A KIND OF LIBRARY.

the perfect vacation read for a lover of books.

2012-02-25T17:06:00.001-05:00

New York City Schools take a February break the week of President's Day. Obviously, this is a huge perk of my job. I didn't plan anything, really, for the week and it turned out perfectly: hiking upstate twice (once by train, once by car, both poetic in their own ways) with great, old friends, pancakes at Maggie's Krooked Cafe (the best pancakes in the world that I usually only get once a year in the fall), an amazing driving soundtrack, baking a Guinness cake with Bailey's icing, making dinner for one of my best friends who happened to be in town for work, finally getting to Tom's for brunch. Sigh. And, of course, a lot of time reading.

{a February Friday, on vacation, midday}

I spent a the past few days getting lost in A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse, which turned out to be the best vacation book ever, meaning it was a sheer joy to read--though not what I would call saccharine. It is about a man and woman who meet by chance in a French mountain town, discover their mutual passion for literature and open a bookstore in Paris that only sells good novels. This book was thoroughly readable and a celebration of literature as art, igniting passion in all those involved. I felt as though the characters were my friends and I am left with the sadness that their story has ended. I will leave you with this, from page 279:

"We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer's block, the author's panic at the thought that he might be lost: his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure that he has taken. We want splendid books, books that immerse us in the splendor of reality and keep us there; books that prove to us that love is at work in the world right next to evil, right up against it, at times indistinctly, and that it will always be, just the way that suffering will always ravage hearts. We want good novels."

defining love in an 8th grade english class.

2012-02-19T17:43:00.000-05:00

I think it is a very small contingent of people who go into secondary english education and want to teach in a middle school. Most of us dream of opening the literary eyes of high school students--the kinds who are past the stage of their hormones being new, the kinds who are starting to think critically about the world around them and their future in it. Before I ended up at my school, I think I applied to every high school in Manhattan, none of which were looking to hire me. Through a friend of a friend, I rode the train to Brooklyn for the first time a week into the school year for my interview and figured teaching middle school was much better than day-temping and evening-barista-ing I'd been doing for months. That was almost 8 years ago and every year I get reminded why 8th grade students are amazing--and this year's reminder is, not surprisingly, rooted in the epic-reread-bookclub of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (uber-nerds see this).

Every student chooses one of five books to read with me at some point during the school year. Last year we had so much fun in the book club that I decided it was definitely worth it to do again, even if there wasn't a movie release to celebrate along with it. That brings me to this week. (I'll be talking across some of the best plot and character moves in the series, if you haven't read the series yet and you don't want to ruin your life, I wouldn't read anymore. Then I'd go out and start reading. Anyway.)

{usually I wouldn't pick a movie picture
for a post about a book, but I do love the
movies and I think Alan Rickman is
brilliant. Am I right, Nora?}

Severus Snape is barely present in person in the last book of the series, though he is all most readers are thinking about after the close of book six when he committed an act of violence that broke the heart of every reader: either Dumbledore was wrong about him all along (and at the time, the very idea of Dumbledore being wrong about anything was unthinkable) or his trust in Snape had roots in something we did not yet know as readers. I spent a significant amount of time between finishing The Half Blood Prince in July 2005 and starting The Deathly Hallows in July 2007 repeating to myself: I trust Dumbledore. I trust Dumbledore. I think that reading the backstory at the end of The Deathly Hallows is one of my favorite excerpts that I've ever read: Snape sacrificed himself, his pride and his ideas for love.

In our book club we starting talking about how the character of Snape redefines for the reader that love, as demonstrated in entire series, is not about what someone else can do for me or how someone else can make me feel, but self sacrifice. I watched as these 13 year old minds began to turn this around in their minds and all of a sudden they begin to discuss the other places in the book where this is present. The first one that came to mind was, obviously, Lily Potter sacrificing her life for Harry, which is something that gives strength and power to Harry throughout the entire series. We discussed that our empathy for Narcissa Malfoy begins when we see her begin to doubt Voldemort out of love for her son and ultimately chooses to risk her life in betrayal at the end of the series. And then there is sweet Dobby who sacrifices everything.

Love means sacrifice. Love means self-forgetfulness. And there is nothing better than hearing this from 8th graders, believed by many to be the most self centered age group in America.

Nostalgia as strength.

2012-01-28T13:42:00.000-05:00

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan was hailed by most critics last year and I'd been meaning to read it for a long time. It is a novel that is book ended by two main characters, Sasha and Bennie--in their relative youth and in their more middle age. In between is a series of chapters where these two characters are on the periphery somewhere and the chapter is focused on someone loosely connected to one of them.

As I was reading it, I found it a little kitschy and a a little hard to follow, feeling like I knew I'd have to reread it if I wanted to truly understand. After I finished the book, I read a bunch of reviews and most people described the chapters as more like short stories. Had I gone into the reading with that mindset, I think it would have been a different experience.

The part of the book that I loved, however, was when the narrator was Sasha's 11 year old daughter Alison, who told her story in a powerpoint journal. The future sections of the book all showed technology gone incredibly annoying, but somehow this was a thought provoking blend of the visual and the written. A few of the things she mentioned particularly struck a chord with me and I found a bit of a kindred spirit in both of these female characters. This is, in part, a book about time, and these moments felt the least jaded and most hopeful to me.

The "What I'm Afraid Of" slide came after she had gone on the kind of long walk with her dad where the world seems incredibly far away. This is what she is thinking as she walks back to their house.

page 299

My heart hurt in a way I can't describe when I read this. I remember having moments like this when I was little, but not having a way to express it: feeling, as a child that I would long for the moment I was standing in later as an adult, and feeling despair for the fact that it was impossible to hold on to it. Alison's voice as a character is different from the rest of the characters, possibly because she is youngest of all narrators, and possibly because what she imagines missing is so pure. The other narrators, when they are older, miss the teenage and young adult years: the freedom and the hope of what it yet to come.

"Mom's Art" slide is where Alison tries to explain the art that her mom, Sasha (who the reader meets at the beginning of the book as a 30 year old women in therapy for kleptomania):

"She uses found objects, they come from our house and our lives, she glues them onto boards and shellacs them, she says they're precious because they're casual and meaningless, but they tell the whole story if you really look."

This is an interesting fact to learn about Sasha: that she now "steals" objects that have no meaning to most people, but is able to find meaning in them, and that she seems able to create true meaning in her life. As a reader, writer and sometimes poet, I love small details that feel meaningless to most people, but have a story underneath. I think it's significant that Egan uses the word shellacs--it sounds a bit like a desperate push to save something, or, an artistic way to create and remember the details that get forgotten among louder, bolder ones.

I've found myself telling others recently that maybe New York has finally gotten to me because I have felt really cynical about a lot of things lately. This is not how I would ordinarily describe myself, so it has been interesting to find this creeping in on my psyche and seeing it play out in my life. Reading this section reminded me that I am both nostalgic and sentimental; and rather than seeing those characteristics as sappy or weak, I think that they allow me to look at the big picture of beauty in life--and that is just what this part-time, temporary cynic needs.

in the company of those who struggle.

2012-01-21T14:26:00.000-05:00

I came across Mary Karr's book Lit after I read an article in New York Magazine about her, David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Jonathan Franzen. I had read all of the authors except for her and sought out to get a copy of The Liars Club. Then I found Lit, an incredibly written memoir based in Karr's alcohol abuse, the dissolution of her marriage and recovery, on a brownstone's stoop and decided that would work. I later found out that a few friends of mine had recently read and loved it, so I moved it to the top of my "to read" stack.

{I've learned that sometimes I love to share the story of how I stumbled upon a story. Thanks for indulging me.}

There are a few parts from Lit that I haven't stopped thinking about. One was that her recovery and redemption came in the company of those who struggled, too. Karr found herself in AA with a mix of every kind of person imaginable, none of whom she would have sought out on her own. The friends she made there were from across the social spectrum, people whose paths would have never crossed otherwise. And yet, they became a lifeline for one another because they deeply understood that struggle is best endured together. No one lives immune to hurt--and that means that each of us has something in common with every person we meet.

I would not normally call myself a cynic, but in the winter it happens from time to time. For some reason that was the space my mind was inhabiting in the week I was reading this book: not in response to the book, but just in response to life. I often get frustrated at the instagram-portrayed life. Don't get me wrong, I think small moments of life's poetry are worth sharing, but sometimes it is easy to start thinking that everyone around has a perfectly curated life. I know this theory is false. Or, I start soaking in cynicism about the self promotion social media induces. I've found that when I remember that I am always in (and a part of) the company of those who struggle, my heart seems to grow in compassion.

I am always trying to teach my students that books make us better people because we learn to empathize with almost any character once we understand the ins and outs of his or her story. Sometimes the teacher needs to remember this, too.

I also didn't realize just how much spirituality was a part of Karr's journey, and when added to a life rich in real community, a portrait of how beautiful--and simple--life can be rose before me.

"Therapy rescued me in my twenties by taking me inward, leaching off pockets of poison in my head left over from the past. But the spiritual lens--even just the nightly gratitude list and going over each day's actions--is starting to rewrite the story of my life in the present, and I begin to feel like somebody snatched out of the fire, salvaged, saved," (304).

I really can't add much to her words, except that by allowing herself to consider, and ultimately accept, the way faith, not religious duty, could change a life, her life and mental landscape began to change. Sometimes I forget this--and reading Karr's story became one of the brightest reminders of my winter--and my own cold weather induced cynicism and anger has begun to slip away.

truth.

2012-01-21T13:30:00.003-05:00

I'm fractured
In the fall
and I want to go home

from Two by Ryan Adams

The kind of literary spirit I love.

2012-01-21T13:29:00.002-05:00

"Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow someone's head off," (59).
from Lit by Mary Karr

This year's winter.

2012-01-08T14:29:00.001-05:00

First, I have been in discussion with one of my best friends who also happens to be a teacher about how we always think of the "new year" starting in September. We realized that the main way we identify ourselves is through our job, which in many ways is great: teaching English combines so many of my passions. It is generally hard for me to do a year reflection, because since I've never left the school calendar since infancy, January to me is the end of the first semester...the half way point. It feels strange to think about 2011 because I had two different groups of students. I had two different curriculum plans. But. This is only if I look at my life solely through my profession.

Second, I caught myself spreading my winter blues this morning. I've written before about my how my college roommate and I diagnosed me with Seasonal Affective Disorder online in 2001 and about how spring-forward is my favorite day of the year. I've probably even written about how I blame the school calendars of my youth who had flowers decorating the month of March (obviously made by a southerner) for the way my heart starts to get prematurely hopeful for warmer weather. However, my personal-not-job-related goal for 2012 (the first fourth of it, anyway) is to have a better attitude about the winter. There. I said it. Please, if you see me, remind me of this.

Another dear friend sent me an essay from a book called Let Your Life Speak many winters ago about living through the seasons as a polite way of telling me to get a better attitude. I return to it every year. It tells me: "Winter is a demanding season...and yet the rigors are accompanied by gifts: ...times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things...One gift of utter clarity as in winter, one can walk into woods that had been opaque and see the trees clearly...Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being." Another friend of mine moved to San Diego from New York and told me that perfection can breed complacency.

So, I would like to live thankfully and intentionally this winter. I realized the other day that I never posted about Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids (which would have definitely made it onto the Top Ten). I reread my notes inside and what I found has a direct correlation with how I want to live in this cold season:

"...it was the work in a hall devoted to Picasso...that pierced me the most. His brutal confidence took my breath away." (11) "I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself...Picasso didn't crawl in a shell when his beloved Basque country was bombed. He reacted by creating a masterpiece in Guernica to remind us of the injustices committed against his people. When I had extra money I'd go to the Museum of Modern Art and sit before Guernica, spending long hours considering the fallen horse and the eye of the bulb shining over the sad spoils of war. Then I'd get back to work." (65)

"But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings could create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not." (11)

"He [Robert Maplethorpe] contained, even at an early age, a stirring and the desire to stir," (13)

I want to stare winter down. If it makes me angry, I want to do let that anger inspire writing. Or to fight against it with dinner parties. Or crawling out of my hole and stepping outside for a run with my friends and then feel as though I have thoroughly kicked it in the rear. I want it to inspire me to actually live rather than hunkering down with Netflix instant streaming. I want to sense a stirring and stir.

Unbroken.

2012-01-07T12:21:00.002-05:00

So many people have recommended Unbroken, the life story of Louie Zamperini--Olympic runner and Air Force bomber and POW in the Pacific during World War Two, by Laura Hillenbrand to me over the past few months. It worked out perfectly that my mom had recently read it, so I curled up for many hours of my visit home for Christmas in front of the fireplace with it . I love history, but realized that my knowledge of the Pacific front of the war was incredibly small, which is sad to me because my grandfather was on the Underwater Demolition Team, the precursor to the Navy SEALS, in Japan. Hillenbrand's book provided a well researched overview of what went on and some of the facts I learned in the book shocked me. The narrative arch in the book, though, took my breath away.

I wrote my last post about my struggle in thinking about the lost in war, and this one I realized is one about the survivors. It still leaves me thinking: at what cost will humans ever stop? I cannot imagine surviving through what these men faced as prisoners. It was impossible for me to read this story without feeling sick to my stomach about the complaints that arise about my own life circumstances. What stood out to me the most in reading this book is the incredible fortitude of the human spirit. It saddens me that this phrase might sound cliched, because if I look at the hardships people have faced faced throughout history and the fact that they have survived--be it a global war or a personal one--is truly miraculous. And in the case of surviving the war, making it home was only half of the battle:

"The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were a torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man's vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended the knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized. Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn't understand...Coming home was an experience of profound, perilous aloneness. For these men, the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness. There was no one right way to peace; every man had to find his own path, according to his own history. Some succeeded. For others, the war would never really end," (349).

In my city there are times that it feels like a superficial quest for outward beauty: to maintain the posture that every aspect of one's life is meticulously curated. But, as most New Yorkers know, there is beauty in the broken and in the faces that no fashion magazine would ever run. There is beauty to be found in the mess and in the trying.

In my last post, I wrote about how wars are often fought for freedom of some sort, and that for the opposing forces there seems nothing left to do but to obliterate the other side. It seems to me as though this can stand for a metaphor for living--for those who can't escape the messiness of being human, anyway. It feels as though my reading life is bleeding one book into the next, because I am about to finish Lit by Mary Karr, which is the story of her battle with alcoholism--finding freedom and everyday fighting against the blackness. I can't help but think about how she needed to find her way to peace. I just saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (one of my favorite books) and was broken watching Oskar, the 11 year old main character who lost his father on 9/11, struggle and fight through his pain, in a way different from everyone else around him.

My students often complain about why they have to learn something that they think they will never have to use. I have set answers for every subject area, but my one for social studies is always that I think that the best president, and any kind of leader for that matter, will always be the one who not only looks anxiously into the future, but one who is able to look back into the past--understanding both the macro and micro horrors and hardships. For it is understanding--and experiencing--struggle that enables us to live and lead in a just, compassionate way. Louie Zamperini's story was a reminder to me of many things, but the most heavy one to me was to know the stories that make up our collective past: to learn what others have been through and to let that lead me into a life of greater compassion and understanding--as well as hope for the moments when I find myself fighting a battle that seems greater than myself. The incredible part about it, to me, was that this was not a work of fiction--but rather, a demonstration of the patterns that great works of fiction try to portray.

War and letters and stories.

2012-01-03T19:09:00.000-05:00

I had a rough start with For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. As his is typical style, it was written in a matter of fact, moment by moment description, in this case mostly from the voice of Robert Jordan, an American fighting with the revolutionary guerillas in the Spanish Civil War. But, Hemingway accomplished his goal and while reading it I felt like I was there with him, moment by moment, which is probably also the reason why I never made it past 3-5 pages when reading it before bed and why it took multiple in-flight reading swathes of time and my break from school to finish.

About two thirds of the way through, Jordan spends time reading the letters found in the pockets of a dead opposing cavalryman, which spurs on one of the longest inner conversations that the reader hears in the story. The entire account is fascinating, and is Jordan thinking about who and why he has killed. Here are a few excerpts:

"You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself," (302)...

"How many of those you have killed have been real fascists? Very few. But they are all the enemy to whose force we are opposing force," (304).

"Listen, he told himself. You better cut this out. This is very bad for you and your work," (304).

I would argue, and actually don't think it's that controversial of a theory, that the reading of his dead enemy's letters were what brought on his mental struggle with the death that accompanies war. What I find interesting about this, though, is that it comes back to the core of my own beliefs: once you know someone's personal story, even the bits of daily minutia detailed in letters Jordan read, it is near impossible to view them in the same way.

I struggle with war because whenever I read about it. I am constantly thinking about the lives of the lost--on either side--and generally it is the daily minutia that destroys me. The first time I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., it was the displays of the personal effects those sent to concentration camps gave up: the piles of brushes and razors, the pile of shoes.

This is what creates empathy in literature and I why I plead with people to read...and write. To me, reading is the great metaphor for understanding humanity and a reminder for me to remember that everyone in front of me has a story--whether it's a student who is driving me crazy, the driver who is honking at me to walk faster through a crosswalk, a stranger I pass on a run.

The interesting part of this excerpt from the book, though, is that Jordan says that thinking in this vein is very bad for his work--which is true. To fight for his cause in this context, personalizing the enemy would lead to failure. He talks himself through the fact that he must do what he is doing to create a better world for the future: and yet, there are people fighting on the other side who believe the same thing, whether it is war on a national level or between two people. And sometimes, looking back, there is a clear, right side. Sometimes there isn't.

I wonder a lot about the fact that throughout history, it has come down to fighting to achieve freedom. I wonder a lot about what this says about us as people. I wonder about what would create a world (or nation or state or city or home) without violence. I don't think it's possible to live without conflict, but I wonder what it would take to teach us to handle it differently. Over the next week or so, I'm going to be writing about it as many of my recent reads have been about war, both fiction and non fiction, adult and young adult. I have no answers and it only gets more complicated, but reading and writing is the only way for me to work through it all.

so 2012 began in the best city in the world with a best friend, laughter and books. This is a good sign, I think.

2012-01-01T15:11:00.002-05:00

front cover.

I've worked in Brooklyn for over seven years and lived here for almost four. I love this borough. A lot. But, there are times when I miss living in Manhattan. They usually happen when I'm leaving one of my best friend's apartments on the Upper West Side and I'm walking south on Central Park West with the park to my left and the lights of midtown ahead of me. Said friend and I had what others (and who are we kidding, ourselves) might initially call a lame New Years, but laughing for hours is never lame. And, lucky for me the laughing didn't end when I left her apartment at 1 am by myself. Like I said, there is something about this city that makes me feel so grateful that I know it like the back of my hand. Walking by myself on New Year's was almost poetic, observing the city silently with a smile, loving it and the great friends I have here.

You might be wondering now why I'm writing about this on my blog about books. Because when I rode the subway up to my friend's apartment I was reading Lit by Mary Karr, which I'm pretty excited about, but let's be honest. It was New Year's Eve, and even though I was wearing a shiny shirt underneath my coat, I probably looked like a killjoy, incapable of smiling as I read a memoir about alcoholism (even though I had read 40 pages and felt accomplished, like my old reading self again, since it took me 5 weeks to read my last book).

So, one of the shining moments of my New Year's Eve was when I walked into my friend's apartment and we exchanged books--I brought her my copy of Tina Fey's Bossypants and she handed me her copy of Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) and we stood there silently reading the introductions, totally engrossed, and became conscious of how lame we probably looked. Then we realized we didn't care and sat there and read all night. Just kidding. We didn't do that. We sat there and laughed all night. And for this year, I can't imagine a better way to spend New Year's Eve.

back cover. can't stop laughing.

So, back to New York being poetic and riding the subway alone on the biggest party night in town. I started Kaling's book and could not stop laughing all the way home. It could have been a sad little moment, given that I was wearing jeans and flats while surrounded by glamorous, high heeled party-goers, but I was just too thankful for what I did have and for the laugh out loud humor and perspective of the book. In a town where sometimes I feel like I'm a little too midwestern, it was so refreshing to read Kaling's not-typically-Hollywood perspective.

Then I stayed up until 3 reading. Then I woke up and finished it this morning. So all that to say, I had a great New Year's and you should immediately go out and buy this book. No, seriously.

Reading Year in Review and Top Ten Books of 2011.

2011-12-26T10:38:00.001-05:00

My blog is about to celebrate its 5th anniversary next month. I wrote my first post on January 6th, 2007, partly to slow down and think about what I was reading again and partly in an effort to get more comfortable with sharing my writing in a "public" space (I would like to thank my 4 loyal readers at this time: Mom, Dad, Alison Covey, Kendra Bloom). Every year when I'm home for Christmas I read every post I wrote over the year and choose the top ten best books I've read.

Usually, it takes me many hours to reread my blog posts for the year. As I read, I take notes and end up with a list at least 20 contenders for the coveted top ten. I have to do some serious thinking and rereading of posts to decide which books had the biggest impact on my thought life--and then spend some serious time laughing about the nerdy ways I spend my time. This year was not so difficult. Sadly, I don't think I can attribute that to any increased coolness to my life, but I do think I have a few answers/self justifications for the reasons why this year I had only 23 posts (2008 holds the all-time high of 97):

The spring was filled with YA books that enriched my teaching life and a side project I'm working on, but weren't necessarily significant enough for me to subject my loyal readers (see above) to.

The summer, normally the two months that I read the highest number of books, was filled with Infinite Jest, a book that I felt I needed to finish before I posted anything about it. (Then, the fall happened and I still have 5 additional posts about Infinite Jest sitting in my drafts.)

