Syllabus #189

"What a week!" - me and every person over 30, literally every Friday

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The backlash over basically Bowdlerizing the Roald Dahl books is totally justified.  Yes, his stories were deliberately nasty.  No, you cannot make less nasty by using a slightly gentler adjective here and there, and more importantly, the comical, over-the-top nastiness is the very point of the books!  I'm not a Roald Dahl Stan by any means, but I am very anti-censorship and very pro-spending time explaining context to children and giving them space to form their own opinions or to ask questions.

"You can choose not to read these books to your children, should you wish, and you would have fair reasons. Or you can do a bit of course-correction while reading them. And it’s a course-correction that has to be done with children all the time, anyway. Recently, I was having a drawing contest with a 6-year-old. She picked the theme: princesses, because it’s almost always princesses. She started to draw hers, and when she drew the body, it came out round. “She looks a bit fat,” she said, wrinkling her nose. I said that was OK—the princess can be fat. And she thought about it, shrugged, and we carried on drawing. I don’t say this to go: hark at me, great woke savior and influencer of young minds. I just mean that it’s pretty easy to do, and would be just as easy to do while reading."

I would say the same thing to anyone attempting to ban a book from a library or from a school's curriculum.  Aside from the fact that it's your purview to to influence only what media your own personal child is consuming, if you're so worried about what they might be reading, maybe try spending a little time with your children and using the content as an opportunity to have a conversation about your values and the context in which the book was written!  Don't expect legislation to sanitize the world so you no longer have to actively parent your own children!

So I guess you can be a literal exercise junkie.    

Jamelle Bouie's takedown of the myriad anti-trans legislation that seems to be the cause celebre of the far right at the moment.  He makes so many great points.

"The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender."

They might as well come right out and admit, "This is a thing I don't understand so I feel both threatened and devoid of empathy for it, and will abuse my position of power to maintain my position of power."

Analog Reading:

Finished Rabbit is Rich.  It was poignant and hilarious, and now I'm beginning Rabbit at Rest, knowing full well that, spoiler alert, he dies at the end.

Read Emma Straub's This Time Tomorrow.  I kept seeing the book mentioned on must-read lists and I've never read any of her work.  It was a fun read, and in terms of books about having the ability to re-do a portion of your life and see the various ramifications of a few small changes, I think she did a fine, self-aware job of dealing with some potentially very corny metaphysical presuppositions.  I have a lot more respect for this book than for say, The Midnight Library, which I finished only begrudgingly for a book club discussion.  

Syllabus #188

I wasn't very Online this week.  I was spending too much time with what, lately, feels like my second family, the Angstroms.  They're so comically dysfunctional, I can't help but revel in the schadenfreude.  Too bad they're a fictional amalgam from the mind of John Updike.  Or thank the lort they aren't real people, let alone people to whom I am related.  At any rate, I'm on book 3 of the tetralogy and I've grown fond of these miserable bastards.

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The only Internet Thing of Note that I consumed this week was this New York Times ode to libraries.  In a rational world, duh, what kind of feral beast doesn't love a library?  But we seem to be doing a lot of defending ourselves and justifying our existences lately.  

"Imagine a teacher who’s responsible for a mixed-age classroom where students are free to wander in and out as they please, all opinions are welcome and detention is not an option. This person is also the principal, the guidance counselor, the school nurse and, occasionally, the janitor. This person is your local librarian.

Yet somehow librarians still find time to match people with the books they need. These selections may be second-guessed by irate taxpayers who don’t know the difference between F. Scott Fitzgerald and L. Ron Hubbard or don’t understand that ideas and stories aren’t contagious; the only disease they’ll infect you with is empathy. Nevertheless, librarians persist. One could argue that they distribute more wings than an airline pilot. Put yours to good use and you can fly anywhere."

Analog Reading:

Finished Tom Perrotta's Mrs. Fletcher.  It was spicy but somehow the ending kind of bummed me out and made me feel sorry for the woman.

Reading Rabbit is Rich.  There are a lot of hilarious lines in this one, and I stand by my assertion that Harry is Gentile Larry David.  Always convinced he's correct, but insisting on it to an asinine extent and coming across as the asshole.  Aside from feeling relieved that I'm not a member of Rabbit's family, it's been interesting to see the progress of this family over the decades now, with Harry being born the same year as my grandmother, and his son, Nelson, born the same year as my mom.  It's funny to try imagining them behaving like any of the people in this book.  Not to imply that just because a real person shares a birth year with a fictional character, they should necessarily have anything else in common, but the books are such close studies of both general American and regionally specific culture (of Southeast Pennsylvania, not far from Philly) that it's hard not to look for parallels.

