Source: Repeat after Me: I Like You. I Love You.
Some wise words from our friend Kathryn at Art-Colored Glasses!
Author Archives: writerspilecki
Mental Models
So yesterday I worked with an MIT engineer on his thesis about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that suffered a severe compound accident from the tsunami that hit eastern Japan on March 11, 2011. One of the theories of thinking and reasoning that underlies some of his research is the idea of mental models, “that the mind constructs ‘small-scale models’ of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Mental models can be constructed from perception, imagination, or the comprehension of discourse” (Johnson-Laird and Byrne). I used this idea when I was writing my theology thesis about environmental survival, and it often comes up in cases where survival is at stake: people have to make crucial decisions at high speed in real time and they rely on their picture of reality, which is itself a) a form of perception, b) usually an oversimplification (occasionally the reverse), and c) affected by language, custom, and other symbolic attributes in addition to our lived experience.
That perception ≠ reality is shown in part by research that shows how inaccurate eyewitness testimony can be in court. “Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them. The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is ‘more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording’” Akowitz and Lilienfeld).
It is true public safety officers are trained to observe more accurately than the rest of us, and there are ways of retrieving testimony that are less likely to color the witness’s recall. However, for my purposes here, that is less useful simply because in an emergency situation—a nuclear accident, 9/11—what an individual will be doing is not recalling What Happened Then but rather What Could Possibly Be Happening Now. The former is based on a single instant of reality and the latter is based on All the Reality I Have Experienced Up To Now, taken together, sifted, and drawn on the blueprint in the person’s head.
Think of the house you grew up in. Then think of all the houses you have ever seen from the inside or the outside. Then tell me what a house is. If you grew up in the suburbs, a three-story house or a Roman villa won’t be part of your picture. If you are M.C. Escher, this might be the house you draw for me.
With an overcomplicated mental model, you might withdraw from action—why try to get down 80 flights of stairs? I will never make it. Social problems, which are indeed multiply constructed, frequently face human inaction for this reason.
If you are a child, this might be the house you draw for me.
The trees out side the house will have brown bark rather than grey and green grass rather than winter yellow, even if you just ran across the yellow grass and climbed up into the grey-barked tree just yesterday.
I am not sure why I am even writing about this although I expect it has to do with Valentine’s Day. I have written before about the problems of love poetry for a writer who wants to be taken seriously, although I don’t think I specifically addressed the problem that poetry causes for us in our expectations about love. But I have a feeling that this is a thing.
Arkowitz, Hal, and Scott O. Lilienfeld. “Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts.” Scientific American. 1 Jan. 2010. Web. 11 Feb. 2016.
“Child’s Painting Land.” MediaWiki. Web. 11 Feb. 2016.
Escher, M.C. “House of Stairs.”
Johnson-Laird, Phil, and Ruth Byrne. “Mental Models: A Gentle Introduction.” Mental Models Blog. July 2012. Web. 11 Feb. 2016.
Words are Meaningless and Forgettable. Say What?
So I got on the train today only to see a pin stuck to the radiator at my feet. It said (with a picture of roses, for some reason) Words Are Meaningless And Forgettable. What an unkind thing to leave where a writer might stumble across it. Winter in Boston is bad enough with the unkind weather and existential dread. But to tell someone for whom words are her stock in trade that, nope, worthless, sorry! Cruel.
Now, given that we are coming up to Valentine’s Day, this might just be a bid by florists to get people to buy more flowers, although I guarantee you that any florists you may know will have several bandaged fingers on Monday. This is like how I always have chalkdust on my right sleeve and a stripe across the back of my jacket: occupational hazard. And as a writing teacher and professional poet, I can also guarantee that there is probably just as much blood on the love poem you get this weekend as there is on your roses. The difference will be the source.
A Made Thing before Valentine’s Day
“My Foucault-friend, who is now an anthropologist, observes that in the West we tend to think of made things as being false” (Biss).
If the poem I make is a false thing, as made as my house,
As false as your eyelashes that you also made this morning,
As thing-like as your car that falsely carried you
To work yesterday and just as falsely, eventually,
Carried you home last night, then how am I to cultivate
Truth like a garden of earthy, homegrown delights?
If my poem, made from words, which presumably also
Have been made, in this case by our ancestors
Who agreed what the grunt would mean, and the hiss
And the slow accumulation of consonants, then how
Can beauty be real, since there too we simply have to
Agree on the symmetry and style of another face?
If the song you made from notes just lying around
The universe is false, if the story you told yourself
Of love and loss and, eventually, redemption and love
Again, if that too is made and therefore false, what hope
Do any of us have to find the real thing, the true and
The beautiful thing, the unmade heart beating to ours?
