Homelessness and Space

The worst of news, readers.

Last Friday, after a visit from the angel of doom and my idiotic tendency to prop my feet up on my desk, I spilled tea on my beloved laptop and turned it into a zombie computer. After taking the battery out, drying it out for the better part of three days to the best of my ability, it will not turn on.

Thus, three years worth of pictures, music, and, worst of all, writing and homeworks, are now in electronic limbo. They might still be on my harddrive. They might not. I have no way of knowing and no way of checking, yet, but I have some of the smartest and most technologically inclined people I know working on it, so we'll see how it goes.

This episode has made me realize two things. One is how incredibly dependent I am on my computer to entertain me, keep me connected with people I don't see on a daily basis, and complete my homework. I wanted to watch a TV show yesterday (and I watch all my TV online) and felt silly going to the computer lab to turn on 'Castle.' I didn't want to check my facebook becuase really, how trival is facebook anyway? And I don't want everyone else in the computer lab to see what incredibly silly game I'm playing!

The second thing I realized is that without my laptop, I feel like a displaced person. I feel homeless without that electronic space to call my own.

I am not by any means trying to trivialize homelessness here. I come from a county with an incredibly high cost of living and an equally high homeless population. I can't say I've ever been physically homeless, but my brother and sister, who have participated multiple times in events like Sleep-Out Saturday, inform me that it's not fun.

When I speak about being homeless, what I really mean is spaceless. I don't have that personal space to store my thoughts or my productions anymore. My stuff doesn't have a home anymore. Using a school computer's not the same -- I have access to the same spaces as I did before, but in a public space. I have a hard time using a public space to do personal things, like write this blog, for instance. I didn't feel anchored enough to devote my time to thinking about blog topics -- I was too worried about when I could get another computer to work on real homework later on that evening.

Hopefully we can recover my data. Hopefully my stories won't have to be recreated from scratch and I won't have to re-acquire all my music. And hopefully I can use this feeling that I have right now, this dreadful, uncertain listlessness, to understand the small percentage of my students that statistics tell me will be homeless. I know my schoolwork's suffering because  of my lack of a computer -- how much must they be suffering when they dont' know where they're sleeping that night?

Airship Ahoy! Student Teaching Dead Ahead!

Good news! The best of news, in fact.

I have received my student teaching placements for next semester! 

There are two of them, one in an area middle school and the other in a high school, and I am assured by people in the know that they are wonderful teachers who really know their business.

I was so overcome with joy at this prospect my productivity for the day imploded, and I ended up leaving my homework until my shift at work last night. Three hours of heavy productivity. It was great.

But after that I went home feeling a great deal like a failure. Here I am, a quarter of the way through senior year, practically swimming in homework and midterms, and all I want to do right now is work on a Halloween costume. Talk about trival.

Not just any Halloween costume, mind you. A steampunk airship officer, to be precise. I spent the better part of Wednesday Googling Do-It-Yourself steampunk accessories, including the obligatory round-rimmed goggles and making a shopping list for the local craft store, thrift shop, and bargain outlet. I realized I want to work on this, instead of writing the 5 mini-essays I have due next week, because I’m bored. A little burnt-out, too. I’m sick and tired of learning about how to teach kids, and it doesn’t help that in two of my classes we’re talking about exactly the same thing. I need a week, I think, to not do any schoolwork at all, and a week is a luxury I don’t have.

Steampunk is an interesting aesthetic. It tries to combine the power, creativity, and mechanical prowess that the Industrial era embodies while at the same time embracing the whimsy, romance and beauty of the Victorian age. Simultaneous creative periods, but very different ideas in terms of what form and function are. It’s like Gaskell’s North and South in a big way, the culture of the city meeting the machinery of the town. (Speaking of which, I got a massively awesome mashup idea involving Mr. Thornton and a bunch of robots that I think I might use for my final project in Contemporary Lit.)

