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The “Southern” Project, Sneak Preview #1

One year ago, I introduced a planned series on “Essential Southerns: Hollywood’s Forgotten Genre.” As I worked on it, though, the series continued to grow and grow in size and scope. Eventually, I knew it had passed well beyond the bounds of a mere blog feature and threatened to overwhelm everything. If I were to publish all of it here, I would have to rename this “The Southern Film Blog.” Tempting . . . but not what I want this site to be. But I promised you a list of films last year, and I aim to deliver a list of films. So, here’s a little preview of my “Southern” project in 4 parts. Enjoy!

Nashville (1975)
Screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury. Dir. Robert Altman.
Perf. Ronee Blakley, Ned Beatty, Keith Carradine.

What it’s about: A diverse group of 24 characters converge on Nashville for an extended weekend leading up to a major political primary. Each has their own talents, desires, and reasons for being there, which intersect, collide, or quietly pass each other by as their relationships shift and evolve. Eventually, all of them end up at a momentous rally for a populist third-party candidate that brings their shared story to a thematic head.

nashvilleposterWhy it’s essential: Released right between the Watergate scandal and the American bicentennial celebration, Nashville speaks for a disillusioned decade. This is the “Athens of the South” as a stand-in for the nation as a whole, a giant slice of Americana with all the tragedy and comedy of American politics, religion, and entertainment, as they intersect in the drama of the country-western music industry. Nominated for multiple Oscars and later inducted into the National Film Registry, Nashville is generally regarded as Altman’s greatest film, and it is certainly his most ambitious.

Among the many things Altman gets right is the huge role that musical performance plays in the film. Most of Nashville‘s many songs were written for the movie by the actors that perform them, and there is something like an hour of singing, more than a third of the film’s run-time. As a result, many of the most significant moments take place in the context of a live performance, including the shocking final scene at the political rally, where a star is born in the aftermath of a great tragedy, singing a song of almost-apathetic passivity in the face of exploitation. It is an incredibly bleak ending, but then again … maybe it isn’t?

This is a true ensemble film unlike anything that came before it, and its influence is clear on many later films and filmmakers. No one of the two dozen characters emerges as more significant than the others, and they meet and mingle their way through the film in surprising and unexpected ways while the camera glides in and out of their lives. Because it follows so many characters in such a documentary-like fashion, Nashville ends up showing us lots of different kinds of relationships: romantic, familial, friendly, and many of a much more impersonal sort. But more than that, it’s about portraying a community (and a nation) where people are basically commodities, whether financially or politically or in some other way, and everyone is okay with that. Post-Watergate cynicism rolls off of all this in waves, but moments of genuine hope and human connection still shine through here and there, even at the end. Nashville is satire, and very sharp, pointed satire at that. But it cares too deeply about its characters, and shows us their humanity too clearly, to only be that.

But is it worth watching? Nashville is not a short film, and depending on how you look at it, either a lot happens, or nothing at all does. And if country-western music is not to your taste, you may struggle through it, even as it effectively sends up the industry much of the time. Nevertheless, this is a movie that rewards the dedicated viewer, and even stands up well after multiple viewings. There’s just too much to really take in the first time: too many great performances, complex relationships, and characters and events whose full significance develops slowly. This is a full-on dramatic miniseries expertly distilled into a single film.

Django Unchained (2012)
Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino. Dir. Quentin Tarantino.
Perf. Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio.

What it’s about: Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist and bounty hunter, frees a slave named Django and enlists him to identify a trio of brothers. The operation is so successful that Schultz takes Django on as his permanent partner, and Django convinces Schultz to help find and free his wife Broomhilda from the clutches of vicious slave-owner Calvin Candie.

djangounchainedposterWhy it’s essential: Quentin Tarantino has crafted an impressive career around sophisticated homages to disreputable genres. Django Unchained is his tribute to the trashy blaxploitation Southerns and Spaghetti Westerns of the 1970s, an adrenaline-fueled blend of Old West and Deep South. Controversial, even for a Tarantino film, due to its treatment of race and racial violence, Django was still a critical and box-office success, and won numerous accolades and awards, including 2 Oscars out of 5 total nominations.

In classic Tarantino style, Django basically ignores historicism, instead creating a pulpy, post-modern vision of the antebellum South that draws heavily on the cultural imagination for lurid details like “Mandingo” fighting. More than just a catalog of sordid Southern cliches and the horrors of slavery, though, the film is primarily about revenge; not only revenge by Django against his enemies, but by the entire black race against white slave owners. Tarantino upends what we know about actual history, and also what we expect from a movie set in the antebellum South. The climax explodes in an orgy of black-on-white violence that ends only when Django has killed everyone on the plantation who was complicit in the oppression. He even dynamites the plantation mansion, the primary cultural symbol of the slave system.

Tarantino uses blood on film much the way Jackson Pollock used paint on canvas: liberally splattered, but not haphazardly as a casual observer might believe. The enormous body count of the movie’s finale is the cathartic pay-off to multiple hours of watching white masters subject their black slaves to every sort of dehumanizing cruelty imaginable. Much like D.W. Griffith before him, Tarantino rewrites history with lightning, using the power of his medium to share a different vision of America’s racial past. Unlike Griffith, Tarantino makes no pretense of telling it “the way it was,” only the way we might wish it had been.

But is it worth watching? Few directors working today can match Quentin Tarantino for sheer stylistic flair, as he has proved in film after film. Django Unchained revisits many of his familiar themes, and feels like a spiritual sequel to (or perhaps self-plagiarism of) Inglourious Basterds. Django is flawed in ways that Basterds is not. In particular, the film’s final 30 minutes are somewhat self-indulgent and rough. But much of it is great, even brilliant virtuoso filmmaking.

Our Hospitality (1923)
Screenplay by Clyde Bruckman. Dir. Buster Keaton & John G. Blystone.
Perf. Buster Keaton, Natalie Talmadge, Joe Roberts.

What it’s about: Willie McKay, a displaced Southerner who grew up in New York City, learns that he has just inherited the family estate back in Kentucky, and that the McKays have a vicious, generations-old feud with the Canfield family. On the train ride out, he falls in love with fellow traveler Virginia, and she invites him to come for dinner. He accepts the invitation, not realizing that she is Virginia Canfield. However, the Canfield patriarch decrees that the code of Southern hospitality dictates they cannot harm anyone, even a McKay, while he is a guest under their roof, prompting Willie to find every possible excuse to overstay his welcome.

ourhospitalityposterWhy it’s essential: Our Hospitality was Buster Keaton’s first true feature-length film (his previous feature, Three Ages, is really just three comedic shorts connected by a common theme), and is one of his most entertaining, hilariously funny from beginning to end. Keaton chose to set the story in the antebellum period so that he could indulge his passion for antique trains (which he set about recreating with meticulous historical accuracy), and the film’s various train sequences foreshadow his success in The General without exhausting the comedic possibilities of the railroad.

For a comedy that revolves around family (well, dueling families), it is appropriate that Keaton also made the production a family affair, giving parts to his father and his infant son, and casting his pregnant wife as his leading lady. The whole film practically glows with the enjoyment Keaton seems to have had making it. Meanwhile, his light-hearted take on the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud sharply satirizes some of the absurdities of Southern society, deriving endless fodder for amusement out of the contradictions between the pride Southerners take in “their” hospitality and the region’s reputation for violence.

Ultimately, though, Keaton only mocks Southerners in the same gentle spirit with which he pokes fun at the quaintness of the past: out of apparent nostalgia and affection. The same affection for the South is apparent in some of Keaton’s other films as well, notably The General and Steamboat Bill Jr. As he was born in Kansas to a family of traveling vaudeville performers, it is difficult to say exactly where Keaton’s affinity came from. Perhaps it was merely a canny response to the market for all things Southern. Either way, Keaton manages a more effective critique of Southern hypocrisy than more vocal contemporaries like H.L. Mencken through humor, historical distance, and the silent art of early cinema.

But is it worth watching? This is Keaton at his most playful, somehow making the comedy look completely effortless. That’s not to say that what he does looks easy, though. A perilous waterfall rescue during the movie’s climax features a stunt that is easily among the most jaw-dropping feats ever committed to film. While certainly not as celebrated as The General, Our Hospitality is every bit as enjoyable to watch, a true gem of its era (or any other).

Deliverance (1972)
Screenplay by James Dickey. Dir. John Boorman.
Perf. Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty.
From novel Deliverance (1970) by James Dickey.

What it’s about: Four men from Atlanta head into the wilderness for a weekend canoe trip along a stretch of river that is about to be flooded out by a dam. On their way downriver, they are attacked by a pair of vicious, inbred hillbillies. Both sides suffer casualties, and the survivors must battle both nature and each other if they want to leave the river alive.

deliveranceposterWhy it’s essential: This is one of those films that instantly invaded the popular imagination and has remained firmly embedded there ever since. Critically-acclaimed and a box-office hit, the film was nominated for 3 Oscars, and was eventually selected for preservation by the National Film Registry. It has inspired countless imitations and parodies in the decades since it was released.

Deliverance is a kind of Southern horror entirely different from the spooky Gothic films that had been more typical of the genre. This was horror in the wilderness, where the natural danger to inexperienced city folk was further heightened by the threat of murderous, freakish country folk. Boorman and Dickey populated their film with the weirdest, scariest-looking hillbillies they could find, and it is difficult to say now how much they were inspired by stereotypes and how much they created them. Either way, after Deliverance, the sound of mountain banjos took on a decidedly more sinister tone.

What most people miss is the film’s ambiguity towards its city heroes, whose actions and attitudes are questionable at best. Dickey’s original novel draws a sharper parallel between their actions and their fate, essentially presenting their canoe expedition as a rape, and the nearly-completed dam as the river’s annihilation. They, in turn, face rape and ultimately annihilation at the hands of two “river people.” Their ultimate triumph is not particularly triumphant, and they return to the city haunted by nightmares of what transpired outside the safe boundaries of civilization.

