ON THE CUT AGAIN
to write, and so to
teach.
Last Wednesday, I posted a short piece of impressions and recollections
from a walk across campus on a preternaturally beautiful early Spring day, the
kind that bring all sorts of splendid vitality to a university not always known
for weather or wild abandon. Last week brought both, and this week -- after a
weekend that saw an inch and a half of rain and almost four inches of snow --
brought even more of the same, nudging the mercury -- and so too the merriment
-- up another ten degrees or so.
Today it's a bit warm, but yesterday was absolutely spectacular. And I was faced, at three in the afternoon, with a class of twenty bright young minds but dark, sad faces, junior and senior economists who came to class -- hurray for the small favors of loyalty and required attendance! -- but really wanted to be anywhere else. I could not blame them. If only because I felt the same way. And so I pulled from my overflowing bag of pedagogical tricks a sure-fire, can't-miss exercise for a writing class distracted by the sights and sounds of outdoor frolics: the Sunny Day Sketch.
At CMU, it's not uncommon to see art classes up and out and all over campus, plopped down in front of a building, a tree, a statue, sketch pads open, pens or pencils or charcoals blazing, capturing little impressionistic bits of a campus at rest. And so I send my writers to do the same: to stake out a bench or a wall or a nice patch of grass, to open up their writing notebooks, and to set their pens or pencils ablaze for thirty blessed minutes, so that they might capture little impressionistic bits of a campus at play.
Write what you see. Write what you hear. Write what you think about what you see and hear. Sketch, in your own free-flowing words, a half-hour of a sunny day on campus.
I've been collecting and reading them all day. They are, as always, uniquely sincere and sincerely unique. Entertaining. Insightful. A loose collection of lovely lessons in the power and the possibility of the written word.
For the record, and for a snapshot of the Carnegie Mellon cut on a deliriously beautiful early April afternoon, here's my sketch:
WRITIN' ON A SUNNY DAY
3:25pm . 4.5.05
The air is still. Old Glory droops and drops and does not flutter.
The campus is alive. Teeming, restless, rustling, shimmering in the sun. Voices carry and rumble and blend, a cacophony of chatter indecipherable on my left, from the corner of the Fence, where twenty-something twenty-somethings congregate, shuffling in the paint-drop pebbles, cueing up bad country music on a pair of flat, muddy speakers, laughing and smiling and looking around, almost as if they can’t believe this is Carnegie Mellon in April.
I can’t believe it either.
The breeze picks up, blowing gently across my back, my neck, my rolled-up-sleeve-bared forearms. The flag is full and flying now, extended, fluttering right to left and showing all its stars and stripes. Unlike its country, it has nothing to hide.
A call of Lollipops! breaks the reverie, the first audible, decipherable word I’ve heard. I look up and see a little boy walking by, 2, maybe 3, holding his Dad’s hand and looking around bewildered, clearly struggling to process what he sees and hears.
I can relate.
Country segues to hip-hop, but hip-hop doesn’t last long. The choice is overruled, vetoed, replaced instead with Talking Heads. "Life During Wartime." (Heard about Houston, heard about Detroit, heard about Pittsburgh, PA.) Nice choice. And, of course, appropriate.
There’s a lot of flesh today – bare arms, bare legs, bare chests – but less, actually, than I expected. Some shocking restraint on a sunny spring afternoon. Perhaps because we saw some of this lovely weather last week. Perhaps not. Either way, I’m pleasantly surprised.
A young woman waves. Far away, near Purnell, her target waves back. Another woman bends down and picks up some shoes – red and white, maybe suede; hard to tell from this distance – puts them on and trudges slowly, reluctantly away. It can’t be class, but clearly she has a calling, however unwanted.
A makeshift slip’n’slide unfolds. It was only a matter of time. Black and wet, clock to grass, with frighteningly pale frat boys body-sliding and laughing and slowly, surely killing the grass beneath them.
U2 now. "Beautiful Day." The DJ is irony-free. Nice.
Haseeb rolls by on a neon green skateboard, turns the corner, rolls left, and heads toward the UC. Pops a wheelie, stays upright. This is, if not progress, at least process. And it is good.
