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advantage ofteaching English at Queens College fortwenty-one years is that the Collegemust want for me what I want formyself — time to read, write, think,and talk about what I’ve been readingand thinking. When I am on campus,talking is my profession, I am beingpaid to say what I think. Studentssometimes comment that I couldn’tpossibly believe what I say ---“That bitabout point of view,” the prizewinning student said at the awardsceremony, “You don’t really believethat, do you?” A good student is achallenge to my reasoned beliefs andanxious commitments, a challenge whoevokes only greater emphasis andclarity from me. I judged myselfsuccessful enough when a student —he is Miguel in Birthplace — referred tomy “violent lucidity.” Teaching atQueens College has made my voice asa writer more direct than it might haveUen after too much Yale, more upfront and point blank. I learned to cutthe irony and teach, because irony is afailure to love the actual.’As a writer, my role on the campus

of a liberal arts college is tosupplement research, experiments, andrational intellectual methods with ananeient and universal method ofinvention and discovery, the art offiction. Everyone tells stories, and theunity of the stories derives from themoral values that inform the narrative.Fiction is the most comprehensivemethod we have to think with abouthow to live. In the novel 1 am currentlysketching, the refrain occurs, “We’vedone what we shouldn’t have done.What do we do now?” I can work onsuch questions while bumping alongon the Q65A, or facing the peach-greycinderbiock walls of my windowlessoffice, or laughing with Ruth Stern in

the English department office in thattemporary building I watched beingerected over the old tennis courtsmaybe twenty years ago. And I look upat my students in 1982: “OK. What dowe do now?”

I learned what I could about theshort story by writjng the stories inmy collection, Why don’t write like FranzKafka, and I ended the book with achallenge to myself from a bereavedwoman who chooses death over life,and who invites me to write the story Iwould want her to read. I beganBirthplace as my answer to herchallenge to write somethingaffirmative, even consoling. I wantedto adapt the myths of being bornagain, familiar to me from mymedievalist studies and from readingsin anthropology, to modern secularlife, because I like to see people starttheir lives over again, and to see howthe new life uses the old life. Theexcitement of teaching at QueensCollege, where I sometimes feel that Iam working in the shadow of theStatue of Liberty as well as within thatglorious view of Manhattan, is that forso many of my students college is achance at a new life. Year after year Iconfront students from strong familyor ethnic or nationalist backgrounds —fresh from Yeshiva or Xavier, fromChina or Iran — and I watch theconfrontation between the traditionalculture, sometimes damaged or cut offat the roots, and the generalized ideasof Western liberal rationalism,accompanied by iti seductivetechnology; it is like chposlng betweena nest and a grid, or like trying to carryon a romance with reason, I enjoywatching students as they choose orconstruct their lives, for theynecessarily imply a definition of life asthey implicitly answer the question,

WlIIbm S. Wilson IllWilliam S. Wilson, Professor of Englishwho has been teaching at QueensCollege for 21 years, is the author ofBirthplace: Mouing Into Nearness: his firstnovel, published this summer by NorthPoint Press. The New York Timesreviewer called it an “eccentric, oftenbrilliant first novel,” and added, “It is artthat Mr. Wilson cares most about, thatfrozen moment when the imaginedworld—the world itself—achieves anillustory completion. Birthplace, as it ends,offers us that triumphant illusion”Dr. Wilson is also the autbor of a

book of short stories. 1Vhy I Don’t Wri!Like Franz Kafka, which the New York‘flmes reviewer called “the mostpowerul new American fiction I haveencountered in years.”A graduate of University of Virginia,

he received his M.A. and his Ph.D. fromYale. Prof. Wilson describes how thesometimes, but not always,contradictory acts of writing andteaching often enrich each other.

