Toward a compositional walk/run program

After 17 years of flaccid inactivity I began a walk/run program last week: 60 seconds jogging, 90 seconds walking, repeat 7 times for a total of 8 minutes jogging. The goal is to ease “adult onset athletes” into an active lifestyle with so much emotional and physical cushioning that we barely notice how we’ve begun to enjoy something that we supposedly hated.

And it occurred to me: why don’t we ease our students into writing the same way? Students come to FYC courses with the same feelings about writing I had about running: I’m terrible at it, my teachers thought I was hopeless, everyone around me is so much better. In the past, I often responded to these concerns callously, telling students the academic equivalent of no pain, no gain.

In running, at least, it is pretty clear that pain causes no gain: all the research I have read in the last week calls it far likelier for an amateur athlete to over-exercise, to become tired, frustrated, injured. I wonder to what extent my years of immersive writing instruction, pushing students to churn out 40 pages a month, led to the compositional equivalent of these responses.

What, though, is the compositional equivalent of walking?

Paris by limplight

Eleven months ago I threatened a flood of posts about my Pariscation. I intend to publish one post per year until I can afford to return.

The Tour de Franceophiles among you know that Paris is paved not with passion but with cobblestones. The cobblestone has several engineering advantages: it shifts flexibly with changes in humidity and temperature, it slows Paris’s frenetic traffic, and it has an air of old-timeyness that loosens tourists’ hold on their wallets.

Cobblestone is also a blasted holy horror to walk on.

My first day walking Paris, mere hours after I arrived, I stubbed my right foot near the Parc Monceau, cobbling my shin and leaving me with a piratical limp for the rest of the trip.

There may be a few lessons to learn from my Parisian peg-leg—forgo rigid-soled Rockports in favor of a shoe more forgiving of uneven bricks, and don’t walk like an American.

But there was also an unseen advantage to the limper’s tour of Paris: hobbling myself that first day forced me to go more slowly and deliberately than my otherwise nervous personality would allow, and made me familiarize myself with the benches of Paris. Paris—actual Paris, its nooks and neighborhoods—is a city of watchers, and in parks the folks sitting on benches are Parisian: the tourists are too busy racing about and stubbing their toes.

I sat hours in parks in nearly every arrondissement I visited. I loved the Parc de Monceau with its joggers and teens, the Square Louis XVI with its retirees and bored businessmen, le Jardin Catherine Labouré across the street from the Prime Minister’s home with its young chic couples and young chic kids.

Perhaps my favorite bench of them all was in a tiny little square at the corner of Rue Vielle du Temple and Rue des Blanc Manteaux on the edge of the IIe and the IVe, a tiny playground near the Archives Nationales that felt like the heart of the city: children in beautiful clothes whirling about like kids anywhere, light traffic audible from the busy places to the south, and the overhead hum of birds and laughter. There is no way I would have spent two lunches there had I not been so frustrated by my limp and needful of leg-rest.

For Certain Tourists

When I decided to visit Paris for 10 days of summertime lollygagging, I did what comes naturally to a grad student with too much unstructured time: I began researching les halles out of it.

European travel is a deeply classed thing, about as far from a human right as a good local pâtisserie to the American way of thinking. And so LUXE Paris differs from The Rough Guide to Paris more in branding than content: every travel writer assumes you need two pages explaining the virtues of the Louvre, and that perhaps you’re interested to learn that the Tour Eiffel was built for the World’s Fair of 1889, commemorating the centenary of the Revolution.

Perhaps this die-cast method of guide editing is the clearest marker that guide-readers are first-time visitors seeking a Paris Experience nearly identical to those their aunts and great-aunts had in prior generations. And like any earnestly self-conflicted student of the humanities I simultaneously reject and desire this mimetic Paris Experience. I’m exactly the sort of consumer who will scoff at the Lonely Planet Paris City Guide one afternoon but happily buy the identical Lonely Planet Paris City Guide app that evening.

But the issue runs deeper than cookie-cutter guides: the problem confronting the self-hating tourist lies in defining what it means to experience a city.

