Thus begins Amarcord, Fellini’s autobiographical film, a brilliant tribute to his birthplace Rimini. I’ve been replaying its opening scene in my mind for the last few days, desperately wishing for some signs of spring in NYC.

This weekend I finally sat down and watched Amarcord in full again. The last time I watched it this closely was several years ago when I was constructing a writing assignment around it for my composition class. Naively, I thought my students would immediately share my fascination with the colorful characters and the sheer surreal beauty of some of the scenes: a boy encountering a white bull in the fog or a gorgeous peacock appearing out of nowhere in the midst of snow. To say the least, my students were not engaged when I showed the film. I was willing to connect their reaction, rather lack thereof, to anything – non-linear narrative, symbolism, unrealistic characters, insufficient introduction to Fellini on my part – but subtitles. Really, I was very surprised to learn that a small inconvenience to read short notes while watching a scene would be met with such intense resistance.

Watching the film again, I wondered how subtitles could be made into a useful tool in the classroom. If the film is in English, subtitles can work to the advantage of English language learners, or to their detriment: relying on the written text, they may turn off their listening. I did some additional searching online and found an extensive list of practices aiming to develop linguistic and cultural literacies through film as described by Anthony Helm in the post “Teaching Language Through Film” on the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) blog. Helm reports how two foreign language instructors use film to create teaching resources. A Russian instructor Alfia Rakova “develop[ed] teaching materials (readers and exercise books) from the scripts of four films. Film scripts are not regularly published, however, so it meant watching and re-watching the film countless times in order to extract a working script. From there, she could build vocabulary lists, identify parts of the film that serve to demonstrate grammatical points that she wants her students to work with and understand, and highlight language exchanges between characters that serve to model real-world interactions.” A Japanese instructor Mayumi Ishida focuses, among other things, on how “films excel at presenting clear demonstrations of non-verbal communications, which textbooks may only be able to describe.” I find the whole post illuminating when thinking about the place of film in the classroom across disciplines and encourage those interested in the subject to take a look.

On Paver’s website, you can find mesmerizing photos of the places that have inspired her songs. Many of them feature proverbs and aphorisms originating in those places along with the lines from her songs. One saying stood out to me, mainly because it managed to express my dissertation thesis with the clarity, precision, and suggestiveness I could never hope to achieve in my writing: “People are people through other people” (Xhosa proverb).

I was also tempted to read this in connection to our last Great Works faculty roundtable that centered on the different uses of student writing in the classroom: modeling, peer reviews, blogging, writing workshops, collaborative writing (i.e., wiki). One faculty member voiced a very common concern that students are not always ready to give each other constructive criticism in peer reviews. One could add that more often than not the recipients of their peers’ feedback tend to ignore it, jumping to the professor’s comments for obvious reasons. Yet, we still try to find ways to encourage students to open doors into each other’s writing, and through that into each other’s experiential realities and thinking paradigms. Isn’t it, in the long run, about helping them grow as people through other people (other than the authority figure of their professor)? David Ignatow says it better than I ever could in his poem “My Place”:

I am good to talk to,

you feel in my speech

a location, an expectation

and all said to me in reply

is to reinforce this feeling

because all said is towards

my place and the speaker

too grows his

from which he speaks to mine

having located himself

through my place.

The Bloomsbury Book Fair took place at a hotel where a large hall was transformed, probably overnight or in the course of early morning hours, into a very natural habitat for a great number of book dealers and their collectibles: books, photographs, maps, manuscripts and the like. As its numerous virtual counterparts dealing with found photos and paintings, this physical place exuded the air of an orphanage, urging you to adopt abandoned beings. Once you did, however, you immediately felt unimaginable pangs of shame and discomfort one feels when intruding upon someone’s privacy, claiming possessions of another, and depriving something of its independent existence, albeit in a box. I wonder if the physicality of both the place and its ‘orphans’ can evoke these feelings more powerfully than ‘orphan’ websites can.

However, the book fair also had a regal aura, proudly hosting a procession of respectable relics: first editions; dusty, yellow-paged books, cleverly and warmly inscribed; glowing surviving maps of the Chinese Empire, etc. It was my first time at such a strangely honorable gathering, so I had to be slowly introduced to the protocol. Those who frequent such book fairs explained that I could put aside the things I liked and come back to them. I also learned, to my embarrassment, that a person “manning photography” would not direct me to American letters, as this was not a store where books were classified neatly on the shelves.

All I could do was quickly embrace the exuberant promise of accidental finds!

