O Brave New World...

From mudpriestess and winterhart534 and yes, ( lj cut for your convenience )

I don't know exactly why I haven't updated for shit, recently. It's summer; I've got the time. I'm doing pretty well at not falling into my general summer habit of staying up ridiculously late and then sleeping during the day. Partly, my summer is starting off with classes and trainings that don't really permit that.

Anyway, I thought I would use this entry to kill two birds with one stone: continue writing about some of the YAF authors on my long, long, long-assed list, and make what I write one of the assignments I turn in for the final class I need to take to clear my multiple subject teaching credential. I hope it is the final class. I may need to take CPR again (so annoying) and I have to prove to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing that I DID take the stupid Health Ed requirement. Which I did. I don't know where proof of that lies, sadly, since I took it through Oakland Unified. But I did take it.

So. The class I am taking, the possible LAST class, is through Cal Berkeley Extension, and it's on Mainstreaming Students with Disabilities. I think it is fantastic. SO much better than the version I attempted last Fall, which was online and dreadful. I really, really like this instructor, who is a counselor specializing in adolescents and adults with ADHD as well as a graduate professor of education. She's awesome. And herewith, annotated reviews of several YAF books that focus on or include as major characters young people with disabilities. And possibly one film -- we'll see.

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As a middle school teacher of Language Arts, I try to have a wide knowledge of contemporary and more classic (or just less current) young adult fiction. I also try to maintain a large library with what I consider are the best examples of these. That doesn't mean I exclude R. L. Stine and K. A. Applegate, both factories churning out series titles -- horror and science-fiction, respectively -- which are very popular and very easy to read. I just don't read them myself, or care whether they get dogeared or are stolen. I admit that I cater to my own tastes, too -- I have a vast collection of historical fiction written for children and teenagers, some excellent, some merely covering a place and time I consider useful. I also choose books that offer students (potential) opportunities to identify with characters like themselves. Working in West Oakland, I made it a priority to find YAF that centered around African-American characters, and was written by African-American authors, or at the very least extremely good non-Black authors -- some of the historical fiction had white authors who managed not to be terrible in that regard. In the district I work in now, I look for novels in Spanish, in translation, but also for books which reflect the Latino/a immigrant experience, Mexicans in the United States, turmoil in Central America and so on. I also have gathered, over the years, a number of books whose main character or major supporting characters live with a disability of some kind. My reasons for having these books -- well, if I'd thought about it, my reasons would have been to -- again -- offer models and opportunities for identification for my students, and to offer vicarious opportunities for students without disabilities to "step into someone else's shoes", or take perspective. In fact, however, I didn't think about it, exactly. The following titles are books which meet those goals, but which I collected more because they are very good fiction -- well-written, interesting, mind-stretching, emotion-evoking fiction. I offer this annotated list as a resource for teachers of students aged 11 through 15 or so.

Blindness/Deafness

Okay, this first one isn't a book. But it's a classic movie which is still amazingly effective even with jaded students who play fast action video games in color every afternoon. I refer to the movie The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke playing Annie Sullivan and the famous Helen Keller. The Miracle Worker not only gives what seems to be a pretty accurate portrayal of the world a deaf-blind child could create for herself in the absence of any more complex means of communication than miming, but makes it very, very clear to any watcher that the facts of a disability mean nothing whatsoever about the quality of the mind in that body. Helen Keller was brilliant, stubborn, brave, and resourceful, and that is clear in the movie as well as in any biographical material about the socialist speaker.

ADHD

This is a more recent focus of attention in schools -- was that a pun? Not sure. Anyway, when I was in school, there was no such diagnosis, and a student with the range of symptoms which might produce that description now would probably have been called "a handful." But we have named it, now, and now students with this label are well aware of it. Some of them, in my experience, are able to use their self-knowledge to get accommodations for themselves. Some of them, not yet. One series of books which I think is wonderful both in giving students a sympathetic mirror to look into, and to offer deep recognition, is about a boy named Joey Pigza, a fifth grader (I think -- maybe he starts out as a fourth grader?) and is by Jack Gantos. In my longer treatment of YAF, these books would also go under a category I want to write about -- novels with working class culture and roots. There are far fewer of these than I would like to see -- most novels for teens are firmly rooted in the middle or upper-middle class, and if their class identification shifts for one or two titles, the attempt is often awkward and unconvincing. An example in this regard is an author I like very much, but who can't really write anything that isn't middle to upper-middle class, or anything that isn't white. That would be Andrew Clements, an otherwise great author of school stories.

