The City Below by James Carroll

On a brisk spring morning in the year that John F. Kennedy began his run for president, a pair of burly micks in overalls and tweed caps sat on the bench in front of the monument on bunker Hill in Charlestown.

Opening to The City Below by James Carroll.

When does something become a cliche?  Can the status of cliche be applied retroactively? 

It's not completely fair to open with those questions because it implies that I did not like The City Below, which is not true.  I found much to enjoy in The City Below.  The novel is about two brothers who grow up in the Charlestown section of Boston.  The brothers are Irish.  They are raised by a single mother and their somewhat crusty grandfather.  One brother is destined to become a priest the other a gangster.  There is an alcoholic priest.  There are ties to the Kennedy's.  There is a sense that we've all been down this road many times before.  But the book was first published in 1994, almost 20 years ago.  How often had we been down this road in 1994? 

Even a cliched story can offer the reader rewards, and The City Below does offer them, but whether or not you stay with the book long enough may depend on how you react to the following passage which occurs at the end of the first part.  The would-be--priest brother has had a crises of faith.  He may not enter the seminary after all.  After his mother dies while he is away from home working on John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, he goes to confession.

He had not been to confession since May, when he'd decided against entering the seminary. He knew he had not caused his mother's death. And he knew he had not blinded Bright. Or deliberately lied to Didi. Or abandoned Nick.  Yet moments later, on his knees, curled like a fetus in the warm darkness of the womb of the church, he whispered dryly to the shadowy ear a few inches from his mouth, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."

And for the first time ever he knew it was true.

Curled like a fetus in the warm darkness of the womb of the church.  I almost gave up then and there.  But I kept reading.  The City Below won't make it to my top ten reads of the year list, but it did serve a function more literary fiction does not.  The City Below occupies a status between literary fiction and more pulpy, supermarket type fiction.  This middle ground makes it possible for books like The City Below to address contemporary issues, like birth control, like busing, like crime, like the loss of faith in ways more literary fiction avoids.   And it can present a cast of characters one can readily identify with, maybe because they are a bit cliched. 

Within the cast of characters who make up The City Below there is one original character,  Bright McKay, a young African-American man Terry meets while working for John F. Kennedy.  Bright is the son of an Episcopalian minister.  He grows up in the once thriving Roxbury section of Boston, is successful in college, works for a succession of Kennedy brothers.  Does very well in life.  He's also secretly gay.  This is a story I for one would like to read.  It's a story that I've not heard yet, in 2010 and one that certainly would not have been cliched in 1994. 

Yale Update #1 - Booking New York

 Before heading up to Yale for the summer, I spent five days in New York City with my partner, C.J. We stayed at The Amsterdam Inn on the upper west side. It's very cheap for New York, just under 100 dollars a night. This is the floor map on the back of our room's door. Our room is the one with the dot. It was just a bit too small to actually take a picture of the room, so I took one of the map. Did I mention that it was cheap?

C.J. is an artist and a big fan of both Medieval European art and of textiles.  This means that whenever we go to New York we visit the unicorn tapestries at The Cloisters.  This is not sacrifice for me at all, since I enjoy the art there and they have a very nice cafe/garden where I can sit and draw while C.J. gets his fill of tapestry.  You can see my sketch in the picture to the right. 

  

I made a conscious decision not to go to the Strand Bookstore this time. I've been to it on all of my three previous trips to New York City -- it's huge, it's wonderful but to be honest, it's not really my kind of store. I'd much rather go to a smaller bookstore, one that's comfortable for browsing and much more likely to have six or seven books I've never heard of but look so interesting I have to buy them.  I tend to walk out of The Strand empty handed and I think it's a bit pricey for a used bookstore.

Unfortunately, I also made a conscious decision not to buy any books this time either since  I'll have the Yale library at my disposal all summer long. On Broadway, just across the street from Zabar's is Westsider Rare and Used Books.  More used than rare, but lots of good stuff.  I found many titles from England which haven't made their way to the left coast, at least not to the used book stores I go to.  Westsider is a small store but the books go all the way to the top of the twenty foot ceilings.  You have to use a ladder to get to the ones on the high shelves.  I bought one book.  C.J. took it back to California so I can't check the title but it's by Jane Gardem who wrote The Queen of the Tambourine.

A surprise treasure is the bookshop at the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side.  If you've not been to the Tenement museum, I highly recommend it.  They've preserved a mid-19th century tenement and offer several different guided tours of the apartments which are furnished to reflect different periods of time and different waves of immigration to the U.S.   It's fascinating, and their book shop is wonderful.  There is a focus on immigration and the immigrant experience, but I found an autographed copy of The Thing Around Your Neck and had to have it.  I'm a Chimimanda Adichie fanboy.  If you're out there Chimimanda, I still want to interview you.  I don't mind that you never replied to my email. 

The Housing Works Bookstore/Cafe on Crosby St., not too far from the Tenement Museum, is a used bookstore junky's paradise.  They've an excellent cafe and a wide selection of top notch books in great condition and at excellent prices.  Better than what I'm used to paying in California.  Their wifi is free with a 1.50 dollar purchase.

Much of New York is a bargain.  The books, the breakfasts.  We found lots of museums with free nights and pay what you want polices, and once we gave up on getting a ticket to a Broadway show, we were able to see four Off-Off-Broadway shows for under 110.00 dollars for two.

Now, C.J. is back in California and I'm at Yale.  The Yale bookstore is a Barnes and Noble.  It's a very good Barnes and Noble, but still.  I was hoping for something else.  And so far, there are no bargains at Yale.  New Haven is turning out to be much more expensive than New York.

An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel

This morning in the newspaper I saw a picture of Julia.

Opening to An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel.

Reading An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel I soon began to wonder why the book's characters spend time together.  They don't like each other very much.  They are not very nice to each other either.

The narrator, Carmel, comes from a working class, Irish Catholic family.  Her mother pushes her to gain a scholarship to the local convent school and then to sit for examinations to London University.  Along the way Carmel is forced to befriend Karina, the daughter of immigrant parents.  Carmel's mother knows something about Karina's family that justifies forcing Carmel to befriend her, though her mother never tells Carmel what it is.

