Category: Books

Marsco Readings and Reports

9/28/2013

September 28, 2013 – Saturday – Grading and Game Day

            Okay, so I am slow on the uptake of technology. I have begun to make PowerPoint presentations for class in the past year, for example; it’s taken me that long to get going on that.

            I was looking for my Cloud connection today, so I can send my work from my office computer to my laptop easily. Instead of finding the Cloud, I found this instant blog link. So, I’m writing this “entry” in my journal this morning with the intention of posting it via my computer right to my blog. We’ll see if it, one, works, and two, if I have anything to say.

            I started my blog to get more buzz out there about my work, specifically The Marsco Saga, my four-volume speculative sci-fi piece. I am happy to report (as many of you know) that the first novel, The Marsco Dissident, is now available on Amazon for e-reader download. It has been up since June and sales are happening.

            This month, I did a pair of radio interviews locally (NPR hasn’t called yet). These shows were via SMSU and owe their manifestation to Jim Tate who is the campus PR guru. Jim organized them and was my front man for them. In a word, they were a hoot. I had never really been on a show like this. (I have to add, by the way, that Jim is part of a gaggle of SMSU folks who have made this project possible: Jim, Marcy—the cover, Dana—Kindle format, Neil—encouragement to go to e-publishing format: SMSU all!)

            The first locally, KMHL in Marshall, I sat in the booth with the glass separation and deadening sound. Earphone and mic. I saw the radio host on the other side of that dividing glass. It went pretty well. The second I was at home and did the same over a pre-arranged phone call. I liked the first better; it gave me a sense of “being on the air” as opposed to just chatting and looking at all-too-familiar surroundings. Those listeners who heard me said I did a creditable job. I thought so, too.

I was asked to speak of future projects, so I explained that all English profs have at least one novel in them parodying academic life. That caught the campus attention. I do have such a novel organized; it will have to wait until after The Marsco Saga and The Aries-Augustan Saga are published; both multi-volume sci-fi works. Marsco is finished; Augustan is underway.

My two readings went extremely well on Tuesday September 17th. At noon I was at the Marshall/Lyon County Library. That night back at SMSU.

The Library garnered a small crowd of 16 listeners. But, they listened and asked good questions. This experience was a great warm-up for my evening reading.

Back on campus, I spoke and read to 115 people. I was blown away by their attendance and interest. I spoke, read my first passage and then answered some questions. Once more, good questions. Then I read a second passage with answers following. My whole time went an hour. Not sure how many sales I made, but it has all generated a host of Spur articles, (our campus student newspaper) and a bit of buzz in Marshall.

To current readers and owners of The Marsco Dissident, I once more say thanks. To future readers, I do want you to know I have reduced the price to $3.99. Dissident can be downloaded to a Kindle, an iPad or iPhone, or any PC with the right (and free) app. I am looking into print-on-demand; will keep you posted on that. Of course, I won’t chase away the chance to have a publisher pick it up for mass marketing. To viewers of this blog who might be unwilling to buy the book, there are two chapters posted on my site that give you a taste of the novel. Enjoy them first before you download the whole piece. I am sure they will convince you that my work is worth the time and effort to read.

Until next time, good reading and Go, Mustangs! And Go, Irish! Beat the Sooners!

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Downton Abbey and the Loss of Matthew Crawley -- Spoiler Alert!

