Comma Dot Comma

I’ll be teaching two online creative writing courses through the Piper Studio this summer, starting June 2. Discount summer rates of $100 for an eight week course. Same ones I mentioned earlier this spring, and still buckets of fun!

I’m suprised by what a fan of online writing courses I’ve become over the past four years– before I started doing it I wondered if you could create online the “warm fuzzy” atmosphere needed to encourage new or sensitive writers. As it turns out, you can. The trick is in the persona– the teacher has to have a very strong presence that sets the tone and erases the antiseptic feel of plain black letters on a white screen. Some people go the mothering route; others the philosophical route; I go the zany-yet-thoughtful, faux bossy route. It’s sort of like blogging in that you take some true version of yourself, and highlight/intensify certain aspects of it so they carry through a two-dimensional medium. Or like public speaking, where you still speak from the heart but change your pacing and volume from normal conversation. The teacher has to be the leader in humanizing the environment, and then the students usually follow suit. The medium itself becomes a way for everyone to develop his or her writing.

The other thing I’ve noticed about online teaching is that you need so many more instructions! We have no idea how much information we exchange via eye contact, tone, and body language. In a face-to-face classroom, I can give a one-line verbal assignment (”Write a poem in which an inanimate object complains”), judge from people’s expressions if they understand what I’m asking them to do, and follow up with just the right amount of explanation. Online, obviously, that does not work at all. I’ve been on the receiving end of opaque instructions and find the experience exasperating. “Answer the review questions.” What review questions? Where? Do I just answer them in my head or is there a screen where I must enter the answers? Online teachers, do not exasperate your students. Sometimes the poet in me cringes at the wordiness of online assignments, but if the person can just get straight to work without feeling confused about what needs to be done, every word is worth it. Even if there are very few requirements, I write that down: “Choose any subject, style, and length that you want.” I want my students to spend their energy on the creative process of writing and not on mindreading.

Most of my thoughts are related to dirt. The backyard and a few unsightly portions of the front yard are full of pits, trenches, and heaps of dirt, evidence of our belabored attempts to install a sprinkler system and plant a patch of grass in the backyard. Landscaping an older home (ours is vintage 1975, which I know is not old to east coasters but in Phoenix people hardly ever buy houses more than a few yrs old) involves a lot of destruction. So far we have removed:

1 rusty pool fence
3 tree stumps
1 tree
2 clumps of decorative grass
1 4×10 patch of bamboo
4 bushes
2 planters
1 yardful of knee-high weeds

We rototilled the back yard at the end of March and since then dirt has been blowing into the pool and the house at every opportunity. Mmm! Grit! Gotta love it. With all our tilling and digging and uprooting, though, we’ve uncovered a number of suprises.

1 plastic easter egg containing a mini candybar
1 carefully folded piece of magenta cloth
1 cats-eye marble (the big kind that we used to call boulders)
1 patch of asphalt
1 patch of concrete
1 coil of disconnected TV cable, which apparently connected our house and the neighbor’s at one time.
2 pre-existing non-functional drip systems
1 underground tree stump
Several bricks and paving stones
1 cockroach nest
1 bees nest
Countless nails and bolts
Countless big rocks.

Dirt, dirt, dirt. It is hard to imagine a time a time when it will be settled down and doing its job beneath a layer of grass and gravel.

It’s time for a visit from our favorite Netflix reviewer. Today, he weighs in on the movie “Circle of Friends.”

“I cry like the baby to watching this movie of girl with plumpness finding for the love. Mini Driver has for me the much of beauty to makes me wondering of her boyfriend playing with her sexy friend. I finding myself twirling in tornado of emotional for the hurtness of the Mini for suffer betrayal of lover, but for drunking by evil sexy friend. I cry the many of tears for sadnesses and triumphing. If you don’t sameness, you must be missing heart that is beatings in your chest cavity!”

An interesting post on Earth Day over on KarenJoy’s blog got me started on a long commment that I decided to convert into a post after it reached its second parenthetical aside.

Her post reminded me of some of my early experiences when we moved here from the liberal east coast. One thing about the culture of Arizona that struck me was how fiercely people resisted any label that smacked of, oh, how shall we call it– non-conservatism. On several occasions I heard people say, “I’m no _________ (fill in the blank with your favorite term, liberal, environmentalist, feminist), but…” and then share a deeply held belief or lifestyle choice that, to my mind, fit quite comfortably in that category.