To my left, a group of five students sit and lean and luxuriate on the lawn. The way they’re spread and sprawled, relaxed and comfortable and enjoying some quiet, simple moments, they remind me of that great scene, and the movie poster, from Sideways. One more body in this bunch, but the body language is the same: late afternoon leisure, and not wanting it to end.
One bike, then another. The first cell phone: a full 20 minutes in, which must be some kind of record. And so some small measure of my lost faith in humanity is restored. Maybe this is a sign. Maybe sunshine conquers cell phones. One more reason to move to Arizona.
A scream. A laugh. Two shirtless, hat-backward frat boys grab a girl, one at the hands, the other at the ankles, and carry her kicking and screaming to the hose. They launch her down the slide. The crowd cheers. She is not pleased.
I am so over you, she shouts. Then, I’m fucking dirty now!
Her shirt and her mouth bear witness.
Girl #1 has barely calmed down when Girl #2 gets slide-napped. Yellow shirt. Jeans. Sandals. She protests less, takes it better. But the novelty wears off quickly. Fewer cheers this time. The crowd, perhaps because it’s been listening to blaring hip-hop misogyny the last few minutes, is desensitized already.
Preppie at 12 o’clock. Black polo, upturned collar, white t-shirt underneath. Second upturned collar I've seen today. I’m having bad 80s flashbacks, wondering if the guy is wearing penny-loafers. Maybe some Drakkar Noir. Where’s Judd Nelson when you need him?
Girl #3. Stolen. Carried. Slipped and slid. No reaction at all this time. Just another walk-by wetting in the ‘hood, and nobody saw nothin’.
Some guy with a yellow marker is double-cheating: coloring a sun on the Fence. No paint. In broad daylight. I wait for the Fence Police to descend. They don’t.
I’m disappointed, but not by the day.
A potbellied kid fires up a pot-bellied charcoal grill. It’s spitting smoke and fire like some long gone steel mill – them smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of God into a beautiful sky of soot and clay – and so a subtle reminder that, come sun and sweet, blue sky, we are still in Pittsburgh. Somewhere, Andy Carnegie lies in state, smiles, counts the money he made and gave away, the great benefactor and now the beneficiary, the dead man who made this good day possible.
Today it's a bit warm, but yesterday was absolutely spectacular. And I was faced, at three in the afternoon, with a class of twenty bright young minds but dark, sad faces, junior and senior economists who came to class -- hurray for the small favors of loyalty and required attendance! -- but really wanted to be anywhere else. I could not blame them. If only because I felt the same way. And so I pulled from my overflowing bag of pedagogical tricks a sure-fire, can't-miss exercise for a writing class distracted by the sights and sounds of outdoor frolics: the Sunny Day Sketch.
At CMU, it's not uncommon to see art classes up and out and all over campus, plopped down in front of a building, a tree, a statue, sketch pads open, pens or pencils or charcoals blazing, capturing little impressionistic bits of a campus at rest. And so I send my writers to do the same: to stake out a bench or a wall or a nice patch of grass, to open up their writing notebooks, and to set their pens or pencils ablaze for thirty blessed minutes, so that they might capture little impressionistic bits of a campus at play.
Write what you see. Write what you hear. Write what you think about what you see and hear. Sketch, in your own free-flowing words, a half-hour of a sunny day on campus.
I've been collecting and reading them all day. They are, as always, uniquely sincere and sincerely unique. Entertaining. Insightful. A loose collection of lovely lessons in the power and the possibility of the written word.
For the record, and for a snapshot of the Carnegie Mellon cut on a deliriously beautiful early April afternoon, here's my sketch:
WRITIN' ON A SUNNY DAY
3:25pm . 4.5.05
The air is still. Old Glory droops and drops and does not flutter.
The campus is alive. Teeming, restless, rustling, shimmering in the sun. Voices carry and rumble and blend, a cacophony of chatter indecipherable on my left, from the corner of the Fence, where twenty-something twenty-somethings congregate, shuffling in the paint-drop pebbles, cueing up bad country music on a pair of flat, muddy speakers, laughing and smiling and looking around, almost as if they can’t believe this is Carnegie Mellon in April.
I can’t believe it either.
