I’m heading on a trip to Boston with my partner, Matt. (Anyone see that no-hitter last night?) Two of our friends are getting married; I can’t wait to see the city. I’ve been there once before, for two nights in college. It was an abbreviated trip. I’m looking forward to filling in the gaps, especially with a native as a tour guide. I won’t be blogging while gone, so I thought I’d leave you with some news for the week.

1) I love my neighborhood. I love being able to walk to the coffee shop, the grocery store, and restaurants. I love that the other night our waiter at the next-door-Mexican restaurant turned out to be the Awesome Baton Twirler who practices in the empty parking lot across the street. Who knew?

2) A great local band (made up of great folks), The Skylarks, is playing at Blind Willies (a great blues bar) on Tuesday May 27th.

3) A friend of mine in Asheville is part of Lewis. Stephanie blogs about their latest show.

4) Did you check out Rocksploitation from my earlier post? Hmmm? They’re playing Friday May 23rd at Smith’s Olde Bar as part of the Bob Dylan Tribute. Go support the Lelands!

5) Oh, yes, books. I finished reading The Sound and the Fury. Having read my share of Faulkner, somehow each new Faulkner novel becomes my favorite work of his. The last one I read was Go Down, Moses. What I love is how the story, the truth in his work, can be so raw and real while the prose so beautiful. Talk about layers. Anyway, I like how The Sound and the Fury is divided into four distinct sections, each having a clear point of view. And then there’s Caddy, who isn’t given a voice. Caddy is such a mythical character: the one who got away. Is it me, or is it often only the women (In Faulkner) who are able to escape the crumbling family aristocracy and get out? Of course, Caddy’s escape results in her banishment. Others seek death as escape, and others exist in anger and resentment….perhaps more on this later. Next in line (I’m trying to catch up on reading for exams in the fall) is James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

6) I almost forgot. PUKACORN is coming soon.

The other night I watched Sexy Beast for the first time. (I love you, Netflix!) It was a fantastic film–brilliantly shot, perfect dialogue…The beginning of the film, well, the beginning after the big boulder incident, is all suspense and fear and wonder and waiting. But, about what? About a person the audience has never seen and knows nothing about. But all of these other people are talking about him–Don Logan–and that builds tension.  The stakes are raised pretty damn high before he even arrives; this is done through subtle dialogue, facial expressions, and body language. Gal, Deedee, Aitch, and Jackie sit around being edgy and stressed out, and it works brilliantly. Then Don shows up, and Ben Kingsley turns it all up a few notches.

New fascination: Rocksploitation. From their website, “Rocksploitation’s sound is a new take on the three-chord (or fewer) attack pioneered by Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, and the Modern Lovers.”

I’ve known Stephanie and Adam Leland for a while now, and I knew they were fantastic folks before ever hearing their music. I enjoyed their shows when they were performing as a duo,the A-Sides, and now they are working with Eric Leland as Rocksploitaion. I saw the trio perform last night at Blind Willie’s, and now I have to spread the word. You can download some of their new tunes here.

SUB-LIT is reviewed at NewPages. Check it out. Check SUB-LIT out. Send me some more art.

I finally uploaded some pictures of our adventures at the Yellow River Game Ranch.

There’s a wonderful article on college education in the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic. The June issue isn’t up on the web yet, but should be soon. The article is titled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” and is written by an anonymous adjunct professor of English 101 and 102, Professor X. The blurb before the article reads, “The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.” I found myself thinking Yes! Yes! Exactly! as I read this article.

No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass.

I’ve had some wonderful teaching experiences, but I also know what Professor X is saying. How are we to teach the designated composition curriculum to those who are barely literate? Or to those who have never used a computer? Sure, a student might think they need to get a degree, but if your reading level is such that you aren’t ready for high school, and you lack the schemata to organize new knowledge, then what? The student works hard, perhaps, but they can’t pass the class. In college, we should not be giving ‘A’s for effort. Students need to master certain knowledge and skills before moving onto other courses. I could say a more about this, but I’ll stop now for fear of offending anyone. However, do go search out Professor X’s article. He says it all better than I can.

The front cover of The Atlantic reads “Higher Education’s Cruelest Hoax.”

I’ve been using Picasa for a while to organize my photos, and I just opened a Picasa Web Albums account, hoping to make posting photos to this blog easier. This is a test: Callie and Rowan, my parents’ new Maine Coon kitties.
 

I’ve been facing the challenges of working from home for a while. Over the last year I’ve had several part-time jobs at once, many of which I could do from home. Since the semester ended, I just finished teaching an English 1101 course. This required me to hold class at Georgia State, but most of the grading and lecture prep took place at home. I work for two literary magazines–I do all of that work at home. I work on my own fiction an non-fiction projects. And this won’t come as a surprise, but no one pays you for that stuff until you actually produce something great. Oh, and let’s not forget finishing up grad school. So, the struggle is to produce, to nurture that production, while ignoring the fact that there may be dirty dishes to wash, that you  may not be completely stocked up on special milk which a certain little someone might ask for when he gets home from school, that you need to do umpteen different life-admin tasks. But these things never go away. I’ve been re-learning this fact. There will always be more dirt, more field trips, more doctor appointments. And what am I doing right now?–blogging about this fact when I have a stack of submissions I need to read through. By tomorrow.

