reading aloud + used books = reading used books aloud

I've been thinking a lot today about what's going on when someone reads aloud, and specifically when one reads aloud and other people are listening. It keeps coming up today. In one class, while going through some hypothetical lessons to be taught in correlation with Moises Kaufman and The Techtonic Theater Project's The Laramie Project, a few of my classmates read from the play's Moments. Now, the lesson activity they were reading for wasn't necessarily about giving voice to the words or anything like that. But it was pretty powerful, even as a side note to the objective of the lesson.

Then in another class, we learned that students with learning disabilities tend to comprehend a text more adequately when they hear it read by a fluent reader than when reading it silently themselves or when they "sound it out." So there's another qualification to the kind of "reading aloud" to which I'm devoting this blog space: Not only am I talking specifically about reading aloud to (a) listener/s, it's also gotta sound good. What does "sound good" mean though?

Later in the afternoon, I happened to catch the first twenty-five minutes or so of a poetry reading by Natasha Tretheway who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Now that woman can read aloud.

But I'm having trouble describing exactly what I think is happening when someone reads aloud to an audience, and does so well*, that I'm finding so exciting.

Whereas in the above paragraphs I was writing about reading aloud, in the rest of this entry I'm going to write about reading books that have been used by other readers**. I'm talking books that have been checked out of the library before I've checked them out specifically, but also books that are purchased "Used."

I'm currently in the middle of reading an essay from a book I got from the library. Actually, I'm reading a copy of the essay that I made today because I wanted to be able to take notes on the text, and it's impolite to write in library books. Except that someone already wrote in this one. And I'm having a lot of fun comparing what s/he underlined to what I think is striking enough to underline, seeing what s/he starred, etc. (The fascinating-ness of comparing our two sets of markings of what's important gets even deeper when considering the topic of the essay, which is a critical examination of evaluation and value; how do we decide that a text is valuable?)

I'm not sure what I make of this either. Other than thinking, "Coooool."



*well: a relative term meaning I'm not sure what
**This sentence is an example of something that writers call a transition***
***This clarification is an example of something writers call a footnote

Flattering!

I'm in love with his brain.

I'm in the throes of a pretty intense mind-crush on Prof. H. Samy Alim at UCLA who writes about, among other things, linguistic profiling, race and racism, education, systems of power, and (of course, right Didi?) Black Language and Hip-Hop Culture.

Seriously, he's so cool. I'm channeling Brian Johnson of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club in the scene where Bender's sitting on the railing in the library, methodically tearing pages out of a book. Andy accuses him, "That's real intelligent," and then Bender mockingly whines, "You're right. It's wrong to destroy literature. It's so fun to read. And... MO-LAY really pumps my nads." Claire corrects him, "It's Moliere." And that's where Brian's line comes in, and incidentally, where I end my gratuitous Breakfast Club quoting and get back to my original point, "I love his work."

Seriously. A favorite point of mine from his article "Hearing What's Not Said and Missing What Is: Black Language in White Public Space"? At the risk of over-simplifying his argument, I'd probably pull this series of poignant questions:

Why is it that, despite ample evidence from sociolinguistic studies and theory that different speech communities possess different, yet theoretically equivalent, linguistic rules and rules of language use, [Black Language] and linguistic practices continue to be denigrated and underappreciated by Whites, particularly in educational institutions? What is at the root of this denigration and misinterpretation? How is that ideology and practice of linguistic supremacy -- the unsubstantiated notion that White linguistic norms are inherently superior to the linguistic norms of other communities, and the practice of mapping White norms into 'the language of school,' 'the language of economic mobility,' and 'the language of success' -- persists, even within the subjugated group? What is the role of communicative misunderstanding in maintaining and perpetuating tensions between communities? How do we understand communicative differences not as the source of tensions but as a means of perpetuating and reinforcing those tensions? how do we move beyond searching for communicative mismatches to explain intercultural tensions and conflicts that already exist due to the larger and systematic social, political, and economic subjugation of a group? Or worse yet... will greater knowledge of communicative differences be used for or against justice?

