in memoriam

The last class session or two of each semester are typically devoted to students sharing with each other the texts, objects or events they created in response to a task called “a history of ‘this’ space.”

In brief, the task was initially inspired by the dearth of information on students’ lived experiences in first-year comp classrooms. In this way, it provides students with whom I work the potential of communicating something (to future readers/discovers of these collections of histories) about who they were, what they did, valued, experienced, thought, etc. at a specific point in their college careers. Students are encouraged to approach the task by defining the specific space or spaces they are considering focusing on for their history. Following this, they must decide what it is about their space(s) they would like to represent for future readers/viewers and to determine the specific methodology/methodologies they will employ while collecting data on their designated history day. Lastly, students must determine the means by which they will represent their findings.


On December 7, 2006 the members of my play theory class participated in a memorial service for “the English 320 Fresh Stories” project. Before the service proper began, Elizabeth (the creator of what she referred to as an “installation history," and member of the group that devised and facilitated the “English 320 Fresh Stories” project) arranged on the large table in the front of the room, an electric candle, a small, rose- and dove-covered black box/coffin containing colored photographs of the dolls created during the “Fresh Stories” presentation session, a framed black and white photograph of the dolls sitting unused during the other class presentation, a spiral book with the words “In Memoriam” on the cover, and a second notebook titled “Book of Condolences.” Memorial cards were distributed to members of the class before the service began. After explaining why the service wouldn’t feature any organ music (i.e., she had too much to carry and couldn’t swing lugging a CD player to class), she asked for two volunteers to assist with readings she had specially selected for the service.

After clarifying what we were doing and who we were remembering (i.e., the dis-use, and so death, of the "fresh stories" dolls, and with this, the death of Elizabeth's vision of a web-based history), she asked the first volunteer to stand and read the Langston Hughes poem entitled “Dreams Deferred” that appeared on the back of the “in memoriam” cards we received at the start of the service. "What happens," the volunteer/speaker began, "to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore--and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over--like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

Following this, the second volunteer was asked to stand and deliver the second reading, an excerpt from one of the course's assigned readings, Douglas Hofstadter’s 1985 essay, “Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity.”

“Strange though as it may sound,” this speaker began, “nondeliberate yet nonaccidental slippage permeates our mental processes, and is the very crux of fluid thought. That is my firmly held conviction. This subconscious manufacture of ‘subjunctive variations on a theme’ is something that goes on day and night in each of us, usually without our slightest awareness of it. It is one of those things that, like air or gravity or three-dimensionality, tend to elude our perception because they define the very fabric of our lives.”

After thanking her reader/volunteers, Elizabeth concluded the ceremony by passing around the "Book of Condolences," urging people to write something to and/or about the dolls. There was some confusion from members of the class who happened to be absent the days the dolls were constructed. One person in particular asked if she should "still write something even though she had never actually met the dolls."

At this time, the spiral-bound “In Memoriam” book was also passed around for the other members of the class to look at. Here, Elizabeth meticulously documents the too-brief life of her “fresh stories” dream. The book includes a much-reduced (i.e., in size or magnification) copy of the Stein article, a photograph of the cover of the collection the article was originally published in, color photos of Stein and Kress, and copies of all the documents produced before, during, and after the “fresh stories” presentation. Included here are the itinerary/objectives for the in-class presentations, the written narratives produced before and after the doll-making session, photos taken during the session, images and snippets of conversations that appeared on the facebook “fresh stories” page and emails that were exchanged between Elizabeth and myself after the “fresh stories” presentation. In one of the emails, Elizabeth suggests that one of her “main goals” with the facebook site was to have Pippa Stein see the work we did in class, join the group and/or post a response. The final page of the “life-book” features an image of the dolls sitting unused on the ledge of the room we used for the Kress presentation. Above the image, is a print out of one of the final emails she sent me concerning the status of her history: “I don’t know,” she writes, “what will become of my history or the website etc. . . . . :( ”

the baltimore fresh stories project (continued)

. . .as luck and timing would have it, students in another of my classes were getting ready to host a presentation (another of the fall semester's highlights) based on Gunther Kress’ “‘My Gawd, I made it like Australia’: Making meaning in many media.” In prep for this group presentation we had booked a large, carpeted but otherwise empty room on campus since the presenters had planned a hands-on presentation, one for which we would need plenty of space to work, that is to say, build things like race cars, a rocket ship, a fort and a theater for a puppet show. Elizabeth, though not a member of this particular class (she had actually taken the course the semester before) attended the group presentation, hoping that the dolls her class made would be given new/other life in this presentation. Plus, having taken the class the semester before, she was familiar with Kress’ work, and having spent a considerable amount of time researching Pippa Stein for the play theory class (i.e., she was particularly interested in learning more about Stein’s work and how the piece assigned for 320 had been taken up, if at all, by others) she was interested in further exploring the connections between Kress and Stein's work.

Cognizant that the Kress presentation would have a theater/puppet show component, Elizabeth and I brought the fresh stories dolls to this group presentation, hoping that the group responsible for creating a puppet show might use the ready-made dolls, rather than creating their own.

