The deadening of a tin roof

7,302. That is how many words I wrote yesterday on William Blake and read today in a lecture entitled "What is so fearful about Blake's Symmetry." And why I did that will just have to wait.

Many noticed a delay in posting last week and I did not state why it occurred when I did return at the end of the weekend. Did you read closely? Then you saw that I returned! (I am writing now as I speak when teaching my students reading comprehension strategies). Want some more? When the question asks who, it is best if you respond with a person. What will usually be a thing. Whenever you see Why, ask yourself if it is necessary to use because in the answer. And Whither means place to which. Actually, I do not teach this one, nor do I teach whence. Alas. I say again Alas. I can barely succeed in Where being a place. I don’t know how many times I have heard “Where is ColPro” la solution: Hannah Montana (actually that was a mean-spirited pastiche of the actual answers). Speaking of Hannah Montana, take a look at this picture. Now it is not here, it is me—is it not ever so flattering? I include it under a mention of Hannah Montana because all the students want me to talk about her and so thinking that I would humor them during one exercise of drawing on the board I named the caricature Hannah Montana. OOOOPH-TA what a revolt I had. Apparently Hannah Montana has bangs and my girl most definitely did not. Well, now I now better. This was one of the best activities I did, the whole drawing on the board thing. It came as a result of studying for the exam that I administered yesterday and today. I had the students come and draw (some are really extraordinary artists and it is fascinating to watch their different styles that slowly bring forth a picture). I made them include clothing and a food item. Then the class described the different people. After, I wrote the descriptions and had the students draw accordingly. That is how I came to be on the board. And the reason I am sad? It is because I can’t find the monkey. That may seem a non sequitor, but it is not at all. You see this week I taught prepositions and for one of them I included a monkey on a branch. I then asked Abdoul, where is the monkey. Abdoul is a young man who never pays attention. Well, he did not know. Others were eager to help. “The monkey is on the branch.” On to other prepositions, behind, in front of, outside. “Abdoul” I shouted out of nowhere, “Where is the monkey?” Well he got half the answer. Three prepositions later, I again asked. Boy oh boy did he ever know where that monkey was this time. How very satisfying. But then it turned into a great game—much like POINT! Of the first week. Whenever I walked into the class, the students all turned to me to ask where the monkey was. As I left it was to a chorus of where is the monkey, where is the monkey. (for a very funny stand-up comedy scene about monkeys and trees, watch Eddie Izzard for my inspiration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1sQkEfAdfY

Ahh, but I was distracted with my didacticism. I meant to tell you whither I went on Saturday and whence I returned. The elections were Saturday and Sunday, so Phil wanted to get out of town. Off we went in the Lutheran mobile, Phil, Mia, and myself. After a while of driving and one police inspection, we whirled off the main road and down a ravine. Then up through a creek and across a roadless meadow. But wow, was it ever worth it. There we were at a small cottage next to a lake. We were going camping! And we did, we even slept in a tent. There was no electricity though so we went to bed at 8.30. Now that sure is hard when I usually go to bed at midnight and awake at 6.30. But I can count sheep with the best of them, after all I still want to herd sheep on the slopes of Mt. Ida in the hopes that pretty goddesses will come and ask me to make a decision that will affect the entirety of western literature. We camped and canoed and I sat beside the lake and caught no fish despite having a line with bait in the water.

But I am sure you burn to know (much like a certain Tiger, eh?) about the number heading this post. About four weeks ago, Oliver—the head of English at ColPro—was telling me about a second job he has teaching at a private school. They were working on the poems of Blake. He asked if I liked Blake’s work and I responded positively. The next week, he asked when I would like to give my lecture on Blake’s poems. How out of the blue can one get! But since I am rather starved for academic settings, I agreed. This is, let you know, without having read Blake since my freshman year at Bard when we read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. But I have The Tiger memorized, since it once seemed like something I ought to do. So I agreed to give a lecture two weeks away. And the time passed and I learned that I would have two hours. Well, I figured it was about time to actually read something. Out came the iPad and down(loaded) came the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience. And with them turned on my PhD candidate mind (actually the mind belongs to an accredited Master, as well at this point). Turns out I have a great deal to say about what I termed, stealing from Blake, his fearful symmetry. I unveiled a series of readings across the doubled poems that showed him deeply antagonistic to the industrial revolution, the hypocritical church, and the privilege of the imagination, and the wisdom of the pre-natal child brought into a world of suffering on account of having to hide ignorance and suffer “mind-forged manacles.” None of this is particularly new, but the way I did it was. I analyzed the deployment of various meters and rhyme schemes. It was tremendously successful, and at the close three of the teachers at Mercy Bilingual School all congratulated me and asked to have a copy of the talk that they could study further. It was a pretty well structured talk as well, opening as it did with an emphasis on the industrial revolution and specifically the change in textiles (which I naturally linked to the Text in Textile). Following this I gave a talk on the literary milieu, with an emphasis on Romanticism. And then onto the talk. It was great fun. I stood and lectured, then would turn and write on the board with such definitions as Metapoetic, Trope, Concatenation, Anapestic heptameter, and so on and so forth. Here is an example of something I said. On the poem Holy Thursday in Songs of Innocence, there is an identically titled poem in Experience. Here is the first stanza:

’Twas on a holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,

The children walking two and two, in red, and blue, and green:

Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,

Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames waters flow.

Unlike our introductions, these two poems do not at first seem very similar, apart from their titles. The one from Innocence has three stanzas, rhyming aabb in heptameter (seven feet). It is a poem of great solemnity and its long poetic lines mimic the long lines of the children flowing through. Along the lines of this metrical mimesis, we can see that the children advance two by two even as the rhyme scheme advances two by two (aa, bb, etc).

Following this I have a lengthy discussion of the simile, the idea of purification by filth. The whole discussion ends by pointing to the fact that the church forces this pageant on the children in order to elicit pity (i.e. donations) from observers. Thus the children are like the Thames because the Thames connected London to its mercantile empire.

I did similar scenarios with eleven other poems. Afterward, there was supposed to be question and answer, but it was deeply unhelpful because the students just wanted me to answer questions in the little preparation booklet for their Exam that they take (it is an international one like the Bac). But if they had listened to my talk, they would know that I had answered “Explain why Blake uses simple sentence structures.” Or, “Could one say that Blake opposes the Industrial Revolution.” Or “What emphasis does Blake place on prophecy.” All these question I had answered. So, that was too bad. Then the teachers and I went to the headquarters and drank cokes and chewed meat-on-sticks. It was enormously satisfying. One other wondrous moment came as I was reading a particularly passionate section of my paper—on church Hypocrisy—and the skies split open and rain drowned out my ability to talk by striking so hard on the tin roof. I had to wait a while.