the needs of his men; in the back, he keeps what he calls a death notebook, like his death letter, only more real.  He writes that the “back pages ... belonged to [him].”  He carries the notebook wherever he goes.  When he settles in to go to sleep, he pulls his “notebook and pistol” into the sleeping bag with him.  When needs relief, he writes that “headphones and writing relieved” him.  Activity happens around him, and he “looks up from his journal” to notice, but in the early pages of the memoir, he tends to ground himself by writing.  Midway through the memoir, back in Phoenix, he writes that he “look[s] for redemption in words and wait[s] for [his] stray bullet to whiz through the window.” His buddy Kipper appears in a hallucination and tells him to “[s]top being a bitch and tell the fucking story.  The whole story.”  So he starts typing again, returning to writing as a way of making sense of what has happened, what continues to happen as he remembers.  He writes for, and toward, a resolution to his own narrative.  He reports that EMDR has helped his PTSD, but the reader has a sense that because the “vivid memories [Van Winkle] collected in combat won't disappear,” because Van Winkle closes by asserting “a piece of me will always be in Iraq,” the writing also will not stop.

And I look forward to whatever he chooses to write next.

notes from the bookishness symposium

Notes from the Bookishness symposium “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age,” University of Michigan, May 15, 2009

Jessica Pressman (http://jessicapressman.commons.yale.edu) spoke about the materiality of the book, the book as reading machine.  Her focus was literature born in the digital world that remediates print based practices and print based literature for the screen.  She invoked, but did not quote, Hayles and the concept of the posthuman.  She situates the book within a network of current and previous readers as she attempts to formulate or describe an aesthetic of bookishness.  She says our nostalgia for books is not merely a nostalgia for print, and she suggests we consider a relationship, rather than a dichotomy, between digital and print literacies.

Leah Price (http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~lprice/), on the other hand, interrogates that nostalgia, asking at the outset of her talk why it gives us such satisfaction to think about the death of the book.  She started with NEA-reported literacy/reading rates and suggested that the NEA figures, which measure the anecdotal versus the empirical, should be called into question.  What kinds of reading do they measure, after all? Print books only, which even in the height of the popularity around which our nostalgia centers, somewhere in 1908-10, comprised only 14% or so of total print output.  She calls the screen the book’s “uncanny double,” an unfortunate but convenient relation Liu debunks later.  She suggests that the nostalgia narrative of the book is a cultural narrative of loss, and she points to the false nature of that loss, pointing to research indicating that books have always made a small fraction of read material, with periodicals, forms, and pamphlets more important and popular.  She invokes Nardi’s media ecologies and places the codex on a symbolic pedestal only to collapse that position.  An interesting point of departure toward the end of the talk (Pressman read from a prepared paper, and Price had some notes but spoke mainly from a file that kept spinning from the dome) was the relationship she described between text and identity construction.  She calls reading a form of appetite, tying the object of appetite to a materiality beyond its usual margins, and suggested that as forms of literacy and reading become more plastic the identities formed by reading action are becoming less plastic.  I loved Price's talk.  She is brilliant amazing wow, and I don't think these notes really convey that.  Wow.  I went for Liu but got a real treat in Leah Price.

And then, Alan Liu (http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/).  He titled his presentation The End of The End of The Book and explained that his talk would look at bookishness from the point of view of the digital.  He started by describing, briefly, professional research environments (mostly projects in process) including the Nines Collective (a collex/database like a digital-text or datamining delicious), the Public Knowledge Project (where you can also create customized journals), and PReE (from ETCL at U of Victoria, next-gen folksonomies).  He explained that the book and the screen are two separate material forms, that the digital necessarily subordinates other material forms to documents, to packets and bytes.  He questions the “thoughtful online use of books” before launching into a series of formulaic descriptions of professional-research environment parameters, the sort of formulaic descriptions I’d not seen since root cause crisis meetings we held (during network or other crises, of course) when I was an IT director. 

He is interested in the relationship between operability and tractability.  He describes the initial relationship this way:

Accessibility + tractability = operability

or

Operability = f(accessibility, tractability)

So then online use = overall topography of operability versus datastructure. 

(He then uses these relationships to visualize the use of topographies as a way of describing disaggregated online activity in research and mainstream (non research) environments.)

The data shows that popular or mainstream sites constrain tractability in order to maximize operability, while research sites maximize structured tractability while constraining operability.  This is why we might initially experience digital research sites as more “difficult” to navigate or manage, until we discover the structures that allow us to manage data relationships.  The research sites provide fewer constants, so the data structures are looser, even the naming conventions can be, as he responded in Q&A, “chaotic.”   (I had asked a question about the relationship between freeform tagging in research environments and potentially chaotic folksonomies as the analogue for print-text marginalia)  This designed, user-structured chaos happens because the structures allow the research users to manage low level textual events in ways that manipulate higher level heuristics for aggregated data phenomena. 

And, as the other scholars invoked at least one of their major influences, Liu quoted Derrida’s the end of the book, the beginning of writing.

And afterward, Bea and I spent way too much money on books as we wandered the streets of Ann Arbor.  All fabulous, luxurious, and worthwhile.

remember this

when you talk about the war
remember this beautiful face

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