Three thousand words for... goofily joyous

Backyard birding

For those who enjoy this sort of thing, here is our current backyard list. I've boldfaced the birds we saw just yesterday.

American Crow
American Goldfinch
American Robin
Baltimore Oriole
Black-and-White Warbler
Black-capped Chickadee
Blue Jay
Brown Creeper
Brown-headed Cowbird
Brown Thrasher
Canada Goose
Cedar Waxwing
Chipping Sparrow
Common Grackle
Cooper's Hawk
Dark-eyed Junco
Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon)
Downy Woodpecker
Eastern Screech Owl
European Starling
Fox Sparrow
Golden-crowned Kinglet
Gray Catbird
Great Horned Owl
Hairy Woodpecker
House Sparrow
House Wren
House Finch
Indigo Bunting
Mourning Dove
Northern Cardinal
Northern Flicker
Purple Finch
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
Veery
White-crowned Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
White-breasted Nuthatch
Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker

Birding resources we love:

Field Guide to the Birds of North America (National Geographic)
The Sibley Guide to Birds (David Allen Sibley (National Audubon Society))
Common Birds and Their Songs (Lang Elliott)
Birds of Illinois (Sheryl Devore, et al)
Birds of Chicago (Chris C. Fischer)
Birds of Illinois Field Guide (Stan Tekiela)
Bushnell Falcon 10x50 Wide Angle Binoculars
Audubon Bird Call Whistle
Moleskine Reporter, Large Plain

Sancti-Mom-ious

As the winter swim season drew to a close, my least favorite mother on the team (and this is a label of some distinction, this designation "my least favorite") took time from her busy schedule of gossiping, berating, belittling, and, oh, yeah, gossiping some more to let me know — again — what a bad idea homeschooling is.

After all, she smugly offered, how will they stay in shape after swim team is over? And when will they socialize?

At the moment that she expressed her concern for my girls' physical fitness and social lives, her own daughter, fully thirty-pounds overweight if she's an ounce, was in the process of surreptitiously pinching the girl in front of her — again! — while scratching an itch deep in her nose with her nail-bitten forefinger. Yes, again.

Yeah, I replied, shaking my head. It's a regular worry.

Odious, sancti-Mom-ious dolt.

Over the last nearly nineteen years, I've heard all manner of sancti-Mom-my from other women:

My child doesn't eat... fast food, soda, sweets, preservatives, etc.

My child doesn't watch television.

My child doesn't read that.

My child was born potty-trained.

My child has always slept through the night.

My child this....

My child that....

My child wouldn't dream of....

My child couldn't possibly....

And so it goes.
______________________

Because there is such a gap between my oldest and my two youngest, I am often among mothers with much less time spent in the parenting gig. Their sancti-Mom-ious tone is, of course, most despicable since, more often than not, they don't know what the feck they're talking about. Unfortunately, it's socially unacceptable to sigh and suggest, "Hey! Why don't you spend a little more time working the kinks out of your whole 'parenting vision' before you inflict your half-baked philosophy on the rest of us, you sancti-Mom-ious dolt?" Since I am supposed to model for my children the sorts of behavior I'd like them to exhibit, however, I refrain.

But the words tickle my lips.

It's not as if homeschooling is without its sancti-Mommies, by the way. In fact, some bring sancti-Mom-my to new heights (or depths), what, with their lists and their schoolrooms and their posters and their what-have-you.

My child scored a 32 on the ACT when she was eleven.

My child doesn't read twaddle. (Typing that ridiculous word makes me mildly ill.)

My child is in fifth grade. We don't always have enough time for physics, advanced calculus, and oboe lessons. Should we give up sleeping or eating?

My child completed Henle Latin. He's six. What now?

Or, alternately...

My child is ten and still can't read (or do math or write a clear sentence or whatever), but that's all right because we're at peace with the universe.

My child is behind in everything, but life keeps getting in the way, and life is, after all, the best teacher, right?

My child this....

My child that....

My child wouldn't dream of....

My child couldn't possibly....

It's enough to make a thinking person scream: Stop the sancti-Mom-my now!
_____________________

I took my kids to Steak-n-Shake for dinner tonight. My husband is working late and cooking seemed too much of an effort on this beautiful Friday night. I drove our aging van to the lake, and we watched the heron make several lonely criss-crosses over the gray, wind-tossed water. My son and I read the Sun-Times, and my daughters read #20 and #11 in the Animorphs series. We checked the local television listings to see if "Mythbusters" will be on this evening and licked the salt from our fingertips before slurping the last of our shakes.

