#4

In The Ghost Writer, Nathan Zuckerman was a young author just getting his feet under him. In Zuckerman Unbound, he has had a smash success with a novel largely about jerking off. Fame and fortune aren't all they're cracked up to be, however. Nathan is hounded by an obsessed fan with photographic memory, he receives death threat mail from fellow Jews who think he's portrayed them badly in fiction, his third marriage has crumbled, and Nixon is president. He has sex with a film starlet and she turns out to read Kierkegaard and fuck Fidel Castro from time to time. Things couldn't possibly be worse.

I haven't read Roth in a while, and returning to him is like going back to a favorite place after a long absence. That voice is so appealing, and moves convincingly from perverse humor to despair with appalling ease. I'm always tempted to read him all at once, but resolve to savor these books slowly. There's no one like him (well, no one except perhaps Stephen Dixon, or Stanley Elkin). A great book.

netflixed

A moving and entertaining exploration of the transformative power of creative expression. "It's hard out here for a pimp," indeed. Terrence Howard is exceptional as a pimp with hip-hop aspirations and a great hair-do. A keeper.

Day #85

No school today--professional development for teachers today and tomorrow. I took a personal day today and will use sick time tomorrow; this is what my IST at the Book told me to do during the January professional developments, and I think it's a good plan. I have never been to a useful professional development, and this is my 3rd year in the Baltimore City school system. Besides, I have yet another cold/sore throat.

The big news from today's faculty meeting (I heard through FB) is that the March is being zero-based. This means the entire staff has to re-apply for their jobs. The Big Cheese apparently told everyone that 50% of the staff will be let go as "incompetent" based on standardized test data, and once that happens they will be ineligible for re-hire.

Sounds like bullshit scare tactics to me--how can they shit-can half the staff as "incompetent" and then say everyone can reapply for their jobs? What criteria measure "incompetence"? The acting principal has been in my room exactly once this entire year, and never gave any feedback. No faculty member has received feedback following their formal observations in the Fall. Some big wigs from headquarters have moved through the school from time-to-time, but nobody has been in the building long enough to say someone is "incompetent."

Word from the Mrs. is that the Book wants me back, and at least two other schools (a good middle and a challenging and impressive charter high school) are asking what my plans are for next year. What to do, what to do?

Onward.

#3

Not reading much in terms of books these days, but I'm reading a lot of journals and mags, of which I have a backlog (catching up on Cabinet and Lapham's Quarterly takes some time if you fall behind).

Finished Vance's The Palace of Love fairly quickly, however. The Demon Princes books are a bit formulaic, but still evince an imagination fervid as it is fertile. What Vance does with his formula is always impressive. Here Kirth Gersen goes after the 3rd of five Princes who wrecked and imprisoned the inhabitants of his home world. Viole Falushe is a futuristic DeSade, but only in spirit. Turns out the proprieter of the galaxy's Playboy Manse is impotent due to an adolescent fixation. When a teenage crush object spurned and humiliated young Falushe, he became a soul-less beast of unimaginable cruelty. Even cloning his young love gives him no surfeit, and Kirth makes sure Viole will never sate himself in a satisfying climax.

Day #84

Since the first couple weeks of school I've been trying to get Priceless tested for special ed services. She is incapable of writing her own name. There is no way she belongs in sixth grade. I've been watching her carefully to try and figure out how she got this far, and her MO is pretty ingenious: she's quite crafty at moving her eyes around and copying work from a variety of papers. She'll copy #1 from one student, #2 from another, and #3 from a third. She's incapable of reading, but she can copy letters and shapes reasonably well.

And when I say "incapable of reading," I don't mean that she's a couple years below grade level. She is literally incapable. I knew it the first week of school, and submitted a form for testing. Nothing happened.

Then, her behavior went off the rails a couple weeks ago. Apparently Priceless has had enough of the frustration, and she's decided to force the school system to help her. I had a parent conference with her mother and father and the first thing they said was "she doesn't belong in regular ed. She can't read the TV Guide."

So today Priceless was tested. She is below kindergarten level in reading and writing. Her math skills are immeasurably low, off the charts.

I love Priceless. She is one of the most charming and pleasant children I know. She is strong and athletic and lovely, and when the boys call her names or make fun of her I wish I could knock their blocks off. I will miss her when they take her out of my class, but she needs help beyond what I can provide in that gonzo 2nd period class.

How does a child slip through the cracks for this many years? I can't help but think she's simply being passed on from grade to grade by people too lazy to fill in an SST form.

Day 83

I can't believe we are still not quite halfway through the school year. UGH!

