The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Chaucer

  • Tele Pieces

    “Tele Piece #1” is the title finally settled on for the first of a planned series of short pieces played on the Telecaster Squier guitar.

    Squier not to be confused with Squire, as in Chaucer’s “The Squire’s Tale.” I considered titling the piece “The Squire’s Tele.” Chaucer’s tale for the squire is characterized by a bit of rambling, seemingly planned for a long piece, if planned at all, but interrupted by the Franklin, who might be in terms of social class considered subservient to the up and coming squire. And the Telecaster Squier guitar is often considered subordinant to the Fender American made Telecaster. Fender acquired the name Squier when it bought the Squier brand, a family name, in 1965. The V. C. Squier Company out of Battle Creek, Michigan began in 1890 and made strings for violins, banjos, and guitars.

    But the early Telecaster Squier is now considered a classic in its own right. In short, it’s a good guitar. Close to 20 years ago now, I was playing my Tele on Thursday evenings at a local wine bar, which closed almost as soon as it opened, victim of The Great Recession. I wasn’t up front or on a stage. I set up with a small room amp (Crate GFX-15) in a corner and played background instrumental pieces, mostly impromptu and rambling, or taking off on standards and going often I wasn’t sure where. Anyway, one night a family of four with some time to spend before their movie started across the street stopped in for a drink. They seemed inordinately interested in what I was doing. Most patrons just ignored me. Then the son, in his twenties, came over to chat. He and his father played guitar, and from where they were sitting he said they couldn’t tell if I was playing what he called a real Telecaster or a Squier.

    One of the first guitars out of the new Fender factory opened in Japan in 1982, this one is fitted with aftermarket Dean Markley and Seymour Duncan pickups, and it’s strung with D’Addario ECG24 XL Chromes Flatwound Electric Guitar Strings .011-.050 Jazz Light.

    The amplifier used in “Tele Piece #1” is a Fender Champion 20, with the Voice knob set to 02 Tweed Deluxe, and the FX knob set to 03 Reverb Hall. This combination gives a bit of mild amped style without too much distortion or fancy effects taking over. Filmed with a cell phone leaning against the bottom of the amplifier.

  • Not the Rubric Itself, but Ideas about the Rubric

    HTMLGIANT recently posted an interesting poetry rubric, evaluative criteria for students writing poems. One would think forcing a student to write a poem would be punishment enough, but grading the effort seems a bit excessive. In fairness to the teacher, maybe the rubric made more sense to the students in the class, or it might have been some sort of administrative mandate.

    I was reminded of an old grading illustration. Here’s the scenario: art class – draw a picture of your house. Little Mary, who loves art, digs in with the crayons, drawing a tiny house below an enormous, blistering red-orange sun in a pink sky. The teacher walks by and asks “What’s that?,” pointing to the sun. “The sun,” Mary replies hopefully. “Oh, but is the sun really that big?” teacher asks, and slaps a C minus bigger than Mary’s house onto her work of art. The scenario is repeated the following art class when Mary downsizes her sun and upgrades her house. Teacher’s response: “Much better, Mary, but that sun is still too big.” The teacher draws a small B minus in the center of Mary’s sun. Mary’s next effort conforms to the teacher’s expectations: a tiny yellow dot in the sky just above the roof of a house that reaches to the top edge of the paper. Grade: A minus.

    Thus Mary learns not art, but that to succeed in school means conforming to the teacher’s notion of reality, a notion that is at odds with Mary’s empirical knowledge, for the sun is, of course, bigger than any house. But in fairness to this teacher, maybe the lesson was perspective. But must every perspective be a fixed point of view?

    Buckminster Fuller describes the effects of the art class scenario in “Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies”: “I am quite confident that humanity is born with its total intellectual capability already on inventory and that human beings do not add anything to any other human being in the way of faculties and capacities. What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed, so that by the time that most people are mature they have lost use of many of their innate capabilities. My long-time hope is that we may soon begin to realize what we are doing and may alter the ‘education’ process in such a way as only to help the new life to demonstrate some of its very powerful innate capabilities.”

    Here’s the “Period 9 Poetry Rubric”: “Title, 2 points; Stanza Breaks, 1 point; Line Breaks, 1 point; Concluding Lines, 3 points; So What? 3 points; Imagery, 3 points; Things not Ideas, 2 points.”

    I was inspired to try my hand at a poem in response to the rubric. I made a few changes to the one I posted in comments at HTMLGIANT, so it’s a work in progress. Not sure that’s allowed under the rubric:

    After the Title

    After the title,

    there’s not much more.

    The stanzas break,

    and lines fall apart

    to the concluding

    so what?

    (“…the white chickens…

    a red wheel barrow…”;

    “Not Ideas about the Thing

    but the Thing Itself”)

    The poem total

    never enough.

    Postscript, from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue. “I’ll pay as much attention to your text / And rubric in such things as would a gnat.”