When the hurly-burly’s done

I took the long weekend off, leaving my GuiltBag in a drawer at work and resolving to relax, to clear my mind after a couple of very intense weeks. In between cleaning, commerce (I bought a vacuum cleaner, a bed frame, and one of those Ikea Poang chairs that are so comfortable you never want to stand up again–thanks, Craigslist!), and catching up with friends I hadn’t seen in ages, I read.

A lot.

First, I finished Atonement (which, appropriately enough, I began reading on Yom Kippur afternoon). I read my first Ian McEwan novel, On Chesil Beach, this summer in Scotland on a recommendation from Allyson, my writing tutor. She had me read it because it’s a great example of how to create tension from literally nothing happening. What kept me reading, though, and made me want to read more McEwan, was his writing style. McEwan’s an old-fashioned writery writer, relying on sumptuous and sensual description to carry the weight of his stories, which, from what I can tell so far, mostly take place in his characters’ internal lives. Check this out, from Atonement:

She went indoors, quickly crossed the black and white tiled hall–how familiar her echoing steps, how annoying–and paused to catch her breath in the doorway of the drawing room. Dripping coolly onto her sandaled feet, the untidy bunch of rosebay willow herb and irises brought her to a better state of mind. The vase she was looking for was on an American cherry-wood table by the French windows which were slightly ajar. Their southeast aspect had permitted parallelograms of morning sunlights to advance across the powder-blue carpet. Her breathing slowed and her desire for a cigarette deepened, but still she hesitated by the door, momentarily held by the perfection of the scene–by the three faded Chesterfields grouped around the almost new Gothic fireplace in which stood a display of wintry sedge, by the unplayed, untuned harpsichord and the unused rosewood music stands, by the heavy velvet curtains, loosely restrained by and orange and blue tasseled rope, framing a partial view of cloudless sky and the yellow and gray mottled terrace where chamomile and feverfew grew between the paving cracks. A set of steps led down to the lawn on whose border Robbie still worked, and which extended to the Triton fountain fifty yards away.

I love how McEwan writes so heavily and softly–the wood, textiles, and herbs are almost smellable in this scene. And the colors–don’t even get me started on the colors. This is writing that is a feast for the reader. I usually tear through novels, but I took my time with Atonement, even though it’s relatively short. I just couldn’t read huge chunks of it at a time without feeling like I’d just eaten a very big meal.

So I just said I’m a fast reader, and I think I proved it by swallowing all of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road yesterday. Literally. I was up at dawn–my sister spent Saturday night at my apartment, and I gave her my bed, leaving me with first the too-small couch, then the floor–so I just started reading, waiting until it wouldn’t be rude for me to make a lot of noise. The Road is definitely McCarthy’s fastest-paced book, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy read–the premise itself is tough enough (a man and his young son travel across postapocalyptic America), and there are some scenes (cannibalism figures heavily in this book) that are going to haunt me for a while. But McCarthy’s style just moves in this one. While he’s been known to indulge in Faulknerian rhapsodies to candleflame and horses, McCarthy here is at his most taut:

He woke toward the morning with the fire down to coals and walked out to the road. Everything was alight. As if the lost sun were returning at last. The snow orange and quivering. A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he stood there a long time. The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.

So these two books are amazing, and totally different, and that leaves me in an interesting place as a writing teacher–for that’s what I’m beginning to consider myself, more than anything else.  It wasn’t a slip-up that I told the ENG212 parents on Thursday night that the class is a writing class where we happen to read some books.  But what do we do, when teaching writing, about style?  Is it appropriate to teach a specific formal writing style when students are writing analytically?  Is there such thing as one formal writing style?  And what, pray, do I do about my Creative Writing students?  Do I have a responsibility to show them examples of different writing styles, or will that just confuse them?

I got the final-ish draft of my short story from this summer, with Allyson’s comment, in Saturday’s mail.  I haven’t looked at it yet, but all of this reading and thinking about writing makes me want to.  I am not sure if I’m going to keep working on the story in the foreseeable future, but I’d kind of like to see it finished.  If that’s possible.

I’ve got a lot on my mind right now, and I honestly have no idea where this post is going to go, so I’ll understand if nobody (including me) makes it to the end. Still, I think it’s worth a shot.

Thing 1 is the fact that 17/45 of my sophomores are going to receive Fs on their progress reports, which went out on Friday. This doesn’t mean that most, if any, of them will fail on their 1st quarter report cards, but as of Friday, I hadn’t received their first exploratory essays. They’ll hand something in, get minimal (but some) credit, strike a deal with me w/r/t their IEP-mandated extra time, and everyone’ll be happyish. That’s not the issue here.

