If you live in New Jersey, today is not a good day to own a dog-- the rain is torrential and not letting up anytime soon-- but if you do own a dog and you need to step out for a while and leave your dog at home, then you might want to put on "Jon Glaser's Soothing Meditations for the Solitary Dog" so your dog can have a stress-free meditative rest while you are gone (actually, you'll probably want to listen to this brilliant piece of sonic art with your dog . . . but maybe don't listen with young children, as there's quite a bit of profanity).
Uh . . . Etiquette?
Early this morning, before sunrise, my dog and I turned left down 2nd Ave for our usual constitutional to the park-- but we had to beat a hasty retreat because a pack of women was walking an even larger pack of dogs (some-- but not all-- of the women were walking two dogs) and I didn't want Lola to start barking maniacally at all these dogs in the early morning darkness-- no one wants to be woken up like that-- so I did the right thing, put the walk in reverse, and walked back up Second Avenue: back towards my house-- and I know the women saw me do this-- but then when they got to the intersection of 2nd and Valentine, they followed me instead going up to the next block and turning-- so I walked Lola up our driveway and had her sit behind the Mazda to wait until they passed and then one lady let her two dogs lead her onto my lawn and across my driveway, and I mumbled some passive aggressive stuff to Lola: You're such a good girl . . . I'm not sure why this lady is walking her dogs towards you when I obviously walked away from them to avoid a bunch of early morning barking-- she must be very stupid, unlike you, you're a good girl--and I don't really understand where this lady is going or if she knows what the fuck she's doing, but you're a good girl and if I see these ladies again maybe I'll be collected enough to tell them what's what with dog-walking-etiquette . . . or perhaps they will stumble on this post-- but when you see someone turn their dog away from your dog to avoid conflict, don't follow that person, and especially don't follow them and then walk onto their lawn and driveway with your dog, unless you want a bunch of early morning barking.
The Power Broker: Chapter 18 Rules!
After many pages of politics and politcal strategy-- mainly centered around NY Governor Al Smith vs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1928 Democratic primary-- Robert Caro's The Power Broker offers up something slightly different: "Chapter 18: New York City Before Robert Moses" and if you like Depression-era anecdotes, urban decay, Tammany Hall Corruption, and grand plans for improvement, then you will love this chapter- in fact, it's a set piece, and if you have access to a copy of this intimidating tome and you don't feel like reading the whole book, turn to this chapter and enjoy the disaster: half-completed skyscrapers; breadlines; tired and hungry school children; a corrupt and paralyzed city government; a vice-squad involved in racism, bribery, and graft; laid off teachers and other city employees; absolutely disgusting, dangerous, and despicable "parks"; politicians privately using public land for parties, housing, and financial gain; rotting unpaved narrow bridges and roads; extraordinary traffic; playgrounds unfit for children; Central Park full of dung and stumps and weeds and mud; a lavish city casino at the edge of Central Park where the elite and the mayor could frolic while the rest of the citizens starved; and a man with a plan . . . an ambitious, populist plan to link the citizens of the city to refurbished parks, to better roads, to New England and New Jersey . . . a monumental plan to preserve the last open natural spaces of the city and to make them available to the people . . . or particular people: people rich enough to own a car, the middle class, those people who had enough money to burn some fuel.
Snowing, It Is?
It's not epic-- it's not even all that impressive-- but it is slippery . . . and for the first time in what seems like (and may very well be) years, it is snowing in Central Jersey and, right now, it's actually accumulating, so there are a few kids on the sled hill, Lola got to frolic in the park, and my afternoon tramp was far more enjoyable than the typical 42 degrees and muddy.
Too Easy
I walked out of my house the other night and there were four teenage vandals on my lawn, tampering with my wife's giant inflatable Christmas decoration (a snowman, penguin, striped pole, and holiday gift tableau) and so I yelled, "Hey, get off our lawn! Don't mess with that . . . it's the holidays for Christ's sake" and then, instead of booking away, the delinquents sheepishly apologized: "sorry sir . . . sorry" and then one of them said, without any prompting: "It's Mason . . . you know my brother Tyler," and I was like: yikes, that was the quickest, least compelled confession in the history of crime.
You'd Like to Go Second? No Problem . . .
