20190605.0430

5 June has been better for writing than 4 June; I've posted five times on the date in this webspace: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. As is likely to continue to be the case throughout the month, the 2018 piece is one element of a sequence of poems. The 2016 piece is a poem noting an experience in the Texas Hill Country (and marking me as the UTSA graduate I am--BA, English, 2005, cum laude, etc.), and the 2014 piece is a short musing on a dream; neither suggests itself as needing my attention again at this point. But the 2015 piece, talking about a potential teaching exercise that never came to be, and the 2013, looking at a book-as-object, both seem like they could use revisiting.
The teaching piece looks at comparative levels of obscenity in a series of nearly-identical statements. I note in it that I would have to have tenure to get away with offering it, and I've found that's not quite as true as I might have thought--as witness this account on another blog I maintain, incidentally just under a year ago. At the same time, I've not really been in classes where I can deploy the exercise, not because my students wouldn't go for it--they're generally non-traditional at this point, and most such are happy to have something more "real" than they associate with formal education remembered from their youth--but because the teaching I do is in a lock-step curriculum where I do more to regurgitate material passed down to me than anything else.
A lot of the teaching has been online, as well, and while there are benefits to teaching in that venue, one of them is not the development of the kind of rapport that allows such exercises to go off well. Online students tend to engage less frequently and deeply than students who have to have their butts in chairs in a set place on a set schedule, and the engagement is the thing that matters; it is what allows for the development of a space where inquiry into what is obscene, how obscene it is, and why it is so can occur. But even my on-site students cannot engage quite so much; I see them once a week for a three- or four-hour stretch across two months, which is not enough time or exposure to develop rapport with more than a select few. It's not as helpful as might be hoped.
To turn to the 2013 piece: There are other places in this webspace that I've considered books and their paraphernalia as objects rather than as texts, as such. A piece about a bookmark comes to mind as one example, as do some other pieces from earlier this year (here, here, and here). It's been perhaps not a theme so much as a topic of occasional interest to me. And while I no longer own the book in question--I passed it along, in turn, as I made to move from Sherwood Cottage back to the Texas Hill Country--such thoughts as I put to pixels then still occur to me when I look over the "inherited" volumes I still have. A bookstore I shop at deals mostly in used books, and I find things tucked into the pages on occasion; I still wonder about who left them there and why. I've not matched the (likely apocryphal) story of finding money tucked between the pages of dissertations, more's the pity, but I have come across things that offer interesting departure points for thought. Taking that kind of trip might be good to do again...