Reading, Icing, Rinsing, Repeating . . .

I am still laid up and moving slowly today-- waiting for the cortisone shot to work its anti-inflammatory magic on my left knee-- I went for some x-rays this morning to make sure it isn't anything more than arthritis (and the x-rays were quite taxing, I had to lie on a cold metal bed and twist my leg this way and that way-- then the machine got finicky and they had to take a few shots over again, then I had to sit-up, holding the digital sensor board behind my knee, and freeze in that pose) and I've recently finished two novels, quite opposte in tone: The Keeper by Tana French, the third in the Ardnakelty trilogy, is dark and claustrophobic and insular, a Chicago cop retires to what seems to be an idyllic pastoral Irish village but then he learns that the town and its inhabitants have been entangled with the land and each other for centuries and you shouldd not mess with the locals . . . and by the third book, Cal Hooper has nearly become a local and he really gets involved in the town, a mysterious suicide, a woman, a once feral child, and the baroque relationships, hiearchies, and gossip mill that fuel much animosity and loyalty-- it's the usual Tana French, masterful, brooding, smart, and evocative . . . and then for something completely different, I read Volume 1 of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion by Beth Brower, which can only be described as witty, delightful, and faux-Victorian-- it's mildly historical fiction (with lots of Shakespeare references) from the point-of-view of Emma Lion, once an upper-middle-class Victorian woman, but now thrown into difficult financial straits by her annoying fop of a cousin Archibald, who has spent much of her inheritance before she could manage it . . . it seems Emma will have to navigate all sorts of social and fiscal quandaries in her london milieu, but she'll do it with verve and aplomb and plenty of witty repartee and banter-- I'll certainly read a few more of these to take my mind off my knee.

The Ten Year "Affair"

The Ten Year Affair by Eron Somers is not for everyone-- as with many books that I like, the Goodreads reviews are split-- which I find a better indicator of something interesting than if the vast majority of people like the book . . . and this book was well-reviewed by actual literary reviewers, so fuck gate-keepers and all that, but sometimes they know what they're talking about . . . anyway, the novel is about a millenial couple who move to a suburban town in the Hudson Valley and have various millenial child-rearing problems and social interactions, and the narrator-- Cora-- is in a mainly sexless marriage witha depressed but very nice husband, begins to imagine an affair and splits her life into two timelines, very Sliding Doors, until it gets messier . . . the tone reminds me a bit of Halle Butler . . . but not quite as futile-- anyway, give it a shot, you'll know if you like it by page two.

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:

two beautiful horses in a twilit pasture and a man so awed by their pastoral serenity that he feels he might "break into blossom," but the lesson is that it's not so easy to draw a beautiful horse (as evidenced by the student examples) 

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-- 

and then I ask them to list animals that would ruin the tone-- bunnies and kittens and panda bears and such-- and this led to some interesting discussions from the students as to what animals they are scared of . . . one girl is petrified of ladybugs?-- and another girl said, "ants are attracted to me" and then launched into several ant-freak-out anecdotes, and another girl said she hides indoors whenever she sees a bee, and she is also scared of moths, butterflies, lanternflies, and mice . . . and this really led me to wonder how these children are going to survive in the world.

Best For Last . . .

I am assuming Chris Pavone's The Doorman will be the last book I finish in 2025, and it was my favorite-- a thriller with plenty of social, racial, and class commentary; the novel's center is a working-class doorman (Chicky) with working-class problems, and his interactions with the very, very rich residents of the fancy Upper East Side apartment where he works-- and they have very, very rich problems-- and all the problems collide into a wonderfully stressful mess: this book feels like a tightly plotted modern version of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, with some Richard Price NYC tone thrown in for good measure-- definitely worth reading.

Ignoring the Unspeakable

Today was an apt day to finish  Omar El Akkad's book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (a title which reminds me of a book I read about the Rwanda genocide called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families) since the news is filled with unspeakable gun violence and mass shootings-- which Americans will be ignoring soon enough-- Akkad wants people to stop looking away from the horror, especially the horror in Gaza, perpetrated by what he views as the ugly business of imperialism, supported by the U.S. military industrial complex, political machinery, and media . . . here's a passage from the end that gives an idea of his tone:

One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing of the newly stateless. One day it will become impossible to accept the assurances of the same moderates who will say with great conviction: Yes the air has turned sour and yes the storms have grown beyond categorization and yes the fires and the floods have made life a wild careen from one disaster to the next and yes millions die from the heat alone and entire species are swept into extinction daily and the colonized are driven from their land and the refugees die in droves on the border of the unsated side of the planet and yes supply chains are beginning to come apart and yes soon enough it will come to our doorstep, even our doorstep n the last coded bastion of the very civilized world, when one day we turn on the tap and nothing comes out and we visit the grocery store and the shelves are empty and we must finally face the reality of it but until then, until that very last moment, it's important to understand that this really is the best way of doing things. One day it will be unacceptable in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness.

it is rough stuff and an especially controversial topic around my area because we have both a sizeable Jewish and Muslim population, there are people on both sides of this issue, and I don't see any resolution other than more violence, suppression, terrorism, displacement, starvation, military incursions, explosions, and horror.

