early childhood education

From Pnin: How much care, skill, inventiveness have gone to devise those marvelous techniques! What a shame that certain patients refuse to cooperate! There is, for instance, the Kent-Rosanoff Absolutely Free Association Test, in which little Joe or Jane is asked to respond to a Stimulus Word, such as table, duck, music, sickness, thickness, low, deep, long, happiness, fruit, mother, mushroom. There is the charming Bievre Interest-Attitude Game (a blessing on rainy afternoons), in which little Sam or Ruby is asked to put a little mark in front of the things about which he or she feels sort of fearful, such as dying, falling, dreaming, cyclones, funerals, father, night, operation, bedroom, bathroom, converge, and so forth; there is the Auguata Abstract test in which the little one (das kleine) is made to express a list of terms ("groaning," "pleasure," "darkness") by means of unlifted lines. And there is, of course, the Doll Play, in which Patrick or Patricia is given two identical rubber dolls and a cute little bit of clay which Pat must fix on one of them before he or she starts playing, and oh the lovely doll house, with so many rooms and lots of quaint miniature objects, including a chamber pot no bigger than a cupule, and a medicine chest, and a poker, and a double bed, and even a pair of teeny-weeny rubber gloves in the kitchen, and you may be as mean as you like and do anything you want to Papa doll if you think he is beating Mama doll when they put out the lights in the bedroom.

a new key

I’ve been typing (not well, four fingers) for forty years or so. I’ve had this particular keyboard for over a year. This morning I noticed a key I had never seen before. Well, obviously I had seen it–it’s just below Backspace and above Enter. But I never apprehended it. It’s this: \ |. The latter mark, the vertical line, is actually expressed as a stylized colon on the key. It’s called the pipe. It is used, I learned, to filter out email addresses and on the command lines of computer programs. And that’s as much as I care to know about that. The slash (lower case on the key) leans opposite of what we’re used to seeing. It’s called a backslash as opposed to a forward slash or vergule. The vergule (from the Latin virgula, little rod) is also called a solidus, an oblique, a slant, and in Britain a stroke.

july 6

Here's the cover of the new paperback version of Requiem, Mass., available at a bookstore near you on July 6!

rotten tomatoes

Dania Beach, oldest city in Broward County, was once the "Tomato Capital of the World." Salt-water incursion put an end to that dream.The tomato industry has moved west to Immokalee. Nearly all the tomatoes available in national supermarkets in winter come from here in South Forida.Those tomatoes are generally thick, dry, and tasteless. In fact, I haven't had a decent tomato in twenty years. But that's not the real problem. Gourmet magazine's March issue features a story on slavery in the tomato fields of Immokalee. It's well worth reading about the inhuman working conditions endured by migrant workers. "Workers who pick the food we eat can't afford to feed themselves." And then find out how you can be assured that you buy slave-free fruit by checking the Coalition of Immokalee Workers Campaign for Fair Food here.

lsu press

LSU Press in Baton Rouge, one of the country's most prestigious academic presses, is in danger of losing its funding. If you're thinking fiction, think Lewis Nordan, John Kennedy Toole, James Lee Burke, among others. Maybe an e-mail to Governor Bobby Jindal will help. But it'll probbaly be a decision made within the university, and we doubt athletics will suffer any. So maybe an e-mail to LSU President John Lombardi. And it looks like the Press is not the only program in danger. Here's a bit of the the message from Chancellor Martin to Lombardi:  

"This cut will require certain academic support entities to implement new fees for their services or to increase their existingfees to students, faculty, staff, and/or the general public. Because of the nature of some of these entities and their fixed costof operation, it is very possible they cannot generate the revenue needed and will close. Examples of units that may be impacted as a result of this type of decision are the LSU Museum of Art, Rural Life Museum, Hilltop Arboretum, LSU Press, Southern Review, Louisiana Library Network, Alumni Association and the Fire & Emergency Training Institute."

I wonder how that fits with the mission statement of the University?

usher

I've just read B. H. Fairchild's new collection, Usher. You'll want to read it, too. Just a couple of favorite moments:

From "Wittgenstein, Dying":

                                            The way a sentence is a story. It is raining.

                                            Something happens, as the case may be, to something

                                            of a certain kind and in a certain way.

From "Bloom School":

                                            Nothing is everywhere: doorless doorways,

                                            dirt filled foundations, and weed-pocked

                                            sidewalks leading to a sky that blued

                                            the eyes of bored students stupefied

                                            by geometry and Caesar's Latin.

Here's Mr. Fairchild reading "The Gray Man" from Usher.  (And I love the Edward Hopper book jacket!)

