Slighcarp and Grimshaw

My ass has been solidly roundhouse kicked by my job, but I am still up and fighting! There are only about five teaching weeks left. I can totally do that! Yeah!

Anyway, here’s a short list on what’s been going on in my intellectual life, which has been a little meager the past couple months.

1. I lost my ability to read smart, intelligent literature for awhile there and read a bunch of books from my classroom library. I read The Outsiders, So B. It, and Sister Spider Knows All. Interestingly, both So B. It and Sister Spider Knows All revolve around a young woman who does not know anything about her mother and engages in a grand search to discover whatever missing details there are to be found. And of course The Outsiders has orphans for main characters. What’s up with YA fiction and the lack of solid parental figures?

2. I watched a bunch of movies based on classic YA books. Holes, Tuck Everlasting (the one with Alexis Bledel), and The Outsiders. Holes and Tuck Everlasting are fabulous. The Outsiders was the worst piece of dreck I’ve seen since watching Across the Universe. Actually, we watched both of those movies in the same weekend. It’s amazing how a movie can be full-feature-length and feel like it’s moving so quickly and be so incredibly unsatisfying. The lack of character development in both of those movies was astounding. I do NOT recommend them.

3. I am reading Night by Elie Wiesel with my 10th graders. I also read Lord of the Flies for the first time ever. Reading them at the same time was eerie and instructive. People en masse can be terrifying. Also, holy shit! Holy shit! is what I say to the end of Lord of the Flies. And oh yeah: many of my students do not know what the Holocaust is. Ahem. This makes teaching a Holocaust memoir somewhat more challenging. Boy howdy do I know more about it now, though.

4. I finally finished reading Modern Love by Matthea Harvey. In my eyes, Ms. Matthea can do no wrong. She wrote these poems in two series called “The Terror of the Future” and “The Future of Terror” that are both haunting and whimsical. Only Matthea. Also, her poems about Roboboy were pretty awesome. Click here to read “Dinna’ Pig” (scroll down), a poem from Modern Love, and get a brief but fantastic taste of the brain of Matthea Harvey.

6. The Wire. I broke down at Borders yesterday and bought the fourth season. I simply cannot wait the couple days between disks that Netflix requires. For those of you who still haven’t watched The Wire I say for shame! In the fourth season the show stretches its tentacles into the public school system, which makes it that much nearer and dearer to my heart. It’s also become that much more heartbreaking because you watch kids get sucked out of school and onto the corner. Ugh, but in the best way.

7. I am hooked on Grey’s Anatomy.

I left the house today to learn about my new job assignment. Today is one of the april days referred to in the childhood ditty, and remarkably crappy. While doing the dishes, I decided to put on Kiss It Goodbye’s only lp, called She loves me, She loves me not…. Understand that when I first developed my own taste in music to the point of having to seek out stores that would sell records from places like Victory Records, I wanted to listen to things that would be the aural equivalent of getting whiplash from being hit in the head with a brick. My friend Casey was very into Rage Against the Machine, and when we would drive to soccer games, that’s the sort of thing that he would want to listen to, whereas I wanted to listen to Deadguy’s Fixation on a Co-worker or whatever-the-hell-tripe Earth Crisis was shouting about at the time. Straightedge as I was by simple default, I wasn’t interested in the message of going vegan and hitting people who weren’t with bats. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

But really, Deadguy was where it was at. I was listening to a lot of punk music concurrently, but So-Cal punk, with harmonies and a tempering of anger with melody and, from time to time, some hope. Deadguy was the first east coast hardcore band I got into, and from the word go, there was something new and troubling about it–and who could resist such weight and sludge coupled with what sounded like true bitterness and rage about nothing in particular? Sure, there was the song about having a crappy office job, another about some girl that done someone wrong, but it is only now, actually thinking about it, that it strikes me as extraordinarily existentialist, even wallowing in serious nihilism on occasion. They were singing about how unbelievably fucked up it felt constantly, simply to be alive and conscious in New Brunswick, NJ in 1995. And the guitar sounded like a garrote and the vocals were a rope fraying itself into its constituent bloody threads. It was really just the thing to get me through the last couple of years of high school. If I remember correctly, it was really the first record that really gave my parents pause.

