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.

Meeting reflections

Meeting Reflections.

I’m starting to get more of a sense of the thesis now and how it is that realism connects with education. Basically I’m of the position that the reality of objects transcends our subjectivity. Our subjectivity certainly contextualizes things for us and makes them meaningful in relation to a problem. But I feel that subjectivity alone seems to limit our ability to really ‘know’ or understand our situation as human beings because it directly limits what we can know to the extent, limits or boundaries of our experience.

I think that using Social Constructionism alone, in the classroom, as a means of understanding the ‘processes’ at work is a case of too much human agency with too little consideration given to underlying structures. ‘Too much human agency’ (i.e. placing people at the final centre of things) could, perhaps, be argued as being consistent with a common sense approach to the classroom and to life; and this can be beneficial - and I won’t deny that. However whilst I am willing to concede, in line with common sense, that people do get the ends or rewards that they work for (i.e. what they ‘deserve’); it is a very different thing to say that the relationship between ‘effort and reward’ is the only variable at work in a, for example, classroom. This is not that there can ever be - and indeed this relationship is not the total nature of the world.

Changes in direction

I wonder - black on white - if I'm slowly loosing my grip on this thing. I started with ideas of social justice and unintended consequences, but know I seem to be branching (dangerously) into the world of phenomenology and things that seem to speak of the ultimate nature of reality. All very interesting, just a bit of a concern for someone doing honours education.

At any rate after talking to my second supervisor my potential thesis now looks like this:

• Chp. A substantial discussion of Social Constructionism. Trying to clearly spell out the implications for educational practice.
• Chp. Realist critique of SC and a little discussion of 'practice' from the realist perspective.
• Chp. Discussion of the limits of SC with the implications of these for the debate.
• Chp. Could include an analysis of an empirical study; perhaps something that connects with work done Brian Butterworth, "The Mathematical Brain".

.

Beat up and battered around

(I've) been beat up and battered aroundbut like a tall ball hitting the wall I bounce back. It's been a hard week as I try (before Uni even officially begins) to figure out just how it is that I'm going to mix work and study. At the moment I'm doing 5 shifts a week - so pretty much full time. The problem is that a typical shift runs from 4pm to 11pm. So when you factor in things like exercise, procrastination time, a generally slow note taking ability; well the words don't write themselves and I do like the time to drink a cup of coffee or two. Anyway, I called in sick on Wednesday and this week they gave me only 3 shifts.

Getting less shifts is actually a blessing in disguise because I feel that it frees me up to now make myself less available and hopefully this will save me from getting more and more depressed and less and less happy as 5 days is just too much with a full time study load. But life and all that coffee costs money. Hopefully this change will be just enough to free me from looking into the 'mental mirror' and seeing myself as grumpy, complaining bitter guy. It's not a pretty site.

It's funny how the human condition works; it seems to be in turns that you're happy then you're sad, then you're miserable, then you're depressed, then the light shines through and you're happy and joyful again and then something else rears up. Either money is OK or you've spent too much. Damn all this 'binarity'! I want to deny that things are as simple and predictable as all that. I want to deny that we are acted upon. I want to refute externalism. I want to be miserable because it's who I am.

At the moment I'm doing a fair amount of thinking about realism and relativisim. I think that there's a lot to be said about the idea that discourse shapes our realities. But I maintain (at this point) that saying that discourse "is the world" is a bit like taking a tail, a furry tail, and inferring that there's a dog connected to it. Sure a dog is consistent with the 'existence' of a furry tail but I think that discourses merely serve to give shape and colour and definition to that tail. The tail neither exists or not exists because of language. It is perhaps more of a found thing that 'floats' in a sea of language. Now all I have to do is prove it.

Buzzed to the Core

I'm still feeling 'buzzed to my core' by the things that are happening. It's funny but I know that I'm some kind of 'structural realist' (bare with me I still learning about all this stuff), because I keep using words and articles that imply absolute things: things like 'I', 'core', 'choice', 'meaning' and so on. I believe that I've got some kind of 'identity' separate from the limits and context of language and that's what I'm following (in part) in this thesis process.

