Sometimes when you are trying to get work done and your mind is all over the place, it helps to make lists like the following. As I learned years and years ago from my good friend SZ.
1. Stephanie Says - The Velvet Underground
Actually Lou Reed spent a lot of time listening to what women said and then writing songs about it. As for Stephanie, the people all call her Alaska. Damn, that girl is cold!
2. Perfect Skin - Lloyd Cole
Not only did she look like Greta Garbo at the age of ten, but she’s got cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin.
3. The Element Within Her - Elvis Costello
If only for the line, “But back in the bedroom with her electric heater. He says, Are you cold? She says, No but you are…” Yeah, she’s pretty damn sharp. I wish I had said that.
4. Foxy Lady - Jimi Hendrix
Well, really it’s just this: Foxy lady, I’m coming to getcha!
5. Short Skirt/Long Jacket - Cake
I am certain my fingernails shine like justice, though my voice may not be like dark tinted glass. Yet.
6. Debra - Beck
Not only would he offer me a fresh pack of gum, but he’d pick me up late at night after work and say, Lady, step inside my Hyundai. Who would say no to that?
7. Janine - David Bowie
Aw man, remember when Bowie wrote gorgeous songs like this? I mean, like a Polish wanderer he travels ever onward to her land. Lovely. And were it not just for the jewels, he’d close her hand. Not sure about this, but it sounds good.
8. Tiny Dancer - Elton John
You must have seen her, dancing in the sand.
9. Greetings to the New Brunette - Billy Bragg
“I’m celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo.” That pretty much says it all.
10. Hey Hey What Can I Do - Led Zeppelin
Do I really need to explain this one? Something about being in the bars with the men who play guitars. Well, actually you know what I'm talking about.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Thursday, September 15, 2011
I Got By In Time
When I was about eight years old, I had this plan to give my Barbie doll a perm. I’m guessing that this was probably the only Barbie I had left with a reasonable amount of hair since all the others were unfortunately suffering from my poor attempts at haircuts. (This terrible skill at cutting hair would follow me into adulthood. Can you just trim my bangs, my younger daughter has asked. To which I must answer a horrified, No!) Looking for something that would help the perm set, I came upon my mother’s bottle of patchouli on a tiny shelf in the bathroom. There were many bottles on that shelf, but this one was unfamiliar to me. The strong smell of it was so shocking I couldn’t imagine it as anything but medicinal. I was sure it would do the trick.
Some hours later this would result in my mother yelling at me for using practically an entire bottle of her very expensive oil on a doll's hair. For what reason? she demanded. I thought my explanation made perfect sense, but apparently she did not. In fact, she just could not believe what I had done. I should point out that in all my life I had never known my mother to wear patchouli and the three-quarters-full bottle of it remained in the bathroom for years until one day it was just simply gone. My Barbie’s perm, unfortunately, never took.
But meanwhile. That faint smell of patchouli that never really went away worked its way into my sense memory, winding its way through the various food co-ops of my life, until one day many years later I found that I did, in fact, like it. Which is maybe the way anyone comes to like patchouli when they didn’t plan on liking it, you know, gradually and unexpectedly. I’m not saying that I would ever wear it or anything (I mean, really now), but I have been known to burn patchouli incense and thus both horrify and confuse my children. What is that smell? asks my older daughter, horrified and confused. Oh, don’t you like this? I answer, knowing that of course she doesn’t, but also knowing that as she heads down the winding path of food co-ops in her own life she will at least be familiar with it.
You think I’m going somewhere with this? Well, now, let’s just see. A couple weeks ago my friend Kate told me how she had just finished writing a novel. And I reacted the way I always do at the thought of something like that: utter astonishment. I could never write like that, I always tell people who think that I am actually planning to write a novel someday, though I’m not. I could not keep going on one story like that. And Kate surprised me by saying simply, Well, of course, you read a lot of short stories, don’t you? I think writers who like short stories the most write short stories. And there it was, the best explanation I’d ever heard. It’s true. I love short stories. I read books and books of them, even though everyone wants to talk about and read novels. I read novels, too, of course, but I think I might actually like short stories better. Is that possible?
