fringe journal

When Rochelle Owens’s play, Chucky’s Hunch, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1981, critics lauded what they expressed as a tour-de-force performance by the actor playing Chucky, and they took the plot at face value.  The play, which is a long dramatic monologue by an aging man triggered by the news that the second of his three ex-wives has won the lottery, takes the audience into a fascinating psychological odyssey.  On the face of it, the play is simply about the embittered rantings of a failed Abstract Expressionist artist whose grandiose plans took him nowhere except into penury and bad health, as he lives with his 85-year-old mother somewhere in upstate New York.  He reads his letters to Elly, his ex-wife, to the audience, and in doing so, expresses a range of thoughts and feelings, ranging from rageful recriminations to sentimental recounting of the times that he and Elly spent together, and his observations of her behavior. The narrative is a straightforward epistolary one, punctuated by a framed tale (The Snake and the Porcupine).  

Chucky's Hunch is featured in this anthology.

However, when looking more closely at the structure of the play, and then relating it to her other works, particularly her long poems, it becomes clear that the structure is one of repetition and interweaving, just as she has done in her brilliant “Black Chalk,” “Patterns of Animus” and “The Aardvark Venus.”  As in those poems and others, there is an apocalyptic intensity that envelopes the reader with a sense of creeping horror at observing the protagonist’s existential nihilism that insists on destructive behavior and an ineluctable journey toward self-erasure. It is good to note that one can read the play for free via the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/wordplays200perf/mode/2up) although it is necessary to create an account and borrow it online.

The release of a video version in 2024, with Charles Berliner as Chucky, music by Marcia Kravis, video editing by Ellen Reynolds, and produced by Rochelle Owens, enables the audience to see a darker and more intimate version (https://youtu.be/OZdRLyXTNbI?si=F5wzMoBLzhhjwnYu).  As a narrator, Chucky could not possibly be more unreliable.  He flings words like the Abstract Expressionist flings paint, and it is necessary for the reader to find the patterns that make the deeper meaning, which is not really about Elly and her perceived slights to Chucky, but more about fatal “dances” (like the fabled Tarantella) of those who fall in love with each other, and in their dance of love, they toy with the parallels between love and death. Eros is held up as a life force in popular culture, but for Owens, Eros gives way to Thanatos, and the death-drive animates the various love dances / erotic tarantellas that weave in and out of the play. 

Love-Death Dance 1:  Chucky and Elly.  Chucky reminisces about his time with Elly and the items of clothing he purchased for her. Their life together was something he now views with a combination of sweetness and bitterness, a relatable pain for anyone reflecting on failed relationships of the past.  Images of a bright-white smile framed by carmine-red lipsticked lips further eroticize the narrative. 

Love-Death Dance 2:  Characterized as an impecunious and unmotivated bum, Chucky mooches off his 85-year-old mother, who horrifies him with the relations she has with Chester, her 82-year-old boyfriend.  Depicted in graphic terms, the discordant notion of a couple approaching death carrying on as though they were teenagers is deeply unsettling to Chucky. 

Love-Death Dance 3:  Mother and son have a close relationship, one fraught with contradictions. Chucky describes how he chews his mother’s food for her as an Eskimo mother would chew food for her baby, which may seem potentially kind-hearted except that she lost her teeth because he hit her. 

Love-Death Dance 4:  Chucky’s only friend is his dog.  The dog was killed, however, because it came between the amorous and deadly contortions of a porcupine and a snake.  Their passion killed not only Chucky’s only living friend, but also each other.  As a female voice narrates the frame-tale, images of a snake about to strike and a young porcupine fill the screen. 

Love-Death Dance 5:  Chucky’s tarantella with his own mind starts at the beginning of the play, and it weaves in and out of a kaleidoscope of emotions.  They take him around in colorful, expressive effusions of emotion and reminiscences, but ultimately, the audience sees him as on a path to madness.  When he disappears without a trace, the tarantella takes its final frenzied spin.  The impressions are emphasized by the juxtaposition of images of seagulls feeding on trash piles. 