THREE . . . count them, THREE-- that's right, I generated three great moments in education over the past two days-- for an average of 1.5 great moments per day; so without further fanfare-- because this is already too much fanfare-- here they are:
1) yesterday, a girl in my College Writing class asked me a strange question: she wondered if I knew anything about the PE mid-term . . . and though I told her that I did NOT know anything about the PE mid-term-- why would I know anything about the PE mid-term?-- but I told her I was totally willing to hypothesize about what I thought should be on the PE final, and then I went into an impromptu monologue about something I am fascinated with-- the sundry and miscellaneous rules of in-bounds and out-of-bounds in various sports . . . and while the girl that asked the question tuned out immediately-- before I even finished contrasting tennis and basketball!-- some of the athletic boys in the class got involved, and we went through a number of sports, hashing out when a ball or player was considered in-bounds or out-of-bounds and we agreed that knowledge of these rules would make an excellent PE final and we had a generally excellent time speaking on this topic-- especially because our hypothetical final monumentally annoyed the girl who originally asked the question;
2) in Public Speaking class this morning, we were about to present informational speeches and when I asked for a volunteer to go first, once again-- and this happens all the time-- a girl asked if she could "go second"-- this is a common and logical request in Public Speaking class . . . the kids are great-- they actually signed up for Public Speaking so they like to speak in public . . . but they still don't want the pressure of leading-off, so I'm always getting requests to go second or third-- but someone has to go first . . . and today, in another great moment of teaching, I finally solved that dilemma-- a girl asked if she could "go second" and another student quickly claimed "going third" and someone else actually claimed the fourth spot-- so we were all lined up and ready to roll, but someone needed to go first and then I had an epiphany, a stroke of brilliance and I said: "Ok . . . I will go first" and the kids looked at me like: "Wtf?" and then I drew a line on the board and I said: "Tennis" and, once again, they were like "Wtf?"
3) then I did an informational speech on the topic of "In? Or Out?" and first I went through sports where the ball is "in" if it hits the line-- soccer and volleyball and tennis-- and then I discussed the anomalous nature of basketball, where the ball is "out" if it touches the line-- and we also reviewed how the sides and top of the backboard are in-bounds-- but not the supporting braces up top; we talked about football and the fact that if your foot hits the line, you are out; I outlined the complication of pickleball: the ball is "in" if it hits the line, unless the serve touches the non-volley zone line, then that serve is "out"; I brought up darts and what happens if the dart splits the wire (you get the higher score) and that started a whole debate on if darts and bowling were even sports at all (they are) and then I broke down the weirdness of baseball-- the ball can roll foul but if it rolls back into fair play before the base, then it's a fair ball-- and if it hits the foul pole then it's fair, so yu should call the foul-pole the "fair-pole" and then I actually learned something new from the lacrosse girls in my class-- and this rule seems plumb-fucking-crazy-- in lacross, if the ball goes out-of-bounds after an unsuccessful shot, when the ball crosses the end line, then the team whose player/player's lacrosse stick is closest to the ball is awarded the ball . . . wild stuff-- and now I'm making this extemporaneous informational presentation into a Google slideshow, entitled "Is it IN? Or is it OUT?" so that next semester, when a student asks to "go second" the class will be in for a real surprise (and perhaps no one will ever ask to go second again . . . but maybe I need to prepare a number of these boring and technical speeches, so that any time I don't get a volunteer to go first, the entire class gets tortured . . . there so many great topics I could present on: Transcendentalist Philosophy in American Literature, How to Keep a Salubrious Sleep Schedule, Here Are Some TV Shows Old White Guys Like, Seven Ways to Improve Your Pickleball Game, and -- of course-- How Robert Moses and the Automobile Destroyed Our Once Great Nation).
Remembrances of Ween Past
Wow . . . fifteen minutes into 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: "Santeria -- Sublime, Rob Harvilla really gets off topic and, starting with a quick discussion of King Missile's "Detachable Penis" and then he launches into a passionate paean about the greatness of Ween (particularly the live version of "Dr. Rock") which brings me back to this particular Ween concert in Asbury Park, where it all went down.
One Resolution Down, Too Many to Go . . .
