Stephen Swanson

Thanks to my participation in a faculty new media seminar, I have received a wonderful tool, a valuable gift to broaden my mind, an iPad. While I could write a great deal about how I benefit from the longer battery life and minimized weight, these traits do not approach the central question of the role of technology in our world and what would make me more able to provide a contribution to my communities, both large and small.

This reading for this week deals with the possibilities of rethinking how education looks and feels in the future. I know that Relief is not an education or technology venue, but as I think about the roles of writing and reading, I cannot but help to think about the impacts of these acts on those participating with informal education versus my students who engage in formal education towards unclear ends. The lack of motivation and direction of the “youth” has long been decried, but are things different now? Are there significant problems with the next generation of learning and learners, and if so, then what?

Well, in theory, the hope lies, for some, in technology, like online education, open universities, nontraditional education, and iPads, but the fears of thinkers like Jacques Ellul come to mind about the changes that the technologies work on us as we leave a “natural world” and more frequently inhabit a technological world of their own creation.

At least according to Ellul, this has a tendency to push us away from faith and spirituality, a connection to the transcendent because we become more connected with the Technique. I think that, to me, this becomes obvious in my use of the iPad. Sure, there are a lot of useful things that I do with it, including writing this post, but it tethers me while promising mobility.

I have an app for finding free Wifi spots wherever I am. We Rule and We Farm tether me in time and space as I ask, “Will I be able to harvest my eggplants and pet my llama?”. I grow more and more “docked” with the technology, even as it promises freedom.

This week in my Graphic Novels as Literature class, we are discussing the graphic novel adaptation of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and what it is saying about consumption of media and the relationship between form, content, and the effect on the people engaged with form and content. This seemed, to me, to grow directly from the discussion we’d been having since we read Scott McCloud‘s Understanding Comics at the beginning of term.

However, this is not what happened. The idea that form, content, and meaning might influence each other appeared anathema to them. “There’s nothing wrong with Michael Bay films! I love them.” “Yes,” I answer, “There is nothing wrong with Bay as a singularity, but Bradbury is arguing about what happens when that’s all there is, reaction and not contemplation.” “But, what about Harry Potter?”

The fact that they struggle so much stems, to me, not so much from the ideas themselves but from the process of thought itself, and this lack of familiarity with depth, texture, and what Faber, in Fahrenheit 451, calls the “pores” in life comes from, at least in part, the technology and our assumptions about it. It will teach us, connect us, warm us, cool us, protect us, and solve our problems eventually in some lab somewhere. It’s easy to see where Bradbury and Ellul might see this type of relationship between people and technology as a replacement of meaning, depth, and faith.

But, look at how cool my iPad looks on my desk with my monitor and laptop,

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain  aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications (Calvin College), Film Studies (Central Michigan University), and Media and American Culture Studies (Bowling Green State University. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in detective narratives.

Michael Dean Clark

This is the first in a series of entries on working to get the content ready for the next edition of Relief to go to press. Check back on Mondays for further installments.

Serving as the guest fiction editor for the coming edition of Relief reminded me of something.

Editing other people’s work is hard. Not difficult, hard.

At times, the decisions feel like chiseling off pieces of an already formed statue. In its initial form, the sculpture is complete and what the author wanted it to be when he or she put down their own hammer.

Being more of a writer than an editor made my work even less intuitive. Every sentence I suggested they cut or word I asked to be altered made me think of the sentences I’ve lost and words I’ve parsed for someone else in my own work. It’s never pleasant, even when I see how it is improving the story.

To come to terms with the work that needed to be done, I finally came to the following resolution: Venus De Milo would be far less beautiful with arms I didn’t have to imagine.

Sometimes you edit a part of a story to make it stronger. Sometimes you alter an element that works against the purpose of the piece. But most of the edits I found myself making were not about change. Rather, they were addition by subtraction.

Increasingly as I worked with these stories, I found myself excising lines and sections that got in the way of the author’s best work; the places where their voice was audible; the moments where their prose was at its most unselfconscious; the scenes where the world they brought me into ceased to exist through mere ink and paper.

The more I edited the more I saw myself cutting away background noise so that the silence left behind would cast the rest of the sound in clearer tones.

I found myself clearing paths so that the quiet moments of loss and strength like the passage below could more definitively mark Zach Czaia’s character Gladys in “The Wonderful Thing about Forgiveness.”

“Jorge said other things, made apologies, touched her arm briefly. These gestures she waited out. It could have been five, ten, a whole half-hour of minutes Gladys waited before finally hearing him rise from the chair, shuffle heavily out of the kitchen, open and close the door to the front porch.  Only then, after she was sure he had gone, did she lift her face from the table and bring it back into the light.”

In Michael Cocchiarale’s “God She Could Tolerate,” I worked to help clarify the utter disconnect that has grown up between Maddy and her husband John; a disconnect that rings in Maddy’s thoughts after he comments on how beautiful the afternoon is.

“At least he didn’t say ‘Lord.’  He didn’t say the Lord had anything to do with it, and for that reason Maddy decided she could tentatively accept the proposition, even if it reeked a bit of sentimentality.  To be charitable, she was even going to say “indeed”; but then, the silly fool, he kept on going.  ‘Forty years,’ he said, turning to her with moist, dung-like eyes.  ‘I don’t think I have ever taken the time . . .’”

Even in Margot Patterson’s “Catholics,” a story I mostly tried to avoid getting in the way of with the changes I asked for, I found myself pruning away lines and scenes so readers will run head first into passages like the following: 

“Now as I wait for Edward to call me, the cold of that day whistles through me, a draught that blows its cold breath on my hands and my heart. Before me, the long fall towards nothing. Within, a crazy, inextinguishable hope I’ll discover wings on the side of my body.” 

In a way, all of this feels a bit like the first and most vital tenet of the Hippocratic Oath, which is a pledge doctors make to help others using their skills and knowledge without harming them. Seems like a good way of looking at someone else’s writing as well.

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and 2.7 children.