Did I miss the boat?

"Four scores and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth, upon this continent..."

This is Saturday night, one of the quiet nights in this neighborhood, and I am sitting here, waiting for a telephone call that will activate a series of calls that I will have to make to the many people who in turn have to pick up their telephones and make further calls, and so forth, as if a toothache is being communicated through the telephone lines that stretch into a vast network that imitate the nerve bundles that mimic a toothache...

Who is in pain?

Goal Statement of LNT

My most pressing need is to narrow my focus and pick a small topic to do my goal setting.

My overall concern is the function of literature and how that's going to help me as a person and to help others to see the world in a different light, in the hope that we can all benefit from this exercise.

Like the fact that I am wearing a pacemaker to regulate my heart beat, my range of topics and degrees of coverage must be within a manageable limit.

My long-range goal is to teach online an introductory course in philosophy, poetry writing, or a literary theory course.

That then gives me an idea of what courses to choose from and the manner that I must pursue this goal.

First, this goal is based on things I already know quite a bit about. The manner to pursue this teaching goal is then to develop concrete plans as to when and how I can take courses to further this goal and to help me find the format that is suitable for me to teach the subjects.

self-directed learning

I want to do my thesis on Is There A Problem of Identity in Chinese-American Writers. First of all, what is the problem? How do I define the problem? Here is where I am going to start using the analytic philosophy style of writing - premise, argument, and conclusion.

Secondly, I got to flesh out the argument. I must then use many examples. Not only do I use examples that support my thesis, but I also have to present the strongest arguments from the opposing points of view. Then I still remain objective until the jury is in.

How do I direct my learning? As always, research the literature and see what has already been done. Find where the weaknesses are and exploit that, research and fill the gap. What if someone is wrong? Someone who is recognized to be an "authority"?

There is always more than what meets the eye. Who for instance say that that "authority" is who (s)he claims to be? What ulterior motives could they have. Here my paranoia personality serves me well. Don't overlook any detail that in any way contradict their claim, especially if there is a power group that may "use" that particular writer for a purpose. I know that in recent years, China bashing has become very popular.

But don't stop there. I am a China born Chinese. Does that color my vision somewhat? Am I really overlooking the inhumanity in China, especially the issue of "human rights?" Or is that a false issue based solely on what the West's unworkable notion of "individual freedom?" Now why do I say that there is a problem of the emphasis on the individual?

Now my wheels are turning. This idea of individualism vs. the group, how far back in history does it go? Where there economic reasons for such bipolar views? Or is it the "nature" of being "animals" after all in a biological sense?

Why has the West evolved Christianity, in particular the notion that only the "pledge" to accept Jesus is all it takes to live a good life? I mean by this that the wishes and the well being of the group or community in which one is a part of pales in comparison with one's "convictions."

Is there historical reasons why China was different in this regard?

Then, I need to look at the historical fact of Empire Building. What are the excuses and dynamics of empire building? Why do they always fail? Is America the next Giant to fall? Will China really overtake the US?

Issue of identity for Chinese-American writers

If I carried an ID which says that I am Chinese-American, would you still ask me if I would go back to China? The China I left is a half a century ago. What landmark still exists in Canton, the mouth of the Pearl River, and the sampans that sold fish congee?

My svelt auntie ruffled my hair here in the Canton evenings when the breeze from the ocean was still warm. Lovers and children lie on the grass. Some truant boys are still up in the massive yung trees.

Here the British gun boats that once fired into this oldest of all Chinese sea going city in the attempt to sell opium.

Here they were defeated and they went north to Nanking. The Empress Dowager
sold China because it wasn't hers. She was a Manchu.

The China I can go back to is only in the heart, in memory, and in spirit. Capitalism has stinky up China and so it is becoming like the West. When you begin to have young people grow up on rock'n roll instead of your ancient poets, only one thing can happen, the Merchant sails down the river and is gone forever, along with the ancient wares of China, the treasures that will never come back, nor the emigres to other lands.

I have come to know and like (sometimes) pizza, hamburger, fish fries, and apple pie -- they are good and convenient and the electrical wiring of the coke dispensing machine is more intricate than my logic, I bow to the neon gods,
I supplicate to credit cards, and I love formal poetry, and did I leave out anything? We will take our sales team there.

Is there some things that are invariant when translated into a new domain? Why do there exist Chinatowns? The invisible walls that keep the Chinese "in" or the others "out"?

Even Hu Jintao wears a suit, a business suit.

I wear Lands End clothing in this freezing land. They are a good company. And they did not do like Marco Polo, who stole silkworms from China in a bamboo stick. Gone are the scholars and concubines. Gone is Li Po who crazily embraced the moon. Gone are the water-buffaloes grazing on the perimeter of the village pond. Gone are the bull frogs that croak as the evening descends. It is night over there now if the day begins here.

And here I sit at the Computer, an infinite better refinement of the abacus. But the abacus was all China needed. Then someone said, you got to make things that don't last. That way, you have repeat customers and so you will have a steady source of profits. I think China has learned that lesson from Japan. And so who am I who is here bemoaning Progress?

You can go back to the land, but not to the people. Here you are suspended, uncomfortably straddling two or more cultures. Define yourself through praxis. Define yourself by nothing but love.

Negotiations

I am doing better in my Philosopher of Mind class since I started negotiating and being diplomatic. I was taking intellectual arguments too personally.

"You drew a circle to keep me out.

I drew a bigger circle to keep you in."

--- Anonymous Native American saying?

Goals statement

To make explicit the connections between prior experiences and my stated goal of becoming a literary theorist, I rely on practical hands-on experiences of running a press pretty much as I wanted to do it my own way. Thus, my literary identity is already unique. But through my associations with hundreds of writers/poets over the past 30 some years actively engaged in literature and being its advocate, I have become very discriminant as to the quality and message of the works presented to me. The fact that I have been judge of various poetry contests gives me confidence that I can choose good work from the heap or the bin.

chapbook for sale

The Burden of Sanity & Other Poems

by Koon Woon, Chrysanthemum Publications 2004, ISBN 0-9712598-0-x

is a chapbook of some of Koon's finest published poems including nominations for Pushcart Prize.

This unusual chapbook is a veritable mix of cultures - an algorithmic rendition of a pre-computer, changeless society of China catapulted into the space-age of one-way tickets into the unknown.

But the reader will find a sense of recognition in each and every poem in this 44-page chapbook as the poems take you up in air and take you to water-buffalo slow scenes of the far side of the Pacific, to disorient you, and to return you to American soil via the Beat's preoccupation with everything Asian and enduring.

This chapbook follows on the heels of Koon's highly acclaimed full-length book The Truth in Rented Rooms, winner of the Pen Oakland Award and a finalist in the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Price: $9.95 includes shipping and handling.

Write to 2012 18th Ave. South, Seattle, WA 98144, USA or order through email at

nooknoow@aol.com

The embodiment of soul in a tea cup

My style of learning is to take it slow, forget about the grade, go for the jugular

When I am mangled and bleeding from the high mountain passes

I want to trade my horse for your house

My knife for your mantle piece

I owe it to FG Lorca for the gypsy blood in me

though I was a village boy who watch the rice sprout

I was a philosophy who did not drank German stout

I was simply a boy that they let be

My philosophy of learning is to investigate

Because at this juncture of life I can no longer hesitate

What has been done has been done

To rewrite it is up to cheats and tyrants

You can box me from ear to ear

But it is the beginning of a new weird

As I type and gripe, gripe and type

Nowhere is the solution perfectly clear

So I guess we will muddle along

Like eddieandbill following the lame balloon man

and whistle far and wee for this is again spring

Yes, my philosophy is simply to write

To look!

And to write.

"Bravely the little frog

at edge of swamp

croaks, to hold back night."

Identity

This cat is bound for glory this cat

This cat is learning how to eat your bread

Import/Exporting Seattle Waterfront

The Title for my MA LNT degree will be: The Struggle of Chinese-American Writers for Identity

Goals Statement

My short range goal is to obtain my MA in Liberal Studies with emphasis on literary theory.
The long-range goal is to teach part-time online Humanities and/or introductory courses on poetry writing and/or philosophy. My life-long goal is to work for world peace with the Chrysanthemum Literary Society that I have created through literature.

