6 posts tagged “books”

I have been dutifully doing my work to finish my incomplete. I am designing a unit of lesson plans covering the Civil War because we were allowed to choose our own subject and i couldn't think of any other subject that has so much information in print and online. Let's just say i haven't had any problems finding overheads... I am beginning to see a pattern that  i will probably grow to hate as it becomes clearer. Using the MA State frameworks means i have to plan these lessons around the test they give sophomores and seniors to pass before they can graduate. Teaching from the frameworks is the same as teaching to the test, and an awful lot of narrative gets left behind.

My best buddy Mike, his wife and two kids came in for a surprise visit yesterday, which was like a shaft of sunlight at midnight. We went to college together, Mike and I, and altho i couldn't take organized Pentecostalism any more Mike, the trooper he is, has managed to begin a ministry that has both significance and relevance. He is about the only person that could actually fan to life the embers of a fire that i thought was buried in ice, the only one that could make me a little wishful about being a minister again.

Otherwise the nose is to the grindstone. It has been a long time since i have experienced this  kind of stress, the kind that presses down and causes you to hunch your back when your awake and squint your eyes when your asleep. At least the weather has been cooperating, as it has been in the mid to low 70s this week. What can i say? Autumn and Spring are my two favorite seasons, and i figure in the winter, you can always put more clothes on, right? Summer is fine, but it often is accompanied by humidity, which i could do without, and you can only take off so much clothing to cool down.

I am also sitting the dogs again, till Sunday. Its kool, they have began to grow on me. Plus, these folk's TV didn't melt down, and they have NESN, the home of all the Red Sox game. The Sox gained a game on the fucking Yankees last night, and i hope we make it six tonight.... OK, time for me to get back to the lesson plans. Mike gave me a B&N gift card, which i intend to use to purchase this publication of "On the Road,"  the original manuscript Kerouac typed out on a scroll , as well as John Leland's new book -- next week sometime, maybe. Sigh

My brother called me a few days ago to tell me he thought it would be nice if he, my brother Scott, my Dad and myself could go to the Nebraska Assembly of God District's men retreat together. They had bought me a ticket home for the Fourth of July, if you'll recall, and i had missed my flight so i still have a ticket. Why not use it for this? My birthday is on the 28th of February, and the retreat will be the 1st- 3rd of March. Having the boys all together is usually a good thing, if it is not to drawn out or extended; we get together to long and we semi-revert to the roles we played when we were growing up, which is bad news for me because both my brothers can bench press over 350 lbs and i've come to address them, affectionately, as "sir." Its a tough gig being the oldest.

 Work has been light, which surprises me a bit because last semester it took off running from the first week and had ver few lulls.  My only problem is one that may escape attention because of its consistency, but is behind almost every gripe i have: i work for incompetent people. These people couldn't run a popcicle stand, and i have proof of that every day working in my little coffee kiosk in the university library.

I went to class today and walked away very, very dissatisfied. This is a 655 level grad class, we are supposed to read and discuss two books a week about particular aspects of American culture, and mostly what we do is talk about our opinions and our politics. We read Confederates in the Attic and Dixie Rising, two books written in the mid to late 90s. They were good books, i particularly like Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic.  There are two Danish exchange students, a young lady, and two othe Grad students. These kids are not dumb, they are very, very bright. Its just i have much higher expectations. There was so much, and we talked about so very little of these books.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, The Wife and i rarely see one another. I only have until the 21st of Febr., and i'll be back in the apartment, and hopefully back in the saddle again as well. The Wife had been thinking of going part time, but has found something within to decide to continue full time. It hasn't all been suffer for Jesus, as she has mangaged to spend some quality time shopping for school and the apartment. It is fortunate that most guys who have never been married have no idea just how expensive it is to be married; i believed the myth that "two can live cheaper than one," which is true if they're both guys.

I really don't know what to make of going home, back to the AG campgrounds back in Lexington Nebraska. Those campgrounds are a part of me, as much as the house i grew up in or the schools i attended in Bayard. I was in second grade, eight years old, when i went to kid's camp. I went every year except my sophmore year when i went to a local basketball camp. I went every summer as a couselor while i was in college, and when i youth pastored in nebraska, i attended them there with my groups. I attended youth conventions, family camps, and men's retreats. I have a lot of history there and i a lot of associations...  Gotta write a two page preview of my paper on Kerouac.

