Monthly Archives: December 2006

Speaking Truth to Dylan

Posted on by

With the caveat that he “is not a music blogger,” AKMA, in an end of year post on pop music, writes:

I was not as impressed with this year’s Bob Dylan album, Modern Times, as I was with Love and Theft. When I heard Love and Theft, I heard a new chapter in Dylan’s work, and I delighted what I took to be his perfect accomplishment. He laid claim to the folk tradition’s continual re-employment of its own history toward new performances that still bespeak the old; on Modern Times, I hear him say, “Oh, yeah, and another thing. . . .” I’ll keep it around and I’m prepared for it to surprise me (what would be more typical of Dylan?) on relistening, but it doesn’t make a “top” anything list for me.

Which is exactly how I felt about it. I still listen to Love & Theft; Modern Times . . . Hmm, I’ll have to remember to give it another listen one of these days. AKMA also notes that he “fail[s] the Joanna Newsom test” for coolness. He’s obviously cooler than I am, since I don’t know Ms. Newsom from Adam. Furthermore, I haven’t listened to enough new music this year to have a top ten list, or even a top five. I’ve been listening to a lot of Louis Armstrong & other early blues. And the other night I downloaded fifteen versions of the traditional ballad “John Henry” because I’ve been reading Scott Reynolds Nelson’s historical study, Steel Drivin’ Man. (I’m so hip.) I can strongly recommend versions by Big Bill Broonzy, Bill Monroe, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, as well as the Bruce Springsteen version from the Seeger Sessions CD, though I generally find Pete Seeger to be a pretentious prig. True to form, the Seeger version from the 60s folk revival days exhibits all the worst traits of that era, especially the very careful e-nunc-i-a-tion. You can see why Dylan wanted nothing to do with Seeger & the Sing Out! crowd when he was figuring out how to move beyond Woody Guthrie. You can also skip Van Morrison’s version from The Philosopher’s Stone CD. Starts out all right, but ends in a complete train wreck. The piano is particularly awful. I’m usually a huge Van Morrison fan — & have been since I was fifteen & listening to “Gloria” & “Here Comes the Night” on AM radio — but this track & most of the album are just a mess.

There were a couple of records I really liked this year, though. Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris produced a masterpiece in All the Roadrunning. I wrote about the record previously & would only add that Knopfler & Harris remind me, not only of Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash, but also of Richard & Linda Thompson. Knopfler & Harris are clearly aware of the Thompsons’ influence & acknowledge it explicitly with references to “Wall of Death” in the album’s title track. There is not a bad track on this CD & it contains the year’s absolute best up-tempo country love songs (that should be a Grammy category) in “Red Staggerwing” & “Belle Starr.” Both songs are funny, loving & really, really hot. I also liked Leonard Cohen’s new record. Cohen didn’t release a new album this year, you say? Oh, yes he did — it’s just disguised as a record by the pop / jazz singer Anjani. All the songs on Blue Alert are written by Cohen, though he doesn’t sing on any of the tracks. Cohen has always used female backup singers to fill in his one-dimensional voice & this is the logical extension of that device.

Getting back to Dylan. Just as the best new Leonard Cohen album this year was not by Leonard Cohen, the best new Dylan album was not by Dylan. And it’s actually from 2005. Dave’s True Story released a collection of Dylan covers called Simple Twist of Fate that pays respectful homage to the master without giving up their deft touch with music & lyrics. Kelly Flint’s voice has just the ironic inflection required to carry Dylan’s lyrics & David Cantor’s arrangements & guitar playing are attractive & unpretentious.

So that’s my top three list. Now I’m going back to Louis Armstrong playing “St. Louis Blues.” Here’s what the poet Hayden Carruth had to say about Armstrong’s recording of W.C. Handy’s blues, from his short essay, “Anthems,” from Suicides and Jazzers:

What a record it is. It should be required listening in every freshman course in the country. These numbers are the heart of the American tradition, in both substance and manner of performance. Granted, already when I was a boy W.C. Handy was referred to snootily as a poor musician and was accused of “stealing” his compositions from black folk sources and getting rich on them. Well, at least he was black himself, which ought to make it better than what Stephen Foster or Louis Gottschalk did, to say nothing of outright thieves like Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson. As to the former charge, I remember once hearing some very old dim recordings of the Handy Band from the late teens or early twenties, and they were awful. Truly. Quite as awful as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which was white, from the same period. What difference does it make?

