Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Butch Morris (1947–2013)

Sad news in the New York Times:

Butch Morris, who created a distinctive form of large-ensemble music built on collective improvisation that he single-handedly directed and shaped, died on Tuesday in Brooklyn. . . .

Mr. Morris referred to his method as “conduction,” short for “conducted improvisation.” He defined the word, which he trademarked, as “an improvised duet for ensemble and conductor.”
Here is Morris’s website, Conduction. And three examples of conduction, from 2009, 2010, and 2011. Try one, or more. As the narrator of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” says at that story’s end, “It’s really something.”

Diction levels, crisscrossing

On the PBS NewsHour last night, a New York Times reporter referred to Judy Woodruff and company as “you guys.” And on the local PBS station, a student-weatherperson referred to “tornadic activity.”

[What’s a good alternative to “you guys,” good people?]

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Bobbing for apples

I have nothing against Halloween customs, but I dislike bobbing for apples. That’s my name for a habit that makes classroom discussion more difficult and less productive than it should be. A student who bobs for apples might offer the following observations in discussion:

The speaker in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is asking someone he loves to go for a walk: “Let us go then, you and I.”

The father in Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” works in an office.

The poet in Sappho’s fragment 31 sees the man she loves talking with another woman.
In each case the bobber, largely or wholly unprepared, has bent down and come up with something. Someone who had read these works (and accompanying assignment pages, full of guidance) would not — could not — make the bobber’s mistakes. The possibility that Prufrock can speak to anyone but himself (much less that he is in love) is one that the poem belies at every moment; the “overwhelming question,” whatever form it might take, is one that never gets asked. The father in Hayden’s poem has “cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather”; the poem’s “offices” are the lonely rites the father performs for the members of his household: building fires, shining shoes. And in Sappho’s poem, pronouns make clear the object of the poet’s desire: the man is seated next to “you,” and it’s the sound of “your” delightful laughter and one glance at “you” that leave the poet unable to speak.

Bobbing for apples makes things difficult in several ways. It impedes the give and take of discussion by requiring a teacher to function as an arbiter of interpretive truth, one who must take up the unpleasant task of saying no — or let any old absurdity fly. There’s little point in asking about the basis for the student’s response when no reasonable evidence could be forthcoming: to ask would yield only embarrassment. (What, for instance, could be the evidence that the father works in an office, aside from the glanced-at, not-looked-up word offices?) Another problem: bobbing for apples fosters the notion, especially among students who might not recognize bobbing as such, that literary interpretation is an arbitrary, haphazard affair: to vary the metaphor, a Rorschach test. You see something (or think you do); you say something. Who’s to say whether it’s right or wrong?

One good answer to that question: literary study is typically not about right and wrong. There are many plausible things one might say about a poem, some of which will contradict others. Another answer: every reader of a work of literature — anyone who really reads it — has a say. And to read, really read, one must do much more than bob. Repeated immersions, to the limit of one’s ability to remain underwater: that’s what will let you come up with something worthwhile.

A related post
Zadie Smith on reading

[The examples in this post are from my imagination, not from life.]

“Silent film effect”

[Hello, solvers. If you’re looking for an answer to the clue “Silent film opener” (August 16, 2017), please read all the way to the end. It’s complicated.]

A baffling answer in today’s New York Times crossword, 32-Down, “Silent film effect”: IRISIN. Even after getting it, I was lost: was irisin a chemical used to treat film stock? No, the answer is iris-in. An explanation:

Iris: A technique used to show an image in only one small round area of the screen. An Iris-Out begins as a pinpoint and then moves outward to reveal the full scene, while an Iris-In moves inward from all sides to leave only a small image on the screen. An iris can be either a transitional device (using the image held as a point of transition) or a way of focusing attention on a specific part of a scene without reducing the scene in size.


Here is an iris-out, from Buster Keaton’s Neighbors (1920), found here. Please imagine that it is an iris-in.

*

August 16, 2017: A reader has let me know that IRISIN appears in today’s Times crossword, 47-Down: “Silent film opener.” Today’s clue is, well, problematic. I checked several reputable books about film: three define iris-in as the move inward and iris-out as the move outward; two others reverse the terms. So is an iris-in a “silent film opener”? It depends. But no matter what the Times crossword says, Mel Tormé still isn’t a “cool jazz pioneer.”

Monday, January 28, 2013

The Revisionaries, tonight

On PBS’s Independent Lens tonight, The Revisionaries, on the Texas State Board of Education’s role in shaping the content of a nation’s textbooks.

[The role has since changed, as the series’s website explains.]

Hi and Lois watch


[Hi and Lois, January 28, 2013.]

In the first panel of today’s Hi and Lois, Mom has rebuked her firstborn: “Chip! Do you have to add to the noise?” That’s cold. You should never rebuke your son for playing an acoustic guitar. (Electric? Maybe, sometimes.) I suspect that Chip, amid outcroppings of dog, sofa, and children, has escaped into his music to maintain his sanity on the family’s vast arid living-room plain.

Lois must be watching Downton Abbey. She has Edith’s eyes.

 
Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Free Mr. Bates


[By KnittyGrittyTN. Found at strix.org.uk.]

And if you haven’t yet seen it: Edith with Googly Eyes.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

From a dream

“It’s as if my wiles had vanished into thin air.”

“Exceedingly thin air.”

Whence such dialogue? I must have had Downton Abbey in my sleeping head.

Other dreams, arranged by subject
John Ashbery and Fred Astaire : Baloney recovery : Beach Boys reunion : Citizen Kane : “Columbain coffee” : The Cummerbund Response : “Darn That Dream” : Jack Dempsey : Inara George and Van Dyke Parks : Infinite Jest : Charles Mingus : Skeptiphobia : “Smoked chicken water” : Ulysses : United States of America commercial

Friday, January 25, 2013

A Seymour Barab celebration



As Elaine likes to say, Seymour and Margie King Barab are our “favorite inhabitants of the Upper East Side.” I wish we could be in New York this coming Sunday.

Related reading
The After Dinner Opera
Seymour Barab (the composer’s website)
One Foot in Oz (Margie King Barab’s blog)

College completion

In the New York Times, an article on a report from the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment (now there’s a great name) on the need to increase graduation rates. The group’s chair is Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee:

The report, “College Completion Must Be Our Priority,” which will be released on Thursday, calls on colleges and universities to find ways to give students credit for previous learning, through exams like the College Board’s College-Level Examination Program, portfolio assessments or other college equivalency evaluations. It also calls for more services and flexibility for nontraditional students, suggesting innovations like midnight classes, easier credit transfers and more efficient course delivery, including online classes.

“These are all very important things, they’re all unusual, and they’re things we’re not doing,” Dr. Gee said. “We concentrate most on the admissions side of things, getting the bodies in, and there’s no one in charge of seeing that they get through and graduate. I’m going to call this person the completion dean.”
I’m struck by two things in Gee’s remarks:

1. The frank language of business: “getting the bodies in” and moving them out (while still warm of course). Here is the language of credentialism at its worst. The life of the mind? The pursuit of knowledge? Not so much.

2. The assumption that there must be someone “in charge” to see to it that students graduate. Thus the solution to any academic problem: more administration.

Gee’s Wikipedia article makes interesting reading. You can find the report here.