On the nightstand

Inspired by the format of Nick Hornby's Believer magazine column, I am tinkering with my presentation of the (mostly) monthly "On the nightstand" feature -- adding headings for books acquired and read, as well as making the notable additions of review copies received and books borrowed from the library.

Without further ado, then....

Books acquired
■ Standing by Words: Essays (Wendell Berry)
■ The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (Wendell Berry)
■ A Year in Art (2008)
■ The Hour I First Believed (Wally Lamb)
■ Reading the OED (Ammon Shea)
■ Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Elizabeth Kolbert)
■ Tom's Midnight Garden (Philippa Pearce)
■ Drawing with Charcoal, Chalk, and Sanguine Crayon
■ Little Brother (Cory Doctorow)
■ Daemon (Daniel Suarez)
■ The Lost Painting (Jonathan Harr)
■ Wesley the Owl (Stacey O'Brien)
■ Nation (Terry Pratchett)

Books borrowed
■ Test (William Sleator)
■ Outside Lies Magic (John R. Stilgoe)
■ Alex & Me (Irene M. Pepperberg)
■ What I Saw And How I Lied (Judy Blundell)

Review copies received
■ The Invention of Air (Steven Johnson)

Books read
■ Outside Lies Magic (John R. Stilgoe) *
■ Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Elizabeth Kolbert) *
■ Diary of a Provincial Lady (E.M. Delafield)
■ Walking through Walls: A Memoir (Philip Smith) *
■ What I Saw And How I Lied (Judy Blundell)
■ Test (William Sleator)
■ Little Brother (Cory Doctorow)
■ Daemon (Daniel Suarez)
■ Ender in Exile (Orson Scott Card)
■ Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)
■ Julius Caesar (Adam McKeown)
■ Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery) *
■ Reading the OED (Ammon Shea) *
■ The Hours before Dawn (Celia Fremlin)
■ A War of Gifts: An Ender Story (Orson Scott Card)
■ Drawing with Charcoal, Chalk, and Sanguine Crayon *

* Denotes "partially read" books

Notes
Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady reads like a self-effacing and wry blog (if only online journal-writing were so accomplished!). If you're not already familiar with Delafield, begin here: "[D]espite the short sentences and the simplicity and unpretentiousness of the prose and subject matter, here is a very subtle and deliberate talent at work, naturally satirical, with a marvellous ear for dialogue and an unerringly accurate social sense."

Fremlin's The Hours before Dawn also offers ample displays of "an unerringly accurate social sense." In fact, I spent much of my time with this psychological exploration/mystery thinking how very much Girl Detective would appreciate Fremlin's unsparing depiction of motherhood.

Let's see...

The Misses are studying Julius Caesar this month, and we've also embarked on an Anne of Green Gables project. And the rest of my reading month passed primarily in YA and sci-fi -- or, as in the case of Little Brother, both. Neither Little Brother nor Daemon will earn "great writing" kudos, by the way, but both of these techno-thrillers leave the reader thinking -- hard -- about technology and its role not just in our lives but in our society. For the discussions that will ensue, I heartily recommend both.

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

Chapbook entry

Ender in Exile (Orson Scott Card)

p. 17
My needs are simple and few, thought Valentine. Food. Clothing. A comfortable place to sleep. And no idiots.

But of course a world with no idiots would be lonely. If she herself were even allowed there. It's not as if she never made mistakes.

p. 300
What I understand now is this: There is no harder job than parenting. There is no human relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or even not-horrible for any particular child. It is a job that simply cannot be done right.

"No era's ideas are monolithic..."

From "How Lincoln and Darwin Shaped the World" (Smithsonian, February 2009):

The obvious truths of 1809, the kind that were taught in school, involved what could be called a "vertical" organization of life—one in which we imagine a hierarchy of species on earth, descending from man on down toward animals, and a judge appraising us up above in heaven. Man was stuck in the middle, looking warily up and loftily down. People mostly believed that the kinds of organisms they saw on earth had always been here and always would be, that life had been fixed in place since the beginning of a terrestrial time that was thought to go back a few thousand years at most.

"Few writers have staged such elegant lexical ballets on the page."

They don't award the Nobel posthumously, so now he'll never get one.

A "failed investment"?

From "Good News and Bad News on Parenting" (The Chronicle Review, January 23, 2009):

If family environment has little effect, why does almost everyone think the opposite? Behavior geneticists have a plausible explanation for our confusion: Family environment has substantial effects on children. Casual observers are right to think that parents can change their kids; the catch is that the effect of family environment largely fades out by adulthood. For example, one prominent study found that when adoptees are 3 to 4 years old, their IQ has a .20 correlation with the IQ of their adopting parents; but by the time adoptees are 12 years old, that correlation falls to 0. The lesson: Children are not like lumps of clay that parents mold for life; they are more like pieces of flexible plastic that respond to pressure, but pop back to their original shape when that pressure is released.

