1. I remember our Kellogg High School band teacher, Mr. Exum, told us a story once about a renown music combo that played in Coeur d'Alene, I think at the Athletic Round Table. A blizzard struck. Hardly anyone came to the concert. Mr. Exum attended. This combo played their asses off for the very small crowd and Mr. Exum told us that it didn't matter if we were playing for a handful of people or for a sold out crowd in Carnegie Hall (the Kellogg band never got this gig), we were to play our hearts out.
Six students showed up for my WR 122 class on Thursday. For about ten minutes or so, only five were in attendance. I could sense the students in attendance wondered what I was going to do.
I remembered Mr. Exum. My words to my students, "Let's get going. I'm going to teach my ass off for you."
And I did.
2. Elizabeth Woody, Laura Lynn Drummond, or Paul Calandrino never heard Mr. Exum's lecture on giving it your all no matter what the size of the audience. These three superb writers gave a reading at Lane Community College yesterday afternoon and the turn out was, well, dismal, in my opinion. Nonetheless, Woody, Drummond, and Calandrino read as if they had packed Carnegie Hall: I loved their work, their energy, and their generosity.
3. I'm very happy I decided that my World Literature students would write either in the classroom or at home after viewing the movie "Paradise Now". Its power left me speechless and incapable of discussing it afterward. I can almost never talk about a movie right after I see it. It's probably why I watch so many movies alone.
Showing posts with label Paradise Now. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paradise Now. Show all posts
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Three Beautiful Things 03/29-04/02/10: No Night School, Middle East Lit. and Movies, Studying the Middle East
1. The most encouraging and uplifting event of the past five days has been the experience of not teaching in the evenings. I have taught night school off and on at LCC for most of the nearly twenty years I've taught full time. Until about a year and a half ago, teaching at night worked really well for me. Now it doesn't and I finally scheduled myself out of teaching at night, starting this quarter. (Why doesn't it work for me? I think it worked when our courses were three credits and my evening classes met once a week. Now, with four credit courses, the classes meet twice a week. That started to wear me out.) This past week I went to bed early to rise early, I watched movies in the evening, and I began doing some reading. It's been good for my physical and mental state of being not to drive back out to school after coming home. That's enough. It's just good.
2. In the late stages of the spring quarter, in ENG 109, I'll be assigning my students poetry and stories from Israel, Palestine, Egypt, and other sources from the Middle East. Much literature is not explicitly political or polemical. Reading poetry and stories from the Middle East acquaints a reader with the human dimensions of everyday life in this region. I'll also be showing movies made by Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers. I wish I could also fit some Iranian movies into the course, but there's not enough time. This week I watched "Paradise Now" (a story about two Palestinian suicide bombers) and "Divine Intervention", both Palestinian movies, very different from each other, and deeply illuminating about what it feels like to live in the West Bank. "Divine Intervention" views the Arab experience in Nazareth as well as the West Bank, with special attention to the Al-Ram (a district of Jerusalem) checkpoint. It views life in these places as surreal, so the movie portrays fantasies, dreams, and absurdist vignettes of despair, all in darkly comic ways. If you'd like to see one of the movie's most famous scenes, go here. It's a fantasy.
3. I've thrown myself once again into reading about and trying to understand the history of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. It's hard. The most difficult challenge is to read and study this history with some sense of dispassion. As I'm inclined to do, I'm trying to understand the many contradictions of this part of the world. It's hard. It's haunting. It's all haunting.
2. In the late stages of the spring quarter, in ENG 109, I'll be assigning my students poetry and stories from Israel, Palestine, Egypt, and other sources from the Middle East. Much literature is not explicitly political or polemical. Reading poetry and stories from the Middle East acquaints a reader with the human dimensions of everyday life in this region. I'll also be showing movies made by Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers. I wish I could also fit some Iranian movies into the course, but there's not enough time. This week I watched "Paradise Now" (a story about two Palestinian suicide bombers) and "Divine Intervention", both Palestinian movies, very different from each other, and deeply illuminating about what it feels like to live in the West Bank. "Divine Intervention" views the Arab experience in Nazareth as well as the West Bank, with special attention to the Al-Ram (a district of Jerusalem) checkpoint. It views life in these places as surreal, so the movie portrays fantasies, dreams, and absurdist vignettes of despair, all in darkly comic ways. If you'd like to see one of the movie's most famous scenes, go here. It's a fantasy.
3. I've thrown myself once again into reading about and trying to understand the history of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. It's hard. The most difficult challenge is to read and study this history with some sense of dispassion. As I'm inclined to do, I'm trying to understand the many contradictions of this part of the world. It's hard. It's haunting. It's all haunting.
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