2 Board Alley

Mike's Seven Vex Me So

Mike has posted seven endings of novels, none of which I recognize.  But that's not going to stop me from posting my own endings to novels that I've enjoyed.  Having just unpacked all of my books (after a year of sitting in boxes--oh the smell!), I feel like I'm at a reunion, meeting up with  old friends and family --Hello, Alice, Arthur C., Louisa May!  And over that corner stand Hans, Jacob and Wilhelm and Dr. Seuss.  Good to see all of you!

And now for my meme contribution, which tags anyone who is willing:

1.  "At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late."

2.  "Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.  Amen"

3. "For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man."

4.  "And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen  Hundred and Twenty-eight."

5. "I have more mothers than any eight girls off of the street.  They are the moons shining over me."

6. "The soil they took would be moved to some other spot along the Chesapeake, there to be utilized in some new fashion for perhaps a thousand years, after which the waves would borrow it again, using and reusing until that predictable day when the great world-ocean would sweep in to reclaim this entire peninsula, where for a few centuries, life had been so pleasant."

7. "Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o'clock Salve in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows, the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again."

Happy Guessing!

Under Construction, Cont'd. Literacy Narrative

I'm redoing my TypeLists--specifically consolidating them and cleaning up links.  Excuse the mess.

In my real time life, I'm working on the next draft of my literacy narrative, and have come to realize a few things that now require further thought:

1.  The drive to strive is still there three generations later, but we are not reaching towards getting at least a high school education to become teachers and escape poverty.  Education was a given, though paying for it was up to each of us.  All of my grandmother's granddaughters (that would be three of us) have degrees and graduate degrees.  One of us is a lawyer, another is a dual-language researcher, and the third is a community college professor.  So what?  This may merely reflect the rise in the family's income  along with the the momentum of the women's movement.  In between, my mother was a teacher (with an M.Ed.), and my aunt was a librarian.  our mothers each had three children; in my generation only one of us has children.  But all three of us are in careers that in some way involve language.

2.  Unlike the other contributors who are either scholars of or residents of (or both) of Appalachia and who are thus grounded in the place, my Appalachia is a memory, a passed down story and a dream and intersects with the everyday reality of the place only when I visit. When I first went there and listened to the stories, I imagined that my relatives lived a Laura Ingalls sort of existence, a little house in Jellico, so to speak.Now, like Merlin in T.H. White's The Once and Future King, I feel like I'm moving backwards in time while others may ground their writing in a forward- moving life narrative or research project, I'm reaching back to tell my story of discovering myself from others' past and others' recording of that past, through saved letters, photo albums and oral stories.

3.  Education was pushed to a great degree, but my parents never preened about it--I taught myself how to read at four, and when my mother realized, as I read out loud the stained-glass windows in church on Easter Sunday, that I could read, she just more or less took it for granted.  From that time through first grade, I was always surprising my parents with what I'd learned. Since they didn't brag or preen, I didn't either, and just taught myself things like how to tie my own shoes because my parents were busy and i was impatient.   

(Reading though is something that I need to write about in greater detail because it was singularly the best and most important thing in my life.  I was impelled to learn to read.)

My verbal precocity lead my teachers to want to push me ahead two when I was in the primary grades.  I wish they had.  My best friend was two grades ahead of me.  But my mother had been pushed ahead two grades and absolutely hated it.  Of course, she was also the daughter of the superintendent of schools in a small town, and I think that the attention that that must have generated might have added to her woe.

But the point I'm trying to make here is that my reading life was wide and varied because my parents were generally liberal and didn't supervise what I read.  I wish that they had talked to me a bit more about my forays into the grisly (Catholic Martyrs' Lives) and the gross ("I Am Joe's Kidney" in The Reader's Digest.)

( Reading was such a regular activity in our family that I never realized until I was a teenager that the RD was a subscription and a yearly gift from my aunt's family--I assumed that everyone got it, like a free local paper.

So we could take reading and writing (and, alas, ciphering) for granted.

I also want to spend time writing about those orange-bound biographies that I read in third grade--the women were either wives and mothers of presidents or "the first woman.  . ." The vocational influence that this series had on my was that I wanted to be a "first woman who. . . ," and was not picky about what the career would be.  Astronaut, President, Underwater Photographer, Airline Pilot.  Why not?

3.  religion reinforcing literacy--both via Protestant and Catholic strands.  More later.

4.  My family was so involved in getting and giving educations that the Goins family motto was"whatever you do, don't teach middle school."

5.  When I was very little, I never thought that i would be forced to be a stay-at-home wife and mother.  I always felt that I would do something(see above)outside the home.

6.  Books were given as gifts, always with inscriptions from the giver to the given.  Sometimes family friends (like Velma Linford) would give us inscribed copies of books that they had written.

And tomorrow I'll add this to the draft.

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N

That's where I'm going for the next week.  I'm going to try to stay away from computers and put my energy into spoiling my nieces and nephews with attention and more attention. And even more attention.

I'm packing Here, Bullet and Authorship in Composition Studies along with my next dramatic monologue assignment.  And that's it.  Enough to read on the plane, enough to augment what I've gained at the CIP conference, but not enough to lug through the airport, cursing at myself for overpacking books.

You all have a good week, okay?

Powered by ScribeFire.

I Spent This Morning

1. Reading a book on sentence composing.

2. Reading Writer's Toolbox.

3.  Writer's Toolbox is the textbook I'll be using this semester in my Basic Writing class.

4.  Sentence composing involves learning how to write sentences through imitation and manipulation, deletion and combination.

How Do You Read? How Do I Read?

I've found a new blog:  McCarty Musings.  Here's what one of the McCarty's mused the other day:

Hello, my name is McCarty Muser, and I am a serial book monogamist.

I only read one book at a time, all the way through to the end. (Although I like Kathleen Norris’ Vocabulary of Faith so much that I decided to read Cloister Walk much slower, just a little bit at a time, like a piece of cake you try to just eat one bite of, and walk away, but you keep taking little bites of every time you walk by because it is just so good.)

I never, ever cheat and read the last page first.

(there's more to this essay and it's worth the click)

This confession lead me to muse about how I read, which is usually to have five books going at a time--different levels, different intensities.  Books on writing and educational theory are usually slow, painstaking reads, as are poetry volumes.  Novels, biographies and so on usually depend on how easy they are to get through, and with blogs, I skim and go back (and back and back--I'm hyperactive with the mouse, I'm afraid!).

Given that I'm an English professor, though, it makes sense that I have several books going at once--the professional texts and the texts for pleasure.  And I do "cheat" when it comes to texts for pleasure.  I usually read the beginning, the end and then the middle, so that I can spend my time trying to figure out how the author is going to get us from point A to point Z.  It turns every novel into a mystery and keeps me involved in the work.

I saw an ad for a book called How to Read Literature Like a Professor recently, and scratched my noggin.  Was this one more thing I'd forgotten to learn in grad school?  Or is the jig up?  Has the wizard been revealed behind the drapes? Am I a "kindly yet erudite literature professor" ? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. 

When I read literature as a professor, I stuff the margins with notes, too-large sticky papers and fold over pages.  I write inside the cover and on the back.  Sometimes the books can look pretty ragged before I've even used them in class.  If they're paperback, their covers are curled into a roll.  Within the book, words are underlined and commented on.  Within my mind, I'm following every level of symbol that I can find, thinking critically all the way:  " Oh boy, another obvious river of life symbol!" or, "Fascinating stuff--plot seems octagonal--let's see how it plays out," or, "how is reading simultaneously in two languages affecting how I interpret this poem?" Inside the book, on the covers, I jot down the main ideas in the book --a sloppy precis that I can look at to refresh my forgetful mind.

When I read literature as a laywoman, I may notice symbols, allusions and so forth, but rarely do I do more than underline a passage or fold the page.  Folding and underlining assume that I'll return to the book at some time, and that's not always the case, so I like to think of them as a kind of affirmation for a book enjoyed.  Also, I'm not running another track of thought--a continuous loop asking "How will I teach this to a class," or "How does this idea fit in with my ideas?"

With both kinds of reading, I can get so excited that I have to tell someone about it and read from it.  Depending on the situation, the other can be my students, a colleague, my husband and, in extreme circumstances (like 2 in the morning), my cats.

This electric excitement for reading is something that I've always had since before I could read.  The words "hunger" and "absorb" are often used to describe a reader's enthusiasm, and,  as much as I hate leaning on nearly trite expressions,  I have to admit that they describe the visceral feeling I get when I read and am satisfied. 

I'm sure that many of you reading this post can relate to what I'm saying.  Reading was real magic (no wizard of Oz) to me.  Still is. 

So, that's how this professor reads.

Summer Reading

Katherine wants to know what we're reading for fun this summer.  In keeping with this week's theme of women religious, I've started Our Lady of The Lost and Found by Diane Schoemperlan, which answers the question posed on the back cover:

What would you do if you found the Blessed Virgin Mary standing in your living room?

She'd say "I assume you know who I am."

I'd say "Mother of God!  You can assume anything you want, but don't put a hole in the ceiling."

Am I funny or what?  I don't think the Catholic Church misses me much.