A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

COMM 337: Links to today's reading, epigraph

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do." -- Elvis Costello, quoted by Timothy White, "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock" Musician No. 60 (Oct. 1983): 52.

Hey, the reading is just a few items down. Here's the permalink ... which I formatted, no less, so it'll open in a new window. We'll listen to the NPR interview with the reporter, Evan Wright who covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq for Rolling Stone magazine.

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Elvis Costello's words of wisdom about writing about music -- which I think apply equally as well to writing about writing -- are traced to their source by Alan P. Scott, who once used a video display terminal that students of ancient history will no doubt be glad to know showed green letters on a black screen like those we used at The Rock Island Argus in the later Paleolithic Age.

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About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.