A modicum of taste, a minimum of time

Hi-ho,

Your intrepid reporter is overwhelmed at the moment. In my place, please accept the following far more talented substitutes...

There is no O or U in "team", either. — source unknown

I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day but couldn't find any.

If we want our world to be different, our first act needs to be reclaiming time to think. Nothing will change for the better until we do that. — Margaret Wheatley

You can say this for ready-mixes — the next generation isn't going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother used to make. — Earl Wilson

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. — George Bernard Shaw

Never confuse movement with action. — Ernest Hemingway

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. — Ezra Pound

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
— Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. — Bertrand Russell


Tra-la! Keep passing the open windows...

L

For Leslie

...and anyone else who's slightly stuck in the not so pleasant past...

For Zak

"History is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever."

And from Chekhov: "Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice."

Tra-la!

L

Deadhead sticker on a Sunfire

1) How can it possibly be September 17?

2) Frost warning issued. Sigh. But at least we didn't get snow in Edmonton.

3) Meetings: the practical alternative to work.

Thought for the day: "One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil." — Nietsche

L

How I spent my summer vacation

I welcome your comments! — L


An Inquiry into Curriculum

Sexuality is a vexing question in contemporary Canadian classrooms. Our students are bombarded by sexual messages in their extra-curricular lives: sex sells products of all kinds, drives fashion, underpins the plot of television programs, movies, and novels, creates the punch line of jokes, and provides a fascinating turn in conversation for almost every peer group. The presence of sexuality in the classroom, however, is eminently fraught. We are afraid of pedophiles and sexual predators, be they teachers, volunteers, or strangers, entering the school building. We are forbidden to discuss certain topics, be they same-sex relationships, birth control, abortion, or non-normative behaviours. And we are especially afraid of our students' own sexuality, emerging polymorphously into a galaxy of competing and conflated texts, voices, and selves.

As I write this paper, the CBC is reporting that a former high school drama teacher from British Columbia has been deported from Washington state to answer charges of possession of child pornography. News of a sex offender in a classroom is extremely disturbing and casts a wide suspicion upon all teachers: those who spend time outside of school with students, those who make casual physical contact with students, those who seem unusually friendly with students. But where are the students in all this? Are they merely objects in the grammar of sexuality? Where is their sexuality, and how is it inflected by factors such as gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, ethnicity, and class?


My Destination
I am interested in the way the educational community deals with expressions of sexuality — desire — in the high school classroom. Specifically, I want to understand how — or even whether — we can discuss the embodied desire of young women whose sexuality is revealing itself day by day as it is shaped by both biological and sociological forces. These expressions of emerging sexuality may be directed at other members of a class or other students in the school, at teachers in the school, or at individuals outside the school. In every case, society seeks to control young women's desire (and simultaneously, though to a much lesser extent, young men's desire) through several strands of discourse.

As Michelle Fine observes, the topic of girls' sexuality is taken up in curriculum discussions in several treacherous ways. "Sexuality as violence," a view taken by some feminists, assumes that heterosexuality is inherently violent and destructive to women (169); girls, therefore, must be taught to survive. "Sexuality as victimization," a view taken by other feminists, assumes that all young women are vulnerable to men's sexual aggression (but not necessarily violence) (170); girls, then, must be taught to resist. "Sexuality as individual morality," typically a more conservative view, assumes that all self-respecting and self-controlled women will refuse sex outside of marriage; to have sex outside of marriage is to admit a personal failure (170–71) and thus girls must be taught to overcome. In no case is a young woman's sexuality situated within her subjectivity and agency; rather, her sexuality is situated outside herself, inflicted upon her, and she is seen as ductile, pliable.

Yet anyone who observes young women in the high school classroom must know that their relationship to their individual sexual identities is much more complicated than such reductive discourses would suggest. Although many of us try to de-sex the young women in our classrooms, these girls are resolutely not sexless; indeed, many of them are terrifically aware of — if not always in control of — the power and potential of their sexuality. And why wouldn't they be? They can turn to literally thousands of cultural texts, from classic literature to commercials, that demonstrate the apparently wide-reaching, near-irresistible lure of the female sex. What girl wouldn't want to put on such power?

The de-sexing strategy that many teachers — particularly male teachers — adopt in the classroom is dangerous. Teachers may insist that their students are neuter, neutral, sexless; insist that they themselves are neutered and sexless. As a society we require that teachers see but not look at their students, and we tend to silence suggestions that students may be attracted to their teachers — or worse, that teachers may be attracted to their students. Perhaps this is a socially necessary fantasy, one that allows male and female humans to work together closely and trustingly. Yet the neutering, de-sexing strategy invites complicity with silence. We create the conditions for sexual predation by refusing to acknowledge that we are human, gendered, and embodied. When we don't talk about things that frighten us — such as pedophilia, exploitation, and sexual abuse — we impair the ability of those who are experiencing these things to speak of them: we take away the language to articulate their experience. We mystify these happenings, make them abnormal and alluring; we place them in the shadowy realms of the unconscious, where live our greatest loves and deepest fears.

My project, then, is to find a way to discuss attraction, flirtation, desire, and developing sexuality in the high school classroom, to drag these issues out of the shadowlands and into the light of open, honest discussion. I do not propose to solve the problems of child exploitation through pornography and pedophilia, as these are illegal acts in Canada and no single person has the expertise to address all the complexities of this issue. Rather, I seek to open up a conversation about the presence of sexuality in the classroom — after all, it's always-already with us.

This topic is important to me because every day I observe the distorted and disfigured selves of girls — myself included — who have grown up in Western ideologies. Female sexuality is frightening to so many people, and we can see all around us the forces that would repress, suppress, and oppress this vital aspect of women's selves. It is important to me because several women in my group of friends have had an intimate relationship with a teacher or professor and, while they did not feel at the time it was wrong or bad, have since been made to feel they committed a "dirty," "sinful," "repugnant" act in doing so. And it is important to me because the legacy of silence around sexuality and education causes such unnecessary suffering, such needless confusion and pain. Through this investigation, I seek to begin a conversation about how we can speak about real — and sometimes really messy — human lives.


My Method of Inquiry
This investigation would be best addressed through psychoanalytic method, informed by feminism and critical pedagogy. Post-structuralist feminists have spent a great deal of time thinking about desire and pedagogy at a theoretical level. Ursula A. Kelly's book Schooling Desire: Literacy, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy, for instance, declares that "the territory of education is the body, and education territorializes the body" (1) and announces that "my concern is with how any utopian inclinations of desire, on any and all cultural sites, might forward emancipatory practices" (2). Jane Gallop's collection Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation explores similar terrain, as have many other texts. In the last few years, however, theorists have moved away from the entwined questions of sexuality and texuality, as a chill has set in around these topics before we have fully understood the application of theory to the lived realities of bodily experience. We need only look at our media to see how hysteria has beset sexual expression in the classroom.

Psychoanalytic theory argues that we may repress desire but it does not go away; instead, it emerges in other ways. These may be creative forms, such as dance, music, or visual art; these may be destructive forms, such as anger, depression, or violence. Perhaps, then, one of the most productive sites to begin a conversation about sexuality in school would be in the English classroom. If we believe as some post-structuralists do that our sexuality is inscribed in our cultural texts, then the classroom where we learn to decipher such texts seems a likely place to open a discussion. Literary scholars have been working productively with psychoanalytic theory for several decades; Mark Bracher and Jeffrey Berman, for instance, provide two deeply ethical models for students to learn about themselves and others through literature and composition. Openly discussing the way we learn to read our selves and our desires may be one way to approach the larger issues of sexuality.

Psychoanalytic theory is the necessary mode of inquiry for this issue because most people find sexuality, particularly in the context of schooling, so threatening. Thinking of teachers inhabiting sexed, desiring bodies, thinking of students inhabiting sexed, desiring bodies, is extremely irruptive in our society; it threatens our sense of self as whole and stable — and this perception of threat is precisely why this inquiry is so important. Shoshana Felman explains that "Teaching...is not the transmission of ready-made knowledge, it is rather the creation of a new condition of knowledge, the creation of an original learning disposition" (603). She explains further, "Teaching, like analysis, has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge. ... Ignorance, in other words, is nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature is less cognitive than performative ... it is not a simple lack of information but the incapacity — or the refusal — to acknowledge one's own implication in the information" (602, italics in source). The silence that descends when one speaks of sex in or around the classroom reveals our resistance to a particular kind of knowledge: a resistance to the knowledge of our selves as sexed, desiring bodies.

In this inquiry, I am not particularly interested in traditional domains such as biology and sex education, although they may be a starting point. These discourse tend to the normative and repressive — exactly the trajectory I seek to avoid. Deborah Britzman comments, "when the topic of sex becomes like a curriculum and stuck to the underaged (and here, I mean the legal categories of children and youth), one can barely separate its objectives and fantasies from the historical bundles of anxieties, dangers, and predatory discourses that seem to render some sex intelligible as other sex is relegated to the unthinkable and the morally reprehensible" (90). When we apply value labels such as "abnormal" and "unspeakable" to human acts, we willfully ignore parts of ourselves we recognize in the Other. Felman explains this process through transference: "In human relationships, sympathies and antipathies usually provoke — and call for — a similar emotional response in the person they are addressed to. Transference on 'the subject presumed to know' — the analyst or the teacher — may provoke a counter-transference on the latter's part. The analytic or pedagogical situation may thus degenerate into an imaginary mirror game of love and hate..." (606–07). To interrupt this dangerous game, we must first be aware of it, acknowledge it. Only then can we begin to comprehend it, to counter it.

