It doesn't get any better than this!

A new book by Daniel Pinkwater; it's online with myriad fun illustrations (click on the subject line, above); and the blurb on the back of the IRL book is by Neil Gaiman! Who could ask for anything more? Pinky says it's his best book to date, and while I am still partial to Hoboken Nights, if we're talking fiction, he may just be right.

The Neddiad, or How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization is the saga of young shoelace heir Neddie Wentworthstein. Filled with bad guys, trains, turtles, and those wonderful Pinkwater names (Col. Ken Krenwinkle, for example), every page is a delight. Just reading the chapter titles is fun - my favorites so far are "Box of Weasels" and "My Yiddishe Shaman."

I found the book in the library and devoured it. What I really want, though, is to buy it as an audiobook read by the author. This is the best way to savor Pinkwater, I believe: to hear him read his own words. Our family has listened to so many of his books on tape that I can now pick up a new Pinkwater book and practically hear him read it to me - but it's much better to hear the real article.

Three cheers for Neddie! And thrice that for Daniel Manus Pinkwater, who never ceases to surprise and amaze me.

~Namaste

Reviewing for Elle Magazine

One day a couple of months ago, while browsing the discussion forums on PBS, I learned how to apply to be a reviewer for Elle Magazine. It sounded like fun, so I applied (an interesting process in itself) and was accepted. My three books came a few weeks later, and I began reading.

Based on books I told them I'd recently read and enjoyed, they sent me three memoirs. I found this a bit odd since I don't often read memoirs, but they looked mildly interesting; in fact, one of them looked fascinating (if very sad), so I started with that one. Visiting Life - Women Doing Time on the Outside, by Bridget Kinsella, purported to be about the wives and girlfriends of incarcerated men. It sounded very different from anything I'd read before, and since my college has a prison outreach program, I thought it was something I ought to know about.
Actually, the book is about Kinsella's inability to come to grips with her divorce and her ticking biological clock. Although she interviews a few women, the interviews are constantly interrupted with her own whining, and she shows little sympathy for the women except where their experiences intersect her own. The prisoner she interviews becomes her "savior." She depicts him as worshiping her, and at the end of the book (I'm not giving anything away, because I warn you strongly NOT to buy this book, which means you're not going to read it, right?!) he conveniently contracts throat cancer and chooses not to have it treated. In other words, he's around just long enough to function as her "angel" and then disappear so she can get back to life away from the sordid prison setting.

Although the prisoner, "Rory," is supposed to have been the inspiration for the book, and her emotional and spiritual savior, the book isn't dedicated to him. Heck, he's not even mentioned in the acknowledgements, nor are the women who so freely gave of their time and souls to the project. That left a bad taste in my mouth, too.

I believe that she did meet with a few wives and girlfriends, and perhaps she even visited a prison once. But the rest of the book is an obvious fabrication - a framework for her own private whinings. Which, I should add, are poorly written.

Can you tell how much I hated this book?!

Now, Carolyn Jourdan's book Heart in the Right Place was so wonderful that it made up for having had to read Kinsella's! It comes out in June (I believe all three of these books do), and you should immediately run out and buy it! Jourdan is one of those authors who make you wish she were your next-door neighbor, and her book is one of those books you want to buy to give to everybody you care about. She has an honest, straightforward voice that speaks right from the heart - in other words, the title does not disappoint.

Jourdan took a brief vacation from her job as a U.S. Senate counsel when her mother had a massive heart attack, and returned to her rural Tennessee home. Her mother immediately put her to work running her father's family medicine practice for two days until her mother was back on her feet. (Obviously, both Jourdan and her mother were in denial about the severity of her mother's condition.) The time was extended from two days to a week, from a week to two weeks and so on, as Jourdan had to learn to cope not only with making appointments over the phone for people who demanded special services she did not understand ("does the doctor wash out feet?") to dealing with goat emergencies (many of the farmers trusted her father more than they trusted the local veterinarian).

There are similarities to James Herriott's gentle humor, but Jourdan has a crisis all her own: she wants to return to D.C., her exciting, important job, foreign embassy dinners and her mentor, who keeps calling and urging her to come home. Rural Tennessee is no longer her home; she has gone to great lengths to escape a place where she never fit in, and she has no intention of staying any longer than her parents need her. She is homesick for Washington and out of place in her father's office.

It is a good book. Read it!

