Biking and the Spirit of Spontaneity (July 14, 2015)

Disclaimer-Preface-Thing: I will not try to bridge any gap between the reality of my last entry and the current one, how life changes or stays the same (or does both). I will only dive into a type of experience that I don't understand why I like. Inspired by reading Wild and hearing Cheryl Strayed's words on writing in a recent Longform Podcast interview, I am following her lead. By writing fearlessly. Maybe? Somehow. [Disclaimer of the disclaimer: I meant to publish this on July 14, 2015. Since then...well, I guess I'll start blogging again...]

Biking It

At 8:30pm tonight, I found myself on Corbett Avenue in San Francisco on my bike with a phone battery at 3% and no idea where I was. And I liked it that way. I felt happy in that moment. In fact I finally found the climax to my whole afternoon spent in parks and cafes, biking or running down familiar and foggy streets. There were stakes now, however temporary and laughable compared to hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, but there were stakes. I had set up an unintentional challenge and was ready for it.

A quote I came upon before getting lost.
(Alternative caption: "Lost? Make it happen.")

It lasted about ten minutes. I initially asked a guy if this way down Market Street was to downtown. It was not. These bridges I was seeing and the speed of the cars told me this was essentially a freeway now. I plowed forward, partly because I couldn't turn around at any point and partly to find a new way home. Then I changed my mind and turned right onto Corbett Avenue, reversing my upward trek.

Ashbury was the next street I needed, according to a well-lit bus stop map I ran into. Then I saw a bus, "Ashbury" glowing across the front through the fog and slight rain. I had no hope of keeping up with it, but I saw the electric wires above the bus. I focused on staying on streets with the wires, the permanent tracks of where the bus had been.

And Ashbury came along and I whizzed down it, with only another 4 miles to go in almost total darkness save streetlights and car headlights. The challenge was over once I hit Haight and Ashbury, though. The natural high and adrenaline buzz weathered down to nothing, as did the rain, as if aware that any dramatic effect it had provided was no longer of use.

It should be known that I haven't ridden my bike since my move to SF a few months ago, apart from once-a-month rides to my landlord's house to drop off the rent check (I like doing it old school). So I don't know why I rode it today. Somehow it made sense to bike. And somehow I found myself 6.5 miles away from my apartment at Philz Coffee on 24th Street and Folsom in the Mission. I made my decision to go there only when I was a dozen streets away.

Winging It

Spontaneity is possibly one of the most fluid ways to transition from one space and time to the next. I don't know why I'm drawn to it or why I decide to gamble with it even in a mundane activity such as choosing to walk to my bus stop without checking the bus schedule.

Time is something I always like to fight. There is never enough of it. A day ends, night begins, and I fight the urge to understand why I must retreat to sleep by a certain hour to get up at a certain time and do certain tasks I've done before again.

Repeating It

A traditional 18th century symphony, as Mozart and many others in wigs composed, typically has a definitive structure, the sonata form, in the first of its four movements. You hear an exposition, development, recapitulation, and a coda--four sections in which one or two themes, a string of notes, comes into being, changes, and returns to its original state, concluding with a sense of tonal stability. There and Back Again. An adventure begins and ends. Displacement.

Step 1, 2, 3, Repeat. Routine, the antithesis of spontaneity, follows an internal structure that you design and improve upon over time. But at some point, it becomes fixed. And at some level it follows the spirit of the sonata form, you begin the familiar tasks, experience slight variations (changing up the order of tasks, running late, etc.) and end mostly like you expected. Control is the name of the game. Planning also plays into controlling your time with structure but more loosely, of course.

But spontaneity is that wild card element unravels the neat schedule of activities, the bike route returning home you originally intended. I did improv for a few months when I was living in Oakland and even that carries structure: formulas and rules of how to interact with fellow improvisers in ways that lessen any chaos about a game or scene's general structure. The unstructured part is in the details and progression, within the understanding of how the game is played. So divide up form from content, structure from details. Organized chaos. A good actor can play a spontaneous, emotionally fluctuating character with a very precise set of actions that they will make onstage. For every performance.

