Portrait Of A Reader

I'm feeling like a very bad reader right now.

I have spent a month on Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, and I am just barely halfway through.

I am just...not feeling it. I usually eat up Victorian literature like blueberry mini-scones, but I cannot...am I supposed to like any of these people? I don't trust them. I haven't gotten to know them very well, and I just don't trust them. Osmond in particular creeps me the hell out. I am sure that his relationship to his daughter is supposed to be "affectionate" and "loving", but all I see is "manipulative" and a "pervy". When he refers to her as his "little convent flower" my skin crawls. Something just does not seem right there. And who the hell names their kid Pansy?

What is Madame Merle's deal? Is Ralph in love with his own cousin? Is Isabel actually looking for independence? I don't know, I don't care, and for the life of me I don't know why. How did things get to this point? This is like being in a boring but stable relationship: you know something's not quite there, but you don't know what it is. How did I end up in this relationship? Are things ever going to change? Jesus Christ, The Portrait Of A Lady, we're drowning here, don't you see that? Don't pretend like everything's fine. I don't even know who you are anymore! THIS RELATIONSHIP IS SUFFOCATING ME!

Maybe The Portrait of a Lady is just not a good subway book.

Am I the only one who feels this way about this novel? If anyone out there has read The Portrait of a Lady, tell me: should I stick this out, or move on to other books? Does it get better? More interesting? Less passive-aggressively pervy? I hear Moll Flanders is pretty hot. Is she available?

What if I read The Portrait Of A Lady Monday through Friday and see other books on the weekend? Will that make me "that book whore"? I am in such a moral conundrum...much like in Victorian literature.

Damn this book.

Kanye’s Mom’s Gone to Heaven (and now we’ll have to put up with his whining)

Nooo! Not Momma West! First Anna Nicole and now Kanye’s mom? All Hollywood’s momma’s are leaving us! Whose next, Britney Spears??

Rapper Kanye West’s mom died on November 11^th due to get this…complications from Liposuction. Well at least it wasn’t a Stingray through the chest like some famous parents decide to go out on.

Now here’s my prediction for the future of Kanye West, and how his mammie is going to come back as the Angel of album sales…

Kanye is going to go off into seclusion for like a year. Not going to be seen at parties, avoid the public, maybe even leave the country. Then he’s going to emerge as a “whole new Kanye” and go public about his experience with losing his mom. How he was battling inner demons, very depressed and talk about contemplating ending his life. Then he’s going to peddle it into a book and generate absolute fandom and use the craziness to announce the release date for a new album. Then he’s going to just bust out and completely blow everyone away and it’s going to go like quintuple platinum and he’s going to thank his mom on stage.

Dang. If only I were that smart. (???) The downside is that now we’re going to have to sit through all of his lyrics preaching about how we should hug our loved one’s more and be better people.

Writers can Strike?!

This is news to me. Seriously, I didn’t even know writers could strike! I mean, they’re self-employed on commission aren’t they, who are they going to strike against? Themselves? Weird.

BBC NEWS- There is no end in sight to the increasingly bitter Hollywood writers strike. Union members and their employers, the studio producers, are rigidly sticking to their position that they are not to blame for the deadlock.

Okay, so apparently every screenwriter in Hollywood is refusing to write. Shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives will purportedly suffer the hardest (as if these shows are well-written anyway, I’d rather watch Scrubs and Chickfights on Youtube). And Oh No! The Jay Leno Show is going to have to air re-runs! NOOOOOO!!!

Writers are ticked because apparently with the inundation of digital media like DVD’s and TIVO and internet broadcasts, Networks are doing things like airing shows online or selling DVD’s of the series and not paying the writers every time they do so. Writers want what are called “residuals” for when their media is used outside of a regularly scheduled program, even though they’ve already been commissioned and let go.

What they heck, so they want to get paid for work they’ve already been paid for? O.o

And even actors are walking off their jobs to support the writers! Someone please tell me what actors have to do with this? No one’s more air-headed than actors nowadays, they strike for jobs they don’t even have. Hah, I’m going to laugh when they get sued for breach of contract.

You know what, I’m a firefighter. I spent the summer fighting raging wildfires in the worse fire season in California history. I got paid about $12 an hour. I’d sure as heck like to make a little more money seeing as I’m like, you know, risking my life and all. But hey, that’s what they pay me, and I took the job. What am I going to do? Refuse to go fight a fire until they pay me more?

So now there are a bunch of writers wandering around Hollywood with red shirts that say “On Strike.” I’m temped to get a red t-shirt that says “Go Back to Work” on the front, and “8 Cents” on the back.

Right now, if I were an up and coming writer, I’d jump on the opportunity to be a scab for a big show right now. Screw the Writers Guild’s threats of retaliation, use a pen name and get your foot in the door while everyone else is at home sleeping.