The third book they sent me was a real surprise. I hadn't expected to enjoy it, but the first paragraph grabbed me and from there on I couldn't set it down. Lindeen has the comedic timing of P.G. Wodehouse - yes, she is that good! I'd never heard of her, or of Zuzu's Petals, or of most of the punk rock bands in the book, but the experiences and the time about which she writes, oh yes, they ring lots of bells for me! Of the three books, this was the most laugh-out-loud fun to read, but in some ways also the most painful, as I'd shared some similar situations (Lindeen is about 2 years younger than I am, so we grew up in the same era, and it was a tough one). You don't have to have wanted to break into the music scene to love this book - it's about dreams, and growing up, and friendships, and finding yourself. But it's also about the music scene in Minneapolis, and that part is really interesting!

And did I mention how marvelous the writing is? ;-) Do get it when it comes out. It was the last of the three that I read, but ranks very high on my enjoyment meter. C will be reading it next - he's not into punk, but he recognized Lindeen's husband's band (The Replacements) and, of course, he's interested in books like this anyway.

~Namaste

Student Mandalas

The semester is over - and the summer session has begun. Spring semester's mandala project was a huge success! Despite the entire class blanching when I announced it, every single student pronounced it the best project of their semester - not just of this course, but of all the courses they had that semester. And they created some truly lovely, inspired work (which I will show you, below).

So I decided that it was time to try it out in my online sections this summer. We'll see what happens. It means that students will need to use either a digital camera or a scanner, but since last term several students scanned things for me, and since they have plenty of lead-time in which to locate the equipment, I am not concerned about it.

So let's get to the mandalas. The students voted; here's the one that won first place:
(Ignore the dates on these; I am still fighting with my camera about this.) Surrounding the mandala is twisted stereo wire, representing Christ's crown of thorns. Danielle used fabric, fabric paint and tissue paper to make this large mandala, and it was indeed beautiful.

Second place went to this one.
I particularly like this one. It is a stepping stone for a garden, embedded with bits of colored glass and then painted. Knowing Erin, it is very much an expression straight from her heart. What a great medium! Can't you just picture it in her garden?

Third place went to Laridys, a very quiet student with quite a talent for drawing:
I was thrilled for her to win a prize, since she is so shy and self-effacing.

One of my very favorite mandalas was done by Luan. I greatly admire his ability to draw hands - having seen C&Z work on hands, I know how difficult they are to master.
He explained that he comes from a Buddhist background, but has left most religion for Secular Humanism, which he finds far more compatible, after studying many other religions in our course. I like the way he depicted "letting go" of religions.

Another very interesting drawing was done by one of the two honors students in the class:
Unfortunately, although I remember that his artist's statement explained the image and made a lot of sense, I can't remember even the gist of it. Still, it's a cool image.

This one didn't come out very well digitally, but it was very nice IRL. My Wiccan student depicted the Lady Gaia, using beads to color each of the jewels above her head. Very pretty. N, who came in with me that day, admired it so much that Katie gave it to her to bring home. Made N very happy, and it's now hanging in her room.

This was one of my very favorites. Alex barely got to class before N&I left, and most of the other students had already gone. As you can see, it's a "Jesus fish," and she's even colored the rim to look metallic - that alone took her a couple of hours with grey markers of three shades. The scales are individually cut and glued circles, each with a different religious symbol - if you click on the image itself, it will open in a different window and allow you to view it up close. You should really do that, it's worth the examination. WOW. I continue to be impressed by this one, and by what it represents.

This one was interesting because each side opened into a two-page booklet. I wasn't crazy about the content; for one thing, the books had an awful lot of text, and for another, I'm not into bloody nails. Nevertheless, it was quite a creative concept, turning the poster into a double book.

Scott, who is a musician, took photos from the insert of his cd, and turned them into a tower.
I didn't get the whole thing in, but I was able to get a picture of his artist's statement, which you can read if you click on it:

He's an interesting fellow, a good musician, and a good person. And a creative one, too - this is the first vertical piece I've received!

Last, my favorite piece from this class - favorite because it is interactive. It did not receive any votes at all; it's not flashy, and I think perhaps some of the students found it hard to understand. It may not have looked as showy as some of the others - but the thought that went into it was profound. I wish I had asked the students to give me copies of their artist's statements, because hers was very good. (So next time I will know to do that!) She is a Taoist and a free-thinker, so it makes sense to me that her mandala was created on a mirror:

Nada used tissue paper and ink on top of the mirror; when you look into it, you can still see a colored, shadowy image of part of your face through the tissue paper, which is a very interesting effect indeed.

So there you have the most intriguing of my students' work from last semester.

