Hypertext reading

The teacher for my Geographic Thought seminar urged us to consider various strategies for the heavy load of reading. He passed out a heuristic grid, with sections boxes labeled, "Quotes," "Questions," "Connections," and "Theory." All fine, but I realized working through some of the assignments that I don’t read in any linear or analytic pattern, and probably not in these boxes, even if one is labeled connections. I know I may need to go back and squeeze into that mold to hold conversations in class, but I realize that I read in an associative pattern, which to update metaphors, I’ll now call “hypertext reading.” This fits, I believe, what I need to be doing in Geography just now—I need to be finding ways to mesh my own background experience with this new field. I need to discover and build cognitive links between the books and ideas I already have with these new concepts. (If we all did our reading on Kindle-like devices, I'd be inserting such links as I read.) That building-from-what-you-know is a pretty basic idea in reading theory, but I’m not sure it’s what people expect in the on-demand performance world of graduate school.

To illustrate:

In Biogeography, we began to go over “Changing Themes” in the discipline, with a key figure—“poster child”—for each. Interesting in its own right. Here we have the “Divine Chain of Being,” which I recognize in terms of E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1942) and his ‘Great Chain of Being’ from Shakespeare studies--Linnaeus picturing nature as a static hierarchy, without including Lucifer nor the cherubim in his scale. We hear about William Bartrum, a plant exploiter, and of course I can connect this with a novel from a summer Native American Lit class I taught, Leslie Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes, a complex interplay between a similarly exploitive orchid procurer, a Native girl who collected seeds from the imperative of her grandmother’s lore, and a wife trapped between competing and brutal ideas. And an amazing juxtaposition of English/European folklore with Native, which should have helped my students past their scoffing at the “senseless” beliefs of Native Americans, but didn’t, fully.

We looked at Alexander von Humboldt, the “father of plant geography,” and quite a few other things we skimmed past, and I mentally linked back to the essay in David McCullough’s Brave Companions, which we had used a few years ago in our INCC/how-to-be-a-freshman class. Fascinating guy, and maybe I remember that there are more places named after him than any other person.

“Romanticism” in Biogeography, well, Thoreau, and I am an English teacher--though I haven't tackled his million word journal, which would be more relevant here.

“Change and Struggle”—Darwin. David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution, an "airplane book" I read sometime last year, came to mind (and left me feeling guilty that I have but haven't read the same author's The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions.

This section of class also brought to mind my favorite steampunk novel,
The Difference Engine, by Gibson and Sterling, in which one protagonist argues through his career on the relative merits of uniformitarinism vs. catastrophism. And notions that Lord Byron might have wound up as a radical prime minister, and the the Babbage Engine would have functionally changed industrial England...

Carl Sauer, we find out, was from Warrenton, Missouri, a drive-through when we I-70 to St. Louis.

The theme “Discordant Harmony” brings in notions of a norm of instability, rather than some ideal balance of nature, and I have to think about Chaos Theory, with periods of turbulence, strange attractors, points of bifurcation. (I team-taught an Honors seminar on Chaos Theory last fall, with two other teachers, from math and philosophy. I was also anxious about being able to contribute to that forum, but I did manage to do this same thing—I found stories and novels and videos that illustrated/connected with the main points of the seminar.)

* * * * *

In Geographic Thought, our main text is Geography and Geographers, Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945, 6th ed. The first chapter begins an overview of the discipline, in institutional terms, and continues with a survey of Kuhn’s notions of paradigm and scientific progress, and various commentators. Interesting enough, and not alien.

I’m prepping books for an October evening class on New Journalism, using Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jon Krakauer. The second essay in Tom Wolfe’s Hooking Up is “Two Young Men Who Went West,” which looks at social and psychological influences on the people who built Silicon Valley. The paths Bob Noyce, one of those 2 young men, took seem to amply comment on the way ideas in science develops.

And also we could look at how ideas work in James Gleick’s Chaos or M. Mitchell Waldrop‘s Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos--both books we used in our Chaos Theory class.

Ok. I’m finding some connections to this new world of Geography, though I don’t yet know if my new world will care what I already know.