#I think this ones gonna be the mainstay... Hopefully.
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Ayano: I like wearing oversized sweaters. Not just because they're extremely comfy and cuddly, but because whenever the sleeves are really big, I get to flop them around and smack people.
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Belphegor: Something’s off.
Ayano: Maybe you’ve finally developed human emotions and feel bad for hurting people.
Belphegor: No, but that’s funny.
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Mammon: But seriously, what is the real plan here that has to do with not fucking around?
Ayano: There is no plan that does not involve fucking around. But we will make sure all of our fucking around will be applied in a constructive direction.
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Ayano: Do you think sex without love is a sin?
Kiyoko: If it is, I’ll see you in hell.
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Lucifer: If you got arrested what would be the charges?
Mammon: Theft.
Asmodeus: Disturbing the peace.
Satan: Aggravated assault.
Belphegor: Arson.
Ayato: All of the above. In that order, probably.
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Ayank: Hey, @Belphegor, when you wake up you're legally obligated to agree with me.
Belphegor: But I don't.....
Ayano: I don't see why that should be my problem??
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Belphegor: I found a note in one of my old word .docs that said Note to self: Get revenge on Satan.
Belphegor: Except I couldn't remember what I was supposed to get revenge for.
Belphegor: But I trusted my own judgment, so I went with it.
Satan: Hmm... I don't know what you were supposed to get revenge for, either.
Belphegor: I can only assume you got what was coming to you. Not 100 percent sure, though.
Satan: Well, whatever I did, I guess I deserved it.
Belphegor: Let that possibly be a lesson to you.
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Mammon: Beelzebub, please calm down.
Beelzebub: I asked for two large fries!
Beelzebub: *dumps fries onto table*
Beelzebub: But all they did was give me a MILLION FUCKING LITTLE ONES!
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Belphegor: You're smiling. What happened?
Ayano: What? Can't I smile just because I feel like it?
Leviathan: Mephistopheles tripped and fell down the stairs today.
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Ayano: Are you this rude to everyone?!
Lucifer: Yup.
Lucifer: Don't think you're special.
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Mammon: FIGHT ME, YOU NERD ASS SLUT!
Satan: At least try to sound slightly more sophisticated when you threaten someone.
Mammon: Oh, I'm sorry. I should ask; dost thou want to engage in a duel, my good bitch?
Satan: Somehow that's worse.
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Ayano: Well, has Lucifer been wrong before?
Asmodeus: How wide are we willing to open this up?
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Luke: You bought a taco?
Ayano: Yes.
Luke: From the same truck that hit Lucifer?!
Ayano, with a mouthful of taco: Well, me starving ain't gonna help them.
#Shall We Date?: Obey Me! One Master To Rule Them All#Shall We Date?: Obey Me!#Shall We Date?#Obey Me!#One Master To Rule Them All#Obey Me! Lucifer#Obey Me! Mammon#Obey Me! Satan#Obey Me! MC#Obey Me! OC#Obey Me! MC OC#Obey Me! Yuuki Ayano#Obey Me! Incorrect Quotes#I think this ones gonna be the mainstay... Hopefully.
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Forever ago I made a post about women’s boxing champions by country. Can no longer find it but basically it was about how Mexico was whooping the rest of the world’s ass by having the most champs. Thanks to a mix of the pandemic and many of their best fighters pushing 40 though, many of the country’s champions have lost their titles. I’m not gonna do another breakdown by country but thought it’d be interesting to see where the trends are going.
First off, when I made that list (2017-ish), I think the U.S. had two world champions - Claressa Shields and maybe Kali Reis or Franchon Crews-Dezurn? Actually, it might have been just Shields. Now there are 8 American women who own like 18 world titles between them. Two of them (Shields and Jessica McCaskill) are undisputed champions (they own all 4 titles) and Crews-Dezurn will be fighting for unified at super middleweight soon hopefully. It’s a nice mix of new and old faces. Former Olympians like Mikaela Mayer and Marlen Esparza have emerged to grab world titles while long time mainstays on the pro scene like Kali Reis, Mary McGee, and Seniesa Estrada finally getting world titles. Plus you have someone like Jessica McCaskill emerging from obscurity to capture gold relatively early in her career. It’s worth noting though that of all these champions, only 3 are signed to major promotions (Mayer, Estrada, and Esparza). Some of the remaining *may* be signed to Eddie Hearn but it’s hard to discern at the moment. Just goes to show how hard it is, even with the growth of women’s boxing, for these women to get paid seriously.
Another interesting trend is the growth of women’s boxing in the UK. When I made that first list, there were no UK women’s boxing world champs. Adams was forced to retire before she could win one and unlike the US, the UK doesn’t really have a history of having women’s champions. So them having four world champs now is kind of astonishing - Savannah Marshall, Chantelle Cameron, Terri Harper, and Shannon Courtenay. And they have a big crop of up and coming boxers from the amateur who seemed to be getting signed monthly - Caroline Dubois, Sandy Ryan, Ebonie Jones, Carly Skelly, Rhiannon Dixon, Stevi Levy, Ellie Scotney, etc. plus you have contenders like Natasha Jonas and Rachel Ball floating around. There seems to be a pipeline of talent that is getting money invested into it and I can’t see that not translating into multiple world titles in the not so distant future.
Not represented well in the world title picture and forgotten because of how hard it is to get out these countries right now, but be on the lookout for New Zealand and Australia in the near future. Women like Mea Motu, Cherneka Johnson, and Taylah Robertson are people to keep eyes out for.
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Electronic - AOL Webchat, 07/30/96 (Bernard and Johnny answering fan questions in a chat using the same handle, I've made minor edits for clarity purposes - archive link in full here)
Max Warner [AOL Webchat host/moderator] : We'll be starting in just a few minutes. We are having some minor technical difficulties.
Max Warner: Johnny and Bernard will be using the screen name Elctrnic.
Max Warner: Just a couple more minutes.... we swear!
Max Warner: We're here with Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner of ELECTRONIC.
Elctrnic: Hello From Bernard & Johnny
Max Warner: Here we go! after a few of those [Online host] Bringing together mainstays of two of the most influential bands of the last 15 years Bernard Sumner of New Order and Johnny Marr of The Smiths. The music of Electronic has exceeded even the high expectations that such a creative partnership undoubtedly engenders.
Max Warner: From Nexland: Question: Barney, Johnny Can U tell me the Story with George Michael. Where Did U meet Him???? it's funny because i saw a picture of Peter Hook with Barry White. That is Cool
Elctrnic: He was cutting his new record at the same studio we were in, hes a nice guy actually
Max Warner: From Embody123: Question: Bernie, what's the nicest thing about working with Marr (Marr: Vice Versa)?
Elctrnic: Johnny never calls me Bernie
Max Warner: From NewOrder3: Question: I would like to know whether any concerts will be scheduled in 1996 and who is the author of the paragraphs in the CD of "raise the pressure"
Elctrnic: At the moment were looking for the right musicians,we'd like to see everybody.
Elctrnic: Bernard wrote the text inside the album$
Max Warner: From SeanJorda: Question: Will either of you be doing any production work in the near future? Barney: I just listened to your SHARK VEGAS, TECHNOTRONIC, and BEAT CLUB tracks today.
Elctrnic: You really know your stuff. I would like to concentrate on Electronic $
Max Warner: From BigBoy666: Question: What do _you_ listen to?
Elctrnic: We mostly listen to European dance music and older good rock stuff, Stones 2000 Light Years, Bowie/Eno Be My Wife$
Max Warner: From APinto65: Question: How did it happen that Neil Tennant did not join up with you on this CD? It's still is fabulous, but I was just curious?
Elctrnic: Electronic is Johnny and Benard.Neil is a guest artist,Johnny is on the new P.S.Bs album
Elctrnic: On this album Karl Bartos from Kraftwek is the guest
Max Warner: From Nexland: Question: Barney, Johnny How are u Tonight???
Elctrnic: Really Groovy
Max Warner: From SeanJorda: Question: How did you guys like TRAINSPOTTING, and Barney- did you like the use of TEMPTATION in the film?
Elctrnic: Its a great film, it opens friday in the U.S. I was proud to be associated with it
Max Warner: From AJ Wells: Question: Hey Barney... how is the jogging coming along? Any Olympic hopes?
Elctrnic: Im meeting up with Ben Johnsons dealer tonight so I should be o.k
Max Warner: From Embody123: Question: Marr: what do you think of MOJO magazine's listing you in the top 25 greatest guitar players of all time?
Elctrnic: Whos this Hendrix bloke ?
Max Warner: From LLabo2909: Question: Johnny, will you ever be joining Morrissey for a reunion tour with the Smiths. Please say yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Elctrnic: Sure Boris, do you see any quiffs about?
Max Warner : From AJ Wells: Question: Barney... what ever happened to Section 25? Or Shark Vegas? Or Stexx? Or 52 Street?
Elctrnic: All in mental institutions I think, honestly!
Max Warner: From BBMountai: Question: I've heard that Johnny's been websurfing lately and was wondering if Bernard has also? And what do you both think of the web sites fans create about you?
Elctrnic: Johnny's quite into the web.We intend to make our sites more personal and as informative as possible.we're into it
Max Warner: From Jester000: Question: Johnny I was wondering what gave you hte idea for the whales used in "last night I dreamt...." thanks, glenn
Elctrnic: Bernards getting his browser together when he gets back to U.K
Max Warner: From Embody123: Question: How long did the new album take?
Elctrnic: The sound is actually a protest march sound effect slowed right down.Angry unemplyed.
Max Warner: From PULPTALEN: Question: What is the most succesful song in your career?
Elctrnic: The new album took two years to make but it only feels like one year and eleven months
Max Warner: From Annabel50: Question: hows life in the fast world?
Elctrnic: Slow
Elctrnic: How soon is Monday
Max Warner: From CADS1: Question: are you guys in nyc
Elctrnic: Yes
Max Warner: From Cphel: Question: Bernard- Is New Order no more? Johnny and Bernard-Why no PSB involvement?
Elctrnic: Not quite suree abot that one. P.S.Bs were guests.
Max Warner: From NEXLAND: Question: Do u feel any pressure with an new album??????
Elctrnic: I hope thats not a joke ,
Max Warner: From Femboheme: Question: I love, actually worship the new album. I also love the b-sides, do you have any good instrumentals on any upcomming singles for us?
Elctrnic: Were gonna do some new stuff soon. Were really glad you like the new Album,Thanks.
Max Warner : From CanadaBil: Question: You guys have had awesome careers!! I've been a fan of both since day one. Bernie, is it true that you (New Order) own a bar on one of the islands off the coast of Spain? I'd like to go. Thanks!!
Elctrnic: We dont own a bar in Spain, well not that I know of anyway.We recorded Technique in Ibiza/Spain
Max Warner: From Jcorker: Question: Bernard-Any relation to Sting?
Elctrnic: Hes my great Grandfather actually!
Max Warner: From KCleary: Question: Your music style is not necessarily the most accessible or popular in today's music scene when compared with what's on the charts - i.e. grunge, hard rock. Do you see that as a positive Question or negative when you go into the studio and/or when you tour?
Elctrnic: There should always be a place for someone who is different
Max Warner: From CADS1: Question: at the end of get the message what are you saying
Elctrnic: I am saying "Living on peanuts ain't my scene,shame that word rhymes with mean"
Max Warner: From FBrowniii: Question: do you guys care what radio thinks of your eclectic mix of styles? (we won't tell the record company execs :)
Elctrnic: No
Max Warner: From Femboheme: Question: Who writes the lyrics, who music? Is it a mix or is there a majority-one does more of one thing than the other?
Elctrnic: We both write the music and Bernard writes the Lyrics
Max Warner: From NewOrder3: Question: to Bernard: what do you think of the compilation: Tribute to Joy Division ? are you flattered ?
Elctrnic: I was touched by the gesture
Max Warner : From LLabo2909: Question: Johnny as usual you have great taste in music. is it true that you went guitar shopping with Noel from Oasis? the best band in the world!
Elctrnic: Yeah I did,but in future Noel can take his cheque book
Max Warner: From Lucozade: Question: heard you're both insatiable gossips. any new dish?
Elctrnic: O.K , Prince Charles is Ice T,s lover!, it's true!
Max Warner: From Bridge bo: Question: would you guys consider yourselves closer to christians or zen budhists??
Elctrnic: Were from The Church Of The "Not To Bothered"
Max Warner: We're running out of time... 2 more Questions.
Max Warner : From HammoFam: Question: How do you compare the bands of the 90's w/the bands of the 80's? Honestly, do you miss the 80's?
Elctrnic: We both really miss Flok Of Seagulls and Wang Chung! it's really sad
Max Warner: AND here's the last Question, from SJacobs62: Question: what is your favorite band?
Elctrnic: We dont really have one favourite band.Were going now,thanks to everybody whos supported us in the past and hopefully well be in touch one way or other soon. Take care
Elctrnic: from Johnny and Bernard
Max Warner: Bernard and Johnny, thanks for coming.
Elctrnic: Cheers!
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(1/2) hi there! so, i don't really consider myself a "new" christian- i've felt drawn to god since i was young- but i only started reading the bible about a week ago. i set a goal for myself of reading 20 chapters a day so that i will have read the entire bible in ~2 months, which was very manageable initially because april break was still in progress when i started. however, now that i have schoolwork to do, i'm finding that i just don't have enough time in the day to read that many chapters.
(2/2) i don't want to disregard my goal, but if i force myself to read too much each day, i fear that i won't be able to retain or appreciate much of what i read. i'm not sure what to do. should i lessen my ambitions at the cost of taking longer to read it overall, or somehow muscle through 20 chapters a day at the cost of not fully understanding them? sorry this isn't relevant to lgbt matters- i'm just always comforted by your advice and wasn't sure where else to turn. thank you for your time!
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Ah, don’t be sorry! If I could talk about the Bible all day every day, I’d be thrilled! (I’m autistic and scripture is my mainstay special interest haha)
This gets super long so tl;dr: I vote for revising your goal and reading less per day. You don’t wanna get burned out, and you want to be able to retain what you read and have the chance to really mull it over!
It means a lot to me that folks like you come to me for suggestions; I’m by no means an expert but golly do I love the Bible, and I’ve been reading it since childhood -- first picture book & abridged versions, then the “real deal” starting in ninth grade, and these days I often translate passages from the original Greek and Hebrew. So I’m always joyful to share what I’ve learned about reading the Bible, particularly in ways that combine the spiritual and the scholarly.
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I super admire your dedication to reading the entire Bible; most Christians never do so and while it’s by no means a prerequisite to being Christian, I find that actually reading it all can be a great help in many ways:
First, it means that no one can tell you what’s in the Bible without you being able to bring your point of view to the discussion, because you’ve read it too. You don’t have to just accept what others say about it, ya know?
Secondly, there really is deep richness in the Bible; the Holy Spirit will breathe through the pages as you read and enliven your heart. You’ll learn more about what it means to be in relationship with God, with yourself, with other humans, and with all Creation.
Finally, only in reading the entirety of the Bible to you come to see the overarching themes of scripture, the fullest glimpse of the God it reveals. The separate fragments and books of the Bible are distinct from one another in many ways, written by many authors with differing opinions and understandings of God; but once you’ve read them all it is possible to trace the path of the Divine across them all.
Hopefully, you’ll grow more comfortable with things like contradiction and doubt. You’ll learn how to scoop up glimmers of the Divine even in Bible stories that make you shake with anger or scratch your head nonplussed. You’ll learn that being faithful doesn’t = having all the answers, but instead is about a willingness to engage in dialogue with God and with others, to constantly learn and question and grow.
All that being said, 20 chapters is a lot to get through in a day!! Whew!! I do recommend reconsidering your goal. It was a valiant one and I’m impressed you were able to do it for a time, but it’s totally okay to re-plan things. I used to be really, like, averse to the idea of revising goals; I felt like a failure or like I was weak or something if I had to change them? So if that’s what you’re feeling, do what you can to let that feeling go. There is no shame or weakness in realizing that your current plan isn’t working for you. The true shame is in refusing to change your ways when everything is pointing to a need for change!
Decrease your goal to something more manageable, so that you don’t start dreading your scripture reading and get burnt out. You don’t want to resent the time you reserve for reading! You want to be open to the Spirit’s wisdom as you read.
Honestly, if your goal were to become as general as “read at least one chapter each day,” or even “read at least one paragraph each day,” that would be totally fine! There may be days when you get more done, but even a little passage of scripture is full of richness. And you’ll be showing your dedication and learning spiritual discipline in making time for even a little passage in a busy day.
Yes, you’ll be reading for a lot longer; but there is no rush. Reading the whole Bible isn’t just about cramming all its contents into your brain; it’s also about letting the words seep into your heart. That takes years, lifetimes even.
Still, I understand the desire to have the whole Bible in your head. So the rest of this post is going to try to balance the “scholarly knowledge” of the Bible that you logically want to get into your brain as soon as possible with the spiritual wisdom and impact of the Bible, which is cultivated over a lifetime.
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The spiritual side of Bible reading
I’m gonna share a passage from Sister Macrina Wiederkehr’s book A Tree Full of Angels about Bible reading, because she describes the richness held in the tiniest crumb of scripture and the wisdom in taking it a little at a time better than I can.
Let’s start with her explanation of the spiritual discipline called “Lectio Divina,” reading the Bible in an embodied way that enriches our understandings of God’s presence in all Creation:
“Here is a way to harvest the Word of God.
The monastic tradition to which I belong has always stressed the value of seeking intimate communion through persistent dwelling with and in the Word of God. We call this form of prayer Lectio Divina (Divine Reading). Lectio Divina is far more than what we ordinarily understand as spiritual reading. It is reading...with the eye of God, under the eye of God. It is reading with the desire to be totally transformed by the Word of God, rather than just to acquire facts about God.
The incarnational aspect of Christianity reminds us that all of life is full of God. God is in all. Lectio Divina, then, is a way of reading God in everything. ...
In the tradition of our desert fathers and mothers...the emphasis was on the reading of the Scriptures. This was the Word of God par excellence. The discple was encouraged to hover over the word of God in the Scriptures as the Spirit once hovered over the birthing world. ...The one who is immersed in the Word of God in the Scriptures is eventually able to read God in all things. ...
Macrina then brings up Guigo II, a monk from the 1100s who came up with four phases or degrees of the Lectio: reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation.
It sounds to me like you’re currently most focused on the “reading” phase, since you’re busying yourself with getting through the whole Bible as soon as you can. That is totally cool!
Guigo II described the reading phase as putting food in the mouth, while “meditation chews it, digs for the treasure. Prayer extracts the flavor and helps us get to know the treasure. Contemplation embraces and welcomes the thirsty soul.”
I know that there are days when I just can’t seem to get my spirit into the latter three phases of the Lectio; I can only manage the reading phase. So I read, with the faith that by absorbing the content of Bible pages into my brain, there will come a time when I chew on that content, digest it, find the treasure in it. Thus I don’t think it’s a bad thing to read the Bible primarily in that “info-gathering” mode -- the more scholarly mode -- but when you’re ready and able to wade in deeper, do so! That might be every day for you, especially if you don’t spend all your time and energy on cramming in as many passages as possible; or it might be something you don’t really get to until you’ve read whole books of the Bible. I’m not saying there’s one right way to do all this -- just stuff to consider!
But I will emphasize the “meditation” phase Macrina describes next, because I think it might help you decide that yes, you do need to cut down on just how much of the Bible you read daily. Here’s what she says about how much of the Bible she reads in one sitting:
“Read until your heart is touched. When your heart is touched, stop reading. After all, if God comes in the first verse, why go on to the second? A touched heart means God has, in some way, come. God has entered that heart. Begin your meditation.
Meditation is a process in which you struggle with the Word of God that has entered your heart. If this Word wants to be a guest in your heart, go forth to meet it. Welcome it in and try to understand it. Walk with it. Wrestle with it. Ask it questions. Tell it stories about yourself. Allow it to nourish you. Receive its blessing. To do this you must sink your heart into it as you would sink your teeth into food. You must chew it with your heart.
... You may ask if there is ever a day when my heart is not touched. Yes, there are many. On some days each psalm or gospel passage is like the parched earth. There is nothing moist or life-giving to be found in the words I read. I see this barrenness as a message from God also. ...God also speaks in silence and darkness. So when nothing comes, when darkness prevails, then too, I lay my Bible down. My word is silent darkness. I carry the dryness, the emptiness, the silent darkness with me through the day. It is only in darkness that one can see the stars. I have seen too many stars to let the darkness overwhelm me. Even though You are silent, still I will trust You.”
So, yeah. That’s Macrina’s instruction for reading the Bible -- it leans very heavily onto the spiritual side of Bible reading. But the scholarly side is important too, especially for your first go-around! Let’s get into that.