I come into the MA LNT program with 30 years worth of poetry reading/writing/editing/publishing experiences. My own poetry efforts have received international attention. Moreover, I have studied philosophy, both in the academic sense from a university curriculum to many years of literary ruminations. And from a very torrid life.

I will perhaps take more courses in psychology in addition to literature and philosophy. Since the kind of work I envision for myself means negotiating with people and to change each other's outlook in the process, I must learn to get along better with peers, especially academic peers.

I have, by the way, published two literary books (one poetry and one short fiction collection) that sit on the shelves of Antioch University Seattle. These titles are PORCH SHADOWS by Betty Irene Priebe, a collection of poems that illumines the Wisconsin landscape and the people and their history and their concerns for this land and the greater role of protecting the environment, which ultimately sing praises of family, friendship, and the pursuit of beauty. The other title I have published with my Goldfish Press is I WAS NEVER COOL by Joseph Musso, Jr. Cool is a book of contemporary angst of our young people navigating through an uncertain future. Nevertheless, these collages that made up the book make the reader think twice about his "comfortable" position and onto greater concerns of humanity. The writer is a young writer and there is more to expect from him.

I have also promoted literature in Seattle and the Greater Pacific Northwest for the past 30 years. My magazine Chrysanthemum was an occasional but impactful venue for much of the new poets in this region. However, these pages have also been graced by famed national and international poets. It is possibly the first multicultural magazine in the true sense of the word and spirit and it did its job quietly without any support from arts agency. (Inner city black berry vines grew ok without city rain; heaven's pennies it abstains from taking...).

I figure that once I receive my MA degree, more people will pay attention. I am going to imitate the poet Henri Michaux (you got to stretch the definition of things sometimes) and my philosophy prof John Wisdom. I am going to mix literature with philosophy with psychotherapy and that is to parlay my three miserable failures into one grand success. In this, "My hopes go way up, to infinity almost..."

Journal assignment for week 5

Writing you must do this week. (4 hours)
1. Journal Writing. For your goal statement, write a dialogue on your significant values and how they developed.
2. Journal Writing. Consider several questions from the “Viewpoints” section of Chapter 1 of Keen and Valley-Fox to elaborate on your values.
3. Journal Writing. For goal setting and your philosophy of education reflect on your preferred learning styles and patterns.
4. Journal Writing. Record a learning experience and identify the learning style.
5. Learning Autobiography. Continue writing your learning autobiography. You will need to post it in session 6, and this is session 5, so this is the week when you should finish it. The reading load is light this week, and you should have several hours available to finish or come near to finishing your draft.

This blogger lives here ...

It is 3:30AM. I am up early at 2AM, having gone to sleep at 9pm. My address is Chrysanthemum Literary Society, 2012 18th Ave. South, Seattle, WA. 98144, USA.

This blog grew out of an assignment from Dr. William Kline at the University of Illinois at Springfield (online). I have him to thank and also my first follower: Laura Priebe, artist, mother, grandmother, and candidate for the Minister of Culture.

I have a poetry reading coming up with Michael Yuan at the Hugo House in Seattle on March 3 in the evening.

Chrysanthemum Literary Society

Presents a Poetry Reading of the Chinese Diaspora

Featuring : Changming (Michael) Yuan &
Koon Woon

And OPEN MIC

At The Hugo House
1634 Eleventh Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122

March 3, 2010
6 – 9:30 pm
Supported by
Supported by Poets & Writers,
Inc.

This Event is Supported by
Poets &Writers, Inc.



This event is supported by the City of Seattle, Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, smart ventures Funding Program


If you are in the vicinity of Seattle at that time, please drop by. It is free and open to the public. And there is open-mic for a full hour.

Sunday, February 21, 2010 at 3AM Seattle time

Koon Woon
(Learning Autobiography)


LNT501

Professor William Kline

University of Illinois at Springfield online









Early Childhood

I was born in a small village in Toishan, China in 1949. At the age of 5, I witnessed a public execution of a landlord. The Communists came to power and instituted land reform, winning the hearts of poor peasants. Thus, their hold on power was secured.

I went to public schools in China and in 1960, came to the US to join my family, who had immigrated before me. My parents had left me to the care of my maternal grandmother. My siblings were all born in the US. Because of historical prejudice against the Chinese immigrants (they actually came as “indentured servants”), I was what was known as a “paper son.” I came under an assumed name. My legal name is Koon Woon, but my real name is Locke.

I arrived in the US at the age of 11 and I began public school education in Aberdeen, Washington, a small logging and fishing town on the Pacific coast. I previously had not spoken a word of English. I made that my first priority out of necessity. Though I also played like other children that age, I learned responsibility early, for I was the oldest of 8 siblings. Immediately I took on a paper route to augment my family’s income, because the only income was my father’s job as a fry cook, at the Smoke Shop Café, owned by the mayor of Aberdeen.

Our family finally, through a loan from a family friend, started a small café when I was 16, and called it the Hong Kong Café. I began working for my family as cook/waiter/chief bottle washer. I learned every phase of operating a café by the time I was 21; I was able to be in charge when they went on vacations.


High School Days

I was a loner from the age of 14 onward, because at that time, before my family had the capital to open up our own restaurant, my father worked as a cook for the China Doll restaurant in an adjacent town. The restaurant was a “cover” for a house of prostitution upstairs. I had to help my father work in the kitchen on weekends until the wee hours of the morn. I saw prostitutes doubled as waitresses, the madam Sally, the bouncer who doubled as a cook, the clients who after a few drinks claimed to be the mayor or the sheriff and eventually the madam got run out of town for blackmailing people.

So, in high school, I hit the books hard because I had no real friends with this kind of secret knowledge and nascent cynicism. I was appointed the literary chairman of our creative writing club in high school. I also excelled in everything else. I went to night school to study calculus with Tom, whose brother later won a Nobel in Physics. I had no social activities, because I had to work at the family restaurant. The last year of high school I got a job with the US postal service. I learned a little about business from family obligations, and later on I was to take only one course in economics, microeconomics, and I received an A+. I remember on one occasion, I read a book called ­The Economic History of the United States. For my first course in college (I was attending college and high school concurrently), I studied philosophy, and the text we used was called The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner, in addition to the regular introductory course book to philosophy taught by a Stanford graduate. I rather enjoyed the course. I was 18 at the time, going to high school during the day, working a few hours for the post office after school, and attending the local community college in the evening. And on weekends I cooked at the restaurant. And no dates with girls. It is easy to see now how an emotional crisis was in the making.

During high school, I was selected to go to science seminar for bright and gifted high school students, meanwhile, my friend Tom who, at the age of 16, did some original research in Physics and was published in “Science” magazine. Unquestionably Tom was the best science student in our Aberdeen high school, but I was second. My honors English teacher in my senior year, Ms. Gwin, a spinster who taught continuously at Aberdeen high school for over 30 years, wrote on my report card that I was the best student she had in 30 years. I guess I was gifted in languages. I took French for a year and I received national honors. I had taken Spanish in middle school and a year in high school and I was able to get along in Mexico later on when I hitch-hiked there at the age of 21. But that’s getting ahead of our story.

I was awarded a science scholarship when I graduated from high school, which I did not apply for. I did not apply for anything nor volunteer to do anything in school, even though quite a few girls wanted to be my “lab partner” in chemistry. I was also the best chemistry student in high school, and so at the invitation of MIT, I attended their conference in Seattle during my Junior year in high school, when MIT suggested that I apply to their school a year early, but I didn’t do so because I felt obligated to my family, and my father wanted me to go into business with him. And so in some ways, my father had sabotaged my college career.

Sometimes as a waiter at our café, I donned on a waiter’s jacket and filled the salt and pepper shakers, washed the drinking glasses and made tea. During the slow hours I read philosophy. I enjoyed philosophers with a literary bent, people like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and later on John Wisdom. I did not understand much of what they said, but it paved the way to intellectual curiosity in a drab, logging and fishing town, where, in the slow hours of the afternoon in low-blood sugar days, the loggers slapped their silver dollars down on the bar for schooners of Olympia beer. I became interested in the “other worldliness” of thought.