Karina is not a sympathetic character in spite of the un-named tragedy she has survived.  She reminded my of Tsugumi in Banana Yoshimoto's novel Goodbye Tsugumi.  Carmel is saddled with Karina throughout childhood and on into the dormitory at London University though she longs to dump her in favor of Julienne, the daughter of wealthy parents who befriends her at the convent school.  But even Julienne' friendship becomes problematic by the novel's end. Why do these girls spend so much time together when they basically do not like each other? 

Midway through the novel, I remembered my own experience at college, living in the dorms, forced to befriend the people I lived with though we had little in common.  We thought more profound things drew us together, but proximity was the strongest factor at play.  I became friends with people who lived on the same floor and a few more that I shared classes with. The friendships of youth did not last beyond it, with but a handful of exceptions. 

Ms. Mantel gets much of it right in An Experiment in Love: friendship, first love, moving on and away from family.  However, towards the end the novel takes several dramatic turns and finally loses its way.  First, we realize that what looked like extreme frugality brought on by lack of funds was really a developing case of anorexia.  Ms. Mantel's narrator doesn't realize this until she becomes ill from it, and it's a tribute to Ms. Mantel's narrative that the reader does not either.  It's difficult for me to understand why one becomes anorexic, but after reading An Experiment in Love I can see how it happens.  Carmel's illness surprised me as much as it did her, but it was entirely believable.

There are two very dramatic events at the end of the novel that I won't reveal.  One of them was believable, but the second was so over the top it made me chuckle when I should have been horrified.  Really, some editor out there should have said no, you can't do that.  I don't care if it really did happen in real life, it's just too much for a novel.  And it wasn't necessary.  Know when to say when.

 An Experiment in Love is one of Ms. Mantel's earlier books.  Based on the strength of her writing, and her understanding of  human behavior, I'll be looking forward to more of her work.

TSS: Edmund White and Doric Wilson Discuss Stonewall

In many parts of the United States today is Pride Day.  CJ and find ourselves celebrating by parting ways, temporarily.  We're leaving New York City--he's going back home to California, and I'm going on to Yale for my summer class. 

So we're actually in New York on Pride day but instead of celebrating we're on our way out of town.  Funny how life works out.

I found this clip of novelist Edmund White talking to playwright Doric Wilson about gay life in the 1960's in general and the Stonewall riots in particular.

Happy Pride Day everyone.

Dakota's Favorites: The Last Ride (The Missing) by Tom Eidson

Every two weeks Dakota and I dip into the archive and present a book we reviewed and loved.  This week, a change of pace, a western.

The Last Ride (The Missing) by Tom Eidson is one of several book I've ordered because of recommendations on BBC Radio 4's, A Good Read. It still seems odd to me that I found out about this terrific novel by an American writer set in the American west through a discussion among three English celebrities. Perhaps Americans find the western so far out of the category "literature" that we no longer give it any notice. That's too bad really, because if there are more books out there as good as The Last Ride then we've been missing out.


The Last Ride, most recently published under the title The Missing, contains both classic western plots: a stranger rides into town and a stranger rides out of town. The stranger, Samuel Jones, is a dying man, a mystery man, come back to white society after years of living as an Indian. He finds his daughter, Maggie, whom he has not seen since he left her mother a lifetime ago, married with two young daughters, living on a successful ranch. Maggie knows that he left her mother for an Indian woman and blames him for her mother's breakdown and death. She will have nothing to do with him, won't allow him into her house. Her husband, Brake, refuses to send a dying old man away and lets him sleep in the barn. Maggie tries to keep her daughters away from him and his Indian ways, but her youngest daughter, Dot, is taken in by the notion of an Indian grandfather and, of course, by his small dog, Chaco.

Several days later, Maggie's husband, their farm hand Mannito and their daughter Lily are attacked by a group of Apache Indians who "gone off the reservation". Mannito is horribly killed, Maggie's husband is grievously wounded and Lily is kidnapped. Dot begs Jones to use his Indian magic to find Lily like he found her missing cat Harriet, but Maggie puts no faith in anything but the Christian God. Jones tells them that the local sheriff and his posse are heading in the wrong direction, walking into a trap instead of following Lily's trail. He sets off to rescue Lily. Dot runs off after him followed soon by Maggie. The three of them form a very uneasy alliance in the search for Lily.

This is John Ford's The Searchers, starring John Wayne and Natalie Wood, but it's much more than The Searchers. The relationship between the whites and the Indians is not kept at a distance like it was during most of The Searchers. The hero, the John Wayne role, in The Last Ride is a white man but he is also fully an Indian. The conflict between the two societies has already been played out in the life Samuel Jones lived before he arrived at the start of the novel. Now, what remains to be done, is to rescue Lily, his white granddaughter, and reconcile with Maggie his white daughter. He has already lost most of his Indian family, massacred by whites. He must also reconcile himself with the reader as well because he did abandon his wife and family and, no matter what your position is, this is an unforgivable act for the hero of a novel to commit. The rescue attempt and the eventual reconciliation are what make up the bulk of The Last Ride.

The aspect of The Last Ride that sets it apart from most historical fiction, and that many readers may find difficult to accept, is howit  integrates Indian spirituality. Samuel Jones has constructed a belief system based on the many Indian tribes he has spent time with. He believes that the visions he sees in his dreams are real, that his spirit guides will lead him to Lily. And they do. Throughout the novel, Jones spiritual life is presented as true and real and as the key to many of the plot developments, so much so that the novel begins to border on a type of ghost story. The Last Ride is a western, but a western that almost passes into the realm of fantasy.

It seems a shame to me that American audiences have basically abandoned the western genre. Books like The Last Ride, movies like The Searchers, still have much to offer. Leaving this ground behind is understandable I know, but I think we leave behind a large part of the American consciousness as well. So, I'm giving The Last Ride by Tom Eidson five out of five stars. I'm also adding the author's other westerns to my wish list at Paperbackswap.com. I also warn readers that Tom Eidson writes westerns in the tradition of Larry McMurtry; neither of them shy away from depictions of violence.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch

In the fall of 2007, I reluctantly decided to have my office repainted.  It was inconvenient.
Opening to chapter one of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch.

