Saadat Hasan Manto's The Dog of Tithwal: Precarious Lives during the India-Pakistan Partition Years

Saadat Hasan Manto. The Dog of Tithwal. Translated from the Urdu by Khalid Hasan, Aatish Taseer, and Muhammad Umar Memon. Introduction by Vijay Seshadri. Brooklyn, NY:  Archipelago Press. 2021.

Sadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was born in British India and when India was partitioned into Pakistan, he, as a Muslim, had to move to Lahore, Pakistan. It was in Pakistan that he began to produce the vast number of stories, radio plays, and essays that made him a formidable influence in Urdu-language writing. Manto’s life and times were shaped by conflict, disruption, and confusion as Kafka-esque political absurdities erected boundaries and divisions between previously happy cohabitants of a beautiful land. 

The story that is also the name of the collection of short stories, “The Dog of Tithwal,” perfectly illustrates the tragic absurdity of a politically engineered clash between the Hindus and the Muslims. They take up arms against each other and decide to fight on the border.  However, no one really has the heart to fight; it’s a political imperative imposed from on high. In the No Man’s Land between the two sides is a rag-tag, importunate dog who is regularly fed by both sides, and both consider the dog to be of their nationality. The dog survives, somehow, in this existential limbo until one day (spoiler alert), he is killed.  The dog perfectly embodies the capricious nature of fate, and the razor-thin margin of safety that keeps people and dogs alive.  

That razor-thin margin between life and death is also apparent in “Ten Rupees,” in which a mother faces the terrible consequences of having sold her young daughter into prostitution. In “Kingdom’s End,” an educated man occupies an office and yet does not seem to have any work to speak of. He falls in love with a voice on the telephone that started out as a wrong number. The precarious nature of his life is perfectly illustrated as he falls ill with a high fever just before he is to meet her. In “The Monkeys Revolt,” monkeys attack the insulting idea that humans, whom they consider to be quite beneath them, “evolved” from them. 

Other stories in the collection are likewise intelligent, sympathetic, and they unflinchingly face life in a world with few safety nets but with many ideas about the nature of survival, both physical and intellectual. 

-- Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.

 

Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.

Moodle 4.0 Is Here! What's new?

Moodle 4.0 is here! I’m trying to determine just what the advantages are and how much of a step change it is from Moodle 3.11.  I don’t think that Moodle can change the basic architecture for a number of reasons. So, the changes have to come in things like user experience and efficiency.  

 If you've worked with Moodle for very long, you know that it can be a place of almost infinite complexity, but also almost Zen-like simplicity. It's also a veritable ant-hill of programming activity, as programmers develop productivity and design apps - some are available for free, others require a download fee.  Moodle and Moodle partners are likewise entrepreneurial, and you can quickly use pre-built templates and hosting and an integrated software-as-a-service solution.

 

Improved User Experience, with modules listed in an easy-to-follow design.

 

MoodleCloud is still in 3.11, so I can’t experiment with it as much as I’d like. However, the “sandbox” is still available, and one can select a role as student, teacher, or manager, to play around with it.  

Here are some of my initial thoughts:

PROS:

1.  Much improved user experience, in terms of navigation, layout, use of new thumbnails, and course construction (with drag and drop). 

2.  The default theme being used in the Sandbox (probably either Clean or Boost) is very attractive and easy to use.  

3.  Fully responsive interface that works well with tablets, laptops, and phones. 

4.  Improved navigation – you can tell where you are, and can go back to a previous screen very easily. There may be some AI-based plug-ins that can help refine "smart navigation."  

5.  One can use the calendar as a dashboard. The "My Courses" screen can display in a number of different options. The “Card” option makes the interface look a lot like the way Canvas displays available courses.

My Courses page

6.  The basic structure of the learning management system is the same, so the same names, arrangement, process and procedure works.

7.  Moodle 4.0 is available for download if you’d like to host courses on your own server. That PRO is also a CON if you’re not ready to be a Moodle Administrator. 

8.  Outside Apps more easily integrate with Moodle 4.0.  Integrating apps has always been fairly easy by means of a link or embedded log-in.  I don’t know to what extent single-sign on is facilitated, and if authentication is otherwise streamlined. 

9.  There is less content on each screen. Not only is it easier to see with your tablet or phone, it’s much easier to stay focused and avoid distractions due to a busy design.

10.  Moodle is open source, which means that there is an entire industry dedicated to building plug-ins and other features that are useful and needed.  I would not be surprised if there will be machine learning-based apps that can detect patterns in student performance and help administrators and even teachers, see student preferences, gaps in knowledge, and collaborative strengths.   

