Excuse me, I just storied myself

To make ready for class today, I went through a few invention exercises. I wanted to mix it up, vary the approaches to show a range of possibilities for essay one: A Tech Autobiographical Sketch. The assignment serves a few purposes, not the least of which are a writing sample and a portrait of students' tech backgrounds, which influence my aims and design for the next several weeks.

The assignment asks students to tell their technological becoming. It's a narrative essay about gadgetry and mechanisms, from old, block-style Legos to one-buttoned joysticks, from coin-op school supply dispensers to cordless phones with auto redial. And my favorite: hand-held football games with red, LED players on both teams, no matter whether it was the Patriots and Panthers or the Lions and Browns (my imagined, dream Superbowl). Red blips on both sides of the ball; a fresh 9-volt battery and a 45 minute school bus ride, one-way; those were the days.

My models for the class, for the essay, included a graphic organizer, a messy map of sorts that starts with a blank sheet of paper and a will to scribble without inhibition, loose clusters of ideas. The second model, even more spontaneous than the first because of its disregard of coherence, was a list of 50. A fit of associations with the perpetual present guided by impulse and only the faint beckoning of the writing prompt. My list (for the tech autobiographical sketch) looked like this:

Boeing 757 to Seattle, Supersonics shirt, Mount St. Helens, Pong with paddles, Frogger, black and white television, Galaga at Pizza Hut, camcorder, C64 programs in basic, [friends who] pirated software, welding and your eyes, Tetris, first broadcast warfare, statistical reports, digital photography, surveillance cameras, exercise equipment, rocket launches, stopwatch, camping with cords, Popular Science, helicopter bike, northern lights, fishing sonar, radar detectors, Sault locks, fax machines, Mouse Trap, Operation w/ glue, Walkman, audio books, Lance Haffner Final Four, Adam computer, tape drive soccer, Rambo knife w/ compass, Tecmo Bowl, breakaway rims, car stereo wiring, magnet games, batteries, race track motors, vibrating football board, UHF/VHF antennae, TV adjust with pliers

I stopped at 44. The inventive scope had me reeling. Could have gone longer, but I had to get on with the third model: a formal outline. Less stimulating, in my view, but important to show, to talk about what purpose it might serve, its relative structured-ness. So I dummied one up on the evolution of photography in my days: slide-projector shows, Polaroids, a costly/priceless Dimage7i, up to Kodak's abandonment of film camera's in Western markets last week.

This assignment, good or bad, was already concocted before I read Galen Strawson's review of Jerome Bruner's book, Making Stories, which I came upon over at Arts & Letters Daily. I haven't read the book, but the review sparked my interest, led me to believe Bruner's latest has parts that would help me think more fully about narrative and its place in composition studies.

This snippet of the review left me with a kind of Myers-Briggs itch, which I'll explain:

Is any of this true? Do we create ourselves? Is the narrativity view a profound and universal insight into the human condition? It's a partial truth at best, true enough for some, completely false for others. There is a deep divide in our species. On one side, the narrators: those who are indeed intensely narrative, self-storying, Homeric, in their sense of life and self, whether they look to the past or the future. On the other side, the non-narrators: those who live life in a fundamentally non-storytelling fashion, who may have little sense of, or interest in, their own history, nor any wish to give their life a certain narrative shape. In between lies the great continuum of mixed cases.

The "deep divide" between compulsive narrators and their counterparts left me wondering whether I've been obtuse in weaving narrative slants into solicitations for essays in undergraduate writing courses. Surely we aren't rigidly fixed along any continuum, are we? My itch comes from the resonant echo of this passage to other sorts of neat social stamping--the sort that rely on gross simplifications to exclude our moods, fluctuations, interanimations and ambiguity. I was told late last week that I'd be part of a committee of three who will meet for six hours next Monday to revise a departmental strategic planning statement. Important work, to be sure. But six hours? Why? Because we're all introverts was the explanation. Well, yeah, in this case, on this project, I'd rather work independently for two hours, quietly, to do the work we'll accomplish in six hours of circular exchanges about how to spend money on this and that. The administration buys into Myers-Briggs typecasting; it's that simple. Once you're an "I" there'll be no doubling back, darling.

But, for me, I rather tend to regard myself as INFP one day, ESTJ the next. Flexible and varied, more so than essential. But then again, maybe I'm just storying myself that way through contrived, never-ending narratives.