Tomorrow I'm putting on an all-day retreat for the English Department in which we will try to transform the English major and undergraduate experience. That the Facebook gizmo popped this onto the page today seems to forebode something.

I'm not usually one for putting together film reviews, so I'll leave most of the poo-pooing and discussion of camera angles, and lighting to someone else. But I did want to share some thinking about Perfume, which we watched last night. To me the best way to understand the film is to think about it in terms of mixing. The biggest problem, I think, is that it's difficult to get the mix right between magic and realism. For instance, the notion that one could derive a substance based on beauty into a distillation so powerful it would transform the vilest anger into overwhelming love is fantastic. A bit innocent, unrealistic sure, but that's the point.

The problem comes with the realism added to the mix. There is plenty of grit poured into the film--rotting fish, dank alleys, and dirty bodies are everywhere. Still, this is fine and in some ways makes the texture more compelling. But when the process through which the magical elixir is made is revealed, the result is mostly gruesome details of serial killings and processing of bodies . The realism swamps the magic and the resulting mix makes the ending ultimately unsatisfying. The magical mixing needs less presence, more mystery.

This brings me to another kind of mixing that the film also illuminates. The kind of synaesthaesia that comes from trying to represent one mode or sense through another. In this case, the film tries to portray smell through the visual. It's an ambitious goal and it keeps the film engaging. Of course, film has the advantage of also being able to layer sound into the mix. A close up of the nose, a close up of a girl's skin, the sound of inhalation, and voilà, a sense of smell. What really struck me about the film, though, was the way in which the effect can be pulled off with less than the full application of all of these elements. This came home when the scenes switched to Grasse in rural France.

 

Several years ago I checked out a book by Dennis Stock from our art library. The book, Provence Memories, could easily be the inspiration for many of the synaesthaetic rural scenes from Perfume. As I looked over the images then, I experienced the same sense of something beyond the visual. Really the images offered a transformation into the scene. I could almost feel the sunshine and inhale the scent of lavender on the breeze. (The high res images in the book are more powerful than those linked here on the Web.)

So, there's much to be had from synthesizing the senses through media. But in many ways that power comes from a blending that is subtle. The realism of Stock's images translates into visual magic that yields impressions beyond the simple scene captured in the photograph. The trick, then, and the reason to consider the film and keep on working with media, is learning to mix.

Cheryl asked me about a phrase from an e-mail message in which I mentioned thinking about the writing course as shop class. I’ve been considering the writing classroom as a studio for a while, an approach that has great promise if only for the counter-force it applies to the analytical inertia of most language arts pedagogy. It’s hard to fall back on consumption and analysis when making stuff becomes the main activity of the class—a point particularly helpful when working with media. Over time, I’ve modified my thinking about this studio model to put back some analysis, ending up with a core of activity/making (maybe 70 or 75%) woven through with threads of analysis and critique.

So why switch metaphors now? What might be found in the shop class that would make it worth reconceptualizing my teaching? For one, shop classes use a lot of tools. My take on the debates about tool metaphors resonates with what might be found in Stuart Selber or Andrew Feenberg. Tool metaphors and fixation are dangerous—they tend to blind us to the human or ideological motives invested in those tools. And yet, tools can also function to implement human intentions. Not neutral, certainly, but not off limits for use and in fact helpful, even necessary. So, I’m OK with making tools and tool use a key part of teaching.

In fact, I’m more than OK with making tools a key focus of composition classes. I’m a regular subscriber to the belief that the focus of the writing class should be students’ writing. But I’m not sure that the best way to focus on that writing is always to foreground it. Sometimes, I think the writing gets in the way of the thinking and of the connecting that matter as much as the compositional moves. Here’s where a tool comes in handy. Learning to use a digital audio recorder creates a space to push aside for a moment the high pressure concerns of producing and evaluating writing. Through the use of the recorder, composition emerges, but it’s mediated by practical/fixable concerns. Tools. Tools of misdirection.

