More Taxing ...

More taxing work again today--
Not time at all for rest or play.

Instead, it's tax--again, it's tax--
I've had some signs of heart attacks.

I hope I'll finish--quickly so--
For taxes kind of bore me, Yo.

Tomorrow--it's accountant time--
Because of that I hope that I'm

All done with sorting and receipts--
I'm not the sort of guy who cheats--

So wish me luck tomorrow, folks--
And--please!--withhold the taxing jokes!

Today, I worked on income tax ...

Today I worked on income tax--
Among the worst of all life's facts.

I print; I sort; I crave relief--
And when none comes, I gnash my teeth.

I meet with our accountant soon--
I'd rather fly off to the moon

In some ill-fated lunar craft.
I know: This sounds a little daft,

But income tax--no if's or but's!--
It really makes me purely nuts!

What crushes hope ... what raises fear:
It all returns this time next year!

Salmon Again

My family had a ... relationship ... with salmon when I was growing up. My dad was from the Northwest and loved salmon from the Columbia River (not far away), and his younger brother John would go to Westport, Wash., on the Pacific Coast, every summer, live in a camper, and go out salmon fishing every day while he was on vacation from his lifelong job at John Deere in Walla Walla.

One summer we joined them in Westport. I didn't get to go out with them (I was still a kid--I guess that was the reason); instead, I played with my brothers and with our cousins, Billy and Patty, Uncle John and Aunt Juanita's kids.

(Oh, and another great memory: seeing Native Americans salmon fishing at The Dalles, on the Columbia River, before The Dalles Dam, 1957, pretty much ended the Old Ways of doing it.)

I'm not sure how Aunt Juanita liked the week-at-Westport thing (or was it two weeks?). In a camper all day. Etc. But she was/is a saint, so I would guess that "seldom is heard a discouraging word" in that camper.

Uncle John would store some of the salmon he'd caught in his freezer back in Walla Walla--and he would have some canned. And some of that each year he would send to us--in Oklahoma and, later, in Hiram. Mom would sometimes make salads with it, but Dad preferred "salmon burgers"--and, I have to confess, I sided with Dad on that one.

Mom soon developed a lifelong passion for salmon. One of her favorite things about the stages-of-care place where she spent her last years (in Lenox, Mass.) was that it served salmon once a week in the dining hall. Mom would not miss salmon night. It would be, for her, like missing church.

(Mom's other passion? Chocolate. My older brother once gave her a large chunk of chocolate--shaped like a salmon.)

Dad used to fish a lot--and so we ate lots of trout and bass and other critters he caught. But as the years have gone on, I've become more and more like my mom, salmon-wise. Other fish are okay; salmon is ambrosia.

Joyce has caught the bug, as well. And for the past couple of decades we've had salmon once a week--usually for Tuesday suppers.

In the spring we like the wild-caught that's available here and there (ain't cheap--but I don't care!). In the winter we buy the Full Circle brand (available at the local Acme)--frozen, wild-caught. Delicious.

I open the bag the night before, remove the two hard-frozen pieces, put them in a plastic bag in the fridge, grill them on Tuesday--on the outdoor grill in good weather, indoors in bad. A lemon slice. Some Paul Prudhomme salmon seasoning.

Along with the fish, we usually "do" mixed rice (or basmati) and a veggie. Homemade sourdough bread.

After a Tuesday salmon meal I could happily die. And I am not kidding.

Another great memory: Taking a Yukon River cruise near Dawson City with my 14-yr-old son in August 1986, seeing the salmon-catching devices along the river.

By the way, "Klondike" (a smaller river that joins the Yukon in Dawson City) meant "hammer water"--the place where Native Americans would hammer their fishnets along the shore and catch the salmon that composed a staple of their diet--and of their sled dogs' diet.

Anyway, tonight is Salmon Night at the Dyers'. And every bite will remind me of Uncle John and Aunt Juanita, of Patty and Billy, of Westport, of The Dalles, of Dad, of Mom, of those great salmon-burgers, of Joyce (uncharacteristically silent as she swiftly downs the fish), of so many things in my boyhood, in my family, that I will not forget until I must.

Within the Scope

In Saturday's mail was a large mailing envelope from Scholastic Press. I was hoping it was a fat royalty check for my 1997 YA book, Jack London: A Biography.

Nah.

That book's now out of print, but I can still say--with a straight, honest face--that J. K. Rowling and I share a publisher! (Scholastic did the US printings of the Harry Potter books, which, by the way, my younger grandson, Carson, about to turn 10, is now reading.)

No, instead the envelope held the most recent edition of Scope, one of Scholastic's classroom magazines. And when I saw what it was, I have to utter a cliche: Memories flooded back.

You see, I used to use Scope in various ways when I was teaching middle-school English classes (I retired in January 1997). Sometimes I had the kids subscribe; sometimes I merely shared with my classes some things that had appeared in it. Short stories, one-act plays, interesting news articles and features--these Scope features sometimes composed my lesson plan for a day.

So ... let's take a look at the February 2019 issue ... what's there? What (if anything) would I have used? And what's changed?

• The first thing is a very colorful piece on the Chinese New Year--lots of graphics, few words.
• Next is an nonfiction piece--"The Children's Blizzard"--about a "monstrous storm" in January 1888 in America's Northern Plains. It's several pages long--and also has lots of illustrations. It also features some highlighted vocabulary words--mobilized, encrusted, etc.
• Next--an ecological piece about the lionfish, a critter doing lots of damage in the Atlantic Ocean.
• It's followed by a short companion piece, "The Invasion of the Giant Goldfish: How a Little Pet Became a Big Problem." It seems the cute, not-so-little things "can take over a body of water, destroying the habitat of native species" (13).
• Next--a nod to Black History Month, I would guess--is "The Girl Who Dared,” a script about some school-aged youngsters who were activists during the Civil Rights Movement. Included is a portion of a speech given by one of the girls, Barbara Posey, 17, on June 24, 1960--and a link to the entire text.
• Next is a story, "The Perfects," a tale about an apparently perfect family that includes highlighted clues about how to write a story--e.g., figurative language, text structure, setting.
• Next--a two-page piece, "My Life as a Military Kid," by a young woman--looks to be high-school age.
• Text--pro and con pieces about whether the school week should be four or five days--pieces written by two middle school students.
• The final piece is about how waffles changed the design of sneakers.
• The back cover features some graphics and information about spicy food.

