Ice Storm 2009

Wow! An entire week out of school. What a life! How, do you ask, have I been using my week? Besides glancing out the window every hour or so to note the change in the thickness of the ice on the trees, watch the fat snowflakes tumble down, see if the green garden hose has yet disappeared, or observe the sun converting the glass-like ice to prisms of color, I've been relaxing. Grading papers, drinking chai, reading books, hanging with friends. My former roommate and her husband lost power, so they stayed with us for two nights. They had to go to work, unfortunately, unlike my roommate and I. However, it was fun to eat dinner together and watch movies and TV.

I finished reading the first book in the Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers. If you love Christian historical fiction, you'll love this book. Not too cheesy, interesting, spiritually challenging in its own way. I'm on to rereading book two--yes, rereading because I read book number 2 before book number 1, a big no-no in trilogy reading. Oh well, se la vie.

Last weekend I saw Slumdog Millionaire. Fabulous. Definitely recommend it. Storyline is creative, using the questions the protagonist answers on the Indian version of the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? as the catalyst for flashbacks to how he learned the answers. Within those flashbacks, though, are harsh memories of a childhood filled with people who are looking out only for themselves or those who want to take advantage of homeless, poor youth. In the movie's superb storytelling, then, lay barbs of cold reality that will stick with you long after the closing credits. Regardless, a must see.

Purple Pens & Staplers

I have a fetish for purple pens. I use them to grade, mostly, but I also use them to write letters. If I can't find the right pen, it seriously hinders me from getting started on my work. I feel this intense sense of loss; I feel imbalanced, and it is a good half hour before I acquiesce to using a different colored pen than the one I had hoped for.

The pen deal is quickly fading, though, thanks to the supply I received for Christmas. Thus, my new crisis is my stapler. I think I'm on somewhere around stapler #10 over the course of the past 2 to 3 years, and I'm about to go crazy! Over Christmas I bought a brand new, super duper handheld power stapler--the kind where you barely apply any pressure and it Bam! shoots the staple through 15 pages. Low and behold, the first day I allowed students to use it, since I couldn't find my student-friendly version, they broke it. So, I bought a brand new red stapler for students, and a translucent green super-powered one for me. They have survived one week, although it became touch and go awhile for the red one. It apparently has an innate ability to jam that can easily fool one into thinking it's dead when it's not.

I'm starting to understand Office Space much better.

Ella Minnow Pea

Tonight, our book club discussed Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea. The book is an epistolary novel, as the plot is divulged through a series of letters between the book's namesake and a variety of people on the island nation of Nollop, located off the coast of South Carolina. Central to this community is the vitality of language--the letters are comprised of sophisticated language and serve as the primary means of communication between members of the populace since other technology is unreliable.

This civil little society is rudely awakened, though, when letters begin to fall from the epigraph on the statue of Mr. Nollop, founder of the society and mastermind of the pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." (Pangrams require the use of all 26 letters of the alphabet in one sentence. We enjoyed trying to devise our own tonight to share with each other. Mine: "My quest: catch jolly zephyrs to exhibit for vast knowledge." Others were better.) In the book, those in charge deem the droppage of letters as a sign from Mr. Nollop from beyond the grave that social life should continue without the use of the fallen letters. So, they first hold a party for the z, the first letter to be outlawed from spoken or written expression. Life quickly goes downhill as other letters follow the course of z, and with the council's refusal to hear sense, Nollopians soon find themselves kicked off the island or running to escape the tyranny of this totalitarian regime who is slowly siphoning away their pride and sole means of communication.

While the premise is provoking, the story itself leaves the plot and characters undeveloped, a flaw perhaps contributed to by the epistolary format. However, the author is certainly clever--as each letter successively falls from the statue, so too, his own writing must reflect the absence of the letters, leading to some creative phrasing and word usage. I think he makes up a few of his words, splicing roots and suffixes together to create meaning, and by the end of the book, reading becomes more like playing Mad Gab as the council deems phonetic spellings appropriate for illicit letters (thus, "ph" suffixes for the letter "f" and "off" becomes "oph"). As a result, it is easiest to read the text aloud in order to comprehend more quickly, something likely to get a few stares if you are reading that part, as I was, out in public.

Overall, a fun little read. Clever, literary, definitely recommended for the wordsmith. However, I enjoyed Eyre Affair much more for overall quality that includes wit, plot, and a little more character development. 3 of 5 stars.

Icy Days and the Hudson

Today I read the article "Man in the Water" with my students. Since we are reading Night, I wanted them to see a positive side of humanity before dwelling too long on the sadness created and darkness of man displayed during the Holocaust. This article, written by Rosenblatt, recounts the 1982 plane crash of Flight 90 into the icy Potomac River near Washington, D.C. An anonymous man in the water, a passenger of the plane, repeatedly handed the life saver dangling from a rescue helicopter to the other passengers still floating in the water around him; when the plane returned for him, he was nowhere to be seen. Only five people survived. He selflessly sacrificed his life for others and made an indelible imprint on those who knew his story, showing the best of what humanity is capable.

Ironic, then, that tonight I run into a parent who informs me that today another plane crash landed onto the Hudson River in New York. I'm thankful that this time no one was lost.