Cinnabar and Alabaster

cooking:
(frankly, i think this is the sloppiest, least developed, most un-useful metaphor he has, but he's peter elbow, & so you have to be able to talk about things in his term, don't you, to get credit for playing well with others disciplinarily?)
49. "i think i've finally figured it out. cooking is the interaction of contrasting or conflicting material....[there are] various kinds of interaction that are important in writing. but in any of them cooking consists of the process of one piece of material (or one process) being transformed by interacting with another: one piece of material being seen through the lens of another, being dragged through the guts of another, being reoriented or reorganized in terms of the other, being mapped onto the other."
cooking as interaction between people
49. & on through the explanation: "the original, commonest, easiest-to-produce kind of interaction is that between people....i write a paper; it's not very good; i discuss it with someone; after fifteen minutes of back-and-forth i say something in response to a question or argument of his and he says, 'but why didn't you say that?...i want to shout, 'but i did say that. the whole paper is saying that.' but in truth the whole paper is merely implying or leading up to or circumnavigating that....two heads are better than one because two heads can make conflicting material interact better than one head usually can."
50. "the process [of arguing a point back & forth] provides a continual leverage or mechanical advantage: we each successively climb upon the shoulders of the other's restructuring, so that at each climbing up, we can see a little farther."
cooking as interaction between ideas
50. "just as two people, if they let their ideas interact, can produce ideas or points of view that neither could singly have produced, a lone person" can "maximize the interactions among his own ideas and points of view"--"the way to do this is to encourage conflicts or contradictions in your thinking"
other forms of interactional cooking
51. between "the medium of words" and "the medium of ideas and meanings"--rather than debating whether it's better to write to see what you mean or to figure out what you mean before writing it, practice moving back & forth between the levels. see what just writing seems to mean/lead to, & step out of the writing to see what meanings aren't making it onto the page.
53. & "between metaphors"--play w/them, look at them, see what they offer in terms of relational understanding & avenues of interpretation, limitation, extension.
& modes & symbols & etc.

alice

"but 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knockdown argument,'" alice objected.
"when i use a word," humpty dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what i choose it to mean--neither more nor less."
"the question is," said alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"the question is," said humpty dumpty, "who is to be master--that's all."

the doubting & believing games:
171. "i think of the doubting game as the dialectic of propositions because the more you get ideas and perceptions into propositional form, the better it works. and i think of the believing game as the dialectic of experience because the more you get ideas and preceptions into the more experienced form, the better it works"--the idea behind both is that it's the "cooking" from above--the interactions between people, between ideas, between ways of approaching words on pages--that makes either/both doubting & believing generative. doing either alone in a box accomplishes nothing; they exist at the intersections of readers & texts, writers and listeners, ideas and other ideas.
175-6. "both games are...inherently social....for entrance into the intellectual world, we tend to require willingness to play the doubting game. this would be all right if we also required willingness to play the believing game....though the two games are complementary and mutually beneficial, they cannot be played simultaneously. we cannot say, 'well let's try not only to be as critical as we can, but also be a bit more believing too.'"
182. the inevitable danger of groupthink: the doubting game, although you'd imagine otherwise, actually "supports groupthink because it promotes the feeling that a new or minority idea must disprove the reigning one before it need be seriously entertained--which in most cases is not possible"