We stopped at Home Depot to exchange the garage door remote and then drove home in companionable silence.

Earlier today, my son and I hung a new bird feeder, and my daughters and I set up a science experiment (which, as regular M-mv readers know, stands a much better chance of failing than succeeding, but that's all right — we'll roll with it), read aloud from our astronomy book, discussed Twelfth Night, and practiced piano. In the afternoon, the girls played outside, Boy-boy installed software on his new computer, and I read a book. There was other stuff; there always is — math, spelling, Latin, and the rest. But that was the gist of it.

It was a good day.

And that's not sancti-Mom-my. That's confidence and contentment.

You either have it.

Or you don't.

My observation is that sancti-Mom-my masks a decided lack of confidence and contentment.

Or a wealth of stupidity.

Or both.

Heh, heh, heh.

A thousand words for... Ouch!

Click to enlarge

After a whirlwind courtship, the blue jays have determined that, yes, they will take us -- or our towering pines, anyway -- up on our offer of a spring wedding. It's a bit of a shotgun affair: As you can see, they're assembling a nest already.

Those of you who know how much I adore corvids will understand how delighted I was to find that these noisy, blue friends had chosen our yard for their nest. Maybe we'll espy the fledglings.

"Why is it that the work of this earnest but artless writer continues to enjoy such astonishing popularity?"

It's a good question. In this article, Jonathan Yardley admits, "As a teenager, even into my early 20s, there wasn't a writer dead or alive whose work I treasured more than John Steinbeck's."

Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was my first "grown up" novel. I followed it up with East of Eden... and then swallowed everything of his whole. I reread Steinbeck in my mid-twenties and thought that, yes, he held up. Like Yardley, I treasured Steinbeck.

But does Steinbeck hold up when one is a bona fide grown-up? I'd like to argue that a book like The Winter of Our Discontent does (it was, after all, once on my "Regularly reread" list), but now I'm not so sure. I was reading a passage the other day, and, yes, it did seem... strained. Dated. A little -- as I used to chide my writing students -- clunky.

Concludes Yardley:

For myself, Steinbeck is most comfortably lodged in a past that is now half a century gone. I no longer can read him -- too often, for me, reading his prose is like scraping one's fingernails on a blackboard -- but he was important to me once and that should not be forgotten. Not many books of our youth survive unscathed into what passes for our maturity, and many other books await that maturity before we are ready to appreciate and understand them. For me, Steinbeck eventually gave way to William Faulkner, but I decline, now, to thumb my nose at my old friend as I bid him farewell. [Emphasis added.]

Which authors and books were important to you once but have not arrived unscathed in what passes for your maturity?

Worth repeating:A lifetime of excellence

Elsewhere, last year, I responded to a poll about homeschooling mistakes. Mine? Well...

In the beginning (and that was twelve years ago)...
I'd work the day. In other words, I'd parent, teach, and write/edit on Monday, and it was good. And I'd parent, teach, and write/edit on Tuesday, and it was good. And I'd parent and teach on Wednesday, and it was good enough. And I'd write and edit on Thursday, and it met the deadline.

You get the idea. For those first couple of months, although I had an unwavering commitment to and clearly articulated philosophy about the family-centered learning project, I was working day-to-day. "That was good. That was good. That was pretty good. That was good. That wasn't, but there's tomorrow." This was my fundamental mistake.

Superficially, no, there's not much wrong with it, but when I finally read Marva Collins for the first time about a year into our homeschooling adventure, I realized I was going about our days all wrong.

Collins writes:

Many of us can be excellent for a day, but we find a lifetime of excellence to be just a bit difficult. Good teachers leave their egos and problems at the door each morning. They become so immersed in the children they teach that they forget time, problems, who they are, or what they can't do. They believe that they exist for their students. They hear with their hearts, they see with their souls, and they teach with their conscience.

I realized with an unsettling all-at-onceness that I didn't want to be good (or good enough) for a day. I wanted to be excellent most of the time. And so far? I wasn't even close.

And it is utterly doable. It really is. If I refuse to lower my expectations but raise them, instead. And then exceed them. If I refuse to whine or complain or yield to more self-indulgence than the occasional bookstore coup. If I teach. Lead. Coach. Motivate. Inspire. Give my students the best that I have to offer every. single. day. My goal, then, became a lifetime of excellence, not a day or two here and there. A lifetime.

And it all began with raised expectations -- for me and for my students.