CONS:

1.  If you have not worked with Moodle before, you may feel a bit discouraged. Moodle is not a very intuitive LMS, and one may not know where everything is without going through a pretty thorough training course.

Courses and categories admin screen

2.  It’s not clear how much Universal Design for Learning was used with the new interface, dashboard, icons, etc.  I did not see multiple modes of content delivery on the sample classes in the sandbox site, but that does not mean that they are not available.

3.  Moodle 4.0 is not yet available in MoodleCloud, which is the most popular cloud-based Moodle.

4.  Moodle documentation is still at 3.11. 

An Initial Chat:

Relatecasts' Rick Zanotti and I had an informal conversation about Moodle 4.0, just hours after its release to the web on April 14.  Please click on the link to hear our conversation on E-Learn Chat.  I'm not as clear as I could be as I respond to Rick's questions -- I think my enthusiasm about the  arrival got the best of me :)  Please click and listen, then share your thoughts.

 

E-Learn Chat on the debut of Moodle 4.0 - speaking with Rick Zanotti

 Here's a link to the chat:

https://youtu.be/PqjHqLuWRqg

 Please note that an updated version of Packt Publishing's guide to Moodle course development will be published in July 2022, just in time to get courses and programs up and running. 

****

Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. 

 

 

A Visual Poetics Coup de Dés of Meaning: Thomas Fink's Selected Poems

 Thomas Fink.  Selected Poems and Poetic Series. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press. 2016. 244 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9964275-0-0

This stunning collection includes examples from some of Thomas Fink’s most innovative and subversive work.  His work subverts the subversive, thinking specifically of all the concrete poetics that followed Malarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard (1897) that has been used as the foundation for so many visual poets, including John Cage, John M. Bennett, Jesse Glass, Dick Higgins, F. A. Nettlebeck, Rochelle Owens, and Armand Schwermer, just to mention a few.  The visual poets subvert reading and meaning-making practices by add the aleatory, while Fink systematizes the strategies for generating meaning from a visual poem, particularly in his series that use the same form. 

For example, subversion of the subversive occurs in “Jigsaw Hubbub” where a Figure 8 / vertical Infinity sign is used several poems. The reader automatically resystematizes his / her method of approaching the poems, and looks for similarities and differences.  The same can be said for the “Goad” series where the upside down Greek letter Omega suggests the end of meaning (a common conceit in the twentieth century), but the fact that the shape is the same for each of the “Goad” poems instantly imposes at least two types of strategic meaning-making processes: first, comparing the shape of the upside-down Omega in each for raw semiotic meaning, and second, in the words themselves and the meanings forged by reading from right to left, descending from line to line. 

The collection of work is particularly fascinating because it is arranged chronologically and we can see a timeline of textural and thematic innovation. The collection begins with 1993’s Surprise Visit. The poems serve as an antidote to the then-ubiquitous L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and are intertextual in the sense that they evoke and import an entire body of exogenous work. Perhaps the most delightful example is “Louise Bourgeois” which one cannot read without thinking of her big daddy longlegs spider sculptures, her bold prolificity, and the workshop where basically everything was cubed, drilled, formed into serviceable art (which is to say that it beckons itself to be in the service of EveryPerson).

Excerpts from Gossip (2001) reflect the giddy sense of having dodged apocalypse, until, of course, apocalypse showed itself to be a narrative characterized by its innate multiplicity.  Such inescapability from deterministic narratives is reflected even as natural phenomena are considered to be random, are likewise subjugated to narrative, as in “Reprise”

like a refugee

and every time you kiss me it’s like 

another little piece of my

lightning striking again … (p. 13)

After Taxes (2004) incorporates poetics of unparalleled sweetness, with a palpable desire for meaningful connections that flow through dreams, memories, and the actual experience, past or anticipated. “In Memoriam” is either a letter from a grandfather to a grandchild, or from a grandchild to a grandfather, or simply from / to childhood to later life, a homage to the ability of language and letters to forge enduring bonds and to affirm life. 

Dusk Bowl Intimacies stretch from 2011 to 2015. Each has more or less the same formal structure: A block prose poem followed by a minimalist verse, three to eight lines in length. The voice is the persona of an older woman, possibly a grandmother. She is an inquisitive spirit who investigates the underlying assumptions in the ways that language embodies everyday life, and then closes with lines that assert a personal commitment or an exhortation. 

“Home Cooked Diamond” and “Jigsaw Hubbub” are visual poems. As mentioned earlier, “Jigsaw Hubbub” toys with infinity, and subverts the popular notion widely espoused in the twentieth century that a visual poetics liberated language, thus unleashing an infinite number of potential meanings, and thus finding a way to define infinity.  “Jigsaw Hubbub” puts a playful stop to that, while “Home Cooked Diamond” has enough variation in the shape and textual arrangement on the page to look like shadows from a tree as the day progresses, looking “slant” and also into a mirror. 

