Author: Christopher Patton

I write curate teach & blog in & from Toronto, Canada.

On Socratic method

Just quick, it’s late, and I’ve a torrent to watch. Witch.

I was made sad beyond all reasonable bound by a student’s complaint. “He has a great sense of humour but he doesn’t teach.” Someone I admired and respected so was open to feeling hurt by.

I guess in a sense she was right. You know that guy Obama? Whom I aspire to be when I grow up? And who got mocked for saying something about leading from behind? I sort of teach like that. Want you to be your own teacher, and poke you till you find it.

Times I want to say, some students, smart and shallow, young and coddled, they aren’t up for being poked. Entitled brats.

Times I want to say, it’s me fucked up, poked when I had no okay to, missed the cues, all my bad. (I’m leaving out all the lovely times it went bitchin’ fine.)

Seems to me, as of this now, it’s neither this nor that.

There’s no telling how the combos, one person and another, or 20, are going to work it out. We like to think our sciences can say, but no.

All there is, is, I do my most honourable best, you do your most honourable best. And if we fail to meet – no harm, no foul, okay?

I like to think, when I’m feeling sympathique to Plato, that that’s a premise to all his dialogues (just as all his dialogues are together a premise to all our universities). If we fail to meet, no harm, no foul, okay?

It happens to the best of stars, too. They fly on.

The bit I’ve put in my syllabus newly, with that student’s, and another’s, negations in mind.

I work by Socratic method. I ask questions meant to sharpen distinctions, shed light on unexamined premises, and enhance a student’s own capacity for inquiry. It’s a messy, improvisational process that sometimes falls flat and makes everyone (me included) feel awkward. Sometimes it looks sort of inefficient. And yet it’s the oldest teaching method we have (older than the university, as an institution, itself) and has survived this long for a reason. It makes the student her own teacher.

If it causes discomfort sometimes that’s why. Or I think so anyway. Being asked to be your own teacher is not easy or comfortable.

They’re growing more tender by the year. What’s the bearing we need to meet them rightly and kindly? I want not to do harm – want also, not to let up.

Our sickened discourse

This is what sickens our discourse. A small instance of it. I was asking me, how can I get excited about Clinton, since she’s the one now. And I thought, Warren for VP, a Clinton–Warren ticket, now that I could get excited about.

Next thought, Is the country ready for that, two women, oh boy I dunno.

Most of the world, it wouldn’t be no insuperable thing. Indira Ghandi. Golda Meir. Margaret Thatcher. Corazon Aquino. Benazir Bhutto. Dilma Rousseff. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. And those are just ones (in)famous enough to come quick to mind. (From one to two, okay, sure, but. No great leap in mind.)

Here in this backwater superpower though. Here, for a woman to have won through to major candidacy is huge. And I’m glad for it, lots, though I could wish for another individual than her. (I sense in there a good person. Don’t think she’s sold her soul but subdivided and mortgaged the parcels.)

So I wasn’t insulting women, folks, I was insulting America. If you want to get mad at me, that’s okay, but get mad for the right thing.

A senator made the mistake of asking the same completely reasonable question. Is the country “ready for” a two-woman ticket? And got shouted back into place for it. From Politico:

Sen. Jon Tester on Tuesday walked back controversial comments he made last week about voters possibly being unready for an all-female presidential ticket.

Tester (D-Mont.), chairman of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, said he “wasn’t thinking” last week when asked if Elizabeth Warren would make a good running mate for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“I’ve never had a position against her. She’d make a great running mate, absolutely,” he said today.

Conservative research group America Rising seized on Tester’s earlier comments in an email blast today questioning whether Democratic Senate candidate Maggie Hassan, current governor of New Hampshire, would denounce the “sexist statement.”

Tester said his response to a question from reporter Todd Zwillich last week about the possibility of a Clinton-Warren ticket — “Is the country ready for two women? I don’t know” — was “totally off the cuff.”

“Is the country ready for two women?” = “Is there still enough silent bias or kneejerk sexism lingering in the electorate to doom a two-woman ticket?”

The insult wasn’t to the women, or to women, but to the country.

When discourse gets choked off like this – when in a momentary lapse of self-monitoring a politician expresses directly a sincere thought and is slammed for it and made to walk it back – it’s got several pernicious effects.