And don't for a minute think that this means we marched through the aisles of Jewel chanting Latin declensions (although we did that -- just twice, though). Or that the children are all bound for Harvard (they're not). Or that we drill endlessly or read only leatherbound Great Books. Anyone who reads my M-mv entries knows none of that is what we're about here.

But we do arrive at every morning seeking the moments of learning, discussion, synthesis. We're never (well, rarely) "off." Each and every day is about learning more, doing more, thinking more, writing more, drawing more, discussing more, connecting more -- all with a clarity of expression that approaches excellence. Every. Day.

If I let myself or my students "off the hook" too often for trite things, when the big events arrive, we'll be un(der)prepared -- mentally, spiritually, organizationally. So while bird by bird is an sound approach for dispensing with projects, it will not help one live each day with excellence. Do you see the difference? Each day is a fresh page, sure, but I'd prefer that the pages that preface it represent my best work at that time.

Excellent for a day is pretty easy. Excellence over the course of lifetime? Difficult. But doable.

Just. Do. It.

Follow up
After making that post, someone inquired: "How do you make each day an excellent learning day and keep up with your deadlines?"

Simply put, by fitting the work into the interstices that parenting and teaching permit. And that often means going to bed late and getting up early. My current gig does not require any 9-5 contact with clients or sources, so I haven't had to deal with distractions of that nature since, hmmm, late 2002, I think. (More about that near the bottom of this post.) I write about fitting it all in here: It all begins with me.

And here, too: Fine Art Friday (with its related and long aside).

And in a series of posts in which I worked through Linda Hirshman's polemic about women and work, I discuss how I squeeze it all in (and how important my work as a writer and editor is to me):
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

I was also asked, "Did you cut back on your writing/editing after reading Marva Collins?"

Believe it or not, no. I actually took on more work. First-born. What can I say? But if you can believe my luck, my key contact was an older man who arrived at work at 6:30 a.m. or earlier each weekday. When we needed to meet, we did so at 6 a.m. We dispensed with our telephone conferences before 7:30 a.m. The rest? Email worked well for us. And I attempted to make email work well enough for anyone else, including writers who were contributing to the newspaper, for example.

When my "boss" on that large project (a weekly publication, quarterly newspaper, and all of the literature associated with an ambitious capital campaign) left, I only lasted another eighteen months with that client. I then took a two-year break -- writing only articles (with, admittedly, mixed results -- I think I only placed eight pieces during that period). A few months after our relocation, though, I scored my current gig, which I love. Collins simply shook me out of complacency. Okay or good isn't really good enough. Not for me, anyway.

Born dying

Many folks think daffodils announce spring's arrival.

I think they're wrong.

Forsythia is the real harbinger.

Ours bloomed in the week before my birthday, and I was reminded all over again that forsythia is a tragically beautiful plant: Even as the blooms open, they wilt. It's as if the effort has exhausted them; as if they were keenly aware that they were born dying.
______________________

I once knew a couple whose backyard abutted a neighbor's deep, lush tangle of forsythia bushes. Every spring, the husband would exclaim over the yellow blooms. Every summer, the wife would demand that he take clippers to "those weeds."

Forsythia as foreshadow. Who knew?

"One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn."

Yesterday, the Sun-Times ran an essay by Michael J. Lewis, Falson-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art at Williams College. In the wake of the news about a Yale student's "abortion art" project, the piece ran in the WSJ under the headline "Art and (Wo)man at Yale" (April 24, 2008).

Two passages from the essay:

It is often said that great achievement requires in one's formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others.

And:

Immaturity, self-importance and a certain confused earnestness will always loom large in student art work. But they will usually grow out of it.

It may be my (pardon the pun) frame of mind today, but Lewis appears to be saying as much about the nature of education as he is about art school, no?

In which a former band geek...

assembles her favorite begging-to-be-performed-by-a-marching-band pieces and mentally choreographs a winning half-time show:

Opening
Slow center number
Conclusion

(This entry might also be titled, "What Youtube is good for.")

The recommended daily allowance

If you enjoyed this post -- and a remarkable number of your did -- you will likely be as fascinated by Helvetica as I was.

Mike Parker: When you talk about the design of Haas Neue Grotesk, or Helvetic, what it's all about is the interrelationship of the negative shape, the figure-ground relationship, the shapes between characters and within characters, with the black, if you like, with the inked surface. And the Swiss pay more attention to the background, so that the counters and the space between characters just hold the letters. I mean you can't imagine anything moving; it is so firm. It not a letter that bent to shape; it's a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of surrounding space. It's... oh, it's brilliant when it's done well.

