Mr. Brame's Blog

The Great Gatsby Book Drive

2012-02-09T08:15:00.002-06:00

Do you have an old copy of The Great Gatsby lying around? Here's what you can do with it, Old Sport.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I teach in an inner-city school where students do not have enough access to the books that they needs. And, if you went to high school in this country, the chances are high that you had to buy a copy of The Great Gatsby somewhere along the way. Therefore, I am asking you to have a look at your bookshelf or in your attic and see if you still have a copy of The Great Gatsby lying around.

If you would like to donate your copy to students who will definitely put it to use, please mail it to me at:

c/o Mr. Brame

1254 Jefferson

Memphis, TN 38104

Include a note to my students. They are always appreciative of strangers who show them generosity, and they would love to hear from you.

I began teaching The Great Gatsby four years ago, when a colleague of mine found 25 copies of the novel in a box in a storage closet. At that time, I was teaching three different courses without a single book. (I spent hours down at the copy machine, running off packets of my old texts and creating ancillary materials as I went along. It was exhausting.) The choice to teach this novel was a no-brainer. Here were books! What else was I going to do with them but hand them out?

At first, I was quite apprehensive about how the novel would go over. How were my students going to relate to the travails of these ultra-rich whiny white people in 1920s New York? But I should not have worried. Gatsby was a smashing success that first year, and it has only become more popular each year I teach it.

I show my students the 1974 version of the movie, starring Robert Redford, while we read it. (Don't judge me on this. You and I know the movie is bad, but they love it.) We do a research project on the 1920s, some of them learn to do the Charleston, and at the end the students make facebook pages for the characters. Lots of the kids start calling me "Old Sport."

We will start reading the book on March 19, when we return from spring break. (Spring is the best time of the year to read Gatsby, I am convinced.) I am still using those same 25 copies that my colleague found four years ago. We have enough for each student in class--barely--but we don't have enough for any of them to take them home to read on their own. And that's where you can help, Old Sport.

January Reading

2012-02-03T08:13:00.000-06:00

Here's what I read in January

It's hard to believe that I've been writing these what I read this month posts for an entire year now, but I have. Not a lot of people read these, but they have focused my reading and kept me disciplined more than anything since I was assigned my last term paper. So long live the monthly posts!

January 2012 started off slowly. I picked up my wife's copy of The Once and Future King, by T.H. White, which has always been one of her favorites. I thought I'd give it a shot.

At the same time that I started it, I was collecting and organizing books for the library I am creating at school (more on that in the near future.) At the bottom of one of the bags was a copy of The Sword in the Stone, the first book in The Once and Future King. It had a much cooler cover and was a more-manageable 250 pages (The Once and Future King tops 600), so I went for it.

It was impossible for me to get far into this book. I was hoping for a captivating recounting of Arthurian legend, but what I got was a rather boring boy Arthur and a Merlyn who annoyed me with everything he did. (Except for the falconry. That part was cool.) The anachronistic touches that T.H. White adds to his narration came off as irritating rather than clever, and pretty soon my interest in the book stalled. I didn't want to give up on the book, though, as I had already invested quite a bit of time. But one day I caught myself passing over The Sword in the Stone in favor of a Rachel Ray magazine. When you find yourself doing that, folks, it means you have officially lost interest in your book and need to pick a new one.

Which brings us to the first books that I read in the new year.

1. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

Back when I was teaching my mythology class, we would do a unit on the hero's journey. I took Campbell's idea of the monomyth (pictured below), pared it down to seven steps so that my students could grasp it, and then used it as a framework to teach the myths of Hercules, Perseus, and, ultimately, Pinocchio. It was a successful part of a successful class, but I did not know anything more of Joseph Campbell.

When this book appeared in my pile of donated books, I snatched it right up. I was surprised to learn that Joseph Campbell was not, in fact, a Victorian Englishman, as I had imagined him. It turns out he was American! And he lived until 1987!

This book is a conversation between Campbell and public-television mainstay Bill Moyers, which was televised in the mid 1980s and is readily available on youtube. These two men have an extended conversation about myths, symbols, archetypes, stories, rituals, dreams, and the consciousness that connects us all.

Reading this book, I assumed that it was a literary collaboration between the two, and that they probably spent a long time working out their questions and answers, revising their work, and editing it until it sparkled. I mean, there was no way that two human beings could actually speak so eloquently and cogently about such a topic, and at such great lengths.

But then I watched the videos . That's them talking, and this book is just a transcript of the conversation. Brilliant.

So, what is this book about? This book addresses the larger questions. Why are we here? What is the point? Why do we do the painful things that we do? What is the meaning behind the everyday rituals of our lives? How can one live blissfully? What are all of these stories about? What is life and what is death? The Power of Myth pulls back the curtain, to use a tired expression, and shows you the underlying forms that surround us, whether it be the eagle on the back of the dollar bill, the cross hanging in your church, or the tattoo on your barista's wrist. It is all linked.

I am not a spiritual person, and I look for my answers in a library, not a church. The Power of Myth showed me that my intellectual efforts were not different from other people's spiritual efforts; they are, in fact, the same. The intellectual quest is a spiritual quest. There is a religious text that you can trust wholeheartedly, Campbell tells us. There is a self-help text that tells you all you need to know about yourself. And that text is simply the entirety of human literature. It's right there, waiting for you discover it.

If all religious fundamentalists could read this book, the world would be a saner place.

Here is the last thing I will say about this book, and then I will leave it. Think back to Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana's friends come to visit him while he's teaching his class. You know the scene. There's the girl with the words "LOVE" and "YOU" written on her eyelids.

So then class ends, and Indy's friends start telling him about the medallion that they're looking for, and all of a sudden, Indy's like Wait! I have this awesome book that tells you everything you need to know! It has all the answers!

And then he goes to his shelf and pulls down this enormous leather-bound book and flips through it, and then the creepy music starts to play in the background, and he opens up to a page with a terrifying lithograph in it, and he starts telling them about the Staff of Ra and how it can melt people's faces.

Remember that scene? Well, I always really, really wanted that book. And the closest thing I've ever found to it is The Power of Myth.

2. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

I read this book. It was not so bad, I guess.

Bow Tie Tuesday

2012-02-01T10:29:00.000-06:00

Real men wear bow ties.

The bow tie is such a risky article of clothing. Wear it right and you look urbane and debonair; wear it wrong and you look like a clown. About six months ago I was feeling sartorially frisky and decided to buy one. I ordered this one off amazon.com, and my wife picked up another from Urban Outfitters (pictured above.)

Of course, I had no idea how to tie the darn thing. Even The Art of Manliness, which has a wonderful tutorial on tying regular neck ties (I'm a half windsor man, myself), was unable to help. I had to check out a few youtube videos, none of which was really satisfactory, before I could get my tie looking somewhat normal.

Next came the hardest part--going out in public. Have I mentioned that I am a high school teacher, surrounded by 800 wise-cracking smart-aleck kids? 'Cause I am. Nevertheless, I walked into the building one Tuesday sporting my new bow tie.

The first kid who saw me complimented me. I told him "Thanks." So did the next and the next. I walked through the halls with my chin held high, and bow tie Tuesday was born.

These days, lots of the students and faculty (male and female) wear bow ties each Tuesday. Above is a picture from yesterday of a few of them showing off their stuff with Mr. Sillah and myself. Other students were disappointed to hear that they missed the photo shoot and pleaded with me to bring my camera to school next week as well.

So, to all of you young men--it's time to celebrate your maleness. Remember what Mr. Brame teaches you:

Real men read books.
Real men write poetry.
Real men wear bow ties.

A Poem for Every Day

2012-01-30T14:46:00.000-06:00

Take a look at the Library of Congress's Poetry 180 project.

I understand well that many people--maybe even you--don't like poetry. They see poetry as tedious and evasive, something that their teachers made them read in class many years ago for reasons that they never understood. Trust me; I get it. I know the feeling of staring at a dense poem, reading stanza after stanza, thinking, "Get to the point already."

But it shouldn't be that way. If you dislike poems and poetry, please find it in your heart to give them another chance. Visit the Library of Congress's Poetry 180 project, which is designed to feature a poem for every day of the school year. It is sponsored by Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States. (Quick! Can you name our current Poet Laureate? It's this guy.)

Τhe 180 poems on Poetry 180 are chosen because they are contemporary and well-written, and because they do not need a master's degree in comparative literature to suss out. And with titles like "Love Poem With Toast," "Bringing My Son to the Police Station to be Fingerprinted," and "How to Change a Frog Into a Prince," it won't take you long to find a favorite.

Below are two of my favorites. "Forgiving Buckner," is, of course, about baseball, and therefore should surprise no one who has ever read this blog. (We read this poem in class once, and I showed the the footage of the famous ground ball to my students. One of the girls squealed, "He's just standing there!")

The Buckner of the title is Bill Buckner whose famous error cost the Boston Red Sox a decisive game in the World Series.

Forgiving Buckner

John Hodgen

The world is always rolling between our legs.
It comes for us, dribbler, slow roller,
humming its goat song, easy as pie.

We spit in our gloves, bend our stiff knees,
keep it in front of us, our fathers' advice,
but we miss it every time, its physic, its science,
and it bleeds on through, blue streak, heart sore,
to the four-leaf clovers deep in right field.

The runner scores, knight in white armor,
the others out leaping, bumptious, gladhanding,
your net come up empty, Jonah again.
Even the dance of the dead won't come near you,
heart in your throat, holy of holies,
the oh of your mouth as the stone rolls away,
as if it had come from before you were born
to roll past your life to the end of the world,
till the world comes around again, gathering steam,
heading right for us again and again,
faith of our fathers, world without end.

I also like this one, which may or may not be about sex.

Grammar

Tony Hoagland

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

Thoughts on John Updike, Two Years After His Death

2012-01-27T08:00:00.000-06:00

John Updike died two years ago today, at the age of 76. I was teaching AP comp at the time, and I had recently finished teaching my students "A & P" and "Deaths of Distant Friends" when I saw the news of his death. I went out in the hall and saw one of my students, Lasey, passing between classes.

"Lasey, John Updike died," I said.

"Who's John Updike?" she asked.

Updike was writing until his final days, and his last book, Endpoint, includes "Requiem," his last poem. It was also published in the New York Times on the day after his death.

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

For no good reason whatever, here are some of my favorite works by John Updike, arranged by genre.

Novels:
Rabbit, Redux
Rabbit is Rich

Short Fiction:
"A & P,"
"Death of Distant Friends,"
"Still of Some Use"

Poem:
"Capacity"

Non-Fiction:
"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," naturally

Children's Books:
A Child's Calendar

Jay McInerney, Novelist

2012-01-13T08:30:00.000-06:00

Jay McInerney is 57 years old today, which means that, yes, you are getting old.

Jay McInerny turns 57 today, and if you think that that just can't be, please keep in mind that Simon LeBon and Belinda Carlisle are just behind him at 53. The 80s became the new 70s sometime around the millenium; at this point, they're more like the new 60s.

Every hack who has ever had a crack at J-Mac has gone the easy route and compared him to Brett Easton Ellis. It's just too obvious and easy. To prove it, here is my comparison of Ellis and McInerny.

If asked what author best captured the overkill of the Reagan years--both the giddiness of its unlimited possibilities and the despair of its rapacious excesses--many people would point to Brett Easton Ellis. You know Ellis's work, of course. Books like American Psycho and Less than Zero became huge bestsellers, then big-budget movies, because people liked to be reminded of a 1980s that never quite was, with its unchecked greed, cocaine use, and nail-gun-related murders.

If you wanted a more human and humane look at the 80s, though, you could do worse than Jay McInerny. His sweet spot of 1984-1988 is more or less contemporary with Ellis's, but I prefer McInerny's rounded humanity to Ellis's bleak nihilism. At first I was surprised to learn that McInerney was a student of Raymond Carver, my favorite fiction writer of the decade, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Like Carver, McInerny is able to capture the humanity of the character in the middle of the maelstrom, and each of the three books below concern main characters who are trying to hold things together while their lives fall apart.

Here are my three favorites by McInerny, none of which I have read for quite some time.

1. Bright Lights, Big City

I did not read Bright Lights, Big City until approximately 2005, and I was a little underwhelmed by it. Being his most famous work, I expected more. Still, it's a sad, amusing look at the best and fastest way for someone to wreck his life.

It's also famous for its use of the second-person point of view, which McInerny is able to pull off without being too distracting. It's one of the rare works of fiction that does this and does it well, and it's always good for an illustration when you are an English teacher. Here's a look at the first paragraph:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are a a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Loung. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not.