Chucky complains that Elly never answers his letters, and he resents the fact that she is not only surviving, but is prospering, thanks to winning the lottery. She has gone on to live and thrive in the modern, changing world.  Chucky’s world is one that resonates with medieval times – with echoes of the earthiness of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the resignation of Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, and the aleatory movements of the Wheel of Fortune. The still photos and collages in the film form a backdrop behind the performer, and they resonate with the words, not so much depictions but visual metaphors. The soundtrack, featuring sombre music, seagull cries, and more. 

In the end, Chucky psychologically juxtaposes himself in a final dance with the memory of the successful Elly, and in that final dance, he generates more self-destructive energy and pathos, leaving the audience staring into the “filthy maw” of an oblivion of one’s own devising, forged from the dances of “love-death” which left him with little more than shame and regret about his life. And thus Chucky hits home.  Chucky is Everyman. 

---Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. 

By putting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, Duchamp, along with the Futurists and the DaDaists of the early 20th century, questioned the authority of the elite and the prevailing dominant groups in society to set the rules about what can be considered "art" or "high culture."  This questioning had started in the 19th century, with the Realists daring to challenge the established conventions by putting poor people (the gleaners, for example) on a large canvas - a size reserved for "historical" scenes -- heroic or religious.  The Impressionists continued the interrogation of tradition (and the hegemony of "royal societies" and other organizations to dictate what was considered to be "good" or "real." 

 

What I think is a bit ironic of the public's reaction to Duchamp's questioning of the dominant culture's stranglehold on "taste" and "beauty" and what it means for something to be considered "art" is that Leonardo himself was an iconoclast and not a paragon or the apotheosis of conservative, elitist ideas about art, and the appropriate subjects of art.  

 

If you take a close look at his famous painting, "The Last Supper," you will see significant deviations from earlier work, say, from medieval times.  Through his placement of Jesus, the disciples, the sacraments, etc. and his use of light and color, he is incorporating Renaissance and humanist values, moving away from the rigid iconography of the medieval cosmology (derived from strict, hierarchical relations).  If you want to see the perfect illustration of a medieval mindset, and notions of hierarchy (and hence legitimacy), think of the Great Chain of Being, or the layers in Dante's Inferno (and similarly, the rounds in Purgatory and Paradise). 

 

So what could possibly have been subversive about Leonardo’s “La Gioconda / The Mona Lisa” at the time he painted it? First, let’s take a look at what Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the silk merchant and the mother of his five children, known now as La Gioconda, is wearing. It was the norm for a wealthy man who was commissioning a painting of his wife to make sure she was adorned with all the best family jewels and pearls in their possession.  After all, this painting was intended to document their prosperity and well-being. So, let’s take a look. Do you see any jeweled hair pieces, dangling pearl and garnet earrings, bejeweled necklaces, rings, or bracelets? No. Neither do I.  Do you see fancy furs, fur trimming, plush velvets, or fancy gold embroidery?  No. Neither do I.

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (image from Wikipedia)

Finally, where is Lisa Gherardini, La Gioconda, sitting?  She’s not in a palatial garden in front of an elaborate fountain, and nor is she in a room or an alcove where you might see ponderous Doric columns suggesting she is in a palazzo or a large villa. Instead, she is seated in front of a landscape so complicated that it seems to be a dreamscape or even something from a medieval notion of reality, even something you might imagine as a part of Dante’s Purgatory – winding roads requiring the presence of a virtuous woman, Beatrice, to guide you to eventual portals of Paradise.

 

Wives were to be the repositories of virtue in the Renaissance household.  As such, they needed to behave in a certain way. Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti asserted that young women should maintain self-restraint and a “grave demeanor.”  Mona Lisa’s smile flies in the face of that admonition.

 

Nor is the Mona Lisa beautiful.  Beauty was related to virtue, following not only Greek ideals, but also those of Petrarch and other Renaissance writers.  The woman’s beauty was assumed to lift a man up and unite him with the sphere of all beauty and perfection, which was God. La Gianconda has regular features, but she looks nothing like the paintings of other Renaissance artists, such as Botticelli, whose paintings of “A Young Woman” and of Aphrodite rising from the sea, perfectly represent the kind of transcendent beauty capable of lifting up the mind and spirit of a man and achieving unity with the divine sphere (and the source of divine knowledge, the making of intuitive knowledge).

