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Test for ESL teaching resource page

 

  Piano Bench and Lamps (Spring, 2022)

The lamp shades were designed with Tinkercad and printed out in SLA on a Prusa 3-d printer.

Bases are built up in plywood and enameled. I ran wiring up from the baseboard, inside the walls. 

The prairie-style bench was completed in the winter of 2021-2022. The seat was glued up from recovered soft maple, the base from 3/4” oak boards, also recovered from the scrap pile.  I made a wall brackets for the keyboard from some 2” doweling and more scrap.  

A Dining Table Console

For years, we’ve have our dining table butted up against the wall instead of the more common center-of-the-room position. This saves us circulation space while still accommodating seating for 4, and in a pinch 5. This has worked well, the mission of the furniture being essentially that of the classic “kitchen table”, a spot for casual meals, reading the newspaper over breakfast, or having family meetings. I’ve always felt the arrangement was a bit clumsy. 

 This “table console” seems to do the trick of visually connecting the table to the wall, in much the same way as a fireplace mantel centers a room.  It adds a new display place for art, and a convenient outlet for appliances and charging cables. After several iterations of the design, this is what I came up with:

Leaving a notch in the supporting plinth allows a tablecloth to slip past and drop behind. Even though the table is not mechanically linked to the console, the “reveal” links them with a bit of negative space.  This has emerged as the perfect spot to leave our devices for re-charging. We seem to use the table more frequently now for iPad and computer work in general. 

Construction notes

The shelf is a running parquet of oak flooring strips, trimmed out in curly maple, echoing the tabletop I made a few years back. The plinth is a box of rescued 1/2 and 3/4 inch plywood mounted to the wall with a French cleat. I got the combination AC power and “Lightning” connector outlet from a source online for about $15. 

Before. The chair rail of 3 step suggested a place to insert a new display shelf, and perhaps a more elegant way to plug in the toaster.

"Bricolage" Mission-style Floor Lamps

I made the base for this lamp twice, after many months of thinking and slowly acquiring the parts. I still made many errors of craftsmanship of the first version.  I finally placed it on a square base, perhaps 14" x 14". It was clumsy and, even at that size was unstable on the carpeted floor. After living with it a few months, it occured to me to redo the base in the same vocabulary of 3/4"x3/4" sticks whch could be splayed out further (more stable) and yet presented less mass.

Later, I made a painted version, with far simpler construction. Both contain a copper tube that houses the lamp wire.

Enchanted objects

Would it not be fair to say that an integrated circuit, which contains, at tiny scale, a specific structure and function capable of endlessly variable, yet meaningful outputs, is an enchanted crystal. 

What is a meaningful thing?

A work of art, generally speaking, is an enchantment of a physical object. It attempts to tell a story, or make reference to something beyond. Paint splashes on canvas stand for the sunrise. The carving represents the bird. 

Words have meaning. They are symbols, and as such can represent things others than themselves: intentions, plans, stories. When we speak words into a thing, are we not enchanting it? If we share the the language.

Objects, like chairs, tables and shelves are typically seen as functional, not symbolic. But, when this table is made of wood reclaimed from grandfathers fishing boat, or that is the very chair mother sat in the night before I was born, they prompt us to tell our stories. The mute objects are enchanted, and in turn enchant those listening. 

The chair can be metaphor for the body, a table the extension of my lap. When the references are shareable, signs, they are semiotic. Their meanings can be shared within a culture. 

Could this bookshelf be a metaphor for a marriage? 
Why not? 
It carries stories. It sturdily contains a masculine and feminine end.  


As we live with the most utilitarian, un-metaphoric objects, they acquire layers of referential, personal meaning. 
The silver spoon Mom fed me with. 
The wedding dress. 

The made thing can tell stories, recall the past. When the signs emerge from the same culture, the meanings of the objects can be shared was well.

This shelf holds our favorite books.

The books are already dense with meaning because we have read them.

Can the shelf reflect that? ...be covered with signs?

What does it take for the shelf to become a work of art?

The material can tell its own story. The story of the tree. 

It can take the form of another object. The electric lamp can recall a torch, the shelf can suggest a body part, or a building.

It can be signed by the maker.

It can be a “picture”, or  “book” itself.

My Arrowmont Box

In September, I spent a week at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Our instructor for the workshop, "Personal Reliquaries and Story Boxes" was sculptor and furniture maker Peter Dellert. The hours were long and the pace was challenging, especially for me, who came with far less developed skills than the other students, not to mention the teacher.

Our challenge was to make a cabinet, a simple hinged box that might stow items of personal significance. Several of us worked with live edge material. In my case, looking at the material on hand, I decided to invert the edges, pulling their asymmetry to the inside.