Anyway, as I’m googling around I can’t help but be fascinated by what some of these people have built. These contraptions are beautiful – mahogany keyboards with repurposed typewriter keys, working blunderbuss guns that fire ping-pong balls. (That was another reason I was ashamed of myself – I’m not half that creative or talented to be in this genre) I realized that cosplay of any kind says something very interesting about our society in general. We have such creative, artisanal talent as human beings, and in our industrialized, buy-it-out-of-the-box world, that energy that in earlier periods would have been put to the purpose of making useful objects  is rerouted into making objects that could have been useful, but instead are used for this specialized kind of play. Steampunk’s fascinating to me because it tries to embody this past-present binary, the beauty of past design but also the desire to be futuristic and imaginative as well. (Also awesome - dieselpunk, the 'punk that started after WWI and the Age of Steam left off. Think Art Deco, Soviet Realism, film noir and really futuristic looking cars. Epic.)

I’ve realized, in between trying to finish the midterm exam due tonight and the final project due tomorrow, that this is an excellent conundrum for several reasons. First, I have to practice a good deal of self control in sticking to my time management options. Second, I’m realizing teachers cannot live on homework and grading alone. And third, if I’m getting burnt out thinking about the same thing all day and it’s only October, how must my students feel when they’re learning about five or six different subjects and they have to write a bunch of papers?

All of this is pointing me towards a conclusion we’ve discussed, both in Pedagogy and in Young Adult Lit-- students need to have a way to engage with the literature they’re reading beyond just writing about it. Involve an art project once in a while, something that uses a different part of the brain. This is why art and music and the humanities in schools is so very important! Kids need a creative break!

I know this teacher does, too.

Graphic Novels -- Great Books?

Mmm, canon. A big word with a lot of punch. Add another letter and it will shoot you. Leave it as it is and it'll fill your English classes with misery.

The idea of "The Canon" has come up in classes twice in the past week. In Pedagogy, we're discussing what parts of the Western Canon  we should keep and which books we'd pitch. (The Scarlet Letter, unsurprisingly, was binned without question. Somewhere millions of high school students should be rejoicing.) And in Contempory Lit we were discussing graphic novels and whether any of them should be considered for entry into the sainted halls of canonical literature.

Like Sister Mara always does, after we'd considered if Persepolis (our graphic selection for the semester) could potentially be a canonical choice someday, she asked us if we could consider using a graphic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice instead of having students muddle through Austen's volumious prose in the original.

In my mind, this is a great question becuase it makes us consider two things --
1.Why are we having the kids read this book in the first place? Is it the complexity of the language or the plot or the themes expressed throughout the book or is it simply because we read it and gosh darnit, someone else should, too?
2.What do you add or subtract from the book when it becomes a graphic novel?

Thankfully, Pedagogy has already answered question one for me.  We continue to read the Canon because we want to challenge students with the language, there are supposedly universal themes we can find in classic novels, they discuss Big Ideas and by being 'foreign' to our students, they allow us a space to teach them how it is we're supposed to read, not just taking in the words but finding the meaning behind them.

Question Two has also already been discussed, this time in Contemporary Lit. When we read a graphic novel, we need to take on a new way to read, using the pictures in tandem with the text. When Pride and Predjudice (or any other canon book) becomes a graphic novel, it loses some of the language and complexity that English teachers love so much but adds images so that visual learners might be able to connect to the text more. To me it seems like the same process that occurs when a book becomes a movie -- the themes and big ideas should still be there, but in an abbreviated version. In the movie there is less room for the storytext, or plot events; in the graphic novel there is less room for the storytelling text. What we loose in storytelling text, however, we gain back in relevance for our students. Maybe Pride and Prejudice doesn't seem like such an old and out of date story when Eliza Bennet has a face we can see.

I have a different perspective on Canon entirely: for me, the word means what my English teacher mind needs it to mean, the accepted cultural representations of the Western world. But it also means what fanfiction makes it mean -- the world according to a specific author. In fanfiction, every text can be a source of 'canon'. To be canonical does not mean that it belongs to an elite group but rather that it follows the rules well. This, I think, is interesting -- in subverting the world of print literature and copyright, we've taken a word that meant something very insular and turned it on its ear to make it mean something inclusive.

I think if we as English teachers take the fanfiction definition of canon as our guidepost when we're choosing novels our classes might not be so universally disliked. Fanfictioneers choose their canons because they find them (or can make them) relevant to their lives. If we can do the same in English Class, using both the Canon with a capital C and the rest of the literature out there, we might get more kids on the reading wagon.

