Dennis Wheatley

All this study will be the death of me; to this end I've been hiding from its evil clutches by escaping into some Dennis Wheatley. An almost shameful thing to say in this day and age, I know - however I've always found the 'Roger Brook' series to be good value, and whilst I won't even apologise or try to excuse some of the rascist language and ideology present in Wheatley's books, I can't quite bring myself to condem out of hand such good adventure writing. At the moment I'm re-reading 'The Man Who Killed the King' and I find it a pleasant diversion to read through the through the final days of the Ancien Regime and the rise of the great trerror preceeding the Napoleanic era.

It's interesting to compare the Roger Brook / James Bond canons. Both characters are only children, spys, of vaguely Scottish extraction, have a single master that they (usually) defer to, both are ready to give their all for King/Queen and country and both are to be found in roughly 12 volumes a-piece. Although Roger Brook at least has had the good fortune of dying. Both authors, Wheatley and Fleming, were upper middle class sorts, both men's writing contains rascist content and to some extent both authors believed that 'evil' people can easily be recognised as such through their physical characteristics (or Europeaness). Both authors served as British officers engaged in WW2 'Intelligence' related areas. Probably the biggest difference between the two authors lies in their styles of writing. Fleming has been widely praised for his 'dash' and elan, for the exciting flow of his books and for his sharp eye for (then current) period detail. Fleming has also been noted for his (if not with praise) tendency towards sado-masochism. Wheatley also presents a certain amount of sado-masochistic content, however his work is often seen as being much more dull in its style, but nonetheless, historically accurate; a good yard type of writer comparable with the likes of Bulldog Drummond et al (as has Fleming been compared also). Sounds terrible really. I wonder why I bother to read it all?

Probably for prose such as this:

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it (Fleming, Casino Royale, 1953: 1).

Roger's fists clenched spasmodically and his teeth closed with a vicious snap. It was all he could do to restrain himself from striding after de Batz, boxing his ears and kicking him into the road ... No doubt he would meet de Batz again in due course on the continent, and he could then spit this French turkey-cock on a yard of good Toledo steel without fear of legal repercussions (Wheatley, The Man Who Killed the King, 1951: 448).

Ye Ha! (With apologies to the French)

Thermal Binding

I can't believe how quickly time moves on. Forgetting I even have a blog I've gone and rediscovered an old world (bicycles) and actually discovered a whole new world of binding, thermal binding - think 'perfect bound' paperback books and you'll pretty much know what I mean. Thermal binding promises to sort out all my photocopy management needs into one discretely bound collection of papers.

I'm still scratching around with realism and relativism. I feel like its all there at my finger tips - the answers all slippery and wet, waiting to squit away. Hopefully I'll get there.

I've gained a major concept of understanding to the whole endeavour. I now think that constructivism per se creates things which appear to be objects but are fact just fictions. By this I mean that an object would be, for example, a person. A fiction or a 'thing' would be a certain characterisation about a person - locating them in some sort of grouping. So object equals person whilst thing equals (for example) 'refugee' or 'gifted youth' or what have you. Thus we can say that language can powerfully shape the identity of people but it does not create people. Rather, people can (and do) exist quite independently of our perceptions and characterisations of them. This will have powerful implcations for teaching and constructivist teaching pedagogy because a large part of teaching, an inherently social endeavour, revolves around perception. Separating things from the objects they are derived from may also be useful in helping us to answer such knotty questions as "who am I?" But more of that at another time.

So what does this all mean for me? Well it means that I can start to break down the problem and think about what it is that I'm looking at when I talk about education. I think that it means I can avoid certain problems such as:

Being stuck in the act of creating meaning - either as author or reader. I'm thinking here of the postmodern dilemma of there being nothing but the text. Sure , the meanings that we construct are important, up to a point, but if I can show them as being about 'things' and not 'objects' (and of course that objects can exist), then I may be able to sidestep a move into relativism and have some recourse to the more 'fixed', shall we say, ends of realism. I believe that there are some things that are certain and these things can be grasped - if only with difficulty - through the haze of our subjective existences.

This will somehow connect with constructivist teaching methodology - which seems to imply that there are certain things to be learned by students. Either from a Piagetian perspective that sees children having cognitive structures (and cognition implies that there are things to cognate about, things independent of existence) or the Vygotskian perspective which sees that children move through a zone of understanding about the world. Moving implies that some cognitive/language structures are more advanced than others.

Its all very jumbled and I'm just thinking aloud.