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The scholarly side of Bible reading
People who have to read part or all of the Bible for school know that Macrina’s method of reading only “till your heart is touched” is pretty, but not pragmatic. There were times when I’d be assigned all of Exodus, or all of John, or all of Paul’s letters to read within a few days or a week in seminary -- so I wasn’t that focused on getting spiritual fulfillment out of the words then! I just had to cram that info into my brain so my teacher would know I did the homework!
I feel like your first Bible read-through is probably going to lean more heavily on the scholarly side than the spiritual, because if the stories aren’t already in your head, getting them in there is your primary goal.
As you read I cannot recommend enough the use of footnotes or commentaries or other resources to help you make sense of what you are reading. Especially when you come to the more problematic or culturally-complex parts of the Bible. You’re not the first to have questions and confusion and distress about things in scripture; so let others who’ve been in your shoes and done research help you out! By finding trusty resources, you’re leaning on a whole community, just as Christians are called to do.
I’ve got a post here with recommendations for Bibles with good footnotes, for online Bible resources, etc.
One of the resources listed in that post is the Bible Project’s YouTube series that offers a short video for each book of the Bible. It might be cool for you to watch through all of those in the coming month, so that you can get those “main ideas” and Bible stories into your head now, even while your reading of the actual Bible slows down. Those videos can be like a “sneak peak” for what’s in store as you continue to read through scripture.
If you prefer text to video, you could also consider getting a “family Bible” / “children’s Bible” to read through! I recommend the DK Illustrated Family Bible, because it has wonderful historical notes and images, and it quotes from the Bible verbatim rather than paraphrasing it in kid-friendly language. Reading through that Bible could totally be done in 2 months, no sweat, unlike getting through the whole Bible. And then you’ll have the main stories and themes in your head asap, while not letting your Bible reading overwhelm you or burn you out.
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To wrap up, here are a couple other resources you might find useful as you continue your reading:
A webpage I made discussing a framework for scripture that takes it seriously and affirms LGBTQ+ persons; concepts like divine inspiration, “cherry-picking,” and the rule of love are also discussed
A post addressing misogynistic passages of the Bible; oh and another post on sexism in the Bible
A post addressing the potential for antisemitism when reading the Bible through a Christian lens
And in my Rachel Held Evans tag you’ll find quotes from her wonderful book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, which is such a helpful little book for those wanting a crash-course in things like cultural context, divine inspiration vs. human authors, and grappling with violence in the Bible.
I hope that something in this post helps you out, anon! And best of luck to you as you continue your journey through scripture!
#bible tag#lectio divina#reading and studying the Bible#new to christianity#< i hope you don't mind me tagging this with that tag just because this might be pertinent#to those who are new to christianity#Anonymous#macrina wiederkehr#long post#essays#resources#exploring and discerning
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BUT WE’RE NOT THROUGH YET
A Promise Kept by D.C. Renee is a 2018 contemporary romance novel about an asshole dude who appears to be intentionally torturing the object of his affections because he thinks she’s not a good person and he wants her to know how HE, a scarred man who has suffered and must wear a mask, feels. He’s gonna force her to marry him specifically so she can suffer with being unhappy forever. Apparently this becomes a romance at some point, so... hopefully he gets better?
Opera Macabre by Michelle Rodriguez is a 2015 vampire romance involving two vampires harassing the same opera singer, who is probably going to get murdered and turned into one of them when they get done fighting over who gets her first. You’d think I’d have caught this one, considering that Rodriguez is a mainstay of regular Phantom publications, but it’s here now!
Guardian Angel by Anne Rouen is the fourth in Rouen’s Master of Illusion series, and I SOMEHOW managed to miss it in spite of knowing about the first three. It’s a World War II historical romance involving the struggles between France and Germany and a young singer who has to become a soldier hunted by Nazis while struggling to remain in contact with his true love. There is apparently also a supernatural element involved?
The Phantom of the Opera: The Jeremiah Story by Jeremiah Semien is an extremely short 2010 story about a girl moving into an apartment and encountering the Phantom and his opera house. There is also something about the opera house maybe burning down? It looks like there might be a language barrier involved here.
Death is the Cool Night by Libby Sternberg is a 2013 psychological mystery set in the 1940s involving a tortured composer who has blackouts and isn’t sure if he has committed rumors or if the beautiful soprano he worships did it, and of course we’ve got love triangles and destroyed careers due to tragic injuries and opera productions plagued by deadly mishaps.
Only the Dead Know Burbank by Bradford Tatum is a 2016 novel about a girl who may or may not be a zombie deciding to go to Hollywood in the wake of the world wars and become the secret behind-the-scenes genius who creates the classic horror films The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, and Frankenstein, complete with Lon Chaney as a character but our zombie protagonist, of course, the true Phantom. There is almost certainly a layer of satire involved.
Gabriella’s Voice by Michael J. Vaughn is the 2000 contemporary story of a rich dude who travels the country seeking out new young opera singers with potential and giving them large sums of money to start their careers, fueled by the SORROWS of his mysterious yet angsty past. He of course runs into a singer who is so amazing that he can’t just leave, though, and gets entwined in her career. We have both a non-traditional romance (the book suggests it hardly qualifies as romance at all) and a large age gap here, things that we often don’t get in these retellings.
The Opera Singer by P.J. Werner is a 2015 retelling of the story transplanted to Victorian England, where an orphaned opera singer comes within reach of her dream of being a prima donna only to be torn between her love for a childhood friend and a mysterious, grumpy stranger who may or may not have committed some murders possibly.
Fractured Light by Ashley Jane Wigfield is a 2011 suspense romance involving a young girl who is swept away to the Paris opera to attempt to achieve her dreams of becoming a star, only to discover that he might actually be kind of dangerous and involved in some bad shit, and also her childhood friend has just returned and really likes her and would kind of like to rescue her from said bad shit, once he figures it out. There appear to be secret societies involved in addition to your general murders and secrets.
I hope everyone involved this brief journey into Phantom Literature I Failed to Round Up. This is an ever-evolving project and I love all of you for caring about it and also sometimes sending me emails that try very politely to tell me I forgot about something important.
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Playlist Breakdown - January 2020
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus/Josie Moon/My Chemical Romance/Coldplay/+others
Welcome, one and all, to my first ever playlist breakdown. It’s tasty, it’s fresh, it’s hot off the presses for the emotional messes. Let’s get into it.
January has been a weird month for me, not gonna lie. Coming out of the holidays I have a tan, a renewed sense of self-identity and a fierce appreciation for the people in my life with whom I have close relationships. The music of this month represents a shift from a sun-drenched new years’ holiday into the grind of starting full-time work as a self-employed writer. It’s been a wild ride and the year’s not even started. Oh boy.
What’s that? Oh yeah, the songs…
1. False Pretense / The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. This track is a favourite from way back, and it’s mainly just here as a check-in. Hey RJA. How ya doin’? Don’t You Fake It still a banger? You bet. This band taught me so many things about great sugar-punk songwriting when I was first starting out making my own music - and when you think that this track comes off the same record that gave us such classics as Face Down and Your Guardian Angel, it’s no surprise.
2. Victor Hotel / Josie Moon. This track has been a mainstay in my monthly playlist ever since it dropped at the start of summer. Victor Hotel brings textural arrangements and mature pop songwriting together into this gorgeous collage of instrumental and vocal production that’s simultaneously old-school and lo-fi, but undeniably modern as fuck. The album art and title add a heavy pull of intrigue, too - I don’t know what or where Victor Hotel is, but listening to the music makes me feel like I’ve been there.
3. Summertime / My Chemical Romance. I was a latecomer to the MCR love train, dipping my toes into their discography during my high school career and only fully taking a deep dive during some dark times in 2017. Like so many others, MCR helped to pull me through the shit and into the light. Having been gifted The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys in paperback by Taylor for Christmas, I waded into the world of Danger Days over the summer and haven’t come back since. You know those rare songs that walk into your life at precisely the right time, squeeze on your feels like a fucking trash compactor and just don’t let go? Summertime did that for me.
4. Orphans / Coldplay. Not much to say about this one. I’m definitely missing some sort of memo when it comes to Coldplay’s new record - it’s not bad by any stretch, it just has me yearning for the days of Mylo Xyloto which then begs the question as to why I’m not just listening to that. The hooks are there, the production’s there, the lyrics hold up, it’s just… tired. Someone get Coldplay a double shot espresso, stat.
5. Zero Percent / My Chemical Romance. This one’s a real interesting cut from MCR’s Danger Days era. Released as a B-side to the Kids From Yesterday single, it had me hooked from the start with a drum and bass (???) style opening that then progresses into more familiar MCR territory. It’s damn good all told - the vocal melodies fall a little flat if I’m honest, but Gerard’s delivery is just too huge to fail.
6. Rangers / Randa. I had the pleasure of meeting Randa at an out of town show with Holloway Holiday. We were both supporting Auckland act Openside for their New Zealand tour, and we got to watch each other’s performances and chat a bit backstage. He’s the most genuine, authentic and out-there human being, and that ethos absolutely saturates his music. Rangers is a standout for me because of the syncopated beat production and the absolutely infectious chorus - not to mention a fresh and wholesome flow in the verses that you just don’t see a lot in rap. Totally original and captivating.
7. Give ’Em Hell, Kid / My Chemical Romance. Another MCR classic that I discovered way too late in life. This thing is a fucking steam train of a punk rock song featuring the huge production and lyrical finesse we’ve come to expect from the boys. The thing that always gets me about this one is the vocal effect when the verse kicks in, ‘I took a train out of New Orleans...’ it’s infectious and angsty as hell. I’m absolutely in love.
8. Damn Regret / The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. Another Don’t You Fake It throwback. A lot of what I said on False Pretense can be said for this track too - impeccable production and songwriting, an absolute anthem of my high school years. Ronnie’s vocals are a standout in this song - the sheer range and delivery this guy has is basically unheard of in pop-punk. He’s like a grungier Brendon Urie, with a voice to match.
9. Soaked / BENEE. Having only discovered BENEE very recently I can fairly say this track cemented my option that some of the world’s best pop music comes out of New Zealand. This song cleaned up at the VNZMAs, and to be honest it feels like BENEE is verging on international success too. This song rides the metaphor of water for misguidedly infatuated love - not groundbreaking by any means but it’s catchy as hell and the production carries it all the way through.
10. The Piss, The Perfume / Hayley Mary. I discovered this track (and this artist) about five minutes before writing this, and I just had to add it to the end of the playlist. This track has this gorgeous, romantic, over-saturated quality to it and I’m kinda loving it. Quite a classic rock groove with really modern sounding vocals and catchy melodies. The compression on every element of the song is really tightly packed and tidy, which is not for everyone but I love it. Great discovery. Go listen!
11. Some Kind Of Disaster/All Time Low. Some Kind Of Disaster dropped at the end of the month and HOPEFULLY means there’s a new ATL record on the way. And if this song is anything to go by, I’m excited for whatever follows. This track comes together to represent solidifying of the modern ATL sound (a la Last Young Renegade) but also a call back to the good old days, more in the vein of Nothing Personal. Perhaps telling that they just celebrated the tenth anniversary of that record. This track is catchy, upbeat and lyrically interesting (standard ATL fare) but I feel like they’re really leaning heavily on the songwriting this time, as opposed to drowning the song the production tricks that have been mainstays in their sound as of late. I’m excited for what’s to come.
So, that’s it for my FIRST EVER playlist breakdown. If you’ve read this far... THANK YOU! Shouldn’t you be doing something more important? Anyway... How’d I do? Do you agree with what I said? You’re the best, you’re the best, what should I review next... (kidding). Let’s see where February takes us - the year is young and there’s a world of music, new and old, to explore. I can’t wait. C u.
#music#newmusic#music blog#music review#my chemical romance#all time low#coldplay#emo boy#emo girl#band trash#bands
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BNHA 219
To be honest, I could probably just sum up the most important points with this panel alone:
JUST LOOK AT THEM AHHH
Jk, I’ll write a full reaction (but it will be a bit shorter than normal... it’s currently exam season at my school... this is my study break )
Honestly, this chapter was a bit lukewarm for me, apart from Bakugo and Todoroki’s flawless performance. But it’s clearly gearing us up for something bigger, so I’ll take it.
Main takeaways:
--Shirakumo who?
--Bakugo is a responsible SWEETHEART
--sleazy ceo is DEFINITELY the Penguin
--what the heck was going on in the final page?
First off, I was pretty disappointed Shirakumo (if that’s who this guy actually is...) was defeated so easily. I was kinda hoping he was going to become a villain mainstay, especially if he does turn out to be Aizawa and Yamada’s former friend. But I’m not throwing it out of the realm of possibility just yet. I think we may see more of him in the future.
What we learned:
his quirk is manipulating carbonated water - not bad, but his performance left a lot to be desired
he seems like he may just be a petty thief? No lofty ideological motives, just wants to scrounge by mooching off of others. Just a man who “lives for the thrill” (Bakugo in the background: “Get a job!!”)
he acquired his support item - those gauntlet thingies - from Detnerat, via the black market. They’re rigged to self-destruct upon the user’s loss in battle, it seems? And they’re meant to collect combat data. Interesting.
maybe it’s possible the gauntlets were faulty in some way? Maybe I’m spitballing, but perhaps that’s why he lost so easily
we didn’t get to see where the pro hero took him after the battle. If he’s headed to jail, where they’ll theoretically do a background check on him, maybe that’s when we’ll find out for sure if he’s a former UA student or not? Or he was just a plot device and we’ll never see him again. Guess we’ll wait and see.
Second, I love this panel. LOOK AT THAT RESPONSIBLE SWEETHEART WITH AN ARMFUL OF WALLETS. I mean, let’s be real. A month or two Bakugo may have completely forgotten/not cared about getting the civilians’ wallets back at all in his blind drive for victory. But this to me shows his extra training helped him develop a bit more basic awareness. Still got a long way to go, kid, but good job.
Also, I’d argue Bakugo showed significantly greater prowess in this battle than Todoroki, despite Todo ultimately dealing the finishing blow. Not only did he snatch the wallets before blowing them up, he:
was the first to overwhelm Mask Boy with an attack
saved All Might and the civilian mid-battle
avoided catching his teammate in the crossfire
didn’t have to melt all his ICE afterwards
As much as I like Todo, as it’s been stated, the weakness in having such a strong quirk is it’s difficult to maneuver in smaller-scale situations. Plus Todo needs to be more cognizant of his teammates. Though Todo has a stronger quirk, Bakugo’s got greater mastery, at least at this point.
Third, CEO guy is definitely the Penguin.
What we learned about the Special Abilities Liberation Army’s activities this chapter:
they’re using hero support items fed into the black market to gather combat data and intelligence (hmm now what could that be for?)
they’re currently interrogating Giran, broker and scout for the League of Villains, who isn’t being too cooperative
What are they planning? What requires massive amounts of combat data? I’m kind of at the end of my mental rope at the moment, so I’m not gonna put forward any grand theories, but if you’ve got some, I’d love to hear them!
Finally, this page.
Apparently, this happened a month before, right before the billboard announcements were made (the hero billboard announcements?) To me, it looks like maybe a joint training exercise-equivalent for the League of Villains? Or All for One trying to ally with another powerful villain dude.. or both. Either way, it seems like some kind of tryout, which the League is failing at.. again, I’m too tired to put much thought into this, but it’s striking how similar the League is to Class 1-A here.. working hard and training to be better villains.
Predictions:
I’m guessing the next chapter will center around the League a bit more? Give us some explanation for what All for One’s doing here... and who the giant muscly dude is. Maybe we’ll see Shirakumo again, maybe not. And it’s been a good two chapters now without any real 1-A focus, so hopefully we’ll be returning to UA. But then there’s the Liberation Army and their interrogation of Giran... Wow. So much going on here.
Also what’s Shinsou up to I miss my purple son already
#bnha 219#bnha reactions#bnha spoilers#bnha manga#boku no hero#boku no hero academia#bnha meta#mha#my hero academia#mha meta#mha reactions#mine#meta#manga#bnha
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Let’s Talk About Pokemon - Gen 7 Retrospective
That's at least a little more sizable than the XY generation was. Granted we have some Alolan Forms to help inflate the numbers a bit. Sure, if you were to count Gen 6′s Mega Evolutions, Gen 7 would be the actual smallest Gen to date. But remember what I said last generation's recap with how Gamefreak seemed to be taking a “quality over quantity” approach for that generation? That mentality seems to be back in full force here. 'Cause we're looking at my second favorite Gen right behind Gen 5.
I did bring up that Gen 6 was my third favorite generation in terms of the new, numerical Pokemon introduced. What has Alola muscle over it is how it's crammed as much inventiveness into the designs as they could think. The starters, the Legendaries/Kinda-Legendary Ultra Beasts, even the common fodder Pokemon have a little more going on than their typical ilk. And even some of the more boring designs like Oranguru and Passimian have interesting battle mechanics by changing the way you can approach double battles entirely on their own.
That also seemed to be a focus this generation. Not all of course, but a lot of the new Pokemon seemed to be based on different gameplay interactions and having unique abilities or signature moves. Between Salandit's Corrosion to Minior's Shields Down to Mimikyu's Disguise to Toucannon's Beak Blast and to Toxipex's Baneful Bunker. They really tried taking a shot at making each Pokemon have something unique to bring to battles. They even essentially made a more tournament-rules friendly alternative to Arceus in Silvally.
But there's a little subject more contentious about Gen 7 than the Pokemon, of course. That being the games themselves, which feel like they got the fandom split. I like Sun and Moon, but even I'll admit Gamefreak's gotta try a little harder for Gen 8. All the inventive things they've tried from a gameplay perspective ultimately don't change much. The game still had an 8-mini-act structure just like the Gym games. HMs getting replaced with Ride Pokemon is nice, but is still the same mechanic with different dressing. The biggest changes in the usual story structure don't even matter that much, the biggest change feeling like you get to know the region's Legendary Pokemon from the very start in the form of Nebby. Otherwise, it's just A Little Bit Better Written Than Usual. Y'know, not that Pokemon games tend to be master classes in writing anyway, its only real competition there being Black and White's story. (And even then, Sun and Moon's in desperate need of a Skip Cutscene button.)
Then there’s the Let’s Go games, which I suppose are technically Gen 7 games. Those got even more divisive. Some love it, others hate it. I personally just find it boring as a rather dumbed down remake of the Kanto games, only really playing because it was an excuse to use Melmetal. There’s some neat things in there that I wouldn’t mind seeing implemented in the main series (namely overworld-wandering Pokemon and AVs replacing EVs.) Just please keep the very poorly implemented Go-imitating catch mechanics as far away from the main series as possible.
Pokemon’s also starting to get more competition recently as well. Other than Digimon of course. Ni No Kuni, eventually Tem Tem, of course, the rise of the mighty Yokai Watch, which to my understanding, has been wrecking Pokemon in terms of sale numbers in their home region. Each of them implementing monster-catching RPG mechanics in their own unique way. I can’t speak for Yokai Watch, but Ni No Kuni is a lot more like a traditional JRPG, with the monsters being familiars that still fight in battle, but the trainers themselves also participate in the battle as well! And Tem Tem, while very much like Pokemon, is giving it more of an MMO angle. While I’m not one to shout about how much Pokemon just NEEDS to make an MMO with ALL THE REGIONS already, I am interested in seeing where TemTem winds up. It IS a Kickstarter game that made way more than it asked for, but as we know from a certain Strong Numerical Value That Is One Less Than Ten, that’s no guarantee it’ll be amazing. But worth keeping an eye on. It still has the potential to be something Gamefreak’s gonna have to watch out for.
Whether I like these other games or not, I appreciate that they exist, because they mean that sooner or later Gamefreak's gonna have to get their ass in gear and do something about it. I'm really getting burnt out on a new Pokemon game coming out literally every year. What I've wanted more than ever is for Gamefreak to at least take a hiatus from the yearly releases to have the game that comes after said break to really kick it out of the park. I get that the Ultra games probably didn't take up much development time and from my understanding Let's Go was made by a whole different team, so those games coming out in the years between Sun and Moon and Sword and Shield might not have much bearing on the latter's quality, but still. Pokemon's not had a major mechanical update since they introduced Abilities in Gen 3. I just hope Gen 8 does something interesting or has some form of major mechanical overhaul. Not asking Pokemon battles to be in real time or anything. Just some new Super Forms and powerful one-off moves aren’t gonna cut it for me. After over 20 years of Pokemoning and on, what, year 8 of a new Pokemon game coming out every year? I'm a little bit fatigued.
...Okay, let's end this on a better note than that.
I AM still exciting to see what Gen 8 has to offer, and I hope they mean it when they say they're trying something different. And of course, I'm ALWAYS gonna be excited to see some more new Pokemon. Gens 5, 6, and 7 are proving they're nowhere close to being out of steam yet, and I can't wait to see more Gen 8 Pokemon come our way in the coming months.
Top 10 Favorites of Gen 7:
Dangit this is hard. So many to love! So many new super-duper-tippity-top favorites!! Shout outs to Palossand, Silvally, Salandit, Xurkitree, and Buzzwole. There's just too many good'ens!!!!
