cross country collaborations

jared, i'm jolted by the last two posts, as i have been teaching a course on vietnam and the 1960's and the last two weeks have been entirely dedicated to music. we've been discusing music as outlet of protest, an obvious place to start considering the time period, but from there one of the assignments that i gave was for my students to bring in lists of the 10 songs they felt best described the current social climate. i played as many of the songs they chose that i could access from the classroom, and also offered up some of my own selections. note, i teach all teenage girls, so their taste in music is often drastically different from mine, but we are able to learn more about each other through sharing music in the classroom than through some of the conversations we've been ahving over the last several months. one of the girls had chosen an older metallica song, and that led me to talk about their original bassist cliff burton and we listened and free wrote to the last song he played, "orion." the haunted tongues came to life in my classroom, but until i read the post i didn't have the language to explain what it was like. although everyone in the room wrote something similar, like the message was lingering in the air and coming down through each individual pencil. mystic indeed. i love how we can go months without directly communicating and still be on the same wave length.

on a separate note, i wanted to link you to a site from a poet who recently moved to portland. one of the guys that i work for is friends with him and told me about his project a few months back, and i took a look at it again today when i realized that he's in your area. it's www.thepeterprinciple.org