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It's another writing
period and this freshman is stuck. He thinks he's done, so I
look it over. I see that there's more to say and help him see
it, too. He gets the idea and jumps into the writing.
But now, a few minutes
later, he's drawing on himself. A closer look shows that he has
sketched S T U D Y hugely across the back of his hand and snaking
onto his wrist. I shake my head slowly in grand teacherly fashion.
These freshmen love
to write on themselves (sometimes words, often quite intricate
arabesques); but when I suggest that we all forego paper and
write our next essay across our bodies, they give me weird looks.
Well, I suppose I deserve those looks for such an outrageous
notion; but I do find something very attractive about it, similar
to the thrill I get when I click on the overhead and see these
huge words blasted across the wall. I like to find language in
surprising places. Words are facts in the world, as solidly present
as trees or rocks or bodies of whatever denomination. We really
do read the world, after all. I've always gotten a kick out of
Jenny
Holzer's
tricky, grand work with language on display in public spaces.
Jeanette
Winterson
has a novel called Written on the Body, I think, which
I have not read.
T-shirts with any
number of profound or stupid messages and corporate logos tacked
onto any bit of clothing have made the next step inevitable:
words belong on the body as certainly as on clothing. Tattoo
them, brand them, plop them down in ballpoint ink. But the biggest
question remains: what will you say? what will you write? I'd
hope that it would not be an advertisement for anything other
than yourself and your own mind.
Can you tell that
we're close to the end of the semester? About half-way through
the next-to-last class today, a wave of weariness swept over
me. I wrote, "...then it stops being fun despite the fact
that many of them are working seriously on this project. It just
stops being fun. What does? The teaching, the being here, the
telling them over and over to do this, the fielding of simple
questions like errant flies buzzing." We have these moments
at semester's end. But we get over them.
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