Beautiful Children

I just finished reading Beautiful Children by Charles Bock. Here is the review I posted on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com:
This book deserves its distinction as one of The New York Times Best Books of 2008. It is well-written and organized in such a way that readers understand these characters as people and not as caricatures. Not only that, but Charles Bock has a keen eye for social critique and many of his characters provide insightful commentary about society as well as a developing sense of their own reasons behind their actions. For example, Lestat appears earlier in the novel and the reader is repelled by him, but later on Bock allows the narrative to pick up Lestat's voice and the inner workings of his mind and suddenly the reader is given a new perspective on this character: "The sane sober businessman does not walk down the street talking out loud to himself, but the crazy homeless man does...Over time Lestat had also grown to understand how the former becomes the latter. How all your thoughts and frustrations can inch closer and closer toward one uninterrupted rant. How the chasm between a person and the world around him can grow, a shell forming between the life you once had and the life you are living." This situation is true for the characters in the novel. Each one is dealing with a chasm that either developed while he/she was consciously or unconsciously oblivious or is coming to terms with the fact that the chasm is developing at that moment, based on a particular decision that needs to be made. This, for me, is the best part of the book--that the philosophy and vision behind it are so satisfying. Who hasn't at times felt like Kenny on the side of the road, raising our hands in the air and wondering "What am I supposed to do now?". I like the nun's answer in this novel: You must question how you might be more than you are. Like Rilke writes in his poem "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," You must change your life. I agree. You must also read this book.

Donald Hall

I've been reading Donald Hall's White Apples and the Taste of Stone, which is a collection of his poems from 1946-2006. This book comes with a CD of Hall reading some of the poems, which I've been listening to in my car while driving to and from school. I recommend Hall's poem "To a Waterfowl." Here is a link to the audio of the poem online: http://audiopoetry.wordpress.com/category/poet/donald-hall/. I laughed out loud in the car while driving. I keep relistening to the poem over and over again. In teaching news, I only have two days left until Christmas break, not that I'm counting...but anyway, this year has gone well so far and my honors students are working on a project right now comparing Montag from Fahrenheit 451, Equality 7-2521 from Anthem, and Truman from The Truman Show. Oh, I don't think I've updated my blog since my post about censorship and Feed by M.T. Anderson. I can teach it as long as I get parent permission. I made the permission slips, sent them out, and received them all back. After break, Feed will be the next book we read.

Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road, a novel by Richard Yates, is set to come out as a movie in January. The movie is pairing up Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in their first movie together since Titanic. I'm not a big DiCaprio fan, but I do think he could really pull off the part of Frank Wheeler. I read the book in my early twenties; now I'm reading it again in my late late twenties. I have to admit the book has a lot more resonance with me now that I have a wife, two kids, two dogs, and live in the suburbs. If you've read the book, then you know why. Richard Yates writes so well that when Frank Wheeler is discussing "American life" and "consumerism" I can't help but think of how closely it resembles Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451. Yates is a great cultural critic, which also reminds me of Don DeLillo and how closely Revolutionary Road resembles Americana. DeLillo definitely develops the character of David Bell with more darkness of soul and paints a more disturbing, haunting, and dangerous portrait of America than Yates, but the connection is still there.

I'm also reading the poetry of W.S. Merwin and Joseph Brodsky.

Censorship

It is ironic that my "name" on this blog is Granger, which obviously is an allusion to Fahrenheit 451 and also illustrates my intense love of the book and it's message, and the fact that the high school where I teach has just banned Feed by M.T. Anderson. Both Feed and Fahrenheit 451 are similar, which is why I recommended Feed to our Book Review Committee and why it was originally adopted. Well, it was adopted two years ago, under a different school administration and a different school board...now, um, the inappropriate language (the F-word) is causing it to be banned. I was not the one who was teaching Feed at the time of the controversy. A new English teacher in our department was teaching it and a parent complained that she didn't want her daughter to read the book; the teacher gave the student an alternate book; end of story, right? No, the parent also complained to a school board member, who then complained to our new first year principal, who then decided...to suspend teaching of the book and made the new English teacher personally confiscate each copy of the book from each student. My students were just finishing Fahrenheit 451 and heard about the controversy. One of my students came up to me after class one day and said that it all reminded him of the Coda from Fahrenheit when Bradbury writes about how there is more than one way to burn a book. That says it all. You can't fool students and you should never underestimate them. That school board member and the new principal provided the most relevant text-to-world connection my students could ever encounter with their reading of Fahrenheit 451. Oh, and yeah, since we have so many copies of Feed, we are still allowed to offer the book as "independent reading." The next week, the new English teacher offered the book as independent reading and every single student, except the one whose parent complained (who actually really wanted to read the book), chose to read the book. It's interesting how things work out in the end.

Stanley Kunitz

I just returned from a trip to the public library with my two little ones. Emmy and Nick have been obsessed with Silly Sally by Don and Audrey Wood for weeks now since they've been reading it in preschool. So, we took a trip to the library to pick up a copy and I indulged in some poetry reading. I checked out The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz and The Wild Braid. The Wild Braid is a book that focuses on Stanley Kunitz and his musings on gardening and writing. Genine Lentine apparently spent about two years with Kunitz just talking to him and walking around his garden with him. Marnie Crawford Samuelson contributes photography of Kunitz in his garden and the total affect is a book that helps readers connect with Kunitz as an artist and person.