Anyway. Jack Gantos' protagonist Joey Pigza, is a handful. His mother is divorced from his father (who seems also to be a handful) and in the first novel, Joey lives with his paternal grandmother, who is eccentric to say the least. Throughout the first novel, called Joey Pigza Swallows the Key (2000), Joey is confused and sometimes tormented by his inability to fit in with the norms of classroom behavior. The depiction of what it feels like to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is very powerful, and very specific. Gantos evokes the physical sensations as well as what seems almost like a manic emotional high. He is on medications, but they do not work well. By the end of the novel, he is transferred from a mainstream environment to what seems to be SDC while a more competent and concerned teacher helps him both with meds and with coping techniques. This novel obviously deals with very controversial ideas -- whether and how to mainstream, for instance, and the place and utility of medication -- but it does not state anything monolithically. In the course of the four books, in fact, Joey's education seems to run the gamut from mainstreaming to segregated Special Education to being withdrawn from public education and home-schooled by a Christian acquaintance of Joey's mother. It is as though the author wants to explore several different avenues of how Joey can deal with his life, his education, and his interactions with others.

There are four books in the series, so far, and it may end there. I haven't read the fourth one yet, but the titles are, in order: Joey Pigza Swallows the Key, Joey Pigza Loses Control, What Would Joey Do?, and I am not Joey Pigza. I really wish I had these books on tape.

Amputation/prosthetic limbs

Cynthia Voigt is an amazing author of young adult fiction. She is prolific and she is especially good at complex characterizations which are often ambivalent. None of her characters are flat. In Izzy, Willy Nilly, she tells the story of a young middle class high school student, moderately popular, moderately pretty, moderately good in school, whose life is disrupted when she allows her older date to drive her home drunk from a party. In the crash, the driver walks away, but Izzy loses a leg, or more accurately, her right leg below the knee joint. The novel is a journey for Izzy through dealing with this change. She denies it, revolts against it, is deeply depressed for much of the story, and slowly comes to terms with it. Her life changes as a result of losing a leg, but in some ways, Voigt seems to argue that she comes away a better person for having to struggle. She is dropped by her own popular clique and slowly becomes friends with a much smarter, more awkward and honest misfit. She sees herself and her old friends through a more thoughtful, if painful, prism. I don't think that the book is didactic or preachy -- Voigt never is -- but she handles emotions and nuance very, very well.

Learning Disabilities

Cynthia Voigt is also the only author of YAF I can think of right this minute who has a major character who would have an IEP (Individualized Education Plan, for students who qualify for Resource Specialist Programs), at any school I've taught in. In her series on the fictional Tillerman family, the younger daughter, Maybeth, is "slow" -- she does not have mental retardation, but is frequently identified as "retarded" by children and teachers alike. She has been held back in school once already, and in the first book is about to be held back again, so that she would be in the second grade for a third time, this time with her younger brother. Throughout the series, Voigt develops Maybeth's abilities and explores her processing issues. She has trouble both with language processing when using the whole language teaching methodology and the memorization of lists of sight words, and with mathematic concepts like fractions. Yet she can learn to read using phonics, and she has perfect pitch and the ability to read music and recall songs and melodies very quickly and accurately. The second novel in the series, Dicey's Song, even has her older brother James, a gifted student, research teaching methods that might help Maybeth once she is allowed to proceed into third grade instead of being retained. The book is useful not only for is portrait of Maybeth as a multidimensional character, with many graces and talents, but for its exploration of how families can look for resources to help members with processing issues, and how they can understand difference.