“Home Cooked Diamond” has the feel of a memoir and an awkward road trip with  parents whose flaws are all too obvious to the children, which makes the telling all the more uncomfortable. The struggle one has to read parallels the emotional struggle in the author’s voice. It’s strangely emotionally compelling. 

--- Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. 

The Irreducible Uncertainty of Poetics in Hedge Fund Certainty: Thomas Fink

Thomas Fink. Hedge Fund Certainty. Meritage Press and I.E. Press. 2019.  ISBN: 978-1-934299-14-2

The beauty of poetics is its irreducible uncertainty.  The meanings are unmoored, allowing the reader to do what she / he would like. They can attempt to lash meanings to a limited number of options which may prove satisfying for some (especially those who consider the interpretive enterprise as a kind of exegesis). 

However, the real joy of discovery engaging in a sense of play.  The process involves observing the words, the structure, the syntax, and arrangement on the page and then embracing all the possibilities as they come to mind. 

A hedge fund is probably as far from certainty as one could imagine, so Fink’s play on the idea of certainty gives rise to ideas of gaming the system to have a positive outcome. The collection begins with “Yinglish Strophes.” All are in English, but with Yiddish syntax and arrangement, line breaks, and subjects that create an intense sense of place and of character. The words trigger a deep sense of nostalgia and loss: .. “Never later / was I back Russia the same once” (Yinglish Strophes 25). 

It is delightful to see the long poem, “Subprime Mortgage Bargain Lot” series. The title alone is amusing, because most readers will see that this has everything to do with rolling the dice and losing, seeing something you thought you possessed, whether it be the meaning of numbers on a page, or your ability to agree on a value with other readers. 

Hedge Fund Certainty evokes Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés Jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897). Translated to “A throw of the dice will never abolish hazards (or risk)” Mallarmé created a concrete / visual poetry notable for the aleatory aspects of the word choice, and the open arrangement on the page. 

Likewise “Subprime Mortgage Bargain Lot” is seemingly aleatory, and it gives you the choice to read the words in clusters or straight across the page.  Further, the words break in unusual places and words interject themselves.  The result is a vertiginous race to the bottom of each page. It is a thoroughgoing condemnation of greed and the brutalization of humanity as wholesale wealth redistribution occurs: “Out with / your ragid / daydreaming / that costs / & costs / the hard / working” (from “Subprime Mortgage Bargain Lot 16). 

The collection ends with “Prohibitionism,” which proclaims a message of hope: a telethon for poetry, that would suggestion unity, but the arrangement on the page denotes separation into opposing clusters of words (or camps), although the last line suggests a coming together: “walls / curve  toward  one  another.”  

-- Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.

Preserving Alternative Epistemologies through Preservation of Indigenous Languages

 Irma Pineda. In the Belly of the Night and Other Poems: En el vientre de la noche y otros poemas. Ndaani’Gueela’ne xhupa diidxaguie’ English translation: Wendy Call. Illustrations: Natalia Gurovich. Mexico City: Pluralia Ediciones e Impresiones. 2021. 9780607-7655-xx-x

To publish poetry written in endangered indigenous languages not only preserves the language, but also a way of knowing, which is often an alternative epistemology. 

The work of poet Irma Pineda is no exception. She writes in Isthmus Zapotec, from her rural small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the number of speakers is dwindling rapidly. She also writes in Spanish in what she considers to be “mirror poems” rather than denotative translations of each other. 

In order to accommodate both versions in a single English version, translator Wendy Call sat with the author, Pineda, who explained just how each poem is shaped, and the kinds of word play that each has, and why. In investigating the differences, core ideas about the world and systems of knowledge came to light. For example, in Spanish, “En el vientre” means “in the belly.”  However, “Gueela” does not mean belly or intestines at all, but umbilical cord. Further, the umbilical cord is inextricably linked to the house where one was born, because, after birth, the umbilical cord is placed in a small pot, which is then buried under the house. 

The earth and the body have a unique connection that does not occur with the Spanish colonial impositional culture. The fact that the translator spent time to learn about the embedded beliefs and traditions, and to incorporate them into her English translation, and to explain the process in the preface, is a great contribution to the understanding of the Isthmus Zapotec culture and poetic output. The themes in the clusters of poems include the concept of the “guenda,” which is simultaneously spirit and animal. 

In “Sun,” reflects an animistic view of the world, where objects in the natural world can take on human traits, and then shape-shift back. Similarly, the crocodile’s eggs swim just as the observer’s mind opens to the fecundity of all things, and unbreakable (albeit not always visible) connections. 