And now, as I listen to it again, I’m not sure it was evil, but it certainly sounded it. Today, at 29, when I have the wherewithal and the means I didn’t really have in high school to burn down a whole town, I could totally talk myself into burning down just one house. I suspect, in a couple of years, by the time we have kids, I won’t even be able to be talked into the one. Man, I’m getting old.

Marshmallows + Rubber Tubing + the Japanese = Laugh so hard I’m crying.

It starts with The Wire. After months (years?) of hearing tell of the virtues of this tv show that I’ve never seen, as I haven’t had HBO in any house in which I’ve lived since I left my parents’ house many years ago, it finally managed its way to the top of our Netflix queue (btw, I really like that word). We put it in, and I for one was immediately hooked (Sarah was not sure we needed to own it on DVD after the first two episodes, but after, I believe, four episodes, she turned to me, eyes wide, and said something along the lines of, “Yes, we do need to own this.”) We are at this point 5/6 of the way through the second season, and I’ll be damned if I am not among those folks touting The Wire as one of the better shows around, if ever. The question that people ask (my family, just yesterday) most often is “What is it about?”

You start to talk about the cops in Baltimore, then have to explain how the name of the series comes from (wiretaps), but then you have talk about the fact that the concept reaches beyond just wiretaps to the idea that everyone, everywhere is on camera, or having their voice recorded, or their identity verified, or their pin number punched in to make sure the person/group is getting the information it/they need(s). Which leads to the concept that David Simon puts forth in one of the commentaries, that we are all bombarded by information, and the part of the conceit of the show is that there is too much information, and of the main activities we are engaged in daily is the filtering of information–much like the audience of the show, since there is constant information being projected from the story, and because the show is allowed to develop in a seemingly organic manner, there is the possibility that some information is superfluous, which is very cool, I think.

Then you have to talk about the drug dealers. But you have talk about how you get to see them as human beings, and watch the dynamics among the kids that distribute the shit on the corners, the guys that supervise them, and the guys that run the trade. (Of the many fascinating interactions, the moment that the guy running “the pit” explains to two of the kids doing the distributing how to play chess–honestly one of the most coherent explanations of chess I’ve ever heard.) And you see the fact that, in many cases, that the drug trade is a business, conducted with as much emotion as investment banking. The moment that you start to sympathize with the Barksdales, you’re in trouble, unable to escape.

I would say that the show’s greatest strength is the portrayal of all the characters (and the list is sprawling, to say the least) as people. And people, without fail, do awesome things. They also do really shitty things, and the show is entirely invested in having its audience see the spectrum. And ultimately, the show wants its audience to understand that in no matter what group you find yourself involved, you have to bend your ego to the will of the institution–whether that institution be the police department, or the governmental office, or the drug empire, or your family. And if you buck that system, you are going to be dealt with, without much deference. For anyone to align himself with a group is a tacit agreement to live (or work) by a set of rules. And the game runs best when everyone follows the rules that some set up for you. Once someone starts fucking around with the rules, not only does the group that was controlling him lose its regard for him, he finds it very difficult to convince any other group that he can function within any group.

And then you get to the second season and you have to talk about the steveadores. And you have to talk about the Greeks.

And you have to talk about Omar.

The Wire, I think ultimately, is about Baltimore: and Baltimore as an analogy for any other city you care to name. It is about the stories that every group tells itself. It is about the zero sum game that people play when they ally themselves with institutions, which we all do by simple dint of the necessity of civilization. I kind of hate to say that The Wire is about everything, but the longer I watch it, the more convinced I become. Which is profoundly disquieting.

Dear Dad,

In the midst of the chaos that has been the past couple weeks of my life, Jeff and I took a few hours out of our limited entertainment schedule to watch “Princess Raccoon.” If we hadn’t already decided that we were going to watch it in two shifts (because I fall asleep after one hour of anything) I’m not sure we would have made it through that movie at all.

I will not argue that “Princess Raccoon” is a visually striking film. I love this strange set piece with Princess Raccoon and Prince Amechiyo on a swirling river in a canoe. But just before this wide shot, Princess Raccoon was doing this fake-steering thing with her paddle and looking menacingly at Prince Amechiyo in a way I simply could not get behind. Even if it were an actual stage-play I would have had a hard time suspending my disbelief.