2. Story of My Life

As long as we're on the topic of infrequently-used fiction techniques, let's take the practice of writing from the point of view of the other gender. Story of My Life is told from the point of view of Allison Poole, whose smart-cracking narration drives this novel along at a steady pace. Allison wants to be an actor, but she's not doing too much acting. As the 1988 review in People magazine states, "[Allison] is halfheartedly studying acting but wholeheartedly avoiding doing anything interesting."

Again, I haven't read this one in years, but I remember it being a fresh and charming read.

3. The Last of The Savages

The last book I will discuss is The Last of the Savages, which was released in 1997. What I remember most about Savages was its connections to my home of Memphis and, more specifically, the suburb of Germantown, Tennessee where I grew up. I can say that this is the only novel I have ever read that is set, however briefly, in Germantown, and the image of a tony Germantown home being firebombed because it is the scene of an inter-racial love affair is one that I can't forget.

I also remember that one scene takes place at a super-hip 1970s party, attended by Alex Chilton and William Eggleston. The scene was not all that convincing, but it sure sounded like fun.

Last of the Savages was more a more sweeping story than his novels from the 80s, and more personal, as well. I remember the final, touching conclusion of the main character, but I'm not going to tell you what it was. You should read it for yourself.

Wikipedia-free research!

Sources Cited:

Vespa, Mary. "Picks and Pans Review: Story of MyLife." People 3 October 1988.

"Jay McInerney." Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Vol. 18. Detroit: Gale, 1996.Gale Biography In Context. Web. 12 Jan. 2012.

A Poem For Steelers Fans

2012-01-10T10:55:00.001-06:00

Emily Dickinson knows how we feel today.

It's been two days since the game, and many of us are still trying to get back to normal. I'm back at work, trying not to think about it, my feet going around mechanically, in a "wooden way." I have no desire to talk about what happened Sunday night, but I would like to share with you a poem from Emily Dickinson, who knew a thing or two about pain.

After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes

After great pain, a formal feeling comes--

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--

The stiff heart questions was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round--

Of ground, or Air, or Ought--

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone--

This is the Hour of Lead--

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--

First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go.

-Emily Dickinson

December Reading

2012-01-02T08:30:00.000-06:00

Here's what I read in December.

1. Readicide, Kelly Gallagher

I have often heard teachers--teachers!--tell their students "I have never been much of a reader." I've heard them argue against the need for textbooks in schools. They really do! Then they use me as an example of someone who likes to read a lot, as if I am some sort of freak or exception to the rules. And they do this in front of their students. (These are teachers! Have I mentioned that yet?)

So, I read Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It, by Kelly Gallagher, and this book reassured me that no, I am not a freak or an exception. Remember what Ringo told us in Hard Day's Night? "Books are good," he said; and he was telling the truth.

I like to think of myself as a good teacher, one who values and loves books and tries to show that to my students every school day, but this book really chastised me for being part of the problem.

There are some problems in our schools that I already understand, namely:

Reading is undervalued in our schools today
There are not enough books in my school
The pressure to prepare students for standardized testing is far too strong
Leading a class in silent, sustained reading is perceived as lazy teaching, when it should not be.

But here are some things I had not considered:

Teachers cause students to hate reading by giving them difficult texts, then expecting them to understand them on their own.
Teachers should not scoff at students for reading pulpy, trashy, or "less-than-literary" texts. Students have to find reading enjoyable when they are a teenager, or else they will not become life-long readers.
It's okay to teach a novel without a hundred pages of analysis, quizzes, notes, reflections, and essay questions. Students need to lose themselves in a text, which cannot happen if a teacher interrupts them every few minutes to assess their learning.
Schools expect less reading from poorer students, students who probably read below their grade level. Therefore, their reading level stays low.
Schools expect more reading from wealthier students, who probably read at or above their grade level. Therefore, their reading level gets higher.
My job as a teacher is to give them something interesting to read, a place to read, and a time to read.

These are just a few of the revelations that Readicide offered. Since I finished it, my students and I have done a lot of reading at our desks.

2. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

When we were in seventh or eighth grade, my buddy Hayden came across a copy of Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret. The girls in our class were scandalized that there was a boy in their class reading this book, and I think they actually petitioned the teacher to get him to stop reading it. Being a dude, Hayden didn't see what the big deal was, and found the whole hubub to be amusing.

(An aside: here's Hayden and me, around seventh grade, photographed with Atlanta Brave great Dale Murphy.)

Reading The Handmaiden's Tale, I felt a little self-conscious, like I was in seventh grade again, reading a book that was not meant for guys like me. It's a frightening look at what happens once women's reproductive rights are politicized, commodified, and exploited by a patriarchal right-wing society run amuck. If you think I felt a little bit uncomfortable reading this one, you are right.

But The Handmaiden's Tale is a fantastic book, and the story of Offred's captivity is resonant and nightmarish. It is entirely relevant these days, when most Catholic hospitals refuse to give emergency contraception, we have a referendum in Mississippi claiming life begins at conception, and when Barbara Bachmann speaks out against HPV vaccines for young girls. It takes a vicious imagination like Atwood's to show us just how dangerous these ideas can be.

So, ahem, yeah. I tend not to speak out on issues such as these. I just turn up my Bikini Kill records and let someone else do the arguing. There's always someone louder than me anyway.

3. The Postmortal by Drew Magary

I love Drew Magary. You may know him from his hilarious entries on Deadspin or Kissing Suzy Kolber, or maybe you follow him on twitter either on his Drew Magary account or his Drew Magary ALL CAPS rant account, WHICH HE TYPES IN ALL CAPS. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't read something that he has written, and his thoughts often become my thoughts. In fact, it's rare that a day goes by that I don't ask somebody, "Did you see what Drew said?" (Usually, the person I am speaking to has already seen it.)

So, it would give me no pleasure to disparage The Postmortal, his first novel, which is quite bad. It's earnest and imaginative, but it's still just bad. But if there's one good thing that you can say about Drew Magary as a novelist, it's that he sure is a hilarious blogger.

Keep up the good work, Big Daddy Drew.

What I Read, 2011

2011-12-30T22:14:00.000-06:00

Looking back on a year of reading.

Around this part of December, you'l hear some people say things like, "I hate these end-of-the year lists." I think those people are crazy. End-of-year lists are great, and I wanted to contribute to the glut with one of my own!

(Also great? The in memoriam part of The Oscars. It's the only reason to watch, really.)

I read thirty books this year. That's it--just thirty I would have thought that my grand total would have been much higher. There are some blogs I have read about bloggers who have read as many as 125 books this year alone, which is not sane. Where does one find the time to read 125 books in 365 days? I think those people must be a little bit off.

I thought about giving awards to these books, such as Funniest Book, or Most Disturbing, or Most Likely to Make Me Want to Quit Reading, but I realized that that is a horrible idea for many reasons, and that I wouldn't want to subject any of my readers to it. But one of the reasons that an approach like that wouldn't fly is because I read Infinite Jest this summer, and that book would just monopolize any attempts of handing out awards. So, if we pretended to do that, this is what it might look like.

GRAND AWARD WINNER: INFINITE JEST!

Winner of:

Best Book!
Funniest Book!

Longest Book!

Most Moving Book!

Heaviest Book!

Book That Made My Family Hate Me The Most!

So, you see how that would be a disaster.

Instead, I am taking another approach. We will get to the pie charts (that's right, pie charts!) in just a moment, but first I'd like to talk about my five biggest surprises of the year (Infinite Jest excluded. If you would like to read what I thought about Jest, you can do it here.)

Top 5 Surprises of the Year

1. Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

I never would have read this book if it hadn't been recommended to me by my friend, Amy. As I stated in February, it was a shocking and terrifying book, but one I was glad to have read.

2. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

This book was also recommended to me by a friend of mine, Darcy, who is a fan of Ishiguro. I had read Remains of the Day, and was wholly unprepared for this sci-fi, dystopian nightmare. Darcy says that his best novel is When We Were Orphans, which is currently on my to-read list. If you haven't read anything by Ishiguro, what are you waiting for?

3. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

What can you say about Bridey? While I was reading it, I had the sinking fear that this book would never end. Once it was over, though, I counted it among my very favorites, and began annoying my friends and family by starting all of my sentences with, "I say..."

"I say, who do the Steelers play on Sunday?"

My wife and I watched almost all of the BBC miniseries, but right when we were about to get to the last DVD, Netflix went and ruined everything. I say, Netflix!

4. A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

This book is 600 pages long, but I read it in six days. If there were ten more books like it, I would read every last one of them. Bill Bryson is a fantastic writer who is largely responsible for everything I know about science.

(Man, May was a good month for reading!)

5. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Ok, I simply could nto make a list of the biggest surprises of the year without including Jest. Even though I knew I was beginning something huge and important when I started reading it, I was still unprepared for just how massive and meaningful this reading experience was. I will never forget the 34 days I spent on it.

And now for the pie charts!

I learned how to make pie charts on Excel, and so following is a breakdown of the books I read this year in ways that I hope you might find interesting.

In other news from 2011, I read a play this year!

I had a great time reading and blogging in 2011, and I hope I was able to inform or inspire you at least a little bit. Here's to 2012!

BOOKS I READ IN 2011

FICTION

1. A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest Gaines

2. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

3. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

4. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

5. Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker

6. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

7. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

8. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

9. Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow

10. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

11. Into the Great Wide Open by Kevin Canty

12. Little Bee by Chris Cleave

13. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

14. Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

15. Talking to Girls About Duran Duran by Rob Sheffield

16. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

17. The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim

18. The Postmortal, by Drew Magary

19. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

20. Waterland by Graham Swift

21. Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow

NON-FICTION

22. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

23. Ancient Rome (Eyewitness Books)

24. And on Piano... Nicky Hopkins, by Julian Dawson

25. Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting it Right, by Bill Bryson

26. In the Best Interests of Baseball by Andrew Zimbalist

27. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

28. Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It by Kelly Gallagher

29. Talk Show by Dick Cavett

DRAMA

30. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Drew Magary Likes My Hustle

2011-12-20T10:50:00.001-06:00

Here's why you should be jealous of me.

Not only am I reading The Postmortal, Drew Magary's first novel, but I am reading a signed edition of this first novel, in which Magary professes admiration for my hustle, which he refers to as "GREAT." (See image above.)

Here is a photograph of Magary, put online by the man himself, in the moments immediately before he signed my book. He was probably thinking of my hustle even then.

Thanks to Jason, my brother, for getting me such a fantastic gift, and reminding me, and the world, just how great my hustle is.

The Chubby Vegetarian Dishes About His Favorite Author

2011-12-12T12:22:00.000-06:00

This is my best friend Justin, who you may know as The Chubby Vegetarian. He's not just an expert on a brunoise or a bocconcini--he also knows about books! I asked to him to write about a favorite author, story, or poem, and he came up with the essay that follows, "Philip Roth Ruined Fiction."

Philip Roth Ruined Fiction

My reading life was once simple: I read some flimsy lit that friendssuggested, various short stories, and predictably, loved J.D. Salinger. Ithoroughly enjoyed the written word and the escape it provided. This was beforeI was led down a long and confusing road that started with Portnoy’s Complaint.

Quite simply, Philip Roth ruined fiction for me.

Alexander Portnoy, the anti-hero of Philip Roth’s masterpiece,could be a grown-up version of Holden Caulfield, who everyone knows as thewhiny but likable prep-school punk from TheCatcher in the Rye. Both charters seem to want to be understood, and theyboth desire to have a better understanding of themselves. To achieve this, bothPortnoy and Caulfield both talk endlessly to a psychiatric professional abouttheir own perceived realities and maladies. I was comfortable with Portnoy’s Complaint, because it feltfamiliar having already been a fan of Catcher.So I moved on. I wanted more Roth in my life.

I picked up Goodbye,Columbus, Roth’s collection of short stories. “The Conversion of the Jews”may be the most compelling short story ever written. It’s actually a quitesimple story about being ignored and then heard...loudly. It’s a must-read!Roth’s writing is energizing. After Portnoy’sComplaint and Goodbye, Columbus,I knew I was hooked. And that’s when things got weird.

Many of Roth’s adult characters are unlikeable, to say the least.Take Micky Sabbath, the main character in Roth’s 1995 book Sabbath’s Theater, for example. We watch this guy fumble throughhis late-in-life hijinks as he considers whether to go ahead and end it all. Imean this guy is a far cry from the confused but somehow strong young men fromthe first two Roth novels. You had hope that those guys would turn out okay.They certainly weren’t phonies. The prose is so creative and beautifullywritten that the reader cannot help but follow Sabbath down an unfortunate backroad and watch him as he implodes.

Next, I was introduced to the Swede via American Pastoral. He hadeverything going for him, but Roth couldn’t let that last. We are introduced tothe black sheep of the family, his daughter Merry, who helps him fall apart.Parts of the book read like a well-written manual on how to make gloves. Infact, since I read carefully, I’ll bet I could cut and sew you a nice pair ofgloves right now if I had a piece of kid leather in front of me.

Things were not so simple anymore. They were dark, but by thispoint, I had adjusted to Roth’s darkness. I breezed through the Kepesh novels.They seemed somehow lighter. Then OperationShylock did me in. This book is written by Philip Roth about a character named PhilipRoth who is confused for another guy named, you guessed it, Philip Roth.Maddening! I put it down, and then picked it up, and then put it down again.I’ve not read a Roth novel since, although I should give him another shot.

Roth’s prose is so exacting, creative, and exciting that he makesyou care about his unlikeable and strangely flawed characters. He makes everyother book I pick up seem, well, less--less exciting, less revealing, lessriveting. Nowadays, I stick to nonfiction works about Johnny Cash or JoeStrummer. I glean bits of wisdom from books about running and magazines aboutcooking. So, thanks a lot, Phil. You are so good that you make everyone elselook bad.

-Justin Fox Burks

Read more from Justin Fox Burks at thechubbyvegetarian.com, and keep an eye out for his cookbook, which will be on shelves in 2013.

A Visit from the Other Mr. Brame

2011-11-30T21:25:00.001-06:00

That's me with my brother Jason, who dropped by my classroom last week to see what goes on in there. Here's what he had to say about it.

A week ago I had the opportunity to hang out in Aaron’s classroom, meet his students (whattup, Johnnie Taylor’s great niece!) and hear a very informative mini-lecture on Frederick Douglass (seven times). It was a pleasure to observe such a well-structured classroom full of well-behaved and respectful students—I can only hope that when I have a classroom of my own, my students are this well behaved and respectful.

As a future teacher, it was interesting to see how my brother’s presentation became much more fluid, well paced and confident the more times he gave it. It was also illuminating to see how smoothly he drew his students into analyzing the first few pages of Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Freed Slave—his questions expertly guided them to making important connections with the text, applying their background knowledge and understanding in interesting and insightful ways that jump-started their reading. It was a great way to kick off a unit on this book; I would like to observe more in-depth class discussions once students have worked their way through to the end.

It was an honor to visit, and I sincerely look forward to returning. Next time, though, please turn on the heat . . . halfway through lecture number five I looked over and I’m like, “Hey, is that Walt Disney?”

November Reading

2011-11-29T13:18:00.000-06:00

Oh no! Don't you hate the realization that the book you just read and enjoyed was an Oprah Winfrey selection? It just happened to me.

I thank you, Morrissey, for many things, including writing this depressing, depressing song.

If you have read my recent posts, you will know that I spent the first part of November reading Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret. (And you may even know why reading this children's book took me longer than it should have.) But that's not all that I read, of course.

My older brother, Jason, is completing his licensure program at Alverno College in Milwaukee, and has been doing some student teaching recently. One of his assignments was to help lead a class through Richard Wright's "The Man Who Was Almost a Man." I had never read this one before, even though it is often anthologized in high school textbooks, so I decided to give it a shot.

1. "The Man Who Was Almost a Man," by Richard Wright

"The Man Who Was Almost a Man," is a short work that follows Dave, a poor African-American in the deep south, as he goes through a painful maturation process. Dave wants to buy a gun, to prove to himself and the others in his town that he is a man. His parents, of course, think this is a bad idea. Dave buys one nevertheless, takes it out into a field to shoot it off, and begins a horrifying chain of events that leaves him humiliated and alienated from adult society.

2. A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest Gaines

"The Man Who Was Almost a Man" dovetailed nicely into the next novel I read, Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying. I picked this book up because it was the closest thing at hand as I was locking up my classroom for the long Thanksgiving break. Our 10th grade English teacher had taught this one before, and I had about five copies lying around, so it seemed a likely read.

This book and the Wright short story touch on the same themes of what it means to be a male in an unforgiving world of poverty and injustice.The main character, Grant Wiggins, is a teacher in a small, African-American Cajun community in Louisiana. When Jefferson, a man who is not quite Grant's cousin, is sentenced to death for his involvement in a liquor store robbery that goes wrong, Grant is called on to teach the condemned prisoner how to be a man before he faces the electric chair.

But A Lesson Before Dying took it further, questioning the role of a teacher in an unjust society. This novel is not about the death penalty or regret as much as it is about teaching. Teachers like to think of themselves as pretty important people, who do nothing but change the world for the better. Being a teacher, though, is more uncertain than that. We have to punish, chide, sometimes humiliate, and sometimes fail our students. And it's not fun to think that we may be as much a part of the problem as we are the solution. It's as Grant realizes, at the end of the book, "You have to believe to be a teacher." It is sometimes hard to believe.

The lesson in A Lesson Before Dying is pessimistic and cynical, but it happens to be true. This was a wonderful book, and I am looking forward to seeing the film version, starring Don Cheadle and Cicely Tyson.

3. Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw

Reading Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw was a strange, book-free sort of reading experience. As I was driving home from work the other day, listening to my iPod on shuffle, an excerpt from this play popped up. It was delightfully funny and made me want to read the whole thing.

I did a google search for the text of the play, and found it with little trouble. Then, I bought an audio performance of it on iTunes for about $3.50. And there it was. I kicked back in my computer chair, put on the play, and spent the next hour and a half reading along with the actors.

When I was done, I thought it was only right to have a look at some clips of My Fair Lady, which is, of course, a musical, and therefore not a movie that I enjoy or would ever enjoy or even really think about enjoying. But I wanted to give it another shot.

Yeah. I didn't like it.

I needed to brush up on my mythology a little bit afterwards (don't we all), so I went to my copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology to re-read the story of Pygmalion. I found Ovid's version on wikisource (in English and Latin) and read that, too. Over the years, I had forgotten that Pygmalion was the man in the story, not the statue/woman. Also, I'd forgotten the happy ending the myth has (Pygmalion and Galatea seem to live happily ever after); it's a sort of Midas tale in reverse.

Also, I couldn't help remembering a story called "Silver Threads Among The Mold," from an old Vault of Horror from E.C. Comics, which is a gruesome retelling of the the Pygmalion myth, only with a rotting corpse of a woman hidden inside a statue.. I know I have a copy of this in my parents' attic. Perhaps someday I will be able to find it and post clips from it.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

2011-11-21T08:00:00.000-06:00

I don't know much about young adult literature. When I was young, I always read just plain old adult literature. My idea of a good book when I was nine years old was an Ian Fleming Bond novel. I read Stephen King's The Stand in 1988, when I was eleven, when I was supposed to be reading The Princess Bride or whatever else was on my sixth grade reading list. In fact, the first time I ever read The Outsiders was in 2000, when I was getting ready to teach it to a bunch of eighth graders.

I hadn't heard of Brian Selznick or The Invention of Hugo Cabret utnilthis fall at a teacher conference, in which a middle school teacher was going on and on about Wonderstruck, his most recent book. Driving home from work that day or the day after, I passed a sign for an exhibition of Selznick's work at the Dixon Gallery here in Memphis. A few days later, I read a gushing article by Roger Ebert about an advanced copy of Scorcese's Hugo that he had seen, and how this was finally a movie that used 3D to tell a story correctly.

Since the book I had just heard about had instantaneously revealed itself to be an art exhibit and a movie by my second favorite director of all time (here's the first), I thought it would be worth it to go buy a copy.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a book told in both prose and in pictures. The narrative begins not with words, but with a series of pencil drawings of the full moon as it illuminates the streets of Paris. The drawings draw our attention to a solitary boy as he walks along in a train station and disappears into a secret opening in the wall. Like an establishing shot of a movie, the story follows the main character in silence as he goes about his daily routine. Only after a series of dozens of drawings do we get out first words of the novel.

The story is as filmic as it is textual. Rather than have illustrations that illuminate what is going on in the prose, The Invention of Hugo Cabret has illustrations that take over the narrative and leave the words behind. After a few pages of words, the reader gets 20 pages or more of Selznick's drawings, which furthers the plot.

It seems an obvious way to tell a story, but I've never read any book that does it quite like this.

Another thing to know about the book is that it is nearly 600 pages long. As most of these pages are illustrations, it is an effortless read, but its heft (and price--my copy cost $24.99) is formidable.

The story is far-fetched and drives along with an insistent kind of DaVinci Code motor that never stops chugging. There are one or two coincidences that stretch the limit of your imagination, and some of the dialogue is awfully stilted. Still, it has everything a kid could want in a story, and there are enough religious and mythological allusions to keep it interesting for adults.

Give Me My Book Back!

2011-11-17T07:30:00.000-06:00

I was halfway through The Invention of Hugo Cabret when one of my students took my copy.

All the time I was reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the remarkable graphic novel by Brian Selznick, I was thinking, "You know, Aaliyah would love this book."

Aaliyah is a bright student in my sixth period class who makes wonderful pencil drawings in a sketch pad she keeps with her all the time. So I let her see my book when she was done with her work on Wednesday, and the next thing I knew, school was over, all my students were gone, and my book was nowhere to be found.

I ran out into the hallway and asked the other students if anyone had seen her. They just shook their heads. "She's gone," one of them said.

Like one of the characters from the story, she had snatched up a treasured item, and now the authorities were after her!

I went home dejected that night, and had nothing to read.

The next day, she brought me the book back first thing in the morning and told me that she had read about 150 pages of it. There was no way I could take it back without letting her finish, so I made a deal with her. She could keep it for the three-day weekend, but when she brought it back, she'd have to write a review for my blog. She accepted.

Tomorrow, I will post what I thought about this book, but for now, here's what she said:

I took this book from my teacher, Mr. Brame. I took it home with me when he was in the middle of the book. It was totally funny because someone told me that he was looking for me.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret was an awesome book because of the life-like situations. The drawings were also amusing. I love how all the pieces of the puzzle come together as you read along towards the end. The drawings in the book made it exciting and fun. This book tells me to never waste your dreams. This is a small world; you'll never know what will come out of your creations.

-Aaliyah Lucas

The Pixies, Live in Memphis, November 14

2011-11-16T09:41:00.000-06:00

I can't believe I got to see the Pixies play live.

The first musical acts that I got into that swam away from the mainstream were Leonard Cohen, The Velvet Underground, and The Pixies. I'll split up the credit for this between the film Pump Up The Volume and the influence of my friend Hayden, both of whom deserve it. For the first time in my life, when I was about fourteen, I set aside my Rod Stewart and Aerosmith records for something that sounded decidedly different.

(I remember standing at the Cats Records store in Germantown, Tennessee, trying to decide what to buy Hayden's for Christmas, 1991. In one hand, I held Lynyrd Skynyrd's greatest hits. In the other hand, I'm Your Fan, a tribute album to Leonard Cohen with tracks from R.E.M., The Pixies, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I didn't buy the Skynyrd.)

The problem with our timing was that we were getting to know a band that was in the last days of their existence. When I really fell hard for them, in 1994, after buying Surfer Rosa, they were already part of the past.

But the Pixies came to the Orpheum Theatre this Monday night, and Renee and I were not going to miss our chance to see them. In the hours before the show, I got an intriguing, mysterious tip from one of my facebook friends about where Kim Deal was likely to be having dinner. I instantaneously turned from a responsible 34-year old adult to a star-stuck teenager, and Renee and I decided to make reservations at the same restaurant in the hopes of catching a glimpse of her.

We didn't see Kim Deal there, but we did have a fantastic night at the show. The Pixies played Doolittle in its entirety (including the B-sides), plus an encore of greatest hits from their other albums. Renee came away with a complete understanding of my Kim Deal admiration, and we both went to bed with our ears ringing.

Great job, Pixies!

The Pixies put out five records from 1987-1991. Here are my favorite tracks of each album.

1. "The Holiday Song," Come On Pilgrim (1987)

2. "Bone Machine," Surfer Rosa (1988)

3. "Hey!" Doolittle (1989)

4. "Alison," Bossanova (1990)

5. "Letter to Memphis," Trompe le Monde (1991)

Bonus: "Wave of Mutilation (U.K. Surf)," B-Sides and Rarities

Vachel Lindsay, Poet

2011-11-10T08:01:00.000-06:00

Today is the birthday of Vachel Lindsay, a poet I know almost nothing about.

Vachel Lindsay is one of those poets whose name I know, and who I have a vague idea existed on the fringes of the modernist movement, but about whom I know almost nothing else. Even after doing a little bit of research, my knowledge of the man and his work is fuzzy, at best. However, I greatly admire one small poem of his.

