Liberating our tender objects ...

I do so love my Monday theory ("theory") class - or maybe I just have a secret desire to be thrown into some kind of write-on-the-spot workshop.  Today was Thing Theory, Things, Materiality ... so Bill Brown, and Jane Bennett, and Woolf, and Fraiman's Extreme Domesticity, and Mark Goble on Obsolescence.  Two poets introducing ... so lots of writing ... First, after a number of descriptions from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons were shown us, we were invited to choose a small object from a box that they handed out - everything from a cork, to a charcoal stick, to a Jew's Harp, to - well, how could I resist a very small plastic pony?  - and to write about our object in a way - a Steinian way? - that would bring out its thinginess.  And liberate it - my title is their title ...

Solid flowing mane tail fetlock feathers.  trotting out, trotting back, trotting out, trotting back left right left right suspended in plastic motion.  proud bay wildness tamed to toy.  condensed energy pressed pressed pressed and shrunk. left right left right wild eyed neck curves turning, tilting left thin seams of plastic mold thin lines of horse hair left right plastic balance.

Sorry, Gertrude.  Maybe I shouldn't have taken a plastic pony to work with - too familiar?  I now want to delete that over-explanatory "condensed," for starters.  But of course I wanted to photograph it, on my desk, the class behind it.

I think I managed much better with Exercise 2 - take something that we see in that classroom each week and of which we're pretty much unconscious - and write about it and defamiliarize it.  Here's one of those chains that one uses to open and shut blinds.

I was awed by some of the things that the students wrote (and in so little time!), and by their associative imaginations.  Frankly, what I learned most was that I should try writing more in unfamiliar modes ... Or, rephrase: try writing.