What I like best actually are books of short stories in which the same characters show up in different stories, and I consider Alice Mattison and Edward P. Jones the masters of this. Right now I’m reading books of Amy Bloom’s short stories and I feel like I’m wolfing them down like a bag of potato chips that you don’t even remember opening and I end up having to go back and reread most of them. And the story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Katherine Anne Porter, which I read twice in a row recently because I liked it so much. The thing about stories is that half the time with a really good one it feels like it’s over too soon. But isn’t that kind of the best thing about them? It’s like leaving the party when it’s still going strong, or, you know, like The Jam breaking up at the height of their success. The best kind of short story invites you into a world and then ends with a snap and you are left longing, but only in the very best of ways. This is why I always keep reading them and also why I keep trying to write them.
So now I need to tie this back to patchouli, right? Well, let’s just say that short stories have also worked their way into my sense memory throughout my life and now I can finally admit a kind of preference for them. And I will keep on reading and reading them. And, oh yeah, writing them too.
Some hours later this would result in my mother yelling at me for using practically an entire bottle of her very expensive oil on a doll's hair. For what reason? she demanded. I thought my explanation made perfect sense, but apparently she did not. In fact, she just could not believe what I had done. I should point out that in all my life I had never known my mother to wear patchouli and the three-quarters-full bottle of it remained in the bathroom for years until one day it was just simply gone. My Barbie’s perm, unfortunately, never took.
But meanwhile. That faint smell of patchouli that never really went away worked its way into my sense memory, winding its way through the various food co-ops of my life, until one day many years later I found that I did, in fact, like it. Which is maybe the way anyone comes to like patchouli when they didn’t plan on liking it, you know, gradually and unexpectedly. I’m not saying that I would ever wear it or anything (I mean, really now), but I have been known to burn patchouli incense and thus both horrify and confuse my children. What is that smell? asks my older daughter, horrified and confused. Oh, don’t you like this? I answer, knowing that of course she doesn’t, but also knowing that as she heads down the winding path of food co-ops in her own life she will at least be familiar with it.
You think I’m going somewhere with this? Well, now, let’s just see. A couple weeks ago my friend Kate told me how she had just finished writing a novel. And I reacted the way I always do at the thought of something like that: utter astonishment. I could never write like that, I always tell people who think that I am actually planning to write a novel someday, though I’m not. I could not keep going on one story like that. And Kate surprised me by saying simply, Well, of course, you read a lot of short stories, don’t you? I think writers who like short stories the most write short stories. And there it was, the best explanation I’d ever heard. It’s true. I love short stories. I read books and books of them, even though everyone wants to talk about and read novels. I read novels, too, of course, but I think I might actually like short stories better. Is that possible?
What I like best actually are books of short stories in which the same characters show up in different stories, and I consider Alice Mattison and Edward P. Jones the masters of this. Right now I’m reading books of Amy Bloom’s short stories and I feel like I’m wolfing them down like a bag of potato chips that you don’t even remember opening and I end up having to go back and reread most of them. And the story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Katherine Anne Porter, which I read twice in a row recently because I liked it so much. The thing about stories is that half the time with a really good one it feels like it’s over too soon. But isn’t that kind of the best thing about them? It’s like leaving the party when it’s still going strong, or, you know, like The Jam breaking up at the height of their success. The best kind of short story invites you into a world and then ends with a snap and you are left longing, but only in the very best of ways. This is why I always keep reading them and also why I keep trying to write them.
So now I need to tie this back to patchouli, right? Well, let’s just say that short stories have also worked their way into my sense memory throughout my life and now I can finally admit a kind of preference for them. And I will keep on reading and reading them. And, oh yeah, writing them too.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
I Think My Spaceship Knows Which Way to Go
For a long time I’ve suspected that being an astronaut would just be a total hassle. All that equipment you have to wear all the time in such a small enclosed space. Plus the lack of gravity would really get to you, I thought. Really it must be exhausting. And it turns out I’m right, of course, but the thing that I guess I wasn’t considering is that astronauts don’t really care. I’m reading Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars, and the part that I’ve been thinking about for days, the part that probably explains everything about astronauts, is that back in 1962, people at NASA were considering a “one-way, one-man” expedition to the moon.