So ... what would I have used in this issue? Not much, probably. I might have had the kids read aloud the dramatization of the Civil Rights story ... maybe write a fiction story about destructive fish? (That kind of sounds like fun, actually.)

So ... what's different about Scope these days? (I'm relying entirely on memory now--and that can be a problem!)

• Lots more graphics.
• More patently instructional material--vocab words, suggestions for writers, etc.
• Nothing--at least in this issue--by any celebrated writers. I remember using Scope-adapted versions of famous stories and plays.

One surprise: Except for a suggested link to a site, the social-media, computer worlds are mostly darkened here. Pale sunlight on them, at best. I like that. The magazine--at least in this issue--has not caved, surrendered. It shows students there is another world out there--a world of words and ideas, a world that has its own ways of being exciting.

And that, my friends, is, I believe, profoundly important.

Sunday Sundries, 219

1. AOTW: I don't really have anyone this week--although, this morning, there was a woman with a cart in the grocery store, a woman determined to get ahead of us in the check-out line (she did it, too), but, on the other hand, Joyce and I were kind of ... dawdling. So ... cause and effect? So, once again, I will claim the mantle for myself, earning it in all sorts of ways this week, ways I'd prefer not to get into!

2. The wind has been fierce a couple of recent days. One day, in fact, it blew down a section of our cedar fence that separates us from the next-door funeral home (metaphor?). And it reminds me, this wind: When my brothers and I, as kids, were afraid of the wind back in north central Oklahoma, Dad always used to calm us by telling us it was just "Windsy," a friendly fellow who just wanted to be noticed.

Of course, Windsy had an older brother with a fouler temper--Funnel Cloud. But I managed to escape my twelve boyhood years in Okla. and Tex. without ever actually seeing one--other than the dust devils dancing in plowed fields outside of town. And they were red devils--the sod in Okla., you know?

3. I finished one book this week (very nearly two!)--The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt and His Times, by the amazing Jerome Charyn (1937-), who keeps cranking out fine novels, year after year. I've been reading him since the late 70s when, I think, the first I read was The Seventh Babe, 1979, a novel about a left-handed third baseman. But his first novel was 1964, Once Upon a Droshky (which I haven't read ... maybe it's time?). He also has a series of mysteries--about a dozen now--featuring detective Isaac Sidel. I've read some of them--lots of fun.

The novel--narrated by TR himself--follows Roosevelt from young manhood to the assassination of Pres. McKinley in September 1901 (and, thus, TR's ascension to the presidency--he was McKinley's VP). We learn about TR's boyhood health issues, his time in the Wild West, his political career in NY and NYC, his married life and fatherhood, and, of course, the Rough Riders and the Spanish American War.

Charyn clearly shows us the political forces of the day--and the widespread corruption (has anything changed?)--and shows us a Roosevelt who, though he of course has "issues" of his own, had a moral and ethical sense that separated him from many of his political colleagues.

Charyn is always a wonder to read--and this one is no exception.

4. Yesterday (Saturday) Joyce and I drove down to Green, where our son and his family live--to Green HS, where the community was having its Celebration of Excellence. And among those honored yesterday? Our grandson Logan (who just turned 14), an eighth grader who won first place in an essay contest called "Laws of Life." His piece--a very touching one (which he read aloud to the sizable crowd at the event)--was about his mother's brain-tumor surgery five years ago--how it affected her, him, their family. A proud grandma and grandpa were there!

5. For some reason, we waited a while to start streaming the third season of True Detective on HBO--but we are "enjoying" it. I put quotation marks around enjoying because it's about the disappearance of two elementary school kids--brother and sister--and the desperate search to find them. (Don't want to give anything away ... so no details about it.) We're in the third episode now (we stream, oh, about 15 min/night--can't take the grimness these days)--and there are seven in total, I think? (Link to some video.) The show moves through three distinct time periods, one of which is very late in the life of one of the principal detectives, Wayne Hayes, played by Mahershala Ali (pictured in foreground below).

6. And--a grim note: I will meet this week with our accountant re: income taxes ...

7. Last Word--A word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers:

     - from wordsmith.org

throttlebottom (THROT-l-bot-uhm)

noun: A purposeless incompetent in public office.

ETYMOLOGY: After Alexander Throttlebottom, a Vice Presidential character in Of Thee I Sing, a 1931 musical comedy. Earliest documented use: 1932.

NOTES: In honor of Presidents Day, this week we’ve been looking at words with presidential connections. It’s about time we paid our dues to the Vice President too. A VP, by its very nature, is meant to play a second fiddle though it’s not uncommon to find an eminence grise in that office. Here’s how the term throttlebottom came to represent VPs and other similar (mostly) harmless figures.

The first musical comedy to win the Pulitzer Prize, Of Thee I Sing, is a brilliant political satire that gave us today’s word. In this masterly operetta (music: George Gershwin; lyrics: Ira Gershwin; libretto: George Kaufman and Morris Ryskind), presidential candidate John P. Wintergreen runs a political campaign based on the theme of love. His National Party sponsors a beauty contest, with Wintergreen to marry the winner. Instead, Wintergreen falls in love with Mary Turner, a secretary at the pageant, and marries her on the day of his inauguration. Diana Devereaux, the contest winner, sues President Wintergreen for breach of contract; France threatens to go to war, since Devereaux is of French descent; and Congress impeaches him. Wintergreen points out the United States Constitution provision that when the President is unable to perform his duty, the Vice President fulfills the obligations. VP Throttlebottom agrees to marry Diana and forever etches his name in the language.

