Okay. Something new. In addition to my "On the nightstand" entries, I plan to post a monthly review of books read. There may be a little overlap between the two, but that's all right. Besides, the review will help me prepare an annotated year-end list.
So, here goes.
■ Boot Camp (Todd Strasser)
YA novel. Uses a "ripped from the headlines" approach to reveal the horrors of disciplinary boot camps.
■ The Other Mother (Gwendolen Gross)
General fiction. A somewhat heavy-handed examination of the so-called "Mommy Wars."
■ Wish You Were Dead (Todd Strasser)
YA novel. Again, there is some "ripped from the headlines" appeal here: An unpopular student blogs about wishing several popular students dead, then those same students disappear.
■ Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village (Laura Amy Schlitz)
YA non-fiction, read-aloud. A gentle re-introduction to regular studies, completed just after New Year's. Everyone and her mother has already raved about this Newbery Medal winner, so let me simply add my voice to the chorus: highly recommended.
■ The Homeschool Liberation League (Lucy Frank)
YA novel, read-aloud. Recommended by Semicolon, this novel pleasantly bookended our reading-thinking-learning days this month.
■ The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
Classic. With the Misses as part of their literature studies.
■ Give a Boy a Gun (Todd Strasser)
YA novel. This book rounded out my experience with Stasser's oeuvre. I much preferred Nancy Garden's Endgame, which covered similar ground more compellingly. (Related entry here.)
■ A Man for All Seasons (Robert Bolt)
Play, modern classic. Perfection -- even Bolt's introduction and his description of the characters. Plays are, of course, meant to be seen, not read, but this was a superlative reading experience.
■ The Merry Widow (Victor Leon and Leo Stein; translated by Christopher Hassall)
Libretto. Wonderful entertainment. (Related entries here and here.)
■ A Friend of the Family (Lauren Grodstein)
Fiction. Reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates writing as Rosamond Smith, particularly The Barrens.
■ What Learning Leaves (Taylor Mali)
Poetry. One of my promises to self this year was that I would read more poetry, and this was a wonderful way to keep that promise. (Related entry here.)
■ The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Allison Weir)
History. Mr. M-mv and I watched Season 3 of "The Tudors" over the winter holiday (Thank you, Aunt M-mv!), which reawakened my interest in Weir's books. Her writing is a competent blend of clarity and scholarship.
■ Keeping Faith (Frank and John Schaeffer)
Memoir. A reread, for obvious reasons. (Related entries here, here, here, and here.)
Reading life review: January
"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was."
As you likely already know, J.D. Salinger died on Wednesday. If, like me, you felt a sense of loss mingled with deep appreciation for his work, you'll probably enjoy "Defending Holden," which I first posted back in 2006.
Untitled
Three weeks ago today, at 5:30 a.m., we received the scripted “I have arrived; I am safe” call from our recruit. We knew to expect little more than a familiar albeit hoarse, tired, distant voice reading from a prompt taped near the phone. Imagine our cautious delight, then, when following the briefest pause at the conclusion of this monologue, our recruit ad-libbed, "I love you. Goodbye."
That off-script reminder that he was, after all, fine -- at least fine enough to send a verbal hug -- sustained us until this past Friday, when we received our first letter.
Although Master M-mv is a writer, we expected nothing more from him than terse missives advising us that he didn't have much time to write. Again, imagine our cautious delight when we received eight paragraphs, well-crafted, informative, and even wryly humorous. If during those first weeks in an environment so foreign, so difficult, so other, he could find the mental time-space to be coherent -- let alone articulate -- then he must be doing well emotionally and mentally.
Right?
I cling to this. Perhaps it is a mother's folly, but I cling to this -- his witty, newsy letter, penned as if he were visiting his fraternal grandmother, not learning the art of war.
If the soundness and resilience of his heart and mind do not worry me, though, the limitations of the human body do. The physical challenges he now faces were designed to “POP YOUR HEART, RECRUIT!” And even if his heart endures, will his feet? Shins? Knees? Back?
Every day his absence becomes a little more tolerable, but I continue to miss him. Interestingly, I never miss the same him: Sometimes I miss starfish hands gripping a grubby stuffed puppy, and sometimes I miss laughter, deep and loud. Sometimes I miss his tweenish self -- braces, Harry Potter glasses, and flannel shirts. And sometimes I just miss knowing that he is here and not elsewhere.
That said, though, I am periodically troubled by the sense that I am betraying him by not missing him more; if not more, then more obviously. Should I cry more? Doubt more? Worry more? Then I am bolstered by the thought that I must be right: In letting him go, I let him become.
Leaving, done well, is not forever painful, nor should it be.
"I love you. Goodbye."
Definitely. Beautiful. Definitely. Beautiful.