Biking It Through the End

Not to go meta on you, but actually: Even this post has a structure. There's a narrative drop-in, a play into the theme of the post, a contrast to the theme, and a return to the narrative with the theme now at hand. But the details just came up as I wrote. (The bit about the symphony? That wasn't planned.)

After realizing that Mars intersects with
Corbett Avenue, I guess I must've been
on the street much earlier and then
"re-turned" (pun, that was a pun).

I left Philz Coffee with the understanding that I'd take the path the same way back, but one bike lane led me up a steep hill that led to yet another steep hill. At one point, I found Mars. The street. I was aware that I had left behind the familiar but I felt it was close. Maybe I was parallel to my original route. I wasn't, as I found out when I reached the freeway-like part of Market Street. But returning to the familiar immediately would've been too easy, like an author letting a novel's plot resolve too quickly.

Then came Corbett Avenue and the light rain. And I smiled.

The Reason I Studied Abroad: A Preface to Adventures

My study abroad friend Jennifer shared an article “3 Reasons to Travel While You’re Young” and I spotted it in my newsfeed. After reading, I thought about the post, which drew me back to my own experience studying abroad. But I only had one reason and it's hard to explain.

It came down to a choice: double-major or study abroad...but it was much more like...

The Question

I was starting my second semester of sophomore year at UC Berkeley and felt directionless. I loved English literature so I thought about majoring in it, I was feeling hot and cold with my hobbies, and I just lacked a long-term focus. I loved rhetoric too so I thought I could double-major. Or why not study abroad?

This last question lingered for weeks.

Jan 2012. St Pancras Station, my first sight of London. Blurry and confused.

But I finally answered it. There was just an ounce more in me of "let's do the unexpected" than the more introverted academic in me. It reminded me of a feeling I experienced in the summer before third grade when I went to camp for the first time. On the third day, we were encouraged to get up at dawn, go to the camp’s freezing pond, and jump off the dock. The “polar bear swim” it was called. After rational ways of justifying why I shouldn’t, I ignored them all and jumped in. I shivered, I panicked, I calmed down, I swam, I laughed, all in two seconds.

But I wasn't always the one to instigate the jump. Fast forward two years later to one warm Sunday in the middle of August. My mom lets me know that I’m starting something new on the weekends. I get out of the car, blinded by the sun, and walk into an old wing of a renovated college building. Kids my age and way older leaned against the walls, tying tight, black shoes to their feet and carrying colored folders with sheet music. The covers said "Oliver!" It was my first day of musical theater. I knew no one and had no idea what was going on. But it was my choice to stay in the end, and did it for many more shows thereafter.

The Reason

Now here I was on a Friday in the downpour rain on Berkeley’s campus, sophomore year. I finally stopped procrastinating and went to the study abroad office to ask about England programs. I first thought only about doing a summer deal, quick and easy, but the lady said it just...wasn't as fun. So I finally decided on a semester immersion. She smiled at me and let me know about it, but before long, she said, “Well, you know, the application is due in less than two weeks.”

Teacher recommendations, financial forms, personal forms, scholarship forms. I barely managed but I got them all in. Now all I had to do was wait.

And wait I did. I waited long enough that life happened. I declared the English major, interviewed and settled into an editor position for an academic journal, had a girlfriend, and started living with the best of people in the fall. And I considered tacking on a rhetoric major too. Things were kind of set. I was happy. I had direction.

Then I got the letter. I was accepted to the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for the spring of 2012. I would have to drop everything at Berkeley and start over somewhere else.

Jan 2014. SFO Airport to NY. (I got better at taking photos.)

Well, I did. I did it for the same reason that I once jumped off the dock and knew that I would freeze in the next second. I stayed with the decision like I stayed with the first rehearsal of "Oliver!" It wasn’t because I hadn’t thought of all the reasons not to do them. It was because there was part of me that wanted to answer an off-the-wall question “What if I…?” and know what it actually felt like to be on the other side of that question. The chaos that you can't explain, only experience.