 

So, the Mona Lisa’s smile is subversive, and her plain looks do not elevate. In that sense Leonardo subverts the notion of what kind of emotion a painting of a woman is supposed to elicit – either a serious regard for the embodiment of virtue, or a vertiginous flight of the mind to ideas of eternal, divine beauty, and by extension, knowledge and understanding.

 

How is the Mona Lisa posing?  She is not seen in profile or looking straight on to the painter or viewer. Instead, one shoulder is ahead of the other, and she’s seen in three-quarter view. This pose, new in the Renaissance era, draws the eye in, and makes the subject seem more approachable. The Mona Lisa was one of the first to have the sitter relaxing with her hand resting on her arm, which is on the arm of a chair.

 

There is a rare intimacy in the portrait, to the point that it is almost as though she is asking you to talk to her, and also accompany her as she takes you though life’s winding pathways, depicted in the fantastical landscape behind her.

Audio Recording of interview with Rochelle Owens over Patterns of Animus: http://www.zenzebra.net/audio/rochelle-2022-12-07.mp3 

Rochelle Owens:  Patterns of Animus

Speaking to Rochelle Owens is always a pleasure because she sheds insight on her work and discusses some of the themes and philosophical constructs that animate it.

 Audio Recording:  http://www.zenzebra.net/audio/rochelle-2022-12-08.mp3

Rochelle Owens has been writing and publishing poetry since the early 1960s, and now her early work is available together with recent work (from 2020) in a single volume, The Aardvark Venus: Selected Poems 1961 - 2020. 

Welcome to an interview with Rochelle Owens, who chats with Susan Nash about her work, the philosophical ideas that have influenced her. 

To purchase a perfect-bound paper copy, or to read it on Kindle, please click here. 

The Aardvark Venus, by Rochelle Owens

13-year-old Julieta Klehrmorgan

Moved to Norman, Oklahoma

Dad is an engineer, mom a geologist –

both love Julieta, but are chronically worried and self-absorbed

Julieta likes to explore

Mysterious traffic circle at the end of Main Street

Twirl  twirl

take the second outlet

Follow the road, weeks pushing up from cracked asphalt

The block-long three-story red brick Prairie Corinthian

An abandoned psychiatric hospital, an “asylum”

Boarded up, a time capsule shivering

with its own knowledge -

Julieta peers into windows, sees the

No Trespassing Sign on door…

but the door opens,

a boy around 12 waves to her to come in.

Slender, wearing khaki pants,

sky blue button-down shirt

(or chambray)?, leather shoes

Dark, straight hair, round face –

Walks through the door … slips down stairs –

now in new dimension

new wood building, smells like oil

She touches the wood – it feels like a candle

Windows have metal bars

Through the window, she sees tall, uncut prairie grass,

cedar trees, and a large pond

A couple of people are on horseback

An apple orchard is in bloom

In a room, boys are seated around a table

Sorting colored blocks to put in small boxes

They seem to be wooden toys of some kind

The boys are sorting, grouping

Some are able to move smoothly

Others have limited range of motion

One is making grunting noises

Another, round face, lashless eyes,

a perfect “O” for a mouth

Partial to the red blocks

A small blonde boy keeps standing up on his chair

Another, pensive, hunched-over,

sorting, sorting, sorting

Julieta picks up a block

Wonders, does it, too, feels like a candle?