Does this happen because people associate those labels with the most extreme ideas within those categories (For example, the tiny number of feminists who believe we’d be better off without any men at all)?. Abstract terms like these are catch-alls that hold a wide variety of ideas about a certain theme, and people who do identify with these labels often do not even agree with each other (Consider the label “Christian,” which I gladly accept, even though I share it with a few people who march around with signs that say “God Hates You”– an idea I do not agree with, to say the least). Is there guilt by association? Let’s take the term “environmentalist”. Some, if not many, environmentalists are motivated in their efforts at conservation by philosophies which are not Christian and in fact may be antithetical to Christianity. Should I eschew association with such a label due to the differing motivations among my fellow label-ees? I admit it’s not really a fair question since I had an answer before I even wrote it.

I’d describe an environmentalist as anyone who seriously considers, and tries to minimize, the environmental costs and consequences of their use of resources. If someone asked me if I were an environmentalist, I’d probably say yes. But in terms of actual choices about food, purchases, and use of water and energy, I suspect that my friend KarenJoy, who does not want to be called by this label, is actually more of an environmentalist than me.

I think it would be a fun experiment to take some of these assumption-and-association-prone terms and get a bunch of one-sentence definitions from people. Do you think it’s been done already?

Liberal
Conservative
Enviromentalist
Feminist
Politician
Emergent Christian
Fundamentalist Christian
Evangelical Christian
Humanist
Activist
Evolutionist
Creationist
Spiritual
Religious
Intellectual

I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’m suddenly so efficient. Dr. G has been gone most of the week, gallivanting around the country presenting his research and whatnot, and I’ve been fending for myself on the homefront. This consists, in part, of sleeping poorly and having dreams of the pool overflowing in the backyard while a row of evil Harley Davidsons charges the front. I also start to say things and then sheepishly stop, suddenly realizing that no one is there. I miss my Dr. G and will be glad to have him back. And yet, with him gone, I get so much more done. The annoying pile of tangled necklaces has even been sorted through, each one dusted and hung on a peg board; the leather sofa has been treated with a protective salve and the cushions rotated; I hung a picture and deep-cleaned the kitchen, dug up a bunch of bamboo in the backyard and treated my tomato plants for whiteflies. This in addition to the usual routines.

The question is, why? There is nothing in particular that he and I do together that would prevent me from doing things that otherwise languish undone for weeks. Granted, he did not grow up, as I did, in a home where Saturday Chores held a spot of honor just below loving Jesus and honoring your parents. So, these days, when I occasionally “get my chore on” Dr. G. opts for the Duck and Cover response. He does not believe in the Implacable Force of Chore Doing that was practically a member of my family. Perhaps my knowing that he is not a chore-mania believer subconsciously dampens my task-based enthusiasm when he’s around. Or maybe it takes plenty of homemaking effort to simply live life together, to pay the proper attention to the one I love. Most of the time, I will happily neglect any number of chores to sit out on the back patio or watch 1950’s TV shows together.

It was iron deficient. It was brittle. Its aged branches hung over the roof and creaked ominiously during storms. Its roots pressed up against the house and snaked under it. The trunk was about five feet from the front wall. It was only a matter of time until Something Bad Happened, so we signed its death warrant. The executioner came, muscles bulging just like they do on the billboard photo. He had his big truck and his posse and his ladders and his saws.

It was also one of the reasons we bought the house. It towered over the neighborhood, about three stories high with a trunk so wide we couldn’t reach our arms around it. It was a good thirty years older than the house itself, a tree that had seen the neighborhood creep up the hill in the 70’s and absorbed the sight with stoicism and aplomb. It kept one whole side of the house cool on hot days. And, being a eucalyptus, its leaves smelled great. This is Phoenix and a real tree is a treasure, except when it is a menace. A menacing treasure was our tree.

When I got home from work yesterday, all that was left was the edge of a root butting against the house and a pile of fragrant red sawdust. Alas! It was as if Dr. G smiled at me and his four front teeth were suddenly missing. It is sad to be the Destroyer of a tree.