And in close second:

'What are you saying, Alim -- are you proposing that teachers should not teach 'standard English''? Here's what I'm proposing. First and foremost, we must begin with an understanding that there is nothing standard about 'standard English.' Standard simply means that this is the language variety that those in authority have constructed as the variety needed to gain access to resources. What we have, then, for a 'standard' in the US is nothing short of the imposition of White linguistic norms and ways of speaking in the service of granting access to resources to Whites and denying those same resources to as many others as possible, including poor Whites (linguistic supremacy goes for varieties of a language as well as languages other than the dominating language, whatever that may be).

If I was in the habit of using emoticons, which I'm not, I'd probably use something with a kissy-face, or that's blushing, or sighing.

Also: Um, today's NatGeo Photo of the Day? Very cool.

odd.

Play them both at the same time, but hit play on the bottom one first.

Here's a t-chart of my weekend:

Is it achy or achey?

To the Bahamas!

click to make image larger and more clear

This is a hand-me-down piece of awesomeness that I got from Kasey this afternoon. I've just typed and deleted several paragraphs that tried to explain how cool I think this poem and letter are, but I think I'm too excited to explain myself coherently. Enjoy!

Almost as cool as regular graffiti. Almost.

Something I've been wanting to blog about for a while. Walking through my neighborhood, something that stands out is the way that the people who live here use their homes, yards, and cars as spaces for written discourse. People write all over this neighborhood. Below are pictures of just very few examples of all of the writing around here:







The final image, which for some reason I can't get to load vertically, is something I'll probably write more about later. This robot-ish motif is something I've been taking note of all over campus-town. I wonder if there's some artist responsible for all of its instances. Or maybe there's an underground robot art movement. That'd be pretty cool.

One of my favorite pieces of public writing in this neighborhood is something I don't have a photo of yet. One house's address is marked "605?" I can't remember if 605 is actually the number or not, but the question mark is what I like love.

Number of times I used the word something in this post: 4. Now 5.

incessant sneezing due to dust allergies -- totally worth it

I spent much of Saturday afternoon helping out with a major clean-out process that's going on in the Student Programs Office at the Y. With a long history of being one of the hippie-er places on campus, the office did not disappoint in terms of the amount of really cool crap that's been accumulated and forgotten.


Among my favorite finds:
one (1) limited edition Super Famicon cassette tape complete with type-written (as in created on a type-writer) note from Super Famicon's spokesperson

one (1) VHS copy of East Side Story, tagged as "ALL SINGING! ALL DANCING! ALL MARXIST MUSICALS!"

one (1) Famous Vegetarians & their favorite recipes, paperback edition, that includes the biggest superstar of them all, Jesus Christ, and his favorite recipes: Barley and Lentils; Wheat, Mint, and Parsley Salad, and Essene Sprouted Bread

one (1) note for Aimee, a terrific hostess who could nonetheless use a little work in the finger sandwiches department

recommendations

The speaker this afternoon for the Y's Friday Forum Lecture Series was Nick Burbules who maintains Progressive Blog Digest, and spoke about the ways that the blogosphere fosters citizen journalism and the networking of political activists within a new public space. In incredibly nerdy fashion, I get really excited about the possibilities for blogging. One of the points that Mr. Burbules made was that the radically democratic ethos of sharing and community in the blogosphere necessarily engenders the collection and compilation of local, national, and international news in ways that can make patterns more visible. (i.e. The revelation via the blogosphere's synthesis of local news reports from various states that strange things were happening in United States Attorneys' offices.)

Anyway, he inspired me to (a) run, not walk to the nearest computer to update this thang, and (b) be sure to link to some more of the cool things that I've been checking out lately. Like Andrew's important September 11th post.