Many of us worry that our nation will pay a heavy price in years to come because modern parents are shirking their responsibilities to the next generation. If you combine the results from time diaries and behavioral genetics, however, you get a different picture. It turns out that there is some really good news and some mildly bad news. The really good news is that we can stop worrying about the horrible fate of the next generation. The bad news is that parents today are making large "investments" in their children that are unlikely to pay off.

Later: What kids seem to want from their parents isn't more time; it's a better attitude... Kids know better than anyone that if mom and dad aren't happy, nobody's happy.

"What does friendship mean when you have 532 'friends'?"

Not as much as some would have us believe; not as little as still others might maintain.

From "The End of Solitude": (The Chronicle Review, January 30, 2009):

What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

The conclusion speaks to this curmudgeonly autodidact:

The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn't very polite. Thoreau knew that the "doubleness" that solitude cultivates, the ability to stand back and observe life dispassionately, is apt to make us a little unpleasant to our fellows, to say nothing of the offense implicit in avoiding their company. But then, he didn't worry overmuch about being genial. He didn't even like having to talk to people three times a day, at meals; one can only imagine what he would have made of text-messaging. We, however, have made of geniality — the weak smile, the polite interest, the fake invitation — a cardinal virtue. Friendship may be slipping from our grasp, but our friendliness is universal. Not for nothing does "gregarious" mean "part of the herd." But Thoreau understood that securing one's self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone. [Emphasis added.]

Ayup.

Read the entire essay here.

Thirteen

This was one of my favorite images from last year (as was this one). I took it while we were waiting for the bus during our "Holiday Magic" adventure. Untouched, untweaked, the photograph captures something of the essence of this incredibly complex and unconventionally beautiful girl.

As does this image.

Heh, heh, heh. Happy birthday, Miss M-mv(i).

"I’m not having a good light here at all."

Is the problem really delivery?

Or is it content?

In other words, if the text were worthy, would it not have held up, even under brutal delivery?

Here's a case for content triumphing in spite of delivery. An audio link is embedded in the introduction. Listen as you read the transcript. I'll wait for you.

Are you back?

Okay.

Certainly not the finest opening, right? The delivery was shaky, stumbling, uncertain. And then... great text prevailed. It moved with a cadence and a greatness that befitted the occasion. The text, moving swiftly and surely, overcame the delivery and swept away the speaker and his audience.

The text required no explanation, no footnotes on form, no debate about its meaning.

The text was, quite simply, magnificent. Appropriate. And fundamentally right and true.

About that other poem
Look.

I understand what she meant, and I actually appreciated the folk-art-ish rendering of the quotidian -- it served as a reminder that the ordinary, the commonplace, the everyday undergirded an extraordinary and momentous occasion. More, I embrace wholeheartedly the idea that an artist must remain constant in his or her vision and message. It's just that, well, a commissioned artist -- which is, essentially, what the poet slated to offer his or her work at an inauguration is -- must also consider the event, the venue, and the audience for which his or her work is intended.

And I don't think she did. Not really. The day deserved a poem majestic, a pillar of words and images on which new dreams could perch.

In other words, it wasn't so much praise song as an opportunity lost.

I’ll just have to get through it the best I can. I think I’ll say …

This was to be a preface to a poem I can say to you without seeing it. The poem goes like this ... (Applause.)

“The Gift Outright”

The land was ours before we were the land’s
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people....

Are you going back?

A gateway drug

From "The Triumph of the Readers" (Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2009):

Whether you're in the life of Wilbur the pig, or Greg Heffley, the wimpy kid, or that little blonde prince in the desert, you've stepped outside of yourself for awhile, something that is beneficial to every child. Even if you're stepping into "Valley of the Dolls," it's better than nothing. I'm all for reading bad books because I consider them to be a gateway drug. People who read bad books now may or may not read better books in the future. People who read nothing now will read nothing in the future.

Related entry: Young readers (1.19.2006)

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

A thousand words for... Brrrr!

