What causes that racket? Ours don't do that in this place though I'm trying to remember if they did last year when Doug was around to go bug Barbara downstairs for the radiator key so he could bleed the radiators. In fact, now that I think of it, it IS peculiar to have heat without noise! I mean, they're metal! How can they NOT clank clank as they heat/cool, expand/contract?
At my last class (don't get excited, there's still plenty o' work to be done before I'm finished with it) we sat in groups of four. We discussed an abstract painting that Prof brought in. "How do you react to the painting emotionally?" he asked. We responded. "What do you see?" "What would you say in a narrative about the painting?" He then had us share with our group members. It was a bit peculiar since the thing we have in common is not necessarily a love of art, rather, we all want to be teachers...of some kind...of kids who are somewhere between 11 and 19. However, it never ceases to amaze me the creativity that emerges from the group whenever we're prompted. Last week, CTM (C the Magnificent) was giving a lesson using primary sources to teach about the Dust Bowl. She showed us some photos, read us some information about Steinbeck's background (asked questions about how this might affect his perspective on migrant workers), then played an historical recording of a man reading a poem about leaving the babies to starve and going in search of work. When she asked us to write a poem from the perspective of someone enduring these hardships the results were...whoa...impressive.
But, I digress. During our last class, we shared about the painting. Each successive person revealed things they had seen in the painting that totally changed our perspectives. The next step was to look at a piece of art far removed from the source. We looked at a BW print-out of a ppt of a photo that Prof ripped from the internet of a print of Picasso's Old Man and Guitar (don't remember exactly what the title is). Anyway, we looked at it, once again answered teh questions "How do you react to the painting emotionally?" and "What sort of narrative might you construct in response to the painting?" Then we read this excerpt from Wallace Stevens's "The Man with the Blue Guitar":
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
Then, after we had discussed that portion, we read a new excerpt with this addition at the end:
"And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."
We were supposed to talk about the poem and the painting and whatever we liked. One woman in our group said, "It's like when a group remakes a song and you listen to it, hating it, and wonder why they did that."
We talked about that for awhile and then J gives a long look and says, "I'm a musician and so is my girlfriend. She plays guitar and does a lot of reinterpretations of songs. Almost always, I don't like them. And it makes me question our relationship.
We discuss this further. There are people who would hear that and think he's crazy, "I mean," they would say, "It's like liking some cornball song you hear on the radio, or downloading it to your ipod." But he's right. It's not. When you re-express the song and you invest time in making it sound like that. And 'that' is so utterly opposed to what J would consider to be beautiful (or even 'good') you might actually be expressing inner values that are fundamentally at odds. In some respects, it is strange that such a seemingly frivolous judgement could be so sound, but there it is. Wow. I'm glad that guy's gonna be a teacher. I wish I could take the time right now to write it in such a way that the true awe of it would come across more melifluously, but in the meantime I thought I'd feed you the story anyway.
Maybe i should regroup. I'm sure i can come up with a better plan between now and when it's time to go PLAY IN THE SNOW! --er, go to work, i mean. Cause that's what i actually have to do today. Which is cool...