A Symphonic Assemblage
more than 10 years in the making
When was the last time anyone proposed a daring and radical, imaginative and innovative approach to the study of English — and bagged it together with scores of student compositions and the best that the times have to offer?  |
| The two Volumes of (totaling 1600+ pages) provide an integral, fresh, and comprehensive survey of 5 key components of the English Language, with 55 innovations: (1) in a revolutionary method of Vocabulary Acquisition; (2) in a dramatically revamped Grammar; (3) in a clear and vividly memorable presentation of Punctuation; (4) in an innovative Pedagogy for teaching Writing; and (5) in a new, more effective method of Reading. Even more notably, the book introduces a model of creative and critical thinking for all disciplines of learning. An additional, remarkably unique feature of the two volumes is that they contain 271 student compositions — totaling 480 pages — which notate and footnote what the volumes identify as the 11 essential Sentence Forms used in all English writing.
For the first time the Volumes demonstrate a radically simple and effective method by which all students everywhere in the world |
| can learn to write competent prose within a year as well as powerful techniques for dramatically improving the Thinking and Reading skills of students.
Finally, the two Volumes introduce an innovative genre of academic scholarship called the Symphonic Assemblage which affords widened scope and opportunity for integrating insights, connections and discoveries across academic disciplines, varied cultures, and national boundaries.
Good writing, thinking, and reading are within the reach of everyone! |
Volume I: The Opening, The Mother Tongue (824 pages)
| amazon $39 |
Volume II: The Father Tongue,
The Imaginative Tongue, The Closing (828 pages)
| amazon $39 |
We have received some encouraging feedback on our these 2 volumes. One encouraging email was from Steve McIntosh, (home page author of  Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution: How the integral worldview is transforming politics, culture, and spirituality. McIntosh summarizes the thought mindsets (memes) (ways of thinking that give way to certain cultural characteristics of previous and current phases of history. These phases are summarized in a spiral  The spiral implies that there is a lateral and circular (cyclic) aspect to these phases, but also that there is something progressive and cumulative. Here is his email:
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[2012 March 21]
Quote from Gustav Mahler on the Symphonic form
"The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything."
Wikipedia explains: "True to this belief, Mahler drew material from many sources into his songs and symphonic works: bird calls and cow-bells to evoke nature and the countryside, bugle fanfares, street melodies and country dances to summon the lost world of his childhood. Life's struggles are represented in contrasting moods: the yearning for fulfilment by soaring melodies and chromatic harmony, suffering and despair by discord, distortion and grotesquerie. Amid all this is Mahler's particular hallmark—the constant intrusion of banality and absurdity into moments of deep seriousness, typified in the second movement of the Fifth Symphony when a trivial popular tune suddenly cuts into a solemn funeral march."
In a like fashion, the Symphonic Assemblage draws from the vast ocean of knowledge and the languishing halls of history, and it, too, plays with counterplacement of hitherto thought otherwise unrelated items.
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Unity in diversity We are at an important juncture in our history. In this new Era, our reach should exceed our grasp, and our future should include our past. Whether we like it or not, we are building upon all our pasts — your grandparents and ancestors and forefathers and foremothers. What John Lukacs did not mention in his description of the new form, novelized history (rather than historical novel), is that this form of literature is an imaginative way to paste together the pages of the past. Hard times call for hard decisions and hard evaluations; they also call for imagination and new perspectives and creative contemplation. The writers of these 2 books on the Symphonic Assemblage see it as a prototype or sample of a new form of scholarship, perhaps as something that can go alongside the mammoth paper of dissertation. Scholarship needs to have depth as well as range. Perhaps our very survival as a species will require and welcome the new, expansive, and integral nature of Assemblage. Stephen R. Covey wrote that Difference is the beginning of synergy. A wider view requires an allowance and tolerance for variation and differences. Yet, like alloyed steel, the outcome is something unpredictably amazing. A desire for greater inclusivity among researchers, across disciplines (and the need to communicate with the public at large in a language that is comprehensible) must spearhead this movement in research, giving us synergetic scholarship, fused forms, new crystal structures, new speckled landscapes. This process is called assembling. |
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The recasting, the renaming, and the rendering of the important aspects of the English language in clear, concise, and easy-to-read charts is an obvious challenge that many previous approaches to the study of English have missed or covered only partially. But this can only be done at this culminating time in history when sound waves and laser light are continuously cabled and transmitted round the globe and history's harvest is now within keyboard reach. New technologies and new software are tools that the English instructor can use in now sorting and synthesizing the repast of the past, and in doing so in a visually appealing way. The visual side is certainly not missing in our Approach. I remember my high school years in a science lab or geography classroom with charts and diagrams galore. But — unfortunately — English classrooms would be lucky to have a movie poster or poster of the Tower of London or William Shakespeare. When I taught at Gumoh University in Gumi, I was always impressed with the framed (powerpoint?) graphic charts that showed processes or materials in a colorful and visually appealing way. In this slim book, more than 150 poster charts fill the void and could well adorn the walls of any English classroom, thus providing an initial attempt at delineating the mechanics and intricacies of language (and English in particular) in much the same way that the science lab is not averse to showing its complexity by exhibiting analytical diagrams, scaled miniatures, and key timelines on its walls. Why are English classroom walls so lacking in charts and posters? Our Poster Chart book is an attempt, therefore, to render unto Language — that cat's cradle and catch basin of reality — the focussed attention, the simplification, the elucidation, and the scrutiny that it so certainly merits. |
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A leading quote |
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Another leading quote |
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A micro-assemblage Assemblages start small but gather substance and steam for those perceptive enough to see connections between people, stories, events, lyrics, research reports and facts, and all literary genres. |
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Two relevant quotes ". . . never before has the proliferation of writings outside the academy so counterpointed the composition inside." "never before have the technologies of writing contributed so quickly to the creation of new genres." |
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Some stunning observations from the one and only Ursula LeGuinn About Reading (and its sometimes ponderous nature) contrasted with Viewing "Fiction is experience translated by, transformed by, transfigured by imagination. Truth includes but is not coextensive with fact. Truth in art is not limitation, but incarnation." "In a factual history or memoir, the raw material of experience, to be valuable, has to be selected, arranged, and shaped. In a novel, the process is even more radical: the raw materials are not only selected and shaped but fused, composted, recombined, reworked, reconfigured, reborn, and at the same time allowed to find their own forms and shapes, which may be only indirectly related to rational thinking. The whole thing may end up looking like pure invention. A girl chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a monster. A mad captain and a white whale. A ring that confers absolute power. A dragon. |
 See our companion derivation work, New Angle on Writing, a kind of condensed 2 volume series designed for teaching a 1-year foundational course in writing. They are subsequent books to the Assemblage 2 volumes. But there are no passages by famous writers and there are much fewer student compositions. There are 3 parts to the book. The entire books are online. Also, check out Friar Richard's video. The website is newangleonwriting.org |