“It would be cheaper, faster, and perhaps the only way to beat the Russians,” insane Bell Aerosystems engineer John M. Cord is quoted as saying. So basically what this would entail would be sending a man to the moon and then eventually sending a spaceship to pick him up in a few years once they figured out how to do it. And, you know, no worries about supplies or anything! Why, they would send module after module to provide him with all the stuff he might need! On the moon. Hmm. I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.
But here’s the part that gets me, the part that I have been thinking about for days, the thing that really separates ordinary people from astronauts: someone, more than just one person really, would have volunteered for this mission. Basically there are people in this world that would be willing to be sent to the moon for an indefinite amount of time where they’d just be, you know, hanging around for a while. And really you’d just have to wait there until first, someone got around to coming up with an actual solution (Oh god, just put that return lunar module stuff on my desk. I’m just swamped with work! I’ll probably get to it when I get back from my vacation or something.) and then the months, if not years, of testing on earth, while you were maybe just playing a whole bunch of solitaire.
As for myself, I don’t even really like to carry a bag if I can help it. You know, I just throw my money and keys and things in my pocket and that’s that. And I get kind of queasy these days just watching my daughters ride a carousel. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t always enjoy the company of people, but I think that basically when it comes down to it I tend to like the occasional conversation.
So I wonder if maybe that is the one real distinction between people on earth, not male or female, gay or straight, Dave Matthews fan or not. It may all come down to: would you be willing to be sent to the moon for an unknown number of years with a good chance that you’d be up there just kind of waiting for some “scientists” to come up with a way to get you back? And maybe trying not to panic too much or get a little too, you know, antsy? I mean, that's maybe all it comes down to really. Well, that and people who like relish and people who don't.
“It would be cheaper, faster, and perhaps the only way to beat the Russians,” insane Bell Aerosystems engineer John M. Cord is quoted as saying. So basically what this would entail would be sending a man to the moon and then eventually sending a spaceship to pick him up in a few years once they figured out how to do it. And, you know, no worries about supplies or anything! Why, they would send module after module to provide him with all the stuff he might need! On the moon. Hmm. I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.
But here’s the part that gets me, the part that I have been thinking about for days, the thing that really separates ordinary people from astronauts: someone, more than just one person really, would have volunteered for this mission. Basically there are people in this world that would be willing to be sent to the moon for an indefinite amount of time where they’d just be, you know, hanging around for a while. And really you’d just have to wait there until first, someone got around to coming up with an actual solution (Oh god, just put that return lunar module stuff on my desk. I’m just swamped with work! I’ll probably get to it when I get back from my vacation or something.) and then the months, if not years, of testing on earth, while you were maybe just playing a whole bunch of solitaire.
As for myself, I don’t even really like to carry a bag if I can help it. You know, I just throw my money and keys and things in my pocket and that’s that. And I get kind of queasy these days just watching my daughters ride a carousel. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t always enjoy the company of people, but I think that basically when it comes down to it I tend to like the occasional conversation.
So I wonder if maybe that is the one real distinction between people on earth, not male or female, gay or straight, Dave Matthews fan or not. It may all come down to: would you be willing to be sent to the moon for an unknown number of years with a good chance that you’d be up there just kind of waiting for some “scientists” to come up with a way to get you back? And maybe trying not to panic too much or get a little too, you know, antsy? I mean, that's maybe all it comes down to really. Well, that and people who like relish and people who don't.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
The Summer Day
This morning I took my younger daughter to her swim lessons at the lake we’ve been going to for I think seven summers now. She’s been doing these lessons for the past two weeks, but today was the first time I took her. Usually, in past summers, it was me taking my girls to these swim lessons, and so today I planned to approach it antisocially as I have been doing the past couple of years, which involved sitting way over to the side at these picnic tables and reading The New Yorker or whatever book I would be distractedly managing to work through the entire summer. But when I got there today I noticed that the picnic tables were not shaded as they usually were, but blazingly right in the sun. This is not the kind of day to be messing with sun. I took my magazine over to the shaded benches where all the other moms were talking about things their kids said and soccer tryouts and that sort of thing and I tried to read in my usual distracted way. I squinted way out at the dock where my daughter was practicing dives and I could just make her out.