Bottom 10 Least Favorite of Gen 7:
Amazingly, the only Pokemon here I really “dislike” is Zeraora. The rest are just that cherry-picked handful of Alolan Pokemon I don't really care that much about. Hurray!
Bottom 10 Least Favorite Overall:
Almost got through with no new additions. Almost.
The Cutest:
God this Generation was good for Pokemon I just want to pick up and hug. Or in Mimikyu's case, get horrendously murdered by because I got a little too close to taking its rag off. And I'd still say “Thanks.”
The Coolest:
The Prettiest:
The Spookiest:
This gen was really good to scratch a Halloweeny itch. A BUNCH of cool new ghosts, complete with the eerie head leech Pokemon I never would’ve suspected would make it into Pokemon!
Most Creative:
Weirdest/Most Unique:
This section here could've been filled with Ultra Beasts alone if I really wanted to, haha.
Most Forgettable:
Magearna is here not necessarily because I think the design is forgettable, but gee wizz I keep thinking it's not a Gen 7 Pokemon.
Most Personality:
Here's a new section! Gen 7 had a lot of personality-based designs, so there was actually a fair bit of competition for a slot like this. Buzzwole and Bewear are just hilarious, and I'm still thoroughly impressed with Meltan. They managed to cram so much adorable personality into such a simple design. And I’ll eat my hat the day we get a Pokemon more smug than Salandit.
Most Under-Appreciated:
Poor Stakataka keeps getting dismissed because of its bad typing... not that I can blame anyone because Rock/Steel is easily the most boring of all the UB typings, especially when we had room to have a Ghostly duo between it and Blacephalon to have us our first Rock/Ghost type!
Most Long Overdue Concepts:
Seriously, how'd it take 7 generations to get a wolf and a mosquito? Let alone 6 generations to finally get a second MANTIS and traditional horse Pokemon?! As far as spooky Pokemon go, you'd think a shipwreck would be one of the easier and more obvious concepts to go after, even if the one we finally got didn't take the form I expected it to. And Araquanid's just here because a fully evolved BUG/WATER was a long time frickin coming.
Best Regional Variants:
At least I'm naming the category that way because Regional Variants better be a series mainstay from now on!! These are the Alolan Forms with the most fun alternate take on their original forms. And Vulpix and Ninetales are there because fox solidarity.
Best Ultra Beasts:
Again, I really hope Ultra Beasts won't be an Alola-Only thing. I want to avoid talking about Gen 8 spoilers to be considerate of anyone that wants to avoid those, but a certain image carved into the ground in a particular scene has me hoping Ultra Beasts might be returning. And that Xurkitree could have a big brother in the near future. There's hardly much basis because said carving could literally be anything, but. Please.
Anyway, I love the Ultra Beasts as a concept of extra-dimensional alien beings. Some sell the look of freaky aliens better, especially ones like Nihilego, Xurkitree, Kartana, and Celesteela. But nonetheless, these 6 are my favorites out of our roster. HOPEFULLY so far.
Pokemon That Should’ve Gotten Alolan Forms:
I tend to agree that limiting Alolan Forms to Gen 1 Pokemon only was a silly thing to do, but even minding that, I feel like there was crazy amounts of missed potential here. Seel and Dewgong just desperately need some fresh attention to stop being Pokemon’s more forgettable critters. While I suppose Lapras and Tentacruel are excusable given they’re sea dwellers regardless, I totally wouldn’t mind electric jellyfish versions of the Tentas, or even a Kracken-based form for the former. This was also MORE than an opportunity to redeem Dragonite with a more Dragonair-like variant. And some tropical jungle variations of Paras and Venonat would be neat. I’m just saying, a Venomoth turned into more of a Tropical Hawkmoth would’ve been killer.
And Parasect hurts the most. You’re telling you’re gonna have Parasect inhabit this jungle area along with another, brand new mushroom Pokemon. AND you’re gonna introduce the concept of Gen 1 Pokemon taking on new forms based on the new and radically different habitats in Alola. And you’re just NOT gonna place some glowing mushrooms on their backs, turn them pale white, and call them Bug/Fairy types?!?!?! Hello?!?!!??!?
...Oh, am I forgetting something?
Top 50 Favorites Overall:
...Surprise! Yeah, just sorta decided “why not?” This is our last Gen for the rest of the year, so let's end it on a “Look At All My Favorites!” type of a bang. Also because it pained me to see all these not make it to some sort of Top Favorites highlight. And of course, they might not be 100% consistent with scores or previous Top 10 favorites. I'm only a human with a finicky brain that is constantly changing how absolutely precisely I feel about every single one of these.
And... that's it... that's every single Pokemon reviewed. Every single Gen Recapped. We've had lots of ups and downs and plenty of getting a little too excited about cartoon animals. Gen 8 is still a ways away, and even when it comes out, I'd like to wait a few months to let the new designs settle into my mind before I go writing opinion pieces on all of them. And of course, for official artwork to be out for everybody.
BUT I do have a handful of ways to pass the time until Gen 8 does come out... What's up next exactly? Well, we won't have to wait too long, thankfully...
[Archive]
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HEATHER GRAHAM SENDS UP HOLLYWOOD’S TOXIC MASCULINITY IN HER DIRECTORIAL DEBUT
written by: Jacob Oller
Heather Graham has been a mainstay in both indies and comedies since License to Drive and Drugstore Cowboy in the late ‘80s. Her performances, especially her lauded turn as Rollergirl in Boogie Nights [1997], were often sex-positive and presented with an agency and enthusiasm rare from others cast in similar roles.
Her intense fascination with sexuality is as deeply felt in her performances as the roles themselves—as sex workers or other objects of the male gaze—position her for a thoughtlessness stereotypical in the film industry. Reclaiming these roles and using her position as a decades-long sex symbol, Graham has written and directed her first movie, Half Magic.
Half Magic, a romantic comedy about sexism in the film industry (and the world at large), focuses on women sick of being mistreated by men, leaving Graham’s character Honey to negotiate her position in Hollywood and her relationships to men and sex. Honey, along with friends played by Stephanie Beatriz and Angela Kinsey, tackle their love lives, their friendships, and sexually harassing bosses with a bit of witchery a la The Craft [1996]—only their magic is mostly hope and good intentions.
This is all perfectly positioned in the wake of the #MeToo movement disrupting the predatory status quo of the entertainment world. When I sat down with Graham to discuss her directorial debut, she was eager to talk about the shifting ideals of the film world.
JACOB OLLER: I know you’ve been shopping this script around since 2014, so this has been on your mind a while—how was the experience getting this to the public?
HEATHER GRAHAM: It was hard getting the financing. We have a friend named Michael Nickles, who’s a producer on the movie, and I was writing the script during a breakup. I wanted to find a way to laugh at all the things in life that had really upset me, and Michael said “You should direct this.” He helped me find these financiers and we went into pre-production, then they told us they didn’t have the rest of the money. We had to shut down the film and it was devastating. So stressful. Then I met Bill Sheinberg who told me “if you get the rights back and all your legal stuff is kosher, I’ll make the movie.” We had to get this quitclaim [deed], we got the rights back, and finally we made the movie. It was a long road and, luckily, it’s coming out at a time when people are open to the subject matter in a way they’ve never been before.
OLLER: It really feels like Chris D’Elia’s film executive character in the film grew out of these Harvey Weinstein allegations, but you had this written years ago.
GRAHAM: Of course guys have been acting this way for a long time. Finally America decided “this isn’t cool anymore.” Hopefully that makes people more open to my story, which is about sexism, sexual harassment, and all that specifically in the entertainment business.
OLLER: As someone switching to a new side of the business, I know you’ve said that as an actor playing a part, it’s your job to be on your character’s side, so you have to see it all from that perspective—how does that job change when you’re also the director?
GRAHAM: An actor could be playing a person who’s crazy or a person who’s mean, a person whose point of view you don’t agree with but have to find their point of view. When you make a movie you can tell a story from your own perspective and tell the story you want to tell. I wanted to inspire and empower women, and men too, by opening up a conversation about sexism, relationships, and sexuality. I think women in our culture are presented with a mixed message. On one hand we’re told “your looks are the most important thing and you have to look sexy” while we’re also told “don’t be too sexy or we’re gonna judge you harshly.”
OLLER: One of my favorite lines from the film is during a script discussion where your character says “I like sluts, why do they all have to die?” which is a funny way of summarizing these sex-positive values.
GRAHAM: I did want to be sex-positive because our culture is sexist. If you see a male hero and he’s James Bond and having sex with all these people, everyone thinks he’s so cool. If you watch, for example, a horror film, and you see a girl that has sex with a guy, you know she’s gonna die. In film and in life, women are punished for things that men are celebrated for.
OLLER: In terms of your direction, did you try to subvert this?
GRAHAM: I mean I made the women the protagonists. Most movies have men protagonists with women as the objects. Mine has female protagonists and men that are…maybe “objects” is the wrong word..
OLLER: I think there’s definitely some fun objectification done with something like Luke Arnold’s dancing, especially since the way you film sex scenes and physical comedy feels very linked.
GRAHAM: I’m glad you said that because his whole character actually happened to me. I met this guy who, I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was doing a lot of drugs. He was all “I make up my own exercises” and stuff, but he was so cute! So later I thought “that’s kind of crazy” but he was so handsome I let it slide. I was definitely making fun of not seeing red flags. A guy that breaks up with you by telling you he wants to go climb a mountain but he really wants to go do drugs? At the time it was devastating, but in retrospect it’s so obvious.
OLLER: Wait, the mountain stuff is real?
GRAHAM: Everything in that breakup scene is real. Everything the guy says to her is real. “I have wars to fight, I have mountains to climb…” Someone actually said that to me.
OLLER: Were any other lines from the script taken from your life?
GRAHAM: A lot. When she’s at work and her boss tells her “If you want to get a movie made, write about a man. Nobody cares about women stories.” I was developing stories for years that I wanted to act in and produce, and a lot of people would tell me that exact thing.
OLLER: Wow.
GRAHAM: For anyone outside the industry it sounds crazy, right? The hardest part of doing this movie was getting someone to give me the money. People are scared to take a chance [on a female filmmaker].
OLLER: Do you think that will change in the wake of the #MeToo movement?
GRAHAM: Hopefully. I think people want to be on the right side of this issue, so they’re doing some affirmative action. But if you look at the percentages of women directing film, it’s still around 7 percent.
OLLER: Does establishing a directorial foothold with Half Magic mean you’ll be pursuing more in the future?
GRAHAM: I’m working on two stories right now, one called Chosen Family about a woman’s dysfunctional family and how it repeats itself in her romantic relationships, and another one about cancer. They say they want to cure cancer but it’s such a big business that…do they really want to cure it? That’s the idea, anyways [laughs].
OLLER: Changing directions after that, when you direct the sex scenes you also star in, you use this really interesting superimposed shot of you and a sort of mystical outer space. Where did that idea come from?
GRAHAM: I put that in because I experienced something that felt like that. I grew up religious and was told I would go to Hell for having premarital sex. So I was having sex at one point and had this spiritual moment where I felt like the universe was telling me that sex is a beautiful, divine thing. Feel good about it! For the movie I went, “how do I express this?” So I figured, I’ll just do what I saw. This starry sky and this voice that talked to me. I actually got my yoga teacher to do the voice in the film. It’s a trippy part in a comedy movie, but it’s my personal experience around sexuality.
OLLER: Did any of that come from your interest in transcendental meditation? I heard you got into that after working with David Lynch.
GRAHAM: So I was in the original Twin Peaks when I met David and David’s really into it. He’d meditate every day at lunch. I was like 20, which is a hard age when you’ve left your parents and want to become your own person. I definitely had a bit of angst and talked to him about that. He said I should really try meditating and I figured, what do I have to lose? I’ve been doing it ever since then. It helped me break a lot of bad habits, like I used to eat a ton of junk food.
- Interview Magazine
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Hej hej, it took me too long to get this done, but here it is!
Tagged by @my-space-and-all-within Thank you so much!!
Forewarning these answers might be kinda long; I’ve only gotten to talk to like one person that isn’t family or a coworker in the past few days. Which means not much music talk, since I don’t want to overwhelm one friend with that (I want them to keep being my friend lol) and family and coworkers just don’t want to hear me chatter so...yeah.
1. Your favourite metal band/singer.
Just one? I...I can’t choose. I can however give a top 7 (aka 7 is where I made myself stop adding bands lol.)
Avatar, Ghost, Type O Negative, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Dethklok/Brendon Small and various others, Behemoth, HIM (I always considered them gothic metal, though I admit some other tracks fall into more gothic rock.)
And to be honest, as I discover more bands and make up for the lost years where my family kept me from the music I loved, this list tends to rotate every now and again. Doesn’t mean I love these bands any less of course, just means I’ve got too many favorites to listen to all at once--and if you did that very literally, could you imagine the cacophony?...actually hold up ya’ll I gotta try something...
That was...an interesting ear sound. Not the worst thing at some points, but definitely sounds like I put all of them on one stage that was much too small for everyone and told them they’d all been scheduled for the exact same time slot, and no we could not move anyone or have anyone play at a later time and so they just fuckin’ went for it.
Hey, if you want to make your ears go ???!!!?? like mine just did, here’s the playlist: Venus Doom-HIM, Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer-Behemoth, I Ejaculate Fire-Dethklok, Healing Through War-Fleshgod Apocalypse, Black No.1-Type O Negative, Year Zero-Ghost, and Hail the Apocalypse-Avatar.
Played all at once. Just open up those seven tabs of Youtube and let it happen.
Go forth and hear some good music, but maybe not in the best way possible lol.
2. My favourite non-metal artists/bands.
This list is not as long as it used to be, but I still have a few mainstays. Another top 7 then:
Gorillaz, A$ap Rocky, The Mountain Goats, Frank Ocean, Cab Calloway, The Decemberists, and Lana Del Rey.
Remember how I said my music taste could be a bit varied at times? This is what I meant. No one will ever hand me the aux cord :(
3. Favourite singer/band from my own country.
My Chemical Romance are still my dudes, broken up or not. Dethklok could also fit here though. So, one goth rock option and one metal option for this one.
4. 3 favourite songs.
Oh dear. Um. I’m going to try and keep this short. I mean it, really. Y’know what, let’s make me choose 3 favorites out of the seven from the first question. That might help. So then, that’s still kind of impossible but I will make myself choose lol:
-Black Waters-Avatar--could listen to this one on repeat for hours and never once feel like changing to a different song. Have done so before, to be honest.
-Year Zero-Ghost--I mean, how can I not have this one as a favorite of theirs. Is it possible to hate this song as a Ghost fan? Maybe, but not that I’ve seen.
-Black No.1-Type O Negative--they have a shit ton of good songs, but this is the one that introduced me to this band (at the time played for me by a best friend I was crushing so hard on in middle/high school when we were a bunch of baby goth/metalheads-and she really did dye her hair black to match the scene lol. She’s left the scene and married some guy who listens to country; they’ve since moved hours away. I miss her sometimes, but the memories associated with this song are nice enough to have, since us meeting up again now would probably be a disaster.)
5. In your opinion, an overrated band/singer.
Oof. Don’t want to start any shit, so again, this is just my opinion which means nothing lol.
This didn’t specify metal or not, so I’m going to say that Shawn Mendes kid (is that how his name goes? I’m not sure.) I literally can’t turn on the radio without hearing his shit. He sounds good enough, but I grew up in the era of boy bands--my standards for whiny pop are higher than whatever the standards are currently, though let’s be real here that’s also a lotta fuckin’ nostalgia influencing my opinion.
But he’s also a tiny thing at 19, so hopefully he’ll experiment more with his sound and topics. Better for him then, as well as better for my ears whenever I have to listen to the radio with my family.
6. In your opinion, an underrated band/singer.
Oooh--Avatar introduced me to Old Kerry McKee since he opened for them for part of this last tour cycle. He reminds me of some of my favorite folk artists, but he’s got his own edge to that sound, and I really like it. Like I struggle to find that style of music that I consistently like enough to buy an artist’s music or listen to it more than once or twice, since I’m picky with my acoustic shit, but his was an instant love.
Anyway, long story short, go buy Old Kerry McKee’s music and I think he was working on a merch store to be up at some point in the future? So look for that too. Give him some love and support, he deserves it.
7. Artists that remind you of your childhood.
My Chemical Romance, The Used, HIM, Fall Out Boy, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Poison, Motley Crue, Backstreet Boys, and N’Sync. Guess which I listened to at which ages in my childhood and which my mum got me into lol.
8. An artist that you used to love but now hate:
A few come to mind that I dislike, but none that I straight up hate. Some that I don’t listen to anymore because they turned out to be nasty fucking people. That’s about as much as I’m gonna say on this one I guess. Said acts are associated with fragile memories that I don’t really want to dredge up at 8 PM on a Sunday night.
9. Did you enjoy the challenge?
I did! This was fun, and I really do love doing these. I feel like I reblog ask memes and tag games too often, but I can’t help it--I love sharing and talking about music like this.
10. Tag 3 people
Okay, going with my followers/folks I interact with that I know listen to metal lol.
@pblbak @feathers-andflesh and @black-metal-hermit (if you all are feeling up for it of course--no obligation if this isn’t your thing!)
Also if any of you try my experiment from Question 1, I humbly request you blog about your reaction and tag me in it. I wanna see who else has experienced the weird magic lol.
#text post#ask box things#god these are fun but I'm a wordy bitch#sorry this is so damn long at some parts#I just get talking and don't stop lol#did try to edit them down a bit#still thanks to everyone who reads!
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Star's Sacred Stones Adventure Part 2
A lot has happened since the last one, so let's get through it.
For starters, I made that fog of war chapter my b*tch! The grinding I did helped to make my units more than prepared and Vanessa showed that spider who's boss! OK, yeah, I did have to restart once because Eirika got blindsided and killed, but that's more of her fault for not dodging low percentage hits.
Nothing really to report until chapter 8, which, by the way, I love that the chapters name is "It's a Trap!". Looks like the FE developers were referencing memes long before Heroes. But back to chapter, the only really noteworthy thing that happened is when the thief that spawned ran up to Artur and stole the guiding ring I was having him hold! I tried to get Colm to steal it back but to no avail. I would've restarted the chapter, but I was only about 4 turns away from the end and I didn't want to repeat the whole thing all over again. So there's one guiding ring right down the drain. Hopefully this doesn't come to bite me in the a** later.
Anyway, I decided to go with Eirika's path since I'm more familiar with the characters on her side and I wanted to take the easier rout first (and I made a second save state so that once I beat this game I can go back and check out Ephraim's path). But brother was chapter 9 annoying! I had restart not only because the pirates made a b-line for the villages and destroyed them, but because of rng, Tana, while trying to stop the pirates, got killed. Thankfully this knowledge encouraged me to play through the second run a bit more aggressively so that my units can get across the bridge faster and I wouldn't have to put my two pegasus knights in danger. And I was able to more properly train up Tana this time around since I could always use a second flyer. Though, just gonna say this up front, I'm not using Amelia. Ross is the only trainee unit I need since I've been able to train him up from the beginning, and there's no way I'm gonna do the same for Amelia. Maybe on my second play through I'll invest the time in her for a different team composition, but right now I'm just not interested.
Well, thankfully the next chapter gave me a lot if units to talk about. I'm gonna have a lot of fun using Innes and him being a prepromoted sniper is just glorious! I don't see myself using Gerik or Marisa since I already have more than enough sword units and I want to maintain variety. Definetely going to keep Tethys since I could always use a dancer, though I gotta make sure I remember to leave her out of enemy line since, unlike Azura, she can't fight back.
With this map containing an arena, once more I proceeded to grind all over that thing, this time with the goal to get all my current mainstay units to level 15. And with Tethys there to help, I was able to get this done much faster then I thought, though my turn count was still ridiculous, but I got a f*ck ton of gold now.
And with my units at level 15, I thought this would be a good time to promote those whose items I have. So Franz, Joshua, Colm and Vanessa got their promotions. And with me getting a guiding ring from the boss, Artur will soon get the same (I'll likely promote him in a skirmish just to save time).
Also, I think at this point I'm going to stop deploying Moulder. It just doesn't feel like he's contributing much and I often find myself forgetting about him. Plus, now that I have Tethys, I can get Natasha to do double healing if needed. Plus, I just like Natasha more in terms of design and character, and I'm already kinding liking her bond with Joshua.
And that's everything that happened. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this game and how everything works, though let's just hope my luck doesn't run out soon.
I'll let you know how that goes in the next part!
#fire emblem#fire emblem sacred stones#eirika#vanessa#artur#colm#tana#amelia#innes#gerik#marisa#tethys#franz#joshua#moulder#natasha#fe eirika#fe vanessa#fe artur#fe colm#fe tana#fe amelia#fe innes#fe gerik#fe marisa#fe tethys#fe franz#fe joshua#fe moulder#fe natasha
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The Herman Miller x Logitech gaming chair will set you back $1,500
I’ve learned a lot during this pandemic. About myself, about the world. But perhaps most important of all, I’ve learned the value of a good chair. In normal years I’m rarely home, between work and travel, and as such it’s not something I gave much thought to. So naturally, I spent the first month and half cultivating some serious lower back pain.
