Away from my Desk

This is a collection of activities I either read about, or had suggested to me, during winter break. They are all self-contained (though some have the potential to flower into something bigger and wilder), and they should all be doable in an hour or less.

25-word stories
I got this from Will Ferriter's Tempered Radical blog, of which I am a big fan. It really needs no explanation beyond the title. I particularly like it because 25-word stories are something of a "thing" (they've even been blogged about on the New Yorker, which is my personal guarantor of significance - not a view my students share, mind). But this means that students can read other peoples' stories, and see websites devoted to the genre. Incidentally, a cursory web search revealed that these are sometimes called espresso stories.

If you want to try this yourself, Ferriter provides a handout (it's a word doc).

Structured Academic Controversies ("Debate-and-switch")
I learned about these from Tina Chavez, but they appear to come from the "cooperative learning movement" (again, I got this from a cursory google search, and I don't know very much about it). You give students a controversial topic and some information, and have them craft arguments. They take notes on the other side's arguments, and then (this is the key thing) switch sides and each debate the opposite side, using their notes from the other team's arguments. You can read more about doing Structured Academic Controversies here.

Writing Prompts
Not just any writing prompts, but the "28 most tried-and-true" writing prompts on this tumblr. They are pretty awesome (and beautifully presented) (thanks to Dan Wise for the link).

The Alibi Game
This is one of several activities suggested by Helen Cox, who teaches in England and edits the New Empress Film Magazine in her spare time (and evidently owns that watch that Hermione used in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkabhan). 

You announce that the school was broken into last night. In pairs, everyone in the class must come up with their alibi. One "suspect" leaves the room, while the other gets questioned by the teacher and the rest of the calss. If their stories dont' match, their nicked.

The Adverb Game
I'll quote Helen directly for this one:

Write adverbs (eg "angrily") on slips of paper (or whisper into student's ear) . Student has to act in that manner and the rest of the class has to guess which adverb it is.

If you want you can give the students a long list of adverbs and they can choose which one they think it is - this helps for kids with poor vocab / weak emotional intelligence.

The Aphorism Game 
In groups of 3-5, students construct aphorisms by going around the circle with each person saying a word. The only requirement is that the words need to connect grammatically. At a certain point, the group realizes that they have an aphorism. At this point “wisdom has been born” so everyone in the group strokes their chins and says “mmmmmmmm”.

At this point the group writes their aphorism on the whiteboard. To extend the activity, groups can explain the meanings of each other's aphorisms (it's generally funnier if they explain the meaning's of each other's than if they explain their own). 

Action stuff
I love activities that are heavy on movement and light on language - and (to be crude and reductive for a moment) neuroscience backs me up on this.

• Clapping call-and-response (leader claps a rhythm, the class repeats it - but everyone does it with their eyes closed (from Helen Cox)
• Counting to 5 in pairs, alternating numbers and gradually replacing numbers with actions (from Helen Cox)

"Who's Line is it Anyway?"
This is a treasure trove (recommended by Jo Pugh) 

Little Greetings at the start of class

• The most obvious of these is the simple but effective "High-low" - that is, high point and low point of the weekend.
• I also like "recognitions", in which you single out someone who helped you out in some way during the previous week for recognitions.
• Another one I just found in my notes is "My name is _____ and I feel like ______ color today."

When we talk about exhibition at my school, there is always discussion of the "sizzle" and the "steak". The "sizzle" refers to the look of an exhibition - particularly the transformation of classrooms into unrecognizable, magical-looking spaces - while the "steak" refers to the actual content of the exhibition - the students' demonstrations of their learning.

Sizzle and steak are normally presented as different, even opposing things, but I read the metaphor differently: when you cook a steak, the "sizzle" is the sound of raw material being transformed into something digestible. So "sizzle" strikes me as a defining feature of beautiful work - information shaped by students into something that is meaningful to visitors who attend the exhibition.

What is of more concern to me isn't the "sizzle", it's more like non-edible cake decorations - stuff that looks nice, but doesn't have anything to do with the matter at hand. This year, our mantra for exhibition was "nothing goes on the wall that doesn't help us convey the information we need to convey. This led us to a relatively spartan exhibition, and one that caused consternation among many during the process of setting up the exhibition, but it was an approach that I feel good about. 

