Paling Kings

“Most of us are allowed to go through the span of life allotted to us in actuarial tables.” from The Echo newspaper, November 1, 1869

Except the tables don’t tell the whole tale, do they? There are also qualitative burdens—especially when it comes to certain folks, say for example kings, who:

…must bear all. O hard condition,

Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath

Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel

But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease

Must kings neglect that private men enjoy! Henry V, IV.1

Does not late model democracy make all of us Henry’s? Kings and yet also subjects—to the king of collective will. And doubly subjects to that sovereign’s king, the entity that orders and executes that will. I’m referring to the actuarial tables, or the paper on which they are printed. It’s quite a trick to take on all the worries and enjoy so little of the power. Pale kings indeed.

Remember this testimony on March 13, 2009?

Or is this the king David Foster Wallace refers to with the title of his unfinished novel? It’s Robert Herz, chairman of FASB, who got himself “dragged in front of Congress” and subjected to the steam and grunts (–”the breath of every fool”–) of subcommittee members over the loss of constituents’ jobs and the need for immediate action. Mr. Herz twirled his water bottle’s cap and articulated maddeningly reasonable explanations for various accounting practices. He tends to smirk slightly when speaking, but perhaps not consciously.

It’s dreadful to watch elected representatives beg him to modify this or that mark-to-market or discounted cash flow accounting protocol. Not because he’s always ready with a lucid description of the rule’s origins and purpose, but because of his perfectly legitimate refrain that, even if a legislator’s suggestion makes sense, he’s merely one voice on a 5-person board, and, more importantly, accounting standards are now a global concern and unilateral changes to the way US corporations handle their balance sheets would have bespectacled bean counters from Alberta to Zaire shaking their fists at yet another overreach of US hegemony. Actually, Herz didn’t raise the specter of actuarial terrorism as much as indicate that no matter what the US does, everyone else isn’t going to necessarily agree to it, or even if they do, it may cause, instead of prevent, bookkeeping chaos.

Because he’s very smart, Herz didn’t say anything like, “A pile of shit weighs the same in pounds or kilograms.” Good bureaucrats know enough to allow their patrons to deceive themselves, both about facts and the scope of their (the bureaucrats’) power.

A good bureaucrat isn’t particularly human, which seems to me to be what concerned Wallace so much. In his work (and in interviews) there’s an evident desire to palpate those parts of us the world seems determined (and better than ever able) to conceal. Qua American writer of talent, energy, and ambition, he’s obliged to poke his fingers right into the heart of things American. The hearts of the last two centuries have been oil (and whales), and dreams (and Long Island). Certainly the 21^st century’s pièce de résistance will be about taxes (and the suburbs). A book on paying the bills that have been run up is probably the last one our experiment can write and we can stop when it’s done. By then, we’ll have used up the span allotted to us in the tables.

 

Dionysus Caught Reading

I didn’t spy Mayor Jerry Sanders in the audience Friday night at The Theatre Inc.’s ancient Greek twinning of Prometheus Bound and Cyclops. Would he have found it edifying?

This week, under the direction of Mr. Sanders, large city vehicles roved the beaches of San Diego, removing concrete fire pits and secreting them into an undisclosed storage location until some civic-minded (and deep-pocketed) person or group pays a Lindbergh-grade ransom—289k US dollars for 18 months cleaning and upkeep.

This is the latest development in an evolving littoral culture. A temporary alcohol ban on city beaches was made permanent by voters in November. The putative reasoning for the temporary ban: civic order. Now that the mob has grunted its approval, the rights of the few are permanently subordinated.

Cyclops is the only surviving satyr play. The satyrs are lusty, drunken followers of Dionysus and in this play they’re also cowards, though hardly more cowardly than mighty Odysseus, who tries, like any good general, to get someone else (in this case the satyrs) to fight the Cyclops for him. Friday night, this play began immediately after the first one ended, appending some jolliness and frivolity to the tragic meditation on torture, the anger of the Gods, and man’s unhappy fate—kind of the way you might go to the beach after a long day of soul-crushing work and go for a swim and then sip from your wineskin as the sun settles pacifically into the sky’s western hem.

But until now, if you couldn’t sip your wine, you could at least start yourself a fire when it got dark.

