We were in Marion over the Fourth of July, and we had the occasion to walk back to my mom’s house from a restaurant in a dying shopping center not far away.  A good part of that walk was through a expansive empty parking lot, originally paved for a now-defunct movie theater. 

My most vivid memory of that lot and that theater is a June evening in 1982.  My dad and I were going to see E.T.  It’s the only time I can remember him suggesting and organizing something for us to do together.  For some reason, I was convinced this was a big enough event to wear my suit (not E.T., not superhero; a regular suit). 

We drove the twenty or so minutes into town and found a line extending from the theater doors, well into the lot.  We got out of the car and joined the line.  In my mind, this increased the excitement; I didn’t think about the potential problem such imbalance between supply and demand could create.

We stood in line only a few minutes; I doubt it really even moved at all.  I remember seeing a woman open one of the exit doors and hearing her shout, “Everyone here for the six o’clock E.T.: It’s sold out.”  She repeated the news, but I still had to ask what that meant. 

“We have to go home.”

Please note (ha): The only person I’m not furious at is the kid. Found this in a book as I’m getting things ready for the move to Central.

Earlier this month, Colin spent a week with his grandparents in Marion, during which he had two 45-minute swim lessons with an old high school friend of ours. Through the magic of Facebook, we got two very detailed follow-ups (thanks, Mark) that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit since I eagerly read them to see how Colin was doing in the pool.

These two lessons, which essentially comprise a complete assessment and instruction cycle, provide a useful way of thinking about teaching and learning.  While it’s true that working with one five-year-old swimmer in a pool is very different from teaching 25 adolescents in a classroom, I think there’s a lot to gain from a closer look at what Mark and Colin did together.

First, the lessons began with a clearly defined set of goals that served as the basis of preassessment.  Mark identified six essential points of instruction (holding breath, swimming underwater, not holding nose, repetitive diving, kicking, and breathing to the side) and worked with Colin to see where he needed to focus instruction.  Mark also recognized that teaching is a personal and social act, and he shared with Colin stories about going to school with Sarah and me, and mentioned to Colin that he and I have birthdays just a day apart.

Part of the stated mission of the National Day on Writing is to draw attention to the remarkable variety of writing in which Americans engage as part of their daily lives.
To put this concept in concrete terms, I decided to try an activity I learned about through the NCTE Reading Initiative several years ago—a literacy dig. I looked back at a recent weekday (last Friday to be precise) and compiled a list of all the writing I did:

• 15 work-related emails to 10 different audiences
• 8 personal emails (including Facebook messages) to 5 different audiences
• final edits, including basic HTML coding, to a lesson plan on responding to literature through microblogging and social networking
• a draft of the INBOX Ideas and ad copy for an upcoming issue of Classroom Notes Plus
• a personal blog entry on the New York City subway system, including five related images and captions
• 2 comments on a colleague’s blog
• 3 posts on Twitter
• 5 updates or links on Facebook and a response to a comment
• a dozen or so words corresponding to images our son drew on a whiteboard in our living room
• dozens of text messages
• marginal notes in a textbook on learning in adulthood
• online form to add a payee from my checking account
• multiple IM chats

This list accounts for all the actual composition that occurred, and because I had a record of most of these activities, they were easy to recall. Missing from this list are activities such as the prewriting that occupied my thoughts on the drive back from a visit to a local writing project site. Participants shared videos of their writing processes, and I soon began thinking about how I might use images, sound, and text to capture my own writing process.

It’s not zeugema.  It’s not even syllepsis.  I’m still searching for the rhetorical term that describes an author’s artful shift of meaning through repetition.

It’s definitely wordplay of sorts, but unlike a pun (“He kneads me,” Dot says of her new lover, Louis the baker, in Sunday in the Park with George after claiming earlier to love the “size” of artist Georges Seurat), the play I’m talking about is dynamic.  It’s not two meanings implicit in one word; it’s two meanings generated from the same word or phrase when sung in two different contexts.

I’ll discuss three  examples from two musicals, Sweeney Todd and Gypsy, but it’s not as if I’m choosing from a wealth of possibilities as I have in earlier posts.  The infrequency of this construction is so dependent on character and context that I have to conclude that it’s pretty hard to pull off.  What I like about these three is examples is that, though they share a common technique of shifting meaning through repetition, they’re all extremely different, varying both in terms of how they’re constructed and what they reveal about character or contribute to meaning of the work.

One of my (many) favorite things about the city is its subway system. The first thing I buy on nearly every trip is my 7-day unlimited MetroCard at the airport.  For a mere $25, I can get anywhere I want in the city, provided my destination is serviced by one of the lines on that iconic map.

But getting from A to B is only part of the appeal of the New York City Subway line.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of reading geographically appropriate literature, and the sometimes lengthy trip from one end of a borough to  the other provides plenty of time to savor the likes of Salinger, Pete Hamill, or Claude Brown.

Colin and Sarah's first ride on the subway, Summer 2007.

And, of course, there’s something authentically urban about riding the subway.  Only 70 or so cities in the world have an underground system, and the scale of human population that necessitates such transit naturally plays out in the riding experience.  Without precise knowledge of where you are on a line, you can infer accurately whether you’re in a place that’s desirable to go to, or get away from, depending on the time of day.  As an observant visitor, I find that riding on the subway provides snapshots into the real life of the people of the city.