These periods of my life were characterized by seriousness, industriousness, and intense introspection. My father was a typical Confucian who expected his sons to follow his footsteps in scooping up all the riches in America that he can. America, not surprisingly, was originally called “Golden Mountain” by early Chinese indentured servants as well as other immigrants. But history tells us that the rail links in the American West were built by the Chinese, who when they became ill, were thrown off the mountains because food was limited. In the small conservative town of Aberdeen, my mother was forever telling people, “He my son, he good boy.” So, as long as I lived at home, there was a mystification of our real status in America. The loneliness became even more intense, as exhibited by my often driving 50 miles to nowhere and then driving back home. The crab grass along the beach roads in Ocean Shores and the swampy lands near Duck Lake seem to echo my moods. It led me to later read Theodore Roethke’s poetry, his poem “Dolor” made a serious impact on me. I discover the reading of literature. This became the beginning of my real life’s work.


College: a 40-Year Venture


I began college when I was still in high school and when I graduated from high school, I was a sophomore in college. I transferred from Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, Washington to the University of Washington in Seattle in 1969 and majored first in electrical engineering and finding that I had very little enthusiasm for engineering. I switched to mathematics as a major when a couple of graduate mathematics students and I became friends. Actually, I saw an inspirational film about mathematics in high school wherein it was shown that a mathematician could “work” anywhere. That is to say, in the film, the applied mathematician was studying erosion of the river bank and so he was outdoors making notes of vector fields to represent the flow of the river’s water. I thought to myself, “To do this kind of work, all you need is a pad of paper and pencil and your imagination; that’s really far-out!” So, I started spending a lot of time at the Last Exit on Brooklyn coffeehouse in the University District in Seattle, a couple of blocks from campus, where so-called intellectuals hung out.

At the Last Exit coffeehouse I did my homework during the slow hours of the café. I learned to play chess and Go, read books on philosophy, and held conversations with a variety of people who frequent the place – from drug dealers to occasional commercial fishermen, from intellectuals to hustlers, and from students to street people. I got to make friends with people who stayed friends with me until this day --- a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, a mathematician that went to The Advanced Institute at Princeton, the son of a documented CIA agent, and a parade of coffeehouse musicians and poets. So, I took up the guitar. I read books on Zen Buddhism by Dr. Suzuki. I read plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett, and books by Camus, Kafka, Lorca, John Fowles, Theodore Roethke, and Pablo Neruda and many others. The books roughly fall into two categories --- Philosophy and Literature.

I also spent two consecutive summers in San Francisco, living in North Beach, and hung around Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. I was also in the periphery of the drug culture. But I only did so-called “soft-drugs.” I had an occasional girl friend. And so things were good. I was living off my savings and got a job tutoring math and grading homework papers from the math department. I was blossoming. I attribute that to getting away from my parents and Aberdeen. I was let loose in a university and in a city like a child was left alone in a candy store. Little did I know that I would see “the dentist” in the future.

Disappointment with love led to alcoholism for a number of years. Actually the alcohol merely “masked” my incipient mental illness. I often felt anxious at this time and was not able to carry on a job I had in a psychology lab. I got depressed often and I sometimes slept around the clock. The war in Vietnam was going on and I was ordered for induction. I fought the draft and was given a 4F for administrative reasons. I drifted around for several years, going in and out of school at the University of Washington and also 2 years at the University or Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. Sometimes I would also work for my family at our café. Mental illness was ticking in me like a time-bomb. I had a full-blown psychotic episode in San Francisco at the age of 27 and was involuntarily committed for paranoia delusions at Napa State Hospital. When I was discharged 4 months later, I was diagnosed and given a form of disability payment called SSI and Medicaid. I had to take psychotropic medication religiously.

I could not set foot in a classroom for over 20 years because of anxiety disorders and paranoia ideations. To put it mildly, I was not well. I was hospitalized 12 times. (Here is a poem that may capture something of this experience):

“A Season in Hell”


“When you come in to work each morning,
you got to remove your bodily organs and limbs
one by one, hang them up on the hooks provided
in the walk-in box, and then put a white apron
onto your disembodied self, pick up a knife
and go to the meat block,” said Alex the manager.

I was also drained of blood and other vital bodily fluids.

After the morning rush preparing pork adobo and chicken curry,
I ate lunch with Fong the chief cook and Lee the dishwasher.

In the afternoon I examined souls and kept the merits and demerits in a ledger.

For the three months I worked at City Lunch near the Bart Station,
I paid my rent and gradually I became robust enough to walk to work.
The entire city of San Francisco swung with the rhythm of my walk.
And stars appeared in the middle of the afternoon with a sliver of the moon.

Meanwhile, at Fisherman’s Wharf the stingrays came to the jetty
and whipped their tails against rocks; tourists paid me to dance
on the waves. I carefully treaded water and remembered to breathe.

In the end I was evicted anyway from my castle that glowed at night.
For a lack of a better thing to do I walked from hill top to hill top,
burned newspapers to inhale the smoke, then climbed down to the water
beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and harvested seaweed.

I waited until one sunny day when the water was warm and calm.
I swam all the way to Asia and got replacements for my disembodied self.
I did not forget that I was a ghost.
And that was my first season in Hell.


Koon Woon


Despite these hardships, which included 3 times of homelessness, brief jail experiences due to the acting out of my illness, and dire poverty, I kept myself intact by writing poetry and doing volunteer work until I published a book of poetry at age 49. This eventually gave me confidence to return to college and finally earned my BA degree in Liberal Studies at Antioch University Seattle. Now what I need to talk about is my literary development.
­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Learning Styles: Good and Faulty


I am a paradoxical learner in the sense that I am a book learner on the one hand and on the other hand very much an experiential learner. Sometimes I hit the right combination and sometimes they mishmash.
Going way back in childhood I was not a person who respected authority, unless authority demonstrated reason as well. It probably was that my father was absent the first 12 years of my life, and I was the “little emperor” to my maternal grandmother who reared me. But my maternal uncle, Uncle Sum, I dearly loved.
On any pretext, I would walk 3 or so miles, beginning at age 5, from my village to his in Sui Poh. My Uncle would instruct his wife to slaughter and cook a chicken and give me one of the thighs for dinner. The other chicken thigh goes to his youngest son. Before dinner, however, there will be a session on the abacus. He taught me the numerical chants that went with the flicking of the beads on the tray of the abacus, which literally went faster than conscious thought. This way, one made oneself into a “computer” that follows an “algorithm.” In addition to abacus lessons, Uncle Sum would recap stories of his life as a merchant and later as a farmer. He had done many things during the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930’s to the successful Communist take over in 1949. He had been an arms runner. When the Communists took power in 1949, they asked him to be “mayor.” He refused their offer, as my Uncle is a strict Confucian and a Taoist. They asked him why he would indulge in such a “rich refusal.” He said, “Undoubtedly you will ask me to name my relatives who have money, but I do not wish to generate animosity with them.”
The authorities said, “But we are in power now!”
To this, my Uncle Sum said, “Yes, but I do not know how long your government would last, but my relatives last forever!”
He was a village leader, the same way my own father was a village leader. My great-grandfather had immigrated to the US back in the 1860’s and was instrumental in conscripting 500 men from the Locke clan to work in the logging industry. Later on, these men settled in many small towns of Washington State and in time, “grew” the first US governor of Chinese descent, Gary Locke, who is the current Secretary of Commerce under President Obama.
Perhaps some of the leadership traits are in me also, for I founded a multicultural literary magazine, Chrysanthemum, and I operated a Goldfish Press in Seattle since 1990. My own work in poetry reaches out internationally. I have published an award-winning book, The Truth in Rented Rooms, which was given recognition by the Poetry Society of America.
Thus, I am able to learn by myself. First, I learned English well enough within a few years to become literary chairman of my high school. With the same literary interests, I was catapulted into national recognition for my poetry. In a similar vein, I had taught myself guitar, journalism, editing, and publishing. And in business formations, I have now a sole proprietorship, an S-corporation, and a charitable, nonprofit organization devoted to the advancement of literature and world peace.