Right Back To It

We now enter the three-week slog before Winter Break-- and while some of us teachers might not make it until the end and will end up crying under our desks, broken and despondent, amidst piles of ungraded essays, I am determined to give it the ol' college try and try to teach through these dark days with energy and alacrity-- but today was rough, I attended the 7 A.M. early morning faculty meeting (to avoid staying after school) and then planned and graded my ass off during my prep, essentially became a game-show host second period for a spirited lyric-fill-in game, and then taught Creative Writing mock-epic tone and fairy tale tropes so they could have some fun writing a story, and then went back to grading synthesis essays during my study hall duty . . . my back hurts, my eyes hurt, my brain hurts . . . and that's only day one.

Pained Epiphany

I needed a break from reading the dense and detailed (but very well-written) slog that is James M. McPherson's Battle Cry for Freedom: The Civil War Era, and so I dove into the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke award winner Annie Bot by Sierra Greer-- Annie Bot is a sci-fi novel about the perfect android girlfriend, and while the book starts with a light, technologically provocative tone (warning . . . or perhaps selling point? there are robot/human sex scenes) but as I got further int othe story, I realized that though I was trying to read some sci-fi to escape the disturbing rationalizations, racism, and inhumanity of the Civil War, that Annie Bot and Battle Cry for Freedom are both ultimately about slavery and autonomy . . . but my NEXT book is going to be fun!

All the Pretty Good Horses

After we read James Wright's serene and transcendent poem "A Blessing," I like to have my Creative Writing students draw the scene-- at a minimum, they are required to sketch two graceful, docile "Indian ponies" that can "hardly contain their happiness" and if they're really cooking with gas, then they can also attempt to draw the narrator, who is so entranced by these kind and mysterious animals in the twilight that he says, epiphanically: "Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom" and, year after year, the results of asking kids to draw beautiful horses are extraordinary: .  

and I do NOT allow the students to use their computers or phones to look at horses before they draw, and the point of this exercise (besides my amusement) is that for most of us, it is much easier to use our words to convey tone than it is for us to visually represent tone, especially if the tone is enchanting . . .

and there is a bonus message to this lesson; noted writer Garrison Keillor once had James Wright as a teacher and Keillor describes Wright as lecturing through the haze of a hangover while smoking cigarettes and ashing in a tuna fish can-- so think on this irony: this unkempt figure wrote some of the most beautiful and evocative lines of poetry in the English language-- this should be inspirational to all of us, you don't have to be a beautiful person to write a beautiful poem . . . 

but you do need some real skill to DRAW a beautiful horse.

The Canadian Allman Brothers?

If you love the Allman Brothers but you've worn out the grooves on their oeuvre, then you could give "Dickie Betts" by the Dean Ween Group a listen-- no surprise that those guys did an Allman Brothers Tribute . . . or-- more surprisingly-- you could listen to "Making Memories" by Rush . . . I've been going through their discology lately and the tone and sound of this track kind of shocked me (in a good way).

The Hegelian Trumpalectic

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis . . . that is how 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel imagined progress happened, whether in logic, philosophy, spirituality, politics, ethics, art, etcetera . . . and it seems we are amidst an extreme version of this process, spurred by the human antithesis himself, Donald Trump-- and while I don't agree with some of his bullshit, like a blanket pardon to all the January 6th rioters-- including people like Matt Huttle, who violently abused his own child and Theodore Middendorf, who sexually abused a seven-year-old . . . a seven-year-old, dude . . . Jesus-- I don't think there's going to be much synthesis with that move and I can't understand why cops love Trump when he's releasing criminals back into the wild-- although I guess Trump is just "on brand" for cops-- but on the other hand, Trump's removal of all DEI initiatives from government agencies is certainly a valid antithesis to the reverse discrimination of "affirmative action" and the Biden administration's "woke" consideration of race, intersectionality, and microaggressions-- racial discrimination is already illegal, banned by the Civil Rights Act-- and I think the majority of people are sick of race being at the forefront of identity politics and don't want mandates that go beyond the illegality of discrimination . . . while we can't ignore the past, the goal is to become what Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther king dreamed-- a color blind society--  so while you might not like Trump's
tone, attitude, or methods, just remember, there will be an eventual synthesis of some of Trump's more obnoxious objectives and maybe, eventually, some sort of halting progress.

