It has become possible — even likely — to survive academically, be retained in school, get passing grades and graduate with a baccalaureate despite long-term patterns of alcohol and other substance abuse that are known to damage the formation of new memories and reduce both the capacity and the readiness to learn.
—“Culture Change for Learning” by Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh.
(Source: insidehighered.com)
Who can really distinguish between the sea and what’s reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?
—Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart (via airchrysalis)
(via murakamistuff)
I hope you don’t lose your classroom. Or your garden.
On Thursday, a woman with a clipboard entered my classroom and began looking around and taking notes. I looked her in the eye and said, “Hello. Can I help you?” She said absolutely nothing and continued taking notes. I again looked her in the eye and said, “Hello. Can I help you?” Then she said, “We’re from school construction.” She took a photo of my ceiling, which I’ve recreated above. Then she took a photo of the room number over my door. Then she said, “We hope to fix this.” I thought, “For who?” I saw her later, through my window, photographing the courtyard where last spring my students planted a vegetable garden. I suppose we’ll lose that space too.
I often used this to justify the use of the term “anarchofeminist” in my poems:
“Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he’d himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.
“I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox”—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of ‘42 from aMad magazine satire, though I’ve still never seen the film itself. I’m not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we’ve both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I’d probably better be permitted to name it.”
Jonathan Lethem, “The ecstasy of influence”
(Source: harpers.org)
Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
—
Jonathan Lethem (kind of …) in “The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism”
I’m teaching this tomorrow.
(Source: harpers.org)
If any of my students ever ends up on @literallyunbelievable, then I will know that I have failed as a teacher.
How come I always get the best ideas for my lecture 10 minutes before I have to go to a meeting?
“Battle Royal” plus Trayvon Martin plus racist Hunger Games tweets? Can I pull this off?
Flannery O’Connor: “I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor Bible salesman prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs.”
Deep water and drowning are not the same thing:
So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony, lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood. These streets hadn’t changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea. Most of the houses in which we had grown up had vanished, as had the stores from which we had stolen, the basements in which we had first tried sex, the rooftops from which we had hurled tin cans and bricks. But houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn’t. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped, after all, I was a school teacher; or that Sonny had, he hadn’t lived in Harlem for years. Yet, as the cab moved uptown through streets which seemed, with a rush, to darken with dark people, and as I covertly studied Sonny’s face, it came to me that what we were both seeking through our separate cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind. It’s always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.
(James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”)
The story, of course, is about much more, including love and how human beings cannot protect anyone, the reality that “sorrow never gets stopped,” and the inexorable fact that the best among us may not survive — that life, sadly, often takes those whose dreams are greatest, whose voices are most needed.
—Kenneth A. McClane, “‘Sonny’s Blues’ Saved My Life”