This was my favorite scene: the Virgen Hag raps about Azuchi Momoyama, Prince Amechiyo’s evil and outstandingly arrogant father (his closest analogue in western culture is clearly Snow White’s stepmother). I remain uncertain whether “Virgen” is a typo or an honorific I do not understand, because I saw “virgin” spelled correctly at least once in the subtitles. Also, there is clearly some link between black magic and Christianity based on how the Virgen Hag calls on Mary while she defends Momoyama by attacking people–or raccoons, it’s hard to tell the difference–with the evil silly string that comes from her fingertips. Regardless, this was the one musical number (of many) that I did not fast forward through a bit of.

Yes, we did a lot of fast-forwarding. The movie brought me to mind of my comments on seeing Ricki Martin live: too many slow, boring songs. I enjoyed the Japanese rap, Japanese prog, Japanese ska, etc. But the Japanese ballads, ballads, ballads were boring.

Also hard for me as a westerner watching this film, what is up with the raccoon mythology? During the curtain call, every character that was a raccoon put a raccoon mask to his or her fact to illustrate that s/he was in fact a raccoon. And, yes, curtain call. This movie had a curtain call. Huh?

Next time you recommend a movie, I am going to make you defend it with much more than a “I really want to know what you think.” Or else I shall ask you to watch “Beer Bad,” my personal favorite of the stupid “Buffy” episodes, over and over until you get the genius of a cave slayer and evil beer.

love always,
Sarah

Just a quick note to say that I’ve got things in the hopper that I really want to have time to write about. I’ve got something simmering in the back of my mind about The Anatomy of Disgust, an article I read in Harper’s about the water-treatment facilities buried below New York City, and Two Girls, One Cup. And then, last night, Jeff and I watched Princess Raccoon, which we think is weirder than Pippi. I’ll say this quickly about Princess Raccoon: I’m never letting my dad talk me into renting something again by telling me that he’s “really interested to know what you think.” I’m positive this was code for, “Please tell me if this movie is so strange it’s good or the biggest pile of hoo-ha you’ve ever seen.” I believe the flick was somewhere between those two poles, but probably leaning closer to hoo-ha. He has temporarily lost his recommendation privileges.

I’m off to prep for school, as always. Next week is the big Quality Review and I’ve been told my principal hand-picked me as a representative of excellence in special education. This means I have to have 100%-differentiated-100%-of-the-time lesson plans for the second half of next week. If this sounds like some kind of pedagogy BS, I can tell you it is. Unfortunately for my writing life, I still have to deal with it.

Teaching has done strange things to my intellect. Every once in awhile, I’m feeling my intellectual oats. I’m either dishing poetry with Jeff or Joel, or a student asks a question that I can knock out of the park. Just this past week, while teaching poetry (I don’t even want to talk about the disservice I may have done poetry, the thing I value most in all of academia, which is the house I live in), a student asked a question about the nature of line breaks and received the full height of my passion and knowledge in return. But day in and day out, I am chained to a high school curriculum. I don’t mean in anyway to degrade my job or my students. I love my job, I love my kids, I have a good time on a regular basis. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking, regularly, that our students have no idea the extent of the talent and intelligence that all their teachers possess. I think the moral here is that it’s hard to have teenagers be the bread and butter interactions of your day.

As a refuge, I’ve been trying to read things that are very, very smart. Novels and poems that involve language so very far above any high schooler’s head that I cannot possibly mistake what I am reading for something “high school.” Over a year ago, I read this review of an Edna O’Brien novel at Slate. At the time, I was knee-deep in poetry, workshops and a two-poetry-book-a-week diet. I was also spending a good hour a week browsing the Oxford English Dictionary online. (Sidebar: I spent this morning at the Sarah Lawrence library so as to use the OED online to put Calvino’s “The Enchanted Garden” through an N+7. Squeal!) As it goes with books and me, I promptly wrote O’Brien’s name down in my little black book that lives in my purse. Six months later, I bought Night at Half Price Books. Then, a full year later, I read the book. And I read it rather quickly, which is saying something because my exhaustion these days knows no bounds.