Also, I've been reading Paul Monette's Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. Sooooo incredibly moving. I knew I was in for it in the first few pages when he first introduces Roger, his partner who eventually dies of AIDS, with

"How do I speak of the person who was my life's best reason? The most completely unpretentious man I ever met, modest and decent to such a degree that he seemed to release what was most real in everyone he knew. It was always a relief to be with Roger, not to have to play any games at all. By a safe mile he was the least flashy of all our bright circle of friends, but he spoke about books and the wide world he had journeyed with huge conviction and a hunger to know everything."

Last night, slumped in the armchair in my bedroom, I sobbed as I read the final pages. I looked up this picture of Paul and Roger, which for some reason made the whole story even more real for me.

Paul comes off, in his prose, as a slightly arrogant guy with a disdain for the middlebrow and sort of an odd obsession with all things ancient Greek, but he clearly loves Roger deeply, and the story is as beautiful as it is tragic.

...Now I have to spend the weekend creating a website about the book for use in a high school classroom.

late night snack

On Tuesday nights I have to walk home from work at 12:30, 12:45ish, and it's a half hour walk, and it's scary. But I have this one friend who waits up for me to text that I'm home safely, and it's the best.

Tonight, I had a double security system because Frank Zizi just happened to call me during the walk. He had just gotten home from the bar, and was wondering if he should eat a Polish sausage or some cheese pizza. Since we haven't talked since about December, he called for my opinion, and we had a nice little chat.

"Oh no, no, no, Humphrey, don't get up!"

Lucas and I found ourselves referencing this today. A total blast from the past that's still hilarious.

Ratfink!

Last year for her birthday, my roommate Megan's aunt sent her, among other things, a set of fake rats. Since then we've enjoyed no end of mischievous fun with them. We put them into each others' shoes, closets, purses, etc., and then laugh our asses off when one of us gets freaked out.

It's Saturday night, and I'm staying in to get some work done, but Megan and Colleen are out tailgating. Inevitably, they'll come back all drunk and hilarious. My hope is that they'll want to keep the party going, and will keep drinking. So I put a rat in the case of beer in the fridge. See?


Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that they won't come home and immediately race to their computers to see if I've updated my blog!

quitting

I really don't like quitting. It's not that I completely buy into that whole quitters-never-win mantra. Just personally, I don't like not finishing things. Call it a compulsion. Even if I hate a book, if I've read the first twenty-five pages, I have to finish it. I always have to clean my plate.

And today I had to drop a class. I've been saying I need to drop that class for at least a week now, but it took a lot of self-pep-talking to be able to log into the registration site and finally do it. In the end, I made it about someone else. I thought that if I told the prof I was dropping then it would be easier for me to actually do so. So after class this morning, I went up and broke the news to him that I'm a horrible disappointment to all that is ENGL 396: English Avant-Gardes. I'm glad that I did; because, the class is full, and the kid next to me was glad that now he can register for it. So I didn't quit; I gave my spot in the class to someone else. How selfless of me.

In memory of my enrollment in the class, I'll say a bit about the interesting stuff we were looking at. Today we were talking about the first of two issues of a little modernist magazine put together by the bitter, self-righteous, and sort of cool in spite of that Wyndham Lewis, called Blast. Blast, in this instance, probably used more for its meaning as an impolite word, closer to damn than fuck. Here's a few images of its pages, which are visually ...awesome.

the cover -- described by the Chicago modernist magazine Little Review as "something between magenta and lavender, about the colour of a sick headache"

Double-clicking on this will make it easier to read, and it's worth reading, I think. One of my favorite bits: "WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY --- their stupidity, animalism, and dreams. We believe in no perfectibility of our own." Hilarious.


These two are interestingly juxtaposed, and get even more fascinating when considered with some of the next pages that go on to "BLESS ENGLAND!" and "BLESS FRANCE."
"--Oh !-- Papa is wonderful: but all papas are!"
Love it.

One page I find particularly worth noting is this one that addresses the Suffragettes, those crazy women who wanted to vote and be allowed to get divorces and other radical things like that.

