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July 18th, 2008
09:45 pm - books 94-96: math is cool, i swear edition
Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics
This book is ridiculous. It take you through the ten major advances in mathematical thought throughout history, and I mean, the math is (presumably) sound (obviously in a less than 200-page book, you are not going to make advanced math comprehensible to the lay person, but you can sort of glimpse the impetus behind the ideas, so it's still fun). But the writing is ridiculous. It's super smarmy and pretentious and full of ludicrous flowery language, like talking about a formula arising from an equation like a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis, and leaving behind this part of a theory like leaving strips of a film on the cutting room floor and this whole weird thing about the director's assistant who recently graduated from Bryn Mawr. In other words it's being taught math by this dude:
(yup, that's the author picture. also, i think the dude is a creationist). Informative. But weird.
Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra
This book was a lot more fun. It is exactly what it says, all the way from the ancient world to today. There are handy math primers to help you get a bit of a handle on some of the concepts he talks about. The book is written pretty conversationally, which sort of bugged me at first, but then I wound up enjoying it, as it was sort of like listening to your geeky friend talk really excitedly about math. The end notes were really extensive but sometimes pretty fun. There was a bunch of fun trivia and characters sketches of mathematicians (who are, as a whole, a pretty weird bunch), like Galois, who died in a duel (over a woman? over politics? it's unclear, though we know he was held in the Batille for quite some time shortly before) shortly before his twenty-first birthday--his papers were published posthumously by his brother--and David Hilbert, who is my new dead German boyfriend (in addition to being super quotable--he once said, referring to the growing abstraction of geometry, that the laws of geometry should hold consistent if you replace points, lines, and planes with tables, chairs, and beer mugs--he also advocated heavily for the addition of Emmy Noether to the faculty of the University at Gottenberg, despite the University's rules against hiring women, saying that he didn't believe mathematicians should be judged on anything besides the quality of their math--after all, "This is a university, not a bathhouse"). A lot of fun.
The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics
This book was AWESEOME. It's about the quest to prove the Reimann hypothesis (which next year will celebrate its 150th birthday as an unproved hypothesis. happy birthday, Reimann hypothesis!). The quest to solve the Riemann hypothesis has yielded many fruitful advances in math, but alas, no proof yet (though if anyone does prove it, they're gonna win a million dollars, which is pretty sweet, but let's face it, not as sweet as achieving immortality for your name, which will definitely be assured). It is important in large part because a ludicrous number of proofs currently exist that are only legitimate proofs if it turns out that the Reimann hypothesis is true (which most mathematicians believe it is, but that is not enough in math), and also because if it is proved there is a chance it'll make online business, credit cards, anything using encryption way less safe (don't you feel better now?). The writing in this book is GREAT, really fluid and gripping and easy to digest--I actually found the book to be QUITE the page-turner--and there are of course loads of great stories about mathematical personalities, who as I mentioned above are a little bit nuts but frequently rather endearing (like Erdos, the homeless mathematician, who basically couchsurfed for years while co-authoring so many papers that mathematicians have "Erdos numbers," the number of steps they need to get through co-authorship to Erdos. the author of the book's Erdos number I believe was 3, which means he's co-authored with someone who co-authored with someone who co-authored with Erdos). Also, there are more details about My Dead German Boyfriend David Hilbert, like how he would scandalize the wives of professors by playing billiards with undergrads at night and borrowing ladies' fedoras in restaurants when he got cold, and how he would ride his bike all over town carrying flowers for his latest paramour (of whom there were many, I mean how could you say no to this):
David Hilbert is awesome. And so is this book.
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July 6th, 2008
10:33 pm - if you catch me with my hands in the till/i promise, sugar, i wasn't trying to steal
i'm in a hotel in washington d. c. i always get weirdly lonely on vacation with my family. i love them, and we're getting along. it's not about them at all. i just feel weirdly lonely. y'all should update your livejournals or leave me friendly comments to appease me.
we went into a pharmacy and it really depressed me how much space there was taken up by beauty products. i guess that's not anything new, but for some reason today i noticed it more. maybe because i'm reading a don delillo book, which means i'm thinking about obsession with appearances and surfaces and shallowness and fakeness and the like. possibly i should not read don delillo books on vacation. and yet, they are best then, because you can sink into them more. this book has been perfect for hours and hours and hours of almost uninterrupted reading.
music meme from keane - list your favorite album of every year you were alive. i would like to preface this by saying, i did not listen to music until the 4th grade, and am still really bad about actually listening to entire albums of people i have heard and liked. so, probably something better came out these years by someone i like that i just don't know all of cuz i'm lazy. yeah.
( here be EMBARRASSING ALBUMS )
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July 5th, 2008
10:00 pm - i hate people
dear assholes who thought it would be a good idea to release a commemorative 7th-anniversary 9/11 silver-leaf twenty-dollar bill, the commercial for which brags about the fucking towers on the bill gleaming like they did in the sunlight on that fateful day,
fuck you.
no love,
new york.
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11:43 am - books 91-93: gender is a multifaceted gem of a problem edition
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us
Part memoir of a male-to-female transsexual lesbian's (more or less) experience, part manifesto against the concept of gender, and as an awesome bonus part short queer play that is sort of bizarre and funny but also, by the end, very beautiful, I thought. It's written in a sweet breezy style and plays around with different fonts and layouts, which is sort of disconcerting at first (especially given some of the very radical ideas in the text, like gender is a bad idea) but makes sense with the explanation the author gives--her life is sort of pieced together and disjointed, so it made sense that her book would be too. The author makes a seriously compelling case for doing away with the concept of gender as concept that both can't be really defined and winds up harming people (those who don't conform, or those on the unluckier side of the binary). I don't know what exactly I do believe, but I don't think I really believe in any traditional concept of gender, that's for sure. The book also goes by real quick, and is very moving in part, and also refreshingly angry but not in a hateful way--it's anger that's born out of and seeks to go towards caring about people and their happiness. Highly recommended, especially if you have been puzzling about gender issues yourself.
In A Different Voice
And now for something completely different. This little book (less than 200 pages) was apparently a big deal back in the day when it came out (the 80s). In it, psychologist Carol Gilligan basically takes the historically male-dominated field of psychology to task for never questioning themselves on their own internalized biases, and for examining male psychology and (specifically, in the book) development, calling it "human development," examining women through that lens, and coming to the conclusion that women are flawed without ever wondering if women's different experiences and realities might give them reason to display psychologically as they do (or wondering if their own sexism might cause them to automatically view the male experience as more valid). The book uses psychological studies (mostly three very interesting ones done by the author & colleagues) to construct a picture of aspects of female psychology that takes into account the actual lived female experience (though the author explicitly says she is not interested in the question of why the genders differ in their average psychological presentation, refusing to come down on the side of either biology or socialization, which has led some to accuse her of essentialism, a claim I personally don't find warranted).
