This Writer Reads

 Last winter I read The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo. It was an exquisite little book, all fine writing and character development. Last month, when I was re-shelving my classroom library after the renovation, I found Tiger Rising by her, a book I didn't even realize I owned. I read it the weekend after school got out, and again I was captivated by the jewel-like quality of her writing, the characters so finely wrought.

Because of Winn-Dixie has long been a favorite of my students, but I'd never read it; I finished it yesterday, and The Tale of Despereaux is next. This morning I visited Kate DiCamillo's website. There is a wonderful little essay about writing there, where she says this:

The world, under the microscope of your attention, opens up like a beautiful, strange flower and gives itself back to you in ways you could never imagine. What stories are hiding behind the faces of the people who you walk past everyday? What love? What hopes? What despair?

(You should read the whole thing-- it's worth it.)

During the school year I teach my students to approach their independent reading with the eyes of a writer, and I do the assignments with them, but many times they are no more than exercises. That is not so as I read DiCamillo's work; she has earned the admiration of my inner reader and inspired the writer in me, too.

Perspective

We took our nephews to see Winter's Bone the other day. The film won a Sundance Festival award and has been hailed as a feminist masterpiece by certain critics, with a stark Greek-tragedy-like plot. Clearly it is dramatically different than most summer fare, and I wanted to see it. Two of our four boys will be 18 next week, the other two will both be 15 by the end of September. The main character of the movie is a 17-year-old girl living in the Ozarks, and although she faces a lot of adversity that our guys hopefully never will, I hoped that her age and strength might be enough of a connection to draw them in.

I thought the movie was excellent, but the boys' reactions fell on a continuum from oldest to youngest: Eric thought the movie was pretty good; Riley thought it was "really fucking bleak;" Treat commented on the visual monochromaticism and "never said I didn't like it," and Josh wondered what the point was-- "Not a lot happened in it," he said.

Yeah... I'm still glad we saw it together.

Does it Bite?

We watched Shutter Island last night. A fan of both Scorcese and DiCaprio, I was looking forward to seeing this film. There were warning signs that I might be disappointed-- not only did it receive lukewarm reviews and earn a lackluster box office, but the producers postponed its release from Oscar contention time to late February. Still, I was hopeful.

Sadly, I found the movie to be a foggy, gray mess. A main character is agitated by confusing experiences-- this main theme of the relationship between identity, reality, and perception has been more handily addressed in many movies, for example The Sixth Sense, Blade Runner, and The Matrix.

Tonight we had dinner with a close family member who has Alzheimer's Disease. His grasp on the present becomes more and more tenuous each time we meet. At 86, he is well cared for and generally happy, although he is confused and agitated sometimes. It's hard to know how to react: should we be bothered by how he jumbles the past and present, upset at how he asks the same things over and over again, disturbed that he forgets what has recently occurred? Or should we simply try to make him as comfortable with his perceptions as possible?

In those movies, it is the revelation and subsequent understanding of the discrepancy between reality and their own perception that is devastating to the people caught in that situation. In both Shutter Island and The Matrix, characters make the choice to remain delusional rather than to face the bleakness of their "real" lives.

Maybe reality is a little over-rated. Even the most functional of us spend time in our own little worlds, and as long as we can avoid cognitive dissonance, what's the harm in it? Who's to say that it is an illusion at all?

Summer Blue

When I was a little girl growing up in the garden state, there were certain summer mornings when my mom would call us from work to say that she was coming home so that we could go to the beach. Sometimes on our way home from the shore we would stop at a pick-your-own blueberry place where we could pick (and eat) as much as we wished. Then there would be blueberry pancakes, muffins, pies, and jam, not to mention plastic containers full of frozen blue marbles that would last in the freezer until a time when those hot and sandy days of summer were only a happy memory.

Beware

In the wake of the firework perils of yesterday's post, this morning I woke to a gruesome story on NPR about table saws... an average of ten Americans amputate one or more of their fingers every day on this ordinary power tool.

Yikes! That every day sort of danger is terrifying. I take back what I said about being hard to scare; we were just telling the wrong kind of stories around the campfire.

Caution

While at the ranch we spent a couple of evenings sitting around our campfire telling scary stories, but it turns out that it's pretty hard to scare three teen-aged boys and a couple of forty-something ladies, so on the second night we had a few fireworks, too. They were really no more than glorified sparklers that we bought from a pair of wacky church ladies manning a tent in the Walmart parking lot in Luray. Even so, I confess to being a little intimidated, if not scared, by these incendiary devices, and I cautioned the boys more than once about their use.

When I was a kid, somebody always knew somebody else who knew somebody who had blown a few fingers off with fireworks. Urban legend or not, to me playing with firecrackers was like eating your Halloween candy without your parents checking it-- there could be a razor blade in your apple or LSD in your peanut butter cup.

The other night our pyrotechnics sparkled and burned bright and beautiful and without a hitch, but the same cannot be said for everyone this holiday. Here's a headline from the Washington Post: Police: NY Man Blows Arm Off With Party Fireworks.

See? It can happen.

Explosiony

This afternoon we saw one of those empty-headed movies that can be an entertaining way to wile away a too hot day. It lived up to our expectation of mindless diversion with the exception of misrepresenting Gandhi as a warrior's philosopher. To be honest that bothered me a little bit, but I soon forgot my concerns in the dazzle of all those white teeth and detonations. Ah, summer vacation.