The tragic part of the program featured Prometheus, whose name means “forethought,” chained to a cliff in the Caucasus by Zeus, who wasn’t a fan of Prometheus’ decision to steal fire from Mount Olympus and give it to mankind. Prometheus also vouchsafed man the ability to plan and the creative arts such as writing, and for this he suffered greatly.

Amazingly, MJS also tried to close some of our libraries, but luckily the city council voted to keep them open temporarily. One of the books you might still find on a public shelf is Percy Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. The closet play Prometheus Unbound is Shelley’s attempt to close the gap between Aeschylus’s tragedy and what’s been lost in ensuing years (namely, the ending: only 1/3 of Aeschylus’s trilogy survives). His Jupiter (aka Zeus, the one who imprisoned and tortured Prometheus) understood well man’s cruel fate—that some gifts are burdens, and should be taken back. From on high, he intones:

Henceforth I am omnipotent.

All else has been subdued to me—alone

The soul of man, like unextinguished fire,

Yet burns towards Heavan with fierce reproach and doubt

And lamentation and reluctant prayer,

Hurling up insurrection, which might make

Our antique empire insecure, thought built

On eldest faith, and Hell’s coeval, fear.

 

Apocalyptic Occasion with a Curmudgeonly, Andy-Rooneyesque Beginning

Can you believe the newspaper?

Have a look at the last two graphs from a recent article in the business section detailing the long lines and general excitement associated with the release of the new Blackberry Storm:

Standing on line in San Francisco’s financial district, Fred Vassard, a systems administrator, said he owns both versions of iPhone but was dissatisfied with its phone capabilities. He wants Storm for work and personal use.

“It’s a touch-screen, so it has more real estate,” Vassard said. “The reviews were so-so, so I’m hoping I can find some positives in it. But the phone part will work better than iPhone.”

All around this gentleman, in surrounding articles, the daily litany marches on: frozen credit, foreclosures, layoffs, downsizing, debt deflation, recession. While the very sky falls, Mr. Vassard could join a clown troupe and juggle his PDA cellular phones, so many does he have. I’m not inclined to criticize him—in fact he may be heroic, an example of man’s ability to endure against seemingly insurmountable odds.

What a tableau – this man buying his 3^rd cell phone, apparently with no sense of irony whatsoever. I imagine his face as Sphinx-like, his voice even and matter-of-fact. His mention of “real estate” isn’t a conscious allusion—he’s just using the metaphor that best helps him make his point. His attitude is un- and anti-complex: “What do you want from me? All I can tell you is the truth as I see it.”

***

There’s a great character in Josef Skvorecky’s novel The Engineer of Human Souls called the green man. The green man served as a bombing raid lookout for the Reich, during which time he’d been blown out of his post several times, turned green (somehow), and witnessed all sorts of civilians’ bodies and houses destroyed. A man of many experiences, he’d also been subjected to tortures in boarding school (e.g. placed in a concrete room that slowly filled with water until he had to stand on tip toes and breathe through his nose for 12 hours), and forced to bury people alive as a gravedigger, then dig them up if it was suspected they had gnawed their way out of the casket (which they sometimes did, and then gnawed their way into other caskets, where they cannibalized the dead (or not yet dead), since, the green man noted, there was nothing else to eat down there).

The green man plays the role of scatological guru in the novel. The characters spend more and more time in the bathroom of a Nazi-controlled Czech Messerschmitt factory as the war progresses because the bosses become less interested in keeping the factory on schedule. Each time they return to the lavatory, there he is, describing some other horror he’d witnessed or endured: armies accidentally blowing themselves up, families obliterated at dinner time, pilots targeting birthday parties. The others scream at him in disbelief and call him names (often the names of animals—anaconda, buffalo, etc. Czech humor depends a good deal on zoology) but he just continues speaking. His trials rendered his face unable to take on any expression at all. His voice is without affect or modulation. And he’s green from head to foot.

The straight man infuriating those around him is the trademark of another Czech-lit character, Hasek’s Svejk, one of the really great and frighteningly relevant characters in 20th century literature, who humbly demonstrate that doing one’s duty in the midst of disaster is just silly enough to be quintessentially human.

***

But who has time for novels? What the Blackberry story compelled me to re-read was a very short story by the German writer Wolfgang Hildesheimer called “A World Ends.”