Must the tourist have walked the Route des Iles in the Bois de Vincennes? must he have eaten at l’As du Falafel? Tourism by obligation is a matter of mere ranking: if Musée de l’Orangerie > Musée Marmottan then you do the first and skip the second.

The practice of tourism by assimilation is centered on the performance of authentic local behavior—c’est à dire behavior the visitor has been taught to understand as authentic: snubbing a beautiful afternoon by reading Kristeva in the windowless inner room of the Café de Flore, par exemple. The assimilatourist will rent an apartment, frequent two cafés and un resto, and return home with an experience of an experience rather than a sense of the city.

Somewhere between these extremes lies the etymological tourist, practicing a tourism of movement (tours, from Gr. tórnos: a turn). The tourer has the advantage of Paris on the neighborhood scale, a semi-authentic experience qua flâneur, and a partial mapping of the city’s physical and social spaces.

This, in any case, is my theory.

In coming posts, I’ll assemble the Paris tourer’s guide I had to cobble together from diverse sources. This includes travel and tourist lit, history podcasts, and walking equipment sufficiently lubricious to ease the pudgy academic’s amorous entry into Paris afoot.

Wait, when did I subscribe to this blog?

I’ve always thought about dormant blogs with something of the same procrastinatory fondness of giving a student an extension: I’ll have one fewer paper in the weekend grading pile, and there’s always a chance it won’t come in at all. And so I’m always a little annoyed when a pleasantly dormant blogger rudely begins publishing again, unsettling the balance of readerly obligations I’ve finely engineered.

For the next few days I’ll here bloviate about the planning and execution of a trip to Paris. I promise I won’t be offended if you take the occasion to unsubscribe. (If you’d prefer that I be offended, let me know and I’ll do what I can.)

Et al., et cet.

One of the great pleasures of working in the Writing Center is having the opportunity to experience how students approach academic writing for the first time. Watching talented students stumble over comparatively easy rules—et al for et al., “Quotatation”. for “Quotation.”—reminds me every day how arbitrarily academics have settled questions of style.

Incidentally, why do we continue to write et al. in Latin? Is and others somehow demeaning—do collaborators feel fancier in an abbreviation from a dead language? Why not reduce the Latin to its typographic equivalent—(Jones& 2004)—or simply to a +?

In a perverse way, these students’ struggles have convinced me to write my current chapter not in my usual belletristic prose (in my advisor’s generous characterization), but in a prose accessible to any slob unlucky enough to pick it up.

There is a feeling of risk to this exercise.

A quick note on the neuroscience of reading

I’m sure it has been noted before, but Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007) makes a persuasive defense of literary instruction. The goal, she writes, is to transform fluent readers into expert readers:

If a common letter pattern or a word like “bear” appears to an expert reader, it will trigger its own network, rather than individually activating the large number of unrelated individual cells responsible for the lines, diagonals, and circles within its letters. This operating principle is the working example of the biological maxim “Cells that fire together stay together,” and is the brain’s basic tool for creating ever larger circuits that connect cell assemblies into a system of networks distributed across the entire brain. (146.)

The more networks the reader has, the more quickly s/he can read a text. More importantly, synaptic networks make the reading process more efficient, saving brain space for higher-order intellectual work—inference, analysis, critical evaluation, and the other skills we are desperate to teach our students and to practice ourselves.

If the goal is to make expert readers, literature has two advantages over other sources—online or professional, say. First, literary writing is with few exceptions richer in analytical and inferential material than other kinds of writing. Second, literary writing promotes sympathetic reading in a way that other kinds of writing often cannot.

Those two advantages are topics Wolf discusses, but there is a third that I think her review implies: literary writing rewards and often requires rereading, which I would assume would make a reader more expert.

I can’t help but wonder if we should use some of those valuable hours at the beginning of an intro lit course reviewing the science of reading. If that class is the last literature course a student ever takes, oughtn’t it make a strong case for the medical and ethical value of reading?

Is that an author photo you see before you?

We found a mossy staircase leading to a short quay on Orcas Island, and I couldn’t resist. Sadly, I had neither my leather bomber jacket nor my pipe at the time.