See it here: http://commadotcomma.net/blog/2007/08/26/joining-the-landed-gentry

I’ve got a few days off from my regular job and I am spending them…. working. I’ve got two online creative writing courses that I will begin teaching (thanks for the edit Karen) come Monday, and there’s always more to do to get online courses ready than one imagines in one’s little mind when one chooses to watch movies instead of working on curriculum for multiple weekends in a row. Both courses are getting into ship-shape order now, and I’m feeling that start-of-the-course excitement. We are gonna have some fun! It has just occured to me that, since they are online, anyone could sign up, not just my fellow Phoenicians. Eight weeks, with one assignment due per week. The first course is Beginning Creative Writing, where we will work on memoir, poetry, and short stories. The second course is Beginning Poetry, where we will do five different poems (nature, persona, list, strange, rhymed) plus some revisions. I know it’s late notice, and I must confess total ignorance about the availability of space, but hey, if you’re interested, check it out. http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/workshops/index.html

There is this depressing thing at my work called a body fat meter. It measures what percent of your body weight is fat, water, and other tissue by measuring the electrical resistance in your bare feet. It prints out a receipt helpfully listing the percentages and total pounds in each category. The machine is not super-accurate but in a way, it is kind of fun to have a receipt listing my percent body fat, right where sales tax would be listed on a grocery receipt. I get on this machine every six weeks or so, and no matter how much my weight changes (ok, it doesn’t change MUCH), it always declares that my percentage is one point above the desireable range. That’s the depressing part.

Since my golly-I-need-new-pants high point in mid-December, I have begun erratically exercising more and erratically enforcing a one-food indulgence-per-day rule for myself. I occasionally endure the cheerful encouragement of the free fitness trainer at my work; he is excellent at knowing when I am plotting to quit my weight lifting reps too early. If I seem especially stubborn on this point, he will ever-so-kindly swap my weights for the next size down and make me keep going. He is unaffected by my black stare of doom, which communicates the message, “I am old enough to be your mother, youngster, so don’t even think of bossing me around again.” I would have had to begin childbearing when I was 10 yrs old for that to be true, but you are allowed to mentally exaggerate when you are resisting others’ attempts to help you get healthy. (It’s a human right,look it up on the UN website).

Unrelentingly Cheery Fitness Trainer and I have fortunately eliminated the need to buy me new pants (I wonder how he would be as a personal shopper? As far as I know his wardrobe consists entirely of sweats and basketball shorts). But that darn “desirable range” percentage point! Why must it elude me?

Two movies worth watching side by side: Ushpizin and A History Of Violence. In the first, an Israeli flick, we throw our lot in with a man who has repented of his life of crime and, with his wife, joined an orthodox community to study the Torah and start a family. Two characters from his old life suddenly appear to disrupt his hopes of a new start. In a History of Violence, which stars the fantastic Viggo Mortensen, we throw our lot in with a man who has repented of his life of crime and settled in small-town, family-values America to raise a family. Characters from his old life suddenly appear to disrupt his carefully maintained existence.
The two films could not be more different tonally—Ushpizin is brimming with Divine Providence and optimism that good will prevail. The threats that come Moshe’s way certainly feel real, but they never overshadow the sense of God’s beneficence in the midst of trials. And it’s pretty funny; an outlandishly expensive lemon serves as a key plot point, for example.
A History of Violence, on the other hand, starts at its emotional feel-good high point and deteriorates from there. I’m sensitive to onscreen violence and spent about a third of the movie with my eyes closed (Note: this movie has extreme violence so may not be a good option for everyone). God’s presence is faint and oblique; Tom, it seems, must save his own life, destroying every connection to his old ways with any weapon that comes to hand. “What can I do?” Tom asks at one point. “You can die,” says the other guy. You can guess how well that goes over.
For the man in each movie, the violent past is always looming. He thought he was free, but it has hunted him down, insisting at every turn that the new man, the gentle family man, is false. The brutal man is the real one. It brooks no arguments and gives no mercy. He has fled to the safest place he can find and it is not safe enough to protect him or his family from his old self. What is a reformed criminal to do to keep (or lose and then find again) redemption? I like these two stories together for the way they trace different answers to that question.

In this issue, you get to hear the authors read their poems aloud, if you wish! Topics include Marco Polo, psychological tests, unicycles, IV nutrition, and many other fine, rhymed items. Check it out at www.unsplendid.com.