I was drawn to a box brimming with photographs. And, here are some of my black and white picks: a 1929 photo of “sea nymphs at play on the rocks at Dinard, before taking a swim,” as the inscription reads; an undated wedding photo of two people who look alike before even starting to live together; a copyright protected photo (oops) of charming chimps, the property of the Gibraltar Tourist Office; the image of a solitary gentleman who in his solemn elegance doesn’t seem to know what to do with the boundless, breathtaking landscape behind him (except to make a picture perhaps and  meditate later on the meaning of life).

Virginia Woolf would call these “moments of being”; Milan Kundera may see occasions for character creation (as he famously reflected on the birth of his charactes, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite. …[C]haracters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about”);  Joseph Cornell would be tempted to construct a new existential context for them in a shadow box.

I’m also thinking of Baudelaire, in particular his prose poem “Windows,” in which the speaker is more passionate about looking into a closed window than out of an open one:

A man looking out of an open window never sees as much as the same man looking directly at a closed window. There is no object more deeply mysterious, no object more pregnant with suggestion, more insidiously sinister, in short more truly dazzling than a window lit up from within by even a single candle. What we can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what we can perceive taking place behind a pane of windowglass. In that pit, in that blackness or brightness, life is being lived, life is suffering, life is dreaming….

To me, looking at an unknown photo epitomizes the same kind of promise as looking through a closed window does to Baudelaire: it is a promise of simultaneously discovering and creating a life (if you’re thinking this is my way of redeeming my fetishism, you’re probably right ), and, if we are lucky with the visual or written cues, a life in history.

Photo credit Ikebana Arts Studio

Ikebana is a form of Japanese floral art whose major premises are minimalism, symmetry, and organic composition. The stems must be positioned at designated angles, and they must be visible, not hidden in a vase. For this purpose, Ikebana arrangements are made in a kenzan, a flower holder consisting of many closely positioned spikes upon and between which the stems and twigs are placed. If kenzan is not a part of a larger container, it can be placed in one that is best suited for the given arrangement.

Ikebana has a very rich history and philosophy that I have never had a chance to study; for instance, in the most basic composition three stems are slanted in certain ways to symbolize the relationship between heaven, earth, and human being. When I work on my flower arrangements, I don’t usually think about these higher meanings. But I do enjoy every step of the process from selecting flowers to finding the right surface and background in my apartment for the finished arrangements. I wish I could say the same about writing.

And yet last night Ikebana taught me something really valuable about writing: concentration and discipline cannot fully preempt chaos. There was a moment when my major stems were in place, but the arrangement wasn’t appealing. It didn’t express what I intended it to express. Usually by the end of process, I’m pleasantly surprised that the final composition is more exact and beautiful than I imagined it to be. This was not the case yesterday!

I was upset, but then reminded myself that I wasn’t fully done, that there were several small flowers and leaves I could add to reshape the arrangement. Not really having faith in my actions, I cut my remaining thin stems and began sticking them into the kenzan. Magically, my unbalanced composition was transformed into a (not exactly minimalist) cascade of yellow daisies!

Now I have to go back to my conference abstract, and I so hope it will be transformed in the same way.

As I continued reading the article, I realized, despite my initial reservations, how promising this project really is. For instance, the authors are asked to select a line from their work to be animated and posted on YouTube. This is a new and very creative form of literary expression that allows for imaginative possibilities and, as Michael Cunningham pointed out, “maintain[s] the integrity of the written word and extend[s] its range.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPqOy2rvfqM[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJieivqFQs[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSf_4vxWmxg[/youtube]

I was reminded of a few students in our in-class workshops in the past few weeks whose eyes were constantly on their iPhones. The same happens on the subway, in gym classes, and everywhere we go. As much as I’m reluctant to accept the pervasiveness of the electronic world, I must admit that it can effectively create what Rick Moody has called “new envelopes for [literature’s] message.”

photo credit: Olivander

Aside from its main mission to establish a relationship between academic and business discourses, this year’s Symposium has, in my view, peripherally addressed another notorious bifurcation of academic and creative writing. Perhaps Peter Elbow’s proposition to ignore audience for some time can be hard to grasp in the context of business letter writing. It does, however, resonate fully with our experience with more expressive writing forms, those that convey a personal voice and in turn strike personal notes in the audience.

Listening to Elbow, I recalled a Q&A session with Orhan Pamuk. To my question whom he imagines as his audience when drafting his autobiography, he quickly responded “myself.” He explained that thinking about potentially disapproving readers would hamper his authenticity and creative effort. Another writer, whose personal journals have been a subject of my scrupulous analysis these days, connected his inability to write truthfully about his life to his typewriter, seeing it as his immediate audience.