Dave is No Freddy Krueger

I was discussing "mock-epic" tone with my Creative Writing class this afternoon, which made me recall the first words my wife said to me this morning, just after she had arisen: "I had such a bad dream last night . . ." and I immediately imagined the worst-- murder, mayhem, abduction, forced entry, a high-speed chase-- but then she finished her sentence: "you were a litterbug and you wouldn't stop or listen to me."

Chores on a Workday?

My plan was to do some chores after work-- vacuum, clean a bathroom, call Vanguard and open a retirement account-- but now I am stalling by writing this sentence, which is a stupid endeavor because absolutely nothing of any import happened at school today, so Ihave zero content . . . just business as usual with the seniors: lessons about narrative tone and structure, then they got to watch a couple videos (of me, telling stories-- I have archival footage from the pandemic that I love to use-- then I can write stuff on the board or grade an essay while the video version of me is doing the lesson) and then we took a walk in the sun and I got them organized into groups and then they presented on tone-- easy lessons, easy-going seniors . . . I also entered a few grades into the new sophomore Common Assessment columns and screwed them up because they weren't in the right order, but I re-entered the grades and everything was fine, just an uneventful day but even though it was uneventful and even though I showed two videos of myself instead of actually telling a couple stories live, I'm still tired and I'd really like to take a nap now instead of doing chores.

The Pathetic Fallacy, Pregnancy Edition

Today at work the ladies organized a "sprinkle" for a teacher who is very pregnant with her second child (and leaving at the end of the week) and it took me a couple hours to comprehend the term for the party . . . you have a baby "shower" for the first kid and then for the next kid, it's not as big a deal, so you tone the weather down a bit . . . and I guess for a third kid, you just get a "mist" or a "fog."

Daylight Sucking Time

Everything always feels topsy-turvy the first Monday after Daylight Fucking Saving Time (otherwise known as I Had a Vivid Nightmare Saturday Night That the Government Stole Time From Me and Sunday Morning It Turned Out It Wasn't a Nightmare Day) and so while I was at school and then the gym, I watched the latest political polarized shitshow in reverse chronological order and I think it made more sense that way: first-- in the English Office-- I watched Scarlett Johanssen's SNL send-up of Senator Katie Britt's absurdly melodramatic SOTU response; next, while riding the bike at the gym I actually watched Katie Britt's entire seventeen-minute oddly unhinged, trad-wife, transitionless, tone-deaf kitchen-centric monologue; and then I watched President Biden's fairly energetic and topical SOTU address . . . and I've decided to cryogenically freeze myself until next December so I don't have to live through this stupid rematch.

A Noteworthy Parking Offense?

A few weeks ago, I noticed an egregiously parked car in our school note and left a mildly censorious Post-it note on it-- and while this might have been mildly obnoxious behavior, there was no question that this car was poorly parked. . . ANYONE would agree that the parking job was awful and that this car encroached on BOTH parking spots on either side of the vehicle-- the car was OBJECTIVELY poorly parked; yesterday morning, my wife and I went to pick up the Mazda, which we left on Adelaide Avenue overnight after we took the train to Princeton to meet my brother-- we were several drinks over the limit so we did not drive it home and instead walked from the train station back home on Friday night-- and when we got the car on Saturday morning, we noticed a note tucked into the driver side door handle-- the note said: 

2 Vehicles can fit here. Next time, pull closer to the driveway in front or behind you. 

and while I understand the sentiment-- Catherine parked the car in the middle of a small strip of curb between two driveways-- and obviously the note-writer wanted to park right in front of their house-- but I don't think this parking event was noteworthy for several reasons:

1) Adelaide is a long street with plenty of parking;

2) if my wife had pulled the Mazda all the way up to the next driveway, there might have been enough room to squeeze another car behind it-- but why do this? why encroach on someone's driveway when there is plenty of parking on this street?

3) this is not an objectively poor parking job-- it's a subjective desire by someone lazy and inconvenienced by the fact that they could not park exactly where they wanted;

4) this note is boring and didactic-- 

if the offended party would have written something funny or clever . . . "Pull up or pull out, dick" would have sufficed-- then I might have empathized more with the put-out parker who had to walk eleven yards farther than normal . . . but because of the moralistic tone, I will seek that spot out the next time we drive to the edge of Highland Park and foray into New Brunswick and I will park exactly in the middle of that strip between the two driveways and perhaps I will keep this note and adorn it with dicks and place it on my windshield.

