These bumble bees by Grant's Tomb made my day

Wave

10 days! This wasn't what talk about U- and V-shaped curves was about.

Hail storm!

Homecoming

For a gay variety of reasons so tangential as to be possibly karmic, I've spent the weekend with Lama Rod Owens' just-published book Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger. Owens belongs to a younger generation of American Buddhist teachers which is reimagining what Buddhism, and religion, can be. He's one of very few queer black teachers (not to mention in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism), and shows how powerfully traditions are enriched when all registers of human experience are called to speak, and most profoundly by those who speak from experiences of marginalization and oppression.

Love and Rage is a book of essays, dharma talks (he calls them sermons) and practices which I can't summarize. But let me share the lovely way he begins each of the practice sessions he outlines, with a sort of gathering of gratitude to benefactors he calls the Seven Homecomings. It's based on the traditional Buddhist taking refuge in the "three jewels" of Buddha, dharma and sangha, broadening them beyond narrowly Buddhist references as guides, wisdom texts and community, then adds four more: ancestors, earth, silence and yourself. Each is described capaciously, helping us identify the many sources of care and protection we each have; he doesn't tell us what true wisdom or genuine community is but invites us to reflect on what and who so functions in our lives. In the practice you take time over each one. Together they form a "circle of care," and hold you as you take on challenging work like working for justice, accepting people (including yourself) and - vital for both - loving your anger. There's much more, all of it challenging.

I'm grateful this book found its way into my hands.

Who needs fireworks?

8:23

8:29

8:36

8:48

8:54

Taking a stand

It took them long enough to make the decision, or to make it public (neighboring universities' dithering didn't help), but here it is. At last: marching orders! Tell us what we're doing and we can get to work figuring out how to do it well! I guess I'll think about converting some of the money I'll save on subway passes to getting one of those thingies that lets you raise and lower your computer so you can work both standing and sitting - better for aging backs, and also for pedagogy.

再次阅读「红楼梦」等于第一次读懂

So as not to be entirely consumed by this trying moment, with its apocalyptic fears and its messianic hopes, I decided to read again the 18th century Chinese mega-novel 红楼梦, variously known (in Chinese as well as English) as the Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone. (There are other names too.) You might remember that I've read all 2500 pages of it once before - the year I spent in Shanghai - only to learn that I should have read another translation, the one on which I've now embarked. But what you don't know is that in the interim I've also watched two Chinese television adaptations! Overkill, maybe. But as we came to the end of the second adaptation last month, having spaced it out for as long as we could manage, I found I couldn't bear not to be involved with this story and procured the Hawkes translation from a used bookstore upstate. Proud to report that I've just finished the first of its five volumes!

I suppose rereading - indeed never stopping reading and rereading - a beloved novel is nothing remarkable. One hears of Jane Austen afficionados who read all her novels again each year. I've reread some novels in my time, too. But this is my first time deliberately taking another lap with a novel this way, and I'm relishing the experience.

Making my way through it the first time I had few points of reference for making sense of what was happening and quickly lost track of most of its hundreds of characters. I didn't even know what kind of book I was reading, though I realized it offers cameos of pretty much every genre besides the martial. Now is different. The TV series have given me visuals and even a soundtrack for the world of the Jia household in early Qing Beijing (or perhaps Nanjing), and the different emphases of the two versions have left openings in understanding what's truly important. And Hawkes' translation is a delight, too. Knowing now the world Dream of the Red Chamber comes from and the kind of world it conjures it's like I'm reading it for the first time the way a Chinese person might.

I also know, as I didn't back in 2014, that the world so lovingly depicted here is doomed. I had read somewhere that the novel is sort of like the story of Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha-to-be, whose father had locked him in a garden full of young beauties to prevent him from learning of the seriousness of life and becoming a renunciant. I see that now, too.

But Chinese Buddhism is Mahayana, relishing the beauty of the evanescent joys of the world of samsara and even finding meaning in its sorrow, and married to Daoist ideas too. As I think about the world of the novel now, a fifth of the way in, seeing the characters emerge and engage with each other once again, I feel like I'm seeing the transitory congealing and melting away again of beings of the Zhuangzi. And there's fate, too, or karma if you wish. Early in the book the main protagonist (there are in fact scores of major characters) is taken in a dream to the world of the fairy Disenchantment, who lets him look through some books in her library of lives, where he finds poems describing the exquisite fates of a dozen people named after flowers. He doesn't then know, but readers do, that these describe the fates of people he will meet and love. Describe, foretell, predestine: the story of every character in every book is of course fully told before the reader even meets them, but here this is known to be the nature of reality, not just of fiction... though just which of those is which is another question!