USAGE: “[Lyndon B. Johnson] wanted to be Vice President, both to position himself as JFK’s successor someday and because he believed that he could convert any job -- even Throttlebottom’s -- into a power base.” James MacGregor Burns; The Crosswinds of Freedom; Knopf; 1989.

Flours

No, that's not a typo in the title. Valentine's Day is over, and this morning I'm thinking about my (mild?) obsession (interest?) in flours. Not flowers.

I certainly didn't grow up with it. Neither Mom nor Dad was much interested in baking. We had Bisquick in the house--and a small sack of Gold Medal (white). That was about it. Often the dinner rolls we ate came from a Pillsbury tube that you'd open by smacking it on the edge of the counter. Pull out the pre-shaped dough. Put the dough on a baking sheet. Bake. Consume the resultant rolls in seconds.

As I've posted here before, I began baking our bread in about 1970 (the first year of our marriage), not because it tasted better (though it really did) but because it was cheaper. I had my (pathetic) salary as a middle school teacher; Joyce had her (pathetic) stipend as a teaching assistant at Kent State. And it was just cheaper to bake our own bread.

Gold Medal (white) flour. Packaged yeast. Sugar. Crisco. Yummy, yummy, yummy, I got love in my tummy!

In the summer of 1986--on a trip with my fourteen-year-old son to Alaska and the Yukon, exploring both sites in The Call of the Wild, which I taught to my 8th graders, and some family history (my great-grandfather had gone on the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897)--I acquired some (dry) sourdough starter in Skagway, AK. And that substance, as regular visitors to this site know, changed my life.

At first, it was just basic old white sourdough bread (Gold Medal flour).

But as the years have gone on (yes, the same starter is still alive), I have morphed into a flour-nerd and now have an entire section of one of our kitchen cupboards stuffed with varieties of flour I use for baking the multigrain bread I make pretty much every week (as my Facebook friends, to their sorrow, know because of the annoying pix I post each Sunday). The pic below shows the cabinet ...

Each metal container you see holds a different variety. Right now, that cabinet holds the following varieties of flour (in bags, in containers): buckwheat, soy, flaxseed meal, flaxseeds (whole), barley, graham, spelt, oat, brown rice, teff, kamut, millet, cornmeal, semolina, amaranth, quinoa. There are probably some others; I'm too lazy to go look--but you get the idea. In the pantry (not shown) are some 5-lb sacks of Bob's Red Mill organic white and organic whole wheat. (The little sacks you see above are also from Bob's Red Mill.)

Acquiring these varieties takes some doin'. Trips to Marc's, Heinen's, Acme, Mustard Seed, and (not often--I try to avoid it) Amazon.

Joyce has gracefully surrendered the entire cabinet (not to mention Sunday mornings in the kitchen) for my obsessions. And I try to reward her kindness with a couple of loaves, every week.

Obviously, we can't eat it all ourselves. So we unload some on our son and his family (their parakeet, Jet, loves the flaxseeds!). Consign some to the freezer. But I eat the bread for lunch and supper. Every day.

And we haven't had store-bought bread in decades.

"So why do you do that?"

This was a question that a coffee-shop acquaintance posed to me today. Why, the acq. wondered, was I taking notes on the book I was reading in the shop?

Sometimes that question is easy to answer: It's a book I'm reviewing. Q.E.D. And I have found over the years (I've been a book-reviewer for about twenty years now) that when I take fairly detailed notes, the review I'm going to write is simultaneously forming in my head.

But what about books I'm not reviewing?

This was the case today. I was reading a novel by Kate Atkinson--one of her Jackson Brodie mysteries (When Will There Be Good News?)--and, about 2/3 of the way through it, I already had ten pages of notes.

Why?

Okay, let's rewind a little (in true Atkinson style): There are books on which I take notes on sheets of paper; there are other books whose only notes are some brief penciled reminders in the front papers; there are other books on which I make no notes at all.* Let's begin with the last ...

• Books with No Notes at All
• These tend to be the thrillers and mysteries I read at the end of the day, in bed, waiting for Morpheus to arrive. I've always got a couple of them going--sometimes on Kindle, sometimes not. Right now--a hard copy of Ken Bruen's latest (The Galway Silence) about Jack Taylor + the recent one by John Grisham (Kindle: The Reckoning). Oh, very rarely I will take a swift note on something in one of these books--but hardly ever. Mostly these, for me, are bedtime snacks to be consumed swiftly and with great pleasure.
• Books with a Few Notes in the Front Papers
• These are books of all sorts--books I'm reading for information (and pleasure), books that are up the ladder a step or two from those great thrillers I read. Right now, these include Wilkie Collins' The New Magdalen, a new bio of Wild Bill Hickok, a popular science book about the critters that live in our houses with us (not dogs and cats--but bacteria, bugs, etc.), a serious novel by Haruki Murakami (Killing Commedatore). I jot down page #s of things I may want to allude to later on--sometimes a brief explanation (in pencil).
• Books with Detailed Notes
• I've already mentioned the necessity of this for my book-reviewing.
• So ... I also take detailed notes on books by writers I really love (right now, it's Kate Atkinson; lately, I've done the same with Rachel Cusk, John A. Williams, Rachel Kushner, and many others), on writers I used to teach (Faulkner, Shakespeare, Dickinson, etc.), on writers I think are significant (Jerome Charyn, Joyce Carol Oates, etc.).