It's important to note that at this point in the semester, Elizabeth had been planning to create a final, web-based project for the play theory class, one that would serve as a tribute to Stein and Kress’ work in that it would feature the writings and photos associated with the play theory course along with the video footage she’d take during the Kress presentation. Disappointed, however, to find that the members of the puppet show group were more interested in creating their own puppets from scratch, this as opposed to using the dolls made by the play theory class, Elizabeth didn’t feel that the video she captured that day was useable. To her mind, all she had was a lot of same-looking footage (see image below), footage that depicted the dolls “sitting on the ledge of the room unused,” footage that seemed more in keeping with the opening of a “really bad Lifetime movie” than with the dynamic website that she had in mind for her final project for the play theory class.

With that, the idea for the website was completely scrapped, and Elizabeth had to come up with a different idea for the final project in the play theory class. . . .and this gets to issues related to when, why and how the in-class memorial service for the fresh stories project comes into play.

the baltimore fresh stories project (part one)

Now that tooth #15 has been taken care of and I’m pretty much back to feeling like my post-nov. 29th-self, I wanted to detail a few of the highlights of the fall 2006 semester. Problem is that the highlight I really wanted to begin with (i.e., an in-class memorial service for the “English 320 Fresh Stories” project) is nearly impossible to describe or do justice to, without first explaining what the “Fresh Stories” project was.

Some background: At the start of each semester, students are placed into groups of three or four and asked to facilitate a class session based on the texts assigned for a particular day during the semester. As the task group presentation description makes clear, the presenters’ job is not to summarize the assigned readings but to find ways of extending, updating, challenging or enacting what they understand to be the major themes, issues or arguments associated with the assigned texts.

The “English 320 Fresh Stories” project was a the result of a group presentation based on a text written by Pippa Stein titled, “The Olifantsvlei Fresh Stories Project.” The members of the presenting group were particularly interested, in the words of one group member, in exploring “the effects of a multi-modal approach to narrative construction.” More specifically still, the presenting group was particularly eager to learn how the members of English 320 might take up, and subtly alter or even radically transform, “using a limited amount of resources,” a piece of writing that each participant in the course would be asked to produce prior to attending the presentation session. To this end, two days before the October 26th presentation session, members of English 320, a play theory course, were each given a name tag that contained a different social identity (i.e., athlete, bride, movie star, police person, cat, prisoner, chef, religious figure, farmer, groom, nurse, rock star, supermodel). Members of the class were then asked to wear them nametags to the next session and to bring with them as well a piece of writing containing “five to ten sentences about the identity that appeared on their nametag.”

On the day of the presentation, the group members got to the classroom early and placed throughout the room 6-8 plastic bags containing various kinds of materials that might prove useful for constructing dolls (3-D replicas) based on the social identities their classmates had been given. For the most part, the bags contained “disposable” material, stuff that the presenters found, had on hand, or had purchased at the dollar store: empty water/soda bottles, coffee filters, yarn, bottle caps, buttons, ribbon, shower curtain rings, wire, hair ties, felt, pipe cleaners, empty coffee cans, sponges, beads, empty cardboard toilet paper/paper towel rolls and so on. On the front table in the room, the presenters had assembled materials that were intended to be shared by members of the class—scissors, glue sticks, markers, etc.

As members of the class entered the room, group members collected the written texts people had prepared for the session. The class was then given approximately ten minutes to root through the garbage bags placed throughout the room, grabbing whatever materials they thought might prove most useful or fitting for creating a three-dimensional replica of the social identity each member of the class had been given. At the end of the ten minutes we were cued to begin constructing our 3-D models. While we had not been given the option to collaborate with other members of the class while creating our written texts, we were given permission to collaborate with others while constructing our 3-D models. So, for instance, if we wanted to create a context where a police person was interacting with a farmer or a prisoner, we could do so.

I chose, for instance, to work with a student who had the cat identity, see image left. As we constructed our dolls, we began imagining scenerios where her doll might interact with my character (a movie star). We debated, for instance, whether or not the movie star and her cat would resemble each other, if they would dress alike, who would be the more dominant figure in the relationship, etc.

Before the session ended, we were asked to compose another written text, again, five to ten sentences about the identites we had just composed using the stuff we found around the room. At the end of the class session, the presenters collected the dolls and the texts we created in class, curious to learn how, if at all, their classmates’ ways of thinking and/or writing about their assigned identities had been altered as a result of creating the 3-D models. Impressed by the efforts of their classmates (i.e., the dolls came out far better than anyone expected), and amazed by how different the first and second writings were, the group members posted to blackboard the second batch of writings. Elizabeth, a member of the presenting group and the host/creator of memorial service for "Fresh Stories," had been taking photos throughout the session, and posted these to facebook, creating a special group there called “the english 320 fresh stories’: adventure in multi-modality.”

(Click here to view footage of some of the dolls created that day.)

in lieu of shamelessly plugging my own gigs on facebook. . .

i’ll be appearing at Maiden’s Choice Family Dental from Jan 2007 through March 2007, times and dates tba. if you can’t catch the show there, i’ll be playing a few gigs at Frederick Road Periodontics as well as Ingleside Endodontics--again, times and dates tba.

secret santa?

dated (delivered?) dec. 19:

i'm not sure who to thank,
but thanks for the card
and your kind words.

all i want for christmas

. . .i guess the filling on #15
is a little too close to the nerve