The truth of the matter is that we have no idea how much longer we’re going to be dealing with all of this, and as such, I can’t recommend investing in a good chair enough. You can get a pretty solid one for a couple of hundred dollars, if you know where to look. Or there’s always Herman Miller.
The company’s office chairs are pretty universally well-received, and they’ve got a price tag to match. Even with that in mind, however, its venture into the world of gaming chair is still… well, “investment” is certainly one way to put it. The company’s collaboration with gaming peripheral mainstay Logitech is going to set you back a cool $1,500.
Image Credits: Herman Miller
According to the companies, the Embody Gaming Chair was designed with help from 30 physicians, with a focus on good posture (something many gamers can likely use) and the ability to sit in one spot for an extended period of time, because, let’s be real here, gamers are gonna game.
There’s padding with “copper-infused particles” designed to cool off the body, and “pixelated support,” which helps more evenly distribute the sitter’s weight. Herman Miller describes that bit thusly:
Thanks to a dynamic matrix of pixels, Embody’s seat and back surfaces automatically conform to your body’s micro-movements, distributing your weight evenly as you sit. This reduces pressure and encourages movement, both of which are key to maintaining healthy circulation and focus.
The chair itself is made up of 42% recycled materials and is up to 95% recyclable — though hopefully you won’t be thinking about that for a while, given the pricing. There’s also a 12-year warranty that should let you hold onto it for a little bit longer. Which, again, will hopefully be a while at that price.
The Embody is going to be the first of a number of collaborations going forward, including a $1,300 gaming-focused desk and a $300 monitor arm. At the end of the day, your lower back will be more thankful than your bank account.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN – RED SAILS BEST FORGOTTEN
According to Captain Blackeye, the Lunar Swell shaved four days off the six it would’ve taken to get to Galaga Island, affording them all two days to come to know one another better. On the first night, the meeting in the small dining room just below deck was a cramped and stilted experience until Wally set to work in the galley. As he found the space just the right size for him to work, he concluded it was Polly who prepared any of the captain’s meals, as imagining the bulky frame of the great commander of the sea doing anything in the small kitchen was far too hilarious to have ever actually happened.
The smell of whatever Wally happened to be cooking put everyone at ease enough to turn the atmosphere from confined into cozy. When the meal was finally placed before them, they all ate as if food was a long forgotten concept.
“Mm! Wally! What is this?!” Rozzi said as she hurriedly swallowed another mouthful.
“Well the galley’s storage didn’t exactly have a lot of variety, a number of drie goods and cured meats and a few containers with rice and spices… So I threw together an Icthyite recipe I knew with some of the vegetables I picked up at Areca. I mixed some potash into Wistea’s, extra salt for the Captain and Polly, a touch more meat in Hector’s, and a bit of bitter fruit in yours because Cri’tet told me you enjoyed that sort of thing.”
Blackeye savored his last bite quite audibly before speaking in an awestruck tone, “By the currents lad, if you’re this talented with a pot and pan, why on Mondia d’ya stick with makin’ cakes?”
Wally finished serving himself and sat at the table with everyone. “Well, aside from more personal reasons, there were dozens of cooks in Animana, but bakers were in short supply. After the war, everyone got used to making their own bread which, anyone will tell you, is the mainstay of any baker. So it was a difficult business, one where you had to be creative to survive. Everything about it appealed to me and the rest was just leading up to that.”
Polly attempted to speak in an ancient language that had never been deciphered, as it required the speaker to almost choke on the food filling their mouth at the time. As was always the case with innovators in said language, only a few garbled noises escaped before the food won out and made a direct charge on the throat. She beat on her chest to force down the mass of chewed rice, meat, and vegetables before it finally plopped into her belly.
“Chew then talk, sunshine.” Captain Blackeye nudged Polly’s drink toward her, which she happily gulped down to ease her throat.
“Captain,” began Hector. “I’ve been meaning to ask… A ship this size would need at least ten hands to manage. Even if you could do the work of five sailors, that’s still five short. What happened to your crew?”
“Gone on to betta things I bet. Told them I’d wait for the swell and sent’em off. That’s the way for us at sea. We drift on as the currents guide, maybe we run into each other on the way. But, some just stick with you… S’how I ended up with this little one here.” Blackeye patted his granddaughter on the head. “No doubt it’s clear she ain’t exactly the spittin’ image of this old fish. Her mam was a member of my crew ‘til she passed. She always had the habit to call me ‘pappy’ and it just kinda stuck, loved her the way father’s do and came time to deal with this one, I was happy to do it.”
“Mam was the ship’s navigator, so I do that now.” Polly said proudly.
“If I may also ask a question,” remarked Wistea. “How is it we were able to reach the top of the swell? I honestly felt as if we were going to tumble back into the ocean for a moment there.”
“Aha, that’s our Kettle Engine! Y’no doubt done seen the big metal bits ‘round the stern, yeah? That’s where the steam builds up from the boiler just under the galley. You take in sea water; boil it up ‘til y’get steam, then throw the switch by the wheel and OFF YA GO! Got it years back from a fella from Insicai named Rollo.”
Wistea suddenly sat a little straighter. “… I know I really should not be surprised to hear when one storied individual meets another but… You actually MET Rollo Poda, the so-called ‘Shining Star’ of Insicai?”
“Met ‘im? I carted him around Mondia for a year after the war was over. Said he was looking for something, didn’t tell me what ever. But he was a brave sort, liked him plenty, so I helped him out. Plus, I got to see some pretty amazing things on the way and he gave me the Kettle Engine as a gift. The God’s Fortune was already the fastest thing on any waters, that just made it even faster!”
“May I… See the boiler?” Wistea could barely contain her excitement.
Blackeye looked to Polly who happily hopped onto her feet and gestured to Wistea to follow. Her chair nearly toppled as she sprung from it and squeezed past everyone.
“Guess Poda was a big deal,” Wally concluded as he finished off his plate and set about cleaning the table. “Mind you the curiosity’s infectious now... I’ve been meaning to ask how you knew I used Fire magic.”
“You smelled like you’d been inside a furnace.”
Wally recalled being the center of a massive geyser of flame a few days earlier. “You could call what I did that…”
“Eh? Not that! I can tell that happened days ago… All magic usin’ folk got a smell to ‘em.” He gestures his fork at Rozzi. “She smells like a breeze o’ spring so she got Air magic.” He points to Hector. “This one’s a fresh rain, Storm magic. Your greenie friend smells like a mess’a flowers, Forest magic.”
Hector sat back. “Blimey, and I thought my nose was sharp.”
“Aaah, you’ll get there someday! Years of practice iz’all.”
“So you’ve met other people with Fire magic who had the power of insight?”
“All them magics come with lil’ extras y’never notice until you do. Fire folk shine their light on the absolute truth. Air folk are agile as leaves on wind. Storms c’n move faster than a blink when they want, Forests live long and hold onto memory like steel traps.”
“What about the others?” Rozzi said as she leaned in.
Blackeye grumbled a bit before leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms behind his head. “Ain’t gonna tell ya.”
“What? Why?!”
He chuckled quietly. “Where’s the fun in me tellin’ ya? Ain’t an adventure iffin’ I just toldja everythin’, eh? We meet some, then I’ll tell ya.”
Hector sat up, his tone serious. “Captain, Sir, I mean no offense but this is hardly an ‘adventure’. This is-”
Wally held up his hand, cutting Hector off. “He’s not going to tell us, Hector. His mind’s made up… We’ll be thinking on the fly half the time anyway, so better he tell us when we need to know it most.”
Hector stared at Wally for a moment before finally relaxing in his seat and going back to his meal, replying between mouthfuls, “Alright… But I don’t have to like it…”
---
A day away from port, the towering mass of water that carried them over the great expanse of ocean finally began to shrink, just as the captain had predicted. As the swell calmed, Blackeye saw fit to salute its passing and thanked it for the comfortable ride. Soon, when the sun rose to midday, Wally found himself looking out over the water again, but not in calm reflection. Something in the back of his mind raised a flag of caution that he couldn’t ignore. His legs felt tight and ready to hop, and his ears danced back and forth in search of something he couldn’t quite place. He approached Captain Blackeye slowly as the question he wanted to ask finally took shape. “Captain… Is it normal for there to be no other ships in sight this close to a major port?”
“The Lunar Swell ain’t exactly part of the normal ‘round these waters, but you’re right to worry. Gettin’ stiff gills I am, even if the waters got choppier than they’d ever been, there’s a few hard barnacles who’d sail out regardless. Should’ve seen one by now.”
“CAPTAIN!” shouted Polly from the crow’s nest. “THREE SHIPS! AHEAD STARBOARD! NO FLAGS!”
Wally and Blackeye turned their eyes and found the three vessels as barely dots in the distance. The reveal did nothing to alleviate Wally’s tension, in fact it only increased. “Something’s… Wrong.”
“Aye lad, don’t need your insight t’ know that. KEEP EYES ON ‘EM POLLY!”
“AYE CAP’N!”
“Mister Walter, take Mister Cani down to the Gun Deck and load starboard cannons, Proper knight like him knows how. MISS ORLAND! MISS FABOI! BE READY TO REPEL BOARDERS!”
Wally and Hector quickly rushed down to the gun deck, a small space with only four low caliber cannons, the kind best suited to a ship built for speed and agility over offense. Hector quickly walked Wally through the loading of one so he could move on to the other. As with everything he’d taught him, Wally caught on quickly and moved efficiently. He wondered for a second or two if that was the hard working kitchen boy in him or the knight he’d been fostering, and if their was even a difference anymore.
On deck, Rozzi kept her eyes on the approaching ships and her hand wrapped tightly around the grip of her sickle as Wistea questioned the Captain.
“So are they pirates? Corsairs? Privateers?”
“Pretty sure those are all the same thing, Wistea!” called out Rozzi.
“Preposterous! Why have different words for them then?”
“Greenie…” The captain almost growled. “They all the same when they tryin’ to cut your head off.”
Wistea instinctively reached for her neck and swallowed hard. “U-understood, Captain.”
Blackeye reached over the wheel to its pedestal, lifting up the brass cap there, revealing one end of a voice pipe. “You boys ready down there?”
Hector and Wally quickly searched the room for the source of the captain’s voice, finding the other end of the voice pipe at the far end of the gun deck.
“Aye sir!” called out Wally. “Just one question, who’re we even shooting at?”
“Hopefully no one,” replied Blackeye. “Defensive stance’s ‘til we know better.” Blackeye pressed on the center of the ship’s wheel, locking it in place. He headed into his cabin and from the wall pulled down his harpoon. It thrummed ever so slightly as he held it in his hands, its silvery sheen masking its age and exposing its mystical nature. A round dark blue gem seated in the foreshaft below the harpoon’s head flashed briefly as he gripped it. He then slid it into the slots stitched into the back of his vest and headed back outside, pulling the wheel lock out. He exhaled slowly as he took a loose grip of the wheel and allowed the rudder to drift slightly as he closed his eyes to focus his thoughts.
In his mind formed an image of a flat and endless ocean, in the distance; vague silhouettes of the approaching vessels appeared. The illusory ships caused the imagined water around them to ripple. Suddenly the ripples formed into waves and Blackeye quickly snapped back to reality and drew his harpoon. With the quick upward motion of it, a geyser of water rose beside the ship, and just as the sound of an approaching cannon ball reached the ears of those on deck, the geyser readily intercepted the shot, throwing it entirely off course and plopping it in the ship’s wake.
“Bilge drinkin’ scallops think they c’n take ol’ Blackeye from that far out… HAH!” the Captain thrust his harpoon in the direction of the ships and a sizable swell rushed toward them, forcing the ships off course and throwing off the following volley of shots just as they fired. “HANG ON LADIES, WE’RE MOVIN’ IN!” Blackeye spun the wheel hard and the ship took a sharp turn, now quickly moving toward the opposing vessels. “LET’S SEE YOU FIND YOUR RANGE NOW!”
Cannon shots flew over and beside the God’s Fortune as it charged toward the enemy flotilla with great speed. Blackeye called down through the voice pipe. “READY TO FIRE, STARBOARD SIDE!”
With the gunlock lanyards in hand, Wally and Hector readied themselves for the force and noise of the firing to come.
The God’s Fortune raced up to the ship furthest to the left of the formation, putting its broadside squarely in the cannon’s crosshairs. For barely a second, Blackeye’s senses picked up on something that made no clear sense; he quickly ignored it and shouted, “FIRE!”
The small cannons roared without fail, punting their ammunition into the hull of the enemy ship. Blackeye turned the Fortune for another pass as a bizarre sound drowned out all others. The air around the struck vessel began to shatter like heated glass and explode into a shower of what could only be called dark light. When the paradoxical cloud of non-light faded, beneath it was the rotted remains of a sailing ship. The wood was black and soaked, massive gaps filled with wriggling tangible darkness dotted the whole structure, and the sails were a tattered and stained mess of red cloth with a barely visible sickle of silver across their surface. On deck, the once barely visible figures of sailors became clear. To those aboard the Fortune there was no doubt, before them was a ghost ship, crewed by the dead.
The visibly damaged, waterlogged, and slightly bloated corpses of Icthyite sailors shuffled aboard the now exposed enemy ship, still working their stations long after life had left them. Rozzi could almost make out the sounds of their gurgling, raspy voices shouting out the Fortune’s position to whoever captained the ship.
The captain snorted scoffingly. “Isto the Red’s fleet… Back from the abyss. I’LL BE HAPPY TO SEND YOU ROTTING SCOUNDRELS BACK TO IT! WALTER, CANI, BACK ON DECK, CANNONS ARE NO GOOD HERE!”
The two other ships in the enemy flotilla dropped their illusions with as much fanfare as the first, repositioning themselves to assail the Fortune. As the ships turned, a figure was revealed on the largest of the three, positioned in the middle of the formation. Standing on the very end of the ship’s spar was the Ragged Rogue, his sickening and muffled laugh somehow crossing the distance. Rozzi grit her teeth to force down the feelings of panic that jolted up her spine, driving her mind to focus on the now and not her prior encounter with the otherworldly monster. As she did, she noticed something out of place.
The Rogue seemed larger somehow, and less patchwork. She wondered if it meant he was stronger than he’d been, and if so, were all of Kota’s Generals growing in strength?
Wally and Hector arrived on the deck just as the opposing flotilla had adjusted course.
“So its Ghost Ships now…” growled Hector.
“Aye, not my first either.” replied Blackeye who’d turned to face them. His attention quickly focused on Wally, who’d brought a barrel filled with cannon balls with him. “What’s that all for?”
“Well, I had a thought. Since we can enchant our weapons with magic, I wondered if one could do that with anything, in this case the cannons. Hector said yes, but there were two problems, One I’d only be enchanting the cannon, not the balls themselves, and two the more you use a weapon the more of your magic it can handle.” Wally set the barrel down with a considerable thud. “So I wouldn’t be able to enchant the cannon balls as much as the Flare. Therefore we make up for power with numbers!”
It was then Blackeye realized that Wally had easily carried a barrel full of cannon balls up from the gun deck without a drop of exhaustion or strain to show for it. “Just… how d’ya plan on doin’ that?”
Wally easily scooped up two cannon balls, one to each hand, and hopped up on the ship’s railing. Using his tail to keep himself steady against the rolling of the waves, he carefully gauged the distance between the leading ship and himself, and reared back his right arm. The ball was then engulfed in bright magical flame, gleaming like it’d just come from a blacksmith’s furnace. Wally then pitched it as hard as he could, striking the enemy ship across the bow with a powerful explosion of fire, shaking the entire ship from stem to stern.
“BY THE EASTERN GALES!” Blackeye watched in awe as the mystic fire danced across the old and seawater drenched wood of the ghost ship, spreading unimpeded until the waves coming off the keel doused them. “You pitched that faster than any cannon I ever seen! How in the world d’ya pack that much power in such a small body?”
Wally shrugged as he tossed the other cannon ball to his right hand and pitched it, blowing another burning hole in the nearest ship.
The captain laughed triumphantly. “RIGHT! Mister Walter to the foredeck! The rest of ya cover ‘im! WE’RE TAKIN’ THESE LOT HEAD ON!” He steered the ship hard to port to take them back toward the flotilla.
Wally hopped down, hefted the barrel and rushed to his place flanked by Hector, Wistea and Rozzi when he finally caught sight of the Rogue. Without a second thought he plopped the barrel down, picked up another ball and pitched it directly at the rag monster only to see the ball cleaved to pieces mid-flight, falling to the sides of the targeted vessel. Daylight glimmering on their narrow surfaces revealed the cause, thin snaking threads from the Rogue’s body.
“Of course,” muttered Wally angrily before a flash of inspiration overrode his frustration. “Rozzi! Come here, I have an idea.” Rozzi approached as he held up a cannon ball. “Now see if you can put your magic in while I do…”
Rozzi’s smile was almost devious as she happily placed her hand atop the ball. The sensation was an odd one as their magics intermingled within the heavy mass of iron, causing it to vibrate slightly. Briefly the two of them felt as if their hearts were somehow seated next to each other in their chest. Instead of mystic flames, what coated the ball was more of a halo of bright light that flickered like candle light over its surface. Wally pitched it at Kota’s General where, in mid-flight, it exploded into the form of a whirling tornado of flames that wildly veered off course and bashed into the vessel left of its intended target.
However, the force of the blast was enough to blow the keel clean off the ship. Dark tendrils desperately grasped at splintering, burning wood as seawater rushed in and began to drag the damaged ship back down to where it belonged.
The Rogue reached his hand out to the sinking vessel and the barely visible threads from his body yanked up several decaying sailors and flung them like violent marionettes at the Fortune.
“POLLY! JUMP DOWN!” Shouted Blackeye.
The young Icthyite girl quickly dove from the crow’s nest just as a strung along carcass crashed into it and shook the foremast. The captain caught her easily, setting her down on her feet. “Stay by me sunshine, things are gettin’ ugly.”
She nodded and gripped the hilt of her small dagger as she watched the other corpses slap hard onto the deck and railings. The undead sailors moved slowly at first, their rotten muscles yanking on the bones they barely held as they sloshed about in search of targets.
Immediately, Wistea whipped one off the ships railing before it could climb up, the sound of her vine striking it down almost a cue for all the others to mobilize. Wally kept throwing cannon balls at the flotilla, hoping to prevent the two remaining ships from firing anything else as Hector, Rozzi and Wistea moved to block for him. Hector parted one of the ghastly assailants clean down the middle, sparks racing out from where he struck, only to have both halves topple to the ground while still grabbing and flailing at him. “DAMN! Cutting them doesn’t work! Improvise!”
Rozzi smirked. “I got an idea! Wistea, can you try and herd them together?”
“Umm… OH! Yes! I can!” Wistea tapped her hand to the deck, a flash of green light sliding outward from her touch, followed by rapid shoots of bamboo instantly growing at bizarre angles, slamming into the befouled sailors and forcing them to cluster.
Rozzi quickly took up some spare rope from the deck and dashed around the amassed undead, wrapping it around them tightly before she handed the far end to Wally. “Flick of the wrist if you wouldn’t mind, dear.”
Wally looked at the rope and the struggling monstrosities before easily understanding her plan. Taking up as much of the slack as he could around his forearm, he dragged them off their rotting feet and into a spin. The disgusting mass rotated faster and faster over their heads before, with the suggested wrist flick, Wally flung the whole decomposing mess off into the mast of the second enemy ship, demolishing it and part of its deck as well.
Any possible celebration at the minor victories thus far faded from thought as the Ragged Rogue began to laugh once more. The sickly unnerving sound drew everyone’s attention, toward the general, still on his perch. “FLAREBEARER! I SEE YOU’RE FINALLY LIVING UP TO THE TITLE! WHICH IS WHY WE WILL SHOW YOU NO QUARTER!”
Everyone readied themselves for whatever could come, but it was Captain Blackeye to make the first move, slashing his harpoon in the direction of the ship’s aft, summoning a wall of water to block an almost unexpected barrage of cannon fire, two shots were stopped dead by the mystically aided water but a third slipped past and rocketed toward the deck where Wally leapt up to intercept, hooking his foot around it and kicking it away from the ship.
From behind the wall of water three more ghost ships appeared, approaching the battle rapidly.
Blackeye growled quietly, he hated running from a fight, but he could always see one he couldn’t win without losing more than he’d like. “MISTER WALTER!” He waved Wally in close and spoke quietly. “Whip us a distraction if y’can, we’re leavin’ in a big hurry.”
Wally nodded and spread the word quietly to everyone else who moved into position. The wallaby himself stood in the center of the deck and drew the Stellar Flare. “… Right, this should work…” He held the sword high above his head and took a deep breath. “EIGHT GODS INTO ONE MOMENT, FROM MY SOUL INTO THE WORLD! DRAGON’S CALDERA!”