3/3/2013

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Downton Abbey and our loss of Matthew Crawley
Spoiler Alert!
*
            Okay, first an apology for not posting anything in nearly a year. I know I have no excuse except “I’ve been busy.” That’s a feeble one, but it’s all I can offer.
            Busy end of my Spring ’12 semester. Busy summer winding down my five-year tenure as Chair of the English Department here at SMSU. Busy sabbatical semester which included lots of writing and editing and reading; a week-long trip to California for a wedding; a three-week trip to London, Bath, and Canterbury; then home to surgery (needed but not life-threatening); Notre Dame going 12-0 during their regular season; Thanksgiving, Christmas, and an intense Landmark Forum Weekend; and then school resuming with a rush and with me again teaching fulltime.
[Insert a longing breath for more sabbatical
disguised as a deep sigh…..]
*
            And now here I am, heartbroken over the Season Three finale of Downton Abbey.
            I wish I could sing it like Curly does in Oklahoma!, “ol’ Judd is dead, poor Judd Frye is dead…” but I can’t. Judd wasn’t dead, but Matthew Crawley is most sincerely dead. He lies in a ditch; blood running down his handsome, young face; crushed by his sports car that flipped over on top of him after being hit by a furniture remover’s lorry on a beautiful Yorkshire road near Downton Abbey itself.
            Only moments before, he’d held his son, his only child, born of his beautiful wife, Lady Mary, who never looked better even though she just went through labor and delivery.
            And he’s saved the estate, Downton. And he’s saved his brother-in-law, Tom Branson, from poverty and estrangement from the Crawley family. And he’s saved Cousin Rose, Lady Rose MacClare of Scotland, from running off with a married man three times her age and as randy as a goat on the heather-covered moors of Scotland. And he stood by his sister-in-law, Lady Edith, as she strove to become a journalist.
Oh, Matthew, so middle-class! He once worked as a lawyer, after all, and is the son of a physician whose practice was in Manchester, the hallmark of all things “trade” in Edwardian times. And yet, he grows so aware of what it will take to save an institution like Downton for generations to come and understands why that’s important for his family and the nation. And those will be his generations, since he managed to melt the icy-but-not-so-maiden Lady Mary and produce a one-and-only heir by her.
I think at times, if it weren’t for bad luck, the Crawley family would have no luck at all.
Let’s take Lady Mary as an example. She’s born into the most powerful social class ever, the Gentry of the Victorian Period, and she grows up surrounded by limitless Edwardian splendor. But that enormous grandeur can’t be hers; she’s a woman and can’t inherit directly. This is a historically inaccurate plot line, by the way. Jane Austen used the same last will and testament tension in Pride and Prejudice, but it wasn’t accurate even in 1813. By 1912, women didn’t have all the rights they do now, but it’s reasonable to assume Lady Mary would have been sitting pretty without tying the knot to secure her own home. But, in 2011 when Season One opens, we accept this twist of fate and horrid Crawley luck as history, but it’s not.
So, Julian Fellowes, our script writer, has taken some liberties with Lady Mary’s fortune.
And, even before the opening credits for Episode One (Season One) have ceased running (with the spectacular Highclere Castle in the background and swarms of starched servants preparing breakfast and ironing the newspaper to stop the ink from bleeding), Lady Mary is left with an unscathed heart. This is April 15, 1912, the morning that the tragedy of the Titanic makes headlines. Lady Mary’s fiancé died on that emblem of wretched excess gone with the waves.
In A Room with a View by E. M. Forester and published in 1908, Lucy and her brother refer to all fiancés as fiascos; it’s a running family joke in this Matthew Crawley-like middle-class family. Lady Mary’s never-seen-on-screen-alive-or-dead fiancé fits as a fiasco to be sure. He was a distant cousin of her father’s, the Earl of Grantham, Robert Crawley, and conveniently close enough in blood to be a lackey for Lady Mary to marry the estate she loves.
Unlike John Brown, who lies moldering in his grave, this cousin’s remains are never recovered, and he is declared dead.
Lady Mary wears black, but hardly feels the loss except for the inconvenience of having to find another way “to marry Downton” as it were.
Her luck runs from rot to riot as a lover dies in her illicitly sensuous bed, potentially razing her social status while her jealous sister, Edith, stokes the fires of ruinous scandal.
Now enter Matthew Crawley, by chance, a more-distant cousin and only living male descendent able to inherit Downton from Lord Crawley. Matthew, of course, is smitten at once by the beautiful and haughty Lady Mary, but he manages to insult her even before she’s properly introduced herself and delicately raised the veil of her riding habit, so fashionable in 1890 yet still in style at the Yorkshire Downton estate. Soon, to show how much he really loves her, he even tries to disinherit himself. He knows the law. He tries to give back his future title, and thus Downton, but can’t while he’s upright. No way exists to do so.
Another unlucky sister of the Downton threesome is Lady Sybil. She’s the youngest, a bit wild, appearing in one scene wearing I Dream of Jeannie Harem garb and in another helping a house maid secure a position as a typist, at the time, a job with a future for a young, independent woman.
When Lady Sybil is being wildly political by going to a Suffragette Rally that turns violent, Matthew comes along with Branson, the chauffer, to save her. It’s at this point that Lady Mary sees Matthew for what he really is, a decent, smart, kind gentleman who happens to love her and happens to have the key to her happiness—the future ownership of Downton. But, in fairness, I think Lady Mary is more caring and generous than not, but brought up to presume that life will always be fair to her and always gild her way.
That evening, after Lady Sybil is back safe at Downton, Lady Mary order sandwiches for Matthew. They sit together in a small dining room, just the two. He has wine, which he offers to share but lacks a second wineglass. She accepts but won’t break the enthralling spell by ringing for a servant to fetch one. She drinks from his crystal goblet; one sip’s all it took.
At the end of The Princess Bride, the grandfather tells his grandson that Wesley’s kiss of Buttercup was one of the best ever given. I would rate Matthew’s leaning over and kissing Mary after he proposes (the first time) right up there. The way she hold his neck to draw him closer, it’s a marvelously done scene. In this informal setting in an all-too-formal world, the seemingly invulnerable woman allows herself to be vulnerable, allows herself to love an honorable man.
Then, her change of heart: her engagement with Matthew is off and the Great War is on. Season One closes as that magnificent world ends, at English high summer with its gaiety and splendor, and with thoughts of Sarajevo far from everyone’s mind. No one at Downton that bright day knew the lights were going out all over Europe; no one knew they’d never be lit for these gilded elites again. No one at that summer lawn party has the gruesome vision to imagine the unimaginable horrors of Ypres or Gallipoli or Verdun.
Season Two begins with Captain Matthew Crawley a gallant officer on the Western Front, the Somme specifically, about the worst hell-hole in the whole bloody, aimless affair. He’s now engaged to Miss Lavinia Swires, like himself, a wealthy middle class denizen. And luckless Lady Mary has snagged a wealthy scoundrel from the heap of conniving opportunists circulating London society but not in uniform. She takes up this second fiasco, Sir Richard Carlisle, a wealthy up-and-coming newspaper mogul whom no one likes and many fear, even though clearly she prefers the engaged-to-another-woman Matthew. Dante would be hard pressed to know into which circle of Hell to fling this fiasco; he’s mean-spirited and threatening, vindictive, arrogant, and utterly contemptuous of the very privileged society he hopes to marry up to. Even the butler, Mr. Carson, knows better than agree to work for the future bride and her brooding, ill-tempered groom-elect.
Also in Season Two, Lady Sybil becomes a nurse surrounded by Gentry officers but falls for her father’s worst nightmare, the chauffer: a commoner, an Irish Catholic, a Sinn Féin supporter, and one solidly principled and conscientious young man. No father could ask for more of his Irish son-in-law except possibly a Trinity degree.
And this season ends with the Great War reaching its non-conclusive Armistice and the Great Influenza cutting its snarling swath through many of the War’s survivors, including Matthew’s Lavinia. But eventually, Lady Mary sees the light, accepts Matthew’s hand (a second time) and his second memorable kiss in the snow of Christmas 1919. All seems set for a happy Season Three.
But early in Season Three, Lady Sybil, now Mrs. Branson, dies from complications of childbirth, which paints a cross-hair target on Lady Mary’s back at the end of this season when she, like her sister, becomes pregnant. Was Sybil’s condition hereditary, and thus, would Lady Mary suffer the same fate? Would this pregnancy be another successful live birth that tragically costs the mother her life?
Circumstances beyond the control of the producers forced Julian Fellowes to let Lady Mary and child both survive but forced Matthew’s death. Dan Stevens’ decision to leave Downton Abbey after three years left few options. So, Matthew, played by Stevens, dies in that ditch five minutes before the end of Season Three.
It’s a painful loss. Matthew was so upstanding without being a prig, so middle-class in the best sense: fair and open, willing to hear all sides, dedicated to his principled causes, willing to speak up against the disdainful authority and omnipresent precedence of class and society as often represented by his father-in-law. And he loved Lady Mary and let her know it. He actually seemed to me to be the embodiment of everything we brag about as being a modern, enlightened, and liberal-minded American.
In the USA, Season Four won’t start until January 2014. We’ve ten months to fret, to hope for leaks from across the Pond informing us of what’s up at Downton, and to follow the actors as closely as we are following Princess Kate’s pregnancy.
I speculate that Tom Branson will shine even more now that he’s not in the glare of Matthew’s stellar status. I’m pulling for Tom and Rose to fall into a stunning and fulfilling love. And I hope Lady Mary will discover she can run Downton as well as our deceased Matthew did. And here’s a plug for Lady Edith finally finding an honorable single man rather than converting to Catholicism and joining an order of nuns heading off to equatorial Africa as a missionary.
But I fear for Matthew and Lady Mary’s son, who will be old enough in Downton Abbey, Season Twenty-Two to die on the beaches of Dunkirk.

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"Libraries of My Life"

2/5/2012

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Nota Bene: Reports of my discontinuing this blog are premature! Christmas came and went with this essay lingering on my computer. Then the semester began in a rush. But, I am back to the blog-task and hoping to get one a week or two a month posted throughout this semester. Thanks for hanging in with your absent blogger!

I hope you enjoy.

                 “Libraries of My Life”

     As an English professor, libraries have always been a part of my life. Fortunately for me, I work on a campus with a wonderful, recently-renovated university library and also live in a town that opened a brand new city-county library. They are gems open to all out here on our wind-swept prairie.

     My earliest memories of libraries go back to the Ella K. McClatchy branch library in Sacramento, California. I went there for school projects and general library use from grammar school up through high school. Set in a neighborhood, this one-time mansion became a public children’s library in the 1940s. Recently, I looked at pictures of the building on Google and remember the long exterior stairs going up to the main door. I also remember the dark woodwork and the racks of books in salons and sitting rooms with marble fireplaces and gleaming mirrors, sentinels of times past welcoming and tolerant of the hordes of noisy children trooping through the stacks, often lost amid the Dewy Decimal System.

     It’s ironic, but as a child I was slow to learn to read. Grammar schools, I am convinced, are designed to teach girls not boys. We are messy and energetic multi-taskers who find it hard to focus on neatness and the minutia of details. Reading, spelling, penmanship—beyond most boys’ ken. My lack of precision on 1950s drill sheets led the nuns to assume I wasn’t getting it. One spring in the 5th grade, the nuns tested me and said I read below a 2nd grade level.

    Fortunately, my parents sent me to a reading tutor after school for a year and then a private summer school program to brush up on my reading after 7th grade. When tested again after completing that summer program, I scored high enough for my teacher to say I could get into West Point if I applied myself. (My goal in life at that time was a career in the Army.)

    Taking standardized tests was boring. I quickly got lost in the rows of circles, and after a time, I didn’t care where I marked or whether I marked C
when I should have marked D. I wasn’t a slow learner, I was a bored learner.

     Even so, I loved the McClatchy Library. I knew all those books were a treasure that only a genie could open for me. That genie was the force of will it took for me to concentrate and read carefully. I never marked up a library or school textbook, but once I bought my own books, I began marking them
and jotting notes in the back to force myself to concentrate and remember.

    To this day, I still read with a pen in hand. For me, that became the key. But that key unlocked the
door when I was in college. Getting there was an anxious and frustrating experience, but I knew I
wanted to go to college and not seek my fortune as a grocery clerk as too many of my family and teachers suggested. Determination has always been a driving force within me not easily shut down. It also helped to have supportive parents who believed in you.

     I learned early on as a college student to use a library as a quiet place to study. At Saint Mary’s College, that was St. Albert’s Hall. I seem to have a knack for being at schools with new libraries; St. Albert had just opened when I matriculated at SMC in 1968. I have one visual memory from those
evenings I spent studying in St. Albert’s. One quiet reading room had a common but expensive wall clock that shows the whole world on its broad face and a wave diagram passing over the surface of the planet to designate the edge of daylight or the coming of night. Although SMC had a European travel program, I wasn’t able to swing a trip during my undergraduate years. But that clock always reminded me of places I wanted to visit, especially
England. I finally made it, several times: alone, with
friends, with Marianne and Elaine, with students, with my brothers.