An animist perception of the world is also apparent in a poem from the first cluster of poems, “Red Belt,” where the red ribbon wrapped around the narrator’s pregnant belly both adorns and protects.  The final cluster of poems, “From the Cord House to the Nine Handspans” incorporate the Isthmus Zapotec traditions while reflecting on the deep love the narrator has for Sebastian, in his journey through life, from the “[umbilical] cord house” where he was born, to the “nine handspans” (the grave, nine handspans below the surface of the earth). 

Knowing that Pineda is writing from her home in Mexico City, and lives in a kind of self-imposed exile from the cluster of Isthmus Zapotec speakers she grew up with, adds another level of loss and nostalgia. 

The Enduring Value of Linguistic Play: Thomas Fink and Maya Mason's Collaboration: A Pageant for Every Addiction

 It’s a remarkably cold and windy New Year’s Day, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than to sit with a small stack of Thomas Fink and Maya Mason’s playful and intelligent poems and let them take my mind wherever it wants to go.

I love the way their poems are an invitation to a dance: they spur a conversation with the future, the past, and the present.  I enjoy seeing how the anxieties of antecedents play out: one visual allusion leads to another, one set of topics and tropes leads to thinking of other authors, and so on. 

Sometimes this approach leads to specious connections and I wonder which corners of my mind produced them, which is something akin to finding YouTube has created “My Mix” that contains principally opera from Henry Purcell and Mexican rancheras performed by mariachi bands from the 1950s.  

Thomas Fink and Maya Mason. A Pageant for Every Addiction. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press. 2020. 77 pages.  ISBN: 978-0996991209

The cover art is what captivates first: It’s compelling, especially on a cold New Year’s Day when one is obliged to trot out one’s New Year’s Resolutions, even if they constitute little more than cleaning out a closet and ordering vegan protein supplements and Vitamin D on Amazon and “Favoriting” a morale-boosting podcast on YouTube. A man holds elongate objects in his hands (lumpy anise treats?) and a woman holds what appear to be $100 bills between her hands.  Multi-colored dots give the painting an effervescent, playful feel.

The first poem made me smile. “First Date Questions” – I could not even imagine anyone asking me such questions, but if some did, I would immediately pay attention. The questions move from the concrete to ones that are clearly playing with cultural assumptions, asking you to look at things in new ways:

… Don’t

you just hate when you reach the zoo,

          

and the zebras have been sent

out for cleaning?

I love the whimsy and way they ask one to consider the basis for our underlying mindsets:

I hate to think of

worms eating my

dog’s eyes; is that love?

The questions are a perfect form for a collaboration, and an ideal way to start a collection since they embody a kind of conversation.

Addictions are judgments. They are condemnations of sorts, and impugn the character of the addict, even if the addiction is to something as innocuous as hoarding blank journals. So, it is only fitting to see a poem entitled “You’re Morally Inferior If” and to see that each 4-line stanza contains at least one criterion upon which to judge and condemn a person.  They also made me smile.  Here are a few:

 

               you keep

               your fingernails long –

               rendering hands useless

 

or

 

               …. you

 

               buy two of the same

               necklace, you’re too

               sentimental to kill

               mere mouse.

As a geologist with a soft spot for paleontology, I was drawn to “Substitute Fossil,” wondering first, how fossils relate to addictions although I can easily envision a Fossil Pageant in the A Pageant for Every Addiction.

Fossils are fairly meaningless unless they are classified; fossils are not only remnants of the past, they are used to time-stamp a layer of the earth (formation), since many fossilized organisms lived in very defined spans of time.  Fossils then, invoke classification systems, and as such, naming and identity.

If you substitute fossils, it’s possible to completely subvert the entire classification system, and suddenly the system will have no connection to a stable time frame, orientation, or even meaning.

That’s exactly what is going on in “Substitute Fossil,” and it’s up to the reader to create a new set of relationships of time, meaning, connection.  If fossils are indicators, they can be both the alphabet and the syntax of meaning. If we substitute, we have the arbitrariness of classification laid bare:

… convict

our glad workhorses into gold

 

deficits – to

a new alphabet for potpourri to assum

maneaters of grammar castrate

the chairmen of prattle …

The final minimalist long poem, “A Few Promises” makes the reader smile with whimsy, sometimes schadenfreude:

“A staircase for

every stiletto”

…

“A straightjacket

for

every extrovert”

The verses incorporate professions, physical phenomena, and life forms. They also relate back to the realities of uncertainty, unpredictability, and gambling, including market plunges. They are not only promises to fulfill dreams, but also to solve problems (or even create them – “a shark for every bathtub”). 