The entrance to the fairy Disenchantment's Land of Illusion bears a couplet with multiple puns, one on the word jia, which means fiction but also sounds like the name of the family whose story the novel tells.

假作真时真亦假
（假作真時真亦假）
 Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true

无为有处有还无
（無為有處有還無）

 Wu wei you chu you huan wu

Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real

The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes,

trans. David Hawkes, Volume I: 'The Golden Days' (Penguin, 1973), 130

Color of summer

On our drive Monday my heart leapt at each sighting of day lilies along the roads. But it turns out I didn't need to leave the City to see them!

Potted music

After feasting Babette-like on trees yesterday I can't not share this picture of a string quartet performing for a theater full of potted plants! It's the Liceu Opera in Barcelona on its first day open since the pandemic struck, and the plants - one in each of its 2,292 seats - were later given to health care professionals. You can listen to Puccini's "Crisantemi" with them in a somewhat creepy video that begins with the obligatory injunction to silence their cellphones and ends with applause.

大自然！

After four months in the city, the Rockefeller Preserve dazzled us

with greens... and even introduced us to a 20-foot glacial erratic.

For what it's worth

Humanities and social science majors continue to get a bad rap - in Australia, fees for Humanities and Society and Culture degrees are doubling - but the data shows that our work is in fact valuable in many ways. My colleague McKenzie Wark (incidentally an Australian) posted an article from the UK confirming what we already know to be the case for the US on Facebook yesterday and gave this nice summary of what we do and why it works. Unsaid but clear: not just majors in arts, humanities and social science but society at large benefit from having more citizens attentive, reflective and versatile in these ways.

Pedagogical rabbit hole

Oh, I haven't said anything about how the TESOL Methods Intensive ended up. Well, we finished on Wednesday, submitting a lesson plan for a class we were actually going to teach and then describing it to two classmates for feedback. After a final burst of content, we were asked to write a word on a piece of paper which described the experience of the course or the way we were feeling about it, and then hold it up so we could get a class photo. I wrote THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS but most people kept to the stipulated one word, the most common one, so far as I could tell peeking over the top of mine, being INSPIRED!

I found it inspiring, too, but what inspired me about it was the through the looking glass experience it offered me. I guess this is because the TESOL thinking wasn't new to me, since I've taught English as a second language - and have been trying to learn a foreign language, too!

Long ago in Tokyo I taught English conversation as I was learning Japanese, and the mix of pedagogy books I insisted on reading in my agency's office (nobody else did but this didn't stop me) and the daily switchbacking of being student and being teacher taught me a thing or two. TESOL is more structured, and teaching for college students more formalized. (I was excited to learn about the University Word List, and blown away by online level analyzers like Lextutor.) But the language teaching game wasn't new to me as it was for most of my classmates.

What was exciting was being on the receiving end of a course of a kind I thought I understood - and in an online version to boot. Hence: through the looking glass. And what a ride it was! Our teacher was not only an excellent teacher but a kind of meta-teacher, which I suppose any teacher of pedagogical methods must be. She always told us why she'd present something in a particular way or format (note to self: in online teaching you need to to make the purpose of every exercise clear to students) - or asked us to guess why. Things went on at so many levels we didn't realize how much we were taking in until our final assignments, when I found I'd picked up a whole new way of thinking.

Actually I'll wait to tell you about my lesson plan (which I think is great) until I get back the instructor's comments next week! For now, here are four the things I want to make sure not to forget. We may have encountered them as TESOL strategies but they apply far more broadly.

1) Start with some low-stakes way in which students can bring their own ideas and experiences into play. One trick is to give them the name of something you'll be discussing and ask them to predict what it is.

2) When you give people something to read, as in a powerpoint slide or handout, give them time to read it in silence. Talking while they're supposed to read it (or reading it aloud, as I am wont to do) will make comprehension difficult not only for non-native speakers. 

3) Don't ask people if they've understood something. Some people will say they did when they didn't. Others will say they didn't when in fact they did. Noone will be the wiser for your asking. Instead...

4) Ensure that for every important thing you teach, students have the chance to apply it, learning by doing and letting you - and them - know that (if) they've got it. Best if you've let them know what the purpose is before you start.

Some of these things are just good ideas, but I have to admit some rub up against the looser and more spontaneous and open-ended learning environment the seminar format has allowed me to allow. I usually have a series of topics I intend to cover but let the class find its way to them, always open to the tangent or detour opened when students ask questions or see connections I hadn't... Isn't the point for them to make sense of things on their own and learn that and how they do that best?