Here's the problem: What to do with those notes? Right now I have, oh, seven four-drawer file cabinets stuffed with notes and information about writers (Joyce has several more upstairs). I'm going to need to buy another one--and soon. Or two.

I read this over, and I see I have not yet arrived at the Why? answer.

[PAUSE WHILE I THINK ABOUT IT.]

I don't know.

Or, more accurately, Because I feel I have to. And I want to.

You see, you never know when I might have to ... you know ...?

*BTW--I never underline or annotate pages--not anymore. We are now selling much of our library on abebooks.com, and few things diminish the value of a book more than pencil and/or pen marks on the pages.

Another Old Song Invades My Head--Will Not Leave

This one is Joyce's fault. The other night--fussing in the kitchen with supper prep--Joyce quoted part of a lyric to me: "she's got personality ...."

And my sad brain--full of life's clutter--promptly reeled off some more of it.

All I could remember, though, was that it had been popular when I was in high school (1958-62), but I no more could have come up with the name of the singer than I was able to produce some of those answers in Algebra II. (Don't ask me my grade. I do remember this, though: a D+ one six-week marking period!)

So ... trusty Google to the rescue!

The song--"Personality,” by Lloyd Price (1933-)--was released in April 1959, the spring of my freshman year at Hiram High. It perched at #2 on the Billboard 100 for three weeks--never managing to topple the #1 hit at the time, "The Battle of New Orleans," by Johnny Horton (a song I loved, by the way--link to Johnny Horton's song).

Link to "Personality."

Lloyd Price

Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, Price was born in Louisiana and has had many irons in the Fire of Music.

And, oh, those lyrics to "Personality":

Over and over

I tried to prove my love to you

Over and over

What more can I do

Over and over

My friends say I'm a fool

But over and over

I'll be a fool for you

'Cause you've got personality,

Walk, with personality

Talk, with personality

Smile, with personality

Charm, personality

Love, personality

And plus you've got

A great big heart

So over (over and over) and over

Oh, I'll be a fool for you

Now over (over and over) and over

What more can I do?

'Cause you've got personality,

Walk, with personality

Talk, with personality

Smile, with personality

Charm, with personality

Love, with personality

And of course you've got

A great big heart

So over (over and over) and over

Oh, I'll be a fool for you

Now over (over and over) and over

What more can I do?

Over and over

I said that I loved you

Over and over

Honey now it's the truth

Over and over

They still say I'm a fool

But over and over

I'll be a fool for you

'Cause you've got personality

Walk, with personality

Talk, with personality

Smile, with personality

Charm, with personality

Love, with personality

And of course you've got

A great big heart

So over (over and over) and over

Oh, I'll be a fool for you

Now over (over and over) and over

What more can I do?

Songwriters: Harold Logan / Lloyd Price

So, April 1959. I was finishing my first year in high school. I was doing better academically than I'd done in 8th grade (Algebra II lay ahead of me!). I'd taken Latin I, Algebra I, General Science,  I'd played JV basketball, varsity baseball (catcher--sometime pitcher). I'd had a role in our production of The Mikado (November 21 & 22). I had a girlfriend. I'd sung in the choir, played in the band. I had great friends. The future unrolled before me like a carpet at the Oscars. The end of high school seemed like forever away. And I knew--positively knew--that I would live forever. That the day could not possibly come when I could not remember the name of Lloyd Price ...

Fiat Lux

This morning about 6:45 as I stepped out onto the front porch to head to the coffee shop (my wonted and wanted walk), I noticed something odd: I didn't need the porch light to help me descend the front steps (a process that's a little bit more ... dicey ... in my dotage--especially in the winter).

It's no glimmering insight to note that much of the dreariness of winter is its oppressive darkness. December, January--it's dark when I get up, dark when supper's over. It's as if the land itself can't abide looking at all the ice and (apparently) dead vegetation.

But today--as I said--the sun was edging up, and not long after I arrived at the Open Door Coffee Co., I had to lower the sunscreen on the window in front of me, for Old Sol was pouring a river of light through that window, a river that splashed me, full in the face. I was simultaneously grateful--and annoyed. (Hard to concentrate on my reading when Apollo's chariot is flaring in my face.)

In the kinder months when the sun lingers in the sky in the evening, Joyce and I like to run an errand after supper--"errand," usually, meaning a stop at Mickey D's for a Diet Coke. Or whatever. ("Fries with that?")

And until very recently, we even went out in the winter evenings (unless Frosty the Snowman and his ilk prohibited it), though our brumal evenings usually involved merely a stop at a Starbucks drive-thru in Aurora or Stow-Kent.

But this year ... I've wussed out. We eat supper, clean up--then I head upstairs to read for an hour or so until it's time to stream "our" shows. (I usually watch a Rockford Files episode before Joyce joins me; some of you know I've watched those episodes, in sequence, countless times; I quote lines coming up as Joyce enters the room--hard to tell if she's charmed, annoyed, impressed, depressed, regretful about a certain event that occurred on December 20, 1969).

So our evenings, I'm saying, have become even less exciting than they used to be. I mean, when a quick jaunt to Marc's or the grocery store or Kohl's or Mustard Seed Market qualifies as a Dyer Adventure, you have a pretty good understanding of the dimensions of our lives.

And--as I've said--it's even more constricted and restricted in the winter.

Nothing used to daunt me in my younger (dumber?) days. We'd head off to see family in Massachusetts for Christmas in a blizzard. We'd decide at the last minute some summer week to drive out to Oregon. When I was in my mid-forties, I thought it would be cool to hike over the Chilkoot Pass from Alaska to the Yukon because I was teaching The Call of the Wild to my eighth graders, and that pass figures a bit in the story. And so I did.

In the summers Joyce and I would drive all over the country looking at sites with literary significance--writers' homes, hangouts, graves. No problem.

