One of the real pleasures of Minister Faust’s From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain is his obvious and over-the-top love of language. All of the characters seem to spew tortured extended metaphors any chance they get. The narrator of the book is a psychiatrist who cobbles together strained psycho-babble like:

One of life’s greatest paradoxes is that only when we see ourselves at our most naked, weak, foolish, ugly, disappointing, cowardly, broken, repulsive, selfish, and stupid, can we really appreciate just how special we are. For Wally to fill up the tank of personal reintegration, he was going to have to pull into the filling station of exhaustive self-assessment. And so will you.

The book is about superheroes–specifically a world in which the superheroes have defeated most of their enemies in a the recent Götterdamerung and now don’t have a whole lot to do. The premise is that 6 of the most important superheroes have been forced into a Group Therapy session mandate by the JLA equivalent in order to resolve their differences. There are some similarities to Soon I Will be Invincible but that novel was more of a Thirtysomething meets Marvel approach while Dr. Brain feels more Die Traumdeutung meets Fight Club.

Many twists and revelations of the Luke-I-am-your-Father ensue and there is an anarchic quality to the narrative which feels loose and unstrained. Some of the targets of satire (psychology, superhero conventions) seem too easy, but others (race, gender, capitalism) are surprising and welcome. Of the 6 main characters, two are black and there is a running subplot about how superheroes have become complicit in racist and corporate crimes against minorities.

Also, in order to separate the 6 characters, Faust gives each an accent (Omnipotent man is a redneck, Iron Lass is a Norwegian Goddess, BrotherFly is a mix between a bug and 50 Cent) complete with dialect spelling–but they really don’t talk that differently. They all have the same sense of humor as Faust–sardonic, surreal, hyperbolic.

This is a good book to have in a classroom. It taps into (primarily) boy energy about superheroes but it is also infused with intelligence, satire, and an undercurrent of resistance to racial and sexual hypocrisy. Plus, the use of inspired language and intellectual allusion offer up a model for kids about how to see the world. See an excerpt here.

Image Credit: Coverbrowser.com

While I was away at lovely Cama beach with my kids and LOML, I read two books about ineffectual men obsessed by woman: All about Lulu by Jonathan Evison and All the Sad Literary Men by Keith Gessen. Both of them had something going for them, but I’m not going to finish either.

Lulu is about a boy named Will growing up frustrated and vegetarian in a house full of carnivorous bodybuilders–his Dad Big Bill who constantly falls short of Mr. Olympia and two meathead twins Doug and Ross–until his Dad remarries and Lulu enters the house. Will falls not smitten but unhealthily obsessed.  The writing has a great undercurrent of humor and absurdity, but I wasn’t able to care about Will and whether or not he would capture the heart of his stepsister.  The character was venal and sarcastic but without enough of a wit to make it better. This may be my fault as I’ve always had a hard time following and caring about sad sack characters.

Literary Men is completely different. This is a series of connected short stories that revolve around hyper-educated Harvard twentysomethings canoodling on the Right Coast.  I had a hard time telling them apart except based on what major work they were writing or failing to write: Mark wrote about Mensheviks, Sam Zionists, and Keith liberal political essays.  Strangely, even though I  didn’t enjoy these stories–they felt self-absorbed and  cramped–I read them quickly and kept on reading. I think the fact that the characters are similar to me attracted me despite the lack of other qualities. Jonathan Yardley liked it better than I did.

I’m glad I read what I did, but I’m not going to finish them.

That used to be a big deal. I remember being 14 and reading Camus’s The Myth of Sysiphus and not understanding word one, but still reading the whole thing because, you know, that’s what you do.  I’m not sure if I got the irony of that.  My students too are surprised when I tell them they don’t have to finish a book.  We get so locked into the idea that the books we assign are to read in full so that we can have a multiple choice test on them that we forget that the books serve us and not the other way around.  We have the power to put them down and find another one, one who will treat us better.

Maybe there are a few books in a classroom where we’ll want the students to read it all so we can talk as a community about the entire enchilada and have everyone munching along the whole way.  But reading doesn’t have to be a Bataan Death March.  We/I should remind ourselves that when we stop reading a book we’re making a decision to take our limited reading time and filling it with the best we pages we can find.