From the blade sprung a spire of fire that rose into the air above the God’s Fortune and blossomed outward like an infernal fountain, cascading around the ship to flash boil the seawater beneath it creating a rapidly expanding fog of steam.
There was the sound of cannon fire, and old ships creaking before a piercing whistle and a rapidly accelerating God’s Fortune raced out of the handmade cloud, rocketing away from the deadly melee.
The Ragged Rogue shouted, “YOU USELESS UNDEAD SCUM! TURN THE SHIP! GET US OUT OF THIS FOG!”
The ships all groaned, creaked and shuddered violently, from what the Rogue could see of the other ships; they all seemed to be locked in place. As the fog lifted the reason was made clear. Dense ice had formed around their hulls, adding stress and weight to the already barely held together wrecks and locking their rudders.
A voice behind the Rogue spoke up. “It appears, my General, that Cofresi hasn’t lost a step, even at seventy-two.”
“BAH! MISERABLE OLD FISH! Ah… But I best control my temper. This can work for us, with them sailing to whatever safe spots they have, we can return to our mission. Now get us moving before I get bored, Isto!”
“As you wish, General.”
---
The God’s Fortune sailed until nightfall with all hands on deck, every set of eyes watching the horizon for any pursuers. Finally a large waterlogged cave provided the cover they sought to anchor down for the night. Once there, everyone was ready simply sit and rest out the stress of the day, but Wistea called Wally and Rozzi aside. She sat them down across from one another on deck. “Now, please hold hands.”
The two shared a speculative look before both shrugged and did as she asked.
“Now, channel magic like you would to enchant your weapons.”
They both looked down at their hands briefly with a bit of concern before looking up.
“Count of three?” Wally said.
“On three.” Rozzi answered.
They both silently counted as tiny jets of wind and wisp of flame danced down their arms. Slowly, the space between them filled with the same white light they’d created earlier that day. It was small, and flickering, and once again it felt as if, somehow, their hearts were beating alongside one another’s before the feeling quickly fated and the small light banished in a tiny tumult of wind and fire.
Wistea crossed her arms and hummed thoughtfully. “It is a start… The Wind and Fire attributes relate positively on the Wheel of Creation, so the two of you should be able to produce a stable unified result with some work. Maybe with a bit of practice…”
“Maybe they should kiss!” Shouted Polly from her seat on a barrel a few feet away.
Wistea yelled back over her shoulder. “Y-young lady! T-this is a very serious matter! Please do not disrupt it!”
“Huh, I was right; her leaves totally go darker when she’s embarrassed.” Rozzi said casually.
Turning back to the two of them she stomped a foot in frustration. “R-Rozzi! Please take this seriously, if you and Wally can combine your magic, it may give us a considerable advantage against that ghastly fleet out there.”
“Not tonight,” Captain Blackeye said as he finished inspecting the foremast for damage. “Need us all up bright and early, so we’re beddin’ down now. Mister Walter you’re on first watch so you sleep most of the night after your shift.
Wistea sighed. “I… Suppose we will pick this up tomorrow then.”
As everyone else set to leave, Wally began to stand when he realized Rozzi was still holding his hands.
Wally readied himself for more playful derision and teasing when he saw that Rozzi’s expression was one he hadn’t seen before. It was so outside her normal range that he could hardly recognize it as shyness.
“Wally… Did you… I mean, when we tried this did it feel like, I dunno… Our hearts were like, right next to each other?”
He nodded slowly. “Happened again just now, so I guess that’s supposed to happen.”
“Oh! Good, not just me then! That makes me feel a little better.”
Wally cocked his head to the side curiously.
“Okay so maybe, JUST maybe. I thought very briefly that… I dunno… I was holding you back.” Wally was about to say something when she continued. “I mean, you’re Mister Magical Destiny n’ you’re carryin’ around a literal gift from the gods and I’m just…”
“Someone who’s helped save my life more than a few times? Rozzi… Where’s this coming from?”
“I know, I know, it’s silly, but… It was there and if I didn’t say somethin’ it’d’ve just festered, y’know?”
Wally nodded again and held her hands a little tighter. “Let’s try it one more time before bed, eh?”
Rozzi took a moment to steady herself and nodded when she was ready.
As their hearts came into sync once more, the bright halo of light flickered into being once more before them. The two chose a single point within the light to focus the energy before finally, with a kaleidoscopic flash of light, a small whirlwind of bright orange flame danced in the air between them before flitting out of existence.
Overcome, Rozzi sprang forward and hugged Wally tightly, laughing happily.
Wally happily hugged her back. “There see? I knew we could do it!” He waited a few moments until she pulled away, except she didn’t. “Um… Rozzi…”
“Not done yet,” she replied.
Wally, if reluctantly, let her take the time she needed.
A minute or so later she spoke up. “You know I could just fall asleep like this.”
“Rozzi.”
“… Carry me?”
“Rozzi!”
“Alright!” She giggled and pulled herself away. “But I’m expecting double next time.”
“… What on Mondia do you mean by ‘double’?”
Rozzi smiled coyly and winked before walking away, humming happily as she went.
Wally sighed and shook his head, a clear smile on his face as he headed up to the foredeck to begin his watch. He began to idly play with the knoka nut bracelet his sister had given him before leaving home, silently relishing in the respite of the night, knowing moments of calm would become sparser as time went on.
<[Chapter 12]–[Index]–[Chapter 14]>
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One Size Never Fits All
By Gina Fournier
August 5, 2008
13, 595 words
Writers like Jim Harrison, Joseph Epstein and Willa Cather have long known the damage English teachers can inflict on potential readers. In the late sixties at SUNY, before he gave up academics and focused on writing, Harrison began to contemplate the ultimate master’s level writing program, which would include living both in the city and in the country, manual labor to clear the mind and intensive reading to feed it. Notice the absence of a central authority figure in this plan. Epstein comments in the introduction to The Norton Book of Personal Essays, “Few things are more efficient at killing the taste for a certain kind of literature than being forced it in schools.” Apparently, Cather refused to have her books anthologized in student editions for fear students would never read her again.
Of course writers never force readers, but unfortunately teachers tend to do so. “Reading has been forced upon us every since we were in preschool. Because of this most students dread to read outside of the classroom,” explains Josh, one of my Eng 1510: Composition I students in metro Detroit. I can’t think of a worst indictment of my profession. Teachers turn off students to learning. Yes, aided by complacent parents and unresponsive institutions, but those problems require their own essays.
Signs indicating trouble abound. Downturns in newspaper publishing, stagnancy in book publishing and the cultural shift away from words toward images all align with Josh’s testimony, as does the National Endowment for Arts (NEA) 2004 release “Reading at Risk” and the 2007 follow-up “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence.” Although U.S. Census Bureau figures from 1940-2000 show huge gains in educational attainment (in 1940 under 1 in 20 adults 25 and older had earned a college diploma, while in 2000 nearly 1 in 4 had), Americans are reading less and less plus reading skills are worsening, says the NEA, even among college graduates. A cable television commercial for Everest Institute, a college alternative specializing in certificate programs like medical billing, understands how to sell admissions, by promising hands on training over reading books. The organization’s website relates, “You may have gone to high school cause you had to.” The terms aren’t quite literate, but clientele may not be too discriminating.
Asking every student in the classroom to read the same material is still the most popular approach used in English classes across all levels of study, the selections often chosen by committee and designed to somehow reach a substantial majority. As I write that sentence in mid July when I really should be doing something else like taking a break or updating my coursepacks, a wave of boredom pins me down; as a teacher I try very hard not to forget what it was like being a student.
Why such a large and devoted following for such a limited approach? In New Jersey this summer, The Star-Ledger reported that Butler High School picked a non classic, Kyle Maynard’s memoir No Excuses: The True Story of a Congenital Amputee Who Became a Champion in Wrestling and in Life for its summer reading program. “One book, one city” approaches began catching on about a decade ago, the paper explained, in the steps of school-wide requirements for incoming college freshmen and the ruling classroom mainstay: one-size-fits-all reading assignments. But why did this most traditional of all approaches pick up steam amid ongoing failings in education, when all methods, even time-honored—perhaps especially time-honored—should be assessed afresh for worth? U.S. A. Today covered community colleges this July too, in “’Turning Point’ Arrives as U.S. Community Colleges’ Purview Grows.” The down-side of the picture cited a California report regarding the state’s 109 community colleges issued from the Legislative Analyst’s Office. It discovered that teaching approaches “are not often aligned with students’ learning styles,” but are teachers listening and responding? Though all indicators point to serious problems in reading and writing proficiency across many levels of education, few seem to question the central tie that binds most English instruction.
Meanwhile, average Americans in large numbers are stammering through literacy classes in their native language. Nationally, people are concerned. Recently, The Tampa Tribune added to this grim discussion with “Fewer Students Read Between the Lines,” which shared a sobering comment from Don Gaetz, a former county superintendent and current chairman of Florida’s Senate K-12 education committee: “The No. 1 problem in secondary education in our state and in the country is a decline in literacy in high school.” That same deficiency stays with students who enter community college, nearly half of all college undergraduates, according to U.S.A .Today, who often carry the extra burden of financially supporting themselves and dependents.
As a community college English instructor, I think the “one city, one book” approach is a big part of the problem. Alonso High School reading teacher Janelle MacLean was interviewed for the Tampa article and is an old friend of mine— but from dancing days circa The Turning Point not teaching days, so imagine my surprise running into her within an internet link supplied by my National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (wordy title?) weekly e-mail newsletter. Turns out she operates a special program sponsored by Scholastic, which allows her to tailor reading assignments to each student. READ 180 is a successful program, according to MacLean, but she’s concerned. Speaking on the phone, she pointed to SpringBoard, a new program in English Language Arts and Mathematics for grades 6-12 designed by College Board, which is set to it hit Tampa schools in the fall, funded in part by the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation. She fears the program will mean a loss of choice and fluidity in the classroom. We agreed, though the bad grammar is all mine and designed for emphasis. Pardon me if I sound frustrated, but if a program doesn’t include choice, it ain’t gonna work.
This past year, for its Great Michigan Read, the Michigan Humanities Council chose the reissue of Hemingway’s The Nick Adams Stories, simply because the collection is set in the state—“a literary masterpiece literally made in Michigan.” (“Imagine everyone in Michigan reading the same book. At the same time.”) However, despite widespread use, one-size fits all reading assignments apparently fail to turn students into life-long readers, or successful reading initiatives wouldn’t be in such high demand.
I don’t think I’m over-simplifying cause and effect here. Instead of learning to appreciate the world of words, common book approaches turn students away—away from reading, away from books, away from the power of their own minds. So please, let’s rethink this thing. Especially with the internet’s easy access to everything, uniform assignments help students avoid actual reading and writing, which are too often successfully replaced with skimming, summarizing, mimicking lectures, consulting Cliff and Spark notes, surfing, cheating and guessing, especially throughout high school and college. Shakespeare classes, online?
I’m very worried that we’re working against ourselves here. Collectively over twelve to sixteen or so years, standardized reading and writing instruction demonstrate repeatedly why, after graduation, students might continue to “hate” reading and ignore newspapers, books, articles, poetry, plays, directions for Campbell’s soup, road signs, tax forms, mortgage contracts, primarily due to a perceived lack of relation to their lives. Summer I semester, this past May and June, sitting in the back row, back corner, Tucker entitled his Composition I entrance essay, which asks students to compare their music listening and reading habits, “Music-Easy, Books-Hard.” Meanwhile, his friend Garrett sitting next to him explained, “I do not like reading” because he can’t “sit still for that long.” Speaking for many of his peers, including his buddy from Central, Garrett believed at the beginning of class, “I feel that books are a waste of time.” (University students take summer courses at community college looking for lower tuition and perhaps lower standards, too.) However, by the end of class, after choosing to read The Lizard King by Jerry Hopkins about Doors’ lead singer Jim Morrison, Garrett changed his mind. We later communicated by e-mail and he confirmed the earnest nature of his sentiments. Before, “I thought that no matter what I was reading, there had to be something else I could be doing with my time, like go outside or hang with friends. This all changed when I found a book that I actually liked.” Describing just the growth I hope for in average students over a semester, he continued, “Of course I will never like reading the boring material like research and books for classes, but at least I will be able to find something interesting within the material and build on it.” Students must first relate to reading on a personal level before they’re willing and able to read productively and proficiently as adults—reading when they must and should, even though they may not want to.
I first heard word about what would happen when the world equated corn with oil two or three summers ago, standing in an Osceola County field, talking to a farmer. Go figure. But more to the point: go to the source. Those of us are interested in education and literacy should listen to writers—professionals and students alike—because both groups understand reading, though of course in distinct ways. In short, what this criticism means for the classroom is that reading and writing instruction should emphasize process—how to read and write— not content—that one book that will hopefully change the intellectual life of tenth, eleventh or twelfth graders for the better, which sounds so childish. Yet this critical juncture is where preventable mistakes are being made.
My favorite example of what English teachers should not do comes with my personal bias intact, operating in full force. A highly rated part-time instructor already on staff, I was not hired for a full-time position at this particular local community college (not even given an interview, which really unnerved me), so what follows is axe grinding but with a point. Here’s who got a living wage and health care coverage instead: an overweight, cigarette smoking out of stater, who planned one semester’s entry-level composition course around pornography. This stroke of brilliance, the kind of thing that gets David Horowitz going (and blowing bad teaching issues way out of proportion), came from an individual who self described the “foci” of his interest to be vaguely and sophomorically “everything” on the department website. At the time, a Michigan company formerly called Weyco was making national headlines regarding their new policy of not hiring cigarette smokers, which launched a debate about employer rights, such as the possible right not to hire people—due to prohibitive healthcare costs— who are both obese and willing to kill themselves with nicotine. Then as now, Michigan was ensconced in its post 9/11 economic woes. Community colleges were demanding more money from the state, for very good reasons, but this one didn’t feel the need to help out the state’s employment figures or tax base in return. Furthermore, the school is located within a city that is home to a large Arabic population, comprising a third of residents, including a disturbing number of female students who wear the hijab. (As a female and feminist, even one figure under wraps evokes distress.) Such radically conservative students might feel very uncomfortable studying pornography and might avoid taking gender studies or sociology courses, where the subject might be better located. I don’t know what happen to the competition’s lesson plans because thankfully I split. Conventional wisdom turned out to be correct in my case. Very gratefully, I was hired full-time at a local community college across town, one other than three at which I taught part-time and learned the craft.
To make students analyze pornography within an entry level college writing course is of course wrongheaded. But to make students study any topic other than how to read and how to write in a course designed to cover process is wrongheaded. This example just happens to nicely blare “bad idea,” but the idea remains bad even when the subject matter sounds more presentable, even more contemporary, like asking an entire program full of students to read and submerge themselves for entire semester into Lee and Bob Woodruff’s In an Instant or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which has been done at my institution in the remedial program. I know because I hear about the titles when students who progress into Comp I talk about not reading the selections. Don’t misunderstand. Both books are fine reads, I’m sure. I especially enjoyed Krakauer’s sidebar about father-son relations. This year, I found that students who picked Krakauer’s 1996 investigation and tried to compare it to Sean Penn’s 2007 film encountered a far greater challenge than they had anticipated. The point is that when students are inexperienced readers—inexperienced authentic readers—they are too often also inexperienced writers who have trouble developing an independent point. In the simplest term, one size fits all turns out students who can’t think for themselves.
Outside of the classroom for the last six years, the world has continued to fight and turn, some days more gracefully than others. Meanwhile, inside the classroom, I’ve learned to appreciate the necessity of diversity. Let student readers choose their own writers and the student’s regard for reading and writing is likely to flourish, or least develop more successfully than traditional teacher-centered models. Teaching students to make good decisions like successful corporate officers or business entrepreneurs must do is much more desirable than proffering assembly-line, book report- style regurgitation. A military veteran and single parent commented this summer, “Before this class it had been 5 years since my last English class and I had forgotten almost everything I had learned, even the fact that I like to read.”
Because my students collectively enliven a cacophony of personality and experience, the notion that one book will suit the needs of a substantial majority with the help of one person’s perspective—the teacher’s, mine—is absurd. Given the opportunity to choose, most of my students select worthwhile nonfiction reading and a substantial majority claim to actually consume their selections and improve their attitudes, even if only a little. A survey of choices made during the recently concluded brief summer semester reflects a panoply of tastes too rich to be contained in a single or even thirty-two flavors.
A budding philosopher read Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic starring a character called Osho, who led a flock, accumulated Rolls Royce vehicles and was arrested on immigration charges in Oregon in the 1980s. Osho’s teachings on the joys of sex and laughter were later collected after his death by followers. The resulting selection is sure to never make even one recommended reading list, which is not to say that the student’s time was necessarily wasted. A male who described being passed over routinely by his teachers throughout his entire educational career found solace in Keith Dorney’s well-received football memoir Black and Honolulu Blue. A history major accustomed to academic treatises discovered the father and son basketball biography Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel and a more personal approach to his future field. David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk make many lives more endurable.
Got an obscure interest? No problem. Want to be a pilot? Talk to your dad and discover Robert Standford Tuck. Disgruntled by your education? Gravitate toward Lies My teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. Both liberals and conservatives check out Michael Moore, as the NCTE advises, “to determine what is ‘real’” and “to make judgments about validity, objectivity, and bias.” Memoirs are popular, with new reads continually popping up, such as Ashley Rhodes-Courter ‘s Three Little Words, about foster care, and Daoud Hari’s The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur.
This summer, students challenged themselves with Bell Hooks, Michael Korda’s Journey to a Revolution about the little-discussed 1956 Hungary revolution, Zora Neal Hurston and Freakonomics. Like minds converged, as in Kevin Mitnick’s Art of Deception, about a career in computer hacking. Going into health care instead? Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance filled the prescription perfectly. Forensics? Mary Roach’s Stiff. Parent of an autistic child? Spiritual sensibilities? Autism and the God Connection by William Stillman. The usual child rearing problems? Setting Limits with Your Strong Willed Child by Robert J. Mackenzie. Recovering heroin addict? Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymor on Hunter S. Thompson. Ex-stripper trying to become a lawyer and/or media personality? Cupcake Brown. Trying to make sense of the world around you, in which black males are best represented in prison populations? Punishment and Inequality in America by Princeton Professor of Sociology Bruce Western, which is no doubt worthwhile reading (I’m putting it on my list) even though Taylor was one of few to report that he read only “a majority” of the book.
Patterns do emerge. Lately, each semester, a few female students have been drawn to Alice Sebold’s Lucky and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted. This past semester, at least two students closely related to Sebold’s rape experience: one as a Bosnisan war survivor who witnessed more evils than a person should be subjected to in a lifetime and the other as a rape victim who found the courage to tell her parents and report the crime to the police. So far, I’ve found that most readers don’t come out of reading Kaysen as fans (students struggle to write a cohesive and clear review of a book that is neither), yet this semester the book was well-received by one young woman who had recently spent time in a mental institution and like Kaysen felt helped by it. A strong but reserved “A” student, Brittany shared her view that assigned reading is “very difficult.” Clarifying her position about her past educational experiences, she added, “I am not saying that the books were bad.” Instead, she has a problem with being told what to read.
It’s just when somebody tells me I have to read a certain book & take notes on it then eventually write a paper, I find myself on sparknotes.com looking up chapter summaries. But this assignment was different. I got to choose a book that interest me & had no weekly schedule of reading dates. With Girl, interrupted I found myself staying up to all hours of the night reading it + re-reading. So yes, I actively read my book and enjoyed it.
Experience tells me that neither dictatorship nor uniformity is likely to hold the answer for addressing the nation’s reading crisis. Sure, within each group a small number of students make regrettable choices like Karrine Steffans’ Confessions of a Video Vixen and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, the most popular book in southeastern Michigan followed closely by Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie. Books that lack ideas, analysis, art or craft wouldn’t be my first choice for students, but I already know how to analyze selections. They don’t, and people learn by doing. Each semester, a very small number of individuals do make regrettable choices, which require them to exercise their own critical thinking more than the author did, but at least writing about the material then becomes a challenging experience, if not reading it. Meanwhile, other students watch this scenario play out, perhaps becoming more confident in their own better decisions.
As an adjunct with limited choice, in my first years teaching community college English I happily used Bedford/ St. Martin’s The Bedford Reader and it’s less-sophisticated cousin, Subjects and Strategies, both of which I liked a great deal with their mix of canonical and more quirky pieces, but then I already love to read. Now, for Comp I, I use Catherine Lattrell’s cultural reader Remix (same publisher), which calls on a world of music that allows for hip-hop and file sharing. Nothing from traditional recommended reading lists here; more so the likes of Salon and Wired are well-represented. To balance group selections, students choose essays independently from a fresh variety that includes Diane Ackerman, David Brooks, Laura Bush, P. Diddy, Firoozeh Dumas, Malcolm Gladwell, Ira Glass, Barry Lopez, Steven Pinker, Jennifer L. Pozner, Katie Roiphe, and Sara Vowell, whose works are organized within themed-chapters such as Identity, Tradition, Romance and Technology. Nothing from the last millennium, so no E. B. White’s “Once More to Lake” (1941), which has its place but not as mandatory reading within entry level college writing classes in America in 2008 if wanting students to actually read is a goal, and of course it should be.
