Start the Week #69

Sax lessons, wailing my harp, course evaluations, and other stuff

In which Terry channels his inner Virginia Woolf and launches into a stream of consciousness covering a myriad of topics without so much as a subheading.

Greetings!

Things were a bit full on last week, hence the lack of a Start the Week. Our social engagements bring to mind the old joke about London buses: you wait ages for one and then three come along at once. Anyway, I’m here now so enough of this persiflage: let’s get on with it.

One of the things that “came along” was the course I taught called Writing Using Constraints, aka the Oulipo.

Rebecca Holden

attended it and wrote a nice post about it, which you can read here: The liberation of constraint. It was good of Rebecca to be so positive about it, and I should just like to say that neither bribery nor blackmail on my part was involved. Well, not much anyway.

The evaluations were mostly positive as well, although one person wrote that they’d have liked more writing exercises. Wouldn’t we all? But given that the course was, in effect, just over four and a half hours long, each intro to an exercise takes around ten minutes, an exercise itself takes perhaps 15 minutes, and the subsequent discussion lasts between fifteen and 30 minutes, I don’t see how more could have been squeezed in. I do believe the discussion, involving as it does learning from others on the course, is crucial. We got through four or five techniques in depth, and touched on several more. Still, whoever it was who wrote that gave me high marks for things like knowledge, class management, and all that.

I think evaluations are very odd devices to be honest. Someone once “marked me down” on her evaluation of a one day course I was running on the grounds that the traffic was terrible. I pointed out to her that I wasn’t in charge of local traffic conditions and that she should complain to the council. Mind you, what can you expect, when someone who was inspecting a training session I was running told me that it wasn’t as good as it could have been because she had difficulty finding a parking place. I asked her why she thought that was my responsibility and what it had to do with my competence in running the session. She was unable to answer.

Assessment is always tricky, because you can quite easily end up assessing something other than the thing you think you’re assessing. For example, one of the things that exams test is the ability to perform well in exams.

In a slightly differtent context, when I’m practising the sax at home it often goes quite well. But as soon as I’m called upon in the sax lesson to toot my horn while everyone listens, it is liable to go to pot. Either I play the wrong notes altogether or the right notes in the wrong order (cf Eric Morecambe), or the right notes cacophonously. So what’s being tested at least partly is my the state of my nerves. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

In the most recent sax lesson we delved into pentatonics and improvisation, and I was so thrilled at understanding it (I got some funny looks on the tube going home when I kept shouting “Eureka!”) that when I got home I grabbed the blues harps I haven’t touched for ages and played to several backing tracks. It went really well, if I say so myself, and I even managed to play As Time Goes By on a blues harp in E minor. Quite a feat considering I’d never played it before and haven’t a clue what notes are involved.

A lot of it is confidence and self-belief I think, and some knowledge of course, much of which is down to the tutor. In this regard, and at the risk of sounding like some sort of class swot, I’d like to give a shout-out to David Harrison, who always manages to push us a bit beyond what we might think we’re capable of, very strictly but always with humour. I think that is quite an art. He runs a vibrant YouTube channel here.

On the subject of art, last week we visited an art gallery and came across a painting of Samson and Delilah. It was by Rubens I think. Well, it was alright I suppose, but I’ve created an improved version:

Samson and Delilah, by Terry Freedman

You’ll be pleased to know that I’m currently working on an improved version of the Mona Lisa. I mean, Da Vinci was OK at inventing things and putting coded messages in pictures, but painting wasn’t really his strong point, so it’s fortunate that I’m prepared to take on this task.

Another gargantuan task facing us Brits is choosing who to vote for at the forthcoming general election. It seems to me that there’s a choice between the incompetent, the innumerate, the imbecilic, the intemperate and the imperious. As I don’t want to get into a political affray I’m not going to say which party each of those descriptions apply to.

When I was teaching in schools I always enjoyed going through the parties’ manifestos to see how they stacked up in terms of numbers. A Dave Allen joke provided the perfect introduction:

Dave Allen: According to the Department of Transport, ten percent of road accidents are caused by drunk drivers. That means that ninety percent are caused by sober drivers. So why don’t you lot get off the road and let us drunks drive in safety?

Unravelling that is an exercise in logical analysis, as is working out a cryptic crossword clue. Such as this one:

Shakespearean character circles around the lines (7)

You can see the answer at the bottom of this post. No cheating now. I explained how cryptic crosswords work in my post Cryptic Crosswords (£). Rebecca Holden and I have been throwing cryptic clues at each other in our letters, which get published every Wednesday. It’s my turn next. Check out the most recent one on Rebecca’s website.

That’s it from me, except to say that my most recent experiments in style post was about breaking the rules, and the one before that was about a ridiculous Q & A session I had to endure in a noise abatement meeting.

Have a nice week.

Terry

Cryptic crossword answer:

˙ollǝɥʇO ʇǝƃ noʎ puɐ ˥˥ ƎH┴ punoɹɐ OO ǝɔɐlԀ ˙˥˥ = sǝuᴉl ;O puɐ O = sǝlɔɹᴉƆ ˙ollǝɥʇO