This fall, I got caught up reading books for and with my students. Many of my Saturday mornings, normally my drink-a-hot-beverage-and-write-about-my-reading time, were filled with training for my half marathon. Also, my book club choice was For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, which is not a read-before-you-fall-asleep kind of book: I would make it literally 3 pages and fall asleep. I'm finally about to finish it, which I owe to traveling 3 out of the last 5 weekends on U.S. Airways, who does not offer in-flight television.

All that to say, it is interesting to look back on a year through the lens of reading. I am nerdily excited for what 2012 will bring in my reading life...and the reflections that accompany good books. As for the Top Ten, I have to credit Margaret, who is the sole other member of my book club, because six of our choices made the top ten list this year. So, in no particular order:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham/Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (rereads)
These books have to be paired together and were two of the most thought provoking reads of the year.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
This book received an insane amount of press when it was published last year. Overall, especially because my book club read read The Corrections first, I throughly enjoyed getting inside the mind of Franzen.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteygart
Not especially well written, but it definitely was the instigator of many great conversations and some science-fiction/technology induced nightmares.

Beloved by Toni Morrison
I think this was the most historically significant, jarring book that I read this year, and combined with its lyrical prose, it left me speechless.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Short. Beautiful. Inspiring.

Bossypants by Tina Fey
The most enjoyable book of the year.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Harder than my book club's run with the Russians a few years ago and encompassing almost all of my summer, this book was well worth it.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller (reread)
This book was a non-fiction, good reminder of all things I love about story and life.

The Summer Book by Tove Janssen(reread)
This book has become one of my yearly rereads and I've written about it a few times. I spend the quiet, early summer mornings I have at my parents' house on their screened in porch reading just a chapter or two a day so that I can savor and soak in it during my entire visit. This year it was my respite from Infinite Jest, to make sure that reading was not only speaking into the my academically-minded side of my brain, but also my soul.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
I read the first book of this series as soon as it came out, on recommendation of our Teachers College professional developer. I never finished the series because I felt like I knew enough to talk about it with kids and had so many other books to read. However, after the Epic-Literary-Reread book club on Harry Potter with my students last year, I thought that it would be cool to do the same thing with The Hunger Games this year. I read these books in about a week and was amazed to see all of the entry points for young readers to have uber literary conversations. I have also been amazed at how many of my adult friends have been reading the series and are eager to discuss. A post-movie discussion party is in the works.

Cheers to reading and a 2012 filled with more writing about it!

you have probably read this by now.

2011-11-11T13:02:00.001-05:00

One of the best things in my life is that I have so many friends who consider Liz Lemon a kindred spirit. Tina Fey has been one of my favorite people to watch over the past few years and her brand of feminism and brains is incredibly refreshing. I can't believe that I never wrote about Bossypants after I read it in May (though I counted and I have over 15 unpublished drafts on my blog). Rather than write too much about it, I just wanted to say read it. Everyone.

Below is one of my favorite passages.

"But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes."

Forever/Pete Hamill

2011-10-29T14:30:00.002-04:00

My book club recently finished Forever by Pete Hamill. I was completely taken by the opening parts of the book where the main character, Cormac, is a boy in Ireland in the early 1700s and finds that his family has been pretending to Protestant, and that his mother is Jewish and that his father is Irish--as in following the religion of the Celtic past. The mythology and magic of him discovering this reminded me of how much I love reading of magical lore and suspending my disbelief.

The story took a turn after his mother is accidentally killed and his father outright murdered by the same man, and according to the Celtic law, he must pursue the killer and end his line. This brings him to New York City, where he meets another mystical character who grants him immortality as long as he doesn't leave the island of Manhattan. His adventures then take the reader through the history of New York, and though I found myself not loving the plot from this point on, reading about how New York has evolved never gets old to me. Its history is far from the picturesque village and it never ceases to amaze me that such a dirty city with so many functionality problems has become what it is today.

Despite my lack of plot excitement, one part that got me thinking was when Cormac is describing how he dealt with the gift and burden of having all the time in the world. As mortals with a life span of under 100 years, there is a spirit within us calling us to cherish the time we have. Life choices can be heart-wrenching because we merely don't have the time to pursue everything we want to do, and there always seems to be a sense of urgency. Cormac, though, described a mental state of "sludge made up of age, memory, repetition and banality" that his brain had to deal with, precisely because he did have the time to pursue everything.

"Then while trying to learn Goethe, he discovered something about himself. When he entered another language, when he tried to absorb its rules, its nounds and verbs, and above all, its rhythms, the sludge in his brain began breaking up...his mind became swifter, his visions more glittering...Learning to paint was learning to live. The same was true of the piano..." (393-393).

Even though we often live with a sense of urgency, the urgency often feels misplaced. Rushing through tasks that should be done with more care, rushing through dinner or coffee with the person we are across from so that we can get to the next meeting, only to come home and crash. This is my equivalent of brain sludge. I live in the tension of needing to crash because my days feel so packed--and watching television or a movie seems like the best way to check out of the harried mental state I carry most of the time. This, though, feels like a false rest--I don't feel fulfilled. (But let's be honest, sometimes watching four episodes of Friday Night Lights is life giving.)

True rest would be a soul and mind filled. True rest is not seeing the pursuit of my passions as a task, as I often do at the end of a work day. Learning better Spanish and writing and cooking and having people over seem like better ways to live well.

Some words. Not mine.

2011-09-29T15:10:00.001-04:00

It's all I have to bring to-day
This, and my heart beside,
This, and my heart and all the fields,
And all the meadows wide.

Emily Dickinson, C. 1858

Beyond the books: reading my city and the long runs; the blinking cursor and the old testament.

2011-09-29T14:41:00.000-04:00

on a San Diego Porch. also awaiting baby Reed's arrival.

Some thoughts that have been swirling. They may or may not form a coherent thread of thought to anyone else but me, so maybe read each paragraph as a singular thought?

One of the best parts of my summer was sitting in a San Diego coffee shop with two of my best friends and letting our focus stray from the laptops in front of us. Often we talk about stories that move us and inspire us--this particular trip seemed to focus on the beauty that is Friday Night Lights. Conversation strayed and Sarah mentioned that she was currently loving unsatisfying things, and that she was feeling violent toward stories that portrayed a neatly packaged ending. This was a hilarious comment, because Sarah appears to be cool and collected on the outside. But those at the table know and love that she has a fiery spirit beneath the surface and a wisdom that spouts from it. So, I wasn't surprised that those words have been sitting with me ever since.

On the way home, I wondered out loud why we didn't all live in San Diego. It really is a city of summer in the day and fall at night--in other words, perfection. Then Katy, a fellow winter-hater and former New Yorker, began to to sing praises of coming-of-adult-age in the dark-at-five, hunched shoulders of New York City from January to March and the days when you miss every train and forget your umbrella for the wintry mix with an armful of groceries (and a laptop in your bag). Perfection is a maker of complacency. There is no atmospheric struggle in San Diego--and that, she says, makes for a city without the raw passion and blunt emotions. Obviously this is a metaphor.

I threw away my half-marathon training calendar yesterday and counted that I ran 200 miles to prepare for a 13 mile race. And the race was amazing. In my mind all summer I kept picturing it being a 13 mile physical and mental struggle--something to simply be endured in order to cross the finish line. But the course was mostly running on a two lane road through the back streets of East Hampton, through woods and past fields and the bay. The entire course was beautiful and reminded me of running at my favorite park in Ohio. The running (with the exception of the last mile) was surprisingly enjoyable.

And so I want to set off to face the writing on the wall. Literally. I made a visual of my writing project on the wall of my apartment to wrap my brain around it and also to motivate me to finish it. I've found that when there is something I need to say in writing, I'm not settled until it has been typed. I want to lean into the unsatisfaction, as Sarah would say and the struggle, as Katy would say. I want to write in the moments when it would be easier to not. I don't want to live in a season of complacency. I want to remember that putting time into the struggle yields enjoyment.

And, also. I want this to sink into my spiritual life. A friend came and shared with my (Christian) small group last night about the significance of Rosh Hashanah and also talked about the tradition of Tashlikh, where people throw bread crumbs or stones into moving water as a symbolic casting off of sin and struggle and becoming renewed. This is beautifully symbolic. The struggle is not forever.

Infinite Jest and Advertising. Or, real goods are intangible.

2011-09-29T12:17:00.000-04:00

Infinite Jest is the kind of book that has to be read slowly because not only are there sweeping themes and ideas to keep track of, but there are short passages and lines that speak volumes into American culture. While I was reading, it was easy to gloss over those small details without considering them in a significant way. I want to slow down with a few. Here is one.

"V&V's NoCoat campaign was a case study in the eschatology of emotional appeals...It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relieveable by purchase. It just did it way more well than wisely," (414).

It comes in a section where Hal, one of the main characters and a junior at the Tennis Academy, is "sinking emotionally into a kind of distracted funk." In what appears to be almost a complete aside with the connection only being that Hal once wrote a paper on the American ad industry, the narrator explains the atmosphere of advertising (as the book is set in the near-ish future). This particular ad was from a company that created a nation-wide need for tongue scrapers: "when the nation became obsessed with the state of its tongue, when people would no sooner leave home without a tongue scraper and an emergency back-up tongue scraper than they'd fail to wash and brush and spray."

A. This is hilarious,
B. but DFW's sense of humor is not what I want to write about, though maybe over coffee some time?

His tone and manner of addressing the absurdity of such aspects and culture is so nonchalant and un-ironic (and reminds me of his essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again)--as though he is pointing out the obvious. Yet, it is obvious only in the subconscious that we hardly ever bring out to play, because life is easier when we don't listen to it.

How did it happen that we know our next purchase will not satisfy anything within us and yet we continue to believe and act on the hope that it will? Why is it easier to believe and act on the promises in advertising than it is in the life truths we claim to profess? What is going on in our brains when we feel great after buying something new? Why is retail therapy a thing? That people joke about?

We are ridiculous.

I want to drink from a well of Life.

Infinite Jest: a very general response to a very specific novel.

2011-09-05T13:13:00.000-04:00

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

I read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace from June 1st-August 8th this summer, with just a 3 day break to read My Name is Asher Lev and a chapter each morning on the porch of The Summer Book while I was in Kentucky. I reread Anne of Avonlea right after to let my brain recover/not commit to anything super literary while trying to unpack this brick of a book (that I am thankful to never have to carry in my purse ever again). All that to say, my summer reading looked very different from my usual devouring of books. It was as if I were in a committed dating relationship with Infinite Jest. I was talking with a colleague before school ended whose boyfriend had read the book and when he was half way through said: "Oh, I get it. The infinite jest is that I am still reading this book." There were many times I felt the same way.

The main conclusion that I came to after finishing its 981 pages of tiny type narrative and 96 pages of even smaller type footnotes is that it is the kind of book that needs to be read twice. (Crap.) Though I'm sure there are geniuses out there who could keep track of all the characters connections (see poster below by Sam Potts) and narrative threads (see digram below by in their minds while reading, but I was not one of them. I've probably spent 5 or 6 hours so far researching the book and reading essays and taking notes with post it flags and feel like my understanding is still shallow at best. I can retell the basic plot lines, but the craft that went into this book is like nothing I have ever seen and there is a part of me that is itching to start over and read it with a much deeper understanding. Chances of that happening in the near future, though, are slim to none. I wish I could take a graduate school course on this book with a brilliant but not condescending instructor.

created by Sam Potts

created by jonny.snsy.de

What I loved about this book is exactly what makes it so difficult to read: its intricacy and its depth--it is an artistic, critical work that forces the reader to be active: to ask questions, to do the mental gymnastics it requires, to step up and work hard to figure out what on earth is going on even when there will not be a definitive answer. He address things from the nature of entertainment to the consumerist nature of the United States to depression to personal drive to personal recovery. There is no way that I could address the book as a whole in a single blog post. The retell alone would be absurd--and it is almost as if each piece of the puzzle that is Infinite Jest needs to be singularly treated and then juxtaposed with every other piece. I start back at work tomorrow, so obviously that's not going to happen. What I've decided to do is respond to a few pieces of the book that I think are relevant to everyone, without giving a lot of context. The book is filled with fleeting conversations and observations that the reader could ruminate on and discuss for hours--which is overwhelming in such an enormous book. But taken in very small chunks could be fodder for your next cocktail party conversation. People have those, right?

My Name is Asher Lev. To wrestle and become .

2011-09-02T14:01:00.002-04:00

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com
My Name is Asher Lev opens with these lines from the adult voice of the title's namesake whom the reader meets as a child and watches grow up: I am an observant Jew. Yes, of course, observant Jews do not paint crucifixions. As a matter of fact, observant Jews do not paint at all--in the way that I am painting. So strong words are being written and spoken about me, myths are being generated: I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflictor of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years. Well, I am none of those things. And yet, in all honesty, I confess that my accusers are not altogether wrong: I am indeed, in some way, all of those things. Reading these words over again after finishing the book was a powerful testament on the process of not only becoming oneself, but the complexity and pain that can accompany the journey.

This book by Chaim Potok is the story of a boy, Asher, who is an observant Jew and an artist and his struggle to identify as each--as the story progresses, so does the tension between art/religion and tradition/individualism. What I thought about the most while reading is that these hard questions of identity--and the confidence that one can embrace--come through struggle and leaning into, instead of running away from, tension. Because there was so much to consider in this book (and I couldn't bring myself to edit it down to a specific one), I ultimately decided to name some of the tensions that Asher had to face in his coming of age and identity formation, which I think are relevant and challenging to almost everyone. After all, I think coming of age is more like a lifelong coil shape rather than a plateau that one reaches.

Being educated before taking action.

Asher's mentor, Jacob Kahn, trains him in the history of art and tells him "Only one who has mastered a tradition has the right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it," (213). His mentor is speaking about art, but this can also be interpreted for Asher through his religion. Because he has been schooled in his religious culture, as he comes of age he both adds to it and rebels against it. Modern culture is one of instant knowledge and a desire of instant acquisition. Slowing down to understand and develop is worth it.

The fear in being completely honest with those around you.
Kahn believes that Asher must show a representative of all of his work at his first show. Asher struggles with this because he knows that people of his culture will not understand the inclusion (let alone creation) of some of his work: "We will show the two nudes, Asher Lev. They are important to your development. We are not playing games. You will enter in truth or you will not enter at all," (287). Especially in the age of social media it is easy to craft, curate and control the way others view your life. The art show becomes symbolic of opening up one's life for public viewing, which can be painful but freeing.

Deciding whether you share or squelch what you long to say.
"Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way," (212). Asher could have remained a boy who had a sketchpad or drew nice little pictures for decoration. But he felt too much. It would have been easy to go to school, do his homework, his chores and create a life that was too preoccupied for his art. But. He chose to let the scream out.

It is always easier to stay comfortable and safe.
"It is my intention to frighten him out of his wits. I want him to go back to Brooklyn and remain a nice Jewish boy. What does he need this for, Anna?" he said (213). For those who have ambitions of any kind, and like I wrote about a few weeks ago, there will always be other things to do to keep busy and keep you away from the work required to share your voice.

Wrestle with the truth.
"I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world really is...in art cowardice and indecision can be seen in every stroke of the brush...paint the truth or you will paint green rot," (226). Kahn didn't live a life of complete darkness. There are some scenes where he is beautifully alive. What I love about him, though, is that he let himself feel and share and question. Watching Asher wrestle through what he believes to be real and true is refreshing to me.

Maintain a sense of self.
"It pleases me that you have chosen not to abandon things that are meaningful to you. I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubt and my fears. And my art." (260) This is one of my favorite parts from Kahn. It takes courage to to pursue an art and yet to maintain and individual sense of identity or conviction that most others in the field don't share.

To close, I love that this book is titled My Name is Asher Lev. Asher repeats this throughout the story in a way that seems to function as a chorus of sorts--a reminder that he is an individual with an individual story and heart and identity. Perhaps my heart melts over this because I teach middle school and watch so many students just want to fit in, or perhaps because I don't always get to see the outcome of the beginnings of the wrestling. I suppose I just hope that they wrestle well and have courage and know that they can solidly land down the road.

We tipped over the half way point for august. I'm slowly turning my brain on again.

2011-08-19T12:30:00.001-04:00

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I have not written on my blog since June. I have a list of six blog posts in note form that haven't been fleshed out yet. Sometimes that is what summer needs to be--not the continual post its of to-do lists. And now that I am looking at the tail end of August I find myself wanting to process through what this summer was and I'm starting to crave the structure of fall and the mental comfort of post its. I thought it would be low key and in many respects it has been. But then I reread A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller and realized that my summer has been filled with challenge--in a good kind of way. It kind of snuck up on me, though.

Miller's book came out of what he learned in the process when two guys wanted to turn his book Blue Like Jazz into a movie. He studied what I call in my classroom the "mountain of action" of a story--exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution and came to the conclusion that people can write better stories for themselves--and the book chronicles his attempt at writing a better one for himself.
One of his insights that stuck out to me the most was when he said: "Part of me wonders if our stories aren't being stolen by the easy life," (186). If the end goal of existence is comfort, then there hasn't been the tension and the challenge and the pain that make a good story worth reading. I realized as I was reading that this was a lot of my thinking behind a lot of my pursuits this summer--I got scared that I was getting into patterns in my life that were too easy.

I think it started back in May when my book club decided we were going to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, all 1079 pages of its tiny print. We wanted something that would be difficult, something that would make us feel accomplished, something that we probably wouldn't be able to get through on our own. I used post it notes to set small goals for every 70 pages, which was my weekly goal. I usually read a book a week and this one took me from June 1st-August 8th. My feeling of accomplishment waned a little bit when I closed the book and realized that I had a lot of rereading and research to do to make sense of it all. But. I'm also the kind of nerd who has been enjoying that process.

Physically, I am half way through training for a half marathon in September. Even though I've almost always been active, I've never been a strong athlete. I realized that a large part of my life is doing what I want when I want it, and even though this is rather luxurious, I was pretty sure that wasn't the kind of life I wanted to pursue. The discipline of getting up and out to run almost every morning and pushing through when I'd rather stop has kicked me in the ass all summer, but in a good way. I wanted to seek out a big goal that would be difficult (which I have to repeat to myself while running up that cursed gradual hill in Prospect Park). I'm hoping that this becomes a metaphor for other aspects of life, especially the part about the process, as I'm sure I will not be breaking any records with my race time.

Mentally, I'm trying to be committed to a larger writing project that I have been dreaming about for over a year. I started it last summer and then put it away for the year. Apparently, it's much easier to watch Netflix Instant for a few hours than it is to sit down, think and write. I've had my fair share of days where my ideas seem too jumbled and I feel stuck. In fact, that's where I am now. But. I'm hoping that I won't give it up just because it is easier to sit on the couch with a book or my laptop or because it is more fun to make plans with friends every night.

Spiritually, I have been thinking about a life well lived. I lost my grandma about a month ago. As I shared that with people, the words that kept coming out of my mouth were that she lived a tremendous 95 years of life. I love the ridiculous stories that my aunts and uncles and dad share about her from growing up. I love remembering how her stories commanded a room and my cousins and I would just be in awe listening to them. I love thinking about the gallivanting she did well into her 80s with her sister. I love that she watched The OC in her 90s and loved the villainous Julie Cooper just as much as my cousins and I did. I also saw the sacrifices that many of my family members made for her at the end of her life to make sure that she was comfortable and surrounded by people who loved her. I can't help but think that though it was probably one of the most difficult things to do, it is also one of the most admirable. and that there is a huge connection between sacrifice out of love for others and a story well lived.

All that to say, I don't want to settle for an easier story. Miller also wrote: "Pain then, if one could have faith in something greater than himself, might be a path to experiencing a meaning beyond the false gratification of personal comfort," (196).

The only addendum or way to close this conversation about the notion of challenge is that it is so much more bearable when walked with friends and family. I have an ongoing conversation with two of my best friends about what the perfect place to live is. The only place we keep coming back to is anywhere, as long as we're neighbors with good people. The reading challenges get finished because I read them with a friend. Running becomes bearable because I have friends reminding me I can do it. Loss becomes lighter because there is a room full of people who loved the way you did.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

2011-06-18T14:33:00.001-04:00

I read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby in one sitting a few weeks ago, as I was left sitting in the wake of my family leaving town. After suffering a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome, he could only blink his left eye. He composed the book in his head and dictated it by blinking his eye, with the help of Claude Mendibil. Of course, much has been said in the history of words about taking goodness for granted, but the way that Bauby approached his memories without being able to do anything physical about them was astounding--and the very existence of this book--of producing a creative work in his condition is the ultimate story of triumph and the power of art.

I'm struggling about responding to this book under the umbrella of not taking life for granted, for that feels so trite. What saves me from this, I hope, is the depth of pain with which he wrote--this book is no "go get 'em, pursue your dreams, you can accomplish anything" story. It distills the goodness of human existence while enduring physical impossibilities and deep existential struggle. No matter how shallow my own wrestling seemed in comparison, this memoir made me want to live actively remembering what is real and good and true--a theme that keeps repeating itself to me in recent months.

Here are three of my favorite excerpts from the book that underline the way that I want to live--and the kinds of things that keep popping up in every meaningful conversation I've had in the past month.

Taking joy in and being thankful for small pleasures, rather than constantly looking forward to the next big item or trip that money can buy.
The delectable moment when I sink into the tub is quickly followed by nostalgia for the protracted immersions that were the joy of my previous life. Armed with a cup of tea or Scotch, a good book or a pile of newspapers, I would soak for hours, maneuvering the taps with my toes. Rarely do I feel my condition so cruelly as when I am recalling such pleasures.