Mental Illness

The book I selected for this category was surprising to me, because its author is more well-known for her own vast factory-like production of The Babysitters Club series novels. Ann M. Martin has been trying her hand, lately, at more complicated, 1960s-based, class-located first person novels, and two of these are very good indeed. These novels are Here Today, and A Corner of the Universe. It is the latter which tackles the subject of mental illness in the secondary major character. Hattie, a girl living in a small town in 1960, meets her uncle Adam, of whose existence she had been utterly ignorant, when his specialized private boarding school closes down. It is not exactly clear what her uncle's diagnosis is -- some level of autism, it seems, signaled by an encyclopedic knowledge of the I Love Lucy show, and the use of lines from that show to mediate most social situations. But Hattie's relationship to her newfound uncle -- by far the closest forged by anyone in her family -- makes Adam a real person, whose differences stop being frightening and begin to be understandable. The novel is aimed at 9 to 14 year olds, but I agree with the Amazon.com reviewer who felt that age bracket skewed too young: the ending of this novel is tragic, and its darkness would be very hard for most children under 12 or 13.

Cerebral Palsy

Finally (I could probably keep going for quite a while, but I am going to stop, I think) there is the novel Libby on Wednesdays by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. The main character of the book has no disability except a social awkwardness caused by being homeschooled by an unworldly poet father. But when she is forced to go to middle school for socialization purposes, the Gifted And Talented Education program places her in an after school writing club which meets on Wednesdays. There, she meets an ungainly assortment of other students whose writing is fascinating and creatively compelling, one way or another. She does not expect to like any of them, but slowly comes to respect and enjoy them all. The first student she gets to know is a boy named Alex, who is called a spaz by other students because he has cerebral palsy and cannot control his limbs well, at all. He writes his stories on computer and composes parodies of almost any genre, lickety split. The depiction of a boy with cerebral palsy, again, underscores the fact that mental ability is not the limiting factor -- if there is a limiting factor -- in a disability.

Sure, why not, a book meme. The 106 least read books on LibraryThing, whatever that is. Uh, I have bolded the ones I've read entirely, underlined the ones I read in or for school, and italicized the ones I started but did not finish. Most of the ones that I've left unchanged, because unread? I never intend to read those books. Same with most of the ones that are italicized for being unfinished. I never intend to finish any of them, except Moby Dick. Some day I will finish that. I respect and admire Melville. Most of the ones I didn't finish, I quit within a page or two. I think of myself as never, or very rarely leaving books unfinished, but apparently an early termination is okay with me, especially if it's long and pretentious.

( 106 Books )

I love reading Young Adult Fiction. I loved reading it when I WAS a young adult, and I still do now. I don't even really try to pretend that it's because I teach middle schoolers, though I suppose I *could* claim that. But it wouldn't be true. I mean, I read a lot of stuff... occasionally political works, but much more often historical novels, mysteries (especially historical mysteries), sci fi (especially by women), chick lit, and middle-brow lit. But whatever else I am reading, I am almost always also reading something aimed at people between the ages of ten and eighteen. Roughly.

Months ago, at this point, I said something about intending to write about authors of young adult fiction, but then I let it drop. I've decided to pick it up. I think it will be an ongoing feature, because (much like movies, and especially Bollywood movies) I sort of feel like I'll never run out of things to say or think about, on this topic. So, diving right in: Eoin Colfer is coming to speak at Books, Inc., a nice independent bookstore in Alameda, California, tomorrow night.

Eoin Colfer is probably best known as the author of the Artemis Fowl series, which is quite wonderful. I don't think anyone writes slash or fanfic about it, though. It's not really on the mega level that, say, J. K. Rowling's stuff about whatshisname is. But I started reading Colfer with some of his earlier novels, to wit, Benny and Omar and Benny and Babe. The first of these must have been published in 1999 or 2000, and the sequel, in 2001. His books are comic, a little antic, and very rooted in their native soil, which happens to be Irish sod, even though Benny and Omar is actually set in Tunisia. He reminds me a bit of an Irish Louis Sachar in how unerring his aim at the preteen and younger adolescent funnybone is.