One, politicians get that much better at slippy speech that says nothing.

Two, we get that much more disheartened by the emptiness of their discourse.

Three, a demagogue like Donald Drumpf gets that much more compelling. He’s renounced self-monitoring, brags he speaks off the cuff, is proud silly to offend.

We are so tired of monitored speech that we will, some of us, fly to any speech with spontaneity in it – it sounds a bit like the meaning we’re starved for.

With the cadences of a hypnotist and the patter of a carnival huckster to boot he “tells it like it is.” His monstrous eructations have a quality of life to them, an aliveness. It’s terrible. If we had a healthy political discourse, in which leaders could say what they think, Drumpf would pose no temptation.

The sort of smackdown Tester got helps make a Drumpf possible.

O my students. Campus discourse isn’t separate from this. Every act of silencing or censorship or imposition of correct thinking sends energy by secret karmic channels to a Drumpf rally somewhere in the country.

When did the Left become the superego and the Right the id?

How did that effing even happen?

The image atop is from a papyrus scroll containing Plato’s Phaedrus. A subtle freewheeling wideranging dialogue 2000+ years old that anticipates many – all? – of the questions we’re facing here about rhetoric, representation, misprision, the manipulation of affection.

Plus it’s got – I swear it’s true – a joke along the lines of, Is that a scroll in your toga, or are you just happy to see me?

Teaching a bit of it two weeks hence to my Editing and Publishing class.

Here endeth the interlude.

I write still working to process two unsettlements. One, an article in the New Yorker that leads with a petition in which students at my alma mater (Oberlin) accuse the college of perpetuating, under the cover of “equity, inclusion, and diversity,” the same old regime of “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and … cissexist heteropatriarchy.” (Here’s the response from Oberlin’s president, Martin Krislov.)

Other, and prior, a similar document presented by the Student Assembly for Power and Liberation to the president of Western Washington University, where I teach, calling for, among other things, the creation of a College of Power and Liberation, and

the creation and implementation of a 15 persxn paid student committee, The Office for Social Transformation, to monitor, document, and archive all racist, anti- black, transphobic, cissexist, misogynistic, ablest, homophobic, islamophobic, xenophobic, anti-semitism, and otherwise oppressive behavior on campus.

If I read the document correctly, this body would be empowered to dismiss any and all faculty, on the basis of a “three-strike disciplinary system.” (Can’t find the full text of the response from Western’s president, Bruce Shepherd, but excerpts here.)

Links cuz the answer to what upsets you ain’t to silence it.

Occam’s Razor 2016

Celebrated the launch of Occam’s Razor with its faithful dedicated brilliant editorial staff this evening. Wow they done good. So proud of them.

I’m faculty advisor, which in some situations might mean doing lots, but here’s mostly meant saying, “you, go be you; oh and keep a style sheet.”

Soon, a link to the online issue, in all its glory. For now, a TOC to titillate or intimidate you – maybe both – and brief remarks I made at a podium.

Check these Western moves out.

  • The Beneficence of Gayface
  • Domestic Violence Lethality Assessment Screening
  • The Historical Biogeography of Phototropic Consortium
  • Perspectivalism and Blaming
  • Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: Cause to Treatment
  • Deterministic Chaos: Applications in Cardiac Electrophysiology

And what I thought to say, or close to it.

Ockham’s Razor. Called a razor because it shaves away the excess, the unnecessary. Named for William of Ockham, a medieval Scholastic theologian whose shapeliness of mind may still be of help to us.

An early form of his razor goes like this. “Plurality must never be posited without necessity.” Got that?

Or – other things being equal, the simpler explanation is the better one.

Or – don’t add entities to your story of what happened you don’t have to.

For instance, when your iPhone stops working for no reason you know, you could blame leprechauns for it, but you don’t, because that would be extra.

In other words – cut through bullshit, your own or another’s, as best you can, in every way you can.

The world is complex enough; don’t add needless complications.

The more complications you cut through, the more the magnificent complexity of the life we share here together steps out.

And these guys get that. Their work shines forth their understanding of it. Look at this cover, at the edge of this cloudbank here. It’s complex. Puffs and crannies. And you know that if you zoomed up to it, it would be just as complex, six inches from your face. Wisps and droplets.

