Kyle > Recent Status Updates

A gripping tale that starts post media res: if the story of how Mark Watney arrived and was abandoned on Mars, that part of the story was deftly done with between Sol 1 and 5, giving the necessary flashbacks to his crew’s hasty departure and his survival skills kicking in on Sol 6. Some of 24 hour and 39 minute spans of time are silently passed over, but each moment is literally occupied with his struggle to survive.

Once again, I am swept away with a very engaging Short Introduction, finding out that I have always been (will have always been?) a futurist. Like Cole in 12 Monkeys, I had to hear from a host of historical figures, Cicero most significantly, that I am “one of us.” The pre-history of my forward-looking gang is just as fascinating as it extends all the way back, perhaps ahead as well, into Dreamtime.

Gathering together a broad collection of arts-based researchers, some established professors with decades of publishing behind them, others recent graduates with a documentary film or innovative methodology course under their belts, all of whom have insightful reflections on the basis of arts in research. Jerry Rosiek’s chapter stands out as it examines old-school ethics and the recent critical view agential realism.

Lots of surprises to be found in the field of arts-based research, from the formulation of artist/researcher/teacher thanks to Rita Irwin and friends, to the farther reaches of the United States, Finland and Spain. The greatest surprise for me, and one that circles back into the alchemical process I had begun in my dissertation, is what Cathy A. Malchiodi writes about a history that includes Jung’s Red Book.

Devoting a chapter to the elemental design behind coniunctio, the bringing together of opposite yet complementary pairs, Jung briefly discusses fascinating paradoxes like lapis and scintilla before he takes a deep dive into the Engima of Bologna. He addresses right upfront that it is a meaningless prank purposely left to the ages to wonder over, including his own thirty-footnote-filled-page discourse on this baloney.

Characters’ motives begin to become a little more explicit so soon after what passes for an inciting incident (howsoever very near the middle of a long-winded narrative) with vaguely familiar scowlers like Snagsby, Smallweed and Tulkinghorn turning upon more gullibly trusting persons. Meanwhile, storyteller Esther who was sidelined with a non-explosive ailment learns of plot twists, sharing her secret of a lost love.

No stone is left unturned, no theory or counterproposal left to stand on its own, as Heisenberg charts the last couple centuries’ steady progress towards a quantum theory worlds away from the classical interpretation. Galileo. Descartes and Kant contribute their worldviews and philosophies towards proto-Copenhagen interpretations, yet later physicists like Einstein, Bohm and Schrödinger take one too many wrong turns.

Zen came a long way from Buddha’s Flower Sermon and Mahākāśyapa‘s subtle grasp of the inner meaning and Suzuki’s essay charts the many ways the teachings were modified and taken up by scholars and masters. On the one hand, it has less austerity than Christian veneration of Christ; on the other hand, Zen Buddhists are willing to let go of the Sūtras, doctrines and even the concept of the Buddha to reach enlightenment.

Laying down the rules and landscape of Arts-Based Research as Leavy began in Chapter One and she and her like-minded researchers elaborate upon in the following categorized sections, she closes off her book with a prospective Chapter Thirty-Eight. It’s a short one, but succinctly sums up how ABR is received by no-longer stodgy academic circles, a more curious public sphere and a not-quite-ready to publish hyperglobe.

Dickens had reached the halfway point in his novel and was determined to kill off one of its central characters. For a moment it might have been Esther herself, who had been narrating every third chapter or so, but then who would take up the storytelling gauntlet? As unwieldy and uneventful as the story had become, suddenly at the end of Chapter 32 it happened. Someone exploded!! If only I could recall who Krook was.

Both my future and my wife’s summed up in this from-the-future tome, featuring some familiar faces explaining their role in Arts-Based Research - no doubt a quick glance through the authors’ biographies will reveal the tight-knit community of ABRers connected with these familiar faces. Hopefully we’ll have enough time over the holidays to dive into the many ways of involve arts in our educational and research praxis.

The narrative wraps up as best it could for the remaining characters even with the planet doomed. There is always another door, a secret path out of those troubled times where the fight against the WTO didn’t involve airplanes crashing into buildings. Both the Seeds and Momoko’s collection set off for more fertile fields, Yumi has her family reunited for a little while longer and Cass gives thanks for Will and Betty.

A selection of poems and other musings are presented in this last section as “the Third Thing”, an account of the extramarital affair Brecht had with Ruth Berlau, both of them disguised with various pinyin names and even changing her gender. Kien-jeh tried to rationalize this love as serving some greater purpose, for all the theatrical insight into the human condition he remain equivocal over the fate of his Shen Te.

The fabulous land of Su that Kin-jeh escaped to had become a totalitarian state under the control of an increasingly despotic Ni-en, Brecht’s support for the communist revolution seems to waiver as he may have frantically been searching for a Vladivostok travel agent. His final thoughts as he closes out this section is on the usefulness of art, what beautiful machines Weimar society had and his own gestural language.

Many intense allusions to unpack here, even Jung himself felt a sense of exasperation that nobody will understand his last book (might be why there are 234 footnote in the first chapter!) but I will press on with this study. It may have less of a direct impact on my dissertation itself but gives me keen insight into the quaternio of my committee, a mysterious coniunctionis of digital literacy and arts based research.

