Getting a Little Crazy ...

We're all nuts, of course, in our own unique ways. People reading this know that there are moments when a video of what they're doing (or a transcript of what they're thinking!) would earn them a trip in a van with some guys in white coats.

I'll not write about those sorts of things (some of you, I know, are waiting to make that phone call on me).

Instead, I want to update you on something I've written about here before: my obsession with memorizing poems (and other literary passages--like the Gettysburg Address).

It started when I was a kid--and the teacher asked me (4th grade?) to memorize “A Visit from St. Nicholas" to recite at a Christmas program. I did--even though I wasn't really too sure of the meaning of that "dry leaves" and "hurricane fly" stuff. Anyway, I liked having that poem in my head--and it's still there. I like to recite it at the table on Christmas.

A few high school teachers asked us to memorize things, too. When I was a senior, our English teacher, Mrs. Davis, required us to memorize "When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A, E. Housman. (Link to the poem.) I'm pretty sure I didn't know what rue meant at the time, but I understood it when I got my grade on the quiz.

Years later, Mrs. Davis (wherever you are), I learned it, cold.

I started having my 8th graders memorize poems in the 1980s, and by the time I retired in 1997, they were learning a dozen pieces a year (three/marking period), including "The Road Not Taken," a Shakespeare sonnet ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" or "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"). I learned them with the students--made it much easier to grade the quizzes!

In 2001 I returned to teaching--Western Reserve Academy (a few blocks from our house)--and my juniors had to learn about a dozen pieces a year, as well,

I'd soon grown bored of the same old sonnets and poems, so while they were learning the ones I'd assigned, I learned something else by the same poet.

Pretty soon, I was nearing 100 pieces, and when I realized that, I learned a few more, got to 100, and on November 8, 2010, I gave a talk to the student body in the Chapel about my "accomplishment." I ended the talk with a silly poem of my own--about learning 100 poems. (I've pasted it at the bottom of this post.)

But here's the cursed thing about it: I couldn't stop at 100. On I went: 125, 150, 175, 200, 225. I'm now at 229 and am looking around for something to get me to 230, at which point I can, of course, stop.

Not.

The problem now, of course, is not learning the poems; it's keeping them in my memory. And that requires practice.

I used to tell my students when I introduced the (not-so-popular) assignment of memorizing that they would remember the poems--but only if they wanted to. You need to run through the damn things in your head now and then.

In my case, a lot of running. I do all of them--yes, all of them--several times a week: some when I walk to to the coffee shop, some at the coffee shop, some on the way home, some in the shower in the morning, some as I'm getting dressed, some at the health club while I'm exercising, some on the way out to the health club ... you get it.

To my fellow sufferers at the health club, I'm the Old Weird Guy Who Mumbles When He Walks His Laps (and Rides His Exercise Bike) (and Rows on the Machine) (and Lifts Weights).

Oh, I do a couple in the health-club shower, too ("Casey at the Bat," "Jabberwocky").

By the way, just about the only audience for my "knowledge" is Joyce, who does like to hear them (or, at least, has convincingly convinced me that she does). I reel off some for my grandsons now and then. They seem to understand they have a weird grandpa--which is why they've always called me "Silly Papa," to distinguish me from their other grandfather, who is just "Papa." (As our grandsons have aged--they're now 14 and 10--they have settled on "SP" for me.)

Anyway, that's one of the (more than) several ways I'm a bit loony. But I do love my tunes ...

* Here's a weird thing. In the image at the top of this post, lifted from Google, are lines from actual poems--and all of them I've memorized!



100 Poems
(pronounce poems as pomes--one syllable)

Oh, you can have your Londons,

Your Parises, your Romes,

And you can have your Hudsons, too,

’Cuz I got all them poems!

Yeah, some of them are sorta short,

But some: enormous tomes—

And I have got a hundred now,

A hundred freakin’ poems.

Now you might think it’s awfully hard

To cram inside your domes

So many lines, so many rhymes,

So many famous poems.

But it doesn’t take an Einstein—

Require a Sherlock Holmes—

It takes no Stephen Hawking

To learn a hundred poems.

(If Dyer can do it, that old man,

Then you can do it, Homes—

Just get a book, and take a look,

And pick some purty poems!)

