I may not work hard enough, but I am very intelligent and I am surely the only one who will illuminate Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego with Nick Cave:
But the peculiar magic of the love song, if it has the heart to do it, is that it endures where the object of the song does not. It attaches itself to you, and together you move through time. But it does more than that, for just as it is our task to move forward, to cast off our past, to change and to grow, in short, to forgive ourselves and each other, the love song holds within it an eerie intelligence all its own – to reinvent the past and to lay it at the feet of the present. “West Country Girl” began in innocence and in sunshine, as a simple poem about a girl. But it has done what all love songs must do in order to survive: it has demanded the right to its own identity, its own life, its own truth.
His entire lecture gets much headier than that. It is well worth reading and everyone should teach it. But I got the idea of pairing these texts from this article.
The reason this is a stroke of genius is that the Cave lecture sneaks poetry and García Lorca in, both of which we will also study, via songs and specifically gory love songs. You cannot say this will not spark student interest.
#OccupyHE
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 