And now? An evening trip to Bed, Bath seems a bit ... much for me. And Joyce--bless her--never hassles me about it. She'll just head to her study, work on her next book--or read, read, read until it's time to walk in our bedroom and hear the man she married quote lines from a 1976 episode of The Rockford Files.

Ah, romance!

But, as the Beatles once reminded us, "Here comes the sun"--and I am ready (more than ready) to embrace that nuclear ball of fire.

Loser Teachers?

First off: Let's be fair. Donald Trump, Jr., was not calling all teachers losers--just those who disagree with him politically, a characterization which is dingbatty enough because there are myriads of wonderful teachers who disagree with him politically. But name-calling is the new substitute for subtlety and analysis, isn't it? Our political world has become a school playground where bullies reign, where they employ their most egregious (and still effective) weapons.

(Video of his comment is easy to find on Google.)

I'll start with a confession: Early in my teaching career (which began in the fall of 1966), I realize now that I was too overtly political. It was the 60s, man--and I was deeply sympathetic with the Leftist causes of the day--civil rights, women's rights, and on and on. My students had no doubts whatsoever where I stood on such issues. And that, I realized later on, was ... inappropriate. The State of Ohio required those students to be in my room, and it was no more fitting for me to serve them snacks of my political opinions than it would have been to insist they all listen to my ideas about religious beliefs.

The years went on; I changed. I'm sure that my students could easily infer where I stood on political and social issues, but I really did try to refrain from discussing them overtly. My job, I realized, was to engage all students--not just those who shared (or pretended to share) my values. And it's hard to reach someone intellectually/emotionally when you have made it patent that you revile their politics.

In a related way, I still employ this principle on Facebook. Probably 95% of my FB friends are former students, and I have fond memories of all of them. And so I do not engage with any of them politically or religiously on FB because I prefer to maintain our relationships--and some of those go back more than fifty years. And that matters to me as I sail into the sunset.

Still, the "loser" label annoyed me when I heard it. In some particular ways, at the beginning, I was a "loser" in the economic sense. My first year's salary was $5100--that's fifty-one hundred, not thousand. The school offered no health insurance. Few other benefits. By the time I paid my bills each month, I had virtually no "discretionary funds." I was most definitely an economic "loser."

But ... I loved my job. I had colleagues I deeply admired (and tried to emulate); I had wonderful students (seventh graders the first couple of decades) who tried so hard, who helped me survive those early years by treating me as someone worthy--when, in too many ways, I wasn't.

I ended up teaching about forty-five years--and even to the very last days of my career I was trying to learn from my mistakes (and to rue them); I tried hard to engage my students, to listen to them, to learn as much as I possibly could about whatever I was teaching. I realized this: I was a learner among learners. And I loved it.

Now retired, I read about teachers all over the country who are trying to improve their profession--their working conditions. And I feel ... related to them. I know what they're doing--what it's costing them.

I also recognize that in this country we like to talk about the "value" of education--but our communities and our states do not often enough commit to that value. We need to pour financial support into our schools--to attract the best and the brightest into the profession--to lower class sizes--to diminish the number of classes our teachers teach (many years I had six a day)--to provide the best supplies and technology for all kids--to make sure every kid goes to school in a safe, comfortable building--to ...

I could go on and on.

But I fear we won't do all that much. It's far easier to vote NO and call your victims "losers."

Sunday Sundries, 218

1. AOTW: The dude who, yesterday, approaching our car, turned left right in my face, forcing me to brake--HARD--to avoid broadsiding him. Joyce heard from me some words she rarely hears ...

2. I finished a couple of books this week ...

     - The first was Kudos (2018), the final novel in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy--a series I did not know existed until a former student of mine, Alexxa Gotthardt, told me about it in the coffee shop a month or so ago. (So I need to go back and change some of her grades ... not: She was a superior student). The three novels, narrated by a writer who's moving here and there for various reasons (writers' conferences, etc.), all deal principally with the stories of the people she encounters during the day--on an airplane (this one begins with such a scene--as does the first in the series), at restaurants, in hotels, at the conferences. And everyone is so intent on telling his or her own story that we don't often get much about the narrator's story.

There's a funny scene in this one when the narrator is being interviewed by a journalist, but the interviewer is so interested in his own story that he never really gets around to the interview! The narrator comments at one point about "the mutual narcissism of human relationships" (56).

Cusk is a learned writer--but never really obtrusively so. There are allusions to Hesse, Tennyson, and some others here.

There are no chapters or numbered divisions--just occasional space breaks to indicate a time/venue change.

And now I'm resolved: When I finish my journey through the works on Kate Atkinson, Cusk is next!

     - I also finished the latest collection of pieces of John McPhee, whose wonderful nonfiction I've been reading since the days of A Sense of Where You Are (1965), The Headmaster (1966), Coming into the Country (1977), and those other dazzling works. I think I've read pretty much all of them.

McPhee will turn 86 next month, and in this new book--The Patch (2018)--he alludes now and then to his declining physical capacities. (He used to climb mountains, canoe all over the place--do pretty much whatever-the-hell he wanted; no more.) And this is sad to read--especially since, I, though more than a decade younger than he, am "enjoying" some of the same ... transformations.

His writing does not have those same snaps of electricity that it once did--but it's still McPhee! And I especially enjoyed the last, very long piece "An Album Quilt" (99-242), which is a collection of sections from earlier writing he's done throughout his career--sometimes snippets, sometimes a few pages long.

What a talent! And what a pleasure to have been able to read and learn from him all these years--these decades.

3. Yesterday afternoon, Joyce and I drove over to the Cinemark in Cuyahoga Falls for a 3:55 showing (the only one of the day) of the WW I documentary by Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) called They Shall Not Grow Old.

What a stunning piece of work. (By the way, if you see it, stick around after the final credits: Jackson talks for about a half hour on film about how they did what they did--why they made the choices they did, etc.)

