Seeing the Roots.
A couple of months ago - I think sometime back in mid December I was flipping channels fairly late one night. I came across a program on Robert McCloskey, the children's author, which I was quiet surprised to see. The program consisted of a series of interviews discussing how he wrote and drew some of his more well known works. How he came by the characters and scenes in them. He showed drawings and examples from the Homer Price books, Make Way for Ducklings and the Maine stories. All of this you could see was a reworking of actual people and places, simplified and clarified for a pictorial work of children's fiction. There was the house in his hometown, one of the Homer Price illustrations, which he re-imagined with less clutter. Less of the actual trees and buildings around it on its street so that he could draw it a little quirkier a little more distinctly. Transferring detail from the surroundings to the central object of the picture. He also showed an example of a tree in Maine. A pine tree in a strong wind cannot be drawn without considering the roots that hold it, and including them unseen in the tree that you actually draw. Even in this video, these segments, you get the sense that in some very real ways McCloskey was stricken almost by the level of detail and depth he saw for the images he created. The type of seeing needed to draw the best pictures. He spent some time and effort trying to describe it. I read the Twaynes bio of him a number of years ago (
Robert McCloskey : Twayne Author Biographies [WorldCat.org]) and got the same sense from that. At some point subsequent I don't recall exactly when I lit up the internets to try to determine what I had seen, and decided it was probably this:
Robert McCloskey - Weston Woods Studios. [WorldCat.org].
Beyond this one program, I was puzzled by the very notion of encountering grade school programming on broadcast TV so late at night. It is on every night to, all night. What is MPT trying to do here, Late Night.edu? It's a nice gesture I thought, but shouldn't the little tykes be in bed by the 2:00 am hour when I saw this. Surely shouldn't I have been asleep also?
Of course not being completely dim I eventually figured out that the intent must be to provide a resource for schools. I imagined teachers setting up VHS decks to blindly tape programming from the wee hours to time shift it forward to daylight. There must be a tip sheet somewhere to what's airing at night. TV listings don't tell you what's on at that hour. It seems so very low tech; though, so very 1980's. Maybe they Tivo it? Examining this further I eventually determined that these programs were being aired under the auspices of something called
Thinkport. An organization created through a partnership of Maryland Public TV and Johns Hopkins University's
Center for Technology in Education. It all seemed so precise and organized seeing this last bit of the puzzle. If I could ever figure out how to use my VCR I could give myself the 6th grade education I never paid attention to the first time round.
11:49:57 PM  ;;
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