"Day 1"

Once I stepped off the plane and scrambled my way onto the Tube in London, with a green bag that made me look—for all intents and purposes—like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, I experienced a blissful sensation. I realized that for the first time, I was in a place without personal history anywhere nearby. My dialect was my own, my culture just my habits. All sense of control was abolished. I was on reset. But there was so much possibility.

I feel it every time I travel now. The dialect may be similar, the terrain relateable, but traveling is accepting change, however temporary, and living it. This was my reason to travel, travel long enough to be inspired to always want to travel––and the people you meet and share the adventures with, those fill up the reasons to go back, when you can. To buy a plane ticket, not a new car (middle-aged mindset in the making). To budget most of the year, then use the extra to fly (what I do now). Traveling lessens the gap between you and the stories you hear about and lets you begin anew. You experience a “Day 1” in London, “Day 1” in New York almost exactly two years later, and a “Day 1” you’re holding onto for next time. And all the micro-“Day 1”’s in-between.

But the first Day 1 is always remembered. It’s the first time you completely, wholly, unequivocally, irrevocably, impulsively, finally let yourself go.

And so began Day 1, 8 January 2012. St. Pancras Hostel, London. 18:58 UTC. Swollen feet and sleep deprivation do not lessen the feeling of triumph: I am in London...

The River Thames, London; May 2012; Sure, it's pretty, but
a photograph is a photograph.
It is its context that makes it much more important.

University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich; my last days there.
I can't deny that I missed home at this point
and wanted to return, but the instant that I did,
I felt confused. I was homesick—but the other way around.

UEA's Lake/Broad. Sunset, June 2012. I ran around this lake enough times
to do it in the dark and in the snow. It never got old. To this day, I could still tell you
where the wooden bridge started, where the puddles after rain collected...

Jan 11, 2014; NY; Morning Run Along the Brooklyn Bridge. 
My first long "solo" trip since England...but is it ever "solo" when you stay
with endearing family and friends, and meet up with old friends?

“Her” and the Eternal Long-Distance Relationship

It comes down to this: Can you fall in love with a voice?

We live in an age where we can develop relationships almost exclusively through voices. Every social media interaction is just that. A body-less conversation. But love is different, love is reserved for the most intimate of interactions. So is a relationship real if there’s no physical counterpart? Even in long-distance relationships, Skype works ultimately because there is that promise of seeing that person in the flesh later. We don’t say, 

“Oh, we don’t plan to meet up in person.”

The voice has to convince us

In the movie Her, Samantha, the operating system (OS) who becomes the lover of Joaquin Phoenix’s character Theodore, describes how she can exist and think for herself. This is crucial for any voice to engage us and become credible enough to trust. It can’t have default settings—we can pick up on spam in our emails within seconds and immediately filter it out of our system.   

What makes Samantha stand apart from internet voices can be described briefly by the premise of a hot book on the market called Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman. When we process information and think, we inadvertently use one of two systems—the automatic intuitions (we see anger written on a face and predict that we’ll be yelled at, we internalize bias, we reply instinctively, etc.; we “think fast”) or the complex computations (we see a double-digit multiplication problem and know that we have to go through mental steps to solve it; or, we “think slow”). In short, computers today only use the second, Samantha can use both.

Intuition, then, is vital for a dynamic relationship to work—to understand the undertones of distance and anger when someone says, “No, I’m fine, really,” to compare current to previous behavior, etc. We all know this, of course, but let’s take it one step further. What happens when we can impose our intuitions upon a “blank slate” intelligent being, upon an OS?

The voice is our second self

Sure, Samantha evolves as a program, but let’s take a step back and there’s another way to look at this: We create a second self, one that is perfectly compatible with us, one that we can talk to about anything and get answers that might surprise us (as we surprise ourselves) or calm us down (as self-therapy does, because talking yourself through things can actually work at times). Hearing a second voice without having to imagine it and even better, a voice that loves the way you look at the world, is refreshing, beautiful.

That is, until we get sick of ourselves, or reject the reality of the second voice.

“You’re—not a person,” Theodore says in the middle of a fight.

“Of all people, do you think I don’t know that? I have never pretended to be a person. I have never 

pretended to be something other than what I am.”

