joys of recitation

My new choir director, the incomparable Kelly Galbraith, demands that we memorize all the music and text for each concert. The last time I undertook this degree of memory work was probably my third-year Cognitive Psychology exam, and I found myself having to rediscover which methods worked best for me.

As a kid I had weekly Bible memory-verses to learn for Sunday School. Then came the monologue for Talent Week, a category for which I won a ribbon several years running (“Alexander And the Terrible, Horrible, No-good, Very Bad Day” was my pièce de resistance). In highschool I memorized a passage from The Great Gatsby just so I could recite it at the perfect moment. I imagined myself on a date, I think, browsing together in a used bookstore. He’d pick up a worn paperback, and I’d sigh, “Ah yes, Fitzgerald,”and then the mellifluous phrases would roll off my tongue. I never actually got out all that much, in highschool.

Do children still commit anything to memory? Left to their own devices mine stick to stuff like Eminem or literal-video Assassin’s Creed lyrics, the names and attacks of seventeen thousand Pokemon. I want to assign them something decorously classical, get them to stand before their grandparents and offer up a well-prepared and diverting performance. Perhaps “Jabberwocky”?

I mean, whatever happened to minstrelsy? Apparently minstrels would not actually memorize their thousand-verse ballads entirely but would ad-lib stuff around repeating keywords and refrains. But even amateurs were better memorizers than us, back then. No one would ever dream of coming to dinner without a good story or song to share.

Once I knew the choir music, I had to hand-write the words–phonetically if the Latin was too fancy–on cue cards. I drilled myself on the subway and anytime I had to wait for anything. The most productive practice seemed to occur when I was walking outdoors. Something about oxygen flowing to my brain, I guess, or the rhythm of my steps. What I (re)discovered was the joy of mastery: of finally having it, of knowing it cold, of being able to trot it out on command.

Now that I think about it, my 7-yr-old has worked just as hard, and is crowing just as loud, over the blasphemous Christmas carols he’s been learning from friends at school (“Joy to the world, Barney is dead. We shot him in the head…”).

the uncanny is still with us

Well, it’s the twilight of another semester of “Studies in the Gothic” (Twilight. Caught that, didja?). The course ended on a high note with the eerily talented author David Nickle paying a visit to the classroom.

Yesterday the benevolent forces of procrastination led me to this so-called cinemagraph from a Tumblr blog:

I wish I’d found this in time to show my students, because it so perfectly demonstrates the uncanny, a concept we discussed specificially in relation to Kubrick’s 1980 horror film The Shining.

The uncanny produces a special kind of fright. It works through a sudden transformation of something familiar into something radically unfamiliar. The mundane becomes strange, the domestic becomes alien, the warm and cozy becomes cold and threatening. The example I always use in class is catching your reflection in a mirror where you didn’t realize there was a mirror, or when the mirror is turned at an unexpected angle. What could be more familiar to you than your own face? Yet you jump and break out in goosebumps.

Kubrick loves mirrors in The Shining. Every shot is deliberately set up to create an impression of unnameable strangeness (a door standing open in the background, a panel of bright lights, a room with no apparent ceiling), or to defamiliarize banal conversation through repetition (“for ever, and ever, and ever!”). Sometimes Kubrick simply holds the shot a moment too long after a character speaks, just long enough for us to second-guess the meaning of the words.

In the photo above, the uncanny is beautifully straightforward. We’re familiar with photography; it’s mundane to us. We expect a still photo to remain still, is all. When it moves, yet doesn’t become a film clip (with which we’re also familiar), the image remains trapped in that in-between space of uncanniness: familiar yet unfamiliar. Creepy!

When photography was invented people found it scary. Cameras were used to take pictures of ghosts, fairies, dead relatives. We may be media-weary by comparison, but we can still cop a thrill when something new and weird comes along.

what I learned by occupying Wall Street

I am a shy activist. All that hollering and placard-wearing makes me nervous. I mean, what if they tell me I’m not cool enough to march with them, or worse–that I’m “part of the problem”?

This weekend, though, I swallowed my middle-school playground fears and sat down amongst the earnest souls in Liberty Square. I read Naomi Klein’s heartening welcome speech in the Occupied Wall Street Journal. I chatted with the Grannies for Peace and perused the Library nook.

I learned that the best way to overcome activism shyness (or inertia, or general crowd-squeamishness) is to get busy. If drumming’s your thing, by all means bring a drum, and you’ll find plenty of company. But I saw a number of (more) inspiring creative endeavors designed to get people chatting and keep people busy:

-a photo booth set up for We are the 99% portraits sent to the tumblr site along with personal text messages–carnival masks optional

-a silkscreening table with three hip 99% logo options and a bolt of canvas patches: for a donation, passersby could get an item of clothing screened on the spot

-a Learn to Knit clinic with donated wool and needles

-two old ladies unloading trays of home-baked goodies from their car for the camp Kitchen

Protest, civil disobedience, resistance–the camp is those things but something more, too. It’s a lesson in practicing community differently. It’s an experiment in equality, fraternity, public interest and consensus. In the words of the TASK sign in the snapshot below: THINK b4 you act/ACCEPT responsibility for your actions/SPEAK clearly and be understood/KEEP an open mind.