Benny and Omar is a story of an Irish boy whose family moves to (as I say, I THINK it's Tunisia; I don't have the book by me now; it's in one of the 22 or so boxes of YAF I have yet to bring to the school I now work in, i.e. it's in one of my closets, denying me storage space) North Africa because his father is middle management for an oil company. This, in itself, is kind of emblematic of the New Ireland and the Irish economic "miracle" of creating a technical and skilled petty bourgeois layer in the larger cities of the South.

Benny's family expects to live the life of expat employees in a walled compound, but Benny escapes over (or under; I can't remember) the wall, and ends up palling around with Omar, a kid his age with a motorbike, street smarts, and loads of ambition. The friendship is very well done, and the contrast of cultures is excellent. It was written just before 9-11, ironically, and I'd recommend it strongly as a subtle cultural counter to Western bigotry.

The sequel is about Benny back in Ireland, befriending a girl -- a townee -- in a fishing village. It's excellent, too, and offers an unselfconscious portrait of contemporary Ireland. It's funny -- all I could get about Ireland when I was in middle school and high school were agonized soap operas about the North of Ireland, some by Joan Lingard (forbidden romance between a Catholic boy and a Protestant girl... or else a Catholic girl and a Protestant boy, I can't remember, but it was a long-assed series... okay, it was a Protestant girl, because I've just remembered her name was Sadie, which is clear enough) and one by James D. Forman called A Fine Soft Day about the choice a teenager makes as to whether to join his older brother in the IRA. I don't think I ever saw a book about the South until the past few years, except one muddled magical fairytale that was crazily long and indulgent called The Hounds of the Morrigan.

Colfer has remedied that lack. I think he's leading the van, in fact, in terms of Irish YAF. I just saw another new book about contemporary Ireland and some amount of folklore -- and folk music -- and the author clearly owes a debt to Colfer, who did a blurb for her, as well.  I cannot find that book's title and author right now, but when I do, I will edit this to include it.

Colfer's more famous Artemis Fowl series unites Irish folklore -- fairies, leprechauns -- and other magical European beasts (trolls, gnomes) and high technology and mixes these with a teenage genius criminal mastermind, the eponymous Artemis Fowl. The whole series is well worth a read -- the books are funny and fast-paced, and the plots are inventive. I own all of them so far, and am looking forward to the next entry in the series, which should be out this year. They are not as portentous as Harry Potter's epic struggle of Good and Evil, and there is much, much more humor. The books in this series are, in order: Artemis Fowl, in which we meet the underground technically advanced remnants of the Sidhe, Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident, in which Artemis rescues his father from the Russian mafia, Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code, in which he succumbs to more hubris than normal for him, Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception, which involves cloning and a goblin plot, or something like that, Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony, which is sort of about redemption and trolls, and the new one, Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox. Well, he had to get around to time travel eventually.

One other book of his which deserves mention (though I think they're all readable) is The Supernaturalists, which is kind of a Euro-Irish Bladerunner for kids, with a hardcore moral about violence. I've read that aloud a few times to classes in the past few years, and it gets kids' attention pretty well. 

Penultimately (obviously I am adding this bit a little late), his contemporary Irish fiction/humor novel Half Moon Investigations is important because there are not really enough YAF authors who aim even halfway at boys, and this book has a plot that involves a horrible ring of stuck-up girls who badly pervert the cause of preteen feminism (apparently by failing the class issue -- the ringleader is quite the upper class child of privilege) and organize a secret cult that wears pink on the outside, but matte black underneath, and vow loyalty to a hidden portrait of Mary Robinson, the first woman President of Ireland.  It's pretty hilarious, while showing strong sympathy to gormless middle school BOYS.  Again, this puts me in mind of Louis Sachar.

