The Problem of Audience and Purpose

Conversation in Back Seat

2012-02-03T17:25:00.000-08:00

     "Mom, the subs don't know anything about us. They don't even know who we are. They don't know anything about how we are," comments my son.
     "That's true," I say. "That's why you sometimes have to speak up for yourself and explain what you need or how you usually work best. You can do it politely and respectfully."
     His kindergartener sister: "No. We don't have to do that in our class because we wear name tags."
     He answers: "That doesn't make any sense because your name doesn't tell them anything about your personality."
     She answers: "Right, but then we just act the way we always do."

Funny Coinkidink

2012-02-02T19:35:00.000-08:00

I think it's hilarious that in my Diigo tag cloud, "Howard Zinn" comes up right next to "Huckleberry Finn." Awesome. Click on "Links, Links and More Links" in my tabs to check it out.

Chicago Blog Redux

2012-01-29T13:39:00.000-08:00

I really enjoyed writing the triptych of prose poems about Chicago a few months back, but I noticed that Chicago Blog (the first one) displays very oddly on my PC laptop, and I'm not sure why. So, below, I'm assembling all three blog entries together in one place for the first time. I wrote these based on my journal jottings during a trip I took with two old girlfriends to celebrate our 40th birthdays. Enjoy.

Chicago Blog: No Ketchup Allowed

Coming soon, Dada prose poem of lime-flavored art and lionesque piers of Ferris Wheel gin, complete with celery salt.

In it, The Venus de Milo sports mink pompoms. Homeless black men give me The Onion free for $2. Hundreds of porta potties escort us to the lakeshore, serenading us with the drumming of a thousand empty dill pickle buckets.

Frank Sinatra voiced-over the William Tell Overture to berry-burst explosions of pointillism.

Obey the Metra. Throw Miró a dulce cupcake. Wash your face in blue Chagall. Occupy Wall Street with a New World Order chosen by musical experts. The teacher at the Prairie School pastes her broadsides into windows and names her boat Semi-Precious. Blow out the candles; it's time to fly.

Chicago Blog 2: Inventions of the Monsters

In the second installation I offer an Art Nouveau triptych: three female forms, tousled tresses scented with crushed marigolds.

A mosaic window. Endless subway tunnels of humanity. A marathon wheelchair. Soviet Backscatter X-Ray technology reveals knotted balloons of nostalgia swallowed to pass through customs. They have burst.

Sandburg sends the hog butchers packing to the suburbs in a flight of granite steps. They take the blue line.

Poverty is the Italian beef of angry foam-board. The buoy bells they ring for me.

Ceres blesses the towering corn cobs along the uphill river. The Sears Tower follows the Tao to the tune of blues harmonica.

Three reenact the past propped on elbows over sprinkles and buttercream. Protests, protests everywhere.

Chicago Blog 3: Anyone? Anyone?

The Wobblies and the lovers photograph themselves in fun-house reflections.

We stand back with our arms crossed, reserving judgment. We are ditchers.

The Hobo College carries the banner with worn-out soles and can't catch a lift. After 26 miles the runners hobble through the streets, weighed down by their medals; the anarchists still serve up deep dish portions of a monumental White Castle. No substitutions.

Who will bail out the students? Where will they park their parents' cars? The new pilings have sprung a leak deep down and we will discover the flooded basements much too late.

The ashes of the old city congeal into plexiglass and steel. The miles of grasslands have become urban renewal. Condominiums sail by.

We taxi the tarmac hunched in our capsule of air and close our eyes.

Original Posts with More Photos:
Chicago Blog: No Ketchup Allowed
Chicago Blog 2: Inventions of the Monsters
Chicago Blog 3: Anyone? Anyone?

The Gaping Maw of "The Box"

2012-01-28T16:28:00.000-08:00

Across the desk, it stares me down. The gaping maw of "The Box," mock-packed with construction-paper representations of each document which still needs to be finished for my National Board portfolio.

I ruthlessly chop away at what I've written, paring it down sliver by sliver, page by paragraph, into concise, glistening gem, cut to specification yet retaining, hopefully, enough of its natural essence to be appreciated.

This is not the fun part. But I'm trying to finish an entry by dinner, so I'd better get off my blog.

