Monthly Archives: June 2007

Fabulous Flickr Groups

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It’s somewhat thrilling to discover fantastic Flickr groups.

Here are some of my favorites:

Pugs – members post pictures of pugs. You can find similar groups for any breed, but I prefer pugs.

Penguin Paperback Spotter’s Guild. These people are completely obsessed with Penguin paperbacks. It’s fantastic.

Reading Stack – People submit pictures of stacks of books they’ve been meaning to read. Somewhat comforting – we are not alone in the world.

Ones that are not as quirky, but that I still love to browse: New York City; Travel the World; Hoboken; New Orleans; Europe; Rome.

And my all time favorite….

Quotation Mark Abuse – members take pictures of signs and other public writing that misuse quotation marks – using them for emphasis or other grammatically incorrect uses. A few apostrophe abuses get mixed in too. Small, neighborhood businesses are especially bad offenders. (Similar group: Atrocious Apostrophes)

The image below is from Quotation Mark Abuse member c99koder:

Do you have a favorite Flickr group?

(And here’s my Flickr page, if you’re interested. Not a lot of photos yet, I just put some of my favorite travel photos up.)

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)

Poetry Sunday

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Tin Ear
by Peter Schmitt
from Country Airport

We stood at attention as she moved
with a kind of Groucho shuffle
down our line, her trained music
teacher’s ear passing by
our ten- and eleven-year-old mouths
open to some song now forgotten.
And as she held her momentary
pause in front of me, I peered
from the corner of my eye
to hers, and knew the truth
I had suspected.
In the following days,
as certain of our peers
disappeared at appointed hours
for the Chorus, something in me
was already closing shop.
Indeed, to this day
I still clam up
for the national anthem
in crowded stadiums, draw
disapproving alumni stares
as I smile the length of school songs,
and even hum and clap
through “Happy Birthday,” creating
a diversionall lest I send
the collective pitch
careening headlong into dissonance.

It’s only in the choice acoustics
of shower and sealed car
that I can finally give voice
to that heart deep within me
that is pure, tonally perfect, music.
But when the water stops running
and the radio’s off, I can remember
that day in class,
when I knew for the first time
that mine would be a world of words
without melody, where refrain
means do not join,
where I’m ready to sing
in a key no one has ever heard.

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Links for 06.08.07

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A very addictive game where you buy and sell houses until you have enough to buy a mansion. Fun and easy. I’m hooked.

Extremely hilarious timeline that explains the history of the internet. The Homestar Runner reference is spot-on.

Great Mental Floss post about the absolutely gorgeous Russian Metro.

A video that morphs 500 years of women in art – morphs the paintings from frame to frame. Fascinating.

Cowboy Eyes. My favorite FOUND magazine online post of late.

A “What Font Are You?” Quiz. I got Fixedsys. I’m not terribly enchanted by this quiz. Neither is the person whose blog I found this link on. Maybe I’ll try to write my own “What Font Are You?” quiz. I’ve only written one internet quiz before (light years ago, in 2003) but I’m proud to say it’s the first result that comes up when you google “Edward Gorey Death.” Especially since it was just made to make my friends laugh, and had way too many inside jokes in it.

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)

Cynthia Kaplan Book Signing

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In 2004, I read a collection of autobiographical essays called Why I’m Like This by Cynthia Kaplan. I enjoyed the collection very much, and was delighted to hear that she had another collection coming out called Leave the Building Quickly and that she would be holding a reading and signing in New York. Her essays are often humorous, and always relatable.

It was a rather small and intimate event, with a lot of her friends and family showing up to support her. She’s not the most well-known author around, so her event was not as “large scale” as others I’ve been to – which was an extremely nice change. It’s nice to not have to show up an hour and 30 minutes early to get a seat, and wait an hour in line after the reading to get your copies signed. Another plus – she is incredibly nice. Sincere, friendly, and appreciative.

If personal essays are your cup of joe, especially humorous ones (she’s been likened to David Sedaris), then I recommend checking out the lovely Mrs. Kaplan’s books. (And I think you should start with her first, Why I’m Like This.)

She also has a website, where you can listen to free audio files of some of her essays: http://www.cynthiakaplan.com/

Leave the Building Quickly: True Stories
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QotD: Modern Classic

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What modern book do you think will be read in high school by the next generation of kids?
Submitted by Tom.

I’m sadly cynical about the future of reading education in American schools.

It seems there are two main problems:
1- They are not having kids read enough (I was assigned, at most, 4-5 books per year throughout my K-12 education. That’s it! A school year is long enough to read much more than that.)

2- They assign boring books that drive the will to read right out of most kids. It seems that the only kids who make it out of public schools as serious readers are the ones who became serious readers on their own long before they had to read for school.

Here’s a sampling of the books I read in school (most of these are fine books, of course, but nothing that is going to instill a lifetime of passionate interest in reading among people whose parents didn’t turn their living room into a home library):
- A Tale of Two Cities (possible theory: might as well start right off the bat and make them hate Dickens by forcing one of his most painful in front of them right away)
- Of Mice and Men (enjoyable for some in high school, but still not the most extraordinary of books to choose)
- Heart of Darkness (Absolute torture for most high school students, even me)

Now, the object of grades 4-8 in my school was to make you cry in front of your peers:
- Charlotte’s Web
- Tuck Everlasting
- Bridge to Terabithia
- The Incredible Journey
- Old Yeller
- Where the Red Fern Grows

I do not mean to insult any of these books, and there are obvious benefits to teaching them. It’s also beneficial to challenge students with older classics – it sharpens their reading and analysis skills. But I wish they would mix in some books (especially more modern ones) that are absolute pleasures to read, and which are still able to convey important themes, messages, and information we can learn from.

So, at last, here are my suggestions for Modern Classics that I believe students would benefit from reading. Or heck, just books that show them reading can be fun. And why wait until the next generation?

Grades 4-8:
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster
Holes by Louis Sachar
Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan

Grades 9-12:
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (a classic, yes, but hardly ever used in high school classes)
Time and Again by Jack Finney
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (supposedly used, but I’ve never heard of anyone who actually read it in school)

I’m not proposing throwing out the use of classics, but mix in some modern gems!

< / obsessive post >

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)

Monsoon Wedding

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After loving The Namesake (the book and the movie), I wanted to watch Monsoon Wedding, another film by The Namesake’s director Mira Nair.

This movie was incredible. So beautiful and charming. So much life and spirit in the story and the characters; it’s a joy to watch. Lately I’ve developed a great appreciation for books and movies centering around Indian and Indian-American culture.

Just added several move Mira Nair films to my netflix queue.

I love rainy weekend days sitting on my bed with all the books and magazines and movies I want to attend to stacked high all around me. I may not get to all of them, but it’s nice to have them there.

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Poetry Sunday

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“THANKS, ROBERT FROST”
David Ray, from Music of Time: Selected and New Poems

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

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