I have no idea where this book came from. The name in the front says Timbrell, so it could either be from a school or a used bookstore. In a house full of books, as mine was growing up, it was just there and I read it over and over again. I recently rediscovered it in a box, and had some good end-of-summer reading time with it.

These eleven stories aren’t so much horror stories, as stories of great suspense in chilling settings. Many of them have to do with the presence of the other-worldly in completely mundane locales. I have had a really hard time deciding if I have a favorite out of these stories, but I do know that the first one is the one I always read first, and not just because it starts on page one.

The first story is The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft. It’s the longest story in the collection, and that probably gives it the best chance for drawing the reader in and making you feel comfortable before pulling the rug out from under you. I wish I could remember what it was like to read that story for the first time, and get the full effect. Does anyone else remember reading The Dunwich Horror for the first time?

It seems like Mary Roach is everywhere this summer. I read a review in a blog post, and later heard an interview on NPR. Naturally, I downloaded and read her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

Yes, it’s about death and more specifically, what’s physically left after death. But there’s so much more around the edges of death, and the physical possibilities around those edges. Aside from all the dying and dead bodies, what really struck me was how deep and wide Roach’s research process must be. She really draws you into her research process, telling you both how she found what she shares, as well as tidbits of the things that didn’t make it, the things that were just so interesting but didn’t quite fit in a chapter anywhere.

Of any of the science nonfiction books I’ve read recently, one is a great example of how scientific writing doesn’t need to be so stuffy and personality-less. This would be a great example for students, who sometimes get stuck when writing lab reports because they feel there’s no place for their own perspective.

I recently finished our faculty summer reading assignment, The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner. Last year we chose our summer reading from a selection of books, and there were specific reasons I did NOT choose to read The Global Achievement Gap.

The same gap that gives the book its title is that reason. In the first chapter, Wagner summarizes Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and pokes us with a stick saying, “fear! fear! the world is changing!” I have little patience for this way of manipulating a reader to be receptive to the rest of your book. I think authors like Friedman and Wagner can see the past, but, like many humans, are very very bad at predicting the future. When Friedman himself outlines the global gap that Wagner adopts for his title, he writes something along the lines of “so get your kids to put down the Game Boy and get to work in the classroom.” Dear authors, the Game Boy is not your enemy, that Game Boy is your future (although at the time of this writing, it would more likely be the Nintendo DSi). Wagner sets up the reader with all this fear that all of our “good middle class jobs” are going overseas, but I believe – given the insane amount of privilege enjoyed by those who would have held those good middle class jobs – that something else will arise to take their place. I don’t know what that is yet, but believe me, people will adapt. All of that privilege will not simply disappear just because specific jobs went overseas.

In fact, that ability to adapt is one of the seven survival skills Wagner says students will need in this new, flat world. Put briefly, those skills are critical thinking, collaboration, adaptability, initiative, communication, analysis, and curiosity. Wagner goes through a few chapters contrasting the skills that the business world demands with the content standards and testing that prioritized in the current education system. The resulting impression is one that, taken to an extreme, would say that content doesn’t matter. Perhaps in an English class not remembering the previous text will not harm your ability to analyze the current text (but it prolly won’t help either!). In a chemistry course, however, not remembering the molecular view of matter we developed in the early chapters will certainly impair your ability to analyze your experimental results in the second semester. The content that I expect students to learn and know is the context that helps them ask the smart questions Wagner wants students to ask.

I really felt that Wagner’s critique of the teaching profession and teacher preparation was the strongest part of the book. As a teacher, and especially as a relatively new teacher, I do indeed feel isolated. And in a survey on professional development I recently administered and analyzed, my colleagues do express a desire for greater collaboration. As Wagner points out, none of us in our education courses learned HOW to teach these seven survival skills, even if we did learn how to teach content (which I didn’t, but hey, that’s the program I chose). The only way we will learn is by sharing ideas and lessons with each other. I only wonder if the result of this reading assignment will be, “See, this is what you need to teach all alone with your door closed” instead of “Here’s more time to meet and talk and plan.” In effect, will we have a chance to actually use these seven survival skills, and model them as we teach them? Or will we be expected to teach them while adhering to the old model of schooling?