What if we let kids apply the Nancy Pearl-ian Rule of 50 in their own writing? Lots of readers/bloggers struggle with this a bit, but I think it would be healthier if we admitted that we’re not always ready for even the greatest books?  How can we make the classroom flexible enough to accommodate this?

Usually, I have the students teach the short stories to each other.

I recently finished Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners (from a tip on Bookslut) and I want to try again. She has a difficult style for kids and offputting to some: whimsical with a hint of disaster, winding plots, evocative if strange descriptions, and a taste for the surreal. Her first short story “The Faery Handbag” starts with a description of the Garment District in Boston and tells the story of her Grandmother Zofia who has an immense handbag which contains an entire village, a slavering dog, and the Zofia’s husband. Obviously, there are elements of magic realism there where you’re never sure if the rules of the story are different than the “real” world or if the characters are just coo-coo.

Link has a breezy, quirky style which is fun to read.

We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. The life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and T-shirts and shoes and handbags involves The Garment District. If clothes are good, or even if they are bad in an interesting way, The Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they start to reincarnate. But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.

It’s verbal in its rhythms and eschews SAT words but for kids, and I’ll want to test this out on a few willing victims. I’m worried that the way she plays with reality and fantasy might irritate kids who want to know what’s going on at all times. Later stories have zombies and stone rabbits that come to life, but they’re always literary zombies who are reflective of the consumerist society or literary rabbits who symbolize modern ennui. They never just haul off and munch on brains. Still…zombies are zombies. Here are a couple of other review to get a second and third opinion.

Magic would be a good book to have on hand for the quirky, misunderstood kid who has a bit emo radiating from his/her general direction. I’d love for this to work with a larger class and it might in the aforementioned short story student to student teaching. It would definitely stand out next to Hills like White Elephants or By the Waters of Babylon.

Any others have success in teaching short stories.

The Keep has two narratives going that merge towards the end for the big reveal. One narrative is about Danny, a going-nowhere aging hipster who travels to a castle in an unnamed Eastern European country to help his cousin Howard convert it into a postmodern (pre-modern?) hotel. When they were kids, Danny played a trick on his cousin that went horribly wrong and now he isn’t sure if his cousin is looking for payback or truly has his best interests in mind. There are moat-fulls of gothic elements: dead twins, mysterious baronnesses, ghosts, secrets, and underground passageways filled with torture devices. But the story itself feels modern. The tension between the two keeps the novel fresh while infusing it with some of the power of the gothic genre.

But what I loved most about it was that Egan can write a description like few can. She constantly chooses offbeat metaphors and details that surprise but still explain. The magic she exhibits in doing this reminds me about how hard it is to teach students to do the same.

When he first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language can up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom–those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but you could also be seen, you knew and were known. Two-way recognition. Standing on the castle wall, Danny felt alto–the world was still with him after all these years, even though the friends were long gone. Grown up, probably,

I love how the paragraph conveys not only how Danny feels, but some of the self-absorbedness of his view. He stays sympathetic even if not always admirable. Apparently, there are some talks about movie version, which would be difficult and very likely to rely on the reveal instead of the atmosphere.

If you get a chance, take a look at the official website for the book. It has a feel of a ARG with testimonials by the author, news, and photos of The Keep. Still, none of them really go anywhere. Or at least I couldn’t make it anywhere. A real, honest-to-goodness gothic ARG would have been a cool addition to the publicity for this book.

The Keep would be a good novel to have in the bookshelf and before I send it back to the library, I want to cherry-pick some strong paragraphs to use as models with my kids. Her Look at Me was on the shortlist for the National Book Award, so that might be a good one to pick up after I’m done with All about Lulu and All the Sad Literary Men.

Did you know you have 412 emotions? Simon Baron Cohen (Not this guy) and his crack team of researchers narrowed down the entire range of human feeling to 412 discrete emotions. In Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open, the pop sci author does a whirlinwind tour of brain science from the point of view of, well, a dude such as himself trying to understand himself. He explores emotion, memory, personality, and brain scans to shed light on what’s going on in our heads that we might not be able to quite access with our conscious mind.