Critical pedagogy, however, reminds us that our discovery is not our doom. All human being is human construct; it is not supernaturally imposed from without. Teresa Ebert remarks that "Since it is constructed, it is thus transformable" (810), and thus our deeper understanding of ourselves may help us to achieve a deeper understanding of others. Here my investigation begins to reveal its ethical underpinnings:

To let go of the desire to cure or rescue, to sit with the pain that compels us... to articulate and reflect on what we are feeling and experiencing, to face the terrors that gnaw at us, and to work through the fantasies that structure our thinking, to do these would be to begin to act ethically. (Taubman 31)

It will be risky, yes; it may be frightening, even terrifying, to look at our monsters and admit they are part of ourselves. Yet how can a just and ethical person do otherwise? Peter Taubman observes that "any ideology of hope, conservative or radical, diminishes the irreducible specificity of each situation and imprisons us in overdetermined scripts or fantasies" (27); the same may be said of hope's other, fear. An ideology of fear — silencing — keeps us from dealing with the present, from dealing with what is, and locks us into a repetition of deadly and destructive habits. No teacher consciously seeks to harm her students. With greater understanding of what an enacted pedagogy of desire could mean, our unconscious habits might be addressed by our conscious processes.


My Needs for This Journey
To undertake this project I need to learn much more about feminist revisioning of basic psychoanalytic theory. In my latest course I have been reminded of psychoanalytic inquiry, which I've largely strayed from in my recent emphasis on feminist cultural materialism. Certainly, my critical theory foundations and my inherent suspicion of large institutional structures will help me to examine the field and to identify some of the traps we set for ourselves; but I need a broader understanding of the ways in which labels such as desire, pedagogy, sexuality, and education have been taken up in order to understand how they circulate in contemporary curricular discourses.

One of the important outcomes of working through psychoanalytic method is that the researcher gains insight into herself and her own position and practices as she explores her research questions. This outcome is important for me to keep in mind during the process: I have as much to learn from the inquiry as anyone else. Opening a conversation about such a fraught topic is sure to meet with resistance, but as I noted earlier, such resistance, such terror, is the reason this discussion is so important. Rather than turning away from the tension and conflict a frank and open discussion of sexuality in the classroom is likely to evoke, I must anticipate, acknowledge, and welcome them. I must draw them out, make them part of the discussion itself — and here I lean on the critical tool of praxis. Acknowledging tensions and conflicts does not necessarily mean acting on them, but it does mean reflecting on them and trying to understand them. If I think of these moments of resistance through transference, they become part of the conversation, part of process of learning about myself in others. As Peter Taubman explains in a very different context, "if one were to give up hope [or fear] and the striving for control and cure, a space might open up in which one could more closely hear or sense what was happening in a classroom or in one's teaching or in one's own life. One could live in the problems one saw and by living in them, find ways to live through them, ask oneself how one relates to these problems, find new questions that may well solve old problems" (31). The repressed and repressive discourse of silenced sexuality is certainly one of our society's oldest problems; letting go and opening up are crucial steps to solving this problem.

Our sexuality is a vital part of our human being. It does not turn on when a student graduates from high school; it does not turn off when a teacher walks through the school doors. It is with us as early as we are differentiated male and female; it follows us to our graves. Michelle Fine posits "a genuine discourse of desire" that would "invite adolescents to explore what feels good and bad, desirable and undesirable, grounded in experiences, needs, and limits. Such a discourse would release females from a position of receptivity, enable an analysis of the dialectics of victimization and pleasure, and would pose female adolescents as subjects of sexuality, initiators as well as negotiators" (171). This is the groundwork: acknowledging that our students are also sexual bodies. From this place we all — students, teachers, parents, friends, lovers — may begin to speak together of the "painfully beautiful, impossibly complex" beings we are (Taubman 26).

An Ode to O

Odee Odee Oh.
Odious osprey overtly ogle otters,
Oppulent Orangatans offering odds.
Opiates of orientals offend Ottoman oligarchs,
Ocelots obey overreaching octogenarians
Oedipus...Oh?

(for Carmen whever you might find her)

Esculent

So, Bruce has revealed my purported secret blogging identity. But little does he know my countervailing charm: teaching from life. I'm pretty sure I'm much weirder in person than I've ever managed to be in type.

And if not...

Hi, Carmen!

So we're back from our lovely trip to la belle province. Too much history and culture for me to articulate. We'll make you watch the pictures if you come within 40 feet of us, though. I tried maple syrup. J'ai pratiqué parler francais. And I was drawn as a cat. What more can I say?

In the News

Wood bison have returned to the area around Fort Providence, a community 210 kilometres southwest of Yellowknife. Trouble is, some of them have moved into the hamlet. For much of the summer, seven bull bison have been hanging around, causing damage and generally scaring people with their aggressive behaviour. See the full story here.

Courts have declared the dubious practice of "scrubbing" films a violation of copyright (and in Canada of moral right): See more here.

Humans produce an estimated 60 billion tons of plastic material every year — and much of it is ending up in our oceans, where it is increasingly troubling — see here.

Kansas is one of twelve American states in which sex under a certain age is always presumed illegal, regardless of consent or the age difference between the partners. A new interpretation of Kansas' reporting law, however, makes it the only state requiring that doctors, nurses, counselors, and all other care providers report as abuse any sexual interaction between teens under sixteen. Yes, including that awkward first kiss and full-frontal snogging: see this.


Kibbles and Bits

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once. — Cyril Connolly

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect. — Owens Lee Pomeroy

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out. — Italian proverb

Since I first gained the use of reason my inclination toward learning has been so violent and strong that neither the scoldings of other people ... nor my own reflections ... have been able to stop me from following this natural impulse that God gave me. He alone must know why; and He knows too that I have begged Him to take the light of my understanding, leaving only enough for me to keep His law, for anything else is excessive in a woman, according to some people. And others say it is even harmful. — Juana Ines de la Cruz, 1691, in a reply to the Bishop of Puebla, who had attacked her scholarly work as inappropriate for her sex


Last week I finished reading Gone with the Wind, at last, and watched Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. Personally, I was cheering for the Phantom. Then tonight we watched Brokeback Mountain. People walked out of the theatre?!? Really??? Sigh. But Kananaskis looked very climbable. Next week's movie: Lost in Translation.

Yesterday I started yet another grad course, this one on curriculum inquiry. Please remind me, whenever you next see me, to be very very quiet. I tried averting my eyes from the professor, then sitting on my hands, then biting the insides of my cheeks. It was like being in grade two again. It's very hard not to talk in class.

Note to self: Things not to do: call the voicemail of the person whose job you're filling in his absence.

Speaking of work, it's pleasant once again. I'm SO SO SO looking forward to September. In my other other life, I have worked out a tutoring schedule for Zak's English 10-1 program. IF we can stay on schedule (and with my involvement, that's quite a big if), he'll be finished by the Christmas break and will write a final exam in January. Nothing like putting one's non-existent credentials to the test, hmm?

Now reading: A Short History of the Printed Word by Warren Chappell (fascinating!), A Feeling for Books by Janice Radway, The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance by Paul Grescoe, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place by E.L. Konigsburg, and many, many articles on curriculum theory.

And I have papers due on August 25 and 28.

So there.

Must sleep now.

Leslie

And then Carmen said...

During an intimate moment, when I was revealing all Leslie's secrets to our new apprentice-intern-student-work experience writing slave (Carmen in case you haven't guessed) she made the comment that blogs were private.

Uh?

Apparently according to current Carmenological theory, if one finds a blog as a random occurence or are invited by the author (or perhaps just someone who isn't me) then it is fine to peruse the pedantry, otherwise it is a gross invasion of privacy. While I could easily turn this into an examination of our current society's bizarre notions of personal and private or perhaps a critical critique of one women's journey to refute the age-old definition of "under-the-pillow," "back-of-the-drawer," "It's private dammit!" I will refrain... starting now...

Instead I will paraphrase a very wise man (or "person" for you sticklers). It ain't private if more than two people know about; and pretty sure more than two people are on the internet. Either that or the other guy is pretty creative about keeping me fooled.

So... welcome Carmen. I encourage you to read on. I especially enjoy Wednesday, March 24, 2004 or Friday, January 14, 2005. And if Leslie kills me then you won't have to put up with me any more...

Culture moment

This moment brought to you by Langston Hughes:

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore——
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over——
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Now reading: Gone with the Wind (still, sigh); A Feeling for Books by Janice Radway; and Me and the Blondes by Teresa Toten.

A bientot.

July? July!?!

So it seems it's July. How did that happen?

Not much is new here. I've been on vacation for the last week, but I haven't really started to relax yet and actually had to go in to work today (so I get another day off in lieu). The remarkable hot weather has broken and we've had delightful storms on and off for the last 36 hours. Haven't been climbing for weeks! But perhaps that will change next week...

Meanwhile...