Everyone I have ever met feels qualified to tell me how to do my job.  Everyone.  No exceptions.  I'm a teacher.  I've been in the classroom for 19 years.  Even when they know that, people I meet still feel qualified to tell me how to do my job or at least to let me know what's really wrong with education in America.  Diane Ravitch actually is qualified.  While I don't always agree with her, she does have the background, the experience, and the wisdom to offer a solid critique of education in America.  Her opinion is one that should be respected even if you disagree.

Ms. Ravitch was an early supporter of No Child Left Behind.  She worked for the department of education under President Clinton and President Bush and has stood in opposition to trends in education such as whole language and constructivist math.   She has long believed that the only way to improve education is to focus on what curriculum is taught rather than on how to teach it.  She was a key player in the development of the curriculum standards set by the State of California in the 1980's and 1990's.  One wonders how she ever came to embrace No Child Left Behind in the first place.

In fact, that's one problem I had with The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  While it's useful to have solid evidence laid out against NCLB, I kept asking myself where were you 10 years ago?  I knew this back then; most of us on the ground, in the classroom did.  We knew the goal of 100% proficiency in reading and math by 2014 was an impossible goal.  No one in any profession is ever 100% successful.  We knew that reliance on standardized tests and use of their results to punish individual schools and teachers would produce cheating at worst and teaching to the test at best.  We knew the students had no real reasons to care about the test anyway.  As I remember, we weren't keeping this information to ourselves either. 

That said, if you're following the on-going debate about education in America, then you stand to gain much from  reading The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  One example is the chapter devoted to the influence of private foundations on American schools.  At the moment, America seems to be enthralled by the twin ideas of teacher accountability and school choice.  Teacher salaries must be linked to test scores and parents must be given a choice of schools for their children.  This is accepted wisdom, though there is no solid evidence that it will improve education.  The underlying belief is that application of free market principles in a deregulated environment will bring about improvements in education.  Just like they did in banking, I guess. 

Ms. Ravitch contends that the focus on these two issues is the result of spending by a handful of super rich foundations, namely the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Fund.  Together, along with a few others, these foundations give many millions of grant dollars annually.  They have given money to just about every educational foundation in the country as well as to universities, private schools, charter schools and political candidates.  No one is willing to bite the hand that feeds them by questioning the twin assumptions of accountability and school choice.  Mr. Obama's new Race for the Top program is specifically designed to increase the number of charter schools and to eliminate teacher unions.  Everyone should be held accountable for the success or failure of American schools.  Expect, of course, the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Fund which face neither re-election or a critical board of directors.  They can do as they please; they answer to no one.  Certainly not to classroom teachers with 19 years of experience.

Incidentally, Ms. Ravitch adds, the charter school movement has all but eliminated the drive for vouchers.  Religious private schools can simply take the crosses (or whatever) off of their walls and become a charter school.  No voucher needed. One result of this is that the number of Catholic schools in America has declined by a third as parents leave parochial schools for free charter schools.  Ms. Ravitch is a fan of Catholic schools which she believes have long been successful with immigrant and low-income populations throughout urban America.

One can argue that parents should have the right to send their children to any school they choose.  Ms. Ravtich argues that children should have the right to attend a good school in their own neighborhood and that local schools are the foundation of a community.  She fears that by giving up on that idea, we place the entire notion of local community at risk.  Where do members of a community gather if not at the local school?  What other institution crosses neighborhood barriers of race, religion, class and ideology? 

Ms. Ravitch has always been skeptical of reform, of the latest educational fads.  I've always been open to new ideas.  I'll try just about anything if it looks like it will help my students.  But after 19 years I've been around long enough to know that every educational reform that has come along has also gone away.  What remains?  Good teaching always works.  It doesn't always show up on standardized tests, but it always works.  Solid curriculum also remains as the foundation for good teaching.  On that, Ms. Ravitch and I agree.  Now if we could just sit down with the president. Maybe share a round of beer.

Genesis by Jim Crace

Every woman he dares to sleep with bares his child. 

Opening to Genesis by Jim Crace.

Genesis by Jim Crace takes place at the intersection of love and sex.   The novel's hero, Felix Dern, has impregnated every woman he has ever had sex with.  He has six children, born to five different mothers.  The narration is episodic, each section tells the story of how one child was conceived.  The events and circumstances that lead to each sexual act create a portrait of Felix Dern and of the city he lives in.  I've never read a book with so much sex in it that also had such a strong a sense of place.  The setting of Genesis becomes a character.

While there is sex on the page, Genesis is by no means pornographic.  In fact, I'd be hard pressed to call it erotic.  Sex is one of the most difficult things to write about; just about everyone who has tried  has produced unintended laughs.  Mr. Crace is not prudish but he keeps the details to a minimum.  He is much more interesed in love than sex, anyway.  Of the five women Felix sleeps with, he loved at least three.  I think he loved all five, though this depends on how one defines love.

At times, reading Genesis was a chore.  Felix tends to let life happen to him, rather than to act, which can make him a difficult protagonist.  But when the narration is working, it works very well, well enough to make me gasp out loud.   In the section describing how Felix's third child was conceived, he and his first wife, Alicja, attend a party that ends in a game of confession.  Each player is supposed to confess something they've never done.  If everyone else has done that particular thing, the player stays in the game.  Alicja is already planning to leave Felix.  She uses the game to humiliate him by making a claim regarding their sex life which she knows is not true and that made me gasp.  They spend one final night together, conceiving their second child, and then their marriage is over.

While Genesis is a modern novel, it falls back on an old-fashioned double marriage plot in the end.  Felix falls into a bad first marriage, escapes it, and finds a good marriage with a new wife.  A plot as least as old as David Copperfield.  I'm not faulting Mr. Crace for this-- it's entirely believable in the context of his novel, and Felix does spend seven almost celibate years between wives.  After spending so much time with Felix, it's understandably difficult to leave him unhappy and alone.  Difficult for the author as well as the reader.  I was pleased to see Felix get a happy ending.


Genesis was originally published in England under the title Six.  I think Six is a much better title--it refers to the number of  children Felix had and echoes the word sex quite nicely.   I don't know why the good people at Farrar, Straus and Giroux decided to change the it.  Doesn't sex sell in America?