This is an ambiguous title, for which I apologize. It is meant to imply both "teachers who are interested in education" and "non-teachers who are interested in education". 

Until this autumn, I was a "non-teacher who was interested in education", now I'm a teacher. On the morning that I'm writing this, I have regained some of the luxury of my old job, because today all of the first-year teachers at the chain of shools where I work are going to a "Winter Odyssey" to reflect on what we've all been doing so far. 

As a result, at 7:56 in the morning I'm sitting at the kitchen table writing this, having been inspired to write it by the New Yorker article I was just reading. I had the extraordinary luxury of waking up at 6:15 (an hour later than usual) and today (a tightly-scheduled set of workshops in which we will be discussing our classes in detail, and sharing work that our students have created) feels, to every single new teacher I've spoken to, like a vacation. 

What I'm realizing at this moment is how little time for reflection I have most of the time. Teaching is, to a great extent, and adrenaline-based reflection. It is one of those jobs, like acting, being a chef, and sales, where to be at work is to be be "on". These jobs are precisely the opposite of research jobs. 

So now I'm reflecting. I've just been reading a New Yorker profile of education campaigner Diane Ravitch (paywalled, unfortunately), and one innocuous-looking paragraph stopped me in my tracks:

One of the constants in Ravitch's thinking, throughout its evolution, has been a demand for a rich, challenging, and varied academic curriculum [...] for all students. In part, the education debate can now be seen as a clash between Bill Gates's technocratic notion of Americas needs [...] and Ravitch's humanistic ideal of the well-rounded citizen.

I read this and immediately thought "it takes a WHOLE lot more than a well-rounded curriculum to develop a well-rounded citizen." Now, so far, "researcher me" and "teacher me" are in accord on this: we both believe that pedagogy is criminally undervalued in these debates in favor of "curriculum", and, pedagogically speaking, we are both advocates of project-based learning*. But here's where things change:

Researcher me says "design powerful projects that different students can access in different ways, and then guide your students through the project, and they'll be on the road to becoming well-rounded citizens". 

Teacher me says "OK, thanks, but three kids don't seem to have an access point for this project and aren't interested, one kid is continuing to struggle with organization and it's really making it hard for them to achieve anything else, several just keep seeming to fade into the background, and meanwhile a few kids are just making progress that's leaps and bounds beyond anyone else!" 

Here's what teacher me's anxiety boils down to: "Whatever ideology drives my vision of education, whatever pedagogy I espouse, the progress that my students make is dependent on my ability to provide them with the structures and support that they all need in real time. When I was a researcher, the basic unit of time I focused on was the year (or, more fine-grained, the six-week project). As a teacher I design multi-week projects, I plan the week, I outline the two-hour class, but the most important unit of time is the minute - if not the second. Nothing feels more important than what the kids are doing, and I am doing, right now. And if my awareness is blinkered, or my judgment is off, I'm not helping kids. 

Of course, the good thing about this is that if this moment is important, so are all the other moments, and I have plenty of opportunities to fix my mistakes. But what matters most to me now is not the big structural changes that I used to advocate for in schools, and which, I felt, were pretty much guaranteed to improve kids' life changes. What matters most to me now is what happens, in the words of Matthew Moss Headteacher Andy Raymer, "on a wet Thursday afternoon."

*and student-driven enquiry as well

I've discovered a really interesting problem that's inherent in project-based learning: it's really difficult to reconcile work that engages every student's passions with work that leads to outcomes that are meaningful on a scale that goes beyond students and their families. 

Here's what I mean by that: if students are doing a project that connects with what is meaningful to them personally, everyone will be doing their own project. I'm a big fan of this, and kids still work collaboratively when they do this, because they critique each others' work. 

What this work lacks is scale - when everyone's doing their own thing, you can't so something like run a big science experiment. If you're doing meaningful, cutting-edge science, you need everyone working on what they're commissioned to work on. This means that you're going to be doing work that doesn't resonate with everybody - or rather, you might be able to find a piece of the project that resonates with everybody, but there will be a lot of work that people need to do that they don't find innately interesting. I don't see a way around this. Even if you are doing a large-scale science project that's student-driven, it will only work if it's driven by a few students, with everyone else getting on board to help realize their vision. 