And here's a bonus for those f you who haven't read it.  This is the finest writing about baseball I've ever read. And, of course, it's about so much more than baseball. "Body and Soul."

god is in the salami

From the Freezer Jesus Files: Seeing is believing! (thanks to Neil in Miami)

requiem

A review of Requiem at Phil Jason's blog.

headz

J. J. Colagrande's first novel Headz is now available. You can buy it here. Here's what I wrote on the cover: “The marvel of his gritty and propulsive first novel, Headz , is that right out of the gates, J. J. Colagrande has staked claim on a wild new territory of ecstatic music and young love in a time of hedonism. A guest at the movable feast that is The Show, Thelonious Horowitz, a stranger in his own land, idealist and musician, travels across America to find himself or to lose himself, he's not sure which. So hop in, but strap on your seatbelt and hold on to your top hat. The road's a little bumpy up ahead.”

blood sports

Tom Lassiter from our Friday Night Writers group has a story in the new storyglossia.

pete seeger

Happy Birthday, Pete Seeger.  He's ninety and going strong.

books for sale

From NY Times book ad slide show. (via Moby Lives)

religion builds character ii

"White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified [like when the Romans had to torture Jeus]-- more than six in 10 supported it."

religion builds character

Mule-fucking Georgia gubernatorial candidate and director of security for the Creator's Rights Party says he'd kill his son to overturn Roe v.Wade and secede from the Union. "When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your fist girlfriend is s mule."

writing for nonreaders

Very funny course description in McSweeney's:

ENG 371WR:
Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era
M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Instructor: Robert Lanham

read the syllabus!

mary ann

That's Mary Ann Foley up front on a literary walk in Dublin in 2001. Mary Ann came along and took my class, John Bond's intro class, Don Bullens's photography class (Don took the photo above), and Cindy's poetry class. She was a delight. She hadn't yet written much fiction. She was a trooper, climbing off the launch and up the rocks on our trip out to the Eye of Ireland. Laughed off her difficulties getting around. She was tireless, curious, and passioante about this new creative life she was starting in on. She had a story that she began in my class that I still remember: A husband has decided that he wants to take a photography class,but he's afraid his wife will feel threatened or hurt, so every week when he drives off to school, he tells her he's going to a bar with friends.

I just got an email from a friend of Mary Ann's with some bad news:

Dr. Dufresne....My name is Geri Pastore...I am a friend of the LATE MaryAnn Foley! She was your student a few years ago!..She was crazy about you...as are other friends that have taken your class! My reason for writing to you is a sad story! MaryAnn died last fall! Her story is unbelievable! She had become ill . . . became incoherent . . . hospitalized . . ..had no WILL, or family to contact! While she was incapacitated, the local bureaucracy (the unknown they) CONDEMNED her house . . . SOLD it and all of her possessions! Upon learning the fact that everything that she worked for and owned, free and clear, had been sold, she DIED OF A BROKEN HEART! As you can tell from this email I am not one of your students !Although I would enjoy being one! I have written some thoughts about MaryAnn...and I am hoping to put them on the net . . . in hopes of warning others of this tragedy! It seems that one must have written "Heirs" in their wallet at all time! Imagine! Because she thought so much of you....I am sending you a couple of emails. They are just thoughts about her life.Try not to grade me . . . I am Girl-Writer 101! I am also older than dirt ! I just find it so sad, and unfair, that I hope to inform a few of the people that she admired ! (You were in the top ten )!

DIARY from the DEAD

Mary Ann had only recently started to enjoy her life. She had made friends with many lady friends who enjoyed similar skills in the art fields. They would all meet and write stories, poems, and they enjoyed critiquing them. She belonged to a camera club. She had purchased a very good professional camera. She discovered that she had a true gift for seeing the beauty in the art of photography. She had a wonderful touch for poetry. Her poems were of award quality. She bought a white S U V, and a new better quality camera. She took a couple of short trips to photograph scenes in Arizona, Nevada. Her shots were good. Her life was finally starting to be what she had hoped it would be, but until now, never was. She still lived alone. Her Northern family were a distant past.) She had tried to forget their constant taunts. She became very good friends with a lovely family a mother, with two teenage daughters.One of the girls was becoming a champion swimmer. Mary Ann thought of them as her family. She called them her mom and goddaughters and had intended to leave them all that she had saved in her now rather long life. But, things started to take on that dark edge of her old life. But she fought that old lonely lifestyle. She had volunteered to teach wayward teenage students. (Others would not try to teach them). Mary Ann had a way with them and even influenced a couple of them to get into poetry. Imagine! These kids were considered hopeless, but not when MaryAnn taught them. But then her house was broken into, and she had to buy all new windows at the cost of $750.00 per window. (She had to dip into her savings from her retirement.) The thieves had wiped out everything in her house; they stole everything . . . all of her camera equipment, her TV, the computer. They left everything in the house in shambles! She was absolutely
brokenhearted, had been a good neighbor, a good friend! She knew that they were neighborhood kids. Hum, doesn't that sound innocent . . . just neighborhood kids. . . so innocent sounding. M/A was such a good and generous person. She took special food to a friend in an After-Care Facility. She helped at her church. She cooked for others who needed help!And now she must start all over. Her memories of her father and mother were gone. They took everything. But she was strong and started over, for a while