What worries me is that these 17 students are doing exactly what I did from 6th-10th grade (especially 7th-9th). I basically refused to do homework, justifying my decision by declaring, vocally and silently, that I was bored silly with the way school was “done.” I found very little of any relevance in the experiences my teachers provided, so why encourage them? What, then, do I make of the grades and general low production levels in my sophomore sections? My writing students are crankin’ along–the essay writers are halfway through their third essays of the quarter, and the creative writers are starting their major stories. What’s up with the sophomores, then? Is it The Scottish Play? Is it the writing? Is it me?

Which brings me to Thing 2. Evan and I have a ton of interdisciplinary activities planned for these guys. One we’ve already started (the current events blog, which would be going better if learnerblogs weren’t hiccuping), but the others are on hold for the time being. I think we’re concerned that since the students have a hard time producing what we need them to do on paper (his failure rate is very close to mine, and for the same reasons), introducing usernames, passwords, and online procedures might make things even more unwieldy (less wieldy?).

So there’s tension there, tension between the frustration of dealing with a bunch of students who (despite being nice, kind, and intelligent enough in class) have opted out of doing the work I’ve assigned, and wanting to do what’s right for them by inviting them to use some new tools that they probably understand better than I do.

This morning, once our school’s internet connection finally stopped trying to rival Tom Glavine for reliability under pressure, I sat in a Learning Center into which no kids had been scheduled (I know, I was amazed too) and read Clarence Fisher’s post called “Tools At Work.” In this post, Clarence gets into all the ways in which technology helps him with his daily routine.

I won’t quote the post, because you can read the whole thing, but the essence of it comes with the last line: “This is what these tools are about.” They’re not ends in themselves; they’re means to an end. And what’s that end? Collaboration, communication, entertainment, reflection. The things that make us human and social. Do Facebook and email replace face-to-face conversations or the sheer pleasure of pen-on-paper writing? No. They augment them. The world doesn’t need Twitter, but since we live in a time when people want to know what their friends are up to, and are used to hearing about such minutiae as whether the President is clearing brush from his lawn or who designed the expensive dress some starlet’s wearing on the red carpet before yet another contrived awards show, who’s to stop the information flow? Your own resistance to social networking, assuming you’re resistant to it, isn’t a brave act of defiance in the face of humanity’s increasing mechanization; rather, it’s a misguided use of your anti-machine rage. Rather than fighting the culture of triviality and dehumanization by questioning the structure of society itself, you’re cutting yourself out of that culture’s still-human means of connecting people to people. It is fascinating to me that no matter what other apps people add to their Facebook pages, everyone still has a picture. The Wall, though silly, keeps people in touch. Fight it if you want, but I don’t really want to hear about it.

Thing 3, which I can’t figure out how to work in, but wanted to mention, is that the new Radiohead album comes out next week. What’s newsworthy isn’t that there’s (finally) a new Radiohead album, even though I stand by my claim that they’re frighteningly brilliant (even more so when you realize that, if they stay together as long as the Rolling Stones have, probably 30-40 years of this stuff ahead of them–they’re really just getting started), but the way the album’s being sold. Radiohead don’t have a record deal at the moment, so they’ve decided to sell the album themselves. If you can wait until December and have a lot of money, they’ll send you a box with a couple of CDs and some other treats. But if you’re impatient, like me, you can purchase the album in electronic format. How much will it cost to download the album legally from Radiohead? They haven’t set a price–you set it yourself. It’s up to you, the customer, to decide what you want to pay. Seriously. And if you can’t figure out why this is a major shift, give it another think.

So where does this all fit together? I don’t know. But something big’s happening–I keep getting the feeling that pieces of my life and my cultural space are intersecting in some odd ways. At last night’s Bob Dylan concert, Dylan’s band basically did live remixes of his classic songs, and Dylan himself turned even the most familiar classics (”It Ain’t Me, Babe,” for example) into unrecognizable growled assaults. Is he getting bored with singing his own songs every night? Or is he challenging the audience (”being Dylanesque,” as my concert companion put it) to think about the songs they grew up with in a new context? Is there a metaphor there, or did getting home really late do something regrettable to my mind?

So I’m all moved in and, with the exception of a) two boxes of books that need to go on my shelves at work and b) a box of “crumbs” that I can’t figure out what to do with, I’m unpacked.  A (now-former) colleague and (still-current) friend is on her way over to take away my extra empty boxes for her own move this weekend.  The construction and excavation next door seems to have stopped.  I’ve got some good music going in the background (thanks to the Shuffle setting on iTunes, I just finished listening to a Son Volt song I hadn’t heard in years), a stocked fridge, and a little bit of downtime.