In the end, the collection touches the experiences of readers and triggers one’s own “conversation” in a Bakhtinian, carnivalesque manner, while showing ways to restructure assumptions and gently subvert generic expectations.

 

Converging earth, body, and spirit in Mozambique: The work of Rudencio Morais

Off the coast of Mozambique, the Indian Ocean is a vast expanse of ultramarine blue and the sand hot enough to burn the bottoms of your feet if you are walking barefoot. There are rusted-out shipwrecks on some of the beaches, and white birds and white sails make spotless, bright patterns on the horizon.  The coastal towns parade their Portuguese cathedrals and schools for digital postcards for vagabonds with blogs when it was easy to travel, and the markets burgeon with fruit, shiny metal household items, and tables piled with whatever the vendor thinks people will buy. 

And through it all is a powerful, animating presence that is, in some places, so palpably present that it almost takes one’s breath away, especially as one hears in the strains of the kizomba and indistinguishable voices that float in on the ocean breezes. 

Further, the spirit blends with the spirits of the recent and distant historical past, impels people and objects in a way that breeches the interface between the material world of phenomena and the spiritual world of urge, drive, spirit, and dreams. The mystical meets the mysteries of the multiplicities of interpretive possibilities of geological processes. Simply put, the earth and the body converge.

Rudencio Morais, geologist and poet, works in Mozambique - the geographical location and the literary space - and creates bold texts that span genres and disciplines. 

Rudencio Morais, Mozambique

It is in this context that Morais constructs a powerful liminal space, exhaling and inhaling on the boundary between “what was” and “what is next.”  

O Murmurar dos Búzios & As Miudezas da Alma by Rudencio Morais

The magic of Quelimane. The first prose poem of Rudencio Morais’s magnificent collection of prose poems begins with the piece entitled “Quelimandando,” a verb that roughly translates to “Quelimaning” which was constructed from the name of the gorgeous coastal city, Qualimane.  I have never visited Quelimane, which provides a point of geographical reference in for the collection, which explore spirit, language, and material reality. My travels in Mozambique did not take me all the way to the northeast expanses of the country. I did, however, spend time in Beira, where the sea shells wash up onto the beaches, and the markets resemble the ones that Morais describes in his poems. 

The “buzios” in the title refer not only to the sea shells, but also the very popular method of divination referred to also as “buzios.” In this practice, four cowrie shells are cast, and the pattern they make is what indicates the answer to the question being asked. The shells themselves do not have any particular innate ability to foretell the future; they move in response to energy and vital forces.  In “Quelimane,” the vital forces emanate from the place itself, and Morais describes the sights, sounds, and feeling in a way that brings the invitation to open up portals to inner dimensions, and the place where language breaks down, and a new way of perceiving and creating meaning is forged. 

Eduardo Costley White (1963 – 2014). Born in Quelimane, Mozambique, Eduardo Costley White was awarded the Literary Figure of the Year award in 2001 by the Mozambican Press Association. A passage of his work appears, and in it White speaks directly to the spirits and invokes a divine possession, a passionate experience with primordial energy. Part divination and part mysticism, the poet brings to life the shells of words as he succumbs to the dark forces he has just invoked. One might think of the “poetes maudits” of fin-de-siecle France (Baudelaire comes to mind), or magical realism of the witch doctor scene in Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo.  But these are not allusions to altered states of mind or veiled political commentaries.  Instead, White equates the cowrie shell divination pieces to words, and in a powerful conflation of language, material reality (the cowrie shells).  Morais takes this as the divine portal through which he enters and then descends into a maelstrom of energy of creation and recreation. Here, the poet’s words have the power to not only shape meaning, but also to steer the course of destiny as decisions are made through the buzios, through the power of a throw of the spirit-guided shells and the shell/words.

Descending into the place from which buzios energy burns.  The first poems in the collection squarely confront the idea of a “physics of time” and they mull over how memories, the body, the passions, loves, and loss relate to each other.  The overall feeling is that of pain but also of wonderment, as memories and nostalgia compete with each other for the poet’s sense of reality. The struggle is to assign meaning – what did it mean? Why did it happen?  The love and its loss are still in a state of transition, and to capture exactly that state of being constitutes the essence of “buzios” energy. 

The teaching of the dead.  The power behind the casting of buzios is explored. The poet enters a hut where they invoke the energy for the buzios divination.  The shells give shape to the spirits of the dead that walk with us.  But, who and what are the “dead”?  The dead are those who left life behind, and the poem explores how they want to teach us about pain and the serious consequences of silence. In this poem, the dead also teach us how to wipe away our tears.