Advice: Take it. Leave it.

Subtitle: A post for those just beginning their home education journey... to say nothing of those who've lost something along the way:

1. While your family's days should most decidedly not be about scoring in the Xth percentile on state-required exams, winning a regional [insert kiddie contest here] prize, or earning a House & Garden medal for cleanest kitchen counters, it's important to remember that growing children with good hearts and active minds tends to be more easily accomplished when

(a) their environment has some rhythms and rituals and routines (rising and resting at regular intervals; anticipating repetitive activities (like feeding the fish, reading from the book of 365 stories for 365 days, making the bed, and taking turns with the pet chores)); and

(b) their leader (teacher) models the attributes he or she wants to see in her students.

Which is another way of saying, find a daily dance, a workable rhythm to set the day's tempo. Something catchy but neither too fast nor too slow.

2. Focus on the moment you're in. Not on the best handwriting book, most compelling history text, or most brilliant math program. Not on message boards or blogging buddies. (In fact, if you can, try an experiment: Limit yourself to no more than, say, one virtual visit daily.) Not on all the stuff you could be doing. No. On the moment you're in. On what you should be doing. Teaching. Learning. Coaching. Leading. Modeling. So, for example: Your children's minds are wandering? They've got holes-in-the-brain, you say? Where is your mind? Are you focused on them? Yeah, I didn't think so. Now that you are, discover why aren't they focused. Physical needs met? Something big coming up? Time for a walk?

You get the idea.

3. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of one thousand, a bad day, a spring-feverish morning, a calamitous pre-Christmas afternoon begins with you. That's not an accusation. It's an attitude. If you know it all begins with you, you know you have the power to, if not control the situation, then certainly control your response to it (which is control of the most excellent kind).

3. Don't neglect yourself.
Eat right.
Exercise.
Take vitamins.
Sleep well and for as long as your body needs.
Develop some rituals and routines that enable you to present a fresh face and a clean smile to your children and your students each morning.
Read. Think. Learn.
Take some time for yourself when and where you can get it.
Celebrate your achievements in meaningful ways.
Reflect.
Maintain real relationships. Cut back on the virtual.
Visit a museum.
Roll down a grassy hill. Can you still do a cartwheel?
Leave notes in your partner's jacket pocket.
Revisit a favorite hobby or book or movie from your youth.
Dance.

Remember: Before you are a partner, a parent, a teacher, an [insert occupation here], you are simply you. Ensure that you like who you are.

And take care of yourself.

For other posts of this nature, visit "Thoughts on education and parenting." Note that the 4.22.2005 post "Feed a cold; starve a (spring) fever?" expands on the ideas presented here.

Many thanks to the virtual acquaintance who sent me the link that inspired today's post. And many thanks to those who continue to express their appreciation for my posts and entries.

A thousand words for... underappreciated

Tax rebate checks

If you're part of one of the 130 million households slated to receive a tax rebate check, consider saving a little, spreading a little (perhaps among local charitable organizations?), and, yes, spending a little.

For the record...

I don't like country music. At. All.

And yet...

This morning, Mr. M-mv and I awoke to Steve and Johnnie discussing Kenny Chesney's injury and subsequent performance. They played this song. And, yes, I liked it.

I'd argue with only this point: Life goes faster than you think, Chesney sings.

Actually, few of us give much thought to how quickly it's all passing, so the better reminder might be Life goes as fast as the poets and country singers say, so...

Don't blink.

The researching and writing f(r)iend

A couple of regular M-mv readers have written to ask about the absence of my little researching and writing f(r)iend. What? No deadlines? they inquired.

Actually, I have had a couple of deadlines since the macabre little fellow made his last appearance more than two months ago -- and I am enjoying an enviable number of writing projects. I just haven't felt the same head-against-the-keyboard pressure that usually builds before each deadline. Why? Well, I've explained part of the reason here.

Other time-saving measures
Around the same time I began ruthlessly trimming my virtual travel itinerary, I also became much pickier about review/advance copies: I accept only those books that stand an excellent chance of being read -- and, hence, a good chance of being reviewed: compelling non-fiction, particularly if it is in one of my areas of interest; works by or about favorite authors; literary fiction; and some contemporary or popular fiction. This is a fair arrangement, I think -- for me, for the publishers/publicists, and for regular M-mv readers.

What else? I accepted more work -- and I cut waaaay back on one project. When the work becomes too routine, it actually takes more time to complete, not less. Ask me how I know. Shaking things up a bit has been invigorating.