The book isn't a light read, but it isn't at all difficult either, just dense. Gilligan doesn't waste words, which means her paragraphs are seriously jam-packed, but she's also a good writer with a clear command of syntax, so working through her ideas is fun work, not bogged down with the task of figuring out what the hell she's saying. On a sort of more personal note, this book was the first time in a while I've really enjoyed reading something that required active reading/interpretation/synthesizing of ideas, and it sort of left my head abuzz with ideas (both about the book's explicit content and about things it touched on), as some of you know (heh. sorry about that. i get a little carried away). I especially appreciated her construction of two different ideas of morality, a rights-based and a responsibilities-based, because it clarified the nature of a lot of dilemmas I've seen, as well as helping me articulate why I tend to fall on those dilemmas where I do. I also liked it I think partly because I haven't read that much pych stuff yet, so a lot of the stuff she talks about that is probably old hat to people who actually know shit is still really new and interesting to me. Plus she gave me another reason to hate the Aeneid and love the infinitely superior Odyssey, which is always a good thing.
Again, not a light read, but if you're looking for something seriously smart that will stimulate your intellect without being difficult, I highly, highly recommend this.
Listen Up!
A collection of essays by young third-wave feminists about feminism. Like most anthologies, it aims for breadth over depth, and the essays are very personal, less theoretical (which was... a nice breather, after the Gilligan book). No new ideas, exactly, if you've spent a lot of time pondering feminism, but the essays are full of passion and anger and love and can make for very inspiring reading (I love personal essays, I really do). This collection also gets SERIOUS kudos for being WAY diverse--any sense of being spread thin by the vast array of topics it covers is more than made up for by how refreshing it is to see a book that promises to present lots of different perspectives and actually delivers. The book has essays from women of many races (some dealing explicitly with the way their race intersects with their feminism, others not), women on different sides of the economic spectrum (from formerly homeless students to prep school girls), women of different sexualities, women of different religions, women with different reproductive choices (including a single teen mom who writes of the shock most people in her graduate program feel when they find out she has a kid, a woman who writes about her choice to keep an unplanned pregnancy, and a woman who writes about her three abortions, the third of which was self-administered), different body types (a painful and hauntingly told reflection on anorexia is nearly side-by-side with another woman's "yeah, i'm fat, and if you wanna make it your business, FUCK YOU" manifesto), and probably more I am forgetting about. The writers ARE young, and the writing isn't always as clean it might be by someone more experienced (though given the "quality" of some experienced writers...), but the passion involved makes up for it.
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June 27th, 2008
12:33 am - books 88-90: all you need is love edition
Possession: A Romance
DUDE THIS BOOK IS AMAZING. Okay. So. Mousy semi-failure scholar of literature Roland discovers, among the papers of the poet he specializes in (fictional 19th-century poet Randolph Henry Ash) the beginning of a letter to a woman previously unknown to scholars of the poet. Intrigued both by the professional opportunities and by the romance of mystery, he embarks on an academic mystery quest that leads him to Maud Bailey, women's studies professor and leading expert on the woman in question--little-known (though beloved by feminists) poet Christabel Lamotte. The two of them wind up trekking around Europe trying to discover the extent and trajectory of Ash and Lamotte's relationship. The book is told only partly through straight narrative; huge chunks of it are "primary sources"--the letters of Ash and Lamotte, their poetry, academic articles by Maud and Roland's rivals and mentors, journals of Ash, Lamotte, and other people in their sphere. The plot also drifts into the other academics interested in the scholars (who slowly piece together Maud and Roland's secret, and are as a whole not too happy not to have been informed).
It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. The book is over 500 pages long. And it earns every single one of those pages. The plot could completely fall apart if A. S. Byatt didn't manage to totally pass off her own writing as anything it needs to be--I was actually sad when the book ended that I couldn't go to the library and check out the collected works of Ash (your typical lover of blank verse, dwelling on nature and great men and such) and Lamotte (like Emily Dickinson in rhythm and morbid nature, but with a more fantastical bent, being as she was the daughter of a mythographer). These people feel completely real--and the modern characters do too; despite controlling really very little of the page count, Maud and Roland reveal themselves gradually but completely to the reader, and are totally lovable in their awkward academic way.
And there's so much more. I could tell from the initial description of Roland that this book was clearly written as wish fulfillment--the author obviously wrote Roland as a character people could fall in love with (and oh, how I did), and also wanted to write Victorian love letters all full of dashes and capital letters and ideas and passion--and she lets herself go all over the place, from the 19th-century fondness for both naturalism and spiritualism to the small tragedy of being an English scholar of a poet few have ever even heard of, writing papers fewer will ever read. But it never feels disjointed.
People. I can't even describe. This book is so good. I spent the first like hundred pages whining about how slow it was, and then it got awesome and kept getting awesomer until by the end I didn't want any of it to be different at all. I didn't want it to end. I cried through like the last five pages. The ending is so amazingly perfect you can't even imagine. The book made ME care about the low-stakes world of academic rivalries. OH MY GOD. JUST READ THIS BOOK. It's a great long summer read because it's smart and full of ideas and allusions but also totally dreamy and sweet and will suck you in and make you want to stay there. It'll punch you in the face and then wipe your tears away. AUGH. SO GOOD. PLEASE READ.
A Long Fatal Love Chase
THIS BOOK IS HILARIOUS. It's a posthumously published novel of Louisa May Alcott's originally rejected for being too scandalous. The main character is named Rosalind, who lives on a cliff with her unloving grandfather, and she opens the book by saying she'd gladly sell her soul to Satan for a year of freedom. COINCIDENTALLY, in comes Philip Tempest (YES. THAT IS REALLY HIS NAME. god i love this book), a dashing stranger who soon WHISKS HER AWAY on the YACHT THAT HE LIVES ON with his GREEK PAGEBOY IPPOLITO. But he is not so good as he seems!!! DUN DUN DUNNN. While they're living the high life in Italy, a dude who knows Tempest from his past shows up, much to Tempest's displeasure. Luckily, the dude's host needs to do something while the dude is in town, and Tempest promises to show him the time of his life. Tempest knows the dude is an invalid. So he purposefully exhausts the dude to the breaking point and then takes him to dinner in a hotel with known cholera outbursts, so that the dude DIES OF CHOLERA IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. That's right: Tempest is such an evil motherfuck, he KILLS A DUDE WITH CHOLERA. Oh man. There's a French actress, and a nunnery (of course), and a benevolent priest that falls in love with Rosalind, and Ippolito is really Tempest's son, and Tempest's real wife turns out to be really nice, and Rosalind repeatedly says she would rather die than submit to Tempest again (I think the high point of the book came when she, cornered by Tempest and seeing no way out that wouldn't involve grievous injury to a man who has been kind to her, FUCKING STABS HERSELF IN THE SIDE!!), an insane asylum run by a seriously corrupt dude, and of course, fatality at the end. THIS BOOK IS INSANE. Like half the chapters end with something like "But she found much to her horror that she was staring into the face of Philip Tempest!" AMAZING.