But a self-invitation into a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf has famously called it, is something we seek also when working on projects less posh than a poetic autobiography (though a psychologist can easily make a case that a dissertation is a piece of autobiography); I’m referring to such prosaic items of academic life as seminar papers, articles, and dissertations. For me, an important take-away from Elbow’s speech was that the process of composition happens in very similar ways for writers engaged in creative and academic projects. Whether one is working on a novel or dissertation, the vocabulary to describe the writing process would be the same, ranging from such romantic concepts as exploration to such terrifying buzz words as writer’s block.

In both cases, receiving effective feedback from, alas, audience, at later stages of the composition process becomes essential as well!

Surely, once we receive a particular degree or become a part of a particular profession, we immediately set expectations and become anxiously self-conscious about fulfilling them. In various ways, academic settings tend to enhance our sensitivity to whether we come across to our audiences – and to ourselves – as uncultured oafs. The article brought back memories of my first year in graduate school when I felt like a total impostor in a circle of aspiring young scholars. I was also reminded of the eagerness with which beginning graduate students sometimes imitate the convoluted and often incomprehensible academic prose they read.

Trillin wants to do away with the very label of uncultured oafs, it seems to me, as most of us want to do away with the bifurcation of high and popular culture, or academic and real worlds. Have we all been successful?

Walking in cities is an accumulation of small fragments of loss. A woman you want to keep looking at turns a corner; two people pass and you hear only, “It cannot be because of the child”; you look through a window at a drawing that looks like a print you have seen somewhere before, and it’s obscured when someone pulls a curtain across the window; a woman turns ferociously on the man standing next to her, but by the time you reach home you can no longer remember her face. – “Lost Cities”

Craigslist, of course, has attempted to assemble those fragments of loss in its “missed connections” section. Do you ever read that stuff? Doesn’t it make for a fascinating research topic?

That evening there was a guest appearance. Another subway violinist, (this one was “off duty” and seemed to be doing the same thing we were — waiting for the train) greeted him and sat down to listen. In a moment, he turned to his friend and suggested, “Let’s play Chardish together and they’ll give us money.” I had seen each of them many times before, but they had never performed together. And now they played in complete unison, as if they had rehearsed in advance. Every note of one violin was perfectly doubled and amplified by that of another. Perfect harmony and no train on either side of the platform!

They finished and we all applauded! But there was the expression of confusion on people’s faces: there was only one hat to throw money in. Most of us hesitated, partly because we read hesitation in the faces of others, and suppressed the impulse to give anything.

We all have exceptional subway stories to tell. This impromptu performance is one of mine, beautiful in its spontaneity and sad in its outcome. One of the things that struck me was that no words were needed for an exceptionally balanced performance to take place- the musicians did not say a word to each other as they were playing, most likely for the first time together. At the same time, unspoken language could destroy — right there, in a mere moment — our basic instinct to express gratitude.

The last thing I want to do in this post is pretend that I never question my writing abilities. What can and in my case does effectively dissolve this negative thinking is reading. Somehow, as I move from sentence to sentence, even in the most familiar of pages, I’m made aware of my skill to think, to feel, and to formulate my thoughts and feelings in language. Once I’ve consciously gone through this process, I feel inspired to write.

The Wikipedia page includes a list of “dramatic depictions of writer’s block,” among them Shakespeare in Love and Stranger than Fiction. I’d add another list – literary depictions of writer’s block. And, perhaps, one more – professional writers’ strategies for overcoming writer’s block. Here is how it goes for Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” How is this for a first-day low-stakes writing activity?

As teachers, we’re usually concerned with both transmission and reception; we want to make our presentations clear, our questions thought-provoking, our assignments challenging, and our evaluation encouraging. In many ways, teaching is a performance, and to deliver it effectively we work on our presentation skills. In all this, of course, we conceive of our students as audience: we hope they would receive what we have transmitted or respond to what we have posed as a question. And, there is usually no delay in learning how our message got across. As soon as we hear, read, or simply see their responses, we know whether the message went through or got lost in translation.

As much as I enjoy the performative side of teaching, I think there is a difference between treating students as audience or interlocutors. The word ‘interlocutor’ has interesting etymology; it comes from Latin interloqui, which means “to speak between.” It implies active engagement in dialogue, but even more perhaps – the initiation of dialogue. When students write papers or give oral presentations, they still follow our prompts. They want to succeed, impress their teachers and fellow students, get a good grade, right? In all this, they are still living up to the expectations of others.

I wonder if by asking them to create their own expectations (not without good models, of course) – by preparing a sample assignment or facilitating a discussion on a topic of their choice—we can hope for a more dynamic learning environment. We’ll be creating a new context for learning critical thinking, mastery of the material, and presentation skills. In this sense, I think, blogging provides a great medium for experiencing interlocution. But we’ll also be asking them to assume responsibility that comes with authority. A cliché? I agree, but I am thinking of those times when students, sometimes unwittingly, make offensive comments. When we call their attention to that, they usually smile or blush and apologize (they can also try to justify their thinking and ignite an argument). What I see in this is an attempt to hide experience behind innocence. “I’m just a student. I can be excused,” they seem to be saying. Well, I wonder, can we offer them a role other than “just a student” and do so in a non-punitive way?