Finally, he also has a new novel which I need to finish tonight, because it is on loan from my school's super excellent librarian -- it isn't officially available yet, but she got a special pre-publication copy -- called Airman. So far, I like it a great deal.  It does have sort of fascinating elements which are reminiscent of several sources (which is the problem when you read as much -- as obsessively -- as I do; everything recalls everything else):  Civil War balloonists and escape artists from Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island; retrieval of  a secreted fortune by a brilliant prisoner who escapes a trumped-up charge, like Dumas'  The Count of Monte Cristo, imprisoned nobility of spirit and an escape which involves stitching pleaded-for silk linens, like Stephen King's The Eye of the Dragon and the history of early aviation, like one of my favorite YAF books of all time, by one of my favorite YAF authors of all time, Laurence Yep's Dragonwings. Maybe I'll write about that next time, because I think I want to write about Laurence Yep.


ETA: Oh, my god, SHOUT OUT:  In Airman, one of the characters, a blind former aeronaut (e.g. balloonist in the American Civil War whose eyes were put out by a youthful Jesse James when he was a Yankee spy among the Missouri border ruffians) tells the protagonist, Conor Broekhart, about his dead wife, in India, AISHWARYA.  Oh, awesome, Eoin Colfer, way to display your crush on The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, and link to my other favorite obsession, Bollywood.

The last time I wrote about books that have influenced me (a daunting topic, considering how many books I absolutely love and have read and reread) was in 2004. This was the post:

http://maeve66.livejournal.com/16360.html

But in that post, Alexandra Kollontai was an afterthought. I don't know how that's possible, really. Reading her novel The Love of Worker Bees was one of the formative feminist moments of my life, and that's saying something, because I resisted feminist politics for quite some time, weird reductionist orthodox marxist that I was, as a teenager.

What's bringing me to writing about her at the moment is partly running across that old entry, and partly finding a new icon (of her) that I like, see above, and partly having talked with a friend about her, and looking at Wikipedia and being pissed off that her entry is so short and doesn't discuss her writing. The assholes. Or, I guess, asshole, whoever wrote it. Maybe this will motivate me to learn how to suggest edits for Wikipedia? I do dearly love that people's encyclopedia.

Here's a link to that wanting Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai

Anyway... when I was about fourteen or fifteen, a bunch of adult comrades from the oppositionist current in the Socialist Workers' Party that my parents belonged to, and that I was not allowed to join*-- a current that aligned itself with the Fourth International majority, thus a great deal less orthodox and less dogmatic -- led by Ernest Mandel, etc. ANYWAY (like any of that means anything to most people who chance to read my LJ), several comrades gave me her novel, The Love of Worker Bees, for my birthday. I've read her other major novel, A Great Love, which is purportedly a roman à clef about Lenin's affair with Inessa Armand, too, but not as frequently.

The Love of Worker Bees was a deliberate attempt by Kollontai to write a novel that was accessible to the masses of Russian working women which could set out the problems of building a new society, and especially the gendered difficulties in doing that.

Her main character is a factory worker (I'm working from memory here, as I cannot find any of my three copies of this book) named Vasilisa, aka Vasya, Vasyuk (oh, I have sympathy with that nickname), etc. She's an active cadre in the Bolshevik Party, and a leader of her women's sections, and her companion is assigned somewhere else in the Soviet Union -- he turns out, if I'm not mistaken, to be a NEPman, and thus repellent to her. She's trying to set up a communal household where women will be able to collectivize the necessary childcare, etc. There are explorations of nonmonogamy, and of women's work, and of the whole notion that even in a revolutionary context, or maybe especially in one, the personal is political. I'd never encountered that idea before, and it still took several years before it sank in deep enough.

But the book's passionate -- and, ultimately, disappointed -- argument for socialist feminist vision was amazing to me. I really need to get another copy and reread it. And I wouldn't mind finding A Great Love, too. God, it's annoying that so many of my most important books are STILL in my father's house. His basement, anyway.



*that is, the majority current would not allow me to join the SWP (or the "youth" group, the YSA) because it was perfectly obvious that that would be double recruitment, as I would have instantly joined the minority/opposition current. Well, yes.

