Penn and Ellison

Listening all day for hours. Not just listening, but also evaluating and reflecting.

My juniors began their formal oral performances today. They were well prepared and quite good. Most had taken the time to consider a personal, original, creative approach to interpretation on at least one outstanding bit of writing they found in Ellison's Invisible Man. I listened to five presentations each fifty-minute period for chapters eight through thirteen.

After a grocery stop, I had about an hour at home for reflection and chores before my husband arrived. He has been reflecting about his experience with his various reels, having spent last week carrying the bits of a Penn reel to work, cleaning away encrustations and assessing the viability of vulnerable parts like the crab-claw-shaped spring that has something to do with the bale closing. I asked him-- You used to work on your own bicycle, right? Yes, stripped it down to the frame-- he said, with a grin. That is a valuable and satisfying skill. Of course he is considering what his next reel will be. I observed-- I wouldn't want to have a reel I couldn't work on like that. He agreed.

Until this moment I had not made the connection between the two incidents of listening I engaged in today. To strip a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence, a word down to the frame and then put the whole back together again-- that is a valuable and satisfying skill. Beyond a skill, really, an artful and personal expression of one's world view. That takes time to find.