Friday, May 07, 2004
Impromptu: Revenge of the Prompt
There has been much scoffing at seriousness today, probably because it's sunny and 70F and Prom Day. Puns have been running. Amanda and I accomplished a lot of detailed work for tomorrow's engagement party, including assembling the favors and creating/burning the soundtrack (a double-disc cache of sounds). The imperative command of the weekend is palpable: FEST!
One of my creative writing students wrote a self-portrait as your heart. The best line was something about her being a "small red coconut hiding behind ribs." Great image, and one that oddy matches up with my recent strain of vascular poetry.
The freshmen students ate up "Big Two-Hearted River" today, feeling out new details I had never noticed, predicting and interpreting Nick's solitary walk into the woods. More than last year, I'm glad I'm using it as a pertinent appetizer to The Old Man and the Sea. They wrote Hemingway-inspired paragraphs for homework, to interesing and accurate effect.
I feel a poem is due, maybe by Sunday.
There has been much scoffing at seriousness today, probably because it's sunny and 70F and Prom Day. Puns have been running. Amanda and I accomplished a lot of detailed work for tomorrow's engagement party, including assembling the favors and creating/burning the soundtrack (a double-disc cache of sounds). The imperative command of the weekend is palpable: FEST!
One of my creative writing students wrote a self-portrait as your heart. The best line was something about her being a "small red coconut hiding behind ribs." Great image, and one that oddy matches up with my recent strain of vascular poetry.
The freshmen students ate up "Big Two-Hearted River" today, feeling out new details I had never noticed, predicting and interpreting Nick's solitary walk into the woods. More than last year, I'm glad I'm using it as a pertinent appetizer to The Old Man and the Sea. They wrote Hemingway-inspired paragraphs for homework, to interesing and accurate effect.
I feel a poem is due, maybe by Sunday.
Monday, May 03, 2004
Tissue
What violence, a cough kept pent
in the smokey bellows of dad.
When his lung pops like wet paper
you remember fruit leather,
a marvelous red cape of snack.
Not other things you've sifted:
denim, satin, burlap, chain-mail.
If dad was lined with red cape,
his breath would be heroic, and
he would not share his chest with machines.
Tongues would lick the walls healthy,
and I would hold an opera there.
What violence, a cough kept pent
in the smokey bellows of dad.
When his lung pops like wet paper
you remember fruit leather,
a marvelous red cape of snack.
Not other things you've sifted:
denim, satin, burlap, chain-mail.
If dad was lined with red cape,
his breath would be heroic, and
he would not share his chest with machines.
Tongues would lick the walls healthy,
and I would hold an opera there.
Sunday, May 02, 2004
Lord knows it would be the first time...
Killing time yesterday in the dorm, I read/learned that John Hughes used an instrumental cover of the Smiths song "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" for the Chicago Art Institute sequence of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. There is no question as to this being my personal favorite Hughes film, and this particular montage is probably also my favorite moment in it. The Mozz has also frequently cited this song as the quintessential Smiths song, as the most pure example of their aesthetic and expression. Here I am on Sunday, wrapping up my second year of living and teaching at a 7th-12th grade college preperatory school, and I should be drafting tomorrow's Romeo and Juliet exam, but instead I can't stop considering this filmic moment and the thousands I've observed from the young-adult side in the past twenty months.
Morrisey and Hughes were kindred, each a pop-poet adored by young millions, each isolating for brilliant moments the rushes and pains of adolescence. There is no better metaphor for teendom than the pop song: impatient, sugar-drenched, strung to popular opinion. No entertainment was/is more popular to teens than popular "movies": escapist, fantastical, an easily accesible Friday night event. In these mediums, they revealed a new kind of old angst, the vulnerable hypocrisy and the tender (as in a healing wound) immaturity of youth. They crafted somewhat-dimensional characters and statements in traditionally singly-dimensioned arenas. Each kid in my school is a unique and thesis-shattering case that still proves the accuracy of "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" or Ferris. Wretched parenting, flaws begetting flawed behavior, flux, and extremes all mingle at differing levels in any given student, and they are my neighbors and my charges. I have to care for them at night, and on weekends. Amanda and I took the freshmen class to Coney Island today for an '07 outing, and as they were scattering down the boardwalk toward the fog-lined beach I thought who are these kids? and who am I to be in charge of this precious afternoon of their development? It was the oddest fog hiding the ocean and the tops of tall buildings, and it wasn't cold at all. The wind was as damp as the water, but it wasn't chilly. Everyone was warm. We smiled through the Aquarium and had hot-dogs and a gut-shifting ride or two. It was perfect, and how was I in co-charge?