The tool stands in for so many other things. I’m thinking of the first stanza of Ron Wallace’s “Hardware”

My father always knew the secret
name of everything--
stove bolt and wing nut,
set screw and rasp, ratchet
wrench, band saw, and ball
peen hammer. He was my
tour guide and translator
through that foreign country
with its short-tempered natives
in their crew cuts and tattoos,
who suffered my incompetence
with gruffness and disgust.
Pay attention, he would say,
and you'll learn a thing or two.

I won’t reproduce it, but the second stanza is the kicker where, after the death of the father, the speaker of the poem is left holding “watchamacallits” and “thingamabobs.” Knowing about the “set screw and rasp” opens up a secret language that binds the users of these tools. These bonds eventually become the focus of the poem. So it is with technologies in the writing classroom. The tours and translations go better with tools.

There’s a lot more I need to think about regarding the shop space, but I guess I’ll wrap up with one more rumination on the use of tools. It could be argued that working with words on a page is little different than plugging in input jacks and setting the gain on a mixing board. Both are technologies, variations of tools created to make sounds or words. True. So what gives the mixing board more promise in my mind as a helpful thing to monkey with in the writing classroom? It’s got to be the mediation. Text on the page is so naturalized that it no longer mediates in the way that a microphone might—the microphone (at least for those sopped with the prosaic twelve or thirteen years of public education) has more potential to act as a translator—channeling some Latour [track 2] to mix with the Wallace [track 1] here.

I don’t doubt there’s a bit of a tangle developing in my thoughts between the tool and the medium. But still, I’m going to say that working with the less familiar tool is more powerful not just because it leads to new media—in this corner, representing printed text we have the word processor; in the other corner representing sounds we have the mixing board. Which is more likely to serve as a mediator, linking teachers, learners, ideas? To be intellectually honest, I suppose I’m not sure. Which one am I going to grab as I enter the classroom tomorrow? No contest.

Not much going up here lateley, so how about a poster posting to represent the current state of things. [via David's playlist]

3:20 minutes (2.3 MB)

I think I prefer to read this one silently, though I believe in poetry being performed aloud.

Faculty life seems to bounce between creating and grading assignments one moment and reading and writing professional texts the next. Activities move back and forth from teaching to research with the frantic energy of a flickering flame. When the movement is broken, it’s usually some administrative logjam (or, worse, bit of minutiae) to be gotten unstuck. So, what a joy it’s been to be working lately on a new school project, advising the English majors and their student organization.

Most departments have a club or association for their undergraduate majors. Ours has languished for several years, and I’ve been given the reigns. I quickly decided that we could use some social networking software to facilitate the group interactions. I’ve learned a couple of things.

First, there is no substitute for behind the scenes organization on the part of the members of a group. This is not new information, but it’s always helpful to have the knowledge reinforced. Setting up meetings, tracking down keys, sending e-mails, taking notes, following up—all the usual managing must be in place before anything happens. Fortunately, there is an untapped reservoir of interest among our majors; (many) students want more than just to take courses; they want to make connections, share their love of literature, learn outside of the classroom. So, we’ve got the baseline organizational structure and personal investments in place.

That means that building the social networking site has been more fun than I could have imagined. I’m always glad to tinker with technology, but it’s much more rewarding if a group of people use what you make. I’ve spent the last few weeks taking my relationship with Drupal to the next level; we’ve moved past that glowing-get-to-know-each-other stage, spent some time in the I-just-don’t-think-this-is-going-to-work-out stage, and seem to have settled into the boy-I-wish-I’d-known-about-some-of-these-quirks-but-I-guess-I-can-live-with-them-and-I-sure-feel-comfortable-together stage.

The main focus has been adding community-building modules to create the social structures. At first I focused on things like the birthday module or the avatar module, little touches that add a community feel to the site. I put up an events module/calendar to share information about readings and such. I then set up the organic groups module—a set of tools that allows the creation of sub-groups on the site—you can limit access to blog postings to members of a group, post group-limited announcements, and send messages to group members. My thinking was that the practical groups and events modules would be the most useful.