Two days into the New Year, and I've already accomplished one of my resolutions-- I laid this out in the new episode of We Defy Augury: Traveling Through the Dark, but in short, I was determined to inject some "reality" back into my classroom and bring back some of my weird social experiment trickery that fell by the wayside-- so today I executed the "bee in the cup" social experiment-- where, after reading a rite-of-passage narrative about a troubled kid who learns to be a beekeeper and has to endure an increasing number of self-inflicted trail stings-- I ask a volunteer from the class to undergo a rite-of-passage and get stung by a bee in front of the class . . . and I always get a volunteer-- this year the girl who came up, after asking if this was "principal approved?" and I said, "Not at all!" rolled her sleeve up and closed her eyes-- she was really nervous-- so she didn't even see that it was a fake bee in a paper cup, attached to the lid by human hair . . . and in the same class I also set up the poem "Traveling Through The Dark" with a specious tale at the start of class-- I told them that I was running late for work because my son left me the car with very little gas in it-- which was true-- but then I found a dead cat at the end of our driveway and when I went to pick it up and put it in the trash, I noticed that it was pregnant and full of kittens, one of them struggling to be born-- but I didn't have time to call the vet or do a C-section, so I threw the cat in my neighbor's trash-- a great touch that always gets them-- and while the debate about what I did wasn't as uproarious as in the past, it still generated some discussion . . . anyway, I kind of stopped doing these weird social experiments a few years ago-- around COVID? or when kids got addicted to cell phones and it was hard enough to pull them into reality-- but I'm determined to bring "reality" back into my classroom-- or some fictitious version of it and I'm also determined to have kids put their cell phones in the holder in the front of the room-- I usually get lazy and stop doing this a few weeks into the year and then get pissed off at the kids for taking out their phones, but I'm going to remain consistent for the rest of my teaching career and get those damned things as far away from the students as possible so that I can lie to them and trick them more . . . and they seemed appreciative of my efforts at trickery today, so I will carry on with my resolution as planned and try to execute a few more of these experiments (and again, if you're truly interested in this, listen to the new episode of We Defy Augury . . . I reflect on a full career of these weird moments).
Happy Arbitrarily Chosen Day in the Middle of Winter
While I mainly think New Year's Resolutions are silly and indiscriminate-- why are you going to stop drinking in January? it's the coldest and most depressing month of the year, the month when you need a drink or two to make it to spring . . . plus it's not like you're putting on that bikini for a few months so why are you so gung-ho about the gym?-- and maybe I would make and keep New Year's Resolutions more if I lived in the Southern Hemisphere . . . it's certainly easier to start a new routine when there's more sunlight-- but, despite all these complaints, it seems that every year, I make some absurd or half-hearted resolutions, so I will continue the tradition: I resolve to keep making my podcast-- I just finished a new episode: "Traveling Through the Dark: Reflections on "Reality" in which I discuss an educational resolution too complicated to explain in this sentence-- and I also resolve to make the episodes a bit shorter and more focused . . . I also resolve to focus on flexibility more-- I have a strained calf right now and it sucks-- so I see much stretching in my future-- which is a really, really boring resolution-- so I need to add a more exciting resolution: perhaps I will try to resurrect my idea for a string of TikTok videos (the only problem is that I need my calf to heal to execute these videos so this resolution is going to have to wait a bit).
The Books Dave Read in 2023
1) The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
2) The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager
3) Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton
4) Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
5) Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
6) Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline by Simon Parkin
7) The Quiet Boy by Ben H. Winters
8) Flight by Lynn Steger Strong
9) The Revolutionary: Sam Adams by Stacy Schiff
10) How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
11) South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry
12) Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson
13) This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas
14) The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet
15) Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley
16) The Other Side of Night by Adam Hamdy
17) The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
18) Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
19) The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
20) Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles
21) The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville
22) Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson
23) 1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham
24) If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
25) Ringworld by Larry Niven
26) My Murder by Katie Williams
27) Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
28) The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
29) The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker
30) God Save the Child by Robert B. Parker
31) Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong
32) Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker
33) Promised Land by Robert B. Parker
34) Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy by Colin Dickey
35) Counterweight by Djuna
36) Judas Goat by Robert B. Parker
37) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
38) Pet by Catherine Chidgey
39) Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste by Carl Wilson
40) Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen
41) The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
42) Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith
43) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild.
