Putting chin to knee

An exciting new project launched yesterday, January 15, 2008: The International Day for Sharing Life Stories, co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley and The Museum of the Person in Brazil. It will be held May 16, 2008. Here’s their press release.

Listening to old Dylan, the line “His clothes are dirty, but his hands are clean” resonates–I remember how much the line meant when the song first appeared: I was living at Black Bear, and the image of the hard-working country lad doing honest work outside the crumbling “system” was our [male] fantasy. There’s a whole line of reflection from this image about the sex role stereotypes it supports, but I want to talk about the class implications. I am still astounded at the success of American consumer culture in erasing the idea of the working class. No one is working class anymore, we are all middle class–until we’re not, and then we’re just failures.

The implication of Dylan’s line, for me, is that doing honest manual labor, the quintessence of being working class, absolves one from the guilt being a “capitalist tool” by having a physical product to show for the work. As the economy becomes a knowledge and information factory, with data managers of one sort or another predominating, from the grocery clerk to the mechanic who must each be competent computer operators to succeed at their job, the sense of connection to physical work products becomes obscured…

Will link to this post from

http://www.thedigitalstoryteller.com/

I’ll be taping at Community TV in Santa Cruz next Tuesday, and I made a 1′40″ clip from my “String Epiphany” piece for them to air.

Talking with Jon Silver of Migrant Media Productions who hosts a show on education in the local community about what he want to bring out in the 10 minutes we’ll hove to talk, we got into an exchange about attributing the decline in literacy to the increased use of technology. I countered that, properly used, technology should enhance and facilitate and inspire increased literacy, from the script writing, storyboard sequencing, and tech manual reading that’s required to create a digital storytelling piece, to the publicity and verbal skills used in promotion, when the student owns their piece and wants others to see it. And of course it has to begin with authentic writing.

Jon agreed, and I look forward to an interesting discussion.

What a treat to have my first visit with both Rajesh and Lupin since Lupin graduated fro Marlboro…Been hanging out with Raj, Nicola, and Pearl for four days, today Lupin arrives.

Funny to think, most people would think of a trip like this — 10 days in London at Christmas! — as an opportunity to sightsee, or shop, or do something touristy….We visited with friends of Raj&Nic last night, and our host asked me what I wanted to see in London. I said there’s nothing on my agenda except family…

Here’s some photos…


PearlsLunch22Dec2007

Our cockapoo Nellie is now three & 1/2 months old. She’s losing her baby teeth, and so chews on everything. One of her favorites of the multitudinous toys we give her to keep her off the sheets and furniture is a dried bull’s penis. She did like the green bone, compressed plant matter of some kind, for a while, but bullcock is her current favorite. She changes her eating habits a lot, too. I agonize about scheduling her – 7 am breakfast, noon lunch, 5 pm dinner, no water after 7 pm – and yet I can see the benefits, both to her and to us.

I reflect a lot on the similarities and differences compared to parenting humans. Of course, the lack of language as we know it colors everything, but I also was made conscious of the difference in expectation–children will eventually move on into their own lives, and have whatever relationship you’ve developed with them, but Nellie will never move out on us. And we will likely outlive her.

It stuck with me when the trainer at Nellie’s Puppy Kindergarten said, “Dogs don’t speak English.” Her main point was to emphasize the importance of body language  in training, not to rely on the words, but always have a gesture that means the command, and be as consistent across the caregivers as you can be, just as one would in pronouncing the words correctly. And that’s another lesson from having this animal in my life, to pay attention to how I use my body to gesture and command all the time, often without being conscious of the meanings.

But it’s also an important reminder for me, as a highly verbal person, to feel and communicate in other-than-verbal modalities. Just pure emotion, love and gratitude, a feeling of being blessed – these have all come to me through Nellie, not just today, but repeatedly. We just came in from sitting in the sun on the deck, and as I held her in my lap, felt her soft coat and hummingbird breath, I was at the point of tears of joy, and filled with emotion. Learning to speak dog is forgetting the human urge to put words to everything: surrendering to the presence of the moment.

learning to speak dog

Part 1

I had never liked dogs

and up until a few years ago

the feeling was mutual

For many years I identified proudly as a cat person

it was an integral part of my “feminist male” identity

dogs are macho:

stupid, selfish, impulse driven, strong and brutal

insensitive, easily manipulated

As a proud cat person, I was smart, sensitive, caring, independent, willful yet compassionate

“He feeds me, he cares for me, he must be a god,” says the dog.

“He feeds me, he cares for me, I must be a god,” says the cat.

Then a few years ago I decided it was annoying and bad energy to have dogs always barking and growling at me

besides being a little dangerous

so I cooled it with the anti-dog energy

I calmed down the vibe             

 cooled myself out, like a cool cat can

and dogs stopped barking at me…

but I still didn’t like dogs

at all.

Then something happened.

My partner fell in love with her son’s dog

I could feel it, I could see it, I had to accept it. A big, slobbery, blind pit bull. One of the ugliest dogs I’ve ever seen. But a sweet, good-natured, gentle soul.

When she said she wanted to go to Florida for two weeks to train blind Max how to keep out of trouble, I knew instantly that was the right thing to do.

When she returned from Florida and spoke of how she walked twice a day with Max, how good it was for her to run and play every day, I began to see how a dog could bring good things into one’s life.

She talked of how easy it was to meet people, how she chatted with all sorts of people she would never have spoken to, because of the dog.

There is no real community of cat-owners….

So I finally said, you know, it would be OK with me if we got a dog.

