Create-a-curriculum
We homeschool our son Jake, not for religious reasons, but by necessity. He tests out past the twelfth grade in math and English. Homeschooling is the only way we can keep him interested in learning.
He’s almost ten and has the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old. Keep that in mind when I come kvetching for advice (below).
This year, I’d like to have him read some of the classics of 20th century literature. To help me generate ideas, I found this list of ‘great’ works of the 20th century, courtesy of Random House. Try to ignore the righthand column (Ayn Rand for the number one and two slots? L. Ron Hubbard for number three? Come on!)
Here’s my pick. I’m open to advice from y’all.
The Great Gatsby
Brave New World
As I Lay Dying (lower on the list than Sound & Fury, but I think it would be easier for Jake)
Animal Farm
Slaughterhouse Five
Lord of the Flies
The Maltese Falcon
The Postman Always Rings Twice
To Kill a Mockingbird
I’m leaving out a lot of books I dearly love because I don’t think Jake is ready for them yet (Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, for example). As it is, I’m not sure he’s ready for Gatsby yet.
Thanks, everyone.
D.
Dancing with Snoopy
Someone over at Miss Snark used the phrase Snoopy dance as an alternative to the more contemporary Homer Simpsonesque woo-hoo! I suppose Eric Cartman’s Sweeeet would be even more hip. Whatever.
Point is, Miss Snark liked my snippet. In fact, she used that other L word, the one you want so desperately to hear from your agent/editor/publisher. Here’s the link.
Aside from giving me a goofy smile for the morning, this also persuades me to rethink my plans. I’d gotten it into my head that I would have to sell my first story to a publisher before an agent would ever take me seriously. Hmm. Maybe not so.
I have a meeting tonight. Not one of those ‘pull out my wisdom teeth with rusty pliers’ hospital meetings, but a board meeting for the North Coast Nature Center. I wonder how Ray is doing with her moon jellyfish exhibit. She’s been having a devil of a time keeping them alive.
You lurkers who have known Karen and me forever (hi Kira!) are familiar with our creepy crawly love affair*. Our house is, as always, a menagerie. Unfortunately, we have way too many mammals for my liking: three cats, one ferret, and four degus.
What? Never heard of a degu?
Think big gerbil, but don’t think about it too hard.
Our cold-blooded collection, ignoring for the moment Karen’s tarantula mania, consists only of a Madagascar hissing cockroach colony, some freshwater fish, and a water dragon. For us, this is a mighty low census.
That’s enough for the morning. One Snoopy dance and one cute furry rodent. You’d get sugar toxic if I gave you any more than that.
D.
*Take that however you like.
Morning quickie
Check out Miss Snark. She’s a literary agent, and she’s currently analyzing opening pages (the first three hundred words of novels). Mine hasn’t come under her snarky knife yet, but I’m going to go on record before she savages me by saying this has been educational. Y’all are burying your leads (paraphrase?) was one of many gems. I hadn’t thought to look at my novel as a journalist would, which is foolish, since the damned thing is about a journalist.
D.
T-lady is back
Karen finished reading my book and she has gone back to blogging. Bone up on your Proto-Elamite script, everyone.
D.
Lost Languages
Before resuming my brief review of Afghani history, I should make a few comments concerning the Proto-Elamite and Indus Valley civilizations. Both cultures rose to prominence alongside the great civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. Afghanistan lay at the crossroads of those cultures’ trading routes.
Although the Proto-Elamite and Indus Valley cultures had significant roles in the development of civilization, relatively little is known about them since their written languages have not been deciphered.
The Proto-Elamite civilization developed one of the first written scripts (3050 BCE). This language is unlike Sumerian cuneiform (3300 BCE) even though the two cultures lived in close proximity. However, it is uncertain whether the Proto-Elamite spoken language was related to Elamite and no bilingual inscription like a Rosetta Stone exists. Currently, two elements are needed to decipher a written language: 1) Knowledge of the spoken language and 2) A sample of text translated into a known language or a substantial number of text samples and knowledge of the underlying culture. More than 1500 texts exist but they seem to be accounting/trade records; the text may not correlate well with the actual language. Proto-Elamite script was used over a far larger area than the kingdom of Elam. Samples have been found as far east as Afghanistan, which clearly indicates that trade extended into that region.