The Mathematics Of Love
This is an odd little book that I picked up because the title had two of my favorite things: math and love. It's sort of two novels in one, both first-person--the story of Stephen Fairhurst, a survivor of Waterloo with a peg leg and a lot of emotional baggage, who returns to England after the war traumatized, heartbroken, and having inherited his family's property. He meets by chance Lucy Durham, an unconventional woman with whom he begins corresponding. I don't have to tell you where that's going, do I? Meanwhile, in 1975, jaded teenager Anna Ware stays over the summer in Stephen's property (which we learn was a boarding school that then closed and is now owned by Anna's uncle) while her mother and her mother's new boyfriend try to buy hotels in Spain. Her mother is kind of a flake, her father totally unknown, her uncle sweet but very absentminded, and her grandmother (whom she had never met before she showed up at the estate) is insane and drunk and horribly abusive. There is also a little boy Anna befriends and feels terribly sorry for since he is obviously neglected, and neighboring photographer couple that takes a liking to her.
The author's historical voice for Stephen isn't quite as convincing as the one in Possession, but then if it were the book would probably be a lot more dull to read. It's a romance and a coming of age story, a period piece of the 1800s but also of the 1970s. The characters grow on you unexpectedly--Anna in particular is really well-done, her voice conversational and casual but also very revealing and honest. I liked in particular that she complains a lot, especially in the beginning, about what a flake her mom is but then also has a lot of genuine affection for her mom, and appreciates her a lot more in light of her uncle's neglect and her grandmother's abusiveness (which also gives her empathy for her mom). The plot with the photographer dude should be super creepy, but somehow isn't. The book goes really quickly for a 400-page novel. And also has some really hot sex scenes that totally take you by surprise.
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June 25th, 2008
11:12 pm - books 85-87: the personal is political is personal edition
Night
It's a memoir. About the Holocaust. And is, if possible, even more depressing and grim than it sounds. Don't read this expecting some sort of redemption. Elie Wiesel was forced to stare into the darkest part of humanity and found no hope whatsoever in its gaze. I think it's important to be aware of just how fucking brutal things can get, but don't read this one while you're depressed. It's like, well written and whatever, but it feels sort of irrelevant to talk about that.
Doris: Anthology
Generally the only reading material I talk about is books, not things like blogs or magazines or zines. But luckily, the zine Doris got 10 years of material put together in a book anthology! And, it is so good. I can't even really explain what I love about it so much, except that it's so sweet and personal and also talks about big ideas and is just really unpretentious but doesn't dumb itself down. I dunno. It's super personal and honest and sweet and I just love it.
The Lost Land
Poems by Eavan Boland about Ireland, which means about colony because that's what the history of Ireland is about. Beautiful poems about what belonging to a colony does to people, does to a people, and about other situations like that, about her daughters, bringing together history and memory and loss and the ties that bind. Oh, lovely.
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June 23rd, 2008
02:12 am - DUDE
DUDES
last year i reviewed a book for the harvard book review about the trojan war. and then it came out in paperback, and like books do, in its paperback form it had a page of blurbs--in this case from paul cartledge (professor of classics at cambridge university), bettany hughes (author of helen of troy: goddess, princess, whore), derek leebaert (author of to dare and to conquer: special operatives and the destiny of nations, from achilles to al-qaeda), david l. robbins (author of the assassin's gallery)...
AND ME
i mean granted, it's probably not hard to get quoted in a book saying nice things about it when you are one of maybe like 8 people who have actually read the book.
BUT STILL. DUDES.
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June 22nd, 2008
09:07 pm - and sometimes planes they smash up in the sky/and sometimes lonely hearts they just lonelier
too many goodbyes in too little time. my heart is tired. goodbyes to small adorable children i will probably never seen again, goodbyes to cool people i worked with but never got to know, goodbyes to amazing people i worked with and did get to know and love. goodbyes to awesome people i have known and loved for a long time now, who i will see again but not for a while. goodbyes that need to happen, but only in my head, that still feel like a sigh. goodbyes to places--the city year office, the simpson street 2/5 stop, the smoothie sandwich place with the really sweet guy, the school. goodbye to having a job, not being a student.
isn't it weird how when a phase of your life ends, suddenly it feels really short? like as soon as you finish living something your brain turns it into a zip file that you can still open and look through the folder, but it's compressed and contained. maybe that only happens to me.
Artist: Rilo Kiley
Gender: A Better Son/Daughter
Attitude: Science Vs. Romance
Where I live: Dreamworld
Current emotional status: Capturing Moods
Where I want to live: Spectacular Views
How I live: With Arms Outstretched
Current/last partner: Plane Crash In C
Describe your friends: Give A Little Love
What I wish for: The Good That Won't Come Out
What I enjoy: My Slumbering Heart
Last Words: Go Ahead
Current Music: "a better son/daughter," rilo kiley
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June 16th, 2008
10:28 pm - and some days, they last longer than others/but this day by the lake went too fast
friday was our last day in the schools.
our second-graders had a field day, so we just got to spend the whole day watching them play and be happy. the joyful mild chaos of little kids who have had a whole year to get used to each other, to agree on the rules for sharing and games, to form friendships. the two outcasts i've been trying to steer towards each other broke off and went shell-hunting in the sand. they found forty-four shells in their first attempt, "but some of them are small," the boy told me. when they got separated, they would look for each other. the teacher found one of them asking after the other, and told me, "good job, ms. cole." the girl looked at me suspiciously and said, "what did you do?"
i said, "magic."
she said, "show me." not naturally a child of faith, this one.
i said, "it's invisible magic. i cast a spell on you," but by this point the boy had caught up with her and they were off in search of shells again.
on thursday they had given me a book of letters their teacher had them write me. one said he would be sad when i left, and worried about me. another said he loved me so much i look like a teddy bear to him. three wrote their letters in verse, one using the inspired rhyme "i will miss you ms. cole, i hope someone will kiss you." a few mentioned the time i did a dramatic performance of "jabberwocky" for them on poem-in-your-pocket day--the kind of thing that goes best when the kids already trust you, already know you, are willing to be quiet to wait for what you have to show them, are willing to believe you when you tell them glasses-off means you're the king, glasses-on means you're just telling a story. this was weeks ago, and they're seven, but they remember.
after the kids at the school, it was the end-of-year barbecue at the afterschool program. one girl said she wanted to read with me, pulled a book off a shelf, and had me read to her. i think really she just wanted to snuggle against me. another boy started listening, but thought the book was boring, so he kept making faces. what i loved best about this afterschool program was what we had this afternoon--the moments when no one had homework to do, and the kids were off finding ways to amuse themselves, talking to each other or making up stories or drawing or asking us to play with them. you could just as easily spend a half hour making fortune tellers for everyone who asked as spend twenty minutes listening to the second graders talk about spiders.
there were so many times this year when i honestly wasn't sure i could make it to june, where i thought about quitting because i didn't see how i could keep coming to work and working so long and being so stressed. there are a lot of problems i have with the organization as a whole, the way it's run, the way it talks about its goals versus what its actual goals are, the stupid traditions, the wastes of time, the way it bills itself as changing the world when i'm not convinced, really, you can do that without structural change, the way it always picks the best-equipped schools to do service at.
but all of that faded in the light of a first grader hugging me and saying "goodbye, mommy," in the light of my second-graders thanking me for "my poem," in the light of one of our fifth graders, when we went to see their school production of the wiz, seeing us waiting outside after the show and yelping, "you made it, you made it!" not wanting to do jumping jacks in the cold seems pretty petty compared to those letters.