This is the box in place. I is about 20 inches high and 11 wide, closed

 

My note to Peter Dellert, our instructor:

Thanks again, Peter, for a memorable week. For me, it was a demanding, engaging, and illuminating one. It was not without personal frustration, even shame at times, but such emotions are probably required for deep learning. 

The technical content was just immensely valuable. New to me were the milling processes and working with hinges. The use of finishes, metal patinae, and gilding and so many more, were an unexpected plus. Working at last with Arrowmont’s powerful, professional tools made me reconsider the definition of “shop”, a term I had wrongly applied to my modest workspace back home in my garage. Perhaps most useful of all the skills I learned was your design-build process( draw, mark, test, execute, etc.). It is sequential and efficient, while not totally constraining a free play of ideas.

But being a craftsman/ artist seems to call for certain other behaviors or qualities that go beyond sheer know-how. These relate to what one values, to their capacity for work and control of their emotions. I think these must be the deep skills artists have to master and practice forever. This week has revealed that I would do well to master them myself. They happened to fall, as I thought about them onto my feedback form neatly into five P’s. For what it’s worth, here they are, each with an example from many I could cite from this week:

Planning  

(example: making full-size drawings before picking up the tools.)

Process

(join, then plane; use successive grades of abrasive when sanding, etc.)

Precision

(look for 32nds, not just 16ths, FEEL for thousandths)

Presence

(stay in the moment, especially when leaning over a power tool)

Patience

( don’t panic, and if you must, take a step back, etc.)

Books: it occures to me that Robert Persig’s novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance perfectly embodies a lot of this value set. More recently, Matthew Crawford’s essay, Shopcraft as Soulcraft covered some of the same ground. Great stuff, right up your alley. Anywayyyy.... all the best to you and thanks again for sharing, not just your skills, but your work and life stories with us. 

Thinking about variation (1)

According to the latest neuroscience, every neuromuscular act utilizes a unique set of neural connections. I wanted to explore this idea in more depth, particularly in the context of my current reading of James Gleick's  "Chaos", and the notions of deep patterns to be found amidst the noise of everyday experience. Unfortunately, I don't own any astronomical or biological instruments. One kind of neuromuscular laboratory is "at hand" however--my own writing-- and a few digital tools that allow me to examine it at varying scales. 

This is a figure 8 on its side, or "infinity", which I attempted to render repeatedly with pencil on paper. As you can see, I had great difficulty performing even this well-practiced gesture exactly the same way over a dozen or so overlapping tries.

A Lesson in Metaphor

Proverbs: (some
fruitless activity) is BEATING A DEAD HORSE,

Deeply embedded in daily use, nearly forgotten (but not "dead")
She felt warmly towards him....
We've cooled on that idea over time...
This was the hard part....

Poems (unique and artistic)
IT IS THE EAST, AND JULIET IS THE SUN
TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN A WOOD ....DIFFERENCE.

Unconscious and nearly unconscious:
MARRIAGE IS A JOURNEY,
ARGUMENT IS BUILDING.
TIME IS SPACE.
VIRTUE IS WELL-BEING


Schema derived from our earliest physical experiences:
seeing
reaching
holding
standing (falling)
walking
eating (voiding, evacuating)
waking, rising
making
fighting
hunting
gathering (foraging)
losing (gaining)





Paraphier, peraphrand
Source, Object
Entailments

Not just a trick of language, but our core conceptual mechanism. 

Number & Math

Science and invention:
Cancer is an infection of the blood.....became "white blood"...or leukemia, which led to a cell-based, then a genetic understanding of cancer.

Earth as the center of the universe...became...sun is the center... became a universe expanding in all directions.

Humours (hydraulic model) replaced by the "germ" based notion of disease, a more functional and specific (machine) model,

Law and Government


Economics

‘The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.’ -John Maynard Keynes

Notes on Phenomenological Description (PD)

How can I pull together what I sense are certain related ideas and enthusiasms: philosophical phenomenology, embodied cognition (and metaphor), urban design, facilitation and just...making stuff?

Start here:
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/>

Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward — represents or “intends” — things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.

Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure description of lived experience. (...while...) Heidegger and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context. 

How does this jibe with the kind of phenomenology Bachelard uses to explore "house"....or relate to "embodied cognition" as Lakoff and Johnson might use it, or Matthew Crawford's grounded experience of the skilled worker attending to her materials? And how can it realte to the work of Christopher Alexander's efforts to do a more humane kind of architecture?

Getting back to things themselves seems to be the trick. One blogger <http://itotd.com/articles/237/phenomenology/> explains the phenomenological description (PD) process this way:

The first step is to consider the memory of a very recent experience—phenomenology is not normally done in real time—and subject it to a process known variously as epoché, bracketing, or phenomenological reduction. Much like the Cartesian method of doubt, epoché is a temporary suspension of any external beliefs, placing one’s focus solely on the “raw” experience itself. The goal is to ignore empirical data—along with intuitions and judgments—and simply describe your experience in detail.

