| September'99 | . |
This Journal |
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What came in the mail today? I mean the real mail, brought to this real place by an actual human being with hands and feet and a silly little USPO vehicle. What came? A bunch of good stuff. First there was a computer discount catalogue from which I will buy nothing. Then there were three white envelopes from very good causes that I probably cannot afford to fund right now. The Secondary Reading League announces a meeting way down at Rich East in Park Forest at 4:30 on a Thursday. No way. Then there was this big brown envelope whose return address told me that this was important stuff from Sr. Grace. Sure enough, inside was the recent number of JCA's brand new school paper, The Victory View. This is a very impressive creature, packed with pretty good writing and photographs by some of my favorite people. It's a big twelve pages. It's on real newsprint. It has serious graphic devices...and some spot color used effectively (mostly). And what about the content? What I've read so far tells me that there's a grave (but not too grave) effort to keep it professional. These guys have set the bar pretty high. Mrs. Tierney has clearly empowered this group, and they're making the most of it. Then came the boxes. In one I found a copy of Jim Burke's The English Teacher's Companion, which seems to be packed with mouth-watering insights, theoretical and practical. I'm hoping also to find validation for some things I've been doing for years...and occasionally get flack for. As if I needed validation.... The next box contained no reading matter but just a bunch of CDs of some old guy singing. I guess I'm nicely graduated to geezerhood now that I've got my Tony Bennett box set. Tony was never as cool as Frank, but he always seemed to have a knack for finding the truth of any song and putting it across in simple human terms. This could be anybody's voice (but of course it ain't). And that's what sets these tunes so solidly in mind and heart. The next note is inevitable, predestined, perfect. I only find problems on the very early material (like the first title, "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" recorded in 1950, a great torch song that he blares out as if it were "My Way") This is fascinating because Bennett had so obviously not yet found his voice...and then he does - somewhere around '53 or '54, when he seems to learn that he can use his vocal limitations in his art, that he doesn't have to hide them or blast through them. The crooner turned into a real singer. It's fun listening to these self-negotiations throughout the fifties. And he picked pretty great material. On other fronts, we had our first English department meeting today. This is a diverse, affable group, seemingly alive to the possibilities of the profession. I look forward to some life-giving exchanges with and among them. The second round of academic reports are due tomorrow morning. These are called Deficiency Reports, as distinct from the last week's Progress and Probation Reports. I always have too many of these suckers to fill out. Why did so many of the freshmen not believe me when I told them about the response notebook? I suppose it's possible that they just weren't hearing me. What's it like inside a freshman's brain? Must be an exotic land where they talk funny and think a lot about lunch. |
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
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Chronic
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