The research on 412 emotions–meant to assist autistics who need to study human emotion like I need to study Spanish–reminded me of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics where he shows how to draw differing emotion-feeling faces by combining simple emotions.

Other researchers such as Robert Plutchik cobbled together cute little charts that dissect emotions. For instance, he explains that optimism = love + joy (apparently not madness + full belly) or that love = joy + acceptance (isn’t that contradictory? didn’t you need joy to have love? Is optimism just love with a lot more joy?).

Anyway, why would this matter for writing teachers? Sometimes I imagine that I’m half-Asperger’s (though my score on the Autism Quotient is actually ok) and emotions aren’t always easy for me to decode. It might be interesting to have students use one of these half-mathematical emotional theories to pre-write for creative writing. For instance, you could plan on writing a story about remorse and you would plan to dramatize how and why your main character would feel both sadness and disgust; writers would need to create separate ways of showing how those two emotions are manifested. The sadness might be shown by doodling cartoons of a favorite puppy over and over again and the disgust might come through in a telephone conversation with a friend where the main character constantly puts herself down.

Hopefully, the kids will come up with better examples than that.

Maus led to a number of graphic novels–some revelatory others disappointing. I’d head of Will Eisner’s The Contract with God Trilogy from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Published in 1978 it was a watershed moment for the medium. The first set of the trilogy (The Contract with God) is a set of 4 stories that revolve around life in mythical Dropsie Avenue, an Jewish immigrant neighborhood in NYC. The stories combine forceful, almost melodramatic illustrations with wry, cynical stories that dwell on human weakness and our inability to resist our impulses.

The title story involves a Russian Jew who escapes the pogroms of Tsarist Russia because of his piety and good works. He makes a “contract with God” in which he promises to be do good works in order for unspecified advantage. When he takes in a foundling girl and she later dies of leukemia, he rejects God in a heart-rending panel. Afterwards, he becomes a unscrupulous slumlord and tries to make as much money as possible. Strangely, this may be one of the more positive stories of the series. The other three trade in a much darker, much grimmer view of human nature. No one seems to have benign intentions and no one seems to be able to resist their gnawing Ids, clamoring for release.

I want to be able to say I could teach this in my classes. I don’t think I have the guts. Many of the stories in the first book of the series involve graphic sex and violence. Of course, I realize that I’ve taught books like 100 Years of Solitude which have more sexual content. But the shock of seeing even blue outlined forms having sex in haylofts might be too much. Still, the graphic novel has the potential to amaze. Students might accept Eisner’s graphic stories in a way they might dismiss or ignore if they were more traditional short stories. The writing and art has an undeniable vitality to it that attracts even while the stories themselves express deep reservations about human nature. At the end, I get the feeling that Eisner retains some affection for the grimy lives of humans, something close to pity, disgust, amusement, and wonder all mixed together.

The second book (”A Life Force”) is much tamer and a good US History class could use excerpts to illustrate ideas about life in Depression-era US. The stories even intersperse short articles about the Depression along with the narrative. The last (”Dropsie Avenue”) describes the machinations involved in the evolution of Dropsie Avenue froma tenement into a set of inexpensive homes. This feels less vital to me, but it does make interesting points about white flight and political power which would be harder (and less engaging) to describe traditionally.

In the end, I think having a set 5 books might be a good solution. Smaller groups (especially in a US history class) could read the book, present aspects of it, and even create their own panels or comic book pages that tell stories which illustrate issues in US History. A class in literature or creative writing could use the book to show (ala Understanding Comics) how a graphic novelist can use the conventions of the comic page to tell a story, set a mood, and suggest themes and symbols.

Eisner’s work is masterful and engaging; it would take an excellent teacher to exploit it, but the result could be well worth it.

This novel is a detective story/alternative history where the Jews were kicked out of Israel in 1948 and somehow land in southeastern Alaska for a few decades before the US decides to kick them out again.  The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a detective (a shammes in Yiddish) trying to find the killer of a junkie heroin addict killed in the flophouse he live in before the Reversion sends all the Jews scrambling. There are all kinds of hoary detective cliche’s (down and out detective, losing his badge, tough guy banter, gangsters, at least-spoiler!–his partner doesnt’ die).  Still, no detective story is so crammed full of scrumptious language.