That's where the Art Institute/Morrissey moment conflated with my Sunday. Ferris, Cameron, and Sloan sneak into the museum by linking hands with a line of elementary students, looking drole and out of place. The irreverence of Ferris, the happily nested everyboy of this story, is off-set by the moment Cameron has with the Seurat painting, the little girl with her mother but so alone. Hughes zooms in cut-by-cut from Cameron's perspective, absurdly close to the painting, which is ultimately, as per Seurat's pointalist method, just a group of colored dots. I didn't stare at any revealing art today, but I was observing the action of eighteen high schoolers all day. I watch their herding, hear their humor, and sometimes analyze the things they don't intend to suggest or reveal. It was a holiday, and an oddly edenic one. The boardwalk, beach, and streets were nearly deserted, but all the amusements were open and solicitous. There was no sun but there was the heat of the sun. There was no homework -- until I reminded them about the exam on the busride home (what have I become?). I always announce adult-news like that ironically, as if I don't want to step away from their innocent and sheltered state to join the ranks of the in-charge and responsible, but they never detect it. I'm really just consoling myself in this game. And it's that same tone I take when I issue a bad pun. I know it's a lame pun, and hence I'm guarded when sharing it, but I love it genuinely and there is more sincerity in the motivation than shame, so it's delivered unevenly. That's how I feel on these trips, sometimes: uneven. I've got Amanda, my love and future, and we're just kids. Sure, we've played more innings of life and mastered many of its rhythms and its peculiar stresses, but there is something so carefree about being carefree.
Killing time yesterday in the dorm, I read/learned that John Hughes used an instrumental cover of the Smiths song "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" for the Chicago Art Institute sequence of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. There is no question as to this being my personal favorite Hughes film, and this particular montage is probably also my favorite moment in it. The Mozz has also frequently cited this song as the quintessential Smiths song, as the most pure example of their aesthetic and expression. Here I am on Sunday, wrapping up my second year of living and teaching at a 7th-12th grade college preperatory school, and I should be drafting tomorrow's Romeo and Juliet exam, but instead I can't stop considering this filmic moment and the thousands I've observed from the young-adult side in the past twenty months.
Morrisey and Hughes were kindred, each a pop-poet adored by young millions, each isolating for brilliant moments the rushes and pains of adolescence. There is no better metaphor for teendom than the pop song: impatient, sugar-drenched, strung to popular opinion. No entertainment was/is more popular to teens than popular "movies": escapist, fantastical, an easily accesible Friday night event. In these mediums, they revealed a new kind of old angst, the vulnerable hypocrisy and the tender (as in a healing wound) immaturity of youth. They crafted somewhat-dimensional characters and statements in traditionally singly-dimensioned arenas. Each kid in my school is a unique and thesis-shattering case that still proves the accuracy of "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" or Ferris. Wretched parenting, flaws begetting flawed behavior, flux, and extremes all mingle at differing levels in any given student, and they are my neighbors and my charges. I have to care for them at night, and on weekends. Amanda and I took the freshmen class to Coney Island today for an '07 outing, and as they were scattering down the boardwalk toward the fog-lined beach I thought who are these kids? and who am I to be in charge of this precious afternoon of their development? It was the oddest fog hiding the ocean and the tops of tall buildings, and it wasn't cold at all. The wind was as damp as the water, but it wasn't chilly. Everyone was warm. We smiled through the Aquarium and had hot-dogs and a gut-shifting ride or two. It was perfect, and how was I in co-charge?
That's where the Art Institute/Morrissey moment conflated with my Sunday. Ferris, Cameron, and Sloan sneak into the museum by linking hands with a line of elementary students, looking drole and out of place. The irreverence of Ferris, the happily nested everyboy of this story, is off-set by the moment Cameron has with the Seurat painting, the little girl with her mother but so alone. Hughes zooms in cut-by-cut from Cameron's perspective, absurdly close to the painting, which is ultimately, as per Seurat's pointalist method, just a group of colored dots. I didn't stare at any revealing art today, but I was observing the action of eighteen high schoolers all day. I watch their herding, hear their humor, and sometimes analyze the things they don't intend to suggest or reveal. It was a holiday, and an oddly edenic one. The boardwalk, beach, and streets were nearly deserted, but all the amusements were open and solicitous. There was no sun but there was the heat of the sun. There was no homework -- until I reminded them about the exam on the busride home (what have I become?). I always announce adult-news like that ironically, as if I don't want to step away from their innocent and sheltered state to join the ranks of the in-charge and responsible, but they never detect it. I'm really just consoling myself in this game. And it's that same tone I take when I issue a bad pun. I know it's a lame pun, and hence I'm guarded when sharing it, but I love it genuinely and there is more sincerity in the motivation than shame, so it's delivered unevenly. That's how I feel on these trips, sometimes: uneven. I've got Amanda, my love and future, and we're just kids. Sure, we've played more innings of life and mastered many of its rhythms and its peculiar stresses, but there is something so carefree about being carefree.