Carruth goes on to rehearse the perennial charge that Armstrong sold out his early talent by becoming an “entertainer” at the expense of his early jazz genius before rightly dismissing the charge. We have the music. I’d go so fare as to suggest that Dylan has been subjected over & over again to the same sort of phony test of supposed authenticity. If there is a heaven, Dylan & Satchmo will be playing the blues together in some corner bar. That would be heaven for me, for sure. Entertainers.

Thoughts on The New Blog

Posted on by

I’ve got the new weblog set up with the help of my online friend Andru Matthews, though I haven’t had a chance to begin taking advantage of my new digs yet. Once the last details of my semester (read: grading) are over, I hope to have a more leisurely look around my own site & begin to think about what else I might do here. Other than keep an intellectual & poetic journal. Which will be the main focus of this space. (Is it actually a space? The metaphor is ubiquitous. I remember AKMA talking about this years ago.) So far, I like WordPress — it lets me do more things more easily than Textpattern despite being somewhat less elegant. I also like having a hosting company (BlueHost) that doesn’t have the structure of a fan club (TextDrive). Hint: If you are personally offended when customers raise problems about service, you are a club, not a business, no matter how big your data center, or how hip your technology.

Well then, I’m sitting out here at the very tip of the long tail, wondering exactly what it is I’m doing & I’ve decided that, basically, I’m making a record, keeping track of at least one aspect of my life. But, doing that, I have to assume that a few readers will want to look over my shoulder. Otherwise, no point. So it’s a record, but not a private record & that implies at least a modest responsibility to a potential reader. But which “aspects” of my life? For the most part, the public aspects — what I would say or publish in any case, online or off. (I’ve never been a particularly confessional blogger & I’m not about to begin now.) That leaves as subjects: writing poetry, reading poetry & other things, listening to popular music(s), teaching, cooking, dogs, politics, & what I have called “river notes,” little observations on the rocks & trees & creatures who live around me on the bank of the Raquette River in northern New York. Those are my enthusiasms & avocations. Of these subjects, the only ones I can claim real expertise in are reading & writing poetry. And living by the river, I guess.

In addition to ease-of-use, the other reason I made a change of blogging software, server & over-all look & feel is that a certain kind of political anger had infected the old blog. Politics — the American slide toward fascism — remains of paramount concern to me. But when writing about current American politics, I find that my anger & disappointment overwhelm me. Now, I believe in anger. If you read the poems in the last part of my book Magical Thinking, you will sense — I hope — an incandescent anger. But those poems were written slowly, each one over the course of months & in some cases years; a blog post doesn’t lend itself to that sort of development. Nor should it. The virtue of the weblog is the ability to sketch ideas quickly. Beyond matters of genre, anger is best grounded in love. I find I can ground my anger in love — sometimes — when writing poetry, but not in the immediate flow of a blog post. Not usually, anyway. I’ll be limiting casual political posts here, for my own good — they leave me feeling sick — & because such posts don’t add anything to the discourse. Occasionally, if I think I have an interesting angle of sight on political topics, I’ll write something. Usually, that will mean finding a political perspective that comes through my work as a poet or teacher.

I’m sure that is all very edifying & I write it all out in such detail more as a reminder to myself than as an advertisement. There is a potentially interesting discussion of genre & subject matter that emerges from these considerations, but I’ll leave that to another meta-entry. My instinct about this is that the big blogs up near the rat’s butt have absolutely defined genre boundaries, whereas those of us out at the little pink tip of the tail are all over the place in both subject matter & genre.

Quiz: What Poetic Form Are You?

Posted on by

This very clever quiz with very entertaining questions gets me dead to rights. If I wasn’t terza rima, by the way, I’d be blank verse.

I’m terza rima, and I talk and smile.
Where others lock their rhymes and thoughts away
I let mine out, and chatter all the while.
I’m rarely on my own – a wasted day
Is any day that’s spent without a friend,
With nothing much to do or hear or say.
I like to be with people, and depend
On company for being entertained;
Which seems a good solution, in the end.