Current Music: "it's all over now, baby blue" - bob dylan
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May 7th, 2008
10:55 pm - count you out, like i'm a mathematician
artist, song titles, meme, GO.
Artist: Robyn
Gender: Who's That Girl
Attitude: Cobrastyle
Where I live: Curriculum Vitae
Current emotional status: Bionic Woman
Where I want to live: Anything You Like
How I live: With Every Heartbeat
Current/last partner: Bum Like You
Describe your friends: Handle Me
What I wish for: Be Mine!
What I enjoy: Dream On
Last Words: Konichiwa Bitches
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April 30th, 2008
11:15 pm - kicking it old school
hey remember when we used to sit around doing surveys instead of writing our history papers all the time? well i don't have any papers to write, but just call me li'l miss nostalgic! from ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) queen_bunnie
( survey! )
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April 27th, 2008
07:52 pm - books 82-84: kicking it new school edition
Between Form and Freedom
A Waldorf teacher writes a parenting guide for teenagers (erm, to parent teenagers, not for teen parents). A little conservative for me, a little too into requiring a relationship with God, a little hokey in bits, but has some interesting ideas too. I liked the author's emphasis on kids being given support but also room, and also her somewhat anti-consumerist bent wormed its way into my heart. My aunt gave this to me because she thinks if you're going to teach you should be exposed to as many different pedagogies as possible, so for that reason it was very useful.
A Mind At A Time
A learning specialist/pediatrician talks about the different mental functions we have and how problems with just one of them can fuck a kid up in school real good. He also talks about something very important in this era of standardized tests, which is that it's important to check on WHY a child makes the mistakes she makes, and not just what those mistakes are, because then you know what that child needs to fix. A small example--a child may have problems with word problems because she is not very good at reading the words, because she has a hard time with things that involve a sequential order (i.e. counting), because she has no conceptual understanding of what the word problem is asking her to do, because she is not very good at concentrating for long enough to read, solve, and finish the word problem, because she has problems with pacing herself enough to work with precision, or because she lacks the short-term memory to remember, once she gets to the end of the problem, what the beginning of the problem said. Really interesting stuff, a surprisingly fluid read, kind of made me want his job except I don't want to go to med school. Also made, sort of briefly, a point I really liked which is that when you're dealing with children and your goal is--as it should be--to help them learn as best as they can, then treating them all the same is actually more unfair than giving them "special treatments."
Educating Esme
Diary of a first-year teacher in a Chicago public school. Esme has her kids call her, awesomely, Madame Esme, she wears insane costumes, she at one point lets two kids stay at her house because of shit happening at home, she tries to gently tell a parent that a child has been uncooperative only to watch the parent start beating the child right then and there, she has a sense of humor about it all, she wants to quit sometimes, she hates her principal who doesn't like her much either except for her test scores, she fucking cares about her job, as it should be. A breezy, inspiring read.
Bonus quote since this was short:
"They're not missives of the heart! They're like, 'ha ha, my cat farted on my desk, L O L, smiley!'"--sippycuppy on IMs
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April 22nd, 2008
12:52 am - go to the zoo and we'll ride the llamas/or stay in bed never change out of pajamas
the best city days are the ones that involve good friends and good conversation and good weather and a park and walking through the streets, noticing the stores and restaurants you pass and the other places, like the american moslem center. we finished the mural we were painting yesterday at four, and it actually came out beautifully for once, and the day was lovely and we were in the east village anyway so we headed to veselka because i couldn't let my new friends leave the city without having tried veselka. after the amazing food we headed to mud coffee shop (alissa knows practically every coffee shop in the city somehow, and has a zagat guide on hand in case she forgets one) and then tompkins square park, where we sat and talked about our kids and the teachers we work with, what kind of people they are and what kind of teachers they are and how fashionable they are, and turning everything possible into sexual innuendo and not-innuendo because that is how we roll, my team. we watched people practice juggling and then turn to frisbee while a boy in an "i'm magically delicious" shirt enacted some serious hula hoop moves. julie made cooing noises at all the dogs. someone in the park called the cops on a dispute that was getting out of hand. a man with an accordian accompanied the jugglers, giving them the vibe of the world's lowest-budget circus. emmanuel made fun of me for taking out my knitting when my hands couldn't stand to be still anymore. julia and julie and i danced like five year olds to a band that was playing. we all needed a bathroom and more coffee so alissa took out the zagat guide and we went to the hopscotch cafe and sipped our mochaccinos on the way to the L train.
there are other things going on i guess. but yesterday was so nice it crowded all of them out.
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April 6th, 2008
06:13 pm - your touch, your taste, your breath, your face, your hands, your head, you're sweet
yesterday i helped my middle schoolers (well, the three of them that showed up) learn about the roots of poverty. the best part was when one group was asked to outline a day in the life of a rich parisian girl. they said, "well, she has a good life, but like, she only cares about herself and her friends. she can succeed but like, if she wants to really do something, she has to realize what life is like for other people who have problems. she has to know, you know, not just booksmart but like, street stuff. because like, shopping malls and horror movies are not real life."
our service was a field day/fundraising "race against poverty" to raise money for the bowery mission, a homeless shelter/soup kitchen/job training type place. the fundraising was sort of pitiful, but the races were silly and fun and no one got too competitive. also, it turned out that the day was gorgeous so when we left i went to find a park to lie in, because it was the first park-lying-weather day of the year.
i hopped on the cross-town bus to go to riverside park and then stepped on the path actually by the river instead of leading to riverside park. did you know that you cannot get off that path anywhere between 125th and 99th street? it's true! so if you are hoping to lie in the grass by the hudson river and enjoy the blue sky and the warmth and the water, you better make sure you don't have to pee, because if you do, you're just going to wind up walking forever until you can get out and find a starbucks to pee in.
first i stopped, on a whim, in an art supplies store and bought a sketchbook and pencils and some stuff i needed for my job. then at the starbucks there were two people in line, a disheveled-looking man and an annoyed-looking woman. the woman said to me, "apparently someone's been in there forever." she paused then said: "it's always on the days you need it. i'm having the worst day." the man knocked on the door, hard. a few minutes later an old, old woman gingerly teetered her way out of the bathroom. i looked at my phone and pretended i wasn't one of the bathroom-waiters.
the woman turned to me while the man went in. "i am not going to feel guilty," she said, the words sounding the way they do when you say them to yourself in your head. "i'm not. i mean. if you're having trouble, bring someone in with you. i've been hospitalized, you know? my mom's had cancer, my dad's had cancer. i've been in bathrooms with both of them. it's not fun, but, you know, it's part of the shtick."
i said, "yeah."
