■ Freckles (Gene Stratton-Porter)
Fiction. With the Misses. A follow-up to August's A Girl of the Limberlost. (Related entries here and here.) We loved both books, unabashedly, completely.
■ Citizen Girl (Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus)
Fiction. As it turns out, I actually did read more than three books in September. This one was just so completely dreadful that I had utterly forgotten it when I was preparing my round-up.
■ I Draw, I Paint: Colored Pencils (Isidro Sanchez)
Art. Sanchez's I Draw, I Paint: Watercolor was helpful to me during last summer's pursuits, but I can't say the same about this book and my current class.
■ Room (Emma Donaghue)
Fiction.
■ The Good Daughters (Joyce Maynard)
Fiction.
■ My Lie: A True Story of False Memory (Meredith Maran)
Memoir.
Borrowed all three from the library and read them in quick succession. Random observations: (1) Room really is as unusual and well conceived as "everyone" says, but I didn't love it. (2) Yes, that Joyce Maynard. (3) A lot of people live lives far more complicated and fraught with emotional danger than my own. I think that makes me one of the lucky ones.
■ Every Great Chess Player Was Once a Beginner (Brian Byfield and Alan Orpin)
■ Learn Chess Quick (Brian Byfield and Alan Orpin)
Non-fiction. You'll find my PSA on these two books here.
■ Henry V (William Shakespeare)
Play, classic.
■ Henry V: The Graphic Novel (American English / Original Text edition; adapted by John McDonald)
Graphic novel. The first, a yearly adventure. The second, new to me and well appreciated by the Misses. (Related entries here, here, and here.)
■ The False Friend (Myla Goldberg)
Fiction. Goldberg's Bee Season amazed me, and I continue to recommend it to readers who enjoy and appreciate contemporary fiction with a literary lilt (as opposed to say, a decidedly bestselling beat). Perhaps I met her latest novel with too much anticipation and expectation, then, but where I sought a penetrating and offbeat glimpse into the world of middle-school bullies and the women they become, I found mostly petulant navel-gazing, not much of which was particularly insightful.
■ Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (Maile Meloy)
Fiction, short stories. Picked up as an impulse-purchase and completed in a single Sunday afternoon. If that's not a recommendation, I don't know what is.
■ Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century (Hal Higdon)
Non-fiction, true crime. While reading this serviceable account of the 1924 kidnapping and murder of Bobby Franks, I revisited my entry on McCurdy's article "The Childhood Pattern of Genius" and realized afresh that GENIUS doesn't always mean GOOD, does it? Heh, heh, heh. I purchased the book after watching Compulsion (1959) three years ago, which means, yes, my purchased:read ratio is about 13:1. And that's okay, says Mr. M-Mv. Some people stock up on tuna and canned vegetables. We stock up on brain food. Getting back to the seamier side of Chicago history (i.e., the Nietzschean supermen who botched their "perfect murder"): The book is, as I said, serviceable. The film, though, is excellent. (Related entry here.)
■ The Wright 3 (Blue Balliet)
Juvenile fiction. Speaking of Chicago, this follow-up to Chasing Vermeer (related entry here) finds the Lab School students chasing that ol' synchronicity / serendipity/ synthesis all around the Frederick C. Robie House.
■ What to Do about Alice? (Barbara Kerley)
Juvenile fiction. Delightful.
■ The Unwritten, Vol. 2: Inside Man (Mike Carey)
Graphic series. Girl Detective recommended Volume 1, and now I'm hooked.
■ Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring (Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan)
Juvenile non-fiction. Related entry here.
■ The Mailbox (Audrey Shafer)
YA fiction. Let me be clear: I loved this book. I'm just a little ambivalent on the subject of its intended audience (twelve and up). Shafer serves up sophisticated ideas, including the horrors of war and the nature of some soldiers' life after service, in a style alternately beautiful and, well, menacing. Sure, here and there, I thought I caught a Gary Schmidt vibe, maybe a little Richard Peck -- mostly in the almost-too-neat manner in which central plotlines are resolved -- but even on finishing, I thought, Boy, this seems awfully (for lack of a better word) heavy. Of course, your mileage may vary, as they say. Let me know what you think.
■ Dante's Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation (Seymour Chwast)
Graphic novel. Another delightful discovery. There were moments, though, when Chwast's wry drawings (Dante looks like a hardened Chicago reporter) aroused in me the same shivers of worry and dread that the pigtailed version of myself experienced when I first read this page in Babar the King. Don't miss this one.