Cheers!

Music to Work By

2012-01-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

[peeve-- apparently you can't link to pandora stations? wth?]

Usually I don't work well to music with lyrics, but my Pandora station based on Pink Martini, Norah Jones and a buttload of thumbs-upped other similar singers is very soothing...

Especially for someone (me) who just planned out her next two months of work on the ol' National Board portfolio and has an awful lot of analysis writing ahead of her. I'm in the thick of it now... the slogging through meaty mud parts where I actually have to give evidence that my purposeful teaching produced learning.

Wait... there are a few more cover sheets and forms I can fill out before I dive into the sloggy parts.

I am hoping to finish one of my entries this weekend to the point where I can edit. And to draft another entry, very roughly.

Ooh, here's another station that is working out quite nicely, based on Rodrigo Y Gabriela, spanish guitar. Beautiful!

Rant Against Little Girl Clothes

2012-01-25T19:43:00.000-08:00

So, it's not bad enough that every top is either spangly, sequined, Hello Kittied, crowned, or bedazzled and come in either hot pink, white or pastel lavender. No. Or that the skirts are endless arrays of tulle, ruffles, embellishments or wacky prints that mismatch with the diagonal stripes or abstract glitter-glue modern art of all the other tops.

No, that's not bad enough. But if you choose to buy your kid pants, she has the choice of either knit pants, leggings or jeans. Many models come in black, white or a light pastel. Guess what happens to white or light pastels on the playground (where a little girl should slide, swing, crawl, run and rumble?) Filth. Filth that doesn't wash out. And guess what happens to knit pants? They shred, and you can't patch them.

Then, jeans. When sitting crosslegged, jeans gap in the back. And the little girl tops, the plain stretchy t-shirt ones (and even most of the over-spangled glitter-glued ones) are not long enough to reach down over the gapped open crevice which shows one's chonies and buttcrack to whomever is lucky enough to have the spot on the rug behind you in kindergarten. Plus, a parent is lucky to find a pair of little girl jeans that aren't embellished with rhinestones or swoopy, paisely embroidery in gold lame

Haiku, What the Heck.

2012-01-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

I've been playing around with haiku a little, hoping it would get me through a tough week and warm me up for writing poetry with my high school students. These below are freshly baked... yet perhaps too soon from the oven for consumption? I like them enough to put them out there, though.

I have been reading up on haiku a little, and only recently discovered that the whole 17-syllable rule in English is a complete myth. But I think they are actually more difficult to write when the rules are lifted.

smooth curve of coffee cup
before the blunt edge of day

silly goose
loyally defends
even the blackbird.

The grass bows,
The field is a sea,
yet firmly rooted.

small ecology:
doll clothes, crayons, laundry, books
her habitat

pomegranate tree
so thin of stem and leaf
such rich juice

stone set in hillside.
weather wears incrementally;
avalanche shatters.

Wheelchair Rugby: It ain't just for buff young crips anymore.

2012-01-17T20:52:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I experienced my first wheelchair rugby match. I was a little distracted because we were babysitting my two nieces and I had a gaggle of children along, but it was fun to finally see how the game is played in person.

Rich has been invited to play with the Tucson Pterodactyls: http://www.tucsonmurderball.com/. Although he has finally made it up past the status of mascot, and has actually scored points in a game, he did not play this weekend, but still dressed out and went out on the court with his teammates and cheered them on. Since he's been having trouble with his knee, and hasn't been able to smash the racquetball around like usual, this has been a great way for him to stay active. The kids have also had fun watching him assemble and disassemble and get parts for the wheelchair, a Mad Max-style contraption that is practically invincible and won't fit through any doorway, the bottoms of the wheels are set so far apart for stability and the metal bumpers around the edges are so wide.

As in the film Murderball, the chairs smashed and bashed into one another continually, and players exchanged heated words, chairs rolled over on top of their players, etc. It wasn't quite as violent or as heated as I had hoped for, I'll admit, but there was definitely a competitive spirit and good-natured trash talking during the game. The players were fit and young. The timing of the game kept throwing me off. They could be trucking fast downcourt, stop on a dime and swivel to one side or the other. Other times, the whole game would come to a standstill when two players had locked up the wheels of another and the player with the ball had trouble finding a place to pass. Other times, a player realized nobody could catch up with him, and he effortlessly coasted 20 feet to the goal line.