Then I noticed someone sitting all alone at one of the picnic tables the way I used to do, not even minding the sun, and reading a book. I was immediately interested. Then I realized that I actually knew this woman, that we had talked over the years, mostly at picnic tables at this very lake, and I headed over there. As I approached I saw the name Mary Oliver on the book she was reading and I knew then that I was heading for something good.
The book was called A Poetry Handbook, and in it Mary Oliver kind of guides readers on how to write poetry, but in such a beautiful and graceful way, as she can’t help doing. And so this woman and I talked about Mary Oliver and poetry and Mary Oliver poems and writing in general (she too is a writer) and it was then that I began to realize that the knotted feeling in my stomach that I had brought to the lake with me was slowly unknotting. I have noticed something like this happening to me a couple times before in the past year, but the first time was last summer where at this huge retrospective Picasso exhibit at the Met, I literally felt something just lift up and out of my body. I mean, not to get all clichéd and everything, but it was a feeling of transcendence. When we got through the Picasso exhibit, I told my friend Alisa that I needed to go back to the beginning and go through it again, and so she went off to look at medieval paintings, and I lingered there, noticing, always noticing, the lightness that had come over me.
And so here at the lake, talking about the Mary Oliver book, it was happening again. I know that I’ve said this many times before, and even here, but there’s that line from Oliver’s famous poem “The Summer Day” that I can’t stop thinking about: “I don't know exactly what a prayer is/I do know how to pay attention…” Which, exactly.
After a while of talking, our kids came out of the lake, and I said to this woman, this almost friend of mine, Hey, do you want to get together sometime? My question kind of took us both by surprise, and she said, Sure, that would be great. Before I left, she told me to look for this other Mary Oliver poem that I didn’t know called “Wild Geese.” I think you’ll like it, she said.
Here’s how it ends:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Then I noticed someone sitting all alone at one of the picnic tables the way I used to do, not even minding the sun, and reading a book. I was immediately interested. Then I realized that I actually knew this woman, that we had talked over the years, mostly at picnic tables at this very lake, and I headed over there. As I approached I saw the name Mary Oliver on the book she was reading and I knew then that I was heading for something good.
The book was called A Poetry Handbook, and in it Mary Oliver kind of guides readers on how to write poetry, but in such a beautiful and graceful way, as she can’t help doing. And so this woman and I talked about Mary Oliver and poetry and Mary Oliver poems and writing in general (she too is a writer) and it was then that I began to realize that the knotted feeling in my stomach that I had brought to the lake with me was slowly unknotting. I have noticed something like this happening to me a couple times before in the past year, but the first time was last summer where at this huge retrospective Picasso exhibit at the Met, I literally felt something just lift up and out of my body. I mean, not to get all clichéd and everything, but it was a feeling of transcendence. When we got through the Picasso exhibit, I told my friend Alisa that I needed to go back to the beginning and go through it again, and so she went off to look at medieval paintings, and I lingered there, noticing, always noticing, the lightness that had come over me.
And so here at the lake, talking about the Mary Oliver book, it was happening again. I know that I’ve said this many times before, and even here, but there’s that line from Oliver’s famous poem “The Summer Day” that I can’t stop thinking about: “I don't know exactly what a prayer is/I do know how to pay attention…” Which, exactly.
After a while of talking, our kids came out of the lake, and I said to this woman, this almost friend of mine, Hey, do you want to get together sometime? My question kind of took us both by surprise, and she said, Sure, that would be great. Before I left, she told me to look for this other Mary Oliver poem that I didn’t know called “Wild Geese.” I think you’ll like it, she said.
Here’s how it ends:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Scary Stories
One day when I was about 13 or 14 I stayed home sick from school and somehow came across the book Rosemary’s Baby on the bookshelf in our hallway. Several hours later I was to be found frozen in bed having read the book in its entirety and too terrified to move. The important thing to know is that it is a book about devil worshipers, and you’d think by then I’d have learned my lesson regarding this topic, but clearly I did not. Even now I’m not sure I can think of a scarier book.
