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07/30/2004 Archived Entry: "anecdote pedagogy"
Anecdote Pedagogy
I'm interested in how anecdotes serve writing. Barthes makes this claim a bit in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and Ulmer turns the anecdote into an assignment in Text Book. But these are moments for writing, for inventing, for developing introductions, for getting readerly interest. What about for pedagogy?
Anecdote #1
The first rock band I can remember idolizing was The Rolling Stones. I bought Tattoo You after it came out in 1980 (there’s a long forgotten video of the song “Neighbors” I wish would re-circulate). I got an earring at 13 because Keith Richards had one. I had this really cool Rolling Stones t-shirt I bought at the flea market in Miami for about $5. The cake at my bar-mitzvah was a Rolling Stones tongue.
Anecdote #2
When did I first hear Exile on Main Street? I don't know. But no doubt I was attracted to the "shit" mention in "Sweet Virginia" (kids love to hear curse words in rock songs) and the line from "Tumbling Dice":
All you women
is no damn gamblers
cheatin' like I don't know how
I bought an additional bootleg disc in Tel Aviv when I was fifteen. It was supposed to be a double disc record of outtakes and unused tracks. But both discs were the same! I had bought the same record twice! I never got the second disc. The album art on the bootleg (the original concept of a urinal) was much different than the collage which appears on the commercial release:
Even though I feel haunted by that missing disc (always wondering where it is, what it sounded like, who has it now), I am equally haunted by this cover image. A collage of circus freaks - what does it have to do with "Ventilator Blues" or "Turd on the Run"? Why the circus? Why freaks?
Anecdote #3
My interest in collage does not begin with this album but with the collages my grandmother made of her travels (with my grandfather) around the United States. Every place she stopped, she collected postcards, newspaper clippings, local artwork, etc. and constructed collages to remember the trips by. They hung the collages in the guest room of her Kendall Lakes apartment, the room I'd sleep in while visiting. For some reason, I keep think that the Exile image - in the upper left corner - of a man with stuff in his mouth was in one of those collages.
Pedagogy #1
One of my PhD exams was on collage. I began it with this anecdote about my grandmother's collages and the notion of collage as a type of literacy practice (Eisenstein actualized the pedagogy of collage for non-literates in the concept of intellectual montage). Why does a woman without a complete education use collage to create expression?
It’s an expression of exile. Exiled pedagogy. World War II may have led to the GI Bill, but it kept many out of school as well so that they could help with the war effort at home (as was my partly my grandmother’s situation).
In the urban environment (DETROIT) exile pedagogy has racial and class meanings. What about an assemblage – like Exile on Main Street which has writers compose their own version of exile through image and text. Compose it on the website where rollovers, css, and scripts may be used as well. What is your exile? Name your freak. Get your freak on.
