Weekly Recap
Spoiler: If you are one of the three people in the country who has not seen There Will Be Blood, then you won’t want to read this post.
Very busy around Brooklyn this week. I could start many places, but Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing, you may have heard, never was brought to the floor for a vote. I read some interesting articles about urban renewal, and I hear that in Long Island City (It’s one of those more urban Queens nabes) the city is planning on building lattices around the elevated subway (I guess that’s the 7 train?–must be) with a water collection system. The idea is to grow plants and flowers all around the circumference of the train and to bring in the birds and the bees. The idea will be that when you look up to the train rather than seeing the nasty old grimy city scape, you’ll catch a bit of a garden hovering in the air. Very cool idea, and it got me thinking about doing related work in my classes. There’s a movement at St. John’s to push for service learning, and since urban renewal is a growing interest of mine, if I were to incorporate service in my classes, it would be on the level of urban development and renewal. What role could my students and I help play in making this city a better place? Better start crackin’ on this.
I showed There Will Be Blood in classes this week as students will be next writing critical reviews. I’m leaning towards having them put together film reviews but I’m open to other genres as well. We’re reading Christopher Orr’s essay at The New Republic as one of our models, and Orr takes M.T. Anderson to task, especially for the ending. I remember when I first saw the film (I’ve now seen it four times) that I was so blown away about how darn good the film was, how sound and measured and careful the story line is, how perfect the acting is, and how believable each gesture, glance and look . . . I wanted to love the film, I wanted to love the ending, and I do love the ending, very much. It works for me, but the problem isn’t with the end, it’s with the hop to the end. We move from Little Boston and next thing you know H.W. and Mary are getting married. Twenty years flashes by in an instance, and maybe we were supposed to already know that Daniel Plainview’s character formation completed itself while he was in Little Boston and that the next two decades would only be a matter of his following the same greedy, hateful path. But we also know that D.P. is capable of love–he’s hardly stereotypical–and we also know that he was engaged in other major projects over the next twenty years, and since we do, isn’t it fair to assume that he would have had many other relationships with others, others as important as Eli? In any case, the film is incredible to me. Is it flawed? Of course it is. But it would be flawed if it were perfect–if you catch my rhetorical drift.
Some of my students have become rather strong bloggers. I look forward to reading their posts on a daily basis. I try to comment as much as I can. There are a few who come to mind right away who write with the best of them. Some really good stuff, and seeing this fresh work causes that old image that anyone can be a writer to present itself. But today I’m no fool.
I joined Facebook last weekend. I like it. I have installed a zombie application and have been biting people. I attacked a couple of friends, but they didn’t seem to mind. Donna’s zombie slapped me upside the head when I attacked, and I wound up losing. I went and bit some chumps, got my power up and returned to Donna’s zombie and treated her to some chomping madness. I danced and pounded my zombie chest.
I presented to faculty on the website Ning that I wrote about before, and once I get my screencast up on google video, I’ll post it. We had a good talk about integrating blogs and other media into the classes, and I’m slated to give some workshops/tutorials at the end of the semester. I got meetings this week, faculty observations, and the like. A few of us are going to pilot teaching with Ning and we’re going to start using the space for faculty virtual discussions. I’ll include future posts.
One last thing. I just found out today that Adam Koehler accepted a position at Manhattan College. Adam and I met at RSA a few years ago and hit it off. I’m excited that he’s moving out here, and I hope that he sends me an email so we can set up a meeting when he comes out here to look around.