The Buzios. In this amazing poem, the poet participates in a Buzios ritual, first by entering into a spell, and then taking a terrifying journey with drum beats and messages from the dead. It is hot in the hut, with its burning wood, and there is a liquid to drink. Perhaps this is all a dream, but whether dream, vision, or lived reality, it represents transition, and also the fearful, physical effects that accompany a tearing off of the veil, the ripping away of the scales that may have covered one’s eyes and kept reality at bay. Reality is no longer the docile pet you play with when you’re feeling lonely. Reality is fire in the belly.

Seeing the people we have missed. In truly brilliant words, Morais writes that reality is a mosaic, and memories create wires that hold the pieces together and create the thoroughfares for emotion and love. Morais describes eating traditional sweets while the shells are thrown. The ancestors are present, and they fill the room with love. “Love never goes away,” states the poet. “It reinvents itself, and then simply regroups us and outfits us with the people in our lives.”

From hot to cold. The buzios – the cowrie shells thrown in divination – expand the possibilities of the world and meanings. The rituals take place in hot huts, with a poet on the verge of losing consciousness, or at least passing into a light faint. This is not sustainable. The poet needs the cold nights in which meanings shrink, the atmosphere is quiet, and hands turn whitish suggesting death, or at least cool, strange pause in the journey. 

The spirit is powerful in Mozambique, where the Indian Ocean takes its powerful offshore currents and either builds the hot sand beaches or transports away the sediments of the highly flood-prone rivers. 

The poems take the spirit of love and ask it why pain as instructive as the intense joy of union. The buzios spirit is that of ancestral love, and also the primordial love that is nature and creation; the very definition of life.  Morais, in each of his intense prose poems, describes states of being, and then the mechanisms to perceive and then reperceive; the mechanisms that poetry uses to infuse with language. The philosopher of language Ferdinand Saussure suggested that parole – the word – merges into langue – the language -- in a way that takes little building blocks of concepts and allows them to create a great river where communication takes place. In Buzios, Morais takes us into that river of divine communication, not only with the spirits of those who loved, but also for those who can and will love. 

Thoughts on Elements in Rochelle Owens’s Poem Series, “Patterns of Animus” Part 4 Carnal / Spiritual

Rochelle Owens is writing a multi-part poem, “Patterns of Animus,” which may, at the end of the day, be long enough for a book.  Owens, who has been a part of the poetry vanguard since the 1950s, is still producing innovative, philosophical, subversive work. 

Susan Nash and Rochelle Owens, November 2021

Patterns of Animus Part 4 Carnal / Spiritual takes quotes from Dostoyevsky ("How can you live and have no story to tell?") and the presence of a cosmic-level tapeworm as points of departure; together they posit an alternative mechanism for the functions of the universe. Instead of constantly expanding and growing, Owens introduces the notion of the tapeworm.  It’s interesting to think of the universe dominated by a tapeworm mechanism: parasitically feeding off the energy of its host, and ultimately killing the host (and thus, that part of the cosmos, or perhaps all of it) a postulated end of time, end of the universe. The tapeworm is greedy, eternally hungry, and ultimately grows to enormous size and length in the gut of its host. 

It's not unusual to see an ouroboros in literature, especially Medieval and Renaissance literature, where the snake swallowing its tail causes the snake to metamorphose into another snake with completely different patterns and aspect. The ouroboros had symbolic significance in Ancient Egypt and denoted the transmigration of souls.  For medieval and Renaissance writers who delved into topics of alchemy and mystical practices, the ouroboros represented the transformation of worthless substances into gold. The tapeworm is a kind of anti-ouroboros, capable of sucking in, but instead of entering a sheltering, warm womb, nothing grows, and nothing transforms itself into something else. The tapeworm devours without producing anything except an insatiable hunger. The tapeworm eventually kills the host by completely coopting the digestive system. Anything eaten feeds the tapeworm. Nothing is left over for the pitiful and pitiable host. The image that comes to mind is of a cow in a field, ribs and hipbones protruding, looking like a skeleton draped with hide. The cow is eating grass, chewing, chewing, and chewing, trying to curb her hunger – ultimately a lethal hunger, because the more she eats, the more she feeds the tapeworm. The tapeworm would be a comfortable metaphor for consumer culture, but in Rochelle’s hands, its vaster, horror-inducing, and perfectly sublime (as described by Edmund Burke). 

