Mad Hot Ballroom

A quick movie recommendation: Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary about fifth-graders preparing for and competing in the New York City public schools' ballroom-dancing competition. The film follows students from three schools, two in Manhattan--Tribeca and Washington Heights--and one in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The students' dedication is inspiring; the openness with which they talk about what they hope to do in their lives is beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking; and their discussions of the opposite sex are almost always hilarious. The dance sequences are sometimes clunky, often remarkably graceful. (How do you describe ten-year-olds doing the tango?!) And even with several dozen students and teachers to keep track of, the filmmakers manage (well, sort of manage) to present each as an individual personality. Some of my favorite moments (aside from the dancing): dance-teacher Alex Tchassov explaining the secret of making eye contact while dancing; classroom-teacher Allison Sheniak beginning to cry when she speaks of how her students have become "little ladies and gentlemen" (they're sitting behind her and can hear that something is going in); the gossip sessions among the Washington Heights girls; student Michael Vaccaro's analysis of love and marriage. You have to stay through the credits to see that last one. A bonus, for me: seeing a school auditorium and gym just like those in P.S. 131, Brooklyn, my elementary school.

I was lucky enough to see this movie in a real theatre (not a crummy multiplex)--Boardman's Art Theatre in Champaign, Illinois. If you too are in east-central Illinois, it's worth the drive.

You can see the website for the film by clicking here.

Its and it's

Looking up my old neighborhood of Allston, Mass. (now being colonized by Harvard University), I was surprised to find the following:

Peter Vanderwarker was commissioned by Harvard Planning and the Allston Initiative to photographically capture the spirit of Allston . . . with all it's complexities.

An its/it's error from Harvard--sheesh. You can see it, with a Harvard URL, here.

Its and it's are not that difficult to keep straight. The first is a possessive, like his and hers, neither of which has an apostrophe. It's is a contraction. It's that simple. Or as the writer Jessica Mitford put it,

When is it its? When it's not it is.
When is it it's? When it is it is.

[The offending contraction, from a screenshot. The link to the Harvard page is now dead. “When is it its?” is from Jessica Mitford’s Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979).]

Shelby Foote

From the AP obituary for historian Shelby Foote:

Early in his career, Foote took up the habit of writing by hand with an old-fashioned dipped pen, and he continued that practice throughout his life. . . . Foote said writing by hand helped him slow down to a manageable pace and was more personal that using a typewriter, though he often prepared a typed copy of his day's writing after it was finished.

You can read the obituary here.

The message

Marjorie Perloff, interviewed by David Clippinger:

DC: Why do you think abstract art is more accepted than abstract poetry? Does the aura of the museum offer a form of validity that poetry cannot access, or does the fissure go beyond the issue of institutions?

MP: I think there are two answers to this question. (1) visual art, abstract or otherwise, is much more accepted by the public than is poetry. Ours is increasingly a visual culture: a few years ago, I went to a Magritte exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles. It was packed; one couldn't get near the paintings. But if one asked the same people to read surrealist poetry, comparable to Magritte's painting, they would be at a total loss and say the poetry was much too difficult, too obscure. Thus Max Ernst's paintings and frottages are Big Business whereas André Breton's poems are barely known in the U.S. And the same would be true of Dada or Italian Futurism. Kurt Schwitters, for that matter, is well known as a painter, but his poems remain almost unknown!

But (2) "abstraction" in language is a very different thing from abstract painting. I take it by abstract poetry you mean non-sensical? Like Clark Coolidge or Bruce Andrews? I think the hostility to such poetry has to do with the simple fact that words (unlike paint strokes or dabs of color) inevitably have meanings, and so the reader inevitably wants to "make sense" of a poem and is frustrated when he/she can't. I don't think it's the aura of the museum versus the university classroom. Then, too, poetry is taught especially badly: in even the best high schools the only modern poets read are Robert Frost or Langston Hughes or maybe Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. There is no training in HOW TO READ whereas art history classrooms do better by paintings and sculpture.... we suffer from the awful high school (and also college teaching) which reads poems for their "messages." I always have to remind students not to think in terms of "the message."

You can read the interview by clicking here.

"Zero content"

Guitarist Ry Cooder:

"What do you need another mall for?" he went on. "In L.A., that’s all they ever have built. They cut up the Brown Derby. They cut up all those restaurants that looked like funny things, like pigs or hot dogs. They tear down every coffee shop they can find. You talk about heritage, man, it was there. They find a bowling alley, chop it down. Interesting old apartment house, chop it down. Then they give back stuff with zero content, buildings with no past, a useless present, and no future at all. Where nobody is going to get together, where no memories will be created or associations made, or good times. They will simply be directing you into the act of taking your credit card out of your wallet, with that glazed look on your face. So, you see, I’m not a fan of that."