Before I started teaching, I thought of students (to my shame) as a fairly homogenous entity. In fact, this conception is implied by the term "student engagement" (not to mention "student body"). I imagined engagement as being a bit like chants at sporting events - everybody gets pumped up and joins in for pretty much the same reasons, and it feels good to be chanting as one big group. But full-group enthusiasm is ephemeral. It doesn't get you through a six-week project. When you're talking about the project (as opposed to the project launch day), engagement is much more like trying to pass a bill through congress - every single person has their own particular interest that you need to appeal to. And the very fact that one group of people is excited about a project will be enough to make other people think "ehhh, this probably isn't my thing."

This isn't really surprising. Imagine going up to a group of 64 adults and saying "Hey, you all live in the same general vicinity, I'd like you all to work on a complex and important science experiment together, over the course of several months." It just wouldn't fly.

The extraordinary thing is the extent to which most students, most of the time, are ready to go out on a limb and give something a try, even it it's not the thing they would personally choose to do with their time. 

I'd love to hear about other teachers' takes on this!

Our first full day in San Diego is drawing to a close. Briony’s lying on the air mattress we’re borrowing from our landlady and reading One Day, cars are cruising up first avenue outside our window, and I’m sipping vinho verde ($3.99 from Trader Joe’s. With that, you cannot argue). 

Our journey begins yesterday at about 11:30, UK time. Briony, her parents, her youngest brother, his wife, and I all set off for Heathrow with everything we are taking with us: six suitcases (each carefully measured on our bathroom scales, and weighing almost exactly the maximum of 23 kilos), one carry-on suitcase (full of books, and weighing approximately six metric tons), one carry-on saxophone (slightly oversized, but fingers crossed no-one will say anything), and two laptop bags (one is stuffed so full it barely shuts, the other is big enough to fit a laptop from 1989). I am wearing my hiking boots (too heavy to pack), my zip-up hoody and light hacket (ditto) and my straw hat from Morocco. Briony is similarly laden with extra clothing, yet somehow manages to make it look not just sensible, but stylish. 

We get all our bags checked and get onto the plane without anybody objecting to the quantity of baggage (or, for that matter, clothing) we have on our persons, and get to our seats. I hoist the sax, the unbelievably heavy suitcase, my excess clothing and my boots into the overhead locker, and we take our seats. It looks like we may even have a full row of three seats to ourselves, when a breathless man appears and says ‘Hey, sorry, that’s my seat but I’ve gotta piss like a racehorse, so can you just put my bag on it? You can steal what you like – you’ve got about five minutes.’ We take his bag, and he’s off. He turns out to be awesome. He’s just finished rodie-ing for a band whose name he refuses to reveal for about thirty seconds, before saying ‘OK, it’s Bruce Springsteen, but you can’t mention that name for the rest of the flight’. He’s also a ballet dancer, an actor, and a surfer, and lives in Encinitas, a ‘surfer town’ (his words) just north of San Diego. He reveals the following showbiz information: Bruce Springsteen never gives anybody any warning about what song they’re playing next – when the song in question is a spontaneous cover, this is a nightmare for the guys who run the autocue (I had no idea rockstars had autocues, but it makes sense). The E street band are a great bunch of guys to work for, except for the fact that they play long into the night when everyone needs to be up early the next morning. Madonna insists on having a backstage bathroom built for her at every venue she plays.

Our seatmate also recommends local beers and breakfast places, and teaches me to plié during one of our longs stretches hanging out in the area outside the toilets in the back of the plane (at one point we are asked to ‘keep it down, because people might be trying to sleep’). And he has a twisted and filthy sense of humour. All in all, he’s a great guy to sit next to for an 11-hour flight.