     Sacramento State University, where I earned my MA, also had a new library. The North Wing, as it is now called, opened in 1975, two years after I started part-time there. (A South Wing was added in 1990.) Even after I went to Notre Dame to start my PhD, I used the Sac State library in the summer. There
in the North Wing, I mastered French—translation French that is. (As my colleagues in the SMSU French Department will tell you, my pronunciation of their beloved language comes out like horrendous French mixed with Klingon plus spitting and a soupçon of belching.) But, after that summer, I could sight-read French fairly well, even Baudelaire’s poetry, a much
more difficult form of writing than prose.

     At Notre Dame, I started out regularly using the Hesburgh Memorial Library, the one with "Touchdown Jesus." At first, I had a locking cart which allowed me to check out books directly to it
instead of lugging them home. On quiet nights, like a Friday or Saturday after a game, when only grad students were trying to study, we did race on our four-wheeled carts, but mostly I was a serious student.

     In time, I got my own study carrel, about twice as big as a phone booth. It had the same privilege
as my locking cart, which I surrendered in lieu of a private carrel. I graded papers, read, prepped for my comprehensive exams, actually took my comps and wrote my dissertation in there. I know it sounds a little like solitary, (after all, there is no room for a carrel-mate), but for the neophyte scholar, it was all the room needed. “The mind is its own place, and can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell,” as Milton tells us.

     In time, before my comps, I got one of the few study carrels with a window. Mine overlooked the quad facing west, allowing me to see the famous Golden Dome about a quarter of a mile away. It was under the Dome that one up-and-coming associate editor, Marianne Murphy, worked. Cutting to the chase, after we were serious, then engaged, then married, I knew when she was leaving work (before email or texting) and could watch for her crossing the library quad on her way to meet me for dinner at the end of the day. And I still got my dissertation done, her wonderful distraction aside.

     Although a bit dingy when I arrived, the SMSU Library has always been a great place for me as well. I quickly found a window seat in the campus library and went there regularly over the years for reading or grading or prepping. My special nook was a corner which is now office space for the library staff. My particular window faced north across prairie almost as far as the eye can see.

     Several years ago, the SMSU Library closed for 18 months for major renovation. Its grand reopening was a dazzling sight. New computer banks and labs, sleek circ and reference desks (always staffed by helpful librarians and perky students), quiet study areas, and its wonderful conference room on the top floor with its vista of the endless prairie (and now the new Marshall High School campus). There is not much to see on a prairie but wind and space; the Conference
Room gives you an unconstrained view of that endlessness.

     Because of his generous bequest, the SMSU Library has been renamed the Dorothy and D. C. “Pat” McFarland Library. Mr. McFarland left the campus a cool $2 million, the largest single donation from an individual to the university to date. SMSU is coming of age.

     Besides this treasure of a library, to Marshall’s credit, a second exciting and grand library has opened just across town. Entering the new Marshall-Lyon County Library is truly an “out of Marshall experience.” It’s hard to believe you are still even in Marshall once you cross into that welcoming, lovely place. It opened just a few months ago but I visit it regularly. The last time I had visited the now-closed, musty downtown library was seven years ago.

    The new open and airy space invites you to sit, read, and enjoy your time there as you would savor a five-star meal in the Cities or Paris or San Francisco.

     In a few months time, my five-year tenure as English Chair will end. I will get a short sabbatical and then return to fulltime teaching. I am looking forward to the change of pace, mainly, a change that will give me much more control over my time. It’s a heavy teaching load, but my days will be spent around my schedule and not other people’s meetings. (The creative way to avoid work is to have a meeting!) When that time comes, I am planning on scouring both the McFarland and Marshall Libraries for just the right spot to prep and grade and then sneak in a guilty pleasure of a sci-fi or military history on the side.

    Life is good in a fine library.

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"All Children Left Behind"

11/11/2011

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                “All Children Left Behind” –
        The Decline of Reading in Our Lifetime

     Several years ago, a Catholic grammar school in the Cities tested their students in the mandated, standardized Minnesota proficiency exams. These students were, by all measures leading up to these tests, “at risk.” They came from low-income, mostly minority backgrounds. The school, once a flagship of a parish filled with European immigrants, sat in a
deteriorating neighborhood ridden by crime, drop-outs, delinquency. The parish, however, hung on, kept the doors of its school open, and worked with the low-achieving students who came through the
gates.

    When the results were in, these students—the ones predicted to fall into the lowest percentiles as all US students do from a similar background—scored
among the highest in the state. It’s almost axiomatic that the parents’ ZIP codes predict student achievement. Wealthy ZIPs mean stronger students. This case was exactly the opposite.

    Of course, why? Why did these sure-to-fail students achieve at the Eden Prairie and Edina level?

     Easy: they could read. Their curriculum included reading Shakespeare in the 7th and 8th grades. Early on, they were tackling The Iliad and The Odyssey. When it was time to read, these young scholars read. And they devoured not the educational pap generally flung at students, which limits syllables and includes only preselected vocabulary words slipped
into unnatural and stilted sentences, but they tore through the classics at an early age. It is the rare exception for a “young genius” not to be an avid
reader.

    Reading. It’s the key and core to all things educational. These “at-risk” students proved it. Asked to solve so-called“word problems”? Math was not a problem for them; they understood the questions. Vocabulary became a breeze. Getting the gist of the social science paragraphs was ridiculously easy, given that these young scholars read at the 11th- or 12th-grade level. (Hopefully, they were reading texts before they were dumbed down by the Texas Board of Education.)