The only way that works – the only way complexity can resound like that – is when everything unnecessary has been let fall away. Look at this design. Clouds and empty space and a pebble moon. Complexity meets simplicity, and right at that edge, there’s life, and light.

Anyway, heeding Ockham’s principle, I’m going to be brief.

Does this journal matter? Is it more than just a needless complication?

I think it is. I think it does. Students at Western are doing some phenomenal work in their classes, their research, their independent projects. And all too often it gets handed in, graded, filed away, forgotten. No one in their class sees it – let alone other students in their department, other departments, other colleges.

I think of Occam’s Razor as the geekiest coffee shop on earth. It’s the place where the papers and projects that otherwise might not meet come together, share the same space, relax a little, caffeinate a little, share their intelligence with each other. Calculus chills with social science methodology. Cultural studies flirts with chaos theory.

Geeky coffee shop, or, the university, remembering why it came to be. There are no grades in these pages, no student learning outcomes, no bureaucracy of any sort. This is inquiry not institution. Curious, restless, meticulous.

I’m honoured and grateful to have been a small part of it.

Spider-chastening

I want to affirm for reasons I maybe only partly understand something President Obama said today to graduating students at Rutgers.

Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science – these are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy… In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.

Affirm it because I may want soon here to try to understand the draw of Drumpf. He poses a grave danger and the danger’s got to be understood. And I think for me, understanding it, how he draws so many in, means going to what’s irrational and tribal and hungry for authority in me. What feels worn down by liberal piety and wants to be told its first thought’s okay after all.

I’m a poet and believe in a beauty outside the precincts of the rational. That’s a bound on Obama’s statement, one I think he’d assent to. Irrational, arational, supra-rational.

I’m also a Buddhist, and that’s meant finding the whole range of human goodness and depravity in my own breast. I don’t get to say the bad shit’s out there. To understand Drumpf I need to look at some ugly right in here.

I want us to be governed by compassionate reasonable people. We deserve to be. After all we’ve been through, some of us more than, we all deserve to be.

Don’t take any thoughtplay to come to mean otherwise.

Just want to bring light into dark corners. Mine own. Spider-chasing.

Belatedly he feels the bern

Walking home from the beer store it came to me. I’m voting for Sanders in the primary. I so did not see that coming.

Symbolic, I know Clinton1 is going to win, but still it matters somehow.

I really don’t much like her. Was going to hold my nose and vote for her just the same. She’s better rounded and worlds more pragmatic. She’ll get shit done, and most of said shit will be, at least domestically, more good than not, these fingers cross. What Sanders wants, I love and love him for, but he’s wildly unrealistic. Heaps of sympathetic economists concur. And he ain’t too very strong on facts beyond these murkin’ borders – and that, a little, turns internationalist me off.

What shifted it for me? Three thoughts fell, feather-light, to the floor.

He’s a better person than she is.2

His values align better with mine.

Most quadrennia, he’d be the weaker general election candidate, but this time round he’s stronger. And keeping Drumpf from power is the vital matter.

So, Bernie, you have me.

1. Am I fussy to be bothered by the sexism in her so often being called Hillary? It’s not like we need to distinguish her from Bill. Sanders’s advocates call him Bernie, yes, Drumpf’s fans skeptics and detractors call him The Donald, but Clinton is called Hillary rather more generally, by commentators assuming neutrality. Same phenom I see among students who call male authors by last name, female by first.

2. I know how problematic such a thing is to say. But it’s the form the thought came in and so I set it down in that form. I’m totally into authenticity. If I subscribed to Drumpfism, and never second-guessed my most base impulse, this footnote’d be fired.3

3. Some day in the future, when daring, a post on the liberation I think Drumpf seems to offer. Something to do with id energy uncensored by a super-ego. Something to do with a counter-swing from the sort of impulse-control of which President Obama – may blessings rain down upon him – is an acme.4

4. A complexity here. The counter-swing to Drumpf is a racist swing – from a scarily other president to a reassuring xenophobic anglo-puffball. And some of the anxiety around Obama is that he doesn’t plug into any familiar racialist narrative around American black men. He’s no animal. He don’t even talk black. He speaks Harvard. (Or Yale? I get those two confused. Went to Oberlin and worried more about the difference between tofu and tempeh.)

No wonder white trash find him condescending. That’s where you’re left when the back-and-forth of projection and introjection runs out of juice.