My cousin Jeremy is in town for his PT internship, and so we got out to the game together, and I think he had fun, too. Turns out he works with #13's wife.

Between games, at home, G (who had been to the earlier game) made this out of legos:

You can't even see all the details in this shot. He built the thing complete with an accurately shaped rear bumper, clips to keep her feet pulled back into the wheelchair (most of the guys strap their legs in) and fold-uppable arm rests. Oh, and caster wheels in the front and back. I did not know they were called caster wheels, but he did. To me, the real ones simply look like wheels from rollerblades. The large cardboard wheels were taped to lego wheels, so they turned. He hunted until he found the exact right size of doll to sit in it... cracks me up that it's the Grandmother doll from O's Loving Family doll set. Talk about combatting stereotypes! I'll find some more photos and get them posted. Good times-- totally free of charge. And, by the way, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe has a wonderful recreation center out there! Nice gym!

On Self-Censorship

2012-01-11T20:32:00.000-08:00

I just unposted a post that I would so very much have wanted to post... afraid of possible repercussions. I liked what I had written. I believed in it. But I didn't want to compromise myself or anyone else.

My mind is spinning with freedoms and lack thereof. What-ifs and if-thens. And any number of you should/shouldn't haves.

In the end, the must-do's have won. The what-comes-afters have not had their say. They don't get to vote.

Obligatory Yet Useful New Year's Reflection

2011-12-29T11:48:00.000-08:00

Time to look back at the year, back at my New Year's Goals from last year, and reflect.

For one thing, I am resolved to stop using sentence fragments such as the one above which sound like the script for a local news broadcast: "Local citizens waking up in flames. Migraine striking one pedestrian at Speedway and Swan. Reporting from downtown. Writer, cringing inwardly at local news broadcasts." Usually, all that is missing is a helping verb, and sometimes a subject. I wonder how many extra super-cute Youtube videos of kittens teasing turtles they can squeeze in by eliminating helping verbs. Eliminating the subject of the sentence seems downright irresponsible. The recipients of my e-mails and readers of my blog will be happy to know that although I am not relinquishing fragments altogether, I'll do my best not to sound like I'm reporting on a police shooting.

Here were my goals (not resolutions!) from last year, with commentary from how the year actually went...
1. I will do less yelling in my house and work on strategies to encourage my kids (and husband?) to do the same.    I'm not really sure I accomplished this, though Rich is doing pretty well at it!

2. I will maintain a consistent interest in and commitment to exercise and physical fitness. I will use my gym membership at least a couple of times per week, and get out for hikes at least a couple of times per month. I will try to get out to do the following activities more often: walks at the park, biking to work and for fun, tennis at Catalina H.S.. I'll try to expand my repertoire! Uh, yeah, that one. I did pretty well in the springtime, but once we started working on remodeling our investment property, most of my physical effort went there all summer. Luckily, it was pretty good and exhausting exercise. We did walk around the park a lot more this year, though not so much since November. I am getting antsy though! I want to hike so bad.

3. I will bike to work more often when the schedule allows. Nope. Didn't do that at all.

4. I will recycle more-- too much is making it into the trash can. Did pretty well until the last month or so.

5. I will end 2011 weighing less than I weighed on the way in-- 10-20 more pounds? I'm about the same. So that in itself is some level of success.

6. I will be more consistent about cooking meals and eating lots of fruits and veggies-- and the kids, too. I definitely did better with this throughout most of the year, especially having my dad around during the summer. A lot of this is due to dwindling budget for restaurant food! I don't miss the drive throughs much, though, I'll tell you.

7. I will get the kids out into nature more and have fun learning the lore-- plants, animals, weather, geology, geography, etc. The remodeling project kind of got in the way of this in terms of hiking, but we have spent a lot of time at the park for various activities. We need to clean up the back yard.

8. I will read more books and try to be less susceptible to checking out Facebook and watching whatever trash is on TV. I have definitely accomplished this, despite Rich's jealous behavior when I read books (which I find interesting and slightly amusing.) I need to thank my friends and students for inspiring me to read more... and I have truly enjoyed it, though I no longer have any idea what is happening in the news. Unfortunate side effect.