Finally, I would argue that our upper and middle class students already learn these survival skills from the privileges they enjoy. The most we can do in elite private schools and wealthy suburban school districts is help them practice those skills in an academic setting. What about those students oppressed in our society, without the advantages of privilege? This is the question I wish Wagner had made his hook: not the concern that American middle class jobs will disappear, but the way that school reproduce inequality and class structure. But I guess social reproduction doesn’t sell as well as fear of dropping in status.

The first book I read entirely on an e-reader was Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I downloaded it as a pdf from books.google.com, legally, since it is long past any copyright considerations. The pdf was created from a library book, and had all sorts of charming notes and scribblings preserved in the margins. I loved it, and it was a very enjoyable first e-reader experience.

This past week I read The House of Mirth. And while reading this, I loved drawing all the little parallels between The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and the Gossip Girl novels/tv show. Ok, I admit it. Gossip Girl was the reason I read The Age of Innocence in the first place. I swear that somewhere in one of the novels, or maybe the prequel, Serena is holding/reading a copy of The Age of Innocence and this is meant to be significant. But when I went searching the internetz for blogs or articles outlining the parallels, I found astonishingly little.

Almost every article or blog post comparing Edit Wharton and Gossip Girl mentions one or two of the following points:

• The House of Mirth and Gossip Girl both start with a girl in Grand Central Station.
• Lily Bart is kinda like the name Lily Bass, wife of Bart Bass.
• In the television show, the teens’ senior play is an adaptation of The Age of Innocence.

Some go so far as to say that Edith Wharton was the Gossip Girl of her times, based on her letters and correspondence. Only one mentions a correlation for a more minor character: the fact that Cyrus Rose and Simon Rosedale are the only Jewish characters present in each. However, it seemed to me that there were many more obvious parallels in characters. For example:

• Serena van der Woodsen as Ellen Olenska
• Nate Archibald as Newland Archer

These two might suggest that Blair Waldorf is May Welland, but her scheming makes her much more akin to Bertha Dorset. That may be taking it too far, however. Cecily von Ziegesar acknowledges Edith Wharton as an influence, but she may be just as influenced by the entire genre of the novel of manners. She does list her favorite book as The Great Gatsby. Von Ziegesar is likely to have used Wharton’s characters as inspiration for her own and then let the modern setting take the plot from there. But it’s still fun to speculate: do you think Dan Humphrey is a Lawrence Selden?

for references, click here: http://delicious.com/ejmankh/houseofmirth

I finished reading The Road to Wellville, which I would say is really a book about swindles, swindlers, and swindlees. So I thought I’d tell a story about a time I felt swindled.

I was hugely and overwhelmingly anxious about planning my wedding. I didn’t think hiring a wedding planner was in our budget so I didn’t even consider it, but after breaking down in tears time and time again I realized I really really really should have. Parties are like nightmares for me, so having to plan a very large one at which I would be the center of attention was terrifying.

One of the first things I did was try to find a reception space. I found a place I really liked, but again, wasn’t sure it would be in our budget. But when I went to talk to the event planner at the site, she told me I’d have to make a decision TODAY because there was another bride and her mother coming that afternoon to see about reserving the place for the same date as my wedding. I panicked and made a decision earlier than I felt comfortable. I don’t regret the decision, and everything turned out lovely, but I felt icky working with the event planner because later on I kept getting this sinking feeling that there really was no other bride who wanted the site for the same date. The more I worked with her, the more I felt like she just said that to get me to make a deposit sooner.

Ok, so it’s not a swindle in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme way, but I still felt icky and conned. Swindle stories are hard to tell because, well, I don’t come off sounding so sharp! I feel like there are more times that I felt heartsick over other decisions I felt conned into, but I can’t think of them at the moment. Prolly just blocked them out, ever so conveniently.

how to over-interpret a movie:

Summer Finn begins with very modern ideas about love and relationships, but a very vintage wardrobe and apartment décor. Is this a foreshadowing of her character development, a way to add contrast and highlight just how extraordinary Tom finds her opinions on love, or is she just repulsively hipster and bought everything at Urban Outfitters?

Both Summer and Tom’s parents are divorced. Is this movie a way of illustrating this quote from Carson McCullers: “But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.”? Has the dissolutions of their parents’ relationships made Summer’s heart hard and pitted, while it made Tom’s fester and swell? Or is it just another random thing they have in common like listening to The Smiths?