Biss, Eula. “‘The Folded Clock,’ by Heidi Julavits.” Review. New York Times. 27 Mar. 2015. Web. 10 Feb. 2016.
Maybe I Need an Art Buddy. Maybe I Just Need Backup.
Well, here I am back in the Writer’s Block, which kind of sounds like something you would find in a Communist prison. Yes, they really used to confiscate writers’ typewriters in the USSR and Poland. It was cost-effective. You don’t need to feed typewriters and they don’t bleed when you beat them up.
Here in the more or less democratic US of A, where we have Freedom of Font and also a whole lot more options for putting our ideas down and spreading them around, the problem tends not to be so much Tyranny that is rearing its ugly head as it is Woeful Lack of Imagination.
Part of this, I suspect, is because a blog is not exactly a Project in the same sense that a novel or, for want of a better example, a few hundred pages of poetry about a 1990s TV show are. There isn’t the compulsive pull of a few well-chosen characters whose voices need to be explored. There isn’t the narrative tension of a plot to resolve or of subplots to weave in artfully. On the flipside, there are more opportunities to use pictures of cats to make my points.
Sometimes, when procrastination takes the form of Radically Empty Brain Syndrome (REBS), I stare at the wall, vainly hoping for something to show up. But remember that “radical” comes from the Latin, radix, meaning “root.” If there is nothing at the root of the brain, there won’t be much to grow out of it. So maybe the solution is to find another brain to work with.
If I were an Igor in a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, I suppose I would mean that literally: find a brain, go up to the top of a tall MIT building and wait for lightning to strike. Then do an evil maniacal laugh, etc. Problem solved.
Tempting…
Failing that, I suppose I need to find another brain the less old-fashioned way, by actually finding a writing buddy, a collaborator, or possibly some badass with a big gun or maybe a Frisbee. Some writing buddies each write their own work separately and then read each other’s work. This is different from collaborators who work on the same project. Personally, I was thinking more along the lines of someone to come to my rescue with a whole lotta firepower, or possibly an Iron Frisbee of Doom.
Then maybe I’ll get writing again.
Happy Birthday, Musashi
So today Musashi, my animal companion, turns eight years old. This is as old as he’s ever been, though he would be the first to tell you that I am “way olderer” than him, as in “like elebenty.”
Meanwhile, in other news, a blizzard has just come in on little cat feet and is threatening to drop a foot of snow on much of Southern New England, particularly our little part of it, Boston. Boston public schools, Northeastern University, Episcopal Divinity School, Emerson College, Brandeis University, New England Conservatory—just to name a very few—have closed for the day. But not MIT, in part because not Harvard. Sigh.
On His Eighth Birthday, Musashi Poeminates
Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war. –Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Cry havoc! And let slip the cats of winter,
Chasing the icy wind across parking lots,
Down streets, up trees into the branches
That only months ago wore leaves like green
Fur. February, that month cruelest to those of us
Who never spell easily, tightens its grip,
With every flurry a kitten ready and willing
To ravage your toes with her tiny claws.
Havoc is coming. The schools all know it,
The big men who drive the snowplows all
Know it, the bus drivers for whom havoc is
A daily burden, they know it too. And I,
Lying reflectively in my turquoise catbed,
Contemplating the existential drift, I too
Know the true havoc that is the lack of my
Housekeeper, soccer partner, butler,
Just because she has mad writing skills
And her school, like a German Shepherd
Facing off with a Rottweiler, all growl
And lack of poetry, refuses to accept
How weather makes fools of us all
Sometimes. The snow comes down,
An unfurling of fluffy white cats, stretching,
Shedding, everywhere, and all day.
Photo by Jack Siberine.
Badass Women in Combat Gear, #5 ¾: Jessica Jones
November 20 marked an interesting moment in our popular culture: Marvel Comics released Jessica Jones, its first film/movie property with a female superhero. For the past two months I have been trying to write about it, to add Jessica to our list of Badass Women in Combat Gear, and it has been very hard. At first, I tried to blame my writer’s block on the fact that I had not finished watching all 13 episodes on Netflix. But on Groundhog Day, I had an epiphany that, like so many of my epiphanies, in retrospect seems outrageously obvious.
As one critic describes Jessica Jones, “A woman with superhuman strength, she eschews a costume or cape for a pair of jeans and a leather jacket. She lives in a busted apartment in Hell’s Kitchen where she conducts her business as a private investigator. It’s not necessarily part of the job that requires her special abilities, but they do come in handy” (Bendix). In the past, Jessica tried to use her super abilities as an “official” superhero, until she got mind-controlled into doing horrific things (including murder) by another “gifted” person, a man named Killgrave.