    You want to reform education in the USA? If so, then get students reading at an early age. Make them read the classics, not books expunged of what’s thought distasteful by some. Leave Huck Finn alone, for Twain’s sake. Anyone offended by Twain’s "politically incorrect" vocabulary should listen to 5 minutes of Rap music—our kids are. They hear much worse on the air waves, they see much worse on cable, than will ever enter a classic novel whose plot they can understand. There is nothing worse than “textbook” talk, especially now when the uneducated and politically biased and religiously warped are re-writing our students’ textbooks.

    Many years ago I sensed a reading crisis in education was coming. I was finishing my MA in English at Sacramento State before heading off to Notre Dame for my PhD. I had taught in a Catholic high school for two years by this time, but was between jobs and did some substituting in the Sacramento Diocesan system. What I saw was done by students at the high end of achievement, so it was even more shocking.

     The 7th-graders I was subbing were asked to read an essay in their textbooks and then answer the
multiple-choice questions at the back of the book.
Instead of actually reading the essay first, they all thumbed right to the questions, read Question One, and then skimmed the first section of the essay assignment. It was easy to gloss over the essay in pieces, fitting the section of the essay to the questions at the back, get the right answer for each
in turn and never really bothering with reading the essay start to finish. The questions were in order anyway, meaning, Question 1 asked about the first few paragraphs, Question 2 the next few, and so on.

    These were bright kids; they’d figured out this gig early. And their test scores showed they were well ahead of the curve. Not bad considering they really rarely ever read anything start to finish in a sustained manner. I am sure their story is not unique. Why read an essay when the ideas aren’t important and can’t hold your attention? The 10 points at the end are important—satisfy teacher with 10 for 10; forget any notion of actually reading the material.

     Even at the university level, I hear the same sort of notion and witness the same lack of skills. I am always dumbfounded by the lack of basic skills far too many of my students display. When asked to
read aloud, so many (far too many) struggle over basic words. I had a student trip up on the simple word melancholy the other day, to give just a recent example. He insisted he had never seen the word
before. Having graded his written work, it is no wonder he’s such a weak writer. Poor readers are weak writers, no doubt. And worse yet, weak writer
and weak reader that he is, he’s convinced “in the real world after college” he won’t need such skills. He is part of the self-marginalizing Twenty-Something Generation I witness each day.

     Another time several years back, I gave out a very short (to me) reading list for a class on the
first day. I had purposely already reduced the list from seven novels to six by adding two movies in hopes of getting all my students to finish the entire syllabus. At the end of my intro lecture imploring my students to actually buy the books and then read the material, one student returned my printed handouts with the admonition, “Books! Books! Why are all you
professors always demanding we read books? Can’t you just give us the answers?” And he was a history
major!

    All this would be of little concern if I was talking about how many copies of Harry Potter are sold each day. The real issues of declining reading skills are social and economic, not just artistic and recreational.

    The 2004 NEA report, Reading at Risk, demonstrated the steep decline in reading among our young. But the report also pointed out that “these declines will have serious civic, social, cultural, and economic implications,”or so Matt Burriesci concludes in his review of this NEA report. (The Writer’s Chronicle, Feb 2008.
http://www.awpwriter.org/pdf/mburriesci01.pdf.)
For his review of this NEA report, Burriesci interviewed Dana Gioia, NEA Chairman, who noted “the central importance of reading for a prosperous, free society.” We are not talking about curling up with an Agatha Christie, we’re talking about a skill that is, in Gioia’s words, “both fundamental and irreplaceable for democracy.”

     The NEA report also rightly concludes that “weak reading skills strongly correlate to lower academic
achievement, lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.” A poor or non-reader is more likely to be incarcerated. Strong readers are more than likely to vote, participate in cultural events, volunteer their time for charities, and enjoy rewarding careers.

     Life-long readers and learners are the cornerstone of a thriving democracy. It is no wonder that dictators burn books. You’ll note that Hitler
didn’t start a program to have his Iron Youth read widely; he closed libraries and destroyed the content of their shelves. If Germans were to read, he was going to know what they were reading.

     Today, the censorship of the web in some dictatorial countries smacks of the same paranoia and political control.

     But this brings me back to our students, our children, our culture. I find it so ironic and extremely depressing that in a society that has every book virtually at its fingertips, our young people are electing NOT to read. Hitler shouldn’t have
burned books; he should have made more books available to his Iron Youth. Given the chance to read, if they are like our youth, they wouldn’t have.

     The lack of interest in reading suggests to me this horrific vision: Our 11th- and 12th-graders are taught to drive, given their drivers’ licenses, given access to cars and paved roads and the Eisenhower
Interstate System. But instead (in my dystopian vision), they elect to let their cars rust or run out of gas for lack of the enterprise of filling the tank. And so, they’re forced to work closer to home (so they can walk). They’re forced to seek entertainment and cultural events within walking distance, never
finding new outlets. They’re forced to live among only their neighbors, never venturing into new neighborhoods with different foods or art style or political takes on the world.

     And it’s all self-imposed.

     Perhaps the Occupy Movement is this generation’s wake-up call. It reads less, votes less, is more inclined to be swayed by demagogues.
And at least some now are waking up to the fact that placating the top cats comes by draining the younger citizens and newer voters dry of what society should provide its young: a stable society; a solid, basic education; a brighter future.

     Readers know of that brighter future. And, I believe, readers can muster the skills to obtain it on all levels: personally, professionally, culturally, and globally.

     Let’s hope our youth don’t skip that part of the essay because there wasn’t a question about it at
the back of their books. Let’s hope our young readers of today have a thriving economy and fully functioning, just democratic society to embrace as they grow older. Or else, the few remaining readers may have to read about such a bygone society in the neglected History Section of some neglected library.