The only two women we get to know in the movie are Summer and Tom’s little sister. Both of them are rewarded by the male characters when they act like “dudes”. I understand that Summer is meant to be unromantic, and Rachel is meant to be precocious, but lines like “Don’t be a pussy” are total dude lines, and by extension make Rachel and Summer’s unromantic opinions seem frankly more like the men around them and less like their own opinions held by fully realized characters. The dude lines don’t really fit the rest of the character. The women come across as mere projections of females who reject the male characters and/or play minor roles in their lives. Oh wait, that’s exactly what they are in this movie.

I really wanted to like this movie, and maybe ten years ago I would have. It’s a great premise in that it’s boy-meets-girl, but it’s all about the losing rather than the getting. However, in order to feel the losing and really understand it, you have to love Summer in the first place. This movie just doesn’t do a great job of making everyone who sees the movie fall in love with Summer. Instead of making her a real character anyone could love, she’s just vague ideal for a certain kind of hipster dude.

this was the month I discovered the netflix browsing options through my xbox. I had previously only used my xbox to watch things I had already added to my instant queue on my pc, but hey! now my husband and I could sit down and browse together, choosing to watch cheesy bad sci fi movies like D-War! fantastic.

this book came to me with nicknames like “the brick” and warnings that i could skip over any overlong descriptions of boring things like buildings or breaking bread. I was mentally prepared for page long sentences and descriptions of city neighborhoods like i found in the hunchback of notre dame, but that’s not what I found in pillars of the earth at all.

the beginning was not what i expected, and was decidedly more nora-roberts-esque . i repeatedly wondered to myself where this was all going, but found myself coming back to it again and again as a comfortable thing to read. it felt like an adult version of david macaulay’s cathedral book, which i loved as the pbs television story of a town’s cathedral building. through all the setbacks and disasters the story was ultimately about the cathedral. the similarity to the macaulay work made it a comfortable and easy thing to read even if i wasn’t totally drawn in by the story.

eventually, however, i was totally absorbed by the novel as a story about privilege. who has it, and who uses it to what end? I’d never read something like this before that looked at a medieval society with this degree of realism, and the ways that privilege can frustrate justice as we know it now. naturally, our own time comes to mind and i have to wonder, for all our institutions that guarantee justice, to what degree do each of us use our privilege to get what we want and subjugate others?

possibly the best part of getting this through netflix:

he: “what do you want to watch tonight?”

she: “i got knocked up”

heeeehee

I guess I’ve consumed this on multiple levels. Barry Schwartz has come to speak to the faculty at the school where I teach. In both the book and his talks, Schwartz relies heavily on truths revealed in cartoons from The New Yorker. Consistent with the audience of The New Yorker, it’s all about how to be happier in your middle to upper middle class affluent American lifestyle. I would like three things more from this book:

a. a more comprehensive look at how choice, control, and anxiety contribute to depression and other issues of mental health. How do Schwartz’s recommendations compare to other treatments, like cognitive behaviorism?

b. At one point, Schwartz holds up the Amish as an example of a people who has less choice in their lives, but much more satisfaction with the lives they lead. What about the period in the Amish adolescent’s life when they choose to remain in the community or leave? And furthermore, what about religion as a source of guidance to refine the choices we do make? Embracing the faith your parents gave you, if you are so lucky, could give some measure of lifestyle guidance in the same sense that the Amish have in their community.

c. Finally, I would have appreciated a sense of questioning that middle class American lifestyle that is causing so much anxiety. Instead of making the same decisions in a smarter manner or not at all, why not advocate a much more radical position? If guidelines remove the need to make the same decisions over and over again, why not recommend rules like local eating and the 100 mile diet, or do not create paper waste? Sticking to rules like that can not only reduce anxiety about everyday decisions according to Schwartz’s recommendations, but also have positive impacts for the environments or the rest of the population who are not so fortunate to live the middle class American lifestyle.

As it is, I find the focus of this book too narrow to be worthwhile. As he explained in the chapter on investments in decision making, my life would have been simpler and filled with less anxiety if I had just closed the book after 200 pages. But, being invested by 200 pages worth, I pressed on in hopes of redeeming my investment only to be disappointed in the end.