However, the down side of this is that I do not ask questions and I am generally afraid of authority. I have an ego problem that is also paradoxical. Most of the time, I think I am reasonably intelligent, but sometimes, I swear on my mother’s grave that I am as big of an idiot as they would come, like the hillbilly song, “Well, it is T for Texas and T for Tennessee, but it is W for women, who made a fool out of me.”

Learning Traits

I am mainly a self-directed and self-taught person, despite the fact that I have attended many schools and have taken many subjects. I would say that I am a life-long learner for several reasons. These reasons will explain why I am still a student at age 61, why I still have so many different interests both academically and non-academically, and why I covet intellectual achievements.
One may not be far from the truth that I am reaching very high because of self-doubts of my worth. It is as in the poem by the French poet Henri Michaux, who penned: “It is because of a little lack, my hopes go way up, to infinity almost…”
Because mental illness struck me at the most creative and intellectually productive years of my life (in my twenties for a mathematician), I always felt “cheated” in a way. A lot of self-doubt crept into my psyche. The remedy seems that I learn and relearn the basics over and over again. And that’s why today I still have my hands in math (the simple stuff) by being a tutor for hire. I work privately as well as for a tutoring agency

Purpose of the Writing Life
The literary magazine, Chrysanthemum, that I published for about twenty years, is an attempt to include poets and writers of every persuasion, whether it is racial, cultural, or sexual orientation. I am most interested in the idea of a writer’s identity. Because of the fact that I am bicultural and bilingual, in addition to having had a variety of life experiences, that sometimes I truly cannot know “reality” as such as the fall-out from my mental illness. Thus, I am interested in psychology, philosophy, and literary theory to the extent of understanding the nature of literature and the writer. For Literature, I use the old definition – the study of life. Therefore, it is imperative that a writer knows who he is and whom he writes for. Moreover, I see literature as a form of healing of our psychic wounds from the daily toils of living, sometimes very competitively.
I have taken various psychology, anthropology, sociology, humanity, philosophy, and literary theory courses in order to embark on a serious study of the identity of the writer. A writer writes mostly because he is compelled to. Whether a writer is afflicted with that irresistible urge in his way to set the world right again or whether he writes only for his own enjoyment, I believe that no writer comes with carte blanche. He pays his dues. And his dues are exactly what he owes humanity for being what it is. And so my aim is to point out, to say, “Look! There is the truth. It is not theorizing, it is what you know by looking.”
To this end, my degree will be interdisciplinary – literary theory and the writer’s identity. I shall borrow from psychology, philosophy, and any of the humanistic studies to produce literature. I believe I have set the course for myself, and if an observer merely looks, he or she can see that I have studied and applied literature to good use – the chief among those uses is therapy. In this search for wholeness, the idea is to write, read, write, to live, and to write, and to live!

The Value of Self-directed and Experiential Learning:
This I think is where I have an advantage. What was bashfulness in speaking with professors and higher authorities turns out in my favor as far as experiential learning goes. I am not suggesting that being stubborn and never asking questions is the right way to go, on the contrary, what I am saying is that that is the way to go ultimately, but only as a last resort. Let me explain.
Self-discovery is a wonderful thing. And ultimately, what works for me is excelling in a field that I have chosen for myself. And this came at a great financial and an economic opportunity loss for me. But I don’t regret it. I have discovered who I am and what my goals in life are. I have chosen a literary life.
A literary life is merely a life in books, or is it? Let me go back to the old definition:
“Literature is the study of life.” Then, in this, there is no difference between literature and philosophy as Socrates had said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Therefore, experiential learning is the examination of one’s life – its values and its worth as one lives it.

Journal writing while on ferry in Puget Sound

Journal of Koon Woon



LNT 501 Spring 2010 online




Professor William Kline


























Poem for Susan, my fiancée:





I See My Fate in My Palm


I see my fate in my palm,
the palm that holds your palm,
and the lines and veins that connect
my heart to your heart
in the paths of life.

Be it simple, be it convoluted,
be it properly clothed, or complete in the nude,
you are my life, my fate,
you are my wife, my mate.

When men compare wallets against wallets,
or the number of hairs standing on their heads,
I compare the stars that shine each to each,
and count the days our love grows, from the day we first met.

I will not forget you in my village tongue,
by your name Ai Lian, the beautiful lotus,
and as you lie silently here asleep,
I pause at the typewriter,
to look at the lines you etched indelibly in my palms.

I see my fate, I see the paths of our connecting veins.
I can see the future too, it is always the first day –
You are my life, my fate;
You are my wife, my mate.









January 26, 2010

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

A Smoke Break at the Nuclear Command


We multitask chop, grill, wok, and pickle.
They are fickle, can come all hours, drunk,
after sex, before meetings, during greetings;
hucksters, gangsters, no telling who wants what
stir-fried, steamed rock cod with its head and bulbous eyes.

My father at the meat block hacks spareribs, carves bone from chicken,
mince onions, six sons chow the mein, French-fry the sausage,
whip the gravy, beat the eggs until you can fool the young
into thinking that’s sperm yanked from a calf.
Smoke signals say the pork chops are burnt,
the white sauce turning yellow and the waitresses ladle the soup.
Sounds like feeding at the zoo. Chopsticks tingle from a corner booth.

On and on motors start and stop, door open and shut, ice water
set down as menus are tossed. You need a minute? Mom is helping the girls to wash
glasses and tea pots. It would be sinful to run out of hot mustard during the rush.
My father drinks my coffee and I smoke his Marlboro,
Two cowboys in cattle drive fending off rustlers, and damn!
The waitress says that the women’s toilet has overflowed!

We are going to go fishing as soon as our mental breakdowns are over with.
And we are going to take a smoke break from the nuclear command.
Just then a party of 12 comes in – well, put two tables together,
like a man joining a woman, the yin and yang, and kids with yo-yo’s.
We are family doing family business, money for school books,
Mom’s dentures.


Chinese Waiters
Edsel of Sam Wo is forgivably curtand flirts with single, white patronesses.He smiles, dabbing sweat with a restaurant towel,like Louie, Louie Armstrong.
And Sam of Tai Tung smiles, smilessmiles of an imperial fool, but no fool is hethinking of his kids in school and wife in a garment shop.
I haven't forgotten when tourists askto see the Chinese menu. (The menus are the same, actually.)I wore the waiter's yellow jacketthat had been worn for three generations.My smile was almost genuine --You like our food, we like your money.And with tips I bought a brand new Nietzche.(I figure someday I want to be a writer, not a waiter.)
And on the stone of my great-grandfather,the grass grew (hard to find it).And I saw for a moment that Nietzche had writtenthe inscription: "History walks on the backsof those like so many stepping stones."

I was a waiter at our family café. I filled the soy sauce each day before the restaurant opened. The soy sauce was brooding dark. I filled the black pepper and salt shakers. I wiped the table tops and filled the napkin holders before I slinked into a booth reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The world had a hidden dimension.


But this cannot be the final word. I believe in equality and justice. And fairness and charity of the heart. So, in this sense I am a Christian. Yet, I am a Moslem and a Buddhist and a Jew and all those other things.

I know how those Ph.D. people complain how hard it was to get where they are. So is someone in prison who has no way of getting out. Writing is the only freedom it seems and it is not very effective. Not when one has to fight off the Established Publishing Houses or Fox News.

It is 2:47AM and I am angry. Well, there is one way out, and that is to keep on writing.
This journal idea is a great idea. I have been using it myself but not this systematically.

I am now writing with an audience in mind. So, I must be more open and less cryptic.

I really enjoy reading Carl R. Rogers for he is such a good man, a healer, and someone who really dismisses as the Chinese would say, “Wearing a tall hat.” All the accolades he received he looked at as generosity that the world erred in his favor. He is truly a humble man. If nothing else, I must learn that lesson. By not bathing in the limelight, one gets more work done.

“Great talents mature late,” Tao Te Ching.

You know, the analogy is like a sculptor and sculpturing when I write these notes. I am carving from that unconscious block or blob of words just the right portions in the right form so that it makes meaningful a text.