Feeling deeply and not allowing busyness or struggle to make me feel numb.
I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours. But to keep my mind sharp, to avoid descending into resigned indifference, I maintain a level of resentment and anger, neither too much or too little, just as a pressure cooker has a safety valve to keep it from exploding.

Living life with good people.
Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark...I hoard these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.

Summer Reading: An Earlier-Than-Usual Start/A Relatively Un-planned Summer

2011-06-01T23:15:00.000-04:00

Generally, I am a planner. I remember dates. I use a calendar (albeit, I did switch to a digital one, mostly to avoid unnecessary clutter). For summer reading, I always have a plan. Granted, summer reading isn't that unlike my usual reading life, as I always have a book on hand. The only added bonus is more time, thanks to being employed by the NYC Department of Education. Anyway. My book club (read: me and my one friend) got ambitious and we are tackling Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace this summer. This is an undertaking that I want to take seriously, therefore I am not making a list longer than the following:

Infinite Jest/DFW
Bossypants/Tina Fey

Of course I have other hopes for my summer. Apparently Hamlet is a frequent allusion in Infinite Jest, so I may spend some time with Shakespeare. Or wikipedia. I'm also interested in A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I am craving some rereads: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (yes I just read it in the fall. And? The last movie is in July and I intend to make the most of the end of this era), The Summer Book and Anne of Green Gables. Other than that, I will see where the wind takes me. I'm sure there are many of you who are laughing at my planned un-plan. Sigh. It's a start. And the best part is that I'm starting my summer reading plan a month before my official summer starts, so it's like a bonus month!

I am curious: what are your most recent reading loves? I have some time and there is nothing better than a book well-recommended by a friend.

On leaving. Or, books as escapism.

2011-05-31T22:39:00.001-04:00

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It is impossible for me to not sink into some kind of melancholia when I leave my family--or especially when they leave me--for I am left with empty spaces and without the distractive hassle of a car ride or air travel that the ability to separate one from emotion more quickly than it decamps the ones who stay in newfound quiet.

My television-less studio apartment was our cramped base camp for multiple nights, a way of life quite different to us who tend to migrate to our own spaces to read or watch a game. And yet it seemed to work. For a weekend, anyway. My thoughts are now lingering on the meal that ended outside this time last night and my makeshift dinner of random leftovers this evening. Without fail, while growing up we came together for family dinner every night from our separate places--work, dance, baseball practice, which have been replaced by Louisville, Cleveland and Brooklyn.

The cool air of evening is impossible to ignore right now as is the fact that dusk can say more with its springtime light and its breeze than I ever could in words--of what it means to long for something. But what I'm longing for now doesn't have a name or a place because it is the memory of my dad calling to say he is on his way home and smell of dinner cooking each night and falling asleep in a full, safe house--the kind of memory that I was too young to be cognizant of while it was happening--combined with the permission to go and pursue and to dream. And I hate how those things--dreaming and being home--feel mutually exclusive right now.

So what else was I to do but sit down and get lost in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in its entirety tonight? Thoughts to follow.

To my students. With respect. This started as a mentor text on coming of age, but changed along the way. I'm not really sorry for that.

2011-05-23T21:23:00.001-04:00

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Today I made a new bulletin board in my classroom. I realize it is the end of May and that a month from yesterday the students I love will have cleaned out their lockers, left 8th grade behind, looking only toward the season of freedom and their new high schools, which, whether you hated or loved it, is generally smiled upon more than middle school. So. I want the last month in room 116 to matter.

Our unit is called "Reading and Writing Through Coming of Age" and everyone has to read a coming of age novel. Instead of doing book clubs, students can read a book of their choice and we are trying to notice patterns across the genre: what parts of coming of age are universal? What are personal? In the midst of sharing, I hope that students find something that resonates with what life feels like to them right now.

Today everyone had to bring in 2 quotes that spoke into their characters' coming of age experience in the first half of their book and I was blown away by what they found. I've been reading young adult fiction incessantly for the past month (Girl in Translation, Sweet Dates in Basra, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter, A Northern Light) and though they are all engaging books, I have not been inspired to write off of any of them, or the coming of age experience, which is also the reason behind my severe lack of posts recently. Until today.

I took about 25 of the quotes from 10-15 books that my students are reading and wrote them with permanent black marker on sheets of white paper. I hung them all across the bulletin board that stretches across the entire back wall of my room. All of a sudden it was reverse personification--I saw all of my students somewhere in the paper mess (well, let's be honest, the quotes are hanging orderly, but still) of complicated emotion--and then it became post modern, because I could almost trace their jumps from one quote to another at different times throughout the year. For instance:

"This was simply around the time my parents stopped understanding what I wanted and I stopped understanding what they wanted me to want." (Born Confused)

"Standing there, I loved and hated myself. It made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time." (The Secret Life of Bees)

"You still have a lot of time to make yourself into what you want." (The Outsiders)

"I told the waitress I'd been out all night 'looking for trouble.'" (Teen Angst...Nahh)

"I didn't answer him. I didn't feel like it." (Catcher in the Rye)

And I guess the reason that I wasn't connecting with any of the young adult books I was reading was because I wasn't picturing my students in them, because after listening to them read all their quotations and hearing their voices, I was tapped into their lives--albeit the slivers they allow to come out in English class, but it was as though the beauty of becoming and possibility was present. I'm not sure if they noticed it. But I did. And I'm absolutely sure that they will make fun of me for my waxing poetic about a day in class. But.

This week we talked about the first half--the pain, the confusion, the struggle. Next week we talk about the second half--the resolution, the growth, the wholeness, the strength. I. Love. Story. And I love to think about the people that these favorites are going to become and the stories they are going to be able to tell when they make it to the other side of growing up. But here are a few pictures of who they are right now. They are kind of endearing, right? You can read their writing at www.room116ela.blogspot.com.

My "Sold" bookclub with supplies they bought for Restore NYC's safehouse.

Mustache Monday. Obviously.

We take reading seriously.

Like I said, seriously.

My homeroom gets so excited to come back after lunch. Ha.

Sometimes we play paper football.

There aren't words for just how great this one is. Or how amazed I was to capture the single second that they weren't hysterically laughing after decorating my board so thoughtfully.

The Pain of Beloved.

2011-05-22T21:19:00.000-04:00

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"Anything dead coming back to life hurts," (42).

"Can't nothing heal without pain, you know," (92).

These quotes stayed with me throughout reading Beloved by Toni Morrison because at its core, it is a book about existential hurt, impossible choices and living with their ghosts and yet, it is about moving forward--and the story itself feels like a way to let the hauntings go.

I finished the book weeks ago and am still thinking about what a powerful, important, disturbing read it was. The plot centers around a former slave named Sethe who escapes to Cincinnati where her children are already living, giving birth to her fourth child along the way. Less than a year after her and her childrens' escape , she is in the backyard of the house she shares with her mother in law and sees a man from the plantation where she spent her life ready to call upon the Fugitive Slave Act. Sethe chooses to gather her four children and attempts to kill them, rather than allowing them to be brought back into slavery. Three of the four are spared. The bulk of the story is set over a decade later when her house is haunted by the child's ghost. Two people arrive: Paul D, a man who was also a slave on the plantation with Sethe, with whom she begins a relationship. For a time, he is able to scare the ghost away, but then a girl arrives who Sethe and her daughter Denver believe to be the incarnated ghost, which completely rocks and changes Sethe, forcing her to face her past decisions. The book is about the spiral of Sethe wrestling with her demons and the definition of love, of finding and losing herself.

As a reader, I couldn't discern if the ghost-girl was literal or figurative--and at different moments I think could be either. So I've been thinking about the questions Beloved poses in terms of healing: on both a personal and corporate level. It is much too heavy of a story to simply say that it ends with hope--it is a beautiful mess of a narrative that left me a wreck while reading it.

Sethe's turmoil through Morrison's writing feels weighty enough to be corporate. It is not just her story, it is the story of the psychological effects of slavery. On this level, I felt as though I had no place to judge Sethe for her choices--and how she chose to define the love she had for her children. Sethe writhes with her choice and it is impossible as a reader not to do so right along with her. It feels an impossible situation, where I can't decide if the healing of an entire nation after such an abomination on humanity or the healing of a single heart engulfed it it feels more difficult.

This is when I come back to the quotes I cited at the beginning, that came in the first third of the story and were spoken to Paul D, but shaped what I began to see as the purpose of the whole book: that Sethe had to wrestle with the pain and had to feel it deeply. There was no way to move forward without it. Paul D says to Sethe toward at the end, when Sethe is still is the ashes of her life: "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow." This seems so simple and almost trite, but only out of context. The poetry and pain of this story--individual pain of the characters and the pain of looking at our history of a nation-- echo for anyone who has felt the complicated brokenness of tragedy and the reluctance to even try to heal. What Morrison leaves the reader with is the idea that there is still life. There is still life.

The length of an hour. Or, hope, and finding it even when it feels far away..

2011-04-29T21:38:00.000-04:00

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(A note: Reading The Hours after Mrs. Dalloway was incredible. The research and allusion that went into Cunningham's book is tremendous, though it is incredibly thought provoking on its own as well.)

The Hours haunted me for days after reading it--mainly two of the ideas that Cunningham explores. First, each choice a person makes leaves a trail of missed opportunities behind him or her--lives that weren't lived. Almost all of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway consider the decisions they made--and what Cunningham does in his book is give those alternate stories life. It is through the alternate stories that the reader must face some inevitable truths.

For instance, in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa, feeling dissatisfied, daydreams about what life might have looked like if she had been able to choose her best friend Sally as a life partner instead of her husband Richard. In The Hours, we see that desire played out as the character of Clarissa is a modern woman in her fifties in New York City living with her partner of 18 years, Sally. Cunningham creates other nuances that continue the conversation Woolf started 77 years before--but there is meaning behind this even to people who haven't read either book: even when the characters are given the cultural freedom to pursue what they want, no one feels completely satisfied. In both novels, the characters tell themselves stories and imagine different lives for themselves to cope with the reality they are actually faced with.

It is easy to look back on missed opportunities poetically, imagining the happiness that might have been. But such is the illusion of fantasy: we are stuck in the real world with flawed people and to not address this is to not be honest with oneself. Such truth is burdensome to the reader throughout the entire book, whether it be in small, internal conflicts of the characters or tragic ends.

What seems to bridge that concept to any kind of hope at all, is Cunningham's address of hours themselves--not all hours carry the weight or are even the same symbolical length.

Richard, who is dying of AIDS, says: "But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick." As Clarissa is processing Richard's illness, remembering their summer-long relationship, perfect in each of their memories, as well as her current anxiety, she finds: "There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."

It is the small moments we wish we could have frozen in time that keep us moving forward--and become long as they are played over and over again in our minds, and the long monotonous hours that make us human...and I think, I think remind us that we are not made for a world with such brokenness because even if we make all the right choices, the longing remains. And that is when we, when I, must run for my life to hear a pedal steel and a banjo, or chase an urban sunset for good measure and a good reminding that there is abundant life to be had.

"Loneliness brings the best out of a reader."

2011-04-12T19:24:00.005-04:00

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I heard this wisdom today from a student. You can read more from Audrey Bachman HERE. You won't regret it.

... from The Hours by Michael Cunningham and suited for conversation, I think. I need to store them somewhere, though. and write about them someday, after I've talked to you. or, more reasons why story matters, because how else do you say it?

2011-04-11T21:19:00.001-04:00

Clarissa wants, suddenly, to show her whole life to Louis. She wants to tumble it out onto the floor at Louis' feet, all the vivid, pointless moments that can't be told as stories. She wants to sit with Louis and sift through it. (page 132)

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other. (page 98)

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. (page 97)

She has not spoken on his behalf but on Leonard's, in much the way her own mother might have made light of a servant's blunder during dinner, declaring for the sake of her husband and all others present that the shattered tureen portended nothing; that the circle of love and forbearance could not be broken; that all were safe. (page 74)

"There is a gulf between people that one must respect."

2011-04-02T13:28:00.002-04:00

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My book club recently read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, published in 1925 paired with The Hours, by Michael Cunningham, which is based on both Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

Both of these were rereads for me--I read Mrs. Dalloway for a British Literature class and later took a class on Virginia Woolf in college where we read 8 of her books in 8 weeks. That being said, sometimes reading old notes in the margins can be painful. My naive, 21 year old English-major self seems amateurish. Rereading Mrs. Dalloway was a lesson in how reading experiences change with life experience--and how amazing rereading can be.

This time around, what stood out to me the most was the idea that misunderstanding often comes from drawing conclusions about someone without knowing their true inner life. The reader finds that each of the characters is unsatisfied with life and filled with a sense of both guilt for feeling that way and longing to create a different kind of life.

I read this book as a story of what we see in others and what they see in us--and the fact that most of the time--when we are living in our own heads and not honestly communicating, we get it all wrong. Whether people become ideas as we either project onto them what we want to see or we fall into the danger of considering what other people want to see in us, thus presenting a false self to the world. Obviously, relational chaos ensues.

For example, Peter, who depite all efforts, is still in love with Clarissa thinks: "And, after all, she had married Dalloway, and lived with him in perfect happiness all these years" (155) and yet she is haunted for much of the book that she made the wrong choice in marrying her husband. Her presentation of self is confusing because she flirts with Peter because she doesn't know how not to, but spends her time remembering her mostly chaste relationship with her friend Sally and finds herself imagining what her life might have been if she chose differently.

Peter thinks he has it for a moment when of Clarissa he says: "So transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others..." (77). His idea is correct, but he completely misinterprets what he sees as transparent. Clarissa says of Peter: "He made her see herself; exaggerate. It was idiotic," (168). Clarissa is aware of this dance of self presentation and yet cannot step away. She says--and I think understands--that "there is a gulf between people that one must respect," (120)--that one can never truly understand another. Peter understands it, too: "It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels...but he could not bring himself to say he loved her, not in so many words," (116, 118).

The bottom line is that this book made me think so much about relationships and honesty--no one in this story really knew what the other was actually thinking--and no one wanted to tell anyone what they were truly thinking about, which creates an atmosphere of superficial conversation and relationships. Perhaps there is a certain safety in keeping such thoughts to oneself? I think the regret that the characters show reveal to the reader that it is better to live honestly in the present with themselves and others, but with exposure comes vulnerability. This is a trade off the characters weren't willing to accept. It was more comfortable to live with the gulf than attempt to close it. I'm left thinking about the kinds of gulfs that exist, what causes them and which ones are worth crossing.

My ideas don't fit into a single blog post.

All of this can lead to an existential downward spiral to a life in the what-might-have-been and filled with permanent discontent. Each of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway told themselves stories to cope with the lives they chose not to live--which is interestingly exactly what Cunningham picked up on and addressed in The Hours, thoughts forthcoming.

Super Sad True Love Story and Science Fiction Nightmares

2011-03-06T14:17:00.000-05:00

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart is written in the near-ish future--it has a bit of a 1984 feel, in that while reading, it is easy to become convinced that this could very well be the future. Set in a New York City on the verge of political and military chaos, the smart phone has been replaced with an apparat--a device that people wear and use to scan one another and instantly not only receive data about each other, but to be ranked among whoever they are surrounded by. The society is so driven by this technology that people no longer read, they scan. Books are completely obsolete. Some of the setting details are overly satiric, like the fact that people and children love porn stars instead of movie stars and that "onion skin" (or see through) jeans are the pants of choice; but other aspects completely jolted me as they seemed a bit too real.

Within the book there is a love story between two people who are able to look past the unlikelihood of their pairing, for a little while, anyway. But to me it is a love story about about a city and a lost time--which was interesting because there are so many things going wrong with our current society, but reading about this future one made me nostalgic for what is outside my window. A completely data driven society is one of the most frightening things that an author can conjure up, and yet it's not that far from social networking sites that occupy us today (or, for you educators out there, the constant drive for children to be represented by numbers) or our ability to constantly be connected to the world via the phone we carry in our pockets. Here is an excerpt from one of the main characters, Lenny, who is a bit of an old soul in the age of technology:

"Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to worship my new apparat's screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors."

Reading futuristic science fiction scares me: the kind where people have lost their sense of what it means to be human and where the ethical and moral issues are lost in the flurry of moving ahead. It makes me think about what actually constitutes a good life, though that adjective is the most vague of them all, and would be defined differently by almost everyone.

Lenny works for a man named Joshie at the Post-Human Services office in a large corporation, whose job is to locate HNWI (high net worth individuals) who are interested in living forever and undergoing treatments to ensure that it happens. While their work seems absurd, it seems like a logical progression for the capitalist's reaction to our culture's fear of aging. Of course in the book, it also feels adolescent in the sense that people aren't considering the consequences of such steps in anti-aging.

"Joshie had always told Post-Human Services staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day we transform into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves."

This is the part that gives me nightmares--longer life without a sense of self. It is already hard for me to remember what life was like before cell phones and the internet--and there are days that I want to separate myself from them. But then I have to honestly admit that I'm not sure I know how to.

I feel like I've come to learn that life is knowing and understanding the human story. Last night I was talking with friends and one of them said that our technological growth is exponential. It makes me fear just how unhuman are we making ourselves? And if that growth is regulated, that is an even scarier political thriller of an existence. See how I've gone and gotten all paranoid on you?

(I also blame watching the movie version of this book on Friday for this current state of mind.)
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"I put it down on paper and then the ghost doesn't ache so much."

2011-02-23T14:41:00.001-05:00

About a million years ago, a good friend of mine mailed me a copy of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and said it would probably change my life. He was right. This book holds everything I love about literature inside of it--and really, a blog post isn't enough--you should read it and then we should meet for coffee to talk about it.

It is a collection of snapshots that chronicles the coming of age of Esperanza (in English, hope), a girl growing up in a poor Latino neighborhood in Chicago. Cisneros' use of vignettes instead of a standard narrative structure captures stolen moments and insights that together create a portrait not just of Esperanza, but of longing and small beauties, anger and angst. Though short and incredibly readable, this story is complex. Her poetic style brings the beautifully tragic peripheral characters of Mango Street to life, each desperately seeking freedom, each desperately breaking and inspiring my heart:

Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.

Alicia, whose Mama died, is sorry there is no one older to rise and make the lunchbox tortillas. Alicia, who inherited her mama's rolling pin and sleepiness, is young and smart and studies for the first time at the university. Two trains and a bus, because she doesn't want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin.

Cisneros gives Esperanza an eye for tiny details and a writer's heart that carries the weight of her neighborhood. She writes a poem:

I want to be
like waves on the sea
like clouds in the wind
but I'm me.
One day I'll jump
out of my skin.
I'll shake the sky
like a hundred violins.

Esperanza, who is not beautiful, but is smart. Esperanza who is "too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, a tiny thing against so many bricks, who looks at trees." I love picturing this girl gathering her strength and her pen and shaking the sky with all of her might.

Toward the end of the novel, her aunt almost prophesies over her:

You just remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free.

As a person who writes often, and especially as an English teacher, I have spent a lot of time wondering what exactly this means. For Esperanza, it helps her to channel her emotions and her anger:

I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much.

This is why I love writing--and introducing students to writing. I have found that the times in my life that I feel most at peace--even if life is swirling in a thousand directions--is when I am writing. Most of the time it is nothing important, and often words I may never reread. But just like Esperanza, once I've thought through my life with pen and paper, whatever ghost was haunting me doesn't ache so much.

Esperanza reminds me of so many of my students--trying to figure out what it means to be a young adult, what it means to love, where to put anger, how to be themselves. They all come from different places, and yet I think that there are vignettes of beauty inside each of them--and that somehow life would make more sense if they understood that. I'm trying to remember if coming of age novels meant anything to me when I was their age or if I love them now in hindsight after surviving adolescence.

I realize it is naive to think that the world could be saved by writer's notebooks. But perhaps we'd all be a little more emotionally healthy? Free from the demons that eat at us, free from the insecurities that plague us, because we've written them away rather than having them wake us in the morning and whisper to us as we try to fall asleep.

Oskar Schell: tiny existentialist and breaker of of my heart. Or, there is no freedom from feeling.

2011-02-13T11:48:00.005-05:00

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First, a note. I read and wrote about this book in 2007, claimed it as one of my favorites but haven't read it since. I've been thinking that I want to start rereading all the books I call my favorites this year. Also, as I mentioned in my last post, all of my recent reads are connected by the thread of freedom and I want to spend some time thinking that through. So.

Nine year old Oskar Schell's family line includes grandparents who grew up in the same town in Germany and survived the bombing of Dresden during World War Two, but didn't get married until years later after running into each other in New York City. Their stories are complex and sorrowful, and their marriage a union of two who completely understand loss, and yet the other's presence is a constant reminder of their pain. The grandfather by this time has given up speaking altogether and communicates only though writing. In an attempt to not be swallowed by the weight of their grief, they literally made rules for how their apartment and their lives would function: "We made safe places in the apartment where you could go and not exist."

Interestingly, forty years later, Oskar made rules for his own life to manage his grief over losing his father on September 11th: he finds a key in his father's things and creates a quest to find what it opens: "...until I found it, I didn't love Dad enough." He is seeking both a reason to exist and a closeness with his father. I originally wrote about the idea of safety when I first read the book--which is ultimately what these characters are all looking for. The more I thought about it, I realized how fleeting emotional safety actually is--and I think that Oskar somehow knew this . Though Oskar shares the tendency toward an existential existence with his grandparents, the rules of his journey come with the hope that he will ultimately find catharsis--and that will free him from his current emotional paralysis and take him back to the safety he felt when he was with his father. Oskar invents when he is upset, often of ways to keep people emotionally safe:

"I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing."