The breeze picks up, blowing gently across my back, my neck, my rolled-up-sleeve-bared forearms. The flag is full and flying now, extended, fluttering right to left and showing all its stars and stripes. Unlike its country, it has nothing to hide.
A call of Lollipops! breaks the reverie, the first audible, decipherable word I’ve heard. I look up and see a little boy walking by, 2, maybe 3, holding his Dad’s hand and looking around bewildered, clearly struggling to process what he sees and hears.
I can relate.
Country segues to hip-hop, but hip-hop doesn’t last long. The choice is overruled, vetoed, replaced instead with Talking Heads. "Life During Wartime." (Heard about Houston, heard about Detroit, heard about Pittsburgh, PA.) Nice choice. And, of course, appropriate.
There’s a lot of flesh today – bare arms, bare legs, bare chests – but less, actually, than I expected. Some shocking restraint on a sunny spring afternoon. Perhaps because we saw some of this lovely weather last week. Perhaps not. Either way, I’m pleasantly surprised.
A young woman waves. Far away, near Purnell, her target waves back. Another woman bends down and picks up some shoes – red and white, maybe suede; hard to tell from this distance – puts them on and trudges slowly, reluctantly away. It can’t be class, but clearly she has a calling, however unwanted.
A makeshift slip’n’slide unfolds. It was only a matter of time. Black and wet, clock to grass, with frighteningly pale frat boys body-sliding and laughing and slowly, surely killing the grass beneath them.
U2 now. "Beautiful Day." The DJ is irony-free. Nice.
Haseeb rolls by on a neon green skateboard, turns the corner, rolls left, and heads toward the UC. Pops a wheelie, stays upright. This is, if not progress, at least process. And it is good.
To my left, a group of five students sit and lean and luxuriate on the lawn. The way they’re spread and sprawled, relaxed and comfortable and enjoying some quiet, simple moments, they remind me of that great scene, and the movie poster, from Sideways. One more body in this bunch, but the body language is the same: late afternoon leisure, and not wanting it to end.
One bike, then another. The first cell phone: a full 20 minutes in, which must be some kind of record. And so some small measure of my lost faith in humanity is restored. Maybe this is a sign. Maybe sunshine conquers cell phones. One more reason to move to Arizona.
A scream. A laugh. Two shirtless, hat-backward frat boys grab a girl, one at the hands, the other at the ankles, and carry her kicking and screaming to the hose. They launch her down the slide. The crowd cheers. She is not pleased.
I am so over you, she shouts. Then, I’m fucking dirty now!
Her shirt and her mouth bear witness.
Girl #1 has barely calmed down when Girl #2 gets slide-napped. Yellow shirt. Jeans. Sandals. She protests less, takes it better. But the novelty wears off quickly. Fewer cheers this time. The crowd, perhaps because it’s been listening to blaring hip-hop misogyny the last few minutes, is desensitized already.
Preppie at 12 o’clock. Black polo, upturned collar, white t-shirt underneath. Second upturned collar I've seen today. I’m having bad 80s flashbacks, wondering if the guy is wearing penny-loafers. Maybe some Drakkar Noir. Where’s Judd Nelson when you need him?
Girl #3. Stolen. Carried. Slipped and slid. No reaction at all this time. Just another walk-by wetting in the ‘hood, and nobody saw nothin’.
Some guy with a yellow marker is double-cheating: coloring a sun on the Fence. No paint. In broad daylight. I wait for the Fence Police to descend. They don’t.
I’m disappointed, but not by the day.
A potbellied kid fires up a pot-bellied charcoal grill. It’s spitting smoke and fire like some long gone steel mill – them smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of God into a beautiful sky of soot and clay – and so a subtle reminder that, come sun and sweet, blue sky, we are still in Pittsburgh. Somewhere, Andy Carnegie lies in state, smiles, counts the money he made and gave away, the great benefactor and now the beneficiary, the dead man who made this good day possible.
Posted: Wed - April 6, 2005 at 03:06 PM
Quick Links
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Categories
Archives
Terror Alert
Brilliant Satire
Required Reading
Traffic Count
Official Muse
Syndication
Carbolic Wear
Y Chromosomes
Some Perspective
On Tour
XML/RSS Feed
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM