This is Holly Black's third "Modern Faery's Tale," and it resumes the story of Kaye and other characters from Tithe, the first volume in the series. Can humans and faeries be friends? Can faery changlings maintain loving relationships with the people they thought were their relatives, once they've found out the truth about their natures? The pixie Kaye is determined to find out.
Together with her gay friend Corny and Luis, her guide to the Seelie Court, Kaye tries to figure out why Roiben, now king of the Unseelie Court, who she once thought loved her, has sent her on an impossible quest. Until she fulfills that quest, she is not allowed to see him. What's worse is that in the Seelie Court, she must witness negotiations between Roiben and his erstwhile queen, Silarial, a magnificently beautiful faery. Filled with self-doubt, convinced that Roiben will never again love her, Kaye tries to do the right thing by her human mother and avoid death for her or her friends at the hands of the fey who pursue her out of the Seelie Court.
The suspenseful narrative maintains the seductive, darly fantastic pull of Black's earlier books, Tithe and Valiant, similarly blending elements of gritty urban life and contemporary teen concerns with the mythic. It's a good read!
Friday, April 25, 2008
Poetry by Cathy Song
What do I enjoy about reading poems by the Hawaiian poet Cathy Song, whose life and landscape are so different from the life and landscape I inhabit? Some of her poems explore territory that is new to me, but others depict moments I know, relationships I recognize.
In School Figures (1995), she writes movingly of relationships with women, especially. One of my favorite poems in this volume is "The Grammar of Silk," about learning to sew, in which Song describes trailing her mother through the aisles of the fabric store, where her "fingertips touched the titles--/satin, tulle, velvet,/peach, lavender, pistachio,/sherbet-colored linings" but where her mother would find a bargain remnant of brown-and-white dotted kettlecloth that Song would settle for. Song's mother wanted Song to acquire a skill she herself lacked, and her lines recall to me the way my own mother happily gave up sewing to me, once I became reasonably adept at it. When I had children, sewing would give me "what she herself was missing,/a moment when she could have come up for air--/the children asleep,/the dishes drying on the rack." Acquiring the skill, operating a treadle machine, Song says that what she learned was "the charitable oblivion/of hand and mind as one--/a refuge such music affords the maker--/the pleasure of notes in perfectly measured time." In another poem, "For Her," in the section of the book that explores grief for friends and family members, Song begins, "I am sewing a punjabi/for a friend whose mother recently died," and I think of the many ways that sewing can bind women together. Another favorite poem in this volume is "Things We Know by Heart," in which Song addresses her daughter: "You heard me singing/deep within my body, those early mornings . . ." when "I knew you then as a rumor, a hunch,/ a month skipped like a heart beat."
The Land of Bliss (2001) revolves more specifically around the Asian American experience--and yes, I know there is no unified Asian American experience, but Song's poems in this book range through her Korean and Chinese family background and Japanese/Japanese American and Buddhist references. I like the poem "City of Sleeves," which begins with a Japanese saying as epigraph, and "In the Far Wing of an Old Museum," which begins with an epigraph from Wakako Yamauchi that describes museum visitors. I love this volume, with its sections introduced by quotations from Joni Mitchell. But I don't feel that I've really wrapped my mind around it yet, having read it only a couple or three times through. Several of the last poems speak to me most clearly. The beginning of "Handful," for instance--which is nearly 1/2 the poem--focuses on the writing of poetry: "Like scooping water by the handful/out of a lake,/you write a poem,/contain it, gaze/into the small/cup of your hand." "Caldera Illumina" begins, "She came to regard the house of rain falling as her muse." The title poem of the volume, the last in the book, links this process of working and writing as drawing water with a universal concept (or rather, a terrestrial one): "Rain that falls and has been falling/is the same rain that fell/a million years ago. To think not/a single droplet has been lost/in the articulate/system of our blue planet/wrapped in its gauze of atmosphere." These three poems are poems I'd like to take into a writing class to share with aspiring poets.
In School Figures (1995), she writes movingly of relationships with women, especially. One of my favorite poems in this volume is "The Grammar of Silk," about learning to sew, in which Song describes trailing her mother through the aisles of the fabric store, where her "fingertips touched the titles--/satin, tulle, velvet,/peach, lavender, pistachio,/sherbet-colored linings" but where her mother would find a bargain remnant of brown-and-white dotted kettlecloth that Song would settle for. Song's mother wanted Song to acquire a skill she herself lacked, and her lines recall to me the way my own mother happily gave up sewing to me, once I became reasonably adept at it. When I had children, sewing would give me "what she herself was missing,/a moment when she could have come up for air--/the children asleep,/the dishes drying on the rack." Acquiring the skill, operating a treadle machine, Song says that what she learned was "the charitable oblivion/of hand and mind as one--/a refuge such music affords the maker--/the pleasure of notes in perfectly measured time." In another poem, "For Her," in the section of the book that explores grief for friends and family members, Song begins, "I am sewing a punjabi/for a friend whose mother recently died," and I think of the many ways that sewing can bind women together. Another favorite poem in this volume is "Things We Know by Heart," in which Song addresses her daughter: "You heard me singing/deep within my body, those early mornings . . ." when "I knew you then as a rumor, a hunch,/ a month skipped like a heart beat."
