Book Review: Getting Schooled by Garret Keizer

I never could bring myself to read all the way through books by alleged super teachers like Ron Clark and Rafe Esquith.  While they offer some sound advice (and their tomes are nothing but a patchwork quilt of pithy recommendations, often enumerated and always emphatic), their primary example of how a classroom should look and operate was their own, and at times the pointless bragging about going to the White House or having the president namedrop them in a State of the Union speech grew tiresome.  To be honest, it wasn't "at times" or "grew tiresome."  It was as consistently annoying as trying to lie out in the hammock on a pleasant day only to be pestered by mosquitos (a common occurrence here in Savannah).

Imagine, then, my relief at Garret Keizer's testimony to the triumphs and trials of teaching, where right on the first page he lays naked his shortcomings and aspirations:

It's fair to say that I have never gone to work in a school with what might be called purity of heart, though much of what I know about purity of heart I learned there.

Keizer second guesses not only local and federal policies and procedures, but turns his bitter, geezerly, cynical eye mainly on his own soul.  When he does stab at policy, however, it is delightfully mordant:

... throughout the school year, I will repeatedly be struck by the sense that the professed goal of creating 'a level playing field' through education is little more than the goal of sorting winners from losers with a steady hand and a clear conscience.  The single greatest expression of the American project, American public education is also its most cynical lie. ... I'm still straining to keep my mouth shut ... 

He also does not spare his students this raking analysis and dry commentary:

I have a small, highly cooperative lunch-period study hall, and a most delightful girl on the list, someone whose studiousness and affability seem to rub off on her neighbors.  One day she has nothing to do ... I ask her if she likes art.  Yes, she likes art very much.  Music to my ears - among several of the books I've brought to school for browsing is an expensive coffee table compendium of painting and sculpture by three Italian masters ....  The girl glances at the book without opening it.  'Thanks,' she says, 'but I guess I'll just draw,' by which she means penciling in the scribbled loops on a torn-out page of lined notebook paper.  So much for the Renaissance.

The running theme, then, is hypocrisy and the disappointment it engenders.  But, again, Keizer rifles through no one's corrupt morality more than his own.  When he mentally criticizes a troubled student for her sloppy work ethic, he immediately pulls out the whip for a round of self-flagellation:

     Not that I would say such a thing, and I'm not exactly pleased with myself for thinking it.  Even in this funky little tutorial I am reminded of how hard it it to predict when and how a girl or boy is going to catch fire. ... I'm reminded as well of how hard-won an achievement a kid's mere attendance can be relative to the forces keeping her down. ... And, perhaps, who knows, my greatest contribution to her life may be the remembrance of a single late afternoon when she glimpsed what it means to be part of a community of scholars.  It will be my fondest remembrance too: I know even as I'm sitting here that the year will hold nothing better than this.

So the drive to change lives and teach, to be a teacher, to teach students, lets go the accelerator and drifts off to settling for a single moment of semi-successful after school tutoring.  Keizer's honesty allows his greatest insight, that we cannot really be those plastic Ken doll National Teachers of the Year, hailed by presidents, book publishers, and motivational speaker bureaus alike.  We try, and we fail.  We cannot change every life with which we intersect, after all, but we do well enough to try, and to have those occasional moments of epiphany when we realize that Bob Marley was right, that we don't have to worry about a thing, because every little thing is gonna be alright.  Even if it really won't.

Book Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

We've all experienced it: you have a dream so vivid and affecting that you wander all day in and out of recollections of the dream and marveling at how perfectly it dovetails with your waking life.  The sensible part of you reassures the speculative part that dreams don't really mean anything, that Freud has been largely debunked, and yet you can't shake the fog of dreams misting up before your eyes and making the air you breath a bit heavier.

Reading Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is much like that waking dream.  Even the piece of music Murakami selects as the novel's theme (he always does, whether it's The Beatles or Janacek) is a murky piece oscillating between dream and life.  The plot is simple: a middle-aged man seeks to discover why his four high school friends renounced him shortly after he left for college.  The overarching theme seems to be the idea of reconciling with one's past, and yet Murakami cannot leave things so simple.