I don’t know if it’s the devil-worshiping topic itself that was so terrifying to me, though there was that (and strangely being raised by atheists somehow failed to make me doubt the devil’s existence). But the one part that really stuck with me, and it's a theme you'll see again and again in scary stories, was the fact that Rosemary goes to her doctor and explains the whole story to him and you think that finally someone will believe her, but the doctor simply leads her back to the devil worshipers who have convinced him that she is simply crazy and needs their care. It’s like that short story, “I Only Came to Use the Phone” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which ends up doing the same sort of thing. I mean, take look at the title. A woman’s car breaks down and she gets a ride on a bus that’s going to a mental hospital. She gets admitted as a patient and no one believes that she isn’t. She is ultimately forced to stay there forever. Now, that’s scary!
But just the other day I found myself rereading Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which I’d first read about 12 years ago. I totally remember the experience of reading it on the subway and looking around in horror and wondering if maybe I had to stop reading it because it was so disturbing and creepy. It wasn’t scary exactly and yet, had I been alone in bed reading I might have remained there frozen for some hours. Yet reading it the other day was a totally different experience. Really I just took total pleasure in its creepiness. I could say that it starts like all Paul Auster books, but since that was the first book he wrote I guess I could say, It starts like all the Paul Auster books that would come after it but at this point it was still quite unique, in which an ordinary guy who just had some tragic event occur in his life finds himself in an extraordinary circumstance. And eventually he is plunged into madness. So it isn’t exactly scary, in the true sense of the word, but there is much to disturb the reader. At least there’re no devil worshipers in that one.
But what has gotten me thinking about all this is that right now I’m reading (and by reading I mean at the exceedingly slow pace of like five pages every three days, which is how I read books in the summer) Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. You probably know Shirley Jackson from her famous story “The Lottery,” but it’s almost a shame if you do because everything else she wrote is just so damn funny and purely a joy to read. But is it scary? This is what I keep asking myself and, to be honest, complaining about to my entire family. This book is so much fun to read, but it’s not scary. The quote from the New York Times Book Review on the cover says, “Makes your blood chill and your scalp prickle.”
Well, no, it doesn’t, really. Sure there are parts with doors unexpectedly locking and mysterious writing found on the walls of the house. But really I find myself more pleasurably distracted with things that the character of Eleanor thinks, to calm herself: “I have red shoes, she thought—that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons.” And really there are some scary things going on in the house, like a room that is suddenly covered in blood or an area next to the nursery that is unspeakably cold or the fact that Hill House itself seems to be alive. But it hardly seems to matter. So this makes me wonder: am I no longer so easily scared? Or is it just that I can no longer be scared by stories? Or is it that the last ten pages of the Jackson book are so terrifying that when I (finally!) get to them I won't be able to speak for hours afterward?
Coming soon: answers to these questions.
I don’t know if it’s the devil-worshiping topic itself that was so terrifying to me, though there was that (and strangely being raised by atheists somehow failed to make me doubt the devil’s existence). But the one part that really stuck with me, and it's a theme you'll see again and again in scary stories, was the fact that Rosemary goes to her doctor and explains the whole story to him and you think that finally someone will believe her, but the doctor simply leads her back to the devil worshipers who have convinced him that she is simply crazy and needs their care. It’s like that short story, “I Only Came to Use the Phone” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which ends up doing the same sort of thing. I mean, take look at the title. A woman’s car breaks down and she gets a ride on a bus that’s going to a mental hospital. She gets admitted as a patient and no one believes that she isn’t. She is ultimately forced to stay there forever. Now, that’s scary!
But just the other day I found myself rereading Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which I’d first read about 12 years ago. I totally remember the experience of reading it on the subway and looking around in horror and wondering if maybe I had to stop reading it because it was so disturbing and creepy. It wasn’t scary exactly and yet, had I been alone in bed reading I might have remained there frozen for some hours. Yet reading it the other day was a totally different experience. Really I just took total pleasure in its creepiness. I could say that it starts like all Paul Auster books, but since that was the first book he wrote I guess I could say, It starts like all the Paul Auster books that would come after it but at this point it was still quite unique, in which an ordinary guy who just had some tragic event occur in his life finds himself in an extraordinary circumstance. And eventually he is plunged into madness. So it isn’t exactly scary, in the true sense of the word, but there is much to disturb the reader. At least there’re no devil worshipers in that one.
