A LONG day after a short Spring Break . . . the first day back to school is always shocking and exhausting-- but I still managed to teach three senior English classes, walk a few laps around the track with Brady, attend the faculty meeting, and run to the library during my off period (I took out an absurd book-- the 1300 page comprehensive account Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert-- perhaps because I finally finished Stalingrad . . . I did read a regular book between epic historical tomes, Liz Moore's Long Bright River-- which I read in two days, a gripping page-turner-- highly recommended).
Pathetic Pathetic Fallacy
My short Spring Break is over-- a measly five days long (because our district did not budget any snow days) and the weather is appropriately rainy, dark, and glum: mirroring my emotions about returning to school, and the long stretch of five-day weeks where I will (futilely) try to educate fourth-quarter seniors-- and while normally, in reality, the weather does not give a shit about human emotions, in literature the weather often mirrors the themes of the situation (for example, the oppressive heat at the end of the Great Gatsby-- Tom is sweating like a pig, but Gatsby remains cool and perspiration-free) and it seems the weather is doing me this service today-- perhaps because I teach English and have oft-mentioned the "pathetic fallacy" to my students-- but whatever, the reason, this is the perfect way to end a short (but quite fun) Spring Break-- with the weather showing fallacious empathy towards my returning to work.
Over the Hamlet Hump!
I am past the halfway point in my insane podcasting project: a thorough analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet with a myriad of embedded clips from various productions-- it's close to breaking me because not only am I producing all this carefully edited content, but I'm also trying to achieve professional sound quality and loudness (-16 LUFS? should I normalize, compress, or use a limiter-- or do all three? it's nuts) but I'm over the Act III hump, so it's clear sailing from here (aside from the pirates) and while Act Three, Part One is elegant and professional, Act Three, Part Two is much more akin to what it's like to be in my classroom-- at times, things get a bit weird and meta . . . I hope you enjoy it.
New Stuff at the New Museum
Took the train back from the Big Apple today . . . though we only spent one night, we did quite a bit: we got a great deal on Hotwire for the Sheraton Tribeca (probably because it's under serious construction, it doesn't really seem safe to have patrons, but they did let us check in early, and there's a lovely rooftop bar, and they gave us two drink vouchers!) and we did lunch in Chinatown at Shanghai 21 (cash only) and then went to the New Museum, which has just reopened-- it's a fantastic sci-fi space and all the exhibits are on the theme of "New Humans: Memories of the Future," so surreal modern art and sci-fi exhibits (including the original "Alien" sculpture that inspired the creatures in the film and the original animatronic E.T. robot) and then we did something new-- we couldn't secure tickets for the Comedy Cellar or Village Underground so we stood on the waitlist line-- which was really easy because once they take your name, you're free to wander until right before the show-- and they called our name right at showtime and we got to see five outstanding comics (Erin Jackson, Dan Soder, Greer Barnes, Daniel Simonsen, and Adndrew Schulz) and today, before checking out, we got some excellent bagels at Leon's and then-- miracle beyond miracles-- we caught the subway just as it was leaving and THEN we caught the Northeast Corridor Jersey Transit just before it was leaving . . . public transportation working the way it always should!
A Short Sentence about a Long Book
I am on a train so I will keep this brief, to avoid getting trainsick: I just finished Vadily Grossman's epic and enormous novel Stalingrad . . . and I will be taking a break before I tackle Life and Fate.
Bipolar Beach Day
Ahh . . . Spring Break . . . finally: Cat and I headed to the beach, and while the water was very, very cold, the air was alternatively very very warm and randomly-- if the breeze shifted-- quite chilly; we ate amazing sandwiches at the Speakeatery in Asbury and then stopped for some beer at the Source Farmhouse Brewery (I had the nitro-conditioned Irish Red Ale . . . it took several minutes to pour and had the character of Guinness but with a malty flavor: delicious) and then we got some bread and cheese at Delicious Orchards . . . a good day (aside from the traffic and construction on Route 18 . . . will it ever end?)
Dave is Brave
I have completed my course of three hyaluronic acid injections into my right knee, so now my knee is full of this gel-like substance, which is supposed to lubricate the joint and reduce arthritic inflammation-- which it seems to be doing-- but I also pulled some muscle behind this knee and down into my calf-- so while my knee feels better, I'm still limping around . . . and I don't think this kind of bullshit is going to end until I'm pushing daisies (and I should point out that I valiantly let interns deliver two of the three shots, so I consider myself responsible for fostering the next generation of medical science).
Dave Defeats the Youth
Spring "Fake" has begun-- I headed off to school today, rather glumly, because this was supposed to be Spring Break, but we used too many snow days, and so we have school today and tomorrow-- and the day was something of a waste but we made the best of it-- I oly had six students first period (in a class of 28) and my two other classes were less than half full, so instead of doing my planned lesson, we did a REAL test of intelligence: we played Scattergories-- which is an incredibly stressful word game and good way to ward off dementia-- and I'm proud to say that I crushed these teenagers (and I'm sincerely proud of this-- even though their brains are atrophied from cell phones, social media, and AI, Scattergories is a game where you can lose to a twelve-year-old if you lapse in focus).
Dave Implements a Solution!
I was getting stressed about saving the enormous audio files for my new podcast (Pig on the Wall) on my very old computer and rather old external hard drive-- and I was starting to back things up on a little SSD drive that I use for school, but that wasn't going to hold everything, so I finally solved the problem today and backed everything up in IDrive . . . it cost a few dollars-- but far less than buying a new computer!
If a Toilet Gets Cleaned, But My Wife Doesn't See It-- Did It Happen?