No, it’s no harder than it is

To drink a drink that foams—

All you need is to decide:

“I wanna learn some poems!”

You copy/paste one on a card—

A sort of mobile home—

You take it with you everywhere,

Your precious little poem.

And soon … like we have Hudson, and

Alaska has its Nome,

And Canada its Winnipeg,

You have got your poem!

 

You then take newer cards along

Wherever your heart roams,

And soon, before you know it,

You’ve got one hundred poems!

Now that I’ve got that hundred,

Perhaps you think I’m done?

But I have got another card—

It’s time for one-oh-one!

Yes, there are strange diseases, and

Some stranger sick syndromes,

And I still suffer from the worst—

Memorizing poems!

But there’s a simple message that

I wish here to impart:

That what you’ve truly learned in life

Lies anchored in your heart.

The ancients knew it; I have learned it—

One of life’s best guides:

An educated mind and heart:

True wisdom there resides.

A Daily Email--a Flood of Memory

Every day--and I'm not positive just why--I get an email called "ELA SmartBrief." It's about education issues, and I'm guessing I receive it because I'm a decades-long member of the National Council of Teachers of English. ("ELA" seems to stand for "English Language Arts.")

I often--not always--scroll through the SmartBrief, which provides links to various news stories about, well, education issues. Sometimes, I confess, I simply delete it without even seeing what it offers that day.

Anyway, the other day was a day that I looked, and I saw a story about a high school in Marietta, Ohio. Its English Department has reorganized itself and is now offering to juniors and seniors a choice of semester-long courses on such topics as Early Works of Stephen King, Women in Literature, Poetry of Springsteen and Friends, and Civil War Literature. (Link to the story.) (BTW: The ELA SmartBrief was not so smart in one instance: It also indicated the story came from Marietta, Georgia.)

Reading this, I immediately found myself in my little Time Machine and was whirling back to the 1970s at the Aurora Middle School (and, from 1974, Harmon School--the new middle school building that opened that year). I taught there for about thirty years.

For some (remarkable) reason the district had hired too many middle-school English teachers back then, and so we decided to employ ourselves by offering not just a "traditional" curriculum to our sixth, seventh, and eighth graders but also a series of electives.

This was a long, long time ago, but off the top of my (hoary) head I can remember these: Playwriting, Black Literature, The Western, Film Study, Fantasy Novels (pre-Harry Potter!) ... oh, there were many others. I just can't come up with them right now. (Later, after I post this, they will, of course, cascade over me like whatever that big waterfall on the border between the USA and Canada is called.)

I'll speak for myself here: I loved those electives. It was a chance to have a very different relationship with the students, who seemed, by the way, to enjoy the electives very much, too. (Hey, it beats underlining nouns and verbs and circling direct objects!)

I had the playwriting course, and we actually produced the scripts we wrote. The kids ran around making 8 mm and Super 8 films, and we had a public showing each year. One of them did well in a student film festival sponsored by our local PBS station.

But ... times changed ... Back to the Basics, etc. By the time I retired (January 1997), Ohio had already bought into the idea of proficiency testing--Big Time. And the elective days were over. We got ... Serious.

So, based on the news from Marietta, Ohio, perhaps that fabled pendulum is starting to swing back?

Let's hope so. I'm betting that kids are really hoping so.

A Nerdish Sort of Coincidence

Kate Atkinson

Okay, this is a story that nerds will appreciate--especially Book Nerds.

A little over a year ago (July 31) I read a small piece in the New York Times about some writers who would be doing some talks, etc. in NYC. I had heard of and read some of them (Jonathan Franzen), but another writer scheduled (Kate Atkinson) was not someone whose work I knew. (Link to that NYT piece.)

So I thought, Well, I'll read one of hers--just to see. And so I ordered a 1st printing of her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), and (to coin a phrase) it blew me away. Clever, funny, Surprising. (Yes, I capitalized surprising on purpose! Readers of Atkinson will understand.)

And so I started reading her other novels--in the order that she wrote them (my custom). (One of them, Life After Life, 2013, is one of the best novels I have ever read.) But I deferred until later her series of P. I. novels about Jackson Brodie, thinking they would be less ... whatever ... than her real novels.