"An increasingly arcane hobby" redux

From "People of the Screen" (The New Atlantis, Fall 2008):

Despite the attention once paid to the so-called digital divide, the real gap isn’t between households with computers and households without them; it is the one developing between, on the one hand, households where parents teach their children the old-fashioned skill of reading and instill in them a love of books, and, on the other hand, households where parents don’t. As Griswold and her colleagues suggested, it remains an open question whether the new “reading class” will “have both power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital,” or whether the pursuit of reading will become merely “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

Related posts
■ An increasingly arcane hobby

■ Book wars

Weekly Geeks

This post (thank you for the kind words!) prompted me to link "Weekly Geeks" to M-mv. This week's entry asks:

In the spirit of the amazing community building that Dewey was so good at, tell us about your favorite blogs, the ones you have bookmarked or subscribe to in your Google Reader, that you visit on a regular basis. Tell us what it is about these blogs that you love, that inspire or educate you or make you laugh. Be sure to link to them so we can find them too.

Another option: Reading goals for ’09 and wrap ups for ’08 have been pretty well covered by now on a lot of blogs and other memes. But if you haven’t done this, feel free to make that your first WG of the new year, in addition to or instead of the above.

In no particular order, then, I present the list of blogs I follow:

■ Magnificent Octopus: Literary responses to good and great books.

■ Pages Turned: An electronic chapbook, a few cats, and an affinity for towering TBR piles.

■ Semicolon: Book reviews, "Lost" talk, film recommendations, and a voice I enjoy hearing.

■ Surface-Mined: Kept by a reader, thinker, and autodidact.

■ The Sheila Variations: Unabashed opinions on books, films, and life.

■ Book Moot: Compelling commentary on children's and YA books with a dose of humor and fun.

■ Girl Detective: Reviews of books, movies, and television programs interspersed with the occasional parenting post.

■ Quiet Life: A gentle spirit garden.

■ Outer Life: This beautifully written blog may be the web's best kept secret. Brilliant.

Does Facebook make you a bad parent?

Check out this "Good Morning, America" segment.
____________________________

I'll confess: I don't get Facebook. A year or so ago, I joined to view someone's photo album. I looked... and never logged on again. More recently, I reconnected with an old friend (via e-mail). She invited me to join her Facebook friends. I couldn't even remember my log-in information! After leaping through a number of virtual hoops, I managed to log on, but I couldn't help but think, Now what?

Don't get me wrong: I'm glad to know where to find her between e-mail messages, but I can't imagine being more (for lack of better word) present on the internet than M-mv and the various sites that archive my work. Heck, I don't even enable comments on M-mv. What would I do on a social networking site? Read a book in a virtual corner? Of course, that may just be me and my legendarily large personal space issues talking, right? Heh, heh, heh.

Related entry
■ “Re-embrace your inner critic.”

Related links
■ ‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’ (New York Times, June 7, 2007)

■ When Mom or Dad Asks To Be a Facebook 'Friend' (Washington Post, March 9, 2008)

■ Teens to parents: It's our Facebook (USA Today, October 2007)

Anti-Social

Could this be any funnier?

We're homeschooled! That's NOT supposed to happen!

Chapbook entry

Skellig (David Almond)

p. 26
"Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?"

I said nothing.

"What color's a blackbird?"

"Black."

"Typical!"

p. 49
"I don't go to school."

I stared at her.

"My mother educates me," she said. "We believe that schools inhibit the natural curiosity, creativity, and intelligence of children. The mind needs to be opened out into the world, not shuttered down inside a gloomy classroom."

"Oh," I said.

"Don't you agree, Michael?"

I thought of dashing across the yard with Leakey and Coot. I thought of Monkey Mitford's temper. I thought of Miss Clarts' stories.

"Don't know," I said.

"Our motto is on the wall by my bed," she said. "'How can a bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?' William Blake." She pointed up into the tree. "The chicks in the nest won't need a classroom to make them fly. Will they?"

I shook my head.

"Well, then," she said. "My father believed this too."

p. 58
"See how school shutters you," she said. "I'm drawing, painting, reading, looking. I'm feeling the sun and the air on my skin. I'm listening to the blackbird's song. I'm opening my mind. Ha! School!"

She picked up a book of poems from her blanket.

"Listen," she said.

She sat up straight, coughed to clear he throat, held the book before her.

"But to go to school in a summer morn.
O! it drives all the joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay."

She closed the book.

p. 135
I felt how the more I drew, the more my hand and arm became free. I saw how what appeared on the page looked more and more like what I saw or what I thought of in my head. I felt how by drawing my mind became more concentrated, even while one part of it still thought about and worried about the baby.

p. 140
"We can't know. Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can't know. Why is your sister ill? Why did my father die?" She held my hand. "Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can't. We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine."