Just the other day a friend told me that this thesis choice was a profound one - because there are going to be repercussions. At the time she phrased this in the context of the film "Sliding Doors"; I thought 'hey, that's a really nice thing to say' - at the time I thought that anyway! And it was a nice thing to say. But it's only now that the real 'meaning' of what she said is starting to sink in.

You see, I was going to be doing the 'teaching thing' as a first year teacher. And that implies all sorts of ideas about me being 'sure and certain' about what good teaching might look like, it would also seem to imply me thinking about classroom issues like behavior management, about kids refusing to 'comply' with instructions / activities / tasks, about unhappy (and happy) parents. It would also seem to imply a whole range of discourses that I already have some idea about - discourses that I kind of think I fit into. These discourses include 'me being' a white, male, middle class educator. Job, house into mortgage, professional development, rosters, reproduction.

So starting to write an honours thesis is a different thing with an element of the unknown in it for me. I don't know where it will take me in any positive sense but I'm pretty sure that it's moving me away from the 'mainstream'. Certainly becoming 'more academic' doesn't seem to be perceived as a good thing when your out on the ground teaching and doing the 'real' (non-theory) thing.

Anyway to bring this to an end I shall quote from my friend's e-mail:

"It's exciting ... I get buzzed by 'tings' that remind me I am a part of the critical mass - the realisation that, by engaging in research, I'm actually engaging at the most profound level of ideas ... I was both daunted and stunted at first by the indoctrinated, 'socially constructed' nomothetic belief that, either I had to be 'right', or [relativism] I was destined to wallow in the syrupy world of ... if everything’s valid, then what’s the point … of existing? Until I shifted my focus and thought more broadly about the possible ‘aims’ of research. The following quote also helped:

‘to admit the perspectival character of knowledge should be to sharpen rather than blunt your critical stance’ (Dean ?)

Anyway ... I’m in the study zone and called to ask you to look up a term in the glossary of Burns, if he has one … but you were obviously out either playing or getting buzzed by conversation. Anyway, doesn’t matter because I changed the context and worked around my ignorance ...
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH DEADLINES

Meeting with another supervisor

Far out, I've just come out of a (just short on) 3 hour meeting with the man who is now my second supervisor, he's a lecturer in my Universities Philosophy department and he's going to help me with some of the philosophical implications of a realist engagement with social constructionism in the classroom.

I feel absolutely stuffed - and a little apprehensive and a little buzzed and a jazzed all over. It's like there's this needle and it's starting to thread more and more strings of 'interconnectedness' into me. Strings that bind me to other people, strings that bind me to a world of new ideas - ideas that are almost forced onto you. Strings that thread new directions into one's life. Threads that bind me to people that have 'real' work commitments and meetings with agendas and diaries and expectations. All at once it's like there's this 'thing' building up around me. Both fully formed and yet without shape. It's very confusing and I'm not sure if I'm even going to be up to the task. And so it is that people - real people - are getting involved ....

Far Out!

Not only are real people getting involved but they are bringing with them questions to be problematised - and readings to be looked into. Paper, paper shining white where will your words take me tonight. So I'm starting to feel a little FfffK! I've just had a little bolt of empathy for all those people that get involved in 'undertakings'.

Meeting with my supervisor

Basically we were able to define my thesis question as: A realist critique of social constructionism and it's practice.

Important questions that were raised included:

1. What will we use to cast a critical eye on SC ?
2. What are our theoretical boundaries?
3. Empirical Side of the study ...

A potential outline looked like:

Early Chp's: Doubts about social constructionism
Middle: Policy documents of the department
And/or: Talking to or observing teachers in action

Words that floated into the conversation included: realism, Marxism, Post Structuralism, the structure-agency problem,

Quantegy files for bankruptcy.

Another small milestone of sorts passed by a week or so ago, as Quantegy, the last manufacturer of 2“ studio quality tape filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. As with many people in their 30's I remember when CD's first came out and how much better they were touted as playing and sounding (wow and flutter were effectively unmeasureable) and I vividly remember those impressive scratch/gouge demonstrations. However, the potential demise of Quantegy as a going concern reminds us all that we should maintain some reservations about combining the words "digital" and "archive" in the same sentence. I love iTunes, and iPhoto, and my academic and other writing is very important to me, but I wonder how I’m going to preserve all of my work - turning to photocopies, printouts hardly seems like the solution (especially in terms of space). At any rate, it's a lot to keep track of.

