Story-Hoard

Reflections: 5 + 9

Reflections on Turning 59:

Sometimes I am arrogant enough to think my death will mean that no one will be reading books the way I do--and the world will suffer--and I mean that far less selfishly and less egotistically than that may sound.  Feel free to laugh.

I mean that I have read and have trained and have practiced to be a Reader, so I should be able to recognize and understand what is true and what is not true--and others will not have trained so long or so hard or so well as I have.

That's been my motivation as a teacher since 1990 (and even before, as a friend): to share, to guide, to model.

Reading well takes practice and guidance and more practice.

I think I have been a true reader since my early teens, and I have worked at it for decades and decades, trying to teach my own students to Read Like Readers, but more importantly to Read Like Writers.

I still need to write the books I want to write.

Not done yet.  That's the battle-cry.

Repose: Lady and Captain

I always feel a little more rested, a bit more at ease, when I watch my cats sleeping.  Or, as I should say, resting.  If you look closely, you can see that Lady's eyes are open and watching me take yet another picture, and Captain is resettling here atop my laptop, which I need to work . . . .

Lumpy II

Catch-and-Release

Odd sensory memories surfacing from 2016
while I was working through a stack or two of paperwork:

a rat so very gingerly swimming past my kayak in the canals of Venice;

a bat so very gently rebounding from my chest in a castle in Scotland.

Pedagogical Clay

For strict pedagogical reasons, I asked my college students to work with clay.
Here are some of the results of the experiment.
Aren't these cool?

Work, Work, Work

English 1A: Non-Fiction Emphasis

Casey's The Devil's Teeth;
Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft;
Ebbesmeyer and Scigliano's Flotsametrics and the Floating World;
Greenberg's Four Fish;
and London's The Sea-Wolf.


English 1B: Intro to Literature

Appelbaum's English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology;
Hegi's Floating in My Mother's Palm;
Nunn's Tapping the Source;
O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night;
Shakespeare's Macbeth;
and Shelley's Frankenstein.

Louise Gluck's "The Mountain"

THE MOUNTAIN

My students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
of endless labor. Their expressions
hardly change; they need to know
a little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist’s life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain. Why do I lie
to these children? They aren’t listening,
they aren’t deceived, their fingers
tapping at the wooden desks—
So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain.

--Louise Gluck


Thank you, AB, for the gift.

Getting to Work

Basic kit: pumpkin; knife; scrapper-spoon; pint.

And, I didn't intend this, but doesn't that pumpkin remind you of the cave-troll in the mines of Moria?

Becoming Poseidon

Embracing process.
Maybe the smile on the mask had something to do with my own appreciation to be playing with clay again after a hiatus.
Or, maybe the Greek god Poseidon has his own matters to be happy about.  I am the channel, only, after all.

Moya Cannon: "Emptinesses Which Hold"

NAUSTS

There are emptinesses which hold

the leveret's form in spring grass;

the tern's hasty nest in the shore pebbles;

nausts in a silvery island inlet.

Boat-shaped absences,

they slope to seaward,

parallel as potato drills,

curved a little for access --

a mooring stone, fore and aft,

and a flat stone high up

to guide the tarred bow

or a hooker, pucan, or punt

when the high tide lifted it

up and in, then ebbed,

leaving it tilted to one side,

in its shingly nest.

--Moya Cannon

'WE ARE WHAT WE EAT'

That's what she said,

'Every seven years

almost every cell in our body is replaced.'

I thought of her own art,

how faithfully rendered

the miraculous lines, the miraculous lives,

of feather and bone --

and I remembered an oak rib,

honeycombed with shipworm,

given as a keepsake to another friend,

who had sailed from Dublin to the Faroes

in a wooden fishing hooker,

which was later rebuilt.

These boats are rebuilt, renamed,

until every plank and rib

has been replaced so often

that nothing remains

except the boat's original lines

and a piece of silver,

hidden under the mast.

--Moya Cannon

Salvage Work (small): sculpture mix; blue slip; clear glazing; copper wire; twig; twine.

Supplementary Reading

A sample from the 2011-2012 school year.

Anticipation

Booklist: English 1A Fall 2011

Susan Casey's The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks;

Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work;

Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why;

Tom Kendrick's Bluewater Gold Rush: The Odyssey of a California Sea Urchin Diver;

William Langewiesche's The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime;

and

Philbrook's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.

Also, a good college-level dictionary.

Plus selected essays and chapters from Ebbesmeyer & Scigliano, Whitty, Wells, Steinbeck, and others as well as selected videos on sharks, marine mammals, abalone and urchin diving, and related local material. (Perhaps Steinbeck and Hemingway on writing too.)

Summer planning will be fun.

P.S. All those subtitles look a bit daunting, don't they? Or, those subtitles combine with the titles to draw you in, draw you closer!

Here's the list again, but just with the basic titles:

The Devil's Teeth

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Deep Survival

Bluewater Gold Rush

The Outlaw Sea

In the Heart of the Sea