If you've been following the spate of plagiarism cases in the US this year, you're probably already aware of the Ann Coulter controversy. If you follow this link, however, you'll get a fuller picture of exactly what Ann Coulter is about. (For an especially rich experience, click on the Quicktime movie box at the right-hand side on the page.) Scary!

I continue to read lots of YA and discipline-specific texts, but one book I especially enjoyed recently is The Story of V: Opening Pandora's Box by Catherine Blackledge. Here is the synopsis from Amazon.UK:

It is the seat of female sexual pleasure, the passage for both the creation and the birth of humankind, and the channel for menstrual blood. Yet we know less about the vagina - its structure and function - than we do about any other organ of the human body. Why? THE STORY OF V explores how female genitalia have been conceived and misconceived over the centuries and today. A new look is long overdue. More than two millennia of misinformation has resulted in a western culture where we hold back from mentioning or showing the vagina; where this organ when seen publically is most commonly viewed as pornographic; and where, of all the organs of the human body, the vagina remains the most clouded in mystery, myth and biased, out-dated beliefs. In the past, medicine has misrepresented female sexual anatomy, reducing its remarkable complexities to the notion of a passive vessel. But, as this book shows, science is at last beginning to reveal the true structure and function of female genitalia, and the dynamic nature of the vagina's role in both sexual pleasure and reproduction. The result is nothing less than a vaginal revolution. With a wide-ranging perspective that takes in prehistoric art, ancient history, linguistics, mythology, evolutinary theory, reproductive biology and medicine, Catherine Blackledge unveils the hidden marvels of the female form.

A fascinating read, although most people I've discussed it with have been rather squeamish about the topic — and the dread colour-plate section. I'd recommend this book highly. It's amazingly readable, with a chatty style, and packed with disarming information. Regrettably, it's difficult to find locally — but I have a copy if you're interested!

I've also been engaged by Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Rotten. If you like literature and speculative fiction, you'll probably love these novels. Fforde's now started a new series about Nursery Crimes. The first book, The Big Over Easy, is sitting on my kitchen counter waiting for me to finish ... wait for it ... Gone with the Wind! The second book, The Fourth Bear, is due out next month. Excellent summer reading, if you don't mind big (silly) books.

Well, the sky is getting dark, so that's enough from me. I'll try to get back here again soon. As always, if you have book recommendations, I'd love to hear them.

Wishing you well,
L

How to catch a breath?

Pre-made, because I simply haven't time to write something original but wanted to remind you that I'm still around. Will try to say more soon.

L

Now listening: James Blunt, Back to Bedlam

**

Then Jesus took his disciples up the mountain and gathering them around Him, He taught them, saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are they who mourn.
Blessed are the merciful.
Blessed are they who thirst for justice.
Blessed are you when persecuted.
Blessed are you when you suffer.
Be glad and rejoice for your reward is great in heaven.

Then Simon Peter said, "Are we supposed to know this?"
And Andrew said, "Do we have to write this down?"
And James said, "Will we have a test on this?"
And Phillip said, "I don't have any paper."
And Bartholomew said, "Do we have to turn this in?"
And John said, "The other disciples didn't have to learn this."
And Matthew said, "May I go to the bathroom?"

Then one of the Pharisees who was present asked to see Jesus' lesson plan and inquired of Jesus, "Where is your anticipatory set and your objectives in the cognitive domain?"

And Jesus wept.

Herr Harper

Journalists, according to Stephen Harper, should demand nothing of him, according to this story. Accountability? Opposing views? Different values? Surely not in this country!

This is the end of Canada as we knew it. And Canadians will likely give the Conservatives a majority government next time, too, to boot. Sigh. Amsterdam is looking better and better all the time...

L

Wish me luck on my ASAC tomorrow!

pwned!

*wincingly ironic, ya know*

Gave my first and second academic papers on Friday. The first one went fairly well; the second one not quite so. Especially when one of the audience members felt it incumbent upon her to declaim for over ten minutes against my topic, just as I was getting into the meat of my subject — a little frustrating, that. And my technology didn't work because the hotel didn't provide an internet connection. But oh well.

Am teaching a proofreading course next weekend. (SURPRISE! You never know *what* you're going to learn by reading your e-mail.) That'll be easy-peasy after the semester I've had.

Not quite over, that semester I've had. Wednesday, it'll be over. Then convocation on Thursday. Must find a black, long-sleeved gauzy blouse between now and then...

Meanwhile, I have been asked to review another academic article. Yay!

And next week I'm going to start bouldering wearing Roap.

The biggest news of all: Bruce's knee is in excellent shape, healing nicely, flexible and strong. Thanks be to those so due.

Now reading: The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore and My Heartbeat by Garret Freyman-Weyr.

Must go mark.

L

PS: Thanks for the beautiful flowers, Bruce! They made the day especially memorable.

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, Bruce!

Time to sample from the wisdom of the ages.

• No wise man ever wished to be younger. — Jonathan Swift

• Every man over forty is a scoundrel. — George Bernard Shaw.

• Age is a high price to pay for maturity. — Tom Stoppard

Hmm...

• Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words. — Plautus

That's it! Here's to remembering birthdays and forgetting ages. Enjoy!

love,
Leslie and Zak

Censorship?

Which ad would you rather see?



Or



Seriously, I want to know. A local publication has refused to run the first ad after a reader complained about the second. I'm not going to tell you what I think just yet. So, in the meantime, please comment (you can do it anonymously, ya know!). See, down there by my signature where it says "comments"? Click there, pass the stupid human test, and leave me your thoughts. I'm counting on you, you know -- I'm giving a presentation on censorship next week! PLEASE!

Thanks.

Love,
Leslie

----------------------> click somewhere over here >>>

The day after the day before

Hmm. It's been a month almost since my last update. A lot happens in a month. In two weeks I'll be presenting at ELAC. It's probably time to write my paper, then. Hmm hmm hmm.

Do you know about You Tube? I suppose I'm possibly the last human with internet to learn about it, but now I have and have squandered a couple of hours watching old Kate Bush vids, including two live takes of "Suspended in Gaffa." I remember trying to work out that routine from the official video, particularly the part with special effects that can't be replicated by a dancer. Thinking about my interpretation and watching Kate's early choreography, I'm satisfied with how it all turned out so many many years ago. The thought of dancing -- or not dancing -- makes me wistful. I wonder if I could book time in one of the studios at JP over the summer. (Well, Brian Webb can do it, so why shouldn't I?) I also watched the alternative promotional video for "Running Up That Hill," which features Kate's band on stage dressed like monks in long brown robes. Kate herself assumes the role of a minister at a pulpit, delivering a passionate oratory in an ankle-length overcoat. In the final seconds of the clip, she takes up a wooden bow, fits an arrow in it, and kneels at the front of the stage, preparing to pierce the sky. Quite beautiful, really, in the post-apocalyptic manner of the mid 1980s.

Just finished a compelling novel called Stay with Me by Garret Freymann-Weyr. The story is very simple -- a sixteen-year-old girl lives through the year after her older sister commits suicide -- but the narrative is strikingly complex and richly ornamented. I recommend this book highly.

School is quietly winding down. Soon it will be May and I will be getting ready to take the chair of my department. Unfortunately, this appointment has turned out to be unexpectedly fraught. One of my colleagues now refuses to speak to me, the current chair is having trouble relinquishing his hold on the department, and another colleague seems intent on getting herself fired and taking me with her. But, on the bright side, I will be travelling to Toronto and Montreal at the end of May, and that destination makes holding on a little longer worthwhile.

Well, I know there's more to say but I need to run off to the grocery. Enjoy your weekend festivities if you're observing. I'll write more one of these days...

L

Ten Years After

Do you remember March 19, 1996? I do. That was the night I saw Heather Nova perform at the Sidetrack Café. She was quite amazing (even live, her voice was pure and clear), but the most memorable part of the night was probably when she told the unusually loud and obnoxious table right in the front of the stage to "shut the #@&% up". (My guests and I were sitting stage right, midway back, in a booth.) She had a cellist as part of her band — too cool!

Incidentally, Heather Nova's new album, Redbird, is currently garnering strong positive reviews. Too bad it hasn't been released in Canada! Instead, it's available only as a rather pricey import.

Went on a bit of a CD binge over the weekend and ended up with, among other items, the 2006 Juno nominees disc. It's quite a good compilation, as those things go (although keep in mind that I have a large shelf of greatest hit / anthology / retrospective discs, so my opinion may not be entirely reliable).

A friend recently remarked that the Arcade Fire disc Funeral is "OK" — OK?!? (Hey, have you heard about the interrobang? Look here... ) Then she told me she preferred the Death Cab for Cutie disc Plans! Sigh. Insert witty Gertrude Stein remark about genius going unrecognized in its own backyard...

Oh, to have hair like Pete Burns, ca. 1987...

Meanwhile ... Happy Spring!

Here's a great new word: pronic. It refers to a number that is the product of two consecutive numbers: for example, 2 (1 x 2), 6 (2 x 3), 12 (3 x 4), 20 (4 X 5), 30 (5 X 6), and so on. There are apparently 99 pronic numbers below 10,000. The synonym for pronic is heteromecic.

(What a great day today is now. We've learned something!)