But is it worth watching? Even after so many years, Deliverance is still thrilling, and still terrifying. Many moments stick out in memory, but the “Dueling Banjos” and “Squeal Like a Pig” scenes are both certainly deserving of their famous (and infamous) reputations. Each of the four principal actors is perfectly chosen. Reynolds plays to type as the rugged, skilled outdoorsman, but then against type when he is ultimately helpless, unable to be the hero. Meanwhile Voight is the quiet, sensitive everyman who is forced to step into that role instead. This was Ned Beatty’s first movie, though he has since performed in countless Southern films, and Ronny Cox had acted in front of the camera only twice before. Both are excellent.

In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant. Dir. Norman Jewison.
Perf. Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates.
From novel In the Heat of the Night (1965) by John Ball.

What it’s about: Virgil Tibbs, a black homicide detective from Philadelphia, is picked up in Sparta, Mississippi while traveling north by train. A local deputy suspects him of having murdered a local bigwig. When the redneck Sheriff Gillespie learns who Tibbs really is, he reluctantly invites him to stay on and lend his expertise to the investigation.

intheheatofthenightposterWhy it’s essential: In the Heat of the Night works equally well as civil rights drama and crime thriller, but its real significance can best be illustrated by the conditions surrounding its production. The film’s subject was considered so volatile in the mid-1960s that before it could be green-lit, its producer had to prove to the studio that the film could make money even if it weren’t shown anywhere in the South. Then, the film’s star, Sidney Poitier (the only black leading man in mainstream movies at the time), agreed to do the film only as long as it was not shot anywhere in the South, either. Poitier had good reason to be concerned; just a few years earlier, while delivering money and support to civil rights workers, he had been pursued by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Although it has several memorable moments, the film’s most crucial scene occurs in Endicott’s greenhouse. Endicott, a wealthy plantation owner, answers Tibbs with syrupy condescension. However, his geniality turns to rage when he realizes that Tibbs is there to question him in connection with the murder, and he strikes the black man across the face. Without hesitation or pause, Tibbs backhands the white man in return. Everyone else in the room freezes in shock, and Endicott asks Gillespie what he intends to do. Gillespie, as fascinated as he is horrified, quietly replies, “I don’t know.” Reportedly, white audiences, who had never before witnessed such retaliation from a black character in a movie, were just as unsure about how to respond, but black audiences, unsurprisingly, erupted in cheers.

Despite a predictably cool reception in the Southern states, In the Heat of the Night still ended up being one of the biggest box-office draws of the year. It was also nominated for 7 Oscars, and won 5, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor (which went to Rod Steiger for his performance as Gillespie). Poitier went unnominated that year, despite playing major roles in three of the top-grossing films of the year (he had already become the first African American man to win an Oscar in 1963). Poitier and Steiger are the perfect foils for each others’ characters, and it is difficult to imagine either performance working without the high caliber of the other.

But is it worth watching? In the Heat of the Night is still a compelling film. It wisely lets the mystery drive the story, and allows the other relationships to play out naturally around that. Thus, what could otherwise have been a tiresomely sanctimonious parable about race becomes a very believable personal drama about one racist sheriff who grudgingly learns professional respect for one black detective. The film never pretends that the solution to the issue of race is as straightforward as the solution to the murder mystery, but it subtly undercuts the audience’s preconceptions at every turn.

~ by Jared on May 11, 2014.

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Facebook’s Not-Quite-A-Dislike Button Could Just Be Emoji

Facebook Emoji How do you convey empathy concisely and unambiguously across languages?  The Dislike button has been the most requested feature from Facebook’s users for years. Finally, this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the company is building a way for people “to express that they understand and that they relate to you” when you share something sad, such as news of a natural disaster… Read More

I am an Internet Marketer. I want to use this platform to Share my knowledge and recieve some good advice as well. Thanks

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Ratings & Reviews

  1. José Neves's rating of the film Sugar

    Yet the mythology of the young rebel, the "live fast, die young and has a beautiful corpse", through a gay romantic imaginary, via Van Sant and Warhol, where, incidentally, Palmer started with a beautiful film. This time there's nothing really interesting,unless, at the beginning, a kind of document of the night and some of its "creatures". The rest is cliché and several trivialities, badly filmed. And Brendan Fehr.

  2. Archie Del Mundo's rating of the film Sugar

    A little (gay) coming of age film from Canada, or My Own Private Toronto. Brendan Fehr was electric.


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Tuesday, 3 December 2013

The Thirties Era, with a Polish Twist

Since the National Trust opened Agatha Christie's home at Greenway, on the left bank of the Dart Estuary, we had promised ourselves a visit there, and browsing through the NT handbook revealed two other interesting houses nearby, both twentieth century, all of which could be reached from a walking holiday based at Paignton or Dartmouth. We had visited Dartmouth in the past and decided to make that our base, and the first requirement was to book the bed & breakfast to ensure that we could stay there, the second to set up an alert to tell us when the cheapest tickets for the trains would become available. As a fan of Agatha Christie our daughter Celia was to join us for the first couple of days, meeting us in London for the start of the adventure!

For us, the trip started with the usual train to Peterborough and then to London, and we made our way to Paddington where we had arranged to meet Celia at the First Class Lounge on platform 1. (A little tip if you're travelling from Kings Cross to Paddington by Underground: change at Edgware Road to the District Line because the District platforms at Paddington are much better placed for the main line concourse than the Circle/Hammersmith & City platforms are, and it's an easy change.) In the lounge we had our coffee and snack as we waited to be called to our train. We had been here once before when we had travelled to Cornwall on the Night Riviera, but this was the first time we'd caught a day train here. The deep blue livery of First Great Western's High Speed Trains is very striking, and their First Class cars have comfortable leather seats. It was a nice ride, but their catering is not like that of East Coast. We were offered a variety of drinks, biscuits, nuts etc but for a meal we had brought our picnic, bought from the M&S at Paddington before boarding, including "le Froglet" wine in plastic "wine glasses". The catering offer on board was not advertised well on Great Western's website and we had not known that there was a "Pullman" (so they call it) restaurant car, or we may well have budgetted for a special meal on this special trip rather than our M&S picnic. The line took us through Exeter and along the Exe estuary and the south coast via Dawlish and Teignmouth, a stretch which is now becoming familiar to us.

There are though trains from London to Paignton but not at the time we needed to travel in order to meet Celia and to make our connection to Kingswear, so we hd to change at Newton Abbot. This was a simple matter of getting off one train, waiting at the platform and getting on the next. Our little train from Newton Abbot to Paignton was a fairly full local train full of shoppers, workers and just a few other holidaymakers (most using the earlier through trains, I expect), and we found ourselves chatting to some local people which is always a bit of a bonus on these trains. The sun was shining and Torquay looked lovely. And so into Paignton. Here we had to leave the main line station and cross the line to the preserved railway's station next-door where we acquired our "Jubilee Passes" which would give us our travel around the area for the time we were staying. I had bought these in advance via the Dartmouth Steam Railway and Riverboat Company's website for collection at Paignton booking office and they entitled us to travel on any of the company' train or regular passenger boat services for five days (three in Celia's case as she was leaving early). This is a huge bargain, saving on the cost of the train to Kingswear on arrival and from Kingswear on departure with all other travel effectively free! We had allowed plenty of time for the connection to the steam railway in case the main line train were delayed but all had been on time so we had a little while to look around the gift shop and wait in the sun for our train. Our pre-war fantasy holiday had begun!

As those who've seen Michael Portillo in Dartmouth will know, Dartmouth has a station but no railway: the railway terminates across the river at Kingswear and passengers for Dartmouth cross by ferry. Arriving by steam railway and ferry would add to the inter-war era feel of the holiday.

We waited in the sun on the steam railway platform with its timber buildings and mock period posters and boarded our train when it came, the first of several steam train rides that would be taken on this trip. We were efficiently delivered to Kingswear and queued for the ferry across to Dartmouth where we arrived early for our check-in and whiled away half an hour at a pavement table outside waterfront bar surrounded by our luggage! There is always plenty of movement to see on this stretch of the river. We stayed at the unusual and excellent Anzac Street B&Bistro run by an Anglo-Polish couple with a Polish chef and would recommend it to anyone. We had dinner at a first-floor restaurant, in the yacht club overlooking the estuary.

Our first full day was the day at Greenway and it began, following the usual guest-house breakfast, with the ferry over to Kingswear and the train to Greenway Halt. This is a new station, with a very short platform requiring travel in a specific coach and it is on a very steep gradient just through Greenway Tunnel. As we made our way off the platform the locomotive struggled to haul its coaches away towards Paignton with about two seconds between exhaust blasts: those who know about steam traction will realise how hard this engine was having to work. Meanwhile dense smoke continued to pour out of the tunnel mouth, testament to how hard it had been working to get us this far. By railway standards this is a very steep hill!

Then began the first country walk of the holiday, through the woods to Greenway House, and the first of three National Trust house visits, with both coffee and lunch taken at the NT catering facilities at Greenway and a thorough tour of the gardens, the boathouse and the house itself, all seen on TV recently in the Poirot episode Dead Man’s Folly. Back through the woods to Greenway Halt and our train back to Kingswear. We were in plenty of time and while waiting were treated to the dramatic sight of a Paignton-bound train thundering up the grade without stopping. We had anticipated a pint at the hotel at Kingswear before crossing to Dartmouth, but it had unfortunately closed permanently a short while before. So home to sample the “menu with a Polish twist” at Anzac Street.