The Land of Bliss (2001) revolves more specifically around the Asian American experience--and yes, I know there is no unified Asian American experience, but Song's poems in this book range through her Korean and Chinese family background and Japanese/Japanese American and Buddhist references. I like the poem "City of Sleeves," which begins with a Japanese saying as epigraph, and "In the Far Wing of an Old Museum," which begins with an epigraph from Wakako Yamauchi that describes museum visitors. I love this volume, with its sections introduced by quotations from Joni Mitchell. But I don't feel that I've really wrapped my mind around it yet, having read it only a couple or three times through. Several of the last poems speak to me most clearly. The beginning of "Handful," for instance--which is nearly 1/2 the poem--focuses on the writing of poetry: "Like scooping water by the handful/out of a lake,/you write a poem,/contain it, gaze/into the small/cup of your hand." "Caldera Illumina" begins, "She came to regard the house of rain falling as her muse." The title poem of the volume, the last in the book, links this process of working and writing as drawing water with a universal concept (or rather, a terrestrial one): "Rain that falls and has been falling/is the same rain that fell/a million years ago. To think not/a single droplet has been lost/in the articulate/system of our blue planet/wrapped in its gauze of atmosphere." These three poems are poems I'd like to take into a writing class to share with aspiring poets.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
A Return to Poetry
I don't know whether it's spring or some other force of nature that has impelled my return to reading poetry recently. I am mostly a devourer of fiction, mostly novels. But from time to time, I read poetry voraciously. This time someone quoted William Stafford's Writing the Australian Crawl and when I was at the library to borrow it, I looked at some other autobiographical writing by writers--and I checked out Langston Hughes' The Big Sea and Li-Young Lee's The Winged Seed. And then, before I knew it, I was back in the poetry section, pulling slim volumes off the shelves.
So today I'd like to write about Ruth Stone, whose In the Next Galaxy (2002 National Book Award Winner) I read last night. I am primed to love those women artists who have a western Virginia-Vermont (or New York State) trajectory, and Ruth Stone started out in Roanoke, Virginia. Her poems are spare. It is typical for her to yoke disparate elements to arrive at some hard nugget of insight. She does not shy away from the hard insights either. Perhaps I'm drawn to her honesty about loss and deterioration. As I read In the Galaxy, with its many mournful remembrances of her husband, who committed suicide, I was reminded of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Also, perhaps, of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. There are some wounds that never heal, but we return to them again and again to process them from new perspectives. I thought, too, of Maxine Kumin's Inside the Halo and Beyond and recent poems. It is a reflection of my own aging, no doubt, that I love these writers' willingness to share their vulnerability. These are the books I'll be carrying with me into old age.
Actually, though, one poem that really spoke to me dealt with remembered experience from adolescence--"Reading the Russians," which starts, "Of course they are gloomy;/they drink a lot of vodka./It's a frost bitten country./The women are trivialized, used, thrown aside." Pretty accurate, eh? But the remembered experience comes here: "All those Victorian translations/where I was transfixed:/lying stomach down on my bed/that summer of my fourteenth year" after which Stone goes on to describe her "heart rushing/with the wolves, the exhausted horses,/the over-turned sleighs,/the cold veil of the Steppes." Here she's captured a feeling that feels very familiar to me--that enthrallment with an alien world that actually had started even earlier, when I read a biography of Catherine the Great in elementary school. Two years ago, on sabbatical, I reread The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, which had nothing to do with my sabbatical project, nor will I ever teach these books. I realized that I'd been far too young for the books when I first read them--but I'm glad I did read them young, and I'm glad I reread them, and I'm pretty sure I'll reread them again, for no other reason than the reason I read poetry: these texts feed my soul.
But why Hughes and Lee? The pull of writers' stories, initially. As a teacher of writing, I'm constantly on the lookout for stories and quotations I can share with my students, and memoir and autobiography are wonderful sources. And then there's the fact that I didn't manage much reading of Black authors in February, as I intended, and the desire to read/reread/read further in the work of the Asian American poets I spent a year or so studying several years ago. I got away from my focus on American minorities' texts when I was writing my book on YA lit, but it wasn't for lack of interest--just lack of time. And I'm moving into summer mode--even though there are three weeks left in the semester: choosing books that I simply want to read, not books that I have to read.
In short, it's time for some poetry--some that maps out a path for me, that may help me through the decades ahead, some that helps me see the world through vastly different experiential lenses. Mostly, though, I just love to immerse myself in poetry--and it's way too long since I did so.
I am looking forward to Ruth Stone's forthcoming book, What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems. It will be available May 1.
So today I'd like to write about Ruth Stone, whose In the Next Galaxy (2002 National Book Award Winner) I read last night. I am primed to love those women artists who have a western Virginia-Vermont (or New York State) trajectory, and Ruth Stone started out in Roanoke, Virginia. Her poems are spare. It is typical for her to yoke disparate elements to arrive at some hard nugget of insight. She does not shy away from the hard insights either. Perhaps I'm drawn to her honesty about loss and deterioration. As I read In the Galaxy, with its many mournful remembrances of her husband, who committed suicide, I was reminded of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Also, perhaps, of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. There are some wounds that never heal, but we return to them again and again to process them from new perspectives. I thought, too, of Maxine Kumin's Inside the Halo and Beyond and recent poems. It is a reflection of my own aging, no doubt, that I love these writers' willingness to share their vulnerability. These are the books I'll be carrying with me into old age.
Actually, though, one poem that really spoke to me dealt with remembered experience from adolescence--"Reading the Russians," which starts, "Of course they are gloomy;/they drink a lot of vodka./It's a frost bitten country./The women are trivialized, used, thrown aside." Pretty accurate, eh? But the remembered experience comes here: "All those Victorian translations/where I was transfixed:/lying stomach down on my bed/that summer of my fourteenth year" after which Stone goes on to describe her "heart rushing/with the wolves, the exhausted horses,/the over-turned sleighs,/the cold veil of the Steppes." Here she's captured a feeling that feels very familiar to me--that enthrallment with an alien world that actually had started even earlier, when I read a biography of Catherine the Great in elementary school. Two years ago, on sabbatical, I reread The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, which had nothing to do with my sabbatical project, nor will I ever teach these books. I realized that I'd been far too young for the books when I first read them--but I'm glad I did read them young, and I'm glad I reread them, and I'm pretty sure I'll reread them again, for no other reason than the reason I read poetry: these texts feed my soul.
But why Hughes and Lee? The pull of writers' stories, initially. As a teacher of writing, I'm constantly on the lookout for stories and quotations I can share with my students, and memoir and autobiography are wonderful sources. And then there's the fact that I didn't manage much reading of Black authors in February, as I intended, and the desire to read/reread/read further in the work of the Asian American poets I spent a year or so studying several years ago. I got away from my focus on American minorities' texts when I was writing my book on YA lit, but it wasn't for lack of interest--just lack of time. And I'm moving into summer mode--even though there are three weeks left in the semester: choosing books that I simply want to read, not books that I have to read.
In short, it's time for some poetry--some that maps out a path for me, that may help me through the decades ahead, some that helps me see the world through vastly different experiential lenses. Mostly, though, I just love to immerse myself in poetry--and it's way too long since I did so.
I am looking forward to Ruth Stone's forthcoming book, What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems. It will be available May 1.
Review of One Good Punch by Rich Wallace
Rich Wallace's young athletes are generally depressed by the culture they've been born into in northeastern PA, a blue-collar world hedged by a narrow Catholicism, alcoholism, boredom, and the decline of economic opportunities. They may feel loyalties to their friends, their schools, their teams--but the lure of "getting out" through college, and especially college sports, is a powerful motivator of their actions. One Good Punch underscores the limited opportunities that Scranton offers a bright young runner with its opening scene: Mike Kerrigan has a part-time job writing obituaries for the local newspaper, and his phone conversations with his contacts at the local funeral homes create brief portraits of the citizens he's used to memorializing, mostly elderly and middle-aged citizens with long ties to local organizations, their final terminal conditions often brought on by careers in the mines or textile mills or by the long-term health effects of addiction. Interspersed with the work-related calls are anxious calls from his long-time friend Joey, and through these conversations we come to recognize the situation that drives the plot of this short novel: Joey has stashed some drugs in Mike's locker, and the word is out that the authorities plan to do a locker sweep over the weekend. If they do, Mike's promising senior year as an athlete with prospects for scholarships at bigger, more prestigious universities than the local one where his father teaches will be cut short, and his dreams for a fresh start outside Scranton will die an abrupt death.
From the outset, Mike faces the dilemma of whether and what to tell school authorities. Should he blame the stash on Joey? Joey is a long-time friend, but not really a friend--just someone that Mike's known since grade school and continues to hang out with. But over the years Mike has seen the bruises Joey bears in the aftermath of getting in trouble with his parents--and he fears Joey's father may actually kill Joey if he buys his own freedom at Joey's expense. The people who attempt to influence his decision, his parents and his other long time friend (girl), don't have much effect, in the final analysis, but his conversations with them about the situation make it clear that Mike's a pretty solitary guy. The person who does have a significant effect on his thinking is Joey's father, whom Mike catches in a pretty good mood when Joey isn't home, and who shares his stew recipe and the story of his brief boxing career that ended with "one good punch."
As brief as it is, this novel is nonetheless provocative, giving the reader glimpses into the complexities behind apparently straightforward moral decisions.
From the outset, Mike faces the dilemma of whether and what to tell school authorities. Should he blame the stash on Joey? Joey is a long-time friend, but not really a friend--just someone that Mike's known since grade school and continues to hang out with. But over the years Mike has seen the bruises Joey bears in the aftermath of getting in trouble with his parents--and he fears Joey's father may actually kill Joey if he buys his own freedom at Joey's expense. The people who attempt to influence his decision, his parents and his other long time friend (girl), don't have much effect, in the final analysis, but his conversations with them about the situation make it clear that Mike's a pretty solitary guy. The person who does have a significant effect on his thinking is Joey's father, whom Mike catches in a pretty good mood when Joey isn't home, and who shares his stew recipe and the story of his brief boxing career that ended with "one good punch."
As brief as it is, this novel is nonetheless provocative, giving the reader glimpses into the complexities behind apparently straightforward moral decisions.
Review of Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande
This first novel by Robin Brande (whose book jacket biographical blurb makes her sound like a pretty interesting person) addresses the conflict that teens encounter when literalist Christianity challenges the teaching of scientific theory (you know, evolution is "just a theory") in the high school classroom. Protagonist Mena Reece comes from a very restrictive church and home background, and for reasons that are not fully revealed until well into the novel, she is further restricted as punishment for some major betrayal of the church and her parents. While Mena's own struggles to reconcile her genuine love of God and her sense of justice and integrity and her curiosity about the world are depicted well, the evil, hypocritical church members are pretty two-dimensional villains, and Mena's parents make a last-minute about-face to separate themselves from the narrow-minded persecutors of gay teens, science teachers, and any church member that doesn't toe the line.
The delightful part of this novel is Mena's developing friendship and romance with a marvellous, inviting family, the Connors. She is talked into visiting their home by her partner on the science project, Casey, and as soon as she enters his relaxed home full of Lab puppies and furniture designed by his mother, she is hooked by the atmosphere of love and mutual support she finds in this single-parent household. She is a bit overwhelmed by Casey's big sister Kayla, who edits the school newspaper, blogs, and is headed for an activist career, quietly shadowed by her very big, very smart boyfriend, a silent computer geek who designs and sells custom tee shirts. Kayla is on the hunt for information about the protest against the teaching of evolution that Mena's former friends are staging in Mena and Casey's biology class, so she pumps Mena for information and, eventually, gets her writing a column as Bible Grrrl, a thoughtful re-examiner of Biblical stories for less literal explanations of nature than those advanced by her church's pastor in support of intelligent design.
Forbidden to date or even to spend time with boys--to spend time with anyone unless it's on schoolwork--Mena's involvement with this pleasant family ensnares her in a web of deceit from the outset, as she allows Kayla to persuade them that the "Casey" Mena has referred to is "KC," Mena's older mentor. In order to spend time with the puppies, which she loves, and Casey, whom she thinks she's falling for against her will, Mena goes along with the outrageous stories Kayla cooks up. Of course the lies are bound to be exposed--but when the crisis comes, Mena fesses up, building a bridge to a new relationship with her parents.
The best part of this novel, though, is the way that Mena enters new, freer relationships than the church-group-restricted ones she's had in the past. Instead of being part of a crowd indulging in group-think--a social life that led to the persecution of a gay teen, followed by Mena's effort to apologize, the act that got her in hot water at church and home--Mena discovers the pleasures of spending time with a talkative, intellectually curious, mutually supportive family, and she begins thinking for herself. Thinking for herself does not mean total rejection of her upbringing. She has to think about the possibilities of reconciling her Christian beliefs with the science she's learning. She also has to think about the people she's met and decide for herself whether they are good people or not--since they don't come with the church group imprimatur.
Mena is a likable protagonist, Casey and his family are likable characters, and when the attraction between girl and boy becomes undeniable, Mena's feelings are portrayed in a thoroughly sympathetic way. This is, all in all, a very likable book, and for those who believe that only science--and not religious agendas--should be taught in the classroom and that tolerance is one of the best lessons young people can learn, it is a feel-good read.
The delightful part of this novel is Mena's developing friendship and romance with a marvellous, inviting family, the Connors. She is talked into visiting their home by her partner on the science project, Casey, and as soon as she enters his relaxed home full of Lab puppies and furniture designed by his mother, she is hooked by the atmosphere of love and mutual support she finds in this single-parent household. She is a bit overwhelmed by Casey's big sister Kayla, who edits the school newspaper, blogs, and is headed for an activist career, quietly shadowed by her very big, very smart boyfriend, a silent computer geek who designs and sells custom tee shirts. Kayla is on the hunt for information about the protest against the teaching of evolution that Mena's former friends are staging in Mena and Casey's biology class, so she pumps Mena for information and, eventually, gets her writing a column as Bible Grrrl, a thoughtful re-examiner of Biblical stories for less literal explanations of nature than those advanced by her church's pastor in support of intelligent design.
Forbidden to date or even to spend time with boys--to spend time with anyone unless it's on schoolwork--Mena's involvement with this pleasant family ensnares her in a web of deceit from the outset, as she allows Kayla to persuade them that the "Casey" Mena has referred to is "KC," Mena's older mentor. In order to spend time with the puppies, which she loves, and Casey, whom she thinks she's falling for against her will, Mena goes along with the outrageous stories Kayla cooks up. Of course the lies are bound to be exposed--but when the crisis comes, Mena fesses up, building a bridge to a new relationship with her parents.
The best part of this novel, though, is the way that Mena enters new, freer relationships than the church-group-restricted ones she's had in the past. Instead of being part of a crowd indulging in group-think--a social life that led to the persecution of a gay teen, followed by Mena's effort to apologize, the act that got her in hot water at church and home--Mena discovers the pleasures of spending time with a talkative, intellectually curious, mutually supportive family, and she begins thinking for herself. Thinking for herself does not mean total rejection of her upbringing. She has to think about the possibilities of reconciling her Christian beliefs with the science she's learning. She also has to think about the people she's met and decide for herself whether they are good people or not--since they don't come with the church group imprimatur.
Mena is a likable protagonist, Casey and his family are likable characters, and when the attraction between girl and boy becomes undeniable, Mena's feelings are portrayed in a thoroughly sympathetic way. This is, all in all, a very likable book, and for those who believe that only science--and not religious agendas--should be taught in the classroom and that tolerance is one of the best lessons young people can learn, it is a feel-good read.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Review of The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch
This is a book that can draw the reader completely into a world on the edge of the Puget Sound. Thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley is an only child, and it's pretty clear from his parents' conversations that he was an unexpected, perhaps unwanted, child, and they don't pay much attention to him. Miles, in contrast, pays attention to everything, and the life of the bay where he lives absorbs most of his attention, especially during the summer months. He spends much of his time out exploring and collecting specimens--to be sold to restaurants or private collectors. As an entrepreneur, he even employs a larger boy his own age to do some of the heavy digging and lifting. His assistant, Phelps, is obsessed with women's bodies and classic rock, and his pithy normality balances Miles's precocious wisdom, making them an entertaining duo, especially when Miles offers tidbits of information on sea creatures' reproductive processes.
Since Miles spends so much of his time on the water's edge, the reader is treated to his observations and discoveries and can learn quite a lot about marine life. Indeed, he is in a fair way to becoming the resident expert on Skookumchuck Bay, since he also reads extensively about the marine life he observes and has comradely chats with a biology professor. One reason that Miles sees so much in the environment around him is that he is an insomniac and goes out surreptitiously alone at night as well as during the day. He is also a fan of Rachel Carson's writings, and can quote whole paragraphs from them. This novel embodies an argument for knowledge of the environment and for paying attention to the details of the lives among which we live and die.
After Miles discovers a beached giant squid, he attracts the attention of the local media, and is on his way to being a minor celebrity. The fact that he is small for his age, and looks several years younger than thirteen, seems to make his pronouncements even more appealing to the reporters who seek him out, and the media attention in turn draws the interest of a local New Age cult. Because his closest friend is an elderly retired psychic named Florence, Miles gets in the habit of dropping "wise" observations, like "Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something." It's difficult for him to keep the media attention from going to his head, and eventually he repeats Florence's prediction of a record high tide that will occur on a specific date in September--and then worries about whether he's made a fool of himself.
But while this attention circles around him--and he tries to avoid it--Miles worries about (and gets angry at) his parents, he worships his former babysitter who plays bass and sings with a local band, he worries over the progress of the degenerative terminal illness that grips Florence. He's after all a reasonably normal kid, and as he grows into awareness of his own sexuality, he's thinking about some of those forces that drive human lives--the nature of love, the interrelationships of living beings, the factors that drive the natural world (and us), the inevitability of death.
This is a really wonderful novel--beautifully written, attentive to detail, realistic in characterization. I'd heartily recommend its use in high school classes and would certainly pair it with some of Rachel Carson's writing as well as reading about marine life and environmental issues.
The book has its own Webpage, complete with giant squid video, at http://thehighesttide.com/. It has been discussed or reviewed at http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/highest_tide/review/, http://www.hcplonline.info/weblog/readers/2007/05/highest-tide-by-jim-lynch.html, and http://rcbookclub.blogspot.com/2007/10/comments-by-moderator-jim-lynch_22.html (the Rachel Carson Centennial Blog).
Since Miles spends so much of his time on the water's edge, the reader is treated to his observations and discoveries and can learn quite a lot about marine life. Indeed, he is in a fair way to becoming the resident expert on Skookumchuck Bay, since he also reads extensively about the marine life he observes and has comradely chats with a biology professor. One reason that Miles sees so much in the environment around him is that he is an insomniac and goes out surreptitiously alone at night as well as during the day. He is also a fan of Rachel Carson's writings, and can quote whole paragraphs from them. This novel embodies an argument for knowledge of the environment and for paying attention to the details of the lives among which we live and die.
After Miles discovers a beached giant squid, he attracts the attention of the local media, and is on his way to being a minor celebrity. The fact that he is small for his age, and looks several years younger than thirteen, seems to make his pronouncements even more appealing to the reporters who seek him out, and the media attention in turn draws the interest of a local New Age cult. Because his closest friend is an elderly retired psychic named Florence, Miles gets in the habit of dropping "wise" observations, like "Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something." It's difficult for him to keep the media attention from going to his head, and eventually he repeats Florence's prediction of a record high tide that will occur on a specific date in September--and then worries about whether he's made a fool of himself.
But while this attention circles around him--and he tries to avoid it--Miles worries about (and gets angry at) his parents, he worships his former babysitter who plays bass and sings with a local band, he worries over the progress of the degenerative terminal illness that grips Florence. He's after all a reasonably normal kid, and as he grows into awareness of his own sexuality, he's thinking about some of those forces that drive human lives--the nature of love, the interrelationships of living beings, the factors that drive the natural world (and us), the inevitability of death.
This is a really wonderful novel--beautifully written, attentive to detail, realistic in characterization. I'd heartily recommend its use in high school classes and would certainly pair it with some of Rachel Carson's writing as well as reading about marine life and environmental issues.
The book has its own Webpage, complete with giant squid video, at http://thehighesttide.com/. It has been discussed or reviewed at http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/highest_tide/review/, http://www.hcplonline.info/weblog/readers/2007/05/highest-tide-by-jim-lynch.html, and http://rcbookclub.blogspot.com/2007/10/comments-by-moderator-jim-lynch_22.html (the Rachel Carson Centennial Blog).
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Review of The Baptism by Shelia P. Moses
The Baptism is a week in the life of the twelve-year-old twins Leon and Luke Curry as their baptism approaches. Leon is the narrator, and Leon manages to get in trouble more than any boy should during the week he's fixing to be saved--or rather during the week before the baptism his mother has dictated. Living on the Occoneechee Neck, the twins, their older brother Joe ("Joe Nasty" to Leon), and their mother Lemuel have had a tough time of it since the boys' father was murdered, presumably for asking a white man for money that was owed him for some work he'd done. It's no wonder Lemuel has remarried, but Leon has little use for "Filthy Frank," and eventually his suspicions of his lazy stepfather are borne out by events.
One reason Leon keeps getting in trouble is his propensity for picking fights with his "White Cousin"--everybody knows that Lemuel is the half-sister of the local landowner who has inherited the tobacco fields that have been in the family for generations--but people don't generally talk about it. Family relations are difficult with a history of racial injustice simmering on the edge of boiling over--and one cousin has had to hightail it North after being accused of interfering with a white woman.
The Curry family is poor, and they have had to face more challenges than such good, God-fearing folks should have to, including a storm that takes the roof off of Grandma Curry's house, but all the members are proud and honest. These characteristics are what get poor Leon whipped on a regular basis. Throughout the week this book covers, Leon tries to cope with the pressure to be good and to get himself to his baptism for his mother's and his twin's sakes, at least. It's a tricky battle, but he comes through, and when the next Sunday rolls round, some of the community and family tensions are resolved.
Moses has created a wonderful twelve-year-old character, a wry observer of the society into which he's been born whose sense of fairness is sometimes outraged but who mostly tries pretty hard to please his family and live up to his father's memory. Like Zora Neale Hurston's novels, this story is worth reading just for the sake of the story, but Moses also gives the reader a window into a Southern rural past with vivid dialogue and details.
One reason Leon keeps getting in trouble is his propensity for picking fights with his "White Cousin"--everybody knows that Lemuel is the half-sister of the local landowner who has inherited the tobacco fields that have been in the family for generations--but people don't generally talk about it. Family relations are difficult with a history of racial injustice simmering on the edge of boiling over--and one cousin has had to hightail it North after being accused of interfering with a white woman.
The Curry family is poor, and they have had to face more challenges than such good, God-fearing folks should have to, including a storm that takes the roof off of Grandma Curry's house, but all the members are proud and honest. These characteristics are what get poor Leon whipped on a regular basis. Throughout the week this book covers, Leon tries to cope with the pressure to be good and to get himself to his baptism for his mother's and his twin's sakes, at least. It's a tricky battle, but he comes through, and when the next Sunday rolls round, some of the community and family tensions are resolved.
Moses has created a wonderful twelve-year-old character, a wry observer of the society into which he's been born whose sense of fairness is sometimes outraged but who mostly tries pretty hard to please his family and live up to his father's memory. Like Zora Neale Hurston's novels, this story is worth reading just for the sake of the story, but Moses also gives the reader a window into a Southern rural past with vivid dialogue and details.
