The Best Way to Write...

I'm working to optimize my "workflow" by starting all professional writing with a wonderful software package called Scrivener, using the MultiMarkdown codes for simple formatting like italics, lists, tables, images, and footnotes, which results in fair copy that I can then send, in whole or in smaller modules, to LaTeX for typesetting as a .pdf or to .rtf/.doc for collaboration and editing.

Detail from "Blue Maunderings," one of the Lost Divers series by Josh Dorman (Cerise Press)

Teaching: Unpacking writing

One of my students writes a response paper with the sentence, 

For example there was a story in the end where his brother says that to help your sick mother you must feed some of your flesh and the narrator remembered this at the time of his sister’s death and believed that his brother had eaten her and was sad because maybe he wasn’t full and was wanting to eat someone else, and that this world is kind of like survival of the fittest."

The student is being a bit lazy, writing quickly, mangling syntax. Worst of all, they make a weak gesture at an idea "survival of the fittest" that is complex and even intriguing. 


Nevertheless, the response is basically correct. So the role of the teacher then, is to make them slow down, take more time, and expand on their answer, right? I offered: 

This is a really good thought, but I'd like you to expand it a bit: how does the first part of this sentence, up to "eat someone else," make us feel that the world ensures the "survival of the fittest?"

The Stump-Watcher

From a response paper by one of my students:

Based on further research I have found that in ancient China there was a widely-known tale about a farmer who found a dead rabbit in his field one day who had run into a stump and broken his neck upon impact. As the story goes on, the hopeful farmer then proceeded to disregard his work in order to watch the stump, hoping that more unfortunate rabbits would meet their end by it. Instead of capturing more rabbits, the farmer became the laughingstock of his community and therefore became known as the stump-watcher. The title of stump-watcher eventually became coined as a term for “those who think they can take the ways of the ancient kings and use them to govern the people”.

I looked this up; it's from Han Feizi.

守株待兔 (illustration from MyChinaConnection)

Johnson's Definition of Wit

Thanks to PowerOfBabel

A wit, Mr. Rambler, in the dialect of ladies, is not always a man who, by the action of a vigorous fancy upon comprehensive knowledge, brings distant ideas unexpectedly together, who, by some peculiar acuteness, discovers resemblance in objects dissimilar to common eyes, or, by mixing heterogeneous notions, dazzles the attention with sudden scintillations of conceit. A lady's wit is a man who can make ladies laugh, to which, however easy it may seem, many gifts of nature, and attainments of art, must commonly concur. He that hopes to be received as a wit in female assemblies, should have a form neither so amiable as to strike with admiration, nor so coarse as to raise disgust, with an understanding too feeble to be dreaded, and too forcible to be despised. The other parts of the character are more subject to variation; it was formerly essential to a wit, that half his back should be covered with a snowy fleece, and, at a time yet more remote, no man was a wit without his boots. In the days of the Spectator a snuff-box seems to have been indispensable; but in my time an embroidered coat was sufficient, without any precise regulation of the rest of his dress. --Samuel Johnson

Story Reading

The cyst turned out to be a benign tumour. Kat liked that use of benign, as if the thing had a soul and wished her well. It was big as a grapefruit, the doctor said. "Big as a coconut," said Kat. Other people had grapefruits. "Coconut" was better. It conveyed the hardness of it, and the hairiness, too.
-- Margaret Atwood, "Hairball"

One has to admire the Americans. Who else would come up with the idea of turning the belly of a fighter into a robot's head and then proceed to create a machine that executes the transition so flawlessly?
-- Bi Shumin 毕淑敏, "Broken Transformers"

Folktale: "Die Vagina"

In olden times the vagina went around on her own. She had not yet fused with the woman. The vagina wandered about all parts of the earth. She was constantly on the move. She let anybody sleep with her. ... The vagina met the scorpion and said to him: 'Have sexual intercourse with me.' The scorpion did so. But the scorpion stung the vagina with his tail while they were making love, whereupon the vagina screamed with pain. Frightened, the vagina ran away. She ran to the woman and hid herself there. The vagina said to the woman: 'Hide me and protect me!' The woman did so. Ever since that time, women have had a vagina."

--Old Tale of Guinea

-- quoted in "Borderlines of the Body in African Women's Writing," by Flora Veit-Wild.

Concept: Lacan's Nothingness

McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion:

Ultimately, qing involves an experience of abyssal nothingness, whether sacrificial death, castration, or the severing of one's flesh, all being forms of the dissolution of the self...

...[in Liaozhai zhiyi stories] The man's foolishness, the literal and metaphorical acts of the self-negation of severing the flesh, and the liminal quality of the remarkable woman -- all these are signs of the negativity of the frame, and in themselves amount to the empty core of the individual subject...

Previously, McMahon gave:

...To say that the subject is fundamentally split is a way of referring to the impossibility of full and present self-consciousness or self-understanding. In simplest terms, there will always be a gap between what subjects think they know of themselves and what is hidden from them. The subject can only fantasize that "I am what I say I am." ....The I is a pure void, an empty frame only knowable through the predicates that make up except through the endless series of predicates and statements that fill out what the I thinks....(8-9)