Short Story Monday: The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick

Clara Church, although only thirty-three, earned fifteen thousand dollars a year.

Opening to "The Oak and the Axe" from The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick.

"The Oak and the Axe" is the fifth story in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick and the first one I liked.  The story concerns Clara, a middle aged woman, recently divorced, successful at the magazine where she is the food editor, able to afford the lifestyle she wants.  Clara meets Henry Dean, a single man with a great deal of promise. Henry, the son of wealth, has the aristocratic air her more successful first husband lacked.  Henry has no substantial wealth; he is "retired on 250 a month."   Age 47, he hasn't done anything of note yet, but Clara is convinced he will.  She has so much faith in him that she asks him to marry her.

There's a meanness about "The Oak and the Axe" that I found troubling.  The story is satire; we're not meant to feel sorry for Clara or for Henry.  Clara is basically cold, a person kept so busy by her struggle to keep everything at work perfect that she cannot make a marriage successful.  Her first husband leaves her for his secretary while she is still quite young.  They have no children.  When she falls for Henry she is falling for her opposite, a ne'er-do-well, lazy, unambitious man incapable of concerted effort, but a man whom other people feel sorry for in a way no one would ever feel for Clara. 

She's just  too easy a target.  Satirizing women like her is  like shooting fish in a barrel.  While I found it good fun when Dorothy Parker did it, it feels uncomfortable here.  "The Oak and The Axe" was published in 1956, just a few years before Sylvia Plath would rip the lid off of the world of women's magazines in The Bell Jar.  Maybe Clara should be read as a precursor to Esther Greenwood.  But I suspect Esther would have been horrified by Clara. 

Ms. Hardwick was one of the founders of The New York Review of Books, which has published this collection.  Her stories appeared there and in The New Yorker and The Partisan Review.  They seem to be just the sort of thing for their readers.  Satirical and sardonic, the kind of story Dorothy Parker would approve of, though I think Ms. Parker did it better. 

Full Disclosure:  I received a advanced review copy of The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick from the publisher.

TSS: Arrgh! I'm a pirate! And other randomness.

Appropo of nothing I found out how to turn a picture into an "Andy Warhol" at Big Huge Labs.  This really makes me wonder what Mr. Warhol would be up to if her were making images today.  Imagine what he could do.  I think this has lots of potential for next year's yearbook.

And think Dakota and I look pretty good in multi-color montage.

Arrgh!

This weekend was the annual Pirate Festival here in Vallejo, CA.  The lawn in front of the ferry building is taken over by 100's of pirates and thousands of pirate admirers.  It's remarkable that so many grown people long to dress up in pirate costumes and pretend to be marauders on the Spanish Main.  But what the heck; pirates know how to have a good time.  Here are some photos.

Several different groups have full size mock-up pirate ships at the festival. 

There are several stages around the festival with singing groups.  They sounded pretty good to me, for a bunch of pirates.  Lots of sea-shanty type stuff was sung.

At this attraction you can fling a monkey at the pirate.  They have a little air cannon that shoots toy monkies at a target.  A target, a cannon and a barrel of monkies.  What more do you need for an afternoon of fun?

If you want to know about pirates I recommend Under the Black Flag: the Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly.  It's a very readable piece of history, loaded with interesting stories and information about pirates.






What I Saw At Walmart....

CJ and I went to Walmart this week. We're not proud; we're on a budget.   New England summers are very hot and humid, so I wanted to get some sandals and shorts for my trip to Yale.  We also needed a new lunchbox size cooler for New York.  This is one way we save money when we travel, and we plan on buying lunch at Zabar's, which is down the street from our hotel, every day while in New York.

We seldom ever go to Walmart, so it's an unusual experience for both of us.  I was looking for a hat, which I didn't find--all too small for me.  One-size fits most, ha!  I did see a mesh-type cowboy hat with "Speak the language!" embrodiered on it.   While the hat didn't say which language, it was written in English.  I think this is a controversial item to sell in a store with a very large non-English speaking clientelle, and a hat I would not wear in many parts of California.   I checked the label to be sure, because I had a feeling.... Sure enough, it was made in China.

I checked out the book section because I always check out the book section wherever I go.  Though small, it's not bad.  Most of the books in it are not something I'd read, but they do have a little section of "Oprah approved" type books that are a bit more literary.  Then I saw it, the new thriller written by right wing pundit Glenn Beck.  I wondered if he had someone helping him, since he's not really known for his novelistic skills.  Mr. Beck has three, three people he credits with helping him write his novel, three.  Mr. Beck does not list them as co-authors.  Instead they are listed under the heading "with contributions from:"   Still, I guess we should credit Mr. Beck with being one of the writers.  Tom Clancy doesn't even write Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell books anymore at all. He hires someone to do it for him and puts his own name on the cover.  (Maybe he was inspired by Andy Warhol.)

Why do so many political pundits write thrillers anyway?  Mr. Beck, Mr. O'Reilly, even politicians like Barbara Boxer.  Does anybody actually read them?  Have I missed anything good?  In all fairness, I think a couple of novelist should be elected to congress or given their own talk shows.  I think John Irving would be a good congressman based on his work ethic alone, and I suspect Stephen King has enough to say to fill up a nightly cable talk show.  I know I'd watch.  If I had cable.

Have You Read.....

Man of Errors wrote a wonderful post about his mother's passion for Nureyev this week.  I've not made it sound very enticing, but it's a wonderful post, just the sort of thing the blog format can do so well.  If you missed it, you really should check it out, even if you have no interest in the ballet.

Brent, a 15-year-old book blogger in Kentucky takes his school librarian to task over the lack of LGBT titles in the collection here.  If you haven't read his post yet, check it out.  The kid is all right.  My middle school's collection does have several titles, Brent, as does my classroom literature circles collection.  But nothing by Glenn Beck.

Friday Picture Reading

If you know anything about this painting please let me know.  I found it, uncredited here.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.  That's what we're doing.

From Jimmy Wales's forward to The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih.

I have been obsessed with Wikipedia lately. Jennie over at Biblio File recently complained that the author of a book she was reading listed Wikipedia as his main source of information.  This should not be allowed in a nonfiction book, says Jennie, certainly not in one nominated for a prestigious award.  I teach middle school English and history, which involves a significant amount of research, which these days means significant use of online sources including Wikipedia.  Jennie is far from the only person who argues that Wikipedia should not be used for serious research based on the assumption that because anyone can write or edit an article, the articles on Wikipedia cannot be trusted. 