“White trash.” Well now that was asshole of me. I’m going to leave it, cuz I think Drumpf, his upwelling from the deeps of ‘Murka’s psyche, if it has value, it’s that he exposes the tribalism we’re all of us given to.

Myself too. “White trash” the surfacing of an ineradicable tribalism. I’m white and don’t want to be that white.

That’ll be the next post maybe – tribalism, rationalism. We all still do us-and-them, folks. We do it by skin colour, we do it by creed, we do it, here in Bellingham,  by bumper sticker. You might have time, before I get to it, to read Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which lays out how Hume and Voltaire lead to Hitler, Hollywood, and our present bind.

“Return of the repressed.” What you repress returns, doublestrong.

That includes, repress the repressor. Trump’s our asshole, and that’s hardly even a metaphor. He’s America’s id, unrepressed but constipated.

Mother’s Day, a hard day

Mother’s Day’s a hard day for me. My mother and I have been estranged for some years. We’ve started talking a bit by e-mail recently, and that’s good, but this day’s still tough, even with all my humanistic skepticism re: the greeting card–industrial complex.

So I did what I usually do when something tough comes up. In no particular order. Meditated. Neglected the dishes. Wrote in my journal. Cut myself some slack. Stared into space thinking/feeling. Neglected a pile of grading. Pulled some weeds. Chitchatted with neighbours passing.

The journal writing (nothing very new vis-a-vis my mother) (inner mother and outer mother) (a distinction for another post) (one maybe never to be writ) (curious? buy my poetry!) after photocopy mojo looks like this.

Mother's Day
Click on me for some up close face time.

Veiled, I know. Do I want you to put the work into decipherment? Ish. Confession, I swing madly between nutshell-to-others and severe overshare. Seriously – I mean no glib appropriation here – I’m close to the spectrum on this one. Can’t figure out the norms, read the signals, can only see the shudder or shoulder-turn when I’ve overstepped.

With that proviso – maybe proof of the point it makes – I’ll for once give the source text of the aasemic text above.

8 May.

Mother’s Day. Not ever an easy day. With the chime of an email arriving came in quick succession—dread of an email from my mother tearing into me for not writing sooner or in a better way—shame, at that feeling—and, a thought, the connection is broken for good isn’t it. As to that shame: thought later: wherefore? The feeling (dread) verifies itself. I mean I would not feel it if I had never had reason to feel it. So—I thought later working at weeding—instead of shame, maybe, sadness. That I think is what comes in when the shame steps aside a little—sadness, for me, for her too, in the grip of she knew not what———.

I want to affirm three friends, all mothers, who’ve borne me up today.

One, Beth Thomas, an old friend from New York, who told the truth for her about Mother’s Day today on FB and made me feel bold to do likewise.

Another, S., even longer a friend, who wrote to me today

And thinking of you because it’s that day again – how is it that day again so quickly? – and I know it’s a hard one for you. As always, I hope you not just know but believe and feel that you’re loved.

Brings tears cuz I guess I don’t always.

Third, came to me a memory of a student in our program, she’s a mother, maybe a month ago we were both at a reading, her son was with her. And seeing, late in the evening, how heavily and easily her son draped in her arms sleeping – how quietly and carefully she packed up her bag, his toys etc., so as not to wake him – how fixed even so, all the while, her attention was on the reader reading, taking the words in.

Is it strange of me? Do you find it ordinary? It was so moving to me, her undividedness, her totally being nourished by what she was there for – the poetry – and being totally there as what her son needed her to be.

I need, as we all do, to be mother to myself, and lack, as many do, a good interior image of that. And so I savage me.

A lot of my inner life is trying to find relief from that.

Some relief comes from inner resources. Some more comes from chosen works – teaching, say, though I should be grading right now. And some comes from blessings like rain – friendships like these three.

She’s also, that third one, one of the most kickass poets I’ve worked with.

We ask a lot of mothers (fathers also) (children also).

Who are we that we think we get to ask so much.

Donald Drumpf. That’s your koan. Pass it and I’ll vote for you.

Good luck w/ that.

Addendum May 9.

Not Mother’s Day. Mothers’ Day.

Or just Mother Day.

Be a mother to what needs you to.

Something, someone, in here, out there, do.

Have I tucked this where none will see it?

I do that.