But what has gotten me thinking about all this is that right now I’m reading (and by reading I mean at the exceedingly slow pace of like five pages every three days, which is how I read books in the summer) Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. You probably know Shirley Jackson from her famous story “The Lottery,” but it’s almost a shame if you do because everything else she wrote is just so damn funny and purely a joy to read. But is it scary? This is what I keep asking myself and, to be honest, complaining about to my entire family. This book is so much fun to read, but it’s not scary. The quote from the New York Times Book Review on the cover says, “Makes your blood chill and your scalp prickle.”
Well, no, it doesn’t, really. Sure there are parts with doors unexpectedly locking and mysterious writing found on the walls of the house. But really I find myself more pleasurably distracted with things that the character of Eleanor thinks, to calm herself: “I have red shoes, she thought—that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons.” And really there are some scary things going on in the house, like a room that is suddenly covered in blood or an area next to the nursery that is unspeakably cold or the fact that Hill House itself seems to be alive. But it hardly seems to matter. So this makes me wonder: am I no longer so easily scared? Or is it just that I can no longer be scared by stories? Or is it that the last ten pages of the Jackson book are so terrifying that when I (finally!) get to them I won't be able to speak for hours afterward?
Coming soon: answers to these questions.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Assigned Reading
So now we’re reading tenth grade essays, in which the students are asked to write about a character in a work of literature that has to stand up for something. Thus, there are about 1,000,000 essays on To Kill a Mockingbird (set in the “sleepy, prejudiced town of Maycomb County”) and The Odyssey (“After the suitors were done mooching Odysseus’s food and drinks and servants, they started trash talking him behind his back.”) and Romeo and Juliet (who stood up for love! Love!) and Of Mice and Men (for a reason I can’t quite determine since often it’s the fact that George stood up for killing Lenny). Occasionally there are the science fiction ones, in which you are thrown directly and without warning into Middle-earth since you obviously know what they’re talking about (you don’t) or the Twilight ones (which are, without exception, terrible, and which are also, without exception, written in that big round girly handwriting).
But the essays I have liked most turn out to be the ones on The Catcher in the Rye. (Man, it always comes back to Salinger for me, doesn’t it?) Partly for the observations (the fact that Holden smokes so much is always commented on, which I find hilarious) and partly because it reminds me of what a great book it is and partly because it reminds me of my hometown. My favorite quote so far: “He makes it back to his hometown of New York City where he finds phones at every turn.” Yup, that’s exactly right.
And of course this makes me think about the books we read in high school. Despite the fact that I went to one of those sciencey high schools in New York, English was always my favorite subject, though I can’t say that any of my English teachers there were as good as my aforementioned seventh grade one. I recall Mr. Casella talking about something something transcendentalism in The Grapes of Wrath, which to this day I don’t really get, and the part in The Great Gatsby (a book I truly loved) where F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the ash heap in Flushing Meadows, which eventually became the site of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Though actually the thing I remember most about that book was the look of surprised delight on Mr. Casella’s face when, after calling on my friend Loraine, she shrugged and said, Well, like, you know the way daisies are like, white on the outside, and like, yellow on the inside, so, like Daisy was like pure on the outside, but really not on the, like, inside? Did he really fall for this? Could he not see this high-level thinking was pretty much impossible for anyone but a writer of Cliffs Notes, whose insight Loraine had sought five minutes before class? He could not. Because wouldn’t you want to believe that a student could actually come up with something like that on her own? And Loraine, smarty though she was, had a way of talking that was truly admirable in its teenagery-ness (Wait, do you, like, like him?), which also added to the appeal, I suspect.