■ Half a Life (Darin Strauss)
Memoir. Although his insurers and a detective at the scene declare Strauss blameless, he is, of course, never quite the same after a classmate swerves into the path of his car and is killed in the unavoidable collision. Half a Life traces his journey from the accident to his decision to pen a memoir as therapy. Strauss has written three novels, included the acclaimed Chang and Eng. I read More than It Hurts You (2008) shortly after it was released and found it thought-provoking, if disturbing. Half a Life is often emotionally draining and occasionally indulgent, but it also read true. It's certainly not a book I will soon forget.
Reading life review: October
October birthdays
My oldest turned twenty-one.
My youngest turned thirteen.
And Mental multivitamin turned seven. (Recent entry here and my very first entry here.)
The Limberlost
Related entries here and here.
The recommended daily allowance
Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring (Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan)
In 1944, the collaboration of three unique talents met both popular and critical acclaim. The work? Appalachian Spring. The talents? Martha Graham, dancer and choreographer; Aaron Copland, composer; and Isamu Noguchi, artist.
As this lovely picture book (illustrated by Brian Floca) explains:
Martha asks the composer Aaron Copland to create music for her ballet. She writes a script for him, struggling to get down on paper the rarin' to go rhythms of a new land.... Aaron's music suggests the music, fires the dancers' imaginations, dares them to do more.... Isamu's set is spare and angular, like Martha's way of dancing.Complement this read-aloud with the ballet itself.
The dance will take place in springtime, in the hills of western Pennsylvania, where a young farmer and his bride celebrate their wedding day.Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part III, which features the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th of the ballet's fourteen movements, begins with the iconic "Simple Gifts." (Related entry here.)
We also appreciated Keeping Score: Copland and the American Sound And, of course, that ol' synchronicity / serendipity/ synthesis nodded to us in the discovery that Noguchi designed the set that was "just what Martha hoped for, 'a new town, a place where the first fence is going up.'" (You'll find the related Fine Art Friday entry here.)
"This story shall the good man teach his son."
NOTE: Post bumped up as a gentle public service announcement for fellow bardolators.
________________________________________
From Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare:
According to a legend which can be traced back no further than the eighth century, Crispin and Crispian were two brothers, Christian, living in Rome. They fled the persecution of Christians begun under the Roman Emperor Diocletian. They traveled to Soissons in what was then Gaul (later France), and there they remained in hiding, supporting themselves as shoemakers. In 286 they were found and beheaded, presumably on October 25, which became their day of commemoration. They were the patron saints of shoemakers and their day was particularly celebrated in France. And it was on October 25, 1415, that the Battle of Agincourt was to be fought.Yes, Monday, October 25, is "call'd the feast of Crispian," a day we've been marking for about ten years now.
Admittedly, we began celebrating early this year. As it turns out, while the Misses have seen Henry V several times, learned wide swathes of it, and discussed it at length, they had never read it and participated in the sort of line-by-line analysis that we have done with such plays as Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing, and Julius Caesar. We sought to remedy that last week, and after working through two-thirds of the text, we treated ourselves to another screening of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (their fourth or sixth and my... oh, thirteenth? twenty-first?).
As I wrote in this entry, Act IV, Scene VII of the film wins my vote as "Most Moving."
When we finish the final third of the text this week, we plan to watch Laurence Olivier's 1944 version, which I saw just once, about ten years ago with Master M-mv. To say I disliked it would be an understatement, but I wonder if revisiting it, this time with the Misses, will temper my experience, much as revisiting Romeo and Juliet in their company utterly converted my mild contempt to abiding appreciation.
Why not join us in our Saint Crispin's Day celebration? Watch. Read. Think. Discuss. Learn.
Hey, and if this will be your younger set's first brush with Harry -- or even Shakespeare -- you might appreciate the following M-mv entries:
■ "I was not angry since I came to France / Until this instant...." (11.04.2007)
■ Shakespeare. Yes, again. And again. (9.30.2006)
(Other bardolatry entries are collected here.)
_________________________________
From Act IV, Scene III of Shakespeare's Henry V:
King Henry:
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
Morton Arboretum redux
We returned to the Morton Arboretum because (a) Mr. M-mv had not yet been, and (b) Tom Skilling maintains that the weekend will be rainy and humid -- we didn't want to squander a gorgeous autumn day on an inside adventure (the Adler).
Two words about yesterday's adventures: Just. Gorgeous.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
And now we are seven.
Mental multivitamin is seven years old this month. (Related aside: And my oldest child is twenty-one this month; my youngest, thirteen. I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my overalls rolled.)