Alas, whatever might be said for this approach in in-person instruction, the experience of being on the receiving end of this online course made us aware it'll be next to impossible in the online format. (Online has its own opportunities for tangents, detours and new connections which I'll need to master by Fall.) But I dare say I'll still be less direct than a language instructor working from a textbook...

One enjoyable discovery was this early (and antiquated) analysis of the different ways people in different cultures make an argument:

(1) North American (English) argumentative writing is linear, direct and to the point, with the thesis statement/claim at the beginning of the argument, and supporting arguments arranged hierarchically.

(2) Semitic argumentative writing (Jewish, Arabic, Armenian) presents the argument in parallel propositions, or embedded in stories, not in hierarchical progression.

(3) Oriental (Asian) argumentative writing approaches the argument in a circular, respectful, indirect, non-assertive, but authoritative way.

(4) Romance (and German) argumentative writing favor a digressive style that requires readers to follow the argument to its conclusion.

(5) Russian argumentative writing follows the Romance model, but with more freedom for dividing the pieces of the argument as the author proceeds to the conclusion.

Robert Kaplan, “Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education,” Language Learning 16 (1966)

In graduate school I was faulted for having a "teutonic" writing style, which I took to mean dense and convoluted (not untrue at the time, or, to be honest, now). But in this account of "Romance (and German) argumentative writing" I recognize what I think the journey of learning should be like, the sort of discovery I try to let happen in a class. There's got to be more at the end than I knew to expect at the beginning, not least because the most powerful knowledge is gained only through learning new frameworks and questions!

We'll see how I do with online pedagogy... And there's another course just around the corner, required for all faculty hoping to teach in the Fall. I'll let you know how that goes!

Uptick

Oh no.

Multimedia Juneteenth!

The New School had its first official commemoration of Juneteenth today, over zoom of course. One highlight was the powerful and eloquent welcome of our president Dwight McBride, whom I'd not had the chance to hear speak as a scholar before. (I guess I like listening to scholars!) He shared two images, including this one from the early days of the holiday, an effervescence of almost celestial whites, but I confess I was delighted also by the affect of the beaming ASL interpreter whom zoom had placed above him, who enacted the joy he was describing!

Eve

 Three more nights of

 sunset extravaganzas

Over the hump

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus updates, with their reassuring series of Powerpoint slides in the state colors of blue



and gold, will end on Friday. Let's hope this is the only mountain we'll face. Almost twenty-five thousand souls were lost traversing this one.

Cyberhistory!

Need a pick-me-up as you shelter in place? Our newer truer history of The New School has two diverting new reads for you - our foreword for the eBook republication of Alvin Johnson's 1952 autobiography (with a juicy excerpt), and an eyewitness account of the first time New School ventured into online education, a third of a century ago!

Where there's smoke

An amazing picture - the kind of picture we've still not seen in this country, despite one hundred sixteen thousand twenty-nine souls lost to covid-19. It's from Peru, where the death toll is over 6,400. Here images of five thousand souls are blessed by the Archbishop of Lima, Carlos Castillo, in an otherwise empty - or full? - cathedral. In the homily, which was apparently broadcast, Castillo criticized a health system “based on egotism and on business and not on mercy and solidarity with the people." Lord, hear our prayer.

I used this image for a "peer teaching" assignment for the TESOL Methods Intensive this morning, with two fellow students standing in for an imagined class of native speakers of other languages. The assignment was to use TESOL pedagogy but in service also of our own subject. I framed my 20-minute mini-class around the adage a picture is worth a thousand words, discussing what this advertising jingle with pretensions to hoary wisdom might mean (are pictures just more efficient or are there things they convey that words can't?), then focusing on this picture. Students had two minutes to spend with the picture, then a few more to write down what they saw. ("If you don't know the name of something, describe it - the thing the man in front is holding, etc.; for this exercise that's even better.") Then they were to add some of their words to the zoom chat, and work with a partner to draft a few sentences about what they thought was going on. ("If you see it differently, so much the better; find a way to report this.")

We didn't have time for the last part, but my two "students" - one from the MFA Writing program, the other an instructor in Parsons' first year Studio-Seminars - were eager to talk about the picture. I hadn't even thought of how this image resonated with the word thousand: here were thousands of pictures, worth how many words!?! For my part I was happy to push their responses in the direction of some religious studies insights. The cathedral with its every seat full/empty was powerfully resonant. But centrally, once we'd decided that this was the scene of a blessing of covid-19 victims, who was the blessing for? Besides the archbishop and an acolyte (whose affect caught our eye, too) we know only of one other living person in the cathedral, the photographer, though through her/his image many others could know of it. The "students" thought what they saw was a powerfully symbolic act. But still: was it mainly symbolic? wasn't it ultimately for the dead? and weren't they, in fact, blessed? Given our thoughts about the powers of pictures, what did it mean to incense photographs (even printouts of photographs)? Religious ritual is worth a thousand words, too.