As you probably know, technical experts standardized the film speed (the WW I movie cameras were hand-cranked, and the speed varied from camera to camera--thus, the "jerky" movements you see)--and now the movements of the soldiers (and others) seem perfectly "normal"--i.e., like yours and mine. Jackson's team also colorized the film, and the overall effects--the movement, the color--humanizes that old film in ways that just stunned Joyce and me.

Jackson begins--and ends--with some old b&w jerky footage so that when the restored footage begins, it seems truly miraculous.

He focuses tightly on some things: the enlistments, the training, the voyage from England to France, life in the trenches, an attack across "no-man's land" to the German lines--an attack that saw vast casualties on both sides. (He reminds us that about a million British soldiers died in the war.)

We see these men as human beings--human beings, by the way, who are mesmerized by the camera. He tells us afterward that most of them had probably never even seen a movie camera before.

A remarkable afternoon at the cinema. (Link to film trailer.)

By the way--one of the best high school teachers I had at Hiram High School (1958-62) was Mr. Augustus Horatio Brunelle (1894-1978), and he had served in France with the U. S. Army during WW I--but not in a trench-warfare capacity. Since he was a Ph.D. candidate (U of Wisc, where he was working on his dissertation in classics at the time he enlisted), they assigned him to an office: He could type--a valuable skill then. When he came back from the war, his dissertation advisor was gone, and his new one didn't like his topic and told him he would have to start over. Mr. Brunelle instead took some teaching--and preaching--jobs before ending up at Hiram High and, eventually, changing my life.

4. Had a weird experience streaming the most recent season of Vera via BritBox (or is it Acorn?): The subtitles were out of sync, about five minutes off. That was disconcerting. And, yes, we use subtitles for some of the British shows: We can't always understand our own language!

5. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from Oxford English Dictionary

† magirist, n. An expert in cookery.

Origin: A borrowing from Greek, combined with an English element. Etymons: Greek μάγειρος, -ist suffix.

Etymology: <  ancient Greek μάγειρος cook (further etymology unknown) + -ist suffix.

N.E.D.  (1904) gives the pronunciation as (mădʒəiə·rist) /məˈdʒaɪərɪst/.

 Obsolete. rare.

  1716  M. Davies Diss. Physick  12 in Athenæ Britannicæ  III Magists, Magirists..Geoponists, Hygiests, Prophylactists, Remedists.

1814 School Good Living  53 To their Magirists was given an appointment of culinary artists.

Derivatives

 magiristic adj.(in form mageiristic) relating to cookery.

1892 Punch  21 May 249/1 Immortal contributions to mageiristic lore.

Why Would You Ever Go Off-Script?

In earlier centuries, politicians could say one thing in one gathering, something quite different in another gathering. The formula: Say what your audience wants to hear--even if it contradicts what you said to a different audience the day before. And no one would really know. They could stumble and misspeak and goof--and no one but the folks in that particular crowd would ever know.

But today? It's Twitter-Time! It's Blog-Time! It's 24/7-News Time! It's Facebook-Time! It's iPhone-Camera Time! It's Whatever-Time!

And every word a politician utters is like a top, waiting to be spun.

As a result, candor has become error. Any slip of the tongue (or mind) becomes grist for the mill, corn for the cattle, forbs for the sheep, pizza for the population ...

And a result of this? Well, we are encouraging politicians (and other public figures) to deliver lines from a script rather than speak--as Petruchio says in The Taming of the Shrew--"extempore, from my mother-wit" (2.1).

Unfortunately, so many of us come up a bit short in the "mother-wit" department--as Katherine counters in Shrew--"A witty mother! Witless else her son."

(And daughter, of course.)

So ... when public figures drop their scripts and speak "extempore," so often (so very, very often) they demonstrate their witlessness--and the blade of the social-media Cuisinart commences to whirl.

If I were a politician (not likely: Even I would not vote for me!), I don't think I would ever deviate from a carefully crafted script. Doing so is a slow form of suicide (unless, of course, you're You-Know-Who).

And so--in our swiftness to indict, judge, convict, condemn, and execute, we are encouraging our public figures to become mere deliverers of lines--the sort of person Macbeth alluded to in his speech about "life": "a poor player  / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more ..." (5.5).

We're a bit hypocritical, wouldn't you say? We allow ourselves countless mistakes, slips of the tongue, inadvertent cruelties, goofs, misjudgments, misadventures, but our public figures? They must be flawless! Not a single mispronounced word must pass their lips, not a single error of grammar or usage, not a single thoughtless thought. (Think of the careers of politicians that have ended with a single error.)

And so--in a way--we deserve to drink the salt water they serve us at our banquet of tears.

Changing Roles for Teachers?

In the Washington Post today is an op-ed by David Von Drehle--"It's Time to Think What Teachers Are For" (link to the piece).

In the essay, he notes the accelerating number of advances in technology that now make it possible, he says, for this: Students from inner cities to rural hamlets can now (or soon) experience the world’s most skilled instructors delivering optimal lessons — at the student’s pace, in the student’s language, at whatever time of day the student learns best.

Okay--this is the argument--often advanced by people who have never taught (or have not taught much)--that what will improve education is putting kids in front of computers (or smart phones or whatever), where they will sit and watch "master teachers" instruct them about, oh, indirect objects or Hamlet or whatever.

To be fair to Von Drehle, he does make the argument, too, that "on-site teachers" will still be needed as life coaches, role models, facilitators, therapists, motivators, demolishers of obstacles and openers of eyes. And he talks about one of his teachers who had a significant influence on him years ago.

But all of us who have spent time teaching in actual classrooms--as I did for about forty-five years--know the folly of this replace-teachers-with-online-experiences stuff. It just ain't the same. Not even close.