When bored and pressed for time, students act like water trying to escape. They take the easiest way out. And who can blame them? In the February and March 2008 edition of the University of Maryland’s Teaching and Learning News, assistant director of the Center for Teaching Excellence Dave Eubank related a classroom experience that transpired in ENG 241: Introduction to the Novel. The article concerned a new technologically-based assessment tool, clickers, which bring, it seems (I look forward to trying them) a game show appeal to learning. Clickers are what the name implies. Each student holds one and pushes buttons in response to Powerpoint questions. This system of instruction provides an opportunity for instructors to poll student learning and cull anonymous results about teaching effectiveness, but Eubank’s experiment revealed the elephant in the room: students easily avoid reading. “Our discussion of the fact that nearly 60% admitted to not completing the novel about which each student was required to write in her final paper was less than comfortable,” he bravely relayed. Though the goal of the article was to promote the use of clickers outside of the sciences, Eubanks admitted that answers to questions about how much of each novel students had actually read were “occasionally surprising and often disheartening.” So, what should an English teacher do? Make students take lie detector tests and fail non readers?
Certainly, White’s “Once More to the Lake” is worthwhile reading, but not something students can readily relate to, and I fear that’s true about far too many selections entrenched in classrooms and forced upon students today. Uniform required reading operates like a sort of intellectual waterboarding-style torture using authors instead of liquid. If students make it all the way through the White’s essay without losing focus, they encounter “the chill of death” and perhaps are engaged enough to reflect upon their own mortality, but in my experience most are unlikely to do so. Before the essay closes it thoughts about life passing from generation to generation, White’s reminiscing has him editorializing about how “the unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors” interrupted his reveries about the past. Unlike his son, who “loved our rented outboard,” the father prefers the past and the “old one-cylinder engine with the heavy flywheel, how you could have it eating out of your hand if you got really close to it spiritually.” New agey perhaps, but a long way from Silicon Valley. The average student can’t readily relate to dated, AARP reflections, or someone else’s idea of a good time. It’s a vicious circle; they don’t read enough to empathize, yet empathy is learned through reading.
Frank McCourt’s marvelous memoir Teacher Man gracefully shapes teaching’s true grit. Over the course of the book, he calmly accepts his fate. McCort taught English in New York City public high schools for thirty years before making it big with his first memoir about growing in Ireland, Angela’s Ashes. Still, he mentions more than once that the young people in Greek drama murder the old people who get in their way. Of course, one of the many reasons to read is to recognize the difference between art and reality.
In teaching, separating good ideas from bad is important because ideas take so long to implement and, if institutionalized and they turn out to be bad, they take a very long time to undue. A few years back, The Detroit Free Press published a dandy profile, “Outboards Got Started in Detroit,” about local inventor Cameron Waterman (great name, given his claim to fame), who utilized a Detroit boiler plant and the waters off Gross Ille to test his invention in 1905, after first hitting upon the idea for the outboard motor thanks to his participation in the rowing crew at Yale. (In short, according to Waterman, rowing “stinks.”) Turns out, the Great Lake State is not only the once revered motor car capital of the world but also responsible for spawning a large boating industry. As a teacher, at first I thought, “Here’s a great unit waiting to be born! E.B. White, outboard motors, the Motor City, up north in the Great Lake State!” Great in theory, perhaps, as students in southeastern Michigan should maybe be interested in these marvelous connections and the opportunity to discuss them in an invigorating college setting, but not in a classroom where I’ve got to teach writing process, including sentence, paragraph and essay structure, some awareness of the wide-range of approaches to writing essays, what I want in particular from student writers, as well as reading and research techniques, dreaded outlining in some form, how and why to use a dictionary, documentation techniques, the difference between a subject and a noun, distinctions between summary and response, and more, to students from the inner city who are less likely to go up north as well as suburbanite students who are more likely to return to familiar lakes for a week’s stay. Want to talk about the time and energy it takes to teach revision to over a hundred college writers fall and winter semesters?
Composition instruction entails a very long list of hands-on how tos and practical concepts. Not E.B. White nor J. K. Rowling nor any single author is bound to magically deliver all those lessons to 27 diverse students who would rather privately surf the internet, listen to their ipods or play with their cellphones (one in the same yet?), who well know how to avoid reading as they have been doing so successfully for years, for many learning to also dread writing in the process.
THE DISMAL STATE OF READING IN AMERICA. According to the NEA data, nine year olds are more likely to read voluntarily than thirteen to seventeen years olds, a fact that surprises no one. Imagine a precocious pre-teen, curled up with Harry Potter. It’s a scene one can imagine happening inside an elementary school free reading period or during summer vacation. Bob Wise of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based think tank, told The Tampa Tribune that major problems occurred when middle and high school teachers neglected to teach reading, assuming incorrectly that those lessons were over. My understanding is the standardized tests of No Child Left Behind have only made matters worse. The students I work with in the metro-Detroit area have all come from high schools that serve a steady diet of standardized forced reading, on which students are gagging and choking and dying of boredom. Meanwhile, teenagers want to be social year-round, and they want to belong. Even if reading material relates to them personally, many would rather hang out with peers or electronics.
Comparatively, college students may be ripe for the picking, but NEA figures suggest colleges are not turning students into readers but rather colleges are turning students away from books. Citing UCLA’s Your First College Year and College Senior Year surveys, the NEA relates that reading for pleasure rates drop over the course of a college career. Turning to the National Survey of Student Engagement conducted by Indiana University, NEA comments, “If we accept that voluntary reading habits are central to a liberal arts education, then surely it is troubling to find that the majority of freshman and seniors alike read only 1-4 books for pleasure throughout the entire school year or they read no unassigned books at all.”
But are students truly reading much of anything, assigned or otherwise? And what about after college? The NEA’s information about the habits of all Americans suggests that serious reading is slipping away as a pastime. In 1982, 82% of college graduates were literary readers; by 2002, that percentage had fallen eighteen points to 67%.
We must ask: Where are we headed?
Dana Goia, chairman of the NEA, describes the stakes in “To Read or Not to Read”:
How does one summarize this disturbing story? As Americans, especially younger Americans, read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they have lower levels of academic achievement. (The shameful fact that nearly one-third of American teenagers drop out of school is deeply connected to declining literacy and reading comprehension.)With lower levels of reading and writing ability, people do less well in the job market. Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement. Significantly worse reading skills are found among prisoners than in the general adult population. And deficient readers are less likely to become active in civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting.
Meanwhile, my profession appears to be deeply involved in the business of ignoring the obvious. Recently a co-worker shared her philosophy. In essence, students don’t have to like reading, they just have to do it. But the thing is, since many students don’t like reading, pragmatically, they’ve simply found strategies for avoiding it. (For some, skimming is taught in high school.) I figure that I’ve worked with over two thousand students and seventy class groups to date. My candid conversations with students leave me absolutely convinced that vast numbers of students simply elect not to read more often than they do read, and for their actions they receive passing grades and diplomas. Possibly, this ease presents a false picture regarding the amount of work required to pass life successfully too. (Low standards certainly confused me.) In the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic, in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr admits to having “troubles with reading” due to time spent zipping around online reading in short fragmented bits, and his “literary” friends agree. “The more they use the Web,” Carr explains, “the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.” If intellectuals and professional are skimming more and finding their reading skills diminished, of course busy college students who don’t love reading are too.
Politics play a big part on campus, as in greater life, adding unfortunate complications to the mix. When I arrived, I discovered that adjuncts and their students were forced to deal with (or perhaps pay for only to ignore) a dull textbook, which I could not read and sought to replace immediately. However, doing so on probation as a new full-time hire meant risking tenure and contradicting all advice given to me. Yes, over one book. All voices inside and outside the institution, even the most progressive and dedicated, urged personal protection and counseled me to wait until “after”—after I achieved union protection, which I now thankfully enjoy, though the advice was right on. Trust me, I’ve paid for my insubordination. When I said, in effect, this textbook sucks, some of my peers evidently heard, “You suck.” Jennifer Haberling, a Baldwin Middle School English teacher and the 2008-2009 Michigan Teacher of the Year, as awarded by the Michigan Education Association, told the association’s newsletter that she felt embarrassed by the honor and that she enjoys collaborating with her peers. Here’s what I think: First off, good English teachers don’t have much time for collaboration with peers (way too many students!), and secondly my guess is that being singled out among your immediate and statewide peers as the best teacher in the state may actually cause some discomfort, as some of those peers deemed less talented by default are bound to feel jealousy and act out any number of insidious ways. Young children and Shakespeare can tell you: teachers are human and not necessarily nice people.
I’m not trying to agitate. Waiting until I was safe among peers would have meant facing far too many deserving students— approximately a thousand individuals over three years—with my hands tied, holding inadequate materials. And since something I call “The Honesty System” is my number one tool for fighting plagiarism (though it’s imperfect), I had to tell each group that first year as a full-timer, “Your pricey required reading sucks, I’m sorry,” then launch a discussion about textbooks to give student’s a voice and let them know I feel their pain. It’s terribly upsetting when you must ask people to spend forty to over a hundred bucks on a lousy textbook you don’t even respect, but this sort of thing happens all the time. It’s too bad, too, because students could use that money to buy a few novels, some poetry and a collection of essays or two they might get more out of in the long run. The way teachers use (or, as in the case of adjuncts and other department members not given a choice, don’t use) assigned texts influences student attitudes toward reading and book purchasing, for better or for worse. Each semester, savvy students with tight budgets ask, their enthusiasm long ago dampened, “Will you actually use Remix?” Based on experience, some have a hard time believing my reply. Forced to read Lord of the Flies one too many times (he claims four times in five years), Leroy struck back:
I chose to boycott the book report and formed the mentality that reading just isn’t for me. I never looked back after that moment I would fight teachers tooth and nail in a desperate plea not to read. The teachers however would fight me off and make me do work. I would turn in half assed reports based on what they said the day before and the teachers would just push me along.
GET YOUR READ ON. Since composition courses ask students to write nonfiction essays, I help students find their own nonfiction book to augment Remix. Even better, as one of my students put it, I help folks get their read on. Guiding groups of students as they make their selections is a nonstop thrill-ride in the amusement park of everyday life. Don’t worry. In class, I counsel students who’ve picked up the cliché not to describe their book as a “rollercoaster ride.”
However, I do want to purposely mix metaphors for a screaming neon effect because I so want people to see what I see. Teaching composition in a free reading environment lets me spend valuable time in a garden of humanity, infinitely more rich than the jungle of coneflowers, coreopsis, the potted hibiscus we winter inside that needs transplanting, tons of black-eyed susans, some overpowering a small group of stinky Asiatic (?) lilies, rose of sharon, purple liatris, cultivated wild daisies (yes, preserved this late in the season due to deadheading), gladiolas, butterfly bush, yarrow, tiger lilies, a few tropical New Guinea impatiens and their annual friends begonia and coleus mixed into the perennials for ongoing color, amid the miniature old-fashioned Hollyhocks transplanted from Chris Allen’s grandmother’s house that do not attract ants, a few rather sickly white, orange and fuchsia dahlias I bought down the street (never again; Chris Allen’s mom never liked that place, I’m told), red rose, Russian sage, some struggling bergamot (bad location), sunflowers, some planted by birds, so located directly under the feeder beneath the apple tree, scented wild geranium, a weak strain of re-seeded cleome from last summer (welcome!), late planted but still appreciated cosmos, and even some lingering spring pansies all blooming in our yard and attracting monarch and swallowtail butterflies.
New arrivals in Comp I and Comp II are adults who have reached the end of the road, their last required English classes ever. Imagine. Teaching literacy to grown- ups, I get to hang out among a non-stop gusher of individuals who each act in very interesting ways as they commandeer their individual projects and also mix with one another. No two students or groups are exactly alike. Though I want to savor every last nano-second of summer vacation (important for assessment, updates to lesson plans, preparations for the new school year and a well-deserved break), I am very much looking forward to classes this fall during the November election.
Some of my findings:
1. After a lifetime of forced reading, students need help learning how to choose reading material, which is a reasonable byproduct of assembly-line treatment. Once teachers stop telling students what to read, students often stop reading (or stop approximating). Too often, metro Detroit high school graduates don’t know how to find books to read on their own. They don’t have an accurate idea about the available range of material, and they don’t know what they enjoy.
Fitted with narrow, rigid views of the world of books—one at a time, single file—students don’t automatically understand the difference between fictional literature and nonfiction stories, or the difference between “novels” and “memoirs” in particular. Of course, they’re not alone. James Frey and Oprah help get this conversation going. And thanks to Augusten Burroughs, of course, for keeping it alive. For some students, keeping “autobiography” and “biography” straight is challenging like keeping “me” and “I” under control, maybe not to the same degree, but all together equally repulsive. Some have never tried commentary and find they like it (or hate it); others learn to love (or hate) true life stories.
Students don’t necessarily know how to navigate the world of information, in person or online. The chance of falling into a discussion about the differences between Dewey Decimal and the Library of Congress systems of classification is remote in any busy classroom, yet bookstores organize differently from the town and school library, which may organize differently from one another, adding yet another layer of distance. The mere act of going to a library or bookstore overwhelms students at the bottom, who are likely to take the most time making a selection. Librarians have been typecast as mousy and boring, making them difficult to approach, especially for the unsure. To the unfamiliar, searching for books at a bookstore can be a nightmare, especially if the student makes the oft repeated rookie mistake: asking for a “nonfiction book” without narrowing focus. A tired clerk may snap back with sarcasm.
One thing that amazes me among many is the fact that many students are not much more tech savvy than I am, and they certainly aren’t automatically information and media savvy, either. Online, the distinction between amazon.com customer reviews, a short blurb from Booklist and long scrolls of blog entries blurs for a steady stream of students, who can’t necessarily identify the NBC peacock. Thankfully, as a full-timer, most of the time I can snag a classroom with computers to help facilitate the process of teaching all the processes necessary to reading, writing and thinking today. (At our campus, adjuncts and their many students go without choice and computers.) Learning how to look up the key to pronunciation in a print dictionary is important, especially if the power goes out. Otherwise, the dictionary is online now complete with actual pronunciation of “taciturn” (soft “c”).
2. Many students write vaguely about books at the beginning of the semester, without naming any books or authors, because they have not established literary relationships. Institutionalized students know few books and even fewer authors specifically by name. If specifics are shared, I may scan To Kill A Mockingbird referenced by title within student testimonials, but I’m less likely to spy Harper Lee next to her book. I regularly hear a very few big names like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, but very rarely encounter a literary writer. And just about never an idiosyncratic choice. The last ones I can recall are punk musician Henry Rollins and media observer Chuck Klosterman. Even the best prepared students like Erin are likely to have “always hated” reading despite parental efforts (paying tuition for an upscale all-girl Catholic high school) until they find their own favorites. Even though Erin discovered two novels she likes, Nappily Married and Nappily Ever After by Trisha R. Thomas, the nonfiction book assignment “was challenging initially” because she could not find anything she wanted to read within the confines of the assignment. However, she “eventually realized that I love music and have started to love reading and decided to pick a book that related to the two,” so Erin read Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye by David Ritz and raved about it.
3. Coming into college, too many students cite Dr. Seuss and Dave Pelzer as their main literary influences. The frequency with which I read about Green Eggs and Ham and Oh, the Places You'll Go! as most memorable and favorite books, particularly absent more substantive and mature corollaries, is remarkable and disconcerting. A Harry Potter tale is often the last book read. Amir elected to dual-enroll as a junior in high school and an entry-level college student in Comp I. He mentioned loving books when he was a “little boy,” naming Clifford, Arthur and Dr. Seuss, but now that he’s older, he allowed, “I still like to read books every once and a while,” in other words, the J. K. Rowlings’ series. Now, as a teenager, for Amir books must be “descriptive and have many scenes in the book where there is action in the books that just sucks me and makes me feel like I am involved in the story taking place. An example would be if the author said, ‘He stalked his enemy like a hungry predator ready to attack with his shiny silver dagger in his enormous hands.’” During the last class meeting, the student congratulated himself and thanked me for an experience more challenging than high school, where he ‘wrote down’ to please the teachers. Amir certainly seemed to enjoy a sense of mastery over babyish course work.
4. There are many reason why students don’t read: they have little clue about what to read, lack confidence in their skills, haven’t the time, feel no inclination, miss a sense of mastery, but many react well to a strong nudge. Unfortunately, students don’t necessarily grow up in homes with books or know reading mentors. It takes time and practice to get beyond James and the Giant Peach, The Indian in the Cupboard and Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, no matter who you are, which makes the plight of the unwilling even more challenging. Tabitha entitled her entrance essay “The Love of Music vs. the Agony of Reading.” She recognizes the value in reading but simply doesn’t want to bother:
For some indulging in a 300 page book, is like escaping to a deserted island. However, for me personally, being handed a 300 page book and being told to read it is pure agony. Every now and then, I will find a book that looks interesting to me and be able to finish it in a maximum of 3 days. Although, if I am being handed a book by my professor, then told that if I do not read the book I will fail the class, I become that much more inclined to not read the book.
To her credit, though her friend stopped attending class, Tabitha hung in there. Despite troubles curbing her cellphone addiction, she wrote a nice book review and finished the class. Likewise, John, a little edgy perhaps because he quit heroin and cigarettes simultaneously, admitted in his course evaluation, which he signed, “I have a new found like towards reading. Not love don’t get ahead of yourself.” Turns out, he hadn’t realized that making personal connections with books and writers was okay: “I always thought I was reading wrong.”
5. Reading material choices are critical. Remix understands the central tenet of literacy instruction: the need to relate. Amy is extremely uncomfortable in groups. Her therapist even called me about the student’s performance in class, which did suffer due to social inhibitions. (I thought the therapist’s action was great, a network of service providers networking). In her entrance essay Amy wrote, “I like stories where the characters have challenges and problems that I can relate to.” However, in her exit essay she recognized that changes might occur in personality and reading habits as a person matures: “Today I like the band Silverpun Pickups and to read books that can relate to my problems, such as Perks of Being a Wallflower, but in the future that can all change.” She continued, “Going from fairy tale books to a woman suffering with OCD is a big change. Just to think what I will be reading later on in my life.” At the end of the semester, she connected reading to her major, architecture, and described a move from Cosmo to Architectural Digest and Designing Homes. In her entrance essay, she said she didn’t like popular musician Eminem just because he’s popular. His music, “does not appeal to me because of the way it sounds.” By her exit essay, this painfully shy young woman looked forward to reading professional texts and the future when she can see herself “liking jazz.”
Clint read Black Like Me by John Howard Grifith because books are a “reflection of character” and his white family adopted an African American little sister. He wasn’t thrilled when I urged him to research the science and commentary surrounding Grifith’s unusual experiment (about which there appears to be less written than I’d like), but it’s okay for students be a little uncomfortable. The main thing is that students must build and maintain a personal connection to reading and writing in order to take the next step, reading outside of their interests’ increasingly more challenging material.
6. Even students at the bottom show personal growth when individuals are encouraged to find themselves as readers and writers. Students who don’t consider themselves readers often recognize reading as something they might do when they mature, at some point later in life. But does later ever come?
Jack, dead set against reading, became at least hopeful he may someday change his attitude. Meanwhile, he said he pretty much finished the difficult text he chose, a 19th century treatise by Sir Benjamin Thompson, or Count Rumford as he’s known by followers. I thought the kid was full of blarney until I left his e-mail and went to Wikipedia and Amazon. Turns out Jack’s dad is a chimney sweep, Jack is set to take over the family business, and the Count had some important things to say about the nature of heat, which remain true today. If not an honest accounting, at least the student made up a great story. Paulus from Poland elected to read a few books during the semester, nothing I would approve of, but nevertheless he gave them credit for spurring personal growth and helping him with his goal: learning English and earning a college degree in the U.S. A student who had troubling buckling down but was capable, Marge maintained she “can’t stand the quietness and the calmness of a library for more than a minute.” She admittedly disdains reading, walks “straight to the C.D. and music isle” and refuses to “acknowledge any books” when her brother makes her go to Borders. By the end of the course, after reading Kabul Beauty School, she was still a stubborn reader at best, but she had mellowed a tad, perhaps just to please for a better grade but her testimony suggests limited improvement in attitude. She still claimed to “strongly dislike reading” because “my mind gets overwhelmed with all the words and it makes me exhausted.” No huge turn-around there. Marge still became “very aggravated and annoyed” with the pace of reading. “Why sit through an hour of reading a book,” she questioned, “when the author could have just summarized it in one complete sentence?” Yet she closed: “Sometimes I think that if there were no books, what kind of education and knowledge would I have? Probably none.” The rusty door may have creaked open just slightly, but at least it loosened up.