I disagree, but who am I to say?  Who are you to say, for that matter?  Why should we assume that because Wikipedia articles are the product of a collective effort they are therefore untrustworthy? 

To find an authoritative answer to the question of Wikipedia's accuracy I turned to my local library where I found The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created The Worlds Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih.  In it, I found lots of interesting information that made my general opinion of Wikipedia is even higher now than it was previously, but I did not find an authoritative answer to the question of Wikipedia's accuracy.

I did find that Wikipedia contains all sorts of articles you won't find elsewhere. Mr. Lih points out several fascinating examples.  Do you want to know why there is a year 1 B.C.E. and a year 1 C.E. but not a year zero?  Need an explanation of the Buttered Cat Paradox, The Five-Second Rule or the Chewbacca Defense?  You won't find these topics in maintream encyclopedias, but you will find thorough, interesting articles on them at Wikipedia. 

You'll also find a fascinating article about the Boston Molasses Disaster, which I'm betting you never heard of.  In 1919, a large molasses storage tank burst, sending a wave of molasses between 8 and 15 feet high rushing down the streets of Boston's North End at a speed of 35 mph.  21 people were killed and over 150 were injured.   Can you find that in the Encyclopedia Britannica or in the World Book?  I could not.

The breadth of articles on Wikipedia is matched by the range of languages it comes in.  Encyclopedias are an arduous undertaking.  The difficulties and costs associated with their production limits their profitability to a few major languages.  Many people around the world speak a language with no encyclopedia, or did until Wikipedia came along.  Now speakers of Waloon have over 9,800 articles in Waloon available to them.  Speakers of Corsican have over 5,600, Pangasinan 3,000, Wu 2,600.  If you feel the need to do your research the old fashioned way, in Latin, Wikipedia has over 15,000 articles in the language of the ancient Romans. 

As of today there are well over three million articles in English on Wikipedia. 

As far as Wikipedia's accuracy goes, Mr. Lih's book does not offer a definitive answer.  He does discuss the study commissioned by Nature Magazine which compared 42 scientific articles on Wikipedia with those in the Encyclopedia Britannica and found both to be about equally accurate.  They found just over three errors per article on Wikipedia and just over two errors per article in the Encyclopedia Britannica.  A second study Mr. Lih cites found Wikipedia to be about 80 percent accurate while Encyclopedia Britannica was 96% accurate.  Mr. Lih does discuss several well known cases of sabotage, deliberate attempts to spread misinformation, on Wikipedia and  a few long running controversies, such as whether or not Gdansk, Poland should be called Gdansk or Danzig which was it's name when it was part of Germany.   Much of Mr. Lih's book is like this, concerned with things that will fascinate some and leave many others cold. 

In the end, I cannot say that I have a satisfactory answer to the question of Wikipedia's reliability.  I'll offer up the reply everyone at Wikipedia reflexively gives whenever anyone points out an inaccuracy on it. "Why don't you fix it?" 


To test just how difficult this is, I decided to add some information to the post about one of my favorite authors Patrick Ryan.   I was sure that I would be the first one to post information about Mr. Ryan and that this would get Ready When You Are, C.B. all kinds of traffic.  As it turns out, there was already a post about Partick Ryan, and Ready When You Are, C.B. was listed in the footnotes.  I did add some information to the article taken from the interview I did with Mr. Ryan last year.  While it is fairly easy to add text to a Wikipedia article I found that some knowledge of HTML is helpful when it comes to adding footnotes.  Wikipedia's interface is not as easy to use as sites like Blogger.  This is something they should probably work on.  I did find a very good article about Wikipedia's factual reliability on Wikipedia itself.

So where does this leave me as far as using Wikipedia with my 6th and 7th grade students goes?  I alternate teacher assigned topics with student selected ones throughout the year.  For our last major project I let the students select their own research topics.  They included:

• 
  
  Jello
• 
  
  Early animation
• 
  
  Boston Terriers
• 
  
  The death of Kurt Cobain
• 
  
  The trash art of H.A. Schultz
• 
  
  House cat behavior
• 
  
  Forensic science
• 
  
  P-57 Mustangs
• 
  
  The formation of The Beatles
• 
  
  Roller coasters
• 
  
  Albino animals
• 
  
  An assortment of sports stars

You can probably see already that Wikipedia came in very handy, but it was not the only website they used.  (You can see some of the projects my students produced at TeacherTube.  Please rate them highly.)   For next year, I'm planning on doing a mini-unit about Wikipedia itself, how to use the information there, how to use the bibliography and footnotes as a source for more information and how to evaluate the information in the articles to determine if it's reliable enough to cite in your own research. 

Full Disclosure:  the picture of the Boston Molasses Disaster came from Wikipedia.  I could not get into the Encyclopedia Britanicca online because I'm too cheap to pay for it.  Say what you will about Wikipedia; it is free.  Waloon is spoken in Belgium, Corsican is the native lanuage spoken on the Island of Corsica, Pangasinan is one of the twelve major languages spoken in the Philippines and Wu is a form of Chinese.  While I cannot read Latin, I think it's wonderful that people are writing articles in it on Wikipedia.  That's one way to keep the kids off the streets.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Simon, at Stuck in a Book, challenged his readers to find a picture that sums up their reading.  His rules were no pictures of books or of characters in books.  It's taken me a week to come up with something, but I finally did. 

If you'll look over at my sidebar you'll find annual lists of favorite reads.  These lists feature great classics, modern classics, current literary fiction, young adult novels, graphic novels, children's picture books, science fiction, non-fiction, biography, memoir, fantasy, English writers, American writers, African writers, German writers, Japanese writers, straight and gay writers, living and dead.  In my archive you'll find best sellers, detective stories, short stories, an occasional play, text books, history books, cookbooks, art books, books on grammar, books on alien abduction, books on philosophy and a book on pet food. 

Sounds like a flea market to me.  So I picked a picture of a flea market in Paris.  Why Paris?  Don't get me started.