The Holdovers: Old Walleye Does It Again

Chalk it up to Paul Giamatti (pun intended) to portray the most curmudgeonly, yet compellingly human grouch of a private school ancient studies teacher in cinematic history . . . a bitterly disappointed educator with one glass eye, trimethylaminuria, hyperhidrosis, a tendency to drink too much, and a habit of insulting the students with various elevated vitriol-- troglodytes, fetid philistines, hormonal vulgarians, etcetera-- but despite this, and because of Giamatti's brilliance, The Holdovers has just the right amount of sentimentality and just the right amount of angst . . . the tone reminded me a bit of Catcher in the Rye, told more from someone like Old Mr. Spencer's point of view.

Sarcastic Tone Implied

I'm not very good at sarcasm-- I don't have the voice for it-- so I've got to broadcast it . . . here it comes: you know what's fun after teaching English to high school students all week . . . helping your son on Saturday with all the AP English assignments he neglected to complete while he had COVID.

Tone? Term? What? Who?

I realized today why I've been so fried and exhausted at the end of every school day this year-- and it's not the new schedule of 84 minute periods-- the problem is the sensory deprivation: I can't wear my glasses with a mask (they fog up) so I can't really see the students (and it's hard to discern who is who when they are all wearing masks) and I can't really tell who is talking-- every class wide discussion begins as a ventriloquism act because you can't see anyone's mouth moving . . . and even once you figure out where the sound is coming from, you might not be able to parse the words . . . teenagers are often mumblers . . . AND they might not have clearly heard what I said, so that adds to this muffled game of telephone . . . I told them to find a "term" and they were looking for the "tone" and so I had to remember to really enunciate the ending letters of words (and today was hat day, further obscuring any visual recognition-- when you wear a hat AND a mask, there's no much identifiable face showing) but my only solace is that perhaps I'm developing super-sensory powers because of this intense obfuscated sensory training.

Sci-Fi Twofer Tuesday

I read two excellent sci-fi books recently, and they couldn't be more different in tone:

1) The Humans by Matt Haig is one of those "from-an-alien-perspective" stories that begins with ironic detachment-- wow, these humans are silly and they really can't handle technology and they're dangerous to themselves and the galaxy so we've got to deal with them-- but then, with the help of a dog, the humans start to win over the narrator and things get fun and romantic and profound and complicated . . . a compelling plot and great reminders of why humans are absurd and wonderful;

2) Moxlyland by Lauren Beukes is a  cyberpunk novel of the near future set in CapeTown, South Africa . . . and the apartheid is between class, not race; the government and the media is complicit in this and very oppressive and powerful, in a revised Brave New World sort of way . . . I'll just put a few quotes up that I highlighted on my Kindle and you'll get the idea-- but warning, you don't want to read this if you're a vaccine-hesitant-conspiracy-theorist (or maybe you do . . .)

Don’t be fooled by the cosy apartment blocks lining the highway, it’s all Potemkin for the tourists. 

Compared to what the corporates have done? >>10: What do you mean? >>skyward*: corrupting govts with their own agendas, politicians on their payroll, exacerbating the economic gaps. building social controls and access passes and electroshock pacifiers into the very technology we need to function day to day, so you’ve no choice but to accept the defuser in your phone or being barred from certain parts of the city because you don’t have clearance. you tell me how that compares to you hacking an adboard.

“Repeat. Do not be alarmed. The M7N1 Marburg variation is only fatal if you do NOT report to an immunity center for treatment within 48 hours. Repeat. It is NOT fatal if you present yourself promptly for vaccination treatment. Vaccination is 100% effective within three hours with minimal lasting side-effects.

Left is Right?

We were doing ethical relativism and ethical universalism in Philosophy class today and I had a thought that merits further development-- by someone other than me, a simple shed-builder: 

W.T. Stace claims that ethical absolutism is the province of the right, of conservatism and religious folk, but that may not be the truth any longer . . . the right seems more concerned with general libertarianism-- if you want to wear a mask, do so, but don't make me wear one; if you want to be green, great, but don't regulate pollution, etc.-- while the new "woke" movement on the left seems to believe it has the right ideas on race, climate, gender, etcetera . . . of course, there are exceptions and anomalies-- abortion comes to mind-- but perhaps this reversal in tone and attitude has also caused and confused all the polarization and animosity (and the important thing to remember is that nobody knows the best way to do anything, one society's outcast is another society's hero, and there's usually-- but not always-- a range of solutions to ethical problems, and complete faith in ethical relativism is an absolute and thus a paradox).