Day 161, August 24, 2020
Beach Reading
Tonight's soundtrack: JJ Cale and Leon Russel at the Paradise Studios, LA 1979
I spent a week out in Truro, on Cape Cod. I consumed a copious amount of oysters, and other assorted seafood. I swam in the ocean, body surfed and boogie boarded. I road a bicycle along the national seashore, and hiked through a wetlands park. But perhaps the biggest thing was, for the first time in a long time, I started reading fiction again. On one beach foray I forgot my book, and was able to pull up Tolstoy's Anna Karenina on my phone and started reading that, and the next day, I remembered to bring Ishiguro's Buried Giant.
It has been a long time since I have been able to immerse myself in fiction, which I think takes a different sort of attention than what one might keep for articles or books I might read for work. In fact, I know it has been about a hundred fifty eight days since I last read fiction, just before the pandemic when the Changing Lives Through Literature reading group was in mid-swing. We had just finished reading Daniel Hales' Run Story and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. Remembering back that far, seems so long ago. The book group met on Tuesday nights. There was always coffee and cookies, sometimes some fruit. There was the smell of stale cigarettes, sometimes the funky body odor of people coming straight from work or living outside, but once we opened our books, probationers, probation officers, and judges, we all became readers.
I think Ceremony is about healing. It is about intergenerational trauma. It is about the things we humans do to one another, the beautiful and terrible things. But ultimately, it is about remembering, both the immediate past, and the past of our ancestors. Interestingly, the Buried Giant is, at least at the beginning, about forgetting. A fog has settled over the land and people seem to have lost almost all vestiges of long term memory. There are vague recollections, and vague sense of knowing something exists, but no continuity, no connection.
In some ways, I feel like those two characters, Axl and Beatrice who are traversing a landscape not fully comprehending all that has befallen them. We are all in this fog, this mist that has descended over the world and alternately sequesters us in our homes in isolation, and then there are fits, moments when we rejoin society, whether it is standing in line outside of Arnold's waiting for fried onion rings, or waiting on a stoop on Market Street watching a parade of masked revelers. And then that memory of what used to be fades away again, and we are back in our pod, back in our cocoon, back in our fog layered with NPR, the New York Times, social media, and however else we use to consume our time.
For a moment, reading fiction, even fiction about the mist of forgetfulness, was a return to that pre-state, the before times, when we could read fiction and remember things. I'm hoping that is something I can retain as I return to the back to back Zoom meetings, the emails, and everything else that seems so important, because there is something important in fiction too, in engaging the imagination, being able to dream while waking, to fall in love, to grow angry, and yes, to even die through characters we read about, and this helps us grow in our waking days.
See you in my dreams.
Stay safe.
Stay healthy,
Leo
From Our Friends:
From the Community Economies Resource Network:
There is section that has resources related to teaching,
https://www.communityeconomies.org/welcome/using-book/use-undergrad-teaching.
This includes a full set of materials from a one-semester course based
on the book,
https://www.communityeconomies.org/welcome/use-undergrad-teaching/teaching-tbte-hong-kong.
You are welcome to use and adapt these.
There's also a list of films and related resources,
https://www.communityeconomies.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/Films-for-teaching-TBTE%2C%20Updated.pdf.
recent materials including Caroline's The Banker Ladies (see
https://www.communityeconomies.org/index.php/news/banker-ladies), and a
bunch of terrific videos that Kelly has done for teaching (and that are
on her YouTube Channel, see
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJEJk_h45NCb_GWjf81Zv5eLJ3QNXFokb).
From the Rural Assembly:
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Today's Online Teaching Tips:
From Academic Impressions:
How to Boost Student Engagement - Even Online
Blog | Gray Associates
Read what Dr. William Massy, author of Resource Management in Colleges and Universities, has to say. In his new blog post "How to Boost Student Engagement - Even Online,” Dr. Massy discusses different approaches and techniques he has used successfully in the past.
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