I had some wonderful teachers in my student career--and all of them "knew stuff" and were profoundly human, as well: Mrs. Stella Rockwell (4th grade), Mrs. Ruth Browning (high school English), Mr. Augustus H. Brunelle (high school English, Latin, German), Prof. Abe C. Ravitz (college English), Prof. Charles F. McKinley (ditto).

And as I think about those remarkable people, I try to picture them coming to me only via a screen, a monitor. And it just doesn't ... compute.

Mrs. Rockwell's hand on my shoulder, her smile when I'd done something well (okay, I didn't see it all that often!), her determination to urge us to love books (she read to us every day after recess); Mrs. Browning's insistence that we work hard, that we take our studies seriously; Mr. Brunelle's mastery of language, his vast reading, his sense of humor (he loved puns), his temper (oh, yeah!); Prof. Ravitz's cerebral engagement with American literature, his vocabulary (I often went back to my dorm and looked up words he'd used--like lycanthropy and noetic), his belief that you ought to read a writer's complete works and visit significant literary sites; Prof. McKinley's wry sense of humor, his wide knowledge of world literature, his ability to keep things personal, even in a survey course--these are the qualities that had a significant effect on me, that greatly influenced me (though, I confess, some of it arrived a bit later on--after it had ... stewed ... a little), that helped shape me into the teacher that I became.

I'm trying to picture what Von Drehle is picturing: "master teachers" on the screen, "on-site teachers" walking around the room, smiling, touching shoulders (well, not too much of that these days!), encouraging--like eager trainers at the health club?

Well, if so, that's not a profession that would interest me. No, I want to dive into the sea of literature and writing, dragging the kids behind me; I want to go see where Shakespeare lived, where Hemingway died, where Willa Cather wrote, where Sinclair Lewis lived, where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are buried; I want to drive the road that Faulkner wrote about in As I Lay Dying; I want to walk the beaches of Grand Isle, LA, where much of Kate Chopin's The Awakening is set; I want to tour the Missouri cave where Injun Joe died in Tom Sawyer; (a book Mrs. Rockewell read to us);  I want kids to write from their memories, from their hearts, from their minds; I want ...

... I want to return to my classroom and show the pictures I've taken, help kids see what I saw, share with them how all of this affected my thinking; I want to have them read--and have their own thinking changed, elevated.

One of the great building principals I was fortunate enough to work for in my teaching career was the late Mike Lenzo. He embodied what Von Drehle mentions near the end of his piece--those things that make us human to begin with: our capacity for connection, compassion, empathy and love. He was wonderful.

Anyway, one day Mike said in a faculty meeting--a meeting at which we were talking about technology issues and what tech can do for us--"Just because we can do something doesn't mean that we should do it."

That rang so true my eardrums are vibrating to this day.

And, of course, Mike (as always) had identified the key questions: What should we be doing? And why? And what will best benefit kids?

I'd love to hear those questions today, bellowed from the mountaintops--and so loudly that maybe even politicians would hear them.

PS: I'll write more on this issue tomorrow--or soon.

PowerPoint?

Several of my Facebook friends have recently shared a piece from Business Insider, a piece that features this headline: Universities Should Ban PowerPoint: It Makes Students Stupid and Professors Boring (August 25, 2017).

I'm not sure why the piece is circulating now? But FB, of course, is known (notorious?) for such things--the resurrection of ideas and memes and lies and interesting stories and inconvenient truths ... it's quite a mix, as you Facebookies well know. (Would Chewbacca be a Facebookie Wookie?)

Anyway, here's a link to the entire piece.

Written by a professor, Dr. Paul Ralph (Aukland Univ.), the piece summarizes some research, some interviews, and makes such declarations as this: "Slides discourage complex thinking."

Okay. I have attended some PowerPoint lectures which were, indeed, dull--the speaker merely reproducing on the slides what he/she was saying aloud. Lots of words--few graphics, etc.

I'll also confess this: During the later years of my teaching career (I retired in the spring of 2011), I used PowerPoint quite a bit in my high school classes--American literature. But I like to think (self-delusion?) that I was animating the class, not narcotizing it.

I didn't use it every day; I didn't simply make slides of the words I'd planned to say--hell, I was lucky to know what I was going to say milliseconds before the sentences tumbled from my mouth!

Instead, I used it principally during my introductions to the classes, introductions to the writers we were going to be reading. So--say--when we were about to read some Hemingway, I would show pictures and talk about Hemingway-related places where my wife and I had gone--from his boyhood home in Oak Park, IL, to his final home and grave in Ketchum, ID.

For Willa Cather, we drove all over the countryside near Red Cloud, NE (the cornfields were awesome!), saw the place where she was born (near Gore, VA), visited her later-life summer place on Grand Manan Island (New Brunswick), saw her simple gravesite in Jaffrey, NH.

We toured Arrowhead (the home in Pittsfield, MA, where Melville wrote Moby-Dick), climbed Monument Mountain (where he met Hawthorne, in company with Oliver Wendell Holmes), took a boat to Nantucket, visited whaling museums, saw his grave in the Bronx.

Jack London took me twice to the Klondike (including a hike over the Chilkoot Pass, prominent in The Call of the Wild) and many times to his former ranch near Glen Ellen, CA.

And on and on and on and on. All these places we photographed, then made PP slides to show my classes.

My purpose is all this was to humanize the writers--to show my students where and how they lived--to show them how history has honored them (or not)--to let the kids see the settings they were going to be reading about in a story or poem or play or novel.

Did I succeed? You'd have to ask my former students. I'm sure that what I was doing did not interest some of them (so it goes--no matter what you do), but I like to think (deluding myself?) that the PowerPoints did, indeed, enrich their experiences with American literature. It certainly enriched mine!

