Category: Art

Cool and Wet, but Quiet

Early morning rain drops fall on the lake at Natchez Trace.

It’s dawn, but the sun has not yet come up. Even when it does it won’t be able to break through the solid, low sheet of stratus clouds. Make that nimbostratus clouds, ’cause it’s raining. The light, forever-drizzle as the spring warm fronts push slowly, persistently, against the winter.

Male cardinal getting ready to protect his territory.

It’s cold, but the birds are out, and so am I. Impervious to the weather, two bright males compete for the attention of a female. She stands apart, as patient as the rain. The males chase each each other from tree to tree. Their intentions are overt, their challenges obvious; yet there is so much less tension than when primates interact.

Studied indifference.

I appreciate their lack of subtlety.

I like rainy days. They bring back memories: of hard, tropical rain beating a pulsing, bass, asyncopation on a galvanized steel roof; of goalkeeping on a flooding field, where you could not even see the half-line, much less the other goal; of hiking the calmed streets of New York, dry and warm with the hood up on a bright orange raincoat.

The rain isolates and quiets the world. Though I enjoy our immersion trips, and really believe they are one of the best mediums for learning, I savor those few minutes of solitude each morning. Before the cacophony to come.

And Poetry Soothes the Savage Beast

Poetry can be disjointed, illogical and irrational. Sam Tanenhaus argues that that is why poetry helps us make sense of catastrophes and disasters.

One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.

This has been, in fact, one of the enduring “social” functions of literature — specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn’t surprising: narrative implies continuity and order — events that flow forth in comprehensible sequence, driven by motive forces of cause and effect. …

But catastrophe defies logic. It faces us with disruption and discontinuity, with the breakdown of order. The same can often be said of poetry itself. It operates outside the realm of “logic.” Rather, it obeys the logic of dreams, of the unconscious. This is especially the case with lyric poetry, with its suggestion of vision and prophecy.

— Tanenhaus (2011): The Poetry of Catastrophe, on the New York Times’ Arts Beat Blog.

Andrew Sullivan, on the Daily Dish, highlights W. B. Yeat’s “The Second Coming,” as being quite apt to the topic. It was written just after World War I (Poem of the Week).

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— Yeats (1919): The Second Coming, (via Poets.org).

Panyee F.C.: Soccer on the Lake

This cute, little, true story of how a bunch of kids (they look like adolescents) living on rafts in a lake built their own soccer field (on rafts), and eventually created the Panyee Football Club, is actually an advertisement for the Thai Military Bank (TMB), but it’s quite inspirational nonetheless. The setting and videography are also superb.

Diverse bedrooms

Image from the book, Where Children Sleep by James Mollison.
Where Children Sleep by James Mollison.

To supplement our work on the fundamental needs of humans, we can add James Mollison’s poignant pictures in his book, Where Children Sleep. It ties in well with the Diverse China pictures.

You can find more of his images in LIFE.

Even without the text descriptions, the pictures are wonderfully composed and evocative. I think I’m going to have to add this one to our library.

An interesting project would be to have my students take their own pictures of their rooms. Just in the book, some of the contrasts are quite startling.

From Where Children Sleep by James Mollison (via Visual News).

Looking for the beat

Engine room,
It could never die, never,
Because it is nine months my mother make me check out she heartbeat.

—David Rudder (1988): from Engine Room

Despite those nine months, scientists have identified a condition called beat deafness, where people just can’t find the beat.

The article claims it’s rare. My wife tells me it must be genetic.

Endurance

The Endurance frozen in the ice.

Shackelton’s Antarctic expedition remains one of the most ridiculously epic adventures I have ever encoutered. Through excellent leadership, and remarkable feats of navigation, every member of the expedition survived the destruction of their ship, The Endurance, and made their way across the harshest landscapes and oceans to find safety.

Sir Ernest Shackleton scouting the way across the Antarctic ice.

How to be a Retronaut has posted the color pictures taken by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer.

According to the State Library of New South Wales, after their ship had become irretrievably stuck in the ice:

Hurley managed to salvage the photographic plates by diving into mushy ice-water inside the sinking ship in October 1915.

– State Library of New South Wales via How to be a Retronaut.

This is kind of emblematic of the dedication of the explorers on this expedition. There’s so much for middle-schoolers to learn about dealing with hardship and immense adversity. I strongly recommend the book, but little anecdotes like this one continue to impress.

Frank Hurley with Cinematograph.

Keynes and Hayek

I used my notes and the Keynes versus Hayek music video as part of our reading this week. As usual, half the class tried skipping directly to the video, but it became pretty clear, as I suspected it would, that they didn’t understand what was going on if they had not read the notes.

We’ll be discussing the video tomorrow when we try to wrap up the week’s work, but, as one student mentioned, it can be a little hard to figure out the words in the rap. Fortunately, the Econ Stories website has been updated to include the lyrics.

Even without the lyrics, however, I really like that you can get a good idea about the competing economic theories solely from the video itself, since it’s just a very detailed extended metaphor. It’s so chock full of symbols that it could probably be used to supplement the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in our language lessons on finding symbols in texts.