The unfortunate thing is that some otherwise amazing books seem much less so when they are assigned by a teacher, which is why I suspect I never read another Steinbeck book or even Dickens, after slogging through the first (!) 800 pages of David Copperfield and then just giving up. It’s not that I disliked any of these books. I think it’s just the fact of being assigned books that always threw me off, which is something I’ve addressed here before. Due to some kind of gap in my education, I never developed any particular respect for authority, which was somewhat evident in high school. (My physics teacher called me “fresh” and wanted to fail me based purely on my bad attitude, but could not because I had passed the physics Regents. Rock on, state tests!) So my point is that once a book was assigned, I always read it, but there was something kind of ruined for me, which I think happens to a lot of kids. If you go back, say, years later, and read all those assigned books for the first time or even reread them, you will truly love them. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that teachers should not be assigning these books. It's just that, perhaps unfortunately, the best books we read are often ones we’ve chosen ourselves.
But the essays I have liked most turn out to be the ones on The Catcher in the Rye. (Man, it always comes back to Salinger for me, doesn’t it?) Partly for the observations (the fact that Holden smokes so much is always commented on, which I find hilarious) and partly because it reminds me of what a great book it is and partly because it reminds me of my hometown. My favorite quote so far: “He makes it back to his hometown of New York City where he finds phones at every turn.” Yup, that’s exactly right.
And of course this makes me think about the books we read in high school. Despite the fact that I went to one of those sciencey high schools in New York, English was always my favorite subject, though I can’t say that any of my English teachers there were as good as my aforementioned seventh grade one. I recall Mr. Casella talking about something something transcendentalism in The Grapes of Wrath, which to this day I don’t really get, and the part in The Great Gatsby (a book I truly loved) where F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the ash heap in Flushing Meadows, which eventually became the site of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Though actually the thing I remember most about that book was the look of surprised delight on Mr. Casella’s face when, after calling on my friend Loraine, she shrugged and said, Well, like, you know the way daisies are like, white on the outside, and like, yellow on the inside, so, like Daisy was like pure on the outside, but really not on the, like, inside? Did he really fall for this? Could he not see this high-level thinking was pretty much impossible for anyone but a writer of Cliffs Notes, whose insight Loraine had sought five minutes before class? He could not. Because wouldn’t you want to believe that a student could actually come up with something like that on her own? And Loraine, smarty though she was, had a way of talking that was truly admirable in its teenagery-ness (Wait, do you, like, like him?), which also added to the appeal, I suspect.
The unfortunate thing is that some otherwise amazing books seem much less so when they are assigned by a teacher, which is why I suspect I never read another Steinbeck book or even Dickens, after slogging through the first (!) 800 pages of David Copperfield and then just giving up. It’s not that I disliked any of these books. I think it’s just the fact of being assigned books that always threw me off, which is something I’ve addressed here before. Due to some kind of gap in my education, I never developed any particular respect for authority, which was somewhat evident in high school. (My physics teacher called me “fresh” and wanted to fail me based purely on my bad attitude, but could not because I had passed the physics Regents. Rock on, state tests!) So my point is that once a book was assigned, I always read it, but there was something kind of ruined for me, which I think happens to a lot of kids. If you go back, say, years later, and read all those assigned books for the first time or even reread them, you will truly love them. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that teachers should not be assigning these books. It's just that, perhaps unfortunately, the best books we read are often ones we’ve chosen ourselves.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
It's a Sky Blue Sky
“They looked down on me, thinking I was some jerk to believe in the Lord Christ.” This is the first line of an essay I read yesterday written by a seventh grader in M___. The question this year on the big state test asks the kids to think of a time they were proud and then write about it. The young man quoted above was proud that he did not fight the kids who taunted him, but rather quoted at length from the Bible, which he considered a greater victory, though I think it’s safe to say that the other kids probably considered him even more of a jerk afterward.
So what are seventh graders proud of? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that many of them talk about winning some kind of baseball or basketball or soccer game, which almost always includes a detailed play-by-play of the action that my coworker Jenni likened to the Phil Rizzuto section of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” There are also dance and gymnastics competitions and trying out for cheerleading. (Everyone at my table hates the cheerleaders.) There are unnecessary descriptions of simply everything: “I walked up to my friend, whose eyes were like pools of blue-green water.” But then sometimes you get that Bible-quoting kid or the boy who was proud of holding his breath for two minutes and thirty seconds, and who pointed out that the worst thing that could happen would be that he’d black out. His goal is to reach three minutes. Perhaps the best thing about these papers is how the kids throw in random vocabulary words that are almost always used awkwardly. These are the sentences we quote to each other all day long: “The time I was supercilious was a benevolent day.”