So far, I have tried to vary our contexts for discussing grammar.  I select sentences from their papers and we correct them as a big group; sometimes they do the same in small groups. The traditional technique of giving a lecture/presentation followed by in-class exercises is another method I tried, especially because I know that many of these students are used to this type of instruction.  So, I try to make it easier for them to process new information in this familiar way. I have also assigned an error log, and of course they’re responding to each other’s writing, paying particular attention to grammar and usage.

I still wonder if there are other effective ways to teach grammar.  Suggestions would be much appreciated.

As I am proceeding to work on my prospectus, I see a need for multiple readers and interlocutors who, I selfishly admit, will help me dig out all the threads and connect them into a coherent whole.  Another truism surely, but I think all writers including our students deserve a responsive audience.  BLSI Fellows and Writing Center Consultants are happy to be that audience, but students who come to workshops and tutoring sessions are usually those who want to raise their grades or who are simply referred by their professors.  What can we do to encourage strong writers and speakers to seek an active audience while they’re formulaing their ideas?

Why am I surprised when she is reluctant to reference her sources then? And, how do you reference 50 images from Google that are glued to index cards?  

Perhaps it is a common or at least recommended practice among professors to integrate CPE-like assignments into their courses if many of their students either have not yet taken or failed the exam.  Until recently I have not encountered in regular classes any assignments that came close to the CPE prompts.  I was in fact very surprised when the professor teaching the section of Great Works for ESL students shared with me her two-fold writing assignment that articulates the same goals and criteria as the CPE.  The subjects of this compare/contrast essay are of course literary texts.   I have not yet discussed the assignment with the students, but I am sure they’ll appreciate their professor’s effort to bridge the cold and scary CUNY testing world with the comfort of classroom learning.

Why bother when surely the tasks involved in the CPE exam require the level of critical thinking and writing abilities that develop gradually in different classes and through different activities in the course of their first few years in college?  But many students still dread the exam and postpone it for as long as possible.  Many do not always realize that attending a CPE workshop plays just one part, and probably not the largest one, in their exam preparation.  It is the work they do in their classes that truly prepares them for this test.  And perhaps reminding them about this through course materials that share the exam’s rhetoric would create a more positive and serious attitude not only toward the exam, but  toward college work in general. 

I think journal writing can be a great learning tool and not just in a composition classroom.  We know that many professors do not see the value in encouraging students to relate their personal experiences to the readings.  And, journal writing is certainly not a common practice outside of the composition program.  But it is no news that the making of new meaning is always connected to the previously gained knowledge and experience, to the things that go on in the students’ lives currently.  Why not let our students make that connection not always on the spot in the classroom, but in their personal writing space? 

1. “On email, people aren’t quite themselves.  They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous.  Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature” (qtd. in Malcolm).

2.  When you accidentally send an email containing negative comments about a person to that very person, do not use email to express your apology. “Just because we have email we shouldn’t use it for everything,” authors suggest.

3.  “If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed.  Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices and anxieties” (qtd. in Malcolm).  Malcolm then summarizes the authors’ suggestion to deal with this impersonal aspect of email —  ”a program of unrelenting niceness.  Keep letting your correspondent know how much you like and respect him, praise and flatter him, constantly demonstrate your puppyish friendliness, and stick in exclamation points (and sometimes even smiling face icons) wherever possible.’”

But exclamation points are really just shortcuts, which we must take because we simply can’t afford to do otherwise with the heavy volume of emails every day, the authors and Malcolm suggest.  Does email then propel weak writing?  At the end of her review, Malcolm poses a related question about young users of email: “Will their childish babbling evolve into decent writing?  Does writing a lot lead to writing well?”  My sense is if we write badly and do so often, we may lose or have a hard time acquiring the skills for writing well. 

With the tremendous number of electronic mediums for communication, perhaps we take shortcuts much too often, and so do our students.  Is there a way to discourage shortcuts or simply bad writing using the very medium that promotes it? Next time I teach composition, I will probably create prompts that would encourage students to correspond via email. Afterwards, in class the sender and the recipient can share their perceptions of the e-mail’s tone.  I think this use of a familiar and favorite medium might be a good way to help beginning writers develop a sense of audience, grow more sensitive to their choice of tone, and perhaps become stronger writers, and not just on email.

Working with the Draft: Techniques for Helping Students Revise