The story’s narrator briefly describes the background to his tale:

• gambling debts forced him to sell a bathtub in which a famous person had been murdered,
• the sale of this tub brought him in contact with the wealthy cultural elite, and
• he took to attending some functions, including an evening party which took place on the Marchesa Montetristo’s artificial island.

The main story concerns this party. The narrator encounters there all the expected stuffed shirtiness and self-absorbed patronizing pretense. He has several awkward conversations with the guests, who are eagerly anticipating the world premiere of two flute sonatas accompanied by the Marchesa herself. Alas, the party ends unexpectedly when the artificial island sinks into the sea! The narrator is the sole survivor, because he alone leaves before the end of the second sonata. Everyone else is too concerned with propriety and the mores of artistic society to save their own hides. The narrator tiptoes out, trying not to disturb those listening with rapt attention as puddles form on the floor. Herr von Perlhuln, one of the auditors, casts a “half-contemptuous, half-melancholy glance” in his direction.  Isn’t that Fred Vassard himself?

***

Yes, I can believe the newspaper, because I’ve been taught how to read it. It’s my green man, my Svejk, my Countess Marchesa. I yell; I laugh; I embrace. I sigh and quote out of context the last lines of one of Melville’s sad short stories: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”

 

A People’s History of Yoknapatawpha County – Part I

In Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America, Diana Kendall argues, among other things, that the poor and homeless are unfairly and incompletely represented in US media. She cites as evidence shows like ER and CSI (and other non-acronymatic shows such as Law and Order), where the homeless and poor are crazy wild-eyed folks in need of medical attention they won’t be able to pay for or decorative red-herrings for the intrepid modern-day Poirots, respectively. I myself can’t furnish enough examples of the media depicting the homeless or poor as actual people whose struggles and challenges matter to argue her point.

With all the televisual focus on hotel heiresses and talentless singers and earnest crime solvers intent on making the world safe for law-abiding white people, it’s easy to read statistics such as the following without flinching: 35 million Americans living in poverty in 2006 (poverty, officially, means making less than around $21k/year for a family of 4); 17% of children under 18 living in poverty—that’s about 1 in 6.

If you do spend time meditating on those figures, which, again, our culture encourages us not to do, I suspect you’d become disturbed. But even if you get beyond the lack of direct focus and patent frivolity of the media-tainment industry, there’s another layer of protection against thinking deeply about the poor: the blame game. From the comfort of your partisan couch, you can bitch about your chosen enemy: corporate power and unfair institutional biases on the one couch, maybe, and shiftlessness and the moral hazard of government handouts on the other.

This multi-layered, insulating sheath, along with the intrinsically inert mindset watching cultivates, precludes acts of the imagination. Maybe all these poor people result from a problem of policy, a lack of leadership, or their own deficiencies, but yes I do believe I think they’re the result of a lack of imagining.

Turn away, with me—especially if you’re reluctant to talk to and laugh and eat with the actual poor—because there exists an endlessly interesting, dynamic and variegated place where one can gain powerful access to penurious lives.

 

A Vision

My face was three inches from his face, max. I couldn’t tell for sure on account of the darkness, it being night and we being lightless, an “oversight.” He was on his back; I on my side. He doesn’t get my puns—the light/oversight thing. I’d taught him the word breeze earlier, my euphemism for the frigid wind. He whispered it at intervals as the tent’s fly ruffled. Other sounds included the raspy murmur of leaves and pattering rain—but all this was kind of muffled by the fog.

The third story I created, needing nothing to create it but his ears, concerned a Dad and a little boy. The previous two had as well, but they were short—mere yarnlets compared to this one, which, with each new word, gained synechdochal energy and increasing contemporary relevance.

Was he listening or asleep? I didn’t know for sure.

A dad and a little boy rode to town in a pickup truck, and this was a nostalgic story where town and home were different, clearly delineated, almost as if by the passing of tens of years. The highways widened the further they got from home. The traffic increased, the confusing pace of the world encroached ever more closely, shrouding lives in a sort of urban fog.

And the theme of seeing: the boy seeing and noting the sullen drivers of other cars, their lack of interest in him, their business. Trucks? Of course trucks. All stripe of trucks. The boy looked at his father as he drove and noticed that he was not actually seeing but thinking—what mommy would call plotting.