As an essential cosmological mechanism and unseen presence in the universe, Owens’s construction of the tapeworm opens the mind up to really intriguing (and horrific) ideas and images. First, one might say that the mechanism is appropriate – after all, we have detected the presence of black holes.  What if they are simply mouths of the multiple tapeworms that riddle the universe? They suck up the energy. We have mathematically explained it with models in astrophysics that suggest that stars expand but only to a point, and then they implode. I don’t understand how the extreme gravitational pull is explained by physics. I thought one had to have a tremendous amount of mass in order to have a gravitational pull. Perhaps the mass is there, but is in a long-term process of compression and collapse, and perhaps that is what drags in the nearby “nutrients” (light, moving objects, etc.).  How would that process relate to a tapeworm? A tapeworm has two orifices: the gaping mouth that ushers nutrients into its “filthy maw” (to quote Spenser in The Faerie Queene), and its back orifice, its anus.  Perhaps there are eruptions in the cosmos that correlate to the tapeworm mechanism’s outpourings of waste products. I don’t know. It’s a fascinating, mind-expanding mental exercise to envision it. 

In Owen’s study, next to the computer where she works on her poems, there is a window that provides a view of a corner and a lovely little tree, which Rochelle has observed with concern and outpourings of well wishes for its health.  She also has a Merck’s manual which contains a lengthy entry on tapeworms. 

There is an essential horror in the concept of a massive cosmic tapeworm. It makes the Dune sandworms look like Silly String. Intrusive thought -  Do you remember Silly String?  I don’t know if it is still being manufactured – it was something you would spray from a can, and it would come out as thin strings of plastic.  I’m not sure what the entertainment value really was, but I remember being in a Silly String war. It was fun to spray over plants as a kind of decoration. It was probably toxic and highly flammable.  I am just guessing, though. 

I can imagine Owens’s cosmic tapeworm as a fundamental, thumpingly insistent expression of a rap song, with its dark chord progressions and even darker lyrics. The yawning, filthy mouth, the devourer of its host is actually a pretty good metaphor for the dark songs of classic 1990s group Tool as well. I don’t know what that genre of rock is called, but it definitely fills one with existential gloom, and at times, horror. 

 

Still Life: Rochelle Owens

A brilliantly clear day in Philadelphia

Susan Smith Nash, photo by Rochelle Owens

Interview with Edward Cavazos, LingoLet -- Technology Innovations in E-Learning Series

Artificial intelligence is transforming many aspects of elearning as edge computing, cloud access, and speed dramatically improve. Welcome to an interview with Edward Cavazos, LingoLet, and learn how real-time translation and remote simultaneous interpretation are expanding capabilities in elearning and training. 

What is your name and your background? 

Edward Cavazos, VP Sales Operations

32 years within the language industry, focused on technology delivery platforms for communication in spoken language, Sign Language, content creation, multilingual staffing, supporting e-learning companies with translations, interpreters, translators, instructors, monitors, and facilitators.

Edward Cavazos

What is your history with artificial intelligence?

It is only over the last 5 years AI has evolved to be called intelligence and today seen as Artificial Intelligence. The Ai has evolved from speech to text, text to speech, AI transcription of documents, AI of audio files, AI interpreter a two-way communication of one spoken language to another transcribed or spoken. AI is used today in events where attendees in a language or multiple languages can access their language video channel and see the spoken word texted in their language.

What is your experience with elearning platforms? 

Our involvement is to partner and engage with elearning companies who have platform where we provide the necessary language resources and capabilities needed for the project.

How is AI used in e-learning now?  what are the advantages?

AI is not for all projects, but where the training may be general and where the communication is at 93% as acceptable then it can be of value to the client and to those embracing AI to deliver the information in language. 

The advantage is cost savings and the turnaround time of having what is needed in place when there is a short window to complete the project, or where no interpreter(s) are available to support the project.

What do you think will happen in the short and medium-term in e-learning, especially as it relates to AI?

Here is what my crystal ball states. Embrace it, learn what exist, and see how it can be part of the solution for your client and potential clients. Enterprise organization want to work with companies who lead with technology and support with human components as needed. Business is changing and those in the elearning or any business working with organizations needs to educate themselves on AI technology as a solution.

What is Lingolet? 

We are a technology software company focused in the language industry supporting companies needing technology to deliver, communicate, and to access language communication for their markets, clients, customers. Where technology is the vehicle that drives the services needed to meet client’s communication needs in language.

How does LingoLet work, and how does it relate to elearning? 

Lingolet developed the AI features not to replace linguists, interpreters, translators, they will ALWAYS be needed. Lingolet made a decision to lead the way by giving companies options of using and integrating AI technology as part of their immediate communication needs, to become  more efficient and responsive, streamlining process, versus waiting for a human(s) to facilitate the communication to move things forward

How does this relate to elearning? 

In the traditional way, we still provide the human resources needed to support the project, provide the translation of content, provide linguist via the web or in person. 

In the Artificial Intelligence way, I’m not sure if elearning companies are ready to embrace and present this as part of the capabilities?  Let’s give the audience and opportunity to speak to this question.