Now, say something about the Philosophy of Mind class. It is highly stimulating and I enjoy it.

No matter how miserable my life can get, when I write I feel better. Herein lies my salvation. Writing. Writing. Writing.


Leonard Cohen’s song “Suzanne,”

LEONARD COHEN lyrics - Suzanne Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river You can hear the boats go by You can spend the night beside her And you know that she's half crazy But that's why you want to be there And she feeds you tea and oranges That come all the way from China And just when you mean to tell her That you have no love to give her Then she gets you on her wavelength And she lets the river answer That you've always been her lover And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you know that she will trust you For you've touched her perfect body with your mind. And Jesus was a sailor When he walked upon the water And he spent a long time watching From his lonely wooden tower And when he knew for certain Only drowning men could see him He said "All men will be sailors then Until the sea shall free them" But he himself was broken Long before the sky would open Forsaken, almost human He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone And you want to travel with him And you want to travel blind And you think maybe you'll trust him For he's touched your perfect body with his mind. Now Suzanne takes your hand And she leads you to the river She is wearing rags and feathers From Salvation Army counters And the sun pours down like honey On our lady of the harbour And she shows you where to look Among the garbage and the flowers There are heroes in the seaweed There are children in the morning They are leaning out for love And they will lean that way forever While Suzanne holds the mirror And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you know that you can trust her For she's touched your perfect body with her mind.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1:10pm Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I remember reading the book Who Got Dr. Einstein’s Office? It appears that Albert Einstein was the buddy of Kurt Godel at The Advanced Institute at Princeton. They did not speak each others’ language but they often walked together to their offices. And furthermore, each of them recognized the other as a genius.

Kurt Godel had married a chorus girl against his parents’ wishes. But the girl turned out to be a dutiful wife. After his Completeness Theorem in 1930 and his Incompleteness Theorem the following year, Godel went “off the deep end” and manifested paranoia schizophrenia and refused to eat anyone’s cooking but his wife’s. Unfortunately on one occasion, his wife was in the hospital and was unable to cook for him, and things came to their logical conclusion – Godel starved to death.

They noticed that he had kept a closet full of strange receipts and other notes written in a strange shorthand format. No one was able to decipher them at the time of his death. Finally they were able to enlist the help of a barber from his hometown who was able to decipher them. The mystery turned out to be nothing at all. Those strange notes were the expense accounts of all his dealings while at The Advanced Institute at Princeton. They were merely receipts of doing his laundry, his haircut, and various things of a very mundane nature. Godel and his only brother died without leaving offspring and so the Godel family line ended. Similarly, none of Einstein’s descendants ever made it to the fame he commanded, including a son who died in a mental hospital. At least this was the story in the magazine Omni which is no longer in print.

Why do I think of this right now? My professor in the Mind course comes from Princeton where he studied with John P. Burgess, who is an intellectual heir going back to Leibniz, my favorite philosophers of all times. Although Princeton University is not The Advanced Institute at Princeton, I feel that there is a parallel. What is the parallel? Logic. In my opinion, everything depends on the Liars Paradox which is, essentially, the following: “I am a liar.”


January 28, 2010
.

Here was unsent letter and it is to my psychiatrist friend Dr. Laurence P. Jacobs, whom I’ve known for over 40 years:

Friday, December 04, 2009 3:45AM
Dear Larry,
My apologies for being asleep when you called last evening at 10:23pm. I was more tired than I thought I was when I just lay down for a moment, then I fell asleep. We had been cleaning the apartment for visitors. Susan and I are ready to have visitors over these days, mainly because we are lonely but also because we are more social. She is more social than I am and that’s good. It gets me outside of myself at times.
How is your health holding out these days, Larry? Whenever you need anybody to do anything for you, please let us know. Call us anytime. We owe it to you that we are still together. Her family is beginning to call her here, and I see that as a positive sign that I may be accepted down the road.
I applied for a $1,000 grant for a reading with a Chinese poet Changming (Michael) Yuan in Seattle and we got the grant from the Mayor’s Office’s smART Ventures program. We can try to raise additional money by being umbrella’ed by a 501 ( c ) 3 organization. I hope to resurrect the multicultural magazine Chrysanthemum and Goldfish Press, as well as embarking on a joint venture with Changming (Michael) Yuan and Joneve McCormick (originally from Manhattan who is now in Santa Barbara, CA). (Btw, Goldfish Press now has 2 titles in the Antioch Library). We may all go into publishing. I think I will go into nonprofit work. I will be volunteering in the Chinese Information and Referral Service in Chinatown as a fundraiser soon. I have an appointment today with them. I want to learn some skills at fundraising, marketing, and other things to get the Chrysanthemum Literary Society off the ground. Last week I met with a Jeff Encke, who works for the Gates Foundation, who is a poet and the administrator of the website “Seattle Poets Gathering.” I have been running into other people lately. There is Kris Caldwell, who just got back from living in Beijing, China as I think a tea merchant. Then I got in touch with old friend Leland Ross, who is now married. He had studied at Yale briefly and majored in Albanian (language). This is just to say that Susan and I are more social than I was alone.
You always have an open invitation to visit us and have dinner or whatever is your choice. Our station in life is humble but I think we are finally on the right track as far as dealing with our illness(es) is concerned.
Betty is still going about her days but like all of us, a little older and slower. We are grateful for her support and glad we are able to be someone she can talk with.
Gary Locke, the Commerce Secretary, the other day said that WA State needs more trade, since it is the most trade-dependent state in the US. And so I have been thinking of importing a bunch of tea mugs from China. Now I got to learn the ropes and raise the capital. I think since I am limited as to travel, I might try to do this as Internet business or E-commerce as they call it.
By the way, I have successfully transferred to the MA philosophy program online at UIS (University of Illinois at Springfield) and my first courses will be Graduate Orientation Seminar and the Philosophy of Mind. These will begin in January, 2010.
I dropped out of the Human Services program because my advisor is herself mentally ill
(recovered and has a Ph.D., Denise Sommers) and she seemed to have an axe to grind.
Anyway, things are quiet in this North Beacon Hill neighborhood. I tutored math for a couple of sessions. It is not a dependable part-time job. Susan likes to spend more money than I do on food and things. It is unequal as far as the money thing goes. I pay almost all the bills and I am heavily in debt, but things seem to be NOT in a panic mode, and I don’t know how that works. We cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving and last night, Martin Ingerson came over to show us more magic tricks. We gave him a tea mug and some turkey to take home. Martin had once worked for the SF police department as a civilian go-between the Chinese community there. He is working part-time at the Seattle City Zoo still. He is about 78 or 80 now.
Of all the people, Susan and I got to thank you the most. So, we have no power and little means, but anytime we could be of help, please let us know.






I believe this Journal idea is an absolutely sane idea and will help keep me in this class, school, and in life itself.

6:10AM in Seattle now and it is still dark; the street lamps are visible through the slits of my blinds as I look up to the computer screen. Some people have already finished fornicating, showering, and breakfasted and are commuting to work. The stretch of the freeway between Everett and Seattle and for that matter, all the way down to Tacoma bumper to bumper like electrons in a tube of copper wire in the making of this terrain a mega city in a decade or two. I have not driven a car in almost 40 years.

My mythic journey? In my imagination and delusional states, I have been many things – including that of the Director of the National Security Agency. My job was so secretive that the place of my office was a top secret, so secretive that even I didn’t know where my office was. I belonged to an organization simply know as Insiders. We operated the government itself while we pretended to be janitors at top government offices and multinational corporate headquarters. There are various ways we communicated that were rather slow and primitive, including the use of hiding messages in books in the public libraries. Why were we able to control the world even though our methods were so primitive at communicating with each other? Planning! And Intelligence! We have to anticipate events and conspiracies and military, social, and cultural movements way ahead of time. In this regard, we were almost as good as the Triad of the Chinese Intelligence as it was revealed in the British M1’s The Jackdal Files. We shared intelligence with the Mosad, or the Israeli intelligence. They have the best technical apparatus but we have the best political analysis.