From the bio page at Taylor Mali's website:
Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement and one of the few people in the world to have no job other than that of poet. Eloquent, accessible, passionate, and often downright hilarious, Mali studied drama in Oxford with members of The Royal Shakespeare Company and puts those skills of presentation to work in all his performances. He was one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and was the "Armani-clad villain" of Paul Devlin's 1997 documentary film SlamNation.If you're unfamiliar with his work, check out the clip below, "What Teachers Make."
Other Mali clips
■ The The Impotence of Proofreading
■ I'll Fight You for the Library
■ Speak with Conviction
■ Labeling Keys
Visit M-mv's poetry label for related posts.
"Students are not always the best judges of their own learning."
No kidding, huh?
From "What Makes a Great Teacher?" (The Atlantic, January/February 2010):
Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.Thanks for the link, K.F.
Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.
Related entries
■ The one you remember (9.07.2006)
■ Fine Art Friday: The Lesson (11.10.2006)
■ "The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else." (11.07.2007)
■ Elsewhere... (11.20.2007)
■ A lifetime of excellence (12.29.2007)
■ "[T]he quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." (3.06.2008)
■ The value of excellent teaching (11.23.2009)
Really?
"If your kids are awake, they're probably online," asserts today's NYT.
The study’s findings shocked its authors, who had concluded in 2005 that use could not possibly grow further, and confirmed the fears of many parents whose children are constantly tethered to media devices. It found, moreover, that heavy media use is associated with several negatives, including behavior problems and lower grades.The Misses haven't really boarded the technology train, although their brother certainly enjoyed his computer, iPod Touch, and online pursuits. The only things in the girls' beds -- apart from them, of course -- are their cats, some art supplies, a few stuffed "friends," and the books they're reading by the light of their trusty book lamps. It may be old-fashioned, even neo-Luddite, of them, but they seem to be doing just fine, thankyouverymuch.
The third in a series, the study found that young people’s media consumption grew far more in the last five years than from 1999 to 2004, as sophisticated mobile technology like iPods and smart phones brought media access into teenagers’ pockets and beds.
I suspect I am not the only one to read the article and think that if "children are constantly tethered to media devices," we're talking about a parenting issue, not a social issue. But then I remembered reading M.T. Anderson's Feed with Mr. and Master. Wow. My amended assertion, then: If "children are constantly tethered to media devices," it's a parenting issue -- a parenting issue with grave social implications.
Losing our "opera virginity"
Did you know that the downtown location of Pearl's is going out of business? Everything in the store is fifty percent off, and while the paper section is, for all intents and purposes, now non-existent, we scored some wonderful deals on loose thin-thick pens, Prismacolor pencils, and charcoal sticks, as well as portfolios and portable sketch boards. Perhaps the luckiest find was a collection of quality pastels, unopened, intact. The store is emptying out fast, so local artists -- aspiring, practicing, and otherwise -- should stop in sooner rather than later.
After our spree, we headed to Gene and Georgetti for our pre-opera dinner, during which, Miss M-mv(i) quietly announced that the evening was making her "feel like a princess" (which, of course, made Mr. M-mv feel like a king).
Good luck and planning had us at the opera house in plenty of time for the lecture offered at 6:30 p.m. -- an introduction to The Merry Widow presented by Roger Pines, dramaturg of the Lyric Opera Company. His lecture included audio clips from benchmark performances of this popular operetta, including Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing "Vilja," an aria the speaker described as a gift for sopranos, with soaring lines and melodies.
Afterward, we took our time making our way to our seats, slowly walking up the stately stairs and discreetly people-watching. They say you'll find everything from ballgowns to blue jeams at the opera, and we did. (The gal in the ballgown looked so lovely, I felt compelled to tell her so.)
And what can I say that hasn't already been said about this production of The Merry Widow? It was beautifully sung, to say nothing of funny and touching in all the right places. The orchestra was perfection -- such a rich, lovely sound. Our seats were grand. And, as always, it was over too soon.
Related entry: "She's beautiful! She's rich!"
We visited the Morton Arboretum with Aunt M-mv on Thursday. What a lovely winter's day walk!
Fine Art Friday
Jason Lazarus, American, 1975-
Week of the Perfect Game, 2009
Zoe Strauss, American, 1970-
Make No Mistake about This, 2008
Wolfgang Plöger, German, 1972-
We spent most of our recent visit to the Art Institute (related entries here, here, and here) in the Modern Wing, where our first stop was Gallery 188. Through January 24, the Department of Photography is presenting the third in its "On the Scene" series (i.e., exhibits devoted to the work of emerging photographers) in this gallery.