It's condescending as hell. (And I would have, had I stayed in the class, gotten to learn more about the issues of misogyny and feminist theory within the context of English Avant-Gardes.) "(You don't mind being called things?)" So annoying. And yet, the magazine still has to address the Suffragettes. They can't be ignored within this text because their energy, though Lewis seems to be working hard to polarize it from the energies of the Avant-Gardes, is ultimately present. It's working against the same blasted British stasis that the Artist, the Individual, is if the the Artist or the Individual is one who eschews his (deliberately not his or her) categorization by class, gender, race, education, etc., and who creates movement. And so even though Lewis here advises the Suffragettes to "stick to what [they] understand," meaning not art, he still gives space to the Suffragettes within Blast, within his art.

There's so much more to say, but the reason I had to drop the class is because I don't have the time to get the requisite writing done for it.

I got all these images, by the way, from the Modernist Journals Project at Brown. The whole of both issues of Blast are available for the viewing there.

I live in a jungle.

When I go into the kitchen at night and turn the light on, I see swarms of beady, black bugs scampering back into dark corners, under the fridge, and into other hidey holes.

nicknames

If anyone but my brothers called me "Nellie" or "sweetie" or "princess," I would not be okay with that. I'm just not the princess type, you know? Ew. But when they do it, I don't just tolerate it, I like it. Weird.

Currently watching: Still We Ride!

Still We Ride! is a fast-paced, angry documentary about the Critical Mass bicycle rides in New York City. Currently, I hate The Man.

Critical Mass calls itself, or some particpant/s call it, "an unorganized coincidence" of bicycler -community get-togethers of as many as 50,000 people that occur in cities throughout the world, typically on the last Friday of every month. The rides are sometimes seen as protests and the participants are sometimes referred to as members of a social movement, but Critical Mass is leaderless and therefore official-missionless. Bikers just know where to be and when and then shitloads of them show-up, standing for whatever they want to stand for, or not standing for anything at all, just out for a ride. This has all been going on monthly since the first ride in 1992 in San Fransisco.

Still We Ride! focuses on the shift in authorities' attitudes about Critical Mass that largely came about on the day of the ride in New York City that fell within the dates of the Republican National Convention in August of 2004. On that day, 264 cyclists were arrested as, according to the film, Critical Mass was cited in some cop handbook as a form of protest to be looking out for. And now, it's basically an all-out war between Critical Mass participants and the cops. The film focuses on the NYPD, but I youtubed "Critical Mass" and found, among many others, this video posted last Friday of a cyclist being thrown off her bike by cops in Minneapolis:



Now, frankly, I've always been a little unsure about bicyclists. I have yet to meet a person regularly uses a bicycle who is not fanatical, or near-fanatical about said usage. I'm being serious. Bicyclists are weird. But I think part of the reason that I'm so judgey about bicyclists is because I can sort of see myself slipping into that weird bicyclist parallel universe, and I'm being defensive. Every once in a while, I borrow my friend Quinn's bike to get places on campus, and I must say, it's thrilling. And it's not just that. Bike-riding is better for the environment than driving, and faster than walking. And Still I Ride!, although it is definitely the product of the fanatical bike-types mentioned above, makes a pretty strong case for the coolness of the bicycling community. There's even footage of a pretty sweet post-ride dance-party that the cops break-up.

My brother Michael does this thing to torture me where he holds his finger really close to my eye, almost touching my eyelashes, but not. And when I start freaking out, he says, "What? I'm not even touching you." I start to push his finger away by head-butting him, and he says, "See, now you're touching me and I don't appreciate that." That's kind of like Critical Mass, I think. The cyclists, even though going into it they know they are going to piss off the authorities, when they get arrested ask, "What? I'm just riding my bike!" It's hilarious.

As the credits of Still I Ride! roll, they show footage of some arrested Critical Mass participants in the back of a paddy-wagon and one of them says, "Well, at least we're not wasting gas! We're car-pooling!"


P.S. Andrew, if you're still reading this, I vaguely remember critical mass as a physics concept? Perhaps you could explain the reference to me?