I now insist on seven hours of sleep. Once upon a time ago, I could get by on much, much less. I'm not interested in getting by, though: I want to feel productive all day, especially on those days when my work must wait until after dinner.

Just these and a few other changes have utterly reinvented my schedule. I am writing more, reading more, teaching with more energy (none of us could believe this was even possible!), and, yes, cooking (!).

So, in return, I've given my little f(r)iend a break. He certainly does appreciate being remembered, though.

Today's literary companions

:: The Chrysalids (John Wyndham)
:: Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
:: No-Man's Lands (Scott Huler, review copy, first mentioned here)

If you like the bracelet, check out this site.

Another exit

Regular M-mv readers are aware of my soft spot for "Law & Order," and they know how I feel about Jesse L. Martin, so perhaps sympathy prompted Girl Detective to send me the following link tonight.

Loving Will

Happy birthday, Mr. Shakespeare!

For a complete Bardolatry experience, visit the archive.
___________________________________

"Shakespeare is hard," asserts Fintan O'Toole in his book of the same title, "but so is life, and so long as you can see that there's a lot of life in Shakespeare, then the effort begins to make sense."

Now, I adore O'Toole's provocative, irreverent take on the bard, but I also have some fairly strong convictions about the "Shakespeare is, well, pretty easy, actually" camp.

At summer sessions for teachers, Peggy O'Brien, Ph.D., formerly of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute (Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.), would distribute a "Shakespeare Laundry List" to her students. Top on the list? "Everyone — all levels of society — went to see Shakespeare's plays. There weren't many other forms of entertainment... People went to the bear-baiting ring for a thrill, they went to a public execution of two — and they went to the theatre."

Bear-baiting. An execution or two. The theater. Anyone seeing, oh, I don't know, horse-racing, Court TV, and the theater? (And that's theater with an "er," please; "re" is an affectation, and I'll bet O'Brien knew it, but Ph.D.s, well... let's just say they come with their own academic baggage.) The point is that it was the "beloved groundlings" to whom Shakespeare and company played. To us. The Mountain Dew-swigging, overalls-wearing, pun-loving, regular folk.

Shakespeare can be hard, yeah. But he needn't be. Honestly, is there any doubt about his message in this passage from As You Like It, for example:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

You've got it — the seven stages of man.
________________________

Seventh on O'Brien's "Laundry List" is a much uttered rarely heeded bit o' wisdom: "Reading Shakespeare is hard. [His] plays were written to be performed — acted and seen on a stage."

Ayup. It is cold water on... okay, you're with me... to have Mrs. Grimm the English teacher pass out a musty copy of Julius Caesar or Macbeth and say, "Read Act I. Be ready for a quiz tomorrow."

*SHUDDER*

With all of the productions now available on DVD and video, why would any teacher turn her students loose without a hint of what the beloved groundlings once knew (i.e., that Shakespeare's play must be seen and heard)? If you're wondering, by the way, Norrie Epstein's The Friendly Shakespeare is a good place to begin for viewing recommendations because there is no comparison between, say, Mel Gibson's Hamlet and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.
________________________

In The Shakespeare Book of Lists, Michael LoMonico notes, "Unlike many, I didn't fall in love with Shakespeare in high school or college. No, my passion began some 30 years ago, when I first heard lines from Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello coming from the mouths of my students."

Ditto, Michael.

I took the requisite courses, both undergrad and grad. I attended if not acclaimed then certainly decent productions of the plays, oh, yes. I appreciated Shakespeare, for sure. But I didn't fall in love until my son decided that this was the "coolest" writing he had heard in his then eleven years:

Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

And when my daughters dressed their dolls as a princesses and their brother's long forgotten G.I. Joes as kings and enacted the wooing scene from Henry V ("O Kate! Nice customs curtsey to great kings"), I made a long-term commitment to ol' Bill.

And here we are. Writing about him again. Hoping someone else will see what we see: That there's something in Shakespeare's plays for all of us. And asserting that, no, Fintan, Shakespeare isn't all that hard; at least, he doesn't have to be. Visit the Folger Shakespeare Library site. It's not about Shakespeare's inaccessibility, is it?
________________________

Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is a frequently consulted book in our house, so much so that my son has ordered his own copy. That said, let me hastily add that I don't think our tastes are necessarily "snobbish" (yeah, there's that word again) or even particularly high-brow. Remember? Mountain Dew? Overalls? Beloved groundlings? But Bloom's love of Shakespeare is heady stuff, his fervor infectious:

Bardolatry, the worship of Shakespeare, ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is. The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind's reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us....

