Sirc on Cobain

It's been a long time since I read something that made me want to re-assess classroom practice. Geoffrey Sirc's "Composition's Eye/Orpheus's Gaze/Cobain's Journals," in the new issue of Composition Studies, has got me thinking about what I want to do in writing courses next fall. Sirc starts with an image of Jim Corder asking "why in the hell" his students would want to write the tired essays he was assigning, and then posits Kurt Cobain's journals as a model of a different medium, a different "representational technology," a different "way of seeing."

Sirc reviews familiar critiques of textbook pedagogy--they emphasize consumption over production, they foster dispassionate and disengaged "essays"--and then gets us thinking about writing informed by Orpheus's gaze: something forbidden, something indulgent, and yet something everyday. Of students Sirc says "I can often get them to see the logic of memorializing their everyday, of capturing their unprogrammed interactions with other people and their environment" (15). He looks at Kurt Cobain's sad musings on fame, the state of music and culture, and spirituality, and wonders how journaling both constructed a world and helped (or not) Cobain think about the extant world..."self reflection as self definition" (18).

Thinking about Cobain, Sirc calls for a rethinking of journals in the classroom. If I'm getting the article (and I want to go back and read it again), though, he's calling for a particular use of those journals. Not as a place merely to reflect on the belletristic essay you just read, as a place to make banal lists: what did you see on the street today? what did you buy this week? what songs would you put on a mixtape today?

I've been thinking about these kinds of assignments (in anticipation of adding a significant blog component to writing classes next year) and how they could dovetail and sequence with other writing projects and the Cobtain connection has me thinking even more. I'm not sure what to make of Sirc positioning this mode, this way of seeing, as a response to the Jim Corder question "why in the hell would they want to write this?" If Cobain embodies this way of seeing (the indulgent, banal, everyday), then I gotta ask: why in the hell would they want to write this?

More on this later. What a great article. Makes me want to start putting together the fall syllabi (being that it's the last day of the spring term and all!).