We arrive in San Diego to the smallest passport-check room I’ve ever seen in an airport. Briony goes to the foreigners line, and I go to the citizens one. When my turn comes, the woman taking my passport tells me to pull Briony out of her line to join me. This is the first time that our insane quantity of hand-luggage becomes a problem, as she performs a spectacular feat of queue-jumping. Then we both get sent to the ‘visa room’ (or whatever they call it). It quickly becomes clear that they don’t get a lot of immigrant visas at San Diego airport. My favourite line comes from one of the border officers, who says ‘let’s make a copy of her passport, just for the hell of it.’ But what really makes it is the response the line gets from the subordinate officer: ‘Umm, the room with the copier’s locked. Do you have a key?’

By the time we get to the baggage carousel, everything’s been taken off and set on the floor. Among the assembled bags are five of our six items of luggage. That’s right, one is missing – the biggest one, the one that has nearly all of Briony’s clothes. Things start looking very bad when the woman behind the BA counter informs me that all of our bags are listed as having arrived in San Diego. Eventually someone else brings in all the bags that haven’t been claimed from our flight. Among them is a big black suitcase that looks a lot like ours. The woman from BA calls the number on this bag’s tag, and asks the woman who answers whether she meant to leave one of her bags, and if not, whether she could bring the bag that she took instead back to the airport. The woman doesn’t speak very clear English, but makes it clear that A) the bag she took is ‘in the back of her truck’ (which is really not a reassuring thing to hear), B) she’s driving to her home in Oceanside (over an hour away from the airport) and C) she won’t be turning around until she’s got her kids home. So, we are advised to go and get something from McDonalds (the only place still open in the food court) and await further information. I borrow a cell phone from a woman whose friend’s bag was left in London and call our landlady to tell her we will be late arriving to the apartment. Shortly after this, the woman whose phone I borrowed, and her friend, are given a reference number and told they can leave. Unfortunately, when they try to leave through the only doors out, they set off an alarm that had been set by accident. At this point, these two people – who have been waiting for over an hour because their bags didn’t make it onto the plane – are told they can’t leave until the harbor police come and speak to them, so they can explain why they set of the alarm. I suggest that as witnesses, Briony and I could explain what happened, seeing as we’re hanging around for a while anyway, but no dice. This has become a matter of national security, so common sense has been replaced by inviolable protocol. We are all assured that when an alarm goes off, the harbor police come in ‘about thirty seconds’. In this instance, they arrive in about a half an hour. Briony and I go up to McDonalds, I order some food, and before I have even had time to begin eating it, a man appears with the suitcase! So it’s off to the super shuttle, and then to our new home.

And you can just make out the bay in this shot (taken from the same balcony)

We unpack a bit, now delirious with exhaustion. I stuff sweaters into tee-shirts for pillows and Briony opens up my sleeping bag for a blanket, and we crash out and sleep fitfully. I wake up roughly once every half an hour, thinking it’s 7 AM and then thinking ‘damn, I need to go pick up a rental car, but I’m waaaaay, too tired to drive’. At about 3, Briony tries to rouse me, saying it’s after eight and we need to get going. I suggest to her that she has another look at her watch.

Eventually, we give up on sleep, get up at 5, do a bunch of unpacking, and then go to Hob Nob Corner for an awesome breakfast. Then a stroll around Hillcrest, some coffee beans bought from a lovely guy at Peets coffee, and our courtesy pick-up from ‘Dirt Cheap Car Rentals’. The guy who picks us up is from Tijuana, which, he tells me, is full of Padres fans who come over for the games. I’m pleased to hear the Padres have a devoted fan base. The guy also demonstrates to me what conversational ‘Spanglish’ actually sounds like: ‘Mira that restaurant’, he tells me at one point. ‘it’s muy bonito, the best Mexican food in San Diego.’ With the woman behind the counter at ‘Dirt Cheap Car Rentals’ we talk about schools (her kid’s only three, but she’s thinking about kindergarten already) and I jot down High Tech High’s website for her. Regarding the car, she explains that ‘it’s got some dents and scratches, but there’s no deductible on the insurance, so we don’t need to mark them all down’. Evidently, ‘Dirt Cheap Car Rentals’ doesn’t deign to bring in the mechanics for something as trivial as dents and scratches (at only $399 per month, I’m definitely not complaining). Our car is a Suzuki Swift (Suzy Swift, as we now call her). Suzy has her fair share of dents and scratches, a grey paint job that looks like those pictures of statues that have been damaged by acid rain, a tape player, and no central locking, air conditioning, or, I believe, power steering. She also has the turning radius of a much larger car. Perhaps one with more than four wheels. But having said all that, she’s got a lot of style – and a surprisingly roomy trunk when you drop the back seats down.

