Oct 2002

Sleep deficit - 10/10/2002







The way things work, this morning's questions will keep wringing their way into my head. You'd think that thought can be kept separate from mind much in the same way that forces are kept separate from masses. But if the relationship between force and mass is acceleration, then what is the relationship between mind and thought? Is the link between the two the abstract ideas that interpolate - ie, the link between the mind and thought is a "sub-thought", an act of consciously making the thought. Which is pretty much what meta-cognition is all about. Having the patterns of thought should enable you to think. Sadly this isn't often the case. Scaffolding merely limits thought as it forces the mind to be constrained by a very sketchy and general sense of the world. The minutiae and the indiosyncracies, the distractions and diversions get lost along the way. Like the wind that runs through my sleepy head when I ride the non-airconditioned bus home on a hot drowsy sleepy time afternoon when I've given up trying to decipher the mazy sprawls that delany calls sentences, thought brushes past and leaves in its wake the rude sense of offended time. For if thought occured in time then every acknowledgement of thought would be merely revisiting the thing past. All thought is memory. Whether my own or borrowed or stolen. All thought maps out memory. And a reflection on thought is the history of memory. But then I'm just mixing up the metaphors and toying with weak analogies that don't seem to hold my head in place.

When I've got a headache. Is that the physicality of thought manifesting itself unnervingly? To be unnerved is no mere figure of speech - the disfunctioning neurons spider out, spindley legged fibres - Ganglion - Gaugain - Bright lion. Iced Lion. Paddle Pop Lion. I was born in August - that makes me a Leo Lion. Are you reading my mind better now? Perhaps I should try to increase the speech of thought my the momemts that my fingers write these irrelevant monumnents to memory. IF THOUGHT were the echo of things past, then my fingers dance the with the dead. My fingers caressing the plastic sheaths that encapsulate meaning, these words, burnt offerings to which dead god? Hanging playing flute like tendrils wringing down the naked side and skidding off the crown of thorns. You come to me the yellowed image of Gaugain's Christ, unable to dream again because the setting is remote from the heat dryness and dust. Down in the tomb he lay. Back in the lot they play and we structure the language flows with the automatic reflexes of grammar. Correcting myself with the present, the dance with death and words that dying fall flat on the trying ground open up new sinews - Force and accelearation, Muscle and Mass, thought and mind words combine.







Decision - 10/14/2002







Having written here for about a year, I've been thinking about adjusting some things. Obviously ODing has been a rather important part of who I am, thinking through stuff with my fingers and all that, getting to reflect and communicating with a world that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to communicate with. That's been great.

However, I think diversification is in order. We write for an audience (I remember stuff). Imaginary or not. And different audience's look for different things. Not that I intend to pander in anyway. But this is what I've decided to do. I'll continue writing here about the real world and what I think about stuff. But the creative and experimental stuff will move elsewhere. That's actually largely due to the fact that it's easier to post pictures elsewhere too.

I actually planned to move the whole thing in June. But I've always found FOD really convenient. But my spot has been saved from then and for those interested - I'm sure you'll know how to look. Catch me if you can.









Some Disappointment - 10/19/2002







Got back the scripts for the classes I teach. One did better than expected - the other two didn't. Am musing about the grades that were given. Obviously there's some subjectivity involved in the marking process but by and large the principles for grading are pretty standard. I guess the disappointment has to do with some major upsets rather than an overall sense that things have gone wrong.

However, it has led me to think about what is important in writing essays. And whether I've been focussing on the right thing. I guess I'm pretty confident when it comes to my own stuff but seeing the unexpected results of some of the essays has forced me to re-consider the priorities.

The injunction to keep it simple is well and good. However, I tend to give lee-way to intelligence. That means if a piece doesn't answer the question in the most direct of ways (and here I really mean direct as in literally quoting the question then answering it in every topic sentence) but is more subtle in its devices, and does tend to be eloquent, I don't expect a literal spelling out that "I'M ANSWERING THE QUESTION". In this, sense, my base assumption is that every script has topic sentences and every para is an attempt to answer the question - which leads then to my consideration of whether a para answers the question WELL. However, if my assumptions were different and I believed that scripts would actually NOT have topic sentences and NOT answer the question, the penalty would be for the moments that these devices were not securely in place. Of course "securely" is relative. How explicit do you have to be before you've "answered the question"? Here, one expects reasonable intelligence to be the shared ground between reader and writer. The injunction to write assuming that the reader knows nothing is rubbish because it would just make the whole communicative process impossible. But what happens when reader and writer don't match? The reader can interrogate - WHY is this so? WHY does this necessarily lead to this? But just asking WHY is not enough. The reader has to pin-point the potential misunderstanding in the absence of a solid reply of WHY. Otherwise, it is merely petulant questioning. To have to explain WHY is fine and good when a reference or context isn't clear but there's a base level of accepted assumption.

Perhaps I have assumed too much and not forced the writing to be explicit enough. Because this turned out to be the major problem with some of the pieces.

Not that I'm complaining about the accuracy of the marking. The principle to trust the marker's judgement must be in place and while there is disagreement I will not ask any marker to re-consider a script that they've marked. It's a kind of professional respect I suppose.

Also, asking another marker to re-consider a script takes on all sorts of unpleasant connotations. I really think trusting the judgement of another marker is important.

I suppose what remains to be said is that learning to cope with disappointment is important. We don't always get fairly judged and dealing with that rather than being legalistic and proving a case, bulids one up.







hey ho - 10/21/2002







Because I just managed to get a comments function working (thanks to Peng Hong!) - check it out - but only if you're into esoteric and obscure musings -

http://limitlim.blogspot.com/

If you want the real world - keep it here ...