"We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe."

"In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots."

"[S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!"

It is incredibly painful to read this happening to a nine year old boy.

Emotional safety is fleeting--and that is a tragedy of human existence. The last scene of this book (which I won't tell you because you should really just go read it yourself) pulls my heart in a way that few books can. And yet, freedom comes from allowing ourselves to hurt--and by that allowance we are not completely swallowed.

Defining Freedom, Part One.

2011-02-06T21:20:00.002-05:00

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Somehow I've fallen back into the habit of reading and thinking about multiple books at once. This school year I've been a bit off with my writing about what I'm reading--I have posts planned in my mind that never make it to my laptop. In the chaos that is now my reading life, though, some unexpected patterns have arisen and I thought it would be interesting to unpack them. The first will be on Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, by title and by topic. Continuing thoughts will follow about the concept of freedom in my rereading of both Jonathan Safron Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street. I am about to write about the resolution for one of the characters, and while I don't think it won't take away from the book, don't read ahead if you already have Freedom on your book list.

Freedom is complex and multi-layered, so it is impossible to treat it as a whole in a single post. The aspect I want to think about comes from the story of the main characters' son, Joey. He has grown up spoiled by his mother, a disappointment to his father and in general pretty selfish in all of his life pursuits. He has been in a relationship with the girl next door, two years his senior, since early adolescence. Their connection and relationship has been a mainstay in his life, to the point where he moved next door as a 17 year old. Her entire world revolves around him, but when he goes off to college he seeks out girls who would better fit in to his imagined future: sophisticated, wealthy and influential. However, he remains incapable of severing himself from Connie. They decide to get married on the spur of the moment, yet keep it secret and Joey is pursuing other girls. And then.

The freedom that comes from understanding who you are. Joey's moment came when he accidently swallowed his wedding ring and it came back out while he was on a trip with the girl he'd been chasing after for a number of years--the girl who he thought was his fantasy. But.

"He was the person who'd handled his own shit to get his wedding ring back. This wasn't the person he thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones." (432)

This is the kind of freedom that I'm not sure Joey's parents understood as they were raising him. They seemed to be tip toeing around parts of themselves and restraining opinions in fear and leaving life that needed to be discussed untouched and unexplored--leaving both of them ultimately uncomfortable in their own skin. Seeing their son understand this before they did--especially when he was trying on so many different personas throughout his college experience--was incredibly surprising as a reader. I thought that Joey would be the kind of person who is a serial leaver: always looking for the next person who might fit his idea of perfection, never realizing that perfection never exists up close. That kind of living gives the mirage of freedom, but is actually quite the opposite.

This fall, maybe because I was turning 30 and intentionally thinking about it, I realized that somewhere along the line I became myself: the Ohio and the New York in me all seemed to sort out and settle where it needed to be--and this was incredibly freeing. To live in a place where you know who you are what what you are seeking allows you to not have the burden of carrying what other people might be thinking. And of course there is the part about the Truth I believe in--something about the story of grace and love--that leads me to freedom and reminds me of what matters.

this is not about books, but. winter made me smile. a few times. and that doesn't happen often.

2011-01-27T18:24:00.002-05:00

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A small child with a bowl cut running around an uncrowded East Village restaurant in full body snow pants. Also, the yellow walls and good people I was talking to there.

Multiple, separate, grown men who ran their fingers through untouched snow on a ledge in Midtown.

Bowery almost completely quiet in a snowstorm.

Eating fistfulls (yes, plural) of snow as I made my way home 8th Avenue in Park Slope. Because it was coming down so fast and I trusted there were no pollutants. And it reminded me of Ohio snow. And I liked it.

Hearing my landlord shovel the sidewalk and remembering all of the 6 am wake up calls my brother and I had to clear our driveway, whether we had a snow day or not. Then rolling over and being thankful I didn't have to shovel today.

Prospect Park+over a foot of new snow+children sledding everywhere+evening light (albeit at 5 pm). LOVE.

And, my students' artwork in response to "Do Not Go Gentle" by Dylan Thomas. It makes my room so bright I can barely contain myself.

Sustenance.

2011-01-15T14:58:00.002-05:00

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I've been trying to figure out what I should write about The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen since I finished it the week before Christmas. So much has already been written about this book of a dysfunctional (or maybe more normal than people would like to admit) midwestern family that I wasn't sure which way to direct my own writing. But. The character I kept coming back to was the mother, Enid Lambert: she often made me cringe with a kind of loathing pity with her neurotics, but there were a few moments that absolutely broke me with the concessions she made for her life. "It wasn't a wonderful life, but a woman could subsist on self-deceptions like these and on her memories (which also now curiously seemed like self deceptions) of the early years when he'd been mad for her and had looked into her eyes."

I felt deep seated sadness after reading this. When people are young, the future seems a long way off and time to accomplish things and become the person they want to be seems limitless. Then the line blurs--at different stages and with different weight, which is what we see in Enid's children and husband in the book-- and one can look back and see all of the looking forward that was done has amounted to much less than they imagined. People then feel stuck in who they've become and the daily rituals they've created. All of the corrections they had planned on making are still just well meaning intentions floating around in the back of their minds. Or, perhaps, Enid focused on the wrong kinds of corrections: nitpicking after her children and husband and believing that everything could be fixed neatly and tied with a bow.

I'm not a believer that life can be perfect or free of pain. I am a believer that there is true sustenance that can run deep if we free ourselves from the self deceptions that we walk around believing.

Best Books of 2010.

2010-12-28T11:37:00.001-05:00

This year was the first year that I actually numbered the reading experiences. Each is linked to the original blog post (or two). Enjoy.

10. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It's a mystery about (life and) books. It's set in Barcelona. What is not to love?

9. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. I thought it would be a little too sappy or not well written, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

8. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemiresky. I love historical fiction and Nemiresky's personal story as connected to this unfinished piece about Germany's occupation in France was fascinating.

7. American Pastoral by Philip Roth. I wasn't sure how I escaped Roth. This dark story went along brilliantly with a lot of the cultural portraits and critiques I've read or seen recently.

6. March by Geraldine Brooks: how I got away with not writing about this book, I have no idea. This short book followed the father's story from Little Women, but had plenty to say about both men and women. Post to follow soon!

5. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy by Steig Larsson: I jumped on the bandwagon and got sucked in. These are incredibly smart and addictive mysteries (technically I'm finishing the third one in the final days of 2010...100 pages in as of now).

4. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible was one of the most thought provoking books I've ever read. My book club decided to read this as soon as it came out and it was a gorgeous blend of storytelling and history.

3. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann: this book was phenomenal. Go buy it now.

2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling reread with students: Harry Potter 7 made my top ten list back in 2008, but this fall's rereading experience with my students was a-maz-ing. So much passion. So much intellect.

1. Great House by Nicole Krauss: History of Love, Krauss' second novel, made the top ten in 2008 right along with HP. I could not wait for this book to be released and had its date on my refrigerator months in advance. This book is beautiful, haunting and thought provoking.

Not good for the soul.

2010-12-04T12:05:00.002-05:00

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There are a lot of things that make me appreciate my neighborhood in Brooklyn: the lack of chain stores, the Farmers' Markets, Prospect Park, that I can walk to work, that the guys at the bodega know my order (medium English breakfast with one splenda and skim milk, if you're wondering) as soon as I walk in the door. Between my colleagues who have become great friends, my friends who have transplanted themselves here, my church that loves Brooklyn so well and running into faces that used to grace M.S. 51's room 116 on a daily basis, there's a lot to love.

That being said, there are plenty of people who love to make fun of my neighborhood--and there is a lot of fodder that I can laugh at it, too--as long as we all remember it was ranked best neighborhood to live in by my favorite New York Magazine. The trees in the fall, the vintage Christmas lights strung across the streets, snow covering brownstone steps, the park in the summer and spring. It all outweighs the ridiculous that one sometimes sees in Park Slope.

Last summer there was a lot of buzz about Prospect Park West by Amy Sohn, a book set in Park Slope whose tag line could be read in a similar way to Gossip Girl's (and I believe it is being discussed for a new series). Though I don't read the subgenre this book falls into, when a hard cover copy was left in the lobby of my apartment (another thing I love about this neighborhood), I thought I'd check it out as long as I wasn't paying for it.

Satire well done makes me laugh. Satire well done is brilliant. But this didn't feel like either to me: the underdeveloped characters seemed to try their hardest to turn me into a cynical hater. And that's no way to live, right?

That's really all the time I want to devote to this book. I left it in the lobby on my way to work this week.

On Harry Potter and Another Reason Why My 8th Graders Are the Best. Seriously.

2010-11-21T15:09:00.001-05:00

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Cover Art by Mary GrandPre

Rereading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with my students pre-movie was one of my favorite experiences as a teacher. Epic conversations came out of our meetings, which were a safe haven to bring out each members' inner nerd (I say that in the best of ways, children. I think the inner nerd is the best part of anyone.) as we discussed character arcs, endings, losses, loves. I have challenged each of the members of the book club to post an epic book response in the coming week about what moves their hearts the most in the series. Obviously, I cannot wait to read them and I'll write my own epic post as well. But to help them remember all the glory we discussed--and for it to get all the other Harry Potter fans I know thinking as they reread/watch the movie, I thought I'd post some of their brilliance/some windows into our discussions here. Do not read ahead if you have not finished the series, as our discussions looked at the entire series story arc.

One of my favorite comments presented in all of the book clubs was when a student said: "I love the passion of Ron, Harry and Hermione--and how they have a quest and something to believe in." I responded with the idea that I think that we can have that in our lives, though sadly without broomsticks and spells and apparating. But, I teared up a little with the conversation that followed. What do you think?

On Dumbledore.
How even as readers, we (and the characters) didn't feel safe after the end of Book 6. What does this say about the character of Dumbledore? Are there equivalents in our world?

Is it ok to be young and stupid? How do we carry the layers of our pasts with us into adulthood? How do we deal with the flaws of those we look up to? What does all of this teach us about what it means to be human?

Should adults trust children with difficult truths or wait until they have "come of age"?

Do you learn by someone telling you what to do or experiencing it for yourself? Do you agree with the way Dumbledore let Harry learn many truths for himself?

Dumbledore and Grindelwald went in completely different directions after their young adulthood: Grindelwald sought more political power, while Dumbledore went into education. Which do you think is more valuable?

On Snape.
Is Snape the true hero of the series?

Consider his presence at the Deatheater meetings in early Book 7. What do you think is going through his mind? What kind of complexities exist for him? If he hadn't known Lily, would he have truly wanted to be there?

What do you think Rowling is suggesting by the fact that Snape was changed through love? What kind of foil does James Potter play--for Snape, for Lily, for Harry?

In what ways are Harry, Snape and Voldemort similar and different?

What is the true value of sacrifice? How did it change Snape? What other characters sacrifice? Was it worth it? What about in our lives? What other literary characters do you know who sacrifice and what was the result?

General/Randoms.
What do you think Rowling is saying about government? Racism? What connections is she making to history?

What is the definition of evil? Is there anything human left in Voldemort? What do you make of the changes of heart that we see in book 7 (Dudley, Narcissa, esp.) ? What is the difference between Bellatrix and Narcissa?

What do you think about Draco? What do you think about Dumbledore's final act of grace towards him?

Consider Hermione's loneliness in Book 7. How has she changed since we first met her?

There were some fierce debates about Ron in class 813 and Harry in class 804. What do you think of these two characters and how they have changed?

Why do you think JKR created Ron, Harry and Hermione to be on the fringe of the social life at Hogwarts?

There is a lot of loss across the series. Why do you think Rowling wrote the story that way? Do you have specific opinions about particular losses?

What inspires Neville's character change?

My students are brilliant.

Life as mess.

2010-11-14T10:45:00.000-05:00

I saw One Day by David Nicholls all over bookstores and on reading lists in magazines all summer. When I was last in a bookstore, I decided I couldn't resist and knew I would want a guaranteed enjoyable read post Nicole Krauss. I started it on Wednesday and finished it Saturday--and did not watch a single crime procedural during that whole time, which says a lot for me. It follows the friendship of Emma and Dexter from college graduation for about twenty years, but each chapter is dedicated to the same single day of each year, each part of the novel aptly named "early twenties," "late twenties," etc. I think it's meant to be the kind of book where you fall in love with the characters and close the book wishing you could begin again for the first time. I read this book quickly, but I can't seem to find the same praise that I read about all summer.

The idea of "who am I becoming?" and which layers of experience stay with a person and which ones fall away is fascinating, especially the older that one gets. My favorite parts of the book that spoke to this idea were actually the literary quotations that began each part and cut to the essence of Emma and Dexter's friendship, and in turn the concept of the book. They are too long to quote each one, but "Late Twenties" is: "We spent as much money as we could and got as little for it as people could make up their mind to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one," (from Great Expectations, Dickens).

I just had a hard time with the characters' major flaws: Dexter seeking the next good time and landing in a the bottom of a glass in between, Emma as judgmental and flirting by joking about Dexter's character flaws. I could not figure out why they even liked one another, and I couldn't find that moment where they actually saw one another. Perhaps it happened in between July Fifteenths? Their messiness should have resonated with me on a human level--but all I could think about was that this reminded me of Mad Men, in that I was watching something a tad too depressing that could go on forever in that state (which I think is the fear that both plagues and paralyzes people). The scariest part is that the state humanity is often best portrayed in those scenes of bleakness.

What was heartbreaking, though, and what might have assuaged the bleakness of certain parts, is if Emma and Dexter were able to actually say what they meant when they meant it. Things went unsaid, a great tragedy always--and because it was an omnicient third person narrator, the reader is left knowing what each of them feel, while the person that really needs to know is in the dark. The book is filled with missed chances, and I suppose, such is life.

Wow. One Day was entertaining. I don't mean to sound like such a cynic on a Sunday morning.

in the small and ordinary.

2010-11-11T11:39:00.002-05:00

"We live, each of us, to preserve our fragment, in a state of perpetual regret and longing for a place we only know existed because we remember a keyhole, a tile, the way the threshold was worn under an open door." from Great House by Nicole Krauss

It is the small objects; the ones that look so ordinary but hold the secrets of all that make us human. The most striking realization I had of this was the first time I walked through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It was impossible to walk around without a weight on my heart, reading about the beasts humans can be to one another. Most overbearing for me, though, was the small display of personal effects, collected from victims in the camps: hairbrushes, razors, the small kinds of objects that have no meaning, really, in the context of their daily use. But when considered in light of loss, these tiny items haunted me with the humanity that was denied to their owners, so much so that I had no other option but to retreat to the dark, concrete room where you hear stories of survivors piped in through speakers and let the darkness settle.

This narrator is an antiques dealer, specializing in objects seized by the Nazis. He searches all over the world to find the objects that hold the weight in the world within them for some. I love how Krauss' characters often have a respect for the small details of life that speak volumes of who we are as a people. The fate of this dealer, though, is wrapped in the inability to put the pieces of his broken life back together again--the impossibility to curate a moment that has passed, and he is left standing the burden of unbearable longing, which I think is humanity's signature.

My ongoing struggle between the ideal and the real.

2010-10-30T12:00:00.001-04:00

I read Tana French's first novel, In The Woods, this summer and was impressed with French's ability to raise some serious questions about humanity in her mystery novels. Someone in my building conveniently left her second novel up for grabs by our mailboxes, so I recently followed up with The Likeness.

The story follows Detective Cassie Maddox as she goes undercover investigating a murder of a woman who looks nearly exactly like her, and was using the identity of a person she and her boss made up for a previous undercover operation, Lexie Madison. She lived with 4 of her best friends, all getting their PhDs in literature, in a house that one of them had inherited outside of Dublin. The police squad decides to tell the roommates that Lexie survived the attack and will be going home. Maddox's job is to get to know the roommates in order to narrow down a suspect.

Life at the Whitethorn House, as it is called, seemed to be picturesque. With no television, the friends spent their evenings reading, playing cards or working on the house itself. The girls prepared breakfast each day while the boys cooked dinner every night. Their rhythms felt old fashioned, and it was in that simplicity that they seemed to come alive that such an existence possible. Daniel, who inherited the house and gave the other 4 ownership in it described it as: "colors were so beautiful they hurt, life became almost unimaginably sweet and almost unimaginably frightening. It's so fragile, you know...everything was so beautiful and precarious, it took my breath away."

Literature, like any other art form, is able to capture moments of ultimate beauty--and when I am standing in front of an impressionist painting or listening to any slow song with a pedal steel or rereading one of my favorite books I am carried away into the belief that the moment's perfection can last.

But it doesn't. And it can't. And that hurts me.

The crux of the mystery in this story lies in the fact that the illusion was shattered, and it was this passage that I couldn't stop thinking about: "The idea was flawed, of course... innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end."

But all good readers know that a story without tension is boring and happily-ever-after stories aren't as satisfying as one would think because they don't feel authentic.

I live between the ideal and real, and feel its tension deeply: it is impossible for me to walk without being firmly grounded in what I know is real, and yet my soul would wither if I couldn't hope in the beautiful. I suppose it is the reciprocal emotions that create the human experience. To solely chase perfection in this world is ultimately a destructive pursuit. Likewise, to live strapped to reality is utterly unromantic and unappealing.

So, with grace, the struggle goes on.

Harry Potter is just too big for a blog.

2010-10-17T21:50:00.000-04:00

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I was mortified when I realized that I haven't written on this blog since September 30th.

It's definitely not that I haven't been reading, but I think it's because I've been reading so much for school: my students have all created their own reading blogs and since it's so early in the process I feel compelled to read them all 93 every week, which has been happening over my Saturday morning tea rather than writing about my own reading experiences, per usual (which must change). I've also been preparing for the book clubs that are starting up in my classroom. This is the first time I have attempted to be in book clubs with students all year long. A little crazy. My brain has been consumed lately with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. While my reading focus has been on what my students' book club experiences will be like, I also realized that there are depths to be mined in old Harry Potter. I've been overwhelmed by all of my thoughts that I have no idea where to begin, and this has snowballed as I've been reading multiple essays in Harry Potter and Philosophy and Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays.

That being said, I'm currently looking to reinvent some healthier rhythms that don't involve quite so much work *and* I promise I'm on a mission to draw some serious conclusions about Harry Potter (though, I can say that I'll be rereading this series for the rest of my life, so I suppose I don't have to discover them all now). For now, here are some of the biggest Harry Potter threads going in my brain (please do not continue reading if you have not read the entire series, and on that note, if you haven't read this series, I'm not sure what you're waiting for):

The fact that since we are able to be inside Harry's brain, Rowling brilliantly creates a narrative in which most readers begin to trust all of Harry's thoughts and the conclusions he draws, especially about Snape, and especially in retrospect in light of the ending of book 7.
"In book II, Dumbledore tells Harry that the essence of one's character is defined by what one chooses to do rather than by any inherent ability...by Dumbledore's standards, is [Snape] not an even greater hero than Harry?" (from Cruel Heroes and Treacherous Texts, Schanoes)
"Both Snape and Black complicate a black and white moral schema. Where Snape forces the reader to accept a bad person who chooses the side of good, Black forces us to acknowledge the potential for violence and ruthlessness that can exist in a good person." (from Cruel Heroes and Treacherous Texts, Schanoes)
The character arc of Neville Longbottom, and the development of Harry, Ron and Hermione, obviously.

Tomorrow the Harry Potter 7 Reread book club begins their "pre-club" thinking work...developing the narrative arcs of the first six books in order to provide a foundation for our approach to book 7. My guess is that my conclusions won't be totally drawn until I've talked all this through with my brilliant students. My hope is that I will be posting on the other aspects of my reading life before then, though.

Childhood Favorites Post #9 Stuart Little and an Ode to E.B. White's Craft

2010-09-30T07:29:00.000-04:00

After rereading both Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little in recent months, my love for E.B. White has grown immensely. I think that it is rare to find an adult writer who so richly describes the imaginary hopes of children: his details are so realistic that I come to believe that animals must indeed talk, that the Central Park boat pond is capable of squalls, that people can really befriend creatures. While I was reading Stuart Little, I found that I couldn't find the same depth as in Charlotte's Web, but his literary attention to imaginary details made me really believe that this was a real story. Here are some favorites:

"...and the west wind (which had come halfway across America to get to Central Park) sang and whistled in the rigging and blew spray across the decks, stinging Stuart's cheeks with tiny fragments of flying peanut shell tossed up from the foamy deep." I love how alive the wind seems--as though it were on an arduous journey to get to New York City at this exact moment. White goes on to create an entire ocean on the small pond and I can't help but get caught up in it.

I also love White's passion for the country, which can be heard in the sweet bird Margalo's voice (and reminds of The Cricket in Times Square, sigh): "I come from the fields once tall with wheat, from pastures deep in fern and thistle; I come from vales of meadowsweet, and I love to whistle." White not only describes but creates an entire sense of place and person (well, bird). This kind of writing makes me want to write my own Ohio version of this sentence.

Stuart is incredibly endearing when he asks to the class he substitute teaches and E.B. White comes across as one of those adults who truly understands children and never lost his sense of wonder:
"How many of you know what's important? Henry Rackmeyer, you tell us what's important."
"A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby's neck smells if it's mother keeps it tidy."
"Correct. Those are important things. You forgot one thing, though. Mary Bendix, what did Henry Rackmeyer forget?"
"He forgot ice cream with chocolate sauce on it."
"Exactly."