The Slate reviewer claims that “O’Brien has her own language.” I concur. But she finishes her thought on O’Brien’s unique language by saying that her language is “stilted, and cumbrous when you first encounter it.” I say fie. I will not deny that Night’s language is intimidating. Check this out:

Birdshit on the window. Happened without my notice. Bloody negligence. I was looking down at myself, surveying the zones that are going to rack and ruin. The poor old corpus, the corpus collosum and ciliare and dentatum and spongiosum and urethrace and the devil knows what. The bones are supposed to give revelations, but I haven’t had any yet. Soon I will be eligible only to play gooseberry, to wait under lampposts or at crossroads, while some wench is experiencing the ends of fingers.

If you happen to be saying to yourself, “that thing about ‘experiencing the ends of fingers’ sounds kind of dirty,” I will tell you that it is. This book is dirty. Maybe dirty is too strong a word, but I don’t think saucy is strong enough.

I would kind of hate to pick up Night, because I knew it was going to make me think. But after a paragraph, I was hooked in again. Perhaps the sauciness was part of it. But equally important was that, unlike other language-obsessed Irish authors–I’m thinking Joyce and Beckett–O’Brien’s engine is story. I say story and not plot because Night is anecdotal, for lack of a better word, and does not press inexorably towards a climax in the way of plot. But I’m telling you, read one paragraph and you have to read the next three pages at least.

The only thing that stopped me from reading the book faster was a pressing need to close my eyes. If I were the kind of person who read books more than once (like Jeff), this would go on the re-read list. As it is, the reason it is currently sitting on the bookshelf next to Jeff’s bed (see above picture) is that I’m pressing the book on him. Jeff rereads good books; I push them onto loved ones.

Jeff and I watched a double-feature yesterday of Pippi Longstocking and Once. Fortunately, Once was only 84 minutes long because Pippi Longstocking feels like it could be a five hour movie. I don’t know how many of you have seen Pippi Longstocking, the original I mean, from Sweden in 1969. I remember seeing “The New Adventures . . .” with Mimi back in the day, but I’m pretty certain it is nothing compared to the plotless wonder that is the original.

Upon completion of the viewing, I was finally able to vocalize why I object to teaching plot to students as “a story needs a beginning, middle and end.” Beginning + middle + end does not a plot make. Pippi clearly had all three of those elements, but it did not have a plot, per se. Plot involves conflict. Plot involves that conflict developing through a series of incidents of rising intensity that culminates in a climax, a turning point after which nothing can be the same. Furthermore, the climax often comes at the very end of the “middle,” so the whole evenness of “beginning, middle, end” is but a lie we tell our students so we feel like they’ve learned something.

So, to sum up Pippi Longstocking using the inferior “beginning, middle, end” schema: 9-year-old Pippi comes to town to live in Villa Villekulla, her pastel colored house, with her horse and her monkey, but no parents. She meets Tommy and Annika, who conveniently live next door. Ms. Prysselius is scandalized and tries to get the police to put Pippi in a children’s home. They fail woefully, then seem to give up forever. Pippi gives away free candy to the local children, then free toys, all financed by her suitcase filled with solid gold coins. You see, her father is the Cannibal King of an island in the South Seas. The town’s local robbers catch wind that Pippi is loaded, and they try to rob her. They fail woefully as well, because Pippi is stronger than she looks: she can hold her horse above her head.

Umm, and then Pippi plays some more with Tommy and Annika. She ruins a coffee party. They play in a hollow tree. Pippi leads them in search of “spunk,” which no one knows the nature of. Tommy, Annika and Pippi take a balloon ride all along the coast of Sweden and frighten a drunk church custodian. Then Pippi’s father actually returns and Pippi beats him at arm wrestling. They have a large party where the person who eats the most will win a prize, though this prize is never seen nor mentioned again. Pippi’s father prepares to set sail again to return to the South Seas, and Pippi almost goes with him. But Annika is sobbing like a fool on the pier, so Pippi ends up staying.

