A Slightly William Wivell Blog

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Tue, 14 May 2013 03:40:16 +0100

TAPEWORMS STEAL HANDBAGS - NEW REPORT

Sun, 12 May 2013 13:42:00 +0100

TAPEWORMS STEAL HANDBAGS - NEW REPORT

100 Hacks - #35

Sat, 11 May 2013 14:58:43 +0100

100 Hacks - #35

Showreel! Watch it! Or don’t! I don’t mind that...

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:20:17 +0100

Showreel!

Watch it! Or don’t! I don’t mind that much!

Photo

Tue, 07 May 2013 04:22:33 +0100

Photo

Tue, 07 May 2013 01:54:43 +0100

lampsarepeopletoo: punsicle: hurdygurdygirl: This is how I’d...

Sun, 05 May 2013 17:03:16 +0100

lampsarepeopletoo:

punsicle:

hurdygurdygirl:

This is how I’d play chess

I HAVE NEVER LOVED A VIDEO SO DEARLY

HOLY SHIT

A couple of walk cycles I’ve been working on...

Thu, 02 May 2013 01:18:41 +0100

A couple of walk cycles I’ve been working on today.

Hooray. Oh, productive me. How I’ve missed you. Me.

"The Average Fourth Grader Is A Better Poet Than You, (And Me Too)," Hannah Gamble

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:05:28 +0100

"The Average Fourth Grader Is A Better Poet Than You, (And Me Too)," Hannah Gamble:

layalas:

tetraghost:

commovente:

While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.

When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasn’t expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my students’ folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.

Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:

“The life of my heart is crimson.”

[Writing about a family member’s recent death:]

“My brother went down/ to the river
and put dirt on.”

“Peace be a song,
silver pool of sadness”

“Away went a dull winter wind
that rocked harshly, and bent you said,
‘Father, father’.”

[Writing about a terminal illness:]

“I am feeling burdened
and I taste milk……
I mumble, ‘Please,
please run away.’
But it lives where I live.”

“The owls of midnight hoot like me
shutting the door to nothing.”

[Writing about life as a movie:]

“The choir enters, and the director screams
‘Sing with more terror!!!’”

“I have provisions. Binary muffins.
It’s an in/out/in/out kind of universe.
We cannot help you,
this is a universe factory.
A sound of rolling symbols.
Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards.
Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not.”

“I, the star god,
take bones from the
underworlds of past times
to create mankind.”

These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn’t been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.

Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.

Anecdote that I hope you’ll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]

So let’s look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:

Snacking on this and that
my friends and I keep the party going
even when it is over”

“Whispers of a
secret crush being unraveled”

“I’m trapped in this hole that
I can’t break through”

“Barack Obama in the White House.
I can feel the inspiration
Can you feel it?”

“Now I feel secure with my head held high.

Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.

While the average older student’s poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer’s vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bazaar, yet true.

Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”

The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.

The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.

(source)

This has accurately but into words something I have noticed, yet couldn’t put my finger on, only this week, about my own writing. I have been browsing through my works throughout the years in attempts to get back into my penmanship.

I am un-learning so many things.

BUILDING A HUMAN ALL HAIL OUR FANTASTIC LEADER ARPOOVIAN...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 02:01:07 +0100

BUILDING A HUMAN

ALL HAIL OUR FANTASTIC LEADER ARPOOVIAN SHEBBER-SHENTY

Well, due to some weird glitch, my Steam window kept rapidly...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:13:00 +0100

Well, due to some weird glitch, my Steam window kept rapidly refreshing itself whilst still on Window 7’s semi-transparent, stripey ‘window not loaded’ overlay thing.

It got darker and lighter and increasingly vivid and it was actually quite frightening until I remembered I could just move my mouse and make it all better again.

Clerks operating adding machines. Blythe house, c. 1924

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:32:22 +0100

Clerks operating adding machines. Blythe house, c. 1924

lumos5000: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 Trailer: [x]

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:43:09 +0100

lumos5000:

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 Trailer: [x]

I don’t post much about Doctor Who, if at all, but there’s something I’ve been...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 02:05:46 +0100

I don’t post much about Doctor Who, if at all, but there’s something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest.

The 11th Doctor isn’t the same ‘aged’ character he was in earlier series, and I kind of miss him. He had more depth as a character. The hunched shoulders, the casual wringing of his hands, the gentle grandfatherly kiss of Amy’s hair whilst talking to her in the Pandorica, those impatient moments where he snapped at people like a slightly lost, frustrated, cantankerous old man (“Call that ‘flying the TARDIS?’ Ha!”) all seem to have been diluted by a more generic eccentricity.

I miss moments like these:

Stills from ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’. This gets...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:19:22 +0100

Stills from ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’.

This gets me very excited.

k-a-t-i-e-: Forty-eighth Street window washers New York City,...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:29:58 +0100

k-a-t-i-e-:

Forty-eighth Street window washers

New York City, 1958

Inge Morath

scruffyharrison: sailorpizza: ʘ‿ʘ and this is how I harrass...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:49:05 +0100

scruffyharrison:

sailorpizza:

ʘ‿ʘ

and this is how I harrass Luke on the sofa while he tries to read books.

My draft posts are piling up on here. Might have to rework some of them and actually post them,...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 01:45:21 +0100

My draft posts are piling up on here. Might have to rework some of them and actually post them, because they’re just as valid as anything else I’ve written. Perhaps even more so.

Photo

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:49:35 +0100

Hey everyone! Liquid metal embrittlement! Gallium is just the...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:36:00 +0100

Hey everyone! Liquid metal embrittlement!

Gallium is just the shit. It melts in your hand like it’s TERMINATOR 2, and it turns aluminium into tissue paper simply by touching it.

Hah. Science.