When I finished the real ones, I started the Brodie ones--and, once again, Atkinson dazzled me. They were every bit as good as the real ones, and I realized what a biased fool I'd been.

(BTW: I just fixed a typo in the previous paragraph: I'd written "every bit as god"--actually, I wasn't too far wrong!)

Anyway, I consumed all her work like Snickers bars--including her volume of short stories and her play.

Now ... since that first book of hers, I've been buying signed first printings, and I had a bit of a problem with Transcription (2018). In April I ordered it (via ABE) from a dealer in England, but it didn't come ... it didn't come ... it didn't come.

So (long-story-short) a few weeks ago I cancelled the order, got a refund, and looked around for another dealer on ABE, and I selected Dan Pope, from whom I've bought many titles over the years.

It came yesterday (Pope is fast as well as generous), and with it he included material from the event where he got her to sign it.

It was the very event the Times had mentioned, the very event whose notice had first turned me on to Atkinson in the first place. (See scan below of the relevant page from the program.)

Even better--her signature on the title page has her name, of course, but also the date (September 25) and "NYC." To say I was ecstatic when I saw that is to underestimate/understate the vast dimensions of my book-nerdiness.

I've had a few other Magic Moments in book-collecting (like the time I bought a used copy of David S. Reynolds' book  about Walt Whitman--and discovered it had been poet Mary Oliver's copy and contained many of her underlinings and annotations; I eventually got Reynolds to sign it when he appeared at the Hudson Library, and he was more than curious to see what she had written). But this? The BEST.

Really only one more thing to say: Nerds Rule!

My Coffee Thing

One summer in the mid-1960s I was working in a boys' camp in the Adirondacks as a tennis instructor. (Those of you who have seen me play know that the camp must have been in desperate straits that summer.)

There was a counselor there--a bit older than I and quite a bit more self-assured--who would wear a sign around his neck each morning at breakfast. It said: Don't talk to me--I haven't had my coffee yet. I think he was a bit of an addict.

I'm not. Really.

Let's back up. I had my first cup of coffee in college when Peer Pressure was working its dark magic on me. I hated the taste of it but sipped it nonetheless with what I hoped was an insouciance that impressed my friends. (The same thing with cigarettes--virtually all my college friends smoked, so I did it, too, for a few years.) I gradually came to tolerate it, then to kind of like it.

(I should add that my parents both drank it--Folgers in the can & instant, too--Sanka at night.)

Soon coffee became a Thing in my life. When I started teaching in the fall of 1966, I would drink it all day, and throughout the early years of our marriage we always had some kind of coffee device in the kitchen--everything from a teapot (for instant) to a Mr. Coffee to (now) a Keurig., which I don't use much except in the winter.

When we moved to Hudson, Ohio, in the fall of 1979, I quickly became a regular at Saywell's Drug Store (it had a soda fountain and some tables), and when Saywell's closed (after nearly a century--the arrival of CVS and Drug Mart had zapped their Rx business), I became a regular at other coffee shops in town. Coffee-on-Main (it closed). Caribou (closed). Hattie's Cafe (closed). Bruegger's (open).

When the Open Door Coffee Co. opened next door to the old Saywell's site (and included in their decor some of the old Saywell's furniture and accoutrements), I became a regular there--and still am. I visit twice a day: early in the morning, right after lunch. It's a wonderful place (but don't you go NEAR "my" chair!)

But, to be honest, I don't drink much coffee. I sip away--slowly, slowly--and probably don't even drink a full mug throughout the day.

I am not a connoisseur--just ask the baristas at Open Door. My definition of good coffee? It's hot. I do like the taste of the Open Door coffee--but I'm not sure I could explain it. (Other people rave about it.)

Oh, along the way, years back, I became a Starbucks regular. I used to go there after lunch every day (until Open Door wooed me away).

Here's a quick Starbucks story. In the early 1990s, I flew out to the Northwest to do some Jack London research and to see some of the myriads of Dyers who still live out there (my father came from a HUGE farm family near Walla Walla, Washington). Anyway, I flew on a tiny plane from Seattle into Walla Walla, where my uncle John picked me up. I had brought him, as a gift, a pound of Starbucks coffee.