In the case of the Indus Valley civilization writing, even worse problems prevent decipherment. Only very short samples of text exist in the form of carved stone stamps and insignia on pottery and metal objects. For whatever reason, they did not write on walls, tombs or statues, although it is likely they used some type of paper which has not survived the last 3800 or more years. In addition, the spoken language is almost completely unknown. Linguists might be able to work backwards from existing languages to obtain a “source” language but this is only theoretical. There is a great deal of interest in investigating this language since it may shed much information on the development of Indo-European languages.
This lack of information is especially unfortunate since this culture was unique in several respects. Although they controlled an area larger than ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, their rulers did not build huge monuments to their own egos, possibly due to their somewhat more egalitarian society. This may explain why the civilization was not rediscovered by western scientists until 1921. Aristoboulus, an emissary of Alexander the Great, wrote of seeing ruins in 326 BCE, but no other historical record exists.
In any case, they preferred to spend their time engaged in careful city planning, and building advanced drainage and sewage systems, granaries, docks, and harbors for their trading ships. Trade was apparently an important part of their economy and Indus Valley artifacts have been found in ancient Sumerian sites.
I think there is a tendency to judge a “great” civilization by the size of the monuments that it erects. However, if I were the ruler of a nation, I’d build sewage systems to avoid epidemics before bankrupting the country by erecting large and useless pyramids.
Stylistic tics
In the best writing, the author disappears.
Not everyone would agree with this. The success and critical acclaim of authors like M. John Harrison, China Mieville, and Neil Gaiman would seem to argue otherwise. I appreciate what these authors achieve with their pyrotechnics, and I enjoy them (especially Gaiman) if I’m in the mood, but this is not the kind of writer I want to be.
I want my readers to forget I exist. Martin Cruz Smith is my role model, along with a slew of hardboiled novelists who put the story first and themselves last. I’m thinking about James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss), Jim Thompson, Harry Crews (A Feast of Snakes). Yeah, I could go on.
Invisible writing requires a vicious internal editor to seek out and eradicate all stylistic tics. You know about tics, right?
As I trudge through this monstrous manuscript, I’m learning to find and destroy my worst tics:
- Anemic sentences, thanks to dependence on ‘was’, ‘was (verb)ing’, and other abuses of the verb to be.
- Overuse of em dashes, semicolons, and ellipses.
- Poorly handled speaker attributions. I’m a saidist (my characters will occasionally shout, murmur, or whisper, but they usually just say things, and never ever ever do they aver, proclaim, hiss, or growl their sentences). Nevertheless, my attributions often suck.
Those are my primary tics. Have you found yours yet?
D.
A dose of mindless fun
From the Infinite Cat, this video, which might be subtitled, “What women really want.”
While you’re at it, check out this cat fight. (I found this at Killer’s Place.)
Okay. Back to editing.
D.
Jump for joy
After the Game, by Kenney Mencher
You know what I love best about this one? The expression on the cheerleader’s face. What is she thinking?
I fell in love with this painting and almost bought it. Instead, we bought one we could hang in our office without fear of giving elderly men angina.
It’s fun following the comment thread to PBW’s latest writing exercise. Check it out. In brief, the idea is to summarize your current writing project in 25 words or less.
Several writers are working on multiple projects. This blows me away. I feel daunted by my ONE project, and here are folks with three, four, or more pans in the fire. Meanwhile, I’m thinking editing doesn’t feel like the best word for this activity. Crawling is a better word. Crawling through molasses studded with fire ants.
Why? Because no one freaks out over mad buffalo disease. Here’s the recipe:
1 lb ground buffalo
1 package Lipton’s onion soup mix
1 egg
Several turns of freshly ground black pepper
Combine thoroughly. Let the mixture sit in the refrigerator at least one hour. Cook ’em over coals. No, not under the oven broiler, you heathen. Some people.
D.
It’s a classic
I’m fixing a Chicken Kiev*, and Jake’s watching The Amanda Show on Nick. The Amanda Show is a comedy-variety show for kids featuring Amanda Bynes.
Here’s the skit. Amanda sits on a porch with her date, a geeky young boy with a pimple in the middle of his forehead. She can’t take her eyes off the pimple. Before long, she’s fantasizing that she knocks the pimple off his forehead, the pimple takes on a life of its own, and Amanda falls in love with it. Yeah, that’s right — the pimple.