9. I will continue to work on buying less crap I don't really need ($1 bin shit, stupid office supplies I covet but never use, stuff like that) and stuff that has tons of packaging (this is a tough one...)   I have definitely, definitely bought less crap this year. Yea!

10. I will create time for friends and family and work on nurturing my adult relationships-- more fun time for me and me more fun for others! I need to do much better with this.

11. Attitude: Empowered, positive... stop whining, internally and out loud. I think I have done better with this, although working on my National Board Certification has definitely caused me plenty of anxiety and panic from time to time.

ALSO-- I have been writing much, much more this year. So, yea! I feel like if I had more time and focus to devote to it, the writing itself could be a bit more serious, reflective, well-researched, well-crafted. But... one step at a time, my friends. And I have written a few poems that I really like, and participated and WON my first NaNoWriMo.

Three additional goals for this year:   Accomplish my National Board Certification.  Travel more. Write notes and letters to friends and family.

Nutcracker

2011-12-29T11:21:00.001-08:00

Due to my years of playing violin, combined with having multiple little brothers, I have realized I have highly conflicting connotations connected with the term "nutcracker." That is all.

Snapshot of Life

2011-12-19T19:17:00.000-08:00

O is painting watercolor hearts with a friend at the dining room table.

G is playing x-box with a friend who brought it over-- games he doesn't have in his limited collection of Wii games.

Homemade tomato garlic soup is on the stove.

Sink is full of dishes.

House smells of quesadillas, douglas fir...

I am lying fully clothed under the covers with the computer on my lap. Taking advantage of not having too many obligations just right this second. I do feel like some exercise would do me good after grading papers for the last three weeks without (it seems) moving. Tomorrow, movement. I'll be painting tomorrow-- that'll get me moving a little. And maybe it won't be raining. And I'll be caught up with my sleep.

Finished re-reading The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I had been thinking about that book, but haven't read it since... when? College? I must have read it since then, no? It reminded me why I really like her writing, and how much her prose style has influenced mine, how much I learned about images by reading her books and short stories, even the more heavy-handed ones. The weird thing is that I remembered Offred actually being pregnant and actually having the baby in the novel... and I won't give anything away, but it is a little different than that. Strange. So maybe it has been that long since I read it. I remember I wrote an essay on it in college about cultivating a pearl-- and I focused on the image of the women being like pearls. I could have sworn that I talked about her daughter as a pearl. But that wasn't in the book! And there were only one or two mentions of pearls at all. I must have really milked that image!

Plans: I would like to write letters this week, for once, and feel like a good girl. Especially for my grandma. Maybe bake. Definitely make and eat more soup.

Blog for G

2011-12-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

Today, I celebrated the ninth anniversary since the wee hours of the morning after the long hours of a night in labor with my son. Five days after G's Pearl Harbor Day due date, when my brother Bill came down from his nearby condo and knocked on the door. He told me that, if I was willing to try castor oil (to induce labor) he'd try it with me. What a guy. The oldest sibling anywhere nearby (his half sister/ my stepsister lives farrrrrr away) I was the first to be pregnant, and G would be the first nephew anywhere within visiting distance. Bill was pretty excited-- and he's a little OCD, so when he gets going on an idea, you can either fight it and pay the price, or go with it. And really, we had just attended (or, I had barely managed to sit in a chair long enough for) Rich's grandfather's funeral that day. All our major obligations were finished. I was finishing making a lampshade for the nursery when Bill knocked. Rich was visiting his family or maybe playing racquetball. And I was physically uncomfortable and ready to be done being pregnant. (That probably sounds callous, the funeral being a social obligation, and I did feel grief that day, but let's face it. Very pregnant women process these things much differently than normal people-- all the energy is focused inward.)

We made a trip to the drug store. We filled shot glasses with the thick oil and took a photo. I chased my shot of castor oil with grapefruit juice as my mother had suggested over the phone. It was a gloppy mess and I would have gagged without the bite of the citrus to follow it. Shudder.