The dad let the little boy press the elevator’s buttons and the boy said “bank” to himself, practicing. “The bank. Not like a cutbank. A money bank bank.” They couldn’t see; then they could see again. The boy grasped his dad’s hand and they walked. He heard the voice first and saw the shoes. The voice of his uncle and the shoes of someone else. Then, the voice stood up and it was his uncle, and his uncle’s shoes, and the boy’s father shook hands across the desk, holding his hat in his left hand, the one that hurt, all the while.

His uncle asked how was his mommy and the boy said fine.

No country man walks into a bank not expecting to walk out with every hair on his head mortgaged to the hilt, even if it is his own brother who’s president.

They started talking by not talking. And outside, far below, a city bustled.

“Our mommy would wear people out bragging on her son’s corner office, if she was around,” the dad said.

“Shoot,” the other said. Seems like he should take a toothpick out of his mouth for punctuation. Yeah, let’s say he does that. And then he said, “Mommy ain’t never wore nobody out but herself.”

You awake?

A reasonable silence. His mouth breathing inches from mine; I can hear it and even feel it.

“Pa, on t’other hand, had no need for bankers. If he’d a gone to school, he’d have liked Emerson: The world is in a state of bankruptcy; the world owes the world more than the world can pay.”

“Our Pa didn’t need no learning from school, and verily school didn’t need no learning off him.”

Then a voice ushers me back, for I’d forgotten about a character, and he noticed.

“Little boy?” he asked, not more than 3 inches from my face. The little boy looked out the bank’s window while his daddy and uncle talked, and while I described what he could see below, we fell asleep together.

 

What Does “Stabilizing Housing Prices” Mean?

An American walks into a bank and obtains a mortgage loan he can’t afford—be it an ARM, interest only, or even a 30-year fixed. Because of the risky loan, he’s able to pay more for a house than he otherwise would have.

If he hadn’t obtained a mortgage on the house he wanted, it seems he’d have been left with three choices: continue renting his apartment, continue living in his smaller and more modest house, or try to get a smaller loan to buy the house he can afford.

Instead, he stretched and bought the pricey house. Isn’t it true that, on the aggregate, lending practices that permitted/encouraged such risky personal finance decisions, along with low interest rates and perverse tax incentives, drove up housing prices all across the country? The bank failures, foreclosures, and government bailout seem to have demonstrated that some are now paying for their risks. But the connection seems not to have been made, at least at levels that matter, by people willing to employ honest diction, that these risks and policies led to artificially high housing prices. And artificially high housing prices encouraged/permitted all sorts of other things, such as increased rates of borrowing against real equity, a real estate derivatives market frenzy, and a land craze not seen since the Homestead Act.

The tax incentives and low interest rates will unlikely remain with us, but risky lending most likely will disappear into the nooks and crannies from which it recently emerged—at least for a while. The hard truth seems to be that the economy was humming far faster than it should have been, and when we finally reckon with its tune, our houses and portfolios will be worth much less than before. But this is not something the government can or should fix. The realignment of worth and value has all sorts of virtues. If only it could pay off the bills we’ve been racking up.

 

Newscasters Everywhere Practice Saying “700 Billion Dollars!” into Their Mirrors

One doesn’t have to turn over very many rocks to find the number 700 billion in other contexts. Few of them are relevant, but this one is apposite, I believe. It’s from Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck:

Subsidized automobile use is the single largest violation of the free-market principle in U.S. fiscal policy. Economic inefficiencies in this country due to automotive subsidization are estimated at $700 billion annually, which powerfully undermines America’s ability to compete in the global economy. (see this brief excerpt for a fuller description)

Free-market supporters usually defend de-regulation by claiming that government intervention prevents the market from pricing goods and services. The market, they believe, is the most efficient mechanism for arriving at fair prices and for rewarding risk, incentivizing hard work, and nurturing good ideas. This may well be the case.

What I find myself trying to convince free-marketeers of lately is that government intervention is already much more significant than they suppose it to be. It’s difficult to persuade them because government intervention with markets is so big one can hardly even see it.

Our society has evolved by subsidizing certain industries—automobile, insurance, and especially big oil—at a huge cost to the American taxpayer. Concerned taxpayers and campaigning politicians are justified in getting hot and bothered by, for example, the ethanol subsidy.