The second full day entailed the longest walk, to Coleton Fishacre, the home of the D’Oyly Carte family of Savoy fame, an Arts & Crafts style home with fabulous Art Deco interior and a wonderful garden. There was a well-worthwhile cross-country walk to get there, although we did not take the rather longer walk via the coastal footpath. Celia was to travel back to London this day and so we took her luggage and although there is not an official left-luggage facility at Kingswear station the staff kindly took in her case for us so that we did not have to lug that to the house and back.

After the walking and the visit to Coleton Fishacre we took the steam train again and saw Celia off at Paignton, then returned to Dartmouth: our steam train back had the Devon Belle Pullman Observation Car marshalled at the back and for a small additional fare we were able to travel in that and had a wonderful view of the coast and of the countryside. Unfortunately the champagne bar in the coach was not open … More of our Polish “home cooking” that night and a good sleep after all the exercise.

No train rides the third day, but a splendid river cruise to to Totnes, again included in our Jubilee pass. It was warm and reasonably sunny and we sat out on deck all the way. We were on our way to Dartington to see High Cross, the modernist house built for the headmaster of Dartington School and now a design museum managed and opened by the National Trust. It was a long walk across the farmland of the Dartington Estate, the opposite side of the town from the riverboat quay so we saw quite a bit of Totnes, too. An alternative way to travel to Dartmouth would be by train to Totnes and then riverboat, but it would be a long walk with a week’s luggage, so I think our route via Paignton was better.

From High Cross we walked down to the main road at the Shops at Dartington and caught a bus back to Totnes, then after tea and cake in a café in the town went to get our boat back to Dartmouth. This was when we had the only rain of the entire holiday but the late boat back was not crowded and everyone managed to travel in comfort under cover.

By the time we arrived in Dartmouth the rain had stopped and we were able to enjoy an evening out, fish and chip dinner to celebrate our wedding anniversary (!) and then a walk on the riverside. We popped over on the ferry to experience the crossing at night and on the way back over to Dartmouth were the only passengers. The ferry crew kindly switched off all but the navigation lights so that we could better enjoy the view of Dartmouth and Kingswear lit up at night. This simple pleasure was one of the highlights of a fantastic week.

All that remained after one last night at the B&Bistro was the trip home. We were going via Cheltenham and Birmingham, partly because were were to stay with friends near Cheltenham on the way, as we have done before, but in any case it is part of the experience on these tours to go back by a different route if it is convenient. Cross Country Trains run services to and from Paignton so after a final ferry and steam train ride (this time in the observation car behind the locomotive which was an amazing experience as it blasted through Greenway Tunnel with fire-lit smoke and steam all around us and pouring in through the windows!) we  had a picnic on the beach at Paignton and boarded our through train to Cheltenham, returning home from there two days later via the usual change at Birmingham New Street. We have already determined that we must return to Dartmouth and the English Riviera, and I am working out which way we might take next time. There is a lot more available from the Jubilee Pass which we did not fit in this time and now that we have visited all those NT houses, we may do a bit more exploring of the sea and the beaches on a future visit.

If you would like to see all the photographs of this adventure, they are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/frmark/


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Consequences (Consequences #1)

Besieged by memories of a brutal abduction, Claire Nichols wakes in an unfamiliar bedroom, within a luxurious mansion. Her recollections have one common denominator, the man she just met, Anthony Rawlings…-Goodreads

Where do I start? Instead of giving you the background of the novel I am going to give you my reaction only.

I stumbled upon a group on Goodreads labeled Consequences Support Group and it immediately sparked my interest. I purchased the book with barely skimming the description. I figured if it already has a support group it must be worth reading. I went into this book blind and I’m glad I did because I might have been a little scared.

Aleatha Romig is a literary genius. I have experienced happiness, love, lust, fear, and sadness from books, never can I say that I experienced them all at once.

“God she hated the dance. A blow to the cheek one minute and discussing a romantic getaway the next. It was the one step forward, two steps back waltz. She wanted to scream. Sitting on the side of the bed, Claire allowed herself tears and swallowed”

I felt like I was experiencing moments bipolar/Stockholm Syndrome/multiple personality from page to page. One minute I would be in fear, in tears, afraid to turn the page, then the next I was saying ‘oh well it can’t be THAT bad’. Yes this book is a total and utter mindf*ck. Romig blew my mind away. I cannot imagine how she created Claire and Tony. Speaking of Tony….

Follow my rules: number one, do as you are told, do not divulge personal information, actions have consequences, appearances are of vital importance, and public failure is not an option.

He is cold. He is kind. He hurts. He heals. He is calculating. He is thoughtful. He is beautiful. He is ruthless. He is a fantasy. He is a nightmare. I do not think I ever understood the definition of the word paradox until Tony found his way into my heart and my fears. He is by favorite the most fascinating character I have ever had a pleasure of reading about. The lines between love and hate were so blurred it was no wonder Claire had to find a way to adapt.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
– Charles Darwin

No truer quote could ever begin to describe Claire and the her journey. I have read other opinions of her ‘putting’ up with Tony’s treatment but she is one of the smartest heroines in a book today. There were moments when her pain was so real I found myself living those emotions. My heart ached for her in ways I’m not sure I can describe. All of her actions made sense. To have imagined her handling Tony in any other way would have been such a disservice to this book.

Consequences is a book that stayed with me for days. I finished it around 4 in the morning. Fell asleep for 2 hours and awoke because I couldn’t get Tony or Claire out of my head. I immediately started book 2 ‘Truth’. I also preached about this series to anyone willing to listen to me. I am a very emotional reader but I have never experienced a more intense reaction to a book as much as I have about Consequences.

Infinite* There is no rating that could properly convey my absolute love of this book. It is a must read!

Barnes and Noble

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It’s day 69 of 365, my beautiful friends.

And a very happy Sunday evening to you all. I hope you all have had a splendid weekend. Mine was pretty good. Obviously yesterday was my birthday. Today was spent wandering around the house. I wrote thank you notes to everyone who sent me birthday gifts…and wouldn’t you know I was one stamp short. So I guess I’ll be going to the post office tomorrow. I also cleaned out Levon and She-ra’s aquarium to ready it for a new fishy tomorrow since Levon died last week. I had to wash our comforter again because some little kitty peed on it…again. She was doing really well, but we had a slip up. I’m going to keep working with her though. I also got to speak to my aunt and uncle on the phone for awhile, which was nice. We usually only talk through email because we are all so busy, so it was really good to have an actual real time conversation with them. I also redeemed my Amazon gift card that Scott’s aunt sent me for my birthday…I’ve been “shopping” for 3 days now, adding things to my cart and then deleting them. I finally decided on 3 cookbooks I’ve been wanting : Moosewood Restaurant New Classics, the Veganomicon, and Witch in the Kitchen. I also bought 2 new scrub tops and a pair of scrub pants. I’m going to need them now that I’ll be starting full time at the animal hospital in two weeks. I really wanted a pair of boots, but I had a hard time deciding online…I think I’m just going to have to buy them when I can try them on and walk around in them. I have a little bit of birthday money left, so maybe I can put that towards some cool boots.

Something I’ve been thinking about all day is how I really wish I could have spent my birthday with my family and my closest girlfriends. Everyone is just so far away or too busy. My perfect birthday would have also included Robin, Kim, Lily, Donna, Debbie, Nancy, Kendra, and my family. I miss you guys so much. Let’s all see each other soon, at least as soon as we can, ok?

For those of you who may not know, I’m Wiccan. I don’t talk about it much, so unless you know me in real life, you may have had no idea. I practice using many elements of paganism as well as elements taken from other world religions including Native American beliefs, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others. I don’t belong to a coven, but rather practice on my own. I’m very proud of my beliefs, and it has taken me a very long time to find where I belong and feel comfortable admitting so. It was hard for me because I grew up in a very strong Christian area where other beliefs were strongly looked down upon. Thankfully, my parents believe that children should always ask questions and choose their own beliefs. My mother is one of my biggest pillars of support even though she herself is still Christian. I believe that all personal religious/spiritual beliefs are valid and that everyone should find something to believe in, even if it is just themselves. I try to always stay open minded and I LOVE learning about others’ beliefs. If you’d like to talk about yours sometime, I’m all ears 🙂

So, my biggest feats of the day were reassembling my altar and some difficult spellwork…I haven’t set my altar back up since we moved to this house. I really like having it out in the open again. I’m not sure about the location, but it will do for now. I would also like to have a taller table to set it up on and some new altar cloths…Somehow mine got lost in the move. The spell I was working on today involved 1)writing it (which isn’t all that easy, especially when it needed to be for something really specific and it had to rhyme) 2) hollowing out a piece of nutmeg to seal the spell in (I managed to cut my finger and bleed all over the nutmeg in the process, but I’ll be darned if I was going to start all over again because I was almost finished when this happened) 3) and carving certain phrases into the anointed candle and using the wax to seal the paper with the spell inside the piece of nutmeg. So now the candle is burning (it has to burn until it dies out…and it’s pretty big because I asked for some pretty big help) and the nutmeg is buried where the moonlight touches the earth. Whew! That took a long time and it took a lot out of me. Therefore, I really really really hope my magic works. Because the person the spell is for totally deserves it. So if you want, think happy thoughts to maybe help send it along its way to the God and Goddess. I (& the person its for) would super appreciate it.

So anyway, that was my day. And now, there is one more piece of birthday cake with my name on it…and it’s calling to me. So I’m going to go eat that. My photo today is of my altar. I’m mega proud of it. (and I just want to say here that if you don’t agree with my beliefs, please remember that this is my blog and I will post freely here without fear of being mocked or judged by my readers. So please, if you don’t have something nice to say, I would appreciate if you kept it to yourself) Enjoy it and I’ll see y’all tomorrow!