What Poetry Form Are You?

[via Scribbling Woman]

Birds

Posted on by

This fall I took an old cedar four by four I had lying around, cut a bit off & notched it to make a T & set it up at the edge of our little patch of lawn, near the spruce & cedars beside the stream. I hung bird feeders from the arms of the T, filled with sunflower seeds, & also attached a couple of suet cages to the upright. Around noon today, looking out from an upstairs window, I saw three blue jays, one nuthatch, one downy woodpecker, one hairy woodpecker, a bunch of chickadees (& two red squirrels) at or around the bird feeders. The woodpeckers really love the suet blocks I’ve put out. We’re having a very easy winter so far, though the goldfinches seem to have finally headed south about two weeks ago. And there are no more Canada geese on the river, though it hasn’t been cold enough to put even a skim of ice over the surface. There are generally some crows fooling around at the high end of the pond & a couple of days ago we saw (& heard) a raven over Dean Green’s pasture. I put this down for my own pleasure.

Finished Grading

Posted on by

I entered my grades around 1:00 Saturday afternoon. Sunday I didn’t do anything. It’s Monday & now I have to start planning next semester’s courses, not to mention the development of a wholly online version of my Vietnam course for summer. But all that can wait until tomorrow. Time for a bit of retrospective musing.

This was the semester my department, Humanities & Social Sciences, began teaching a brand new first-semester course for freshmen. We had been teaching the old Great Ideas course — a two semester sequence — since before I arrived at Clarkson twenty years ago. The new course is a single semester, to be followed by a souped-up writing across the curriculum requirement. The new course fits into a new general education curriculum that I had some part in developing, so I have something of a vested interest in the course working. We haven’t had our departmental postmortem yet, so I haven’t had the benefit of my colleagues’ reactions, but I am guardedly optimistic about the new course, though concerned about how the new curriculum fills our students’ need for writing instruction & practice. Basically, do they get enough writing practice after their first semester? Tentative answer: Students who arrive with some ability & background as writers & who take the new course — we call it the Clarkson Seminar — probably do get enough practice under the new curriculum. It’s the weak writers, probably the bottom quarter in terms of ability, who are going to suffer from the lack of a second-semester follow-on course.

The old two-semester Great Ideas course was as much a reading course as a writing course, designed on the great books model that reached its zenith in the 1980s. When I first came to the university, there was a very strict reading list: Pick at least five books from this list, with up to three more from this (somewhat broader) list. The first semester was limited to the ancient & medieval world, the second to the rest of the tradition, up to Camus, if I remember correctly. During my first decade at Clarkson, these structures were progressively loosened as younger faculty replaced older & as theoretical incursions of various sorts subjected the Western Canon to the assaults that have themselves become part of the standard discourse. By the turn of the millennium the old course was feeling its age & discussions began toward doing something new. These discussions were both bottom-up — from faculty within our department dissatisfied with the old structure — & top-down — from an administration looking for a general education curriculum that would be more “outcomes-based,” which is the jargon term for the way our accrediting organization now evaluates such things.

Because Clarkson is historically an “engineering school,” the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences was until ten years ago strictly a service department. (We were, in fact, until a few years ago, first a “Faculty” outside the other schools, then, for a few years, we were the School of Liberal Arts. About five years ago, we became a regular old department within a combined School of Arts & Sciences. The sciences, too, while they had their own majors, also mostly served the School of Engineering by teaching Calculus, Chemistry & Physics. We taught the Great Ideas & our electives were meant to serve the general education requirements engineers were thought to need in order to be “well-rounded.” The kids who couldn’t cut the engineering courses usually fell back into the Business School. But about a decade ago it became pretty clear that engineering enrollments were leveling off & that continued growth was going to depend on new programs in science & even in the liberal arts. And we haven’t done badly in programs like History & Political Science. We have around a hundred majors in our various programs & have become a place for students who arrive at the university believing — or their parents believing — they will become engineers, but who discover an intense dislike for, say, Calculus or Physics. We have also begun to recruit students who actually come to the university to study History or Political Science or, more rarely, the Humanities. We also run a double major program with the Business School.