Very pertinent selection of sayings in a randomly assembled text, especially as I started reading Me-ti's advice to stop teaching in a classroom I didn't really feel comfortable being in! Other parts of these readings, apart from the overwrought comparison to ploughers and smithmasters, was the finishing sections on Heraclitus (He-leh) and Heisenberg's (Hi-sen?) uncertainty principle, revealing Brecht's quantumeracy!

Continuing to write about the resistible rise of the housepainter Hui-jeh, the philosopher Mei-ti looks wistfully to the east and contemplates his banishment. In addition to considering the foible empires of the Soviet Union and Japan, Me-ti writes about farther flung topics like Zen Buddhism’s one is and is not one, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Julius Caesar’s memoirs as Brecht randomly connects to my thesis.

Hard to believe how many months this library book sat on my shelf and the moment I start reading it someone recalls it! With less than two weeks to absorb all of “Me-ti” and Brecht’s aphorisms, I am impressed with the playwright’s concern over perception and reality, yet notice how some parts drop all the orientalist pretense and directly address Germany’s political issues between wars and its house painter problems.

Presented as a mock-Classical Chinese philosophical treatise, cleverly disguising Brecht’s contempt for his fascist Fatherland and the communist confusion in a splintering Soviet Union, there are many layers to peel back. The most challenging part, however, may have already been partially revealed in his play The Good Person of Szechuan that was a thinly veiled account for his affair with helper Ruth Berlau.

It is like these Very Short authors are reading my mind, and know exactly what to write for their introductions. Given that Cynthia Freeland concluded her 2001 Introduction to Art Theory, her virtual tour, with critical reflections on Benjamin, McLuhan, Baurillard and Irwin, charting the artistic progress through literacy, new media, digital technology and beyond, it's me that she had written rather than written for.

As my mental image of Marie-Louise comes into focus, I am puzzled at the audience she is lecturing for: obviously intellectuals gathered in Zurich who would recognize Eddington’s contribution to physics as well as the habits of gamblers and primitive cultures around the world. I see an early-career Pierre Bourdieu somewhere in the crowd formulating his own theory of habitus while von Franz lectures on field matrices.

So many comings, goings and almost-gone-but-suddenly-came-backs in these few chapters, with Elliot being rightfully terminated (but due for at least one last grasp at Yumi’s moral compass), Tibet born, the Seeds released and the Garden website rebooted, Lloyd dying and Momoko almost slipping away first. The biggest surprise may be Yumi making an untimely exit either by flying back to Hawaii alone or just falling off.

Art theory heats up with Guerrilla Girls and other critical theorists picking apart the patriarchal notion of genius and what counts as canonical. The next chapter has mostly male theorists (Freud, Tolstoy, Dewey, Foucault, etc.) retreat inside the mind to discover cognitive and psychological explanations for why artists express themselves in their work and how audiences tend to respond with inspired interpretations.

Here again I am reading a version of the Duchess of Malfi almost as if it was for the first time, except for bits of The White Devil, The Devil’s Law-Case and Ford’s ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore woven in by Brecht and several other hands. Not even sure which version of this Eyre Methuen texts relates to a Random House edition or any one of the multiple scripts held in an actor’s hand.

A more scholarly, dare I write practical guide to understanding Zen Buddhism, not to the detriment of two other seminal works for Westerners approaching the ineffable satori and the classical ko-ans found in his Introduction to and Manual of. More than merely curious Daisetsu writes invitingly, even conjuring up the spirit of his master Soyen Shaku to criticize his Essays.

An impressive, thought-filled book that sums up decades of research in alchemical symbolism, which took Jung and his colleague von Franz a decade to publish, and I have left myself with ten days or so to absorb all this knowledge in order to include a small fraction, perhaps a paragraph in my dissertation. It feels like there will be much that I am going to miss, yet with his Foreword encouraging me, plenty to learn.

Naturally, I am impressed with the author’s framing technique as she continues the virtual tour of art theory, widening the circle to where else but Japan, and then having John Dewey lend his voice to the critical use of art in society. From Zen garden and tribal cultural to the modern museum and its own “tribal” off-shoots, what we know as art remains too chimerical to pin down as something serving a single purpose.

Any goodwill this textbook may have generated for teachers concerned about how every student deserves a chance to move forward, rather than make preventive measures for those being left behind, evaporates in the last couple of chapters in assessment, the bottom line being your job and also the district will suffer because of those ELL kids not understanding the basics. That’s why only billionaires make it to the top.

Amusing how Marie-Louise continues her lecture on divination by calling out the stupid conclusions of certain colleagues and the binary assumptions of primitive societies, as if her research had to endure so many fallacious methods of inquiry. Her serious encounters with palmists shows that she has an open mind to the many ways of getting at a meaningful truth, the kind that gets each of us out of bed in the morning.

In five years or so, someone will perfect the Babel Fish and everyone will have a device in one’s ear with instant translation of languages, making books like Coelho’s and all her time-worn strategies obsolete. For now teachers have to devise worksheets, printed material and tests to accommodate students who are less likely to catch up the older they arrive. But can we just get rid of flashcards as their last resort?