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Our Answers

You should know up front that it is likely some of the positions we take will challenge your existing beliefs. Those of us who specialize in personal financial economics had to face that same issue. After all, we did not set out to be contrarian. We were confronted with a different perspective and had to choose whether to ignore it and walk the mainstream financial industry path, or be open to learning something new. Just like you. You’ll also make that choice.

Some make the choice informatively; some do not. It’s up to you. While it may not appear so, it bears repeating that a seemingly simple, obvious, and benign financial action can result in a lost potential in the tens to the hundreds of thousands of dollars – a difference that can be easily proven, but never suspected up front.

Please consider this: when all is said and done, we each must live with the results of our own actions – and, of equal importance, our own inactions. The advice givers, as well meaning as they may be, will be long gone and will never make up the difference when the advice doesn’t work out.  So, we try to avoid giving advice. We believe in personal empowerment. In essence we say “here’s what happens, why it happens, and the risks involved, if you do this or if you do that” and we will do that for as long as you want or need until it is fully understood. Then you choose what you want to do.

It’s actually a lot easier than it may sound and the rewards are truly great. What makes it easier is this:

with highly advanced, state of the art, proprietary software we have the capability to calculate the results of different financial actions with precision; to compare them; and, to vividly demonstrate them in order to achieve full understanding. The results speak for themselves.

We do not tell people what to do. We show them their valid options and respect their right to choose their own path. Just like we did.

Here are our answers, with explanation, by category. Thank you.

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Northern Michigan Runs, Walks and Cycling Events: July 2014

  • This event has passed.

July 27, 2014
8:00 am - 4:00 pm
Event Category:

Northern Michigan Cities, Towns and Villages, MI United States

My North Calendar
July Runs/Walks/Cycling Events — 4-27
Independence Day Run Shores of Lake Charlevoix July 4, 7:30am
Boyne City, 231.582.6222 boynechamber.com
Crystal Lake Firecracker 5K Village Park July 4, 8am
Beulah, 231.930.4222
Paul Revere 3 & 10 Mile Run Downtown Harbor Springs July 4, 8am
Harbor Springs, 231.526.2059
5K/10K Run/Walk Louis M. Groen Nature Preserve July 4, 8:30am
Johannesburg, 989.858.1855
Firecracker 1 Mile Race Hanson Hills July 4, 10am
Grayling, 989.348.9266
Ryan Shay Mid Summer Night Run Thurston Park July 4, 7pm
Central Lake, 231.544.2815 ryanshay.org
L.A.S.S.I. 5K Loop Mears State Park July 5, 7am
Pentwater, 231.869.4150
Firecracker 5K Run/Walk & 1K Fun Manistee High School July 5, 8:15am
Manistee, 231.398.9355
Waugoshance Marathon/½ Marathon Wilderness State Park July 12, 7am
Mackinac City, 231.347.0991 landtrust.org
National Cherry Festival of Races Eastern Elementary July 12, 7:30am
Traverse City, 231.947.4230 cherryfestival.org
Alpenfest 5K/10K Run/Walk, Fun run Downtown Gaylord July 19, 8:15am
Gaylord, 989.732.6333 gaylordalpenfest.com
Kaleva Finnish Line 5K Run/Walk Kaleva Elementary School July 19, 9am
Kaleva, 231.362.3519
Port City Run Goose Park July 19, 9am
Frankfort, 231.352.7251 frankfort-elberta.com
SummerFest 5K & 10K Downtown July 19, TBA
Indian River, 231.238.9325 irchamber.com
Running Bear 5K & ½ Mile Kids Run Cherry Republic July 22, 9am
Glen Arbor, 231.334.7363 runningbearrun.com
Tour de TART TART & Leelanau Trail July 25, 4pm
Traverse City, 231.941.4300
AuSable River Festival 10K & 1 Mile Grayling Middle School July 26, 7:30am
Grayling, 800.937.8837 grayling-mi.com
Black Bear Bicycle Tour Grayling to Oscoda (100 miles) July 27, 8am
Grayling, 800.937.8837 grayling-mi.com

Event Comments


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Yesterday Sweden was shocked by a news which nobody would have ever expected to come. A truck drove into one of the most crowded streets of Stockholm around 3 in the afternoon on Friday the 7th, killing 4 people and heavily injuring at least 15. I got blocked when I got to know about what happened, it was more striking of a reaction than I would expect from myself, but it seems like expectations are not to be fulfilled lately.

During a press conference held today, the police gave no further details about the attack than that a 39 y.o. man from Uzbekistan was stopped and retained as strictly related to the attacks. There are still uncertainties about the actual and complete relation of the man to yesterday’s event. An explosive object was found in the truck. The Swedish page of The Local is one good place where to find clear updates.

Police is now way more present and spread within Swedish cities than it was before. Just yesterday night in Möllevångstorget, Triangeln and the central station in Malmö – the third biggest city – one could see how police was spread. One curious thing for me was to see a policeman kicking a football ball to some guys who were playing in the square. A friend told me that a main character of police in Sweden – nevertheless belonging to Swedish culture in general – is to develope and transmit trust and confidence to inhabitants so that in return they can feel safe and protected by them. What can seem as an insignificant and small gesture can instead be the way to a stronger community building.

It is sometimes hard to not be able to help in these moments, I wish I was living in Stockholm to also open my door to people in need or in some other way give support. Here is a video showing the support showed by the Stockholm folk and others right after the attack. People tried to help those directly involved in the attacks or who could not get home because of traffic being closed, by literally opening their houses to them (#openstockholm) or offering coffee and food on the streets. One of the main churches was left open, police made a space available for people to have a roof on their head, sleep and talk with someone, and an increasing number of people donated blood.

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The guilt

The guilt is eating me alive. I have come full circle it would seem. From being eager and excited to get back to work, to feeling the awful mummy guilt of leaving my little lady day after day. The only thing that takes the edge off it is knowing that she is with family and that she is happy when she is there. But it’s the getting her there and waving goodbye in the mornings that’s hard. Knowing some mornings that she is still tired and would much rather sleep than being coaxed awake by mummy who “has to go to work”, but who knowingly and guiltily made the choice to go back to work. I know in the back of my mind that she is fine and that this is fine, that its good for her to spend some time away from me and the husband, socialising, playing and learning to be with others even if it is family. I know that this is the right thing for our family from a financial perspective and I know that I needed to go back to work for me. It was and still is the right decision on the whole. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling terrible some mornings when I can see that the little lady doest really feel like getting up, or getting dressed. I was certainly under no illusions this morning that it was one of those days, when she refused to kiss or say goodbye to me as daddy whisked her out the door. As I start to get back into the routine of it all, as I start to get fall back into the monotony of it all, I can’t help but ask myself whether I could have compromised more. Whether I could have considered the options more. A full time new job doesn’t leave much time for anything. Out the door at 8am and back in at 7pm. That’s a long day, even for me. But isn’t this what everyone does? Isn’t this the norm? Isn’t this reality? Isn’t this everyone’s story almost? I love my little lady and I love working, and somehow, someway we seem to have found a way to make it all work. But something still doesn’t feel quite right. Something feels out of balance. Something is making me feel a little bit guilty..

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My Tabloids | Satire on the Mon

It's not true, they didn't come anywhere near my tabloids…

Archive for October 2009

Roethlisberger digs “Breast Awareness Month.”

big_ben_roethlisbergerSteelers QB “Big Ben” Roethlisberger was “totally stoked” when he heard that the NFL would be celebrating “Breast Awareness Month” by wearing pink ribbons, shoes and underwear.

“Now this is something I can totally get behind,” Said Big Ben, with a wink. “I mean, I’m not into the pink stuff, but if you’re talkin’ breasts, I’m your man!”

Sometime later the Steelers PR machine went into overdrive. “Ben simply left off the “cancer” part. It was an inadvertent error made prior to a game, when Ben was distracted by a cheerleader named Tiffany.”

Letterman changes name to Worldwide Zippers

lettermanDavid Letterman, who admitted he’s been regularly having sex with multiple young woman on this staff, has decided to change the name of his production company from Worldwide Pants to Worldwide Zippers.

According to spokesperson Tiffany Amber D’Alessandro, it was an effort “To more accurately reflect the reality of this wonderfully creative person’s life and good works.”

Bush surprise Copenhagen visit: Makes case for Crawford

bush_podium1Former President George W. Bush showed up in Copenhagen, Denmark today and made a strong case that the International Olympic Committee should consider Crawford, Texas as a “Damn fine place to hold them Summer ‘Lympics.”

Bush contends that Crawford has most of the amenities that Rio, Madrid, Chicago and Hong Kong do, but that, “Parkin’ is cheap and we are a friendlier than those “big city” people.

While making his statement, Bush also pressed the Committee to consider his request that cow-chip tossing be added as an Olympic event.

“It’s about damn time.”

Written by mytabloids

October 2, 2009 at 8:17 pm


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Tele: 0333 8000 345.

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Arrow 23 Gauge Headless Pinner (12-25mm) APT23EUK

Stapling and Nailing Supplies Ltd

Professional Use, Semi Professional Use, DIY (Home Improvement)

This headless pinner from Arrow is a really price-competitive option. Used for hidden/secret fastening on intricate and decorative work. Especially for times when you don't want to use woodfill or leave a visible pin. This  Headless Pin Gun is so well priced making it a great addition to your kit. Use with 23 gauge headless pins, which we stock in both galvanised steel and stainless, for the times when you need an anti rust finish.