Five hidden benefits of homeschooling

1. Fewer clothes. We save a lot of money on clothes and shoes. The children would need more of both if they were in school. After all, no one says, "Didn't you wear that outfit on Monday?" And we need not be slaves to fashion: The kids wear what looks right and fits well; fads be durned.

2. Health. The children have been (*knock on wood*) exceptionally healthy, and I attribute that to the time they don't spend in classrooms or school buildings.

3. No artificial peer group. The kids have spent their time with people from a much wider circle (age, socio-economic, ethnic, etc.) than one finds in a typical classroom of same-age, same-town peers (and even in a typical homeschool support group or co-op, really). This has enriched their souls and informed their confident communication style.

4. No time-wasters. No pointless assignments. No busy work. No fundraisers. No assemblies. No mismanaged field trips. No parent-teacher conferences. No P.T.A. meetings. No study halls. No waiting for the others to catch up. No testing. Homeschooling, at least in our experience, makes the most of each minute, even when that minute is spent simply staring at the birds on the feeder or poking around the mind's (lavishly furnished) rooms.

5. Emphasis on family. Homeschoolers do not have a corner on strong families, but, for us, the family-centered learning project has, in fact, built this family from bricks and concrete. Each of us feels a sense of centeredness and, yes, strength because of our relationship. I'm not sure how we would have done this, in fact, I'm not sure if we would have done it quite so easily were it not for homeschooling.

From the archives:When it goes gray,we need to dream again.

Elsewhere, someone wondered if others sometimes feel as she does: that despite all of the good things in life, there is no joy. What the heck is wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with you, I replied. Sometimes, though, the realization that we have arrived at adulthood and it looks nothing like what we dreamed of when we were eleven or thirteen or even twenty-one can provoke this feeling.

I don't ordinarily spend much time in the company of women; I don't like them much. But my daughters' involvement with the community swim team has thrust me into their midst for the last six months, and I've learned that many women, homeschooling and not, feel all but enslaved to their homes and their families -- even women who are also working traditional jobs!

Simply put, even as they acknowledge that they have good husbands, nice homes, and decent kids, they also admit that they feel like it all falls to them to keep it going. This, I think, is one of those gender-specific issues. I have never met a man, for example, who frets, "How will I get all of the laundry done!?"

Related anecdote: Yesterday, a woman shared that she felt so bad... her daughter had finally learned to dive, but the mother had missed the first successful attempt. "She's still upset about it. I feel so bad. She kept saying, 'Did you see it? Did you see it?' And I hadn't. I feel so bad."

"When that happens to me, I just say, 'No, why don't you do it again for me?'"

"But then she would still be upset. I didn't see the first one."

"Then say, 'Mommy has a life apart from watching your every single move, dear. I'm paying attention now. Would you dive again?'"

"I could nev-- Do you do that?"

"I don't have to. If the kids need my attention, they call to me to ensure that they have it. They've always known that while I'm their biggest fan, I also have a life quite apart from being their mother."

"Oh! Well! That's my problem! She knows I have no life. I have no life! None at all!"

This story seems to run true to the common theme: We women seem to think that it all falls to us. We must see every dive, so to speak. And we become so consumed with the quotidian -- the everyday rituals that keep the house comfortable, the husband happy, and the children well -- that we expend any extra time and talent we might have kept in reserve for our own pursuits.

I don't know how other women escape the malaise that can suck the color from their lives, but I have always clung to the conviction that while I am a wife and a mother, I am also me first. When all is said and done, I must live with me, so I must like me, nay, love me. So I have always made time to pursue those things which contribute to my self-definition, including work, yes, but also things like music lessons, reading (and I don't mean books for the kids), ornithology, and more.

Often when these virtual discussions develop, someone will suggest more personal care or a vacation. I do think that exercise and basic self care are critical to one's mental clarity, but I'm not sure Calgon paints the color back in, if you know what I mean. And a vacation? Well, it's all there -- the house, the husband, and the kids -- when you return. How does leaving it really help you deal with it? I think that when it all goes gray, we've lost sight of the technicolor dreams of what we could be. When it goes gray, we need to dream again.

This is not a call to run away to a Paris cafe, by the way. Just a suggestion that if you feel this way, you might consider that it is all in you to recover some of the "stuff" that makes you you.

Get to work.

It's not laziness, usually, that undermines one's efforts. It's a lack of focus or even self-discipline. For example, so many people attack a problem or approach a project by reading every. single. scrap. of information ever written about X. The ones who enjoy lasting success, though? They generally read several of the good or excellent resources available about X -- and then they get to work.

Get to work.

Folks who achieve much -- whether by conventional standards or other measures of success -- are those who get to work.