As we walked through the little Walla Walla airport (more like a bus terminal--a small one), there was a Starbucks kiosk. Uncle John sniffed, said, "I hate that stuff."

Oops.

Change of plans.

Joyce and I rarely go to Starbucks anymore--sometimes through the drive-thru when we're in a hurry or on the road somewhere. I go now about once a month--on Haircut Day. The local Starbucks lies between my barbershop and the health club (my next stop), so ...

So I guess you could say I'm not an addict. But I kinda gotta have it.

"Happy Birthday, dear Sourdough Starter ...."

sourdough loaves
Aug. 18, 2019

This is the month that my sourdough starter turns thirty-three years old.

It was in August 1986 that my son (who had just turned 14) and I flew off to Alaska to check out some sites from The Call of the Wild (a book I'd been using with my 8th graders; he had been in my class that very year) and some family history, as well. My great-grandfather, Addison Clark Dyer, had gone on that same Klondike Gold Rush that had inspired Wild. He had found a little gold, bought a farm near Walla Walla, Washington (lost to the family during the Depression). And Steve and I wanted to find his old claim on Bonanza Creek (we did) near Dawson City, Yukon.

We flew from Toledo (cheaper) into Seattle, where we stayed overnight with dear friends from Hiram College days, Claude and Dorothy Steele. Then a plane to Juneau. Then a tiny prop plane from Juneau to Skagway with a pilot who looked, oh, about Steve's age.

We rented a car in Skagway (the lot had two available; one started--one didn't; we took the former), and off we went on the Klondike Highway, over the White Pass (which my great-grandfather had walked over) and on to Dawson City, about 450 miles away. We spent our first night in White Horse, Yukon, where we went to see Howard the Duck at the local cinema.

Anyway, we had a grand time; the weather was spectacular (warm, sunny); and I took a jillion pictures of it all, pictures which I used in subsequent years to show my students while we were reading Wild.

Midnight Dome
Dawson City, Yukon
August 1986

Heading home, back in Skagway, we roamed through some shops, and it was in one of them that I bought my sourdough starter. I knew the substance had been a staple for the miners back in the gold rush days; I wanted to give it a try myself.

Back home in Hudson, Ohio, I mixed up my first batch, and ... failure. A loaf that reminded me in just about all ways of a brick.

I mentioned this to Joyce last night, and I commented how it seems so unlike me to have tried again. It would have been more in character if I'd cursed and hurled it all into the trash and forgotten about it forever.

But I didn't.

And since the late summer of 1986 I've been baking with the stuff regularly--at least once a week. I make not just loaves of bread but muffins, pancakes, waffles, rolls, etc. I give away some of it--especially to our older grandson, Logan, who just finished 8th grade and has a taste for the stuff. Sometimes he shares it with his parents and brother, Carson.

I have to "feed" the starter every week before I use it--adding three cups of flour, two cups of warm water, letting it sit for, oh, nine hours or so (overnight). In the morning I put two cups of the sticky substance back into the fridge in its "home" (see pic of the crockery below), then bake something with the rest of it.

Over the years I've added flour to the starter--flour that has some personal significance for me. Flour from Garrett's Mill in Garrettsville, Ohio, where my mother taught for ten years; flour from Lanterman's Mill in Youngstown (one of my maternal great-grandfathers was a Lanterman). And some other things.

It's taken me a long time to understand the dough--how long it likes to rise after being fed, how the mixed bread dough rises slowly or quickly depending on the ambient temperature, the humidity. In the summer, for example, it's ready to shape after about two hours in the bowl (see pic); in the winter, it's sometimes three hours.

In ways, it's like having a pet (I almost said a child, but that's a bit much): You have to deal with it regularly and well and with affection.

Even now--thirty-three years later--it will sometimes remind me who's in charge. I'll mess up, forget to do something. And I pay the price. Like the time I wasn't paying close attention, and I added too much oat flour to the bread mix. The loaves came out looking as creased and cracked as an Old Man. Like me. (I still ate every damn molecule!)

Sunday is my bread-baking day, and I generally make a multi-grain recipe I've developed over the years (decades!), though I sometimes do just whole-wheat. Depends.