I’m not sure why I have felt compelled to sketch out this superficial history of my department’s role in the university, except that I cannot manage to think about the new course outside of this political matrix. As part of the deal the department made with the university during the curriculum reform process, we agreed to reemphasize writing instruction in the Clarkson Seminar & in return we’d get a reduction in class size from twenty-five to twenty. The other part of the deal was that, in instead of teaching a second semester of the freshman course, our department would be able to offer more electives. In theory, this would benefit our nascent major programs as well as the general education curriculum, since in the spring semester there would be a lot more teaching power to offer electives that would serve both purposes. It would also give faculty a way to teach more courses in their specific disciplinary areas. That’s the macro level. At the micro level, one of the tensions within the department is between the Humanists, who are more or less comfortable with teaching writing, & the Social Scientists, who mostly claim ignorance or disdain writing instruction. I think the fault line as we begin to discuss the class will be between those who took the macro deal & are trying to make good on writing & those who took the reduced class size without a serious commitment to teaching writing. Because of the demographic profile of Clarkson students, the Humanities have fewer majors & consequently less clout than the Social Sciences both inside & outside the department. That’s reality. But the Social Scientists are, for the most part, the ones who are not much interested in teaching writing. They also, for the most part, would claim that they don’t know how to teach writing, a situation that ought to be addressed through a faculty development effort. Such an effort was bruited, but I haven’t seen much will from inside or outside the department to follow up on the talk. All of which has the potential to leave people like me, who make a serious effort to teach writing, feeling exploited.

How did the new course go? My two sections it went pretty well, though the smaller class size exaggerated, on the one hand, my very informal approach to discussion & class organization, and on the other hand, highlighted the weakness of the least able students. Taking advantage of the smaller class size, I abandoned a quarter century of practice & got out of the front of the classroom, moving everyone into a circle. Previously, I had preferred to conduct the orchestra from the front, only occasionally breaking into smaller groups for discussion. I called on people. In the new format, I tried very hard to let students take the lead. (I found, alas, that I can lecture from a student desk positioned in a circle almost as well as from behind a table at the front of the classroom!) The best students took off & ran with the discussion, but the weaker students sat quietly; as it turned out, the best talkers were the best writers. In the future, I need to work much harder to bring the weaker students into the conversation. Their inability to put ideas into language does not mean that they are incapable of ideas, though without adequate language they cannot be said to actually have ideas. Bringing such students into the conversation would be a form of socialization that might allow them to begin to have ideas. As for writing instruction, the top two-thirds of the class only needs correction & encouragement, but the bottom third needs aggressive intervention. That’s just my experience, of course — there were thirty-five or so other sections of the course, two per instructor — & I’m going to be very interested in hearing from my colleagues during the meetings we’ve scheduled for early next term.

So let’s say that twenty to thirty percent of first-year students need more writing instruction after completing the Clarkson Seminar, over & above the writing across the curriculum stuff everyone has to do to graduate. What form should that intervention take? There is no silver bullet, nor should we waste our time looking for one. The answer has to be variable & pragmatic. We have a good writing center with peer tutors for the motivated & more able of the bottom third. What we don’t have is a way of identifying the weakest language-users from the git-go. And what we don’t have, if we could identify these students, is a way to help them right from the beginning. We have talked about & the dean has said he would like to have an add-on course to the Clarkson Seminar that would be nothing but writing practice, staffed by people who really know how to do remedial writing instruction. Resources — the academic euphemism for money — are the main problem with such a course. We also need to create a group of “freshman electives” for the second semester of the first year that would have small class sizes & focus on writing. These could be taught by anybody, theoretically, inside or outside Humanities & Social Sciences, though most of them would certainly wind up being taught by Humanities & Social Sciences faculty. And that would require more faculty. Again, resources. Our faculty has remained the same size over the last decade, but our mission has been expanded & in fact ought to be expanded even more.

At the moment, I’d say the new course & the new curriculum have a lot of potential. The faculty in my department have some enthusiasm for the new course & the new curriculum, which allows them a good deal more freedom, but that enthusiasm is variable & precarious.