LAST week, games we played when we were children, and the good, clean fun involved.
This week, let us connect to the psychology of play, the most famous treatise of it being by Johann Huizinga.
Johann Hui... who? Huizinga. He authored Playing Man (1938), whose thesis is that play -- make that Play -- is a necessary element of culture. Make that binding element.
It was in the mid-1990s that I was asked to advise a student whose undergrad thesis dealt with Huizinga's psychology of play. The thesis belonged to a graduating seminarian of the San Pablo Seminary at Crystal Cave. (I know... how can the seminary be at a cave?)
For several years in the mid-1990s, yours truly handled Literature subjects there -- the seminary, not the cave. And now this has to turn into a comedic sketch.
So in one of my classes, the syllabus required classroom time spent on the variants of the Essay, Poetry, and so on. By term's end, we did not have time for the Novel. I settled for studying the Novelette. Choice of material: Like Water for Chocolate (1989). It remains great writing, Bizarro world and all.
One of the book's 12 chapters ends with a female character riding off from her ancestral house on horseback, seated behind her lover. The female character, she is naked on horseback seated behind her lover, both riding off in protest of any and all that they leave behind. And of course that one visual has enough Elements of Literature to last a month's worth of classroom study.
We got done with Like Water, and for many in my class, it was an introduction to Serious Reading in English or Your Teacher Will Fail You. To cap the unit, what better way than to show the students the movie, right. Right.
It is a teaching maxim that you always preview first what you intend to show in the classroom. You never walk in with a video blind. For perhaps the only time ever, I neglected to preview the movie I would show in class.
So, the video was playing (VHS, no DVDs yet) and my students and I were thoroughly enjoying watching the novelette come alive audio-visually, before our very eyes. Before our very eyes, the section that had the female character riding off from her ancestral house on horseback, seated naked behind her lover, began to come alive. Caught unaware, I thought to myself that whoever directed the movie could not possibly have shot this scene as written. (to be continued)
