Books #18, #19, and #20

The reading this year comes in fits and starts. I’m bored by books for the first time in my life. More later about this?
  I read this on the Kindle Fire (and iPad3). I like the way the book was formatted to focus on one frame at a time if you choose, or the entire page. It’s interesting to read V for Vendetta as a first-timer after seeing OWS and Adbusters use the Guy Fawkes mask to such effect. Will the radical change of consciousness Chomsky believes necessary before an anarchist revolution actually occur, or are we too distracted and complacent even now? I fear we’re going to have to deplete the Earth even further before we can make positive change.
  Got this for my classroom library. YAWN. The characters are boring and predictable types, the supernatural aspects of the story are tired cliches, and the art was uninteresting. Kids who hate reading might like it, which is all that matters I suppose.

  Picked up a donated copy for the classroom library and read it on a whim. It was, after all, one of the books by which I can measure a good chunk of my near-decade as a bookseller. How many copies of this did I ring up? How often did I stack it at the Info Desk? Who knows? It wasn’t a bad book by any means, though at the time it was hot I had a snooty kind of attitude, something akin to “the Herd is reading this, it can’t be good.” As a descriptor of perennial truth it’s not too shabby. I wonder if the Celestine Prophecy is as good? Will I find out? Likely not.

@ the Wickerman Burn Festival

@ the Wickerman Burn Festival, originally uploaded by Blog-Sothoth.

We returned yesterday from 3 days at Four Quarters campground in Artemas, PA. We were there for something called the Wickerman Burn Festival, which is a mid-Atlantic knock-off of the Burning Man Festival. I liked camping with friends and having a little area all our own for people to visit and trade things. I enjoyed being outside and doing out-doorsy things. I liked seeing (some of the) freaky people, and meeting and talking to a few. But the music wasn't that great, the arts and crafts were sadly lacking, and I'm past the age when glow-in-the-dark bracelets or battery-powered jewelry might interest or excite me. We did get to dance a bit, and there were naked people, and the fire itself was a thrill: a huge effigy burned atop a gigantic pile of timbers, followed by a bit of hedonism. We took a long nap next to the conflagration once it had shrunk enough to get near. I watched burning embers climb a smoke ladder into the starry sky where they vanished, and wondered about early hominids doing the same and creating the underpinnings of religious and mystical thinking re: the heavens above. I would love to camp at Four Quarters again, but I'm not sure about Wickerman Burn. It wasn't a negative experience by any means, but I expected more...creativity? Paganism? Fun?

Day #178

It's close now, the end of the 2011-2012 school year. So close I can taste it. I'm trying not to act like I'm on summer vacay yet, but it's hard. There's so much left to do: complete final assessments, write report cards, plan next week's mini-course on international travel, DJ the end-of-year picnic, rehearse and set-up and break-down and get through the 8th grade passage ceremony at UMB, create the center pieces for the tables at said event, coach my homeroom through their portfolios and student-led conference presentations, look at the end-of year benchmark reading and language data for the 65 kids I have currently and will see again next year, begin planning next year's three academic expeditions, think of final products for said Expeditions. I've got to take courses this summer to keep my certification: Teaching Reading in the Content Area I and II. Yuck. And I just found out that on the new facilities map my room is moving across the hall and down next to the library. This makes room close-out a much more complicated process, and one of our pack-up days has now been co-opted by a School Leadership Team meeting. Oh, and Culminating Event is today. I need to get ready for that, because I haven't, and in a couple hours parents will be touring my room with their kids. I'm starting to choke on it all. I'm going to be the Humanities Team lead next year and I don't feel up to it. Insomnia all week hasn't helped. I'm so tired I bombed out on the Push-up Wars: I only did 67, which is terrible for me, and I came in second to one of the counselors, who did 84, a number I normally crush. I don't like losing those challenges. At least I beat the Phys Ed teachers. Ugh. What will I do with the students in my reg classes next week? I have nothing left to give, but I don't want to show movies. Maybe they can help me clean up. Yesterday on the playground before school: Morganna: "Mr. Geoff, I'm bored." Me: "Why are you bored Morganna?" Morganna: "There's nobody out here I like." Me: "How can someone your age ever be bored. Look around you. The world is an interesting place. What about your imagination?" Morganna: "If I imagine I'll be a big weirdo."

