Archive for September, 2011

The shoulders of giants

Back to school is a fresh start, that clean slate with the promise of new lessons and approaches. I wish we could get that clean slate—or smart board these days, I guess—in the great American debate over education reform.

We’re heading in the wrong direction, according to one critical report I read recently. It shows that the ideas backed by all of the different factions in the U.S. debate—corporate reformers, unions, union bashers, charter schoolers, budget cutters, standardized testers, test haters—won’t help us catch up with the countries that lead the world. We need a reform do-over.

via Why We Need a Clean Slate on School Reform – Pelham, NY Patch.

Sorkin does CNN for HBO

Here’s another one I’ll watch. He did sports news (“Sports Night”) and succeeded with national politics (“West Wing”) and now Aaron Sorkin will provide his special POV for a series on cable news for HBO. The untitled hour-long drama doesn’t have an air date yet, according to Broadcasting & Cable.

The series will portray staffers at a fictional cable news network “as they set out on a patriotic and quixotic mission to do the news well in the face of corporate and commercial obstacles and their own personal entanglements,” the HBO release says. I like that patriotic and quixotic turn. Wonder which network that is?

Jeff Daniels, Sam Waterston and Olivia Munn are in the cast.

MA in Tolkien

The Mythgard Institute opened this fall as an online academic outpost for the study of all things Tolkien. You can earn an MA in English on J.R.R., with the first diplomas handed out spring of 2014. “Most of all, we hope to provide students with new opportunities to study Tolkien and related works seriously and with academic rigor, either for their own enrichment or towards the achievement of a degree,” the Institute says.

First and only course for this fall is “The Great Tales: Tolkien and the Epic.” As the institute notes, quoting Sam Gamgee approvingly,  “Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

I thought I was having fun when I took a single course in Tolkien and C.S. Lewis during senior year of college.

Credit the often fun Geek Chic Daily for reporting this first (to me at least).

The first day of school

I wrote about the last day of school in one of my early Pelham Patch columns back in June. I would never attempt one on the first day of school after reading the piece by the late Mike Levine linked below. The editor and writer got it so right that his column was re-posted by his paper, The Middletown Times-Herald, two and half years after his death and is now shared around the Hudson Valley on this big day.

Quick, before they leave this morning. Take a good look. Touch their faces, run your hands through their hair.We got antsy with them last month, but now we want time to stand still. Like falling leaves and chilly mornings, some great force signals us today. We are aware of life passing. See the kindergartner with a brave, bewildered smile watching her mother cry as the school bus pulls away. The high-school freshman with a lump in his throat hears his father whisper everything will be OK. Brothers and sisters who fought all summer now hold hands.

via Mike Levine: The first day of school | recordonline.com.

Dyslexia saves the writer

Lost for what to do after my first mystery manuscript received eight nice rejection letters from crime editors and my agent decided to get her MBA and enter venture capital (I still wonder if it was my writing that caused this), I enrolled in the Writer’s Studio back in 1997. Joining the New York-based workshop run out of an elementary school in the Village was the best thing I could have done. In three years, I learned many things, but the most important lessons were about the big three: voice, tone and mood.

The studio was founded by Phil Schultz, who went on to win the Pulitzer for poetry in 2008. In Sunday’s New York Times, he wrote of how his disability made him into a writer, and informed the approach he would teach to the rest of us. If you’re looking for a writer’s education, I highly recommend the Writer’s Studio over the course-catalogs-on-every-street-corner mass manufacturers of continuing ed like Gotham. Definitely read the column:

Philip Schultz is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the author of the forthcoming memoir “My Dyslexia.”

I WAS well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine. When I was his age I’d already all but given up on myself.

via With Dyslexia, Words Failed Me and Then Saved Me – NYTimes.com.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy

“Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy” is one of the great twisty spy thrillers, about thinking and betrayal rather than booms and bangs. I was worried a new version would pale in comparison to the British mini-series, or die on the vine of period-piece dustiness. Not so, says this first review, from THR. I can’t wait to see it.

Huge on period atmosphere and as murkily plotted as its source material, this big-scale European adaptation of John le Carré’s 1974 Cold War novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy shows a faithfulness that should fully meet the expectations of the writer’s fans. At the same time, with Swedish director Tomas Alfredson at the helm of his first English language film, one might be pardoned for hoping for a bit of the spookiness of his Let the Right One In or the political passion of le Carré’s The Constant Gardener. Instead this good, old-fashioned square-off between spymasters Karla and George Smiley demonstrates a lot more loyalty than most of its characters. It is one of the few films so visually absorbing, felicitous shot after shot, that its emotional coldness is noticed only at the end, when all the plot twists are unraveled in a solid piece of thinking-man’s entertainment for upmarket thriller audiences.

via Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Venice Film Review – The Hollywood Reporter.

Step right up

I marked the end of summer the same way I did as a kid, with a trip last week to the Dutchess County Fair in Rhinebeck. I’ve been to the giant Ohio State Fair, and our own New York edition in Syracuse, and I can promise that you don’t need to go any farther then two counties north for a top-drawer cows-ice cream-and-rides experience.

The Dutchess County Fair remains, after 160-plus years, a wonderful combination of an agricultural exposition, an ad-hoc shopping mall for things you really don’t need, and a giant carnival. My siblings and I wax nostalgic about how much it’s changed since we were kids, what’s missing and what we miss. But to be honest, much remains that makes it a true county fair, the nearest such to us here in Pelham, and well worth a visit during its six-day run.

via Step Right Up: The Real and True County Fair Experience is a Short Drive Away – Pelham, NY Patch.

Refrigerator boxes

I’m not a believer in signs and portents, that is, signs and portents in this, the real world. Nothing has ever happened to me that told me what was to come, or even gave me a hint I was heading in anywhere like the right direction. Mine is a plain old world. It’s probably why I love signs, magical vision, foretelling and such in the stories I read. So my experience Wednesday was a new one.

I was helping my neighbor, Manu, put some new furniture on his porch. I pointed out that the kids—my son and neighboring boys—would love to play in the huge boxes the two wicker chairs and couch came out of. My neighbor was surprised at this, perhaps because he has an infant and a three-year-old girl. Or maybe he had a sheltered childhood. We put the three boxes in the front yard, and they instantly became forts, pill boxes, meeting rooms and drawing boards. All the adults who passed by that evening smiled as soon as they saw our box village, all with the same look that said getting to play in huge boxes was the best thing to do in the world when they were kids.

It made me smile too, but for more than kid memories. I started my next novel, a YA time-travel story, just last month. I’ve had the idea for ten years, maybe longer, and the opening scene in my head for the past two. Here’s how it starts:

Jamie is crap-housing around inside the empty Frigidare box. The box shakes and shudders. He giggles like a six year old, which is easy enough for him, since he is one. This is our big reward every time we move. We get to play in a damn leftover box. I knew I was done with going to a new town, a new house, a new school every four months when I didn’t want to roll around in a box anymore. I can’t stand the smell of cardboard. It’s the smell of leaving things behind.

I’ve only got a thousand words, and a bunch of research still to do, and the project may turn out terrible. But when I saw those smiles on Wednesday, it gave me a lift, a burst of confidence. The world was telling me that my refrigerator box would get an emotional response from readers. I believe that confidence begets good work, in the writing game as in any other, and the reaction to those boxes gave me that.