I hope I can pass the starter on to my son and his family. There's something kind of selfish about it--as if they're keeping me (kind of) alive. In the fridge. Then ... once a week or so ... re-birth!

Sunday Sundries, 240

1. AOTWs: I've written about them before; no doubt I'll write about them again: tailgaters. There are just some folks out there--men and women-- who just can't bear it that I go only 4-5 mph over the speed limit. And so they pull up so close to my rear bumper that they risk carbon monoxide poisoning. If I had to brake for, oh, a squirrel or a buffalo or whatever, they would hit us--hard. Sometimes, I'd like to have one of those James Bond cars--one that has some sort of rocket that can fire from the rear of the car, and ...  (Can you tell I was hassled by more than one of these AOTWs this week?)

2. I finished three books this week; two were from my Night Pile (ones I pick away at a little bit each night in bed before Lights Out).

     - The first from the Night Pile was Jared Diamond's Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (2019). I've read a few of Diamond's other books, the first being the one that propelled him into celebrity: Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book I loved and learned so much from. Later, I read his Collapse (about civilizations that have fallen--and how and why)--and now this one.

Diamond looks at six countries (he knows them all well) and looks at how they have/have not adjusted to crises they have faced. And, yes, the USA is among them, and, yes, our crisis is now (our deep political divisions).

This one was a little sort of formulaic, I thought, organized a little like an old-fashioned school essay--but still some telling points, some alarming statistics and other evidence.

Back in the early/mid-90s, by the way, I was out in the Bay Area doing Jack London research. On one of my trips I stayed with dear Hiram College friends, Claude and Dorothy Steele, who, at the time, were teaching at Stanford. While I was there, they asked me if I'd like to go hear Diamond speak. Duh! He was working on Collapse at the time, and I had already read Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I must have taken some notes on that talk ... where are they?

But it was a great night with two of the finest human beings I've ever known.

     - The second from the Night Pile was Career of Evil, a Cormoran Strike novel by Robert Galbraith (a pen name for J. K. Rowling). My friend Chris Cozens got me going on Galbraith (I'd not read any of them before), and now I have but one left.

In this one, Strike--an Afghan war vet who has lost part of a leg as a result--is investigating someone who's mailing body parts to his PI office. It's a long and complicated story--but gripping, as well. And I especially like the character of Robin, his young secretary, who is extraordinarily bright and loves the PI business. A subplot is her relationship with Matthew--a marriage is imminent--yet there is some sexual electricity between her and Strike, though nothing (so far!) has happened between them.

Cinemax has a limited series--CB Strike--based on the early novels, and we've just started streaming it. Kind of like it ...

     - The final book is one I read this week, Richard Russo's new one, Chances Are .... The title is a reference to the old Johnny Mathis song (link to YouTube), released in August 1957; I was just about to start 8th grade, and I remember that song was a soc-hop favorite that year--and later years.

Anyway, the novel tells about three men, now in their mid-60s, who were close friends in college. They have decided to meet on Martha's Vineyard (where one of them has a family cottage) for a kind of reunion. On the minds of all three of them: a young woman named Jacy who was with them on an earlier weekend at college commencement. A classmate, Jacy won the hearts of all three of the men, but none of them made a move. They were the Four Musketeers.

But after that long-ago weekend, Jacy disappeared. Totally.

So--slowly, slowly--the story emerges in the minds and words of Russo's three men. And we eventually learn what we need to know.

Russo names each chapter for one of the three (Mickey, Teddy, Lincoln), and so we get the story in slices, in varying points of view.

Oh, there's also a jerk who lives next door on the island. He's hard to ignore ...

I've loved Russo's work since I saw that film Nobody's Fool, 1994, based on an early novel. (Link to some video.) And I've now read all his work. This one, I thought, had a bit of a problem at the end (I'll not tell you what it was), but, overall, Russo once again lassoed me and dragged me behind his stunning stallion.

3. Didn't go to the movies this week, but we're streaming happily away--Waking the Dead, Line of Duty, CB Strike ...

5. Our older grandson, Logan, started ninth grade this week. Impossible.

6. Our son (Steve) and daughter-in-law (Melissa) had their 20th wedding anniversary this week. Impossible.

7. Later this year, Joyce  and I will celebrate our 50th. IMPOSSIBLE.

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

     - from Oxford English Dictionary

fuhgeddaboudit, int.