But then, earlier this week, students in my first year seminar complained that it’s difficult to read all of the postings and comments on the class blog without being able to attach a face to a name. Enter the avatar module. Why I didn’t think of this earlier, I can only attribute to thinking that the face-to-face time we had in class each week obviated the need to add the community-building measures to the class site. My bad. The avatars on the class Web site have gone up more quickly than those on the SOUL site. The students then asked to have their pictures appended to their postings and comments, which I set up.

I’m glad they set me straight, because I’ve been trying to study ways that the studio teaching model that I favor might translate into online spaces. I guess, though, this pokes a hole in my theory that working with the English majors organization was a break from the usual routine; my dabbling with the majors site quickly bounced into the classroom; and now it seems to be moving back toward scholarship. Fickle flame.

Tucked next to the long rows of book after book sits the empty shelf for my recently added literature class, Major American Authors. Strolling through the rows and rows of books selected by colleagues for every class imaginable in the English Department, I’m overwhelmed by all the good stuff. I’d love to work through all these stories and flashes in the cultural frying pan, but I just don’t see how to fit it in with my teaching style. We need to make things in class. We need to learn tech. We need time to think for ourselves instead of soaking up all these pre-packaged words and ideas. Don’t get me wrong, I need content. I love to read and to teach texts, and my book is on the way, arriving two weeks late. Still, hard pressed by the long rows and stacks, my empty shelf calls out the question, What is literature? In class we’ll follow this up with What is American? What is major? What are authors? And now as I type this, the earbuds just pushed Bob Marley into the equation. Book envy gone now. “The waiting feel is fine.”

I've been thinking about the "ragpicker" approach to creating media--the term I've culled from reading Geoff Sirc. I've been using this approach to teaching video creation for the last several years, but I've noticed that the model has shifted a good dea to enable the collecting of not only still images, but also videos. The projects are shifting from slide shows to found video compilations. I'll link this approach to a conversation Alex initiated about access and the WPA outcomes statement. I'd like to reiterate that the access concerns are really a cop-out when you think about what can be done with even basic levels of technology. To make the point I'll share this video from summer school. The video was created with nothing but found materials from the Web, snippets from a music collection, and the ubiquitous consumer video editor. Anyone who has a computer with a net connection can compose a video like Derek Sanders's Lost at Sea

John tagged me for this many moons ago. I won't prolong the agony by passing it along, but will share what I've got. The randomness turned into a nice memory exercise, which I probably needed.

I went to free school for first and parts of second grade. Twelve Gates Free School started out on a farm in Corrales New Mexico, where the main memory I have is an incredible school-wide mudclod fight that took up an entire day. If you’ve never had a mudclod fight, then know that mudclods are about the size of snowball, except fashioned from wet mud and then dried, sometimes with a small rock inside for good measure.

In high school my best class was auto shop, taught by Erwin Schlaack, who brought his German background and Porsche sensibilities down hard. Re-roll that air hose; it has a loop out of place; rotate it one turn for every loop. Back to the solvent tank; the hidden parts of that cowling need to be cleaned as well. I loved it. Tore down and rebuilt the motors on a 1974 Porsche 911T and a really nice 1969 911S with racing cams. I can still hear the timing chains sometimes sing. Whreeem whreeem.

I’ve lived in a tree house. Before that I lived with my Mom and my three brothers crammed into our bungalow house. One day I had had enough. Strung an extension cord out to the tree house in the backyard and spent my last year and a half of high school there. After some bouncing around, moved back to the tree house for another year and a half. Temperature in Laguna 65-75 degrees pretty much all the time,

I won the Turkey at the Boys Club Thanksgiving gaming tournament when I was 12. The tournament combined scores for pool, ping pong, foosball, air hockey, and archery. I was a foosball wizard and still like to try out the bow and arrow to center the mind at times.

I own eleven antique bicycles. Six of them are in a shed at my Dad’s house in New Mexico. Four are in my attic. They are all in various states of refurbishment. Some day I will rebuild most of them. Right now I have one rider, a 1948 Rocket girl's frame with gas tank that sits in the garage—I need to put on a new pedal.