Sounds like democracy in action to me.

Next time I occupy, I will check the supplies wish-list on the website and scrounge together what I can (Markers. Cardboard. Scissors. Tarps. Rubber boots, any size). I’ll think of something I know how to do well, and go do it there, with enough materials for others to join in. Making Gods’-eyes comes to mind…

Gothic getaway

Green Park Cemetery's front gates

In honor of reading Dracula for class, I took a tour today of Brooklyn’s 400+ acre Green-Wood Cemetery. A handful of tombs and catacombs were opened to the public for the first time as part of Open House New York. I napped atop a sunlit hill next to the worn marble marker of someone named Lucy, but I didn’t catch sight of the white-clad girl slipping like smoke through the quarter-inch gap in her tomb’s door…

 

 

SAD LAMB

remember Van Helsing peeling back the lead cover of the coffin (shiver)?

disapproving saint

i heart my treadmill desk!

Lookit me; I’m walking as I type this!

Two years of low-back trouble has convinced me that human beings were never meant to sit at desks, especially not hunched over keyboards. Luckily I attended a reading by YA writer Arthur Slade, and during the Q & A someone asked him about the DIY treadmill desk featured on his blog.

Also luckily, I am married to Neil, who is one of the handiest men on the planet.

I stroll at 1 mph, as Arthur recommends. It took me a couple of days (and a keyboard-shelf height adjustment) to adjust to the choreography. And if I don’t snack, I can get a little carsick from the hip-swaying.

But here are all the things I love about my treadmill desk:

1. It does keep my back more limber than sitting. I still need to stretch, but I stretch more often now that there’s “exercise” happening by default.

2. It tires me out—makes me aware of the amount of time I’m working, and deters me from checking email and/or surfing in the evening if I’ve already spent hours at the screen. And I sleep better!

3. I am warm and thirsty after an hour of typing, which feels better than chilled and sluggish (my default state after deskwork).

4. I switch it up more often: I’ll take some reading over to the armchair or down to the dining table, then return to the treadmill to write.

5. I am hopeful that it’ll improve my writing concentration and stamina, as Arthur has experienced. Time will tell.

the joy of working weekends

My job is the take-anywhere kind. When I’m not teaching I can be home in pajamas and no one will know the difference.

This would be Employment Nirvana except for two things: 1. Running a household means I’m never in pajamas, and schoolwork is in constant competition with housework/kidwork, and 2. “Take-anywhere” means, in practical terms, “take-everywhere.” Evenings, weekends, camping, Christmas–I am never, ever free of the feeling that I should be working.

Sometimes I go to school on Saturday. I leave my family to their bacon ‘n eggs and basketball games and playdates and fixit projects. The Department halls are dark, and I have to notify Security I’m there or they’ll wonder who is tripping the motion-sensor alarms.

I wear slippers. I print stacks of research articles and haul armloads of books from the library. Then I lie on the couch in the student lounge and read until the sun squats atop the skyscrapers and blinds me. I head home, brain-dead and blissed out, just as all the partiers are heading out.

Not everyone’s idea of the perfect weekend, I’m sure. But for me it comes close enough–and it’s why for me, mine is pretty close to the perfect job.

 

all kinds of awesome

Horace Walpole, man. Now there was a gent who knew how to have fun. In 1746 he moved to the village of Twickenham, bought a villa called Strawberry Hill and decided to turn it into a Gothic castle-slash-themepark. Using drawings of medieval cathedrals as his guide, he knocked together turrets and gargoyles out of plaster and papier mache. He filled the mansion with his vast collection of historical curios (including Henry VIII’s jeweled dagger and an Elizabethan necromancy mirror made of black obsidian) and threw open its doors to daytrippers from London.

Then he wrote a little novel called The Castle of Otranto, claiming to have translated it from a crusades-era Italian text. When it sold well and he finally fessed up to the authorship, he told a friend that the story had come to him in a dream.

“I am writing; I am building. . .My buildings are paper, like my writings,” Walpole said in 1761, “and both will be blown away in ten years after I am dead. If they had not the substantial use of amusing me while I live, they would be worth little indeed.”

I love the fact that Walpole’s prediction was 240 years off. The Strawberry Hill Trust has just finished restoring his house, and his book reappears yearly on Gothic course syllabi worldwide.

There’s a lesson here for us dabblers and dilettantes, hoarders and hobbyists. Even if you make stuff purely to amuse yourself, even if your stuff is insubstantial or fake, even if your stuff doesn’t make you rich and famous–your stuff still counts.

Two and a half centuries from now, it might even be revered.