Ten most recently played songs on iTunes:

1. Hungry Like the Wolf - Duran Duran
2. Bathwater - No Doubt
3. Steppin' Out - Joe Jackson
4. Ain't No Sunshine - Bill Withers
5. Straight from the Heart - Bryan Adams
6. You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) - Dead Or Alive
7. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) - The Arcade Fire
8. I'm the Only One - Melissa Etheridge
9. Mysterious Ways (remixed) - U2
10. You Can't Hurry Love - Phil Collins

(And now you're covered for tomorrow, too.)

I have too much marking to do. And other stuff too. Think I'll go to sleep now and avoid it all for a few more hours... Did I mention I've almost kicked my little antidepressant addiction? A few more of the dr's wicked tablets and then I'll be back to my normal state of weird. Oh how I've missed my insanity.

"The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished." — Daniel W. Davenport

Leslie (because the night)

"If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster." —Isaac Asimov

With cat-like tread

OK, OK, so it's been two months since I've written anything here. But you wouldn't believe the other, much more important things I've managed not to do in the interval.

"Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg." — Author Unknown

Ahem. So here's a little update on what's been happening with us lately.

Bruce injured his knee in January and has been forced to rest it for the last two months — which has meant a severely truncated climbing regimen! He's currently awaiting his date with the surgeon, which we hope will be soon, because his work keeps requiring bending and kneeling, less than ideal tasks in his current condition.

Zak is getting ready to register for grade ten, so we've been attending open houses and talking to teachers. With any luck, he'll be able to study Japanese, foods, and drama! (And all the core courses, too, of course.) We'll try to get phys ed out of the way over the summer. Then look out, world!

And me, I keep teaching. Still loving it. This semester is fairly manageable so far; my sections are smaller than they were in the fall, although the courses themselves generate considerably more assignments. But it's easy marking, thankfully. I've had to put my own studies aside for a few months, but I will be giving two presentations at ELAC at the end of April. (Yikes!) I am currently slated to assume responsibilities as Chair of my college department around Victoria Day. Oh, the power. Of course, I must get through my ASAC first... But I got my new business cards today — that's got to be an important sign.


If I had been so lucky as to have a steady mother
Who could talk to me as we are talking now to one another
Who could give me good advice when she discovered I was erring
(Which is just the very favour which on you I am conferring),
My existence would have made a rather interesting idyll,
And I might have lived and died a very decent interwiddle.
This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter
Isn’t generally heard, and if it is it doesn’t matter! — adapted from Gilbert and Sullivan, "Ruddigore"


So, that's what's been happening for the last few weeks. Fairly pedestrian, really. Oh, I should write about my Xmas iPod: 30 GB! 7500 songs! Colour display! Video and digital photo ready! Or my RoadTrip transponder, which allows the iPod to broadcast over my car radio — very cool! (Well, other than my potentially causing great traffic peril while searching for the perfect song and driving, that is.) I'm sure there are many other things I've neglected to write about, but I'll have to do that some other time. I'll be back in the habit soon, I'm sure.

À bientôt!

L

Edmonton: Gateway to the South

"We have already seen that the technology required for coping with extreme cold did not emerge until after anatomically modern humans invaded Europe around 40,000 years ago, and that people did not colonize Siberia until 20,000 years later. Eventually, those early Siberians crossed to Alaska, either by sea across the Bering Strait (only 50 miles wide even today) or else on foot at glacial times when Bering Strait was dry land. The Bering land bridge, during its millennia of intermittent existence, would have been up to a thousand miles wide, covered by open tundra, and easily traversable by people adapted to cold conditions. The land bridge was flooded and became a strait again most recently when sea level rose after around 14,000 B.C. Whether those early Siberians walked or paddled to Alaska, the earliest secure evidence of human presence in Alaska dates from around 12,000 B.C.
Soon thereafter, a north–south ice-free corridor opened in the Canadian ice sheet, permitting the first Alaskans to pass through and come out into the Great Plains around the site of the modern Canadian city of Edmonton. That removed the last serious barrier between Alaska and Patagonia for modern humans. The Edmonton pioneers would have found the Great Plains teeming with game. They would have thrived, increased in numbers, and gradually spread south to occupy the whole hemisphere." — Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Happy new year!

I just finished the Diamond book— it's an interesting read but at times a little too pat. However, the issues that he raises about linguistics and literacy have given me some new ideas for my own research, so slogging through 400-plus pages was ultimately worthwhile.

Obviously I'm continuing my pursuit of 100 books a year — in fact, I surpassed my goal in 2005, thanks to an abundance of YA literature. This month's obsession is magazine editors' biographies — there is a surprisingly large number of these! I'm also making some progress with Wicked, but it's going slowly. And I have a film from NFB to review — I'll post a link if my review is published.

On New Year's Day I made a fantastic turkey with rub marinade and no stuffing — wow! I also made homemade pie filling with cherries from our Evans tree — fabulous! The filling went into tarts and a pie (with storebought shells). So perhaps the Evans will be spared to live another year, despite its prolific suckering habit... If not, I hear that Nanking cherries are also quite tasty...

Not much else to tell right now. School starts again in a few days. I'll be back with more to report soon.

looking out,
L

"The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter." — Mark Twain

Solid Advice

A sprinkling of tips to keep you safe this holiday season. Don't let a black cat cross your path, and if you draw the nine of swords, think very carefully about your next step.

"Do not mix products containing bleach with products containing ammonia." — Chemistry 30

"Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over 30 who is not a conservative has no brains." —attributed to Sir Winston Churchill

"Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom." — Phyllis Theroux, essayist, columnist, teacher and author

L

Endurance Marching

Hello hello,

It's the grim time of year now, during which my only strategy is to keep moving forward and refuse to rest. If I sit down, I might not get up again. This year's unusually bad because all my exams have been concentrated at the beginning of the week. Fortunately, though, I have stayed on track with most of my marking, so only one course is looking actually threatening. All my grades should be handed in by next Monday and I will have nothing — nothing! — to worry about for three whole weeks.

In the meantime, I had another review published. Read it here. I also prepared a peer review for Children's Literature in Education earlier in the fall and a reader's report for Oxford University Press in the summer — all good for the CV: only four months until my ASAC!

Anyway, enough of all that. Back to the grind... I'll post again when I emerge.

Leslie

Today's thought: Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand. — Mark Abley, journalist

A penny for the guy, belatedly

"It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge a elephant, but we can't dodge a fly." - Josh Billings


What if I came knocking

What if I came knocking
on your front door some night?
Would you open the window
and drop me down the key?
What if I came knocking
on your bedpost that same night?
Would you open up your heart
or try to get the best of me?

What if I came knocking
on your brain the next day
and asked for your truth and your love and your honesty?
Would you build up your big walls
and try to hide behind that smile
or would you try to pull the wool right over me?

So what if I came knocking?

So what if I came kicking
and it scared you a little bit
and I came on strong — would you think
that there’s something wrong with me?
Or could it be your fears
of trying something real
or just afraid to touch
a guy like me?

What if I came knocking
on your front door some night?

So let’s just say it worked out
like a storybook dream
and we lived happily ever after
la la la la...

But what if I came crying
after just a few weeks
and said I misread my heart,
this is not really meant to be?

So if you hear some knocking
on your window tonight,
you can bet that it’s probably me.
But let it be known
that we’re just a pair of tumbling dice
and the outcome of these crapshoots
is hard to see.

So what if I came knocking
on your front porch tonight?

— John 'Cougar' Mellencamp

December will be magic again

Hello, hello,

It's been an age since I've written, it seems. Lots has been happening, but most of it is still in process so I shouldn't write about it yet. But here's something I can write about...

***

Kate Bush, Aerial

Despite my earlier anxieties, Aerial arrived without copy protection, so I did not have to fret about whether or not to own a legal copy. I have listened to it now repeatedly and like it better each time. The "album" presentation adopts the metaphor of vinyl, with two "sides" represented by two discs: "A Sea of Honey" and "A Sky of Honey." Both display Kate in fine form, offering a contradictory reflection of the title image: while often fanciful, and even playful, the album is never lacking in substance.

"A Sea of Honey", the first disc, presents seven unrelated songs. The single, "King of the Mountain", is melodic and catchy; when I heard Kate Bush interviewed, she explained that she was trying to imitate Elvis Presley's vocal delivery style — that explanation makes her somewhat indistinct singing through the verses much easier to understand! "Pi" is perhaps one of those "be careful what you wish for" songs — in the past, fans have rashly made statements about being willing to listen to Kate recite the phone book, and that is roughly what she does here, chanting through more than 100 decimal places of pi. Although that description probably elicits shudders, the song itself is quite good (but I still don't like her use of interplay with the chorus, a habit she formed on The Red Shoes). "Bertie" is a beautiful tune with Renaissance instrumentation, but is lyrically very thin. Fans are quite divided over it: some despise it for its embarrassingly honest expression; others admire it for its musicianship. I find it appealing — very listenable, although I would hesitate to sing along with it — and being the mother of an only child myself, I can understand the unabashed adoration Kate declares for her young son. Bah, all you cynics, bah!