Stuart Little is the kind of book that did not exactly carry me away the way that Charlotte's Web did--the ending seems way to abrupt and we don't find Margolo. I remain wondering what happened to sweet Margolo and whether she was just White's impetus to get Stuart out of the city and into a life of adventure, or whether the rumors I researched are true and he had a deadline he had to meet. Either way, I suppose I'm left thinking. But this was a story, for me, less of narrative perfection and more of an endearing escape and a reminder of sweet things that are far too often on the periphery of my mind.

Childhood Favorites Post #8 On Death and Love.

2010-09-29T07:21:00.000-04:00

We started the Childhood Favorites Reread Unit and while I was running around my classroom talking with all the book clubs, I found myself saying that to the kids that it seemed like the author trusted his or her readers with some weighty material in many of the books. I heard myself say this multiple times before I realized that 4 of the 8 books included death at the end: Charlotte's Web, Bridge to Terabithia, Freak the Mighty, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. It could be argued and interpreted that the same happens in The Giver. My next questions were why are young adult authors tackling such heavy topics and why are these the books that kids love, return to and claim as favorites later?

A part of me thinks that the reader becomes so attached to the well developed characters, that when we lose them it is a deep cut to the heart. The pattern I notice is that the characters we lose (Charlotte, Leslie, and Kevin) teach the reader so much about how to live life well, that it seems impossible that those left could ever move on. And yet, we see the ones who are left (Wilbur, Jesse, Max) deliberately choose to live life differently because they had experienced such incredible friendship. It is not that these characters have great fortune in the end, but it is as though they have been trusted with a great, deep secret that people who haven't experienced loss often do not understand: there are things worth much more than any tangible object, amount of money could ever give us. Love.

I think it is Edmund in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe who demonstrates this the most--or, perhaps it is Aslan as my ultimate literary hero. Edmund is less rounded than the other characters I've mentioned and his flaws are not endearing. Unlike my immediate love for Jesse Aarons, I basically can't stand the selfishness he displays for the majority of the story and have a hard time conjuring up any sympathy for his middle child antics. But. Aslan sees in Edmund what he can be (he later becomes, we find at the end of the story, Edmund the Just). Aslan shows the ultimate form of love and sacrifices himself for Edmund--not something that I could ever do because Edmund seems so rotten. But it is in that display of love that Edmund is rocked to the very core of his being, as I was as the reader. (And, lucky for us, the deepest magic of Narnia brings Aslan back to life, more glorious than before. Thank goodness!)

All that to say, these authors trust my students--and me-- with real life and true life and good life. They aren't afraid to put our hearts through the wringer a bit in the hopes that the story they have to tell will stay with for quite some time. And they have. All I can say to the book clubs happening over these stories in my classroom is that they hurt my heart in the best of ways.

Young Adult Female Protagonists: Nancy Drew

2010-09-26T21:15:00.002-04:00

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I am among the throngs who couldn't get enough of Nancy Drew mysteries when I was younger. It fed into my obsession with Mary Higgins Clark in 7th grade and is probably the foundation of my love of too many mystery television shows. I've been trying to read a lot of young adult books with female protagonists to get some insight into why we love certain ones, why we need certain ones (or why we should hate certain ones). I found a copy of The Secret of the Old Clock for a dollar while shopping with my mom this summer and just re-read for the first time since...1988?

I couldn't get enough of her when I was younger. In fact, I think I wanted to be her: driving around in a blue convertible, solving mysteries for all my neighbors, a blond beauty. I'm pretty sure she was the impetus behind the "Mysterioso Club" I formed with my best friend, when we tried to find mysteries to solve in our midwestern neighborhood. Maybe it was a combination of her cunning and her "smart" outfits that got me. (What are "smart" outfits, anyway?)

Generally, I am a fan of female protagonists who are imperfect--girls a reader could see herself in (the Judy Blume response is coming soon...). Nancy Drew is so creepily perfect in behavior...and very stereotypical suburban, upper middle class and white that I doubt any of my students could see themselves in her. If I had read the book for literary and cultural study alone (without my nostalgic childhood dreams of fighting crime), this post would be very different. But I find myself incapable of betraying Nancy like that. And, it is interesting to me that such an independent, teenage girl character was published only ten years after women got the right to vote.

All that to say, that despite the unfortunate nature of its literary style and characterization, I am still a fan of Nancy's adventures--their vintage nature is perfectly delightful.

Never Let Me Go

2010-09-12T13:55:00.001-04:00

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a dystopian, slightly science fiction novel that takes place in England in the late 1990s. It is narrated in what feels very stream-of-conscious by a 31 year old woman named Kathy H., who is remembering her child and young adulthood at a boarding school called Hailsham. She narrates the way that I often talk--she has an initial point, but the details of narrative are built into the back story she provides while getting to that point. Her narration has a deep tone of nostalgia and it is clear from the beginning that she is trying to make sense of what her life has become and the fate she knows she cannot avoid. It is this tension that drives the book: the hope that the truth somehow didn't apply to the characters.

What I have been considering since I finished the book is how do we, as people, handle the truths about life that we accumulate along the way, especially the ones we do not wish to believe, not matter how confident we are of their existence?

One of the most poignant moments of the book for me was when another character, Tommy, faces the reality of his situation. He is in a car with Kathy, and asks her to pull over. He walks into the woods at the side of the road and screams his lungs out. The injustice of reality is too much for him to bear, and he can think of no other way to respond.

Later, it appears that Tommy and Kathy have succumbed to the "safety" of knowing what is inevitable. Perhaps they feel foolish for ever wishing existence to be more. Kathy repeatedly talks about their knowing when they were children at Hailsham, but they just went right on playing and pretending.

When does it become naive and adolescent to fight what is bound to happen? Are there certain realities that can be fought?

Is it ok to accept what is? What do we do with the angst that remains? Live a life with trips to an isolated wood so we can scream our lungs out about it?

(Don't continue reading if you plan on reading the book or seeing the movie. All conclusions drawn so far are thought provoking without the ending. But I had such a strong opinion of the ending that it is impossible for me not to write about it). My biggest disappointment in the book is that the characters don't fight (very hard, anyway). I wanted to see them rise and buck authority and defy the life that was set for them, but instead they got angry and then settled into sadness and nostalgia. The book is ironically called, then, Never Let Me Go...but they do. And I kind of hate that.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

2010-09-10T10:51:00.001-04:00

"There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic," (preface).

"I have as much trouble as the next person with illusion and reality," (32).

I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion about a year and a half ago and ever since have wanted to read more of her work. Didion is able to capture--I don't want to say the heart, because though the heart is filled with mystery, such an overused term does not quite feel nuanced enough for her--the essence of a person or a place or an event in her nonfiction writing. Her nonfiction essays in Slouching Toward Bethlehem are not merely a chronicle of something or someone that happened, but they cause the reader to enter into the exact temperature of mood and are given thorough understanding and feel of the time and place. These essays were published individually in the sixties, then pulled together for this collection in the early seventies.

Didion's writing style made me think about how a sense of place creates a sense of self...or, about how remembering the small details of a place that was once our own can remind us of who we were, and wonder if those tree rings of experience are still buried somewhere.

"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," (139).

My first studio apartment in New York City in an Upper West Side brownstone--the worn banister next to the slightly crooked steps leading up to the third floor, my ikea furniture and new towels that matched my shower curtain. My ritual of walking to Riverside Park every night with a mug of tea, looking west, leaning on the black, pointy rail imagining Ohio beyond the horizon. I knew in those homesick moments that I would look back on them and feel nostalgia for the very reason my heart was then breaking. Those days when New York didn't feel like home and my naive sense of self seem so endearing in a "bless her heart" kind of way that I wonder if the hardness of the city has gotten to me, after all.

I can think that way about any place, really. My high school's football stadium. All the backyards of my old neighborhood that ran together. My first year teaching when I didn't have my own room and knew those 8th graders were playing me. While I was visiting my parents in Louisville this summer, I really wanted to make a trip to Ohio--to see people, too, of course--but to run the 3 mile loop through the woods that I ran almost every day of every high school summer. I romanticize that if I could just run at Sugarcreek every day, then continue my life in Brooklyn, that I'd have such a better sense of self. Time and logistics didn't allow me to get there, and I can't decide if that were a good or bad thing.

Anyway.

Overwhelmed by books.

2010-09-09T11:19:00.001-04:00

September is my new years. I've never left the school year calendar, so I am lucky enough to still relish in new pencils and notebooks and post-its each fall. My summer days are pretty leisurely, but there is something in my persona that is absolutely ready to start using my tiny moleskin planner again. I also leave behind my nice, neat world of summer reading and end up with massive stacks of books to read and the desire to read them all at once. It is September where I usually start reading a few books at once, given that they are different genres.

These are my current genres and a few titles of what you might be seeing posted around here in the near future:

Young adult for school. I'm doing book clubs with my students all year, so I'll be in a young adult book at all times. We are starting with Sold by Patricia McCormick and in a month or two we are doing a "I read Harry Potter #7 way to fast" reread club!

Young adult for research. I've been trying to study books with female protagonists. I'm going to revisit some favorites like Nancy Drew and Dicey's Song.

Fiction for book clubs and/or my sanity. Upcoming picks: March by Geraldine Brooks and A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert.

Nonfiction for research, to add to the female protagonist study: Shelf Discovery: Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading and Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume.

Nonfiction to learn. Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright. No Logo by Naomi Klein.

There is a good chance I'll be reading one of each at any given moment and I couldn't be more excited to get started. There are just so many words to read! Cheers to the feeling of fall and the beginnings of great things (and the most glorious season of life)!

Summer Reading Conclusion.

2010-09-02T17:33:00.001-04:00

Somehow September started and I barely noticed. Then I found myself in my classroom at school trying to set up my library before the kiddos arrived and I realized summer was indeed over. Interestingly enough, last summer's reading conclusion was written on a 65 degree August day. Today, the high is 94 degrees and I've got a hurricane looming over my labor day weekend flight to the homeland.

The biggest clue to summer ending for me is that I find myself needing/wanting to read 5 books at once. It is a habit I typically grow out of during my season of freedom because I am able to spend so much time reading, that I finish books pretty quickly. Here's how it went this year:

I read almost all of the books on my list! I think this is due in part to the fact that I was traveling, which forced me to plan. These included:

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirevsky
In the Woods by Tana French
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larrson
March by Geraldine Brooks
Stuart Little by E.B. White (children's)
Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick (young adult)
The Giver by Lois Lowry (young adult)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (young adult)

I picked up a few along the way, borrowed from a friend and my mom (and two I broke down and bought):

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Chasing Fireflies by Charles Martin
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
The Curse of the Good Girl by Rachel Simmons
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Alexie Sherman (young adult)

Final conclusions: Favorites: March and rereading The Summer Book. Also, despite (almost) always having a book on hand, I found myself missing my bookshelves and some randoms I wanted to reread on lazy days at home (Harry Potter, especially). Also, my books weighed too much and took up too much space in my carry on. It was the only time I have ever wanted an e-reader of some sort. Scary. Anyway, cheers to the fall and the craziness that my reading life is sure to become (which is the subject of my next post!)

My favorite summer book. Of all time. I don't say things like that very often.

2010-08-19T15:30:00.000-04:00

I've written about The Summer Book before. I first read it in 2008 and fell in love. The post is so short because I had no words to describe how much I loved it. I have recommended it, given it as a gift and reread it every summer since then. Pure joy. You should be on your way out the door to find a copy by now.

Each chapter is a separate vignette style story that distills the essence of summer, childhood and adult sense-and nonsense-ability. Sophia, her father and her grandmother have an easy way about them, as they live quietly and adventurously all summer. Sophia is six, feisty, and pays attention to all of the small details and mysteries of life for the first time. Her grandmother is 85, equally feisty and is paying attention to the small details and mysteries of life, but with the kind of wisdom only age can give. I have found myself falling for the way that Jansson captures Sophia's awakening to life and the endearing patience with a side of crankiness with which Grandmother watches it happen. These are just a few things I was thinking about today as I was reading:

In "The Robe," Sophia is going through a "rebellious" stage. This is the part that makes me love Grandmother with all of my heart: "...she played cards with grandmother. The both cheated shamelessly, and their cardplaying afternoons always ended in a quarrel. This had never happened before. Grandmother tried to recall her own rebellious periods in order to try and understand, but all she could remember was an unusually well behaved little girl. Wise as she was, she realized that people can postpone their rebellious phases until they're eighty-five years old, and she decided to keep an eye on herself."

In "The Tent," Sophia tries to sleep all night in a tent outside and comes in under the pretense of wanting to hear about her grandmother's experiences in tents. "A very long time ago, Grandmother had wanted to tell about all the things they did, but no one had bothered to ask. And now she lost the urge...That's strange, Grandmother thought. I can't describe things anymore. I can't find the words, or maybe it's just that I'm not trying hard enough...unless I tell it because I want to, it's as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it's lost." This is kind of random, but this speaks into my writing life: although sometimes a little discipline is required, I've found the best time for me to write about something is the moment in which I am excited about it. That is when the most passion is conveyed in what I'm trying to say. It also made me think about how sad it is when stories get lost because the moment it should have been told or written has passed.

Jansson does not let the moment pass, though, because this short book crystallizes so much. Seriously. Find a copy. Curl up somewhere summer-y: I'm predisposed to the porch at my parents. A lake would be ideal. And love.

Fiction as Eye Opener.

2010-08-15T10:50:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned before that I love mystery. The literary genre held court in my elementary school life (Nancy Drew, R.L. Stine) and middle school life (Mary Higgins Clark), but then dropped out of sight until recently. Inspired by my love of mystery shows from The Closer, which is great in every aspect, to Bones, which isn't, and all the Law and Order, CSI:NY and Lie to Me in between, I was ready to get lost in the literary genre once again.

I just finished the second of the three Steig Larsson books, The Girl Who Played With Fire. There are many literary aspects that set these books apart from a lot of the pulpy bestsellers, most notably the complex characters who are developed over the course of all the books. But. What I want to focus on more is that the main mystery of the book revolves around trafficking and the sex trade. This book was originally published in Sweden in 2004, which means that the original research was completed years before. Larsson was ahead of his time in making the public aware of what is happening worldwide.

In the past few years, trafficking has become a more well known issue, but I remember first becoming really informed around 2005 by a friend who helped to found Restore NYC (in 2004), which "aims to provide safe housing and special legal, medical and employment services, as well as optional spiritual activities" for women who have been sexually trafficked into New York City. In the early days, my friend spent a lot of time educating everyone she could about the issue of trafficking--and one of the main responses were jaws dropped in horror that one, this was occurring, and two, that they didn't know about it.

All that to say, I am glad that there are books and authors who aren't afraid to delve into the darkest corners of our existence (for the issue of trafficking, see also the young adult Sold by Patricia McCormick). I am a firm believer that fiction is one of the greatest ways to understand the complexity and depth of the hardest issues in society. Fiction forces the reader to not just read statistics or facts, but to know the physical and emotional impact on individual characters. Not facing these issues leaves us utterly ignorant and only promotes living in a bubble of safety, unaware of anyone else's needs but our own. Go. Read.

An Illusion? A mess? The American Pastoral?

2010-07-27T14:51:00.000-04:00

I had a bit of a packing quandary when I was leaving New York for two months. Determined only to have a carry on, I did not realize the impact this would have on my reading life. I only had room for three books, which I hoped would last me through my trip to Colorado, 5 weeks later. Fail. This is the only time I found myself wishing I had a Sony Reader (take a look how Sony has been supporting education here, thanks to Kenneth Byers), as the idea of reading books electronically skeeves me out a little bit, but would have been so practical for the summer. Anyway, I spotted American Pastoral by Philip Roth on a San Diego neighbor's bookshelf and borrowed it. I justify buying books all of the time, so this is a pretty big step for me. It is also my first jump off my summer reading list. Sometimes I type the way I talk and give a lot of background information. Anyway.

American Pastoral is a book that beyond its intricate narration and literary value, covers a lot of material between its cover: ethnic relations, industrial history, politics, war and family, but most of all it is a book about illusion and coming to grips with reality. Reading this as I've been rewatching Mad Men episodes and watching the premiere, the question that I can't stop thinking about is how do we cultivate lives filled with meaning? The number of movies and television shows and books dedicated to the emptiness that people feel (Catcher in the Rye, Revolutionary Road, etc.) can make the world feel bleak.

The illusions.
The book is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who shows up in a number of Roth's books. Through a series of events, including his a 45 year high school reunion, he learns the adult story of Seymour "The Swede" Levov, his (and his town's) adolescent idol, whose athletic victories helped ease the weariness of World War Two. Zuckerman, well into adulthood, was under the impression that the Swede's life maintained its childhood perfection. He learns facts that prove otherwise and begins to ponder about the nature of human relationships: "The pictures we have of one another. Layers and layers of misunderstanding. Completely cocked up. Only we go ahead and we live by these pictures. "

I started to think about the pictures that our culture has of one another: advertisements that allow us to misunderstand what will add value to life. Photoshopped pictures in magazines that allow us to misunderstand what beauty is. Even facebook photos allow us to think that everyone else's life is anything but lonely. I can picture these misunderstandings snowballing in our minds--layers and layers--and as we live by them we are only more disillusioned and further from what is actually true.

The messes.
The structure of the book speaks volumes in and of itself. The first section, "Paradise Remembered" is about the youth of the narrator and the main character, a time when following the local high school sports team is an umbrella from reality, where despite the larger fears that have swallowed the adult population, the narrator remembers the safety of childhood. Aptly named, the second part is "The Fall," when the main character, Seymour "Swede" Levov's daughter commits an act of political terrorism and all of the Swede's visions of his American pastoral are shattered. The final section, "Paradise Lost" follows how his life essentially falls apart in the aftermath:

"Initiating the Swede into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of utopian thinking...The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its anthithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral--into the indigenous American berserk."

Is the American berserk a better description for what happens to us? It was jarring for me that the book ends in the midst of the berserk--or, rather, that the world continued to be out of control and the characters are left to choose how to respond. I watched the characters become paralyzed at the realization that life had not come to what they always thought it would.

This post has remained in draft form for a few days because I have no idea how to wrap it up. The shattering of illusion and the inability to deal with the mess that is life hits the reader over the head as the story weaves in and out of countless moments in the past that lead up to the disastrous state we find the characters in at the end. I could think and talk about this book for a long time. But here are a few conclusions. We cannot control anything. It is easy to create illusions. It is easy to believe illusions. We cannot prevent messes.

I think that the book critiques obviously the absurdities of the American culture of privilege and entitlement. And though I really believe that hope can change our lives, if we are hoping in what is purely material or the idea that it's possible to cultivate a life on earth insulated from pain and suffering, we will surely find ourselves wandering in the American berserk. So, I guess rather than going on about ideas on how to cultivate a life of real meaning, I will leave you to think about it. Or call me to get some coffee. I will absolutely be thinking about this for some time to come.

Childhood Favorites Post #7: Utopias and Dystopias in Young Adult Lit, or trusting young readers with deep material

2010-07-23T13:16:00.000-04:00

Another overlapping idea that I have found in my re-reading of childhood favorites is the concept of forming "utopias" in books with science fiction slants, The Giver by Lois Lowry and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Readers learn that the places that were designed to be easy and safe are actually disastrous.

In the world of The Giver, the community was designed to be "extraordinarily safe" and "meticulously ordered." Emotions are seen as dangerous, so at the onset of puberty, every citizen is given pills to keep the "stirrings" away. Anything that wasn't practical was done done away with: "the weather made transportation almost impossible at times. It wasn't a practical thing, so it became obsolete when we went to Sameness." The community operates out of the fear of mistakes, out of the fear of bearing pain, sorrow or inconvenience, and in turn sacrifices all of the good as well. One person in the community, The Receiver, is chosen to hold all of the memories prior to Sameness: pain, color, love, choice. The Receiver bears all of the knowledge and pain so that the rest of the community doesn't have to.

In A Wrinkle in Time, the kids land on a planet called Camazotz to rescue their father. They feel completely creeped out when everyone seems exactly the same. Finally they meet IT, who explains:
"For you, as well as for the rest of all the happy, useful people on this planet, I, in my own strength, am willing to assume all the pain, all the responsibility, all the burdens of thought and decision. I am peace and utter rest. I am freedom from all responsibility. To come in to me is the last difficult decision you need ever make." Charles Wallace attempts to fight IT, but loses and falls under the Camazotz spell as well: "Why do you think we have wars at home? Why do you think people get confused and unhappy? Because they all live in their own, separate, individual lives. I've been trying to explain to you in the simplest possible way that on Camazotz individuals have been done away with. Camazotz is ONE mind. And that's why everybody's so happy and efficient. " Creepy!

I think that these books have content that is not only interesting for a reader of any age (most of my students read these titles in elementary school and loved them for separate reasons then), but that invites adolescent readers into some serious questions about the nature of life and the decisions that they have to make as 12-13 year olds. For example, despite the initial allure, relinquishing responsibility isn't all it's cracked up to be, and not worth the cost of what you lose. Middle school is the time when you learn what it means to be more independent and responsible and it is a scary time. Also, these utopian/dystopian books celebrate individuality and I'll be the first to say that in middle school all I wanted to do was to be like everyone else. These characters and conflicts can arm kids with courage.

Readers watch characters they love struggle with figuring life out and growing up right before their eyes. Meg realizes: "Maybe if you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy." This is a really deep thought for an adolescent (or even pre-adolescent) reader, that I imagine can create amazing book club conversations and even intellectual arguments. Books like The Giver and A Wrinkle in Time are ones that kids, if they are able to pick up on these threads, will walk away with not only an incredible read, but feeling smarter and feeling changed as a thinker. Do you remember the first moments when you realized the world is a lot bigger/deeper/more interesting than you ever thought possible? These books trust kids with intense issues...and I think that kids want to be entrusted; they want the adults in their lives to recognize the capability they have. Of course, different realizations will come at different times for different kids. That is why I am so excited to hear what my 8th graders have to say about these books in the fall as they reread them.

bound together as humans?