Here's Suzy

We go with Suzy to the local AT&T outlet, where I fear the worst, but am proven wonderfully wrong when two guys with an immense and not entirely legit technical knowledge set us up with iphones (what do I mean by 'not entirely legit?' One of the guys told us about how he 'hadn't played World of Warcraft in ages', before adding 'Yeah, I had this program going that kept it running while I slept, I was raking in money... I'm not allowed to get an account on World of Warcraft anymore.'

Then it's on to Trader Joes! (More to come, when I've got time).

Every so often, we get EXTREMELY long comments on the blog posts I write for work. These comments occupy a liminal space between spam and mad rants (maybe we could call them 'spants'). They suggest that there are quite a lot of people with a lot to say, in desperate need of someone to listen to them. I always skim these before 'unpublishing' them, but this one (posted underneath a post I had written about the argument to teach computer coding in schools) had a line that caught my eye:

I just had your Pecan Encrusted Chicken   good stuff even though 
I used a toaster oven 

It's nice to have the affirmation, even if the pecan encrusted chicken here referred to is not my own.

Last week, we took our first seaside trip of the year. In the party were Lucy, Jeremy, their (rather unwell) boxer dog Callie, Briony, and me.

As is our custom, we met at the Broca, outside Brockley Station, and bought coffee and vegan cupcakes to take in the car.

Our initial destination was the Leigh on Sea Vintage and Handmade Fayre - 'vintage and handmade' meant that there were stalls selling handmade jewellery, clothing, and homewares, stalls selling vintage examples of same, and stalls selling things handmade using vintage materials (the two-tier cake stand made from an old LP and EP was a particular favourite of mine). But the highlight of the fayre, to my mind, were our fellow-shoppers, many of whom had dressed for the occasion - saddle shoes, pomade, and elaborate hairstyles were much in evidence.

Then we headed to Southend for lunch at the Railway Tavern, a vegetarian pub with anarchist-punk roots, and live music in the evenings. We were told that dogs were sometimes allowed, but not today (what time would have been better than a sleepy Saturday afternoon is a mystery to me. Perhaps Callie would have irritated the meeting of militant vegetarians sitting at the table next to ours (overheard: 'I think, probably, everyone who works in a slaughterhouse is psychotic'). 

Our waiter looked like he was probably still in his teens, and was visibly relieved when we all ordered the same drink (fresh-squeezed orange juice). 'Well, that's easy to remember!', he told us. After a slightly less straightforward food order (three 'crassburgers' - one without sauce, and a goats cheese burger), he brought out our cutlery, wrapped in purple napkins, My little bundle was, to be frank, a bit of a mess. 'I know it's not very neatly done', he apologised, 'but I do try!'

The kitchen staff didn't look any older than him, and as we waited for our meal I caught the occasional glimpse of a 6th-former pan-frying onions or deep-frying chips in the kitchen. As our waiting time lengthened, my expectations for our meal diminished.

How wrong I was - those teenagers can cook! The unfortunately-named crassburger was a big, soft, flavoursome patty in a warm bun, served with caramelised onions. It was miles ahead of any other veggieburger I've had in years. The chips were hand-cut, fresh, and delicious. 

After our meal, we headed to Southend's seaside, strolled a bit, sat on its (small and crowded) sandy beach, then headed back to Leigh (but not before a convertible drove by filled with teenage girls all singing along enthusiastically to Tenacious D's classic, 'Fuck Her Gently' (with its eminently sing-alongable line 'What's your favourite dish? I'm not gonna cook it but I'll order it - from Zanzibar!')

All day we'd been discussing good coffee, and Lucy told us she'd scoped out Leigh and Southend for good cafes with no luck. But as we drove past it, I spotted The Coffee Bean Company, so we found a place to park and Jeremy and I doubled back to the cafe while Lucy and Briony browsed a vintage shop we'd happened to park next to. 