And this got me thinking about actually learning the word “inevitable” in the seventh grade. One day I didn’t know this word and the next day I did and suddenly I couldn’t imagine how I’d never known it before. We had this great English teacher, who may have been all of 24 at the time, who gave us extra credit anytime we saw one of our vocabulary words in real life. We just had to write down the sentence it was in and show it to her. And at the beginning of every class there were always kids rushing up to her with scraps of paper scribbled with sentences containing words like “balderdash” and “harried.” And most of us did exceptionally well on the vocabulary tests that year too. It was, you know, inevitable.
But back to today’s seventh graders, who sometimes write about Justin Bieber and sometimes about learning to do ollies on their skateboards and sometimes just want to make things perfectly clear: “My jaw dropped all the way to my blue crocs that were in style then.”
Of course, I'm sure it's no surprise that reading these all day can be tedious and that sometimes we skim them (especially the sports ones, oh man, the sports ones), but that sometimes there is that seventh grader that shines as brightly as the daisy yellow sun in the cornflower blue sky. Wait, someone will say. Listen to this! And we'll all marvel at the fact that some kid out there will go on to do great things, even though most of these essays leave us generally discouraged about the youth of America.
But here, the last line of a baseball essay about the last game of the season, in which a girl pitched a winning game against a team that included a mean girl named Angelica, who had been taunting her all season: “I remember the hoots and howls of the crowd when I threw that changeup and the look on Angelica’s face when she swung five seconds too early.” We all know that look. Sorry, Angelica.
So what are seventh graders proud of? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that many of them talk about winning some kind of baseball or basketball or soccer game, which almost always includes a detailed play-by-play of the action that my coworker Jenni likened to the Phil Rizzuto section of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” There are also dance and gymnastics competitions and trying out for cheerleading. (Everyone at my table hates the cheerleaders.) There are unnecessary descriptions of simply everything: “I walked up to my friend, whose eyes were like pools of blue-green water.” But then sometimes you get that Bible-quoting kid or the boy who was proud of holding his breath for two minutes and thirty seconds, and who pointed out that the worst thing that could happen would be that he’d black out. His goal is to reach three minutes. Perhaps the best thing about these papers is how the kids throw in random vocabulary words that are almost always used awkwardly. These are the sentences we quote to each other all day long: “The time I was supercilious was a benevolent day.”
And this got me thinking about actually learning the word “inevitable” in the seventh grade. One day I didn’t know this word and the next day I did and suddenly I couldn’t imagine how I’d never known it before. We had this great English teacher, who may have been all of 24 at the time, who gave us extra credit anytime we saw one of our vocabulary words in real life. We just had to write down the sentence it was in and show it to her. And at the beginning of every class there were always kids rushing up to her with scraps of paper scribbled with sentences containing words like “balderdash” and “harried.” And most of us did exceptionally well on the vocabulary tests that year too. It was, you know, inevitable.
But back to today’s seventh graders, who sometimes write about Justin Bieber and sometimes about learning to do ollies on their skateboards and sometimes just want to make things perfectly clear: “My jaw dropped all the way to my blue crocs that were in style then.”
Of course, I'm sure it's no surprise that reading these all day can be tedious and that sometimes we skim them (especially the sports ones, oh man, the sports ones), but that sometimes there is that seventh grader that shines as brightly as the daisy yellow sun in the cornflower blue sky. Wait, someone will say. Listen to this! And we'll all marvel at the fact that some kid out there will go on to do great things, even though most of these essays leave us generally discouraged about the youth of America.
But here, the last line of a baseball essay about the last game of the season, in which a girl pitched a winning game against a team that included a mean girl named Angelica, who had been taunting her all season: “I remember the hoots and howls of the crowd when I threw that changeup and the look on Angelica’s face when she swung five seconds too early.” We all know that look. Sorry, Angelica.
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