I finally, finally, managed to have an eight hour "night" of sleep. Things were very slow last night, due largely to the Super Bowl. I got to watch the first and most of the fourth quarters. I have to say that I was very disappointed about the commercials! For the most part, they sucked like a Hoover vaccum cleaner in the middle of a snow drift. The one i really liked was the one that won contest that anyone could enter for Doritos. I think i heard someone on the news say they shot it on a videao camera, edited it on their Mac, and all for like $50. I liked the game, tho mostly because of the weather. I loved that it was wet and humid and real. Usually the game is turned into a ride in Disney World, artificial and contrived, slick like a magazine add. This was the American showcase, and it was cool that for all our power and technology, we couldn't manage or control the weather and make last night like everyday Disney parade down Mainstreet USA.

Holy crap, but its cold outside. After my shift ended at 2 am, i went out to where i parked the car, and i pretty much froze my balls off walking to the lot where i left it. I woke up and walked the dogs, and i froze all the hair on my face because of the fricking wind chill. Damn, its been cold...

I had a chance to head back to bed, and i took it. The dogs didn't bug me, and i slept for another couple of hours. I get to bed around 2:30. 3:00 am, and the little fur balls are whining for a walk usually at 7:00 am. Sigh. I have to hit the Smith College library this afternoon and check out a book they have on reserve library called "Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves." The only problem with taking my graduate history classes is the strong revisionist bias of many of my Professors. I am reading three books for the class, i have to lead a 20 minute disscussion on public history: Lies Across America, and a book about the early 20th century pagentry movement and how they attempted to pass down tradition. In Lies, as well as in Standing Soldiers, both authors have a revisionist agenda, which means ideology of one sort or another.

These authors claim that any public history, either monuments, or markers, or museums really have two histories, of when and why they were originally placed, and the history of what they commemorate. I believe there is a third layer, that of the context surrounding the issue of why contemporary historians have engaged public history in the present.

I have no trouble revising markers or museam displays or even monuments that were purposely set up as inacurate or to mislead people. History is very much about facts. America declared her independence from England in July of 1776, Abraham Linclon delivered the Gettysberg Address, etc. However, when marker and monuments are changed, one is ignoring a part of history. Why were these erected? What motivated people in locales to put their own interpretations these monuments and markers? When a snowplow "accidently takes out an offensive historical marker, and it is replaced with an more accurate one, a layer of history is lost, and historical memory is weakened. Instead of taking them down and sweeping them under the rug, why not put up another marker or monument beside the offending one?

I went to worship yesterday and it was one of those Sunday mornings where it was just outright duty to sit and listen. Angels didn't sing, epipnanies did not burst upon the scene, and grown men did not weep. The pastor is beginning a sermon series on the Book of Mark, and in Wedensday night housechurch we will me using NT Wright's The Book Of Mark For Everyone. Mark is my favorite among the Gospels. It is a no hold barred, concise presentation of jesus Messiah, written for a Roman audience. I am looking more and more forward to this semester...

Anyone ever watch Blazing Saddles when the call girl sang I'm Tired? This is exactly how I am beginning to feel at the beginning of each New Year, and its getting worse. "Madison Avenue" hasn't come up with anything new or unique for years now; I'm pretty sure that if originality introduced itself and bit people in the ass, they'd fall over from the shock You doubt me? Then all I will say to you is Clerks II.

