A Spring 2011 ds106 alum (the semester ds106 broke!) tweeted me tonight for the first time in a long while. She was an amazing student and she was one of the first to really pickup and run with submitting her own assignments for others to do that semester (she’s also a gifted illustrator). And I have to say what she tweeted was somewhat bizarre:
Reading the bava in a graduate education class? That sounds like academic heresy 🙂 And she followed-up with this:
While a far too kind overstatement, it made my day given I had just finished flailing through my hardboiled fiction freshman seminar. I had failed miserably to communicate the magic of Hammett’s Red Harvest and I was beating myself up about it. Seeing Erin’s tweets reinforced how much time, energy and failure goes into making something work. ds106 failed a lot of times before it took off (and still fails regularly), and in the end it’s the students that made it amazing. So here’s to UMW’s ds106ers and beyond, you’re pretty much the embodiment of what students should be in the “Net Generation.” There are too many to name here, but you all know who you are and that you’re #4life! Now back to Hammett, I will crack this nut yet!
I’m sure you’re not the first to fair to communicate the magic of Dashiell Hammett and I’m sure you won’t be the last. It’s an acquired taste.
Here’s a suggestion (take it or leave it) – present these stories in the medium in which they first became popular – radio. I was converted to hardboiled listening to Philip Marlowe http://archive.org/details/OTRR_Philip_Marlowe_Singles (there’s also a series of Sam Spade stories but the Marlow is much better).
Stephen,
That’s an awesome suggestion, and interestingly enough Paul Bond was reading Hammett as an audio book and used that for his quotes. But returning to the Old School radio version to get at the language is a brilliant idea. I will be raiding the archive for Red Harvest clips, and may very well change up the assignment for this week to reflect the old time radio. I guess it’s time to get cracking on the Internet Archive, thanks for the idea, Stephen.
I didn’t know Marlowe was in the Internet Archive, or that he had a radio show for that matter. Thanks to Stephen for pointing that out. And that first show title, “Who Shot Waldo,” is just begging for a creative misinterpretation. Too bad I’m not a cartoonist.
I don’t know how you failed with Hammett, but from their blogs it looks like the students are into it.
Paul,
The failure was really in trying to breakdown the Continetal Ops shifting allegiances and the complexity of plot and the various characters. I tried to map it out and I started getting confused by events myself. I’ll blog more about the details tonight. It wasn’t a complete failure, but for the rest of the semester I’ll be broadcasting and archiving the audio so you can tune in or listen as you see fit.
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