What do we do now? In my novelBirthplace, one character suggests acollege’organized around biology, asthe study of life, but another characterwonders if a college couldn’t be aparty, where we might learn to begood guests in the world, learning theappropriate loyalty to existence, ratherthan appropriations of money and ofthings.I am the one who gets to give the

grades, but I think of myself less as ateacher or as a writer than as astudent: I go off to my study andstudy. As a student, one who teachesso that he can continue to study, 1have been able to use the writing offiction to think about what I have beenlearning while teaching. A studentglancing up from writing an exercise inclass, noticing me scribbling in mygrade book, might have seen me atwork on my novel. Even an Englishteacher can be reborn as a novelist,and even a classroom in the New

(Continued on Pase 12)

TEACHING INVENTION AND DISCOVERY

The c!. e

©Capsby Dr. ,ViIliam 5. Wilson 111

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UJelville Bell hadthe idea over a century ago. Couldspeech be converted to images so thatthe deaf could see a conversation asit occurs?Are there exact visual equivalents

for the loudness, pitch, soundduration, stresses and intonations thatconvey vast amounts of information tothe ear instantaneously?Technology of that day was too

young for Melville Bell’s idea to be putinto practice. But his son carried on hiswork and did develop some originalapproaches for using visual means toteach speech to the deaf.Though these devices were not

successful, they did lead AlexanderGraham Bell to major breakthroughsin communications research which, inturn, he used to invent the telephone.The time may be ripe for the elder

Bell’s first dream of helping the deaf to“see” speech to be made a reality.Professor Mark Weiss of the QueensCollege Computer Science Departmentforesees a time in the not too distantfuture when a deaf person wishing tocommunicate with a deaf or hearingfriend, could step into a specialtelephone booth equipped with anAutomatic Visual Display for Speech.“The untrained eye might see a

churning field of unrelated colors andimages flickering into view at one edgeof the screen and fading away slowlyat the other edge,” Professor Weisssaid. “But the trained user would graspthe meaning as the voice of the personspeaking to him would be instantlytranslated into a rush of pattern andcolor. The eye would follow aconversation fluently and withoutconscious effort.”Eventually information conveyed

today by speech. Professor Weissbelieves, could be captured through aVisual Speech Display that wouldautomatically translate voice todynamic multi-colored patterns on avideo screen.He and his colleague, Dr. Harry

Levitt, Professor of Speech andHearing Sciences at Queens College,were awarded a $102,800 per yearresearch grant recently by theNational Institute of Neurological andCommunicative Disorders andStrokei’NIH. They will conduct a threeyear study of display systems for

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$306,000ComputerScience StudySeeks Visual“Hearing”for Deaf

representing speech which could beused in rehabilitation of the deaf andhearing impaired.“Practical implementation of a visible

speech display that is yeadily intelligibleto both deaf and hearing persons isextraordinarily difficult,” ProfessorWeiss explained.He believes that a computer smart

enough to understand speech and thenprint it out — the perfect solution forvisualizing speech — is far in thefuture, if it will ever be possible.The Queens.College project will

focus on electronic devices which donot “understand” speech, but simplyconvert it to non-alphabetic imageswhich represent sound characteristics,but need to be interpreted by theviewer; in essence, a new code ofshapes and colors generated directly bythe physical characteristics of thevoice, and therefore a visual analogy ofspeech.Professor Weiss, who is nationally

known for his work in enhancing thespeech signals on the Watergate andFDR White House tapes, in 1960pioneered use of”real time spectrumanalysis” for study of speechcharacteristics.He developed the first system able

to generate and display a continuous

spectrum of speech without delay forcomplicated processing and with lineresolution. He also developed displaysof vocal pitch; methods of identifyingvowels from frequency; and a high-speed method for measuring vocalpitch which is extremely accurate andreliable.His co-investigator, Professor Levitt,

has been active in developing sensoryaids for the deaf for the past twelveyears. He has used visible s,.eechdisplays to train deaf children atseveral schools to speak, and worked atBell Labs In developing devices to helpthe deaf use the telephone.Professor Levitt has also been

involved in research to improvehearing aids, and on methods ofcomputer assisted testing of hearingand speech. -

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The Role of the Writer(Continued from Page 11)