Please recommend a book or two. 

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim – Renee Mauborgne

You, Inc. by Burke Hedges “Discover the CEO within you.

Please visit the E-Learn Chat interview with Ed Cavazos here: 

https://youtu.be/3jYLVqXlKB4

What Is Art? Bob Ross and Mary Cassatt

I was listening to a discussion of the recent documentary on the life and work of Bob Ross. He is the painter who painted all the "happy little trees" and liked it when a slip of the brush or paint drippings created "happy accidents." He was a practitioner of the "wet on wet" technique of oil painting that would allow a person to complete a painting in around 30 minutes. He was not an academically trained painter; he learned to paint through a television series after he retired from the Air Force, where he spent much of his time in Alaska.  Alaska gave him a deep appreciation of mountains and other bucolic, tranquil scenes. 

Critics routinely savage Bob Ross. They attack him for being sentimental and formulaic, and that there are no deep ideas behind his paintings, just a shallow, uninteresting set of visual cliches designed to make people feel that all is good in the world, and there is no reason to examine, interrogate, or question life. His work is not subversive, at least not overtly so. 

It's interesting about how and when critics attack artists for being too "commercial" or sentimental. I think that the early Impressionists were not universally admired or embraced, especially those who painted in "plein aire" -- taking their oils out into the outdoors and painting quickly. I think it's similar to what Bob Ross did, except the brush techniques, the color palette, and the subjects were different. Mary Cassatt comes to mind. Many of her paintings were done in "plein aire" -- "Poppies in a Field (1880)" comes to mind. It's not a landscape per se - it has children in it, but it has bright colors and to look at it gives one a happy feeling (to quote Bob Ross).

Mary Cassatt - Poppies in a Field (1880)

Is Mary Cassatt controversial or subversive?  She was classically and academically trained, and from a wealthy family. She moved to France to pursue painting -- so, her formation alone differentiate her from the way that Bob Ross learned how to paint. She was quite literate, where as Bob Ross dropped out of high school at age 14, but presumably had a GED given that he was in the Air Force.

But, how might Mary Cassatt be considered great and Bob Ross considered kitsch?  We can say that Bob Ross is making a visual commentary on the Hudson River school such as Thomas Cole and the landscape artists such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt who painted the American West -- with the sense of romantic vastness. 

Thomas Cole - The Oxbow (1836)

The answer might be not just in the technique, but in the philosophical underpinnings that inform the paintings. Bob Ross paints to elicit an emotion (happiness) while painters such as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt painted from the Romantic spirit of the day; Romanticism as a philosophical construct that seeks extremes of emotion (awe, the sublime), a sense of the vast, unknowable states of being and universal order (or chaos), and finally, the concept of human liberty. That said, would a painter who seeks to evoke tranquility be automatically relegated to "kitsch"? Sometimes the differentiator is a commercial motive: Bob Ross worked to sell his books and art supplies. But, how many Romantic painters worked on commission? Here we can see one differentiator - Kitsch is intended for mass markets; Romantics painted for a more rarified audience, seeking the seal of approval by various academies or institutions.

But, to return to the idea of a visual "conversation" with an artistic forebear, it's interesting to compare the choice of colors - the palette - of Bob Ross versus that of the 19th century landscape artists. Bob Ross's paintings are often considered "pretty" or even "beautiful," while aspects of the Romantics could be considered "stunning" or even terrifying. He is making a commentary of sorts. The same be said of Mary Cassatt -- she is making a visual commentary on paintings such as Jean-Francois Millet's The Gleaners (1857).

Jean-Francois Manet - The Gleaners (1857)

Manet subverted generic expectations by including the poor and working class. She subverted yet again generic expectations by incorporating children of the upper middle class, playing in poppies. The children are not cherubs or angels, as in religious paintings, nor are they the infant Jesus or saints as infants. That in itself makes them rather unique -- plein aire -- spontaneous depictions of every day life, and a heightened kind of realism that makes experience, or the recollection of one's experience, more glorious and joyous each time one recollects it.

The Smithsonian's American History Museum accepted the donation of four Bob Ross paintings, along with memorabilia. One of those paintings was displayed, after the Smithsonian even hosted a Bob Ross painting class featuring one of the Bob Ross, Inc. instructors. The concept of having a school of painting and many practitioners is oddly evocative of the Italian Renaissance, and more specifically, of Michelangelo, Titian, and Donatello, except that the painters paint to achieve a mood rather than to produce a mood (thinking of religious awe or later, the Romantics' "blessed mood" (Wordsworth) or the "sublime" (Edmund Burke). But, more on that later!