I will spare the readers of my blog the details of the next several hours, but I called Bill at about 11:30 to find out how his evening had gone (Rich was home and passed out asleep by this point, of course.) He said his gut was pretty much emptied. I was still cramping... turned out to have worked. Rich was a very effective coach. I can still hear him at my side, in my ear, "Go! Go! Go!" My mother's method was a bit more nurturing, rubbing my feet, giving me stiff backrubs along the back of my pelvis, providing counterpressure until I had to turn onto my back, putting up with my comments about her coffee breath. I think G was born by 4 a.m., maybe even earlier. Time was irrelevant by that point; I was experiencing an altered state of consciousness which was not induced by drugs but by complete physical transformations of all sorts. The date was Friday, the 13th.

My first impression of my son was that, somehow, I recognized him-- it was a feeling of seeing something I had imagined in a dream brought to life, as though he looked exactly as he was meant to, and I experienced the joy of fulfilled expectations. Beyond that, he was a wrinkly, shriveled little thing, like any newborn. I was struck by how much he looked like an old man, actually. Our first couple of days were a series of negotiations-- mostly he won. He still negotiates each an every situation, behavior and consequence with me, though he is much more helpful around the house. He is a meticulous and focused artist, a willful and belligerent non-homework-doer, a gifted thinker and designer, a hiker of endurance and fortitude, and an avid reader of imaginative literature and nonfiction (and Calvin and Hobbes.) He cleans his room better and more efficiently than I have ever managed to do. He creates endless versions of his "mini-man," a roughly cut-out paper man about two inches tall who goes on adventures and inevitably ends up limbless and decapitated.

Though G has been the greatest challenge of my life, he is also one of the greatest treasures. As he grows older one of my greatest hopes is to disentangle him from media and video games for enough time that he continues to use his imagination and keep a sense of his own mind. And that he can learn to control the idiosyncratic behavioral things that make it so difficult for him in school. He is strong-willed, so if he chooses to do these things, he will.

Happy Birthday! I apologize that until you are grown, this will always be finals week for me.

Planning For Ekphrasis Poetry

2011-12-10T00:14:00.000-08:00

Whenever I have a lot of papers to grade, I find some other way to occupy my mind. Something that is urgent, creative, fun... usually planning my next units.

I'm not sure exactly how it will work out, because I want to cover various poetic forms and techniques at the same time, but I want to teach poetry through its relationship to other art forms, and somehow I found out that there is a word for this: Ekphrasis. A work of art based on another work of art. Fantastic concept!

I've started a small Diigo collection of websites I am tagging "ekphrasis" for use in my unit. I would love ideas!

Poetry about Art.
Art about Poetry.
Poetry about Music
Music about Poetry
Poetry about Other Poems & Lit.
Poetry & graphic novels
Related Topic: broadsides (Drooling to do broadsides!)

Links for Use in Ekphrasis Poetry Unit

List of Possible Works to Use:
"My Last Duchess" Robert Browning
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" John Keats
Pictures at an Exhibition Mussorgsky
"Green Light and Gamma Rays" by Thylias Moss
Iliad-- description of Achilles' shield
"The Man With the Hoe" by Edward Markham
"Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies, A Sestina for the Douanier" by Sylvia Plath

Turkey Carcass

2011-11-27T12:41:00.000-08:00

I love turkey soup, but the experience of breaking down the carcass of a 23 pound turkey so that half of the remains will fit inside my inadequate stock pot is an exercise in coming face to face with one's own mortality.

The endless labyrinth of skin, roots of feathers remaining in the pimpled, fatty skin, layers of muscle, perimysium (ooh, new word), cartilage, tendon, bone... the popping of joints and the snapping separation of vertebrae. The greasiness of it all. Using my fingers to pick the meat, so we can consume it later. This is enough to make turkey soup less appetizing. All the parts of the turkey: drumstick, wing, thigh, and breast-- they all become unrecognizable as I become more and more disoriented by the insides of the bird and as, part by part, they disappear into the pot. The bones in the wing are impossibly large-- the size of three or four chicken drumsticks, and I find myself both awed and disgusted by modern farming methods. I turn what is left of this creature over and over on the cutting board, trying to figure where there might be another deposit of meat I may have missed. And, sure enough, I keep finding more. We can easily eat for a week off this thing, and my cousin took home at least three pounds of meat on Thanksgiving.