The thing about flea markets is that while you never know what you'll find, you know when you've found something great.  And if feels great to find it.  I think that sums up the way I read.

The Last Exit to Normal by Michael Harmon

The decoder card to the universe wasn't included in the box of cereal God gave humanity.

Opening to The Last Exit to Normal by Michael Harmon.

I wish a certain person was still blogging because I'd love to hear what she would have to say about The Last Exit to Normal by Michael Harmon.  The whole time I was reading it I kept thinking, "Oh my, would a certain person ever rant about this."  This certain person could rant with the best.   That's a trait she shares with the narrator of The Last Exit to Normal, Ben Campbell. 

Some things a certain person might have ranted about: 

• 
  
  The fact that 17-year-old  Ben still remains homophobic three years after his own father came out and his father's terrific boyfriend, Edward, moved in with them.
• 
  
  The fact that the main  way mothers are depicted in the novel is as someone who abandons children.
• 
  
  The fact that the boy next door is abused by his fundamentalist preacher father, and the whole town seems to know about it but does nothing because in Rough Butte, Montana, where the story is set, beating your 11-year-old son with a  belt until his back is bruised is considered good child rearing.
• 
  
  The fact that the town bully can get away with an attempted rape because the victim, a girl Ben falls in love with, won't report him to the police.
• 
  
  The fact that Edward's mother, whom they all move in with, teaches young Ben some respect by continually hitting him with a wooden spoon or whatever is handy at the time while at the same time insisting that a boy needs a mother.
• 
  
  The fact that the entire novel seems to present the theory that all a misbehaving city boy needs is to spend some time with good hearted country folk who like to shoot holes through roadsigns.
• 
  
  The fact that even though Edward was driven away from Rough Butte by his homophobic neighbors he now seems to see the basic decency inherent in each of them, including the fundamentalist preacher next door,  a feeling the narration never really counters. 

A certain person might rant, "Tell it to Matthew Shepard! Tell it to Brandon Teena!  Tell it to Constance McMillan!"

I almost stopped reading The Last Exit to Normal a couple of times, but I kept with it. It is good to expose yourself to views you don't agree with now and then. I'll admit, by the end of the novel I did come to see the inherent decency in most of the characters.  Edward turned out to be right about them.  I won't be relocating to Eastern Montana anytime soon, but I can see that it did turn out to be a good move for Ben Campbell and his two fathers.

In fact, I can see that I am Ben.  His initial reaction to the people of Rough Butte was my reaction.  The way he felt about his father, Edward and Edward's mother was the way I felt.  He was just as outraged by the abuse going on next door as I was and just as upset about the way no one in town did anything about it.  When he fought with his father I took his side every time.  But, we both grew some by the end of the novel.  We both could see that Edward's mother was not just doing the best she could or the best she knew how to do, but a darn good job.   Just as she had done a with Edward even when she forced him to leave Rough Butte before he graduated high school.  We both came to terms with Ben's father and with his mother, too.  And I think we both came to appreciate the time we spent in Rough Butte.

But I'd still love to hear what a certain person would have to say about this book.

Books on Film: Roald Dahl on How to Recognize a Witch.

From ITV's Southbank Show.



"Some things are too horrible to talk about."

TSS: The Death of the Five Paragraph Review and Other News

Several weeks ago I read a not very good article about book blogs on Huffington Post.  Sometimes even a badly written article that you disagree with can contain a kernel of truth that hits very close to home.

Lost in the madness all too typical of a Huffington Post blog entry was a comment condemning book blog reviews as standard five paragraph articles: three paragraphs of plot summary, one paragraph of praise, one paragraph of critique.  Oh, no, I thought.  This sounds just like my blog.  For years I've made a conscious effort to limit my book reviews to five paragraphs which have followed this exact format.  Huff Po, you know me all too well.

Gandhi said you must become the change you want to see in the world, which is very good advice.  By extension you must write the kind of book reviews you want to read.    I do think standard five paragraph reviews are useful--they certainly help when you're trying to decide whether or not to purchase a particular book--but are they what I want to feature here on Ready When You Are, C.B.?  I'll be honest; while I appreciate plot summary,  if it goes longer than a paragraph I tend to start skimming.  I'm much more interested in what a reviewer has to say about the book than I am in plot summary.  As far as traditional five paragraph reviews go,  my interest as a reader lies in paragraphs four and five.

So I'm attempting to reduce the plot summary as much as possible.  I'd like to start writing reviews by asking what  I want to say about a book and then  include only as much plot summary as I must.  Whether this leads to a brief two or three paragraph comment or to a long essay will depend on the book.  It should lead to a much wider variety of reviews. 

In Other News....

School is out for the summer.  Huzzah!  If I can use year-end gifts as a measure of the state of the economy, things are not looking very good.  I did not do as well in the gift card department as I usually do. Last year, C.J. and I breakfasted at Starbucks for free until after the  Fourth of July.   But this year, I did walk away with  60 dollars in gift cards to Borders and Barnes and Noble.  I'm pleased to say that I spent it all on trashy books I can read on the plane to New York and on the various trains I'll be taking this summer to Connecticut and to Washington D.C. and maybe into Boston one weekend.  I like traveling with books I can comfortably leave in hotel rooms once I'm done with them, and I figured that since I'll be doing a lot of very serious reading at Yale this summer  I'll go for escapism outside of  class.  So I bought a bunch of detective novels and several high fantasy tomes.  I'll do all my serious reading in the Yale library. 

I did get one Visa gift card which I'm going to spend on Yale sweatshirts and coffee mugs. 

Now you know one of the dark secrets of teaching middle school. The real reason  we do it... the gift cards. 


Full Disclosure: I found the picture of Ghandi reading at Poster Guide.

Dakota's Favorites: No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I read No One Writes for the Colonel for the Novella Challenge back in 2008.  Looking back on it, the Novella Challenge was one of the better ones.  Because of it I read six novellas, books I would not have read otherwise, and I came away loving all but one of them.  That's a good challenge.