But what about a much larger subsidy that encourages the continued dependence on greenhouse gasses when most Americans favor R & D for new energy technologies that will limit toxic emissions? Further, all sorts of other problems, that many Americans, again, would like to avoid, inhere in the auto subsidy, namely: foreign entanglements, landscape destruction, and the emerging idea that our car and suburb culture isn’t sustainable or even aesthetically agreeable.

(Expanded explanations of the auto and other subsidies is available in this Newsweek article.)

The question isn’t whether the government should “interfere,” it’s how and where they should. The government interferes for car-driving and alters the “free market” by around 6% of GDP. I applaud those in Congress opposed to the financial bailout, but their reasoning, if based on defending free markets from government interference, is suspect. If the effect of their opposition will be to put all government subsidies on the negotiating table, their misguided posturing might be productive.

 

What Rough Beast Slouches Toward Bethlehem to Be Born?

I’m in the process of being bludgeoned by three media whales – Ike, Obama vs. McCain, and the meltdown of the financial sector. I can’t check my electronic mail or turn on public radio without encountering “news” about them, and I’ve descended into a sort of meta-panic, not about the “news” but about the fact that I’m not actually getting the news. My guess is the real news is much worse, but I suppose that’s a matter of opinion or worldview.

Three important characteristics of US journal-tainment-ism have resulted in a perfect storm, where hurricane force winds, attack ads, and market crashes beguile a crazed public and have us staring so intently at our tv screens, pc monitors, and (in rare cases) newspapers, that we barely feel the breeze just at our backs.

One is obvious, though its effects are further-reaching than initially thought. Technology and globalization have led to increased competition for stories and audience. With this many sharks in the water, everything will be devoured, regardless of its worthiness as food. As a result, any trifle is either a story or can be turned into one. This has a great leveling effect, where the fall of housing prices in Cleveland is seen as equally weighty as an $800 billion war in Iraq or another celebrity DUI.

Two: the rise of derivative journalism. As a result of the competition and the difficulty (in terms of cost, mostly, but also, it’s hard work) of doing actual reporting, much of the “journalism” remains only derivative. Reporters report on how other reporters are reporting things. Sometimes, the sharks eat each other, because they have to eat. Charlie Gibson interviewing Sarah Palin is a story. John McCain telling his own supporters and a bunch of reporters about his energy policy is a story.

Three: As a result of the ubiquity of derivative journal-tainment-ism, commentators can (and do) spend air time and column inches pointing out how biased other journalists are. The problem is, they can be right (correct, that is) about their attacks, or at least not proven wrong, because they’re not commenting on anything other than other people’s comments, which tend to be more pliable than actual facts and circumstances. These are the big sharks, and everyone must pay attention to them because of their size.

Introducing sanity into this sort of cannibalistic feeding frenzy is, of course, impossible. So the two political parties spend their time shoveling in chum.

Imagine this wet, churning, many-gilled monster as it loiters off the coast. Now it blows landward on hurricane force winds, toward country that already has a liquidity problem.

 

Learning Curves

How Differential Calculus and Reading Employ the Same Skill

We build too many walls and not enough bridges. -Sir Isaac Newton

It’s fairly widely known, and confirmed in an old NFL Films piece, that former Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swan studied ballet in the off-season. I’m sure some of his teammates who spent their free months flipping over giant tractor tires and running on hot sand asked him, with respect to the ballet: why? When you see clips of Swanny reaching for balls on go routes interspersed with footage of him in tights pirouetting and striking Arabesques, you get it.

Keep this in mind while I transition from the gridiron to the proving ground for another contact sport: the college composition classroom. From time to time, a student’s excuse for poor performance in a reading and writing class is that they’re a “math person.” Unfortunately, by “math person” they often mean someone who’s good at adding and multiplying. But on occasion I’ve encountered the odd engineer or serious science student who’s a math person in the more thorough sense of the term-someone who can manipulate abstractions effectively, for one thing-and I’ve had some success explaining how the calculus they’re learning might help their reading.

Let me describe the relationship between reading and differential calculus as I see it. I have to ask you to stipulate a sort of equivalence between a curve in 2-space and a text[1], insofar as a text is something to be studied when reading and a curve is something you can study when doing calculus.