They don't talk about how someday they're gonna....

They don't blog about how they always wanted to....

They don't whine about how if only....

They don't bemoan this and decry that.

They don't change their minds (or their whatever -- their curricula, their underlying philosophy, their "style," their plan, their dream) like "Name the Day" panties.

They don't adopt (and blithely discard) passions, pursuits, plans, etc.

No. Folks who achieve much, who succeed simply Get. To. Work.

Even when they're tired.
Even when the kids are sick.
Even when their partners are busy.
Even when it just didn't turn out the way they thought it would when they were twenty-one.
Even then.

And the rest? Well, they probably aren't lazy. They simply lack focus and discipline.
_____________________

Note: Janna, I received an email message indicating that you were looking for this material. I have the link, too, if you need it. Best regards.

Don't miss the biggest full moon of 2009.

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

On the review pile

Walking through Walls: A Memoir (Philip Smith)

My piles of review and advance reading copies are beginning to resemble book stacks of reproach, but I suppose there are greater problems one could have.

Among the titles whistling for my attention is Philip Smith's memoir, Walking through Walls, which focuses on his unconventional father, a decorator-turned-psychic.

To learn more about this book, check out Smith's short essay "Why Did You Write Your Book?" Smith also contributed "My Father, the Witch Doctor" to the same forum.

Speaking of author essays...
I neglected to include a link to the piece that inspired the article discussed in this morning's entry: Susan Hill's essay "A Novel Way to Treat a Writer" (Standpoint, January 2009). (Thanks, M.)

An aside: Late last year, I read Hill's The Pure in Heart, which, as it turns out, is the second Simon Serrailler crime novel. (The third will be available here in March.) Beautifully written and reminiscent of the work one of my favorite writers, it was a strong contender for placement on my list of most memorable books of 2008, so, yes, of course: After reading the Telegraph and Standpoint articles, I placed orders for I'm the King of the Castle and The Woman in Black.

"[T]urned off literature altogether"

The subjects of two excerpt-heavy entries from last month -- teaching (12.14.2008; "Most Likely to Succeed" (New Yorker, December 15, 2008)) and, more specifically, teaching literature (12.16.2008; "What Ails Literary Studies: Leaving Literature Behind" (The Chronicle Review, December 19, 2008)) -- are also treated in this article. (Many thanks for the link, B.)

From "Poor teachers fueling 'loathing of books'" (Telegraph, January 1, 2009):

[Author Susan Hill] claimed they were taught "so badly, so dully and so mechanically" that many children were being turned off literature altogether.

Miss Hill said that the demands of mixed ability teaching meant pupils at the "bottom of the heap" failed to understand books while the very brightest were no longer pushed.

She said "not all" pupils should be required to study GCSE English – including elements such as literature analysis and textual comparison – to stop the subject declining in popularity.

"Not all of them need to, or will ever, find practical application for those particular skills," she said. " If those who struggle... were introduced to a wide variety of books which they simply might enjoy reading, far fewer would be put off all literature for the rest of their lives.

"[Y]ou wrote the ----ing book didn't you?"
A curious insularity had led me to surmise that the excessive rudeness I witness near-daily is a uniquely late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century American "thing."

I was, apparently, quite wrong.

Also from "Poor teachers fueling 'loathing of books'":

[Hill] told how she refused to write an essay for one pupil, only to be met with the reply: "Why not?"

Another wrote saying: "But you've got to know the answer, you wrote the ----ing book didn't you?"

But, despite the abuse, she insisted she was "happy to reply to the cries for help".

Clearly, she's a better person than I because I would not have responded to any of the students who penned the examples featured in the article.

Read, think, learn, and teach, folks. And teach them well, please. Get away from the boards, out of the comment sections, and off the computer. Get off your as- behinds and teach them to read, to think, to learn, and, yes, to behave.

Thank you.

Fine Art Friday

Terrace and Observation Deck at the Moulin de Blute-Fin, Montmartre (late 1886)
Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch Post-Impressionist (1853-1890)

I know. I know. I've done Van Gogh before:

3.07.2008
1.05.2007

But you know how much I love his work.

As so often happens, I saw Terrace for the first time this week, even though Master and the Misses swear I say that every time I see it. I've seen this before? I ask. Of course, you have! they respond.

This month's issue of Smithsonian features an article about the painter's blend of the real and the surreal, particularly in his night paintings.

Van Gogh was also enthralled with night, as he wrote to his brother Theo that same year: "It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day....The problem of painting night scenes and effects on the spot and actually by night interests me enormously."