"well. this guy i don't think will be too long. i think he's drunk. it's amazing the people you meet, you know, you just... don't want their energy in your life."
i said, "yeah. like one time, i was in a train station, and a guy asked if he could borrow my cell phone, and i said sure, and i lent it to him, and he takes it and calls and says, 'hey, it's me, i'm in south station... she what? what?' he hangs up and says, 'turns out my ride got pulled in for a DUI again.' I was like, okaay" and made a face.
the woman made a face. the bathroom door started opening. she turned to be and surreptitiously passed me a brown paper napkin, muttering, "here, take this, i doubt this guy washed his hands." the man came out, looking, now that i noticed, very drunk indeed.
the woman went in. i realized i couldn't remember whether the man in south station had actually said his ride got a DUI again or if I had added the "again" for dramatic effect. i wondered why i'd said i. the woman came out, opening the handle with a wet paper napkin. "here, use this, that way you can lock the door," she said. she meant use hers for the handle and then i could use mine for the lock without ever getting drunk-man's bathroom germs on myself, but i didn't realize that so i hesitated. "here, use this," she repeated, bringing it towards me more forcefully. "it's just water, it's just me."
i bought a starbucks parfait and walked back to the park, where i discovered the parfait had strawberries and bananas--points to starbucks for that idea. i opened my pack of pencils and sketched the rocks in front of me and the view across the river until my fingers got cold. it came out insanely inaccurate because i am not very good at sketching far off buildings, but i like the way it looks anyway. i remembered what i love about sketching, the way it makes you notice things more, the way it disappears ugliness because everything is just lines. the buildings are just boxes, the grass is just spikes. the river is just water. the artist is just me.
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March 20th, 2008
08:16 pm - books 79-81: american masters of prose edition
The Soul Thief
The strange, swift, quiet new novel from Charles Baxter is about Nathaniel, a grad student in Buffalo at the opening story, and his relationships with three people: vaguely intellectual, somewhat pretentious, very beautiful Theresa (pronounced of course Theraysa); down-to-earth artist and lesbian Jamie; and the mysterious, oddly repulsive and creepy Jerome Coolberg. I'm gonna be honest, I'm not 100% sure I got this book--the ending takes a twist for the very odd--but I liked it anyway. The story is very small and inscribed but feels oddly large and imposing, and definitely emotionally packed. But the real gift as in all Charles Baxter novels is the prose, which is so beautiful and glistening and clean, and the details are so perfectly cut (I especially appreciated the sketches of ridiculous 1970s graduate students who think they are marvelously decadent and clever and all that). A work of art from a master craftsman.
It also featured the greatest description of NYC in the summer I have ever read in my life, which I will reproduce for you here because everyone should get to read it:
Then, in late summer, like the old-time God of the ancients, enraged, the sun would melt down whatever it saw and start over again. In August, Nathaniel thought, the sopping gruesome heat in Manhattan liquefied the city. Someday the entire urban landscape would ooze into the Hudson. In New York, summer would be the season of doom.
Tender Is The Night
Holy shit you guys, this book was so good. I liked it waaay better than Gatsby--it's a lot more emotional, and somewhat more sprawling and slower, and so, so beautiful, oh God. It's about three Americans in the Riviera (but seriously, it's really good), who more or less sequentially get their turn in the spotlight--Rosemary, an innocent young actress; Dick, the psychiatrist she falls in love with who hasn't worked in ages despite his once promising career; and Nicole, Dick's patient-turned-wife (and yes, their relationship is every bit as fucked up as that description implies). Centrally and primarily, it is Dick's story, and while there is a lot of action (duels, murders, a drunken fistfight with the Italian police, and of course adultery), the core of the story is emotional, and so honest and therefore complex--there's temptation and loyalty, squandered potential and self-loathing and what happens to a person's spirit when he wants to be needed more than he wants to be strong and true. God. This book left me somewhat shattered, let me tell you.
It also has the greatest description of England post-WWI ever:
An Englishman spoke to him across the aisle but he found something antipathetic in the English lately. England was like a rich man after a disastrous orgy who makes up to the household by chatting with them individually, when it is obvious to them that he is only trying ot get back his self-respect in order to usurp his former power.
And because it seems unfair to show off Fitzgerald's gift for snark without showing off his equal if not greater gift for beauty, two sentences that, seriously, they don't need context, these are just perfect arrangements of the English language, and the bastard wrote them while permanently hammered:
She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitable as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.
Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover.
In conclusion, let me quote F. Scott himself, in an inscription to a friend: "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith."
Players
My fourth Delillo novel, and probably my least favorite, though that still means it's better than a lot of books in the world. Lyle and Pammy are married; he works at the New York Stock Exchange, she writes brochures for a grief counseling service in the World Trade Center. Their lives are fine, not unhappy, not even exactly dissatisfied--there's just nothing really there. Pammy takes off, almost on a whim, with her gay friends Ethan and Jack, while Lyle gets himself involved with a not very effective terrorist ring after they kill a man at the Exchange and the new hot secretary turns out to be involved. The novel makes a lot more sense if you think hard about the title--these are not actors, they are not people that actively do things or seek things or are affected by things personally; they glide through waves of high drama and fake nostalgia and remain, until (perhaps, perhaps) the shocking end, strangely untouched. One thing I really liked was that the narrative often switches back and forth between Pammy and Lyle with absolutely no warning; this very simple choice somehow gave the novel a very flat quality that suited it. I liked the other Delillo books I've read better, but I'm glad I read this one because with Delillo I feel like every book I read of his makes me like all of his books more, because he's the sort of writer who has a clear enough set of, oh, goals, I guess, or themes, or whatever, that the more time you spend with him the more his works seem to belong to A Work. Kazuo Ishiguro is another one like this. I don't know, I'm not explaining this very well. Don't read this book as an introduction to Delillo, but if you have decided you officially just love Delillo even if you feel like you don't understand him very well always, this book might be worth your time.
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March 13th, 2008
07:56 pm - books 76-78: psychology is educational edition
I AM GRUMPY AND SICK. let's review books!!
No Contest: The Case Against Competition
Funny story: I happened to stumble across this dude's homepage while looking for data on the impact of grades on education; google turned up an essay of his arguing against the misuse of statistics. I loved the essay (a quality academic smackdown) and recognizing his name from The Case Against Homework, I navigated over to his other essays. Soon, a brain-crush was born. I needed to read his books. Then, my aunt gave me two of them for my birthday! Clearly, my aunt rules.
This book is amazing. He carefully refutes the most common arguments in favor of competition (my favorite example was his rebuttal to the old "survival of the fittest!" quip--obviously nature sometimes does favor cooperative solutions, or else things like lichens and other symbiotes WOULD NOT EXIST, duh). His argument against economic competition sounds a little shady to me (though his arguments against competition within businesses are much stronger), and even I, who don't like sports, think he was a little hard on sports (I think they can be fine if people don't take winning or losing seriously at all--I do mean at ALL--which I admit is very difficult to do in this society). But his psychological evidence for the toll of competition is great. Competition not only stresses us out but doesn't produce better results most of the time--in experiment after experiment, participants both enjoy a task less and do it less well when they are told they are competing against other participants than when they are just asked to do it. I also liked his anthropological evidence of noncompetitive societies refuting the "it's just human nature!" claim. Interestingly, psychological profiling has also shown that while noncompetitive people accurately (yes, accurately) believe that some people are competitive and some people are not, competitive people tend to wrongly believe that everyone is as competitive as they are, which explains a lot of conversations I have had with competitive people. (People who self-identify as very competitive, by the way, do not necessarily perform any better in the business world either, ahem ahem).