"Mrs Bartolozzi" is a puzzling song for me. It's quite powerful but I don't really understand it. Musically, it feels ungrounded; perhaps it will grow on me over the next few months. "How to be Invisible" is likely to be the next single (if there is another single); it's very uptempo and intelligent, although not quite dance floor material. Somehow it feels most like what I expected to hear on this album; perhaps it has the strongest root in the eighties (at least for me). Many fans have likened "Joanni" to a Tori Amos song, and my assessment is similar: it sounds like Kate decided to show singers like Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos how to write! It is atmospheric and evocative, with lovely little sounds running around in the background, creating a complex listening experience. The most universally well-received song is one that I don't really care for yet: "A Coral Room". To me, it sounds like two underdeveloped song ideas fused. It is emotionally appealing throughout, with some gorgeous musicianship, but it simply doesn't wrench my heart.

One of the reasons I have yet to learn to love "side one" of the album may be that "side two", "A Sky of Honey", is one of the most sumptuous popular recordings I have ever heard. Kate Bush has lost none of her power in her decade away from the business. It is an astonishing creation.

The first four tracks establish the themes for the piece; the nine songs form a cycle or "concept" around the movement of light through a day. The writing is perceptive but a little distant, largely based on experimentation with sound, until track five, "Sunset," on which we hear Kate Bush perform in a jazz idiom that slides gradually into a world music sound. It's brilliant. The next track will either amuse or repulse listeners: Kate sings to bird song — the idea sounds absolutely cracked, but incredibly the performance works. "Somewhere in between" moves into liminal spaces: shadows, the transformation between day and dusk, twilight and starlight — another lovely, complex song with jazz inflections on Kate's mature style.

The centrepiece of the disc is "Nocturn", the longest recording of Kate's career. The song begins with a quiet, warbling vocal and gradually builds into a spectacular mass of voices and instrumentation — I cannot imagine anyone with a pulse being unmoved by the climax of this track. It is also one of the sexiest songs Kate has ever recorded, both lyrically and vocally. The main vocal is bell-pure, while the harmonies are deep and sultry; the instrumentation is intricate and sophisticated. WOW! I have listened to this track dozens of times now, and it gets better with every hearing. The disc finishes with the title track, a high-energy, percussion-heavy performance wrapped around a small number of phrases and Kate's maniacal laughter. I found it bizarre on my first listen, yet it works perfectly to tie the cycle together; the disc couldn't end any other way, musically or thematically.

So, while I've still only lukewarm about disc one, I think disc two is utterly gorgeous. I should mention that both discs flicker with moments reflecting Kate's earlier work, although likely only long-time fans will recognize these little flashes. Vocal touches throughout, aural effects on certain songs, and lyrical concerns give the record a degree of artistic unity generally unseen in popular music. This is a mature, accomplished work — and yet it's clear that Kate Bush had a great deal of fun creating it. It may not be art, but it's as close as a popular form is likely to get, and I really like it.

***

Anyway, this has taken much longer than I intended to write, so I must go. I hope all is well with you! More soon...

Leslie

Now playing: Aerial, of course!
Now reading: Millions of student essays...

Blog Abandonment

So its come to this. I've mostly abandoned this blog for a blog of my own making. In the course of working on my site I installed Wordpress and have since converted all my php pages to wordpress ones. I'm still working on the image archive but I may move that to something else as well. Macblaze may not be fancy but its got all my computer geek stuff and since its running off the Ruby iMac it may be slow, but its surely disposable. I can break it whenever I want...and quite often do. What fascinates me about open source stuff is that it has so much potential for small to medium sized business. If you can't afford your own programmer, there seems to be something out there you can make work--and generally for free. And who would have imagined the cross-platform fluidity. I still hate my PC boxes (mostly cause fixin' them is a b_itch) but it's nice to move from one to another without having to resort to clunky stuff like maclink for translation...or even to have to use completely different software for the same task. Speaking of which... those of you who have two computers on your desk, especially if one's a Mac and one's a windows box, I downloaded a sweet little program called Synergy the other day. Think of it as a software KVM switch without the M. Completely cross platform, it allows me to use the iMac and the PC with the same keyboard and mouse. I still have to use the iMac keyboard to start the software on rebooting but after that I can put them aside. and surf and play games with same keyboard on two different computers. I've been documenting some of my trials and tribulations on Macblaze so check it out if you want to get a sense of what I've been breaking. You'll find some climbing stuiff ther as well and I'm working on a picture of the day type thing for some of the climbing pics. Back to the business thing. Some of the open source stuff like the afore mentioned KVM and WordPress is great and MySql and PHP as well as some stuff like mail servers is simply outstanding. It take some time, and I'll admit the interface of Filemaker is worth paying for, but MySql is powerful, free, multiplatform and totally tuned for the web. I've never really made inroads with Access and I think its unlikely I ever will now that I'm tuned into this open source stuff. Meanwhile I'm typing this in on L's laptop over a wireless connection using a free Widget while I pop back and forth amoungst programs and do a little programming on the Hole's Wordpressweblog. These are all part of the plugin technology that is also going crazy and making things easier and easier to customize. The commercial stuff like Adobe has the possibilities but developers tend to charge an arm and a leg for something to make you life easier. I don't know about you but my workplace finances usually dictate that easier isn't work $$..."Let's save money and do it the hard way" is a more common credo. Anyway, plugins abound inthe open source community and people are generally willing and eager to share their time-saving ideas. Popular stuff like WordPress has literally hundreds of plugins and generally more than a few ways to skin any particular cat. Suffice it to say I can get bonus points at work eveytime I leverage free technology to make the business run smoother. In other worlds, I've reached the pinacle of publishing by being invited to join the BPAA's Executive. We had a meeting in Red Deer last week and I learned something new about human behavior.. or at least was able to articualte soemthing I knew subconciously. People hate to lose. People who lose at one game are loath to let it go and play another. people who thought they were winning have a hard time even admitting that the game was longshot anyway. The Executive spend a lot of time and $$ lobbying the gov't for more support funding for Alberta's book publishers and, as I interpret it, they were played. A lot of positive and encouraging sign led them to hope that our, oh-so-generous Klein government was about to inject fresh cash into our cultural industries and... nothing. Private film projects like Paul Gross's WWI flick got special funding but incredibley successfull and award winning publishers like Red Deer Press are being sold to Eastern interests cause its they only way they can grow. Anyway back to the human nature part. Coming into this cold it seems pretty obvious to me that the Conservatives aren't going to give money to a left-leaning industry like book publishing...what's this reading all about anyway... and they they are very likely to spend lots of visible cash on high profile movies just for the hint of flashing cameras and good press. On top of that, leading Alberta citzens go to the Symphony, see high profile theatre at the Citadel and divide their dollars between the ballet and opera and if they read at all its stuff recommeded by MacLeans or the New Yor Times. They do not read books published by small-time local publishers... no matter how many awards they get. But you see, it was hard for anyone else at the table to fathom it. They had tried so hard and fought the good fight and they had lost...lost? Meanwhile I'm sitting there thinking about what we could do to raise profile or stir up some sh_t. Maybe move into the 20th century with some of the aforementioned open source software. Anything to bide time until a new gov't comes along or Margaret Atwood announces she's marrying Ted Byfield and starting an Alberta-based press specializing in right wing canada lit. God we could rake in the funding with that scenario... I got a few licks in and listened hard to the woeful tales but it stilled seemed to me a lost cause before they started. Course I'm not one to take risks involving government, bureaucracy or an collection of people that number more than 10...never see me at the front of a revolution, no siree. In the end everyone had to accept defeat but those eternal optimists among them still were talking of new plans to fight the total apathy of our government. I guess I'll have to join in because the only thing worse than fighting a losing battle is watching one from the sidelines. What the H, it might be fun if'n no one takes it too seriously. Maybe I'll meet Ralph in a more socail setting than Lois' funeral, invite him over for a brew and expalin just how much I can admire his skill at politick'n and still curse him up one side and down the other for being such a bonehead with my future. I better get off this topic as I can feel L's blood a'boiling... Ciao for now B

Cui bono

Just so you know I'm still more or less in the land of the living. If it was possible for life to be more complicated, it has become so.

Mood a la mode: "Beautiful Ones", Prince; "What Have I Done to Deserve This?", Pet Shop Boys; "I Don't Like Mondays", Boomtown Rats; and "I'll Be There in a Minute", Gowan.

And some thoughts...

"That the birds of worry and care fly over your head — this you cannot change; but that they build nests in your hair — this you can prevent." —Chinese proverb

"Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree." —Rabindranath Tagore

C'est tout!
L

Too busy to breathe!

Hello, hello,

Well, after all the excitement of getting my new notebook on Friday, I have spent the weekend feeling fairly flat and uninspired. I seem to have some kind of virus that I just can't shake, so I spent most of Saturday sleeping or trying to sleep. (Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit my meds...) I have a gigantic pile of marking awaiting me, and I spent today working on a paper and a presentation for my own studies. No time for climbing, sadly, but I didn't feel up to it anyway.

In bigger news, the video for "King of the Mountain" is out! Go to www.katebush.com to view it. It's silly and sweet, and Kate looks absolutely beautiful! Oh, just a few more weeks until the release of the complete album...

Back to work!

L

Meet Little Ghost...

...my new iBook, paid for by the college using my professional development funds. Guess I should use it for something professional, or developing, or something. Well, I'm writing — that's professionally relevant!

Giving my first presentation for my English Language Arts course on Monday. Wish me luck, please!

More soon,
L

A New iBook

L's new toy has widgets and that lets me post to the blog without any other interface.