  • Trigger: Dual Safety Trigger
  • Weight: 0.9 kg
  • Load Capacity: 170 Pins
  • PSI: 70-100
  • Brad Type: 23G (Headless)
  • Brad Length: 12mm - 25mm
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Excellent for:

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  • Coffin Manufacture
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  • Pine furniture manufacture
  • Porta cabins, mobile homes, caravans
  • Presentation boxes
  • Toy manufacture
  • Window frames and beading

£84.71 Inc. VAT

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Sharing good things: 5 January 2014

O Jerusalem, you who bring good tidings, lift up your voice with strength, lift it up, be not afraid; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” — Isaiah 40: 9

Our Bible text is taken from a passage written to comfort God’s people in Babylon. Large segments of the population of Jerusalem and the southern kingdom of Judah had been carried off to Babylon by the Babylonians, and the temple in Jerusalem – the religious and political centre of the realm – had been destroyed. The exiles had the feeling that they had been abandoned by God. Our Bible text addresses this situation of hopelessness and despair: with words of hope and confidence it expresses that God stands by His people and that He will lead them out of captivity and back to the land of their fathers. “Behold your God! Behold the Lord God” (verses 9–10). It is with these words that the prophet extols the powerful presence of God. He calls upon the people to look up to God and trust Him completely.

Let us extol God by sharing good things with others. God came into the world in Jesus Christ so that we could share in His grace, His peace, and His love. We can extol God in the proper manner when we too appreciate that which emanates from God in His perfection and share it with others.

Core Points

We extol God by:

  • grasping His grace and granting the same grace to all people.
  • seeking His peace in order to make peace in our surroundings.
  • feeling His love at the altar of God in order to counter the lovelessness of our time.
  • sharing our joy in the return of Christ with others.
  • always leaving enough room for the activity of the Holy Spirit, such that we may always recognise what is good.

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This world. This place. This life.

Thoughts about greener grass

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Six years ago I gathered up  my courage, put my foot on the bottom rail of the fence, and leapt over into the greener pasture of Unitarian Universalism.  It was heaven.  I wanted to lay down in the grass and roll around, savoring its lush greenness.  So I did.

After a while, I discovered it wasn’t all spring green abundance.  There were bare patches. Once in a while I stepped in it, if you know what I mean.

I am still very, very glad to be in the UU pasture.  My heart still dances, energized by the vitality of its people.

But my joy is tempered by awareness of its imperfection.  By acknowledgment that pastures I’ve abandoned provide nourishment to others–and sometimes even to me.  By recognizing that there are pastures I have yet to explore.

In the past few months I’ve met people in the UU pasture who look with longing at the Christian pasture I’ve left behind.  Some know that Christianity is no heaven, but others see only green, only growth, only vitality.

I want to warn them:  “Don’t eat the greener grass!  The fertilizer they use–it’s toxic!”

But that’s not (always) true, either.  There are petrochemical-free Christian pastures.

And so I breathe in, breathe out, plan and write blog posts like this one, and let it be.

I will lie down in UU green pastures, and beside UU waters I will restore my soul.

Some day, maybe, all the fences will come down, and it will all be one pasture, open to all.

Until that day, may all who seek find pastures that feed their hunger, and waters that quench their thirst.

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29 July 2017

Andy at the Beach.. Children’s Summer Holiday/Vacation chall..

We are holding a Summer Special chall. @ A Gem of a Chall
for Children aged up to 16yrs.
The theme for our Special Children's chall is
Anything the children enjoy doing while on their Summer Holiday/Vacation.
It could be The beach/Camping/Walking/Gardening/Fishing/Playing in the park
just a few ideas for you..
ANY stamped or Digi image CARDS only please...

As many of you know my sweetie of a Granddaughter Mia loves
to get into my craft room on occasions we do actually finish a card,,,lol
This is what Mia & myself made for the chall..
We used Andy with Ice cream coloured digi stamp. & Beach Hut digi..
EK success bucket/spade border punch.. starfish & shell are old provo craft dies.
Card shape is a Press cut Stepper die, lolly die an old spell binders,
copious amounts of seed beads over glossy accents.

 You can feel her concentration..lol
Now of course nanaseaside did help, well I couldn't let Mia loose with scissors ?
but as you can see by the pics below Mia was very determined about the design..

Now where is Andy going to stand Mmmm here me thinks..lol

Now this is where the pkt. seed beads went ALL over the craft room & Floor..lol
Determination on her face to scoop them out with a spoon was priceless..

Please hop over to A Gem of a Chall. for all the details & leave
some love for our young inspirational crafters.
I want to thank my Gemsters for their help with this Special Childrens chall.
without them & their likkle crafting geniuses I couldn't have run it..xxxx
The chall runs from July 29th until Fri. Aug 25th 6pm UK time.

Thanks for stopping by see you soon.

Lisa J said...

Such a beautiful card Mia. Love the little beads!!! Lisa & Chloe x

Marianne's Craftroom said...

Well done Mia, lovely photos and such a sweet card. Loving the seed beads x

KarinsArtScrap said...

very beautiful Mia
gr karin

Bunny said...

I love the pictures of Mia working and concentrating. I see she has her own cute little watermark. Great job, Mia. I'm sure she has lots of fun crafting with Nana.

Thankfully it was seed beads and not glitter. [Bunny]

Karen Knott said...

Well done Mia, your card is wonderful. Love the little buckets and spades and the yummy looking lolly :)
Hugs, Kaz xx

Kelly Lloyd said...

Wonderful card Mia, you look like you really enjoy crafting x


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Quantum Young Earth Virginity Unicorns: Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle

Summer rereads, book two: I haven’t read Many Waters in years and years, I mean probably about fifteen or eighteen years. In it, Murphy twins Sandy and Dennis get to hop off the back burner of their siblings’ famous adventures and into the Biblical Noah story. The only things I remembered about it were the tiny woolly mammoths and the impression that it was WEIRD WEIRD WEIRD. It is weird! The mammoths are very much the least of it. A lot of the same weirdness is already there in A Wrinkle in Time, where L’Engle is already writing spiritually driven science-fantasy. It definitely gets weirder when you put the broader history of Earth in this perspective, and age up the characters so puberty comes into play.

When I say “puberty comes into play,” what I actually mean is, ninety percent of this book is about, not tiny mammoths (alas), but about awkward sexy tinglings and bodily morality for fifteen-year-olds (and hundred-year-old Bible characters). There’s a lot of repeated talk of how the twins Are Not Children Anymore, and the same goes for Yalith, the No Longer Child daughter of Noah who isn’t in the flood story and must therefore die, but does have a great nurturing personality and well-described breasts. She is into them, they are into her, and there is a lot of If Only We Were Older, which turns out to be more confusing if you, the reader, don’t share L’Engle’s (and by extension, her fictional teens’) apparent assumption that teenagers would never consider having sex before marriage.

It’s all much, much stranger because of the Good Pure Angels, the Bad Sexy Angels, and the Unicorns. None of these groups seem to be good for much except as plot devices to serve or push around the human characters. The Seraphim (good angels) heal some wounds and brood a lot while listening to the stars. The Nephalim (sexy angels), who feel mad about not being able to listen to the stars due to FALLING FROM HEAVEN, catcall girls and get them pregnant with horribly gigantic babies and try to badger the less pleasant relatives into not quite murder. All the angels have pretty wings in many colors, unnaturally beautiful eyes, and spend a lot of time in the forms of animals, which are their Earth forms but somehow don’t mind being stretched into angel shape. They come in two personalities: mopey bird good angel and viril snake bad angel.

The unicorns flicker in and out of existence like fairies in Peter Pan, e.g. they exist when someone believes in them, and how they move reminds the twins of science. They’re an extremely useful form of transit, and solve pretty much the entire plot by existing at the right moments. L’Engle also decided the unicorns should hang onto their worst mythological trait:  VIRGINITY DETECTOR. Yes. Every time unicorns show up, we get to be reminded of everyone’s sexual status. We get to reminded a lot that Sandy and Dennis are pure virginal youths from the future, whose first trembling sexy feelings keep showing up but haven’t threatened their lovely innocence. (Guess what? I do not love this.)

The other side to this coin is the Nephalim, who sleaze around making some of the neighborhood ladies more Bad Sexy and are always trying to seduce more. On of the ladies, Mahlah, marries a Nephalim (sort of) and has his giant baby. Another, Tiglah, is trying to snag a Nephalim for herself. They have this exchange at one point:

This is about the level of sexiness that the sexy parts of this book achieve throughout. Women married to human men are generally awesome (and make normal-sized babies by the end of the book). All of the Nephalim-sexy characters are used to highlight how pure Sandy, Dennis and Yalith are. One of the Nephalim keeps feeling up Yalith, which is mostly titillating because of how tiny and virginal and proto-saintlike she is.

Tiglah, who has gone to the sexy side, tries to seduce the twins. She gets nowhere, but the twins’ disgust reminds us of how nasty she is! Also how pure the twins are. In fact, she and Mahlah are both scorned by the story, the narrator, and the other characters. The language everyone uses for them is unpleasant, and their characters are disloyal, sex-driven, and dishonest. That doesn’t mean other characters have let go of love for them entirely, but there’s a bad attitude taken towards them both, and Tiglah unremittingly. I was very startled when one of the twins outright refers to Tiglah as a slut.

Well, okay, tall white unicorn boy that everyone mysteriously loves so much.

It’s funny (not very) because at the end L’Engle tries to round it all up by saying that the Nephalim took advantage of people and warped them, and by having one of the twins rail against the chauvinism of the Bible story that doesn’t even mention the women by name. At that point it is far, far too late to be arguing about ancient sexism. Most of it comes straight from 1986.

The other weird as heck thing about this book is that its relationship with science and religion is a lot more muddled than before, and that makes the world smaller rather than bigger. For example: there is no natural explanation for the flood (although their could have been, without diluting the divinity of it). Both twins know as soon as they hear the name Noah that it’s THAT NOAH. It’s acknowledged that the Bible is written over time by numerous people, but the crux of the plot is that they know from the Bible exactly who does and doesn’t survive the flood by going on the Ark. Weirdest of all, this has to take place a few thousand years ago, and L’Engle over and over mentions the constant tremors and the volcanic murmurings of an Earth that is still being born. She’s literally writing a Young Earth novel! That is, I’m sorry to stay, just straight up non-science. Or nonsense.