I am reading a book I am liking enormously. It's pretty mainstream lit crit, if it can even be called that. Literary biography, really. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. The method -- of weighing both the hard archival evidence, which is scanty, and piecing it out with likely might-have-beens based on other contemporary archival evidence of people Shakespeare very likely knew, and then measuring both against textual evidence and especially metaphor in his plays -- I like very, very well.

And as for the language -- OH, I like the language. I always have. The first time I ever read a word of Shakespeare, which was when I was 10, on a family vacation and most likely in Québec, having another life-changing experience, that of encountering French, I was immediately drawn in. I read The Tempest, which is now not a play I like very much at all, but at age ten it gripped me, and I drew pictures of Ariel and Miranda and Prospero in my journal, the first diary I ever owned, or wrote in, the summer after I'd first found it.

Then, I must have loved the imagery, to draw it... but I can't believe I didn't also read it aloud to myself in the car, tasting the words. They're so amazing, spoken aloud. They're the verbal equivalent of physical drunkenness. Dizzying wordplay and delight in metaphor, oh, man, I love it.

One of the stranger experiences I had in that regard was when those two verbal worlds -- my desire for French and my love of well-made and fashioned English -- collided: when I worked in the Northwestern University Library, shelving ("Stack Control", we were called) on all my high school vacations, I found a whole shelf of French translations of Shakespeare. God, they were awful. Awful. Leaden and plodding and bereft of everything that makes Shakespeare amazing. The strange thing -- and maybe this only speaks of my hard-to-eradicate linguistic chauvinism... -- is that I've read English translations of, for example, Molière, and thought they were excellent. And they were verse translations of drama written in verse. I can't explain it. I tend to feel like French verse can be enjoyed for itself best in French, but to be able to enjoy it in English if it is a good translation. Not in terms of how it SOUNDS, no, but in terms of its sentiment and ideas. Not its imagery. But I've rarely seen English transformed into French that I liked very well at all. Maybe it's just also an indicator of the fact that English is my native language, however good my French has gotten.

So, this biography is really enjoyable. I like textual readings anyway, trying to imagine what elements of a life make it into fiction, or to extrapolate from fiction, biography. I am also utterly enamored of the Elizabethan period, the late Tudor period. Greenblatt does a good job of analyzing what makes it compelling and also alien, of looking at the material basis for the rise of capitalism, and also the interweaving of religion and politics. I had never considered the Catholic/Protestant struggle as a context for Shakespeare before, but it makes good sense, particularly as Greenblatt describes Shakespeare's possible brush with those politics, and quick evolution away from a personal engagement with either of them.

In other news... ugh, I have a cold, a horrible head-stuffing head cold that is making me feel cloudy and tired and out of it. Yechh.

I love this job still, by the way. Love it. It is so strange to feel pleased to be on my way to work every morning. I made the disastrous mistake of trying to teach stuff that is too coneptually difficult for elementary students last week... I reasoned that yeah, *I* hadn't been exposed to verbs in their rote-memorized form until I'd had a year of the ephemera under my belt -- colors and numbers and letters and days of the week and months of the year, etc... but that these kids are being really good at that, and quick, so why couldn't we just start with être, avoir, and aller? Ummm, no. I can't wait until the East Bay Foreign Language Project starts, this year, so I can get some ideas for how to begin incorporating grammar other than simple memorized sentences that use one form of a verb...

Is there any other news? I haven't been writing much, I know. And this is hardly a scintillating entry, though I excuse myself on account of my head. Hmmm. I'm also enjoying my college history survey class -- the section of US History to 1865 that I'm teaching online. I manage to keep up with it, week by week, and sometimes the discussions are interesting. I set them a question for a journal entry two weeks ago (when we were on the reasons for the American Revolution) that asked them to read not only their chapter but the text of the Declaration of Independence, and to consider both sides of the colonists' protests -- how was their destruction of private property (the Boston Tea Party) and violence (treatment of various tax collectors etc) viewed by the lawful authorities, as well as by the patriots? How would people who wanted political change NOW, and used similar tactics, be treated under the Patriot Act? Could such actions -- could revolution -- be justified NOW, as it was then, and as it is a right declared by Jefferson in the Declaration (which, for that reason alone is not part of the legal framework of the United States)? I got answers as varied as "this country has fallen away from God, and as Jefferson clearly invokes God all the time in the Declaration, obviously he wasn't in favor of the separation of church and state, and neither should we be... right now the United States is engaging in leading a new revolution, in Iraq" to "a revolution today in the United States would be stamped on ruthlessly just as the British attempted to crush the American rebellion, but a revolution in the United States seems more and more necessary when we look at how the government has acted in invading Iraq and in business corruption." Both of those answers have been paraphrased slightly. Both come from rural Missouri.