In the acknowledgements Chabon notes his use of Yiddishdictionary.com and it shows.  Did you know shoyfer means phone in Yiddish? Well, actually it is a ritual ram’s horn blown on the Sabbath and so therefore it’s the slang term for a phone.  Yikes.  Still, even though there is a long, obsessed, devoted description of the magic properties of the Phillipino/Yiddish doughnut called shtekeleh which apparently Chabon made up.

But when it comes to description, dude can write.

A ganef wind has blown down from the mainland to plunder the Sitka treasury of fog and rain, leaving behind only cobwebs and one bright penny in a vault of polished blue.  At 12:03 the sun has already punched its ticket. Sinking, it stains the cobbles and stuccos of the platz in a violin-colored throb of light that you would have to be a stone not to find poignant. Landsman, a curse on his head, but he is no stone.

Such a great mix of hard-boiled fiction metaphor-twisting prose and that “violin-colored throb…”  Wow.

What I love about Chabon is that he’s so clearly a lit fiction writer with those sensibilities and brings them into the realm of popular lit. He’s not always easy to read but his challenges tread a good line between litera-cha and popular lit.  There’s talk of a movie version with Cohen brothers directing which could be beyond amazing. I’m not sure who get to be Landsmen–Harrison Ford? Phillip Seymore Hoffman?

As a teacher, I want to clip out some passages as good description models–especially to show how he is able to create surprising metaphors that are nevertheless clear. I’m also interested in how he uses the Yiddish vocab. Could their be an assignment where you get a set of dialect terms or jargon terms and you have to use them to tell a story? I love the idea of the play of language as it’s own character. It would be an advanced skill for students but amazing if it works.

Other resources:

• Spiked-online Review
• NYT review
• NYTRB Review

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The other brain book I’ve been reading is Brain Rules by John Medina. Dr. Medina works at the UDub as a developmental molecular biologist. His book is part of the wave of books about how brains work and the implications for work and learning. I’ve been hoovering them up lately, even though none of them has yet given me a silver bullet yet. In true blogging fashion, Dr. Medina has broken up his conclusions into 12 Rules:

EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.
SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.
WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.
ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.
STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.
VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

Despite the nifty graphics and a strong resistance to the temptation to overpromise, I’m not yet sure how to use this information. The information in the exercise section suggests that some of that TPR stuff might not be such a bad idea. For instance, in my writing class I could start with a fast paced walk around the park to get the blood going and at the halfway mark maybe take an exercise break wherein we could do tree pose or downward dog.

Also, the visual section suggests that we don’t do so hot when it comes to strictly auditory processing. Even static visuals such as Keynote slides seem to be less than effective. Medina blithely suggests that we “animate” our presentations: nuhprobblem! I just teach 185 days out of the year. How hard could it be? Still, I’ve thought about emulating the CommonCraft format of whiteboards and paper cut outs. Or, I could sketch out the basic info I want to communicate and make my kids shoot the animation.

Other bloggers have commented on the book, including Will Richardson, HomeschooledTwins, Engaging Learners, and History Tech. Still, I haven’t seen anyone really try to tease out how this information would play in the classroom. I’ll try in a later post.

He says we are prediction-making machines.

It felt a little like the part in Freud’s Dream Book when he explained that all of our dreams are exercises in wish fulfillment. And then he tells a story in which a woman’s dream, no matter how hard he pushes or pulls it, just doesn’t can’t won’t become a wish to be fulfilled. Until. Until, he realizes that the woman knows all about his theory, secretly loathes him, and therefore her unconscious spit out a dream that defied his theory just to spite him. But, of course, now his theory emerges. Stronger than ever.

Genius.

Still, Hawkins’ book does make me think (sigh). How hard is it to get a machine to make a prediction of what will happen based on what the machine experienced in the past? Is that what the crazy kids at Numenta are up to? And more to the point as a writing teacher. Should I think more about how I can have kids be more deliberate in how they think about their writing as prediction, as playing with the expectations of readers and finding ways to meet them and then surprise them. Somehow knowing when to do which?