Vachel Lindsay was born in Illinois in 1879, and admired William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. He treasured the vocal, singing quality of poetry, and fancied himself a sort of modern troubadour. Lindsay became a literary star, an optimistic voice in American literature, somehow channeling the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, Johnny Appleseed.

Lindsay's fame became a burden. His fans wanted to hear him perform, vocally, his most famous poems. He became disillusioned, depressed, and finally ended his life by drinking a poison akin to Lysol.

In doing my research of Vachel Lindsay, I was surprised to learn that he was the author of "The Flower-Fed Buffaloes," a quiet and mournful poem that I first encountered in the literature book I was given my first year of teaching. Here it is.

The Flower-Fed Buffaloes

BY VACHEL LINDSAY

The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring

In the days of long ago,

Ranged where the locomotives sing

And the prairie flowers lie low:—

The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass

Is swept away by the wheat,

Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by

In the spring that still is sweet.

But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring

Left us, long ago.

They gore no more, they bellow no more,

They trundle around the hills no more:—

With the Blackfeet, lying low,

With the Pawnees, lying low,

Lying low.

Work Cited:

"Lindsay, Vachel (1879-1931)." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 9 Nov. 2011.

Lou Barlow Likes Our Amplifiers

2011-11-07T12:09:00.000-06:00

The Perfect Vessels opened for Sebadoh at the Hi-Tone on Saturday night.

My friends and I had the wonderful opportunity of playing on the same bill as Sebadoh this weekend. It was the most fun I have had playing as a member of The Perfect Vessels, and I wish every show could be more like this one. The sound was great, all of our friends were there, and Lou Barlow listened to our set and was seen smiling from time to time.

(Lou Barlow, incidentally, is just a regular dude like you or me. He was wearing a well-worn green polo and hung out behind the merch table while we were setting up. He told us we liked our amps and afterwards said our set was "awesome." No fooling.)

Sebadoh played a fun set, and it was a pleasure to bounce up and down to "Skull" and "Rebound" with my friends. It felt just like 1996.

October Reading

2011-11-01T13:36:00.000-05:00

Here's what I read in October.

After the two snoozers I read last month, I needed a little pick me up. So I went in search of a book with a pulse, and found it in a section of the library that I usually never explore--the mystery novels.

Now, I have nothing against mystery novels; I just never read them. I did once write a punk song called "Mystery Novel," (oh, do check it out!), but I don't think I've actually read one since about 1995, when And Then There Were None showed up on one of my required reading lists.

1. The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley has been on my "books I'd like to read if I only had the time" list for years, and I decided that this fall was when I had time. I, of course, was familiar with the novel through the 1999 movie version, starring Damon, Law, and Paltrow, but it was not until I was standing in front of her books that I realized that she also wrote Strangers on a Train, which was also made into a fairly successful movie.

I don't know if The Talented Mr. Ripley really qualifies as a mystery. After all, we know who the murderer is all along, and the only mystery is whether he gets away with it. Nevertheless, it was a fun, quick, delightful little read, and I may some day pick up Strangers if I get a chance.

2. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I'm a sucker for those pop-economics books that have been on the shelves for the last decade or so. I've read The Tipping Point and Blink by Gladwell, as well as Freakonomics by those other dudes. Whenever I read books like these, I always get swept away in the storytelling and the statistical analysis that the authors present, but at the same time I realize that I have no background in economics, stats, or even analyzing data, and they could all be misleading me.

Having said that, I read this book on the recommendation of a few different teachers, who all said it was a great read. And I enjoyed it! The latter part about why Korean planes crash more frequently than planes from other countries was fascinating (even though I didn't quite see how it fit in with Gladwell's thesis about how people become remarkable successes), and I always love reading about hockey.

3. Ancient Rome (Eyewitness Books)

Now that my son has turned three and is becoming less of a toddler and more of a little dude, he is beginning to play with the toys and puzzles I used to play with, and soon he will be reading the books I used to read. I saw this one on a pile of books to be donated, and I immediately snatched it up. After flipping though it for a moment, I remembered how fascinating and delightful Eyewitness Books were. (I remember the one I had about space travel, back when the Space Shuttle was my obsession.)

So, I read a little bit of this book to my son while he was eating his cheerios, and housed the rest of it in a few minutes. I studied the classics during a semester at Oxford University, but that doesn't mean I know it all. There was plenty in this book that I learned for the first time.

4. A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman (partial)

I picked up this book at a thrift store when I was at Yale, studying Chaucer and the fourteenth century. It's been sitting on my shelf, and I always fantasized about a time when I would have an opportunity to read the whole thing. A few weeks ago I picked it up and started, and, now that I am 200 pages into it, I have to decide if I am going to stick with it for the entire 600 and some pages. Will I do it? I still haven't decided.

I read Tuchman's The Guns of Augusta few years back and found it fascinating. Tuchman's research is exhaustive, and she tells the story of history (whether it is the opening days of the first World War, or the onslaught of the Black Plauge) in such a compelling way that makes me wish I could take a few days off of work just to finish it. Plus, there's this amazing picture of her laughing as only mad geniuses can laugh:

I wish I felt as insouciant as she looks, just once in my life..

Don't Miss The Perfect Vessels!

2011-10-26T11:22:00.000-05:00

This would be a great time to catch a Perfect Vessels performance.

The Perfect Vessels are playing lots of shows these days. Below is a photo of us (thanks, Renee!) playing at the River Arts Festival last weekend. That building behind us, of course, is the Lorraine Motel, site of the National Civil Rights Museum. (Want to see more pictures of me standing in front of historic sites? Ok! Try this one! And this one!)

We have some exciting shows coming up in the next two weeks. You can catch the Vessels this Friday at Otherlands Coffee Bar in Midtown, where we will be playing with Robby Grant and Brett Ross. The show will start early--if I were a betting man, I'd give you 2 to 1 odds that we'd start playing by 7:30. We might be playing acoustic, and we might be playing electric. You never know with us!

Finally, the show we are most excited about is coming up on November 5, at the Hi-Tone, where we will be opening up for Sebadoh (yes, that Sebadoh). Mazes will also be playing that night. It promises to be a big, sweaty, fun show, and you shouldn't miss it.

Here's my favorite Sebadoh song, "The Ocean." What is yours?

Today is the Birthday of Chuck Berry

2011-10-18T10:47:00.000-05:00

Chuck Berry turns 85 today.

Chuck Berry is still playing club dates, despite the fact that he is now 85 years old. This man inspired the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Rolling Stones. Buddy Holly covered him. Still he holds down a monthly gig at Blueberry Hill in his native St. Louis. You can get your tickets here.

If you're a fan of rock and roll music, you probably have a favorite Chuck Berry song. Here are a few of mine.

1. "Almost Grown," by Chuck Berry

2. "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," by Wanda Jackson

3. "Beautiful Delilah," performed by the Kinks.

Source Cited
"Chuck Berry." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 18 Oct. 2011.

Today is the Anniversary of the Battle of Hastings

2011-10-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

Detail from the Bayeux Tapestry

What could a battle in AD 1066 possibly have to do with you?

It was 945 years ago today that William the Bastard, the duke of Normandy, led his troops to victory over Harold II, the king of England. At first blush, this may not seem relevant to you, but if you speak English, you are still experiencing the effects of this event.

William the Bastard was a Norman duke. That is to say, he was from Normandy region of France, a product of the mix of Viking conquerers and the French natives whom they conquered. He was an ambitious man who had his eyes on the English throne, and was hoping to be named successor to Edward the Confessor. However, when Edward died and Harold II was crowned king in his stead, he decided he must invade.

William waited for months for the right moment, and in October he knew he had it. The Saxon army had been called to Northumbria to settle some unfinished military business there, and would have to rush back to the shore to defend their country when William invaded. That is exactly what happened. The Norman army defeated the weary Saxons, Harold II was killed (according to the legend, he was struck through the eye with an arrow), and William marched to London victorious. On Christmas Day of that year, he was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey.

Under William's rule, England changed in many fundamental ways. He killed off many of the English nobility and installed French Normans in their place. Thus, the French gained control of the English court and the aristocracy, and French became the language of the nobles.

William traded in his moniker of "the Bastard" for a new name--"The Conquerer." (As we shall see, , the word "conquer" comes from the Old French.) In 1085, he wanted to know exactly who owned what in this kingdom he'd conquered, so he ordered the compilation of The Domesday Book, a vast survey of England's land. Anyone who has studied Medieval Europe has encountered the Domesday Book, whose detailed records of the villages, towns, buildings, people, and animals of England paint a wonderfully vibrant picture of life in 1085.

Soon after William's invasion, the language began to change. English was still the tongue of the people, but now the people were under the rule of French speakers. The peasantry and landowners were divided by language. The lower class began to borrow words, syntax, and grammar from the French, forever changing the English that you and I speak.

Take, for instance, the peculiar way English treats what we call the meat that ends up on our dinner table. The word swine comes from old English, which makes sense as the people who took care of pigs were English peasants. However, when this swine was cooked and served to the Normans, it became pork, a word from French. What the English called a cow, the French called beef; the English calf was French veal.

The vocabulary of the court--judge, jury, bailiff--similarly came from the French-speaking aristocracy, as did other words such as date, escape, and money.

This blend of Norman French and Anglo Saxon eventually became Middle English, which was crystalized in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. And Chaucer's English is the English that catches on, which leads to the English of that other great poet, Shakespeare, which leads on to the English I am writing on this blog.

Wikipedia-free research!

Sources Cited:

"Battle of Hastings (historical account),October 14, 1066." DISCoveringWorld History. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Student Resources in Context. Web. 12 Oct. 2011

The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories. Springfield, Massachusetts, 1991.

"Williamthe Conqueror." U*X*LBiographies. Detroit: U*X*L, 2003. StudentResources in Context. Web. 12 Oct. 2011.

In Which My Wife Reads One of my Favorite Memoirs

2011-10-12T08:30:00.000-05:00

I made a deal with my wife--I'll read a Didion if you read a Roth.

Today's blog is brought to you by Renee Davis Brame.

Several years ago, before I had children, I tore through a ton ofJoan Didion’s work. I began with Play It As It Lays andended with TheYear of Magical Thinking. Thelatter was one of my all-time, no kidding, broke-me-in-half-for-a-long-time-afterwards favorite books. I’mactually afraid to reread The Year of Magical Thinking for fear of tarnishing my original impression ofthe book.

Upon my recommendation,Aaron read it and said “Hey. Ifyou like this, you should read Patrimony.” (insert that riff from Reading Rainbow that used to play atthe end of “Don’t take my word forit…”).

I like Philip Roth. Before this, I had read Goodbye Columbus (my personal favorite),Portnoy’s Complaint, "The Conversion of the Jews," and three-fourths of American Pastoral. I wasn’t sure if I wanted toread Patrimony. How much mourningliterature can one person handle, right?

Recently, I was in the right frame of mind and gave it ashot. Here’s what I thought:

Patrimony was engrossing. I found myself reading at night until I couldn’t possiblykeep my eyes open anymore. Thoughthe story is mainly about the illness that eventually killed Philip Roth’sfather, it is just as much about the life his father led long before he evergot sick. One incident in thepresent would trigger an entire chapter of memories.

The experiences Roth had while caring for his father made methink of my own family that took care of and just buried my grandmother. My parents were in Roth’s shoes. It is heartbreaking and, for mostpeople, indescribable. Philp Roth,however, is a master of description. The shaving mug. TheHouston Astronauts. The givingthings away. The tenderness youonly see when a child takes care of a parent (or vice versa). It all struck a nerve. None of it seemed contrived.

If you haven’t read this book (and you aren’t yourself inmourning), read it.

Here’s a little bit of the man himself reading an excerpt. Could there be more bottles of water infront of him?

September Reading

2011-10-05T08:37:00.000-05:00

I only read two lousy books in September.

(The photo above comes from the wonderful Library of Congress stream on flickr.com, which I have featured before on this blog.)

I only read two lousy books this month! Geez. How embarrassing. Normally, I try to get three of them done, plus a few interesting magazine articles or short stories at least. But you know what happened that has kept me from reaching my reading goals? I had to take care of my kids. Thanks a lot, guys.

I didn't realize how much of my reading time had slipped away since we had our daughter until I found myself one day, standing in the kitchen and shuffling from one foot to another in a vain attempt to stop her from screaming. I spied my most recent copy of Sports Illustrated on the kitchen counter, and thought to myself, "Oh, if I only had enough time to read my SI."

If you don't have time to read your S.I., you're pretty busy. Allow me to demonstrate how to read a Sports Illustrated in under seven minutes:

Look at the pictures in "Leading Off." Groan at the awful titles. Check out "Sign of the Apocalypse," "Go Figure," and "For the Record." (Hey, did you see who died? Sad.) Read "They Said It," if it looks interesting. Skip "Faces in the Crowd," and avoid, "Just My Type." Do not, do not!, read the pop culture grid, partially because the athletes always say that their favorite book is the Bible. Skim past all the features, looking for Steelers/Penguins/Pirates, ignoring everything else. Then, you get to "The Point After," which is usually the tritest little thousand words of prose you will read all week. Look at it, maybe. Then throw it on the recycle pile.

Seven minutes, tops.

So, it's been hard for me to get around to my reading this month. But let's look at the books I did read in the last thirty days, both of which came with recommendations (or admonitions) from my friend Kelly at A Certain Solitary Pleasure.

1. Homer and Langley, by E. L. Doctorow

First, I read Homer and Langley, by E. L. Doctorow. The story of Homer and Langley Collyer is a fascinating tale of extreme hoarding between two brothers over three decades in a brownstone on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. I hoped this novel would tap into America's current fixation with hoarding, and I hoped it would have lots of exciting elements like trash! And rats! And mountains of stuff piled up everywhere!

But it didn't. The novel is much more subtle than that, and it follows these two brothers through their youth, young manhood, and adulthood. Throughout, they find themselves more and more isolated from the boorishness of American society, and withdraw into their fortress of trash. It was slow going, and I must admit I was waiting for Doctorow to get to his point.

As they retreat, Homer, who is already blind, begins to lose his hearing. His sense of reality withdraws into a solipsistic guessing game just as the house becomes unmanageably filled with trash. True, the book begins slowly, but by the end, the sense of sadness and loneliness is suffocating. It all ends with one devastating paragraph that is affecting enough to justify the pace of the rest of it.

My friend Kelly urged me not to read this book, but I couldn't resist the $4.50 sale price during the Boarders liquidation sale. When I was halfway through it and struggling with how an author could take a topic as fascinating as the Collyer brothers and make it so dull, he told me "The wikipedia page is more interesting." He wasn't wrong.

Collyer Brothers Park

2. The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim

So, after reading a book that my friend Kelly expressly warned me not to read, I decided to read one that he said I would like, The Hundred Brothers, by Donald Antrim.

Kelly recommended The Hundred Brothers based on my affinity for George Saunders. And if anyone should know about how much I love Saunders, it's my friend Kelly--he introduced me to Civil Warland in Bad Decline many years ago.

And he has a point. The Hundred Brothers is the bizarre story of 99 brothers who gather in the red library of their crumbling manor in a futile effort to find their father's ashes. What begins as a postmodern, comic exercise slowly morphs into a nightmarish journey into the darkest depths of family, fraternity, and literature itself. All the frustrations, joys, and shames of manhood are present in the main character of Doug, who tries making peace with his many brothers while also serving the family in his role as the sacrificial "Corn King." You just have to read it.

And thus endeth my September reading. I'll do better in October, I promise.

Leonard Cohen, Poet

2011-09-21T08:34:00.000-05:00

Today is the birthday of Leonard Cohen.

You may know Leonard Cohen as the cantankerous folk-singer from Canada who wrote "Suzanne" and "So Long, Marianne." However, Cohen was a poet and novelist years before his recording career began. His career in poetry has spanned fifty years, from the release of his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956, to the release of his latest, Book of Longing, in 2006. He also wrote two novels, The Favorite Game, in 1963, and Beautiful Losers, in 1966.

I must admit that my knowledge of his non-musical work amounts to a single poem, "A Kite is a Victim," but it is a good one.

A Kite is a Victim

Leonard Cohen

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.

A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won't give up,
or the wind die down.

A kite is the last poem you've written,
so you give it to the wind,
but you don't let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.

A kite is a contract of glory
that must be made with the sun,
so you make friends with the field
the river and the wind,
then you pray the whole cold night before,
under the travelling cordless moon,
to make you worthy and lyric and pure.

Here is a very groovy animated version of the poem that I found on youtube.

An interesting note about this difficult-to-find poem: I ran across it some time during my younger years, and was so taken aback that I never forgot it. Looking for it years later, the only line I could remember from it was "A kite is a promise you make with the sky," a line that does not appear in this poem at all. So where did it come from?

Well, we're here talking about Leonard Cohen, so I would be remiss not to include my favorite Leonard Cohen songs. Here they are!

1. "Suzanne"
There may be songs more beautiful than "Suzanne," but not many.

2. "Who By Fire"
A song about 24 deaths that does not include the words "death," "die," or "kill."

3. "Everybody Knows"
I heard this song for the first time when I first saw Pump Up The Volume, circa 1992. I wouldn't be who I am now without either of them. Plus, it has a balalaika solo!

(Also born on this date, my son. Happy birthday, buddy.)

Sources Cited:

Ravvin, Norman. "Leonard Cohen." Encyclopaedia Judaica. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 17 Sep. 2011.

"Leonard Cohen." The Complete Marquis Who's Who. Marquis Who's Who, 2010.Gale Biography In Context. Web. 17 Sep. 2011.

Wikipedia-free!

Take a Break to Stare at Something Beautiful

2011-09-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

Above is St. Francis in the Desert,by Giovanni Bellini. If you can't see this (and many other works of art) in person, you should check them out at the new googleartproject.com.

Last summer, I made a special trip from New Haven to New York to see Bellini's painting at the Fricke Gallery. Now it's at googleartproject.com, in beautiful and loving detail. The site has wonderfully large reproductions of some of your favorite works of art, not to mention virtual tours of the museums and ways for you to learn more about your favorite art and artists. Here's a video primer:

No reproduction, not even one as meticulous as this, can compare to seeing a painting in person, but I found the interactive exhibits on this site compelling enough to win my attention all during my lunch break. And then fourth period, and then fifth and sixth.

Right now, there are seventeen art museums that you can tour on the site, but they promise to add more in the future. Below are links to some of my favorite paintings from the site--you should go and find yours.

St. Francis in the Desert, by Giovanni Bellini

Venus of Urbino, by Tiziano

Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein, the Younger

The Starry Night, by Vincent Van Gogh

Grandcamp, Evening by Georges-Pierre Seurat

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David

Investigating the H.U.A.C.

2011-09-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

I am teaching The Crucible again, which means trying to teach McCarthyism to kids who were born in 1995. So this year, I showed my class footage of the actual H.U.A.C. hearings. Have you ever seen this stuff?

Teaching McCarthyism to my students is difficult. I mean, teaching the concept of McCarthyism to anyone is hard enough, but most of my students don't know much about communism, the Soviet Union, or even World War II. (Some of them believed that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Chinese. But don't snicker. This is why you teache.)

So you have to go way, way back whenever you teach something as complicated as McCarthyism, and it takes tremendous effort. You find your class discussing Marx and Engles, the distribution of wealth, organized labor, and then getting around to Governor Bill Haslam, who took away the collective bargaining rights of Tennessee teachers such as myself. And then you stop yourself and remember that you have a standardized test coming up in a few months, and your students are supposed to be able to tell the difference between a summary and a paraphrase. Your job's on the line, after all.

So, usually, you stop.

But this year, I didn't. I decided to go trolling around youtube to see if I could find real testimony from the Hollywood Ten in front of the H.U.A.C. And what do you know? It took me a while, but I found a few short clips, which I showed the students.

You should have seen their jaws drop. They couldn't believe they were watching grown men act this way. Some of them giggled at how preposterous the entire situation was, but when I reminded them that these people spent a year in prison for refusing to incriminate their friends, they snapped back to. And this certainly informed our study of The Crucible, in which John Proctor goes to the gallows before he names names and endangers the people who are closest to him.

Here are some of the clips I showed them:

1. Howard Lawson, one of the "Hollywood Ten," answers questions of the H.U.A.C. and, like John Proctor of The Crucible, is outshouted by the presiding interrogator:

2. Herbert Biberman yells back at the interrogators who will not listen to his answers. Like Giles Cory (and later Arthur Miller himself), he is found guilty of contempt.

3. Finally, here is Walt Disney, (or is that Roy Walley?), the good old boy who has all the right answers for the H.U.A.C.

Roald Dahl, Author

2011-09-13T12:26:00.000-05:00

Today is the birthday of Roald Dahl.

Roald Dahl, who was born on this date in 1916 in Wales, is of course best-known for his children's books. Following is a partial list of his best known titles for youngsters--chances are you've read some of these:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Matilda
The BFG
James and the Giant Peach
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Witches

He is less known for the stories he wrote for adults in collections such as Kiss Kiss (1959) and Switch, Bitch (1974). These stories are decidedly more mature than his children's work, and often involve diabolical villains and wicked twist endings. He also adapted a few of them for "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," the most famous of which was "Lamb to the Slaughter," which tells the story of a woman who kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then serves the evidence to the homicide detectives.

Junior high literature books are stuffed full of stories about characters overcoming obstacles and demonstrating bravery in the face of adversity. Read enough of those, and you'll want to puke. That's why I used to love teaching Dahl to my eighth graders, who were titillated by Dahl's almost-PG-13 stories of gambling, murder, and revenge.

If you'd like to try out of these stories, a good place to start is with "The Man From the South," which was also made into an episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

Sources Cited:
"Roald Dahl." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults. Gale, 2002.Gale Biography In Context. Web. 13 Sep. 2011.

Donkin, Andrew: Dead Famous: Roald Dahl and his Chocolate Factory. London: Hippo, 2002.

(The above citation is a great book my wife picked up in England and includes heaps of interesting facts about Dahl's life. Dahl fans and teachers of Dahl's work should check it out.)

Best Wishes for Another Steelers' Season

2011-09-10T13:55:00.000-05:00

Best wishes to all for the 2011-2012 Pittsburgh Steelers' season. Above, my daughter readies herself for her first game.

Siegfried Sassoon, Poet

2011-09-01T11:22:00.000-05:00

Today marks the anniversary of the death of poet Sigfried Sassoon.

Siegfried Sassoon was born in England in 1886. In August of 1914, just days before war broke out in Europe, he voluntarily entered the British army. At six feet, six inches tall, Sassoon was a fearless soldier and fierce fighter. He earned the nickname "Mad Jack" for his intrepid heroism on the front lines and was decorated by the British government for valor in battle.

While on leave, Sassoon began meeting with pacifists and re-examined his role in the war. He came to the conclusion that the conflict was useless and immoral, and he wrote a letter to his commanding officer stating that he would not be returning to the front. The army, unwilling to court-martial a distinguished soldier, had him declared mentally incompetent and sent him to a sanitarium.

Sassoon wrote many volumes of prose and poetry, including a two-volume memoir about his time in the trenches. He died on this date in 1967.

Below is my favorite poem by Sassoon, entitled "Dreamers." It is a powerful anti-war argument as well as an eloquent description of the joys of manhood, but what I like most about it is that I had never read it until I became a teacher and found it in one of my textbooks. To teach truly is to learn twice.

Dreamers

Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land,

Drawing no dividends from time's to-morrows.

In the great hour of destiny they stand,

Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.

Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win

Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin

They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,

And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

And going to the office in the train.

Work Cited:

"Siegfried Sassoon." Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. Ed. John Merriman and Jay Winter. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2007. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 1 Sep. 2011.

Wikipedia-free research!

July and August Reading

2011-08-31T16:10:00.000-05:00

The lonely existence of the rock and roll piano player.

You've already heard about most of what I read this summer. July was all about Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, which I wrote about at length in the Summer Of Jest entries. After that came Savage Inequalities, by Jonathan Kozol, which I reread for the first time since my undergrad days.

The only other book I have read since then was And on Piano... Nicky Hopkins, by Julian Dawson. Nicky Hopkins was a great rock and roll piano player and session man and one of my personal heroes. If you've ever listened to classic rock radio, then you've certainly heard his astounding piano playing on songs such as "Sympathy for the Devil," "Revolution," and "The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society." If there is a Rolling Stones song you like between the years of 1966 and 1974, there's a good chance that that is him behind the keys (check the liner notes) He played with Jefferson Airplane at Woodstock, and you can hear (though not see!) him tearing up the keyboard on their performance of "Volunteers" from that day, which is perhaps the only song the Airplane ever did that doesn't make me drowsy. He plays on "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" and "Jealous Guy," by John Lennon. He backed up Spinal Tap for "Rainy Day Sun." He's on "You Are So Beautiful" (yes, that one) by Joe Cocker and played synth on "To All The Girls I've Loved Before," by Julio Iglesias. Those last two aren't such great songs. One of his last projects was working with The Jayhawks, and I think it is a sign of respect that they let him play the first note of the album on the fantastic "Waiting for the Sun."