I was going to write this entry just as an exercise in writing to record more or less random minutia (which, arguably, most of my entries are, in any case) -- no Grand Emotions are gripping my breast, or wherever those Victorian notions are supposed to physically reside.

But I wanted a cup of tea to accompany my written ramblings. So I went into my kitchen, not without fear and trembling. Things have Gotten Out of Hand, in my kitchen, in the past several weeks. A friend told me last night, as we went out to dinner and then somewhat oddly exchanged Tips and Hints on organizing space and cleaning from women's magazines and friends' hard-won domestic wisdom, that "the secret to keeping your kitchen clean, the theory, that is, is that you must never let ANYTHING sully the kitchen sink." He explained that the sink is the metaphorical center of a kitchen, and certainly of its potential for disastrous mess and uncleanliness. So if you always do every individual dish or utensil, much less whole dinners' worth of plates and pans... well, magically, nothing ELSE will accumulate.

I believe this theory with the kind of simple faith that comes with a silver-bullet solution combined with plain common sense. I think I ought to try it. God knows letting dishes pile up in the sink demonstrably has the OPPOSITE effect.

Anyway, I went into my kitchen to make a cup of tea, and then quailed before the towering stacks of vilely filthy dishes and pans and pots and bowls, and OLD cups of tea with, literally, mold growing happily on top of the now rancid dregs of cold liquid. Truly revolting. I don't even know if this is wise, to reveal the phenomenally messy nature of my household, at moments. But I guess I am revealing it. It IS, I hasten to assure you (you, my imagined readers) a temporary phenomenon.

And that's what happened, in fact; the phenomenon of that filth became temporary, because I literally couldn't see how I was going to be able to make any tea without doing all the dishes, gathering up trash and groceries that need to be put away, and rationalizing the mess in there.

So I DO have an emotion flooding me, at the moment. Great relief and pleasure that I finally accomplished that nasty task. I wouldn't claim that my kitchen was CLEAN, mind you, because that would take scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees à la Cinderella, frankly. And that ain't gonna happen. Not right now, anyway.

But I can add it to other incremental accomplishments like digging my way out from under vast piles (the bottom layers of which were literally months old) of laundry; cleaning out my hall closet so it can actually be used for storage AND be walked into. Slowly, slowly I am taming this apartment again.

Strangely (or maybe not so strangely) I am better at living in order and calm cleanness when I share space with someone else; I guess as long as that person, too, is someone who prefers order and neatness. Probably if I lived with a slob, I would descend to that easily reached level.

But when I live alone (which I do), it is harder to motivate to do my own social reproduction of my own labor power. It's harder to take the time to do laundry, to clean, to straighten, to do dishes, and especially, to COOK. I infinitely prefer to cook for other people. Cooking for one is ungodly boring.

Oy. Enough of cleaning.

What else is going on, these days? There are now fifteen working days left of the school year. This thought gives me much pleasure. Whatever happens next year, at least it will be NEXT YEAR. A new year always has the potential to be a better year, in teaching. Even in a district as absolutely fucked up as Oakland. I will continue my efforts to get a job somewhere besides Lowell (which will likely be closing, in any case, within a few years -- unless, after two more years, or one more year, it begins to transform into a small high school, one of many options loosed on us unaware by the state administrator, aka, All Forward to the Grand Gentrification of West Oakland, Randolph Ward. The perfect unison of a capitalist restructuring of property in West Oakland (One BART Stop Away from San Francisco's Financial District!!) and the capitalist restructuring (er, elimination) of public education via the "No Child Left Untested" Act; I mean, No Child Left Behind Act.

