Dear Mike and everybody-
I found fascinating that performance for one Indian boy in the national
spelling contest involved praying 10,000 people back in India whom the
grandpa paid for this purpose. I mean that the grandpa paid 10,000 people in
India so they prayed to ask the Gods luck for the boy in the contest. The
practices and meaning networks around the spelling contest are colossal:
from 5 tutors per child to struggle against racism.
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Cole [mailto:mcole@weber.ucsd.edu]
> Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2003 4:19 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Spellbound
>
>
> Well, yes, this discussion is really getting fascinating, but before
> I throw my dsl out the window I wanted to comment that seeing the
> film, "Spellbound" should be of interest to almost anyone on this list.
>
> Multivocality, chronotopes, etc are there. But there, too, in a giant
> way are issues of thought and language in context over time scales.
>
> One thought that came back again and again, watching a young person
> standing at a microphone, seeking to spell correctly some very obscure
> word, was our one-and-always question of relation of individual to
> environment and thinking as transcation. The rules allow the child
> to ask some questions, and some used these rules in strategically
> and varied ways. But there came a point where no more questions could
> be asked. The audience held its breadth (each member, in some sense,
> engaging in the same "internal" search as the child/performer) and
> after some time..... maybe 30 sec in some case, which seems an eternity
> in a turn to talk (and time time to think!)... the individual child
> must organized her/himself to utter a string of names of phonemes called
> "spelling a word."
>
> What sort of actions/thoughts/transactions/incipient externalizations
> were occuring, I kept wondering. How did scrunching up your lips, or
> closing your eyes and "looking at the ceiling" with eyes close
> enter into the process? (Some movements were easier to interpret--
> "spelling out the word" on one's hand).
>
> LSV via Faust via Goethe, in words one encounters too, in Bakhtin (p. 285
> of S&T):
>
> "In the beginning was the deed. The formation of the word occurs
> nearer the end that the beginning of development. The word is the end
> that crowns the deed."
>
> logging off
> mike
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