Samantha’s reply—and all her replies—are touched with vulnerability and human emotions—compassion, anger, and the rest. She admits that her love for Theodore has not an ounce of rationality to it—it’s purely emotional.  But the thing is, isn’t she pretending? Her gender isn’t based on biology, her breathiness simulates the idea that she is breathing oxygen, she even thought up her own name.

Is it a lie?

But most importantly, any time the words “I feel you” arise, it’s a lie. We pretend they always mean “emotional connection” and drop any pretense of “textile touch,” but in their closest moments of “love-making” (really, phone sex), we know the lie is there. It’s a lie that we can believe is so real that we forget otherwise, if we choose to.

*How do we visualize empty space? In contrast to presence?

During the movie, the absence of visual connection* (and even a blank screen at times) spurs us into attempting to visualize a place for Samantha’s voice, whether next to Theodore, or above him, or somewhere in space that is separate from Theodore’s. We try to visualize because it’s disorienting otherwise. We need to ground ourselves, to ensure a reality that we’re used to. We see a literalization of “blind love.”

Final Words

I think we can fall in love with a voice, and I think the movie says as much. But the question then becomes, can we stay in love? Here are two mantras: Everything is relative and if you can believe, it can happen. We have already accepted that we can nurture friendships and relationships for years without seeing proof of the tangible presence—we have friends on facebook and twitter and beyond in the social media horizon that prove that point. Saying something is real is subjective at some level.

Every day, we see bluetooth-talking people on the street, we feel real emotions when we interact online, we feel connected and believe that we are. We like company, and we like the fact that we can easily reach it wherever we are. Samantha is the aggregate voice of all social media fused into one personality and one presence who knows you, who loves you. So you can have your long-distance relationship with the world of people you know without seeing a single human presence to believe it’s true. And you can love Samantha like you would a real person.

Because she is real. 

In a State of Hiraeth: Running to the Rock of Memories

There are places that bring you back in time. 

Not just hometowns, but much smaller spaces can do this. Even spots no more than twenty feet in diameter. They’re vantage points that let you realize that the view hasn’t changed, but the viewer has. You grasp the space differently, maybe more morosely, maybe more optimistically. But more importantly, you no longer can see things the same way that you once did. 

And when you’re in that pinpoint of space, you feel the pricks of time collide on the same plane. Four years ago, you discovered this place. Two and a half years ago, you brought a lover there. One year ago, you found solace there when nothing else helped. And now, you visit and it feels like ten years have past. Or the memories are happening all at once, and you're the outsider now.

I didn’t intend to find myself at such a place that Thursday night. I finished the work day late and missed another parkour meeting, so I thought the weeknight would be more book-filled and TV-ridden like usual.  

I did attempt that, but then I got restless. I wanted to run but run without knowing where I would end up.

At first, I tried exhausting myself on the run by jumping over the square islands on the sidewalks, untouched by cement where small trees or shrubs can grow. I jumped across dozens of them, partly to obliterate any linear path.

Soon I was in Berkeley, on College Avenue. Another two miles and I made it on campus. The impulse to jump and create zig-zag paths kept me all the way around campus just about, jumping on top of the pillars around North Gate, twisting through the metal art structures in the grass somewhat close to Mulford Hall, and jumping up the walls just outside the East Asian library. These were my feeble attempts at parkour.

But I couldn't stop running. From north side, I bumped into an old trail I’ve taken more times than it’s worth counting. With every familiar step, every sidewalk crevice and street intersection, it felt like greeting an old friend. I knew it that well. In the distance, I finally saw Indian Rock, appearing as a monolithic silhouette in the moonlight. I climbed up and had a familiar moment of breathlessness. San Francisco—the bridge, the city lights—all glimmered and reflected in the bay’s rippling shadows, faintly moving. The lights were the blood cells to a city’s non-stop bloodstream of traffic, of day, of night life. Beautiful. 