About the exhibits
Taken during one week in July 2009, the Strauss' collection exposes a rather grim slice of urban life -- a slice that may otherwise have passed unremarked had it not been for the photographer's eye. You see, at the time Strauss was developing her chronicle, the rest of the city was preparing the final Olympic bid "push," celebrating Mark Buehrle's perfect game, and congratulating itself (still!) of its status as a president's hometown.
Lazarus' installation is not quite so moody; it borders, in fact, on the quaint: In the age of digital photography and virtual photo albums, inscribed family snapshots have become "durable objects." His exhibit of photo inscriptions narrates a strange sort of cultural history... and we were captivated.
Plöger's exhibit is the most unsettling of the three installations, and at first, I didn't even understand what I was seeing. A projector aimed at a far wall runs an endless loop of handwritten words that speeds by much too quickly to read. Only by leaning close to the projector itself could I begin to make out the text: the final statements -- apologies, confessions, assertions -- of death row inmates.
By turns harrowing, sentimental, and thought-provoking, the exhibits in Gallery 188 are certainly worth your time. You'll find more information here.
"[I]t’s plain and it’s strong."
On Sunday, I suggested that you check out the Winter 2010 issue of The American Scholar. William Zinsser's piece on teaching writing to international students is another noteworthy reason to grab a mug of coffee and read the issue.
From "Writing English as a Second Language":
So what is good English—the language we’re here today to wrestle with? It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong. It has a huge vocabulary of words that have precise shades of meaning; there’s no subject, however technical or complex, that can’t be made clear to any reader in good English—if it’s used right. Unfortunately, there are many ways of using it wrong. Those are the damaging habits I want to warn you about today.
"She's beautiful! She's rich!"
Through a happy stroke of good fortune, we have outrageously wonderful seats to see Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, so we've been reading about opera (Bravo! Brava! A Night at the Opera: Behind the Scenes with Composers, Cast, and Crew by Anne Siberell) and following along in the libretto while listening to recordings. Oh, and the lovely opera glasses? A gift from Aunt M-mv.
We "opera virgins" will report back following the performance.
Untitled
A week ago today, we drove Master M-mv to the recruiting station for this area. We had prepared ourselves for a dry-eyed handshake and hug outside the station but were invited into the offices of the recruiters, who immediately adopted the softer, affable voices they've been taught to use around recruits' mothers.
A short time later, our son's recruiter drove away with the young men heading to the Military Entrance Processing Station.
And we remained, surprisingly, dry-eyed. We planned a trip to the grocery store for the journey home and then kept the Misses' swim practice commitment. Dancing to the regular rhythms of our days and weeks seemed the wisest course. A week into this new chapter of our lives, I still think so.
We received our recruit's scripted phone call at 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday. He sounded hoarse, tired... and highly motivated. And the call offered his sisters and I some genuine comfort and relief: He arrived at his destination. He is safe.
Of course, Mr. M-mv misses his son, but the women of the family-centered learning project were apt to be particularly bereft. His sisters, after all, have never known a time when Master wasn't there -- as their big brother, sure, but also as their sometime teacher, regular companion, and even their coach on the swim team.
And I? Well, although I am a mother who has long maintained that we are letting them go from the moment they arrive in our lives, I have learned this week that this is far more easily said than lived. But I'm fine.
We're fine.
Everything is fine.
As I wrote to a friend this week, though, they go from starfish hands and stained t-shirts to good-bye in less time than it takes to read a five-hundred-page novel.
This morning I woke up wishing -- just for a moment -- that there were more soiled size 4T white t-shirts in my laundry basket; that I was, in fact, just beginning that five-hundred-page novel.
And I am no longer dry-eyed.
Related entries
Called to service (7.16.2009)
Category I (8.06.2009)
"Fear isn’t a bad thing for a reporter."
One of my favorite chapbook entries comes from Joan Didion's Slouching toward Bethlehem, her first collection of essays:
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.)I was reminded of this lesson in self-awareness this afternoon because Bob Thompson's article "Writing about Writers" (a web-exclusive for The American Scholar, Winter 2010) opens with an anecdote about meeting Didion in print through Slouching toward Bethlehem.
About meeting her thirty years later (following the publication of her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking) he writes:
I was an aging rookie on the Post’s book beat, which I’d recently been asked to take over. I was also quietly terrified, as I would be many times when talking with writers I admired. Fear isn’t a bad thing for a reporter. It forces you to prepare and keeps you alert. But in retrospect, I put this interview in a category of its own.As it turns out, Thompson has interviewed many of my favorite writers -- Didion, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, and more -- and, as he explains in this essay, he has learned much about the craft of writing in the process.
That’s because preparing to talk with Didion — though I was scarcely conscious of this at the time — taught me how to think about my job.
You'll find the complete article here.
Preempted by the president? Apparently not.
I'm certainly looking forward to the season premiere, but I think the tempest in a Thermos over this is ridiculous.