No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez takes place in the author's familiar milieu--an isolated Latin American town, the sort that no one seems to enter or leave for decades, dusty, inactive, dying from entropy. The unnamed colonel has been waiting for his pension to arrive, waiting for fifteen years. His money and his options have run out, he has nothing left to sell, nothing except the fighting rooster his son left in his care before he was killed by government soldiers. If he can keep the chicken in fighting form for a few months, until it has a chance to win the big fight, he can sell it for 900 pesos, enough to support his wife while they wait for his long promised pension to arrive.


This probably does not sound all that promising to most readers, but there is much to enjoy in this novella. Garcia Marquez understands human nature enough to create complicated, layered characters, even when their actions are quite simple. The Colonel goes to town to try to sell a clock, to visit his lawyer, to see if his letter has arrived. Very little happens but alll of the characters major and minor come to life in Garcia Marquez' hands. We see only a few days of the Colonel's life, but we can tell that the people he meets have known him for years, decades, shared much of his life and too much of his fate.

Waiting for the pension that never arrives while his situation continues to worsen, like waiting for a Godot who never appears, becomes a heart wrenching read. When we learn the lengths the Colonel's wife has gone to just to keep her husband and herself clothed and fed they touch us as they touch the Colonel. Garcia Marquez is one of the best writers I know at depicting how love deepens in unspoken ways when it has lasted a long long time. He does this very well in No One Writes to the Colonel.

So I am giving No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez five out of five stars. It is the best of the novellas I have read so far. I'm half way through the challenge now, and loving it.

The Making of the Middle Ages by R. W. Southern

The formation of western Europe from the late tenth to the early thirteenth century is the subject of this book.

Opening to the introduction of The Making of the Middle Ages by R.W. Southern

I have been doing some reading in preparation for the class I'll be taking later this month at Yale.  I made it into their summer program for teachers about Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.  One of the suggested readings is R.W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages which describes how various aspects of what we consider Medieval European culture came to be. Mr. Southern's book, though it's really  meant for undergraduate history students, is highly readable.  Reading it, I can't help but compare it with how Medieval Europe is presented in the text book I use with my 7th grade students.  Here is one example. 

The textbook I use does not mention the  Council at Rheims summoned by Pope Leo IX in 1049.  The one chapter on the Medieval church states that it was the largest landholder in Europe by 1050 but does not explain that the church in 1050 was largely controlled by the nobility who purchased bishoprics, a practice known as the sin of simony.  Simony itself is not discussed until the chapter on the Reformation.  The textbook implies that the church was an independent institution from it's beginnings, but it struggled with a rising nobility which wanted to take power away from the church.

This is what I learned about the same subject from reading R.W. Southern's book The Making of the Middle Ages:

By the eleventh century A.D. church offices were commonly purchased by wealthy nobles as a means of extending their power.  (The papacy itself had likely been purchased by Pope Benedict IX.)  A typical nobleman would ensure that his sons held as many church offices as he could buy them in order to control the land each office held.  The church existed to serve the needs and desires of the nobility who controlled it.  It was the largest landowner in Europe, but it was basically controlled by the nobility. 

However, in 1049 Pope Leo IX dealt a severe blow to the practice of simony when he held a council at Rheims, France.  Rheims was to be the last stop on a tour Leo IX was taking of his homeland and was meant to end with the removal of the remains of St. Regimus and their reinternment at the high alter of a newly constructed monastery dedicated to him. 

Pope Leo had other plans.  He summoned a large council of Bishops for October 1, St. Regimus feast day.  When the day arrived, the body of St. Regimus was paraded through the town before an enthusiastic crowd, but instead of taking the body into the monastery Leo had it placed above the alter in the church where the council of Bishops was to take place.  The following day he insisted that all of the bishops and abbots present declare whether or not they had paid any money for their office. 

A quarter of those in attendance had done just that.  Imagine being forced to admit you had committed the sin of simony to the Pope who stands before the body of an actual saint.  One of the bishops fled during the night and was excommunicated the next day.  One admitted his family had paid for his position without telling him.  He surrendered his staff of office to Pope Leo who then gave him a new staff and reinstated him.  Another admitted his brother had bought his office and forced him to accept it; he was declared innocent and later became a significant church leader.  Yet another admitted he himself had paid a large portion of his own inheritance in order to become Bishop of Nantes; he was demoted to the rank of a common priest which he remained throughout his life.  The bishops who failed to attend the council were dealt disciplinary sentences that included excommunication.

At the end of the council Pope Leo IX himself carried the body of St. Regimus on his own shoulders out of the church to its  resting place in the new monastery. 

Prior to the Council at Rhiems, the church was seen as an extension of secular life, something the nobles held in their near complete control.  Afterwards, it grew to become an institution with power to rival that of kings. As far as church history goes, the Middle Ages were a period of great struggle and significant change.  The church was far from the powerful institution it became.

It a shame that the 7th grade history book has to leave so much of this story out.  History textbooks for children are expected to cover far too much in the course of a year to go into this level of detail, but the consequences are that what makes history memorable is ignored.  Pope Leo IX held his council before the body of a dead saint.  I think that detail would capture the attention of most students, and it's likely something they would remember.  But if it's not in their history book, then they're not likely to hear it.  If their teacher knows about it, there's a chance he will find enough time to tell his students a fuller story.

That's one reason why I'll be spending part of my summer vacation in class. 


Full Disclosure: I found the picture of Pope Leo IX on Wikipedia.

TSS: I Will Not Read It on a Plane, I Will Not Read It on a Train.

I know A Reliable Wife is a popular book and that this post may not win me any new followers.  But here goes....

My book club is reading A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick.  It wasn't my turn to choose a book.  I almost spoke up because, really, be honest, does this look like a book any man would choose to read?  Honestly?  But I try to be a good sport; the book club has read books I selected with covers they weren't exactly enthusiastic about either.  I made it to page 178.  I even made it past the passage below which I defy anyone to read out loud without laughing.

The woman he wanted to undress, to see naked, was a stranger. Her conversation, her requests, were strange to him. Nobody had asked anything of him for so long.

"I'm not....I'm not pure.  You should know."

He watched her in silence.

"I was a child.  A friend of my father's, a fellow missionary in Africa.  He came to me one night and....I'm not pure. Not without the sin of fornication.  My father killed him.  You should know."

Mercy touched at his heart. He held her hand, just for a moment, for the first time.