Today we met with the family of the kid who pushed me. As expected, the administrators failed to file the paperwork Friday, so nothing happened. What should have been a 45-day suspension is now down to 3 days because of delayed paperwork. Next time the Big Cheese gets all up in my grill about not completing my data binder or changing my bulletin boards on a schedule I'ma say "Yo, you didn't do the paperwork on that punk ass bitch who put his hands on me, and it turned his long-term suspension into a long weekend." This kid is liable to put a chair in someone's cranium because he got away with it this time.*

I kept several kids for long detentions yesterday and today. Yesterday I made them listen to Hindustani classical music--flute and sitar ragas, vocal ragas, long tabula solos--and the same punks were back again today for more. So today we listened to 45 minutes of Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys. Tomorrow I'm thinking Frank Zappa, Sun Ra, or John Denver. Or Penderecki.

The kids are really chaffing under the "teach to the test" stuff we're doing. The Maryland State Assessments are in March, and the school big-wigs are in a tizzy about raising scores because our school has failed to meet No Child Left Untested standards several years in a row. If we don't improve substantially this year we can get zero-based, which means the administrators get shit-canned and the teachers have to re-apply for their jobs. Of course we don't have any administrators: our "principal" is really an acting vice-principal who is retiring anyhow this year, and our only true vice-principal was shit-canned from the Book last year after failing to stop the bleeding over West Side. We have been doomed to fail because we are short about 20 special educators and nobody is giving us the funds we need to hire up. But still the higher-ups run around with their hair on fire making sure I'm re-teaching main idea and literary analysis skills for the billionth time to kids who can't read or write grade-level sentences. Kafka couldn't script this shit.



*His father and mother to their credit made their son make eye contact and apologize to me, after he tried to lie and say he didn't do it. The videotape proved otherwise. The father hugged me and thanked me for how I handled the situation.

#2

I try to keep my reading material relatively high-brow for the most part, but occasionally I like to bottom feed. I enjoy conspiracy theories, books about aliens, true crime, hauntings, etc. In Nothing in This Book is True, But It's Exactly How Things Are I've plumbed the absolute depths. This is by far and away the worst book I have ever read. It is confused, pointless, meandering, and achieves spectacular new degrees of non-sequitur. Next to this a book like Intruders by Budd Hopkins is The Golden Fucking Bowl, and Whitley Striber's Communion is À la recherche du temps perdu.

But even a piece of shit like Frissel's can be accidentally entertaining at points. I like the stupid ass excursion into the Eye of Horus trainings inflicted on priests by Akhunaton, and the long story about Grey Aliens from Mars taking over half of Atlantis was rather amusing.

Reminds me of Uncle Area 51, who when drunk on vodka bloody marys will first disparage minorities, and when that's finally out of his system he'll tell you about the Philadelphia Experiment and his buddy who ended up embedded in a bulkhead 30 years in the future for a while. Or about the German homeless guy who used to come into the bookstore and call me "Mr. Communist Man" because I was always tasked with ejecting him. He said he was running for Congress in North Carolina, but for some reason chose Towson, MD as his base of operations. One day as we were ejecting him for annoying patrons he complained that we were destroying his 'files.' The 'files' were a bag of coat hangers and a hand-written list of every US president including party affiliation and eye color.

netflixed

I was totally sure this would suck because it had all the earmarks of that crashing disappointment "The Blair Witch Project," and one of the stupidest titles in cinema history. "Paranormal Activity"? Give me a break. It reminds me of the days in the late seventies when grocery stores stocked "generic" novels with titles like "romance" and "western" and "action."

But I was pleasantly surprised--or unpleasantly surprised--in a good way. "Paranormal Activity" is like a really good episode of a bad TV show I sometimes enjoy called "A Haunting," but without the cruddy cheap thrills. The premise is entirely ridiculous, because no muthafuckas in they right minds would stay 30 seconds in a house after collecting physical evidence of demonic visitation, and nobody would sleep with the lights off and their fucking bedroom door open either in that situation. But in horror films you automatically suspend disbelief anyhow and accept the rules as they are. I had fun with it, though it brought back bad memories:

When I was 9 years old my mother married my stepfather and we moved from my grandparents' house to his house in Reisterstown. My bedroom was in the basement of the new place. One night I woke with a crushing presure on my chest. I could barely breathe and was trying to scream but nothing would come out. Suddenly I started doing involuntary sit-ups of a ridiculously violent nature, and the entire bed shook like a wildebeast was tramping around. Then as quickly as it arrived the pressure was gone and I screamed bloody murder. My stepdad came downstairs in his saggy tighty whities and put me back to bed and let me sleep with the light on. His kids were by that time all teens and he probably thought "Jesus, what have I gotten myself into with this one?" This experience is of course not uncommon--it's in fact archetypal--and though I'm a skeptic crazy phenomena have happened regularly throughout my life.