In the Hatchback Glass

In the hatchback glass
a black raven glides between 
two rear defrost wires.

Can't Help But Love This

I'm not usually much of a share stuff on the internet guy, but these photographs of a Batman action figure having an emo life adventure amaze me to no end.

Photo by Rémi Noël. Click photo for more.

I've loved the gnome, Stormtrooper, and Flat Stanley memes in the past. But this hits all the right resonances for me. Here's a link to the original article on i09.

Icy Street Haiku

He watches those tight
jeans cross the icy street. When
she slips he drives on.

You are the Bread and the Knife

This semester I'm teaching a course in contemporary literature. In many ways, it's an ideal course. I get to assign all the books I've been meaning to read, and I get to mess around a little bit.

Today, on the second day of class, I wanted to make a move that's common in a course that tries to talk about literature that fits into a historical period. If you teach Shakespeare, then you need to spend a little time helping students of today understand what it was like to live in Elizabethan times.

Why? Because we ask students to project themselves a little bit into the time period so they don't make the mistake of judging past works of art according to contemporary standards that wouldn't have been in place then.

So what's a body to do when the time period you want to explore is your own?

I am uncertain that it's safe to assume that students have a clear understanding of this era. I think a little help framing and contextualizing things can be a big help.

So in my attempts to do this today, I tried to curate a few things to show how print is not the final (or most interesting) form literature can take. In order to make my point, I shared some videos of Billy Collins' Poem "Litany."

The text of the poem is over on the right. The first video is of Billy Collins reading the poem himself and offering a little insight into the process and giving a little background. 

The second video is of this viral YouTube video from last year of a three-year-old kid reciting Collins's poem. The first video is pretty deadpan and hilarious. The second poem is downright adorable.

Take a look for yourselves.

I'm really interested in what digital media is doing to support the spread of traditional art and literature. I'm also very interested in the way that digital media is restoring some of the oral qualities of literature.

Mostly, I love this poem, and that little kid.

Litany

Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine. 

NB: I found this wonderful NPR story on Collins and the little kid. I think it says a lot about how little writers will actually ever know about what people do with their work. 

Some changes

With muchos gracias to Grettir the Strong, the updates to my blog are complete, or close to complete.

The URL www.toddpetersen.org (which I've been keeping under my pillow for months now) is all ready to roll now, and should be able to service your Todd Petersen needs for the forseeable future. I'm just coming on a crazy semester of five courses and five preps, and I don't wanna do that anymore. I sort of feel like I have to sometimes because I don't have the power to crush people's skulls between my open palms. So instead I just do extra work, which makes me feel as if I am really necessary. I might not be -- heaven forbid I'm not -- but it only matters if I think that I am indespensible. What others think is irrelevant really, right? 

But seriously folks, it's strange to be thinking about how to get out of so much work. Being a college professor can eat your lunch. There is so much a body can get into that has nothing really to do with the thing that makes a person want to be an academic in the first place. What follows is a list of the things at work I want to give up for Lent (I know it's months away, but who cares):

1. Bitching about money. I'm never going to be rich, so who cares? "Rich" and "cool" are almost never synonymous.

2. Getting mad at other people who can't be bothered to [fill in the blank]. I'm never going to get them to change by reasoning with them. Plus: they'll get more upset if I ignore them.

3. Spending time grading work that students have obviously treated with disdain or depraved indifference. Believe it or not, some students seem not to care if they do a good job. Normally these papers take a really long time to grade in relation to ones written by conscientious students, which strikes me as patently unfair to the students who work hard. They deserve my time, not the lazy wiseacres, who couldn't care if they were in my class or lying in the gravel somewhere.

4. Doing more creative projects just for the joy of it. I've been doing so much lately just because it might have some potential career benefit, and I'm thinking that one of the benefits of tenure is that I can let my attentions wander a little. My primary professional responsibility is to be creative, and not in any particular field of endeavor. In fact the work I should be doing should be outside of the box of my discipline.

I'm also going to put more effort in to writing and sending that writing out into the world. This blog is a good way to do that. Keep your eyes peeled for new posts, which I should be sending out through social media channels and the like. If you're part of my Facebook Crew, Google+ Posse, or TwitterHood, you should know when something has been flung into the world. 

Sometimes Things Aren't Exactly Black and White

Every parent faces the problem of the tough moral conversation, ones where the utmost discretion is required. The briefest hesitation or misstep can damage relationships or worse. It is crucial that a parent play these seminal moments exactly right, or later in life your child will second-guess your knowledge, experience, and character.

A few years ago, I had just such a critical conversation with my son, who was playing with some Batman and Mr. Freeze Legos that I keep in my office for days when his pre-school schedule got jacked.

He had just positioned Batman in his modified Batmobile then looked up up and said, "Dad, does Batman  lie?" Ike was staring at me unflinchingly across his glasses, a gesture acquired from me, which I acquired from my mother.

I measured my words carefully, knowing that my son was aware that I have a dozen toy Batmobiles, and I have written and presented two scholarly papers on Batman.