As another critic comments, “Jessica Jones pulls no punches when it comes to him or to other men on the show who try to rob women of their agency. The word ‘rape’ makes its way onto the screen in episode eight, but showrunner Melissa Rosenberg has no interest in showing sexual assault for shock value or as a way to make female characters more sympathetic. Rosenberg takes a swipe at politicians who would force women to give birth to their rapists’ babies. And she nods more than once at the idea that Killgrave is obsessed with making women smile at him. She doesn’t draw a direct line from allusions of street harassment to rape, but she doesn’t sidestep that conclusion either” (Hogan).
MARVEL’S JESSICA JONES
And this is where Groundhog Day comes in, or should I say Groundhog Day, the movie. I went to see the film for the first time Tuesday evening, and about halfway through, as Phil the weatherman (Bill Murray) is spending several weeks of repeated days learning personal information about his colleague Rita (Andie McDowell), in order to get her to spend time with him, like him, love him and eventually sleep with him.
Had I watched this for the first time in the 1990s before conversations about the difference between rape culture (you must opt out) and the culture of consent (you must opt in) became common, I might have thought this behavior simply romantic pursuit as opposed to temporal stalking. But as I started to see where it was leading, I became increasingly uncomfortable as it became clear to me that such a dishonest and misleading “change” in her attitude toward him would not equal true consent, and I thought, “If she sleeps with him, I am walking out of the movie theater.”
Reader, she slapped him. Probably seven days in a row. Hooray. Then the movie improved as he started to change himself rather than her.
And this is what was so difficult about writing about Jessica Jones. Reviews have called the show “dark” and “gritty” and “grim,” which it is, but a lot of films and TV shows have been dark, especially ones on the topics of war, poverty, and injustice. But those topics are things we can discuss around the dinner table at home or in the lunchroom at work. Rape? Not so much. And the institutional sexism and violence that are the social matrix now being called rape culture? Good luck with that.
And this is one of the things I have learned about writing. The Rhetorical Situation of a piece of writing is Writer, Audience, Topic. If I think I am a bad writer or if I know I have a difficult audience, it is very obvious why I am having trouble with my writing. But I often forget that if a topic is simply difficult to talk about, it is also going to be difficult to write about.
But these difficult topics need to be written about, and so Jessica Jones not only serves as a show that empowers its women characters but also as a springboard for more of these conversations. As Lili Loofbourow wrote in a critical essay for the Guardian: “Jessica Jones is one of the most complex treatments of agency in the wake of victimhood that the small screen has seen yet seen.” And Loofbourow’s essay itself is an interesting critique of the very same issues.
So here is me putting in my 2 cents. We need to talk about these issues. We need to build a culture of consent. We need to tell stories that show people being strong for themselves and others—men and women—and we need to show victims helping each other be heroes. So, thank you, Krysten Ritter (and the other women on the show, who are all very strong, although, for example Carrie Ann Moss’s lawyer, Jeri Hogarth wears power suits as her combat gear), for giving us something meaty to watch, however much discomfort comes with it.
“Jessica Jones is a superhero show for those who don’t necessarily care for the heroics. It’s smart and sexy and dark and creepy; it’s queer-inclusive and focused on women who refuse to be victimized, even by someone who has the power to make them say or do anything he wants. Jessica Jones is about the struggle for power and control, and its lead is the kind of superhero that modern women will idolize. So much of her strength isn’t in her physical prowess, but in her will to survive and never relent to the man with the perceived upper hand.” (Bendix)
Bendix, Trish. “’Jessica Jones’ Is a Queer-Inclusive, Feminist Superhero Series.” Afterellen.com. 20 Nov. 2015. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.
Hogan, Heather. “’Jessica Jones’ Is an Awesomely, Agressively Feminist Superhero Series.” Autostraddle.com. 23 Nov. 2015. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.
Loofbourow, Lili. “Jessica Jones: Shattering Exploration of Rape, Addiction and Control.” The Guardian. 27 Nov. 2015. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.
Where is the Outrage?
Christmas in New Haven, CT was around 58 degrees this year, which is about 30 degrees higher than normal. This past Monday, February 1 was 60 degrees, which is about 40 degrees higher than normal. Can you say anthropogenic climate change?
At the grocery store, I keep hearing people being happy about this “nice” (unseasonable), “beautiful” (unreasonable) weather. Here is the thing people: I know, I really do know, that last winter’s 9 feet of f#$%ing snow was traumatic. I remember taking 2 hours to do a 30-minute commute via the MBTA. I remember climbing mountains of snow to get from the sidewalk to the street and then, on the other side of the street, having to do it all over again.