"That life is past.  It was a long time ago. It was not your fault. Don't think about it anymore."

She looked so far away.

"It doesn't matter to me.  Nobody's pure. My daughter, my Francesca was pure, but nobody else."

I mean really.  I'm not pure...She looked so far away.  The more I read A Reliable Wife the more I thought of Oscar Wilde's maxim, "It takes a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell and not burst into laughter."

My book club meets again to discuss A Reliable Wife in two weeks.  I'm the token male--I'll let you know what they think.

Did you make it past page 178? 

Meantime, only three and a half more days of school.  Huzzah!

Friday Picture Reading

Reading Lady Chatterly's Lover on the sly.

Found on Shannon Kay O'Brien's website.

The Bucolic Plague by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

The last time I saw 4 a.m., I was tottering home in high heels and a matted wig sipping from the tiny bottles of Absolut I always keep in my bag for emergencies.  Emergencies like "last call."

From the prologue to The Bucolic Plague: From Drag Queen to Goat Farmer by Josh Kilmer-Purcell.

What happens when two gay men give up their fabulous New York City lives, buy a farm upstate and everything goes right?

Yes, it all goes right.  Just about.  Josh, the former drag queen, and his partner Brent, a doctor who is also a regular on Martha Stewart's television show, purchase the dilapidated Beekman Mansion, a 200-year-old estate, and decide to run it as a working farm.  There is  much hard work involved, but everything works out with remarkable ease.  For example, when they need someone to run the farm while they are in New York during the week, a gay goat herder who needs a place to keep his goats appears.  When they need a way to generate money for their farm, Martha Stewart invites them on to her show to demonstrate how they make soap from goat milk and a successful mail-order business is born. 

If you're expecting the arrival of two gay city-slickers to cause some consternation among the local farmers, you'll be disappointed.  The two are welcomed from the start by another gay couple who run the local inn/restaurant and by everyone else as well.  Turns out the town they've moved to is full of misfits and eccentrics, so  Josh and Brent fit right in.  There are some comical misadventures involving the slaughter of their first Thanksgiving turkey and the hunt for their first Christmas tree, but overall, The Bucolic Plague is the story of two guys having a wonderful time. Until the stock market crashes, Brent is laid-off and Josh has to start firing the people at the advertising agency where he works.  But not to worry--you can tell from the cover photo that things will work out and things soon do. 

There was a time when two openly gay men starting a farm in rural America would have produced a different kind of memoir.  Had Josh and Brent bought their farm in the 1950's or even in the 1980's Mr. Kilmer Purcell's book would have a much a much heavier tone.  Now the fact that they are a gay couple seems about as controversial as the fact that they are from Manhattan--no one seems to give it much thought.  All the locals seem interested in is whether or not they'll get a chance to meet Marth Stewart.   It all makes for entertaining, light-hearted reading that goes down easily like an Absolut martini.  


Full Disclosure: I received and advanced review copy of The Bucolic Plague from the publisher.

Shane by Jack Schaefer

He rode into our valley in the summer of '89.

Opening to Shane by Jack Schaefer

Does Shane die at the end?  This question was the subject of passionate debate in the faculty room last week.  The school year is almost over.  What can I say?

At the end of the movie, Shane rides off into the sunrise his head hanging down.  Though he defeated the bad guys and saved the town, he was shot once during the final, climactic gun battle. 

"Shane!  Come back!"

Okay, maybe it's a guy thing, but the question needed an answer.  Is Shane alive at the end or not?

I've long been a fan of the movie and have wanted to read the Jack Schaefer novel it's based on, so I decided to check them both out from my local library.  For some reason, the faculty is willing to let me be the final arbiter on this question, probably because at 46 I'm the oldest.  Fair enough. I'm certainly up to the task.

Shane is a classic hero-rides-into-town western.  The novel is set in a remote valley once the sole property of a single cattle rancher, now turning into farmland.  The rancher wants all the farmers off of his land; the farmers don't want to leave.  Shane, a gunfighter with a past he won't discuss, rides up to one of the farms, befriends the farmer, his wife and young son, and defends them all against the rancher and the hired guns he brings in to drive them away.  Shane wants to leave his gun fighting past behind him and settle down.  It's also clear that he won't be able to because Shane the gunfighter is just who the farmers need to defeat the rancher.

It's clear in the book that Shane is alive at the end.  In fact, one of the minor characters states that "No bullet could ever kill that man."  By the end of the novel Shane has become an immortal god-like hero.  There's just no way he can die.  He can ride off and never be heard from again because his time has passed, but he can't die.  He lives on at the heart of the American mythos.  Even men who've never heard of him aim to be like him.  Strong. Independent.  Admired by women and children and other men.  Able to hold his own in a fight but also able to avoid fighting for its own sake.  There's no way he can die.

The George Stevens directed movie starring Alan Ladd is very faithful to the book.  The few changes he makes improve the story.  The fight between Shane and Starret is just one hit to the head in the book but it becomes a brutal fight scene in the movie that serves to point out how terrible fighting is.  The love triangle between Shane, Starret and Miriam, barely noticeable in the book, is down played in the movie, but other than that there are no major differences.  The movie even comes close to approximating the first person narration of the book which is told from the point of view of Starret's young son. 

But Shane is just as alive in the end.  Some faculty argued that as he rides off his head is down and the arm not holding the reins is hanging limp at his side.  He's in silhouette at the end making him look even more mythical but also making it impossible to see his face.  He's not really a person at the end of the movie anyway, he's an archetype.  And he's alive.  There was no blood, not even the minimal blood typical of movies made in 1953. Shane hardly reacted to being shot at all, and anyone familiar with horseback riding will see that his posture is typical of someone riding a horse.  If he were dead, he surely would have fallen off of his horse as it climbed over the mountains.  And I doubt that any horse would choose to go up a rocky mountain path when it could just go home to its feed, unless a conscious rider directed it to. 

So, Shane lives.  No doubt in my mind.  That is my final answer.


This book counts for the Read the Book See the Movie Challenge.  To find out more or to join in the fun go here to sign up. 

Here's the trailer for Shane.  If you haven't seen it, it's wonderful.  The book is terrific as well. 

Full Disclosure:  I found the poster for Shane on Wikipedia.org.