2010-07-21T16:09:00.001-04:00

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"Dolce," the second novella of Suite Francaise, set in the provincial countryside of France, was what captured me and got me thinking the most. The characters seemed more complex and conflicted, more endearing than those of "Storm in June." The question I walked away considering was:

What is it that makes us human, and why are those things not enough to bind us together?

By nature I am a micro-thinker. I am interested in the larger systems: how they function, why we need them, how to change them, but ultimately my life works on the tiny level within a system: as a teacher, as a canvas bag carrier to the grocery, as a user of public transportation. I tend to see the smaller, personal level before putting it into a larger, more complex system, which was why one of the main conflicts of the novella was so heartbreaking for me.

Lucille is a provincial French woman, whose husband had a mistress and a child across town but is now a prisoner of war, whose mother in law cannot stand her, who feels miserable in how stuck she is in her own life. When she and her mother in law are asked to house a German officer, the initial revulsion to housing an enemy weighs heavily in the house, until Lucille begins to see some of the underlying similarities between herself and this foreign enemy, namely through music: "Anything was better than music, for music alone can abolish differences of language or culture between two people and evoke something indestructible within them," (334).

Lucille and the officer find that they have a connection joins the ranks of history's star-crossed: "But occupation is more terrible in a way, because people get used to one another. We tell ourselves, 'They're just like us, after all,' but they're not at all the same. We're two different species, irreconcilable, enemies forever," (333). She almost couldn't bear the things that brought them together because all it raised in her was guilt in having feelings toward the enemy and the confusion when their connection seemed to be above their respective countries' political stances.

It seems that the all of the residents of this occupied town are grappling with the idea of the collective "good" for their countries versus what would make them as individuals feel whole: The German officer lost his autonomy in the name of the war: "Madame, I am a soldier. Soldiers don't think. I'm told to go somewhere and I go. Told to fight, I fight. Told to get myself killed, I die. Thinking would make fighting more difficult and death more terrible," (273). The two, each in their minds, attempt to reconcile their hearts with their national duty, and it just becomes more complex and heart breaking.

I do my best to stay on top of the world news and understand the deep rooted conflicts, but each time I never fail to become broken hearted over our inability to see each other as humans...with families and passions and sorrow. I hate that those connections are so often not enough to bind us: whether in small, inner circle conflicts or those of a worldwide nature.

The mother in law's response seems simultaneously out of touch as well as chillingly brilliant.
She faded into play-acting in her room, barely leaving: "It was neither delirium nor the first signs of madness; never had she been more totally lucid and aware of herself. It was deliberate play-acting, the only thing that brought her some solace, in the same way as morphine or wine. In the darkness and the silence, she could relive the past...she [also] anticipated the future. Though she lied and deceived herself, the lies were her own creation and she cherished them," (305).

This I think, though, is the danger: the pretending that everything is fine that in turns just paralyzes a person. I think that it is better to live in the complexity of human nature than to just pretend that everything is all right, even if being a part of humanity leads to heartbreak.

Suite Francaise and Suffering.

2010-07-20T17:09:00.001-04:00

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky requires some background information, as its journey to publication is quite extraordinary. Nemirovsky was a well known writer in France throughout the thirties and at the beginning of World War Two. She made a plan for a five novellas with overlapping characters about the war, as it was occurring, but only had time to write two of them, as she was arrested by the French Police during the German occupation and sent to Auschwitz, where she died. Her daughter found the manuscript in a journal fifty years later, which is what now comprises Suite Francaise. I typically read appendices and any kind of editor or translator's notes after I read the novel, so some of the issues I had initially while reading the book vanished once I saw the notes she had for the plot and character arcs and understood that the novel I held in my hands was only 2 of the 5 planned novellas.

"Storm in June" is the first novella, which is centered around its portrayals of how different classes of people experienced and processed the war. I wanted to punch some of the characters in the face; I'm not sure if they were overly flawed intentionally or just drove me insane, namely the ones who could think only of their beautiful material goods or of how vulgar the lower classes were. This blatant self centeredness almost seemed unrealistic to me; that suffering would arouse disgust and disdain rather than empathy.

The inner conflict that seemed so realistic was when a well-to-do mother smugly passed out treats to lower class children, feeling as though she were upholding her Christian duty. My gut reaction to her was disgust. But, she became more human as I read about the panic she felt when she realized that there wasn't food to go around, even for the wealthy. Watching her hubris shrink and her maternal instinct of survival and protection rise made her more real in my mind.

I think that watching suffering, more often than not, brings out complex emotions that are difficult to wade through as an individual and even as a reader: when I am faced with homelessness everytime I get on a subway, it weighs on my heart. Walking by feels so wrong and after living in the city for seven years I still don't know how to discern when and how to help. But, I prefer living in a place where I am forced to wrestle with it, rather than forget that it exists...but does thinking make a difference? What I found while reading was that wartime only heightens the complexity of what to do with the suffering one sees.

And, just like the characters in the book, suffering will in time turn from voyeuristic to personal for all of us, and remind us of our own fragility, and, I think, help us to stand in solidarity with humankind.

Childhood Favorites Post #6: A Spiritual Journey with A Wrinkle in Time

2010-07-16T19:41:00.000-04:00

"She keeps thinking she can say things in words," (page 70). This was one of the first quotations in A Wrinkle in Time that made connect in more than just a literary sense with what Madeleine L'Engle was up to while writing this book. There are a lot of different lenses that I try to teach my students to read literature through, and one of them is by making personal connections. Mrs. Who's quote I just shared reminded me of the "mystery" that is a part of my personal faith...the fact that there are some things that I cannot physically give name to, either for their beauty, glory, brokenness or depth. Not long after this quote came many others that echoed my Christian faith and many verses from the old and new testament. That in turn led me to do research on L'Engle. This is partly a record for me of some of the examples, and an attempt try to pull some of the threads together to think about author's purpose. I'm looking forward to discussing this book as soon as someone would like to volunteer to read it!

One of the planets that the children land on is filled with creatures singing: "Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the eath, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof. Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift their voice; let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord!" (Isaiah 42:10, page 77).

The universe is fighting the Black Thing and it hovers over the earth, that echoes biblical themes of spiritual warfare and the sense that something is amiss in our world. Mrs. Who and Charles Wallace discuss some of the strategy involved in fighting it:
"All through the universe it's being fought, all through the cosmos, and my, but it's a grand and exciting battle."
"Who have our fighters been?"
"Oh, you must know them, dear. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehend it not." "Jesus!" Charles Wallave said.
"Of course!" Mrs. Whatsit said. "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They've been light for us to see by."
"Leonardo da Vinci? And Michaelangelo? And Shakespeare, and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein! And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and Saint Francis!" (page 100-101). What I love here is that credit is given to artists and musicians and scientists that deepen the richness of the human experience and amplify the good and the beautiful, and are a microcosm of truth in themselves, much of what C.S. Lewis discusses in his essay The Weight of Glory.

"We were sent here for something. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose," (page 190, Romans 8:28).

"Are you fighting the Black Thing?" Meg asked.
"Oh, yes," Aunt Beast replied. "In doing that we can never relax. We are called according to His purpose, and whom He calls, them He also justifies. Of course we have help, and without help it would be much more difficult."
"Who helps you?" Meg asked.
"...Good helps us, the stars help us, perhaps what you would call light helps us, love helps us." I think that L'Engle's theology here is incredibly refreshing. In my own life I have enormous frustrations when Christians aren't able to see glimpses of universal goodness and truth in all aspects of the world, and how all people who are doing good are moving the earth toward a better place.

"We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not see. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal," (2 Corinthians 4:18, page 205) To read this in the context of the story, you would see that L'Engle uses her science-fiction imagination to give a name and space to that which we don't know or understand. Some of Christian theology's biggest mysteries are revealed through that imagination in a way that enables the reader to grasp it in a more tangible way.

"Listen, Meg. Listen well. The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men...but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty..." (page 222, 1 Cor 1:25).

So, here's the bottom line for me as a public school English teacher who read this book and also happens to be a Christian: I love that anyone can read this and get lost in the adventure, be captured by the settings and relate to the inner struggles the characters face. At the same time, my personal reading experience was enhanced by the way that L'Engle used adventure, story, art and science to amplify many of the truths of my faith and pushed me to think about them more deeply. I think it could also be an interesting angle for an adult reader of a different faith. Either way, reading A Wrinkle in Time was a win-win for me.

Childhood Favorites Post #5: On Growing Up

2010-07-12T13:37:00.000-04:00

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Sometimes I call it oldest child syndrome. Sometimes it's Type-A. Sometimes it's overly organized. Whatever name I give it, and despite the creative side of my brain, I have a tendency to want everything to be orderly and as it should be, whether it is my unit binders on my desk at school, my belongings in my apartment, or my personal life.

It has been a long, slow, frustrating journey to realize that I don't have the ability to get everything right, no matter how hard I try. What used to feel like personal failure, I am finally learning at 29 is an unavoidable part of human life. One of the basic tenets of my faith is that we are all fallible, and when I remember this, it makes it so much easier for me to breathe. It is amazing to me to read books intended for children in elementary school and find so much of myself in them. I can't help but wonder if everyone else got this down at age 10? Ha.

In Freak the the Mighty, Kevin made a dictionary for Max for Christmas, filled with all sorts of clever and poignant definitions, based on the way he saw the world. The one that stood out to me the most was his entry for human: "an improbable, imperfect creature."

In my crazy rush to finish all of my childhood favorites before leaving New York for the summer, I began to see all kinds of crazy connections between them all. Through the character of Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, I watched her grapple with the humanity's imperfection as she realizes that her father (who is lost in time and she goes to rescue) cannot solve everything that goes wrong, and in turn, she begins to grow up.

"Her father had been found but he had not made everything all right Instead, everything was worse than ever, and her adored father was bearded and thin and white and not omnipotent after all. Not matter what happened next, things could be no more terrible or frightening than they already were."

"Disappointment was as dark and corrosive in her as the Black Thing. The ugly words tumbled from her cold lips even as she herself could not believe that it was to her father, her beloved, longed-for father, that she was talking to in this way...She had found her father and he had not made everything all right. Everything kept getting worse and worse. If the long search for her father was ended, and he wasn't able to overcome all their difficulties, there was nothing to guarantee that it would all come out right in the end. There was nothing left to hope for. She teetered on the seesaw of love and hate."

I love that Madeleine L'Engle lets Meg dwell in this feeling for a while, as these realizations and feelings are the epitome of coming of age. I wonder if this goes over the heads of first time readers of the book. I am anxious to talk with my students in the fall about the re-reading experience and how they connect with the emotional changes that Meg experiences.

I appreciate the way that L'Engle characterizes the father as well. He is fully aware of his own limitations and I imagine that as a parent it must be difficult (and yet exciting) to watch his daughter realize this as well: "My daughter, I am a human being, and a very fallible one."

Meg captures it all when she says: "I wanted you to do it all for me. I wanted everything to be easy and simple...So I tried to pretend that it was all your fault...because I was scared, and I didn't want to have to do anything myself." As I read this I smiled at this enormous revelation of hers and the fact that I myself fall into the trap of wanting everything to be easy and simple, and forgetting the great beauty--and the essence of humanity--that can emerge from the struggles.

Though, that is not to say that I don't hurt with nostalgia from time to time about the safety of my childhood. Sigh.

Childhood Favorites Post #4: Remembering with Freak the Mighty

2010-07-09T12:57:00.000-04:00

"Remembering is a great invention of the mind," so says Kevin in the young adult novel Freak the Mighty. The whole concept of memory is fascinating to me, and I tend to write about it every time that it comes up in a book.

Freak the Mighty is a story of friendship, of hardship, of transcendence. The characters in this book go through so much, that it is hard to believe that most of my students read it in elementary school. Max lives with his grandparents because his father is in jail for killing his mother. He considers himself stupid and is in learning disabled classes at school. People are frightened of him because of his father, how much he looks at him and how large of a person he is. Kevin has just moved in to his block with his mom. He has a disease that has left him crippled and sick, but is absolutely brilliant. The two form an unlikely friendship and dub themselves "Freak the Mighty."

"You don't need a time machine if you know how to remember," says Kevin in a theoretical conversation between the boys about recalling what he has learned about the ice age in reference to an imaginary game they are playing. What he doesn't realize is how weighty this will become for Max. Kevin is wise beyond his years and knows how sick he is. As much as his friendship with Max has changed him, he is aware that Max will have to move forward without him in the future. The greatest gift that Kevin offered Max in their friendship was the use of imagination and the reminder of how memories can give strength. What is so smart about Philbrick's writing, is that he writes in Max's voice throughout the book--Max who hated school, Max who had no confidence in his intellectual ability--and only at the end do you realize that Kevin asked him to write down their story. At the end of the book it is incredible to "witness" how Max rose above all of his challenges to accomplish this and to see how the memory of his friendship with Kevin empowered him to do so.

And so, yes, remembering is a great invention of the mind. And even though we all have things we wish we could forget, we also have the store of memories that remind us of who we really are and the things we really love...and those are the memories that give us the strength to move forward as changed people.

Reconciling the past and present.

2010-07-06T15:52:00.000-04:00

This summer marks the seventh year that I've lived in New York City. When people ask me where I'm from, I've found that I have a variety of answers. When I was abroad last summer, I said I was from New York. While in the city, I typically say I'm originally, originally from Long Island, partly because it's so close and partly because it's where I was born, where all my extended family roots and my parents' pasts lie. I follow that up with the fact that I'm really midwestern, having spent every year of school in southwest Ohio. Basically, there is never a straight answer and I don't feel fully like myself without mentioning all these aspects of my past. There is a part of me that will always be from Long Island, from Centerville, Ohio and from New York, and I've realized that I feel most like myself when I account for all of these parts.

Reconciling the past and present and learning how to sift through the layers is one of the biggest conflicts of In the Woods by Tana French. One of the settings of the book is the woods of Knocknaree, a tiny suburb outside of Dubin, Ireland. In the beginning of the story, a 12 year old girl is found murdered in the woods and the main character Detective Rob Ryan is called in for the investigation. The twist is that Ryan, unbeknownst to anyone but his partner, grew up in Knocknaree and was the sole survivor of a crime that left his 2 best friends missing. He was found covered in blood and without a single memory of what happened. He has spent the rest of his life essentially forgetting until this case began. The novel is not only the mystery of the girl who was killed, but also of Ryan's past and his psychological state as he is forced to face all he has left behind.

Beyond being the site of two horrific crimes, the Knocknaree woods is also in the middle of another conflict: it is the site of an archaeological dig, which is forced to rush because construction for a highway is slated to begin. French does an impressive job making this story about more than just solving a crime. The woods becomes symbolic in its vastness, it's darkness and its The reader, like Detective Ryan, is left wondering should one dig through the past, carefully trying to make sense of it and put the pieces together in a meaningful way or pave over it, moving into the future leaving it all locked underneath cement?

The ending, unlike most episodes of The Closer, Law and Order and CSI: NY, is not quite as neat as I have grown accustomed to in my television dabbling or in the pulpy mystery reads I consumed in middle school. I think French's literary merit in this book is the psychological depth of Detective Ryan and her skill at depicting it within the genre. He is complex and heartbreakingly human in the decisions that he makes throughout the case as simultaneously faces the past and tries to hide it from others and hide from it himself. I walked away from this book wondering about how he will choose to move forward with all the layers of his past, rather than the satisfaction of figuring out the puzzle.

Short Recommendation.

2010-06-29T11:25:00.000-04:00

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

I have no idea how I haven't posted about Sloane Crosley after reading her first book of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake a few years ago. But since I made a hard cover purchase the day her second book was released (I can count all previous hard cover purchases on one hand...and I buy a lot of books), I realized it's high time that I publicly recommend her highly amusing essays to the 5 people who read this blog. Crosley's essays resonate with me as she grew up in the suburbs, moved to New York and is about my age, but I remain convinced that they are pretty funny for almost anyone.

Anyway, nothing too deep, but if you are looking for an entertaining summer read, either of these two would work.

Look out.

2010-06-28T20:52:00.000-04:00

My after school creative writing class this year was hands down one of my favorite parts of my teaching career. These rock star middle school students each wrote a piece to be published in our anthology and I'm making the prediction here and now that this is only the beginning. I will be the one waving around short stories in the New Yorker and newly published novels claiming to everyone I know that once upon a time these fine writers were in my class. These ones made my Thursdays, made my jaw drop with their creativity, made me laugh. I just adore them. So, all I'm saying is that this anthology was one of my best reads of the year.

Childhood Favorites Post #3. On Distractions.

2010-06-28T20:35:00.000-04:00

As a side note, I'm having a hard time deciding what to write about in response to everything I've been reading lately. Usually, I feel compelled to distill what I find to be the most meaningful aspect of a book and put it into the context of both the entire work as well as my current thought life. But then there are the random sentences I underlined while reading that spark an idea. I'm going to have to do a little bit of both throughout the Childhood Favorites series because inside these "juvenile" books there is just. so. much. Which, lucky for me, is the purpose of this unit in the fall.

One of the creatures set on preventing Milo, Tock and the Humbug in The Phantom Tollbooth from rescuing Rhyme and Reason is the Senses Taker, who collects an absurd list of information from each character before he can, literally, take their senses. When Milo tells him that their destination is The Castle in the Air, he says he is sure they would rather see what he has to show them. Milo begins to see a circus on the horizon. Tock the dog smells marvelous scents. The vain (but loveable) Humbug hears a crowd applauding and cheering for him. Their senses--literally and figuratively--have been taken from them.

Juster's description of what happened to them was so creepy: "They all stood as if in a trance, looking, smelling, and listening to the very special things that the Senses Taker had provided for them, forgetting completely about where they were going and who, with evil intent, was coming up behind him...Milo was too engrossed in the circus to notice, and Tock had closed his eyes, the better to smell, and the bug, bowing and waving, stood with a look of sheer bliss on his face, interested only in the wild ovation."

I'll be the first to admit that sometimes, distractions are quite nice. Piles of papers to grade? CSI, how I love you. Stressed? Oh, Glee. Such joy. Of course, hikes and runs and laughing are more healthy distractions when life gets a bit overwhelming.

But other times, distractions take me on a path that veers so far away from where--and who--I want to be, that it does seem like there is an old, evil Senses Taker trying to prevent me from getting where I know I could be. But he's tricky, because it's so easy to settle into the comfort of what is easier and more enjoyable, just like Miles, Tock and Humbug.

"And furthermore, I'll steal your sense of purpose, take your sense of duty, destroy your sense of proportion..." This is when the destruction sets in. I wonder how many dreamers have forgotten their initial ambitions and hopes by losing sight of what they were originally chasing.

Childhood Favorites Post #2: The Phantom Tollbooth-An Overview and its General Brilliance.

2010-06-22T19:56:00.000-04:00

I just read The Phantom Tollbooth for the first time and was floored by its utterly hilarious wit. It made me wonder if it all would have gone over my head as a child. But then, children tend to get lost in the adventure of the story and it isn't until much later that we realize all the wisdom we ever needed to gain was in books we read in elementary school. But, as an adult, all I could do was nod my head in agreement with his criticism of society, all the while laughing out loud at how clever and pun filled it all is (yes, I laugh at puns. I can't help it.).

The main frame of the story is that the main character Milo begins as an incredibly bored boy. Then a tollbooth shows up in his bedroom and he goes on a crazy adventure in The Lands Beyond, where chaos seems to reign ever since King Azaz, ruler of the land of words and letters, and the Mathemagician, ruler of the land of numbers, have banished their sisters, the Princesses Rhyme and Reason (get it?). Every character he runs across builds Juster's criticism (and wit) while being incredibly creative and entertaining for the average ten year old reader just looking for adventure. Here an example of one of kinds of characters that Milo encounters through the land of Ignorance that I thought was most clever:

The Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort and monster of habit. In his own words, after he asked Milo and his friends to move a pile of sand using a tweezer, empty a well using a dropper and dig a hole through a cliff using a needle:

"Think of all the trouble it saves...if you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. you just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing."

I felt as though the Trivium had called me out personally on this one.

Once all the demons realize that Milo and his friends are trying to restore Rhyme and Reason, they all come out and it is said that they only had one thought in mind: "destroy the intruders and protect Ignorance."

This sentence almost sounds like it came out of a Cold War science fiction story (it was published in 1961, so that would be an interesting thing to research): the government trying to keep people in the dark about what was really going on. I can also link it to advertising, which tells us stories of things we need, so that we don't have to think for ourselves of what is truly valuable. It is crazy to me just how many directions the reader can take this book in.

My favorite part, after finishing the book and looking over my notes actually came from the very beginning:

"What had started as make-believe was now very real," (page 16). Let the adventure begin. And isn't that we always hoped for?

Summer Reading: the final list.

2010-06-20T15:28:00.001-04:00

Despite the fact that it has been flip flop weather for quite some time, the trees are full with leaves and I'm sure there are lightning bugs out there somewhere, summers for me as a New Yorker officially start in July. Our last day this year is MONDAY, June 28th. Monday? Seriously? But, we don't go back until Tuesday, September 7th and then have the 9th and 10 off (and the kids only come on the 8th). Anyway. The end is finally near and I have narrowed down the summer reading choices (and yes, it's ok if you make fun of me because this is my third post about summer reading). I think the final list is pretty great. It will be interesting if I stray. Anyway:

1. Finish the Childhood Favorites. 5 more to go.

2. NYC book club summer picks:

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

3. My mom and I decided to have a mini book club while I am in Kentucky in August. We are going to read a couple Pulitzer winners that we've missed in the past few years:

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout
March by Geraldine Brooks

4. Mysteries:

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larrson
In the Woods by Tana French

The Things They Carried.

