Gleanings

Last year's wild cucumber, an unusually intricate worm shell cluster

90!

We threw a surprise party today - my mother's just turned ninety! These are some of the folks from near and far who sent pictures to fête her (assembled by my newspaper editor sister) and another sixteen came in person to share Black Forest cake, coffee, California bubbles, abundant flowers and plans to do it all again in ten years.

Extension magic

Crest Canyon

Everything's super-sized in response to the spring rains 

Unruly throngs of lanceleafed dudleyas suggest we'll outdo 2010.

Exuberant

Blown off course

Along Torrey Pines Beach today, thousands of By-the-wind-sailors (velella), most just the transparent sail and platform with the polyps  

long gone. We found a few still living colonies in their striking blue...  

And even another bluish life form which seemed attached to them...  

But efforts to return these still living groups to the sea were fruitless, the waves just washing them back to the beach boneyard.

[Learned, a few days later, that the blue stoways are buoy barnacles, who can produce their own styrofoam-like "buoy" and float along surface of the water but are happy to hitch a ride on a velella!]

Efflorescent

Torrey Pines awash in color, everything super-sized by recent rains.

Constellations!

Meanders

Flew to California today, my heart pulled as it has been since I was a teenager by the stark splendors of the western landscape unspooling in splendor below. The tug comes from having lived and moved on that land - a memory in the muscles of one's feet and legs - and beneath its storytelling sky, syncopated over many years with these aerial visions of land patterns you can't see as they shape your way.

Cain't make this stuff up

Susan Stubson, a Wyoming Republican heartbroken at the takeover of her state by "Christian nationalists" who have "hijacked" both her party and her Evangelical faith community, recounts a shocking snibbet of ignorant Biblical literalism:

‌Last year, maternity wards closed in two sparsely populated communities, further expanding our maternity desert. Yet in debating a bill to provide some relief to new moms by extending Medicaid’s postpartum coverage, a freshman member of the State House, Jeanette Ward, invoked a brutally narrow view of the Bible. “Cain commented to God, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’” she said. “The obvious answer is no. No, I am not my brother’s keeper. But just don’t kill him.” 

This confusing ‌mash-up‌ of Scripture (Ms. Ward got it wrong: The answer is yes, I am my brother’s keeper) is emblematic of a Christian nationalist who weaponizes God’s word to promote the agenda du jour. 

She gets the Biblical reference wrong, but in a horrifyingly revealing way. Cain had descendants, at least until the flood, but I've never seen anyone claim him as a forbear, let alone as a role model. 

It could be that Representative Ward is, as Stubson suggests, just cherry-picking: on certain forms of Biblical literalism, every word of the Scripture is true and doesn't just permit but demands to be taken out of the context in which it is uttered. This is one way to avoid the problem of different biblical accounts of the supposedly same event, like the two accounts of the Ascension we heard in church yesterday, a problem few literalists even acknowledge. Ward may have grown up in a "biblical" culture consisting entirely of lines plucked out of context by preachers with a message.

But her comfort with Cain as a forbear suggests something else to me. Ward is comfortable, at least for now, not just with nobody being their "brother's keeper," but in a world in which the Abels die and the Cains live. No meek inherit the earth in this morally tonedeaf theology. Stubson adds a wan hope to her account of the Cainite Representative, somewhat desolately:

We should expect candidates who identify as followers of Christ to model some concern for other people.

Interflora

Floral exuberance at Fort Tryon Park.

Ordination of a Bishop

Big day for the Episcopal Diocese of New York - a new Bishop Coadjutor was ordained in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. The great brass door on the western facade is opened, I believe, only for this occasion, and let in a phalanx of bishops who made their way down the endless nave of the cathedral, following a half hours' worth of other vested processors, ordained and lay. Arrived at the altar they bishops looked, from where we sat, like colorful miniature dolls...

The service was more horizontal and inclusive than the building, beginning with Copland's "Fanfare for the common man" and closing with a contemporary South African hymn, which we sang in English, Swahili and Spanish. Readings were in Korean, French and Spanish, the language also of a wonderful sung litany, and the refrain of the psalm was sung (gorgeously) in Hebrew by a cantor from Central Synagogue. But our bishop, however open, is still another straight white guy.