7. When students increase their appreciation for reading, they learn to become better writers. In a free reading environment, opportunity and growth extend to student essays, where students also choose topic and point. Personal narrations this summer threaded more one-of-a-kind squares into the quilt. Students opened up and told their stories about anorexia, Serbian pride, and finally attending school at age eleven and having a voice as a female in America. (I like excitement, but I’m still actively thankful that the female Bosnian by mixed-marriage who immigrated after the war and the proud male Serb born in the suburbs enrolled in different sections.) What to do when a wilderness adventure goes wrong at the top of the mountain, two reckless bicycle rides, the fear of flying, and going for broke on the streets of Miami, the budding philosopher’s tale, which included statistics from The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, a good deal of partying and some worthwhile reflections:
I went back to Detroit with no doubts that things would turn around if I make them. Instead of stirring in my problems like sugar dissolving in water, I picked myself up and made some changes. I enrolled back into school, moved back home, and got one stable job. I had so much new found determination and drive. And it was all because of one seemingly irresponsible poorly thought out decisions [leaving town on borrowed cash]. I went for broke and came out wealthy.
This constant outpouring of one-of-a-kind student creations is fecund, not sterilized, and would wither if overly restricted. If I didn’t encourage Tom to be honest about his passions—hating English classes and loving water—he might not have written about the joys of scuba diving told with Mr. Limpet-like day dreams of killing sharks and impressing the ladies. His second essay on the power of water then grew out of the first and was influenced by the Greek sirens and the horribly tragic drowning death of a high school classmate Memorial Day weekend. Had I not encouraged individuals to explore their own worlds, Tom’s classmates may have held back about bad parenting, good parenting, alcoholism, how to handle a lemon law vehicle, depression and alienation.
“I wish I had a black box to put my nightmares in; I’d throw it out the window and never see them again,” Chelsea wrote, to which she added the comic comeback, “I really hate writing about my life because it always turns out sounding like a PSA on the timid and suicidal.” Don’t worry about Chelsea. Instead, support her with access to well-funded community colleges, tuition grants, affordable student loans, health care coverage, meaningful internships. “I like to believe,” she dared, “that I am not the kind of teenager that has finally had enough and says to ‘hell with it all’ and plunges myself over the Golden Gate Bridge because to state it simply, I have always thought that those kids just needed a bit of attention and they’d get it by any means necessary, in life or self inflicted death.” Not incidentally, because writing is psychology, the student, whose brother died when she was young, hopes to pursue a career in forensic medicine.
Exhausted? Wait! There’s much, much, much more! Even this small taste from one abbreviated semester is nowhere near a satisfactory survey yet.
I’ve been hearing about autism a lot lately. In the fall, one woman was inspired to write due to her young son’s poor health, which she believes was entirely preventable, and in the winter another parent countered with a strong argument for childhood vaccinations. This summer delivered another variation or two on the topic, along with a disappointing surprise. In her personal narration “The Perfect Miracle,” Isabel explained, “Sometimes unexpected things happen to our plan making it harder for people to deal. Keeping an open mind and enjoying what we have is what I learned from what happened to our son.” Later, within her book review of Autism and the God Connection, Isabel had good reason to utilize personal narration. However, in “Guidebook to Holland,” she plagiarized Emily Perl Kingsley’s poem “Welcome to Holland,” which I didn’t discover until after grades had been given. During class, I asked the student about the metaphor. She said she borrowed it from an unnamed friend, to whom she gave credit, yet when I later checked the lines presented are without a doubt Perl Kingsley’s.
I don’t know why the student chose to lie. Perhaps my direct question caught her off guard and she panicked. Perhaps she had used up all her courage already that day dealing with her son. I believe English was not the woman’s first language. Her idea was good; she could have used the metaphor fairly by simply giving credit to whom it was due, but integrating outside sources is a concept students don’t necessarily understand especially since very few read newspapers or serious magazines. Without her name of course (none of the names presented here are real), I may use Isabel’s work and story as an example to help other students more honestly approach their own work without sacrificing creativity—even if the creativity is someone else’s.
Teaching means learning for me too. There is simply no way I could have guessed by looking at this mature individual, who attended nearly every class and listened attentively, though she was quiet, that she would try to pull off an intellectual heist, which she may not have thought was such a big deal, considering her own big picture. Still, I would never attempt this lesson plan in an online course, which I don’t choose to teach for numerous reasons, for one because other cheaters do drop physical hints and reveal themselves through observable behavior. From the students’ perspective, however, it’s easy to steal something you don’t respect. I catch maybe one to five acts of plagiarism of varying degrees each semester and of course don’t know how many I miss.
Otherwise, students are innocent until proven guilty. And they write about some very heavy stuff, often with a surprisingly deft touch, such as a young mother’s tale of attempting to make plans but making God laugh instead, a phrase she picked up from her mother—now there’s a trustworthy source, right?— delicately referring to unplanned pregnancy, parenthood and marriage. But mothers and fathers aren’t automatically trustworthy. One student wrote about finally learning to stop bailing her mother out of financial quandaries and another didn’t blame her mother for taking off and leaving teenagers to fend for themselves.
This time around was not usual. Student writers shared stories about the death of friend and sexual abuse, but also lighter yarns of first tattoos and perfect days, as well as a smattering of the usual car accident tales of terror. (Word up: Think before you give your teenager a car.) Stripping one’s way through college, a decision which the student regrets: “The embarrassment would not be the best thing, because perhaps one of my high school male teachers would walk-in.” How to survive a stay in jail, romantic rejection, overcoming ESL barriers, dolma, adoption, selling weed to pay for medical bills, learning to smoke pot responsibly, bad decisions, young fatherhood, and choosing a lunch table in high school, influenced by Emily White’s selection in Remix, “High School’s Secret Life.”
Ideally, to lead a strong tomorrow, students can benefit from practice today composing original creations. While personal narration begins the semester, the book review caps it off, putting all our lessons about process to the test. Uniform book reports, which demand little actual thinking and no originality, are easier, said Tom, the scuba diver. “It was difficult to add the commentary and personal opinions without using me, I or you in the paper,” he wrote of the book review. “The other assignments seemed to be telling stories and this one seemed to be reviewing someone elses. I think the first step was the easiest and this one by far the hardest,” he explained, “even after actually reading the book.” Yet in his review, he competently wrote, “For people wanting to be pilots, Robert Tuck is the type of man anyone could idolize.” Though he didn’t provide detailed documentation or talk about the author of Fly for Your Life: Robert Stanford Tuck, Larry Forrester, the student did build his capacity for analysis and empathy: “Crashing in midair into another plane would be terrifying.”
My course design parallel’s my main writing direction to students: pick a point and stick to it, beginning, middle and end. The exit essay serves as a final exam. The directions ask students to return to their initial comparison and re-analyze their personal reading and music listening habits. For students, it’s a last shot at making a good impression before final grades are calculated. For me, it’s an opportunity to check for growth in skills and attitude when compared side-by-side with the entrance essay and the rest of the work in a student’s portfolio. Budding beautifully, Olivia played the role of a writer more comfortably than she had all semester, a difficult one during which her car was stolen from the school parking garage, something that happens once every four years, according to campus police. Inspired by my mention of Virginia Wolf’s “Death of a Moth,” Olivia wrote, “I watched as the spider just seemed to flow on a tiny web. It was at that moment that I realized that reading and music most both flow smoothly,” she discovered, meaning they both must be well constructed. Her final essay reviewed “structure,” the composing process, audience awareness. “Writers write and then they revise and keep revising again and again until the finished piece is as smooth as the spider coming down the web. In the end,” she related, “the writing will be something that the readers will want to read.” Well put. And good news! Olivia just e-mailed me to say hi, thanks and that her brothers bought her a new used Taurus better than the old one.
When students take both Comp I and Comp II within this free learning environment, the opportunity for growth expands. Comp I’s continuation, Composition II- ENG 1520, is all about research and writing argumentatively. At this level, the nonfiction book assignment ideally helps students write a research paper. The book and book review supplement research and provide additional, authentic Works Cited page listings. Though my nonfiction book review’s design has grown over the years into a successful centerpiece, it remains fluid. I made a note recently: “If your author is being held captive in the Colombian jungle by the FARC, make sure to mention that fact is your book review.” Winter semester, in Comp II Marguerite did mention Ingrid Bettancourt’s capture while reviewing her memoirs, but the student could have stressed the politician’s ongoing ordeal more prominently. Maybe if she had more time and fewer responsibilities as a parent, she might have realized this shortcoming. Not helping matters, I read one line out of zillion too quickly in the first draft of Marguerite’s paper and thereby missed a teaching and learning opportunity. As is, despite my shortcomings, the student writer did many things very well, like integrate news and opinion from The New York Times. She simply showed room for further growth surrounding the inclusion of closely related news events, which is natural, especially during the span of a single semester. Like musicians and athletes, writers need practice and time in order to develop.
SEEKING THAT CONNECTION. Students need direct engagement; literacy must be presented as a way of life. The goal is to find books and authors one loves, what I refer to as building a stable of authors. After finding and holding true love, putting up with more mundane reading becomes easier. But to reach that point, individuals need guided opportunities for discovering their own passions. Liam eloquently described his yearning for a literary connection:
As a reader I have never been able to truly connect with an author. Most people, when they are really reading a book, they zone in on the story. I always picture reading like jumping into warp speed in star trek, the words get bigger as they rush at your face with a blur of lines until, wham! You’re stuck in the story. Feeling as though you’ve just been dropped onto a new planet, I picture myself looking around, getting my bearing and then moving into scene like a camera man recording a movie, there, but not interrupting. I’ve never experienced that feeling; never seen the lines blur and hit me right in the face. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read my fair share of books. In school , I floated through the classics [at a very exclusive prep academy] like, Beloved, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, The Color Purple, The Great Gatsby, all of these stories that I’ve read, and enjoyed, but I never really felt like I was experiencing the story. People like the experience, good readers, and people who do it often, can look at a story and really see it. I was in an Avis car rental shop about two weeks ago, and while I was standing in line, waiting, I noticed a woman reading her book in the corner. Sitting all alone, she had no idea of the world around her, and as I’m watching her frivolously turn the pages, while trying to focus my eyes on the title of her story to get a glimpse into her imagination, she burst into tears. In the middle of this overly public building, in front of an entire line of people, she just stated sobbing as if no one else was around. That is the type of emotion that people who really read want, it’s the connection that they are looking for.
The student was likely influenced by an interview with Chuck Palahniuk that I play in class, thanks to NPR, in which the author makes clear the reason for his success. In books like Fight Club, he moves people to feel something extreme, even if it’s shock or repulsion. Otherwise, without that excitement, “Reading is something I do for school,” Liam resigned. “I plow through the words and try to focus on every little detail in hopes of finding that connection. It hasn’t come yet, but I’m sure it will, one day I’ll find that connection, and who knows, maybe I’ll turn off my stereo.”
To address educational shortcomings, why don’t we listen to students more? Where are the books, articles, documentaries, investigative reports and even reality television shows revealing what students think about the state education? They have so much to tell and teach me quite a bit. For those inside the profession who prefer data collection, why not look at actual reading rates and track student attitudes within English classes?
Encourage students to exercise self agency and they will learn to teach themselves. Not drastically, she cautioned, but Molly’s outlook about reading changed for the better—even though the Summer I semester is condensed into two demanding months—because she couldn’t stop reading Lucky. “Relate” is again the key word, repeatedly used by students. Part of an unsettled group reminiscent of The Breakfast Club, Molly explained, “I can relate” to Sebold’s story “because I too had been sexually abused and I know exactly how she was feeling.” After including U.S. Department of Justice crime statistics from the 2000 report “Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident and Offender Characteristics” in her book review, Molly analyzed:
When I was sexually abused, I was a teenager. I would have been part of that statistic [of young people who are afraid to speak out]. I believe that the majority of teenagers don’t say or do anything because people rarely believe them and then start to look at you differently. Sebold was also a teenager, but unlike myself and the majority of other rape victims she did prosecute.
Directions regarding the book review purposefully adapt to circumstance. Most students are cautioned against appearing in their own essays, unless they have a good reason for doing so. Molly explained in hers:
After reading this book, I decided that I want to fight my rapist because maybe in doing so I will move past all my pain and problems. This book also helped me get some ideas of how I can deal with all of my thoughts and feelings. I did end up starting a journal after reading this book and I finally told my parents and I am taking a course of action to fight my abuse. I believe that if I would not have read this book, I wouldn’t have had the courage to tell my parents about what I had gone through. But, I also wouldn’t have had the bravery to file reports against the rapist either. So I believe that this book really does help the readers get by after they have been raped.
Learning often involves discomfort, if not some pain, but also brings satisfaction and joy. However, risks exist. Once students open up, they may come undone. Although I’m not a trained counselor, I sometimes feel compelled by a sense of responsibility to ask someone if they are suicidal or if they have been sexually abused. Community college students live complicated lives and sometimes worry me but most show resilience. Early in the semester, Chelsea’s resolve and writing were less developed, when she cared about “what is going on in others heads” and spent “the better part of my time wondering just that.” At the end of the semester, in her practice journal she revisited these thoughts and revised them, exhibiting much greater self-confidence. Although she finds her life depressing, she clearly stated that she does not contemplate suicide: “I don’t think that way, I have this life for a reason. That reason is unclear to me rite now but I wont let anybody else define me while I try to figure it out.”
Although laziness is one by-product of our push-button society, students still appreciate a challenge and fresh learning methods. With steady command, Chelsea called Stiff “greatly disgusting and not for the squeamish.” Perhaps explicating herself and the world, she wrote that the book “gives readers a cynical way of looking at the morbid inevitable fate for all that is death.” Likewise, John, the young person trying to turn his life around— a colorful young man with much energy to burn— used metaphor in his exit essay like a pro. Like many of his peers, he improved his attitude, if only a little, and believed that reading might fit better into his life when he gets older.
Music is my wife and books moved up from being by my ex girlfriend from middle school to being my ex girlfriend from high school. The like for books has increased and I feel that with time my like for books will turn into a love. But for now bump that music.
Rather than relying on an outside source, the student refueled himself. “I did read my book,” he replied, later adding, “Hunter S. Thompson is one of my heroes so I felt it was my job to give him a good paper.”
I don’t know for sure that students are being honest, but they sound earnest. Peter and I didn’t really hit it off, nor did he feel comfortable among the students in his group. During pre-class chit-chat, he and I had a tussle over politics, which became so lively we each had to take a time out. However, to the student’s credit, he took our full exchange to heart, thought about things wisely, decided to go to work and accomplished much. He expounded, taking on a professional tone:
As I sit here typing my last essay for English 1510, I can look back and the growth of not only me but my reading selection. I do not have a lot of free time but if I did I am sure that I would read books outside of my college courses more often. I see reading as a vital aspect to becoming a great historian. Being able to bridge the generation gap through writing might be the most important tool in education. . . . Writing and reading are necessary tools to communicate not only with the present but also the future. Without books we would not know where we have been, yet most important we would not know where we are going.
Highlighting the connection between music and reading, and ‘keeping things real,’ as one student commented years ago, works. If a person loves favorite song lyrics, he or she can learn to love the written word. Sitting among his peers at the top of the class, Peter’s writing is impressive and supportive from where I sit.
The valuable lesson that I will take with me from this class about reading is that simply by reading anyone can draw new conclusions and look at different aspects of life that they may have never thought of before. This is a valuable lesson for me because I am studying to be a history teacher. Historians have to keep an open mind about other peoples perspectives . . . Now for the first time in my life I actually see the connection between my love for books and music.
The difference? Peter explained, “Unlike my classes at Western, I had the opportunity to actually read a book of my choosing and not just skim through a random book and look for answers to my questions for my research papers.” The implication is clear: skimming doesn’t allow for meaningful absorption of the material.
Teachers make mistakes. I am very confident but realize my classroom isn’t perfect. As a teacher, I know that I’ve inflicted some damage and probably more than I realize, regrettably, since my motto mimics the Hippocratic oath.
It’s a rare student that says something strongly pro-reading outright in her entrance essay like, “Music cannot grab a hold of my attention the way books do.” To Patty, a fan of Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, at the beginning of the course music was no more than the “flavor of the month.” Unfortunately, Patty’s exit exam revealed regression, at least within the confines of the semester. By the end of class, she wasn’t “overly enthusiastic about either” reading or music. Unlike Brittany, she didn’t like Girl, Interrupted, preferred the film version, and titled her book review “Girl Idiotic.” Between my class and Kaysen’s book, together we deflated the student’s enthusiasm. Kaysen’s memoir “could have been greatly improved,” Patty criticized forcefully, “if it had been written from an adult’s perspective that is aware of the writing process, rather than an adolescent, who is still learning,” which sounds close to an idea we discussed in class, about the need to reflect and analyze one’s own story for the benefit of readers. She called the book “difficult to follow” and cites similar views from Entertainment Weekly and Time. Her criticism went into overdrive, particularly in her final revision, where she labeled the book a “waste of time” and gave it an “F.” Patty hated Girl, Interrupted so much, she read the book twice just to make sure.
Students spend so much time in school. Why repeat the same lesson over and over? Listen, repeat. Listen, repeat. Listen to what I say, all of you repeat. Reminds me of step aerobics, which I detest. No matter the variation, it’s just step up, step down, step up, step down, step up, step down, over and over. There’s no way to get ahead, no new territory to conquer.
Fresh out of high school, quiet but committed, Julie is a rare student to name a piece of canonical literature in her writing, Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice. For her nonfiction book, Juile chose a biography of Audrey Hepburn, Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn by Donald Spoto. “I actually read my nonfiction book selection,” she stated like most others, but what started out as an easy read soon reached rocky ground. “Then it hit me,” she remembered, “the boring middle section of the book. I literally had to force myself to continue reading the book at this point.” Through trial and error, Julie learned about the shortcomings of an impersonal biography. As a fan (and an engineering major), she pledged to check out Hepburn’s autobiography, a move she couldn’t see at the start of the project. Still, she held no grudges, calling the book review assignment “more enjoyable than others” due to choice: “It was my choice and my fault the book wasn’t great.” In class, we discussed vetting, but Julie was hard on herself. She added that it was “nice not having to answer questions or do a worksheet after every chapter, as was the case in all my high school English classes.” Despite the boring middle section, she claimed, “This experience reading was one of my better experiences.”
Julie is a success story. For her, reading is “thrilling” and “fresh.” Making good sense of Comp I, she analyzed, “People who lack the time to indulge in a novel look to music to fulfill their emotional satisfaction.” She elaborated about her first college semester, “The only problem I came across is that college textbooks take up most of my reading time. Although, I take pleasure in learning new material from textbooks, they provide facts, and no personal insights.” Calling herself an “avid textbook reader,” the student named one in her writing (perhaps the first to do so that I’ve witnessed), The Biology of Life by Peter Raven. Of it she said, “Since reading the book I can explain anything about the life cycles of any types of plants including angiosperms, gymnosperms, tracheophytes, seedless tracheophytes, bryophytes, hepatophytes, lycophytes, and psilphytes. I can also inform anyone on all the types of animal phylums including, but not limited to, cnidaria, arthropoda, nematode, annelid, and chordate. This information on the essence of human life came from reading a textbook.” Trust no other truth: the joy of reading is local.
The one-book-fits-all tradition has dominated for too long. The common book approach, practiced by well-meaning teachers and organizations across the country, including the NEA and its version, “The Big Read,” is far too limited in scope to be successful in a plural society, like a one industry town lacks diversity and therefore strength. (“Imagine everyone in Michigan foreclosing on their homes. At the same time.”) The Michigan Humanities Council event, The Great Michigan Read, looks like a good idea on the cover—whatever gets people reading more is perhaps worth a try—but covers can be deceiving.
Writers Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane and Richard Ford appeared together for a chat to close The Great Michigan Read July 10 at Michigan State University, where they all spent time. The evening filled with anecdotes and an over-capacity crowd marked a truly great day for reading. However, none of the lauded guests warmed to a question posed to each about favorite books, and for obvious reasons. All this emphasis on ONE AUTHOR AT A TIME means two of the three would have to go, sort of a battle of the scribes, who in this case are otherwise friendly. Ford responded that he didn’t have one favorite. McGuane quickly produced a long list beginning with Don Quixote and said he had “lots” of favorites. Book tastes change in a person over time, Harrison explained. Finnegan’s Wake moved him when he was younger and impressionable, but now he has difficulty with James Joyce’s language.
I hope the Michigan Humanities Council event was recorded. Students need to hear writers talking about a world of reading. Realizing that English teachers and other professionals prefer and dislike various literary styles makes students feel more comfortable with their own preferences and dislikes. Confession: I recently realized that I brought home a third copy of Wuthering Heights, which I have tried but cannot seem to read.
What’s important is not some mistaken notion of the one “best” book for all students, but rather finding an array of books that will form a field of personal favorites over a lifetime. The goal is to find multiple books that will affect us each individually, to ideally make us all better humans together.