Contrast that with last night, when I decided to take a break from watching movies (Jesus Camp, Old Joy, and Y Tu Mama Tambien) to send out the itinerary for my trip to Scotland.  Everything was going well until I realized that I had miscalculated and would be arriving in-country on Monday, not Sunday.  Tripped up by the overnight flight, I guess, and ordinarily not a big deal, the way I like to travel, but I have all kinds of hostels, B&Bs, and campsites booked for my trek along the West Highland Way.   After a panicked call to my mom, I figured out that I can eat the 30quid for the room in Edinburgh, hop a train and a bus to Drymen the afternoon that I get to Edinburgh (after running errands–dropping off extra bag at the University, setting up cell service, buying whatever I forgot to pack) and start the walk on the second day, which is the 20-miler.  Awesome.  I’m psyched again, even though I won’t be doing the whole walk. I guess that means I’ll have to go back sometime.

I’ve got some reading left to do for the course, which I really need to finish up.  I want to do some work on my teaching this summer, too, but I’m not entirely sure when that’ll happen.  I figure I’ll have plenty of time to think about it while I’m walking through Scotland and when I come back, I’ll be recharged and ready to take it all on.

So that’s it.  Just figured someone might want an update.

So good old Akismet caught this most excellent piece of spam today: 

Godday,
I don’t post often my things over the net, but sometimes there are circumstances that makeme doing it. This afternoon I feel to write while I listen to hip hop music and search for download music [this was a link]. Today is my day off from my job, and being monday, it’s nice to do nothing at home while most of the people are at work. I realize I am gonna take a nap. Please do not hate me too much.
Bye

I started this post a few days ago and decided to let it marinate, as I wasn’t happy with my writing. I’m still not, but I can live with it for now. I write this intro bit only because some of the days are off. Can you live with that? Good.
First: if this were Christmas vacation, I’d be heading, right now, to school to meet the crew for the Habitat excursion to Mexico. I’d be beside myself with nervousness about bringing high school students to a foreign country. I’d be wondering if I’d packed enough, or too much. It’d be before I got my above-the-eye nastiness. A lot’s changed since then.

Thankfully, this is a break in which the most stressful thing so far has been spending a great and relaxing weekend in Boston with my sisters and some friends. We wandered around, caught up on what’s been going on in our lives, read the paper over coffee, and just had a weekend. Sometimes you need that.

I finished reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American over the weekend as well. I remembered watching the movie, but not very much about what it was about–it was all a blur to me, a blur of beautifully-shot nighttime scenes of Saigon in the 50s, back in the French colonial days, and Michael Caine being Michael Caine. The film was visually stunning and rekindled, when I saw it, my desire to travel in SE Asia. Movies, books, and music have a tendency to do that to me, to make me want to go somewhere new. It was a heady cocktail of Sigur Rós (“Popplagið“) and The Girl in the Cafe that reobsessed me with Iceland.

The book, on the other hand, made me think a lot about my writing. For the past few years I’ve had, at the back of my mind, a nascent novel that would somehow combine my ideas about memory (and its loss due to Alzheimer’s), the Holocaust, and the kind of modern ennui that I was so good at a few years ago. The problem is, though, that writing the book has become a colossal exercise in frustration. What I liked so much about reading Greene’s book, I think, was its simplicity. There are really only three characters and one central problem: Pyle, an American agent whose murder drives the flashbacks in the books, is in love with Phuong, the Vietnamese girlfriend of the British journalist (and the book’s narrator) Fowler. That’s it. And from that simple premise (a love trial superimposed on a murder investigation and some shady colonialist counterinsurgency stuff), a masterpiece.

On Thursday, I saw Notes on a Scandal. Again, another simple premise resulting in a very moving story. Cate Blanchett plays a young art teacher who begins a love affair with one of her high school students. Judi Dench is the veteran spinster teacher who earns Blanchett’s character’s trust, then uses it to manipulate her. That’s pretty much it. It helps that Blanchett and Dench are two of the best actresses in the business, maybe even in the history of the business (is that hyperbole? probably not), but the story was so compelling in its simplicity that the time flew by. I had no idea how long the movie was. It felt like about 30 minutes, but it probably was more.

So what’s left? Going to see Macbeth tonight. Got a couple of rehearsals tomorrow (did you know that I play bass for both an Irish punk band and a neo-soul band?). Then it’s back to work on Monday. I’ll be spending this afternoon getting my act together for this upcoming week. And that’s it.