Amen.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this,—and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend;
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call:
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
___________________________________

The material in this post was culled from our 4.4.2004 RDA.

From the archives:"Was there anything so real as words?"

From Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives:

Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose).

Attempting to decipher a writer's purpose is travel on uncertain ground, of course, but providing the answer to readers' plaintive, "Why?" is the business of literary critics, no? So travel they must, some mincing, some going boldly, all giving literature their spin.

I tend to be a little wary of lit-crit that looks at or through the author — his struggles, personality, life, etc. — as a sole means to the work. While there is value in knowing about the author, to be sure, it's a bit like building a house on a sand dune to examine a piece of fiction primarily through its author's biography.

Just what do we need to know about Jane Austen, Stephen King, George Elliot, or Olivia Ann Burns to read Pride and Prejudice, The Stand, Middlemarch, or Cold Sassy Tree? In fact, how many of us were very nearly turned off so-called "serious literature" (not that all of the aforementioned titles qualify for this dubious distinction), or even reading itself, by the soul-deadening "This-author-was-born-in-England-in-yadda-yadda" approach Mrs. Grimm the high school English teacher employed when introducing us to fiction, poetry, drama?

ARGH!

All hail the teacher who can lead his or her students to books in some way, any way other than this because anything, even, yes! rap! or, yes! abridgements! or, yes! seeing a film version! or ANYTHING, anything not this would be better. For example:

Listen to this…

Or,

When I first read this, I thought…

Or,

What use is this book to me? you might wonder. Well, I don't know, but maybe you'll connect with…

Or,

How differently we use language now, yet how similar some of our experiences are to those of the characters in…

You get the idea.

[Collecting myself. Straightening the bib on my overalls. Gulping some coffee.]

"What do you like about The Picture of Dorian Gray?" someone once asked me.

Wordsmithery. Mental agility. Finely crafted sentences, some wicked, some wise, some wickedly wise, some wisely wicked, sentences that make. me. think. That's what I "like" (perhaps "admire" or "appreciate" are better words here, no?) about Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Listen:

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

Hear:

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Remember:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Yes, that is all.

Then, maybe not.

In any event, it's the words. The sentences. And the magic that weaves those discrete parts into passages we want to press into our chapbooks.

That's what there is to admire or appreciate about a book. "What do you like about this book?" seems too childish a manner in which to discuss books. What in this book speaks to you? might be a better question.

Why is this one a text to which you return?

Why is this on your students' reading list?

What pleasure or value do you derive from this book?

What did you learn about yourself? About others? About living? About the nature of being human?
____________________________

The text should stand alone. All of the observations about Oscar Wilde's character, while compelling (and exquisitely rendered in, for example, Richard Ellman's biography), do not alter the message of the text itself.

Perhaps I should say, the text can stand alone. If only we let it.

In the case of the inventor of the human, for example, it all but does stand alone. After all, we know next to nothing about Shakespeare. Some scholars even doubt that it was he who penned the secular scripture.

Yet, do we ever doubt the power of the text? The meaning it gives to our reading lives? The definition it offers to our unspoken thoughts? The color it adds to the chambers of our imaginations?

No, no, no, and no again!

The clock says I must bring this all home, yet I find I have so much more to say. Words, books, writers. Ah, the reading life. For a feeble conclusion, then, I offer this: The reviews that prove most helpful to me are those that explore a work's strengths and weaknesses sans too many asides about the author's interest in wrestling or her prolificacy or his previous novel. Not that the author's interest in wrestling, her prolificacy, and his previous novel have no value, mind you. Just that a writer's eating disorder, dysfunctional family, or dearth of novels since the sixties are not foremost in this reader's mind when presented with the promise of new text.

No, it's the words.

For was there anything so real as words?



This entry was first appeared on M-mv in a slightly different form three years ago.

Girls gone ridin'!

The recommended daily allowance

If, by some odd chance, I am not the last person in the world to see -- and love -- this movie, then let me heartily recommend it to you.

Rollo: Well, well... If it isn't MacGuff the crime dog! Back for another test?
Juno MacGuff: I think the last one was defective. The plus sign looked more like a division sign. I remain unconvinced.

The poem in my pocket

Visit this entry, this, and/or this for more information.

Today I selected "Poetry" by Marianne Moore.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.

You'll find the complete poem here.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

I thought it was that time again...