I've been experimenting with Wordpress as well and think it will work fine at work. We will likely move the Enjoygardening site completely over. At home I've been experimenting with Blojsom. See Zak's Blog to see how Blojsom works on my home server and also catch up on Zak's doin's!

All this stuff is basically free for anyone who bothers to figure it all out and the only cost is the server space etc.

Ciao!

Taking climbing for granite

Ouch. Very sore. Last night was the first in the fall Rip and Grip series at VIRG. B and Zak did very well, but I'll leave it to them to talk about that. I myself flashed the first five problems and solved the next two on my second try. I didn't solve problems 8 and 9, but I did try them both five or six times, and after that I was pretty tired, so I just watched the other boulderers. I got my best score ever, though, so I guess all that practice is actually working!

The big entertainment at the Rip and Grip (apart from the event itself, which is incredible fun) comes between the time limit and the announcement of the winners. For about half an hour, some of the top boulderers in the gym play, while the rest of us watch and cheer. If you haven't seen something like this, it's hard to imagine. The boulderers agree to a nearly impossible series of dynos, and then try to get through them. The simultaneous grace and athleticism is astonishing — it is as beautiful as dance and as awesome as lightning. Particularly inspiring is watching them line up to try again and again; some of the guys tried last night's ultimately invicible problem more than a dozen times, most of them having bouldered in the competition for two and a half hours — exhausting! My favourite boulderer is a young guy named Jesse. He is the best boulderer I have ever seen — amazing arms and brilliant technique — but he also has the most encouraging personality. He cheers on every other boulderer with enthusiasm and sincerity. He demonstrates the best of this sport in every way; I have learned a lot from his example.

But that's it for climbing this weekend. Between the holiday, various work commitments, and the gym closure on Monday, there simply isn't time to get back — and I doubt our bodies could survive further punishment anyway. Ow ow ow ow ow.

And anyway, I have cookies to bake for Thanksgiving.

Today's tarot: the lovers — judgement — justice. Hmm. Methinks me better watch out!

Now reading: Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton (again); Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins; Pure by Karen Krossing; and millions and millions of words' worth of homework...

A girl with guns,

L,
NOT solid!

I am proud of me!

Just had my first academic-oriented book review published. This is definitely a CV-worthy event! Meanwhile, my professor has asked me to review one of her articles (informally) before she submits it for academic review. Wow!

Anyway, if you'd like to read my review, you'll find it here. I can only hope there will be more to follow.

Giddily,
L

Disappointed!

This week was supposed to mark the arrival of the new Kate Bush single, "King of the Mountain." And it did, provided one lives in the United States. Fans in the UK, Canada, and other countries are unable to listen to legal copies of the single because, for whatever reason, the record company decided not to license the single for digital release anywhere other than the US, traditionally one of Kate Bush's least successful markets.

Further, the word from Sony Music, Kate's US distributor, is that Aerial will be the first CD released worldwide with DRM on all pressings. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is software that prevents CDs from being copied, legally or illegally, by embedding "errors" in the data; Sony plans to use different technology in different markets, in an attempt to thwart listeners who buy import editions that lack DRM. I predict this decision will compromise the success of this long-awaited album, some twelve years in the making.

I have strong feelings about digital music sharing and have not participated in P2P file-sharing as many other music lovers have. I try very hard to respect artists' copyrights, since I have spent a good chunk of my career in an industry where copyright infringement and financial exploitation of creators is all too frequent. That said, I do listen to most of my music digitally today, on my iPod or my Homepod, and I resent record companies taking away my freedom to make a legal copy of my legally purchased music. Like many other Kate Bush fans, I am currently wondering whether I want to buy Aerial with DRM in place; some fans have stated on mailing lists that they will refuse to buy it at all unless the record company removes DRM.

One commentator noted that the record company may be depending on the reputation of hardcore Kate Bush fans being obsessive completists and thus "compelled" to own the album regardless of controls. At the same time, we fans have grown and evolved over the last twelve years of silence; Kate's fan base has shifted, and the younger fans are likely to be much savvier about online music. If the change in her listeners is sufficiently great, the album is at risk of flopping because it will be roundly boycotted by people who despise DRM and its implications.

Despite my commitment to respecting copyright, I have listened to a bootleg copy of the single online. The file quality is poor, and I will replace it with a legal MP3 as soon as I can. Unfortunately, that may not be until November 7, and that's a long wait in recreational time. I am SO disappointed with EMI/Sony in their handling of Kate Bush's new album. Unfortunately, I'm too old to believe that my disappointment and frustration will register at all with the MBAs who run today's music corporations. Sigh.

L

Catchy catch phrase

"Our tolerance for crap is now zero"
--Stephen Mandel (or so I saw it attributed)

I have to say that it is an important point in one's life when our crap tolerance dips in to the single digits. To hit zero is a singular accomplishment. Perhaps if more people got there we could put away the hip waders and get something done in this world...

...or perhaps not.

Corn Harvest

Good day! I'm feeling much better than when I last wrote, thanks for asking, although I am as busy as ever. Now that I'm in the process of dropping one of my little pharmaceutical habits, I expect to regain control of my mornings, and thus my teaching life. Although I must admit I've grown rather fond of sleeping!

If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one. — Russian proverb

I found an interesting music survey on the web the other day. Here is one of the questions, along with my answer:

Is there any song that you just can't bear to listen to because of the memories? (If so, what + why?) "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her" by Simon and Garfunkel: August 8, 1986. Nothing to do with the poet. Always keep your piano in tune.

Now I'm curious who knows the story behind this. Any takers?

Meanwhile, I've created a fabulous iMix... Tart Pops! Here's the track listing:

Pop Music, M
Precious and Few, Climax
Cruisin', Gwyneth Paltrow & Huey Lewis
The Power of Love, Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Strut, Sheena Easton
'65 Love Affair, Paul Davis
This Little Girl, Gary 'US' Bonds
All Touch, Rough Trade
Tiny Thing, Jenson Interceptor
My Wife with Champagne Shoulders, Mark Isham
Tokyo, Bruce Cockburn
Get Closer, Seals & Crofts
Don't Pull Your Love, Joe Frank Hamilton And Reynolds
Spirit Of Radio, Rush
Lady Marmalade, Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya & Pink
You Think You're a Man, Full Frontal (I've been unable to find Divine's version in digital form, sigh)
This Wheel's on Fire, Siouxsie and the Banshees
Maniac, Michael Sembello
Too Shy, Kajagoogoo
(I've Had) The Time of My Life, Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes
Boy Inside the Man, Tom Cochrane and Red Rider (the original single, not the later acoustic version)
Love the One You're With, Steven Stills
Ball of Confusion, Love and Rockets
Hush, Deep Purple
How Do I Make You, Linda Ronstadt
You Can't Win, Murray McLauchlan
Let Go the Line, Max Webster
Burning Buildings, Elton John
Kiss You All Over, Exile

Two hours of aural pleasure, ironic and otherwise. And some selections are excellent for loud play while driving to work and elsewhere. Enjoy!

The reward of mastering something is the mastery. — Jerome Bruner

Another music survey question:
What band/artist have you been playing the most this month? White Stripes. They've even started to show up on my blackboard, argh.

I'm currently reading The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler as part of an assignment for the course I'm taking. My professor raved about this book, saying that if you enjoy reading, you must own it; I haven't finished the novel yet, but I don't feel quite as enthusiastic so far, although I can appreciate the literary technique. I much preferred watching Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice, also part of the assignment. But the book contains this lovely Mark Twain quotation, which I know some of you will appreciate: "Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it." And speaking of Twain, here's some good advice for writers:

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. — Mark Twain

In the news: Earlier this year Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez printed 1 million copies of Cervantes’ Don Quixote to be handed out in public squares to mark the 400th anniversary of the Spanish-language classic. Chavez encouraged everyone to read the book, which includes a preface by Portugese author Jose Saramango, so as to “feed ourselves once again with that spirit of a fighter who went out to undo injustices and fix the world”.

One more music survey question:
If you had a band, what would you call it and what would be your role? I make up band names all the time. The latest is Shaggy's Green Shirt. I would play keyboards, duh!

... And you read your Emily Dickinson / And I my Robert Frost ...

Be obscure clearly. — E.B. White

Later,
L

It's been a while...

Now I hear you saying to yourself, "Gosh, it's a little early in the term for you to be complaining about being SO busy" or something like that. (After all, no-one's THAT busy...) Sigh. The last few weeks have indeed been hectic, but also positive. I absolutely terrified myself on the Labour Day weekend climbing on wet rocks at Kootenay Plains. I am teaching a full load and also taking a course toward my eventual doctorate. I have been reading like a maniac, trying to get in a few extra narrative joys before the term takes hold, and have been decorating the house with books from four — count them, FOUR — library systems. Ta-dah!

So here are a few news bits and a fresh review. I'll try to think of something more insightful to write about soon. — L


Canadian sales of alcoholic beverages per capita, 15 years and over
• Newfoundland and Labrador: $733.80
• Prince Edward Island: $573.60
• Nova Scotia: $613.00
• New Brunswick: $551.70
• Quebec: $682.10
• Ontario: $601.70
• Manitoba: $530.10
• Saskatchewan: $524.00
• Alberta: $615.80
• British Columbia: $631.90
• Yukon: $1,035.20
• Northwest Territories and Nunavut: $858.90


A lightbulb comes on!
Replacing even one 60-watt incandescent bulb with a 15-watt compact fluorescent light in each of Canada's 12 million households could save up to $73 million a year in energy costs. It would also reduce GHG emissions by approximately 397,000 tonnes — the equivalent of taking more than 66,000 cars off the road each year!