Then there’s a phenomenon I know all Mommies know well. It has something to with how a twenty-minute doctor’s appointment can take up four hours of your time or how a four hour field trip can take up eight hours of your time. I haven’t had to go to work, physically, for the last couple of weeks, and where has the time gone?

I spent one day accompanying my son on a field trip to the Yellow River Game Ranch. I love taking him there. One, because it is a place I went on field trips as a child and I remember how fascinating it was at the time. Two, he loves seeing all the animals. He feels proud of himself for picking out the right kind of food for each animal. The ducks like crackers, the donkeys like carrots…So, since the timing was right I decided to go on the field trip with my son’s school (a montessori school for infants through age six).

I’d read a bulletin earlier in the week that informed parents the field trip was from 10-2. Since Keegan’s father drove him to school that morning, I didn’t have any reason to be at the school until 10. However, there was some event going on at 9, something to burn an hour for parents who dropped their children off early and were sticking around to wait for the field trip bus at 10. This event had something to do with pearls, yes pearls, and all I could imagine was the equivalent of a Tupperware or Pampered Chef party, except for pearls. The imaginary scene I conjured up based on this premise was nothing less than horrifying, so I promised myself I’d arrive just before ten. But, the morning-of came:

I felt guilty for wanting to miss the 9 o’clock shin-dig. I have no idea why. Maybe it was because I like the school, I like my son’s teacher, and surely other moms were there sucking it up. I negotiated with myself, the self wanting to play hookie for the mystery hour and the self full of vague guilt, and decided I’d leave my house at 9. I got there at 9:20.

I was in the main hallway, locked eyes with another mom, and immediately thought we should bolt. We could hold hands and sprint. Then, the director of the school steered me by the shoulder, told us there were two empty seats in the back row, and we were ushered into a room. The front two rows were older couples in suits, the back row mommies–mommies looking tired, sipping free coffee. I had on my Doc Marten’s, grey curdorys, and my bringht yellow Ireland hoodie. I didn’t exactly fit in. There was a man at the front of the room giving a presentation about pearl harvesting and oysters. A documentary played on the t.v., which he kept pointing to and referencing. One of the older men kept taking pictures of us. At some point I realized the speaker was also the star of the documentary, which became obvious and baffling at once.

Somewhere, you may see me in the back row of a photo of a Kiwanis Club Meeting. Because that’s what this turned out to be. A weekly Kiwanis club meeting, the weekly guest speaker, and a bunch of visiting moms from the school. Who would have guessed? I could have used the extra hour of sleep, and I wasn’t the target audience here. I don’t see myself making time to join the nation’s largest service organization any time soon. I don’t see myself visiting the only independent seller of tahitian peals in Atlanta soon, either. I survived. I ate a donut out of distress.

The bus was an hour and a half late. Imagine: school bus with three seat belts per seat, at least thirty kids between the ages of two and six, lunches and animal food in tow, many parents and teachers, now running into the lunch-time of the kiddies. The initial plan was to see the animals, then eat lunch, then go home. Now, arriving so late in the day at the ranch, lunch-time was first on the agenda, which did not please Keegan, who wanted to see the peacocks right now. You know that terrible, sinking feeling of dread that comes from the bottom of your gut? That’s what I felt as we pulled into the parking lot at the game ranch and I counted no less that 12 other school buses. Holy crap. This was not a big place, people. That’s a lot of kids.

I won’t go into the details, but seeing the animals was great (most of the animals are rescue animanls who’ve been injured in the wild, or elsewhere, and otherwise wouldn’t survive) for a couple of hours. Our mood deteriorated as Keegan missed his nap, which he still needs, and became insanely unreasonable. The exhausted and hungry three-year-old unreasonable. Like, hey, I’m going to throw myself on the ground here because I wanted to feed that duck we saw ten minutes ago, this carrot which I just noticed I had, except I didn’t get to feed him this carrot, but Julia got to feed him one and I am so slighted and will just lie here and scream until justice is served. And the duck has fled from me which indicates the world has ended, so I’ll start hyper-ventilating now.

And then there were only two working bathrooms at the end of it all. And many toddlers who needed to go. And it had gotten warm. But this is what mommies do.

Stephanie has given us her list of Top Ten Hotties in Literature over at Natural / Artifical. Check out the blue hair, too. It is an interesting list of cute boys. Despite not being familiar with all of the beaus on the list, I took a guess at who # 1 would be, before scrolling all the way down, and I was right! Can you guess who the number one hottie in literature is? Can you?

“Mom? Where do we go live when we die?”

“When will it be yesterday?”  “Is today yesterday?”  “Then, when will it be yesterday?!”

“How many laters are there?”

“What does inside and outside mean?”

“What is an end to something?”

“Gross, I am never going to grow hair under my arms.”