When your girlfriend gives you a tie, is it just a tie?  After all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  But Murakami is a master at imbuing exchanges which appear dull with terrific meaning:

     "Thank you.  It's beautiful."
     "Some men don't like to get ties as gifts."
     "Not me," Tsukuru said.  "I never get the urge to go out and buy a tie.  And you have such good taste."
    "I'm glad," Sara said.
     Tsukuru removed the tie he'd been wearing, one with narrow stripes, and put on the one Sara had given him.

It's just a tie, right?  However, their relationship ends on a strange note, unresolved, with Tsukuru suddenly overwhelmed by desire for her but Sara asking for a three-day break from their relationship.  It's just a tie, right?  Everything in this novel is a mysterious quasi-symbol subject to interpretation, as if we were at a Freudian dream-reading seminar.

Early on in the book he introduces a little mystery:

     After trying out the piano, Midorikawa took a small cloth bag from his shoulder bag and gingerly placed it on top of the piano.  The bag was made of expensive cloth, the opening tied up with string.  Somebody's funeral ashes, maybe? Haida thought.  It seemed like placing the bag on top of the piano was his habit, whenever he played.  You could tell by the practiced way he went about it.

Having caught our interest, Murakami has his character ask about the bag:

     "What is that bag?" Haida's father ventured to ask.
     "It's a good-luck charm," Midorikawa said simply.
     "Like the guardian god of pianos?"
     "No, it's more like my alter ego," Midorikawa replied ... 

It turns out that Murakami is building dreamlike layers of storytelling, taking us both further from the main story and deeper into it.  The bag is a talisman, a "token," which grants the possessor a costly metaphysical "true sight."  But this story belongs to Midorikawa, told to Haida's father, retold to Haida, retold to Tsukuru (and then, of course, retold to us by Murakami).  These retellings lend the tale a folksy status, like Rowling's tales of Beedle the Bard, or, more significantly, like the retelling of a dream.  This story-within-a-story (within a story, within a story) casts Tsukuru's otherwise pedestrian odyssey in a different light.

He is not simply searching the dim corners of the past for meaning, looking to turn a bad ending into a good one.  He is trying to discover what is in the bag, and if it really allows the bearer to see the truth.  Murakami ingeniously makes his main character a builder, but a builder of train stations, a man who creates the in-between places, the spots we do not really seek out but only pass through, the way places of life.

So we cannot trust the pat ending Murakami offers for the cursory reader, as when Tsukuru parts from one of his former friends:

     "Thank you for coming all this way to see me," she said.  "I can't tell you how happy I am that we could talk like this.  I really feel like a great burden has been lifted, something that's been weighing me down forever.  I'm not saying this solves everything, but it's been a huge relief."
     "I feel the same way," Tsukuru said.  "Talking with you has helped a lot. ..."

We end not with this seemingly happy ending, but with a whisper of doubt, a wind of wondering what's in the bag: is there a way to possess understanding of the truth in life, or will life always be like a dream we can't interpret?

     He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep.  The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths of the night, where it disappeared.  All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping through a stand of white birch trees.

What a perfect image of ungraspable nature of reality and dreams: a wind slipping through white birch trees.  In the end of the book, then, as in life, we do not gain a peek into the bag.

Book Review: The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee

We all live like strangers in a strange land, trying to cobble together a sense of family and belonging, in the world of Coetzee's latest novel.

A man leaving his homeland for a new life takes on an abandoned boy - let's call him David, as his real name is lost - in order to help him locate his mother, or, rather, a mother.  He finds a candidate almost randomly and proposes the new family to her:

     "Let me be more precise," he says, speaking softly and rapidly.  "The boy has no mother.  Ever since we got off the boat we have been searching for her.  Will you consider taking him?"
     "Taking him?"
     "Yes, being a mother to him.  Being his mother.  Will you take him as your son?"
     "I don't understand.  In fact I understand nothing at all.  Are you suggesting that I adopt your boy?"
     "Not adopt.  Be his mother, his full mother.  We have only one mother, each of us.  Will you be that one and only mother to him?"