Everyone is worried because the Bible doesn’t mention Yalith and neither has god, whom Noah talks to a lot. Yalith is apparently the literal only good woman on Earth not married to one of Noah’s sons, so everyone is very disturbed by this. NO WORRIES, THOUGH: Yalith is so pure that she gets OT raptured like Enoch! This is apparently not the same as dying. Therefore everyone in the Noah family is joyful and satisfied with the loophole, and can go back to being not concerned about the destruction of every other human and animal on the planet.

Not wanting to drown, the purity twins ride a couple of unicorns through time and space. The good boring angels come along and take away their sunburn so no one will know about them going to Young Earth Noah World, and they can suffer the loss of a second family and a year of their lives in complete isolation. Then the rest of the Murphys get home and the twins make cocoa. Well, golly, I guess that’s that!

In accidental good timing, there are a number of parallels between Many Waters and The Magician’s Nephew: early world, a present god, visitors from our own world, a blend of fantasy and theology. But Lewis had a better handle on his, especially comparing these two books. When Lewis does deal with puberty, he just kicks people out of Narnia, and although he treats Susan a lot like Tiglah (sexy lipstick, doesn’t get on the Ark), he doesn’t drag her into Narnia and call her a slut first. I suddenly appreciate that.

Many Waters Verdict: still weird. Wish it had more mammoths.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

first read : audiobook : 11:12/11:12

 DIVERGENT! It is the thrilling tale of a butt-kicking girl teen for fans of The Hunger Games who have already read The Hunger Games. DIVERGENT! It takes place in a future Chicago. At some point in slightly less future Chicago, everyone got together and decided in an act of consensus that reminds me of nothing that has ever happened on this Earth, that society’s problems are not racism, religious bigotry, poverty, and so on, NO, the problem is Myers-Briggs types.

The unknown forebears, determining this, decide that segregation is usually a good option in these situations. So they establish the five Cyberhogwarts houses that will reductively and peculiarly dictate the lives of the people of Chicago for at least several more generations. These houses are Evil Ravenclaw, Puritanical Hufflepuff, Friendly Stoner Hufflepuff, Mrs. Weasley, and EFFED UP GRYFFINDOR.*

In this completely realistic society where no one is sure what exists outside of Chicago but one imagines that internet quizzes are read as holy scripture, you live with your parents until you are 16. Then you and all the other sixteen-year-olds play a VR game with the worst programming of all time and it tells you what you should do with your life.

The protagonist of Divergent is an Abnegation (Puritanical Hufflepuff) girl called Beatrice. Later, when she becomes cool and starts getting tattoos and punching people’s teeth in, she is Tris. Right now she is Beatrice, because that is the kind of name you have when you’re a white girl future Puritan who will be needing a tough-sounding nick-name later. Beatrice, Roth tries really hard to tell us, us a BAD, BAD girl, who is not nearly giving and selfless enough to stay in Abnegation. She sometimes feels pride. It’s despicable, you can only imagine how despicable is. This is real important setup for Tris not staying in Abnegation, where probably you could not fit fight scenes into the mix until close to the end of the book?

Tris goes to her super secret test and goes into the VR that will tell her her fate and she has–a choice. The One Choice, from the very cover. The One Choice that will change you forever. I am ready now for the SH*T TO GET REAL. This is a gritty, action-packed, sexy future-story where Tris is A TRUE OUTLIER, A DANGEROUS ANOMALY, A MYSTERIOUS AND ENDANGERED RARITY. That is the PREMISE of the ENTIRE SERIES. TWO BASKETS. TWO OPTIONS. WHO WILL YOU BE? I. AM. PREPARED.

The VR wants Tris to pick between a knife and…a block of…cheese.

Nooooooo there isn’t CONTEXT, she’s just standing there in front of these virtual baskets on virtual pedestals and there’s just this BLOCK OF CHEESE (or you could have this knife, what will it be?) WELL HOW WOULD ANYONE ON EARTH KNOW? Is it to EAT? Is it to OFFER A HOMELESS PERSON? Is it a LIFELONG INVESTMENT, like a knife will probably be more useful over time than a block of cheese…? BUT MAYBE…? IT IS FOR SEASONING SOMETHING? Can I not just USE THE KNIFE TO EAT THE CHEESE?

Apparently Tris and I are the only people to get stymied at this point, apparently everyone else looks and goes OH OBVIOUSLY BLOCK OF CHEESE I WILL TAKE THE BLOCK OF CHEESE, CLEARLY or whatever, because suddenly the whole simulation is messed up in its virtual head, it does not know what to do. And Tris’s results are…IN CON CLU SIVE. Her inability to choose at random between cheese and a knife make her a dangerous subset of humankind, with a computer-defeating superbrain who MIGHT singlehandedly destroy the Myers-Briggs society….somebody…? created. So the test-giver is like HOLY CRAP BEATRICE DON’T TELL ANYONE EVER FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, YOU HAVE SUPERBRAINS AND THEY’LL TAKE YOU DOOOOOOOWN.

Listen. Here is the thing. This means almost nothing for the rest of the book. The test means NOTHING. Because you don’t even have to commit yourself to the faction you come from OR the faction the computer puts you in. You. Just. Pick. One. You pick one by cutting yourself in the hand like everyone ever to take a stupid oath in every book and TV show and movie for fifty years, like your hands aren’t important and delicate appendages that you can completely destroy with that kind of nonsense.

The only reason that your choice matters, aside from your family will hate you forever possibly if you switch factions, is that if you fail your initiation you end up factionless. This is kind of like college admissions where you are forced to stab yourself and move across the country before beginning the admissions process, and oh, if you don’t get in, you will live on the streets for the rest of your life.

It’s both worse and more hilarious because Roth’s idea of Untouchables-style jobs is, like…train conductors. Janitors. You know, normal moderately well-paid blue-collar frequently unionized jobs, so, totally the lowest rung of society ROTH. YOUR PRIVILEGE IS SHOWING. (Then again, you might have known that from the fact that she wanted to write a dystopia only after she’d tossed out all those pesky Real World Issues.)

You can pick, let me reiterate, ANY FACTION YOU FEEL LIKE, NO MATTER WHAT YOUR RESULTS SAY. And Tris has already belaboredly informed us that she doesn’t fit in at Abnegation, where action sequences will be limited. So she and her brother both pick other factions, and their boss-Puritan dad is deeply disturbed by this. Brother picks Evil Ravenclaw, which looks good on the surface, but Tris picks Dauntless, and I can’t figure out why. She should have known better. In her defense, knowledge is a spotty thing in future Chicago. Like, Tris knows ALL about how other factions perceive her way of Abnegation life, apparently, and she knows what the Hancock building used to be called even though she definitely like all other future people calls it the Hub. Buuuuuut she does not know that you have to get initiated after you pick a faction, and she doesn’t know not everyone makes it even though her faction are in charge of feeding the Factionless ? ? ?

On the surface, the Dauntless are punk police forces that wear only Hot Topic remainders and do a lot of body-mod. That doesn’t seem great to me. But also, as Tris would probably know if knowledge made sense in this world, Dauntless members hurl themselves on and off the L, which no one else rides and which NEVER STOPS, EVER. (Is this where the factionless work? Why? Who is paying for this train to drive all around future Chicago just so Dauntless can hurl themselves on and off it?) And that I think says most of what you need to know about Dauntless. THEY ARE NONSENSE CHILDREN. NOW TRIS IS AMONG THEM. WHAT COMES NEXT?

*In order: Erudite, Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless.

8.2.14 ALEX READS The Year of the Griffin

The Year of the Griffin by Diana Wynne Jones

first read / library book / 178/178

The number of Diana Wynne Jones books I can read for the first time is rapidly dwindling, which is fairly terrible; but one of many good things about Diana Wynne Jones is that you can always read her again, because almost every single one of her books is infinitely re-readable.

Year of the Griffin I put off reading for a long age because I didn’t adore Dark Lord of Derkholm. I don’t know why, and I do adore the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which spawned it. I think it’s that DLoD is spotted with violence in a way that’s meant to be unnerving, except it unnerves me out of enjoying the book. That’s incredibly subjective, so everyone else should probably go read DLoD immediately.

Point one: Griffin sexuality is weird as heck.

Point two: Year of the Griffin is nothing like Dark Lord of Derkholm. Year of the Griffin is, like Witch Week, partially a critique of British schooling (in this case university) and partially an eventful and good-humored tumble through several interesting young people’s coming into their own.

In Dark Lord of Derkholm, a man with a plan and a demon wreaked havoc over the land with yearly hordes of fantasy-adventure enthusiasts (“tourists”), until he and his demon were overthrown. Eight years later, one of the wizard Derk’s children (a griffin) has started at wizard’s college. She’s in a class along with a number of other somewhat misfit young magical people, most of whom aren’t supposed to be there and some of whose magic has…hiccups. Jinxes and things. But they’re all smart and willing and just need something to jolt them out of their troubles and into KNOWLEDGE.

UNNNNNNNFORTUNATELY, everyone who works at the university was trained by people whose only concern was getting a lot of nominally competent wizards into the field for Chesney’s devastating Tours. So most of the faculty know next to nothing about magic. They also know next to nothing about teaching, so it’s a lot of harshly put down questions and BIG HEADINGS / LITTLE HEADINGS, and Wizard Corcoran REALLY wants to get to the moon but he is completely clueless. And their administrative bungling is directly responsible for waves of angry bandits and assassins and kings and murderous dwarf forgemasters and centurions.

The HEADINGS and the teachers who aren’t taught to anything but train for the exam and the general tendency of university administration to make everything as horrible as possible, beyond even the scope of their offices, is incredibly realistic, and DWJ makes it funny. You can tell that in real life it’s awful because DWJ usually gets the funniest right around the worst parts.