On the nightstand
In progress
■ The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Allison Weir)
History. Mr. M-mv and I watched Season 3 of "The Tudors" over the winter holiday (Thank you, Aunt M-mv!), which reawakened my interest in Weir's books. One hundred pages in, her writing seems to be a competent blend of clarity and scholarship.
■ The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
Classic. With the Misses as part of their literature studies.
■ The Homeschool Liberation League (Lucy Frank)
YA novel, read-aloud. Recommended by Semicolon, this has provided a pleasant bookend to our reading-thinking-learning days this week.
Completed
■ Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village (Laura Amy Schlitz)
YA non-fiction, read-aloud. A gentle re-introduction to regular studies, completed just after New Year's. Everyone and her mother has already raved about this Newbery Medal winner, so let me simply add my voice to the chorus: highly recommended.
■ Wish You Were Dead (Todd Strasser)
YA novel. An unpopular student blogs about wishing several popular students dead, then those same students disappear.
■ The Other Mother (Gwendolen Gross)
General fiction. A somewhat heavy-handed examination of the so-called "Mommy Wars."
■ Boot Camp (Todd Strasser)
YA novel. Uses a "ripped from the headlines" approach to reveal the horrors of disciplinary boot camps.
"[A] voice in the darkness offers a bond with a wider community."
From "The Listener" (The Atlantic, January/February 2010):
Every night, when most of the world has drifted into unconsciousness, some 30 percent of the American population stays awake. They’re truckers, insomniacs, night-shift workers, or just people who like to stay up late. They tend to adhere to a different set of norms. For one thing, in an age of digital distraction, they connect with enthusiasm to a decidedly analog device: they listen to the radio for longer periods, with greater attention, and with greater loyalty than do audiences at any other time of the day. They tend to listen alone—alone in bed, alone on a highway, alone in the world—and find that a voice in the darkness offers a bond with a wider community. Perhaps you’re one of them. Or perhaps, if you’ve ever driven across country in the dark, or flipped on the radio because you couldn’t sleep, you know the feeling.
Your brain in middle age: Use it or lose it.
From "How to Train the Aging Brain" (NYT, January 3, 2010)
While it’s tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they’ve become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age.
Many longheld views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.
From "Lives: Adam Cohen, Shakespeare scholar whose illness cast bard in new light" (Boston Globe, January 4, 2010):
"I began to think about how many of the audience members for Shakespeare's plays were in fact illiterates, groundlings, similarly struggling to understand their place in an increasingly confusingly technological, mechanical, textual world," he wrote. "From the ashes of my studies emerged flesh and blood people on stage in Shakespeare's time with whom my disability allowed me to connect. My experience with illiteracy gave me unique insights into how the technology of the printing press changed Shakespeare's plays."
Makeover
Thanks to various "readers" (e.g., Bloglines), many of you don't actually visit the site, but to those who do, thank you for your patience while I tidied the place up a bit.
Apart from M-mv's general appearance, the other notable change is the deletion of the tabs/links to archives (e.g., Fine Art Friday, Bardolatry, Birding, etc.) and the addition of labels. It will take a long time to add labels to three thousand entries, but I think the On the nightstand, Fine Art Friday, Bardolatry, RDA, and Birding labels include all relevant posts. I have also ensured that all 2009 entries are labeled.
As many of you know, entries made after December 1, 2009, do not contain affiliate links. Little to no effort has been made to delete such links from older posts, though, so refer to the site's disclosure statement if you have any questions about prior affiliations.
"A self-styled 'shop-soiled Galahad'"
From "Why Marlowe is still the chief of detectives" (The Spiked Review of Books, December 2009):
Chandler was a self-confessed cultural snob whose ‘hardboiled’ writing was sneered at by literary critics, though he insisted that the Bard would have written for Hollywood, too. He was an educated Edwardian gentleman who gave voice to people from the wrong side of the tracks in pre- and postwar Los Angeles.
Fine Art...
Have I persuaded any of you to check out John Berger's television program, "Ways of Seeing" yet? Fascinating stuff, no? I watched Episode Three this morning. It explores the tradition of oil painting as a device for cataloging possessions of the wealthy -- a tradition that has, in large measure, been replaced by the "art" of advertising (which is the subject of the fourth and final episode).
For your convenience, I've reposted the links for Episode One and Two in addition to the links for Episode Three.
"Ways of Seeing," Episode One
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
"Ways of Seeing," Episode Two
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
"Ways of Seeing," Episode Three
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Only two days, nine hours until he leaves for boot camp.
We're doing fine and have appreciated all of your messages. Thank you for thinking of us. Please continue to keep us in your thoughts. And please keep the parents of the two young men who will ship with Master in your thoughts, too.
Related entries
Called to service (7.16.2009)
Category I (8.06.2009)