2010-06-19T11:42:00.000-04:00

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien has been on my nightstand's "unread" pile for years. But after reading All the Broken Pieces to my students and realizing how little reading I've done on Vietnam, I was eager to learn more. Published in 1990, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer. When I closed the final pages, all I could think was that the book was absolutely. brilliant.

History has always come alive for me through literature. I have awful memories of of taking endless notes in my 10th grade Western Civilization class from my teacher's tiny, perfect cursive on an overhead projector. I was able to memorize and get A's, but I was impassioned by nothing I learned. My American Literature class, though, is what painted a broad scope for our country's history: seeing the different cultural beliefs, trends and events and then reading what was produced at that time was fascinating. One of my regrets of college is that I didn't double major in History (but I guess since I changed my major 3 or 4 times, I should just be glad that I made it out in four years), but I feel like studying literature gave me a a desire to keep learning about it. My assignment to teach 7th and 8th grade Social Studies my first year (basically ALL of American history!) also served as a good crash course.

All that to say, what is the best way to learn about history, especially wars? Obviously it's a balance of understanding overarching timelines of events, cultural trends and changes, but those remain just facts on the page. I think it has to come through a variety of lenses while studying the humanities: What music? Whose music? What art? Whose art? What literature? Whose literature? I am so convinced that we need to be a people who studies and understands history--and the present. One of the characters comes home from Vietnam to people who had no idea what was going on and no desire to attempt to understand, leaving him feeling utterly alone: "The town could not talk, and would not listen. The place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know (143)."

O'Brien's book is a work that makes the reader know. It declared as a work of fiction, and yet it is filled with stories inspired by what he knows. His narrative style is brilliant and elusive, one in which the reader never really knows what he actually witnessed and what he fictionalized--which is one of the most artistic craft moves I have ever read. He explains: "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth...what stories can do is make things present (179-180)."

I've never read this kind of narrative structure and style before. O'Brien unpacks the complexity of the soldier's experience in a war that they didn't necessarily understand themselves. The title comes from the opening chapter in which O'Brien lists the literal and figurative items that each solider in the story carried with him. There is something in one's personal effects that breaks my heart in their pure representation of an individual's humanity. Basically, this book took my breath away and really, any further attempt to explain it would only take away from it's significance. Please go find a copy immediately.

Childhood Favorites Post #1: Nostalgia in Bridge to Terabithia

2010-06-15T21:48:00.001-04:00

All summer, I will be making my way through seven "childhood favorites" that I'm reading in preparation for my first unit in the fall. Luckily, this is the kind of work that I am more than happy to do. Bear with me, wait for adult books in between, or be inspired to pick up one of your favorites.

Bridge to Terabithia is a story about a boy with 4 sisters, a boy who feels misunderstood, a boy who wishes he were brave. It is a story about friendship and imagination. But most, for me, Bridge to Terabithia is a book of nostalgia.

I can't put my finger on the moment that I couldn't pretend anymore, but I do remember bring sixteen, baby sitting, and realizing that the magic of imagination and pretend had slipped away years before and I hadn't even realized it. It is a visceral realization of growing up.

As I read about Jess and Leslie creating their imaginary kingdom of Terabithia in the woods near their houses, I could think only about the worlds I created for myself in the woods across the street from my house, the places I made in our unfinished basement...and being able to physically will myself to believe it all for hours on end. While I was reading, Jess and Leslie became kindred spirits.

They were moved by beauty, the feeling of fullness and wanting it to last forever: "They took turns swinging across the gully on the rope. It was a glorious autumn day, and if you looked up as you swung, it gave you the feeling of floating. Jess leaned back and drank in the rich, clear color of the sky. He was drifting, drifting like a fat white lazy cloud back and forth across the blue."

When I was younger, summer nights were the greatest. All of the kids in my neighborhood would be running through our adjoining backyards, soaking up every last shred of daylight and catching lightning bugs into the twilight. Even though I knew there would always be another summer evening with cool grass beneath my feet and the smell of trees and creek and corn in the air, my heart broke when night finally came and we all had to go inside. I spent many evenings after bed time with my face pressed against the screen, trying to breathe in the evening air for as long as possible.

They felt the need to create sacred spaces: "This is not an an ordinary place," she whispered. "Even the rulers of Terabithia come into it only at times of greatest sorrow or greatest joy. We must strive to keep it sacred. It would not do to disturb the Spirits."

Once in college, a few friends of mine and I found ourselves in an enormous grove of pine trees that were planted a hundred years ago in straight lines spanning for hundreds of yards. Without even thinking, my friend Erin and I started sprinting down the aisle of trees...running and jumping seemed the only proper response to such a scene: we were so utterly joyful that merely starring at it all wasn't enough. My friend Matt took a picture of this pre-digital photography and caught us both in midair. It was in a frame for years and below it I pasted the quote: "Perhaps they could run over the hill and across the fields to the stream and swing themselves into Terabithia."

This happened again when I went to England with two kindred and we saw true English countryside for the first time. We just couldn't believe that it existed in real life the same way we had pictured it in our minds in all our favorite books. I do have physical proof of our giddiness:

When the tragedy is revealed at the end and Jess' horrid sister tells him blatantly, it literally plunged my heart like a dagger, even though I knew all along what was coming. Jess and Leslie are just too kindred for it to not hurt like crazy. It is the moment that the magic makes the first break: where it's impossible to be completely immersed in imagination. But. It doesn't mean that it no longer exists.

Bits of the magic come back to me sometimes and remind me that the world is enchanted. Most of the time it's when the eastern woodlands smell like Ohio. Some of the time it's when the sun is setting and the light is perfectly orange and the shadows purple. Sometimes I feel again athe essence of my heart aching because of all that is beautiful and good. And real.

Soundtrack for this book for me:
Pacific Street/Hem
Why Should I Cry for You/Sting
All At Sea/Jamie Cullum
Sometimes You Can't Make it on Your Own/U2
Yellow/Coldplay

reading. history. and reading historical fiction.

2010-06-12T15:55:00.000-04:00

David Brooks is pretty solid. One of his editorials this week was about the importance of liberal arts degrees in an economic time when it seems more smarter to study something that is more directly practical to a specific job. Reading (and looking at art/studying history/listening to music, etc.) makes us people more in touch with the complex depths of humanity that cannot be measured, quantified or simply named.

Last weekend, a student asked me to read Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosay. Though it will never be a book award winner, it was a relatively well written, powerful story about July 16, 1942, when the French government rounded up thousands of its own men, women and children to be delivered to to concentration camps. Sadly, this event was not something that was taught in French history classes until recently--which is sadly too often the case for the darkest moments of any country's history.

The story follows a ten year old girl who was taken from her home and a modern American woman who moved to Paris after college and has lived there for 25 years stumbles up on her story and realizes her personal connection to it. As she visits the lonely, rarely visited places of the roundup, the plaques read "remember and never forget," though she realizes that most people have intentionally chosen to forget, believing that it is a safer, less painful path.

In relation to historical fiction, without story, history often becomes memories of menial note taking and impersonal timelines. We lose the deep, complex narrative of the human race. I was appalled that I had no idea this happened in France. Similarly, I was appalled that I moved to New York with a college degree in hand, and had no idea about what happening in the Sudan. I took two classes about African women writers. Curses.

The moment people begin to forget its own dark corners is the moment that they become closer to resurfacing. And, on the opposite end, the second we begin to forget the bright moments is when we lose our grasp on what is real, good and true and therefore lose everything, collectively or as individuals.

On clouds. Sort of.

2010-06-12T14:35:00.004-04:00

If I count my college friends and their current careers, I am not joking when I say that all of them (ten or more) are currently employed as teachers, counselors or youth workers. I do think this is something of an anomaly, but still, crazy. It was amazing to live life with people whose passions overlapped so deeply with my own.

Obviously the world opened up in a million different ways when I moved to New York seven years ago. One of which is that I made friends in every field possible: finance, consulting in every capacity, fashion, art, real estate, non profits, law. Being around all these different kinds of people only enhanced my nerd-like nature and made me want to be constantly learning more. It has been through knowing such a group of diversified interests that has fueled my interest in uncovering the need the world has for a balance of macro thinkers (simply, how the world needs to change and operate on a large scale) and micro thinkers (how the world needs to change and operate on a small scale).

I am a micro person. My best skills are found in a single classroom of thousands in Brooklyn alone. My best moments in my career typically occur while having a conference with a thirteen year old student about a book they read or a story they wrote. But, my current theory is that micros need to be macro-ly aware and macros need to be micro-ly aware.

So. Finally, my point. Literature lends itself to knowing more about both. Therefore, everyone should read more books.

I have been on a historical kick lately. I'm currently reading two books about Vietnam: All the Broken Pieces (young adult) by Ann E. Burg and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I am learning the broad strokes of the war, through the narratives themselves and the research they have both led me to: causes, complications, perspectives from both sides. And then, obviously, there are the stories of the characters where the Vietnam war begins to have faces, reminding the reader that war is intensely personal and involves hearts and hopes, devastation and destruction. A good friend of mine recently posted a quotation on his blog, via Wired Magazine, that I haven't been able to get out of my mind for some time:

"Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds."

I think, that if are to move forward as a people, be it in energy, poverty, healthcare or education, we have to remember that we are a universe of clouds: we cannot figure it all out in a theoretical equation, but without the theoretical equation we may not be able to progress. I also think that if we all read more books, the world would be a better place. Just saying.

Anyway. These are just thoughts.

inspired.

2010-06-10T18:37:00.000-04:00

Every time June rolls around, I think back to five years ago after my first year teaching when I had applications in at 10 different high schools in the great state of Ohio. The plan was to go to New York for a year or two and then travel back to "normal" life in the midwest. A handful of reasons were pulling me home, and yet I couldn't bring myself to make that decision final. Then. I went to my first June planning meeting, where a team of teachers plans the next year's curriculum. I realized then how lucky I am to have such inspired colleagues and a job that lets us re-envision what we're doing each year.

Last year the 8th grade team planned a new opening unit based around revisiting favorite books from childhood, with the intention of reigniting the kids' passion for reading by teaching how to dig deeply into books they long ago adored. Today we re-imagined this unit and I walked away with a pretty sweet re-reading list and I am so antsy to start working on this pile and, like the nerd I am, annotating and writing about them in preparation:

Then my team took a walk to the bookstore and made a list of books to order for our classroom libraries...it was so fun thinking about what books my current rock-star 7th graders will want to read in the fall as 8th graders. And, let's be honest, I'm pumped to read them all, too.

And, let's be totally honest, I'm also counting down the days until June 28th. Everyone needs a summer vacation to rest, relax and reinvigorate. Sigh. I love my job.

let the great world spin.

2010-06-06T20:55:00.001-04:00

"There is no end. There is grief and there is love and they spin together in this human body, which is, in itself, also a book."

I started this book a few Sundays ago. Once every few months I monitor the door during my church's uptown service. All I really have to do is be at a desk in the front for about 3 and a half hours. I usually bring papers to grade, but last Sunday I got so wrapped up in the beginning of Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann on the subway ride up, that I never even took student work out of my bag. A week and a day later, I swore I was going to grade papers. But it was the end of a delightfully long weekend and so lovely outside that I, once again, left the papers inside my bag and finished the book. I just had to. And now, a week after closing its pages, it hasn't left my thoughts.

The story is set in New York in the seventies and framed around the day that Philippe Petit tightrope walked across the Twin Towers. The story isn't about Petit, per se, but rather he provides not only a historical context, but a metaphor for the book's multiple story lines: that all sorts of people are carefully walking a high wire in their own lives.

There are a lot of things to say about this book and a number of characters that I could spend time analyzing, but the overriding theme that sticks out to me is the title itself: Let the Great World Spin. It seems as though I forget the world's grandeur sometimes and get lost in the mundane or my lists of things to do. Or sometimes, I feel so burdened or heartbroken I can hardly bear it. But, I can almost picture an old school carnival barker announcing all that humans have the capacity to know and feel by shouting this title out loud and inviting us to actually start watching. The Great World, though, isn't made up only of the best parts of existence--it is coupled with the knowledge and experience of the great pain and sorrows that accompany it, which is what the different characters come to learn:

"The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties."

"The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward."

"The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear."

And so. I will continue thinking about the characters who broke my heart in the best and worst of ways. And, I hope that I will not be drowned by the sorrows because there is so much intangible good.

Yes! Time to start planning summer reading!!

2010-05-29T11:55:00.002-04:00

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

Though it's Memorial Day, summer officially doesn't start for me until Monday, June 28th at 3 pm. Until then, I will still have papers to grade and lessons to plan, therefore unable to completely devote my time to the greatness that is summer, obviously including summer reading. And even though I will be avidly reading up until then, there is something I love about planning my summer reading. Each year, though, I seem to make big plans and then books fall in my lap and the plans change--which is probably good for me, even though I have this grand vision that my summer can look like a literature class. I found an old post about my summer reading self--and it was interesting to get a glimpse into myself as a reader from a few years ago...I may have to re-imagine it at the end of this summer and see how I've changed.

This is random, but did you used to do the summer reading programs with your local library? I just had a major flashback to the Candy Land-style boards that the Centerville Library used to provide for children and we'd get a stamp for each book we read, winding our way down the paper path and filled with a sense of accomplishment. My mom would take my brother and I to the library once a week to update our reading piles and our stamps. I forgot all about that. I think i would like a poster with a stamp per book.

Anyway. Here's my brainstorming session of the books I'm thinking about adding to my list this summer:

The New Literary History of America. This anthology takes the reader through American history via literature. I am so fascinated by history and the way that it is portrayed through books, that I have been thinking about this book ever since I first stumbled across it in the winter. $50 at most stores, it is an investment, but has such potential. I could probably carry this one book around with me all summer. Well, I mean that this could be my daytime reading book and then I could read fiction before I go to sleep each night. Downside=I'm travelling for the entire summer, so do I really want to carry around this brick? Should I relegate it to fall reading?

Mystery. I seriously love mystery stories. Much like R&B, I forgot my love in high school and college. My love of crime procedurals like The Closer was what motivated me to pick up the literary genre, which was limited to Nancy Drew in elementary and Mary Higgins Clark in middle school. Mystery books might be the most engaging genre, and then when they are well written? Swoon. Recent loves: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. Summer picks: Continuing with Steign Larsson's trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire. Also, in true Brooklyn style, one of my neighbors had books for free in our lobby, one of which was The Likeness, the follow up to In The Woods by Tana French, which has been on my list for quite a while.

Other options:

Nonfiction: Sloane Crosby's newest book of essays, How Did You Get This Number. I laughed out loud so much in her first book, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and this one has come highly recommended as well. Also, last summer The Shock Doctrine completely rocked my world. I have another book by Naomi Klein, No Logo, sitting on my night stand (which is really a radiator. whatever.).

Rereads: Sometimes books just call to me and I need to pick them back up. These two couldn't be more different: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (though I may cave and read this pre-summer) and The Waves by Virginia Woolf. I read 8 of Woolf's books in a class in college and haven't picked her up since. The Waves completely floored me at the time and I am curious to see what I think of it now.

Fiction. I am pretty obsessed with Roberto Bolano (I fell in love with Amulet a few years ago and my book club read The Savage Detectives last summer). A lot of his books have been recently translated and I've been looking at a few for months, The Skating Rink and The Last Evenings on Earth, especially.
Randoms include The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and Suite Francaise by Irene Namirovsky, along with 3 different books every time I walk into a bookshop.

So. I'm game for recommendations. I'll keep you posted on how it all goes.

Previous summer reading posts (for those of you who are extremely bored or just looking for ideas) can be found here and here and here. And also here and here and here. It's interesting to see the books that have shown up multiple times because I want to reread them and the books that show up as perpetual sitters on my stack of books to read next.

3 Books. 1 Train of Thought.

2010-05-29T11:09:00.001-04:00

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

I am reading All the Broken Pieces, set in the United States just after the Vietnam War, to my seventh graders. For context, I've been teaching lessons on the Vietnam War and its causes, the atmosphere in the United States afterwards and asking students to think about war in general. The main character is a Vietnamese boy, Matt Ping, who has been adopted by an American family. The book is in verse and one of the metaphors that Matt uses is that freedom is the color of his toddler brother's red shoes on the swing. When I asked my students what they thought that meant, I was blown away by their understanding that demonstrated a (newfound) awareness of the world outside the safety of childhood. In response to the metaphor, a student said that freedom is the ability to live without the burden and weight of the knowledge of things like war.

This came after I realized that my reading life has been inundated lately with the question of how we are meant to live in light of what we know to be true and good. This question is never far from my mind, but I've found easy to hide from.

I am finally reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, which is the story of Chris McCandless: his disdain for modern American culture and his journey across the country and eventually to his death in the Alaskan wilderness, a place where he sought out true existence off of land, inspired by the trancendentalists and Tolstoy and Jack London, completely away from all that society has become and all the ways it burdened him.

Krakauer writes of Chris' love of London: "He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness." I guess this is the struggle that exists between idealism and realism, which is incredibly frustrating. The question always becomes how are we supposed to live in a world that is so broken and seems to worship all the things that don't have true value?

Krakauer includes the following quote before a chapter describing Chris' reasons for deserting the lifestyle he was raised in: "To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and rxiles. Here the leaders of the great religious have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality." (Paul Shepard) McCandless was seeking the same kind of exile. A fiction character who embarked on a completely different kind of exile is John Andrew Corrigan of Let the Great World Spin:

"Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where he was supposed to go. He stayed where he was needed. He took little or nothing along. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery...What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties." Corrigan was a secret man of faith--who left Ireland to live in the Bronx, bought coffee for the prostitutes he befriended and owned next to nothing. Like McCandless, he gave away almost everything he acquired. But unlike McCandless, he sought out beauty in the people the world forgets rather than in solitude and nature.

So. What all this translates into in my mind is how are we choosing to live? It is far too easy to slip into patterns that try mimic glossy advertisements and mistake things for reasons for being. When I read of people like McCandless and Corrigan (though fictional) I always wonder how they live out of such unselfish ideals. Though, my favorite part of the book is how Corrigan poetically and painfullly grapples with his and humanity's fallenness...and I suppose that it will always be just that: each day making choices for the things that really matter. Stepping out of the conditioned false securities that we cling to. Having the courage to be a bit unconventional.

All that said, I highly recommend all of these books.

on finding kindred books and getting lost in them.

2010-05-12T20:14:00.001-04:00

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"I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot."

For this post, I opted not to go into coming of age, falling in love, the making of villains or a well developed mystery. I opted not to study characters. Rather, this post is more of a space to catalogue some of my favorite parts of a recent favorite book.

For quite a few months, I looked at The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon every time I went into a bookstore. The back blurb promises a historical setting and a mystery (a literary genre I have recently remembered that I love, though my ability to log incredible hours with CSI, The Closer, Law and Order, Lie to Me and Bones should have been the first clue) among other things you'll read about below. But since I currently have no less than 20 in my apartment that I haven't read, I obviously have no business buying new books. My lucky day occurred when two of my high level readers actually requested that I buy it for my classroom library. Done. And read it immediately. Sorry kiddos.

Some books are a commitment: you go into reading knowing it's going to be work, but worth it.

Other books are entertaining. Others offer new perspectives. And some are kindred.

Usually I reserve the work kindred who the few souls in the world who love the same things I love, whose hearts break over the same things in the world, who derive joy from the same pastimes. But while reading The Shadow of the Wind, I realized that books can be kindred, too: stories that hold so many loves of my life within its pages that it is impossible to put down and tragic when it ends.

Why this book is kindred:

1. It takes places in Barcelona. Sigh. That city stole my heart last August and I loved that I could picture all of the streets, that I understood references to Las Ramblas, Els Quatre Gats and Tibidabo (sigh). I love that the characters lived in the neighborhood where I stayed. ("This city is a sorceress, you know, Daniel? It gets under your skin and steals your soul without you knowing it," page 480.)

2. This is the first line: "I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time."

3. It is a book about people who love books: "Bea says that the art of reading slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day."

"Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens."

4. It is a book about a book that changes people: "Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return."

So. I hope that you find a book so worthy of getting lost in. And if your name is Alison Covey, you should probably visit your local library right away and borrow this particular book right away.

More on why I love poetry, and/or: I told my students I'd write a poem.

2010-04-27T22:10:00.002-04:00

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ELA State Test=done. Winter=over.

It. is. time. to. teach. [and live in] poetry.

I realized that I haven't written poetry on this blog in a long time. (It typically comes up a lot, mine or someone else's.) I think that poetry's disappearance aligns with winter and state tests and the process of moving or any of the other crazy things that have stolen my time. If you've been reading lately, I'm finally beginning to notice beauty and the small details again, which is perfect for teaching this unit and what drives my own poetic voice: I just want to uncover what we miss way too often, and I love how poetry can capture teeny, fleeting moments that would otherwise disappear. I love how the choice and arrangement of words can so much more than lengthy prose can sometimes.

Roberto Bolano has become one of my favorite authors. He considered himself a poet before a novelist and I love the way he describes what can be attained in the shortest kind of literature: "The novel is an imperfect art. It may be the most imperfect of all literary arts. And the more pages you write, the more possibility there is of revealing imperfections...It isn't the same to build a house as it is to build a skyscraper..." Bolano knew the precision and control that could go into a poem; but, as with any piece of art, the control only exists until you hand it over to a reader.