Nicky Hopkins was coveted by musicians during his short life (he died in 1994 after a lifetime of medical problems), but he rarely got the credit he deserved. He was cut out of band photos, omitted from liner notes of albums, and even had his piano credits given to others (c.f. Ray Davies.) As a piano player, I can say that his treatment was not unusual. Piano players are often given such unfair treatment.

See the album cover below. Hmm. Does this band have six members, or only five? It appears one of them got cut out of the picture on the front of the album. Guess what instrument he plays.

(For his sake, his name is Eddie Harsch, and he did a pretty damn good job on that record.)

I have included below four of my favorite performances by Nicky Hopkins for your pleasure.

1. "Angie" by The Rolling Stones
(Note Mick Taylor sitting behind the piano in place of Nicky. How rude!)

2. "Good Luck Charm" by the Kinks

3. "Oh, Yoko!" by John Lennon

4. "Loving Cup" by the Rolling Stones

The Perfect Vessels on Live From Memphis

2011-08-19T14:30:00.000-05:00

Live From Memphis chose the Perfect Vessels to do a "60 Seconds Memphis" spot, and we think it turned out pretty well. Go on by to 60secondsmemphis.com and check out some of the wonderful performers they have doing interesting and tuneful things in a minute or less. Below is our video, but I'd also like to include links to videos made by Bryan Hartley and The City Champs, because I think they're interesting also.

Getting Ready for Rock For Love 5

2011-08-18T12:26:00.000-05:00

Rock For Love is a four-day long musical festival that benefits the Church Health Center, and this is the first year I will be participating in it. The Perfect Vessels are playing the Saturday afternoon show at Shangri-La Records, and I will be there with my good old Wurlitzer electric piano. I hope to see you there.

If you would like to learn more about what the Church Health Center does and how organizers Marvin Stockwell and Jeff Hulett are making Memphis a better place, you can read this recent article in the Memphis Flyer.

Revisiting Savage Inequalities

2011-08-15T12:29:00.000-05:00

Savage Inequalities, by Jonathan Kozol, is a heartbreaking book about the injustice and racism inherent in the American school system. It exposes the shocking realities of how we shortchange poor and minority students, and is a must-read for anyone with an interest in our educational system.

I first read this book when I was a freshman at Rhodes, back in 1996, and I was horrified by what it taught me. Growing up in the suburbs and attending either well-funded county schools or elite Catholic schools, I could not conceive of a classroom without books or a school building without heat in the winter. Savage Inequalities taught me my first lessons in how policy affects different people differently, how lucky I had had it growing up, and how brutally our system can take advantage of the helpless.

This summer, I had a hunch that it was time to revisit Savage Inequalities. Now that I have been teaching in segregated school systems for 10 years (both public and private), I had the feeling that I would not find Savage Inequalities as shocking as I had back in the mid 1990s. Sadly, I was right. This time instead of shaking my head in astonishment, I found myself nodding in recognition.

This book came out in 1991, ten years before the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act, yet the problems Kozol faced are the same ones I face in my classroom today.

As I was reading the book, I started highlighting passages that spoke directly to the problems that I have encountered in my career, and I would like to include them below. These are statements or complaints that are as relevant to me and my position as they were to Kozol when he was writing his book. Nothing has changed.

(N.B. This is not a criticism of my own school, which I love despite its many flaws. Kozol does not criticize individual schools, but rather a dysfunctional and broken system that creates the problems.)

The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education 37 years ago, in which the court had found that segregated education was unconstitutional because it was "inherently unequal," did not seem to have changed very much for children in the schools I saw, not, at least, outside of the Deep South. Most of the urban schools I visited were 95 to 99 percent nonwhite. (3)
Lottery proceeds in Illinois allegedly go into education; in reality they go into state revenues and they add nothing to the education fund. So it is a total loss. Affluent people do not play the lottery. The state is in the business here of selling hopes to people who have none. (16)
"Well, it's amazing," [a teacher says]. "I have done without so much for so long that, if I were assigned to a suburban school, I'm not sure I'd recognize what they are doing." (29)
A history teacher at the Martin Luther King School has 110 students in four classes--but only 26 books. Some of the books are missing the first hundred pages... Certain classrooms are so cold in the winter that the students have to wear their coats to class. (37)
The state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives. (56)
There are no science labs, no art or music teachers. There is no playground. There are no swings. There is no jungle gym. (63)
A 16-year old student in the South Bronx tells me that he went to English class for two months in the fall of 1989 before the school supplied him with a textbook. He spent the entire year without a science text. "My mother offered to help me with my science, which was hard for me," he says, "but I could not bring home a book." (110)
Several children of my acquiantance in the New York City schools were truant for eight months in 1988 and 1989 but were never phoned or visited by school attendance officers. (113)
[A teacher says,] "You don't even dare to speak about desegregation now. It doesn't come up. Impossible. It's gone." (142)
"The high school proficiency exam," a teacher says, "controls the curriculum. It bores the children, but we have to do it or we get no money from the state." (144)

I was shocked to learn that the per-student spending for my school is actually less than many of the schools Kozol visited in 1991--and this is not adjusting for inflation! In other words, affluent schools had more money allocated for them per student in 1989 than Tennessee spends on charter schools today. Kozol writes:

In 1989, Chicago spent some $5,500 for each student in its secondary schools. This may be compared to an investment of some $8,500 to $9,000 in each high school student in the highest-spending suburbs to the north.

Today, Memphis City Schools allocates $7,633 per student each year for my school. It has been twenty years, and we have made no progress.

Work Cited:
Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Update: Late Summer, 2011

2011-08-11T23:40:00.000-05:00

Time isn't holding us. Time isn't after us.

Let me tell you about the summer or 2011. My family and I sold our house, found ourselves staying with relatives for a while, then found a new home. We packed, unpacked, packed again, and unpacked again. We welcomed a beautiful daughter to the family and introduced her to her brother. Hell, we even got a new car.

At the end of the summer, we had a harrowing flirtation with unemployment and uncertainty, only to see it disappear with a whimper.

We entered the summer of 2011 as a three-piece, and emerged at the end as a quartet, completely transformed and improved in every way. And throughout the entire perplexing experience, I kept feeling like the speaker of the Talking Heads song, "Once in a Lifetime," a man who is suffering an existential dilemma in the face of his overwhelming good fortune.

Remember Job, the man from the Old Testament who couldn't understand why his life took such an inexplicable turn for the worse? Well, I feel like his exact opposite. Like Job, I question how a humble man's life can take such an incredible path. But where Job's path was calamitous, mine is auspicious. Job's question was religious; mine is existential. Job complained; I ain't complaining.

Our crises, however, are the same--why me?

You may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"

You may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"

You may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house."

You may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife."

Here are some photos I took during the unprecedented summer of 2011, beginning with the beautiful house.

In short, I am profoundly grateful for it all.

The Oblivians: Live at Goner Records

2011-08-02T22:31:00.000-05:00

Holy cow. The Oblivians played at tonight for free, and I was there.

The Oblivians played an hour-long free set at Goner Records tonight. I am not sure what prompted this gig, but they played some new material, so maybe there is a record in the making?

Emily Dickinson, Poet

2011-07-26T21:27:00.000-05:00

It's late July, and I am getting ready for another school year. Above is a poster of Emily Dickinson I made for my classroom. I hope I have the chance to teach her this year.

As it it, my school is facing closure in the next month, and I am looking at the prospect of unemployment. You can read about it here.

Reading the End of Infinite Jest

2011-07-24T07:57:00.000-05:00

Wait. What happened?

You are at the end of Infinite Jest. You've been reading for the last 34 days, over the course of a thousand pages, and your friends and family members are wondering if you are ever going to return to them. You have met hundreds of characters, underlined dozens of passages of symbolic or thematic importance, and contemplated the bigger questions of the book since you started. No way do you expect a nice, tight ending that will tie up all the loose ends, satisfy all your needs, and answer all your questions. But still, you were surprised at how anticlimactic the book's ending was. It just seemed to...stop.

Below I will address some of the major questions hanging over the ending of Infinite Jest and propose a way to complete the novel that will answer some--though not all--of the nagging questions, while coalescing many of the outstanding themes and symbols.

Need I say it? Spoiler alert.

Here are some questions you might be asking yourself at the end of the novel:

What is going on with Hal Incandenza? Is he losing his mind due to withdrawal from Bob Hope? Has he fallen victim to The Entertainment? Why did the novel go and leave him just when he was showing the signs of significant moral development?
What happens to Don Gately? Does he die? Does he relapse into his addiction? Why does the narrative end with the intricately-detailed story of Fackelmann's destruction, when what we want to know about is Doon?
What do these two story lines have to do with one another? Sure, there is the connecting tissue of Joelle ("Madame Psychosis") holding the two parallel bones of the story together, but what is the true story of Infinite Jest? Is this Hal's story, or Gately's?
What of the Entertainment? Do the Quebecois separatists use it as a weapon against the pleasure-happy O.N.A.N.ites? Where is the master cartridge?
What about the theme of the destructive mother, the "death incarnate" that "woman who kills you and releases you into the next life"?

How are you going to answer all these questions and more? By doing this:

Finish the novel. Then, turn back to the first page again. Begin with the words "Year of Glad," and then read along to page 17. Now you are done.

The first thing your realize is that you knew more of the answers that you thought you did. First, you find that Hal is in control of the narrative, as he was at the end of the book. However, he has had some sort of complete breakdown that was prefigured in the final pages of the novel, in which he felt inwardly calm, but uncontrollably acted in hyper-spastic ways. His destruction, either due to his drug use or his viewing of the cartridge, has been his salvation. This is suitably ironic--though he has been reduced to a blabbering, frightening imbecile, this is a first time (here in the year of "glad"), that he feels like a human being.

"I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex... I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting."

I open my eyes. "Please don't think I don't care." (11-12)

This voice is not the voice of the Hal Incandenza we have come to know over the thousand-plus pages of the narrative, who speaks in the wittiest, most sarcastic, most ironic of quips and rejoinders. This is Hal's coming-of-age, which we have waited for for the entire book, only we missed it because it happens in the first chapter. Hal, who hadn't "had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny" (694) is finally in control, and he cares.

As you are re-reading the first pages again, you will come across this sentence, which you had completely forgotten about:

"I think of John N.R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head." (16-17)

As I was reading Jest, my brother mentioned that Gately and Incandenza meet after the narrative of the book ends, but that I had probably read past that without thinking twice about it. He was right. This sentence fills in the gaps in the story--not only the narrative of the plot, but the larger thematic questions that the novel poses.

Gately survives his ordeal and hospitalization. He and Hal meet and go in search of the master cartridge of Infinite Jest, which was supposedly buried in Jim Incandenza's exploded head. Do they find it?

Maybe they find it. Maybe not. What is important is that both of their journeys have ended here, at the grave of Himself, putting the ghosts, wraiths, and addictions to rest. And it bares noting that two (or three) men digging up the skull of a suicide (se offendendo) brings the reader back to Hamlet, Act V, Scene i, which is the literary launching point for the book.

What of the Entertainment? Well, by this point you should be coming to the suspicion that "The Entertainment," which happens to be called Infinite Jest, this diversion that is so pleasurable and satisfying that it destroys the lives of anyone who gazes upon it, has been in your hands for the last 34 days and is the cause of all the worried looks your family members have been giving you.

But why stop there? What of the woman who destroys you, only to be your mother in the next life? The "death incarnate," the veiled, apologetic Madame Pscyhosis who is death incarnate in this life and your mother in the next? Well, think of what this reading has done--it ends the life of Infinite Jest on page 981, only to bring it back to life in "The Year of Glad," in which Hal and Gately are both reborn. That deadly woman--that's you, brah.

Kertwang!

The final advantage to this reading is that it leaves us with a much more satisfying last paragraph of the novel. My apologies to this guy:

but I much prefer the ending we get on page 17, the one that goes like this.

It will be someone blue-collar and unlicensed, though inevitably--a nurse's aide with quick-bit nails, a hospital security guy, a tired Cuban orderly who addresses me as jou--who will, looking down in the middle of some kind of bustled task, catch what he sees as my eye and as So yo then man what's your story?

And that's your story. Infinite Jest.

SOURCES CITED:

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996.

I Finished Infinite Jest

2011-07-23T21:09:00.000-05:00

The Summer of Jest is over. Here are some of my thoughts on the last 300 pages.

Spoilers ahead.