Why is Ry Cooder quoted in "Stadia Mania," a New Yorker piece about plans for new ballparks for the Mets and Yankees? You can find out by clicking here.

Segovia

Guitarist Andrés Segovia (1893-1987) on his hatred of routine playing:

I have to be present at every note I play.

From the New York Times obituary, available by clicking here.

[Use mediajunkie as your name and password to read the Times online.]

The most dangerous game

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you.

I've been meaning to post an excerpt from John Perry's essay for, well, for some time now. You can read "Structured Procrastination"--at your own risk--by clicking here.

Prof. Perry also has a nice essay on horizontal organization, the art of spreading out your work in piles all around you. You can read "A Plea for the Horizontally Organized"--again at your own risk--by clicking here.

Garrett Wade

I happened to mention it while teaching: the Garrett Wade catalogue must be the most beautiful tool catalogue ever made. You can see the online version by clicking here. The print version, on non-shiny paper, is even better.

GMH, journal-keeper

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a dedicated journal-keeper. Did he write in Moleskine notebooks? Who knows. Here's a sample from Hopkins' journals:

Aug. 10 [1872]. --I was looking at high waves. The breakers always are parallel to the coast and shape themselves to it except where the curve is sharp however the wind blows. They are rolled out by the shallowing shore just as a piece of putty between the palms whatever its shape runs into a long roll. The slant ruck or crease one sees in them shows the way of the wind. The regularity of the barrels surprised and charmed the eye; the edge behind the comb or crest was as smooth and as bright as glass. It may be noticed to be green behind and silver white in front: the silver marks where the air begins, the pure white is foam, the green / solid water. Then looked at to the right or left they are scrolled over like mouldboards or feathers or jibsails seen by the edge. It is pretty to see the hollow of the barrel disappearing as the white combs on each side run along the wave gaining ground till the two meet at a pitch and crush and overlap each other.

About all the turns of the scaping from the break and flooding of wave to its run out again I have not yet satisfied myself. The shores are swimming and the eyes have before them a region of milky surf but it is hard for them to unpack the huddling and gnarls of the water and law out the shapes and the sequence of the running: I catch however the looped or forked wisp made by every big pebble the backwater runs over--if it were clear and smooth there would be a network from their overlapping, such as can in fact be seen on smooth sand after the tide is out--; then I saw it run browner, the foam dwindling and twitched into long chains of suds, while the strength of the back-draught shrugged the stones together and clocked them one against another.

Looking from the cliff I saw well that work of dimpled foamlaps--strings of short loops or halfmoons--which I had studied at Freshwater years ago.

It is pretty to see the dance and swagging of the light green tongues or ripples of waves in a place locked between rocks.

No wonder Hugh Kenner referred to Hopkins' "poetic of detail." For Hopkins, looking (as in his modest preface, "I was looking at high waves") is synonymous with the most careful, extended attention to detail. The excitement of this passage for me lies in realizing just how right Hopkins' words are: "rolled out by the shallowing shore," "as smooth and as bright as glass," "solid water," "the huddling and gnarls of the water," "the looped or forked wisp made by every big pebble," "the foam dwindling and twitched into long chains of suds." Reading this passage, I can see--really see--what I've been seeing and missing.

You can see images of three pages from Hopkins' journals by clicking here.

Update: I've added the two short paragraphs that complete this GMH journal entry (I didn't know that the anthology I was borrowing from had made cuts). Thanks to Sean Payne, whose blog, Sign Language, you can visit by clicking here.

Learning styles

Here's an interesting link, to a free learning styles inventory (via lifehack.org). The score in each category can run from 0 to 20. My numbers:

Visual 13
Aural 14
Verbal 19
Physical 5
Logical 13
Social 9
Solitary 17

Yes, I'm a solitary (and sometimes logical) reader, or at least that's how I learn best. This inventory might not tell you anything you don't already know. Then again, it might.

*

April 23, 2018: The idea of “learning styles” looks more and more dubious. And this inventory of learning styles now looks to me much more like an inventory of habits of mind and elements of personality. My numbers in 2018:

Visual 8
Aural 15
Verbal 19
Physical 9
Logical 13
Social 10
Solitary 18

Go figure.

[Note: The above site asks for a name and email address and says that providing them is "completely optional." But you don't get to see your result until you've filled in the "optional" blanks. Just giving initials and a throwaway email address (e.g., "junkmail@mailinator.com") is sufficient. Mailinator is a terrific resource when a website asks for an email address.]