44) Wellness by Nathan Hill
45) Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
46) All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
47) When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole.
10 Baby Punches Out of 10
If you're looking for a mash-up of Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein, and a self-reflexive, autonomous, meta-Pygmalion (with the addition of a bunch of freaky sex scenes) then Yorgos Lanthimos' movie Poor Things fits the bill . . . Emma Stone should win the Oscar for her revolutionary and evolutionary performance; Mark Ruffalo is rakishly entertaining; and Willem Dafoe does his usual creepy thing; my favorite line: "Now I must go punch that baby."
Three Better be the Magic Number
Hopefully, the proverb "bad things come in threes" is accurate-- because we had three bad things happen in rapid-fire succession today-- in a twenty minute span-- and now I hope we're in the clear . . .
Bad Thing #1: I pulled my calf muscle playing pickleball today-- totally stupid because my calf has been really tight, some kind of spasm or cramp, and despite this, I played a bunch of basketball with my son earlier in the week, which didn't help, but then I rolled it and rested it and stretched it properly and all that and it felt good today-- too good-- so I stopped taking it easy and played hard and mid-jump something snapped, so I'll be out of commission for a while;
Bad Thing #2: Cat texted her principal something that was meant for her co-teacher and NOT meant for her principal (in fact, it was about her principal) and so she had to do some back-pedaling and apologizing-- this was a movie-like bad thing where you're like "WTF?" . . . than happened?
Bad Thing 3#: while we were playing pickleball, our dog Lola did a bad thing-- when Cat walked up the hill to get the car (because I could NOT manage to walk up the hill with a pulled calf muscle) she found our kitchen and living room all amess with plastic wrappers and powdered sugar . . . Lola got up on the counter and ate an entire bag of pita bread AND a bunch of pizzelle star cookies coated in powdered sugar . . . so her stomach is eventually going to be a mess and I can't even walk her.
Gentrifiers Beware!
If you're looking for a thriller that lambastes rich white gentrifiers, pharmaceutical companies, and government-subsidized business acquisitions-- and has the wildly surreal conspiratorial feel of Jordan Peele's Get Out, check out Alyssa Cole's novel When No One Is Watching . . . but I should warn you: I thought this was going to be a more realistic take on race relations in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood-- told from two perspectives, a black woman who grew up there and a white guy who is part of the new wave of property owners-- with a little mystery thrown in for plot . . . but this book is actually a full-fledged, over-the-top, everyone-is-in-on-it hair-raising horror story-- which, on the one hand, is a lot of fun-- with loads of Quentin Tarantino-style "Justified violence"-- but, on the other hand, the race and gentrifying issues lose all their nuance, they are sacrificed on the altar of plot, guns, and vengeance.
Moses = Moses?
As I was plodding through Rober Caro's The Power Broker yesterday morning, I wondered whether Caro will eventually pluck the low-hanging-fruit and make the pun I am anxiously awaiting-- will he compare urban planner Robert Moses, who parted the neighborhoods of New York City to make way for superhighways (including the Cross Bronx Expressway) to the Biblical Moses-- who parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could get to the Promised Land-- if he does make the pun I'll be satisfied and my expectations will be fulfilled, but I'll also be disappointed-- because Caro is such a classy writer and this is such an obvious and rather stupid pun (Robert Moses implemented his projects by learning the ins-and-outs of political bureaucracy, soft power, and acting without permission-- and not asking for forgiveness either!-- while Moses was the recipient of an Omnipotent Miracle from an All Powerful Lord) plus puns are the lowest form of humor . . . I've got 950 pages to go, so the much awaited resolution to this sentence won't be happening for a while.
A (Photographic) Xmas Miracle
Christmas morning, I remembered that months ago I had bought one of those mini-phone-tripods and never opened the box . . . so I gave myself a Christmas present that was entirely symbolic of the holiday-- I opened some random shit I ordered online in the summer and literally forgot about because we live in the land of plenty (I bought the tripod because I had an idea for a series of TikTok videos but I never really got started on them because . . . well, that's an insane thing to get started on) and when I opened the mini-tripod box, I found that not only did I get the mini-tripod, but I also got a mini-remote . . . so that we didn't have to do the phone-timer photo thing-- which is a random nightmare and rarely produces a good picture-- but instead I could trigger the phone-camera by Bluetooth-- a fucking Xmas miracle if there ever was one-- and so I was able to take these pictures and also be in the picture-- and I'm going to declare that these photos are probably my greatest photographic accomplishments in a lifetime of not really accomplishing very much photographically.