About half the bird is now dismantled in the pot on the heat. The rest will go into the freezer for the next batch. I can only hope that if I can keep the stock clear, spoon off the fat, and create small enough morsels of meat that by the time I eat the soup my imagination will have separated itself from this gruesome process. Perhaps a squeeze of lemon and several handsful of fresh parsley will help.

Random Dickinson Inspiration:

Soup is the Thing with feathers
In storage in the fridge
With most of the feathers Plucked
And greasy pimpled skin

It sat-- once--in Confinement
Ate steroid-soaked grain all day
And never stopped to Thank--
For its bounty in its Breast

Its heft weighs on Extremities
Unconscious-- to the pot
to Feed the family for a year
Consumed-- consumed-- we eat.

Accidental Rip-Off. NaNoWriMo Tragedy.

2011-11-21T17:46:00.000-08:00

Like I needed any bad news today.

I went to the library catalog online to see if they had a copy of the children's book about the boy who swam with the seals, which is supposedly based on a Chinook story, which I was hoping would help me with my story.

So, turns out after searching "boy" AND "seals" that The Secret of Roan Inish is basically a rip-off of my book. Or actually, my book is a semi-rip-off of that movie, except the problem is that I have never seen this movie.

Rgh.

I mean, my "novel" (i.e. collection of disjointed scenes and concepts which is working its way toward being a novel) is a little more complicated. There are two strands written in two different POV's. The first is a girl who is a double amputee & competitive swimmer, and sort of her coming of age story and story of getting her first prosthetic legs at an older age. The second strand is a story she is writing or creating in her mind in which her mother turns out to be a selkie (but they are called something else in my book-- they are sea lion people) and it turns out that instead of losing her brother in the ocean as a baby, he transformed into his selkie form and has grown up in their community, and is now a leader of sorts and is figuring out how to transform into his human form. Then I haven't decided whether in that story she actually figures out that she is a selkie, too. I think she probably does, because why not? It's all part of her fantasy world that she is creating. I think there will be tsunamis in both stories-- one more devastating than the other.

So, now my question is, do I go watch the movie just to make sure I'm not completely ripping it off? Or do I refuse to see it just so I am not tempted to rip it off or refer to it in any way, shape or form? Or do I incorporate the movie into my novel purposefully? The third option could make some sense, because both stories are based in the selkie and chinook mythology anyway already. But I don't like the idea of popular culture references because they go dead after a while for the reader-- they date the story.

Rgh. Just when I need to be chugging out amazing word count which is going to wrap up this sucker...

I Need a Hug.

2011-11-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

Just, you know, putting that out there to the universe.

Art Hike / NaNoWriMo Day 12 / Should Be Doing Nat'l Board Portfolio

2011-11-12T08:54:00.000-08:00

Here I am at the TOB (the Transitional Office Building) which sounds like quite an uninspiring place to write, but in fact is filled with the history of dozens of SAWP writers buzzing away at their keyboards and notebooks; before that it was filled with hundreds of sorority girls for however many years blow-drying their hair and writing each other's mid-term essays. We are not sure what it is transitioning from or to... but we are part of that mysterious transition. It's been this way for years and years.

Yesterday, I took the kids for a hike to Pontatoc Ridge trail, I think my favorite trail with quick and easy access. It's closer than Sabino, with fewer people, and within a couple hundred yards you are pretty much in the lush desert, with lots of ups, downs, arroyos and, intermittently, gorgeous views all around town and beyond. I get tired of having to hike the road at Sabino.

We took a) the dog, and b) sketchpads for each of us. Oh, and my daughter would not want me to leave out c) snacks.

My son spent at least an hour going through my drawer of hiking equipment and packing his small frame pack so that he could carry the dog in back. I took out many of the items he had included, such as hand-warmers and the knot-tying game. But I enjoyed seeing him so focused and excited about the hike. Both kids did great-- many of the rocky parts of the trail were a real challenge to my daughter, who is a tall five-year-old, but she loved scrambling up them and felt very accomplished. Markey was patient, though a little anxious, in the backpack, and we didn't even receive any disapproving looks from ethical hikers who follow the rules (no dogs). I don't think Markey would have run after a javelina or taken down a bighorn sheep. He only weighs 4 1/2 pounds. My daughter carried her own water in a reservoir-- yea! That was (literally) a load off my shoulders.

