Blog-Sothoth

Book #17

2012-05-28T10:52:00.000-04:00

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

2012-05-26T09:40:00.003-04:00

"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

2012-05-20T10:19:00.001-04:00

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

2012-05-08T16:56:00.001-04:00

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

2012-05-04T08:58:00.002-04:00

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.

Book #12

2012-04-30T17:11:00.001-04:00

I can't gin up much excitement about Ender's Game. I found it rather wooden and uninteresting. The prose was monotonous. I'd recommend it for several of my middle schoolers who think about war and violence in interesting or surprising ways--it can help kids think through thorny ethical issues I suppose. But it's not my cup of tea. Are the others in the series more of the same?

Hotel Cassiopeia at Single Carrot

2012-04-27T06:22:00.001-04:00

How many times has Single Carrot knocked me out? How many times have they vaulted casually over the high expectations bar I bring to their shows? Hotel Cassiopeia was shockingly good. The performances were deep and warm; Nathan Cooper is earnest and open and is taking on more of the burden the dearly departed Brendan Reagan used to carry around stage. Nathan used to be the go-to for goofy or quirky guys in extremis--now he's the sophisticated well-rounded lead. Katie Rumbaugh danced her ass off as the Ballerina, and was creepily sensual to boot. The cast were all great, and not only did they have to act, they had to perform intricate and well-timed choreography using elaborate props. The Carrots often make deliciously innovative use of their tiny North Ave space, but this time it was off the chain. Genevieve de Mahy served as director of this extraordinary and absorbing work, and I was fully involved for all 100 breakless minutes. The play itself is numinous and challenging. It is intellectual and layered and by turns funny and deeply troubling. It had a profound effect on my dreams. I wish I could see it again, but the show is sold out for the remainder of its run. I hope you have tickets.

2012-04-26T17:38:00.003-04:00

Sorry--I feel like I've betrayed Blog-Sothoth! I've been blogging for my middle school kids--who are writing blogs this trimester--over at my Middle Grades Humanities site. We're learning about food and nutrition and GMO and all that jazz, and reading Michael Pollan together. Check it out if you're so inclined. The students' blogs are linked down the side!

Book #11

2012-04-23T17:56:00.002-04:00

A very enjoyable travelogue of a journey along the old Silk Road from China west to Turkey. Thubron is adept at writing interesting characters, his scene-setting is superb, and his grasp of current events and tribes and situations and shifting boundaries makes for lively and engaging reading. Interspersed with all this are the fascinating historical bits about disappeared civilizations and cities decaying and wasted in the sand. I found his text quite useful for research as I was teaching middle graders about the Silk Road, and as a personal narrative of a difficult journey in troubled times it ranks near the top. He's certainly no Patrick Leigh Fermor, but who is?

I love my 6th grade reading group

2012-04-21T16:16:00.001-04:00

"Don't inarupp me gurl, it makes me stutta," Bre says. She starts to read again, and fumbles three times through the word lecithin. "See!" It's Myja's turn. "Them potatoes have..." Bre: "THOSE potatoes!" Myja: "Gurl, that's what I said!" Bre: "You said THEM potatoes." Myja: "Whatever! Those potatoes have several notorious..." Bre: "Gurl, NOTICEABLE!" Myja: "I said noticeable." Bre: "Gurl you said notorious. Mr. G--she said notorious, didn't she." Me: "Myja, you said notorious.: Myja: "Whatever!" We're reading the youngster's edition of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Kesha rushes over and grabs a Cheetos bag out of Myja's hand. "Dag, it DOES have corn in it. We full of corn!" Bre: "I don't cur. I like curn." Myja: "girl, it's CORN." Bre: "Yeah, curn. I said CURN." Kesha: "CORN, Bre, CORN." Bre: "Curn. How you say curn Mr. G." The Cheetos bag doesn't have Cheetos in it. Myja's been chewing sunflower seeds, which is expressly forbidden in school, and spitting the husks into this bag. Kesha realizes this as saliva and husks drip out onto her arm. It takes a few minutes to get back to reading time.

Day # ?

2012-04-14T21:00:00.004-04:00

I've lost track of how many days into the school year we are. I think it's 137 or something like that.