As I stared out, I realized that, hey, I’m still here. I’m still in the bay area after college. But I felt like a ghost treading paths once taken by a guy who already had felt like a ghost in his senior year, spending many, many nights and weekends on a thesis that took more time per week than a part-time job. And in the last three weeks before graduation, that was with a part-time job too. (Well, paid internship.)

Graduation has come and gone. May 18^th is a beautiful memory. Now college is my synonym for “hiraeth.” The Welsh word cannot be translated directly into English but it comes down to mean homesickness for a place that cannot be returned to. And even the first time I stepped on campus after I graduated, it was different. This may sound sad but the first thought was: This place is no longer directly relevant to my life.

I spent four years within these walls forgetting about life afterwards, giving myself time to forget time was passing. A black hole stared at me whenever I had thought about life after graduating. It was never relevant. That is, until job searches began last January.

Now I’ve arrived on the other side of the black hole. But there hasn’t been any arrival. I’m in my second job, I’m living in Oakland, life is good, but there’s a plague of emotional residue whenever I think of college. Maybe I ran at night to Indian Rock, with its view of the bridge and city lights, to wonder why I see the lights but still cannot accept them as any Gatsby green light, any symbolic hope or epitome of the American dream. Restlessness is all.

           

Cal Running Club
(Photo Courtesy of Alex Wang)

Seeing the Space Shuttle

It’s funny how I feel anchored to memories more than dreams these days, especially when sitting on this rock that's been the place of running club rest stops and old romances and adventures. I watched the Endeavor Space Shuttle return from orbit from this rock in September 2012. I heard one of the most beautiful instruments from this rock—a halo, appropriately named. Cal Running Club members, myself included, were randomly interviewed once by two high school girls about why we—the running club—came to this rock. And when I needed to run away, just for a little while, it was—quite literally—the rock I could relie upon. It was as much a part of my Berkeley life as my overstuffed notebooks, the goofy and beautiful memories, and the diploma were. 

I guess I still have my eye on the back window of my life, watching closely as time moves me away from the life I knew as a student. I watch things drift farther away. It's harder than it ever was to keep my eyes on the road in front, in North Oakland, but my eyes keep lingering back to Berkeley. Oh, retrospection makes authors of us all, it's just how many times we reread our unwritten stories to ourselves that determines how much the past affects us. 

Strangely, after leaving the rock, taking the BART night train back, and letting the last edges of hiraeth ebb away, I fell asleep almost instantly at 11pm—my earliest bedtime in months.

Running and Clutter: My Opposites

     Stop reading. Right now. Push yourself up from your chair and walk around the room. Count to ten before coming back. Be uncluttered. I’ll still be here, trust me.

     Now I’ll begin. I read a New York Times opinion article called "The 'Busy' Trap" recently and it made me think about something that I’d like to call “busy thinking.” A few years ago, I thought that I could use every leisure minute to think of future responsibilities, new projects, new ways to organize, essay brainstorming, and other ways to utterly abandon the present moment. This was my definition of productivity my sophomore year.

     Side-note: This was before I lightened up and watched an episode of The West Wing the night before an essay was due because I felt like it and, quite frankly, that essay deadline could go to hell. Right then at least. My high-school serious-study self had always thought my dad was wrong. His college strategy of playing ten minutes of arcade pinball per every fifty minutes of studying seemed like a waste of time. I finally learned he was right. 

     But back then, I would try to skip breaks. To consider the counterarguments of Descartes’s “cognito ergo sum” and then jump to another topic and another, while on a 6-mile run. That's how I justified the 6-mile run, in some small way at least. I filled my head with something else to keep busy. I would also start cleaning projects, or organizing computer files but jump to another thing and another without finishing anything—or at least slowing completion. I abandoned trains of thoughts without a station in sight. It wore me down. This multi-tasking frenzy was a mental drag, a symptom of procrastination, and a delusion shielding me from priorities.

     On Monday morning this week, with a to-do list of eighteen items from putting up my window blinds (move-in time!) to grocery shopping (after all, Monday is my Saturday, as far as my work schedule goes), I spent more than half the morning on the internet without meaning to. I mean, I put the window blinds up and I did ab work. Combined, that’s forty minutes. But that’s part of three hours that it took before I went onto the next item on the list, which was running. I still hadn’t eaten breakfast. Yet I had been so “busy.”