And who knows -- maybe they'll like the graphic version of "War and Peace" so much they'll be tempted to try the original...

Hello, Universe Speaking

I love and hate going back to college. I love seeing everyone and having things to read and discuss with people and sharing everything you did over your summer. I hate remembering what it feels like to be overwhelmed. Two days of class and already I have a whole novel to read, 6 articles to digest and three chapters in a textbook to prepare for discussion.

A note -- that's only for one class. It's my night class and only meets on Thursdays, but still. This is a little excessive.

But there's another thing I like about back to school -- there's a strange way the Universe seems to speak to you in the people it throws across your path. In the library, for instance, this transfer student came into the stacks where I was looking for a book and very nicely asked if I could help her find a book. Your lucky day, I said. You picked the one person out here right now who works here!

The Universe must also be trying to tell me something through my homework -- in three of my classes I've been asked to write what amounts to a short summary of my reading life. Since I've only finished with the one due today (and I rather like it) I'm going to share it here. I was given on the title as a prompt; it is called "Of Books, Reading, and Me: a Personal Essay."



When my family re-painted my room several summers ago, my parents asked me (in between moving out every single piece of furniture I owned and painting my walls Sherwood Green) if there was anything I needed to add to my room before moving back in. My answer was simple -- a bigger bookshelf. Two little shelves would suffice no longer. Already shelved two books deep, my book collection was growing and there was no place for it to go except the floor, an idea my mother wasn't particularly keen on. So in the new, taller bookshelf came, quickly filled and just as quickly crowded.


I might be a child of the digital age, but I still haven't given up on the analog version of my favorite pastime. New books are added to the shelves all the time, and with far more reward than watching space on a hard drive slowly fill with files. A full hard drive is annoying -- a full bookshelf is an accomplishment, a challenge, even. When I open a physical book, I'm opening up the culmination of four thousand years of human story-telling and -sharing technology. When I read, I owe that experience to all the people who made books possible, the men who spent hours cutting type forms and the women who slaved over paper presses and mills and the printer's children, somewhere in time, who had to put away all the size ten font in those tiny type trays, and I owe it to them to respect the house for the story.


Maybe setting a little bit of type myself has made me more aware of the physical presence of the book. After spending six hours filling three by three inch pages with my own words, and another ten hours printing them, I have a great deal more respect for men like Ben Franklin, who spent their days setting tiny pieces of type for ideas that weren't even their own. The physical presence of a book will make or break my experience of it -- Over the past summer I gave up on what was probably a very engaging story because the type was too small and too closely set for me to read it easily.


But not all my books are on my shelf, and not all my reading is done 'the old fashioned way.' Some of the short stories I read will never find themselves inside a codex, or even on the shiny screen of an e-reader. Some of the news stories or observations on life are not on the path to becoming 'blooks', or books from blogs. And I like it that way. Just as there's something magically permanent about holding a book, there's something wonderfully transitive about reading and sharing thoughts online. Unlike a book, which requires resources and much physical space and contact to manufacture and share, the internet has created a space where stories of all kinds can be shared spur-of-the-moment, without the boundaries imposed by printing off the material to be shared. I might enjoy reading analog, but I enjoy writing digital. My blog broadcasts my thoughts on reading to the whole internet-using world twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. It’s immediate, boots-on-the-ground writing; I can be as elegant or as mindless as I chose. Without a publisher to please or a specific public to satisfy, the entire world is open to my critique.

I’m a child of the Twilight generation. Not just because of Stephanie Meyer’s breakout bestseller, but because people my age are at a crossroads, not quite in the light of the vanishing Day of the Printed book nor fully immersed in the e-reader illuminated Night yet. Wherever it is I stand on the debate between whether the print book is dead or still very much living, at the point where books, reading, and my life converge there’s a single objective in mind – sharing a story in whatever way seems best. Sometimes that’s a book and sometimes that’s the internet and sometimes it’s the oldest story-sharing method of all – the human voice. When I sit down to read to my sister, it doesn’t matter to her whether I’m reading from a computer screen or a printed page; her only concern is that the story being told is a good one.

Under a Snow-Tipped Maple tree, the Village Printshop stands...

Say, that title line ain't half bad.