One thing to define up front: specific definitions for the ordinary words “says” and “does.” At my school, we use these words in reading classes to help move students from basic comprehension toward more rigorous analysis. An example of basic comprehension is something like a 5^th grade book report, wherein you summarize a book and maybe add a sentence at the end concerning whether or not you liked it. These assignments ask you to understand and regurgitate what a text “says.” Identifying what a piece of text (a book, a paragraph, or even just a sentence) “does” requires you not only to understand what it says but also identify its function in terms of, for example, building the argument or furthering the plot. When describing what a piece of text does, students have to know and use abstract categories so they can employ accurate descriptive verbs: e.g. “this paragraph reconstructs the events of that fateful evening” or “that paragraph provides three examples for why the new water line will be a burden on taxpayers.”[2]

Now, we can shift to differential calculus. Taking the derivative of a function allows you to determine the slope of the tangent line for the function’s corresponding curve at any given input value. In more plain English, the derivative of a function allows you to determine how a curve’s trending (its rise over its run, its behavior) at a given point. Trending and behavior essentially = doing. The initial function equates to what the curve is saying and the derivative describes what it’s doing.[3]

Just take a quick look at two blue curves:

For the curve on the left, we can see that when x=0, the tangent line (in red) is parallel to the x-axis, and therefore its slope is 0[4]. What’s the curve “doing” at that point? Well, it’s going neither up nor down. It’s flat. The curve on the right has two points at which the slope of the tangent would be 0: somewhere between -1 and -2 and somewhere between 1 and 2[5] (see these tangent lines in red).

These two blue curves look quite different, but at some points they’re doing the same thing. Now consider a couple of argumentative texts that seem wildly different. One, say, argues that the World Bank’s policies amount to usury and the other claims that Blue Velvet is really a retelling of Great Expectations. However different, these texts will probably do some of the same things: somewhere in both will appear, explicitly or implicitly, the central claim being argued. They also may respond to counterarguments or provide evidence and support. Again, these textual doings correspond, in my conceit here, to a certain slope of a tangent which occurs in two curves that look nothing like one another.

If you’re interested in an optional elaboration, see this note[6]. Otherwise, proceed.

Adding one layer of abstraction–by focusing on “does” in reading or the 1^st derivative in calculus–helps you compare one text(curve) to another, which allows you to more effectively and efficiently compare, categorize, assess, respond to, contrast, contextualize, etc. them. All those verbs describe, basically, what we nowadays consider critical thinking, which, it hopefully has been demonstrated, doesn’t happen solely in the territory of humanities and reading and writing courses, because the learning curves for reading and calculus are in fact more similar than most may initially believe.

---

[1] Of course, in all sorts of ways, a curve and a text are different-and I don’t just mean in terms of looks but in terms of what they actually are since a curve can simply be a curve and/or it can represent something in the physical world such as a projectile’s lateral path over an interval of elapsed time, while a text can’t be, in the same way, representative of anything other than itself, really (though probably some post-structuralist texts try (and perhaps succeed)).

[2] Just another quick example of this distinction using a somewhat famous first line:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

We could easily describe what this says by paraphrasing it: all contented nuclear units are similar while malcontented families tend to be different with respect to the source or manifestation of their malcontentedness.

But what does it do? It:

• Delivers an aphorism.
• Introduces the novel’s general subject: families.
• Brilliantly encapsulates what Tolstoy considered to be the raison d’etre for this novel and, for that matter, for any truly great novel, which is to look at the concrete particulars of some people’s lives that are interesting because of the challenges they face.
• Delivers a claim, presented as fact, to introduce the authoritative authorial tone Tolstoy will employ throughout the text.

There are probably dozens of claims we could make based on that first sentence and what it’s “doing.” And this is how reading gets awfully messy. But I’m here to argue that all these “doings” do have the similarity of being an attempt at abstract explanation of what the text at that place does and how it thereby fits into what comes before and after it.

By the way: In A Tour of the Calculus, David Berlinski claims that “Art is drawn irresistibly to what is singular, but mathematics is drawn irresistibly toward what is generic” (his emphasis). I don’t shy away from the fact that the sort of reading I’m talking about teaching here is more of the New Critic-mathematics sort than the post-structuralist-artistic variety.

[3] We’re limiting our discussion here to real-value functions-whose definition gets us into a larger and mostly fruitless discussion, but I will say that if we expanded beyond real-value f(x)’s, the incredible value of what I’m saying would be revealed with respect to the manner in which this works for post- or even post-post-structural texts with a large amount of pyrotechnics that we could equate with curves on the imaginary number line.