Tape had it's heyday in the period running from the middle of the 1940's through to the beginning of the 1980's. Basically it’s claimed that anything put onto tape since it came into being in the 1930's can still be played back today - often with a high degree of fidelity. It's salutory to compare this with the reality of digital copies and archives and the notion of a "digital master - perfect forever". Perfect yes, but held on what media? Since I started with computers I've recorded data on cassette tapes, 5 1/4" floppies, 3 1/2" floppies, memory sticks, CDR's, and hard drives that I've sealed and stored. Already I struggle to read back copies of data preserved for the moment on 800k 3 1/2” floppies. USB floppy drives won’t read them.

Hopefully Quantegy will be able to get the US$10 million investment that it's CEO, Richard Lindenmunth believes would be enough to save the company.

I've been using MacJournal (MJ) for over a year now - in fact I started using it not long after I bought my 14“ G4/933 iBook; the first 'Mac' I've owned since a Colour Classic 4/16. When I took up with MJ it’s principal attraction was that it was easy to use and that it was free - but not in that order. ☺ Look, I’ll be honest, like most people I *hate* paying for stuff like software which is inherently intangible. I'm certainly not going to pay if it's offered to me freely. However at the moment I'm staggered by the amount of negative commentary flashing around Version Tracker where many people are talking about a supposed breach of trust and so on. However the author, Dan Schimpf, originally released MJ as a freeware application - not an open source application. To start reading on the significance of this difference go here.

Plainly put then; MJ has never been anything other than a privately controlled program, the author's model of development (freeware) has it’s pros and cons extensively outlined in various free/Open-source software websites, rants, blogs, discourses and articles. Now I’m sure that there are plenty of Open-source programs that people could pick up for free and use or build on from and develop. Otherwise there are plenty of opportunities for people to start projects of their own; projects that will always be free if they're defined and licensed as such.

I suspect that this program has a big future in front of it and wish it all the success that it gets.

A Dream

The wind, the moon, the stars - they rise for us in our dreams. Soft voices take form and whisper of happy times past. There is the distinct, gentle sound of leaves rustling as a memory from childhood stirs and tilts up. I remember running through impossibly tall pampas grass under a tropical sky. Colours vivid straw brown and ultramarine blue with the resolution that only memory can give. Tack sharp I can now feel the sticky humidity and prickly pinking of grassy spears getting into my long socks and between a Clarks leather shoe and soft ankle. When you are 5 years old and have dirt on knee (and elbow), a couple of handy scrapes and a Pirate's dream of gold and silver, all is well with the world.

Potential

So many places to go, so many things to do.

I had thought that I'd been to a fair number of countries and 'seen the sights' as it were. But it's salutory to lay out those places on map and see how few and far between they really are. How Eurocentric they've been. I realise that so many places are unknown to me like the black hand of night; dark and behind the veil.

The world really is a large expanse and when you finally reflect and look at just where it is that you've been - all laid out like it were a dining table of past meals, well perhaps it's then that you begin to realise just how limited your choices have been and how small your everyday frustrations are. And yet to look and ponder where next ... there is an enormity of places to go and things to do: new faces, experiences, possibilities. What indeed is 'our' world?

Where have you been?

Takoyaki

Takoyaki
Originally uploaded by BigDragon.

Takoyaki

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Takoyaki is serious business. It's cooked in front of you, but smiles aren't included - on the signs at least. Curiously enough all of my memories of Takoyaki stalls are of places peopled by rather happy and cheerful souls deftly spinning the ball of dough (they have octopus inside them) around on a cast iron hotplate. Sign and place, a study in contrasts. As is Japan.

Perplexing is the urge to write

Perhaps like many people, I find that the notion of writing appeals much more to me than the actual process. Notions are wonderful things, they free us up to acquire more tools: writing tools such as computers, software, fountain pens, notebooks, desks, paper, and various other miscelaneous paraphenalia. And on the list can run. Writing - or perhaps thinking about writing also allows us to merge into some other sort of activity. Drinking coffee springs to mind.

coffee
Originally uploaded by BigDragon.

The Sunne Rising

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide
Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,
Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call countrey ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

(John Donne)