She thinks “no” –

Just a regular block of wood, sanded smooth

Painted even smoother…

Through the window, the sun is starting to set…

Night

Night

Evening prayers. Pray for today

Pray for the fading memory of a mother’s embrace

Pray for roommates sleeping in iron cots, boys

sleeping under identical wool blankets

soft, crisp white sheets

4 am, Saturday, April 13, 1918

The boy gestures to Julieta,

Look through the barred third-floor window

Thunder growls in the distance

Flash of lightning, crack and rattle of thunderclap

Old, twisted, half-dead cedar tree bursts

Showers of sparks and crackling flames

Gust front in a savage Derecho

Bends the limbs, strips the blossoms from the tree

Fans the sparks like bellows into a small flame

On a dark, cold night

Flames tear through the dry pampas grass

Eating their way to the dormitory building

The walls feel like candles

The floor sealed in wax

Screaming, shouting, rattling of keys

Windows open, but bars built into the frame

Doctors, nurses, night guards screaming, shouting

Boys run down the only corridor

To the only stairwell

Paraffin snapping, sparking, crackling

Yellow-orange unstoppable passion

L.T. Hawes running through flames

Unlocking doors, hoping against hope, and

The guard shielding two little boys with his body

One boy clasping a block from the day before

The ones able to talk sobbing for their mothers

The deaf-mute wide-eyed

The Downs Syndrome boys suffocating while they slept

Another guard with blanket over hands on fire-hot bars

Trying to worry them out of the wood frame

But then the smoke

Acrid wool, cotton, paraffin and oak

Clouds inside

Clouds outside

The deadly Derecho with its drenching rain

Put out the fire with water

From the same anvil clouds that hammered

and sparked the cedar with a jagged streak of lightning

Days later after paper telegrams and letters delivered

Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters

Mute with guilt and grief: silent, heaving shoulders

Regretting believing Dr. Griffin’s promises – a brand new treatment

For their child who could not mentally advance,

Or the ones who would not speak, would not look in the eye

Long, protracted tantrums, hour after hour

Riding on their wooden rocking horse

Or simply rocking, rocking, rocking back and forth

Could they have been helped after all at home?

More prayers? More pleading? More bargaining with God?

Night

Night

But by day the headlines:

“Three paraffin-soaked wooden fire traps kill little boys!” 

No more words needed

Julieta looks up

She is seated on an old park bench

North of the red brick Corinthian buildings

Clipped grass, concrete silhouettes of building foundations

The air smells like wet dirt and impending rain

Cardinals and robins chirping

The boy is back

 

“What is your name?”

 

November 27, 2022

 

POETRY OF THE PRESENT (D. H. LAWRENCE)

November 6, 2022

FOX ON THE RUN

8:45 pm, a November full moon Sunday, crisp air

Soft light from the skies and my Honda Passport headlights

I see an industrial duster appended to a lean, little wolfish body

Scampering across the green space just beyond the iron gates

Bolt, bolt somewhere off in the direction of the winterized pool

And the backyards with offering plates of dry dog food 

Semi-urban fox, opossum, raccoon, rabbit

Easier pickings here than the cotton fields across 48th Avenue

Fox? Coyote? The yip-yips I hear in the fields toward the South Canadian River

Suggest coyote, not fox, not dog, not caterwauling feline (that would be me, at least 

in my own idea of self years and years and years ago… so glad that’s in the rearview mirror)

To all wildness, I support you

I leave a special Seventh-Heaven Pumpkin Spice muffin (well, half – I ate the muffin top)

Broken into chunks and tossed behind my Knock-out Roses and red & white periwinkles

And the bushes in front of the hail-pocked weathered cedar privacy fence. 

Tuesday is mid-term elections day. 

I’ll vote. Perhaps this time I’ll do detailed research 

Instead of simply voting “Throw the bums out.”

The coyote’s not a fox

Nor is it an opossum, rabbit, raccoon, or semi-feral cat

Too bad. 1976 Norman High School Spanish Club Spring Break

Trip to Mexico City, Taxco, Cuernavaca and then down winding Sierra Madres

Acapulco Hotel disco “La Tormenta” dancing after straining to see 

The famed cliff divers included in our package deal; 

Couldn’t wait to get out of there; who wants to see self-immolation?

Who wants to pay to see the poor risk their lives just for entertainment? 

