I wish there’d been time for more writing of reflections. The things I reflected upon in real-time tended not to be the predictable byproducts of the curriculum, but rather tangential and sometimes in opposition to what was happening in the classroom. Documented reflected practice is impossible without sacrificing something else important. I decided to pour everything I had into my coursework and my independent study. I worked extra hard at everything, possibly because I’m obsessive or interested or less experienced than many of the others.

Anyway, I’m in New York now for a three-day, post-class respite after dropping off my Eleni at the airport the day before yesterday and before returning to a summerful of being on the move and trying to write my portfolio. I can’t seem to stop working. Last night I went to see the Broadway play Next To Normal and took my competency checklist to review during intermission. In the line waiting to get my half-price tickets, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Cuernavaca, talking about language and Spanish and teaching English and all kinds of things. As I walk down the streets here — my primary pastime — I listen to the voices: the American New Yorker accents, and more often all the other varieties of New York accent. I marvel at the ability of the Arab at the Halal stand to speak New Yorkese to the brusque and speedy customers. Same with the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Jamaicans and Africans from all over, and the South Americans and the Eastern Europeans. The orchestral variation is breathtaking. Today at one store I heard the storekeeper and a customer arguing about the price of stuff. If flowed without a ripple between English and Spanish. (The store guy suggested if she wanted it cheaper, she go to Wyoming, not NYC.)

At the theater last night I read that a requirement of my portfolio will be to explain “ways and details of how the portfolio writing process changed or confirmed [my] ideas about teaching and learning” and “how the writing of the portfolio helped [me] deepen [my] understanding of [my] theme.”

I wonder how and when I’ll know what my theme is.

At any rate, as I sat in the theater before the lights went down, I resolved to write a little about where I am, pre-portfolio and post-coursework.

It is strange to me how differently I see the world now, and a little troublesome. I want just to be interested in the things I’ve always been drawn to, and stay at the surface level. But at least in this postpartum phase, I can’t. I feel as though I have OCD. In everything I read, I find applicability to the areas that have most interested me: folklore, storytelling, politics of language, learning styles, and more. So every book I read has all these highlighted things where, in days of yore, they would have been pristine: absorbed without a trace. Likewise, everything I see and hear, I see in the context of English language-learning and its related tentacles: culture, imperialism, adjustment, autonomy.

I don’t really want to write another infinite posting. I think this captures who I am now. Having spent the year learning — in classes and on my own — about a field that has interested me in theory for years, I’ve discovered that it does in fact still interest me, and deeply. I am underwater, trying to see the currents that might carry me in the most productive direction for my skills. But I feel I’m either in brackish backwater, with no possibility or direction, or in a maelstrom, with too many competing forces blocking my way out.

Today I went to the Guggenheim. I’ve never been there, so that was one reason I wanted to go. But the biggest reason is because the had a show there called “Haunted.” It was about photography and video and the past, so of course it interested me: the passage of time, melancholy, memory. But I think the main allure was thinking I might find ideas to extend my independent study, which will never end. (I found out a few days ago my paper got accepted at the Georgia TESOL, so I have to make it better than it was at Sandanona; I also submitted it to TESOL TESOL, just for the hell of it.) I have a increasing panic to figure out how to integrate my passion for stories with ESL. The panic grows greater as long as this interest is hypothetical, since I haven’t seen a single job possibility for me, particularly not one that would allow me to explore this route. So it’s a panic of wanting to know everything about something, and a panic that that knowledge will lead me to a dark alley.

Here are some things I found interesting in a TESOL way at this exhibition:

• There was a video installation in which a guy was filmed from six or eight different angles simultaneously. That could be a good writing exercise, or MM exercise: to capture or describe the same thing from different perspectives.
• There was a painting that looked red from a distance (not Rothko’s) but when you got closer you could see soldiers. A writing exercise could be to write about something and have it really be about something else. (Advanced.)
• An artist named Robert Smithson set a series of mirrors in different locations at different seasons, and photographed them. Each tells a totally different story: same mirrors, different context. Seeds for a writing assignment in that, too. Mirror Travel in the Yucatan.
• One person had a painting of a bunch of informal questions. Some were normal conversational questions and others were culturally forbidden (Do you think of my girlfriend when you jack off?) Without taking it that far, such a collection could be a good register exercise.
• Another video thing was of a guy who had killed people, I think as a soldier. There were shots of his hands, of buildings, with him talking (and screen text) in the background. There were almost no shots of him during his narrative. One particularly interesting thing (good for my folklore/symbolism stuff) was that he said he often felt like a martian when he thought about what he’d done. Then there was video of his aquarium fish. He talked about thinking of them as martians as well. As he talked, their actions (and his talking about them) became symbolic of his own true self. Writing variation: pick an object that symbolizes you or an experience and describe its aspects that make it an apt metaphor for you.