Syria, wildfire, climate change, and the 2nd Coming maybe

Article in the Times this evening, about refugees from Syria who, having settled safely in Canada, find themselves escaping flames once more, as a wildfire of great speed and scope sweeps through the oilsands town of Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Ms. Wedad Rihani, 68, a lawyer once of Syria – just where the indefatigable Ian Austen does not say –

“I left fire back home created by humans to come to the fire here,” Ms. Rihani said, her son providing translation. “Here you can escape; at home there’s no escape. Here you get a smile; there you get no help.”

Good for my home country.

It should be said though. Both conflagrations – war eating Syria, fire eating Fort McMurray – are climate change at work.

Our works are coming home to us. As to the one. As to the other. Viz, do.

I don’t mean to be unkind. These sufferings are awful, some beyond awful, beyond imagining, mine anyway.

I mean to say – root causes.

Am in a torn mood tonight. The Republican Party is tearing itself in two. But before I get too giddy happy at that – what rough beast, yo? Nuclear codes, yo? The tear comes by a terrifying claw.

American democracy survived, tho’ battered from the inside yes, eight years of Bush Dub. Eight Obama years – and I’m a big fan, would love for a third go – tested it in a few ways, too. This ginger puffball, I don’t want his name on my blog, this one, I don’t think so, I think he’s a grievous threat to the form itself.

He’s a totalitarian clown and I want just to brush him off. But we see by now where underestimating his strength, his appeal, gets us.

Hit me tonight how much hate there is in this country and it made me sad.

There could be a measure for that. Hate Per Capita. And an emergency global compassion fund to take care of it. Probably some climate change would get taken care of, and some income equality, and some other social justices also.

Seriously. Not to be condescending, but America’s HPC is higher than Canada’s, yes? For identifiable understandable karmic reasons, sure. So maybe Canada should be making some sort of lovingkindness donation southward. Without expecting recompense. Cuz that’s not how it works.

Tho’ recompense somehow comes. E.g., Ms. Rihani, whom I’ve not met, and never will, feels affection for northern Alberta – northern Alberta, in its early spring and laid waste by wildfire, and she speaks well of it! What a mind.

Imagine M. Ginger Puff had said to bar the door to her great spirit.

Inanna, a chapbook

Some nice news! A swatch of poems from Dumuzi will be published as a chapbook by Little Red Leaves. I’ve loved their books (fabric covers, hand sewn, venturesome poems) since I first came across them. Sew colour me thrilled. (Sorry, terrible.)

Title to come but I’m thinking simply Inanna Sent. The poems are a graphic novella, collaged out of junk mail, that tells the story of Inanna’s trip to the underworld. Thought I’d post a few panels, final versions. Here’s the first –


Panel 1

The strata are the linings of security envelopes. Inanna and her sidekick, the scancodes you see on autosorted mail. Her jaunty cap, the Bank of America logo, while he sports the NBC paycock (Pound’s spelling). The speaker is one of the galla, demons of the underworld; to them’s given the work of narration. They’re all blown up out of these:


scan code

If you get your pareidolia on, that can look like a postmodern Roman frieze, gods, monsters, epic struggle. Next panel.


Panel 2As Inanna gets deeper in, her logo-feather-flame hat dirties and darkens. Small serendipities: with each new panel, I lifted the logo from the last with a letter opener and taped it down on the new one. Each move brought more scuffing, each layer of tape more obscuration and road dust. One more.


Panel 3Scancodes and photocopy noise. Have written some more about Inanna, what and why she means to me, the space I was in (an intense one) making these poems, here and here and here and here. And a bit at the end here. If curious. (Old images there, the script far less open, but in the spirit of blog, I’m going to leave as was.)

Oh and the grainy oblique smudges above “Her sad eyes”? Bits of pinewood, my writing desk, pulled up by scotch tape I’d stuck there momently while I spotted a paperscrap just right. The meaning of the whole is, make peace with your accidents. (Not in a hey-do-this sort of way. In a note-to-self sort of way.)

Tried to explain the desk splinters to Stephen Burt when he asked me about my work. Talk about happy accident! But, he seemed not so impressed. Oh well.

If you’ve made it this far, thoughts on the title? I sent it out as Junk Inanna Down. That now feels like a hostile mouthful. Do you think so too? What about Inanna Sent? Too mild? Comment away …