When Jeremy and I returned with our (very good) coffees, Briony had gone into 'It's Teatime', a German tea shop, to buy loose leaf fruit tea. Briony beckoned me in so I went inside, acutely conscious that I was carrying their competitor's takeaway coffees. 

'What is that you're carrying?', the proprietor asked me. He was an imposing German man wearing a rather incongruous Calgary Flames t-shirt. 'It's coffee,' I said sheepishly. 

'Hmmph! You have it in a paper bag,' he observed. 

'Umm, sort of...' I replied.

'The taste in a paper bag is no good. But even here, we give customers paper bags when they ask for them. I was in American - and Starbucks, they had to stop serving coffee in paper bags, they went back to porcelain, because their customers did not like the taste.'

He was on a roll, so I didn't correct him, just made noises of assent and told Briony I, and her coffee, would wait for her outside. 

We waited for quite a while, because after painstakingly measuring out Briony's tea into foil packets, he took her through the brewing instructions for all three types of tea. This was going an especially long distance beyond the call of duty, since the instructions for all three teas were identical.

'For this tea, the water must be 100 degrees, yes? Put one teaspoon for each person, and one for the pot - this is very important. Then let steep for five to ten minutes. Five will be weak. 10 is better.' It's worth mentioning that this information was printed, with numbers and graphics, across the bottom of each label - but this man was leaving nothing to chance.

Finally, he reached the last packet. 'Unfortunately, this is in German only,' he apologised, before pointing to the graphics and numbers printed at the bottom of the label: ''For this tea, the water must be 100 degrees,' he recited. 'Put one teaspoon for each person, and one for the pot - this is very important. Then let steep for five to ten minutes.' 

Having since brewed the tea at home, I can say unequivocally that it was worth the wait. And if I return, I will take time to have a tea or coffee (in porcelain cups) at one of their tables. 

Then it was on to the day's final pre-planned destination: What the Butler Saw, an old-style arcade of small vintage shops. It turned out that a recent barista-school graduate (and serious coffee aficionado) has set up a little cafe in the arcade, so we felt compelled to have another coffee. I sampled her first-ever attempt at a soya flat white, which was delicious. We had a hypercaffeinated browse through the arcade (Briony wanted to buy the reclining dentist's chair, Jeremy and I were tempted by the Super Nintendo system (with a note saying it had been tested, and was fully functional!). At the back of the arcade, we came across a rather sinister sight:

We finished our trip with a walk by the seaside as the sun went down. It was low tide, and lots of boats (including one battleship) were left standing up on the sand. As we walked, a group of local youths were shouting abuse at some poor guy walking near us. Eventually, one of them shouted 'Oy, briefcase wanker!', which I can only assume referred to me. I guess there's not much to do in the evening in Leigh on Sea if you're a teenager. Though at least one local resident has an elegant way with a spraycan: 

After our walk, it was time to head home, with Zeppelin on the stereo and good cheer in our hearts.

Last Sunday, Briony and I saw Emmy the Great play a gig at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, backed by four female backup singers and an all-female string quartet (I mention the gender because she kept mentioning it - it was significant because the gig was part of a festival marking International Women's Day. 

It being an era of digital record-keeping, there is some pretty good smartphone video footage of the gig on this youtube channel. 

For the record, 'Emmy the Great' seems to refer to the band, rather than to Emma-Lee Moss (the singer/songwriter) - well, obviously it does refer to her, but in the same way as 'the Jimi Hendrix Experience', which was a band, not an individual. I think it's a really unfortunate name - it has the air of something you wrote down on a Battle of the Bands signup sheet because you'd been arguing over names for weeks, and you were about to miss the deadline.