The piece includes an image gallery. Hey, and for those of you new to M-mv, you'll find the Fine Art Friday archive here.

“Re-embrace your inner critic.”

My chuckle for this morning: "Reblock Yourself the Polly Frost Way!" (The Atlantic, January 7, 2009). Taking aim at blogs, Twitter, Lulu, Facebook, and more, the tongue-in-cheek piece concludes, "Comments are not enabled!"

Indeed. Heh, heh, heh.

One question I've fielded several times is "Where do you homeschool?" (Variation: "What does your schoolroom look like?") The family-centered learning project doesn't have a classroom, but here is a tiny tour of a couple of places where we spend many of our reading-thinking-learning days:

■ The piano and part of our personal library.

■ The piano area from another angle.

■ Part of the library.

■ Another part of the library.

■ A reading nook.

■ Gobblet and breakfast in the bird room (so named for its (inherited) wallpaper).

■ Another view of the bird room.

■ Pajamas, pizza, and "Baywatch" in the livingroom.

■ Nature lesson on the back patio.

■ C'mon! Everyone reads here. Admit it.

■ The floor of the girls' room one silly, crazy day.

■ As seen from the front window, our favorite morning visitor (next to the mailman, of course).

■ Where we read-think-learn and discuss as we head to our real classroom (Chicago, the museums, nature centers, libraries, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Renaissance Faire, etc.).

From the archives:Not for grammar geeks only

The material in this entry first ran more than five years ago: 12.15.2003.

"It's not, 'If I was'; it's, 'If I were,' isn't it?" someone asked last night. A short but delightful conversation about — what else? — the subjunctive ensued.

I see a few of you surreptitiously scratching your heads. Bosh! None of that. We all know our instruction in English grammar was spotty at best. Don't wonder. Learn.

To the subjunctive, then.

English has had a subjunctive mood since Old English times, but most of the functions of the old subjunctive have been taken over by auxiliary verbs like may and should, and the subjunctive survives only in very limited situations. It has a present and past form. The present form is identical to the base form of the verb, so you only notice it in the third person singular, which has no final -s, and in the case of the verb be, which has the form be instead of am, is, and are. The past subjunctive is identical with the past tense except in the case of the verb be, which uses were for all persons: If I were rich ……, If he were rich ……, If they were rich…….

You can read more here or visit God save the subjunctive!, but the salient point is that last bit: The past subjunctive is identical with the past tense except in the case of the verb be, which uses were for all persons.

If I were you...

If that were true...

If he were the only boy in the world and I were the only girl...

You get the idea.

"If I was," indeed. Bleah.

Hey, if you've visited The Underground Grammarian you already know what to do if someone tortures the language (as in, "If I was an angel, I'd have gotten a halo to go with these here wings").

Do not boo and stamp your feet when some barbarian [misuses the language]; it will bring reprisal, for barbarians are vindictive. Simply mutter, just loud enough to be heard, "Clickety-click-click." This requires no lip movement and suggests a wind-up toy. With a female barbarian, an equally good response is "Ding-dong," familiar to all television-addicted barbarians and suggesting some more appropriate career in cosmetics.

Heh, heh, heh.

Look. Before you click off in a huff, let me remind you that a good deal of this is spirited play. I certainly don't intone, "Ding-dong," every time I hear grammar gaffes (although I confess that among some people, the effort required to refrain from doing so makes me feel like a child who has tried one too many times to win the who-can-hold-his-breath-the-longest contest; but I refrain, gentle readers; I refrain). I am simply having a little fun.

You know, grammar is one of those subjects that can divide people as quickly as, say, politics, religion, or parenting methods: prescriptive grammar versus descriptive grammar. Jack Lynch, associate professor at Rutgers University, explains:

The grammar books you're used to are what linguists call prescriptive: that is, they prescribe rules for proper usage. For several hundred years, 'grammar' was synonymous with "prescriptive grammar." You went to a book to get the official word: thou shalt not split infinitives, thou shalt not end sentences with prepositions. (This is presumably why you're reading this guide now: to find out what's "right" and what's "wrong.")

Linguists today are justly dubious about such things, and most spend their time on descriptive grammars: descriptions of how people really speak and write, instead of rules on how they should. They're doing important work, not least by arguing that no language or dialect is inherently better than any other. They've done a signal service in reminding us that Black English is as "legitimate" a dialect as the Queen's English, and that speaking the way Jane Austen writes doesn't make you more righteous than someone who uses y'all. They've also demonstrated that many self-styled 'grammar' experts know next to nothing about grammar as it's studied by professionals, and many aren't much better informed about the history of the language. Many prescriptive guides are grievously ill informed.