Here is a quote from the opening of Kunitz's Collected Poems:

Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole -- that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.

I strive to remain compassionate and whole. I don't know about you, but it is often a struggle for me.

A New Start

I've been busy today:

1. grading essays
2. grading tests
3. teaching at Cincinnati State
4. cleaning my house
5. mowing the lawn, helping my wife decorate the porch for Autumn
6. Emily asked me today not to read her a story, but to tell her a story...so I was also telling stories to Emmy and Nick for about an hour.
7. exercise (bike, lift weights, bike, run)
8. watch SNL
9. sleep
   

Poetry

On this Friday afternoon, I just want to share a poem that I enjoy. Once you finish the poem, read over line 4 and "borrowed" is such a fascinating example of diction. Also, the line "Everything is easy but wrong" resonates strongly with me and it often comes floating into my mind from my subconscious...that, and a line from Charles Olson: "I have had to learn the simplest things / last. Which made for difficulties."

Enjoy!

Old Dominion by Robert Hass
The shadows of late afternoon and the odors
of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.
Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking
across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.
It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell
I stared at on the backs of books in college.
He looked so sad and relaxed in pictures.
He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.
It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov's,
everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized
because it was only there as a thing to be dreamed of
or because someone somewhere had set the old words
to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesn't hurt.
Now the thwack . . . thwack of tennis balls being hit
reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax
in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns
where the young terrorists are exploding
among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.
I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay
in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,
never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,
the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis
whites who look so graceful from this distance.

Get Your War On

I will admit that I am addicted to humorous websites that unabashedly support my view of politics and/or the world in general. Get Your War On is hilarious! Here is a link to the most recent segment: http://www.236.com/video/2008/get_your_war_on_news_cycle_1_9305.php

Today, in my College Prep classes, I modeled how to complete a Dialectical Journal while reading. We just started The House on Mango Street and since the novel is made up of vignettes, I decided it would be a good idea to push my students to quote sentences/passages that really hit at the essential info. readers should take away from each vignette. We read a few vignettes out loud and I modeled how to choose a specific sentence/passage, why I chose it, and then explained its importance. We had time for students to take over and I wrote down their quotes on an overhead. It was a good class - all 4x I taught the lesson today.

The Raw Shark Texts is still keeping me interested. Apparently, the "new" Eric Sanderson meets the "old" Eric Sanderson, who looks flawless at first but then begins to literally melt before his eyes. Weird, but well-written and Steven Hall pulls it off. It only sounds weird when I write about it and summarize it for people who say they're interested in the book. Maybe I should work on my summarizing skills...

Oh, and completely unrelated, but worth mentioning, Robert Hass is my favorite poet. Praise is my favorite book of poetry. If anyone hasn't yet read anything by Robert Hass, look him up or check one of his books out of the library. His book Time and Materials won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For the same book, you say? Oh, yes, I say. What a beast.

Politics and the Funny

I am already wincing, waiting for John McCain's new attack ads. Apparently he has decided to take a "new" approach in his campaign ads...which, by the way, already seem pretty negative. So, if these new ads are going to be the first real negative ads, I'm actually bracing myself for them.

Now, on to the funny. Stephen Colbert has a hilarious segment about the presidential candidates and their Shakespearean connections. You can check it out at: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/186547/october-02-2008/shakespearean-candidates---stephen-greenblatt

I've been reading English-As-A-Second Language (ESL) Teaching and Learning (2006) and was interested to find out that over the next twenty years, second-generation Hispanics will make up a majority of the Hispanic population. This is really interesting if you consider that second-generation Hispanics are mainly bilingual in Spanish and English, whereas first-generation Hispanics are mainly Spanish-only. That makes a big difference in terms of ESL students and education. Also, native-born Hispanics are more likely to go to college and earn higher incomes than first-generation Hispanics.

My Honors students just finished reading and explicating "Courage" by Anne Sexton and tomorrow they'll be working on "Tonight I Can Write" by Pablo Neruda.

My College-Prep students begin The House on Mango Street tomorrow. We've been reading a selection of short stories out of the HRW Elements of Literature series and I've found that "American History" by Judith Ortiz Cofer and "Exile" by Julia Alvarez are great examples of multicultural literature from that textbook that connect well with the issues in The House on Mango Street.

The Raw Shark Texts

This is the start of year 7 of teaching HS English. I have six classes of Freshman, two Honors and four College Prep.

I'm currently reading The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Here's an excerpt: "Maybe it's natural for questions to outlive their answers. Or maybe answers don't die but are just lost more easily, being so small and specific, like a coin dropped from the deck of a ship and into the big deep sea" (108). Questions are essential to this story because Eric Sanderson is piecing together who he was, who he is, and what happened to his girlfriend Clio Aames in Greece. Not to mention there is a lodovician, a metaphysical memory-eating shark, that is pursuing him. I know, sounds like a stretch, but Steven Hall makes it work, makes it believable, and creates enough suspense to make me want to keep reading and thinking about his characters constantly.

I'm listening to Everything All the Time by Band of Horses and Magic Potion by The Black Keys.