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Science Fiction: Plans, Sidetracks, and Endpoints

10/26/2011

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Science Fiction: Plans, Sidetracks, and Endpoints

     For over a year, I’ve been telling students and colleagues that I was willing to venture into the realm of teaching creative writing. I am the Chair of an English Department quite famous for its writers.
I’m not putting myself into that august group, but I wanted to pull my own weight in terms of taking on a
workshop. The Department has recently begun a new class format that is the perfect venue.

    Instead of a 4-hour weekly workshop, we have these new flexible mini-workshops for only 2 hours per week. I didn’t need to go off the high dive; I was going to stand on the edge of the pool and dive (or belly-flop) with a short offering.

    It was to be my first-ever sortie into teaching any type of sci-fi and/or creative writing workshop.

    Although eager, I was nonetheless intimidated.

    I shouldn’t be because, after all, I know something of writing and something of sci-fi. I have put together 4 such novels since the late 90s, working in a lonely and silent workshop (my home office) and pouring myself into a horrific world not so
farfetched from what we have now.

    In these four linked novels, The Marsco Saga, I have space travel, love, political catastrophe, plus colonies on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids. A war is about to break out; a ragtag band of optimistic (and literate) heroic dissidents are not willing to knuckle under; and a religious lunatic (living in a cave) is willing to destroy everyone else to prove his messianic beliefs are correct. (I slapped
him into an Amazon rainforest cave long before
9/11.)

     The creative writing class was a great idea.
Science fiction and fantasy are extremely popular.
Since I’m on the verge of publishing my own books, I readily agreed to do a mini-workshop and let the dragons, war-bots, green-goo-attacker-globs, dark
and shadowy killer thingies fall where they may.

    Sadly, these “best laid plans” have fallen by the wayside. I fell behind over the summer so I never got a handle on a clear conception for the class; I had to beg off offering this class in Spring ’12. To my surprise, my office door on campus was not surrounded by ranks of zombies, creatures from black lagoons, diaphanous and silken-clad alien women lusting for my soul but really desperately needing my blood and marrow to live.

    Had these ET hordes assailed me, I would have cautioned them, don’t mess with me, you alluring creatures from a galaxy far, far away. Marianne is
like the honey badger protecting me and will rip out your pulsing innards, you green-blooded beauties who talk in stilted English. You know the kind, spandex accentuating them just right, threatening with chilling remarks like, “All your orbit bases and hunk-men are belong to us. . . .”

     It would have been a good class.

     I had looked for a textbook and found the How
to Write Science Fiction and Fantasyby Orson Scott Card came with the highest recommendations. I crossed paths with him once in graduate school before he hit it big as a fulltime sci-fi writer, but he wouldn’t know me from Obi Wan Kenobi.

     His enormously successful Ender’s Game didn’t capture my attention when I started it many years ago. Since I was then in my 40s, the appeal of youthful anxiety so central to the novel didn’t grab me, invite me into that world. My nephews read him while in high school and loved him. Card’s
protagonist has that dour, loner, teenage angst, which I had long since lost by the time I opened the novel. It’s not that other works primarily written for young adults can’t hold my attention; I love all seven Harry Potter works and have devoured them twice. The same is true of The Lord of the Rings.

    However, Card’s How to Write is helpful and honest about the struggles of trying to craft fiction professionally on a sustained basis. “Don’t quit your day job” is just one of his many admonitions; “this gig is harder than it looks.” And I love his understanding of the sci-fi genre and why some of us embrace it willingly:

    “One surprising result of the ghettoizing of
speculative fiction, however, is that writers have enormous freedom within its walls. It’s as if, having once confined us [sci-fi, speculative, and fantasy
writers] within our cage, the keepers of the zoo of literature don’t much care what we do so long as we stay behind bars.”

     I hadn’t thought much about it, but when I created my world of Marsco (disease-ridden, dysfunctional politically and socially, rewarding and sustaining only an elite clique), I thought I was
simply exaggerating the world around us. I explained to someone recently that the mainthe-reader-has-to-buy-this-exaggeration of the Marsco world is simply that the Third World is no longer out of sight on the other side of the world, but it’s on the next city block.

    Marsco has the power to control who crosses the street and when. Today, in our real world, Israel is
walling itself away from Palestinians. In the Marsco world, this is happening but on a total planetary level, not in the far corner of the Mediterranean.

    But, back to class! We were to read Walter M.
Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a novel I want my students to know. In this Cold War-era story, the world has been destroyed by a nuclear war, typical sci-fi fare from that paranoid and wary age. The novel is set at a remote monastery in the southwest desert of the old USA. There, the monks are hand- copying books because after the atomic conflagration, the survivors blamed
knowledge and the literate for ending their 21st Century world. So, intellectuals, scientists, educators alike are doomed, hunted and
attacked with merciless savagery after the atomic fires died down. Any books that survived the war went up in smoke afterwards, scapegoats for the catastrophe that brought the world to the edge of
extinction.

     As the novel begins, it is 600 years after the war, but the world is still in ruins. Miller’s world is roughly analogous to the 5th or 6th Century of our real history after the Fall of Rome. The monks at the abbey are painstakingly laboring away on vellum like real monks did in our distant past.

     The next section is roughly another 600 years later, in what would be our own historical world on
the verge of the Renaissance. When secular scholars visit the monastery seeking any text that deals with
theoretical physics and engineering, the monks have already made a treadmill-run generator that allows their visitors to read by a primitive electric light. The visitors are devastated when they realize their incipient theories are not in fact new ones, but rediscoveries from an old world long past; they’re doubly upset because these desert hermits are a century ahead of their fledgling scientific hypotheses.