I have been at my outpost for the last 30 years now – Seattle Chinatown. Hey, folks, I will let you in on a secret --- Seattle is the first place in the world that will be most likely be hit by a nuclear bomb from China or a Chinese sub. The brain of the US government is no longer in Washington D.C. but in Seattle. I have the nuclear codes. It is based on Deontic Logic. For example, I might be on the phone with someone (where that person is doesn’t make any difference, as long as the conversation is picked up be the Chinese Second Artillery Force, which controls nuclear missiles. For example, a person and I may be discussing the price of Lychee tea in Seattle Chinatown at the Uwajimaya Asian Market and Emporium. When I appear to be not making sense to the party I am speaking to, the Second Artillery Force will realize that I have been poisoned or stressed to the point that I have decompensated to the point that I cannot not relied on to do my job. At that point, they will fire nuclear missiles at Seattle. This is all the details I can divulge unfortunately. I am sure you want to know more. Such is this kind of life.

We only show you that there is a puzzle. But once you think you have solved the puzzle, you will see that there is another puzzle within this one, and so on either ad infinitum or terminated at some point. Then, The Truth in Rented Rooms.

I am aware that there is a paranoia delusion with elements of grandeur in my morning illness. It is all right. It kept me alive all these 40 years of my illness. I never wanted to kill myself no matter how bad things deteriorate to, because in the morning, I always feel grandiose and happy.

Seattle Waterfront

Friday, January 29, 2010
8:46pm

Today was better. I shut off Facebook last night because I get too many self-promotions from other poets and the like. I really want to hunker down and study philosophy.

I am thinking of somehow applying abstract algebra to some kind of philosophical structures. If that makes sense.

Susan and I are back on track. My brother called and asked when is the wedding. He owns a cupcake shop in Renton called Common Ground. Of course it refers to coffee residue.

11:37pm. Susan has already gone to bed. I am preparing to meet someone tomorrow who is a poet and a teacher. He taught at Columbia University and is currently teaching at the Richard Hugo House and is working for the Gates Foundation. There are a couple of things I want from him, but I don’t know what he wants from me, except to give me a decision whether he wants to be a part of my nonprofit, charitable literary corporation – Chrysanthemum Literary Society (CLS). He indicated that he wants to contribute as a publicity/marketing person and be rewarded the position of book-length editor. This I can deal with because what I willing to let go is some of the editorial function and concentrate on the business side of things to CLS.

This is a kind of personal politicking for me. I don’t know my own worth sometimes. At least for the past several years, I have more or less done school and nothing else. Living with Susan for the past 1 ½ years though is a new thing. I have always been alone except a brief period living with Melanie in a communal situation. Except for a few dates and one extramarital affair, there have been few relationships. But action-at-a-distance had been my romantic experience most of the time. But the reciprocal attention was either minimal or nonexistent. It means, I like her, but she didn’t like me sort of thing. I loved one woman for 7 years though. She knew I had loved her but she was a flower that Don Quixote would admire and smell all they long. All my life, I had put women on a pedestal.


February 3, 2010
4:56AM, PST Seattle

A Recognition

The last several days I have been undergoing some moral crisis, precipitated by my errors in my Philosophy of Mind class. They were not errors strictly of an academic or knowledge matter; they were also of an attitudinal position.

The immediate cause was that I had a disagreement with what I felt was arrogance on the part of one student in class who mercilessly sought dominance by what I felt was an abrasive attitude towards the thoughts of the other students. Granted that the person in question is likely the most gifted student in the class, however, her attitude did not spare our feelings. More specifically, the “arguments” were over the “correctness” of our philosophic positions of “dualism” vs. “monism,” and the role that science, in particular neuroscience, can lead us out of the muddle the rest of us in the class was in.

Her position was that “dualism,” especially Rene Descartes’ position was just flatly wrong; there is no such thing as “mind,” but only the activities of the brain and its by-products. The professor, though not in complete agreement with her, also said that there is only one type of substance in the world, and that’s physical stuff and that our “mind” indeed is a by-product of our brain.

Such a materialistic theory, purported to be supported by the best scientific evidence now available, is said to be valid. It is just “tough luck” that some of us believe still that we have a “mind” in the normal sense of the word.

Many of us in the class, I in particular, found this “theory” or reality hard to swallow, for it would mean that we really have no “freedom” in this totally mechanistic world.

There was an older fellow, my age, who had been a pharmacist and a psychologist, who took the position of Continental Philosophy that science indeed should not interfere with how we think we should live. I supported his position by saying that “science was arrogant” when I did not deal with the issue, but instead said that to indirectly correct that gifted classmate’s position, which seem totally correct, well-argued and articulated, and had such a recognition by our professor.

Furthermore, she attacked my postings on the class Blackboard as vague and ambiguous, and that was also backed up by what the professor said he wanted – precision and clarity.

My shock was two-fold: first is the mind really a “fiction?” and secondly, “am I smart enough to be taking this class?”

This seemed to be to be some kind of “initiation rite” into Philosophy. This particular class, The Philosophy of Mind, was open to anyone regardless of their background in philosophy. And so we have a big difference between the skill and knowledge levels of the students in the class. Therefore, I felt to be so poorly treated, without kiddy gloves, that it felt like being batted on the head. The larger issues of responsibility, freedom, justice, and morality seem to “mental fictions” which had no place in neuroscience. Since the world is all material, we are just material beings with these “thoughts” which are just by-products of our brains, which are physical objects.

Journal

How Days Are Past

It is the wait. We have a lot of time to wait. We live in the South Side. You cross the bridge just as you come into town, instead of going into town. We are the neighborhood on the road to Westport, just below the hill where the local college sits. We are not students. We sometimes work in the shake mill or longshore. Some of us finished high school but some didn’t and mostly we are in our twenties now. We are too old to hang around the pool hall now or the bowling alley and so sometimes we get a six pack and play cards and wait at the union hall. And on days we don’t get called, we just hang out.

Hank there has a job delivering mail at the P.O. It turns out that Hank buys most of the groceries. There are four of us guys renting this house. The most ambitious one of us here is John; he free lances for the Aberdeen Daily World. John used to write for the O.B. in Aberdeen High School. He mainly writes about his trips to Seattle and sometimes he covers court cases, but his mainstay is obituaries. Then Sam here spends most of his time with Sally and baby sits her four-year-old boy when she waits on tables at Duffy’s. Sam is the poet among the four of us. At night he subs at the Morck Hotel, again part-time. That leaves me unaccounted for. I do occasional gardening and yard work for senior citizens in the neighborhood. The rest of the time I just read.

We are four guys that didn’t have much help from our families, because they didn’t either. We are struggling to keep the rent paid and figuring a way to get out of this depressed area. I guess it started first in 1972 with the oil spill at Ocean Shores. Many birds died from petroleum covered bodies and so did literally hundreds of thousands of clams. Then they planted millions of baby clams but they got washed ashore by the waves. Only a few took hold of the sand. It will be another 10 or 20 years before the beach can recover. Then the environmentalists in Olympia managed to pass the spotted owl bill, which to save the endangered species they outlawed logging. And so that practically shut down our town. No more lumber and pulp mills. No more jobs and alcoholism and teen age pregnancies went up and so did welfare. And petty crime.

Sometimes all the housemates are out except me and I lay around and read. John kids me that he would come up with some money and set up a little used bookstore for me and I could read every book in the damn store before we sell it. I said to John that he should write a few books to put in the store. We had a few laughs over that and we split a bottle of wine. He went to sleep because he was driving up to Seattle to cover a case in the Federal Court for the Daily World. The case had to do with some tribal gambling case. Increasingly there has been more violence at Ocean Shores. The Native Americans opened up casinos and so drugs and prostitutions are moving in. Some rumors these people come up from California or even as far as New Jersey. It is up to people like John to tell us ignorant people in the Harbor what really is going on. I like to read the articles John writes for the Daily World. I hope he will be another Hemmingway some day. Or another John Dos Pasos. And I could be another John Ciardi. The other guys Hank and John are pretty much Aberdeen people, you know what I mean. Hank goes fishing when he isn’t carrying the mail. And Sam likes to hang around Sally and her kid and screws her except the nights he clerks at the Morck. We are just waiting for something to happen and the days to pass.