But most compelling are Kohn's more philosophical points against competition. Why would we want to face our fellow humans as enemies, not teammates? Why do we assume that getting better at something necessarily implies being better than other people at it (a nice counter-example: if you are the slowest in your running group, you may always remain the slowest in your running group, but that doesn't mean that taking your 5K time down three minutes isn't something to be proud of). Are we really so insecure that we can only figure out our self-worth by how many things we can beat other people at? And why is it that no one likes to talk about the fact that "wanting to win" is synonymous with "wanting other people to lose"? The vast majority of people, guess what, can't win all the time! They can't even win most of the time! So why is winning--i.e. beating others--held up as something we should all strive for? And why is it that people who don't like competing are seen as just afraid of competition, or not tough enough, or whatever, when people who love competing tend to be kind of douchebags about it? A well-written, dense-but-engaging (well, to me) book that will really make you think about what the fuck is so great about being number one.
The Schools Our Children Deserve
More Alfie Kohn, this time applied to my pet area. Mmmm. This time he goes up against the "tougher standards" movement, attacking it from several angles. He points out that it's pretty cruel to treat children as information-processing machines, to take all the fun out of school (especially in the early grades), to rank children against each other (as percentile-based standardized tests do--these tests literally necessitate the failure of some students), particularly at an age when children are developing so differently from each other. He points out that it's completely understandable for students to totally lose interest in school and learning when everything they do in school is viewed as a means to an end--a grade, a sticker, the honor roll; schools with heavy emphasis on awards an honor rolls, by the way, also have a higher incidence of CHEATING. you can talk about cheating being wrong all you want, but we all know teenagers don't have the best decision-making skills; when they are taught that the result is what matters, no matter what lip service is paid to "fairness," more students are going to conclude that the ends justify the means, especially under pressure.
And, again, he understands that while in his (and my) perfect world, people would look at what schools are doing to kids' psyches and motivation to learn and say, "jesus, this is unnecessarily cruel, let's change it up!" this is not enough for some people, so he takes pains to point out that tougher standards and a "skills-based" approach to learning don't fucking work. Seriously. Whole Language students don't just like reading better than phonics-only kids, they also read better. Students who are led to understand and discover (with guidance from the teacher) the underlying ideas under basic math do math just as well as kids who learn lots of carry-the-one algorithms, and when they make mistakes, they are more likely to be simple computational errors (subtracting 14 from 24 and getting 12 or 13) than the huge errors that betray a total lack of conceptual understanding skills-based kids make (being asked to find out how many fish Tommy had if Jimmy had 12 and together they had 24 and getting 36--yep, true story from SEVERAL of my second-graders). Of course, a multiple choice test will judge these errors as equivalent, even though the first student clearly has a better grasp of the material than the second.
Uh where was I? Oh. This book rules, everyone should read it, especially anyone who has any interest at all in educational issues.
Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
This is probably the most hardcore nonfiction book I've read in a while, maybe ever--it's listed as "Science/Psychology" which means it's totally legit, right? Psychologists--well, scientists in general, really--are not known for their writing skills, but luckily Howard Gardner is an exception to that rule. Basically his idea is that there are 8 (I think he's since expanded the list, but whatever) human intelligences (linguistic, spatial, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal), and that it's rather unfair to treat certain ones like they are the only ones that matter. His criteria for an intelligence are: ability to be isolated by brain damage, existence of prodigies in that intelligence, neurological evidence of isolation (i.e. this part of the brain works with this intelligence), a clear developmental track, evolutionary plausibility, the ability to test for the intelligence on psychometric tests (though Gardner advises being careful with these), and the existence of a symbolic notation for the intelligence. He points out that some of his intelligences fail one or possibly more of these, but since this isn't a theory aiming for scientific "truth" but rather aiming for creating a useful framework in which to talk about human potential and development, he's okay with this.
The theory is pretty awesome, there's loads of fun little bits (I have a weakness for highly unusual neurological impairments like aphasia, etc.), he is a good writer and his respect for the various areas of human achievements is fun to read, especially his emphasis on the importance of interpersonal skills (which are less valued in our schooling system) and intrapersonal skills. Also refreshing is his upfrontness about the limitations of his theory. A great read overall.
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March 10th, 2008
11:37 pm - books 73-75: is beauty skin deep? fiction edition
Uglies
So, in a futuristic word, our civilization had some sort of unspecified (until the end) cataclysm, sci-fi style, and now people live in totally self-sufficient cities that don't use up any natural resources. But the more salient point is that when someone in this society turns 16, they get an operation to make them supermodel gorgeous, becoming a Pretty. Tally, our heroine, is the last of her friends to turn... until she makes a new friend, Shay, with the same birthday as Tally. But *gasp* Shay doesn't want to turn. Shortly before the operation, Shay runs away, leaving Tally a set of cryptic clues in case Tally wants to follow. Tally has no interest in following, though she misses Shay terribly... until her operation is refused and she's taken away by a shadowy group of scary Pretties called the Specials, who tell her that unless she helps her find Shay, who has run away to a town populated by runaway Uglies, she will never turn pretty.
So this seemed like a pretty corny YA novel that somehow kept intriguing me whenever I passed it in B&N. I finally buckled down and bought it, and it was way more intense than I expected. For starters, it's like 60% a straight action novel where all the action takes place on FREAKING HOVERBOARDS, which I think is pretty fucking badass. Also, a pretty huge chunk of the dramatic tension comes from Tally feeling really guilty because Shay thinks Tally is totally into living all technology-free and ugly, when really Tally just wants to be Pretty (or does she?) Also, I found it an interesting choice that the author chose to mention evolutionary justifications for why the characteristics for Pretties were selected (big eyes, clear skin, etc.) since that's something you hear a lot. Finally, Tally was a believable and likable character, which, considering the book is entirely her story, is pretty important. All in all, this book unexpectedly kind of rocked and I'm really sorry that while I know I bought the sequel I can't find it anywhere in my house.
Cosmopolis
Eric, a self-made bajillionaire in his late 20s, awakes one morning after a not-unusual night of troubled sleep and departs from his disgustingly opulent apartment into his disgustingly opulent limousine to go across town--in what he soon learns is literally the-president-is-in-Manhattan traffic--for a haircut. Meanwhile, he finds his analytic genius failing for the first time as the yen climbs higher than he could have ever believed. But this is a Don Delillo book, so for us it's a journey through disgustingly gorgeous yet never over-done prose; seriously, over and over with Delillo I find myself having to reread paragraphs just because I can't appreciate them enough the first time. The protagonist is not a particularly sympathetic character, though he becomes so by the end, without quite reaching redemption. His various encounters--his rich European wife, his various paramours, his relationship with his driver, his bodyguard, other employees--are sketched in suggestive dark brushstrokes. Everything is distilled to its essentials. This makes the book a seriously intense read, and also highlights the cruel coldness of Eric's life. It might seem like a typical oh-the-rich-are-soulless-in-modern-day-capitalist-America story (is that a typical story? it feels like it might be) and maybe it is, but it's Don Delillo so it never felt like that. This is the book that converted me from Don Delillo admirer to hardcore fan. A flawlessly executed book. Seriously, the dude made me--ME--care about some rich Wall Street asshole. That is no small achievement.