You know, I've always maintained that Mental multivitamin was established for readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. But, really? It was established for me. Born during a respite between teaching and working, it was and is an attempt to write across the "curriculum" of this reader-thinker-autodidact; to synthesize what I am learning about astronomy and history and ornithology and current events and literature and technology and art and, yes, about myself, my family, and the world.
In short, I write Mental multivitamin to learn, to know.
Like so many students before me, though, self-taught and otherwise, I have realized that learning, done well, only expands one's awareness of all he doesn't know, of all he has yet to learn. It is, then, the yen to know, and therefore to learn more, that propels me forward, like an ass lunging for that ever-beyond-reach carrot: one book to another book -- or play or painting or museum or film or concert or endeavor or whatever.
Because I am a home educator, it might be noble (or at least prudent and politic) to say that I do what I do to model for my children the sort of behavior I wish to cultivate in them. But in fact, I do what I do because I am compelled to do it. Ass is to Carrot as I am to Autodidactic Pursuits. Providing the children with an example of academic tenacity -- no matter the nature of one's gifts -- has just been a happy byproduct of my studies.
Another byproduct -- for me, for them -- has been an ever-deepening appreciation for that scholarly "trinity" at work (and at play) in the reading-thinking-learning-writing (to know) life: that ol' synchronicity / serendipity / synthesis. Sometimes, the observation of one or the other will lead to a post; other times, posting leads to the observation. No matter. An epiphany is an epiphany. I'll take it, however it comes.
So, happy anniversary, M-mv. Here's to readers, thinkers, and autodidacts; to asses and their carrots; to me.
Operation Migration
I know where the Misses and I will be tomorrow morning at 7 -- at the computers watching a live stream of Operation Migration. Learn more about this organization's work here.
Every great chess player was once a beginner.
Consider this post a public service announcement, then:
Don't be duped into paying extravagantly for a book you can, at this writing, order for as little as $10.74.
Morton Arboretum
We could not have picked a more beautiful day than yesterday to take the one-hour Acorn Tram ride at the Morton Arboretum! As you can see, though, a moving tram is not the best place from which to capture images of autumn majesty.
Still, I was able to capture a few of the "little things."
And then a certain almost-thirteen-year-old came into view.
And she and her best friend agreed to be photographed.
From the archives: "May something go always unharvested!"
Unharvested
by Robert Frost
A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what has made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady's fan.
For there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.
May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.
Fooba Wooba John
Related entry: Watch the donut, not the hole.
Chapbook entry
A Girl of the Limberlost (Gene Stratton-Porter)
p. 216
“Nevertheless, she is your mother,” said the Bird Woman, softly. “I think almost any kind of a mother must be better than none at all, and you say she has had great trouble.”
“She loved my father, and he died,” said Elnora. “The same thing, in quite as tragic a manner, has happened to thousands of other women, and they have gone on with calm faces and found happiness in life by loving others. There was something else I am afraid I never shall forget; this I know I shall not, but talking does not help….”
p. 319
“… You have an hour to put an idea into our heads that will stick for a lifetime, and grow for good. That’s the way I look at your job. Now, what are you going to give us? We don’t want any old silly stuff that has been hashed over and over, we want a big new idea to plant in our hearts. Come on, Miss Teacher, what is the boiled-down, double-distilled essence of June? Give it to us strong. We are large enough to furnish it developing ground. Hurry up! Time is short and we are waiting? What is the miracle of June? What one thing epitomizes the whole month, and makes it just a little different from any other?”
"Genius by any definition is rare."
The May 1960 edition of Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts featured an article by Harold G. McCurdy, author of The Personality of Shakespeare: A Venture in Psychological Method (1953) and then professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina. "The Childhood Pattern of Genius," based on a (presumably longer and more scholarly) paper first published in the Journal of the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society and later in a report of the Smithsonian Institution, is enjoying a bit of fame five decades after its publication because its concluding paragraph serves as a sort of "So there!" response to queries -- both implied and expressed -- about homeschoolers' methods and motives.
Not content to discuss a potentially truncated and/or inaccurate transcript of the quote, I tracked down a copy of the magazine, a hard-bound gem of a publication that includes such delights as an image of the Bed of Ware (so famous, apparently, that it merited mention in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) in a piece about civilization's best beds; "An Eastern Art Goes Western," James A. Michener's exploration of traditional Japanese wood block complemented by numerous (and gorgeous) full-color images; and mention of Burnham's "White City" of 1893 in an article about the 1964 Fair.