Writing news has been a little thin on the ground lately. I thought I’d maybe post one of the essays I’ve had to write for Writing Essays, but as those are neither indicative of a great breakthrough of any kind nor indeed very good, I felt I’d be shortchanging you. So I guess I’ll talk about my book arts project, which is to illustrate a fable, as some of you already know. I’ve chosen a rather obscure one from the writings of a Jewish author named Berechiah ben Natronai, ha-Nakdan. Task one – find and adapt fable. Done!

A dove saw flax being sown in a field, flew to the rest of the birds and said "Sisters, please come and eat the flax seed with me. If we do not eat it now, the flax will grow tall and the farmer will use it to make nets to trap us in." But the other birds ignored her, saying, "We have already eaten one meal today -- we do not need another."

However, the other doves listened, went to the field, and ate the flax, though they were not numbered enough to eat it all. When the time came after the harvesting, the doves stayed inside while the rest of the birds were snared in the nets the farmer had made from the flax.

Be careful whose counsel you discredit today -- it may be of more use to you tomorrow.

Task two is slightly harder – using the resources at our disposal at the Hill Manuscript Museum and library (HMML or Himmel, as it’s pronounced here on campus), find a 19th or 20th book artist (lithographer, typographer, engraver, fine press printer, etc) and emulate their style to illustrate your fable. I’ve chosen Eric Gill, the guy responsible for Gill Sans:

Perpetua:

And the Golden Cockerel Bible, which is the example I’m choosing to base my fable illustrations on. I actually got to handle one of these bibles, which, according to the Christie’s website, has a going auction value of a little over eight thousand pounds, or sixteen thousand dollars.

And I got to hold one.

I don't get to say this often without sounding like crazy, but I love the HMML.

Beautiful, beautiful stuff. So this is what the mock-up looks like right now, with Gill's characteristic 'inhabited capital' filled with my sower. That's the little guy underneath. I like him a lot. I think his name is Ezra. Or Schmul. Something Hebraic and nifty.

So that's my life at the moment. Lots of books, lots of engravings, lots of bad sketches, lots of printing and typesetting. Hey, a girl's got to do something with a foot and a half of snow on the ground.

Well, It Ain't Hot, But It's Off a Press...

Friends, I've been to the land of letterpress printing, and I have to say, it's pretty awesome. For once in my life, I am intensely conscious of not only the amount of work that used to go into printing anything but also the feeling of power you get when you run the press over a matrix full of type that you set and inked yourself and pull a sheet of paper out that has your work all over it in nice, sticky black ink.

It is a process full of love, and it's hard. Our first project for Art of the Printed Book wasn't actually a book at all, but rather a poster. A protest poster, to be precise. Here's mine.

Okay, I'm not protesting anything. Problem is, I couldn't find a pithy way to protest something using only a few words. One of the other things that letterpress printing teaches you is how to conserve your words -- you can't print your message if you haven't got enough letters, and wood type, the type I've used for this poster, is very expensive, so we don't have a lot of it. I was originally going to do "Don't Talk To Me About Your Sparkly Vampires" but we didn't have enough type, so I went with an homage to one of my favorite movies instead.



Dead Poets Society for the win! I had to keep explaining the poster to people, but I guess that just means more people need to watch DPS. Anyway, this project is part of ongoing events here at CSB relating to the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists who in 1968 walked into the draft office of Catonsville, Maryland and, taking draft records out of the office, staged a 'peaceful protest' by burning the draft records with homemade napalm. I guess someone said they wanted a revolution.

As a further development of this project in Book Arts, our professor brought in Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., a man very widely known in the letterpress world and quite a character in his own right. Go visit his website and buy a poster -- I'm a fan of this one. His slogan -- Put the message in the hands of the people. He does that but printing posters of his own like the one above, and he discusses topics from books to blackness and back again. Pretty awesome, in-your-face kind of guy. So as part of our workshop, we set up and printed a poster evoking the character of 60s protests but still relevant today. Here's what we came up with:

Pretty cool, yeah? Anyway, Writing Essays was canceled today, so, having a whole afternoon free, I went to the print studio and worked on another poster of my own. And I took my camera to document a little bit.

Wood type before I cleaned the ink off from the first run.

