Kay Ryan: Elephant Rocks

My opinion of our current Poet Laureate went through the quickest evolution I have ever experienced. It was contempt at first sight. The first few poems I read--not necessarily the first in the book, but a preliminary flip-through--were bland and unremarkable. They weren't bad, just sub-laureate.

Beth swore they were good, so I persevered. How long does it take to read a book of poetry, after all? As I progressed on, the poems developed a sort of charm for me. My opinion went from "She's trying to be Dickinson" to "She's reminiscent of Dickinson". Indeed, although the topics are. . . odder than Dickinson would choose, the tone and rhythms are right on the money. As with the Belle of Amherst, the poems feel like interior monologues, as though they are being wondered aloud. The rhymes are always surprising, occurring where one doesn't expect them. Sometimes a word hit the end of a line, and I would go back looking for the word it rhymed with--only to find that there wasn't one. Words such as "Delightful" and "Whimsical" started coming to my mind.

As I read on, it got old. The slant rhyming especially ceased to feel whimsical, and began to feel lazy. It reminded me of The Sugar Hill Gang or some other seminal R&B group, so taken with their innovation that the fact a word almost rhymed was enough, and they would slow down and emphasize it. Lame. I thought my irritation was a factor of my mood, so put it down for a few days. Nope. Still lame.

Which is not to say that her ideas are not cute, and even profound on occasion, just that they get old. I can even picture taking a few of them and teaching them in a lesson on line breaks or fancy rhyming. A whole book though? Bleah. And a laurel? Please.

Kurt Vonnegut: Player Piano and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

I am sad that I gave my copy of Player Piano away to Belinda before writing this, because there is a passage in it that I would love to quote verbatim. It was to the effect that the protagonist was transfixed by the mechanism of a machine, one he compared to the action of a maypole. Over, then under, and again. I love this, because it gives me the opportunity to do my favorite literary criticism trick: to show how a single passage is a microcosm of the entire book.

In Player Piano, the characters twist over and under each other in a manner that exactly resembles that of a maypole. In fact, he even opens one chapter with . . . dammit, I can't do this without the book in front of me. I'm going to facebook Belinda and ask her for some page numbers . . . never mind. The whole thing is available online, although it would be easier to see the dogeared page. The quote is:

"Out of the corner of his eye, a crazy, spinning movement caught his fancy, and he turned in delight to watch a cluster of miniature maypoles braid bright cloth insulation about a snake of black cable. A thousand little dancers whirled about one another at incredible speeds, pirouetting, dodging one another, unerringly building their snug snare about the cable" (18).

Her Vonnegut gives--perhaps inadvertently--a perfect metaphor for the structure of this and his other books. The characters are little ribbons, wrapped around each other, some never actually meeting, as a pleasing shawl for the information, "the cable", as it were. As the characters are introduced, it is in a way that fits the metaphor nicely: in their first appearances, The Shah of Bratpuhr is "encrusted with gold brocade. . . On the other side of the limousine's rear seat sat Doctor Ewing J. Halyard [a name that even means 'rope'] . . . He wore a flowing sandy mustache, a colored shirt, a boutonniere, and a waistcoat contrasting with his dark suit" (24). Both descriptions are perfectly in keeping with the "bright cloth insulation". Of course between them is the cable, the interpreter, who is appropriately unadorned. The metaphor continues as far as the end of chapter 3, where Paul "twisted free [of the other characters] and hurried out to his car" (35). After this point, Vonnegut wisely lets the idea speak for itself. Aside from a few mentions later in the book, the reader is left to see for her or himself the tangled web that is woven, and perhaps even to become one of the ribbons in the mess.

This structure is seen in later books, and evolves into the eponymous metaphor of Cat's Cradle, but it is not Vonnegut's structure alone which is seen in seminal form in Player Piano. The themes of an absent father to whom one can not measure up, and the question of human purpose--especially in modern idleness--are also seen throughout his oeuvre. One example is, of course, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. As good as Player Piano was, it was at heart unimaginative. In Rosewater, Vonnegut has found his legs and treats the same things, but in the singular way I have come to expect of him. I feel like Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions (and possibly others which I have not read) should be compiled in to one large, Tralfamadorian novel. Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout and--in this novel--Garvey Ulm together have written the perfect treatise on life, meaning, and love. Insofar as it is truly Tralfamadorian, it is not possible to analyze it here, but it is possible to pick out a few nice quotes:

"He had eyes that were standard equipment for rich American fairies--junk jewelry eyes, synthetic star sapphires with winking Christmas-tree lights behind them" (176).

"All persons, living and dead,

Are purely coincidental,

And should not be construed" (epigraph)

"It's dead, it's dead. And that part of that man's life where he had to be a certain crazy way, that's done!" (237).

BTD:44

John IV

18:4 This is not the deepest thought, but isn't it odd to let a sentence end in a preposition in The Bible?

18:5 This is interesting. In John's account, Judas' kiss does not occur. Surely John was there to see, and is a rather more reliable source than Mark or Luke, at least. . .

18:10 How did John know the slave's name? Did he become a believer later? Or did John do some research?

18:13 Always interesting to wonder how the office of High Priest, originally a lifetime appointment, became a n annual office.

18:17 I wonder a bout the inclusion of this moment. Was John taking a dig at Peter? How reliable a narrator is he, considering that he himself is a character--assuming his authorship, of course, which is contested.