Science Facility can be a birthplace ofan image or an idea. But rememberthat a novel is, however entertaining,an intellectual method of thinkingabout values, bout choices and aboutmoral character, about freedoms andnecessities, and a modern novel isdifficult to read, but then so is modernexperience. As I have written. “. . . themeaning of the story is in learninghow to read it,” and, “The style irtwhich the stories require to be read isthe style in which experience is to beread.” I wrote in the Queens CollegeAlumni Mngiuine in 1969, an essayreprinted in a Dutton paperbackanthology, The New Art, “Art is notentertainment, it is work; it is notpassive leisure or pleasure, it is a wayof actively thinking; it is not a questionof taste, It is a question of provingwhat is real.”] sometimes reread thatessay to learn how to hold my beliefsmore strongly. And now, when areviewer writes of Birthplace, “Wilson isa presumptuous, arrogant writer; heassumes that the reader will stay withhim, and he does not compromise inany particular or in general,” I can onlyhope that former students who haveforgotten me will recognize me in thatdescription.

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[The World ofWilliam Wilson

By GLORIA A. BRUERE

Welcome to the world of William S. Wilson: in Birthplace: Moving Into Nearness (North PointPress, 278 pages, $15.00), Wilson’s first novel, he introduces readers to Primavera and Umber-land, two Caiihbean islands connected by acauseway, two islands peopled by the likes ofSalathiel, Aurelia, Orlando, Oliver, Olivia, and the princly Mayan Dclenda Kinh, letter writersall. For those unfamiliar with Why I don’t write like Franz Katka(Ecco Press, 1977), Wilson’sshort story collection, Birthplace serves well as an introduction to his inimitable work, for it begins, in mis language and themes, whçre W1y I don’t write like Franz Kafka leaves off. One maynot feel welcome in the world presented, or feel comfortable with the ideas rife in these pages, buttake a deep breath and plunge in; it is not painful, only pleasing.The novel is in the form of a letter Salathiel is wnting to his lost grandson Octavio. His letter in

corporates letters from Octavio’s parents, Olivia and Orlando, and his aunt and uncle, Aurelia andOliver. The letters are more meditative than newsworthy, although they do reveal the island’s history and move the narrative along.The islands past is wondrous; Kwant, Salathiel’s father and Primavera’s dictator, is overthrown

by the Mayan prince Delenda Kinh who arrives at the island after the rest of the world is annihilatedby a nuclear holocaust. He proclaims that everyone will write a letter each day to someone on theisland to be delivered sometime in the future, perhaps in a decade.

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In “Metier” (from Why I don’t write like Franz Kafka), Wilson, who is a professor of English atQueens College, writes,”.., the meaning of the story is in learning how to read it,” and “The stylein which the stories require to be read is the style in which experience is to be read.” These two sentences are true of of Birthplace; the narrative structure (the letters move back and forth in time) becomes the island’s history; past, present, and future overlap, intertwine, and merge to create a Utopian vision of people livingoutsideof time, orexperiencing a “freedomofmovernentt” as Aureliawrites in one of her notebooks. The relationship between charactems and time is a concern here.When the letters crystallize into one unified narrative, Salathiel writes, on the last page, “So I haveproduced this letter which hasproduced me.” ‘l’he letters produce more—Salathiel, who is rebornwhen, at the end, he marries a young woman, Yolanda, and fathers a daughter.What is remarkable about the novel is the language. Some readers may be tempted to read with a

dictionary beside them. The language is both sensitive, subtle, as when Salathiel writes, “She hadmemorable collarbones and I remember them.” Wilson writes carefully, almost as if the writingimplement, which he uses to form sentences, was a diamond cutting glass.The sensitivity is consistent with clarity, and strength.Along the way, one meets.up with some of the most curious and intriguing characters in lilera

tore. Particularly memorable are Oliver, who must provide a quote for every occasion, and Olivia,whose cpemwnce is delineated in a vivid array of colors: “Orlando marched past inc ma searinglight, a livid glissando from aquamarine to violet-blue,jolting me outofmy remote transcendanceiii the ordinary sunset into a local, albeit nonspectral purple, a domestic shade of silver, and severallimsiroush shades of greyIn many ways, the novel defies description, and deserves to be read rather than explained. IL is

original, in es cry sense of the word, and contains more than suggested here. Wilson has written “anovel that would be worth reading under the dome of (he sky.”

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Birthplacc:

Dr. William S. Wilson Ill