I sang lead for a couple of bands in college. What a wonderful time of life that inspires someone with no experience to put themselves on exhibit with little thought to the embarrassing consequences. At Irvine when I went to college to play disc golf, I played in a band called Tribal Europa—Talking Heads inspired new wave music with some skanky influences rolled in. At UNM I was in Johnny B—always disliked that name. Not sure what that music was. Told you it was embarrassing.

I just killed a copperhead—IN THE GARAGE! Jeesh. Living in the country has its benefits, but I’ve about had it with nature. We’ve been cleaning up the yard lately and must have stirred up a nest. This is the third one in a week.

I have four cats: Hero and Danger, brothers and middle-aged statesmen of the home, Copper, who just got in a fight and has a torn up ear, and Blue, found at the beach last year.

There has been a good bit of discussion lately about the recent piece in CCC about revamping first year composition as an introduction to writing studies, but I’ve actually been thinking about another piece in the same issue takes up the question, What are English majors for? The question comes at a good time for me, as we’ve been working on the revision our undergraduate curriculum for the last year or so, and it’s time to concretize the plans.

Much of our curriuclum revision stems from the experience of asking graduating English majors what they thought of the program and having them list a number of disconnected classes—“I took Shakespeare, Af-Am literature, a poetry class, etc.” There is little coherency and no sense of a trajectory that one takes through the program. To give the program more of a narrative arc we want to implement two seminar courses, one at the sophomore level and the second at the senior level—the idea is to create on- and off-ramps to the curriculum, an introduction to the major and a capstone experience.

Clearly, though, revising a curriculum in any significant way requires more than adding a couple of courses. In “What are English Majors For?” Thomas P. Miller and Brenda Jackson ask departments to transition from literary studies to literacy studies, opening paths for departments to focus on education, creative non fiction, media and other areas more relevant to students’ lives and the contemporary communications landscape. This makes good sense, and I hope that some of the changes we implement can move in these directions. Of course, local context is everything and the “let’s turn English into Communication Studies” approach is likely surely to be a non-starter here. In fact, one of my biggest concerns is that we will rearrange deck chairs and not do much to transform what it means to be an English major.

You can see some of the reshuffling in the goals behind the new curriculum. Roughly, we’re thinking students should

• develop a sense of the historicity of literary studies (old school),
  
• practice writing and revision of print essays and other forms of expression (new school),
  
• have in-depth exposure to several exemplary authors (old school),
  
• have a sense of major literary genres (with some emphasis on narrative and poetry) and a strong grasp of one or more specific genres (old school),
  
• understand a number of approaches to literary texts and representation (old and new school),
  
• understand the relationships between texts and historical and cultural situations (old and new school), and
  
• recognize aesthetic dimensions of works under study and identify connections between literature and their personal lives (old and new school).

Ideally, the on- and off-ramp courses would be developed around these goals. The tricky part in thinking through a revision, though, is figuring out what to do with the courses one takes in the middle of the English major. Right now, requirements essentially spread courses out chronologically and geographically, so students must take at least one pre sixteenth-century British literature course, one twentieth-century course, and so on. It looks like we will loosen some of these requirements but keep the general focus on time and place as an organizing principle. The challenge, then, is to layer over these requirements some additional criteria that can create a sense of narrative and coherency while opening avenues for pursuing the larger curricular goals and arriving at more significant transformations.

My response is to think about ways that tagging might possibly be used to reshape some of the offerings and the help students create connections within the array of courses that meet their needs. So, a course might be tagged British, Poetry, Theory, and Gender, to name some possibilities. The hope is that this might add more flexibility to the traditional ways of organizing the middle areas of the curriculum—not just time and place. Ultimately, though, I’d like the tags to do more in terms of transforming the curriculum. Faculty could extend their course designs by layering new categories over the existing, and admittedly constraining, containers. I’m imagining tags like Composition, Media, Education, Studio, and so on that would indicate different learning emphases and teaching models.

The challenge would be to limit the number of tags/categories so that a coherency can derive among related courses. What number of tags would allow connections to form among six or eight courses taken during a career? How many tags would be too many? What tags are essential for conserving the traditional values of an English major? What tags are likely to open avenues for transformation of the curriculum?