She started to feel rather poorly, but, like most of us, thought that she would be fine. She was not! She became incoherent, and a neighbor called the EMS ambulance, and she was taken to a hospital. Because she was incoherent and had no relatives that could speak for her, "the powers that be" (whoever they are!) had her house of over thirty years declared uninhabitable. They condemned it and sold it right out from under her. She was sent to an after-care facility and recovered, but when she learned that everything that she had worked for all of her life had been sold, everything, all her life possessions gone, her heart was so broken that she died.

I am telling this story so that this tragedy will not happen to others. Make sure that you have a "will" and alsoanassigned guardian. Carry all important information with you. Protect yourself so that Mary Ann's life will not have been in vain!

P/S.....The most heart-piercing part of the story of Mary Ann is that by some fluke of the local bureaucracy, they allowed all of her worldly possessions everything that she had worked for all of her life, including the small house that her parents owned, free and clear, all of that was lost! Everything! Everything was lost to her. Take a guess: who do you think figured out some way of getting all of her life's possessions? Yep! The nasty cousins from the north!

Blessings, Geri Flynn Pastor

We miss you, Mary Ann

first book

Steve Colca at Norton found thiscatalogue copy from a long time ago.  Thanks, Steve.

will

It's Shakespeare's birthday (1564). It's also the anniversary of his (and Cervantes') death in 1616. Here's his natal chart for you astrologers out there. (via Astrotheme)

And my favorite sonnet, #73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

shapes of the novel

Years ago writer, critic, editor, Clifton Fadiman (Lifetime Reading Plan) addressed the issue of novel structure by suggesting three basic shapes. The horizontal novel follows events chronologically, Point A to Point B, and so, he said, is best suited to the plot-driven novel. The converging novel follows a number of separate characters with their separate subplots and sequences of action until the events and characters meet at a single culminating time and place. As the vertical novel proceeds chronologically, it sends down shafts into consciousness in order to mine the memory of the central character, and this based on some order other than the chronological. The recollections accumulate we come to some understanding about the character’s total experience.

I first ran across the discussion of Fadiman’s shapes in A Passion for Narrative, a terrific book on writing by Jack Hodgins, published in 1998. More recently, I ran across the same discussion on a web site called “The Fantasy Writer’s Cookbook,” by Stephen Tennant. I was startled to see that Tennant has appropriated Hodgins’ entire discussion, word for word. I would have said “borrowed” (borrowed ungraciously, to be sure), except that Tennant had the audacity to copyright Hodgin’s material! “Copyright Stephan Tennant, 2000.” And then he affixed this curious and disingenuous addendum: “I have made no attempt to acknowledge the sources for much of the above [his entire page] as they are many and varied and their work has been re-formed into a new narrative. [Word for word!] To those writers whose work appears here I wish to express gratitude–I hope you don’t get the Copyright Police on my case.” Tennant’s the author (he claims) of Blaydar’s Children and Dark Winter Riders. Fantasy writer, indeed. (The copyright police may have paid Mr. Tennant a visit--a recent check shows that his website has vanished.)

ash

My father’s French-Canadian grandmother, a Plantier, inexplicably married a man of British (possibly Irish) descent up in Hartland, Vermont. Must have broken her mother’s heart. Mixed marriages, you know. She married a man named Burt Ash, who may have been the son of one Eugene Ash, a Canadian, who settled around Rutland, Vermont. When my great-grandmother got pregnant with my grandfather, Mr. Burt Ash fled his responsibilities, his town, and his marriage, leaving my great-grandmother alone to raise her son, alone and very angry. The first thing she did was reject the Anglo son of a bitch by changing his name to the French, Dufresne. Old Burt’s long gone, of course, but if any of the Windsor County Ashes read this, drop me a line and tell me who I am.