... Time for TV Turnoff, that is, an event that I had maligned for four consecutive years. But today I clicked over from last year's entry and discovered that the TV Turnoff Network has morphed into the Center for Screen-Time Awareness, which advocates the reduction of, well, screen-time and the encouragement of "real experiences with real people in real time." *

Now that's an idea I can embrace.


Screen-time awareness
Back in November, I began scrutinizing my use of one of the greatest resources I have -- time. As many of you know, I'm a great proponent of "Making time," but to achieve my professional goals (to say nothing of a few personal goals, including the bird biology course), what I really needed to do was clear all of the tasks and activities from my schedule that took more time than they were worth.

So I did.

You know, of course, where I'm headed with this: Many of the tasks I identified as taking more time than they were worth were related to the computer.

Since then, my internet travels have been confined primarily to (1) destinations that inform my work and/or my studies and (2) a handful of blogs, most of which I have repeatedly recommended (e.g., here and here). Trimming my virtual itinerary has had the added benefit of eliminating nearly all of the writing I was, quite literally, giving away -- another time-saver.

I also identified and eliminated less apparent time-wasters. For example, after the winter holiday, I deleted M-mv's site meters. Really, why do I need to know how M-mv's readers arrive here? I already know the average number of daily readers. When that mirror (the meter) was hanging on the wall, I felt compelled -- even obligated -- to look and, too often, to follow the links it reflected. Now I don't.

These days, I check email far less frequently. My work is important, yes, but it's not, like, oh, say, the search for the "God particle", right? I get back to the client within twenty-four hours. Look, I must be doing something right: The checks keep arriving.


Turn off... or at least turn away
The irony is not lost on me: I sound a bit like a former smoker in this post, yet for four years I relied on a seemingly unrelated aside about smoking laws to describe my disgust with the zealotry surrounding TV Turnoff. Perhaps what irritated me most about the hoses aimed at the Great American Campfire was that they had targeted the wrong fire -- and even the wrong fire-starters.

[Insert shrug.]

Clearly, many screens compete for our attention: televisions, yes, but also monitors at the Jewel checkout, cell phones (instant-messaging), Blackberries, gaming systems, computers, etc.

I certainly won't advocate a week-long screen fast, but I don't think any harm can come of suggesting that a periodic evaluation of our time management, including an earnest evaluation of the amount of time we spend in the company of screens rather than faces, is, quite simply, a good idea. If some people require an event to remind them to do this, well, fine. The event begins Monday, April 21.

___________________________

* I understand that "real people" sit at keyboards. I'm one of 'em. And Mr. M-mv and I earn our living in screen-dependent (i.e., computer- and information systems-based) industries. I'm not about to suggest that what we do isn't "real."But I am also one who has repeatedly distinguished between, for example, the virtual livingroom and the real livingroom. Is there any question as to which one we will long for [Cliché alert!] on our deathbeds?

Turn away. Turn off. Whatever. Just remember: Life is short.

Spend it in ways that enliven your selfhood.

More acquisitions

:: Slings & Arrows: The Complete Collection
:: Adobe Photoshop Elements 6
:: Orson Welles: Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu (Simon Callow)
:: Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans (Simon Callow)
:: Hopeful Monsters (Nicholas Mosley)
:: The Search for Modern China (Jonathan D. Spence)

Celebrate the first national Poem In Your Pocket Day! Choose a favorite poem and carry it with you to share with family, friends, colleagues... even strangers on the el train.

From the Academy of American Poets:

Poems have been stowed in pockets in a variety of ways, from the commonplace books of the Renaissance to the pocket-sized publications for Army soldiers in World War II.

See this entry for more information about today's festivities and National Poetry Month.


Best intentions
As I shared earlier in the month, I've taken the poem-in-pocket idea a step further by choosing a different poem for each day of the month. I had intended to chronicle my daily selections here, but because I blog without obligation, I've missed a few days and will miss a few more, I'm sure. Not a problem: Most of my selections have been taken from Good Poems.

From Garrison Keillor's introduction to that volume:

What makes Kumin and Sexton matter, and make all good poems matter, is that they offer a truer account than what we're used to getting. They surprise us with clear pictures of the familiar. The soft arc of an afternoon in a few lines. Poems that make us love this gaudy, mother-scented, mud-bedaubed language of ours. A cunning low tongue, English, with its rich vocabulary of slander and concupiscence and sport, its fine Latin overlay and French bric-a-brac, and when someone speaks poetry in it, it stirs our little monolingual hearts.

The love of language is the love of truth, and this brings one into conflict with authority, since power employs deceit and is so fond of it....

The poem in my pocket today is "To be of use" by Marge Piercy.