I honestly can't give anyone any lists this year because I honestly can't remember enough of anything i watched or read or listened to this year to actually compile an actual list. The only standout in my mind has been Battlestar Galactica. Damn, what an original, daring piece of work, of art, that genre breaking show has turned out to be. I liked Dead Man's Chest because it was quirky and odd and didn't kow tow to the masse's "block buster" expectations. Plus, K Knightly. There is nothing in fiction that I can recommend, because there wasn't anything that even remotely caught my eye, which is just sad as I like fiction. I liked Frank McCort's Teacher Man in the Memoir catagory. For the annual poetry selection, I'd have to recommend Jack Kerouac's Book of Haikus. My non-fiction selection would be Garry Wills's translation of Augustine's Confessions. The best new group that I heard this year was TV on the Radio, altho I thought the guys were pretty much dicks when i watched them in an interview on MTV. For best video I must bow my head in shame and name Nellie Furtato's Maneater, altho My Chemical Romance's new video was pretty good.

I know this is a pretty short list, but I can only work with the materials I have.

I've been reading Alan Jacobs The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of CS Lewis. It is the best biography I have read on Lewis, including The Inklings. It is simply so well written...

However, I have been having a problem that I have never had before, a problem I never ever thought I'd have. My wife and I went to a marriage retreat in Atlanta at the end of August and I was forced into facing up to a lot of things that had happened when I was growing up. It would be a touching, Hallmark kinda moment if it all came out for the best, but it really, really hasn't worked out at all for me. All I did was open open Pandora's Box, full of all kinds mostly dead shit that won't stay buried safely in the past.

My problem is is one that is not in any way isolated to only myself, it isn't in any special. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people grew up the way I did, which was mostly alone and by myself. I had what i thought was a pretty nice childhood. I grew up in Western Nebraska under big sky, in a small town on the banks of the Platte River, in an intact nuclear family. I'm the oldest of five kids, and when I go home to this day we are all very comfortable with one another. There are no fireworks or dramatics when we get together for the holidays. What I am saying is that there are a lot worst things you can do with your life than grow up in the shadow of chimney Rock on the historic Oregon Trail.

But when I remember growing up, I do not remember relationships with anyone except for my Dad when i worked with him in the summers. I spent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours by myself, wandering the fields and the country roads in and around my hometown. Even when I was in school I was alone in the crowd. I only connected with one other human being for the whole time I was in High School, my best friend growing up, DannyO. I had a learning disability when I was very young, but a very good local 4th grade teacher helped me to kick the problem and by the 6th grade I was reading 12th grade level, and bu Jr. High I was reading College level. How many 8tt graders you know who read and understood The Rise and Fall of the Third Riech?

I was never trained in any type of discipline. I just adapted quickly to whatever short term circumstances i found myself in. I never learned squat from anyone, except my Dad did teach me the bee keeping business. But nadda in anything else. There was structure, I wasn't raised by wolves; but there is a reason why I can fake almost anything for the short term, and can only begin but not end strong...

So my problem is this: unrealized and unrecoverable opportunity and potential. I had the mind, I think, to really excel academically. But there wasn't anyone to direct or push me, I was left to my own devices. I read shit till I was in college, and even then what I chose to read wasn't didn't exactly challenge me intellectually. I think I coulda learned Latin or Greek when I was a kid, I think I could have been read better than I did when I was a kid, but all I had was myself and I wanted to read Sgt. Rock, John Carter: Warlord of Mars, and Louis L'mour westerns. My teachers made me read Hamlet, McBeth, and Romeo and Juliet along with Ray Bradbury and edgar Allen Poe, and I will stay eternally grateful to them. I am not complaining about my imagination -- my reading proves I had a vivid one. But I needed something a bit heftier in the intellectual direction. Really, even when I read Shakespeare, it was taught by a little Mexican drunk who didn't understand these plays any better than we the students did. What about Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy for a teenage reading list? Was I completely asleep? Was I just ignorant? Why not Greek or Roman Myths? Why? Because I was left to my own devices, and I wasn't enough, that is why.

I never read a Great Book until I was in my late twenties, and I didn't read Homer or Plato till just a few years ago. I have great potential, maybe. I've read Kerouac, King, James Lee Burke, and Hunter Thompson. I have the experience and the ablity and the literary muscle to pull off some interesting distinctly American creative literature. But I am still all alone by myself, kinda put on a shelf (that one was for any larry Norman fans out there, if there are any larry Norman fans left). I do not have the ability to begin something and actually finish it, to connect with people in a way that might make them interested in what i might have to write.

