Throwing Out the Past

When not working in the yard or cleaning my home office during the short break that I have before fall semester classes start, I have been reading four years of a journal that I kept between 1980 and 1984.

My entries initially focused on the poetry that I was writing for some of my classes. At that time, I focused on ideas more than sensory perceptions in my poems. I was also fixated on line length in my poems and altered my language to fit the length of the line, not recognizing that my foremost aim should be clarity. One of my teachers, a visiting poet with whom I took a short tutorial during my last semester of college, recommended that I become conscious of an audience when I write. That awareness would have made my writing more accessible and would have allowed me to worry less about form. Making the transition at that time was difficult to achieve. My entries sometimes reflected my anger at my teachers and classmates for not recognizing what I was attempting to achieve in my poems.

After I finally finished my undergraduate degree, I started to record my job search efforts. Although Wichita, where I was living at the time, had a bus system, it wasn’t convenient or readily accessible. My job efforts were hampered by not having a vehicle. It would have been so much easier finding even a temporary job if I had had access to a car. I probably wouldn’t have lived in the city if I had had a choice. The noise from barking dogs and neighbors in the same apartment building often made sleeping difficult.

There was a marked difference in the entries I was writing during my job search. My entries became much more descriptive as I recorded my employment search and my observations. Not having any family nearby and having very few friends, I often wrote much more in my journal during holidays, often recording things that I had done when I was much younger.

Later, these entries described my move to Connecticut, where I temporarily lived with my sister before I moved to Hartford and earned a living of sorts by proofreading and substitute teaching. Several of the last four or five blue books described my relations with a woman I had met at work.

Overall, while sometimes painful to read, these blue books record how I apprenticed myself to language. I had written plenty of essays in college. Even so, it took this regular habit of writing for myself before I became comfortable with my writing voice. In retrospect, it wasn’t important what I wrote; it was more important that I gained practice in using language.

Jan Harbeck: A New Discovery

A recent review of Jan Harbeck's The Sound the Rhythm led to my discovery of older titles in his discography, particularly In the Still of the Night and Copenhagen Nocturne. Sometimes when I'm riding the recumbent bicycle in the living room, I turn on the TV, click on YouTube, and call up Jan Harbeck's "Harlem Nocturne" and "I Love Paris," both of which appear on the Copenhagen Nocturne album, and both of which still allow me to pedal more than four miles in twenty minutes. I am including these videos below. I have not yet had the time to burn my downloads of his albums onto CD. That task is reserved for when I finish grading my student essays this summer.

I mentioned once before that I provide my students with examples of the music that I listen to while grading their essays. I have included these two videos of Jan Harbeck in my list of music selections. It will be interesting if the students say anything about this music next week, the last week of the summer session.

Pictures in Canvas_Spring 2019

As I probably mentioned once before, one thing I like about Canvas, the learning management system that I am using for my online classes, is the ability to add my own pictures to designate the assignment modules. I often think of these pictures as metaphors for what the students are asked to do in any one assignment module. My pictures for Spring 2019 appear below. I have tried to get student feedback, but no one has yet commented on my pictures and what meaning that they convey.

The last four pictures come from a park located above the Missouri River in Leavenworth. I enjoy walking along North Esplanade Park and often take my camera with me. The park where I used to walk has been closed off since March because of the flooding.

The students were asked to take a position in the argumentative synthesis. That view from a solitary park bench has been enlarged to show the incorporation of more sources in the expanded argumentative synthesis. The revision assignment reveals the rapidly approaching end of the semester. Earlier, the students are greeted with the serenity of the introductory materials before they start taking a path in the first week of class and cross a bridge into critical reading for the rhetorical analysis.  The picture for the informative synthesis, on the other hand, is the closest thing, and the most realistic, to what the students face in that assignment as they compare and contrast what appears in three articles on the same topic.

Long before I decided to pursue degrees in English, I wanted to be a photographer. I had enlisted in the Air Force with that intention right after I finished high school, only to learn that I am color blind and not qualified for that career field in the military. That initial interest in photography appears in my playing with the pictures that my students see in Canvas.

Flowering Trees

The flowering trees have been particularly pretty this spring. These pictures were taken over a two week period and show some of the changes that occurred during that time. I sometimes get outside in the afternoon to take a walk along the Missouri River. I can justify the time by telling myself that I can use some of these pictures in my online class to designate certain assignment modules.