And no, there are no F-ing postcards
This brite is apparently for real! See the full story by Toby Harnden here.

For the conservative inhabitants of a settlement called F***ing in rural Upper Austria near Salzburg that comprises just 32 houses (population: 104), the English meaning of their village's name is just one giant headache. One night, all four road signs on its approaches were stolen by tourists. Since records began, there has been no crime there - apart from the perennial theft of what officials call "street furniture". Now, the authorities are fighting back. The signs have been set in concrete bases and Kommandant Schmidtberger, the local police chief, hints at clandestine operations to combat what he calls "foreign criminals" disturbing the alpine order.


Review: Teach Me by R.A. Nelson
Teach Me wants to be a better book than it is. In this awkward coming-of-age story, brilliant 17-year-old Carolina (or Nine, as she's called) falls in love with her 30-something poetry teacher, Mr Mann (she refers to him by his first name at only a few points in the story). Their relationship is, of course, doomed, and the novel traces Nine's journey back from a broken heart. Unfortunately, this journey is unrealistic and renders absurd what is otherwise a passionate story of hard love.

The first 100 pages or so are cast in beautiful, sensitive prose, dense with cosmic imagery and told with authentic emotion. At about this point, however, the telling changes and becomes revenge fantasy of the highest order. (At several points I expected the section to end with "And then I woke up.") Nine stalks her ex-lover, steals from him, vandalizes his apartment, even attempts to shoot him (with blue paint pellets). Her thinking becomes cripplingly unstable and her fury quickly begins to hurt everyone around her. The story climaxes with an unbelievable chase scene in which Mann is forced to rescue Nine and her best friend, Schuyler, from drowning. In the hospital, Nine confronts Mann, who explains his reasons for behaving as he has. Although his explanation will make sense to an older reader, it will sound ludicrously hollow to the YA audience this novel was intended for. Yet in the last pages of the novel the author regains the lyricism of her opening, and the book ends surprisingly gently, with a sense of grace and finality.

This novel feels unsure of its audience. It is relentless for YA, including some scenes of graphic sexuality, but it is also just naïve enough to fail as mainstream adult fiction. Much of the writing is sumptuous, and the motif of Emily Dickenson poetry is scalpel-like in its precise underscoring of the action. But the middle of the novel feels stretched and unreal, as though the author was pushing her character to realize the fantasies of women scorned; given what we learn about her early in the novel, Nine simply wouldn't perform some of the acts her author imagines her undertaking. And as a self-proclaimed observer, Nine is remarkably blind to a critical detail about the marriage she tries to derail, a detail that a close reader could not miss and might even have predicted. The harmonious, if tense, resolution of the novel also feels inauthentic, as if the author is trying to follow the conventions of YA despite that the story resists a happy ending. As Nine herself observes, "Something has closed inside me. It will always be there, but it's closed." Despite its many strengths, the novel ultimately fails, too problematic to be mainstream fiction and perhaps too raw and discordant to be YA. That's a shame, actually, because I had high hopes for this book.


And the iPod says...
...As the sun is setting you'll be betting
I'll be getting through
I'll find a payphone babe
And take some time to talk to you... — "Smoke Baby," Hawksley Workman


Thought for the Day
Only in grammar can you be more than perfect. — William Safire

The Shout Heard Around the World

...was the start of anticipation of fanatics everywhere, responding to the news. You may not be reading it here first, but you can probably imagine my current state of mind...

Press Release
Source: Columbia Records

KATE BUSH; New Single & Album
Wednesday August 31, 5:00 am ET

NEW YORK, Aug. 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Columbia Records is proud to announce the release of the brand new studio album by Kate Bush.

The double album entitled 'Aerial' will be released worldwide on November 8th (Nov 7th in Europe).

The first single 'King Of The Mountain' precedes the album on September 27th. It will be available online at iTunes, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Sony Connect, Walmart.com, Rhapsody, Napster, and MSN Music.

Both the single and album are produced by Kate Bush.

Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick...

L

Vote Now!

Well, in continuing coverage of my library addiction, I direct your attention to Edmonton Public Library's contest, The Last Word, which asks patrons to name their favourite Alberta book. If you have an EPL account (or maybe even a TAL or NEOS account), you are eligible to win a big collection of Alberta books. I have already entered, of course, and nominated No Fixed Address by Aritha van Herk, a delightfully funny, intelligent read. But notice that several of Lois Hole's books appear on the list, and I'll Never Marry a Farmer is highly ranked, currently with six votes (the top book has twelve, for the sake of comparison). Wow!

I am enjoying my final two weeks of holidays very much and have been reading a lot. In addition to many, many articles on postcolonialism and other relevant scholarly topics, last week I read three books that offered some moments of fascinating juxtaposition. My little brain is smokin'!

First, as mentioned earlier, I read Stephanie Coontz's study Marriage, A History. It is a suitably academic tome with fully 98 pages of notes and an 18-page index. The back jacket provides complimentary blurbs from close to a dozen scholars and cultural authorities. With an apparatus like that, I was expecting to be impressed, and for the first few chapters I was. However, as Coontz moved into the early twentieth century (a period I have more than passing familarity with), I realized exactly how superficial and selective her argument is. Although she provides a breathtaking range of sources and quotations, her analysis of changing gender roles post-WWI is suspect, making me wonder about the solidity of the discussion leading up to it. Beyond her relentless American bias, she ignores many significant social facts — for instance, the social impact of the World War One itself and the flu pandemic of the late 1910s. As she moves into the post-war period, her analysis becomes even more glib, as if the facts of our culture are so self-evident as to need no explanation (if that were true, how could she justify writing her book in the first place?). Coontz's final conclusion — that the male breadwinner marriage of the 1950s and early 1960s was a carefully constructed historical aberration unlikely to be seen again in our culture of increasing individualism — is not groundbreaking, and her placid call for patience while the concept of marriage continues to sort itself out feels disappointingly flat after some 300 pages of build-up. I did like her busting of several common marriage myths regularly trotted out by mass media to drive political and economic agendas (for instance, that single women over 35 are more likely to be killed by terrorists than married — obviously untrue, and not because the women are so panicked that they'll marry any man who offers a ring). But in the end I was not impressed by this book as I was by, say, The Meaning of Wife.

Immediately after finishing with Coontz — perhaps as an antidote? — I read Melvin Burgess' YA novel Doing It. This is a surprisingly complex story told by alternating narrators, predominantly three seventeen-year-old males preoccupied with sex. One young man is involved with a young woman almost as self-absorbed as he is, the second is struggling with dating a young woman whose body does not confirm to his peer group's stereotypes, and the third is trying to extricate himself from an abusive relationship with his drama teacher. Be warned: this novel is not for those with delicate sensibilities. The word fuck appears on virtually every page in some form or another, and the main characters' thoughts about sexuality are unabashedly frank. Interestingly, some attitudes identified by Coontz are engaged here as the various narrators negotiate the social, cultural, and physical boundaries around sex. I have some trouble anticipating the readership for this novel, however: I can't see many boys age fourteen-plus reading this sort of book (other than perhaps skimming it for titillation value), and I expect that many girls in the YA age-group would be put off by the males' attitudes (it would be unfortunate if I'm right, though, because teenage girls could learn a lot about "how the other half lives" from this book). Burgess is a fine writer who handles uncomfortable scenes with sensitivity and honesty — there was a lot about this book to like. Just don't expect to find it in every high school library.

I heard Susan Jane Gilman's memoir Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress discussed by a book panel on the CBC (before the workers were locked out, of course). Gilman is only slightly older than I am, and the subtitle of the book, Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless, got me instantly. The first two sections of this book made me laugh out loud regularly; Gilman recounts her childhood and adolescence in loopy, original prose that is delicious, occasionally dazzling. The guys had to sit through many, many passages bracketed by "Just listen to this... Don't you wish you'd written that?". I enjoyed the book overall but felt the final section, which describes Gilman's university experiences and early career (ending with her recent move to Switzerland), loses much of the charm of the earlier chapters. Gilman's account of her parents' divorce is unbelievably whiny, and her story of working in Washington is almost hopelessly naive — here the "clueless" of the subtitle certainly rings true. Women in their thirties may find Gilman's embarrassed enchantment with her wedding dress poignant, but her bride stories are so much better when Susan Jane is a kindergartener who insists on wearing a tutu to class every day. Hypocrite is definitely worth your time, but don't expect insightful feminist analysis or deep cultural commentary. Gilman is at her best in the voice of a girl becoming a young woman, and I hope she will continue to mine this vein — perhaps through YA narrative?

Well, that was last week!

