Between the By-Road and the Main Road

Friday, December 27, 2013

What I'm Reading in 2014: Not The Usual Fare

Image by Robert Adams.

A few books I have either started to read or will be reading soon. An eclectic set of books about art, photography, poetry, genocide, education, and anthropology.

Adams, Robert. (2012). Skogen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery.

Brown, Lee Ann. (2013). In the Laurels, Caught. (Fence Modern Poets Series). Pittsburgh, PA: Fence Modern Poets Series.

Image by Doug Rickard. from Doug Rickard: A New American Picture.

Campany, David. (2012). Doug Rickard: A New American Picture. New York: Aperture.

Elkins, James. (2000). How To Use Your Eyes. New York: Routledge Press.

Image by Mary Ann Reilly from Jane Gangi's Genocide in Contemporary Children's and Young Adult Literature: Cambodia to Darfur.

Gangi, Jane. (2014). Genocide in Contemporary Children's and Young Adult Literature: Cambodia to Darfur. New York: Routledge Press.

Poem by Noelle Kocot from Soul in Space.

Kocot, Noelle. (2013). Soul in Space. Seattle, WA: Wave Books.

Cover to Saul Leiter: Early Color.

Leiter, Saul. (2008). Saul Leiter: Early Color. Steidel.

Morris, Errol. (2011). Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. New York: Penguin Press.

Mullen, Harryette. (2013). Urban Tumbleweeds: Notes from a Tanka Diary. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.

Image by Jimmy Nelson. From Before They Pass Away.

Nelson, Jimmy. (2013). Before They Pass Away. New York: teNeues.
Ruefle, Mary. (2013). Trances of the Blast. Seattle, WA: Wave Books.
Ruefle, Mary. (2012). Madness, Rack and Honey: Collected Lectures. Seattle, WA: Wave Books.

Image by Sebastiao Salgado from Sebastiao Salgado: Genesis.

Salgado, Lelia Wanick & Sebastiao Salgado. (2013). Sebastiao Salgado: Genesis. New York: Taschen.

Image by Klett and Wolfe from Reconstructing the View - The Grand Canyon: Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe.

Senf, Rebecca A. (2012). Reconstructing the View - The Grand Canyon: Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe. University of California Press.
Trethewey Natasha. (2003). Bellocq's Ophelia: Poems. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.
Vasudevan, Lalitha & Tiffany DeJaynes (Eds.). (2013). Arts, Media, and Justice: Multimodal Exploration with Youth (New Literacies and Digital Epistemology's).
Wells, Liz. (2002). The Photography Reader. New York: Routledge.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

End of the Year Images

A few images made during the last week.
Happy holidays.

Bower (Ringwood, NJ 2013)

Last Day of Autumn (Oakland, NJ 2013)

A Walk in the Woods (Oakland NJ 2013)

End of Autumn (Oakland, NJ 2013)

Study in Black and White (Ringwood, NJ 2013)

Fir Tree in Field (Ringwood, NJ 2013)

Ice Melting, Fog Rising (Ringwood, NJ 2013)

Fog Rising at Water's Edge (Ringwood, NJ 2013)

Monday, December 16, 2013

Unscripted Moments in A Writing Class: Learning from Papi's Cologne

I.

This morning in a fifth grade class, I read aloud a writing piece I had begun about the death of my father a decade ago and his penchant for wearing black socks with sandals. It was a difficult piece to read out loud, unfinished and raw, and I told the children this as I struggled to read.

A bit later in the class, a child told me that her writing piece, like mine, was a difficult one.
"How so?" I asked.
She motioned to her notebook where I could see pencil and blue pen markings all over a page, including lines of print crunched into the margins. We had talked about rereading with a pen in hand and I could see that she had done so. She said that it was a struggle to get on paper what she wasn't sure about. I might have sighed at that moment. I listened as she read aloud a narrative about memory and how at night when she is alone in her bed, when her home is quiet, she recalls the smell of her Papi's cologne and this triggers her to think about the man who no longer lives with her.

She's struggling to get the words just right and this I think is the more important lesson to learn than the actual writing. We have been exploring narrative techniques and no technique prepares the writer for the struggle to say what must get said.