We're restructuring our leadership model at school, and I got to participate a little bit in the leadership team meetings around this work, and now we're interviewing candidates to fill three new administrative/mentoring/education leadership positions. I'm finding the work a bit rewarding because I think my main contributions to the school thus far have been academic; now I can bring many years of HR and management skills to the fore. These skills have been long dormant, to the point I thought they were fossilized--but of the 13 questions we settled on for our interviews, I wrote 4 (and 16 people sit on this panel). I think I said some provocative, challenging, important things today--and I even felt the return of a certain eloquence and persuasive power I've been missing even in the classroom of late.

It's a big drain however--several hours a day after school, and a bruising 12 hour day today! A gorgeous Saturday afternoon spent under florescent lights...

I'll need to bring more skills to my practice and my school over the next few months and into next year. There will be change, and I'm no longer "new" to the school or to urban ed--I'm a veteran in the middle school now, I'll be teaching two classes of the same kids for the third consecutive year plus a new 6th grade class, and I may have to take on leadership of the Humanities committee. If my planning partner gets promoted, I'll lose the most fruitful professional relationship I've ever had--and that means working with a new partner, someone we haven't even hired yet. Ready or not....

2012-04-09T21:29:00.000-04:00

Book #10

2012-04-07T22:00:00.003-04:00

I read a handful of books by Dean Koontz about 25 years ago--I found it extremely peculiar a few weeks back that I could have spent so much time with an author and yet I could not remember a single title or character or even a plot outline. Even when I looked at a list of his books I couldn't remember what I'd read. I do remember him having a certain facility with action sequences, but that's about it--I also think he had a story in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions.

So I picked up Odd Thomas, if one can pick up a novel on the Kindle. And it served its purpose as a breezy Spring Break read. Koontz is better than he was back in the day--he's got some humor, and a bit more depth to his characters than I recall. But this book is at best a light entertainment; it's predictable, and the villains are a bit banal and unconvincing to say the least. The narrator is amusing-perhaps next time I decide to slum it I'll pick up another in the series.

Books #8 and #9

2012-03-28T18:42:00.002-04:00

This paperback was listed as forthcoming on Amazon for ages, and then it never forthcame and the link disappeared, so I bought a UK edition used via Amazon. Even though his novels tend to be uneven, I enjoy Campbell's prose so much I don't like to miss them. I enjoyed Thieving Fear because it reminds me of many old-school Campbell books about a malevolent dead person trying to invade the world by using the living: The Nameless, or The Influence, or The Grin in the Dark, or half-a-dozen others. But Thieving Fear also includes elements of my fave Campbell novel, Incarnate, where dreams bleed into reality and really wreck everyone's day. Thieving Fear is not as good as the early ones, but it's pretty good. I wish Campbell would rely less on misunderstood dialogue as a method of characterization because it's too difficult for a reader to try and go back and figure out who was supposed to have said what, but I dug it. The climax is over-the-top and somewhere between Clive Barker and HPL, but that's half the charm.

This historic novel posits that Josef Breuer and Frederich Nietszche worked together to create the "talking method" with young Sigmund Freud coaching Breuer at dinner. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The Antichrist never met Breuer, but he could have, and the co-founders of psychoanalysis were indeed mining some of the same territory as the often incapacitated Zarathrustrian fetishist. So the verdict is fun, if you're into novels about psychoanalysis. It's certainly no The Manticore, but it's pretty damn good.

Whatever

2012-03-27T17:47:00.001-04:00

I gave up blogging about politics ages ago, and gave up following politics closely shortly after that. But I recall calling that the health care bill would result in a Republican sweep of the House and that the Supreme Court would likely strike it down. The first prediction came all too true. Here's the original post.

And now it seems quite likely that my second prediction is imminent. I'd love to be wrong!

Some wise commentors refuted me; I think they were absolutely correct given a reasonable Supreme Court. But this Court has a bought-and-paid-for majority.

Which way will Kennedy swing? After his Citizens United decision I have little faith he'll do the right thing.

Book #7

2012-03-18T13:47:00.001-04:00

I started reading The Civil War in early 2011, planning for what I thought would be a spring trimester focused on said conflagration. I had the idea I'd finish Foote's trilogy by the end of the school year last year. But we switched, largely at my impetus, our focus from the Civil War to John Brown, and though interested and engaged by this book, I languished in its completion. One could be forgiven for taking a year to read this book given its scope and length, but it's certainly not the best approach to so complex and wonderful a text. Foote writes with a novelist's sense of character and timing--allowing weeks to lapse between readings causes one to lose the delicate threads of plot and character, and though Foote draws his generals with exquisite and often endearing precision, it is still without daily readings quite possible to forget who is whom after an absence of some days. So read this--it's fabulous, but read it when you have the time and endurance to stick to it daily. I plan that approach as I continue with Volume II.

netflixed

2012-03-12T09:23:00.003-04:00

If you're a fan of the documentary Hearts of Darkness, you should check out Burden of Dreams. Francis Ford Coppola's awful experiences in the Philippine jungle just might pale in comparison to Werner Herzog's in Peru.