Syllabus #187

On Friday, I got pulled at the last minute to cover an hour of music class.  To my utter delight, it was a 5th grade class that would be practicing their repertoire of recorder melodies.  You truly haven't lived until you've conducted a roomful of 10 year olds through a heartfelt performance of Hot Cross Buns.

Lol forever at this Slate article about the physics of greased pole climbing vis a vis the Eagles potentially winning the Super Bowl.  I'm reading it and they quote this 38 year old pole dancer from Philly whose name is SO familiar, and then it hits me.  I had 3 roommates freshman year, and one of them used to steal everyone else's food and use the rest of our dishes without ever washing anything.  I did some light googling to confirm, and it was, indeed, my long lost friend.  [She was unpleasant to live with, but her antics seemed cute in comparison to the sophomore year sea hag who threatened to stab the rest of us, and trust me when I say it was not an empty threat.]  ANYwho, glad to see she's thriving.

I'm trying to understand who these etiquette rules are for?  The internet is freaking out about this eclectic list of social mores from The Cut, so naturally I had to see what all the fuss was about.  And I'm left with only one assumption, which is that there exists a portal to a bizarro uncanny valley world where people look and act and behave mostly like the people in this world, with enough subtle differences to make you question your sanity.  For example, I don't go to a lot of parties, but WHO is setting out bowls of cigarettes for their guests?  Bowls of nuts, candies, mints, pills*, sure even condoms if it's that kind of party**, but cigs?    

71.

 If you put out bowls of cigarettes at a party, you have to let people smoke inside.

They’re not décor.

*I've never been to that kind of party

**Or that kind, but this is a judgment free zone!  Except about bowls of cigarettes.  Ew.

Analog Reading:

Fairy Tale by Stephen King was an excellent exercise in and meditation on storytelling.  It did take a turn into the gory horror bloodbath at which King excels, but there's something so different about reading it on the page versus seeing it on screen.  Your mind's eye makes it exactly as grotesque as you can handle, whereas actually seeing someone else's interpretation of Pennywise the Clown with blood dripping from his fangs, or watching Kathy Bates slam that mallet into the dude's ankles so his feet flop like discarded sock puppets is almost unbearable.

Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta is SPICY as hell.  

Syllabus #186

I know I've been living in Nashville for too long when I'm reading a Stephen King book and so far, the scariest, most unbelievably disturbing part has been when a teenager puts a very large, important personal check in a residential mailbox.  It was like watching a horror movie where someone is about to open the door to a room where you, the viewer, know they are about to die.  I physically cringed.  Full body, sphincter-clenching cringe.  I was like bro, don't do it!  You're so young!  You've never had to file a police report and get a new bank account and change all your billing and direct deposit information!  You have so much to live for!

But then!  

Then, nothing, actually.  It was not a Chekhov's gun.  That was the end of it.  Presumably, the mail got picked up, the bill got paid, and I could no longer suspend my disbelief with this story.  Like, okay, Steve, you can convince me that a reclusive old man has a shed concealing a portal to another world full of gold and giant cockroaches, but you cannot make me believe that check wasn't stolen, washed, and passed at the Dickerson Pike Walmart.  Come on.

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Yes, this, absolutely x 1000.   I declare a moratorium on my birthday from this day forward.  Don't acknowledge it, don't speak of it.  I'll be come a Jehovah if I have to, except I'll celebrate your birthday if you're into that.  Just leave mine out of it.  

This comic strip breakdown of the trouble with AI art really resonates.  I read a picture book to a group of 5th graders about Marcel Duchamp and the urinal, and how that challenged notions and provoked debates about what could and could not be art.  Then we had a discussion about how we can draw parallels to the current controversy over AI creations of visual art and pieces of writing, and whether or not that can actually be called art.  A lot of kids agreed that AI art was probably not the same as art created by a human.  Did I lead them to that conclusion and they were just saying what I wanted to hear?  Maybe.  But this particular group of kids was particularly resistant to doing literally anything else I was asking of them, so who knows!

Analog Reading:

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta was spicy and thought-provoking but easy to digest.  

Fairy Tale by Stephen King is highly enjoyable.  It starts out sad but almost sweet, and then takes a sharp plunge into Weird Town, USA, but you definitely see it coming.  It's an interesting exploration of the act of storytelling - the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell others.