Our mentors for this mini-unit have been experimental American writer Gertrude Stein and musician and writer David Byrne, the lead singer of Talking Heads.
It occurred to me while reading Boy of the Painted Cave, a thematically appropriate, though substandard (as it turned out), YA novel, that the upper-graders can learn from not only "reading level appropriate" texts but also texts below and above their levels. Sure, "BotPC" turned out to be a bit "lame," but the upper-graders practiced referring to specific places in the text for "lame-osity," and learned the important lesson that publication does not guarantee inherent value. And sometimes bad art inspires great art.
After "BotPC," I thought of some of the most difficult writing I could think of. Gertrude Stein came to mind. I knew it would challenge the upper-graders but that they would learn from it, too. Hopefully even enjoy it. Stein was trying to use language to recreate "the excitingness of pure being." Though "irrational," it's hard not to feel something, to connect to it in some way.
Then I thought of a bit of DVD commentary from Stop Making Sense, a Talking Heads concert film. In it, David Byrne describes the kind of irrational lyrics he was writing for Talking Heads in the mid-80s. "The lyrics don't make a bit of sense." Similar in a way to Stein, Byrne was attempting to bypass logic but still appeal to an audience's emotions. The class watched excerpts from the concert film and copied down the lyrics to "Burning Down the House."
And we too began to experiment with writing irrationally with our "50 Unrelated Sentences" assignment. To me, the assignment is interesting in two ways: one, the "unrelated" sentences usually emerge to be related, to follow from one another-- to tell a story; and two, there is emotion in these sentences.
Finally, we created our own versions of David Byrne's mental maps from his book Arboretum, more recent of his experiments in "irrational logic."
--Chris