McCurdy writes:
In summary, the present survey of biographical information on a sample of twenty men of genius suggests that the typical developmental pattern includes as important aspects: (1) a high degree of attention focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in intensive educational measures and, usually, abundant love; (2) isolation from other children, especially outside the family; and (3) a rich efflorescence of fantasy as a reaction to the preceding conditions. It might be remarked that the mass education of our public school system is, in its way, a vast experiment on the effect of reducing all three factors to a minimum; accordingly, it should tend to suppress the occurrence of genius.I know, right? You can see how homeschooling parents would gobble this morsel UP! McCurdy's "twenty men of genius" included such notables as John Stuart Mill, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Blaise Pascal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Voltaire, John Quincy Adams, and William Pit, and the writer maintains that his "brief sketches" of their lives
confirm the rule that children of genius are exposed to significantly great amounts of intellectual stimulation by adults and experience very restricted contacts with other children of their own age. Nor should we overlook the fact that books themselves, to which these children were so much attached, are representatives of the adult world. [...] Books extend the boundaries of the adult empire.By golly, this is the sort of stuff earnest homeschoolers adore, isn't it? But my first thought after reading the article was, Were there no women of genius? And my second? What a dubious business this is, appropriating a fifty-year-old study about genius as a validation of homeschooling. Sure, McCurdy notes that mass education "is, in its way, a vast experiment on the effect of reducing" the important aspects of the childhood pattern of genius, but he also contends that "Genius by any definition is rare."
Indeed, it is.
Of course, my misgivings may just the coughing and harrumphing of my inner curmudgeon as she makes her way to a dusty soapbox. After all, I've been at this gig for a long time: The urge to offer a quote or a truism or sound-byte to justify how we educate children has long passed. Besides, we're not developing geniuses here.
We're simply teaching and parenting our children.
The first junco arrived September 30...
... just a short time before we left for the twelve-mile ride that would bring the Misses and I to our goal of five hundred miles. Later that night, we saw a most excellent production of Romeo and Juliet at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. (Related entry here.) Yes, it was a very good day, indeed.
Reading life review: September
■ The Education of Little Tree (Forrest Carter)
Fiction. With the Misses. Much has been made of the author's reputation, which was uncovered after the novel had been embraced as a modern American classic. But I maintain that a work can rightfully be considered as something apart from its creator, and the Misses and I enjoyed the synchronicity / serendipity/ synthesis at work when we were able to compare Carter's employment of humor and the vernacular to that of the master -- Mark Twain. (Related entries here and here.) We loved this story.
■ Will I Ever Be Good Enough? (Karyl McBride)
Psychology. I saw this recommended elsewhere and after reading a review determined it might tie in neatly with previous reads, including Robert D. Hare's Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (Robert D. Hare), which I read earlier this year, and Martha Stout's The Sociopath Next Door, which I wrote about here and here.
■ Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)
Play, classic. A reread, in anticipation of our trip to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater (discussed here).
By the numbers
The number of hours we were stuck in traffic en route to Romeo and Juliet.
1.5
The number of Cafe Luigi pizza slices I ate on the way to CST last night.
The number of miles we biked on Tuesday.
The number of miles we biked on Wednesday.
The number of miles we biked yesterday.
The number of miles the Misses and I pedaled between Memorial Day and September's end.
WAHOO! Related entry here.
5
The number of "Girls Rule!" films Mr. M-mv endured (smilingly) in September.
Sabrina (1954)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Stage Door (1937)
Stella Dallas (1937)
Letters to Juliet (2010)
114
The number of books I read between January 1 and September 30 of this year.
Which means...
3
The number of books I read in September.
I know! What happened, right? Well, most of my reading this month related to research projects and/or teacher preparation -- articles here, chapters there. It certainly adds up, but it doesn't give one a host of interesting titles to list in a "Reading life review" entry, does it? One hundred fourteen books in nine months is a respectable number, no matter how you pitch it, though, so I wonder why it feels like I received a poor score on a quiz. Heh, heh, heh. Here's to a passel of book titles in October!
1
The number of tint strips the Misses and I must each complete this weekend.
3
The number of shade strips the Misses and I must each complete this weekend.
2
The number of 2.5-ounce tubes of Titanium White acrylic paint we blew through during last week's art class.
2
The number of 8.5-ounce tubes of Titanium White acrylic paint we purchased on the way home.
4
The number of items on the library's hold shelf for me this morning.
The number of items I have checked out.
7
The number of items still on hold.
The number of Border's Bucks burning a hole in pocket (so to speak).