In representations of regional speech (associated especially with New York and New Jersey): ‘forget about it’, used to indicate that a suggested scenario is unlikely or undesirable. Cf. forget v. Additions.’

Forms:  19– fahgedaboudit,   19– fahgedaboutit,   19– fahgeddaboudit,   19– fahgeddaboutit,   19– fuhgedaboudit,   19– fuhgedaboutit,   19– fuhgeddaboudit,   19– fuhgeddaboutit.

Origin: A variant or alteration of another lexical item. Etymon: forget about it at forget v.

Etymology: Representing a colloquial and regional (chiefly New York and New Jersey) pronunciation of forget about it at forget v. Additions.

 U.S. colloquial.

1987  T. Wolfe Bonfire of Vanities  viii. 175 Fuhgedaboudit. Bed-Stuy's the worst.

1996 N.Y. Times Mag.  1 Sept. 18/1 ‘Will copywriters ever capture the vernacular of New York City?’..‘Fuhgeddaboutit.’

2000  F. P. Wilson All Rage(2006) 83 Me work in a junkyard? Fuhgeddaboudit.

2006  G. De Stefano Offer We can't Refuse  i. 39 We ain't gonna be Vegas or New Jersey... In other words, fuhgedaboudit.

2009  W. Leonhard Windows 7 All-in-one for Dummies  viii. 789 If your computer has less than 512MB of memory.., use a 512MB or 1GB key drive for ReadyBoost. Otherwise, fuhgeddaboutit.

2012 Daily News (N.Y.)(Metro ed.) (Nexis) 26 Jan. 2 So you think you'll have enough money to retire? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Can't Wait to [Not] Finish That Book

This morning, over in the coffee shop, I finished reading Richard Russo's new novel, Chances Are ... (2019). I'll post here about the book tomorrow, but I had an "experience" this morning, getting near the end, an experience that I realized I've had many times before but just haven't really thought about.

I can put many of the books I've read into two categories:

• books I can't wait to finish
• books I don't want to finish

Russo's are almost always among the latter, for he, like many of my other favorite writers, creates a world so real--so emotional, so credible--that I just don't want to leave it. For I know I'll never see that world again, not in the same way. It's a world that exists only in his pages--in the pages of that particular novel--nowhere else. And once I've left it, that world lingers with me for a while, then slowly begins to evaporate, melt, evanesce ... whatever. It leaves me.

Sure, some residue remains. But the intense reality of it is gone.

This feeling of loss only intensifies when I'm reading the last/most recent book by a writer I love (as was the case with Russo). Thanks to my wonderful Hiram College professor Abe Ravitz, I have become a serial reader: I gotta read everything by writers I like--and I gotta read them in the order that he/she wrote them.

I wrote here some years ago about the slow journey I took through the forty-seven novels of Anthony Trollope (1815-82). He did not live to finish his final novel, The Landleaguers (1883), and in the paperback edition I read, the novel ends in mid-conversation. When I read those final words (in bed one night) I started weeping--and I walked into Joyce's study (she works later than I!), book in my hand, tears in my eyes. I didn't need to say a word. She knew.

I've recently been reading the complete works of Kate Atkinson (still alive, still writing), but I felt the same way as I neared the end of her new one, Big Sky (2019). My eyes slowed, only very reluctantly moving on, for I knew that when I turned that last page, there would be a bit of a wait until her next book (one is on the way, says trusty Wikipedia, though no date is set; it's called The Line of Sight).

And then there are those books I can't wait to finish--books I'm reading because I "should," but they just don't ensnare me the way my favorites do.

Sometimes, these books are by writers I love. Like Paul Auster. Right now I'm reading his recent nonfiction collection--Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays, Prefaces, and Other Writings, 1967-2017. Now, I admire Auster's talent, his immense erudition, love his fiction, his memoirs ... but ... this book contains some long pieces about French poetry ... and I just can not get into it. 

But I'm reading it, damn it ... I'm reading it.