Excavating (a land acknowledgment)

Have I mentioned that we have a theatre in the building? The Morninside Players perform in the community room in our basement (recent renovations even provided a green room!). I've heard they're good, and had a chance to confirm it tonight, in a new piece written about the history of our neighborhood. The story is complicated: this is the city's first integrated coop, designed for "middle income" people by educational and religious institutions in Morningside Heights, spearheaded by David Rockefeller and Robert Moses, and partly funded by the federal government's commitment to "urban renewal." 

To build it, however, two densely populated blocks fallen on hard times had to be razed, few of whose inhabitants could afford to join. Moses ensured that a public housing complex was erected next door - in part, the play suggested, because of the Save Our Homes campaign led by an activist teacher and mother of five who lived in the "blighted" zone. And once the dust had settled, the play proposed, life had improved for most people in the neighborhood - whether long-standing inhabitants relocated to the Grant Houses (in apartments each with its own kitchen and bathroom), or the mainly new ones who took up residence in Morningside Gardens (with community spaces such as the one in which we were enjoying the play!). Mmmmaybe.

I tried to find some images online of the happenings and of what came before. The scene at top shows Barnard President Millicent McIntosh posing during the construction of the Gardens (left) and Grant Houses (right), in 1955,  the 125 St IRT station is visible in the background. In the middle an admirably integrated community at Amsterdam and La Salle in 1946. Next are some images of 124th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, the zone replaced by the Gardens, from 1927. And to unsettle things even further, it seems that there was an "Indian Spring" flowing here before, shown here in 1897. 

Kay Ryan

A writer friend posted this today. The poem was written after the 2016 election but names my sense of this moment as Republican-led states compete to be the most reactionary.

In with the new

Met an alum for coffee at school after watching this year's university commence-ment from my office, and he alerted me that there were dumpsters across the street full of treasure. Some old store rooms in 64 West 11th are being cleaned out, revealing forgotten treasures like a plywood rifle inscribed "Linda," perhaps a prop from when our theater program had a performance space there in the 1990s, and a mirror some student had painted with dancing skeletons. The alum retrieved a potrait of Zorah Neale Hurston and a framed translation by Lang faculty of Gabriel Garcia Lorca's poem about Brooklyn, and I made off with a sturdy hand-made stool, perhaps also from some theater production long ago. A little poignant.

Degrees of separation

Today we celebrated our graduating students, listed in the program for the first time by major. (This had the salubrious effect that the very first name is a student I've worked with, reassuring in what was otherwise, as in every year, a parade of strangers.) I guess this information is easy to find anyway, but today it inspired me to try a piechart of our college. While we don't offer majors available in larger places (and only 2 of 369 students majored in natural sciences - the unmarked section at one minute to midnight), the national trend away from the humanities is clear here too, mitigated only by the large number of students in the arts, which would be clearer still if the breakdown reflected that the great majority of LitStudies are writing rather than literature concentrators. I encounter students from all these concentrations, if fitfully, and help all the folks in the peach-colord segment design their majors.

Lush

Meanwhile, in the courtyard...

Coring the Core

Owen Kichiro Terry, a student at our local prestige university, just published an eye-opening article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It reports that ChatGPT use has already become widespread among his classmates at Columbia, and that they are finding ways to make their use of it undetectable. While tourists like me just ask ChatGPT leading questions and titter at how much its responses get wrong and right, Terry describes how his classmates use it - noting, At any given time, I can look around my classroom and find multiple people doing homework with the help of ChatGPT. His argument is that ChatGPT assisted student work is undetectable but, worse, undermines the very purpose of higher education: We’re not being forced to think anymore.

He illustrates how ChatGPT can be used to avoid detection - or thinking. Recalling perhaps an assignment from Columbia's famous core, he shows how one might ChatGPT an essay on The Iliad. You could start with this ask: 

I have to write a 6-page close reading of the Iliad. Give me some options for very specific thesis statements.

