New Tricks and the Hoop of Life

Students in one of my classes have been working this semester to bring the DSU literary magazine into the electronic world once again.  It had a brief moment in the sun of the internet years ago, when Dr. Dan Weinstein did some fancy html work to move the poetry from paper to pixels, but that moment passed and the site apparently disappeared.  So, here we go again with a dedicated site, not bound by the DSU biz.  Our site, New-Tricks.org, is up and running and waiting for the 2012 selections to be made and posted.

Sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society at DSU, New Tricks has been around since 1992, when the English majors sought to make things new by breaking with tradition at DSU.

We hope to shine a light on the good work that the writers and artists at DSU are doing, from students to faculty to staff.  If you're interested, check out the site, give us some feedback, maybe send us some of your work, and we'll have some new material there in the next few weeks.  Wish us luck!

Diving into the Wreck--Adrienne Rich Gone Too

Not only has the Earl left us, but also the Poet, Adrienne Rich, one who led us on the dive below the surface of words in one of her most famous poems:

I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth.  

Fierce in her feminism, Rich left the world poorer in poetry on Tuesday when she left.

Watch Remembering Banjo Player Earl Scruggs, Poet Adrienne Rich on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

The Shooter's Legacy

This week has brought its share of unpleasant excitement, and it's no small thing in a town like Madison, where people know people in a tightly-knit kind of way. We have a friend who can generate family trees, along with temporary relationships and marriages, from generations past, and she's not a Madison native.  Even I, after living here a mere 10 years, know well how many of the townspeople are related to each other, who their kids are, and what their family history is.

But the discovery of an apparent 50-year grudge of one man against another stemming from an incident in high school is a real revelation, the stuff of fiction.  In news reports about the shooting of Norm Johnson by Carl Ericsson, the motive apparently comes from some incident lost to the memories of all but the shooter.  It reminds me a bit of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Cask of Amontillado," in which the narrator Montresor reports that he had borne a "thousand injuries" and so sets out to wall away Fortunato in the catacombs to die slowly in revenge for those unidentified injuries.  Poe's story identifies its narrator as the one carrying the grudge, the other not knowing what motive lies behind Montresor's actions.

In any case, the creative writer in me sees the possibilities in this small-town tragedy, dreaming as is my wont about the scene or scenes that may have played out repeatedly in the imagination or memory of the tortured soul.

I'm reminded though, that Poe had an idea of revenge that you'll see in movies and tv shows:  the act of revenge must be known about, that the person seeking revenge must inform their victim and have them know what's being done.  At the end of "Cask," the narrator, noting that it's been 50 years since he walled up Fortunato, still nurses a grudge, having never told his victim what was going on, so what he asks for at the end is perhaps not for Fortunato, but for his own conscience: "In pace requiscat!"  

New Tricks Electronic Version 2

Something that I Keep Telling People

So, thanks, Wired, for making the point well. Good stories make good games. In a good story, a classic tale, the reader is carried along by the story itself, by the recognition that the events somehow are important, timeless, and capable of being translated not only from one language to another but from one genre or media to another.

Chris Kohler, writing in Wired, makes this case in his article "10 Literary Classics that should be Video Games." Among them, Huck Finn, Moby-Dick, Siddhartha, Heart of Darkness, and some other greats.

Kohler notes that Electronic Arts has worked up Dante Alighieri's Inferno as an X-Box 360 and Playstation 3 game. Why not use great stories to make a great game?

Monkey, Monk, Samaritan

A clash of cultures appeared in my little world today, a contrast concerning the aftermath of a life on earth, whether the actions, good or evil, of a human being, have an effect on an afterlife. The contrast came as a result of my getting up early this morning and reading some of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, or Monkey, followed by attending morning services. In the novel, on display is the Buddhist philosophy of reincarnation and a life of works that will lead to a better next life. Monkey and his troupe struggle with the concept of doing good for others, saving a king from a wrongful death, for example. They are selfish and mean, but with effort they can gather their will to do right for others. When they do right, it’s not clear why they do it. Monkey does some good works for fame, Pigsy does them for treasure. But why does the monk take on these challenges? That’s a tricky question, in part because he’s got Monkey and Pigsy (and Sandy) to do his good deeds for him. But well understood among them all is the importance of acting for others; it’s just not easy or desirable always to do.

With this concept in mind of the importance of a life of self-sacrificing acts leading to an improved state in the afterlife, with the possibility of reaching perfection, I then went to services which included a hymn that pointed to the falseness of such teaching. The hymn stated emphatically that works don’t count in salvation, that only faith matters. For my poor whiplashed mind, it was a clash, something I wonder about and something religions clash over. In your teaching, how do you make it clear that the Samaritan should stop? So it says in Luke 10: "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?" He answered: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" The idea here is the struggle, “What must I do?”