LY #111 In my end is my beginning, in my beginning . . .

Nothing like a little T. S. Eliot to sound the gong of literary snobbery, which is just the note I shouldn't be sounding for tonight's post.

John Berger in Ways of Seeing (BBC)

Today we started talking about Ways of Seeing in my visual rhetoric class.   The first time I refereed discussions between this book and a class of freshmen and sophomores was in the first new prep of my teaching assistantship at Utah.  Now I'll be teaching it as part of my last new prep in my last year of teaching.

Some of those students who actually read chapter one for today were not that happy about it.  The pictures are badly reproduced, the language uses the old sexist "he" and "man" and the writing is a mix of academic clot and Marxist rhetoric.  Nevertheless, I believe that Berger, et al, make some terrific points about the way we look at pictures and how "fine art" gets managed in this age that is now WAY past "mechanical" reproduction.  He notes that our human, class-based responses to what is actually represented in works of "fine art" is mystified by the engines of art history as it pays more attention to the provenance and cost of certain works than it does to what they actually show us of the way the artist saw the world.

I remember a Humanities department picnic here in Bend during my first year when I was attempting to argue Berger's points about art history with the woman who taught it, the wife of a high level administrator of the time.  She disagreed with me but chose not to back up her argument so she just said, "Kake, shut up!"  And I did.

My students and I didn't get that far this afternoon because we took some time work-shopping ways to help the folks who got really low grades on the midterm earn back some points.  Part of the reason for the low grades was the fuzziness of the new questions I created.  Part of the reason was that they just didn't study.  I think they all came up with some good plans which I'll get into practice on my return from the Western States Communication Association convention where I'll be presenting on a G.I.F.T.S. panel.

The next post will be written from Anaheim, California.