While shooting Fitzcarraldo, Herzog indeed seemed to be cursed. When a huge portion of shooting was complete, he lost his star Jason Robards to a punishing amoebal infection. Robard's co-star Mick Jagger had to part due to Tattoo You tour obligations, and Herzog was forced to go to his backers and beg for more money and time. He was so impressed with Jagger's performance that he had to cut his character from the film and re-write entirely, replacing Robards with his "best fiend" Klaus Kinski and starting from scratch. These problems were only the beginning.

Herzog contends with intertribal politics, rumors that he wants to repeat earlier German racial atrocities in the Amazon basin, Catholic priests who advise him to provide whores at his camps, three rusty river steam boats, environmental catastrophes, oil and mineral and logging companies, the Peruvian military, plane crashes which wipe out crew members, arrow attacks, sickness, insects, serpents, a flat soccer ball, engineers who think his plan will kill dozens of natives, a Brazilian TV star, and Kinski. He tells his backers that if he can't complete this project, he will be a "man without dreams. I refuse to live my life that way."

Of course Herzog maintains his jolly disposition for half a decade in the jungle, giving cheerful pep talks about Art and Beauty and Meaning:

I find Werner's musings endlessly entertaining. I recommend this film even if you've not seen Fitzcarraldo.

At the Charles...

2012-03-10T16:54:00.005-05:00

A very wise film, and timely, as it focuses on an age when the world underwent financial crises and upheavals, as new technologies disrupted and derailed traditional modes of communication and entertainment and it seemed the center could not hold...

And now we're in a similar mess with many of the same troubling variables making life by equal measure more convenient and more vexing. And The Artist gives us space to reflect on what's lasting in these eras of transience; it's charming, sad, quaint, and quite beautifully shot.

Yes, there's more than a bit of A Star is Born, Singing in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, and even some Purple Rose of Cairo in the mix--but The Artist is not derivative. I really lost myself for a while, and it felt good to sit at the Saturday matinee with a few dozen other old people.

And what rough beast, its hour come at last...

2012-03-08T17:41:00.002-05:00

Things are no longer so lovey at the lovey dovey hippie charter school. We absorbed the 7th and 8th graders from Diggs Middle last year when we took over their building, and worked our asses off to integrate them into our system with some success. A couple of those chuckleheads are headed to City and Poly because of us! But others struggled and are now lashing out. We have only a few weeks left until the last of those students are gone. They want to graduate 8th grade as Diggs students, and they're acting out against the SBCS system. One put a boulder through the Science teacher's windshield and got suspended for two weeks. A few of the more charismatically thuggish boys have gone to some $5 tattoo dude and had their names inked crookedly up their forearms in a neo-Gutenberg Bible script. This of course sends electric charges down the spines of the 7th grade girls, who are drawn to bad boys. Once the 7th grade boys see the 7th grade girls drooling over thugs, they have to step up their street game, and suddenly the sweet sheltered lovey-dovey charter school kids are running gang initiation fights behind the skatepark next to our building after school.

So now I'm running around jazzed and edgy pulling kids apart and getting between kids about to throw down again. I've had a couple years off from that shit and it is not making me happy to be thrust back into it. Especially when I see my former students at the March attending another candlelight vigil.

My Old School

2012-03-07T21:14:00.002-05:00

...is in the news a lot recently, and not for good reasons.

I didn't teach Monae, but I taught the older brother and cousin of one of the boys arrested for shooting her. That's a very rough corridor over East, and I often think of the kids over there. Too many of them end up on the news.

At the end of this year, all the sixth graders I taught at the March will (I hope) graduate the 8th grade and get the hell out somehow.

TV

2012-03-02T17:47:00.002-05:00

Hooray for my school. The Governor dropped by today to kick off our new library renovation! You can see some of my co-workers and a few of my 7th graders in the background!