I laugh. Right away, Jake wants to know why I’m laughing. (Since age 3, he’s learned that if he pesters us long enough, we’ll explain even the dirtiest jokes to him.) “It was unexpected,” I tell him.
Humor, whether it be one-liners, sight gags, or Jon Stewart’s routines for The Daily Show, has an element of the unexpected. The bigger the surprise, the bigger the laugh. I’ve been trying to teach this to Jake since toddlerhood, mostly so he wouldn’t repeat jokes over and over and OVER again, but also because it’s my parental duty to teach him how to be funny.
Anyway: Amanda falls in love with a sentient, autonomous pimple. I laugh, then I tell Jake why I’m laughing.
“Oh, they always do that,” he says. “Whenever there’s a pimple in a skit, Amanda falls in love with it. It’s a classic.”
It’s a classic?
Elmer Fudd falling in love with Bugs Bunny in What’s Opera, Doc? is a classic (the gender confusion goes back to Shakespeare, and undoubtedly farther than that). Groucho Marx’s “Go, and never darken my towels again,” is a classic. (And if you have any doubt as to my premise that surprise is the life blood of humor, check out this page of Marxisms.) Since twenty years has passed, I’ll even grant classic status to Spinal Tap’s Christopher Guest for “This goes to eleven.”
But I’m sorry — Amanda Bynes falling in love with a pimple can’t be a classic.
What are your favorite classics?
D.
Very simple. Take a pounded chicken breast, the thinner the better. Place a heaping teaspoon of a butter/herb mixture at one end of the breast, roll it up jelly roll-fashion, and run it through a bowl of beaten egg white. Salt, pepper, bread crumbs, a pat of butter on top. Place several such rolls side by side in a buttered baking dish. Bake at 400 F until golden brown and bubbly.
The butter/herb mixture: chives/parsley/salt/pepper/lemon juice/butter is the old standby. You can do whatever you like. For today, I used butter, chopped green onion, garlic, salt, pepper, and chili oil.
Coming soon: high time I blogged on garlic.
Say what?
During my second year of ear, nose, and throat residency at LA County Hospital, one of our chiefs (call him el Jefe) did a study on ear foreign bodies. Very simple study: he reported on the first one hundred ear foreign body patients to walk in our clinical door. It took el Jefe only three months to rack up 100 cases. If you’re easily grossed out or still have nightmares of the Night Gallery earwig episode, skip the next paragraph.
The number one foreign body? Not earwigs, but Blatella germanica, the German cockroach. But don’t freak out. LA County Hospital’s patient population can’t be generalized to the world at large.
Here’s my favorite ear foreign body story. No bugs.
“Why are you putting rocks in your ears?” I said in my not-half-bad Spanish. “Little children put rocks in their ears. You’re an adult. What’s the matter with you?”
What is this damned thing? I thought as I looked at his ear under the binocular microscope. White. Hard. Wedged in pretty tight.
“I can’t believe it,” I said, still in Spanglish. “A grown man putting a rock in his ear. What were you thinking?”
My patient started talking a mile a minute to my nurse’s aide, and he started laughing.
“No, Dr. Hoffman. Not a rock. A rock of cocaine.”
Aha. Well, that explained it. (In case you’re thinking Huh? These folks stuff the rock in their ear when they think they might get busted.) This solved my problem, though. I irrigated his ear with alcohol, dissolving the rock.
My patient was not a happy camper. He’d expected to get the rock back.
My attending physician asked me to do a pelvic exam on a sixteen-year-old girl with vaginal discharge. “It’s her first pelvic,” my boss said, “but don’t worry. From the sound of it, she’s been very active.”
So what if she’s sexually active, I thought. This is her very first pelvic exam . . . it’s bound to be stressful. I vowed to put her at ease by speaking slowly and calmly, doing my best to reassure her and let her know this was all very routine, nothing to be afraid of. I’d tell her in great detail what I was about to do before I did it.
After explaining to her the general idea of what we needed to do, I held up my gloved and lubed hand, my index and middle fingers standing at attention like proud little soldiers, and said,
“Voy a poner dos piernas en su vajina.”
To save you from having to Babelfish that one:
“I’m going to put two legs in your vagina.”
Ever hear the expression bug eyes? We somehow managed to sort out the misunderstanding, and to her credit, she let me go ahead with the exam.
And, yes, I used my fingers.
D.