Koon Woon

February 4, 2010

I realize that I am falling behind in class, and why is that so? I


Today I had slept until 4AM from 9pm last night. I was out like a light. I had a moral crisis because I found out I am no longer smart compared to my classmates in the Philosophy of Mind class. My logic is clumsy and my arguments don’t cut to the quick.

My mind is fuzzy in other words.

But I am going to try still. I haven’t done anything rigorous because I done poetry for a long time and not formal poetry either. My mind is kind of loosely connected --- those neurons that randomly fire control my thoughts.

Today I have a way to get started on my learning autobiography and I will follow the guideline in our handbook closely. I must start learning and following rules. They are not always despotic and arbitrary like my late father was. It is an insight. The world is not according to GARP. Know that, and come up with your own existential reasons for living, Koon Woon.

February 4, 2010

I realize that suddenly I am falling behind in class. I have not read much of the assigned reading. So, given what little I know of Rogers at this point, I want to follow his example and be a little more empirical in my self-evaluation. I must be less subjective. Just starting with that, what should I write and how should I write it?

For one thing, I can list down some things that I have done, wanted to do, and like to see how others do it and what they have accomplished. One such topic is learning how to play the guitar.

When I was 16, and that was in 1965, the Beatles and the English invasion of rock ‘n roll swept America. Elvis Presley was on his way out or maybe had already died. It seemed to me that if you played the guitar well, you would have at least one girl thinking highly of you! I bought a guitar.

I took lessons from the teacher at the music store. She taught me how to strum the Beach Boys’ “My Little Deuce Coup.” Apparently I did well enough that she wanted me to play rhythm guitar for a teenage band. I didn’t think I was good enough. Eventually I couldn’t afford to pay for my lessons and I hang up my guitar.

There was a couple that came to our café quite regularly to drink coffee. They came in the middle of the afternoon when usually at those slow hours they were the only customers. I fill their coffee as much as they wanted to drink. Then one day, as the man reached into his pocket for coins to pay for the coffee, I saw that he had a guitar pick in his hand. I was happily surprised and I asked him if he played the guitar and was willing to give lessons. He said yes and said that he had been doing that for some time. He said he called himself, “El Guitaro.” Since he was only charging half as much as the lady at the music store, I gladly took up the chance to learn more on the guitar.

I drove to the address they gave me and found that it was at a poor neighborhood in the adjacent town of Hoquiam. As soon as I went in, I was assailed by this odor. Later on, when I started smoking in college, I knew it was cigarette tar and nicotine smell. Apparently El Guitaro was living with a woman on welfare and she had 3 small children. And so from then on, each time I showed up for lessons I would bring a large bag of fruit – apples, oranges, and bananas, the usual kinds found in the fruit section of a supermarket.

First thing that El Guitaro showed me was the flamenco tremolo and he said his right little finger didn’t work right because he had been in the army and was mowing the lawn and the mower blew up on him. He taught me for the first song, “My little brown jug.”
He had a Xeroxed and stapled book that he showed me, and he also showed me a letter that some guy had sent him threatened to get him for mail fraud. Apparently El Guitaro sold his books through ads in magazines. Apparently the buyer in question claimed that he did not receive the book he paid for. And he suspected fraud because the check was cashed at a tavern. I was alarmed but El Guitaro said that the FBI wasn’t’ going to get involved for $10. And besides, he sent the book to the guy. Maybe it got lost in the mail. There was no way to trace it since neither party paid for certified mail.

As I got to know El Guitaro and his girl friend and her kids from my weekly lessons, I became more realistic about my potential to make it in the music world. I can’t read music although I tried with the help of a musical theory booklet. Soon, I went away to college.

What I did learn was that El Guitaro really enjoyed his guitar playing and was moderately good, but he had an alcohol problem. Later on I had an alcohol problem myself when I dropped in and out of college. And that’s the way I played the guitar --- on and off, off and on. In the end, I bought a Martin a couple of years ago, and finally I got to perform one song at a local Cabaret.

I realize now that not all childhood dreams are fulfilled. I still think it is ok to have picked up the guitar because I have learned to appreciate another dimension of life – music.

While I did not excel in the guitar, I listened to enough music that it seeped into my poetry. I love poets who have musical ears – Theodore Roethke for example and also possibly the greatest Spanish poet of all times – Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca died during the Spanish Revolution. Possibly he was murdered by the Spanish Civil Guard. He disappeared when he was 36 and his body was never found.

While El Guitaro was not a maestro at the Julliard, I enjoyed what little I learned from him. I realize that we can’t all be Carlos Montoya or Julian Bream. Having fun is part of life. I still have my guitar and now I can make CD’s of my playing on my iMACK G 3 computer. Although it is appreciated by only a few friends, my music pleases me, and sometimes, I figure, perhaps that is the most important thing.

Journal

Here’s my own “Creation Myth”

Creation Myth In the beginning out of the Void and Chaos there was only one Being, who called himself God. He was a lonely guy because although he had the means to slow, stop, or to speed up time, to travel from one dimension to another, to create galaxies and parallel universes as easily as you and I could say “Pie” he had no one to appreciate his powers and his ken. He hadn’t even contemplated the idea of a Dog yet, which was merely the spelling of his name backwards. But one day, as he was traveling through deep space, through a “worm hole” created by a massive dying star, which was creating a black hole, he noticed that he was getting warmer and warmer as his infinite being was being sucked into the black hole. An incredible insight came to him from this darkness. He contemplated a department store called Sears, Roebuck, and Company; he further contemplated all the things that he could create for this variety store. He thought of washers and dryers, television sets, computers, shoes, hats, winter mittens, and even chain saws. He thought even of home improvement k here was no complex organism such as Himself that could appreciate what he was capable of. His loneliness only deepened until he thought of an entity called “Man.” [The reader is advised to read the word “man” as a generic term for man, woman, boy, or girl] So, he invented dough, the kind that you make cake and donuts out of and not the slang for money. He fashioned the dough into little figures of men, women, and children. He put them into the oven which he had previously invented. But since he hadn’t invented a timer and a thermometer yet, he had to estimate how much time to cook each batch of tiny dough figurines of the people he had fashioned. So, he put the first batch into the oven, but he took them out too soon. They came out as the “white” people. So, he told himself that the second batch has to stay a little longer in the oven. But he waited a little too long, and so the second batch came out too well done and so they were the “black” people. And so to remedy the situation, He put in the third batch and took it out timing it carefully. And so they came out just right. He called these the Asian people [a bit of reverse racism here]. And so He created people. Even though the people became highly knowledgeable and civilized after a few million years or so, they kind of forgotten about Him, and so He invented immaculate conception and created a Son of his own. He called it Godson. Some people wanted him to call his Son by the names of Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, or whatever, but since God is God and there is no way of telling him what to do, Godson became part of the vocabulary and reality. So, this was the Original Story. Then the people created Hollywood. After that, nobody knows the truth anymore. people created Hollywood. After that, nobody knows the truth anymore.

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February 13, 2010

I have not been posting the responses to the weekly discussions in this journal and I have to do so now. I haven’t been writing in response to the View Points and I have to do so now. From this point on, I have to follow instructions more carefully.

This is the beginning of the 5th week for me, and I have to write about the Master’s program and what it is to me. It means developing a certain kind of confidence through expertise in what I study and do. It also means catapulting me to a position where I can be an independent scholar for the rest of my life.

For someone who is 61 already, I realize that I must consolidate what I have learned in life so far and put all the experiences to good use. I need to integrate them so that there is a certain identity or “brand” to it.
My Master’s degree will be on psychoanalytic literature. I want to study not only what writers write, but also why they write what they do. This means then that I must study a whole spectrum of social, political, and philosophical issues of the epochs that the writers write. Some write for pure personal pleasures and not meant to share with others. I wonder about the poems of Emily Dickinson and wonder if she expected them to be published.

Others write to change the world. Some are very controversial: such a writer is Solomon Rushdie.

Now let me think about my background for such an undertaking.

I am already a published, award-winning poet. And so what is there to do, after we have climbed the mountain, asks Donald Justice? We can look down at the valley and regret that we are here with the snow and miss the warmth of the valley?