Anyway. I'll probably be writing much more on poetry in the weeks to come. And please, don't judge too hard: it is almost my bedtime and this one hasn't been through a proper round of revision...and oh, how I believe in revision (and writing first drafts in near-prose and whittling away).

smashed in the swinging bathroom door,
one could feel my pulse
in the square centimeter of
my middle finger's nail.

sometimes I wish the rest of the hurt
could feel so pronounced and even
so nearly vomit inducing
because

after some ice from the school nurse
and just an hour or so
it all went away and i forgot
it ever happened.

the small details which are actually huge.

2010-04-19T20:38:00.001-04:00

I'm beginning to re-remember that the best things in the world are not something I can grasp onto with my hands: though the handful of pink spring petals I swiped from a windswept pile on the sidewalk the other day comes pretty close. I was on the verge of finishing The Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins as I was watching them all float out of my hand and had a realization that they were evidence of things unseen; the ache of beauty and springtime right in front of me.

It is a book intricate in its details and rich in the scientific and literary research that must have been compiled for the layers of meaning inside. It was a book that rambled through its words so slowly and deliberately that at times and I wanted to put it down, despite my love of poetic language. But as I reached the end, I found myself wishing I had a professor telling me to go back and trace the repeated references and symbols, to stop and look at each of the characters and what they represent in its historical setting of the New Deal, the Atomic age and the Tennessee Valley Authority. And, to trace the evidence of things unseen, which is translated differently throughout the book. Sometimes it is the mystery of science: atoms and light, and sometimes it is the mystery of life itself: love.

I loved how tiny, seemingly insignificant details, like springtime details in Brooklyn, provoked such deep emotion within the characters: "...in a narrow cubicle behind a curtain were her things, all neatly folded. When he bent to lift her shoes he was so unaccountably overcome with grief he had to lean against the wall to compose himself. Her shoes, he realized, triggered the emotion. The fact that they were empty, that he so rarely touched an article of clothing of hers she wasn't wearing. And her shoes triggered the memory, sudden, clear as daylight, of the first time he had seen her, the first time he had seen her footprints in the sandy track that led to Conway's furnace and the house she'd lived in."

It just breaks my heart to read that and realize that such tiny details can reveal the depth of the human heart. I need to keep watching for them.

a story about time, and. unapologetically, a story about love.

2010-04-11T13:02:00.000-04:00

March was filled with two weekends of packing and moving, a favorite friend in town, the annual trek to Washington, DC with students and no internet at home for the past week. But. I am now moved in and attempting to have a normal-looking life again.

That being said, I've finished some books since I last typed on here: Lost Illusions by Balzac, Special by Bella Bathurst, Until You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I have dreams to backtrack and write about them all in the coming weeks since I've skipped out on my Saturday morning ritual for almost two months. Hate that. We shall see. I most recently finished The Time Traveler's Wife, so I will start there.

I started out reading this because I wanted a quick, engaging read for spring break. Many evenings were spent reading well into the morning. Henry is a time traveler who is not able to control when or where he goes. In his twenties, after he meets Clare, his wife, he begins to travel back to her childhood. Therefore, Clare always has memories of Henry, but Henry does not have memories of her until after they have met in real time, but is able to go back to other times of their lives with the perspective from the future (and yes, despite my Lost-watching, time travel is a difficult concept to wrap my mind around.) Time and love are the two major themes I considered while reading.

Time is a funny thing that I can't stop thinking about lately, especially the relationship between time and self. When Henry visits from the future, young Clare isn't the same as the Clare in his present. When he meets 18-year-old Clare, he misses the depth that is the 33-year-old Clare. It is interesting to think about how time changes us and how it happens without us necessarily realizing it until we step out of it. The core of me is the same, but I have changed so much in the nearly seven years I've lived in New York. Though I can't plot out the exact moments that changed me, it is interesting to track our own stories of becoming...and to realize that I don't want to go back to my 23 year old self, as uneasy as I am to turn 30 this year.

I find myself always skeptical and sometimes cynical of saccharin literary love stories. Because of the popularity of this book, I carried this attitude into my reading, but as it turns out, Henry and Clare's love story was beautiful in its complexity and imperfections and passion.

Time travel worked as a metaphor: in the present time Clare and Henry face incredible loss and it wears on their marriage. Henry though, is able to revisit the times in their relationship when poetry was personified and was able to remember why love is worth fighting for. I think that this concept is often lost on many of my own generation: things get difficult and the overriding belief is that it's easier to quit than to work through it--be it a relationship, a job, a dream. Remembering the good and true can completely change one's perspective.

What impressed me the most--or maybe what I connected to the most--about Niffenegger's book was her incorporation of poetry into the most emotionally charged moments. I am a firm believer that poetry can encapsulate any moment better than prose or conversation or dialogue. I am most often drawn to modern and post modern poetry, but I was completely wrapped up in the verses from Homer's "The Odyssey" that Niffeneger leaves the reader with:

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful in his arms,
longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever.
(translated by Robert Fitzgerald)

I could write about this excerpt from the Odyssey and draw comparison's about travel, difficult journey's and hardship, but I will spare you (unless you want to come over to the new apartment for a book talk, please do). But in a rare moment in which I will not apologize for waxing romantic, or in the back of my mind judge myself for being saccharin (because its not a good idea to mock the Beautiful) I will say this: the idea of having a person as a metaphor for home, the idea that through all of the hardships there is someone who will fight for you and wait for you, someone who cares about where you are and who you are and whose eyes will light up the minute that they see you, that is a beautiful thing.

Finally beginning to feel at home.

2010-04-11T11:48:00.002-04:00

Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
-Pablo Neruda, from "Forget About Me"

It's funny how life changes affect your ordinary rhythms of life. I started selling my furniture on craigslist in mid February, and since then I have felt like a bit of a nomad. As much as I think I would sometimes like to be a wandering traveler, the truth is that the concept of home is one of my anchors in life: whether it is the house I grew up in and its Bradford Pear trees and hill in the front, or my family's weekend rituals Saturday eggs and toast and newspaper reading, or my need to have a space carved out in my apartment that reminds me of the things I love and who I am.

It took me a full two years of living in New York City to feel ready to commit to it as home; to stop thinking about where I was going to be the next year and to let some of my newer roots reach out and grasp onto life here. The trouble is that I'm living in my 5th apartment in New York, my second in Brooklyn. Each time I've moved, I have attempted to make my new space feel like home as quickly as possible, my current studio is no different. Today is the first weekend morning where I have sat down to engage in my old rhythms that make me feel at home: making tea, listening to good music, reading and writing. It's funny how it makes me feel like a person again and how these small little things finally make me feel at home.

I wrote about this nearly a month ago: looking forward to when I would be able to start the rhythms that keep me sane anew. This week I made it to Prospect Park a few times in the evening to "look for the secret things in the world," as Neruda would say, to find the things that move my heart. Because sometimes it feels like a storm has passed and nothing of beauty avails, but. When I open my eyes and breathe and look for the secret things, I find them. And breathe deeply.

Hope during an extra rainy weekend.

2010-03-14T18:54:00.001-04:00

I have finished a couple of books in the past few weeks, but haven't had more than 30 minutes of free time. So. Next weekend maybe you'll read about Lost Illusions and Special. Until then, I decided it was a priority to recognize my favorite day of the year: Daylight savings' spring forward (haters, a day of feeling tired is so worth it to have days that last longer than 6 pm). For my philosophical musings on Daylight Savings and the mental miracle that it is, please see last year's post.

Today I have a bit of a different take on this glorious day (though, that being said, spring forward was ushered in with a vengeance this year in New York City by 4 day rainfall that left umbrella corpses strewn about the streets...glorious in it's symbolism, I should say.)

It is a good thing I believe in grace and new beginnings because it seems like I take almost every opportunity I'm given to celebrate them: a new school year, the calendar new year and the beginning of spring. It seems as though in the winter I forget the rhythms that breathe goodness into my life and instead spend 3-4 months with my shoulders clenched and my face contorted against the cold. In a few weeks I am moving to a new apartment that is only a block away from Prospect Park and I've realized that I can pick up on rituals I've left behind for many winters and years. Every other place I've ever lived in New York, I walked to a park nearly every night, carrying tea and my ipod, sometimes a book, sometimes a notebook: the bridle path and reservoir at Central Park, the boat basin and 91st Street Garden at Riverside, the promenade in Battery Park City.

All this to say: I will take my extra hour of daylight, weather that invites me into it and let the winter and all it stands for in my mind melt away. Happy Daylight Savings.

because everyone needs some pablo neruda, even if you think you don't. his poems are good for the winter soul.

2010-02-18T20:18:00.002-05:00

Here, There, Everywhere by Pablo Neruda
(Senor Neruda, un dia voy poder leer tu poesia en espanol.
Mucho amor, Kristen)

Now the earth is spinning round me,
dizzying me,
like metal at the sound of bells.

Now I have all I have loved
within my little universe,
the starred order of wavs,
the sudden disorder of stones.
Far off, a city in rags
calling me, poor siren,
so that my heart can never, no,
scorn its weight of obligation,
and I with sky and poems
in the light of all I love,
poised here, swithering,
raising the cup of my song.

Oh dawn, breaking out of
the shadow and the moon in the sea,
I always come back to your burning salt.
It is your solitude always which moves me
and, back once more, I don't know who I am.
I touch the hard sand, I look at the sky,
I walk without knowing where I'm going
until out of the night
indescribable flowers rise and fall;
in the salty air
of the coast the stars quiver.

Wandering love, I come back
with this heart both fresh and wearied,
belonging to water and sand,
to the dry spaces of the foreshore,
to the white war of the foam.

BFF!

2010-02-17T11:49:00.000-05:00

Adolescent girl friendships are tricky. Watching them everyday, I can almost pinpoint which friendships will last through high school for my students and which ones will be left behind, though eulogized in long, flowery messages in their middle school yearbooks; the kind that adults look back on and laugh at the promises to stay friends forever. Yes, those messages still get written.

After reading A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray, a young adult Victorian Gothic novel that follows the story of Gemma Doyle and her ability to tap into magical, though dark, outer realms, all I could think about was what defines true friendships for young teenage girls?

Gemma, a new arrival to her boarding school, becomes friends with powerful, popular Felicity because she accidently finds out one of Felicity's biggest secrets. Instant friendship: go. Gemma has previously been repulsed (and fascinated) by Felicity's treatment of other people, so she pulls her scholarship-roommate, Ann, who has been on the receiving end of Felicity's cruelty into the mix. Instant friendship: go. Pippa is Felicity's beautiful best friend, who is not into the idea of widening their circle, but since Felicity holds the power...instant friendship. Gemma hated the way Felicity and Pippa treated other girls. Ann was in near constant pain and loneliness as a result. Felicity cast Pippa to second chair once Gemma came around. Now, these four girls embark on dangerous, otherworldly adventures with Gemma into the realms. Can shared experiences override absolute contradictions in values?

Apparently. Though I wanted to be a hater immediately and judge Gemma for her lack of strength in succumbing to the rotten social rank at her school when she knew better, there was really no where else for her to go. It was interesting to watch these characters ultimately just want to be known by someone, and once they were, that seemed to be what bound them together as friends. They began to see that it's harder to judge someone once you get to know them and their story.

When I look at my own friendships--the ones that have lasted over the years (not to devalue the worth of the ones that didn't; the ones that were meant for a time and a place)--there are two major groups of people in my life: ones that I have shared experiences with (the high school version of coming of age, along with the adult version) and ones with whom I share a certain kindredness. When I started writing this post, I wanted to rage on the ridiculousness of Gemma's friendships, but have realized that no matter what their beginnings, the four girls came to see the world in a different way together. They experienced things together that no one else would understand. And I still believe that one of the biggest joys in life is to be known and to know others. So. Despite Felicity's power rush and Pippa's vanity, Ann and Gemma each have their own faults, too, and in the act of living their lives as friends they came to show grace toward one another despite it all and grow as people along the way. So. Maybe I shouldn't be such a hater.

Though, I still remain skeptic if the shallowly-based middle school friendships are up for this. And I still can't stand watching girls exert power over one another.

Does it count as reading if it's grading? Or, creative outlets keep me sane.

2010-02-16T20:53:00.000-05:00

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My winter break is off to an excellent start. The south couldn't handle a few inches of snow, so on my way to Fort Myers, I was rerouted right back to Newark (curses in a million ways over not being able to see two of my favorites in the whole world). And, this is what is staring me down since I've been back in Brooklyn (and yes, those are notes for future lesson plans written on an airplane napkin. Nothing but class here) :

So, as of 4 pm today, I finished sixty 7th grade reading responses and thirty 8th grade poetry anthologies. I have thirty 7th grade independent writing projects to go. (This is not inlcluding the 120 projects waiting for me on my desk at school. Teaching English is the best!) Needless to say, I was losing my mind by the end of today's installment. Anything sounded more entertaining than grading: I distracted myself by filing for a loan forgiveness, planning mother's day gifts for my favorite mom, making a mix cd for my brother and essentially finishing every other possible thing on my to-do lists. I was feeling productive in a practical sense, but my creativity was at a loss. So, after being inspired by one of my best friends yesterday, I got crafty.

I have quite a few stacks of shelter magazines in my apartment that I'm not ready to part with yet (perhaps I need to enlist help from editspaces.com) and another growing stack of New York Magazines. NYM comes every week, and I've realized that if I don't want to become the old lady whose trash you wade through to get to the kitchen table, I needed to recycle them pronto. But before I did that, in the spirit of reusing, I turned some of my favorite articles and photographs into envelopes!

This will also help me be inspired to write real letters an art I have lost in recent years. Anyway, the point is, sometimes it's cooking, sometimes its crafting, sometimes it's writing, sometimes it's walking with a camera in hand, but this reader needs creative outlets.

on the way to becoming people of weight.

2010-02-10T12:32:00.004-05:00

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First, Saturday morning rituals on Wednesday? Sigh. Snow days are the greatest. My tea and I are currently sitting next to our bay windows watching snow fall over Brooklyn with The National and Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes. Love. Last night after Lost with some Upper West Side favorites, I walked down Central Park West to 59th Street, feeling no need to get home quickly. The city was so still and the cold was...perfect? (That combination of words rarely comes out of my mouth.) The no wind, refreshing, snow-is-coming kind of cold? I love this city.

Books that overlap stories and history are some of my favorites. The historical settings in The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver were almost more interesting to me than some of the characters themselves. The main character floated literally and mentally/emotionally between Mexico and the U.S. between the late 1920s and 1950s. In Mexico, he worked for Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky. While in the U.S. his past of consorting with socialists and communists got him into trouble, despite his very private, quiet life in Asheville. There were two descriptions that stuck with me well after reading:

One, he describes the post World War Two U.S. as "the land of weightless people" who have shed history and their pasts (400) and Americans as people who want to forget all that was painful and trade it in for what was shiny, new and forward reaching. The psychology of this is understandable, but ultimately pretty unhealthy.

Mexico was different to Harrison. Upon visiting ancient ruins he said, "It was Mexico. Or rather, Mexico is still what this once was." (493) It seemed to him that Mexicans carried past conquests, losses and beauty with them into the present.

My question is to what degree are we our own ruins and pasts? For some, ruins define them: it is too much to bear, but nonetheless tucked away, carried in pockets each morning and a reminder when grabbing one's wallet or spare change. For others, the ruins define them for a spell and are irrevocably changed, but the inciting incident can barely be made out in the far reaches of their minds. And there are those who continually look forward, able to walk away without looking back.

I think. I think that the ruins make us, but I hope they aren't the only thing that defines us (because there is that word, hope). When Harrison describes Americans as weightless, I don't think that it is a compliment: more of an eerie observation of a people who want only to avoid the painful, confusing or complex, ignoring the realities in front of them. Ruins can be beautiful and haunting, leaving both scars and inspiration.

Regardless, one of the most thought provoking quotations from the book seems to be a good way to end: "whatever I came here looking for is hiding, holding its breath," (394). As we are walking, trying to make sense of it all, we must just keep looking, and in turn become weightier people.

My mind is about to burst! or, Where do I put all that I have to say?

2010-02-07T09:29:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite things going on in my classroom recently are my students reading responses. Stay with me, I promise this whole post isn't all about teaching. In an effort to ignite some passion into my students' reading and "writing about reading" lives, I've been doing a weekly reading response where students share their entries out loud with the rest of the class. Not only has it provided a real "audience" and given them motivation to write something they are proud to read, we've been asking questions like what goes into a good reading response? What invites a reader into your writing?

My 7th graders are basically all stars. Many of them have started their own reading blogs (heart!) and are growing in sophistication...which makes me scramble for new ways to teach into writing well. This has caused me to think about my own writing process for this blog, in an effort to coach into what writers can do. This is what I've found: (1) I reread all of my underlined notes and dog-eared pages, typing ones that seem weighty into a new post page. (2) I read the ongoing conversations about the book online to help me gain a context/find insight I may not have considered on my own. (3) I try to pull a thread from all of the above to focus on for my post...or, try to choose what might be the most important thread to pull.

The point of this post, is that there are often way too many threads. Sometimes I miss being an English major so much it hurts because all I want to do is write and talk about books in classes that meet three times a week. Sometimes one post per book isn't enough (unless people want to read crazy long posts, and let's be honest, I think my parents might be the only ones who would really read every word I wrote. Because they're awesome.) Anyway, you may begin to see "outlier" posts that are less about the book itself and more about some of the ideas that came up within it that I need to think through. I also blame this on the amount of Young Adult fiction I read...when I finally spend time in books on my own reading level, I don't know what to do with myself!

Anyway.

The missing piece.

2010-02-06T14:54:00.003-05:00

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"From a hundred paces, Salome could see the dirt under these girls' fingernails, but not their wings," (12). This. breaks. my. heart.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver gave me so much to think about that I've had a really hard time choosing how exactly to respond. Its creative structure of journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings and archivist's notes tells the life story of Harrison Shepherd, half Mexican, half American, who begins the story as a a lonely yet adventurous boy on an island in Mexico. His path crosses with the lives of some of history's most interesting character's: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky. He goes on to move to North Carolina and lead a very quiet life as a writer. There aren't enough pages to go into all that the story touches on: The 1932 Bonus March in Washington, DC, the culture of the Red Scare, the relationship between art and politics...so for now I will zoom in on what I thought was one of the most relevant themes in the book, the title itself.

The word lacuna has multiple meanings, but I want to focus on one: it means "the missing piece" and in the story refers to the fact that "...you can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece...That is the heart of the story," (325).

This is the heart wrenching complexity of human relations: we are quick to judge without knowing someone's story and yet, once we do hear it, there is typically some kind of inner backlash:

I wish I would have known that.
That completely changes the way I thought of that person.
Oh, it all makes sense.
Now I'm the ass.

I like to settle myself into the optimist's camp (that I don't think is mutually exclusive with naivete), believing that if we looked at people differently, the world would change. It pains me that even as I type this it seems like a banal idea. But really, if we looked for, or even lived under the assumption that everyone has a complex story, layered with wrongs given and wrongs received, fragile hearts despite iron exterior, I think we'd all be a little less angry. A little less annoyed. A little more forgiving. A little more apt to see the beautiful?

Kingsolver's treatment of this concept in the book is much more deep and complex than I could ever begin to explore in a blog post, but it all underlines what I love about literature: that you get to know the inner lives and motivations of characters and have a bit of a window into humanity. Kingsolver said in a recent interview: "Literature will always be political: It cultivates empathy for a theoretical stranger by putting you inside his head, allowing you to experience life from his point of view."

Sigh.

Sometimes prose needs line breaks, needs to be read slowly, so that one's heart can feel the weight of the words and break a little, if it must.

2010-02-06T13:55:00.001-05:00

"Well,
that's how thick
I am,
I never knew how
to want
what everyone wants.
I only
thought
to look for a home, some place
to be taken in.
Handing over a crumpled heart,
seeing it dropped
in the wastepaper basket
every
time."

(written as prose on page 473, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver)

"I was half in love with her by the time we sat down."

2010-01-31T11:34:00.005-05:00

www.akindoflibrary.blogspot.com

{image from Books Rule}

One of the books I most recommend to my male students is King Dork by Frank Portman. The main character creates a new band weekly, less for the music, more for the opportunity to pick a new name and design new cover art. He mockingly points out that his English teachers are all in love with The Catcher in the Rye, ironically calling out phonies just as Holden would. It's been fun to see kids who have read Catcher go on to read King Dork catch those idiosyncracies and then to have King Dork readers realize they are missing out and walk over to the "classics" basket in my classroom library.

All that to say, here is a round up of some thoughts on Salinger. I'm sure he would despise all that has been written up (hence, see the Onion link), but. I'm not going to lie, it only took a second for me to be half in love with Salinger when my sophomore honors English teacher told us he was going to risk it and read a book with us that is banned in schools across the country. If you know me, it's no surprise that I was not quite apt to subversion in high school, so this small act seemed pretty exciting to me. Of course, when I reread Catcher a few years ago, reading the notes my sixteen year old self left was hilariously amazing. If you know me now, you're probably saying, "Kristen, of course your dangerous living would involve books." I know, I know.

Anyway, my recommendation (if you don't have 30 papers to grade...curses) is to read your freezing day away at The New Yorker, which has compiled a list of many of Salinger's stories from back issues. Or, check out some of these links, which were the most relevant/amusing/best to me (in that order). And, you're welcome, here is a link list of my past thoughts on Salinger.

Holden Caulfield and YA Literature

The Onion

Dave Eggers on Salinger