Fair enough. Sometimes, though, I enjoy picking fights with those linguists, usually amateur, who try to crowd prescription out of the market altogether. The dumber ones make a leap from "No language is inherently better than another" (with which I agree) to "Everything's up for grabs" (with which I don't). The worst are hypocrites who, after attacking the very idea of rules, go on to prescribe their own, usually the opposite of whatever the traditionalists say. These folks have allowed statistics to take the place of judgment, relying on the principle, "Whatever most people say is the best."

These dullards forget that words are used in social situations, and that even if something isn't inherently good or evil, it might still have a good or bad effect on your audience. I happen to know for a fact that God doesn't care whether you split infinitives. But some people do, and that's a simple fact that no statistical table will change. A good descriptivist should tell you that. In fact, my beef with many descriptivists is that they don't describe enough. A really thorough description of a word or usage would take into account not only how many people use it, but in what circumstances and to what effect."

Ah, a grammar nut could fall hard for someone like Professor Lynch.

(*sigh*)

Well, read the rest here. (Scroll down to the entry entitled, "Prescriptive versus Descriptive Grammars.") And Google using terms "prescriptive," "descriptive," and "grammar." Fascinating.

Hmmm. This little sojourn into language and its intricacies reminded me of a post I made in another forum over the summer. I wanted to share a link to Terry Sullivan's delightful essay, "Sign's of the Time's: The Apostrophe Is in Deep Trouble; Can One Codger in a Van Save It?" He begins:

A great weight has been lifted from my back, and I tread the streets of Chicago as lightly as a youth. For some time now, I've been troubled by how I should occupy myself in my golden years. Not on tap for tomorrow exactly, but the prospect looms, what with friends taking early retirements and doing things like buying lathes. I don't want a lathe. There are enough little wooden bowls in America to last the millennium.

My 401K says I will keep typing, of course, but I would like to stay active, or get active for a change, and now I know how. I shall become Johnny Apostrophe, and I've already picked out a van. More on this later, but first the unmet need.

Gingers Ale House on North Ashland Avenue. For years, it's been Gingers, not Ginger's. Ginger, an ex-Royal Navy man, seems apostrophe-impaired and he is not alone in that. Mulligan, of Mulligans Public House in Roscoe Village, ran out of apostrophes too. So did Marshall Field, if the "mens" and "womens" rooms at the State Street store (as in so many other places) are any indication. I could go on.

And I think I will. Ajays Italian Beef on Archer Avenue; Phillips Towing at Halsted and Division; Medusas Circle at Clark and School Streets. Maybe there is no Yakzie behind Yakzies, but surely ". . . Wrigleyvilles finest staff" could have found one unused apostrophe in the back room.

The article originally appeared in the June 8, 2003 issue of the Chicago Tribune Magazine, but it is now archived and available only for a fee, although I suspect that if your library offers an online periodical search, you just may be able to uncover the complete text of this gem. It's worth a few hunts, pecks, and searches.

As I mused on all of this "language stuff," what to my wondering eyes did appear but an email message from one of our ideal readers. In it was simply a link to "A Period Piece Punctuates Fear Of Elliptical in U.K.," which appears in today's Wall Street Journal. Charles Goldsmith writes:

The English have always been persnickety about punctuation, but a little book about commas, apostrophes and semicolons is making quite a pointed exclamation.

Initially slated for a first press run of just 15,000, a 209-page hardback called 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' has in the five weeks since its publication generated orders of 510,000 copies for tiny publisher Profile Books. Its title refers to a joke about a panda that walks into a cafe, eats a sandwich, fires a gun and walks out. But as its subtitle — 'A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation' — suggests, its topic is no laughing matter to many in Britain who remain punctilious about their punctuation.

For them, being picky about dashes, colons and quotation marks represents a last stand against sloppiness and rogue influences, often from the U.S., that are infiltrating the British version of English. A recent affront: The Oxford English Dictionary's online edition recently added Homer Simpson's famous outburst "Doh."

Uh-oh. Doh, y'all.

Well, for more grammar and language fun (descriptive, prescriptive, and otherwise), try these links:

The Grammar Curmudgeon

Test Your Knowledge: A Punctuation Exercise

Test Your Knowledge of English Grammar

Punctuation Project

The Gallery of Misused Quotation Marks

Happy clicking.

FCLP

■ Tickets to this (and if you remember this entry, you'll know how excited we are about Ben Carlson's return).
■ A day spent here.
■ Another spent here. (The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists have come home!)
■ A gift card to spend here.
■ Lunch (once or twice) here.
■ Perhaps a stop here.
■ A bit of this.
■ And, of course, as much of this as conditions permit.