I remember this very clearly. Like you, I still have flashbacks.
But tell me, when it is July, which is usually in the mid-80s or August, which is usually in the mid-90s, if we have 110, 120, or 130 degree weather, are you going to call it nice?
Somehow I doubt it.
Constructive Procrastination
Recently one of my Gentle Readers commented on my post about writer’s block. She says, “When I procrastinate I don’t write. … When I am unsure what to write, I might troll the Internet (procrastinate), which always puts me onto tangents and then an hour or more will go by and BOOM! I haven’t written a thing. So for me procrastination causes a block.”
I would argue that procrastination doesn’t cause the block any more than a stuffy nose causes a cold. We procrastinate because we need something and the style of procrastination can tell you something about what it is you need to get in a more effective way so that you stop procrastinating and start writing. I would also argue that Procrastination Isn’t Bad any more than water is bad, even though water—hot, cold or in between—can kill you. And yes, you can quote me.
The Internet is an interesting place, full of information, pictures and people. When we look for information on the internet because we don’t know what to write, it is possible that we haven’t narrowed down the “what” yet. I should have asked our friend what kind of writing she does, but I know for myself the rabbit’s hole of story leading to story ad infinitum the Internet can be. This is one case where a kitchen timer is your friend. Actually, when it comes to procrastinating constructively, a kitchen timer is almost always your friend. Do the procrastination behavior for a predetermined amount of time, say twenty minutes (as Francesco Cirillo, the developer of the Pomodoro Technique* would say). Then do some writing, also for a predetermined amount of time. Alternate back and forth between writing and one or more other activities. Over the course of an afternoon, you can get a lot done.
The Internets pictures (and videos) and people also are temptations for writers in particular. If I am bored with my writing topic, watching a cat video or reading a web comic might wake my brain back up. Facebook in particular is helpful for writers because, let’s face it, writing is lonely. So give yourself the opportunity to “socialize” in the virtual environment of your choice for, you guessed it, a predetermined amount of time. Then get back to work.
Our friend also says, “It’s like walking the dog or playing with the cats (‘for their sake,’ but I’m really procrastinating), and again nothing gets done, except some exercise for me and the pets.” Hey, don’t knock the exercise for you and them. Exercise increases blood flow to the brain, oxygenated blood flow, which has got to improve the thinking. And socializing with your animal companions also helps allay the lonelies.
“With a real writer’s block, not caused by procrastinating—“
But again, I would argue that procrastinating is a self-defensive technique that we use in an attempt to fulfill needs that the writing can’t fulfill…
“—if a deadline looms or just blocked, I put my but in a chair and push through because it (deadline) must get done. When there is no deadline looming and I’m blocked, I do the time-tested technique of just writing for five minutes without lifting the pen (yes, on paper) and no censoring my thoughts. Sometimes it will show me what the problem is; other times it gives me ideas. Once in a while, I get both, which is wonderful, but rare.”
Free-writing! Woohoo! I have only met one person in twenty years of teaching who could not write for several minutes (I usually go for ten or twenty), and he was seriously ADHD. Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones (a book that I imagine has saved lives) relies heavily on timed free-writing to get stuff Out of Head and Onto Paper (or, for those of you young whippersnappers, on your screen). Don’t judge; just write. Eventually your brain gives up and gives you what you are asking it for. And the more you do it, generally, the easier/quicker the process goes.
Lastly, our friend says, “Sometimes I think my problem is thinking too much.”
Heaven forbid, girlfriend! Thinking? Too Much? How is that even a thing? We’re WRITERS fer cryin’ out loud. Thinking is what we DO. Day and night. Personally, I think about writing 24/7. Yes, my dreams are very strange.
Grr. Arrgh. More Writer’s Block
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, when the wizard Saruman, wears robes “woven of all colors” because he has fallen from the path of the wise, Gandalf (the Grey) says, “I liked white better.” This is Saruman’s reply:
“White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”
Now here’s the thing for me a writer. Saruman is clearly evil here, because he is saying the white page can be overwritten like it’s a bad thing.
For me as a writer, constantly trying to produce, this is definitely not a bad thing. So this past week struggling to come up with blog posts, I have tried a variety of things, but today I actually just broke down and turned to Google Images to find pictures to express how I feel: tired, afraid, studious, interrupted. Clearly Person of Interest (and a little bit of Angel) are helping me out here.
Then I went and found pictures about how I want to feel: badass.
Well, it must have worked, because what we have here, children, is a blog post.
buildingapoem 