"settling the empty page"
(Wednesday: burbled photos partly blue)
"As the wagon trains moved west, the trails they left across the dry and vacant desert stretched out straight as arrows on the land, getting twisted-kinky only when they finally reached the liberal waters of their destinations on the continent's left coast." Clarice Armstrong stops reading and looks up.
It's English 314, "creative editing," taught by Williard Frost, a buttoned-down warm body with a heart too vaguely cold to ever break. Behind the Frostman sitting on the front edge of his desk, on a screen pulled down before the blackboard, is the photo at the top. For the fifty-minute weekly "prompt" class, he shows five slides and gives the students five minutes for each, to write, and then read or just ad-lib, their own response.
Beneath this photo, Frost has added: "Borrowed from the Flickr website, this pic was posted by one 'minniemouseaunt' and titled 'Monumental Valley Navajo Tribal Park Explored!' with an extended caption that reads in part: 'This hiden[sic] valley was called Gods[sic] Treasure by John Wayne[sic - Marion Morrison].'"
"Anyone else?" Frost asks the class.
"Yeah," Nipper Phillips is saying near the back, reclining at his desk in a position nearly horizontal. "The valley is 'monumental,' but it's named after the huge sandstone megaliths, the monuments left behind by a receding ancient sea, and called 'Monument' not 'Monumental' Valley, with the rock formations being monuments -- really, in the end -- to our way of seeing things in terms of the individually-connected art of a science like geology, in much the same way that John Wayne is an icon to the empty-dead god pantheon of our social past." Phillips would gladly turn "this sad world right-side up," to save it.
Frost looks out the windows at the trees and lawn. It's where he'd rather be, back leaned against a tree, the bare legs of a student girl he has yet to meet stretched out beneath her skirt beside him. He lost the "savior" impulse years ago, and somehow his idea last spring for "teaching something new" went off course, as sometimes happens when the vehicle of a faculty structured curriculum meets the impromptu student road.
"Right," Valerie Throttlemeyer joins in. "So the lit-crit starts, then, at the top. With the editing of your photo prompt. Which calls into question the whole intel point of this class. I mean: Does anyone really need to be encouraged, taught, or trained, today, to be critical of things, when self-refacing[no sic] criticism is all we have to say?"
"As the wagon trains moved west, the humble settlers of this new and spacious land killed lots of things, including the way of life of the nomad hunter-gatherers who'd lived there, in ecological harmony, for centuries," Alice Johns now reads, having retooled Armstrong's opening response. Johns expands the opening paragraph to then include references to genocide, infanticide, and the suicide of several settlers who had trouble reconciling the actual passage west, with the brochure ads in bustling St. Louis.
Then several smaller, spoken responses follow in rapid, prairie fire succession.
"As the wagon trains moved west, memories of 'the country old' soon evaporated in the desert sun."
"As the wagon trains moved west, the rutted wagon trails were soon replaced by highways paved with cheap motels, the arrow "Eat Here" signs of restaurants and other roadside money-dumps, with lonely asphalt ribbons stretched between."
"Fuck the wagon trains. Fuck the west. And fuck this lame-ass course," Tiger Lilly says to a small gust of breath laughs.
"Disillusioned by their fantasies of paradise, the settlers soon found that fucking in the west was much like fucking in the east, only less congested."
"Like trains of thought the trains of wagons moved from point-to-point across the empty-nested landscape," Benton French now reads, "until eventually the settlers realized that settling down on something, somewhere in geo-neural space, didn't mean they weren't, still, nomads in their lives."
The class bell rings. Frost turns his gaze from the lawn outside and sits back at his desk. As the voices of the youngheads he is teaching, none of this is anything he wants hear. He's trying to give them all a better voice. They seem to think the better voice is one they find themselves.
20120516 19:13 Wed (713 words)
"As the wagon trains moved west, the trails they left across the dry and vacant desert stretched out straight as arrows on the land, getting twisted-kinky only when they finally reached the liberal waters of their destinations on the continent's left coast." Clarice Armstrong stops reading and looks up.
It's English 314, "creative editing," taught by Williard Frost, a buttoned-down warm body with a heart too vaguely cold to ever break. Behind the Frostman sitting on the front edge of his desk, on a screen pulled down before the blackboard, is the photo at the top. For the fifty-minute weekly "prompt" class, he shows five slides and gives the students five minutes for each, to write, and then read or just ad-lib, their own response.
Beneath this photo, Frost has added: "Borrowed from the Flickr website, this pic was posted by one 'minniemouseaunt' and titled 'Monumental Valley Navajo Tribal Park Explored!' with an extended caption that reads in part: 'This hiden[sic] valley was called Gods[sic] Treasure by John Wayne[sic - Marion Morrison].'"
"Anyone else?" Frost asks the class.
"Yeah," Nipper Phillips is saying near the back, reclining at his desk in a position nearly horizontal. "The valley is 'monumental,' but it's named after the huge sandstone megaliths, the monuments left behind by a receding ancient sea, and called 'Monument' not 'Monumental' Valley, with the rock formations being monuments -- really, in the end -- to our way of seeing things in terms of the individually-connected art of a science like geology, in much the same way that John Wayne is an icon to the empty-dead god pantheon of our social past." Phillips would gladly turn "this sad world right-side up," to save it.
Frost looks out the windows at the trees and lawn. It's where he'd rather be, back leaned against a tree, the bare legs of a student girl he has yet to meet stretched out beneath her skirt beside him. He lost the "savior" impulse years ago, and somehow his idea last spring for "teaching something new" went off course, as sometimes happens when the vehicle of a faculty structured curriculum meets the impromptu student road.
"Right," Valerie Throttlemeyer joins in. "So the lit-crit starts, then, at the top. With the editing of your photo prompt. Which calls into question the whole intel point of this class. I mean: Does anyone really need to be encouraged, taught, or trained, today, to be critical of things, when self-refacing[no sic] criticism is all we have to say?"
"As the wagon trains moved west, the humble settlers of this new and spacious land killed lots of things, including the way of life of the nomad hunter-gatherers who'd lived there, in ecological harmony, for centuries," Alice Johns now reads, having retooled Armstrong's opening response. Johns expands the opening paragraph to then include references to genocide, infanticide, and the suicide of several settlers who had trouble reconciling the actual passage west, with the brochure ads in bustling St. Louis.
Then several smaller, spoken responses follow in rapid, prairie fire succession.
"As the wagon trains moved west, memories of 'the country old' soon evaporated in the desert sun."
"As the wagon trains moved west, the rutted wagon trails were soon replaced by highways paved with cheap motels, the arrow "Eat Here" signs of restaurants and other roadside money-dumps, with lonely asphalt ribbons stretched between."
"Fuck the wagon trains. Fuck the west. And fuck this lame-ass course," Tiger Lilly says to a small gust of breath laughs.
"Disillusioned by their fantasies of paradise, the settlers soon found that fucking in the west was much like fucking in the east, only less congested."
"Like trains of thought the trains of wagons moved from point-to-point across the empty-nested landscape," Benton French now reads, "until eventually the settlers realized that settling down on something, somewhere in geo-neural space, didn't mean they weren't, still, nomads in their lives."
The class bell rings. Frost turns his gaze from the lawn outside and sits back at his desk. As the voices of the youngheads he is teaching, none of this is anything he wants hear. He's trying to give them all a better voice. They seem to think the better voice is one they find themselves.
20120516 19:13 Wed (713 words)