On Beauty
After the Everclear-intense Cosmopolis (which, seriously you guys, that book practically had a physical impact on me) I needed some lighter. Enter the wine-like On Beauty. This book goes down so smooth, and so easy, that whichever reviewer it was who described it as a 435-page novel that you wish were longer was totally right. It's a story about an interracial couple, Howard, who is white and academic, and Kiki, who is neither of those things, and their three children--naive, innocent, Christian Jerome; awkward, self-consciously ironic Zora; and Lee, who wishes he lived in the Roxbury slums like "real brothers" instead of in the fictional Boston suburb of Wellington *coughCAMBRIDGEcough*, at the college in which Howard teaches. There is adultery, there are class tensions, there are racial tensions, there is the general pomposity of academia and the ways particular to academics in which to fail at life, there are parent-child conflicts, there's awkward sex, there's great sex, there is a professional nemesis invading Howard's personal life, it's a 435-page novel, I am not going to try to summarize the plot for you because this isn't a novel about plot. It's a novel about characters. These characters all become so real, they're simultaneously totally recognizable and yet not at all cliches. And, miraculously, somehow by the end of the book, you love them all. I literally did a 180 on a character halfway through the book, which I basically NEVER do. Every character gets to tell their story, and while not all of them have the best intentions, they all have intentions you can understand. Zadie Smith's dialogue is pitch-perfect, and her prose is smooth, funny, and descriptive without drawing attention to itself which, in this novel, would just be a distraction. By the end, it's not so much that you want the story to keep going; it's that you don't want to have to say goodbye.
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March 7th, 2008
03:02 am - books 70-72: random nonfiction edition
Can't sleep, let's review books instead!
The Sandman Papers
Max B. gave me this for Christmas, because he knows what a huge dork I am. It's a collection of academic papers about the Sandman books, which are like my favorite things ever written ever. Normally I totally hate literary analysis, but for Sandman I make an exception, because it's so good and brilliant and satisfying on the surface, and written with such obvious delight (despite the lack of Delight - ho HO, god please tell me someone got that dorky joke), that finding new stuff in it is just extra fun. I don't agree with all the essays, and I still think some of the writers have way too much time on their hands, but they were all pretty interesting (especially the one on the history of horror comics).
Bone Black: Memoirs of a Girlhood
After having bell hooks recommended to me over and over, I went to Barnes and Noble to pick up one of her books and this is the only one they had. I had been hoping for something more overtly political, but this was pretty fucking brilliant, so I wasn't disappointed. She writes of her girlhood spent growing up poor, black, and female in the South, going through the awful learning that happens to children as they realize this world looks down on them, this world doesn't want them, there are other people who the world does want for reasons that make no sense. She writes about being an outsider within your own family because you want to read books and play with boy toys, of witnessing the violence of her parents' relationship with such young eyes, and she does it all in this beautiful, urgent, simultaneously wise and childlike voice. A brief, beautiful book.
Love's Executioner
Ten case stories from an existential psychoanalyst. Sounds weird, I know, but basically the author holds that, contrary to staunch Freudian thought, our personalities and fuckups don't necessarily just come from repressed sexual urges or our relationships with our parents. Sometimes, a big thing that they come from, the thing that truly needs to be addressed before they can be resolved, is not having dealt with some basic things that suck about being human: the fact that no one can ever truly no us as we know us, the fact that there is no immediate evidence of order or meaning to our lives, the fact that we die. I've thought this to be true about people for a long time, so it was cool to read a professional who agreed with me. Luckily, he is also a marvelous writer, smooth, wise, and with an excellent sense of pacing--the book was, surprisingly, a serious pageturner for me. He is also very honest about when his own biases and emotional issues have gotten in the way of his relationships with patients, and when he thinks he has botched cases, which he clearly feels genuine remorse for. The stories themselves are fascinating (a remarkably unintrospective man has beautifully poetic and clearly analyzable dreams about death), tragic, pitiful (the title story is about an 80-year-old woman who has for the past several decades been in love with a therapist she slept with for about a week years ago), occasionally hilarious (the therapist's impropriety and subsequent disappearance from the woman's life turn out not, as the author suspects, to be a result of his callousness but rather of his severe nervous breakdown those many years ago), and every now and then, yes, uplifting.
My favorite might have been the man who viewed women only and explicitly as sexual objects, who, at the author's behest, joined a group therapy group for cancer patients at the hospital where the author worked only to disrupt it by telling the facilitator, after she had shared the fact that she had been raped, that he wished rape were legal. He was a shockingly repulsive human being whose obnoxiousness only increased in the face of death. His breakthrough came when the author asked if he would want his daughter to live in a world where rape was legal. This simple question led to a rapid reexamination of his relationships with his children, and with women, and to the development of genuine compassion. As the cancer progressed to its final stages, he told the author, shortly before he died, "Thank you for saving my life."
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February 27th, 2008
11:19 pm - we don't need no education, we don't need no thought control
Maybe if I start writing out some of the things I think based on all of the things I see and read nowadays, maybe then I can go back to thinking regularly about other things. Maybe I can one day even become fun at parties. Hope springs eternal.
One of the third graders I tutor for literacy doesn't read much at home because she has so much homework. At school she listens to books on tape over and over that she doesn't get to pick, that are about karate of bugs or other things she doesn't care about. She wants to read about funny animals. She gets to read about Horton the Elephant a few minutes three or four times a week with me, and only because I thought of it. Her principal, her teacher, they would be fine with it if all I did with her was drill phonics and make her speed-read with no comprehension so-called stories that make no sense.
How can they do this to a child? How can they so systematically eradicate any hope she had of liking to read? How can they divorce reading from pleasure, from leisure, from exploration on the one hand and turn around and wonder why kids hate reading on the other?
You see this everywhere. A sixth-gader who wants to know why he has to practice reading in after school when it's the math test that's coming up. The second-grade teacher I work with telling her students to put their books away, it's time to practice for the reading test they won't even be taking this year, the resignation in her voice she tries to mask with a cheerful pride as she tells them this was their first time doing test prep, which they'll be doing two, maybe three times a week from now on, and they all did very well. How can this be considered acceptable? How can people value results over process in children half of whom can't even tie their shoes yet? In Finland--consistently considered one of the strongest education systems in the world--children don't even go to school until they are seven years old.
The word education comes from the Latin educare, "to rear or to bring up," from prefix e- "out" and base -duc- "to lead"--to lead out. To lead children out, gently, from ignorance, through their natural growth as best we can, into new ways of looking at the world. This isn't leading out; it's drilling in. This isn't an education. This isn't learning.
Except that learning is always happening, isn't it, especially in children but we are all of us constantly being shaped by our surroundings even as we shape those around us. We are shaping children from the time they are so young that they hug nice adults they've met twice, that they have considerable difficulty with the Golden Rule, that they will sometimes recount their days for you in excrutiating detail and sometimes retreat into whatever hurt they've just experienced or been reminded of and stare at the table, refusing to say a word, we are taking these children and we are shaping them to fill in little bubbles on tests, to value the rightness of the answer above the quality of the reasoning, to view reading as a means to an end, to associate their own value with the results they can produce, to exert the minimum effort they can to get by, to be unquestioningly obedient, to see approval by shutting up, to fear being wrong.
