Above all else, have a chorus

Numerous media sites have been paying tribute to the late Pete Seeger. In the car this morning I was listening to NPR whose memorial compelled me to sing along with the choruses of "Goodnight Irene." The broadcast included references by Tom Paxton who shared the following:

Not just through his books but also through his sheer force of presence, Seeger became a model for younger folk musicians. Singer and songwriter Tom Paxton said he learned invaluable lessons from Seeger about how to reach an audience. "Look 'em in the eye. Make a gesture of inclusion, which he did all the time. And above all, have a chorus," Paxton says. "So I learned from Pete to have something for them to sing." (http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2014/01/28/267488551/american-folk-singer-pete-seeger-dies-at-94)

It was upon hearing the recommendation to "have a chorus" that I was inspired to return to Living [Maxine] Greene after a long, dormant phase.  This gesture--or charge--for people to engage in the musical experience to create change can be viewed as a means of the transcendental/existential project that Sartre proposes and Greene picks up in her own writings.

And so I was thinking about the power that can be found in choral music, singing, chanting, text. I was reminded of a rehearsal I attended at the bequest of a director back in the early '90s. Clay Shirky asked me to visit him in Chicago where he was rehearsing A Preliminary Inquiry Into the Methods Used to Create and Maintain a Segregated Society. It was billed as "a theatrical collage about life in America`s most segregated city: Chicago, Illinois." One of the devices that Clay used in his theatrical work was choral text: actors speaking in a clear, unison voice. The power of the device is moving, to the point of being unsettling. I remember the Chicago actors moving me to pay attention, to be present, to be wide-awake.

It is this wide-awakeness that is consciousness in Greene's writings. It is the demand to pay attention and to consider other alternatives.

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My dormant phase with this blog came about after completing and successfully defending my dissertation about Greene's use of lived life in her writings. In the interim I have started working for a university where I oversee a  new general education program while moonlighting as an adjunct teaching philosophy to artists and educators. I have been yearning to return to Living [Maxine] Greene knowing that it can help me keep the wide-awakeness burning bright in my work with students and colleagues. It took Pete Seeger to look me in the eye and get me to sing along with the chorus. 



Text is cool. Language is hot.

The scanning process continues. I try to be cool and objective, literally searching--without digital or electronic aid-- for the term "lived life." But then I get swept into the language. I try not to see the "language," but instead to search for text. Just words. A couple of "l's" strung together. It's a "Where's Waldo?" approach.

But Greene sweeps me in with her language. I end up reading and thinking and interpreting and bringing my particular sense, my live life, to the language.

This happened with Greene's chapter on "Approaches to Truth and Being" in "Teacher as Stranger." In her remarks about pragmatism, phenomenology, and existentialism,, I started to see Greene's foundation in her doing philosophy. I see her disposal of the role of pragmatism in its attempts to measure things, like humans, that cannot possibly be measure without some accounting of biography. While "lived life" isn't being used, I think I'm witnessing its development here in this 1973 publication.

Earlier this morning I reviewed a booklet on dissertations in the humanities. One of my committee members very thoughtfully sent it to me to help me with this framework. It's quite different form the empirical/science-based framework that is being promoted within the Ed.D. program. The booklet offers standards that use descriptors of outstanding, very good, acceptable and unacceptable.

Within one of the standards for outstanding, the qualities listed int he area of language included "hot." I like this. Language should be hot.

Text, on the other hand, is cool.