I listen as she rereads again, noticing this time she has also drawn her bedroom with herself in bed and a thought cloud above her that contains a man.

"It's a difficult story to tell and it is brave one for you to try." I say this to her, feeling the inadequacy of my words while knowing such words from me are most likely unnecessary. She's flirting with the power that comes from telling something true. She is an agent acting.

II.

I am learning as I work each day with the children and their teachers that in writing workshop where there are no units of study to be employed or scripts to be memorized, or prescribed evidence to be mined--that the present is mostly all we have. And, there is no grander thing than the present unfolding before us as we make it.

It is in the making that deep learning takes hold.

III.

Later in the day, well into the evening, my husband finds me and tells me about a protracted lesson for seventh graders he has read in preparation for some work with a teacher. The teacher is working from a script and the kids need to debate (using sentence starters) an action the speaker in a poem took. The students' task is to "find evidence to support or refute the narrator's (not speaker) decision to take a specific road" in Frost's "The Road Not Taken." They need to ponder (and of course find obligatory evidence) about whether the speaker's turn up the untrodden road was a good or bad decision (I kid you not).

I cringe, thinking about Billy Collins's poem, "Introduction to Poetry," where readers want to tie a poem to a chair "and torture a confession out of it."

Best get out the rope, I tell my husband.

IV.

Scripted lessons, especially jam-packed ones, leave little room for the unexpected, the unplanned, the unimagined, or the turn down an untrodden road. There simply is no room left for anything novel to arise--such as your Papi's cologne--as time ceases to be about what is emerging and instead presupposes an epic construct. Scripted classrooms are worlds where the action has already been performed. The task in such narrow, poorly lit places is to mime.

I think of these scenarios as ones that lead to entropy--where the available energy in a room is sucked out quicker then it can be replaced as students dutifully (or not) complete the assignments. I mean, really, how can new breath even happen in an epic world? I think of Maxine Greene who wisely told us:

"We need to recognize that the events that make up aesthetic experiences are events that occur within and by means of the transactions with our environment that situate us in time and space” (p. 130).

Us situated in time and space by means of the transactions we have with our environment? Not in a scripted classroom. Already made stuff being enacted over and over in thousands of classrooms defy the physics.

Surely, we might want more for our learners and for ourselves. Surely we might want the satisfaction that comes when the child holds his or her power and pen in hand.

Something True: Advice #1

Happiness is the Longing for Repetition (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

1. Leave Enough Big Holes

Think about the predictability of lives that shoot like arrows, unfolding linearly, neatly. I think of Milan Kundera who at the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being comments:

"And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."

I like narratives you can drive through; ones with the potential to circle back in unexpected and difficult to chart ways. Perhaps like me, you too appreciate lives that are composed largely with holes so big that the urge to wander is most often present, flirting with the want to get on.

It's that tension between uncertainty and certain destination that most opens me (and perhaps you?) to possibility.

John Keats, Neil Young, and Me

Things I wonder about….

And Full of Sleep (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

What are the types of things that can’t get lost… Tonight I am thinking about that line from Neil Young's "Old Man." “Love lost, such a cost/Give me things/that don’t get lost…”

What are the things that do not have the potential for getting lost? Perhaps those people in your life who are your true North, if such people exist--if true North is really a constant.

II.

What does it suggest to want things with no potential to get lost? I wonder here about Neil Young and what was on his mind so many years ago, about the finality of those we have loved deeply who die and the deep desire for them to remain.

Tonight I am thinking about John Keats’s letter to George and Tom Keats. In that letter, Keats writes about the qualities that form “a Man of Achievement.” He notes:

“what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (from here)

Is it a matter of achievement to be easy with not knowing? Is that somehow related to the idea of things being lost, perhaps even selves.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Fixed Lens Camera and Seeing in Alaska

The Range (Reilly, 2007)

I was reminded recently of a trip I made to Alaska, more than 6 years ago. At the time, I did not have the means to purchase a good camera with removable lenses. Instead, I had an old Olympus Camera with one fixed lens and used that to make a handful of images. Seeing such immense beauty was the catalyst for investing in a better camera.

Here are a few images I made on that trip.