For anyone who chooses to read this book, rest assured that it requires anti-social and obsessive behavior in order to finish it. I completed it in 34 days, reading an average of 31.7 pages or 14,235 words per. Though I have had an eventful summer (birth of daughter, sale of one house, purchase of another, lots of moving boxes in between), it still took me the entirety of July to complete it. Except for 100 pages of Savage Inequalities and an Esquire or two, this is all I read. Just Jest.

I have a theory about how you should read the end of the novel, which I will cover in tomorrow's post. My other thoughts on the last 300-or-so-pages run thus:

Don Gately checks out of the narrative on page 619, unconscious, gunshot, bleeding. He doesn't check in again for nearly 200 pages, and is missed.
The tone of the novel takes a dark turn thereafter. It begins with a disturbing chapter (p. 682) about the abuse Matt Pemulis (Mike's brother) experienced as a child. Ten pages later, there is a gut-wrenching treatise on mental illness, depression, and suicide, that is ostensibly written from the point of view of Kate Gompert, but reads more like David Foster Wallace's personal explanation of the pain that lead to his own suicide in 2008. These were two of several parts of the last third of the novel that were difficult to read.
Page 876 begins another comic interlude with a ridiculously-long title (reminiscent of the one that began on p. 144). This one concerns a meeting among advertising executives and high-level government figures who are are discussing a public-service announcement trying to protect youngsters from the dreaded "Entertainment." It must be read to be believed.
Hal's adventure to what he thinks is an N.A. meeting (pp 795-808) but is actually a group therapy session for men searching for their Inner Infant is as hilarious and horrific as anything else in the book, and I read the entire section without breathing.

The rest of my thoughts concern the ending of the novel, and how to make sense of it, which I will address tomorrow.

A Few Notes on my Favorite Used Bookstore

2011-07-18T23:30:00.000-05:00

June 25 was Save a Bookstore Day or something like that, but I was busy and missed it.

Far be it from me to miss a made-up holiday that I saw on Facebook. Still, I do have a favorite used bookstore that I like to support, and here I will say a few kind things about it.

My favorite used bookstore is Xanadu Music and Books on Central Avenue, just down from the always-tasty Central BBQ. Xanadu might not be as hip or trendy as Burke's Books (which is also a fine bookstore), but I prefer it. Xanadu is crowded, dark, and usually empty--just what you want in a used bookstore.

This establishment may be better known for the cigar-box guitars that John Lowe makes and sells there, but I don't really have time for that. I'm more interested in the shelves, which always have just the book you've always meant to read, but never gotten around to.

Xanadu is great, and it's cheap, too! Beverly will do her best to save you a couple of bucks, too, but you'd better bring cash--Xanadu ain't got no point-of-sale machine.

Meet Beverly, who is usually in better focus than this.

Summer of Jest--Pages 301-600

2011-07-13T23:16:00.000-05:00

I just finished the second trimester of my Jest-ation.

Here's what I'm thinking as I finish pages 300-601:

1. My pace has slowed.

2. Fatigue is starting to set in.

3. Nevertheless, this is still one heck of an entertaining book.

1. My Pace Has Slowed

I was originally reading on a "31-squared" scheduled--31 pages a day for 31 days. This neat little plan was going to have me finishing the novel on July 21. Well, this is not going to happen. My wife went into labor on the morning of July 7th, and we were in the hospital until the 8th attending to the birth of our daughter, Calliope. We're home now, but it has been hard to read with all the crying and feeding going on here, and, hey, who wants to read a boring old book when you this staring at you?

I am now trying to have the book done by the first day of August, which is also the day that the Brame family moves into our new house. Did I mention we are having a busy summer?

2. Fatigue Has Start to Set In

The number one culprit causing me some mild-to-moderate Jest fatigue is the never-ending series of chapters concerning Marathe and Steeply on the plateau in Arizona. These chapters fill in the background information you need to understand the world of Infinite Jest--and that's a lot of information, let me tell you. There's nothing fun in these chapters--no interesting endnotes, no wisecracking Michael Pemulis, no Donald Gately. Just pages and pages of these two people helping to explain the elaborate exposition of the book.

Also, I find myself writing "this could go on forever" in the margins from time to time. There are paragraphs that go on for pages, sentences that twist and turn and avoid any kind of full stop. Time slows down, then stops, and then goes backwards.

Take pp. 368-372, which details the depths that the "White Flaggers" have sunk to during their alcoholic lives. That almost went on forever. Or pp. 577-about 585, which concerns in great detail the childhood of Bruce Green, a minor character who we don't care too much about, and directly precedes what you can pretty much tell is going to be the most exciting part of the book up to then. That almost went on forever. How about pp 508-527, which spends 19 pages detailing four characters sitting in a waiting room, waiting to go into a meeting that we never even get to see. That chapter just about killed me.

3. Nevertheless, this is still one heck of an entertaining book.

Here's what I like the most about Infinite Jest.

A. Don Gately. Don Gately is awesome. Of all the eccentrics, screw-ups, and weirdos in the book, Gately is the truest character. He has a mind and a heart and guts, and I love reading his chapters.

Gately is figuratively a gate: he stands between the world of recovery and the world of Out There, and he's the only one strong enough to straddle these two worlds without succumbing to temptation.

(Oh, and he also attends an A.A. meeting called "Tough Shit, But You Still Can't Drink.")

B. Eschaton. The Eschaton chapter begins on page 317 and goes on to page 342. If you don't know what Eschaton is, then no way am I going to try to explain it to you. It's worth picking up Jest and reading it that far just to learn about it.

C. Eric Clipperton. The story of Eric Clipperton, the young tennis player who threatens to blow his brains out right there on the court with his Glock if he ever were to lose a match, is absolutely a riot. As long as I am including page numbers, I might as well note that it starts on page 407 and then picks back up on 430.

D. The theme of the Medusa vs. the Odalisque. The Medusa, you will recall from highschool mythology, is a monster so hideous that she turns anyone who sees her into stone. The Odalisque of Infinite Jest is so beautiful that she turns anyone who sees her into a gem.

One of the main themes of this book is how people overdose on happiness, kill themselves with "entertainment," willingly step into oblivion for a brief whiff of pleasure. I know that the Odalisque is somehow tied into to Joelle and "The Entertainment" and The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (below), but I haven't quite gotten it all yet.

Oh, and DFW basically predicted DVR/TiVo technology and how it changed American tv-viewing habits. How about that?

The Results from the Mr. Brame's Blog Challenge

2011-07-09T10:48:00.000-05:00

The results are in. Congratulations to Adam Remsen, winner of the Mr. Brame Challenge! The answers and methodology follow...

First, I have to say that the challenge was a surprising success. A special thank you goes out to Kerry at the ilovememphisblog.com, for helping me spread the word. And now, for the winners!

FIRST PLACE: Congratulations to Adam Remsen of Memphis, Tennessee. Adam is an independent filmmaker, originally from Jacksonville, Florida, who lists his hobbies as "photography, cooking, and identifying quotations embedded in stone." Adam will receive a prize to be named later.

Here is a photo of Adam by Laura Jean Hocking.

SECOND PLACE: Two contestants tied for second place. They will also receive prizes to be named later.

One second place price goes to James Chester, who was my roommate at Yale. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his spouse Paul and their two dogs Gabby and Dakota. He teaches middle school history and English, reads compulsively and make book art and mail art.

The other second place prize goes to Charlotte Hassen. She was born and raised in Memphis, and attended high school with Kerry (of ilovememphisblog.com fame) who directed her toward this blog and contest. She left home to attend Vanderbilt University and ended up sticking around Nashville where she lives with my two roommates and my dog, Memphis.

There were 15 questions worth either one or two points a piece, plus a bonus, meaning that it was possible to make a 26 out of 25 possible points. I allowed partial credit.

Here are the answers.

1. This comes from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. (two points possible)

2. This comes from the Apologia of Plato, in which he quotes Socrates saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Only Justin Sledge got this one correct. (one point possible for the translation)

3. Pablo Picasso, Guernica (two points possible)

4. For two possible points, this is from Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." (The poem is called "The Road Not Taken," people, and not "The Road Less Traveled." If you get the title wrong, there is a good chance that you are missing the point of the entire poem. But that's the English teacher in me coming out. I'll stop.)

5. Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." (two points) I will also accept Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass, in which the poem appeared. (I even grudgingly accepted Alice in Wonderland, but not without a snobbish little snort.)

6. Elvis and Warhol (two points)

7. John 1:1 (one point)

8. Marx and Engles (one point for getting both of their names, zero points for anything else.)

9. Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee," or "Memphis" (two points possible)

10. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (two points)

11. Shakespeare from Henry V (two points) in a passage that never fails to move me.

12. Shakespeare, Hamlet (two points)

13. Lots of you got one point for identifying e.e. cummings, but very few of you got the other point for calling it "Old Age Sticks," or even "untitled."

14. Churchill (one point)

15. Da Vinci (one point)

Extra Credit: Which of the above references stirred up enough controversy after the project was finished that it was even mentioned in The New York Times? Yes, it was "Workers of the world, unite!" Read about it here.

The winners will be getting their prizes in the mail sometime soon. Thanks for playing, everyone!

Miss Brame's Blog

2011-07-08T23:45:00.000-05:00

Meet Calliope June Brame.

She's asleep, so we'll have to be quiet, but I wanted to introduce you to our new daughter. She was born at 7:45 this morning and has had a peaceful and contented first day. Vitals: 6 lbs., 15 oz., 19 inches. She looks just like her brother did when he was her age.

A Brame girl. And they said it couldn't be done.

And now it's time for sleep. Goodnight.

Take the Mr. Brame Challenge!

2011-07-07T08:50:00.000-05:00

This is an actual contest, with winners and prizes and everything. And you are eligible.

One of my favorite places in Memphis is the plaza outside the Memphis Public Library. Go there, and you'll find a beautiful sidewalk dedicated to "the history of information," inscribed with some of the world's most famous quotations. It's just begging to be made into a trivia contest.

The Memphis Public Library

The Rules: I took fifteen pictures at the sidewalk of the Memphis Public Library yesterday, and I am asking you to identify them. For most of these photos, you will have to identify the author and the work. For instance, the answer to the picture at the head of this post would be The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Some you need to identify an artist, a subject, or something else.

As in any trivia games, you are not allowed to use google, books, references, friends, or anything else other than your head. If you cheat on this, well, then you'll just have to live with yourself.

How to Enter: Email the answers to aaronbrame@gmail.com. You don't have to answer all the questions, naturally. The more you answer, the better your chances. I will award first and second-place winners on Saturday, July 9, at noon.

Prizes: I am not sure what you will be getting yet, but it will be something interesting. And you'll like it!

Ok, let's go!

1. Identify the author and the work:

2. Please translate this oft-quoted saying:

3. Identify the artist and the work:

4. Identify author and work

5. Identify author and work:

6. Identify subject and artist:

7. Identify the bible verse:

8. Identify the authors (of the line above the Cat in the Hat.)

9. Identify author and work:

10. Identify author and work:

11. Identify author and work:

12. Identify author and work:

13. Identify author and work:

14. Identify the speaker only:

15. We will finish with an easy one. Identify the artist only.

Extra Credit: Which of the above references stirred up enough controversy after the project was finished that it was even mentioned in The New York Times?

SEE THE ANSWERS AND RESULTS HERE

Summer of Jest--Plotting My Progress

2011-07-03T22:37:00.000-05:00

I'm almost halfway there.

Considering I lost three to four days of reading time to packing up and moving out of my house, plus the six or so hours I just blew on the above graphic, I am pretty satisfied with where I am in Infinite Jest. In 13 days I've covered over 400 pages (not including endnotes, naturally), and I'm moving along at a 31.7 page per day clip. Now, as long as nothing like a new baby or another move interrupts me, I'll be finishing up on the 21st of July.

Summer of Jest--the First 300 Pages

2011-07-01T15:54:00.000-05:00

Mmmyellow?

My family and I have sold our home. We're living temporarily with my in-laws, trying to stay out of the exurban heat, and awaiting the birth of our second child. Throughout all of this, I've been lugging around Infinite Jest, trying to make headway. Here's where I am so far:

Now that I'm 300 pages into it, it's about time for me to do some writing about what I've read. I have gotten through the bewildering first 150-pages or so, when I was beginning to question whether the novel was ever going to stop introducing new characters, new situations, and new plotlines that needed my attention. At this point in the novel, I feel confident that there are two main plots and I understand them--on one hand, Hal Incadenza and the E.T.A. kids, and on the other hand Don Gately and the equally eccentric denizens of the Enfield House.