I think it will be a great week in the family-centered learning project (FCLP). So. What are you doing to ensure that this first week of the year sets the tone for all the weeks that follow?

"[H]orrendous blocks of stone"

Over the last two decades, I've collected three translations of War and Peace:

1. Translated by Rosemary Edmonds; acquired in 1991
2. Translated by Anthony Briggs; acquired in February 2007
3. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; acquired in December 2007

Collected, of course, is the critical verb here. I recently decided that the last edition stood the best chance of actually being read, perhaps aloud to the Misses. Mr., Master, and I had enjoyed several family book club "events" -- that is, long books (classics, if you will) through which we meandered, dallying longer than was our wont. Notable among these events were The Three Musketeers, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and The Lord of the Rings. The Misses and I have meandered though Little Women. Would they enjoy a long walk through Tolstoy? If not this year, then next?

I wondered...

Imagine my delight, then, when I read N.S. a few weeks ago. From his December 17, 2008 column:

I am currently reading War and Peace, out loud to my older son, and we’re both loving it, not because it gives us something to brag about, but because it’s great. When Tolstoy describes a horse, it’s like an actual horse canters into the room, twitching and snorting. When Natasha jumps into her mother’s bed to tell the old countess about Prince Andrei, it could be any 16-year-old girl gushing about her dreamboat. It’s real.

Read the the entire section. His observations are spot on, including this bit:

But must I suppress enthusiasm, keep quiet, just because you can’t imagine any reason to read it other than braggadocio? Every Monday we all have to hear about what the flippin’ Bears did, yet let slip something about a book you love and you’re a bigmouth blowhard preening your feathers. It’s not fair.

No, N.S., it's not fair. But after all, anti-intellectualism has become something of American pastime, hasn't it?

Metropolitan
Longtime readers know about my affection for Chevalier Noir. They may also realize that it waned a couple of years ago. Well, on a recent trip to Trader Joe's, we discovered Metropolitan Cookies.

Oh. My. God.

These delectable wafers may even inspire me to resurrect (and rename) this old feature.

Girlish

Can you still read like a girl?

Erica Bauermeister's first novel, The School of Essential Ingredients, demonstrated that I still can. A Hallmark Movie of a book, Ingredients requires that the reader set aside her qualms about its commonplace narrative structure (a chapter per character) and its suspend-your-disbelief coincidences, and -- like a girl, I guess -- I did. Why? Because the review copy arrived during my winter break, I suppose, and the gentle (if, in retrospect, predictable and, yes, formulaic) story was both well written and appropriate to my softly lit and slow-paced season.

Consider it a recipe for a seasonal confection, then, and, if you're inclined (as I was), indulge.

You'll find an excerpt here, and I've reproduced portions of "A Conversation with Erica Bauermeister" below.

What led you to write this book?
In 1999, my family had just returned to Seattle after spending two years in northern Italy. I found that I missed the food and being around people who celebrated even the most simple meals. So, I took a cooking class. The first night, we killed crabs. I’m the kind of person who takes spiders outside when I find them in my house and it was a deeply unsettling experience. I had an image of a young mother, Claire, and I began wondering what effect it might have on her to kill something. In the end, her story wasn’t at all what I expected. And then I started thinking about all the different characters you could have in a class, and started wondering which foods would affect each one – revive a memory, create an epiphany, change the direction of a life – and that’s where the book came from.

This is your first novel, although you’ve written other books about literature. How was the process of writing fiction different for you?
I remember once speaking with an author who had made a comment about her characters in her presentation – how they talked to her and told her what to do, etc. I was skeptical, and said so. I declared that no characters had ever talked to me. She just looked at me and smiled this small smile and said “maybe you aren’t listening.”

So I decided to listen. Carl was the first character who appeared in my imagination, a man whose wife has had an affair, but who doesn’t want to end his marriage. He was such a wonderful man and I wanted to do him justice; I wanted people to realize that his decision to stay in his marriage was something complicated and loving, rather than a lack of will. It wasn't until six months later that I had a dream about his wife, and I realized that she had actually been planning on leaving him when she sat down at that kitchen table, but had changed her mind at the last moment – and that that decision, too, was complicated and loving, and gave their story a complexity I didn't know it had until then.

Writing Helen’s story made me realize how powerful the concept of interconnected stories can be, allowing the reader to delve deeply into each character, and to be, in the end, the only person who truly knows all the connections between them.