What might we hope for in our own, still covid-19-beset, land?

Trans-borough energy

Had we not moved from Prospect Heights we'd be at the center of the action in Brooklyn, from the tense first confrontations with police in front of Barclays Center to the great demonstrations at Grand Army Plaza to today's marvelous rally in support of black trans lives in front of the Brooklyn Museum - all within 10 minutes' walk of our old home.

ざるそば

Summer is here: bring out the buckwheat noodles for zarusoba!

Just the moment

Working on an icebreaker assignment for the TESOL Methods Intensive, I imagined giving students newly arrived in "Theorizing Religion" a dozen images from which to choose three which showed the "range of religion." One of the images I came up with was this, from the cover of the 2016 book Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by Angel Kyodo Williams, Lama Rod Owens and Jasmine Syedullah, three young American Buddhist teachers of color. (Another was the hopefully career-ending image of the president in front of St. John's Episcopal Church holding "a bible" up like an arrest warrant.) My purpose in including it was multiple: here's a Buddhist book whose cover boasts not just the Black Power Fist but Yijing trigrams, too: syncretism is explosive!

I may or may not use that icebreaker come August, though I think I very well might. But this image and what it opens up - that religion can be revolutionary, that liberation struggles rightly help themselves to resources from whatever traditions can help - seems like it might warrant a more central role in the class in this moment. This would build out the "lived religion" theme I've been cultivating and interrupt the slide to a depoliticized tolerance of "you do your thing, I'll do mine" which misses the power of religion as well as its danger.

"In this moment" - what do I mean by that? I suppose I mean the belated discovery by those Americans who think we're white of the structural legacies which make it necessary, every day, even a century and half after the end of the Civil War, to affirm that BLACK LIVES MATTER. But I don't mean that this is a momentary concern or should be, that there is some norm we can or should return to. That's the case for other belated discoveries, too, like the unsustainability of capitalism, of the continued ravages of (especially settler) colonialism and the - related - crisis of anthropogenic climate change. The fragility of democratic culture, too. I guess I mean something more like momentous. How can a course like "Theorizing Religion" speak to these momentous times?

In the pink

 Sunset

 stunner

Out and about

Adding myself to New York's careful gradual reopening I ventured out today - my first time beyond a walking radius in a very long time!

Reader, I took the subway to Trader Joe on 72nd St! It's exactly three months since I was there last, little imagining it would be so long.

New dawn, new day

To start us off this morning, on our second day of the TESOL Methods Intensive, the instructor told us we'd do a little mindfulness exercise. She would play 42 seconds of a song, after which we should close our eyes for a minute and then write in the chat three emotions we felt. To whet our appetites she shared the list of emotions above, not for us to read then but just to remind us how many emotion words there are! The song, which began with the words

Birds flying high, you know how I feel

Sun in the sky, you know how I feel

Breeze drifting on by, you know how I feel

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me... 

was the a cappela start of Nina Simone's "Feeling good," a voice and a song familiar to some, if not all, of us. Some of us surely heard the whole song from the getgo, maybe also transported back to other times they've heard it. For others it was just these words, or the vulnerable grandeur of Simone's voice. Here's where it took the 17 of us:

awed inspired thankful


quiet, mellow, expectant

grateful, tired, heavy


nostalgic, wistful, weary


emotional, grateful, blissful, vast


inspired, stuck, impatient
 

guided, grateful, tight


yearning, solemnity, hopeful

grief, clear headed, optimistic

empowered, energized, thoughtful


nervous, overwhelmed, hopeful

love, sadness, hopeful

A rush of feelings- extreme pain, beauty, joy grief


engaged, hopeful, nostalgic

sad, quiet, melancholic, slightly anxious

cautious, weary, hopeful

alert, curious, anxious 

This isn't just any day, of course, Nina Simone isn't just any singer, and these aren't just any words, but I'm still amazed at the depth of feeling surfaced in so little time. Beyond a quick glance over the chat we didn't take time to respond to what we had shared, but the instructor did ask us why we thought she'd had us do this. Those who spoke up ventured that this was a powerful shared experience, an experience of shared vulnerability (I wonder if we would have been as forthcoming in an in-person setting...), but I'm staggered also by the complex bundles of feelings the song evoked in us, and how different our responses were. The song was the same but what resonated with it in each of us was our own, something of which we might even ourselves not be aware.