Our inking area, where I can mix color and apply ink to the brayers (those roller type things in the middle of the picture.)

Letterpress filled with BOLD and lots of furniture (the spacing material we use to make sure the type doesn't shift when we run the press over it.)

Finished product. The text at the bottom is 48 pt. Caslon Bold metal typeface and 62 pt. Caslon bold metal typeface. In case you were, you know, wondering or anything. Total prep, production, and cleaning time? Four hours.

And that's what I came up with. I had to do two runs through the press because that B in Be and Bold? Same B. Limits of letterpress again. And please don't mention the lack of 's' in Catonsville -- I had an s and second-guessed myself after my prof misspelled it on her class handouts. Typo aside, I'm actually kind of proud of it -- incorporates the Catholic social thought involved, draws the situation into the present, might prompt people to do a little more digging into who the Catonsville Nine were. And it's mostly legible from a distance.

My next out-of-class letterpress project? I'm shooting for calling cards.

New Stories to tell

A few of you might have known that next fall I will no longer be in the good ol' US of A for my academic enrichment. I'll be going to Ireland, to a little village called Spiddal in Galway. I've started a new blog, The Galway Rover, to cover my exploits of being a stranger in a strange land, and I advise you to all add it to your follow lists -- it'll be a different side of me, I think.

We had our second orientation session today, and our Faculty Director (aka The In Loco Parentis Unit Abroad) for good or ill gave us homework -- to write a future history of our trip, as if we'd just gotten back and were recounting our travels. Since I haven't done much else in the way of writing lately (except Song of a Peacebringer, which has gotten no new reviews...sadness.) I thought I would post this futurist history for you all. It's very reminiscent of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. If you're not familiar with that text, go find it and read it. I think it's a wonderful piece of writing.

It seems strange, thinking back on it now, the first few days in this new green country, tentatively foraging forth from the airport into parts unknown. Some of us were returning to the motherland and some of us strangers to all of it. But we were all of us ready, and willing, to learn. Those first few days were hard, getting used to the way the people spoke and the money and the pace of life in small, rural Spiddal. But it grew on us, and we, in turn, grew to love it.

We were told stories, dozens of stories, stories about men still living and men long dead and some about men who had never lived at all, except in the hearts of other men. Ireland is a land for storytellers, and even the ground sometimes speaks, strange stories out of a long past. All of us shared stories – Megan told us things on our trips we would never need to remember again and Professor Davis told us things we would, indeed, need to know for the quiz later. And we made our own stories too – like the time we got lost in Galway and found our way to the best fish and chip shop on the planet, or the time the girls went thrift shopping and came back with articles of clothing with their own interesting stories to tell, or the time in the pub when the guys…well, there were a lot of times in pubs. We drank our way through none too few good times in the city. We were kings and queens in our own age, heroes in our own time, unafraid to go out and see the world as it would have itself be seen. Not to conquer but to be conquered by the sights and sounds of Eire. We were open, and we had to be, to see everything that needed to be seen and a few things that didn’t. We went everywhere, and like good soldiers we never left a man or woman behind, though some of them might have wanted to be left.

We had skills, and we shared them – Our english and communication majors checked and double checked our papers, our accounting majors helped us budget, our management majors kept us all in line. We all shared laughter. We all shared pain, the pain of being away from home and the sweet pain of adventure and the pain of wearing new shoes you forgot to break in the summer before. We shared each other’s weight, carrying each other home from the pub or shouldering the burden of a day gone wrong. Not that there were too many bespoilt days, mind you.

We fed each other everything we had – enthusiasm, which came in droves from all fronts, and knowledge, which came from our professors, and food, in all kinds. The food! Katie kept us in cookies and muffins and all sorts of warm, fresh from the oven goodness and Megan, heaven bless her, made us dishes we couldn’t name with ingredients only she could identify and we put up with them anyway because eating them made her smile. Not that she ever tried foisting on us anything unfit for human consumption – she had limits just like the rest of us did. We put up with singing, too, singing and whistling and all the manner of music making, because humans like to express themselves in song, even if their singing could wake the dead.

When we were annoying, we were tolerant. When we were angry, we remembered to count to ten. When we needed silence, we gave it, and when talk was needed, we listened.