The Boys Do Good Stuff
A couple of pleasant holiday moments:
1) I picked up Alex from Rutgers yesterday-- he survived his engineering exams but in regards to them, he said, "That was the hardest thing I've done in my entire life" but then we blew off some steam playing hoops at the Piscataway Y-- last night we just shot around and this morning we kicked some butt playing three-on-three . . . despite my sore calf muscle . . . I shot from outside and let Alex handle the athletic stuff;
2) while Ian can't play basketball with us until he undergoes his ankle surgery-- a fact which makes all of us very annoyed and sad-- he still made a clutch play last night . . . he's now working on the production end at Birnn Chocolate, a venerable candy factory on the north side of town, and my wife and I put in a couple of gift orders for some dark-chocolate raspberry jellies, as they are unequivocally the best around-- but they were all out . . . Ian said maybe they were going to make some today but you can't go to Birnn on the day before a holiday-- the line is too long-- but then when he got home from work last night, red-cheeked from biking in the cold, he plopped down three boxes on the counter . . . he made the jellies himself-- obviously he knows how to do that now-- he poured out the jelly onto a sheet, used some giant cutter than makes the jelly into little rectangles, and then dipped the individual jelly rectangles into the dark chocolate . . . a Christmas miracle!
AI Won't Replace Dave . . . Yet
It seems AI will replace low-level sports journalism-- AI can already do a serviceable job summarizing and analyzing the box score of a particular event and it will only get better at these tasks-- and this had me worried so I asked Bard AI if it would also be replacing ME and my personal blog, but Bard said no, that blogs like "Sentence of Dave" contain "the human touch"-- and thats true, I often really fuck up apostrophe usage-- and Bard says that personal blogs also possess "creativity and storytelling" but I feel like AI is catching up on that front and the last thing that Bard says it can't replicate is "community" and this is probably true-- until the AI is embodied and you can meet it at the pub . . . what would this blog be without the comments? and the correcting of my apostrophes?
Good Students = Actually Having to Teach
My College Writing students are hard-working and wonderful this year, which-- on the one hand is a good thing-- but on the other hand, it means that during these last days before the essay is due, they ask me a lot of questions on how to synthesize these disparate non-fiction texts we read ("The Myth of the Ant Queen" by Steven Johnson, "The Critic and the Thought Leader" by Anand Giridharadas and "Always Be Optimizing" by Jia Tolentino) and they have me look at a lot of thesis statements and topic sentences, and so by the end of the day, my brain is swimming in ants and emergence and self-organizing systems and million-ball billiards tables and new feminism and ever-increasing beauty standards and increasing plutocratic influence and shrieking daemonic mini-programs and the costs of evolutionary solutions and the convergence of MarketWorld and decentralized ant dynamics and the polluted miracle of Industrial Revolution Manchester and the dystopian potential of the cyborg and the juxtaposition of a hundred other strange concepts and while I am wholeheartedly behind the Rutgers model of non-fiction synthesis-- of making children aware of these big contemporary ideas and having them grapple with the terminology and concepts of the post-modern world (even though Rutgers seems to be abandoning the model they created and dumbing down the course because kids have lost their minds since COVID and the cell-phone revolution) I still miss teaching books while I like the abstract and conceptual conversations we have about this stuff-- and the connections we make to reality-- the top-down and bottom-up power dynamics really applies to what is happening with abortion right now, etc.-- it will be nice to switch over to something like Twelfth Night.
Wet and Data-driven Monday
Today was very Monday, a caricature of Monday-ness, beginning with a torrential storm that soaked Lola and me thoroughly on our morning walk-- I was so wet, I actually had to change my underwear-- and then, after a long day of helping kids revise their expository essays, we had a department meeting, the most Monday of all meetings, the one where we analyze data from our grade books-- and Stacey said her reaction to looking at everyone's data-- the number of grades, the grade breakdown, the averages-- is that she either cries or acts like an asshole . . . but she did neither, so that was a win, I guess . . . anyway, we'll try it again on Tuesday.
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