Book #17

For my thoughts and reactions to Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, you can stroll on over to my school blog. Down the side are links to what my 6th and 7th graders had to say about the book.

Book #16

"words which are but breath to me will last into eternity"--a paraphrase of Sappho Before I decided to become a certified public school teacher I was accepted into the graduate English program at College Park. I'd intended to get a PhD in literature, and had proposed a thesis idea about the paranoid authorial consciousness in Henry James, particularly in works like The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount. Ramsey Campbell's latest takes a similar track, but in reverse. I shan't explain further for fear of wrecking the surprise premise. Seven Days of Cain combines the psychedelic prose and unreliable nature of perception found in his earliest, best work with elements of Pygmalion and Frankenstein. The result is a mostly satisfying novel. Andy is a photographer working for his folk's portrait studio. He and his wife Claire are trying and failing to conceive. As the novel progresses we find out that Andy was once an aspiring writer and that his imagined characters may be haunting more than their author. Occasionally the book gets bogged down in Campbell's late-phase tomfoolery with awful puns and exchanges of misperceived dialogue, but I enjoyed it. The opening half is the strongest work he's done in some time. If you want a thoughtful, moody horror novel, give it a try.

Book #15

Nobel Laureate for Physics Michael Beard is one of the least pleasant protagonists I've encountered. He's a glutton, he's self-centered, he's arrogant, he's devious. He rides on an early achievement and uses it to move from sinecure to sinecure, enjoying a rather lavish life style. He cheats on his spouses and on his lovers. He covers up a murder and steals the work of a colleague in order to get wealthy from patents involving synthetic photosynthesis--while all along caring not a whit for the environment. The novel is peculiarly episodic, and feels more like three novellas stitched together than a cohesive fiction. As always, McKewan's prose is gorgeous and pulls you along even though the work is not up to the standard of Atonement. I thought the same thing about Saturday. McKewan must have read (re-read) Confederacy of Dunces recently--this is the same type of satire, minus the belly laughs. But Beard gets his comeuppance, which provides a measure of satisfaction. I'm a bit puzzled as to what McKewan hopes to skewer in this satire. Environmental scientists? Complacent bastards coasting through life? The current state of Western civilization? The biggest point of Solar seems to be that assholes are a clean, renewable resource.

Book #14

One of my very favorite voices! Stanley Elkin goes off on wild riffs and when he gets rolling it's a prose thrill-ride. This one ain't a top-notch Elkin like The Dick Gibson Show or The Magic Kingdom, but Ben Flesh is a captivating narrator who criss-crosses the country checking up on his numerous franchises, hustling all types of people and dealing with his own deteriorating physical condition and a strange assortment of god-sisters and god-brothers who are all triplets or twins. Yeah, the Flesh is weak, but he's successful nonetheless in this fraudulent facade of a culture where the closest thing to home is a double in the Holiday Inn and your best friend ever is an asshole Brit occupying the same room in the ICU.

Book #13

About 19 years ago I took a short story course with Phil Stevick at Temple University. I was getting my first Master's--it was a peculiar hybrid of academic MA and fiction MFA. Stevick's class was centered on the modern short story, particularly inovators of the 20th century. I was turned on to Calvino, Garcia-Marquez, Borges, Gordimer, Coetzee; this was a mesmerizing course. We were tasked with finding a new potentially important writer who might make a mark on the pantheon some day. I found, via a brief NPR story, a young Native American named Sherman Alexie. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven had just come out. I read it and critiqued it for the class. I don't recall what I said, and likely could no longer even use that jargon any more. I know I panned the book a bit. It was too precious, too contrived, too redolent of "writer's workshop"--whatever.But there was a spark, an appealing potential... So nearly 20 years later I find The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian in the latest Donor's Choose addition to my classroom library. Home run! I love the voice, the authenticity, the portrait of a young man going through his early teens with all the requisite suffering that age entails, coupled with all the requisite suffering that age entails growing up on the rez. It's funny and sad and full of touching flourishes. I already know which students I'm going to recommend read it.