My favourite Emmy the Great song is 'Paper Forest (in the Afterglow of Rapture)', off her latest album, Virtue. Partly, I like it because its written with a lyrical rhythm that I used to write in back when I was in a band in high school (Bah-dah-dah-dah-Bah-dah-dah-dah-Bah-dah-dah-dah-Bah). Unfortunately my lyrics tended to be, almost literally, gibberish. The only instance I can recall word-for-word was a short verse within a song written by the guitarist (the bassist had a verse too - our songwriting had a kind of Wu-tang Clan 'everybody take a verse' egalitarianism). Here's my bit:

If the tractor is attractive ride it like it was the one

Because the ashes still are glowing even when the fire's done

And if nowhere's where we're going then you know you better run

and now my soul's on fire and it's burning like the sun

Looking back on it, I can't find any way to read the first line other than as an invitation to have sex with farm machinery. What on earth was I thinking? The answer, I believe, is that I was thinking that 'tractor' and 'attractive' have an appealing consonance. I find this line exceptionally embarrassing, but there's stuff to like in the passage too - I like the tight internal rhyme between 'glowing' and 'going',  and the way that 'soul's on fire' slows to eighth notes, breaking up what has been a steady sixteenth-note flow. But that's all to do with sound and rhythm. On the level of meaning, there's less to love - the first and second lines are connected by a 'because', but I defy anyone to find a reason that one should ride a tractor because ashes are still glowing. The third line is a sort of grunge-era stab at a Wildean epigram, and finally, maybe I've just been living in England too long, but 'my soul's on fire' seems like an awfully bold claim to make, especially from someone rapping in a deep, deadpan monotone.

Which brings me to my final note in this tangential reminiscence - the song was a dark and downtempo - trip-hop as played on guitar, bass, soprano saxophone, and conga drum (we didn't know any kit drummers with experimental enough tastes to join the band). This leads me to puzzle a bit over influences. I think I must have bought Tricky's Pre-Millenium Tension by this point, or I have absolutely no idea where this sound would have come from (the other big influence, I believe (chronology is a bit fuzzy) is the Killah Priest track off of a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion remix album). Though I don't think anybody would've picked up on these influences from hearing us play - we had a pretty distinctive sound. There's something to be said for the idea that originality comes from trying and failing to mimic your influences. My Dad first presented this idea to me after he'd read that the Beatles wrote 'Got to Get You Into My Life' in an attempt to write a 'Motown number'. If you listen to the tune with this knowledge, you can hear the Motown influence, but it's definitely NOT a Motown song. For more on the complicated relationship between originality and imitation, have a read of Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism

This brings me back to Emmy the Great, who are intensely (and wittily) imitative and referential, though they never sound like anyone but themselves. The first song Briony and I heard that really blew our minds was 'Hallelujah', which is about listening to Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' (interestingly Moss specifies that it's the 'original Leonard Cohen version' - I would've assumed she'd prefer Jeff Buckley's version to Cohen's dry, synthy original). 

In general, Moss's lyrics are pretty oblique (more so on Virtue than on her first album, First Love), but they have the quality of entering a conversation midway through, rather than of somebody stringing words together more at less at random for the sake of their sound - which, apart from being my preferred approach to songwriting, also characterises a great deal of songwriting (especially in America). 

Another great thing about Moss's songwriting is that she's interested the act of writing itself. There are two couplets in 'Paper Forest' which, together, are my favourite lyrics about writing in any song that I can think of. First, early in the song, she sings the following:

It's like these days I have to write down almost every thought I've held,
So scared I am becoming of forgetting how it felt,

Then, later in the song, she sings

It's like the way I have to write down almost everything I see,
So that the record does obscure the thing the record used to be,

I used to write fairly compulsively in a journal - not as often as I felt I ought (it wasn't necessarily a daily thing) but a lot more often than most people - and I did it for precisely these two, apparently contradictory reasons: to make sure I didn't forget how my life felt, and to rewrite my life in the terms I wanted - which is to say, translated by my literary and musical influences. Thus, quite a lot of my high school journals are written as if they were being kept by the least dissolute member of Jack Kerouac's circle. In University, I tried on Joan Didion's matter-of-factness, and picked up the genial curiosity and off-the-cuff analysis of Henry Allen, a Washington Post writer who taught one of the first seminars (and possibly the best) I ever had. Actually, it goes deeper than this, because something doesn't just become 'my version of events' when I write it down, the very act of perception is an act of interpretation (for evidence of this, walk around anywhere, and I mean anywhere, with the James Bond theme playing through headphones). And yet, there's something more deliberate when you actually write things down - it is an attempt to refashion the world, as well as to record it. 