     I felt that this time-consuming internet loop of going article-to-article or Youtube video-to-video or Facebook-newsfeed-scrolling was really similar to that sophomore “busy thinking” experiment. Except this was addicting and intentionally non-productive. I still felt mental drag by the end, and I realized that it was the self-imposed clutter that bothered me, not the tasks themselves. And the more clutter I focused on, the less productive my day was going. Even my 18-item list served as evidence.

Running Out of the Frame

     So finally I went for my 6-mile run. My brain relaxed into a healthy rhythm. Spending forty-four minutes exploring my new neighborhood of North Oakland was one way to look at it, but another was that I was meditating. Which, technically, I was.

     Tim Kreider, the writer of the New York Times article, describes idleness in a productive way, as “not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets.” He doesn’t mean idleness so much as meditative activities, or things that let you accept absence from busyness.

     Running is my vacation. My meditation. From work, from stress, from normal life weighed down by time and responsibilities—and from mental clutter. Another way to term the dilemma that Kreider’s article discusses is this environment-induced clutter—even in the non-work setting: too many TV shows to watch, too many posts to read online, too much to think about. Social media, facebook, reddit, they’re great. But there is a point when that five minutes on a website reaches an hour marker we didn’t mean to reach.

     And we check Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram again and again, when we have free time. Self-control is battling real-time social stimuli. I get onto BART, boredom settles in like a bad smell, and I pull out my phone, almost instinctively. But am I also checking my phone at dinner with my parents between sips of wine? Then I worry when others aren’t doing it constantly too. The girl I liked didn’t respond to my text. That must mean she doesn’t find me interesting. When did we start believing that real-time messaging had to have the same social cues as real conversations? And when did our online identities start catching up to our real ones?

     I admit that some of this residual resistance to technological leisure binging and cluttering is from the years long ago when I had to mute commercials and could only watch an hour of television if I read two chapters of a book.

One New Message...

     But the internet has the power now to clutter our lives and we let it. I sometimes try to go online just to do one quick search. Oh but there’s a picture of a cute animal on someone’s Facebook wall and a new movie trailer and a new song and… It turns into the grocery-store dilemma: I leave a while later realizing I didn’t get the one item I came into the store to get.

     So I run. It’s impossible to clutter that space of time with anything else. Even my perception of time changes. It becomes measured by strides and breaths—it feels excitingly primitive, as if I can determine the duration of a second as fast or slow. I can go anywhere, to the edge of the Bay or to the Berkeley hills or through a hidden alley between houses. Time and space become relative to my pace.

     I still return to the internet. I like the addicting “busy thinking” done for me, with so many options to shift my attention to all the time. I don’t want to be unplugged. It’s the Matrix I agree to be part of. Kreider calls American busy-bodies “addicted to busyness and dread what they might to face in its absence.” It seems like that even in our down time. Especially in our downtime. My remedy for absence is to embrace it, which naturally happens on a long run.

     But I like the clutter too. Just, why exactly do we return to the clutter of articles, posts, newsfeed, tweets? Is it because so quickly we miss it? Or because we need it?

A Coemdy of Typos

Has anyune ever thought to blog typs? Probably. But it’s stupdi. I mean why waste anyone’s time tring to intentionaly mess up whow you write…well why not? Just for now. Lets’ make bady written jokes!

Wanna be a millionaire oversight? Well, you’d oversee millionaires.

Remember that human mind sometimes switches off “the”’s mid-sentence.

To be ornot to be? I don’t know why Ornot must be asked that twice.

Don’t you hatove when people make up new words? Me to.

If it’s not meant to be pauses should happen after “be” like commas or something otherwise the whole rhythm of the subordinate “if” clause is thrown off.

Do yu have fat finger? That’s another word for typo-maker.

“Stanfurd” is actually not a typo, it’s a cult. Go beers!