The first five notes of Bill Evans’s take on the Gershwin/ Heyward folk opera aria “I Loves You Porgy” are an intoxicating, atmospheric invitation to one of the most beautiful collaborations by a jazz trio, rivaled (in my mind) only by that same trio’s rendition of another tune from Porgy and Bess, “My Man’s Gone Now.”

The track begins with Evans playing a single note on the keyboard, and as the melody builds slowly upward, a line descends from the initial tone until the chord is fully realized on the downbeat.  The bass joins with a dull pluck balanced by the first of many extended shimmers from the cymbal.  It’s expected at this point for the musical tension of an introductory partial measure to be resolved, but in this case we gladly endure the suspense of an extra note (the first syllable of “Porgy,” if you’re familiar with the lyric).

I hope you saved a sparkler and some BBQ to enjoy as you read guest blogger Charles Weinberg’s directorial vision for Sondheim’s controversial musical Assassins.

I’ve been working on a production of Assassins in my head for the past two years.  It should be noted I’ve never seen a production of the musical (or really any musical for that matter).  In a way, this might work to my advantage, freeing up some directorial decisions.  The way I picture the musical in my head is that it’s set in Lee Harvey’s head; since I’m producing this, that puts Oswald’s head inside my head.  Inside his head are the voices of all past assassins, successful and not, manifestations of his mental illness wrestling with his conscience.

Once the multiple frame narratives are established, it gets chronological, starting with Booth.  Lincoln will be in the “actual” audience, watching My American Cousin on a stage on top of the stage.  The audience, in turn, becomes part of the cast: an audience playing the part of the audience.   As Hamlet refers to his distracted globe on the stage at the Globe, so the theater becomes a symbol for the mind, a collective consciousness of what it means to be “American”, and just as “everyone has the right to shoot the president” is a perversion of the American dream, so the contradictory and disparate components of the audience suggest a sense of national schizophrenia–allusive to the schism that divided the nation and allowed for John Wilkes Booth to exist.  To quote Lincoln quoting the Bible: “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” so it is with the mind in Jim Stevens’s poem “Schizophrenia.”  To recap…we have voices inside the voices of the voices, we have symbols inside the symbols of the symbols, and we have allusions to allusions inside allusions.

Though this Fourth of July is comaparably mild (and rainy) here in Southern Illinois, it’s an appropriate time to add my “keeping cool” recollections to those begun by Charlie, [dan] , and Ryan.  The Fourth typically marked the beginning of sweltering weather that would continue through early September.  By that point in the summer we had been relying on our go-to cool down plan for well over a month: swimming in the Lake of Egypt.

My childhood neighborhood, pictured awkwardly at right courtesy of Google Maps, was on a peninsula that thrust itself out into the lake.  Once you turned onto our road (not known as “Clifty Heights Drive” back then, by the way), the only ways out were to turn around or swim.

Every house had a backyard that ended with the  lake, so every summer morning presented only one decision: Whose dock would be home base for our more or less day-long  swim?

Our house was on the west side of the neighborood, thus facing a much more open section of the lake.  This meant we would get some boat traffic and consequent wave action if we swam there.

Inspired by the Pitchfork interview model (in which people discuss “the music they loved at five-year interval points in their lives” with the goal of getting “a detailed roadmap of how their tastes and passions helped make them who they are” or learning something odd and obscure) and prodded by [ dan ], I hereby submit my list.

Like any exercise, this task reveals some trends but leaves out hugely significant ones.  I need a separate entry explaining the absence of pop culture influence through the typically formative years.  My family’s odd relationship with music (and most other consumer goods) as well as my inability to take a critical stance on this documentary will play into that entry.  Until then..exchange your grandma’s dollar for tokens…I’ve got a fever that’s driving me crazy!!

Age 5 | “Pac Man Fever” (Buckner & Garcia)

I don’t remember the presence of too many records in our house growing up, but I can vividly recall this album’s iconic cover and the giddy feelings conjured by hearing the sounds associated with Aladdin’s Castle in the Carbondale mall coming out of our huge record player/stereo console.

Clear evidence that I experienced this musical masterwork on vinyl: the first four songs are burned in my memory, while the last four are totally unfamiliar.

Age 10 | ”Rock Me Amadeus” (Falco)

Regarded by some as the “the single worst pop song recorded in the entire decade of the 1980s,” I must have liked something about this mess of a synth-pop-chant tribute to Wolfgang.

My brother got me the cassette of Falco 3 as a present, and I gave it back to him when the other songs “weren’t as good” as “Rock Me Amadeus.”  Classic.

Age 15 | “Recipe for Love” (Harry Connick, Jr.)

While others were in the throes of adolescent angst and smelling teen spirit, I was happily swingin’ to the big band sounds of Harry Connick, Jr.  Sarah introduced me to this disc, and I eventually came to appreciate Harry as a piano player more than a singer.  He doesn’t play much on this album, and the tracks alternate “happy”/”sad” a bit too drastically and predictably, but I can trace my interest in jazz piano to recordings such as this one from high school.