The best part, obviously, is the imminent arrival of a magical renaissance, in the hands of claws of the first year students, who all learn in the course of the book a lot about themselves and about their magic. (The magical problems of which are unsurprisingly personal and not just magical problems.) And it’s event after event, the whole way through, so there is no time to be bored and plenty of time to watch DWJ play one of her best self-acknowledged writer tricks–that is, to take a small idea and blow it up to its ultimate possibility, so it’s absurd and exciting and really does fill your book up with great stuff. She does that trick particularly well in this book.

One of the cultures in this world (from which one of the students comes) is a sort of generic fantasy Arab country, and this is just a statement of fact and preparation, because it made me somewhat uneasy but I couldn’t gauge its efficacy/appropriateness. If you happen to have an opinion on that I would love to hear it.

7.13.14 Hexwood

Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones

Photo on 2014-07-13 at 07.09

reread : 446/446

I wish I could tell you that I now thoroughly understand this book, after reading it like, five times, and that this post was going to be a perfect chronological explanation of everything that happens so that future readers and past readers alike could come here and go OHHHHHHHHHHH I SEE. UNFORTUNATELY, Diana Wynne Jones worked in mutated layers, not scattered pieces of a single picture.  Her books are also puzzles, but rather than being puzzles where every piece snaps neatly together (see: Megan Whalen Turner) they’re more made out of bits of cloud. You can smoosh them into one big cloud at the end but GOOD LUCK seeing a perfectly clear picture in all that.

Warnings: forced pregnancy, death, gore, torture, child harm/death, brainwashing, forced cyborg life, murder, violence towards women, a woman who really hates other women in a way I find unnecessary.

First of all, wow, that’s a gritty sort of DWJ novel, that doesn’t happen very often! I actually forgot how disturbing some of the disturbing parts are, mainly because I can’t keep all of this book in my head over time. It slips away, carrying bits of OH GOD WHAT IS THIS? with it.

The plot seems to be this: an English girl called Ann, on her first jaunt into the world after a nasty illness, goes into the local patch of woods in Hexwood Farm housing estate, and finds that it’s a lot bigger and more magical than she remembers. She meets a scary-looking guy with a killer smile, called Mordion, and they make a kid called Hume out of their blood, AS ONE DOES. As Ann returns to the wood over and over, though, it becomes clear that time and reality are not working the way they normally do. It seems a machine has been turned on that is called a Bannus, able to play out scenarios in full reality until a decision about a course of action to take in real life.

Of interest to a terrifying group of space aliens called the Reigners are the scary-looking guy and the Bannus, and these incredibly bad people who have been ruling the galaxy for thousands of years one by one descend to Earth to try to deal with it.

Everyone has pretty strong feelings about their place in the universe, but it’s not clear when exactly anyone really arrives in relation to anyone else, or why maybe some of them are kind of King Arthur, or where they got a super intelligent robot called Yam. IT IS A GREAT BOOK.

Here is kind of what happens, I am pretty sure.

(These are definitely spoilers and if you have not read the book it is much, much better DWJ’s way around.)

A long time ago in a galaxy which may or may not be a version or this galaxy or may be far away from us (or a version of us), there were a group of Houses that were…capitalists, basically, that ruled stuff. To keep balance between these powerhouses, they invented THE HOUSE OF BALANCE, which took one person from each of the other five houses to rule together for ten years. This, Reigners one through five, was called a hand of Reigners.

At some point along the line, the Reigners took some robot parts and some previous Reigners’ brains and torturously forced them into being the Bannus. (Later known on Earth as Yam the robot.) The Bannus was used to fairly select new hands of Reigners. Eventually there is a Reigner One called Martellian, who starts breeding children to make and train a “Servant”–someone who will do his dirty work for him, basically, a sort of knight in Martellian’s case. He is particularly successful a few times, as apparently our own records show. (See: Fitela in Beowulf, and King Arthur and his half-sisters.)

This relatively okay guy Martellian is ousted, however, by 100% scum Orm Pender, who puts himself in power, locks Martellian, Arthur and Fitela up on Earth, and also banishes the Bannus there, where it will keep them in stasis. Then he promotes his girlfriend to the position of Reigner Three. With nothing to compel them to retire and a lot of technology on hand, they procede with some other jerks to rule for thousands of years.

Orm Pender, new Reigner One, decides also to breed servants, but he does so by coercion and rape, kills the children’s mothers, and isolates, tortures, trains, brainwashes and occasionally sweettalks the kids until there is one left and that one is unswervingly loyal and completely messed up. He does this over and over, but scary-looking guy Mordion is the relevant one here.

When Mordion is young he has a sort of mental contact with three other people–real or fake, he’s scared to know–called Girl Child, Boy, and King. They get wiped out in the brainwashing, except for Girl Child. Keeping her part of his mind for himself while doing everything the Reigners make him do (largely, kill people).

The Bannus is rightly not happy about this, so when it is turned on, it begins to exert itself to bring all the Reigners to Earth, end their reign, and elect a new hand.

The Reigners have some vested interest in distant Earth because Earth unwittingly exports something incredibly valuable: flint. A peculiar disturbance on earth, at Hexwood Farm in England, is brought to their attention. Reigners go one by one to sort it out, turn off the Bannus, and get rid of any problem people who may now know too much. Reigner Two brings the Servant (Mordion) with him. But they all keep disappearing into the Bannus’s field of influence (which is also the Wood’s own field of influence, but no one can tell the difference).

At last Orm Pender and his woman-hating ex-girlfriend Reigner Three go to Earth themselves. Reigner Three brings Vierran, the girl from the House of Guaranty who manages the offworld wardrobes for traveling officials, along as a maid. This irritates Reigner One, who knows she and her family are rebels, and that he’s just had most of her family exiled to Earth, but he accepts the intrusion because he wants to breed her with Mordion and it’s easier to do that on Earth than bring Mordion back in stass and do it before killing him.

However, even Orm Pender can’t control the Bannus. Not surprising–he cheated it to become a Reigner to begin with. In the Bannus’s and the Wood’s field, time starts to repeat, and a motif of the Arthurian court is laid over everything because the Bannus was started up by a local Raynor-Hexwood clerk who told it he wanted a D&D adventure, basically.

On arrival, Reigner Three integrates into castle life, which already includes the maintenance team, Reigners Two and Four (as the fisher king with a bruise and Sir Fors, respectively), and some of the other levels of management who have been sucked in before the Reigners started arriving. Vierran’s arrested cousin Siri is also there. They worship the “bannus”, whatever they think it is, and worry about bandits in the woods (that would be Vierran’s family members etc. who Orm Pender banished). Sir Artegal is King Arthur, out of stass.

Orm Pender turns into a dragon and immediately flies off into the woods and starts eating people.

It seems very straightforward: the Bannus is expanding the wood, and the wood is the range of its field. Actually that is the wood’s field. The Bannus’s field expands all the way into the village. So when a girl called Ann who gets three voices in her head (Slave, King, Boy) gets up from an illness and ventures into a magical wood, she’s venturing from another illusion. She’s not Ann, but Vierran. At some point, the bannus tricked her. Her greengrocer parents are anything but. Her little brother is Fitela, also out of stass. Half the people in their cozy little town aren’t from Earth.

Ann doesn’t know who she is for quite awhile. The first time she goes into the wood, she meets Mordion (for what she thinks is the first time, but Vierran has talked to him for ages and researched him like crazy as a somewhat incompetent rebel), and they make the boy Hume together out of their blood. After that time swaps around over and over: Hume grows and shrinks, Mordion finds a robot and repairs it, but it seems to know too much in every piece of time the Bannus puts them in.

Things do come to a head, because the Bannus (Yam all along) nears its decision point, and all excellent plot conclusions aside, everyone finally sorts out who they are–including the four people, who are the King (King Arthur – Sir Artegal), the Girl Child (Vierran – Ann), the Slave (Mordion) and the Boy (Fitela – Martin). And those four, plus old Martellian, who was apparently decent enough the first time around and hates to go back so much that the Bannus is making him anyway.

And that is about how that book goes, which is the first time I’ve really understood what is happening at all. Remind me to check back here when I FORGET again. (Isn’t that just like the Bannus?)

6.13.14 Half Bad

Half Bad by Sally Green

First Read / Library Book

This book is like a sadistic Demon’s Lexicon.

TW: gore, death, violence, suicide, torture, parent death, imprisonment

(I am too tired to write a blog post, would it be gauche to just leave it like that?)

Half Bad takes place in a Britain with a small, secret witch population. There are WHITE WITCHES and BLACK WITCHES and the white witches have things like counsels and edicts and they like to hunt the black witches down and kill them. The white witches claim moral superiority but behave disgustingly throughout. The black witches, on the other hand, also feel good about themselves, but they tend to run around murdering people and one another, particularly if they’ve married into each other’s families. So whatever moral questions might be raised in this book, the answer is generally, no, they are all horrible, how would you like this scene of excruciating violence.

Important note: the only characters not described as racially white (actually described, not just left to the reader’s white-defaulting imagination) are Black Witches. There is not enough time spent fleshing out this odd tiny culture to definitively say whether this is an authorial commentary on racism or is, in fact, racism. In any case I am not sure what the commentary would be, since as I said, pretty much everyone is a murderer in this darn book.

Nathan is half-White and half-Black (witch) (he appears to be brownish). His mother is dead of suicide and his father is THE WORST WITCH* IN ALL OF BRITAIN OR WHEREVER HE HAPPENS TO BE. Probably the counsel of white witches would just kill Nathan like they kill all the Black Witches, but first his test results keep being unclear, and then they probably want to use Nathan to catch said bad dad. It’s not immediately apparent that he’s the only “Half Code” in Britain because the counsel keeps sending him edicts (increasingly restricting his movement) to the tune of “all Half Codes”. When you do find out that all of this stuff, framed as far-reaching, is specifically targeting him, it’s very chilling. Eventually they take him from his family and he’s kept in a cage for awhile by a white witch named Celia. Eventually he gets out of the cage and goes on the run.