We had kind of a late start, and it's getting dark early, now. We made it maybe 3/4 of the way up the switchbacks, and ran out of time, so we found a good spot and stopped to sketch.

I am amazed at his drawing. We only sat for about 30 minutes. Wow.
My daughter drew this and that-- she would draw something and then have me guess whether it was something that she saw around her, or something that wasn't here. First she drew part of the ridge across from us, which I recognized. Then she drew vampire teeth. Then a butterfly.

Good times!

Now I'm warmed up and should move onward toward my NaNoWriMo novel before my students out-wordcount me into oblivion. Perhaps I will have a scene of artwork en plein air.

Swinging

2011-11-11T21:04:00.000-08:00

Swinging with my Daughter

I give her a small push

seat myself in the swing next to her

pump my legs two or three times

then hold my legs in front, swinging, watching her.

She pulls and pumps.

Me in my windbreaker and work pants

She in knit pants, snags in the knees

her unzipped sweatshirt hanging from her shoulders

her mouth orange from cheese puffs

I slow and wait

until we swing in unison

Then, as she accelerates

I pump my legs and we keep time with one another

metronome

for the melody

of this fall day

adagio

She watches my legs

and back

and keeps rhythm with me.

her face parallel to mine

her satisfied smile, her two missing teeth

her dark hair flies off her forehead

and back into her face.

two strands trapped in the corners of her smile

I pull and push faster

climbing higher

toward the palms

silhouetted in a pure blue

Lightness

Weight

Lightness

Weight

Lightness

Weight

We defy gravity

opposite one another.

ahead, she turns to laugh

behind, I lean back

to view my topsy-turvy girl.

I slow my legs

allow the earth its pull.

She pumps hers...

then stops.

We slow

arcing past each other

at odd

syncopated

lengths

our feet trail in the sand

we hop off

I offer my hand

Photo from another lovely Himmel Park visit:

Pink Martini at Starr Pass amid Documented Accomplishments

2011-11-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

Shuffling Pink Martini on my iPod.

Documenting my teaching accomplishments.

Curled up on a couch in a boulevard-sized passageway outside the ballrooms with massive glassed views of saguaro, ocotillo, a golf course, and, farther down the vale, the city stretching across the floor of the valley. The crispness of the day refreshes me.

Enjoying the last couple hours of solitude among colleagues and music, writing and thinking.

NaNoWriMo No Naps! Day 5

2011-11-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here in my room at Starr Pass at my National Board Candidacy Working Retreat, trying to write the instructional context passage for Entry 1 of my portfolio. And it is so quiet. So quiet. And my eyes keep drooping mid sentence.

Several times today, I took a break from my National Board work by opening up my novel and adding to it. I am writing in fragments, writing the chunks I know I will need. I am allowing myself long paragraphs of telling, figuring I can go back and turn those passages into scenes at a later time.

I have decided to have the point of view shift from first to third person throughout the novel, although I'm not going to tell why... that would be giving too much away. If it doesn't work out I could always go put it all in first person... see? right there I was falling asleep in the middle of a sentence. It's so quiet here. I haven't had a good night's sleep in weeks. The weird thing is, I haven't had any vivid dreams for a long time, either. I was hoping writing fiction would maybe bring some dreams on, but so far, no. Not even anxiety dreams. Isn't that funny?

I'm going to go lie down, now, and snooze a little. I'm sure I'll be continuing to work tonight. On my professional writing and my nanowrimo novel. The professional writing, I'm sure will be fine if I devote the time and effort to it. The novel? Well, it's getting better as we go onward. I'm thinking it's a young adult novel... unless I can find a way to bust it free.

Can My Setting Be Wonderland? Young Writers Want to Know! NaNoWriMo and Intertextuality

2011-11-04T18:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a student wrote me with a great question. She wanted to know if she could set her NaNoWriMo novel in Wonderland.

