Messed around this weekend with a curious mixture of doing marking of short stories, finishing a book that I needed to finish before reading a couple of ones that are reading choices in classes I'm teaching semester two, and doing stop action animation.
Some of my more interesting comments on students' writing was things like "...I tell you this to make you a better writer, rather than a better serial killer," "skulls don't have hilts" and "well-made lingerie doesn't leave traces lying around."( the latter was in response to "She had found traces of lingerie around the apartment." I suggested that, though the lingerie might be traces of women, that lingerie didn't itself leave traces of itself, and that it was better to omit the words "traces of" entirely. The middle one was in response to "the sword had the hilt of a skull," which I suggested would read better as "the sword had a skull for a hilt.")
Some of my more interesting comments on students' writing was things like "...I tell you this to make you a better writer, rather than a better serial killer," "skulls don't have hilts" and "well-made lingerie doesn't leave traces lying around."( the latter was in response to "She had found traces of lingerie around the apartment." I suggested that, though the lingerie might be traces of women, that lingerie didn't itself leave traces of itself, and that it was better to omit the words "traces of" entirely. The middle one was in response to "the sword had the hilt of a skull," which I suggested would read better as "the sword had a skull for a hilt.")
The idea was to make two wire frames like I've seen in books about claymation, and then build clay on them. What's recommended is twisting together two strands of 16 gauge aluminum wire and making little eight inch models. I tried one bigger than that. When asking about what to use in terms of plasticine or whatever, it was recommended that I try some Crayola air-drying stuff, and Sculpey. I've never tried Sculpey before, but knew you're supposed to fire it, so I was safe and bought some of both.
I found that the Crayola stuff was really the consistency of cookie dough or taffy, and that it didn't air dry to anything very hard. It is very light, but it is too fragile to deal with being on a wire frame that's getting reefed around. I was curiously reluctant to start, afraid it wouldn't work, but I got down to it and decided to use the air dry stuff as kind of a skeleton on the smaller frame, with Sculpey to follow later. Doing this and then trying some rudimentary stop motion showed me how solidly rooted the thing needs to stay, and how tough it has to be.
I then tried an experiment with the Sculpey. Much heavier, and I wasn't proficient enough to know how to design the model to take it easy on myself. Trying something hard. But a brief experiment with putting some Sculpey on a bit of aluminum wire in the toaster oven showed me that it gets much harder than the Crayola stuff, so is that I need to do. Focussed on making the frame more sturdy, with more support bits attached with epoxy.
This weekend was abruptly grey, dripping and cold. Had to put the heat on a tiny bit, I eventually decided. It was depressing. Didn't talk to anyone either day.
Read the greater part of a little book I got online: Frederick Beuchner's Telling the Truth: The Gospel As Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale. Part of it put into words, better than anything I've seen before, why I can't take preachers seriously, why they don't reach me when they work:
...they sit there waiting for him to work a miracle, and the miracle they are waiting for is that he will not just say that God is present, because they have heard it said before and it has made no great and lasting difference to them, will not just speak the words of joy, hope, comedy, because they have heard it spoken before too and have spoken it among themselves, but that he will somehow make it real to them....He is called not to be an actor, a magician, in the pulpit. He is called to be himself. He is called to tell the truth as he has experienced it. He is called to be human, and that is calling enough for any man. If he doesn't make real to them the human experience of what it is to cry into the storm and receive no answer, to be sick at heart and find no healing, then he becomes the only one there who seems not to have had that experience because most surely...all the others there have had it whether they talk of it or not. As much as anything else, it is their experience of the absence of God that has brought them there in search of his presence, and if the preacher does not speak of that and to that, then he becomes like the captain of a ship who is the only one aboard who either does not know that the waves are twenty feet high and the decks awash, or will not face up to it so that anything else he tires to say by way of hope and comfort and empowering becomes suspect on the basis of that one crucial ignorance or disingenuousness or cowardice of reluctance to speak in love any truths but the ones people love to hear.
1 comment:
love the animation! i need to get douglas started on that again, he did some a couple of years ago but hasn't touched it since. lots of grey here too, it's definitely fall.
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