Having said all that, 'Paper Forest' has much more to it than those two couplets - in fact, for the most part it isn't a song about writing. You should listen to it - here it is:

The first time my Mom rode the 176 bus was like meeting a celebrity, because she'd heard so much about the extraordinary goings-on aboard it. It's the only bus that runs all night between us and central London (from Penge to Oxford Circus, to be precise), and all-night buses get pretty wild, but the 176 seems to attract a certain amount of chaos at any hour. To give just a few examples:

There was the broken window. There was the guy who freaked out and lightly hit a ticket inspector in the chest, leading to a swift evacuation of the other passengers. Then, there was the ex-bus driver who held the bus doors open in protest after the current bus driver inadvertantly shut the doors on a woman who was trying to get off. The ex-bus driver knew that the bus couldn't move with the doors open, so he and another concerned citizen kept the bus motionless and called the police to report the assault of a young woman by a bus driver, heedless of all criticism (including from the woman herself, who was shouting at them to stop being idiots and let the bus leave). When the police arrived, they detained the two men who were blocking the doors. However, they weren't held for long, as we discovered later in the evening (it took a looong time to get hoem that night), when we found ourselves again on the same bus as these two concerned citizens, who had never met before this fateful evening. I still remember one bit of their conversation, when one told the other about someone who'd killed himself by jumping off the roof of a block of flats.

'Coward's way out,' his new friend said.

'Naw, it's not,' he protested, 'it takes guts to jump off a building. Doing it with pills - now that's the coward's way out.'

Because we now live a bit further out, Briony and I don't take the 176 as much as we used to, but we still live near a stop, and every once and a while trains stop running, and we get to ride it again (in fact, I'm on the 176 as I write this in my notebok, and a few seats ahead of me a young man is loudly taunting his friend for possibly having contracted scabies over the weekend).

Earlier this evening, Briony and I set off to see Emmy the Great play at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (it was a great gig, incidentally). When we arrived at the train station we discovered that due to engineering works, there were no trains. So we walked to the bus stop, where there was a 176 bus with its hazard lights flashing,and all the interior lights off. At first we thought it was broken down, but Briony's pretty sure that in fact, the driver had taken a break in order to pray. In any case, after a few minutes, we set off.

A little while later, a guy came on talking on his mobile in a state of rage, and kept up an animated phone conversation about rent, and money he was owed, and somebody's illness - his (exceptionally loud) conversation so enraged the man sitting behind us that he started humming loudly to himself to cover the noise.

Meanwhile, the guy sitting across the aisle from me was playing a snooker game on his iphone, with sound effects that were uncannily similar to the sound of a heart as amplified by an echocardiogram machine (though he was wearing headphones, so he was missing out on the sound effects that the rest of us were enjoying).

After the phone conversationalist got off ('Thank God for that!' the guy behind us cried) the phone-gamer started playing some game that seemed to be all about rubbing your thumbs on the screen vigorously, and generating the sound of a TV set that's getting nothing but static. I finally caught a glimpse of the phone's screen: it was taken up by four photorealistic pink udders.

The guy was milking a cow on his phone, for entertainment.

In a cab in Stoke-on-Trent. The driver had been working since 6:30 AM (it was nearly 5 in the evening). He said it'd been the busiest day they'd had since Christmas.

'Any interesting customers?'

'No, no-one interesting today, except a couple of schoolkids got into a fight.'

'What, in the cab?'

'Yeah, a brother and sister, she was seven, he was eleven. I get some real characters though, especially since we started taking NHS contracts. I pick people up from AA meetings, first place they go is the off license. Then they want to drink it in the car.

I picked up one guy, he'd had four bottles of whisky, and he'd been drying out at the hospital. I picked him up in his dressing gown - no trousers. I took him home - his place was beautiful. A big farmhouse, must've cost a million quid, I reckon. He didn't have any money to pay me. Didn't have his keys either, I had to help him break in.'

'Are you sure it was really his place?'

'Well, he seemed to know the name of the cat.'