     The last section is set 2400 years after the first conflagration and the world is on the verge of a second nuclear holocaust. Having forgotten their own history, arrogant and tech-mastering humans are condemned to relive it.

     Even though steeped in Roman Catholic monasticism (the monks are authentic Dominicans who still speak in Latin), and even though our own Cold War fears have eased, Canticle is a tremendous book. Well-crafted.  Keenly paced. Generously
described. Readers feel like they have entered Miller’s Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern redux.
He captures the political machinations of those trying to harness science for their own means, not for the good of the whole. He creates believable characters caught in the political webs and intrigues of their world. The science fiction creeps in; it does not saturate. Radiation-mutilated humans with extra
heads or arms roam about, reminders of the nuclear war long past, of science run amuck, of hubris fouling the world.

     The novel opens with the unwitting discovery of a fallout shelter and its long-buried mysteries totally
misunderstood by monks in their nearly-destroyed, post-bellum world; these discoveries are understood by the reader: Air lock? “Can of kraut and pound of pastrami”? Fallout itself—a mysterious ogre?

     And, Miller asks, how do you make ethical choices in such a world? Indeed, how do we, today, in our real, wrap-knuckles-on-the-solid-desk-world right before us, how do we make ethical choices? How do we live amid the injustices of our world?

     I ask these questions in The Marsco Saga. My characters tend to be of Marsco, of the top 1% of the world in terms of political power and the necessities of life. They have safety and comfort, freedom
from disease, crime, and the grime of a nearly-destroyed world. Most of the world’s population is held down to languish on the “nasty, brutish, and short” lowest stratum of society. How do my characters’ consciences allow them to live while aware of this? How do they live at all? Or love? Move about with any degree of freedom while knowing that their world is built on the backs of the
oppressed?

     It’s an exaggerated world, but also one much like our own. In Card’s words, I write behind these bars. And I chose to locate there so I can control the canvas backdrop and ask questions about that oppressive environment. How do we make ethical choices in our own world? How do we live and love
without becoming calloused and cynical?

    Good speculative science fiction isn’t about the science, it’s about the speculation. The British war poet Wilfred Owen wrote: “All a poet can do is
warn.”

    So, too, with the sci-fi writer: we write to warn.

[So sorry I am late with this! I plan to write on a more regular basis. I'll keep you posted. Also, check for updates on my Facebook wall.]

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"How I Spent my Summer Vacation"

10/1/2011

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[Dear readers: My first entry of the school year was delayed due to the busy rush at the beginning of the semester and a nagging illness I had difficulty shaking. That said, I plan to publish weekly for the rest of the school year.
Thanks for hanging in!]

“How I Spent My Summer Vacation”

    Way back in September 1974, when I first started teaching high school, I really did assign my 9th graders an essay on this topic. It was a hot day, nearly 100 degrees, an easy temperature for the Sacramento Valley to hit at that time of the year. The building had no air conditioner; the assignment turned out to be a flop.

     That semester, however, I did garner the absolute best excuse I have ever received from a student who did not do his homework and therefore was unprepared for a Monday morning quiz. He wrote: “I am not prepared for this morning’s quiz because my father and me drove to Idaho to watch Evil Knievel jump the Snake Canyon.” Knievel was unsuccessful in his jump; the student wasn’t particularly the best I ever taught. His excuse, however, still ranks as my #1.

    The second best excuse came here at SMSU. I had a world-class weightlifter in class. His reason for missing: tournament judges for an upcoming championship match came by his apartment that morning and demanded an immediate, unannounced, random urine test to make sure he was not using steroids to enhance his performance. And so, he was late—but he passed that test.

     The semester after this particular incident, I was explaining to my advanced LIT class, one filled with mostly future high school teachers, the range of excuses we hear as teachers. Of course, I began, Evil Knievel still ranks #1. But when I next explained the weightlifting #2 excuse, his girlfriend (unbeknownst to me, a member of the class) blurted out, “But, it’s TRUE, he did need to give a urine sample that day.”

     My third best excuse is actually the most chilling. A student missed class because of a train accident in her home town, an accident that released a tanker car of chlorine gas. The mustard-colored cloud forced the evacuation of the whole town. It made the national news.

    Coincidentally, this was the semester I was teaching World War One poetry and could tie the accident to Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” about British Tommies being caught in a poison gas attack:
    “Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!" – an ecstasy of fumbling,
    Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
    But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
    And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . .

     This past summer, in addition to trips to Arizona and Grand Marais, I read several excellent books. One, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, is an engrossing biography of an individual woman who changed the world even though confronted with her culture’s entrenched sexism. At first aiming to become an amateur botanist and scientific illustrator, Potter was rejected by the decidedly male scientific community of her day. Over time, her illustrations (which she fortunately kept) proved to be more accurate than many others of the day. And her theories about mushrooms and how they spread was scientifically correct if not accepted until many years later. When a work covering all the fungi of Britain was published in the 1990s, the author rediscovered her illustrations and used about two dozen in his work because Potter’s were finer than any other illustrations and photographs of this subject. Potter was long dead by then.

     And besides Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck and a host of other children’s favorites, Potter began buying centuries-old farms in the historic
and remote Lakes’ District and restoring them as working farms. She supervised their renovation; hand-picked their managers; introduced Herdwick sheep (a breeding stock better suited to the harsh climate in Northern England); and eventually donated her considerable land holdings to the National Trust. Today, these farms are owned by the citizens of the United Kingdom. The Lakes’ District had been the haunt of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge and scores of landscape painters a century before Potter settled there; her actions saved a huge slice of English literary and artistic culture in perpetuity.