This is the time of year that teachers wax sentimental, realizing that some of the kids who drove them MOST nuts are the ones they'll miss terribly next year. Especially eighth grade teachers, like me. Every day seems both a little easier -- kids are happier and even though they're a bit hyper with approaching freedom, they're also somewhat calmer since it's finally almost HERE, their cherished summer -- and a little frenetic, as we try to finish up last projects and cram some final pieces of information in their curious heads. I found myself giving a mini lecture on the Cold War and nuclear weapons today, for instance, because none of them knew anything, anything, anything about it.

It's funny. I often find myself sounding like a Stalinist of the first water when I tell kids about the Soviet Union; I'm bending the stick so far in the other direction from what I remember hearing, growing up in the final paroxysms of the Cold War. And they've never HEARD of any social system that doesn't revolve around capital and property and profit. I can't bear to give a nuanced, even-handed treatment of it, at least in the thumbnail that is almost always all I have time for. So I describe the Soviet Union as being against inequality between rich and poor; as having no unemployment; health care for all; housing for all; no homeless, no starving people; support for people fighting against others taking their countries away or trying to control them and rob them (though that would more properly be Cuba than the USSR, after the 30s, anyway)... etc. I allude to the lack of democracy and multiple possibilities of political (or religious) vision only briefly.

I have one student who is very political (though he's never really told me that until recently; but he's clearly taken in the fact that I am... I sometimes wonder how they figure that out: I'm not USUALLY lecturing or teaching about subversion or radical history... I guess I don't hide my anti-war positions, or my positions on gender politics or race, though...) and he was very excited about the discussion of the nuclear arms race and which nation it is that has ever used the atom bomb, and against civilians, at that. But then... then he asked, in the middle of that discussion, whether it was true that the only reason we were at war with Iraq was because of the Jews. Fuck. My face reflected blank astonishment, and then I had just about time before the bell to reject that, but not to explain why that was so utterly wrong an analysis.

Other stuff. The music I am listening to right now is a CD I got at last Friday evening's Freight & Salvage (a coffee house/ folk venue in Berkeley) show, with Mike Seeger (Pete Seeger's stepbrother) and Evo Bluestein. Bluestein plays tons of old timey folk instruments, particularly the autoharp, which I adore. It turned out, in fact, that that was autoharp week at the F&S or something, because Bryan Bowers had played the night before. I wish I'd known; I would have gone to considerable efforts to see Bowers. He's got some amazing songs. One is a lament about a relationship that is ending... it's kind of chauvinist, but the melody is so gorgeous that I forgive it. Another is his chronicle of his own time in prison (for weed possession or dealing or whatever), and it's incredibly poignant.

And still on the culture front... I am rereading Possession by A. S. Byatt. Probably for the sixth or seventh time, if that isn't underestimating. I do reread books I love a lot. I've read everything Byatt has written (something I also do with authors I like), but this is the least challenging in emotional tone; the least negative or bleak. I like everything she does, largely because of her use of language and emotional observations. But this one novel is particularly addictive because of the dual romance in it (her characters are, like good characters, multifaceted enough that you aren't completely sympathetic to them; they have flaws that are believable... these -- Roland and Maud; Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte -- much less so than other of her characters) and also because it's arguably part of a sub-genre of British novels that center around universities; the academic novel or something like that. Other authors include David Lodge, Kingsley Amis, and Evelyn Waugh. I have a weakness for these books either despite or because of their strange class politics. It IS a weakness; I can't stand the authors, most of them. Misogynists all.

One last bit of unrelated flotsom and jetsam (sp?): Friday is my birthday, and I am going to get to dress up and go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. I'm looking forward to it. I think I will also have a brunch-y kind of thing on Sunday with a lot of friends, at my sister's house. This is much more of a fuss than I've made about my birthday for the last several years, really. Probably a large part of that is due to A., who is very good at celebratory rituals and recognition of Occasions.

Bye, y'all