I did a bunch of chores around the house this afternoon: vacuumed, cleaned a bathroom, did some laundry, put the mattress cover and sheets on the bed, did the dishes . . . but accomplishing these tasks doesn't really make me happy-- I won't feel any satisfaction until my wife gets home from my cousin's baby shower and acknowledges my industry.
Too Much Music For One Sentence: Prog Rock vs. The Cars
I just finished the highly entertaining The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock by David Weigel-- or I found it highly entertaining; it might not be a book for general audiences-- and while the start of the book covers bands that you might know, from Procol Harum to King Crimson to Yes, Genesis, Soft Machine, and-- of course: Emerson, Lake, and Palmer-- you might be surprised by the extent of the cross-pollination within the scene and the extent to which record companies funded and allowed for absolutely wild, bombastic, innovative music to be made and published-- including lots of solo efforts (Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman made a 40-minute progressive synth rock opera based on Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Center of the Earth? and it was a commercial success?) and then the book moves along to Rush and Marillion and Dream Theater, and finally to the remnants of prog rock-- how the old bands fell apart (or learned how to craft singles like Genesis) and how there are some remnants of prog rock in bands like Porcupine Tree and The Mars Volta-- and the book certainly got me to listen to some "new" music from long ago (or rather recent music, such as Porcupine Tree) but Weigel also details how punk rock and new wave put an end to prog rock as the darling of the critics and ended any radio play that these epic songs were getting . . . and I am also reading The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told by Bill Janovitz and you can see why people were so excited for this new music-- it's tight and catchy and skillful but also forward-facing and progressive, and The Cars first album is a perfect example of this-- 1978 was when prog rock was starting to decline and artists like Blondie and Elvis Costello and The Talking Heads and Devo and The Police released great albums (and there was also a slew of great rock albums: Van Halen, Some Girls, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Dire Straits, Shakedown Street) and while Rush did release "Hemispheres" in 1978, a prog rock classic-- pop music was trending toward shorter songs-- and this was partly fueled by punk rock, which gained popularity in this same time frame . . . "Never Mind the Bollocks" came out in 1977 . . . anyway, I prefer the new wave stuff and what it spawned to most prog rock (although "Close to the Edge" by Yes is a masterpiece) but Weigel's book got me to listen to some pretentious but exciting musical experiments, and it's usually good to open your mind to new music (except when Hitler got really into Wagner).
Teaching: Not the Job I Signed Up For . . .
I have been pretty down about education and teaching English lately: the majority of kids don't read; if possible, kids use AI to offload critical thinking; kids are not as interactive as they once were; it's impossible to tell when kids are cheating; any time a kid has a computer, they might be distracted by 1000 things other than what they are supposed to be doing; teachers are just interrupting kids digital lives-- they can't wait to get back on their cell-phones; etcetera, etcetera . . . so I just ordered one hundred composition notebooks from Amazon and-- with my seniors at least-- I'm going to go back to basics . . . I'm going to give them a notebook at the start of class, they're going to write shit down in the notebook, and then I'm going to collect it at the end of class-- and I guess I'll occasionally check if they're writing things down-- and then if I do want them to type something (handwriting is generally abysmal these days) then they can type it from the notebook and make basic revisions-- but if it turns into a professionally written piece loaded with odd metaphors and parallel structure, I'll knwo they used AI because it won't resemble what's in the notebook . . . it's not foolproof, but I don't know what else to do.
The Winds are Dark
My wife and I just finished the third season of Dark Winds, the AMC show based on the Tony Hillerman novels, and the show lives up to the title.
A Physicist Would Think Those Wings Need to Be Bigger, But It Was the 1970s and Everyone Was on Drugs
You may be familiar with Roger Dean's artwork from the various Yes album covers, but I also learned (from the fabulous book The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock by David Weigel) that Dean designed album covers for the Caribbean-African funk band Osibisa, and Dean's flying elephants are much groovier than Dumbo.
Feeling Like Garfield
There are Mondays, and then there are dark, damp, rainy Mondays when your lunch consists of two hard-boiled eggs and some honey-roasted peanuts.
A Bad Day at Pickleball is Better than a Good Day at Work
I suppose getting thumped in a pickleball match is better than not playing at all (but at least we won a few games this time —last week against this team, they shut us out).
I Thought Last Year Was Well Organized?
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My cousin Kim pronounced last year's Easter Pizza resurrection as "total chaos" with no "quality control," and so this year things were much more organized, and generally the experts did the delicate work of folding dough and making the "toes"-- so my wife had to work all afternoon (and so did some small children) while I only had to cut some sausage and then got to watch basketball and drink beer-- and this year's pizzagaina were notably more uniform and delicious than last year's batch-- and I am certainly better at eating them than making them.
Daddy Needs a New Computer for Audio Processing
My iMac-- which is now over a decade old-- is laboring under the duress of the large audio project I am working on . . . but VCU gutted it out in overtime last night, netting me 11 points in the "select 8 and get the points for the seed" pool and Kentucky pulled it out in overtime today (7 points my way!) and Louisville and Illinois and Vanderbilt all won . . . so if Hofstra steals a miracle win over Alabama and St John's wins tonight, I might have the cash to buy myself a new-ish Mac Mini.
Menacing Ladybugs?
Today is my favorite lesson in Creative Writing class: we read James Wright's lovely meditation on nature, "A Blessing," and then my students attempted to draw the scene:
and we read a few other poems that convey tone, including "The Second Coming" by Yeats-- and with this apocalyptic poem, I always ask them what animals would contribute to the arid anarchy of the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, the giant Sphinx stomping across the desert surrounded by indignant desert birds-- so what animals would fit with this scene?-- snakes and spiders and crocodiles and vultures and ravens, creatures of that ilk--
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