It reminded me of a question a mindfulness teacher I know always asks people when he begins: "what is your inner weather?" This always elicits fascinating responses - yes, we do have inner weather, and, like outer weather, it's changeable... Today we had the excuse of moving quickly on, it being a short intensive course, but had one the time, could one honor all the feeling shared, respect the vulnerability? I know folks sometimes start or end a class by asking everyone to say one word about something, going quickly around the room without stopping to analyze, and that somehow generates a sense of community, of being acknowledged, known, cared for. I guess you can do it online too?

Punt

We got the long-awaited update on the Fall semester today. The nub:

It is our sincere hope that we will be able to begin the Fall semester on campus in person. However, should that not be possible for some or all students, we are confident in the plans in place to deliver an exciting, exceptional, and accessible academic experience for every one of our students.

The wait goes on, though if you read between the lines - some or all students? - it's pretty clear where we're headed. In the meanwhile our innovation-loving faculty get to keep preparing for every eventuality.

SWBAP

I've started a one-week intensive online course on TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) Methods and am having a blast! It's a greatly compressed version of a 15-week course in The New School's MA TESOL program, and specifically designed for our faculty (many of whom teach rather more international students than I do at largely domestically populated Lang), and I was glad to get a place. It's fun for a whole bunch of reasons beyond the obvious benefit of learning TESOL pedagogy. For one thing, it's entirely online - my first experience as a student in such a course. Getting to see how it feels to be on the receiving end of a Zoom + Canvas course is going to be of great help as I develop my own Fall courses... how do you create a sense of community without being able to gather, mingle, etc.? How do you allow students to get to know each other? How do you build and maintain momentum? Indeed, since ours is a course for teachers these questions are front and center, and our instructor is superb in making explicit what she's doing and why at every stage, sometimes as she does it, sometimes afterwards, often interactively.

Case in point: this was our first class, and while the 17 students plus instructor fit inside a zoom gallery and one or two of us knew one or two others, we were in a room with strangers. "We'll introduce ourselves in a minute," the instructor said as she introduced things, and then, a few minutes later, "we'll introduce ourselves soon..." It took a while, and when it came, it was in the form of a structured "ice breaker." The instructor shared this list of nine questions, had us peruse them and told us that if we were in the 15-week onsite version of the course we would mingle to find people who answered yes to each question. But here and now we were parsed out into zoom breakout rooms of 3-4 and asked to select a task master, choose two of the questions to focus on, and discuss our responses with each other. When the larger group reconvened the task masters introduced the other group members and some of their reflections. Super interesting ... and we didn't even realize it was the ice breaker! Some of what we're learning is TESOL specific, but thinking about a classroom of students with different degrees of linguistic and cultural fluency clearly takes any pedagogy that much further.

The instructor then had us pair up (well, zoom paired us up) to consider some questions about the activity, before sharing her answers - see above. It was amazing to realize how many "layered objectives" she had (my favorite: feel time constraints), and how the activity had in fact accomplished them. But the cherry on top was the question why she'd not had us do round robin introductions, like most people in most onsite classes do, or write a self-introduction before class like many online classes do. When one "goes around the room" with students introducing themselves, she told us (and the minute she said it we all realized it was true), nobody's listening. Students are preparing their own introductions, perhaps counting how many others will speak before their turn, and often anxiously comparing what they planned to say or have said with what their classmates are saying. There's little information shared and as good as none remembered.

What we had done instead was better in every way. We got to know a few students, working together - it wasn't easy figuring out who should speak etc but we did, and then we effortlessly came to a consensus, too. As the groups reported out we knew similar bridges had been built between other students, which gave us something to look forward to as we get to know the rest of the class as the course unfolds in the coming sessions. Most important, we came to know each other through this course's material and in lively exchange with each other, with no prior, fixed, stale, careful or self-aggrandizing introductions standing in our way. I know what I'm doing in all my classes from now on!

NYC PAUSE lifts

One hundred days after the state's first covid-19 case, all of New York has begun reopening - including NYC! The many formal and informal gatherings which mark city life are still far off (except demonstrating for a better world!), but more shops and workplaces will open. Still ...

Prophetic lilies

About a month ago I noticed some funny-looking green plants growing up in the beds in front of our building. Riot of greens, I quipped, they seem to be dancing like shamans. Well, it turns out they're lilies, and they're ready to pop! Somehow they seem to me to know about this week's glorious outpouring of support for racial justice in waves of peaceful demonstrations across the land (and world), the sort of thing that's unthinkable until it happens. When we tell the story of this time in the future (I'm not at all sure what happens next, though I foresee effects heartening and disheartening), we'll tell it differently than we lived it. We'll know the country was at breaking point, then pushed beyond it.