In no time, ChatGPT supplies ten, all compelling, including the one he decides to work with:

The gods in the Iliad are not just capricious beings who interfere in human affairs for their own amusement but also mirror the moral dilemmas and conflicts that the mortals face.

 

For novice users, ChatGPT produces generic-seeming essays that aren't long enough for college assignments, but there are easy ways around this, we learn. 

I asked it to outline the paper for me, and it did so in detail, providing a five-paragraph structure and instructions on how to write each one. For instance, for “Body Paragraph 1: The Gods as Moral Arbiters,” the program wrote: “Introduce the concept of the gods as moral arbiters in the Iliad. Provide examples of how the gods act as judges of human behavior, punishing or rewarding individuals based on their actions. Analyze how the gods’ judgments reflect the moral codes and values of ancient Greek society. Use specific passages from the text to support your analysis.” All that was left now was for me to follow these instructions, and perhaps modify the structure a bit where I deemed the computer’s reasoning flawed or lackluster. 

Annnnd... done! The words of the essay are the student's own, but the argument and the structure have all been outsourced. The Iliad has to be read, but perhaps not until you've got your marching orders for fruitful foraging. Terry argues that if students are still to be made to think, and to demonstrate that they can, take-home essays have to be supplemented or even replaced by oral exams, in-class writing assignments, or some new form of assignment that's ChatGPT-proof.

I found this essay really instructive. The ease with which smart kids at an Ivy are making use of ChatGPT makes me realize that my ideas about writing essays are really luddite and don't even correspond to what I routinely do. My school's harm-reduction approach to generative AI, which doesn't attempt to prevent use of such programs but rather seeks ways for students to use them thoughtfully and take responsibility for their use of them, makes more and more sense.

The use of ChatGPT to outwit the Columbia Core helps me see what kids have surely been doing for a while in the age of online search engines and algorithms: ChatGPT marks for them a difference in degree, not in kind, in essay writing in the age of the Web. Folks my age made use of a thesaurus to help find the right word or dictionaries of quotations to spice up a speech. I never read CliffNotes but many books offer the wonders of indexes, which can take you swiftly to the section of a text relevant to your research - or tell you you're looking in the wrong place. Then come databases, turbocharged when they go online and launched into the stratosphere by the digitization of most of their sources, now conveniently searchable too. It's a rare luxury to just read a text - the whole thing - and reflect on it, when there are, just clicks away, reviews and analyses and the transcripts of podcasts. I suppose college-bound students are taught most of these tricks while still in high school now. In school as in every other part of their lives the aggregated and sorted voices of countless others are always just a click away. They learn when to defer to the cloud and how to go beyond it to toot their own horn.

Some of Terry's classmates are using ChatGPT to get out of thinking but others are using it to think, or at least to produce the essays and papers that we faculty think evidence thinking. Who is cheated more? ChatGPT makes the effort of wrestling with the complexities of a text, forming an interpretation or critique, finding the right phrasing for it, weighing arguments for and against it seem extravagant. Shouldn't one be able to do that in seconds? More fundamentally, haven't they all already been done by someone? Why do I need to slog through when I could just add my descant to the chorus of cloud wisdom orchestrated by generative AI?

One thing I feel gets lost here is the possibility that a text - it doesn't have to be Homer - becomes a dialogue partner for the reader, questioning me even as I question it. The text calls me to account. ("Don't be a descant," it says, "think for yourself!") While it's good to know what others have made of a text, and good if one can develop an original take on it, the point is - also, mainly - to form a relationship with it. I'm never entirely alone with a text of course(Gadamer's "fusion of horizons" includes the reality that I bring a horizon too) but there's something huge about forming a personal relationship with it, becoming the sort of person who can be in a relationship with books or arguments. That's one of the rationales not just for great books curricula like Columbia's Core but for liberal arts education more broadly. 

By the way, a student I was hanging out with today was familiar with the article. When I told him I'd found it revealing for showing how a piece might be written by a student while the thinking was outsourced to ChatGPT, he replied that our students may be "doing it backwards," doing their own thinking but letting ChatGPT do the writing - "and that's why they get caught"!