Review of Storm Thief by Chris Wooding
Storm Thief is a sci fi novel whose most notable feature, in my view, is the "probability storm." From time to time, unpredictably of course, the citizens of the islanded city Orokos face violent storms--but instead of thunder and lightning, completely random events occur. In a probability storm, a person may lose his ability to breathe, or the seeds of a terminal illness may be planted, or a cyborg changeling may take the place of a loved granddaughter. It almost goes without saying that alleyways or tunnels under the city may change their direction--no map can be presumed valid after a probability storm.
Orokos is a city built on the remnants of a past civilization that possessed scientific know-how that is inaccessible to its present inhabitants, and artifacts from that earlier civilization are prized. It is a deeply divided city, moreover, with a comfortable middle class civilization ruled by a dictator, the Patrician, who preserves its prosperity and purity and large numbers of ghetto folk, who are tattooed early in life so that they cannot infiltrate the prosperous sections and who must maintain themselves, always hungry, by whatever means they can. In the case of young protagonists Rail and Moa, this means a life of thievery, but like other young thieves, they are under the "protection" and bullying direction of a thief-mistress. When Rail discovers a beautiful artifact from the earlier era in a cache they have been sent to raid, he hides it from both his partner Moa and their mistress--and from then on, their lives are at risk. They are tracked by their most bloodthirsty peers, and then by the secret police as well, once they've taken up with the "golem" Vago, a winged cyborg with phenomenal warrior capabilities.
Vago proves himself most useful against the other element that threatens the middle-class citizens, the Revenants, spirits that possess the bodies of those who can't evade them and then sabotage the technology that provides the city's infrastructure. The Revenants are methodical antagonists, taking over the city one section at a time, and keeping the secret police engaged in constant battles against them. They are interested in Vago--but neither Vago nor his young companions know why, nor do they know anything about his origin or purpose. When the three take up together, it is against Rail's will. He is bent on survival and sometimes wonders why it is that Moa is so important to him that he acts against his own self-preservation at times to protect her. He has no use for the despised winged outcast, but Moa, who remembers a free society beyond the reaches of the Patrician and his police force, recognizes a kindred spirit in the dangerous and unpredictable golem. Together, the three seek to escape death or control by others in a mad dash through the dangerous Revenant-controlled districts, and ultimately they are forced into difficult choices by the secret police.
Major themes in the novel are the importance of kindness, even when people are forced into situations that threaten their survival; the dangers of prosperity and the inescapability of human nature; and possibilities for rebirth--as individuals and as societies. In the era of the "war on terrorism," it is hard to avoid drawing some political comparisons between the have/have-not social division, with its tattooing and persecution of the have-nots and the haves' fear and loathing of the have-nots, and contemporary Western societies' attitude toward the Other. The pace speeds up as the characters converge and plot elements set in motion resolve with the mother of all probability storms, when it becomes difficult to guess what will be taken from them, what restored by the mythical "storm thief."
Orokos is a city built on the remnants of a past civilization that possessed scientific know-how that is inaccessible to its present inhabitants, and artifacts from that earlier civilization are prized. It is a deeply divided city, moreover, with a comfortable middle class civilization ruled by a dictator, the Patrician, who preserves its prosperity and purity and large numbers of ghetto folk, who are tattooed early in life so that they cannot infiltrate the prosperous sections and who must maintain themselves, always hungry, by whatever means they can. In the case of young protagonists Rail and Moa, this means a life of thievery, but like other young thieves, they are under the "protection" and bullying direction of a thief-mistress. When Rail discovers a beautiful artifact from the earlier era in a cache they have been sent to raid, he hides it from both his partner Moa and their mistress--and from then on, their lives are at risk. They are tracked by their most bloodthirsty peers, and then by the secret police as well, once they've taken up with the "golem" Vago, a winged cyborg with phenomenal warrior capabilities.
Vago proves himself most useful against the other element that threatens the middle-class citizens, the Revenants, spirits that possess the bodies of those who can't evade them and then sabotage the technology that provides the city's infrastructure. The Revenants are methodical antagonists, taking over the city one section at a time, and keeping the secret police engaged in constant battles against them. They are interested in Vago--but neither Vago nor his young companions know why, nor do they know anything about his origin or purpose. When the three take up together, it is against Rail's will. He is bent on survival and sometimes wonders why it is that Moa is so important to him that he acts against his own self-preservation at times to protect her. He has no use for the despised winged outcast, but Moa, who remembers a free society beyond the reaches of the Patrician and his police force, recognizes a kindred spirit in the dangerous and unpredictable golem. Together, the three seek to escape death or control by others in a mad dash through the dangerous Revenant-controlled districts, and ultimately they are forced into difficult choices by the secret police.
Major themes in the novel are the importance of kindness, even when people are forced into situations that threaten their survival; the dangers of prosperity and the inescapability of human nature; and possibilities for rebirth--as individuals and as societies. In the era of the "war on terrorism," it is hard to avoid drawing some political comparisons between the have/have-not social division, with its tattooing and persecution of the have-nots and the haves' fear and loathing of the have-nots, and contemporary Western societies' attitude toward the Other. The pace speeds up as the characters converge and plot elements set in motion resolve with the mother of all probability storms, when it becomes difficult to guess what will be taken from them, what restored by the mythical "storm thief."
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
CCCC, New Orleans, 4/2-4/5: Jed Horne and Chris Rose
Jed Horne is an editor at the Times-Picayune, one of those heroic newspapermen who stuck around New Orleans when his paper's offices were under water and wrote about the impact of Katrina. He subsequently wrote a book that's been called the best book written about Katrina, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City. If you want to check out his Web site, you'll find it at http://jedhorne.com/. I'm seriously thinking about using his book in a class next year, maybe ENG 101 or PDP 150, even though it's over 400 pages long! Take a look at the reviews posted at Amazon.com. I know you'll want to read it.