Sunday Sundries, 217

1. HBOTW: The squirrel outside my study window, his nest in a nearby tree, a nest I can see, who works hard every day to keep him and his going. No complaints. No calling in sick (when he isn't). No knowledge of Hump Day. A hard worker (who can be profoundly annoying--to me, to the dogs that can't catch him). Virtues and vices abound in him--just as they do in the rest of us.

2. I finished two books this week ...

     - The first--one of my read-a-little-in-bed-most-nights books--was The Law and the Lady (1875), a later novel by Wilkie Collins (1824-89), a friend of and collaborator with Charles Dickens (1812-70). As some of you know, I've been slowly reading my way through all of Collins' novels, in the order he wrote them ... well, after, that is, I got hooked by The Moonstone, 1868, and The Woman in White, 1860.

I realized, about halfway through Law, that I was reading it out of order: I should have first read The New Magdalen, 1873; it's now on my bedside table. Oh well.

Law is narrated by its principal character a young woman named Valeria Woodville, who discovers not long after her marriage, that her new husband had been on trial for the murder of his first wife; a Scottish court found him neither guilty nor innocent--a final possible ruling at the time. "Not proven."

Valeria is convinced he is innocent, and he, ashamed, flees while she decides she will devote herself to discovering who the actual murderer was.

She does. (Ain't tellin' you who it was.)

Along the way, she gets involved with a witness at the trial--a truly bizarre character named Misserimus Dexter, a brilliant but wildly eccentric man who has legs that don't function; attending him is a violently devoted woman ...

Anyway, an early example of a "woman-detective" novel, and, somewhere, perhaps, Kinsey Millhone is expressing her gratitude.

Collins is a brilliant writer--every bit Dickens' equal. Maybe his superior ...

     - The second was a collection of forewords, prefaces, and afterwords by Michael Chabon (one of my favorites), pieces that that he has written over recent years to be included in the books of other writers--and, in some cases, of his own. It's called Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros (2018).

I had never read Chabon until I saw the film Wonder Boys (2000) with Michael Douglas as a writing professor who is stuck in his second novel, a novel that has swollen to thousands of pages with no end in sight. One of his most talented/interesting students is Tobey Maguire (who's not yet realized he's Spider-Man); another is Katie Holmes. With minor--but great parts--are Frances McDormand, Robert Downey, Jr., and Rip Torn. (Link to film trailer.) I loved the film--have seen it numerous times since its initial release--and it got me reading Chabon. 

I've now read everything by him. A confession: I wasn't' really looking forward to this one, but I really enjoyed it. Lots of cool things he says about writing, about specific writers. He's had a lifelong fondness for fantasy, so there are pieces about that. (I've liked some of it, too, but I'm nothing like the fan that Chabon is.)

Some cool things he says ...

• "realism is ... hopeless" (26)
• "the past is another planet" (37)
• "Writers are mutants" (45)
• "All short stories, in other words, are ghost stories" (57)
• "I did believe in fairies. I did. I did" (105)
• good writers "plant flags at the end of time" (138)

And on and on and on and on. Really loved his piece about his own 2002 novel Summerland (which I loved--a baseball fantasy novel!).

3. Last night, we drove down to the Cinemark in North Canton to join our son and his sons (13, and 9--both very close to their next birthdays) to see a film I'd kind of wanted to see before--but it had quickly disappeared from most local theaters: The Kid Who Would Be King (link to film trailer.)

It's a re-telling of the King Arthur story--set in contemporary England at a school where our "Arthur" is a bullied 12-yr-old kid (one of the bullies is Lancelot--"Lance" here). Fleeing the bullies, he stumbles into a construction site, where he finds ... the sword in the stone (yes, that one), and then the story changes and charges ahead.

About midway through my teaching career I became an Arthur fanatic (can't remember why): read scores of books, saw the films, even took a busload of kids to see Disney's The Sword in the Stone at the old downtown Kent Cinema. (Original release 1963--so it must have been a re-release ...)

I actually liked the Kid film a lot more than I thought I was going to. The writers knew the stories, had some sly references (and obvious ones) to various Arthur tales--from The Once and Future King to Camelot to ...

One actor that really stood out, I thought, was the young man who played Merlin: Angus Imrie. That guy just radiated intelligence and humor. I see on IMDB that he's been in a few things--but he has a future. (As King? We'll see!)

We end up with two titanic clashes between "Arthur" and his "knights" (classmates who are convinced of his "chosen" status)--both with Morgana (aka Morgan le Fay) who's come roaring back from her confinement to the underworld, supported by scary bony dudes with flaming swords on flaming horses. The big confrontation: They attack the school, but, thanks to Arthur, et al., the kids are ready.

I especially enjoyed sitting next to my younger grandson, who loves books and fantasy and legend, and who was brimming with questions, most of which I could actually answer!

4. Enjoying the Netflix comedy special--just available last week--with Ray Romano in a couple of NYC clubs where he began his career. He's funny ... (Link to some video.)

5. Last word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from wordsmith.org

nidifugous (ny-DIF-yuh-guhs)

adjective: Well-developed and able to leave the nest soon after hatching.

ETYMOLOGY: From Latin nidi- (nest) + -fugous (fleeing). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sed- (to sit), which is also the source of nest, sit, chair, saddle, assess, sediment, soot, cathedral, and tetrahedron. Earliest documented use: 1902.

NOTES: The opposite of nidifugous is nidicolous (remaining with parents for a long time after birth). Etymologically speaking, these words apply to birds, but there’s no reason you can’t use them elsewhere. For example, if your adult child suggests living in your basement, you could simply say, “Don’t be nidicolous!”

USAGE: “The young of all species are -- as you well know -- nidifugous, and ours will be no exception. And as they go, they will take some of their spirit with them, leaving us, the founders as mere husks.”

Malcolm Macdonald; Strange Music; Severn House; 2012.