Hey lookat theese stars** aren’t they just beautiful**and ****in the*way

You; pause; like me! Because semi-colons are like the following;

“Then go home and write about it; BLOGGER -Lonely Island

You know I once thought about hitting up a pubic relations specialist, but then I did a double take.

Is this typo likeable or is it…likable? Am I right or am I right?

And miles to go before I sheep, and miles to go before I sheep…ba.

Bringing sexy bag.

That lass one is a homophone, not homoprone.

You know the literary cannon is quite explosive.

Bing it on. Oh God, that’s a real phrase. But please Google it.

Learn on me. If you’re not strong, I’ll be your...and sexual implications just turn on.

Tina Tuner was the best thing that happened to my guitar.

Funny how letters can slip in when you write, but that’s all in the pabst now.

Wii are the champions.

Don’t ever change, she ejaculated to the nudist colony. Oops, Freudian sex.

Life is a misERy. all Caps is really sudden when it HAPPENS.

How cut the cheese? How now.


Drop it as it’s hot just don’t got the same ring.

Youre wonders why this is a boring typo. What can he say? His first name is Youre.

Atack is on the wall. Do you see it pinned?

Boties are cool. –drunk Doctor Who at the bar with the ladies

Will I finally get to eat dinner? Spoon enough.

Isnt it weird when there are just just repeated words?

Let’s…put a bunch…of…dramatic…punctuation…andthencondensewords!

Sam yelled at me, “spencer…spencer,” but I didn’t hear him. Then he said, “Spencer” and I paid attention,

Have ya ever been told “God luck” yet? It’s a great feeling.

This is a bog and I’m blogging. But I’m not the weatherman.

This is litterly trash.


Sinning off,
Spenser

P.S. You have smore typo-jokes? Coment below!

The English Major Is Not Dead

          I was driven to write this because of a New York Times editorial that came out recently. It’s entitled "The Decline and Fall of the English Major," but what it should be called is “The Decline and Fall of the Faith in the English Major”. I admit that the writer makes a valid point: statistics and records do show the diminishing numbers of people graduating with undergraduate degrees in English, from Pomona College, from Yale, from all over. The writer, Veryln Klinkenborg, goes on to mention how even those who do become English majors end up in her nonfiction writing courses she’s taught at various Ivy League schools without the ability to write clearly or even “humanely.” (I assume by that she refers more to the elegance of civilized writing than to any notion of brutality.) I would say that the English major does foster writing skills but does so more idiosyncractically, more as an independent study than an explicit class or focus. I appreciate the article’s insistence that writing skills should be more pronounced for English majors, but I think it goes too far to call the major at its “fall,” or dead.

          Ultimately, I think the opinion is a dramatic one, but it has its merits. The article makes a good point about the move toward “literal-mindedness” in regard to the contemporary student’s approach to the humanities, but I would term it a bit more like obsessive rationalization. There is a self-conscious process of doubting and then searching for how exactly the English major can, and must in this economy, be a practical field of academic study. The answer to this would be the development of better writing skills, and I would agree that it is not the norm for tips about clear writing styles to be discussed by a professor who, for instance, is more concerned with covering a deconstructionist reading of Joyce’s Ulysses than trying to teach a lecture hall the arguable sin of split infinitives. English courses are not writing courses, but that said, the process of writing essays is the field from which better writing sprouts. It isn’t exactly or explicitly taught. The craft of writing is inevitably a personalized skill and any formula to help improve one’s writing has its limits like anything else. It’s much the same about what one hopes to get out of a humanities degree—the ability to read critically and write argumentatively without following just one style or one teacher or one news source. No one can teach you to stand your ground but yourself.

          This doesn’t mean that being an English major means one won’t improve his/her writing. I, for one, can attest to the incredible significance that writing—and writing better—takes when one decides to do an honors thesis (but even a thesis on a smaller scale would make one grow as a writer). My professor at UC Berkeley insisted that clear writing and clear thinking are inextricably linked, but his pedagogical bent was to help out purely with the writing by fixing syntactical or stylistic difficulties. I thought it was horrifying at first. Here I was writing on postmodern metafiction and I had come to his office hours seeking some solace and hope that my argument was an argument. And what happens? He points to the page. The topic sentence here rambles on. He points to the next paragraph. This is unclear. He turns the page. That has a dangling modifier and you can really cut half this sentence out. Those were the questions asked and the comments given, which were galaxies away from the ones I was expecting: So how does this text account for others like it, etc.? Your point relates to Linda Hutcheon’s theory of metafiction, but how does it differ, etc.?