Is this what whiplash feels like?

Some of you might remember me from my last post (it seems like years ago) when I was trapped at the world's most uptight and homophobic girls' school in New York. (Which meanwhile is doing a stage adaption of Lillian Hellman's "The Children's Hour").

Whoa, the very school that enforced a top-down rule NOT to mention the word "gay" (unless students asked) during the Day of Silence is staging what?

Goody!...Which one of my former students gets to kill herself?

But I digress...now I'm back.

But this time, in "the hood."

Literally – I'm consulting (as a tech freak & geek) at a high school in the South Bronx, which is literally the poorest county in America.

Yes folks, AMERICA.

So I basically went from the richest to the poorest in a matter of months.

(Is this what whiplash feels like?)

Here are a couple of important things I have learned:

• Kids are kids, rich or poor.


• Kids model their behavior on the adults they see, and tend to be products of their environments.

For instance:

• Last year the rich kids all took cabs or daddy's limo and probably never stepped foot in a subway.


• This year the poor kids haven't taken the subway, because, in their minds, there's nowhere to go.
  
  They live and have been raised in the South Bronx which still has the vibe of post-war hell. No matter how many condos and STAPLES super stores go up on Third avenue there's still plenty of empty lots and boarded up buildings to make you feel like shit.

Don't believe me? Take the 2/5 up to 149th and Third Avenue ... then walk north up Third.

I DARE you to contradict me, but you might wanna...take the bus, it's kinda rough up there.

I'm rambling, but I hope everyone reading this out there realizes how privileged we all are to have received decent educations and be able to read and write well enough that we're compelled to join this blogging community.

A week ago I sat in on an 11th grade English class where the teacher had to remind her students what the word "plot" meant.

Last year I had fifth graders who could read better than the lion's share of kids I've met in this public school's 11th grade class.

This year the 11th grade teacher has 90 students to teach. However, the budget only provides 30 books. Meaning, she can't give the students reading homework (if she can't give them the book to take home).

Can you imagine being a junior in high school and only being able to do your literature reading assignments in class? I'm boggled. Have we returned to the one room school houses that my mother's oldest siblings attended in way-Northern Minnesota?

How is this POSSIBLE?

Last year, I'd roll my eyes at the "let's send money to India for starving baby elephant" assemblies, because I knew that not three miles away kids were starving and growing up in a broken system that would rather let the poor people remain functionally illiterate than gain the strength to fight (or even join) the system.

We're in trouble folks.

You want proof? Just look at your local public school.

Still don't believe me?

Imagine if the only guaranteed meal you'd get that day was a school lunch.

(Which, where I'm consulting is: a pre-packaged pb&j sandwich on wheat bread, a bag of carrots and a carton of skim milk...mmmm, Please sir, can I have some MORE?)

And I don't know how to fix any of this. The deeper I dig, the more disgusted I get! It's a rabbit warren of bullshit to get certified. So it's no shock that most of the people who could have other career options avoid the public schools! You make better money and you don't have to deal with metal detectors, violence and intense poverty in your face.

Better yet, your heart might not get broken (as quickly).

And it doesn't help that every few years someone drops another bullshit bomb to "reorganize" the school board. Which usually just means some crap like No Child Left Behind (which hasn't done shit except make Bush's buddies who pitched all the assessment tools even wealthier.)

Or shuffling the power structure by firing, rehiring and creating all these tiny schools in the place of big ones, so the salaries, potential and mindset can also remain...minimal.

Look at the statistics: No one (across the country at this point) wants to send their kids to public schools. It's become the marker of class separation. Did you see the AP/Yahoo headline this week about how 1 in 10 American schools are "drop out factories" ??!

(Meaning only 60% graduate, and that might be with a barely passing grade.) I have 11th graders who can barely read at my new school! And they're "passing" students who will graduate in less than two years.

Even in the boonies of the Rocky Mountains my dad didn't want me in the factory-vibe public school. It was only the mid-`70s and public schools were already too crowded.

Let's be honest. My dad didn't go to a public high school, because in the height of post-WWII America his school was already over-crowded and setting up multiple shifts of students to deal with the growing post-war population boom. His family had money, his father was a business owner.

Is it any surprise that my father achieved a white collar career path?

People of means know that public education isn't what it used to be, possibly even a route to downward mobility.

And with that, I'm still navigating the crap shoot to get certified so I can try and help these kids.

Or be found dead in a dumpster in the South Bronx
after pissing off one too many suits in power?

Whatever.

At least this time I put the noose around my own neck instead of getting strangled by some uptight society wife on the Gold Coast. I'd like to see any of those plastic biddies even attempt the bus ride to the South the Bronx.

Oh!
Clutch the pearls
Good Heavens!!! NO!