Thinking Literac(ies)

On October 17, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Reflections, Writing1 Comment

“Ultimately we find that the cognitive consequences are more about the new meaning systems and activities that occupy our minds than they are just about the character of work with symbols…”

“Whether one form of inscription is more efficient or more easily learned than another (the asserted alphabetic advantage) may be less consequential in its cognitive consequences than if a society has developed a large bureaucracy, literary culture, philosophic tradition, technology, commerce, and educational system using whatever form(s) of inscription it has historically developed”

“The world we know, think about, and act within is saturated by and structured on the texts that travel from place to place and have some durability over the years. The built symbolic world on which we have elaborated new social meanings and relationships and that is the object of our thought and attention as we try to live our lives as successfully as we can within it, in that we find the consequences of literacy.”

“literacy is part of the stuff out of which a way of life is made”

-Charles Bazerman, Social Implications of Writing-

These (mostly) just in!

On October 7, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading1 Comment

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Of Dialogical interest

On October 7, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces1 Comment

fun stuff i’ve found….

READ THIS!:

What is Dialogism? by Per Linell

Found Autobiography

On October 5, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry5 Comments

A country mapped with invisible ink

– Bob Hicok

Like we are the hole that grows in poor, unmendable

nothing: we blind needles: we unmoored threads:

like feeling I’m the enaction of a waterfall by my tongue

upon your body, as when a boat is brought to the edge

of exile and a hand extends to a hand or a tree

beseeches with its shadeshawl: however born,

there is reaching, we agree the wind smelled of copper

one day, a passport the next: like how to escape

my brain’s slum of words, the ghetto of the said,

while adoring there the rocks, the teacups,

if half of me is a Molotov cocktail and half

the inflection of loss and half a genuflection

to breath: like wondering if this extra half

is a country mapped with invisible ink:

like how windows ask to come along with the going

and preside over the staying, and I look at them

with all the love, all the shatter I can muster:

shards cutting me when I try to put the sky,

the distance back together: boredom cutting me

deeper when I don’t: like searching for a man

in a burning house and finding a piano as echo flees:

a whetstone still warm from the blade: sheets pressed

with brainfolds of sleep: a whisper from the bathroom

of running water: but no body: and I carry

these things to safety that are not the man: the piano

in my arms, running water in my mouth, the vespers

of sleep, the knife, so like a wing, like flight:

and say of him, that was me, to the ashes, the char:

and sift the memory of flames for their sorrow,

holding smoke to the mirror interested only

in solid dreams: like it will finally see

what isn’t there and give it my face, this presence

of absence I have tried and tried not to be

**********

“almost as if I’m making her and this poem and my past

up as I go, to help me feel nothing

goes to waste, not even waste.”

-also Bob Hicok

Person-al Interference

On October 3, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Reflections4 Comments

And finally…poems

On October 2, 2013October 1, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry10 Comments

I recognize that I hunger for poetry – periodically I canvas new poetry books and the old on my shelves to be STRUCK – to be wakened – charged – re-membered – into some leaping alive sensibility awareness delight sorrow grief ecstasy – that the vividness and risk of well-made poems incite…

for me, anyway.

Thus, the Bolano. A beginning.

Thus, returning to Nooteboom, a certainty.

Thus, the new arrivals shelf – Wichita Public Library.

and then…today…BOOM.

Bob Hicok, tested favorite, “new arrival,” Elegy Owed

the jump-start.

the activation.

something like recognition and instigation at once.

what poetry does.

and having no idea where to begin to share it with you

to recommend

to commend to you

I’ll just offer the opening poem:

and the closer…

Good-bye

and to tell you that everything in between is every bit as good

and some even better….

Good-bye

Small white church at the edge of my yard.

A bell will ring in a few hours.

People who believe in eternity will sing.

I’ll hear an emotion resembling the sea from over a hill.

One time I sat with my back to the church to give their singing

to my spine, there’s a brown llama you can watch

while you do this in a field if you’d like to try.

I don’t think even calendars believe in eternity.

Beyond the church is a trail that leads to a bassinet in a tree.

Someone put it there when the oak and sky were young.

I’m afraid to climb the tree.

That I’ll find bones inside.

That they’ll be mine.

I want to be with my wife forever but not as we are.

She’ll become a bear, I a season: Kodiak, spring.

Part of loving bagpipes haunting the gloaming is knowing

the bloodsinging will stop.

Beyond the church I pulled a hammer from the river.

What were you building, I asked its rust, from water and without nails?

This is where I get self-conscious about language,

words are love affairs or séances or harpoons, there isn’t a sentence

that isn’t a plea.

This is where I don’t care that I’m half wrong when I say everything

is made entirely of light.

This is where my wife and I hold hands.

Over there is where our shadows do a better job.

– Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed

Anticipating Leaving the Sea

On October 1, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing5 Comments

As with bated breath I anticipate the January 7 release of Ben Marcus’ newest collection of stories…I sate myself with these two complex tidbits of his alchemical languaging talents, and invite you to swim in them as well…

Ben_Marcus_Notes from the Hospital