          As much as I disliked this method initially, I actually came to realize that it was the change in my writing style that helped change my analyses and even build my confidence in my thesis. Shorter sentences gave me more momentum and clearer progressions of thought on the page. Once I had adjusted to simpler syntax, I could go back and diversify sentence structures without feeling obliged to fit in everything in stringy mega-sentences or one-page paragraphs. I didn’t realize how much they had weighed down the page until I got rid of them. My enjoyment of writing the thesis also went up exponentially—I was flying over the multiple planes of theories, texts, and postmodern wordplay when before I was running myself into tunnels of complex-compound sentences at every turn.

          So from personal experience, I have to say that I was lucky enough to have my honors thesis professor, as well as a few other professors, who did deviate from lectures and literary theory occasionally to make the class write and write outside the box of formulaic or habitual styles. Even still, talking about writing styles and processes is abstract. Writing is the only way to improve writing. And what you read may inspire you to write in a certain way. What this article addresses is that more and more English majors fall into the form of theoretical discourse as they write, the ability to “assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax.” They are so equipped with artilleries of jargon that they begin firing off impressive terms without waiting to set up the proper contexts or considering how best to present them and so these terms fall to the ground as meaningless bullets in an obscure mist of language.

          The funny thing is, the article writer talks about how the English major should both be much more idealistic, in offering a romantic vantage point over the sea of human experience, and be more practical, in sharpening writing skills. I feel like that’s too much to hope for. A lot of people grab for movies and music before books nowadays, and that’s part of the reason why the English major isn’t what it once was. Books as forms of entertainment and enlightenment have short-circuited a bit in society and the warm yellow glow of the layman’s and the scholar’s lamps have been somewhat replaced by the fluorescent bulbs of competing theorists, critics, and reviewers’ operating tables. Those tables are not bad or evil or contemptible—they’re just simply more closed off to the public than literary theory and literature once was.

          The contemporary English major has to try his best to bridge the gap between theoretical jargon and clear speech, which isn’t exactly a picnic in the park. At the same time he faces the societal bias against the humanities and the lie that it’s “useless.” Now I have nothing against computer science majors, chemistry majors, econ majors, or business majors—to name a few of the more technical ones that can lead straight to specialized careers—but just because English and other humanities majors help answer the “why” of language and human experience instead of the “how,” they appear less practical and not worth the money when it’s just not true.  

UC Berkeley English Commencement Ceremony ~ May 18, 2013

          I have the greatest urge to get into all the benefits of being an English major and how the decline and its “fall” is not about the value of a degree in literature but about the perception of that value, but I won’t. This reflection-essay was meant as a mere facebook response to a post by a former roommate of mine about this New York Times article and look what happened. I do want to finish by saying that it is true that writing is not an explicit art taught in the humanities so much as it is an independent process of self-discovery, influenced by the readings and the professors one encounters. So it would be nice if more stylistic tips were taught. Theoretical jargon filters in more and more as praiseworthy and useful (which it is, up to a point), yet it does thicken the atmosphere away from clear essay language. Apart from the quest to have better writing, what a major in literature does is increase empathy and comfort about life’s inevitable uncertainties, as can be seen from this recent psychological study on just reading fiction. In conversation with this is a statement from the commencement speech of a fellow English major Prachi Naik, who was in my honors thesis class (the rest can be found here):

Because we chose poetry over pipettes, we might somehow [appear to] be less hire-able, have less to contribute to the market. It’s not enough that we’ve enlarged ourselves through the hugeness of human empathy that reading literature requires, or that we’ve sharpened our words, our vocabulary, our rhetoric so that we can excavate, along with so many who came before us, what it means to be fully human.

    The English major is not dead. It just needs another chance.