In other words, PD is trying to get down to what you "see" and "feel" not just what you "think is there".  It's what the facilitator, working with those reviewing student work, try to get folk to do by enforcing the protocol that asks "what do you see here?"

In all encounters, in conversation, there is great value to be had by dropping my frames and presumptions, and just taking it all in. Indeed, the other person is "in me" and growing in me, but the more I can take them at face value, the more i will see and hear, the closer I come to understanding.

Embodied cognition tells us that much of our daily experience is derived from pre-existing frames and "objects" constructed out of earlier experience. We do so because processing all that data moment to moment is too taxing for the tiny, conscious tips of our minds.  

Phenomenological description is a very taxing activity. It requires setting aside our quick mental toolset (forms, templates, precedents, filters, etc.) and applying our more primitive receptors. It's felt as slow, and effortful, at least at first. It is done (see above) in post-time, yet it must draw on content received in real-time, at the encounter itself.  

So, when do we do PD--in real time or later? This is helpful:

Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but experience shades off into less overtly conscious phenomena. (as when bodily experience is employed via metaphor). 

As Husserl and others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margin or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heidegger stressed, in practical activities like walking along, or hammering a nail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious of our habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but may become conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think about something. We should allow, then, that the domain of phenomenology — our own experience — spreads out from conscious experience into semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity, along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in our experience.

Phenomenology began with Plato, and the parable of the cave. He characterized daily experience of the world as illusory, and that the "real" world of forms, like the shadow-theater of the cave, lies beyond our unstudied experience. Now, of course we know he was right, but he was wrong. Right, that we live in a shadow-theater (the body, or more strictly the way the body manages its existence in a world it need not know directly in order to eat, excrete and reproduce), yet wrong in the notion of "forms" as the ground of reality. That reality, as quantum vs. Newtonian reality suggests, is still beyond us. 

So, how do we tie phenomenology to embodied cognition, per Lakoff and Johnson and Gibbs, et al? Through Merleau-Ponty.

Merleau-Ponty looked to experimental psychology, analyzing the reported experience of amputees who felt sensations in a phantom limb. (He)... focused on the “body image”, our experience of our own body and its significance in our activities. Extending Husserl's account of the lived body (as opposed to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is, as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive including other people.

And Aleaxander? His work, especially in A Pattern Language (APL), reflects a similar kind of return to more direct description of experience. His was expressed in a reaction to modernist, geometric abstraction and buildings-as-expressionist sculptures. 

His APL was not an invention of new architectural forms but their discovery within something already out there: vernacular architecture.  

CA may have begun with a gut revulsion to modernism. He then became an acute observer of vernacular forms he found more pleasing, and abstracted out those certain building forms ("patterns" taken from medieval pattern books used by artisans), expressed not in feet, or degrees, or by "historical styles" but by relations between human shelter, settlement, and social activity. After he wrote APL, he tries to more fully abstract these out in The Phenomenon of Life.  

In this sense, he began with a phenomenological description, not seeing buildings as pure design, but as a reflection of something emergent, shaped by countless experiences of human, situated activity.

Here is where I am right now: we cannot ever get beyond an embodied knowledge of ourselves or others or the outside world, period (except for math! JK). We can, however, learn a great deal more from our immediate experience IF we can subdue our fast-mind templating of a provisional reality in the interests of getting to the manifold impressions that same body provides for us from moment to moment, but which we typically ignore. 

Less processing, more raw data FIRST. 

Things are not just in-themselves, but are a product of our intentionality towards them and those first-person reports we tune into.

Thus, in a group setting, reviewing a work-product, we withhold judgement when we respond to "....what do you see?". We listen to what we have just said, as though for the first time.

Thus, in recalling a conversation with a friend just the other day, we ask ourselves "what were you feeling, but did not act on in that moment?" We feel again what we had felt, as though for the first time.

Thus, we can look at a text (or recorded speech) and ask "what's the metaphor here? What are its yields and its limits? We refer to our mental maps, as though for the first time.

And in the shop, I learn from my direct encounter with materials. 
A lot of my ideas don't work here. I bend things until they break. I ruin the finish on a new piece. I make joints that fall apart the next day. 
I stay with it. 
New things come up off the workbench. Surprises, happy accidents occur. 
I sand the block until it gleams, I knock the new joint with a hammer and hear it ring. 
My fingers, eyes and ears bring new reports. 
What I can imagine and what I can do seem to come closer.
My skills grow slowly. 
Delight comes with mastery, with closer attunement to the nature of things. 

The "real world", the world of things in themselves, will remain, as ever, just over the horizon. We shall never see them, but we may understand them better by seeing them again, as though for the first time.