~*~
Disclaimer: Yes, for personal as well as professional reasons I have always adored the Steeley Dan song about never going back to my old school. I’ve got an attitude and lots of stories. There’s a post it note on my desk at home, somewhere in the pile, reminding me to kick off the semester with Pink Floyd’s The Wall:
We don't need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Some ideas are better left alone, but my lesson plans are always in a state of slow growth, since one person multi-media events take much more time to create than old-fashioned lectures. Mine are prone to constant fine-tuning and pruning. The presentation currently includes, thanks to Youtube, Aretha Franklin singing “Think!” from The Blues Brothers and Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarf (“Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go!”). As well, in Comp II the first act of Crash, which is excellent for introducing the concept of stereotypes and logical fallacies, among others. To get rid of any dead weight, including scam artists, for the betterment of the whole about a third of the way through entry level courses, I like to run what I refer to as the “community college” scene from the film version of Fight Club, accompanied by a reading, which definitely constitutes “dark sarcasm.”
To create my lesson plans, I’ve pretty much had to ignore just about every traditional approach I was raised on including mandatory midterms, multiple choice tests, and long lectures. Thanks to Professor Stewart at California State University Northridge, as an English instructor I’ve kept reading a loud together and the injection of my own passion for reading as instructor. From The Boston School of Adult Education and Cathy Slater Spence (I hope I’ve recalled her name correctly), as well Jim Krusoe at Santa Monica Community College before her (both costing just 50 bucks a class), I learned more about writing and teaching writing than I did in any of my graduate school seminars (which cost a whopping 900 bucks a class). There are many reasons for this imbalance, including my own shortcomings. Education is an art and a daily grind. But I learned the basics of writing and research no better than I did in seventh grade, thanks very much to Mrs. Gardella at St. Mike’s, who didn’t get mad when future English teacher Barb Johnston and I respectfully called her Mrs. Gorilla because we liked the word play and she didn’t want to squelch our interest. She actually looked more like a tropical bird.
Reviewing my own education, as a writing teacher and a writer what stands out most is the glaring absence of instruction regarding how tos, particularly how to actually write that damn paper and how to become a life-long reader, so I try to provide my students all the things I didn’t get, just like a hopeful parent. As I write this essay, an old student’s new girlfriend, who I met at dinner at the yummy thai food place across the street from campus, is e-mailing me for direction about her summer writing class at the community college closest to MSU. She says, repeatedly, the teacher is only talking about himself and handing out low grades. I simply report these details, which sound perfectly familiar.
Forgive me if I sound pedantic, impatient or obnoxiously impassioned. I do realize that most teachers are good people who try and that institutions change slowly, but one-size fits all reading assignments and the worse culprit of all, mindless regurgitation, must be dethroned. “I learned that writing is whatever you make it,” one student commented anonymously, coining her own term, probably without realizing she did so, but maybe not. “Writing isn’t just a recitement and regurgitated answer to what a teacher wants you to think, feel, and believe. Personal analysis is everything.” Over-adherence to the one book method kicks students out of the learning process, which is not good.
In the near future, thanks to academic freedom, I plan to adapt my methods. I may use my E.B White lesson plan in a contemporary lit course as a means to catapult students into the world of fiction. Showing a collage of old film footage with people taking lake vacations—before the motor car, during world wars, after we dropped the bomb, in Technicolor, wearing funny clothes—looking through the years basically just like those of us in class, though we would laugh anyway. Like sound, images help tremendously. Not incidentally, I went once more to the lake just last week. Born and raised in the area, somewhere there’s some incredibly embarrassing sixteen millimeter footage restored on video tape that Eric in the Media department can probably transfer to DVD for me to use in the classroom, featuring a still chubby much younger me jumping in a lake and running up sand dunes.
But no matter how riveting a visual and auditory presentation I put on, eventually I must ask students to “take out their books and open to page . . .” Afterwards, though, after reading and talking our way through a required essay or short story together, I can free bored minds, instructing them to strike out on their own.
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Reba McEntire Talks Gays at Christmas, Politicization of Her Faith-Based Music
Reba McEntire has released a beautiful new Christmas album. The melancholy spirit of her friend Dolly Parton’s 1982 holiday staple “Hard Candy Christmas” is preserved on McEntire’s new reading, and her sparse version of “Mary, Did You Know?” featuring Christmas mainstays Vince Gill and Amy Grant engenders a spirited hopefulness even the secular population may find comfort in.
But it is two weeks after the Las Vegas shooting, and nearly a month before the CMAs, which emotionally honored the victims during its “In Memoriam,” when I connect with McEntire to talk about the new album and her holiday plans. Sticking to casual banter seems malapropos given the recent series of tragic and divisive events that eventually led to McEntire pledging to love you the best she can during the all-star musical opening of the CMAs.
How do you not talk about issues affecting all of us, even McEntire?
After all, the Country Music Hall of Famer performs in Vegas regularly during her residency, “Reba, Brooks & Dunn: Together in Vegas,” which recently announced additional 2018 dates. Moreover, the icon has wielded great influence as an entertainer – singer; Broadway, film and TV actress; gay favorite – during her four-decade career, and so when she pledged her support for marriage equality in 2014 to me during our last conversation, it felt especially groundbreaking. At the time, she spoke lovingly about her dear friends, Michael and Steven, who didn’t have the same legal protections as heterosexual couples. “It was not fair,” she told me, pointedly. Just over a year after our talk, Michael and Steven’s relationship was legally recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now, any artist with clout is being called upon to take on other hot topics, as evidenced by the preemptive decision by CMA producers to enact a no-politics stipulation on journalists during the event (the provision was overturned by the time the show aired). But the pressure to weigh in on political issues can be felt even within the country music community, as Rosanne Cash pled for the genre’s influencers to speak out against the NRA in a Oct. 3 New York Times column called “Country Musicians, Stand Up to the N.R.A.” (Faith Hill and Tim McGraw recently called for sensible gun laws in an interview with Billboard after Cash’s call to action).
In addition to talking about her personal struggles with religion and being true to her musical roots, McEntire, 62, told me she looks to God for guidance on addressing the world’s affairs.
Strikingly, she did clarify that her track “Back to God,” featured as an acoustic version on “My Kind of Christmas,” is purely a faith song despite various sites and social-media memes associating the song with President Donald Trump.
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Reba McEntire: My Kind of Christmas
Do you have gay people in your circle of family and friends who you’ll be seeing for the holidays?
Probably so, yeah. I’ll be in Nashville before we go out of the country after Christmas, so I’ve got a lot of friends in town that we’ll be seeing after we get through with our show in Las Vegas.
What special something do your gay and lesbian loved ones bring to your holiday festivities?
Friendship. And we hang out throughout the year, so it’s not much different around Christmas than it is throughout the year.
Just more eating.
A lot more eating – yeah, true! And lots of just hanging together and the reason for the season, which is the birthday of Jesus and we all celebrate that. It’s more of the same, just being great friends at Christmas like we are throughout the year.
Please tell me all of our favorite country gay icons – yourself, Dolly, Faith, Martina, and so on – have some kind of Secret Santa.
(Laughs) No, we don’t. Wouldn’t that be fun, though?
Do you do White Elephant exchanges?
Oh yeah, we do it with my RBI (Firm) team and we used to do it at Starstruck. Dirty Santa or White Elephants are really a lot of fun.
What’s the craziest gift you ever received during a White Elephant exchange?
Oh my gosh, probably an old dirty sweater!
I just spoke to your daughter-in-law, Kelly Clarkson, who you collaborate with on “Silent Night.” As I’m sure you know, she finally has creative control. Was there a time in your career when, like Kelly, you struggled to make the music you wanted to make because of label heads?
You know, I was very, very lucky to get to work with people who are open-minded. It wasn’t a situation of not getting to sing the music I wanted to and make the music I wanted to; it’s that when I got started I didn’t know, other than I had been raised with what I wanted to sing, and then when it got a little more contemporary with the orchestras, I had to go to the head of the label, Jimmy Bowen, and say, “I really wanna go back to my roots,” and he said, “What’s that?” I said, “Steel guitar and fiddle.” He said, “All right, you can do it.” And I said, “Well, how do I do it?” And he said, “Well, you need to go start finding your own music.” So Jimmy was totally 100 percent for me doing what I wanted to do and I was very grateful for that.
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Kelly is bold when it comes to expressing her social and political beliefs, and I understand her stepdaughter and your grandchild, Savannah, is really political. Do you have political debates within the family?
Nope. I don’t talk politics because I think there are a lot more things I can contribute to the world without arguing with somebody about politics.
My family has this rule, especially during holiday gatherings: no political discussions.
I think that’s very healthy.
Do you have a similar rule?
I just don’t do it. When somebody wants to talk politics, I let ’em know that and we change the subject.
There seems to be a lot of pressure on public figures to take stances on some important issues concerning our country. During our last interview, in fact, you pledged your full support for same-sex marriages for the first time. A lot has happened since, including the recent shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, and recently, Rosanne Cash penned a column in the New York Times encouraging the country music community to speak out against gun violence. For you, when is a potentially divisive issue important enough to talk about?
I think I’ll know it when it comes to me. I think I’ll know it when that happens. So, I can’t say it’s gonna be tomorrow (laughs), or what the topic is gonna be. I’ll know it – I think it’ll be told to me. I rely on God a lot to let me know what I need to be doing and I ask him for guidance, totally, all the time, every day. So when that’s needed, I’ll be the spokesperson.
Regarding the Rosanne Cash piece calling on the country music, did you feel a need to step forward?
This is the first time I’ve heard of it.
She wrote a column in the New York Times asking country artists to speak out on gun violence and gun control. Basically, “Is the issue deeper than just ‘thoughts and prayers’?” It was a really thought-provoking column.
Well, good for her. Good deal.
How has what is happening in the world become personal for you?
It always has been. When you have children and people you love and care about, it’s not only your children or your grandchildren, it’s your whole family. It’s your friends, it’s your community, it’s your country, it’s your town, it’s your neighbors. You deal with all of it and your concern is for all of them, so yeah, it’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on since – long before we ever got here. It just seems like because of the media we know about what’s going on a lot more than we did when we were kids. When I was growing up, we only had the 6 o’clock and 10 o’clock news and what you heard on the radio and that was it.
Do you think we would benefit by going back to just the 6 and 10 o’clock news?
I really don’t know which is best. Are we overloaded with press? Do we need more? Do we need to know all of this? I remember that song that Anne Murray had out, “A Little Good News” (laughs). That’s what I like to watch – good news.
What does it mean to be an artist who can, in one night, bring together gay fans, conservative right fans and drag queens?
It means a lot to me because what we’re there for – my job is to entertain and to lighten the load off your back, and I hope when everybody walks through that door to come into a concert they leave their troubles at the door and they come in and join together and listen and enjoy and take away something that will brighten their day. Give them somethin’ to think about and improve their lives, hopefully.
Maybe there’s a message in those songs. I have always said, Chris, that I’m the conduit, I’m the water hose. I’m singing these songs because there’s a message in music, because it’s so healing, and so when I sing it, I sing songs that touch my heart. Hopefully when you’re in the audience and you listen to those songs it touches your heart – and in a way that I have no idea how it’s gonna touch your heart, but I hope that it does.
How did you feel about ABC passing on your TV project created by out Desperate Housewives and Golden Girls writer Marc Cherry?
I couldn’t believe it. I was devastated. I thought it was the greatest show. Everybody who I played it for was like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t wait to see more,” and I said, “Well, unfortunately, you’re not gonna get to because they didn’t take it.” Marc did a wonderful job. He’s a genius. I love him to pieces. He is so clever. And it was just such a good show. But we’re not gonna get to continue on, so my heart just hurt for that. We shot (the pilot) in March of this year, and I was really wanting everybody to see it.
Will we see you on TV aside from “CMA Country Christmas?”
I hope so! We’re looking at scripts now for next year and some TV movies and different things like that. You never know what’s gonna materialize. I talked about the Marc Cherry script for, gosh, four or five months and was so excited. Just knew it was gonna be a slam dunk. But you never know about the future. I just have to say, well, wasn’t in the plans, everything happens for a reason, timing is everything.
Getting back to music, your song “Back to God,” which originally appeared on your “Sing It Now: Songs of Faith & Hope” released in early 2017 and now on “My Kind of Christmas” as an acoustic duet with Lauren Daigle, was being associated with President Donald Trump by his supporters upon its release. I mention that because I grew up trying to reconcile being a gay man with my Catholic upbringing, and that was really a struggle for me because I didn’t know which I should choose or if I had to choose. So now, when I see a song like “Back to God” being politicized, I think of LGBT children who don’t side with the president but seek comfort from a song like “Back to God.” How do you feel about your song being politicized in that way when it can potentially alienate gay fans?
I think that’s ridiculous.
But there really are memes and articles saying “Back to God” is essentially a Trump anthem.
No, no. It wasn’t at all. (The lyric) “give this world back to God” means we’ve got troubles, we’ve got things going on, people are worrying, people are trying to solve problems themselves. If they gave their problems and their worries up to the Lord, he will take care of him and you’ll have a peace that you’ve never experienced in your life. How anybody took that and politicized that is beyond my imagination. It’s totally a faith song. Faith-based, and of hope and of faith and looking for a better way of dealing with the stuff that’s going on. And my way of dealing with it is giving it to the Lord.
As a person of faith, what message would you like to send to LGBT people who may struggle with religion?
You know, sometimes I struggle with religion because there are so many, but if you read all of ‘em, all of the different religions, there is one underlying thing: God wants us to love each other. Treat people like you want to be treated and love each other – that’s not hard, but in a sense, it is. But that’s it. He just wants us to love each other, and I think that’s what we all really need to work on.
When I spoke to Amy Grant in 2013, she told me, “I know that the religious community has not been very welcoming, but I just want to stress that the journey of faith brings us into community, but it’s really about one relationship. The journey of faith is just being willing and open to have a relationship with God. And everybody is welcome. Everybody.”
Yeah, yup! And also, another thing: The secret of peace is forgiveness, and that’s hard. That’s really hard. But when you do, all of that hatred and resentment that’s eating up your heart and your stomach and your gallbladder and it’s just making you sick, if you forgive, all that goes away and it’s replaced with space that is ready to have more love put in and you find better relationships and more friends, so you gotta forgive and you gotta just love people.
Sounds like you found the secret, Reba.
(Laughs) Ya know, funny enough: I kind of think I did! Everybody says, “Oh yeah, I’ve known that for a long time,” and then I say, “Why didn’t I understand that?” It’s hard. It’s real hard to forgive. But it’s the best blessing in the world to give yourself.
from Hotspots! Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2017/12/21/reba-mcentire-talks-gays-at-christmas-politicization-of-her-faith-based-music/
from Hot Spots Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.tumblr.com/post/168788231600
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Lineup Lamentations - GW30
Our Transfers, Captains, and Starting 11s.
Please excuse the lateness of the lineup lambs lately - we’re a couple busy boys. Now let’s fuck.
WALSH
Transfers:
OUT: Mane and Coutinho
IN (For -4 Points): Alexis and Zaha
I've bottled the transfer for brother of Jordan. As much as I love Andre Ayew after further considerations it did not seem like a really smart move. I am also worried about his security of starts even though he seems to be their only quality goal scorer Bilic has been playing different lineups virtually all season and I have no clue what he's going to do from a game to game basis.
So, I turned my eye on getting Alexis back in. He looked good in Chile's last game albeit with the obligatory penalty miss so it feels good to get him back right now. I haven't owned Wilf all season and it felt like a good time to rectify that as a Palace supporter obviously I am coming into it with significant bias there, but, fuck it. Fixtures are terrible but whatever. I want to have fun so I'll get someone who I love. Phil was blanking his fucking life away for 3 million more so meh. I did give brief consideration for a Soton mid but I could only go up to 6.1 for the slot so Wilf made more sense to me. Dropping both Liverpool guys doesn't feel too risky at this time. With Lallana dead and Hendo really dead they haven't been firing on all cylinders since the fall. Mane can fill his boots any given game but dropping him was the only way I could make the money work to get to Alexis so here we are.
GK: TOM goes at home. Expecting 4 points here with some saves. Fine today w Tom. Will probably hold him until I remove for a hit on the first DGW.
DEF: A little bit nervous with Holebas and Amat sat there on my bench entering a post-international break weekend but hopefully my main three fucks all start. Alonso and Bellend should be fine to start even though Bell will probably get 1 point. Main concern is South American Tony V, but, he should probably get in there given Mou's love affair with him..We'll see.
MID: Two new lads Wilf and Alexis go. It's nice to remove two shares of my attack in the Merseyside derby which as Alon mentioned on the pod usually a cagey lowish scoring job full of fouls and cards. I still have Barkley but I kinda wanna hold him for a little while through these two tough games. He's been fine and hasn't really done much to warrant removal. Finally Siggy sits like a little Sigmund just toting along and titting. Not sure how / when I will be able to wedge in a Spurs mid...maybe I won't do at all. Idk. Fuck Spurs.
FWD: Defoe has been very troublesome for my life. He's provided nothing but 2 pointers since I got him in and I feel like he personally owes me something. The fucker. I will probably turn him into Laddiadini soon, but could really use some points from him for once. Lukaku and Kun round out the group. I feel happy with both of them and am pleased that I was able to hold on to Aguero and still get Alexis in. Hopefully owning both is somewhat of a differential as I still think a Kun explosion is around the corner......
CAP: KUN! Gonna stick with what my gut was feeling on the pod. Even though Alexis is a close second in my thoughts, I'm just gonna go with Aguero and hope he is able to put Arsenal to the sword. Arsenal have looked shitty enough that I have more confidence in City being able to put three past than I do in Arsenal being able to put three past City. Go on Kunny!!!
ALON
Transfers:
OUT: Stanislas and Aguero
IN (For -4 Points): Alli and Vardy
Like it’s fucking 2016 out here I’m bringing it back with Alli and VaRdZzzzzzzzz...
It hurts me to take out Kun, like I was in a fun club and now I’m turning my back on it, I’m sure it will come back to bite me (you should all be captaining Kun) but I really think Alli is vital in this moment. I shouted him on the pod as the most important and best value mid in the game and I stand by that. They have an absolutely scenic fixture run to end the year and Alli is going to bag a ton of ding dongs.
With Ashley Barnes still in my side, playing Spurs, and Gabbiadini being dead I don’t see a third forward within reach that I want. So I’m going 3-5-2 for a little stretch to see how it feels. Vardy I’ve shouted the last two pods and he’s been on fire lately, even donged for England a few days ago. Kun, I love forever, but at his price - we’ve been saying he’s bad value all season for a reason - he’s the only way I could make reasonable money on a transfer to upgrade piece of fuck Stanislas to Alli. Vards in for home Stoke home Sunderland and then probably swap him for Ibra. Feels pretty good for now.
GK: Going with young Jordan lad Pickford at Twatford... Watford are so fucking erratic who knows what kind of performance they’ll put up but Grant is playing at Leicester which easily is worse. Also Deeney might miss out which would be tidy for me (queue up an Okaka hatty).
DEF: Benching Baines in this moment because Liverpool will hopefully fucking assfuck a makeshift Everton backline but I digress. Even though Leighton is on pens I’m going with Matip who still is right on the fucking cusp of dinging in some dongs so let’s go. Federico Fern gets in there for me in a rare cameo but home Boro is just too much of a fuckfest to not tit and then Alonso rounds out my lads as he will never move from this position until the major DGW.
MID: Five man midfield oooo tantalizing I feel like I’m a “clever” twat making a “tactical decision” but whatever; tits of one half dozen the other. Alli welcome back to the squad I wish you the best in all of your donging. The other four keep their place with the luckiest of the bunch being SNODman as his head was in the guillotine but with the Antonio injury and a good fixture at Hull I’ll give him one more week... His time is running out though. Alexis and Mane I still feel are both fantastic picks with huge upsides so I’m not looking to ditch either soon and lastly Razza... At least I still have a piece of the City pie with no Kun. Just hopefully it’s in form Sterling and not fluff everything ever Sterling... time will tell.
FWD: Only two tods steering the boat in mainstay Lukaku - nothing to be said here he’s owned by everyone ever and on fire - and new boy Judas Vardy. He’s a fucking fucker but he’s on great form, some pretty nice stats, and jizzfest of next couple fixtures. I’m sure it will all backfire in my dumb face.
CAP: Jamie. Vardy. Weird one tbh... The fixture, the form, and a GW in general for captaincy. Hopefully he doesn’t fuck me or Kun doesn’t fuck me. But most likely it’ll be a double penetration fucking gangbang. Fuck.
#Lineup Lamentations#FPL#Fantasy Premier League#FML FPL#FMLFPL#FML#Premier League#EPL#English Premier League#Fantasy PL#FantasyPL#Fantasy EPL#FantasyEPL#Soccer#Fantasy Soccer#Football#Fantasy Football#Footy#Fantasy Footy#Sports#Fantasy Sports#Podcast
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