In his speech at the convention, Horne discussed the media misrepresentations of New Orleans in the hurricane's aftermath and scathingly dismissed the scanty efforts of the administration and the Corps of Engineers, efforts that have failed to revitalize the city's economy, restore some measure of livability to the most thoroughly devastated areas, or protect the city from future storms. He compared New Orleans' flood and hurricane defenses, at this date as the third hurricane season after Katrina rapidly approaches, with the new protective measures taken by the Dutch after they suffered devastating flooding in 1953, saying that they cannot believe how little has been done to improve on--or even restore--New Orleans' protection.
Furthermore, one can't help but conclude that to take a pseudo-objective stance in reporting the struggles and sorrows of New Orleans' people as they sought to re-establish their lives is to be complicit in preserving a hierarchy that privileges white middle-class people at the expense of poor people of color. Do we have an obligation to take some kind of action? I think so. Not only Horne, but the Louisiana State U professor who introduced him, Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, expressed appreciation of the private efforts and initiatives to relieve suffering. It is students like you--when alternative spring breaks take them or you south to build houses for people who need help--that give me faith. Horne expressed his disappointment in the current Presidential campaign for its lack of attention to New Orleans' plight--except for John Edwards' brief campaign that started and ended in the city. He--and some of the attendees--also emphasized the need for bearing witness, for telling what is going on, persistently reminding lawmakers of the untenable situation that has left many families disrupted or in limbo.
This presentation made me think about the great power of the written word to shape our thinking and, I hope, move us to action.
My title mentions Chris Rose. I bought his book, 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, at one of the shops where I looked for a gift for my daughter Natalie, and I read about half of it during my long journey homeward (lots of time sitting around airports, maybe 2-1/2 hours of actual flight time, and 2 hours' driving time after we got into Richmond). Rose is another Times-Picayune writer, who collected and self-published a number of his post-Katrina columns. The book went through multiple printings and sold 65,000 copies before Simon & Schuster offered to publish it. This book has the raw immediacy of day-by-day reactions to the destruction that Rose saw around him. Having safely evacuated his wife and three small children to his parents' house in the DC suburbs, Rose went back and daily looked at his city and wrote about it poignantly, vividly, often bitterly. His columns, taken together in this book, memorably depict the landscape and the emotions of residents whose city, they feared, would never be restored to the city they had loved. This is still true, of course.
If you haven't read much about Katrina, I urge you to. While there is much to spark sadness in these books, I hope that these books can also move you to civic action. Our first step to being better citizens and advocates of policies that heal and restore is to be informed. And I believe passionately in the power of the written word--whether it's addressed to Congressmen or survivors or church groups, anyone who can do something to make a difference in the lives people lead daily.
In his speech at the convention, Horne discussed the media misrepresentations of New Orleans in the hurricane's aftermath and scathingly dismissed the scanty efforts of the administration and the Corps of Engineers, efforts that have failed to revitalize the city's economy, restore some measure of livability to the most thoroughly devastated areas, or protect the city from future storms. He compared New Orleans' flood and hurricane defenses, at this date as the third hurricane season after Katrina rapidly approaches, with the new protective measures taken by the Dutch after they suffered devastating flooding in 1953, saying that they cannot believe how little has been done to improve on--or even restore--New Orleans' protection.
Furthermore, one can't help but conclude that to take a pseudo-objective stance in reporting the struggles and sorrows of New Orleans' people as they sought to re-establish their lives is to be complicit in preserving a hierarchy that privileges white middle-class people at the expense of poor people of color. Do we have an obligation to take some kind of action? I think so. Not only Horne, but the Louisiana State U professor who introduced him, Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, expressed appreciation of the private efforts and initiatives to relieve suffering. It is students like you--when alternative spring breaks take them or you south to build houses for people who need help--that give me faith. Horne expressed his disappointment in the current Presidential campaign for its lack of attention to New Orleans' plight--except for John Edwards' brief campaign that started and ended in the city. He--and some of the attendees--also emphasized the need for bearing witness, for telling what is going on, persistently reminding lawmakers of the untenable situation that has left many families disrupted or in limbo.
This presentation made me think about the great power of the written word to shape our thinking and, I hope, move us to action.
My title mentions Chris Rose. I bought his book, 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, at one of the shops where I looked for a gift for my daughter Natalie, and I read about half of it during my long journey homeward (lots of time sitting around airports, maybe 2-1/2 hours of actual flight time, and 2 hours' driving time after we got into Richmond). Rose is another Times-Picayune writer, who collected and self-published a number of his post-Katrina columns. The book went through multiple printings and sold 65,000 copies before Simon & Schuster offered to publish it. This book has the raw immediacy of day-by-day reactions to the destruction that Rose saw around him. Having safely evacuated his wife and three small children to his parents' house in the DC suburbs, Rose went back and daily looked at his city and wrote about it poignantly, vividly, often bitterly. His columns, taken together in this book, memorably depict the landscape and the emotions of residents whose city, they feared, would never be restored to the city they had loved. This is still true, of course.
If you haven't read much about Katrina, I urge you to. While there is much to spark sadness in these books, I hope that these books can also move you to civic action. Our first step to being better citizens and advocates of policies that heal and restore is to be informed. And I believe passionately in the power of the written word--whether it's addressed to Congressmen or survivors or church groups, anyone who can do something to make a difference in the lives people lead daily.
CCCC, New Orleans, 4/2-4/5: Peter Elbow et al.
As I've promised my Teaching Writing students, I'm going to devote some blog posts to the conference that I attended last week, the Conference on College Composition & Communication, which operates within the larger professional organization, the National Council of Teachers of Writing. I came back really energized and newly inspired by a number of conference sessions, and I'd like to report and reflect on them.
Peter Elbow is one of the "stars" in the college composition field. His most famous book is Writing Without Teachers, and one of his most significant contributions is the practice of freewriting, which he believed in 1973 would help writers discover their true voices. I am a believer in freewriting, and in recent years, I've found that students all too often lack opportunities and time to just write without pressure, so I incorporate some freewriting into just about every class I teach.