No wonder the man and boy read a children's version of Don Quixote together, the original modern novel, one where identity and belonging are confabulated with fantasy and misperception.  Coetzee's novel leaves you wondering if your concepts of self and your understanding of your role in your family and society are what you imagine, or perhaps we are, a bit like the knight-errant, suffering from flattering delusions.  In this work, as in life, there is neither a happy nor sad ending, nor an ending at all, just the steady onward sweep of days and hopes and searching.

Book Review: Astonished by Beverly Donofrio

Maybe we can think of crimes more disturbing than rape, but there is no need.  Rape is horrible enough.

But I've never given rape much thought.  Why would I?  I know of no one close to me who has been raped, and as a regular American guy more focused on education and auto didacticism, I've had no reason to delve into this dark corner of the criminal psyche.

And I didn't see it coming when I picked up Beverly Donofrio's latest title, Astonished.  Her first two memoirs, the movie-famous Riding in Cars with Boys and then the quieter Looking for Mary, told her tales of self-defeating attempts to live freely and boldly, to find both excitement and solace in a confusing world.  Her rape, however, permeates this book like oxygen in the air.  It reminds me of a time I went on a plane trip and was too cheap to buy a rolling suitcase, opting instead for a heavy duffel bag I carried slung across my shoulder - not the kind of thing you can forget is burdening you with every step as you walk a mile from Gate A to Gate WW.

Donofrio begins the book by expressing her bewilderment that such unspeakable evil would visit her in particular:

Even though I do know the important question is not why this happened to me but what I'm going to do now ... I was absolutely shocked that he chose me.  This was not supposed to happen; I was supposed to have escaped: I had hot flashes and liver spots and was finally in the final stretch.  I'd survived all these decades without experiencing this thing I dreaded as much as death ... 

In the past month I've followed friends on Facebook as they went through similarly shocking bouts with evil: two young girls undergoing multiple surgeries after a car crash, and a highly respected, generous man having a brain tumor removed.  Though they never said as much, I'd guess they at some point asked the same question Donofrio asked, the same question Job asked: Why me?  That question seems to lie behind the books title: Astonished that evil would visit me - ME!

Fortunately, Donofrio circles around that question while still moving forward, searching for a monastery where she can take up residence, if not formal vows, to find a place of peace.  Astonished is something of a chick book, perfect for that demographic (female, middle aged, middle class, NPR listener, etc. - the dang cover is decorated with bracelet charms, for gosh sakes), but she is a talented enough writer to rise above the solipsistic memoir genre and speak from the soul about her quest for peace honestly.  Honestly - she admits when she is petty and judgmental, and not in the sordid reality-TV way we know so well, but with a downright saintly humility.

And yet the rape hovers over the book like a blimp at a football game (apologies for the incongruous metaphor).  Evil is not something we really recover from, when it strikes so personally and deeply; not something we get over.  Still, Donofrio convinces us, we can go on.  We can seek peace.  And maybe even find it.

Book Review: & Sons by David Gilbert

I have finally put the pieces together.  You see, for years I have forced myself to read long, rambling, pointless novels that I was not enjoying simply because the literary establishment hailed the writer as the latest and greatest.  All along I figured something must be wrong with me - am I lacking literary sophistication? do I just not get it?  But now I have put together the pieces of this puzzle, and am glad to announce what picture it forms.

Let's take David Gilbert's & Sons (yes, the ampersand is part of the title, which makes life difficult in this computer age - Amazon has it listed as "And Sons" and you can't tweet #&sons but must spell it out as #andsons - but I digress) along with two similar writers, Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon. You probably remember Franzen from his dispute with Oprah when he spat on her selection of his 2001 novel, The Corrections, for her book club; and perhaps you saw the film version of Chabon's Wonder Boys.

These three have much in common: rugged yet soft good looks (Chabon's crystal blue eyes account for 72% of his book sales, and that's A REAL STATISTIC), a high literary bent, and long, rambling works with frustratingly inconclusive and meaningless endings.  (Their latest novels run an average of 554 pages.)  And they win prizes.  Franzen, for example, has collected the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and even a coveted spot in Oprah's revamped book club (they made up a decade after their initial spat).  I read Franzen's Freedom when it was the flavor of the month, Chabon's Wonder Boys a few years ago, and recently Gilbert's & Sons.

