"Everybody Who is Dead," Frank Stanford

"Everybody Who is Dead," Frank Stanford

Today's poem: "Everybody Who is Dead," by Frank Stanford

Short List Tuesday: Today, browse the short lists of our classmates, both in this and other classes, if you like.  (1) Comment on anywhere from 3-5 and (2) make a post titled "Week 5: Top Links" in which you simply link to (commenting on them is optional) the 3-5 most interesting links you came across in your browsing. 

Hill Short List 1.31.12

1.  The Sartorialist: Lunch for 25
   
     The Sartorialist is a great example of how one blog and an internet can make your career.  Scott Schuman went from being a Hoosier like the rest of us, a Hoosier who developed a taste for clothes and started taking street photographs of people whose style he liked.  He posted them to his blog.  And now it's his job.  He travels the world, hitting Milan Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, or just rambling through cities he's never been to, photographing all the while.
     This post contains a short film of a dinner he pulled together somehow with some of the most popular, most stylish men he'd met in the street.  They're strangers for the most part, but they have high taste in clothes and they just look good sitting down to schmooze for awhile.  I sometimes think about who I would invite if I had that hypothetical dinner party of famous folks, but here's a video of someone who actually made theirs happen, and it's fun to watch.

2. From The ByGone Bureau: "Fear and Gaming: Being and Nothingness in Minecraft."

   I haven't finished this article yet, but it's about a game that is fascinating me right now even though I have never actually played it.  I'm kind of afraid to, actually, knowing how one game can eat up your waking hours, or at least mine, if I'm not careful.  Minecraft is a game that my nephew wasted most of time I saw him during this past winter vacation, and it's back story is kind of like Scott Schuman's, if I understand it right: obscure software coder makes a game for the heck of it, it catches on, he's rich.  And from what I can tell, there is little purpose to the game either other than making buildings and showing it to your friends.  So I'm curious about what makes it so special.  I'll either probably respond to the article or to the game itself.  Not sure yet.

3. From the Times, "Lone Wolf Commands a Following."

    For the first time in 90 years, a wild wolf is living in California.  Depending on how you feel about wildlife, or things that happen in far-off states like California, this may or may not be interesting to you.  It is to me, and it's made a little more interesting because this wolf is wearing a gps collar that lets you track him online. People have started twitter accounts in his name even; he's quite a sensation over there.  I think this one grabs me because it parallels a little of what we're seeing happening around here, too, with coyotes in the country and even wolf sightings up in northern Michigan. 

4. Also from the Times: "Harnessing Gaming for the Classroom."

    One of those articles you come across when you are on the Times site and see the list of "most read" articles on the right side. The title of this is what interested me--I could see someone using it as a source for a research project that is probably going on right here at Homestead, right now.  Seems like something of interest, but I haven't read it yet.  I'm just putting it here so I remember to get back to it.

"Wild Geese," Mary Oliver

"Wild Geese," Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

"Death Gets into the Suburbs," Michelle Boisseau

The Genome for Lucky

Sidewalk ice so thin frost ferns its surface,

cat-ice. February sheathes claws to let us think

we might escape. It's toying with us. Wind

that bitchslapped me last week today plays with my hair.

On bare twigs house finches are improvising riffs

no female finch with any sense will heed.

The bird that breeds now will hatch blizzard babies

which would die and take those fool genes with them.

Still, the angle of the sunlight prods,

the air is soft and what if they were right,

what if this is anomaly, an odd

but permanent early spring? Maybe those fledglings

would survive, mate and spread recessives for luck,

just the way others in my family tree

took the right boat, chose to leave Oklahoma,

went rollerskating a certain afternoon

in Detroit in nineteen forty two

so that when I looked up, there you'd be.

Susan Blackwell Ramsey

from The Marlboro Review, Issue 21

Hill Short List: 1.25.12

1.  Images from the doomed expedition to Antarctica by Robert Falcon Scott (1910-1913).  There is something chilling and noble about this collection of photographs.  For one thing, I just love the clothes they're wearing and wish I could find a store around here that outfit me like they are.  There is a rugged stoicism in their eyes, very British of them, naturally.  The fine specimen bottles and their tiny octopi and the stiff penguin would make great knick-knacks, for that matter.  Funny how my impulse is to somehow connect to these tragic figures by buying their look. 

2.  This American Life: Middle School.  This is my favorite TAL episode from the past few months.  Kind of terrifying, really.  The kids interviewed make it sound like the most brutal period of social terrorism a person could ever experience, and suggest that it's impossible to change.  I guess I had forgotten that, but I do remember a fair bit of drama. 

3. Convoy, a tumblr I follow.  Convoy is not updated frequently; the "author" seems to save up images in large batches, almost like a magazine with no text, and post them every month or so.  But they always hold together so well--tumblr can be a wild, erratic place, but this has one of the most consistent looks of the ones I follow.  It's a very sleek, uncluttered, natural lifestyle presented here.  It's funny how you assume that the person who puts this tumblr together is choosing images that reflect his own, actual lifestyle, but it's probably more likely that he's just a guy in an apartment dreaming of a better life.  But he dreams in style.

"Unmediated Experience," Bob Hicok

Unmediated Experience 

She does this thing. Our seventeen-

year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog.

Our mostly dead dog, statistically

speaking. When I crouch.

When I put my mouth to her ear

and shout her name. She walks away.

Walks toward the nothing of speech.

She even trots down the drive, ears up,

as if my voice is coming home.

It’s like watching a child

believe in Christmas, right

before you burn the tree down.

