Simply Similes

Even if it's only as an aside, I sometimes like to isolate a delectable sentence or two for my students so they have occasion to think about the power and the beauties of language use, sentence construction, etc. I've been reading a profile of Steve Buscemi in the current New Yorker (during my 42 seconds of leisure time this week) and Woolf's To the Lighthouse for my Brit Lit survey class, and each has caused me to pause over similes -- one of the humorous variety, one of the stunning variety. You'll smile knowingly (if you can picture Buscemi) when John Lahr describes him by noting that "nothing about Buscemi's physical presence suggests the poetic lineaments of masculine film glamour. He is pale, almost pallid--as if he'd been reared in a mushroom cellar. In a certain light, he can look almost cadaverous. His eyes are large and bulgy, with a hint of melancholy. When he smiles, his mouth displays a shantytown of uneven, uncapped teeth."

Woolf may be the most accomplished 'simile-ist' I've ever encountered. Consider this one from To the Lighthouse, which finds Mr. Ramsay, in an endearing if ultimately unsuccessful way, trying to make amends with his young son, James (although, now that I look at it, it's only properly a simile in the mind of Mrs. Ramsay as she compares him to a sea lion!). The passage then moves into a positively stunning example of descriptive writing (amateur nature photographers like myself will appreciate the concluding image): "Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands when charging at the head of his troops, Mr. Ramsay rather sheepishly prodded his son's bare legs once more, and then, as if he had her leave for it, with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening air which, already thinner, was taking the substance from leaves and hedges but, as if in return, restoring to roses and pinks a lustre which they had not had by day."

My 5 for Your 5, Part II

Well, hats off to Andy after the big premiere of "The Tain" last Thursday night. The man is equal parts Kurosawa, Tim Burton, and Peter Jackson, but all Andy Smetanka! Seriously, though, it was a delightful and (momentarily) restorative interlude in my evening of class prepping (and if he can learn from the epic inclinations of Kurosawa and Jackson for his next film, maybe he can detain me from school work for three hours instead of twenty minutes!).

All of this begs the question, of course, of what you would nominate as your Top 5 films from your moviegoing resumes. This may be the most difficult and provisional Top 5 list to do (I guess music will be next?!), but here's an attempt:

• Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders' most transcendent film; haunting, poetic, beautiful)
• Jaws (I can never get enough of this one, perhaps because, while still thrilled by the narrative, I increasingly appreciate the craft and the genius of the filmmaking. It's also probably the most memorable "film event" of my life: my grandparents took me to see it as an eleven year-old, against my mother's strict warning that they not do so! I remember wearing brand new sneakers that night, which ensured that my visceral discomfort stretched from head to toe. Incidentally, my grandparents would further enrage my mother by taking me, the following summer, to see Tarzan -- the version where Bo Derek is naked for about 100 minutes; this film (but for Bo, of course) would undoubtedly be in my list of Top 5 most horrible films I've ever seen).
• The English Patient (This was also in my Top 5 literary works list. I'm a sucker for this film. I hope Anthony Minghella has a long career, because I think he's an amazing director. This is one of those rare cases where book and film nourish and augment each other).
• It's a Wonderful Life (Do I really need to justify this one? Is there a film with a bigger emotional payoff at the end than this one?)
• Cinema Paradiso (This is perhaps the most flawed of the five films I include, but you have to love a film that celebrates the love of film. And it comes with its own wallop of an emotional payoff during the poignant coda).

It's painful to leave out Jackson's stirring Lord of the Rings films, and somehow I feel Star Wars should be in the running merely because of the movie experience it offered to this then twelve year-old ("You're all clear, Kid, now let's blow this thing and go home!" ah, the goosebumps!) -- it's also the only film I ever saw more than twice (five times, in fact) in the theater ... and I've neglected comedies (but I'm expecting Tim will help me out there!). So, have at it. And, Kate, we're not going to let you get away without an offering here!

Pathways

Greetings everyone. Thanks for the lively discussion about digital composing yesterday. When all was said and done I feared I had somehow managed to come across as suggesting we're dealing with an either/or proposition here in terms of "old" essay/"new" essay, "traditional" comp/digital comp, etc. There's in fact a fertile range of hybrid, middle positions here, and we'll help both ourselves (as individual teachers of writing, as a discipline, etc.) and our students if we're mindful of that territory in whatever modest ways we can. As with many of our classroom practices and beliefs, the goal is to reach as many students as possible, to validate their voices, to give them the rhetorical skills to go out and succeed in the world (Jake said it well yesterday in stating that we want students, ultimately, not so much to be able to write a lab report or a research paper as to be better, more able, more confident "composers").

By acknowledging other sets of literacy skills, my sense is that I have additional pathways to those students who may not be strong in alphabetic literacy; meanwhile, the students who are strong in alphabetic literacy can become more diversely aware and skilled rhetoricians. And there is the fact (even if it's not yet visible to most as the huge paradigm shift it will eventually be seen to be) that new media (and don't forget that pen and paper were once new "writing technologies," too) put us -- as writers, as students, as teachers -- in a new relation to writing. Because the history of literacy shows us that we can expect profound changes in the ways we make meaning and compose, will we (in English departments, in Composition programs, in the arts generally) resolve to be in the camp of the inventors, the determiners?

By the way, speaking of "pathways," I just chanced upon this passage from Patricia Dunn's terrific book, Talking, Sketching, Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing. See what you think: "There are at least three strong reasons to use multiple, alternate strategies to teach writing. First, because words are so powerful, we must use all available means to help students discover the power of words and their own power to use them. As Robert Scholes wrote, 'Textual power is ultimately power to change the world.' Second, we must reach as many students as possible and we must help them reach their full potential. Third, and at the very least, we must 'do no harm.' Using multiple ways of knowing also addresses a pedagogical injustice that is both systemic and local. Throughout most of the educational system, and especially in writing classes, students are forced to use linguisto-centric tools to perform virtually all intellectual tasks."

"Composition is partly failing on all three counts. We are not using all available means of helping students realize and use the power of written text. We are relying too much on linguistic pathways, probably because that' s our preferred inroad, and we're not taking full advantage of what students can teach us about oral, spatial, visual, social, or other ways of knowing. Therefore, we are excluding people. In addition, the linguistically talented students who tell us they 'love English' are not developing as much as they could be as thinkers because they (and we) are missing the insights from pathways others could show us. Finally, we might be doing harm, albeit inadvertently, to students who know things in ways we do not. They fail our courses, but it is we who are failing them. We disrespecting their other intellectual contributions, even as we are losing what they could teach us."

For those few nuts out there who might want to pursue this line of thinking, and who might be interested in the argument that connects digital expression with classical rhetoric (part of the argument goes that hypertext and new media evoke the older rhetorical arts of linking, cataloging, annotating, collecting, etc.), you might check out Richard Lanham's wonderful (and seminal) book, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (1993).