I am gratified for all the folks reading this that have made me a friend or neighbor -- it is strange to get feedback that is actually encouraging. But I still feel like Dr. Johnny Fever DJing for WKRP and being greatful for the ten or twenty people in the greater Cincinati area that listened to the station. I am completely caught up in The Drift now at the end of the semester, and I dunno how to actually break free.

I'm reading this biography and am continually reminded of my own childhood and how that formed and informed who I am now. I hate this kind of funge state, I hate that feel like I am just wasting my time away in futility. But mostly, I hate thinking I am doing this all  by myself.

 

I'm writing tonight watching VH1 Classics and they have mucic videos from a specific year playing for the hour. The fact that I am middle-aged is rapidly grabbing more and more of my attention! The problem is that I don't feel old mentally or physically. Yet the fact is that at eight years old I remember the news reports saying that the Beatles had broken up. All you need is love, right?

I fucking hated the '80s. The first time I heard Duran Duran and The Culture Club I knew it was pretty much time to just hunker down and try to stoically endure the idiocy. Then I heard rap for the first time,  Run DMC, and pretty much figured out that as the apocalypse was upon us, there would be hunkering down only in a fallout shelter deep inside a mountain. It wasn't until I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that I knew it was safe to come out again...

I graduated High School in Bayard Nebraska in May of 82. That September I went to a JuCo in Sterling, Colorado.The only thing that stands out there was that my room mate was black and he was the first black guy I'd ever actually seen in person. Also, walking over passed out kids on a friday nigh to get to my dorm room was new. 1983 I pretty much spent working at the local sugar factory while drowning in a sea of porn -- which contrary to what you might hope, wasn't really all that healthy. Lucky for me my very religious 1st cousin was going to an Assembly of God Bible college in North Dakota at the time and informed the basketball coach that I came from a long line of Pentecostals, that I was tall, and that I had played B-ball in High School. I attended Trinity from 84-88, which was one of the most surreal four years of my young existence, changing from the guy who came to play ball and chase cheerleaders into someone who wanted to be a minister. I loved playing basketball at Trinity, and making the friends I met there. I dated seriously for the first time in my life at Trinity, quickly finding out to NEVER answer in the affirmative the girlfriend's question asking, "Was it Me?"

After I graduated I took the position as a youth minister for an AG church in Rock Springs, Wyoming. The dickhead pastor hired me because the wealthiest couple in his church had two boys that were as spiritual as door knobs and loved sports; I was hired specifically to convince tweedle dum and tweedle dee to be nice guys and go to church for their parent's sake. The only thing that really happened was they turned me on to Van Halen and King's X for the Summer. I lasted to 89, until I told the pastor and parents of the schmuk brothers that these kids were pretty much taking up oxygen in the pews that other kids, who were actually searching spiritually in the church, could be breathing. Oh, and I also pretty much punctured the illusions of granduer that the church secretary's daughter brought home with her after a visit from being a nanny for a wealthy couple in NYC. It is a truism that I learned the hard way: even if its justified, never ever piss off and alienate the church secretary.

The only decent thing to come out of the whole experience was that I met my best friend, "Macho Mike," at Trinity while playing ball. He was best man at my wedding, and to this day we speak to each other almostr every week. He has a wife and two kids and lives a life that places him in my top five of "people I admire and respect" list.

The '80s sucked all the way along -- even the movies sucked. About the only movies I could stand in the entire decade were Ghost Busters, Aliens, Farris Bueller's Day Off, and Beverly Hills Cop. Really, is there anyone out there that has more than two movies from the cultural wasteland that was 80s America that tops their most influential movie list? Sigh.

'Course, lessons learned in the wilderness and in overcoming obstacles are lessons that most form character. I went from being a kid to being a man during this time, from an eighteen year old away from home for the first time to an adult with an actual job. If you want to call youth pastoring a job, that is. There were good times, there just wasn't anything much to listen to, watch, or read.... I received an outline from my education that I have spent the last twenty years filling in on my own, and I developed a perseverance to heart ache and suffering that stood me in good staed during the 90s. It showed me that everything eventually comes to an end -- even glam rock.