In all three cases, I suffered through their works like I would a trip to renew my license - tedious, barren, yet unavoidable.  Several times I tried to read other works by these modern masters (Time magazine labelled Franzen the "Great American Novelist") but could not stand more than 50 or 100 pages before giving up to read something more interesting, like the new issue of Wired or the ad copy on the back of the store brand granola bars.

The characters in these novels all have horrible relationships with everyone around them, especially family, and the plot just plods along without the characters learning or changing or even recognizing their self-defeating foibles.  Is that their point, then?  That humans are doomed to egotistical futility?  Seems so.  Why, then, are these writers so highly acclaimed?

That's what Gilbert's work helped me decipher.  You see, he and the others are superb wordsmiths - they can bang out sentence upon paragraph upon chapter of mellifluous prose.  It really is high-flying poetic writing.  But they are like potters who turn massive sculptures that, though technically exquisite, are repugnant and useless.  & Sons, for example, culminates with the narrator shoving the object of his jealousy in front of a bus because, if he cannot be an insider in the family he idolizes (foolishly), then he will cut off its flowering branch so the whole tree withers.  Really.  That's how it ends.  Oh, and the central character dies of old age without reconciling with any of the people he's hurt.  Now, modern fiction need not moralize or teach Sunday school lessons, but this work lacks the scope of tragedy, comedy, or drama - it just slouches from boring event to boring event until there is no story left to tell.

I am now free.  I no longer need force myself to read these high literary works which garner prize and praise for their beautiful prose when they leave the reader feeling drained of soul rather than filled.  Don't get me wrong: I don't yearn for happy endings and neat tyings-up á la Dickens or Irving; I simply want to enjoy reading fiction, even with a troubled intellectual pleasure.  Is that too much to ask?

Book Review: Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

The first recommendation for this book is its publisher: McSweeney's.  No other publishing house today - or in any time - is so serious about literature, so quirky, so willing to invest in promising young authors, and so darned successful at doing so.  Dave Eggers is their flagship writer, and their periodicals - the Quarterly Concern and The Believer - define innovation in both writing and design. And if you enjoy laughing so uncontrollably that chocolate milk shoots out of your nose even though you're not drinking chocolate milk, you must check out their Internet Tendency.

Michelle Tea's Mermaid in Chelsea Creek is perfect for McSweeney's because it defies categorization.  Much like Neil Gaiman's last book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Mermaid has all the trappings of a young adult title but is far more disturbing than what we'd want our young ones reading (at least I think, but in these days of Twilight and such, maybe that red line has shifted as well).  We have a young girl as the main character, an ordinary girl who discovers that she actually comes from a secret lineage of magical beings - a pretty common theme from Harry Potter to, um, other stuff like that.

However, the story owes a much larger debt to Neil Gaiman, and through him, to Diana Wynne Jones - indeed, even the main character's name, Sophie, comes straight from Howl's Moving Castle.

Stranger, though, was when I jumped to Michelle Tea's wikipedia page to learn a little more about the author.  At first I thought, oh, this must be someone else with the same name because this person "toured with the Sex Worker's Art Show" and "is the co-writer of the weekly astrology column Double Team Psychic Dream."  Couldn't possibly be the author of this delightful YA novel, however disturbing it may be at times.  But it is the same person.  Oh.  Interesting.

On an unrelated note, my one gripe with this book - surprising given the publisher's high standards for design - is the horrendous quality of the illustrations.  They appear to have been drawn by someone who simply cannot draw - each depiction of Sophie looks rather different from the rest, and his depictions of pigeons are so strained you can see the sweat drips on the page.  Illustrator Jason Polan's wikipedia page brags that he has been published in The New Yorker, but that was a single cartoon back in 2006 - something I'm sure his mother was quite proud of, but he's no James Thurber, and that's saying an awful lot.