[4] Optional refresher: y=mx + b where m is the slope and b is where the line intersects the y-axis. In this case, y = -2, or more explicitly, y= 0x -2.

[5] Since this curve represents y = sin(x), I can tell you that these points are actually -π/2 and π/2.

[6] When you take the derivative of a function, which I’m arguing here describes the function’s (curve’s) tendencies, you get another function. Then, as I’ve mentioned, you can determine the instantaneous slope of the tangent (slope of the tangent = behavior) at any given input value. In reading, especially when dealing with a challenging text, it’s more common to figure out what a text is doing at several discrete points (say, in several paragraphs) and use those to start to sketch what the text does overall. Then, you can use this general statement of what the text does to check whether each paragraph actually contributes to the argument. Using an example from above, if you believe that what a certain text does overall is trace the World Bank’s failure in helping developing countries, but you discover a paragraph in the text about the Muppets, you had better figure out how that paragraph contributes to the overall argument (what it’s doing there), or you might have to reconsider what the text’s overall argument is.  Regardless, the idea here is that the derivative’s equation is the equivalent of a macro-does for an entire text.  And where in math you can use input values to get the slope at any point, in reading, you can use your macro-does as a way of checking yourself.

 

Pied Beauty

If you find yourself on Lake Lonely near Saratoga, you see two distinct shorelines, different in many ways. To the south lie the manicured lawns and square-cornered docks of lakefront properties, each separated neatly from the next, cultivated and carved into a perfect waterfront dream house like you see in magazines. Some aren’t yet complete, and from the lake you can hear the snuffle and chort of mini-backhoes moving earth to more perfect locations, the hungry buzz of chainsaws cutting trees to more perfect lengths, and the clipped discussions of men concerned with how best to execute the plan. This one has a t-shaped dock and grass to the water’s hem; that one sports a small boathouse and rocks demarking land from lake. A driveway switchbacks up the steep slope to a house with several bay windows through which one might regard the full ascent of his magnificence.

The other shore bleeds into the lake, and the lake into the shore: some branches and limbs droop half-submerged or thrust upward from the bottom into the air, white-flowering lilies float greenly in the shallows. As you approach that shore, water plants hiss at the kayak’s bottom. Twinned dragonflies hover near or on the boat and paddle, thickly verdant maple and birch trees silver in the breeze. Small birds call sweetly back and forth.

There’s no question which shore has more to teach. What one learns of course depends.

But the hand of man and the hand of God both can whisper to you. After five years aboard the Beagle and twenty years of sedulous study, during which he studied both shores, Charles Darwin pronounced with confidence that living things evolved by means of natural selection, essentially arguing that things were set in motion, not created by a Godly hand. His contemporary, Gerard Manley Hopkins, also a keen observer of nature, came up with something different.

The most basic, and therefore the definitional, capability of humans is the ability to draw different conclusions from the same set of facts. I can look at these two shores and argue that this is the case, and you can advocate for that, and we might shake hands or declare war or make love over, despite, or because of the difference.

Listen to the music of Hopkins sprung rhythm in “Pied Beauty,” in which he catalogs the glories of both of my metaphorical shores (there’s a professor reading it here):

GLORY be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 5

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10

Praise him.

Why is it that he praises sheepfolds and cultivated fields and man’s contraptions in the same stanza as a trout’s freckles and clouds spread against blue skies (i.e. both shores)? I’ve heard it defended this way: GMH would say that whatever man made god made because god made man so these folds and fields are still from Him. Or: GMH’s trying to stress the beautiful and symmetrical juxtaposition of opposites and a man-made garden next to a wild field is a good example of such a pairing. But it still troubles the Romantic in me, this line that bows in fealty to private property and the division of what once was unified. Especially because of line 10, a direct challenge to Darwin, a wild claim, the claim of a poet or a picture taker, that no mere materialistic law governs this scene, that only divinity presides here.

In five years (“with the length of five long winters…”), perhaps I’ll see both shores of Lake Lonely unified again, the entire lakefront devoured and divided, seemingly whole, undappled, twice as many houses, less than half as much to learn, and little left to teach. Arguing then whether laws or gods ever ruled would quaintly sound like birds someone old tells you used to sing.