Couldn’t wait to dance, dance, dance 

Popular still “Fox on the Run” by Sweet, memories bring a 

Return to innocence – where the poor do not mutilate themselves to entertain the rich

Return to purity –Spanish Club Spring Breaks do not unwittingly play into the old paradigm

Or simply dance to 1975 “Fox on the Run” by Sweet

Coyote tail Pony tail run run run dance

The full moon away

I’m here today

My eyes full moons

The cool picnic table air

I’ll never give up

And nor should you; sweet brushtail bush coyote

November 7, 2022

Wet leaves on the patio

Turn the card

A nest of beetles, or a smaller leaf over a smaller leaf over a smaller leaf

Matrochka fall

Five Russian textbooks, dictionaries, glossaries of verbs

Unboxed and placed on my pristine white bookshelves

Near Erik Satie’s A Mammal’s Notebook

After he died, they found 100 umbrellas in his cramped Parisian rooms

Not too thrilled about this

The velvet eccentric had a dozen identical suits, 

to alternate day by day by week; 

Yet after he died, they found a half dozen of those 

untouched, unworn

Inventories of the “raw” vs the “cooked” 

It’s all symbolic – the unworn velvet suit: 

potential for rebirth, a new “skin” and a new being

The worn-out suit: 

Experience, prior knowledge, scaffolding (but to where…?)

(Audio recording) It is very hard to interpret D. H. Lawrence’s “Coming Awake” without a clear understanding of his notions of poetry as expressed in his 1919 essay, “The Poetry of the Present,” and a conceptual framework for Imagist Poetry and the Imagist Movement. 

D. H. Lawrence begins by saying that we need a new kind of poetry because most of the genres of poetry currently used either propel the reader into a projection of the future, or pull them back into the a nostalgic past.  The problem with poetry that focuses on the future or the past is that it has to be perfect.

If you focus on the present, however, there is no idealizing gaze and there is no force-fitting a grandiose “message” or meaning. 

If you focus on the present, you tend to chronicle the concrete images and things that are happening around you. In that case, instead of being grandiose, you’ll be closely observant. 

By being in the moment, you can create a “poetry of the immediate present,” and it will capture a part of the present – like a still pictures from a video of reality. 

In addition, the poetry that captures what is happening in the present is, as Lawrence puts it, “like the wind,” and there is “a sheer appreciation of the instant moment.” He cites Walt Whitman as a wonderful purveyor of the “poetry of the present.” 

In contrast, for Lawrence, poetry that attempts to adhere to or conform to “any externally-applied law” would be “mere shackles and death.”  For this reason, he prefers free verse. 

So, if we apply this concept to “Coming Awake” (1916), it is possible to appreciate it as an example of “poetry of the present” which seeks to imbue the poetic space with a sense of immediacy and of heightened powers of the senses and observation, so that what poetry does for you is to intensify your experience of everyday life. It amplifies, intensifies, and magnifies everything you perceive with your waking and awakening mind.  

In “Coming Awake,” the poet’s observations are of minute, delicate details – ones often overlooked by the person whose mind is in the clouds or in a fog of the past. Lawrence begins by observing the characteristics and qualities of light that often go unnoticed: “lake-lights were quivering” and “sunshine swam in a shoal.” The personification encourages the reader to feel the elements of the poem because the language suggests a human body. 

The poet’s intense attention to tiny details makes the reader perceive it as though looking through a magnifying glass and seeing the “hairy, big bee” with “his body black fur.”  The bee “hung over the primulas” which are later described as “airy primulas.” Primulas are also known as primrose, and they consist of clusters of tiny petals and delicate little stamen. The sense of looking at everything as though it were magnified many times, and frozen in time is what the poet’s language has done for us.  It puts everything in super-sharp focus, freezes it in time, and then magnifies it. 

Thus, the process of awakening can be said to be akin to reading the poetry of the present which functions as a tool to bring everything into extremely sharp focus and to put the reader in the very center of what is being described. The result is an experience so intense that it could also be depicted as shrinking to the size of a bee or a primrose and walking around in the garden and observing a gigantic, hairy, furry bee buzzing loudly, triggering your senses into extreme awareness. 

The careful reader will see an influence of Zen Buddhist thought and the poetic ideas of the haiku and other minimalism. 

Lawrence’s concept of the “poetry of the present” is deeply democratic. It basically proposes that everyone can and should write poetry because it is a tactic for living a happier, fuller, more vibrant life. Anyone can write a poem, Lawrence might suggest. The key is to slow down, write observations, exaggerate the concrete details so they appear larger than life and generate an emotional response of joy, happiness, appreciation of life. 