Beginning: Pippi comes to town. Middle: Pippi plays, plays and plays some more. End: Pippi leaves–no, wait! She stays. What is most remarkable about the absence of conflict, and thus plot, is that there are two–two!–potential conflicts left almost untouched. Ms. Prysselius trying to get Pippi into a children’s home should be the kind of thing that can move an entire movie along, but Ms. P. seems a little preoccupied with, oh, I don’t know, coffee parties or something, to really pursue Pippi. And the two town robbers sweating to get ahold of Pippi’s pirate gold is also ripe for motivating a movie’s worth of plot, but they only try to steal her money twice and they are put off from the effort by nothing more than a cream cake in the face and a Pippi-doll falling from the sky (see above balloon ride).

The moral of the story: Do not F with Pippi Longstocking.

I will say this for the flick, though, I really liked it. Part of why I really liked it is because I imagined Lorelai and Rory Gilmore watching it (yes, I know they are ficitonal). The other part(s) of why I liked it are less clear, even in the sobering light of the day after. Jeff didn’t think he was going to be able to watch the entire hour and a half, but I knew I would make it and drag him along behind me. He pinpointed the nature of the film as “more compelling than interesting.” I agree. I felt compelled to watch the entire movie, yet not interested. Compelled by the erratic nature of what may happen next, not interest to find out what would happen next. Kind of like a horse being compelled to trot by a rider gently squeezing his flanks between her thighs. Yeah, I didn’t mention how often you get to see Pippi’s underwear. Let’s just leave it at that.

Now, this is not a politics blog. But I’m finding it very hard to stay away from politics given the awe-inspiring race between Hillary and Barack in the Democratic party. I happily got to vote this past Super Tuesday. From the beginning I have been a supporter of Hillary. Then I started to hear this buzz that if the Republicans nominate McCain (which it looks like they’re going to have to, like it or not), then Barack will do better against him than Hillary would. This almost swayed me into voting for Barack. But standing in the booth no part of me could not vote for a woman. A woman is running for President of the United States of America, and I got to vote for a woman. This is wonderful.

I found this screed in support of Hillary by Robin Morgan through the viral nature that is the intertron (and Slate.com) and reading it made me feel so powerful as a feminist. It made me feel how excited my mother is to have the choice of a woman in the presidential race.

Old woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age—and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!

We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy; who inspired men to become more nurturing parents; who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put childcare on the national agenda, who transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.

We are the women who now comprise the majority of U.S. voters.

But then, I watched this video of comedians discussing the race for president on Slate’s video channel and my heart fell. I heard the death of Hillary’s bid for president. Among the Hillary analysis presented is the gem that Hillary Clinton is “like Optimus Prime fucked a bumper sticker.” And another, from Bill Maher: “People hate Hillary because they hate themselves,” meaning she’s a strong woman and people don’t like a person who is stronger than they are.

One moment, though, stands out as the one that broke my feminist heart. (Anyone else notice how often my heart is broken?) The sole Republican at the table proclaimed himself more liberal than Hillary: he is pro-choice, anti-death-penalty, and pro-gay-marriage. But, he says, “You could hold a gun to Hllary Clinton’s head and she’s never gonna say those things.” I think this is true. And it is, for me, Hillary’s death knell.

Here it is, two days later, and she has lost to Obama in Washington, Louisiana and Nebraska. Sigh.

We went to see Neko Case on Friday night in Tarrytown. Eric Bachmann opened for her. It was an excellent show and just reaffirmed my giant heart for Neko Case, the fact of which made Sarah feel less like a spazz. Which, admittedly, was a good reason for me not to have told her…

The theater was very old and looked like it was designed in sepia. They charged $7 for a can of Newcastle. I was nearly accosted by an elderly volunteer, but I suspect I could have taken him if it came down to it.

Neko’s singing partner was Kelly Hogan, whose voice is an excellent match what with both of them being booming voice kinda ladies. And between the two of them, the banter is pretty fantastically random, covering topics from urine-soaked Civil War buttons to the idea of Harry Nilsson as the “Master of Sadness,” arriving on a giant bong, complete with kickstand. Down time? Ha! No time for being down! Talk! Sing! Entertain!

I don’t see live music much anymore, but I’ll be damned if it still isn’t one of the better things in the world.