Every time I do it, I think, this time

she’ll turn to me. This time

she’ll put voice to face. This time,

I’ll be absolved of decay.

Which is like being a child

who believes in Christmas

as the tree burns, as the drapes catch,

as Santa lights a smoke

with his blowtorch and asks, want one?

Bob Hicok

Today's work: Your Spartan Reader "Short List"

 We are just figuring out this class magazine project.  Whatever it ends up looking like, it will be something you made, and that alone makes it worth trying.  

For the next two days, we are going to spend our time exploring options for our first article, which will be due not this Friday, but next.  For this Friday, your job is to create a single post, a "short list" of three possible articles you are considering for your first submission.  

Simply provide a list that identifies, for each possible article, the subject/title of the piece, a link, if it is available online, and a 25-50 word description of the subject and why it intrigues you.  Pictures would be nice, but aren't necessary.  

To help you with this process, I have put together a list of links to online destinations that provide an internet's worth of possibilities.  It is saved on class web page as "Spartan Reader Links," and it is a list that we will update as new sites are pointed out to us.  

You may want headphones to listen to some of the audio and video possibilities.  Your job these next two days is to engage yourself in the process of reading deeply.  Let me know what cool stuff you find.

"To You," Kennth Koch.

"To You," Kennth Koch.

Today's poem can be found at the Poetry Foundation.

Jim Harrison and Friday Blog assignment

"I Believe"
I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across
the lake in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools,
the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic,
used tires, taverns saloons, bars, gallons of red wine,
abandoned farmhouses, stunted lilac groves,
gravel roads that end, brush piles, thickets, girls
who haven’t quite gone totally wild, river eddies,
leaky wooden boats, the smell of used engine oil,
turbulent rivers, lakes without cottages in the woods,
the primrose growing out of a cow skull, the thousands
of birds I’ve talked to all of my life, the dogs
that talked back, the Chihuahuan ravens that follow
me on long walks. The rattler escaping the cold hose,
the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see
from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling
to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.
--Jim Harrison


Your Friday Post: Our blogs should be established by now, so let's spend a day having a look around to see what people have done with theirs. Do more than skim and click through these pages--read them deeply, looking at their literacy narratives, their reading responses, their overall look, and do the following:

(1) leave comments for at least three different posts, reacting briefly but sincerely to something the author said in it.

(2) Compose a new post on your own blog that does two things: First, name 1 or 2 blogs that you think are the most interestingly made so far. Link to them, quote them, and discuss briefly what you think makes these blogs above average.

(3) Second, in your post you should name the blog that you think has the most impressively written Dead Poets Society response and discuss what is good about it: its opening claim, the way it describes its observations, or its discussion of the tone. Quote it, too, if you like.

Let me know if you have any questions.

"Things," by Liesl Mueller.

Pulphead, Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

For months, Amazon.com has not shut up to me about John Jeremiah Sullivan's book of essays, Pulphead. Every visit to that site has shoved it in my face: the casual script of its cover page, the washed-out, gritty sentimentality of the photograph. Somehow, Amazon’s algorithms, or whatever you call them, had determined that it was the perfect book for me, the one I was destined to meet and fall in love with, the book that would make me happy.

To honor the fates, then, I took a day off from reading George Eliot and started into the first essay, “Upon the Rock," a pretty hysterical account of driving a 29’ RV to a Christian-rock festival in remote Pennsylvania.

Read more . . .

Tony Hoagland, "History of Desire"

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

Richard Siken, "Scheherezade"

Blog assignments: Week 2.

Just so that we are all on the same page, be sure you know that by Friday, January 13, you should have the following up and online:

1. Your blog.
2. A literacy narrative.
3. At least one reading log, or reading logs that total 300 words.
4. Elements, observations, and a claim for your duo exercise.

If you haven't, please email me your blog url, title, and your username.

Thanks!

John Ashbery, "At North Farm"

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

found on Kottke.org: an answer to the question "what is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?"

You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

Duo close readings: Interior Design Options

Dan Martensen and Shannan Click at home with their dog.

If your group has decided to do a close reading of a home, choose from one of the following. This subject matter may feel like an odd choice, but it is just another application of the close reading process we began using with the Gene Kelly's scene from Singin' in the Rain.

Pick one of the following homes photographed by up-and-coming photographer Todd Selby:

Alternatively, you could observe and analyze Homestead H.S. itself and come up with a claim about it.

Here are the possible homes shot by Todd Selby:

Pharrell Williams Modern Miami home of the well-known rapper known as Pharrell.

Dan Martensen and Shannan Click Upstate New York farmhouse of a photographer and his artist wife.

Jamie Isaia and Anthony Malat Interesting Brooklyn apartment of another couple.

Duo close readings: Painting options

Walton Ford's "Fallen Bough"

For large images, click on the titles:

Edward Hopper, "Nighthawks" (1942)

Walton Ford, "Fallen Bough" (2002)

Jackson Pollock, "#1" (1950)

Roberty Bly, "Surprised by Evening"

There is unknown dust that is near us
Waves breaking on shores just over the hill
Trees full of birds that we have never seen
Nets drawn with dark fish.

The evening arrives; we look up and it is there
It has come through the nets of the stars
Through the tissues of the grass
Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.

The day shall never end we think:
We have hair that seemed born for the daylight;
But at last the quiet waters of the night will rise
And our skin shall see far off as it does under water.

Poem #1

Richard Brautigan, "Gee, You’re So Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain"
at Poetry 180.