Another of his important ideas, though, was addressed in the appendix of that ground-breaking book, and is titled "The Doubting Game and the Believing Game--An Analysis of the Intellectual Enterprise." In that essay, he discussed two kinds of intellectual activity (the "games") that we can bring to arguments: we can question and challenge them, the standard form that academic critical thinking takes; or we can try on the ideas we encounter, try to appreciate the writer's or speaker's argument as though it were our own, try to truly understand the writer's thinking--finding reasons for believing as he or she does. Elbow says that when we affirm, we can correct any misunderstanding "by affirming, believing, not-arguing. Your two possible mistakes are blindness or projection" (165): we either miss what's there or read into the argument some meaning other than the intended one.
Now, using the believing game in critical thinking, as Elbow has been doing recently, gives us an empathic alternative to challenging and questioning with the intent to find flaws in arguments. It's a practice worthy of those who want to make the world a better place, in my opinion.
Let's consider how this might work in our classes--as students and as teachers. Let's say we encounter an idea we disagree with when we are students in a class. Does Elbow ask us to accept uncritically what we disagree with, to be good little robots instead of real students? No, but he might ask us to consider the idea carefully and try to understand it instead of dismissing it because we disagree with it. He would tell us that playing the believing game would prevent our missing or misinterpreting something in the argument. As teachers of writing, we might encounter a sentence or an idea in a student's text that we feel compelled to dismiss--but are we sure we're reading it as the student meant it? If we use the believing game, we try to think as the student is thinking, to understand where he or she is coming from--and we may find that our initial reading of the sentence or idea was wrong, that we missed or misinterpreted something. (I can't tell you how many times I've caught myself in a misreading of a student text over the years! I shudder to think how many times I haven't caught my misreading!)
So . . . here's a vastly oversimplified take on Peter Elbow's comments at the conference. I'd like to add that Nathaniel Teich gave an intellectual history of what Elbow calls the believing game, finding precedents for it over several centuries of Western thought, with a special emphasis on the dialogic, empathetic elements, linking it with Rogerian therapy. One of my favorite teacher-writers, Mary Rose O'Reilly, had written a paper that was read by someone else at the conference, who takes the "game" and students' critical thinking efforts seriously and argued for creating a "contemplative space" for students' struggles with new ideas, telling us our job as teachers it to protect that contemplative space. (Again, I fear I'm being very reductive here.) Finally, Patricia Bizzell, who this year received the highest award this organization can give for lifetime achievement, discussed the way that emotions keep insisting on intruding into arguments--even academic argument that we profess is emotion-free. She said we need to come to terms with emotion, rather than pretend it isn't a part of the positions we hold and the arguments we advance for those positions.
This was a very stimulating and thought-provoking session, and I'm very glad that I attended it.
To my Teaching Writing students--you should read Writing without Teachers.
Peter Elbow is one of the "stars" in the college composition field. His most famous book is Writing Without Teachers, and one of his most significant contributions is the practice of freewriting, which he believed in 1973 would help writers discover their true voices. I am a believer in freewriting, and in recent years, I've found that students all too often lack opportunities and time to just write without pressure, so I incorporate some freewriting into just about every class I teach.
Another of his important ideas, though, was addressed in the appendix of that ground-breaking book, and is titled "The Doubting Game and the Believing Game--An Analysis of the Intellectual Enterprise." In that essay, he discussed two kinds of intellectual activity (the "games") that we can bring to arguments: we can question and challenge them, the standard form that academic critical thinking takes; or we can try on the ideas we encounter, try to appreciate the writer's or speaker's argument as though it were our own, try to truly understand the writer's thinking--finding reasons for believing as he or she does. Elbow says that when we affirm, we can correct any misunderstanding "by affirming, believing, not-arguing. Your two possible mistakes are blindness or projection" (165): we either miss what's there or read into the argument some meaning other than the intended one.
Now, using the believing game in critical thinking, as Elbow has been doing recently, gives us an empathic alternative to challenging and questioning with the intent to find flaws in arguments. It's a practice worthy of those who want to make the world a better place, in my opinion.
Let's consider how this might work in our classes--as students and as teachers. Let's say we encounter an idea we disagree with when we are students in a class. Does Elbow ask us to accept uncritically what we disagree with, to be good little robots instead of real students? No, but he might ask us to consider the idea carefully and try to understand it instead of dismissing it because we disagree with it. He would tell us that playing the believing game would prevent our missing or misinterpreting something in the argument. As teachers of writing, we might encounter a sentence or an idea in a student's text that we feel compelled to dismiss--but are we sure we're reading it as the student meant it? If we use the believing game, we try to think as the student is thinking, to understand where he or she is coming from--and we may find that our initial reading of the sentence or idea was wrong, that we missed or misinterpreted something. (I can't tell you how many times I've caught myself in a misreading of a student text over the years! I shudder to think how many times I haven't caught my misreading!)
So . . . here's a vastly oversimplified take on Peter Elbow's comments at the conference. I'd like to add that Nathaniel Teich gave an intellectual history of what Elbow calls the believing game, finding precedents for it over several centuries of Western thought, with a special emphasis on the dialogic, empathetic elements, linking it with Rogerian therapy. One of my favorite teacher-writers, Mary Rose O'Reilly, had written a paper that was read by someone else at the conference, who takes the "game" and students' critical thinking efforts seriously and argued for creating a "contemplative space" for students' struggles with new ideas, telling us our job as teachers it to protect that contemplative space. (Again, I fear I'm being very reductive here.) Finally, Patricia Bizzell, who this year received the highest award this organization can give for lifetime achievement, discussed the way that emotions keep insisting on intruding into arguments--even academic argument that we profess is emotion-free. She said we need to come to terms with emotion, rather than pretend it isn't a part of the positions we hold and the arguments we advance for those positions.
This was a very stimulating and thought-provoking session, and I'm very glad that I attended it.
To my Teaching Writing students--you should read Writing without Teachers.
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