Of course, I’m not going to be an equal co-parent. It’s your dog, and I’m just helping out a little. I can’t really take this on all the way…but I won’t stand in your way, because I see how much this means to you.

Then one of her friends said, what about a cockapoo? A little dog, you can take it on an airplane, you can carry her in a serape, they don’t shed, they can be trained not to bark…

And then another friend said, I know someone who raises cockapoos. She has a litter for sale now. And she’s a colleague at the Watsonville Charter School of the Arts. She taught both of my kids at Mt. Madonna. Her dogs are so calm and peaceful; they might as well be cats… Charlotte was pregnant, and we reserved a pup from her litter.

And then I met Nellie, the smallest of the litter. She sat on my lap during our first visit and fell asleep.

My mother’s name was Nell, and I’m in love.

Part 2: Puppy Love

The phases of puppy love:

the silly doting parents imitating the infatuations and obsessiveness of middle schoolers

sharing pictures with as many people as you can think of cause your darling is the cutest thing since Clara Bow

excessive pride in her miraculous success at being toilet trained before her third month birthday, and shame and chagrin when she has several accidents in a day, proving her earlier success mere luck…

Seeing her dash headlong and roll over backward in a fallen over clump of grass that’s twice her height, delighted, abandoned into vegetation, the omnivorous forager that she is. Watching her lick rocks, dig in and eat dirt, chew on dead stumps and live grasses and leaves. She put on a mock stalking, barking and staying, then crouch, crawl and pounce upon a mullein, emerging triumphant from the bushy plant with a leaf in her jaw, which she brought back and wrestled with and munched on with delight.

I met an old friend, the bus driver for my daughter’s first year of school at Orchard School, and father to her friend Jeni, whom I hadn’t seen in over ten years. He drives the bus for the Summer Loop at UCSC, late shift. We talked of dogs, and he said he loved having dogs in his life, cause they made him say to them, “Teach me how to be an animal, I’m just a silly human.” I had just read a similar thought from Maurice Sendak, interviewed in “The Art of Raising a Puppy” by the Monks of New Skete, how he considered his many dogs to have been his teachers, the animalness of the dog and its honesty requiring the same in return from the human.

And so I continue the journey of learning to speak dog. As she matures to a grown dog, I’ll find out what lessons she’s come to teach me. So far so good.

Part 3: It’s ShowTime!

Throughout our month with Nellie, our now 12-week-old cockapoo pup, my wife and I have had ongoing discussions about exactly what language to use for the various commands we need to teach her. “Nellie, come/sit/down/heel/turn/leave it” were all straightforward, but we had a hard time with the most used command, “Let’s go pee,” meaning, “It’s time to put on the leash and go outside to the designated spot in the garden,” and its companion, “Do your business,” meaning “Now we’re here and let’s get on with the elimination.” I refused to use either one. I wanted something I could say out loud in a public place and not feel like a new parent still in toilet training mode.

We discovered “Allez, allez,” from the French, in a moment of invention after reading the suggestion “Let’s go,” in one of the many books we’ve been reading to guide us through this new adventure. Although slightly cutesy, my Canadian wife took readily to the French, and we agreed on that one. We tried “Outside” and “Let’s go outside,” but neither had the feeling I was looking for.

Then I hit upon Bob Fosse’s signature line from “All That Jazz,” “It’s ShowTime!” and I was off and running. Nellie had already earned the nickname “Little Miss Thing,” from how clearly she warranted the designation “cutest thing since Clara Bow.” For her excursions to the yard now to become events in her illustrious career as the smartest and cutest puppy ever just seemed natural to me. My wife does not agree, and I could not say we’ve reached consensus. But I am hopeful.

Last time she returned with Nellie, I asked her, “Was that a double feature?” 

Presenting at the “New World Coming” Conference in Kingston went wonderfully. Thinking of the PhD project as three more pieces, interviews with the children who were born there, with the old-timers, and a synthesis/conclusion…

Working on a story collective project, the ABC stories, and got the letter I. So far an extemporized rambling on when the I becomes me…

When I was a young child, my sister, two years younger than I, shared a room with me. We had always been very close, but after our mother died, when I was six and my sister was four, we became even closer.

Our father remarried within a year of our mother’s death, and at some point our parents decided that my sister and I needed some privacy from each other. I remember that we protested, not wanting to be separated, and so they suggested a compromise-a padded board, about two or three feet high, was placed between our beds. I remember telling each other stories over the board, every night, when the lights were out. My stories - those I remember - were almost always architectural. I would describe in great detail the houses we would share in this fantasy world, how many rooms, the surrounding grounds - the image I have is of seeing the floor plans laid out, the connections between the rooms. I don’t remember anything of what we did in those houses, even who we were exactly…just the feeling that these were new spaces, new rooms, new ways of being in the world.

One of our favorite games was building forts, structures of bolsters and pillows and blankets, with tunnels that connected the new rooms: again the theme of an architectural escape from the sad reality of our loss.

While this memory does not really involve reading or writing directly, it involves the construct of story, and I see that notion as part of my life-long resistance to the idea that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end, that there must be conflict, or at least an event that gives content and form to a story. Story was first for me a way simply to construct a space into which to escape from a story that I didn’t want to believe was true. What would happen in that new space didn’t matter - in fact, nothing really needed to happen. The space just needed to be a different space from the one in which reality had told me a story impossible to accept.

An amazing video project, just check it out….

Sarah Mclachlan’s $15 video[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzoNInZ2ClQ]

[Sarah Mclachlan's $15 video=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzoNInZ2ClQ]