"Ike," I said, "Batman is the kind of hero who will do whatever it takes to catch a bad guy."

Ike compressed his lips and cocked his head at me, a cross between the RCA dog and Andy Sipowicz. "So, um..." he said, pushing up his glasses with two fingers. "Does Batman lie?" He leaned on the word "lie" like he was pulling nails with it.

"Yes," I said, when I could wait no longer. "Batman lies."

Masking Tape Epiphany

One day, when I was in the second or third grade, I had an epiphany about what was possible if you took a length of masking tape and folded it over. Do that and you can change it from an adhesive to a material. Before that moment, when tape would fold over onto itself, I considered it unusable, and I would throw it out, start over. What I figured out simple: folding masking tape over itself and layering it turns it into a pale, synthetic leather that is semi-rigid and could be fabricated into a wide variety of objects.

I consider this a major revelation for someone that age, also because this happened in 1976 or 1977, right about the time that duct tape was no longer an obscure WW II-era moisture-resistant adhesive. It was now in the toolbox, next to WD-40 and bailing wire.

Because I was seven or eight, I wasn't part of a DIY or handyman movement, which made me feel like a pioneer. With this masking tape leather I made small boxes, costumes for action figures, helmets for stuffed animals, mazes, the pouch of a slingshot. Later on my friends and I made whole suits of armor using cardboard boxes and the beige leather. We, of course, moved onto duct (duck?) tape and eventually made wallets. In high school I had a tape notebook. After college, I went through a spell of fabricating things with cardboard and hot glue. But it all started for me with masking tape.

My son is really amazing with LEGO bricks. They are his medium. I played with them too, of course, when I was young. I've noticed that many makers, hackers, engineers, and do-it-yourselfers identify LEGO bricks as a basic starting point for their activities. This doesn't seem revelatory to me because LEGO bricks are designed for this purpose. In fact LEGOs have turned away from their "open" roots to a more proscriptive thing these days: build the Millennium Falcon or Helm's Deep; here are the instructions and the special bricks. Michael Chabon has a great essay on this issue in Manhood for Amateurs. I recommend it.

In the end, the power of masking tape for me is the fact that is was not designed as a toy. It was created to assist amateur painters (real painter cut in). Turning this stuff into a helmet and breast plate for Winnie the Pooh was a hack—my first hack— and it established one important foundation for me: you don't have to use things the way their designers intended. This understanding is a requirement, in my mind, for creative thinking.

Are You My Mummy?

NOTE: this is an old post that got hung up in the draft phase for over a year. Ever since I first saw this Diane Arbus photograph, about twelve years ago, I have been enamored of it. I have also been envious of it, upset by it, even obsessed by it. It seems like this kid caught Arbus off guard. He challenged her. It lacks the ironic distancing that is so common in her work.

It's so crazy looking and off the cuff and weird and in your face. It's a pretty famous image, so I know that others have had some kind of similar response to it, maybe not the same identical one that I've had, but something that punches me in the guts.

Today at a Halloween party, I got the chance to get into that Arbus territory with a picture of my son, Ike, in his Doctor Who inspired costume.

It's from the 2005 episode "The Empty Child" The boy Ike is dressed as is named Jaime, a child who was killed during the Blitz but who was resurrected (sort of) by some alien creatures but had his gasmask genetically fused to his face. He goes around asking everyone, "Are you my mummy?" It's pretty chilling in the show.

This costume was Ike's idea. My wife, Alisa, put it all together. She made the gas mask herself, which is pretty impressive.

And I got the shot.

ike-gas-mask

Recently Heard on NPR

This poem says a lot about how I teach and live my life right now. Overland to the Islands Denise Levertov

Let's go—much as that dog goes, intently haphazard. The Mexican light on a day that ‘smells like autumn in Connecticut’ makes iris ripples on his black gleaming fur—and that too is as one would desire—a radiance consorting with the dance. Under his feet rocks and mud, his imagination, sniffing, engaged in its perceptions—dancing edgeways, there's nothing the dog disdains on his way, nevertheless he keeps moving, changing pace and approach but not direction—‘every step an arrival.’

Childhood is Awesome

Being a kid rules. Being a parent of kids like this rules.

I mean, seriously, when did we all decide that it's not cool to wear a construction paper headband with kangaroo ears stapled to the sides?

Alisa and I are (obviously) awaiting the arrival of another little boy. Could be any day now. We've both been thinking a lot about what it means to be a parent, and what it means to get these kids raised in such a way that they can (a) function, (b) succeed, and (c) rock this world. It takes time and it takes patience and it takes a willingness to make all kinds of mistakes, but it is really the coolest thing I've ever done, which is why we want to do it again.

Sure, there will be lots of crying and sleeplessness, and poop, but there are also moments you get when your shy daughter gets on stage to sing and dance and when your son says, "Wait, let's stop and clean my room, Zoë. If we don't, I won't be able to have any screens tomorrow."

I have more to say on my style of fathering (cheeseburger + Marvel Comics iPad app), but suffice it to say, I've been feeling kind of glowy and happy about being a dad lately.

Sample from Monday Gig at Braun Books