But back to the book.  Mermaid is best suited for adults like you and I who now and then need to put aside Syria and global warming and our tribulations at work and home and indulge in a sweeping, gripping fantasy.  It veers off course unexpectedly and ends up galaxies away from where it seemed to be headed.  And it starts right on page one.  Sophie and her quasi-friend Ella are playing the pass-out game, where they take turns helping each other asphyxiate into unconsciousness.  While buzzing back to the world, Sophie sees a mermaid in the horribly polluted creek, and then is struck by a strange desire:

Suddenly, Sophie craved salt.  In the dry cave of her mouth, down her throat, which felt strange and thick, into her tumbling tummy, she craved a bag of pretzels, the rocky salt collected at the bottom, tipped straight back into her mouth - the reward, she thought, for polishing off the snack. ... Faster than her best friend could cry out in disgust, Sophie tugged her still-shimmering body to the edge of the water and plunged her face into it, mouth open, inhaling the dirty creek into her, the perfect, necessary salt of it obliterating the darker flavors of things she'd rather not think about.  The sharpest taste, salt; she felt it travel through her like a delicious knife, the shock of it cutting through her, making her want more more more.  She sucked at the creek hungrily, like a wild animal digging into its kill ... 

So right on the first few pages we have several things we wouldn't want our daughters doing, but written in the most captivating manner imaginable.  And that's the core of this book - the story truly captures your imagination and leaves you hungering for more; like Sophia and her salt craving, you'll find yourself tipping back the pretzel bag to enjoy the last, sharply stinging bits of this book.  Fortunately, Tea has promised this to be the first in a trilogy, so we have those tangy treats to look forward to.

Book Review: Ungifted by Scott Barry Kaufman

While I grew up loving reading, not until I hit my late teens did I become a reader, the sort of creature who prefers the company of books to the company of people.  At the time, I felt such a fierce devotion to books as whole, contained works of art, that I could never skip sections or abandon even the driest read.

But now I have no such trouble - indeed, I often check books out of the library with no intention of finishing them, of just reading the first few chapters (The Signal and the Noise, anyone?).

And that's how I recommend you read Scott Barry Kaufman's important new book, Ungifted.  In sections.  Or maybe just the first few chapters.  Though you may want, like I did, to wade all the way through its deepest waters.

Early on, at the end of the first chapter, he develops and lays out his central premise: "Greatness is not born, but takes time to develop, and there are many paths to greatness."  Emphasizing that educational labels can not only influence but derail children's self-concept and thereby shape their destiny, Kaufman argues against simplistic definitions of intelligence that draw, in our president's phrasing, a red line separating the gifted children from the ungifted - that by calling a select few (less than ten percent at my school) gifted, you define the other ninety percent as not gifted.

The book draws upon and is interwoven with Kaufman's own experience as a bright young man who did not perform well on his IQ test and ended up in the euphemistically named Resource Room across the hall from the kids he felt a strong and justified affinity for, the gifted students.  And, as a teacher of gifted students myself, I sympathize with Kaufman's negative opinion of the gifted label: I start each year by explaining to my gifted group and their classmates that every one of them has many gifts, but we only have tests for certain types of reading, mathematical, and creative abilities.

Here's where you get to chapter skipping, though, if you'd like.  Remember how Gore lost popularity points because he was, as journalists pegged him, a policy wonk?  Well, Kaufman is a neurological psychology wonk.  The bulk of the book is clogged with dense research reporting, as such:

Without activation of the lateral prefrontal cortex, the spontaneous generation of ideas can bypass executive control and flow directly through the anterior cingulate pathway into the motor system to produce a creative response.  According to the researchers, "deactivation [of the lateral prefrontal cortex] may have allowed a defocused, free-floating attention that permits spontaneous unplanned associations and sudden insights.

Right.  Of course.  And these two heavyweight sentences are about, of all things, how jazz improvisation works.  So maybe check out after chapter four, if your pulse does not quicken at phrases such as "reduced latent inhibition" and "lateralization of brain functions."

But don't let the headiness of the book detract from the brilliance of Kaufman's message: "children who are stamped with an enduring label are being fed a fixed theory of intelligence, which dramatically influences their motivation, how they approach learning, and how they handle setbacks.  Many important skills aren't being developed because we are cultivating erroneous beliefs about how abilities develop."

So, when you read Ungifted, feel free to skim over some of the dense research reporting, but don't skip so much that you miss Kaufman's call to action.  We need to challenge and change our concepts of what constitutes intelligence - make them scientifically based - and start recognizing the gifts in all our children.