The girl I tutor, she would get so upset when she made a mistake, I had to tell her point-blank one day, "Look, it's okay to make mistakes. Don't worry or stress out about it. Sometimes, making mistakes is the best way we can learn something. And I don't think I knew myself how true that was until I had to explain it to her. I wish I had figured it out earlier. Mistakes are an essential art of the learning process, because mistakes mean you are trying, you are actively engaging your brain, and when you move past them you can feel a genuine pride that doesn't come from things done effortlessly. But we are teaching children mistakes are something to be avoided at all costs, before they are old enough to even wonder what those costs might be.
And we call this education. And there are people who want more of this.
I try to tell myself, oh, they mean well but they haven't thought it through, they aren't aware of the psychological research indicating that people of all ages but especially children don't just enjoy themselves more, but also learn better when they are engaged in the material, they assume without questioning that these things have a good reason for being done, and if we pointed these things out to them, led them through the explanations--educated them, as it were--they might be resistant at first (after all they did a lot of this stuff and they turned out just fine!) but would eventually nod their heads and see that there is a better way.
But my pessimistic side tells me the resistance to change would prove too strong, or they just wouldn't care, or continue to assert that if a person in charge is doing it, it must be right. And my cynical side whispers that some people, they are perfectly aware of the consequences of this system of schooling and they are just fine with it, because to them you are what results you give, your worth is tied to how well you perform (and not to being a nice person or anything like that), and it really is best if you take whatever authority gives you without question, because all of this works to keep people just where they are.
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January 2nd, 2008
01:39 am - book 69 and 2007 in retrospect
Oh what better way to ring in the New Year than with friends? What better way to do anything, really. 2008 is off to a good start.
And of course the best way to keep it going good is by making loads of resolutions I probably won't keep! God I love tradition. Except I want to think them over a bit so I'll do those tomorrow. Instead, let's talk books!
The final book review of 2008 would have been for Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates, but really I think the title says it all. There are pirates, there are peg legs, monkeys, and parrots (for real!), there is walking the plank and sweeping damsels off their feet (for fictional!), there are battles and beheadings and torture and maroonings (for way, way too real; seriously if there is one thing you can take from this book it is: do not fuck with pirates, they are vicious motherfuckers), there are exotic locales and shipwrecks, there are Anne Bonny and Mary Read, female pirates who sailed under Calico Jack, there is Mrs. Cheng the leader of a huge force of pirates of the Chinese South Sea and her successful attempt to emotionally manipulate the Chinese government into offering pardons for resigning pirates instead of shooting them all on sight, there is rampant alcoholism and pieces of eight. They're fucking pirates!
Also, I realized I never reviewed A Room of One's Own which I read this year. It was pretty cool.
And speaking of books of 2008, two more lists--the top 10 each of the best nonfiction and fiction books I read (out of a total of 69 books--6 books short of my goal, but a healthy number nonetheless). These are not in any particular order because the only thing harder than picking just 10 would be ranking them.
FICTION (out of 38)
Note: I realized writing these blurbs how hard it is to summarize a book in one sentence--my apologies for mocking you, editors of the NYTimes 100 interesting books list--and I've summarized them under the books101 tag anyway so these blurbs kind of suck.
1. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe: Incredibly smart, believable, funny, moving play.
2. Love in the Time of Cholera: Prose so gorgeous you think you're dreaming, characters so real you think you've met them, a plot so sprawling it feels like life.
3. Watchmen: Using the comic medium to its absolute fullest capacity, an unbelievably smart ear for dialogue combines with a plot both inspired and brilliantly executed.
4. Ordinary Love and Good Will: Two novellas examine the minutiae of life, and how we can regret even the choices we don't feel sorry for.
5. The Bluest Eye: An incredible humanity rings in every perfectly constructed sentence, so that in this book full of wisdom, it becomes evident that wisdom is often nowhere near enough.
6. The Remains of the Day: Apparently it is indeed possible to write an entire novel between the lines of the actual story, and keeping it there underscores its most tragic elements.
7. The Death of a Salesman: A profoundly depressing, in a good way, tale of the poisonous allure of the American dream.
8. Mrs. Dalloway: A lyrically written look at the ties that bind us to our pasts, the hurts we can't let go of, the hope we try to hold on to, and what happens when it's gone.
9. Tooth and Claw: Stories to make you laugh, make you cry, make you wince, a lot, make you hate people, make you believe in people, and make you feel unsettled.
10. Love, Stargirl: A lovable character who feels sad and awkward and scared and confused and sometims even exuberantly happy. This is how you do quirky right. This is how you do YA fiction right.
NONFICTION (out of 31)
1. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America: Sharp cultural and political exploration tempered by compassion and a healthy sense of the bigger picture.
2. Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for American's Soul: Part history of the Intelligent Design movement, part brief primer on evolution, part cultural discussion, part gripping (and occasionally hilarious) courtroom drama.
3. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America: Up-close-and-personal examination of the day-to-day realities of living on minimum wage, and the difficulties that people who don't have to think about overlook in their discussions of the working poor.
4. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women: Hits on all angles of the problems, from media representations of "good" and "bad" mothers to the government's response to the needs of mothers, yet somehow a breeze to read.
5. Passionate Minds: An intellectual love story for the ages, about pretty cool dude Voltaire and even more awesome dudette Emilie du Chatelet, filled with science, literature, philosophy, sex, war, friendship, and, yes, swordfighting.
6. The Working Poor: Invisible in America: Demonstrates that the nature of poverty is so complex that attempts to identify one single cause--or one single solution--are both hopelessly reductive and deeply unfair to those who are chastized for being unable to "lift" themselves out of poverty.
7. The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest To Become the Smartest Man In The World: Hilarious, sweet, and chock-full of trivia. The ideal summer read.
8. The Heartless Stone: A Journey Into the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire: Huge in scope, traveling across continents, getting into history, and written with a healthy sense of both outrage and intense curiosity (not to mention great prose). Fascinating, eye-opening, and will make you not to want buy anything diamond, ever.
9. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation: Brings on the moral outrage and a respect for the way children start to work things out. Pretty much demolishes your sense that we live in anything approaching a just world. So beautifully written it can make you want to cry.
10. The Harbor Boys: Memoir of identity, family, adolescence, country, history, and one summer working at a harbor. Prose so beautiful in its simplicity, in its wisdom and direct rawness, it almost makes me ill. The sort of book you simply can't absorb all of at once.
So looking at this list, apparently what I like in fiction is beautifully crafted prose and fiction that leaves you somewhat unsettled, sad over what happened maybe or happy over it maybe but mostly just so full of it you can't process it all, kind of like life and the world, and also YA Fiction (which, you have no idea how hard it was not to include Forever in Blue, the fourth Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book, on the list, because that book ruled, a lot). And what I like in nonfiction is... moral outrage, great writing, and trivia. That sounds about right.
Current Music: sweeney todd videos on youtube
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