     My literary specialty is the British novel, so it’s no surprise I read a few novels this summer. I finally finished the 20-volume Patrick O’Brien series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. O’Brien’s two heroes are unlikely friends: Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin.

    “Mad Jack” is a devoted Royal Navy officer with the spleen to fire all his guns and the ambition to capture valuable prizes on the high seas. In that era, officers grew extremely rich from such tactics that we would describe as piracy today. The captain’s medical officer, Maturin, is a renowned surgeon, a naturalist, a Catholic whose family came from two natural enemies of England (Spain and Ireland), but an enlightened Renaissance Gentleman devoted to stamping out tyranny wherever he found it.

     Napoleon is his arch enemy even if the Doctor has latent sympathies for his beloved Irish; he views France’s dictatorial Emperor as worse than anyone sitting on the English throne. And, Stephen is a spy for the British, a way to insert him on shore for adventures in his native Spain and eventually the fledging United States and the rebellious areas of South America. He is a way for O’Brien to introduce some cloak-and-dagger plot twists and elements that span a few volumes as subplots.

     Since I started reading the series in the summer of 2001, I have watched this pair woo and wed elegant ladies and then watched one of them lose his beloved wife. I’ve witnessed in brilliant prose as “Mad Jack” Aubrey attacked French, Spanish, Moroccan, Dutch, and American men-of-war. I’ve seen the pair cast adrift on the sea, tossed up helpless on deserted islands, been too hot, too cold, too hungry, been overstuffed with the delicacies of the era, been drunk, sober, and been consumed by a cocaine addiction. They also play a respectable selection of violin and cello pieces together when not waging war or discovering the latest mammal or aviary specimen.

     I had thought that O’Brien was going to return the pair to England at the end of Volume Twenty, Blue at the Mizzen. Jack has defeated a superior fleet in the South Pacific as he helped Chile free itself from Spain; Stephen has aided in the political intrigue while pointing out (accurately) the flora and fauna of the South America coastal areas. Jack’s wife and children are waiting at home in Kent; Stephen has proposed to the one stunning woman who can match his scientific wits. Napoleon is out of the scene, but trouble is brewing and so. . .

     O’Brien was about a third of the way into his 21st novel when he died. I have the publisher’s attempt to put the partial manuscript into novel form, but I found it uninviting knowing it will just end without a clear plot conclusion. Yet I envy O’Brien’s grit to keep going, handwriting fifty thousand words, fully committed even in ill health to reach the last paragraph and period of #21. Surely, the writer’s equivalent of dying with his boots on.

     Also this summer, I ordered the DVD set of The Pacific and watched that. For those of you who don’t follow HBO Productions, The Pacific is the companion to Band of Brothers, the HBO series that told the story of the “The Screaming Eagles,” the 101st Airborne Division in Europe during World War II. The Pacific follows various Marines as they land on Japanese-held tropical (and fortified) islands to fight a determined enemy and the horrific jungle itself. Both ten-hour mini-series are worth the effort to watch, as graphic in language, action, and accuracy as they are. Although made-for-TV movies, they hold nothing back.

     After I finished The Pacific, I downloaded to my Kindle two of the memoirs the film used as sources, Robert “Lucky” Leckie’s Helmet for my Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific and E. B. “Sledgehammer” Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa. After the war, Leckie became an award-winning AP journalist; Sledge earned his PhD in biology and was a beloved professor for many years. Both are now dead. The war stories are harrowing and graphic, not to sensationalize the violence, but to make a point: war is hell and should not be glorified.

     But both authors accurately point out that those young Marines in the Pacific suffered    unimaginable horrors to defeat a determined enemy capable of unimaginable horrors. Neither war survivor wanted to write about their buried memories of friends dying painfully, of buddies being mutilated by the weapons of modern warfare or by a cruel enemy, of malaria and other jungle-borne diseases ravaging their own young, healthy bodies. But they felt compelled to in order to put their post-War demons to rest. So write they did of these gruesome miseries, of their own fears, and frankly, of their own eventual hatred for their fellow humans whom they killed with ruthless and merciless efficiency. (Lucky was a machine gunner, Sledgehammer part of a mortar team.)

     Enrolling in college after his discharge, Sledgehammer was asked by a perky coed what he learned in the Marines that could be used to foster his education. “I worked with explosives,” he softly replied, embarrassed by the question. “Well, that might apply to engineering,” the overly-helpful coed chirped. Bending down to her ear, he whispered, “The Marines taught me to kill Japs. I learned really well and got damned good at it.”

    Upon seeing a stage production of the upbeat South Pacific soon after it first opened on Broadway, Leckie began writing Helmet for my Pillow so people in the peaceful USA wouldn’t think the South Pacific war was a musical. He succeeded.

     This gives you a glimpse of how I spent my summer on top of Chairing the Department, traveling to a few weddings and graduations, and working on my own sci-fi novels, The Marsco Saga. By Christmas ’11, you will be able to download the first, The Marsco Dissident, onto your e-readers. An electronic stocking-stuffer.

     Meanwhile, keep reading in good health!

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Marsco Readings and Reports

Downton Abbey and the Loss of Matthew Crawley -- Spoiler Alert!

"Libraries of My Life"

"All Children Left Behind"

Science Fiction: Plans, Sidetracks, and Endpoints

"How I Spent my Summer Vacation"

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