4 posts tagged “work”
The title quote is from Stuart Brown who, to mark the end of summer vacation, writes, on the ever-stimulating New York Times Happy Days blog, about the importance of play in the widest sense. As he relates, play (together with its close relatives art and music) is being systematically pushed out of schools. It’s easy to squeeze it out of our adult lives, too. I suppose the trouble is that “play” has a frivolous sound to it, and we think of it as the opposite of, or down time from, “work” and all that is important and necessary in life. With so much work to be done, no wonder it seems expendable.
“Many people,” writes Brown, “have had the experience of coming back from vacation brimming with new ideas for work.” Me included. Yesterday I returned from a short holiday in a faraway land, and this morning I found myself writing pages of material for a long-thought-about and never-begun book on language learning. I don’t know why driving long distances through the Australian bush, seeing Aboriginal cave paintings, and dining under southern hemisphere stars led to this, but it did.
This morning I heard the voices of a large group of children passing by the house in noisy, boisterous mode. It must have been a school field trip of some kind, and they were having a wonderful time. The children were at elementary school, where there are still plenty of non-academic elements in the school day. If you want an alternative to play-free education, one of the comments (#11) under Brown’s article reminds us: “Stop by your local Waldorf/Steiner school to see play, outdoor time, art, music and organized physical movement used in the teaching of subjects from math to history. It’s lovely to see a child who isn’t afraid of the rain!”
--Julian
—David
If you went by most novels written today, the only things humans do is fall in love and, occasionally, murder one another - whereas, of course, what they really do is go to the office and sleep. The office lends us an identity: we only need to look at our business cards to confirm that we are (let's say) a marketing unit senior manager rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe....
Office work distracts us, it focuses our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it gives us a sense of mastery, it makes us respectably tired, it puts food on the table. It keeps us out of greater trouble."
Alain de Botton in The Guardian (The whole short, wry, wonderful observation is here)
--Julian (who, having recently retired, is enjoying the fleeting insight into being a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. And who will endeavor to keep out of trouble.)
I always told my students at Davis that they should read all the major poets in the English language from the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English on - it's not that huge a body of work. Just do it. And then become acquainted with continental poetry in translation and in one or more languages that you have learned to read. Look at the great poetic traditions of India and East Asia. And look at the songs and poems that pre-date the invention of writing. That's for starters.
(From an interview with Snyder conducted by Pam Jung and posted here.)
When I was in my twenties, my mentor Jazuo Watanabe told me that because I was not going to be a teacher or a professor of literature, I would need to study by myself. I have two cycles: a five-year rotation, which centers on a specific writer or thinker; and a three-year rotation on a particular theme. I have been doing that since I was twenty-five. I have had more than a dozen of the three-year periods. When I am working on a single theme, I often spend from morning to evening reading. I read everything written by that writer and all of the scholarship on that writer’s work.
If I am reading something in another language, say Eliot’s Four Quartets, I spend the first three months reading a section such as “East Coker” over and over again in English until I have it memorized. Then I find a good translation in Japanese and memorize that. Then I go back and forth between the two — the original in English and the Japanese translation — until I feel I am in a spiral that consists of the English text, the Japanese text, and myself. From there Eliot emerges.
(From a Paris Review interview with Oe, a snippet of which I found here.)
--David