The other day I finished Roddy Doyle's Oh, Play That Thing, the continuing tale of Henry Smart. I adored the first Henry novel, A Star Called Henry, and have been eagerly waiting to get the new installment from the library. I was not disappointed. The last thirty pages were riveting — they left me breathless — and I can only hope the next book comes soon. I didn't know much about Louis Armstrong prior to reading the novel, but I'm motivated now to learn more (although when I'll do that exactly is uncertain...). The particular copy I borrowed was filled with surprisingly angry marginal notes, scribbled (in pencil) by someone much less charmed by Henry, and by Doyle's use of source materials, than I was — they added an unusual, but not negative, dimension to the reading.

Oh, and I wanted to mention another book that I devoured a few weeks ago. My Father Had a Daughter by Grace Tiffany is another reconstruction of Shakespeare, this one told from the perspective of Judith Shakespeare, Will's daughter. Judith is a richly developed, appealing narrator that you won't soon forget. The intended readership is YA, but the author is an American Shakespeare scholar, so her speculations are well grounded in research and the story should satisfy any adult reader. Interestingly, the text covers some of the same material as the play we saw earlier this year, Shakespeare's Will — comparing the authors' treatment of the extant facts could lead to some fertile discussion. But that's for someone else to pursue — Shakespeare's not really my guy (although earlier we were discussing the idea that someone might write a five-act history of Elizabeth I in the style of Shakespeare...).

I should also mention Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, my second experience with the graphic narrative form. (My first was Blankets by Craig Thompson, which made me cry — it is so gentle and wistful.) Persepolis isn't technically a graphic "novel" because its story is the author's own memoir of her childhood in Iran. I am ashamed to admit how little I knew and know about Iranian history; thankfully, the book includes a quick primer to contextualize Marjane's story. This book also made me cry, all the more so because of its continuing resonance. I quickly learned to love the young Marjane, and her parents' decision at the end of the story is heartbreaking. I will be watching for more from Satrapi — she writes and illustrates in France — and I'm grateful to the friend who recommended this wonderful book.

I'm currently struggling through Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson — not at all what I expected. And as I mentioned, I'm back to reading fairly academic stuff in preparation for my continuing course work. I have a pile of YA requested at various libraries, plus a few other books to try to finish before the school year starts. And I've been watching movies on video during the days I'm at home. It's been a text-rich summer, in short, and I'm looking forward to going back to school with a head full of new ideas and lots of fresh energy. So... wish me luck!

with love,
L

Happy Birthday!

Today Zak turns fourteen. Happy birthday, Zak! We hope you have a fabulous year.

love,
Mom and Dad

Making the Most of the Library

As you probably know, I treasure my various library memberships (I have four). And I admit that I am addicted to books. Although my addiction per se may not involve stealing from others to feed my habit, nor selling myself on the street (how reassuring!), I certainly own more books than I could possibly ever read, I buy more books regularly (I'm probably one of ABE's favourite clients), and I am always borrowing books (and running up fines) at the library. That certainly sound like an addiction, or at least bibliomania, to me!

In the last week, after finishing Harry Potter 6, I've read several other very popular novels, just by dint of standing at the cart when the books came out for shelving. First I read Ya-Yas in Bloom by Rebecca Wells, the third in the much-loved Ya-Yas series. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this book — and since I almost always try to finish any book I start (The Polished Hoe notwithstanding), many people have had to listen to me grouse about its length and tediousness. Given my bizarre sense of family and the absence of organized religion in my life, this book had little to say to me. I found the narrative structure awkward, as the sections are told by various narrators (or from various narrators' limited third-person perspectives) at various times, not coming together as a whole by the final section. I read this work as the author's attempt to grapple with America's loss of confidence since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Although the pivotal events of the last section take place in 1994, the emotions and actions around these events feel much more contemporary. If you really enjoy and believe in O magazine, you may enjoy this novel; otherwise, you may want to give it a pass.

Next I read The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom, which I've been meaning to get to for a couple of years, since one of my students recommended it. Poor Mr Albom has been the subject of great controversy recently, but this novel was written long before all that, and it's a thoughtful little book. The premise is that when a person dies, he meets in "heaven" (a deeply subjective term) five people whose lives intersected with his, whether he recognized the meeting or not; each of the five must explain some aspect of the dead person's existence to him so he can understand his life's purpose and meaning. (Here "heaven" is a vaguely Christian place, although it needn't be read that way.) The theme of this novel is interconnectedness: we are all connected by a complicated web of time and circumstance, and thus anything that affects one of us ultimately affects all of us. While the novel was extremely simple and short (you could easily read it in "one sitting"), it contains some important messages, much less cloyingly communicated than by, say, the Ya-Yas.

Incidentally, I enjoyed the first Ya-Yas book that I read!

Finally, tonight I finished Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracey Chevalier, another novel recommended by a student. (Well, given the painter at the centre of the story, how could I not read it eventually?) It's quite a lovely book, thoughtful and cautious, and it does not take the easy way out of its plot — I was impressed by the author's restraint. If you enjoy historical fiction and if you enjoy what my friend calls "girl books", you'll probably like this one. Note, however, that Griet, the narrator, is quite a prickly young woman — she reminds me of several twentieth-century Dutch women I've known!

Yes, yes, yes, I enjoyed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince very much, although I'm completely puzzled by how Rowling will resolve the plot in a single, final volume. If you haven't read it, you should, slowly. As another blogger remarked, Rowling has a keen sense of the developing adolescent psyche; the book works remarkably well on several levels, despite many unanswered questions in the deeply complicated plot. You know the basic trajectory of the story, and you may even know the major spoiler, but I'm sure you'll be surprised at how the story ends and where it is set to continue in the next volume. And so the waiting begins again ... thankfully there's a movie in November to keep us amused...

And now I'm reading Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz (great subtitle!). So far it's rather interesting — I'm becoming a big fan of cultural histories. I'm also about to tackle Roddy Doyle's Oh, Play That Thing and Susan Jane Gilman's Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress. As always, I welcome your suggestions. Or ABE gift certificates. And don't get me started about the remainder piles at Chapters...

Off to read some more,
L

ARGH, ARGH, ARGH!

I was driving my car, minding my own business, listening to the news, when the announcer reported the following:

"Same-sex marriage is now the law in Canada."

Well, I know helmuts and seatbelts are compulsory here, but surely this step takes heterophobia a bit too far, no? Well, I could hardly stop laughing at the news-reader's gaffe (she added the "the" to the lead), but then I heard the next item, which makes me say, again, ARGH!

The U.S. Congress has adopted a plan to extend daylight time by two months each year as part of a sweeping new energy plan. If U.S. President George W. Bush signs it into law, the plan means Americans would turn their clocks forward one hour on the first weekend of March, instead of April, and "fall back" on the final weekend in November instead of October. — from CBC.ca; full story here.

Of the three calendar months not on Daylight Time, what exactly will be "Standard"? Now, you know that I really don't like switching to and from Daylight Time every year. I'd be quite happy if we could just set the clock forward — or backward — and be done with it. But thanks to that genius the Americans have elected to run their country, we'll have to change our clocks just before Christmas and again just after Valentine's Day. I'm all for saving energy — oh, don't even get me started — but can't we just make up our political MINDS? And worse, Canada isn't sure whether it should actually follow the %$#@! American administration in adopting two more months of Daylight Time. Perhaps we should spend two months of each year slightly out of sync with the rest of the continent — well, actually, has anyone asked Mexico how it feels about Daylight Time? Grr. I get a little irrational about this issue.

Because, after all, we're going to need all that energy we save to operate our big-ass HDTVs:

Researchers at National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, recently conducted a fascinating experiment: They ran a two-minute clip of Shrek on a whole range of TVs, from small analog ones to massive, table-top-sized high-definition sets, while measuring the power usage. The result? The new big boys chew more than twice the energy of the old-school TVs. Interestingly, high-definition images require more power for their increased picture quality. Click here if you want to see the whole report.

Hrmph! I'm turning into a grump in my old age. But here's a positive item:

People who sing along to music while driving tend to concentrate more and fall asleep at the wheel less often, suggests a British study. Singing stimulates the mind and body, making you more alert, said Dr. Nicola Dibben, a music psychologist from the University of Sheffield. See the full article here, at CBC.ca.

I seem to spend a lot of time on the news, huh?

Well, I've just spent the last three weeks having curriculum theory shovelled into my head, and my brain feels ready to explode. But I've been reading a lot of fun stuff too. One YA item, a novella called The Glass Café by Gary Paulsen, particularly stood out — smart, accessible, loaded with personality and interest. Definitely a good choice for reluctant readers with an interest in social justice. I'd also recommend, surprisingly, Beverly Cleary's autobiography, My Own Two Feet. It is engagingly written, covering the period from her high-school graduation to the submission of her first manuscript, Henry and Ribsy. I loved her books when I was growing up, and her memoir offers some keen observations about the way that growing up on the Amercian West Coast during the 20s and 30s informed her fictional characters. Then I read (blush) a Marian Keyes novel, The Other Side of the Story. It was surprisingly complex, entwining the lives of a literary agent, a novelist, and an events planner. But I was greatly disappointed by her treatment of the character who has an affair with her boss; her resolution of the situation did not feel authentic to me. But otherwise, this is fine beach reading — except that I don't have a beach!

Next week, after I complete the final paper for my course, I will be reading Harry Potter 6. The guys have both already read it — it's taking a lot of restraint not to tear into it myself. Oh, patience, patience. There are some slabs I need to conquer before I get to all that...

Off to the mountains,
L