I answered her question the best I could, saying that fanfiction was all about borrowing from other texts, and literary allusion was all about borrowing from and referring to other texts. To me, the biggest issue is one of ethics. Are you openly borrowing and transforming, reinterpreting, and reinventing? Or are you stealing under the guise of originality?

She answered the question for herself somehow by finding out about the issue of public domain. To her, now that she knew there was no copyright ownership of Wonderland, she could use it in her novel. But I told the class that although copyright is certainly a consideration, the issue really goes beyond that to one of ethics and artistic integrity, but that there were multiple grey areas we could discuss.

I googled intertextuality, and of course a boatload of postmodern academic linguistic semiotic mumbo-jumbo came up, which I could read and interpret and try to simplify for my high school students... or I could spend the next half hour working on my own word count on my novel, from which I am drawing on Celtic mythology, and Chinook stories and language.

If anyone out there knows of a plain-language explanation I could use with my students, or an interesting and accessible set of interconnected texts we could use to discuss the issue, please leave me a comment. Thanks!

NaNoWriMo Day 3

2011-11-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

Word Count: 3817

Well, I am quailing. My ideas are getting more fragmented vs. more linear. No plot is materializing. In addition, I have realized the extent of the research I need to do to pull this off. Also, my scenes feel devoid of motivation for the characters. Maybe I should just throw the selkies and the tsunami back in there and just go with it, cheese or no cheese. At any rate, I have another 900 or so words to write today.

I wish I had some books of Northwest native american stories.
I wish I had spent more time at the tidal pools in Oregon.
I wish I could talk to Rich for an hour about prosthetics and the ins and outs of C-legs vs. conventional legs. For instance, can a person walk up stairs with a C-leg?

Off I go to... rescue this novel from mediocrity and half-assedness.

NaNoWriMo Day 1

2011-11-01T19:57:00.000-07:00

I am attempting this alongside my students because I don't think it would be very fair to expect them to do something I had never done. Besides, I would be envious if they had won NaNoWriMo and I hadn't.

Once again, I am discovering that I don't think in plots. I think in places. Sometimes I can think in people. I think in images, in abstract notions, and even in sound. But plot is beyond me. So we will see how it goes. These students! They think in plots! I am so jealous.

So, the first scene that I write is my character on the cold Oregon beach in a wetsuit, thinking about entering the water despite her mother having forbidden it. She doesn't go in, but that's not the problem. I kind of like the scene, except that my character is a double amputee and is on the beach with her sand wheelchair with huge ridiculous plastic wheels. She wakes up from a nap on the sand, and has a few moments with her two dogs, and... how the hell does she get off the beach? Her single mother can't afford a motorized sand wheelchair. She probably had to rent the sand wheelchair she has. Who the heck pushed her out onto the sand, and how is she getting back home after these solitary moments on the beach? Perhaps I'll have to turn it into a dream. Damn it. Leave it to me. This is what I'm talking about.

At any rate, my word count is 1880. Woo-Hoo!

bell hooks and National Boards

2011-10-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

Last week, someone tossed out the name bell hooks, and I remembered reading Teaching to Transgress in one of my education classes years and years ago.

I no longer have a copy of that book, but I think I need one.

I just read this article: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/hooks.htm and it reminded me how powerful her ideas are, especially in the face of accountability measures such as those being put into place across the country that evaluate teaching based on multiple factors, many of which are somewhat outside the locus of control of the individual teacher who is 1/7 of a student's day for not even ten months. (See my blog entry Anger and Education for some references to what is happening in Arizona). Conversations about education so desperately need to turn to the care of students as whole people, and the nurturing of an imaginative and intellectual freedom for each student. Toward that end, schools need to be humane for teachers and other adults as well.

"The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom." (hooks 1994: 207)

This takes greater personal energy than teaching to the standards. But hopefully, it is an energy that is self-renewing, like giving love: the more we give, the more we have to give.

I find it fascinating that the National Board Certification journey, despite its emphasis on standards and a very specific kind of writing, manages to get at these deeper and much more satisfying levels of involvement with our students' education. I suppose that one could approach National Boards with an eye to columns of rubric scores. I should probably be doing a little more of that. But there is something very powerful and transformative about turning our eyes toward the very people we should be watching all the time, our students, and realizing how often our gaze is drawn away by other forces. The NB process pulls us back.