18:23 Furthermore, Annas is not even high priest at this point, is he? So why address him thusly?

18:26 Again, Malchus has an unusually prominent role in this gospel. What was John's connection to him?

18:39 In my opinion, Pilate behaved reasonably throughout this. Not only his politic approach to the problem (giving them a way out with their pride intact), but his philosophy. To a dogmatic person, the best answer is always, "What is truth?"

19:8 As well he should be, after the way he allowed him to be treated.

19:11 Waitaminnit. These two statements are clear enough separately, but together open up to an interesting interpretation. In the first part, the one above who granted Pilate power is clearly God, but in the second part the one who gives the power is held at fault by Jesus. Is he blaming God? Or is it a trick of proximity?

19:13 A real dilemma. Clearly to Pilate, Jesus is something divine. At the same time, the Jews have a point. In the right context, his claim is a threat to the Emperor and that divinity.

19:16 What else could he do at this point?

19:22 Other than take a cheap dig, that is.

19:24 This is not the first time that John seems to be playing Matthew's game of reverse prophecy. One wonders where JEsus got such a garment.

19:28 By the same token, Jesus seems to be playing the game here as well. The parenthetical could be taken to mean that Jesus was acting consciously in behalf of prophecy.

19:35 This might be a response to my reaction. John sees that his account might seem revisionist, and he offers himself up to questioning. This is rather a forceful, if not soundproof, argument for his authorship.

20:2 Who is they? Who would benefit from taking him? The Romans? The Sanhedrin? His own disciples?

20:14 This opens one of the most fascinating theological disputes in the Bible. Why did she not recognize him? Was he obscured, did her grief blind her, or was he resurrected in some unrecognizable form?

20:16 Perhaps her back was to him, and that is why she had to turn around to greet him.

20:17 Why not hold on to him? Is he incorporeal?

20:24 How convenient that the one who looked most like him was not there when he appeared. A clever trick?

21:4 This interesting question rears its head again. Perhaps the confusion about his identity is here attributable to his distance on the shore.

21:19 John here reveals a touching affection for Simon Peter, perhaps a wistful reflection of events that had happened long before their writing, and of a man now dead. Fitting, then, that he end with a reflection on his own death.

Virginia Woolf: Flush

There is not much to say about this book, for reasons of length as well as content. It was neither innovative or profound. It is unlike any other of her books--or any book, really. It is a rare intersection of scholarship and affection. The love Woolf bears for her topic is evident in every page, and in the fact that she bothered to write the book at all. I can relate to this, for certain. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was my first favorite among writers. Although I have grown apart from her in many ways, reading Flush brought back much of my old warmth, and that was well worth my time.

Gustave Flaubert: A Sentimental Education

I read this more out of obligation and stubbornness than anything else. I read half of Madame Bovary in College, and was not impressed, so I grumbled a bit when my muse, Philip Ward over at http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtward.html sent me in Flaubert's direction again. Perhaps my taste has matured since undergrad, though, because I was cured of my ambivalence by the second chapter.

Flaubert does nothing particularly eye-catching or unique in this novel, other than his overflowing sentence structure--often the clauses build up on each other like banks of snow, and hang precipitously over the next paragraph. It would be easy, in view of this seeming conventionality, to view the book as unoriginal. I easily forget that his scrupulous focus on the concrete, in addition to making the title a bit ironic, is itself an innovation. A Sentimental Education was written in a decidedly sentimental literary world, and Flaubert's abhorrence of sentimentality is, in fact, rather brave.

It is not for its literary significance that I recommend this book, however. I was thunderstruck by Flaubert's keen insight into the human mind, and especially into human pettiness. To take one sterling example, after he relents to his mistress,"Frederic didn't enjoy hearing her take for granted an action which he considered noble" (418). What a marvelous observation on Flaubert's part. He precisely identifies a thought of the sort that lives in all minds, but rarely makes it onto the page. In short, Flaubert paints a chillingly unsatisfying picture of "society's almost unlimited capacity for indifference", beginning from within the mind of one young man (261).

Farah Ahmedi: The Other Side of the Sky

This is in the "Do I want to teach this book?" category, and the answer is yes, in three out of four categories.

It would be easiest to start with the only way in which this is not a good book to teach my students: the length. They have taken seven weeks (more or less) to read a book that is half the length. The payoff of teaching this book would simply not be worth the instructional time it would eat up. A teacher at a school where the students would read so much as a page a night on their own might come to a different conclusion.

One way this book is eminently suitable is its readability. SMOG (http://www.harrymclaughlin.com/SMOG.htm) calculates the level at 11th grade, which is too high for my students technically, but the thorough and helpful footnotes figure nowhere in that calculation, and I only typed half a page into the calculator, so it may well be skewed. My assessment is more like 9th.

Both of the above criteria are a bit sterile, but the book is anything but. It is delightfully idiomatic, thoughtfully written, and filled with emotion and imagery. The students will especially appreciate the author/narrator's nearness to their own age, and my Latino students will relate well to the immigration and ELL themes in the book.

As a teacher, what I am most interested in is the books pedagogical possibilities. There is so much that can be done with this highly topical book--relating it to the war in Afghanistan, 9/11, family conflict, culture shock, any numerous other themes, both in language arts and social studies. If I were staying at my current job, I would co-teach it with my Social Studies compatriot across the hall in a heartbeat.