No way am I going to try a summary, or even an analysis of it. Instead, I am going to highlight some of the sections of the novel that I have enjoyed the most so far, in no particular order. (Most of the following comes from emails I have written with my older brother, Jason, who has been guiding me through my reading. He's the one who encouraged me to start reading it back in 2004, when I made it to page 324, and who has stuck with me until now.)

The seven-page chapter beginning on page 144 with the ridiculously long title which details how video-telephoning (a.k.a. "videophony") first became really popular, but then people reacted against it and went back to regular audio-only phoning. It's so freaking brilliant and hilarious, even though it does nothing to further the story and could easily be excised. I was thinking this: "Dude. If I ever had an idea as great and well-thought-out as this one, then that would be the one idea I've been looking for all my life, and I could write a novel around it." The fact that it's a seven-page aside in this book is mind-blowing.

The chapter from B.S. 1960 that begins on p. 157 is a 12-page monologue from Jim Incandenza's father to Jim in the garage of their trailer park. It includes a 10-page long paragraph. This was very, very difficult to read and had to be done in one all-out burst of energy (how do you pause in the middle of a 10-page paragraph?) And the whole time I was thinking "This [jerk]! Why doesn't he make a paragraph break? This is so so so so demanding to read!" But man oh man. It was just so fantastic. In Jim's father's memory, he (Jim's father) is beating the [bejeezus] out of a kid at tennis and he hears his dad say "Yeah, he's good, but he'll never be great," and at that instant he loses control of his body and [ruins] his knees forever. Wow.

James O. Incandenza's filmography takes up seven and a half pages of the endnotes, and details dozens of his movies. Again, had I been clever enough to think up a few of these ideas (my personal favorite is Cage III--Free Show), I would be very proud of myself. Also, if these movies actually existed, my friend Hayden would own them all, probably on VHS.

From time to time, I have grown frustrated with Wallace's hyper-virtuosic writing style and what I interpret as cleverness for cleverness's sake. I was at first peeved that he withheld some very vital information from us until page 233, but now I see how its sudden appearance fits into the grand comic scheme of the book. The chapter beginning on page 37 about Wardine and Reginald put me off, (sample line: "Reginald he down and beg for Wardine tell Reignald momma how Wardine momma treat Wardine"), and I was reassured to find that others had found this an off-putting moment.

The more I read Infinite Jest, the more I am reminded of how much I loved reading Lolita, and how much I disliked Pynchon's V. And that's what I have to say right now. Back to reading!

Here's Why I Took a Year Off From the Clash

2011-06-27T22:40:00.000-05:00

Today is June 27, 2011, and I am listening to The Clash for the first time in one year. Allow me to explain.

So, let me elaborate on what happened to me exactly one year ago tonight. You could say that I was stuck in traffic, but that would be underestimating it by quite a lot. Here's how I explained it the night after my experience:

After I got off the [New Jersey] turnpike at exit 18E, I ran into a little snag getting on the the George Washington Bridge. I didn't think much of it, as I only had about five miles to go, but then time started passing and I could not ignore the fact that I wasn't moving. At all.

I put on "London Calling" to pass the time. I listened to the whole thing. We still weren't moving. I was surrounded by thousands of cars, and we were all sitting there, staring at one another. It was Saturday night, and half the population of New Jersey was going into town for a night out.

This went on for two hours, then three. I have to admit I started getting a little hysterical and had to call Renee to have her talk me down. A lady behind me just started honking her horn over and over, and other people must have thought it was a good idea, because they started honking their horns.

Eventually, I made it to the George Washington Bridge, a full five hours after leaving the turnpike. My original plan was to be at a motel in New Haven by 10:00, instead, I found an overpriced room in Bridgeport, Connecticut at 2:30 in the morning.

Here is a visual aid of the ordeal:

My tone belies how really frightening it was to sit in my car and stare at the same taillights for five hours in a row. I mean, we're talking about five miles here. Imagine how slow it would feel to go one mile an hour for five straight hours. I run a 5K in about 30 minutes flat, so if you extrapolate that, then I could have realistically jogged this distance in about 50 minutes. And yet it took me five hours. (In five hours, you could watch Goodfellas twice and still have time to watch an episode of The Simpsons.) Here are some other factors to consider:

First, I was 1100 miles away from home, and had been driving non-stop since I left my family two days before. Second, I was slowly running out of gas. I had about a quarter of a tank when I started this little five-mile crawl, and I was nigh on empty by the time I finally saw the bridge. I was lonely, frightened about spending the next six weeks without my wife and son, and I just could not understand why we were all just sitting there! I still don't.

The next morning I woke up in an overpriced Holiday Inn in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a city that David Foster Wallace describes as "the true lower intestine of North America." I ain't going back.

Anyway, I was listening to the Clash while this all was happening, and I was afraid that I would never be able to listen to them again. Consequently, I decided that as a prophylactic measure I would have to take a year off of them. That year ends right now, my friends, and I am listening to "Wrong Em, Boyo," as I write this. And it feels good. It feels so good.

Here are five great Clash songs that I love. They are not in any order or anything. I just love these songs, and it's great to have them back.

1. "Safe European Home"

I love everything about "Safe European Home," but what I think I love the most about it is the snare shot that kicks it off. There is more rock and roll in that snare shot than in just about all the music I have ever written.

2. "Clampdown"

"What are we going to do now?" By the way, what do you make of that line, "You'd look good in blue and brown"? I have always thought it was something an army recruiter might say to a teenager. Thoughts?

3. "I Fought the Law"

Has any song ever benefitted from a cover as much as Bobby Fuller's "I Fought the Law"? I would say no.

Also, I always think of Lenny Bruce when I hear this.

4. "Straight to Hell"

5. "Spanish Bombs"

Oh, mi corazon!

The Summer of Jest

2011-06-24T21:23:00.000-05:00

This summer I am going to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Maybe.

The summer of 2011 is going to be a difficult but rewarding one. First, my wife is expecting our second child at like almost any moment now. Also, we are in the process of selling our house and buying a new one, with an interval of homelessness (and a stay at the in-laws) in between. No question--adult life is stressful.

As long as the theme of the summer of 2011 is difficult-but-rewarding, why not tack Infinite Jest on top of that?

This isn't the first time I have tried to complete it. In the summer of 2004, at my older brother's insistence, I got into the story and made it to page 324 before running out of breath. I was enjoying the read, laughing along, but something came around and distracted me, and I never got back to it.

I'm 134 pages on my way back into the novel, and remembering the delight tinged with frustration that I experienced the first time round. In a few days I will have more to say about; in the meantime, wish me luck and offer advice.

June Reading

2011-06-21T22:18:00.000-05:00

Normally, I wait until the end of the month to recap what I have been reading, but June is different, as this is the month I am beginning my summer reading list. In order to make way for Infinite Jest, the first book on that list, I have to get my house in order. So here's what I read during the first half of this (very busy) month.

1. In the Best Interests of Baseball by Andrew Zimbalist

Before I begin writing, I must note that my family and I are moving in one week, and I have already packed up ninety percent of my books. Therefore, I don't have these books in front of me to quote or cite or even refresh my memory. So this is going to be a great post!

Here's what I learned/didn't learn from this book:

Kenesaw Mountian Landis was a mean bastard.
If you think that the only game-fixing of the early 20th century took place during the 1919 World Series and was properly punished, you're a fool.
A. Bartlett Giamatti seemed to be a sincerely good person who accepted a job no one wanted, did it with as much grace and dignity as he could, and then died.
I still don't understand the reserve clause.
If you live in Milwaukee or follow the Brewers, you have a very good reason to despise Bud Selig.
Is there any excuse for the Pittsburgh Pirates to be as terrible as they have been for the last 19 years? No.

2. Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting it Right, by Bill Bryson

I taught middle school grammar for six years, and my favorite part of the grammar book (didn't you have a favorite part of the middle school grammar book?) was always the glossary of usage. I saved that part of the curriculum for the end of the year, like a desert that you look forward to throughout a long meal.

"Class, do you know when to use 'fewer' instead of 'less'? No? Oh, goodie."

After the joyful experience I had reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, I wanted to check out more Bryson, and when I saw this title, I knew I was going for it. This book is just what it says it is, a dictionary, and it is arranged as such. So I started with the "a/an" entry and went along all the way through"z" and onto the appendix.

It would take a pedant to write such a book, and Bryson does not disappoint. Some people might find his points to be esoteric and his tone to be that of a humorless martinet. I sure did, and I loved just about every minute of it. Here's what I learned.

I make many, many mistakes in my writing. Bryson could look at the four short paragraphs above and find multiple errors in usage. Look! I misspelled "dessert!" The comma after "title" in the third paragraph is suspect. I could have used hyphens to introduce the non-essential phrase ("a dictionary") instead of commas. Bryson's disapproving voice reverberates in my mind every time I write a sentence.
It's okay to end your sentence with a preposition. If you are the kind of person who will break his back to avoid ending your sentence with one of these offenders (or, like me, even ending with a prepositional phrase), you need to get over yourself. There's nothing wrong with it, and the rule you are following has been deemed unnecessary for over a hundred years.
You should read his rule on when to use "shall" versus "will." Thankfully, another blogger has put it online, so I can quote it without my copy of the book:

Authorities have been trying to pin down the vagaries and nuances of "shall" and "will" since the seventeenth century... The gist of what they have to say is that either you understand the distinctions instinctively or you do not; that if you don't, you probably never will; and that if you do, you don't need to be told anyway.

The show Good Morning America should be called Good Morning, America. Of course it should.

Coming up next is Infinite Jest, which I have already started (for the second time) and will be blogging about as much as real life will allow.

Derek Jeter and Roberto Clemente

2011-06-17T21:11:00.000-05:00

Derek Jeter Reminds Us How Great Roberto Clemente Was

Derek Jeter is on the disabled list. If you follow baseball, you already know that. You also know that he is only a few at-bats away from getting his 3000th hit. If you are a fan of baseball, I think it is safe to say that you probably know a great deal about Derek Jeter. But how much do you know about the man who he is about to pass on the all-time hit list, a man who got his 3000th base hit in the last game of his life?

Roberto Clemente was an under-appreciated player on an underrated team, and people remember him more for the heroic circumstances of his death than for his brilliance on the field. Even as he dedicated himself to crucial humanitarian causes in Pittsburgh and his native Puerto Rico, in a time before this was de rigueur PR for athletes, his fans complained that he was a whiner and an ingrate. They did not even call him by his proper name, choosing the Anglicized "Bobby" over "Roberto." (Witness that in the clip at the end of this post.)

When Clemente got his 3000th hit, there were only 13,117 hometown fans in the stands. Jeter will get his hit in front of considerably more.

As a child, I loved the Pirates and hated the Yankees. For my eighth-grade book report, I read my dad's copy of Who Was Roberto? a now out-of-print biography that came out just a year after his death.

Today, there are a dozen or more books about Roberto Clemente on amazon.com, and I would like to read every one of them.

Baseball, like life, is a zero-sum game, but I can accept the fact that Jeter will soon get off of the disabled list and pass my hero in the hits column. If there is such a thing as a favorite Yankee (and I'm not convinced that there is), Derek Jeter would qualify. In fact, Jeter won the Roberto Clemente Award in 2009 for the charitable work of his Turn 2 Foundation. I admire the same qualities in both players--their longevity, consistency, talent, and grace. I just like Clemente better.

Work Cited:

MARKUSEN, BRUCE. "Roberto Clemente." Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Thematic Series: The 1960s. Ed. William L. O'Neill and Kenneth T. Jackson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 17 June 2011.

Wikipedia-free research!

In Which Bill Nye the Science Guy Gives Me A Free iPod

2011-06-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

Photo by Ed Schipul

For the last activities of the year, my colleagues and I are attending a professional development conference hosted by The Martin Institute. The keynote speaker yesterday was Bill Nye, who delivered an inspiring and hilarious address that ranged from the color of the sky on Mars to the fundamentals of building sundials.

After the speech, the Martin Institute gave out door prizes, and Bill Nye insisted on hanging around to help distribute them. And would you know it--they called my name, and I got to go to the stage and accept an iPod from Bill Nye. Now I can check my email and play Angry Birds.

(Incidentally, the Martin Institute has asked that we use their hashtags in all of our blog entries that mention them. I still do not quite understand how hashtags work, but here goes. #micon. There. Did that do anything?)

A New Video From the Perfect Vessels

2011-06-10T14:22:00.000-05:00

The Perfect Vessels have released a video for "Atmosphere."

This video, directed by Neel Scott, is the third video off of the album Name Our Own Stars. Click here for the others.

Atmosphere from The Perfect Vessels on Vimeo.