Video here.

Dayzed and Confused

2012-03-01T20:31:00.003-05:00

The last period sixth grade class went off the rails today. Within the first half hour I'd sent a third of the class to complete behavior reflections in Student Support. There was a lot of street drama; girls were fuming and threatening to get their crews and stomp someone or other. I was breaking up a fight between 4 foot 2 inch boys when the Big Cheese strolled in my room just as another fight was breaking out behind me--a girl grabbed a boy by the hair and pulled his head down while kicking him viciously in the shins.

After school I was commiserating with some other staff in the math teacher's room. We shared horror stories. "All I accomplished with the sixth graders today was getting them to copy three questions on a piece of paper. That took an hour and 15 minutes!" the math teacher said. Another teacher, from Cameroon, had been called a "black African monkey" by a young African American who threatened to kill this wonderful human being. The Big Cheese walked into our impromptu gab fest. "Take a big breath y'all. It's the long stretch between Xmas break and Spring Break, it was a delicious warm day, and the kids are bonkers. It's totally appropriate at this time to step back and hand out workpackets if they are not available for learning. You have my support!"

To complicate things a semi-autistic student of mine found a dime bag on the floor of my room after school as I was cleaning up. He and another student were marveling at it and saying "I think it's weed" when the autistic kid turned it over to me. A bunch of thoughts burned through my head, primarily among them the idea that both of these students had very active PTO parents who were going to hear about this immediately. So instead of ditching the evidence, I had to turn it in to the Big Cheese, who was like "just flush it--or smoke it," until I told her the kids who'd found it, and then she was like "OMG I have to file a police report just so I can tell those parents that I did something!" Baltimore's finest were bemused. "You should have just flushed it," they said. And then I had my formal observation debrief, which went swimmingly.

Tomorrow the Gov is visiting our school. I'ma hug him for signing the Gay Marriage law in MD!

Day #112

2012-02-29T16:54:00.002-05:00

I might teach at a lovey-dovey hippiefied charter school, but we're still a Title I institution in a rugged urban area. A few weeks back some 8th graders smashed out a teacher's car windshield with rocks. Over the past couple weeks we've had some kids from other schools roll up and start fights with our students over Facebook bullshit. Students have been busted giving fellatio in the project room, laptops, phones, and wallets have been stolen, etc, etc.

Today after last period I went down to the main office to pick up a package, and immediately my sixth sense started beeping. I stepped around the corner from the stairwell right into a whirlwind. Girls were banging each other in the face outside the front door and the conflict had spilled over inside the lobby. Parents were screeching at and threatening one another, there was blood, and I just kind of put myself instinctively between combatants. Things were cooling off by the time I arrived.

The fight was centered around T. Woody and her wanna-be thug shenanigans. She kept messing with an 8th grader who's typically on the straight and narrow, but who finally had enough and stood up. T. Woody popped her nose and bloodied her lip for her before the parents got involved and the staff got between them.

T. Woody lives to create problems. Her soul purpose in life is to sow dissension and strife. She's stout, surly, unattractive, and reads on a 2nd grade level in 7th grade. She has no charm or grace or wit, and yet she has a posse of much more intelligent girls who pay court to her and do her evil bidding. I don't have the intelligence network that I used to have over East or back at the Book--I need to find out what Woody's got that makes her so powerful. She got the hookup for dime bags? She is always at the root of every girl fight or conflict, and typically she's got much smarter girls punching each other for her sake. Today she actually threw down herself. It will take days to cool this situation down.

Day 110

2012-02-27T18:48:00.001-05:00

It's ok to be in a funk. Sometimes you'll do an efficient, adequate lesson without all the glamour and glitz--it can be effective. Not everything needs to be exciting and inspiring or some combo of the two.

If I could accept this my life would be so much easier.

netflixed

2012-02-25T22:44:00.003-05:00

This might be my new favorite comedy by the uproarious Werner Herzog. When a glassmaker dies in a German town where his secret red glass formula employs most men, the owner of the factory goes mad, the local prophet sees Europe collapsing into an abyss, and a dimwit woman who carries a duck dances nude.

Several scenes in the film are gorgeously lit like Northern Renaissance paintings--faces straight out of Breughel and Memling, candle light, somber Puritanical interiors.

The finale is set in one of my favorite places, a spot where I had prophetic visions of my own, and where I was nearly killed by a gigantic sea bird.