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

You'll find the complete poem here. And, yes, Piercy also penned He, She, and It.


William Stafford
The poem in my pocket on April 5 was William Stafford's "A Ritual to Read to Each Other." Margaret sent the following links:

The Stafford Trail: Stafford's poems have been placed in plaques along the Methow River in the Cascade Mountains by the National Park Service.

Selected William Stafford Poetry: A collection of poems that appeared in previous issues of the Friends of William Stafford Newsletter.

A thousand words for... ugly new shoes

The recommended daily allowance

Armageddon in Retrospect (Kurt Vonnegut)

Released on the anniversary of his death, this collection of previously unpublished essays by Kurt Vonnegut is introduced by his son, Mark Vonnegut, and punctuated with his sketches and doodles.

I received an uncorrected proof a couple of days before the release, swallowed it whole... and stewed on it for a week.
_________________________

In his introduction, the writer's son suggests how "radical" and "audacious" it may be to think that working hard, thinking hard, reading hard, writing hard, and trying to be of service might have some point. This observation, as much as any of the essays that followed, moved me. It does, after all, describe what Vonnegut was doing: working, thinking, reading, writing -- hard -- and trying to be of service. "Disgust with civilization" motivated him; a belief in the "magic of the process" -- the contract between the writer and his readers -- that kept him going.
_________________________

This isn't a collection of Vonnegut's finest work, but rather a volume that acknowledges our fervent wish that his voice hadn't gone silent yet. Selections include the text of his final speech and the piece from which the collection takes its name, a letter signed by Dr. Lucifer J. Mephisto, Chairman of the Board.


M-mv on Vonnegut
From "Revealing" (9.08.2005):

Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
I read this during my final semester as an undergraduate. Mr. R. insisted. It is heresy, I know, to mention these two books in the same entry, let alone the same sentence, but, like The Mists of Avalon, Slaughterhouse Five sent me on a journey of discovery that, again, filled several shelves and many of my mind's rooms and chambers.

Years later, while in grad school, I spent the day with Vonnegut. I was a grad assistant in a small liberal arts school where he offered two workshops for the English department and a ninety-minute address followed by a book-signing for the general college population. By then, I had read everything of his that was in print. My assignment that day was to help usher him from here to there. Trust me, faculty members vied for his attention, and my services proved non-critical.

But I sat beside him for both workshops. "And this is enough," I thought. "To know that he is a real person who grows impatient and smells old and loses his train of thought sometimes. This writer is real."

Perhaps that is the essence of my reading and writing life: discerning what is real and true for me and recommitting to it periodically.

Updike and Vonnegut: Uneasy Neighbors (5.17.2004)

The recommended daily allowance (9.08.2004)

The recommended daily allowance (2.05.2004)

The recommended daily allowance (12.23.2005; director Henning Carlsen on filming Vonnegut's Jailbird)

Why I read book blogs (11.27.2006)

Recent acquisitions

:: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Maryanne Wolf)
:: Lectures on Shakespeare (W.H. Auden)
:: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (Jonathan Weiner)
:: Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding (Scott Weidensaul)
:: The Life of the Skies (Jonathan Rosen)
:: The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World (Tim Harford)


The poem in my pocket
Visit this entry and this for more information.

As a tie-in with my recent acquisitions, I've chosen some Auden:

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

You'll find the full text of "Funeral Blues" here and information about the poet here.

Black holes

From "Homing in on Black Holes" (Smithsonian, April 2008):

Without question, the Milky Way's black hole is the strangest thing in our galaxy—a three-dimensional cavity in space just ten times the physical size of our sun but with four million times the mass, a virtual bottomless pit from which nothing can escape. Every major galaxy, it turns out, has a black hole at its core. Now, for the first time, scientists have the chance to study the havoc these mind-boggling entities wreak. For the next decade, Keck astronomers will track thousands of stars caught in the gravity of the Milky Way's black hole. They will try to figure out how stars are born close to the black hole and how it distorts the fabric of space itself. "I find it amazing that we can see stars whipping around our galaxy's black hole," says Taft Armandroff, director of the Keck Observatory. "If you had told me as a graduate student that I'd see that during my career, I'd have said it was science fiction."

Speaking of black holes... Surface-Mined on brothers, colliders, tiny black holes, and, yes, even politics.

The poem in my pocket, Sunday edition

Visit this entry and this for more information.

When I finally moved my capacious behind out of bed, the poem I selected was "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

You'll find the complete poem here. You'll find commentary here and more about Stevens here and here.