Works Cited

Lawrence, D. H. “Coming Awake” in New Poems. London: Martin Secker, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/128/  .

Lawrence, D. H. “Preface: The Poetry of the Present,” in New Poems, 1919. In The Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69403/the-poetry-of-the-present

Moodle 4.0 is here! I’m trying to determine just what the advantages are and how much of a step change it is from Moodle 3.11.  I don’t think that Moodle can change the basic architecture for a number of reasons. So, the changes have to come in things like user experience and efficiency.  

 

 If you've worked with Moodle for very long, you know that it can be a place of almost infinite complexity, but also almost Zen-like simplicity. It's also a veritable ant-hill of programming activity, as programmers develop productivity and design apps - some are available for free, others require a download fee.  Moodle and Moodle partners are likewise entrepreneurial, and you can quickly use pre-built templates and hosting and an integrated software-as-a-service solution.

 

Improved User Experience, with modules listed in an easy-to-follow design.

 

MoodleCloud is still in 3.11, so I can’t experiment with it as much as I’d like. However, the “sandbox” is still available, and one can select a role as student, teacher, or manager, to play around with it.  

 

Here are some of my initial thoughts:

 

PROS:

1.  Much improved user experience, in terms of navigation, layout, use of new thumbnails, and course construction (with drag and drop).

 

2.  The default theme being used in the Sandbox (probably either Clean or Boost) is very attractive and easy to use. 

  

3.  Fully responsive interface that works well with tablets, laptops, and phones.

 

4.  Improved navigation – you can tell where you are, and can go back to a previous screen very easily. There may be some AI-based plug-ins that can help refine "smart navigation."

 

5.  One can use the calendar as a dashboard. The "My Courses" screen can display in a number of different options. The “Card” option makes the interface look a lot like the way Canvas displays available courses. 

 

My Courses page

6.  The basic structure of the learning management system is the same, so the same names, arrangement, process and procedure works.

 

7.  Moodle 4.0 is available for download if you’d like to host courses on your own server. That PRO is also a CON if you’re not ready to be a Moodle Administrator.

 

8.  Outside Apps more easily integrate with Moodle 4.0.  Integrating apps has always been fairly easy by means of a link or embedded log-in.  I don’t know to what extent single-sign on is facilitated, and if authentication is otherwise streamlined.

 

9.  There is less content on each screen. Not only is it easier to see with your tablet or phone, it’s much easier to stay focused and avoid distractions due to a busy design. 

 

10.  Moodle is open source, which means that there is an entire industry dedicated to building plug-ins and other features that are useful and needed.  I would not be surprised if there will be machine learning-based apps that can detect patterns in student performance and help administrators and even teachers, see student preferences, gaps in knowledge, and collaborative strengths. 

 

CONS:

1.  If you have not worked with Moodle before, you may feel a bit discouraged. Moodle is not a very intuitive LMS, and one may not know where everything is without going through a pretty thorough training course. 

 

Courses and categories admin screen

 

 

2.  It’s not clear how much Universal Design for Learning was used with the new interface, dashboard, icons, etc.  I did not see multiple modes of content delivery on the sample classes in the sandbox site, but that does not mean that they are not available.

 

3.  Moodle 4.0 is not yet available in MoodleCloud, which is the most popular cloud-based Moodle.

 

4.  Moodle documentation is still at 3.11. 

 

An Initial Chat:

Relatecasts' Rick Zanotti and I have an informal conversation about Moodle 4.0, just hours after its release to the web on April 14.  Please click on the link to hear our conversation on E-Learn Chat.  I'm not as clear as I could be as I respond to Rick's questions -- I think my enthusiasm about the  arrival got the best of me :)  Please click and listen, then share your thoughts.

 

 Here's a link to the chat:

https://youtu.be/PqjHqLuWRqg

 

 Please note that an updated version of Packt Publishing's guide to Moodle course development will be published in July 2022, just in time to get courses and programs up and running.

 

 

****

Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.