There’s also a sort of nascent romance plot with this white witch girl he goes to school with, AND THERE IS LATE IN THE BOOK A SURPRISE GAY FRIEND PLOT TWIST???? WILL NATHAN TURN GAY OR IS HIS FRIEND’S GAYNESS JUST A NECESSARY FOR HIS ROLE OF CLIFFHANGER DAMSEL IN DISTRESS? answers unknowable until the second book! Anyway the romance feels very out of place, although I do buy Nathan’s developing oddly intense attachments to anyone who has been nice to him.

The book is not chronological. It opens in the future, dabbles with second person for early childhood, reins it in and goes first person for the future,  jumps back again in time to cover most of his childhood, and then jumps forward again, in a slightly confusing way, because the second jump happens somewhere in the time period of this last jump but doesn’t actually…happen in it. The effects are there, but the event is invisible on the second pass. I can think of one specific friend who would HATE this. It didn’t bother me, per se, but I can’t say it was entirely effective–I don’t usually mind tense/POV/chronology jumps but these threw me off a little.

The way it’s like a sadistic Demon’s Lexicon is like this, AND THIS MAY BE A SPOILER FOR DEMON’S LEXICON: English kid with black, creepy eyes and a loving brother cannot connect to fellow people, has a hard time reading and writing, is hated by his mother unto death. His father is an evil magic-user. There are witch circles and rules. His father likes to kill people. The shape of the character’s existence actually feels really similar. The crucial difference is that Nathan is always fairly certain both of his own monstrosity and the nature of it; it’s a much more bitter and cynical version of Nick’s living with himself. If Sarah Rees Brennan were merciless to her characters, you could imagine that this is the life her character would have instead of the one she gave him.

In general though, it has some serious violence, and I read the whole thing in under three hours of commuting because I kept speed-stress-reading past all the horrifying parts.

Maybe it was the speed or maybe it was the book–I found it a little difficult to settle in and find deep roots. But I think I’d read the next one when it comes out, at a similar pace, because I am interested to know what happens, even if the ending was sequel-bait and that is one of my worst peeves in YA fiction.

I think I need to read something that’s not overtly violent for awhile. HOW DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?

*Not like The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy. Another, more murderous witch.

4.23.14 Reflections on the Magic of Writing

Reflections on the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones. Fresh read/new book: 354/354.

Photo on 2014-04-22 at 18.16 #2

I wrote all over this book because I was reading it like a LEARNING BOOK and it is so much easier to LEARN when you are scribbling on things. (Not library books, don’t worry, I’m not completely heinous.) This set of essays and talks, published posthumously, is all about Diana Wynne Jones’s approaches to, influences in, and beliefs about writing. There’s a fair amount of repetition, which could be a bit wearing, except really I think what it does is bring forward the things that mattered most in her mind to talk about, in terms of her writing and in some cases her life (never entirely) outside writing.

I’d warn anyone reading it that her childhood, in World War II England under the dubious care of largely absent parents, was punctuated by upheaval and neglect, and that most of her childhood recollections are unnerving, to say the least.

Here are some key points, however, about writing books.

1. Hilarity and horribleness go hand in hand. If you’re writing about something terrible happening, find a way to make it funny. Frequently, terrible things are funny, in the moment, in a terrible kind of way. You can do this when you write.

2. You must know more than you write down and you must never try to fit it all in. The world you are writing about should always feel full but should never feel stuffed. This is very obviously something she carried out in any of her books; there are always these neat references to things that never get taken out of the drawer and unwrapped and explained to you; it’s obvious from how she refers to it that it’s substantial, and you as a visitor to the world had better just decide to keep up.

3. Books that are designed to teach are bad books. You can learn from a well-made story but stories that are made to the purpose of inculcating virtue are usually dreadful. Sentimentally virtuous books are the worst, and apparently they ended up on a childhood shelf that she and her sisters called the Goddy Books and never read twice. That said, she does seem to have liked Pilgrim’s Progress, which may escape the Goddy Book fate by being interestingly heroic as well as virtuously educational.

4. Do not overwrite your language. Tolkien did not write in the labored high prose of modern fantasy novels and heavy written dialect is a cumbersome detraction that can be just as well achieved by cadence as spelling. I’ll add here that dialect is usually classist, racist, or both, so there’s another good reason to avoid it. In general she argues there’s frequently nothing to be gained in tormenting your prose.

5. Publishing has fads. They will probably hate things you would like to write. It’s a struggle. You will not know why the fads are what they are, but they will probably try to thwart you at every turn. She calls them RULES, and they constantly change; and in children’s books particularly, she says, the rules are so arbitrary because they usually have nothing to do with what children are capable of reading or what they want to read.

6. Mythology is perfect material. Mythology is so bare-bones that only the recognizable, near-universal core is left by the time we see it as something called myth, and you can layer that into a story until it is hardly visible and it will still help to power you. It does not have to be obvious to be strengthening.

7. Boredom is deadly. If you are bored with what you are writing, your writing will die. Follow the story, and do not suffocate it in a plan you’ve made ahead of time. Don’t go on writing something the way you’re writing it, if it isn’t working for you.

8. Writing is messy. Sometimes story ideas have to sit for years. Sometimes they get half written and fade out. Sometimes you have to throw the whole thing away. Sometimes you keep drawers and drawers of unfinished projects. Sometimes all you know is the beginning, the end, and a bit in the middle, and you sit down and let the story tell you where it’s going, and it goes. She managed to publish over forty books in all the messiness, so I find that very comforting.

9. The real world is too strange for fiction. If you write down the strict truth and put it in a story, sometimes no one will believe it can happen, even in make-believe. You have to tone it down or wrap it up for people to believe you, even when you’re telling your own history.

10. Take a “What if?” and follow it all the way. You can get a lot of story out of a single question if you just start chasing down the answer and don’t let up until you’ve got the whole thing in your hands. You can take any little moment, in fact, and it grows into something wild and funny and surprising, because you tried answering in the fullest, most interesting way, instead of making a little solemn bullet point and connecting the line from one of those bullet points to the next without any chaotic, adventurous crescendos.

11. The fantastical, wondrous parts are important. Fantasy matters because it lets us say things in a particularly truthful way, even if the “facts” of the story sound less plausible than the “facts” of some other kinds of novels. It lets us escape ugliness in our presents and pasts by finding places that understand us, and giving us heroes who survive their uglinesses. And they show us beauty and imagination and a complete refusal to be stomped down into what we’re told is Reality. Numerous times, she talks about the dreamy, out of place chapter of The Wind in the Willows called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” This chapter was skipped over by their mother when the book was read to them as children, because it was fanciful; but she read it eventually on her own, and it mattered so profoundly that it comes up seven times in the course of this book. Fantasy is important.

I have most of her books and I adore them, but I wouldn’t say I experienced many rushing moments of recognition in the course of reading this one. But it really didn’t matter; what she did worked, and I love the books she made with her way of thinking, and you can sometimes learn a lot more from someone whose brain puts things together in a completely different way.


text:
Capital Bhangra 2012 Highlights

Highlights of the UK’s newest university Bhangra competition, Capital Bhangra 2012. Sponsored by and, Capital Bhangra was held on Saturday 28th January 2012 at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London, UK.

This highlights video was made by Narvision

Music used is ‘Manak’s Mirza Revenge’ from the Case of Bass albums.


text:
The county office–and schools–should be consolidated

Coming to Nevada County?

Coming to Nevada County?

County Superintendent of Schools Holly Hermansen told The Union a couple of years ago that the superintendents of Nevada County’s school districts weren’t clambering for consolidation.

Well, duh!

That’s not the most clueless comment I’ve heard from a public official since moving to Nevada County in 2000, but it is an example of how bureaucrats are reluctant to cede any part of their fiefdoms. The more school districts we have, the more employees she can justify at the county Office of Education.

The office’s web site currently lists more than 50 employees (that doesn’t include part-time consultants) and Hermansen’s been lobbying for a bigger building that can consolidate the three facilities her employees occupy now.

At least two members of the county Board of Education, Marianne Slade-Troutman and Jack Meeks, think she wants a “new and enlarged Taj Mahal for her expanding administrative bureaucracy,” a charge made in a letter to school administrators in November and repeated in The Union last week.

Hermansen has said that a new facility has been under discussion for two years, that she believes it can be done in a “cost neutral” manner, and that no funding will be diverted from school programs to accomplish this.

In a follow-up letter to school administrators, Hermansen wrote: “The letter you received has not been approved or discussed by the rest of the county board or my staff. The areas addressed in the letter have been created independently by Ms. Slade-Troutman and Mr. Meeks.”

Why elected officials need her approval to voice their opinions is a subject for another day, but such petty infighting does distract from the need to discuss the consolidation of schools.

School enrollment has been declining for several years–Grass Valley alone is down more than 30 percent in the last 10 years–and our elementary school districts–all with three schools or less–have been laying off staff and cutting programs.

A lot of people resist the idea, citing loss of local control, longer travel distances for students, and even nostalgia.

Local control? It’s difficult to get enough people to run for open school board seats (forget about competition), and the big decisions about funding and what is taught in our schools are made in Sacramento anyway.

Longer distances? That’s part of the pine cone tax we pay for living here. Nostalgia? Teachers, not buildings, educate our children.

To their credit, the Pleasant Valley and Ready Springs Union school districts are discussing consolidation. The seven other elementary school districts need to get on board so the surviving schools can provide a comprehensive education to our children.

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