What’s funny is that much of this art stuff was made of appropriated/found material — like the video I made a few days ago, and like found magazine, except not. Just a few days ago I made the video cuz I thought it could inspire Ss to use their environment for ideas for self-expression, and here’s this whole art movement I didn’t even know about. Many artists (beginning with Warhol and Lichtenstein) have used appropriated material and made it their own. That movement continues. “Appropriation-based techniques,” the show called them. Reproductions from mass media of everyday life being reshaped into art.

• There was an interesting collection of images by Sarah Charlesworth — her Modern History series — in which she’d grabbed the masthead of a newspaper [Herald Tribune], with a blurb at either side of the logo and in a band underneath, the usual volume number, publication city, weather… and the rest of the front page was blank. She’d grabbed a few (two, three, four) images for each and put them there to tell a story. No text. They call it a “deconstructive technique.”
• The water tower series by Becker: one type of object, in various forms.
• Luis Jacob did themed collections of media images. Collages, really, except they weren’t torn and scattered, but neatly squarely placed. Some themes were too obscure for me, but others were clearer. There were: people in uniforms; protests; cooking; painting houses; chairs; rituals (e.g. pledge of allegiance); kids listening to adults; people near blackboards. All were simple assemblages. Could be a good way to get people to talk about an aspect of their culture and maybe to compare it with another.

Richard Prince (dead) was known for his “rephotographs” of cigarette cowboys, etc.

So who am I now, after school and before my portfolio? A manic, confused person with whirling brain and no grounding. Dimming hope that I’ll get a job. Fear that I won’t be able to escape this overstimulated state of seeing seeing seeing and making connections that go nowhere. Too many connections. Insatiable desire to gather ideas but no place to put them and nowhere to test them. Rolling St. Elmo’s fire unable to disperse into the ground. This must be what it’s like to have OCD. I can’t stop pondering. Went to an art show and all I could do was scratch notes about how some of these forms of creative expression could be brought into the EL classroom, specifically to writing. Thinking, writing, making connections. Wanting just to look and enjoy and absorb, but everything had to be sorted and archived from my brain to paper.

All this with the knowledge that the only EL writing position that opened up at the college level is for someone with a degree in writing as well as teaching. Do I have to go back to school and get another master’s? In creative writing? But at the museum I wanted to study art again, to teach English learners through art.

I have no idea what I want to do. I just turned 56. I just spent 40K on an education. I have no job prospects. I have a grandchild coming. I’m leaving Vermont and traveling around the country. I have no home until September.

This is who I am as I begin my portfolio. But for this very moment, I’m going to get dressed to see Silvio Rodriguez up the road at Carnegie Hall. 1 train, here I come.

PS the next day: I forgot to paste in this description from the Guggenheim Web site. Note the cool phrase, “reproductive media.”

March 26–September 6, 2010

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by ghostly apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive media, as well as in live performance and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, this art embodies a melancholic longing for an otherwise irrecuperable past. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance examines myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession, both collective and individual, with accessing the past. The works included in the exhibition range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, and to videos, both on monitors and projected, as well as film, performance, and site-specific installations. Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim Museum collection, Haunted will feature recent acquisitions, many of which will be exhibited by the museum for the first time. Included in the show will be work by such artists as Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roni Horn, Zoe Leonard, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, and Andy Warhol. A significant part of the exhibition will be dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists. This exhibition is curated by Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography, and Nat Trotman, Associate Curator.

This exhibition is made possible by the International Director’s Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Additional support is provided by grants from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the William Talbott Hillman Foundation. The Leadership Committee for Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance is gratefully acknowledged.

See < http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/exhibition_pages/haunted/#/overview > for more info, if it’s still there once the show’s over.