Climbing literary mountains isn’t exactly what I am out to do. I have always written for therapy.


Viewpoints from Your Mythic Journey

P 10. Make a list of 10 words or phrases that describe you best. I am _____________.

They might be functions, feelings, activities, affiliations (ticket taker, frightened, Rotary Club president, student, competent, clown).

I am a writer who is also a philosophy student. I am anxious to become a better scholar and to exercise more care in my thinking and writing. I am hard working. But I suffer also a serious mental illness. I sometimes deny my mental illness. I am a businessman who has a lot of good ideas but not enough capital. I cannot do many things such as driving a car because I am on medication. I am a good friends.

In what ways are you unique?

I am unique in the sense that I have survived a 3 decade mental illness and still retain enough wits about me to work for the good and to challenge myself into doing more and more. I don’t rest on my laurels either. What I have done is phenomenal all things considered. But I am not going to capitalize on it. I want to keep going and be of help to others.

Tuxedo cat Tuxie at window sill

Journal Assignment Week 2

Writing you must do this week. (3 hours)
1. Journal Writing. You are very much encouraged to write anything you want at any time you like in your journal. You do not need to limit yourself to the assigned journal questions. For example, you could copy all your posts in the discussion boards and paste them into your journal. You could do free writing exercises and put them in the journal. If you write letters to anyone in which you describe our program or your work in the program you could paste sections of those letters into this journal. Do not constrain yourself to just the assigned journal questions.
2. Journal Writing. As a sample autobiography what did you find interesting, surprising, or frustrating about Rogers’ chapters? What might you apply to your own autobiography? What might you do differently?
3. Journal Writing. Note what you learned in the Elbow reading about writing. Which things would you want to try?
4. Journal Writing. Examine your goals and barriers in using the journal as a learning tool.
5. Learning Autobiography. You will almost certainly want to devote an hour or so of your time this week to the beginning work on your actual learning autobiography. This might be time you spend making an outline, or listing main points, or freewriting paragraphs about ideas and memories you've had after doing this week's readings and journal writing.

Completed in previous pages

What I found surprising was Roger’s complete candor and humility in his assessment of his own frontier breaking grounds in the client-oriented relationship in therapy and the person-centered psychology in his humanistic psychology. Also, his empirical methods in understanding the client-therapy interview relationship were surprising.

I tried freewriting and poetry in the Elbow book.

My goals and barriers in using the journal as a learning tool are that to get new ideas and to formulate my ideas well using different methods to generate new ideas and to put them into a coherent whole. I want to use the journal to ferret out what is it that is really motivating me to take this LNT program and what my eventual Master’s thesis and eventually what my work/occupation will be.

The obstacles are that I don’t search deep enough within myself or be humble enough to admit what I don’t know or what I can improve on to get the necessary help and practice and new information to get through the program. Also, I must try new methods to generate writing in the journal and thus, I will have new ways of examining my state of being and the knowledge I posses.

A plan for my learning autobiography is to remember what my clearest and most
memorable learning experiences where I actually got a thrill out of learning. That learning doesn’t have to be bookish or academic though. What I think I enjoyed learning the most is hearing older people talking about how things were in the past. And so although I did not veer towards history as a subject in particular to study, I learned that things have causes, and those causes arose out of a tradition. Coupled with this is my incessant wondering how things came to be when I was young. So, I ended up with a keen interest in philosophy. But my interest in philosophy was tempered with an interest in literature, and consequently, I want to be a literary theory writer or critic. To judge something, I must have standards or approaches to compare it to. Thus I want to learn a fair amount of literature, literary theory, and philosophy.

sailboat in Puget Sound

Journal writing week 3


Writing you must do this week. (3 hours)
1. Journal Writing. In your journal, consider your goals for yourself in the INO Program and anticipated highlights and difficulties.
2. Journal Writing. Write about your thoughts on self-directed learning and what connections you make to the Rogers reading.
3. Journal Writing. Write about an experience you had with self-directed learning in which you learned a skill. Identify the skill.?
4. Learning Autobiography. Choose at least three questions from the "Viewpoints" section of Chapter Four of Keen and Valley-Fox to write toward (especially page 69). Select the most relevant to begin your autobiography. Write this, and then you will post it in the next session to share with the class.
5. Learning Autobiography. Aside from answering the three questions (mentioned above), generally start working on your learning autobiography, and post what you have so far to the class in the discussion board.

My major goals are to learn and synthesize literature and philosophy, evolve my own literary theories about literature and the writers. I need to learn a fair amount of psychology about motivation and identity of the writers and who they think they are and who they are writing for.

I need to learn a fair amount of philosophy that is humanistic and existential as to find ways to deal with angst and the human condition. One impediment will be the dearth of time I have to read enough classics in literature that deals with these questions or issues. Examples of such works would be those by Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoevsky to mention a few of the greats.

Another difficulties would be the lack of such courses offered in UIS online that I can work with a professor, and so I have to do a fair amount of self-study, as I surmise at this point. But that shouldn’t really be a problem since I have self-studied poetry for some 30 years. The crucial thing is to find the same kind of motivation and interest in embarking on this new adventure of applying philosophy and psychology to the field of literature. This is not new at all, but to me it is a very exciting new undertaking.

Self-directed learning takes self-discipline and a vast amount of work once the
Initial curiosity is sparked. I would have to be my own critic and that’s going to be difficult and humbling and objectivity will be a hurdle. The connection I made with Rogers’ readings is that I must not subsume to any preconceived or the usual tracks just to get recognition for my work. I must go beyond the proven methods of getting recognition of an advanced degree. The key is the work. Wherever the work leads, that’s where I have to go.

One of the accomplishments I have is to set up a literary publishing press with
which I published several titles of poetry and prose and an anthology of poetry.
These are perfect-bound paperback books, like what you usually see in a bookstore. In the process of this endeavor, I learned how to solicit manuscripts, editing, copyrighting for the authors, negotiating with authors as to how many copies of the books to be printed, and I then engaged the services of a book designer who also handled the printing end of the books.

Approaching Bainbridge Island from ferry

Journal writing week 4

Writing you must do this week. (4 hours)
1. Journal Writing. In your journal, consider the Rogers’ reading: what kinds of educational values does Rogers have? Where do you educational values fall? Rogers does not give much attention to race, class, and gender. Where do you think these things fit into his scheme of educational values? In yours? (Note the non-sexist writing information in the Faculty/Student Handbook)
2. Journal Writing. Write about your thoughts on self-directed learning and what connections you make to the Rogers reading.
3. Journal Writing. What helpful hints did you glean from Elbow on the subject of revising and/or feedback?
4. Learning Autobiography. Continue writing your learning autobiography. You really ought to have at least a first draft or rough draft of most of the autobiography done by the end of the fourth class session. The learning autobiography is due in the sixth session.
In response to the above writing assignments for week 4:


1.

Rogers have an interdisciplinary approach to education and also he stresses originality. These are also my educational values. The unalterable facts of one’s race, class and gender should not interfere with what one is able to perceive and accomplish in life, although in reality, it is often a political and social struggle, with the “upstart” fighting an uphill battle all the way. My personal example is the type of poetry I write, which is not formal but it isn’t Beat poetry either, and so I had to wait for its acceptance. Also, the topics I wrote were not popular because they criticized social ills long before it became vogue.

2.

My thoughts on self-directed learning is connected to Rogers in two ways: the first and the obvious way is to learn about new ways to look at the old problems. And the other way is to empirically tests my theories.

3.

The helpful thing is to “keep the main idea” prominent all the time. Make sure I can stress that point as a writer and the reader has no problem in following it. Next thing to do is to shape the language. Sometimes it is better to set the writing aside for a couple of days.

My personal example is that I write and revise poems, and sometimes a poem may undergo dozens of metamorphoses before it gets published, and those are the rare occasions, considering the chances of getting published is like about 2% of all that’s submitted to literary magazines.

Revising is just as important as writing itself. It is the way to make it more powerful, impactful, and more memorable. Having a couple of students read my work will catch not only awkward grammar but also diction, style, and content.