APB-SAL is a blog about education, science, science education, fiction, science fiction, literature, literary stories, poetry, and anything else that strikes the blogger's fancy.
NOTE: This blog interrogates art. It rarely make moral proclamations. For that attend the church or politician of your choice. This blog concerns aesthetics, not propaganda. Consider this as interviews with books where the interviewer presents interviewees, so you get what you need to do your own thinking.
I’m interested in workshop the way you go to a place and make stuff. I’m trying to figure out how to make my classes — everything I teach — more like a lab or an experiment zone.
I’m trying to encourage weird accidents of the imagination. I’m trying to set up a classroom as a place where people can make really beautiful mistakes, and where collaboration is among the highest achievements. Radical collaboration, deep collaboration. I feel like something is happening to my work — I don’t know what it is, but something that I trust is good....
I’m so uninterested in proficiency, and I’m so uninterested in mastery.... I’m way more interested in people who are doing things they don’t know how to do.
Everything that I’m writing now I have no fucking idea how to write. I’m writing these little mini-essays. I’m writing a nonfiction book. And then I’m writing this very long poem, that is completely out of my league.
[I]n the revision process[,] I’ll get a sort of feeling for what a poem’s going to be, and then I’ll go back into it and try to find cracks or openings where something might happen. It’s almost always the case that what feels really interesting to me about a poem arrives through the long and slow revision process — really sitting at points where I’m stuck in the poem or not telling the truth, and then finally, hopefully, arriving at the thing that opens the poem up to me. That actually is the moment... that transforms the poem into a thing that transforms me. Sometimes it’s a pronoun, literally — and it takes me months to figure it out.
I have a poem called “Glass” in my second book, and I was working on that poem almost daily for a couple months... I was doing things along the way — but what I needed to do was change a “they” to a “we,” and once that happened the poem materialized. I was banging my head into this poem so hard, and then that happened, and it felt like, oh my god, this is what I did not know until now.
The first [draft] feels like I’m being more verbose[.] I’m including is what’s available in my mind at the time, and that could feel sort of big and wild. The way that a revision might open up to include things is very different.
[T]hat “Spoon” poem... went through many drafts, and it took a couple years to write it. At first, that poem was... about a spoon. It ended in a sort of sweet, boring way. And then I broke it back open, and I realized there was more, and then I broke it open again, when I realized that I could not get to where I thought I was going to get. [T]hat was a turn in the poem where I got to understand something about my poetic process or my imaginative process, but also about this more complicated relationship with people who are no longer with me.
The kids discover oranges with sparkly hair who speak like they're tough 1940s Hollywood gangsters. They have the secret to happiness. The youngest Outerscope kids don't trust the oranges so they plan to stand guard by the ship while the others go to find out about the secret to happiness. The promise to take the kids to the Yun-yun theater.
The set-up could shortened and less repetitious.
# 13
The Yun-yun theater stars none other than stinky... onions. They seem to be the butt of their own jokes. Clearly, the secret to happiness is laughing at someone else's expense. If you didn't get this, they reinforce it with a direct explanation. The oranges (or tree treats) subjugate the Yun-yuns and force them to tell jokes about themselves, so that oranges feel beautiful and powerful. No subtelty here.
# 14
The older kids thought the show was funny until they see Yun-yuns coerced to put on a show.
#15
The Outerscope kids want to turn the tables and make fun of the Tree Treats instead. The Outerscope kids play on the vanity of Tree Treats to make them pretend to be Yun-yuns and plan to put on a better show.
#16
The Yunyuns boo and laugh although some Yunyuns don't care for the turned tables. Meanwhile, the Tree Treats have learned their lesson about making fun of Yunyuns. They discover that either way is wrong. Celebration!
#17
If you didn't get the moral of the story the first time, they expound it again as they travel to another planet.
They hit a bouncy object but it is too dark to tell what they hit. Eleanor decides to go on a space walk without a space suit and has lots of fun. They have to talk her into investigating. What looked like a keyhole from the spaceship turns out to be...
a keyhole! Eleanor swims through space to look for a doorknob.
Am I exaggerating by calling this a science fantasy? They've dropped the ball on wondering to what extent if any they are living in reality.
To be continued...
It strikes me that these episodes are way to short to convey much. Due to their brevity, they had to make certain aspects redundant. If you could recut them to eliminate the pedantic aspects and redundancy they might retain some of the fondness and mystery of the brief glimpses I had as a child. I do like the "To be continued..." but maybe right before an episode where one ends on this kind of mysterious wonder. But until these get trimmed, they are rather tedious. I wonder how many episodes a kid would sit through. Certainly most adults might accidentally lose the disc before getting to the end.