Cool, huh?

~Namaste

My Students

I'm feeling a little down today, after another quiet chat with one of my students. He's such a nice fellow - good student, loving husband and father, talented guitarist and songwriter. But he's been having one of those years, where every time he turns around, he gets slammed with something else. He has gone from being the first one to the classroom in the morning (we begin at 8 ACK! emma), alert and well-prepared, to coming in late and once even nodding off. At least I know why, so I don't take it personally.


The hardest thing is reminding myself every morning that when a student falls asleep in class, it may not be because he's a slacker & was up drinking last night, but because he's pulling double shifts to stay in school while single-handedly supporting & raising two kids and caring for his increasingly-senile grandmother who has a colostomy & keeps dropping & bursting her bag. That the reason another student hardly ever comes to class prepared or gets her assignments in on time is that she's still trying to find a safe place to live because her parents abuse her emotionally since they are strict Presbyterians & can't handle the fact that she's Wiccan. That the two students chit-chatting in the last row might be talking about trivialities, or one might be confiding in the other one about her continual feelings of guilt over having called the police on her father.



The first two are are among my favorite students, one present & one previous. The two chit-chatters - well, I don't know what they're talking about, & I've asked them repeatedly to stop, but I really do try hard not to get as angry as some profs do. Because you just never know.



That's life at a community college.

~Namaste

She's Baaaaack!

In the immortal words of Marvin: "Life . . . don't talk to me about life!" Okay, go ahead & talk about it, I'm delighted to hear all about yours!, but the point is, that's what has been going on at breakneck speed these past three weeks or so and kept me from blogging about mine. It's kept me from my mandala studies, alas, and I don't expect to get back to that in earnest till after May 6th (when final grades from all four of my courses must be turned in OR ELSE).

It has not, however, prevented me from reading, and today I want to enthuse about my discovery of a 2001 book by one of my very favorite authors, Daniel Pinkwater: Fat Camp Commandos. As with the vast majority of his books, it is a book for grownups thinly disguised as a children's book - or, alternatively, a book for children written as if they actually had brains.

In other words, Pinkwater has proved once again what a complete and utter mensch he is by expecting that all of his readers are menschen as well. But it takes one to know one, and this is why Pinkwater is not for everyone.

Only DP could manage to combine Deepak Chopra, Barnes and Noble, Gilbert and Sullivan, Weight Watchers, fortune-telling chickens and terrible potato puns and come up with a story that actually (sort of) makes sense. If you've got the right kind of sense of humor, it will make you smile right down to your toes.

My family has been reading Daniel Pinkwater's books since C was about 3 (that's 17 years, folks) and we bought a copy of The Big Orange Splot. We have since listened to his books on tape, read them aloud as a family, and given many as gifts (but only to very special people). He's part of our family heritage.

While I'm being light-hearted, let me tell you about another author whose menchity (menschness? menschiosity?) shines forth in his writing. Joann Sfar, who incidentally has the most bizarre-looking cat, is a writer and artist responsible for graphic novels about subjects as diverse as klezmer music, talking cats, lovelorn vampires and ancient dungeons.

Sfar blends pathos and comedy in his plots, while in his art he combines finely-detailed elements with silly, cartoonish figures.

I just finished reading Vampire Loves the other day, and I enjoyed it tremendously. Ferdinand the Vampire is a sweetie-pie - there's no other word for it, and he very carefully only pierces his victims with one tooth so as to leave marks that look like mosquito bites rather than fang marks.

And yet . . . he is such a clueless man that you just want to smack him upside the head for not getting the point! Very funny book, and very sweet. A similar humor to, though much lighter subject matter than The Rabbi's Cat, which I read two years ago and found quite a lovely treatment of certain aspects of Judaism.

I should be thinking about what to serve for dinner tonight.

~Namaste

Headbanging Time

This was one of those mornings I just felt like giving up & going back to bed. I knew it from the very beginning when I woke abruptly at 6:30 & realized that the clock radio hadn't turned on - great, no time for a shower, & I had 45 minutes in which to review my notes & get to campus. The feeling was reinforced when I tripped & bashed my knee on the table in the kitchen. Spilling coffee down my front necessitated changing my shirt, which meant rummaging through the laundry basket since I hadn't had time to put away any of the mounds of clean laundry, but at least there was clean laundry, right?

On the way to campus, I did a mental inventory of the problems I was likely to encounter in class (so okay, I was feeling pessimistic). This is the lecture I always hate giving, and this semester would be more annoying than most, since I have a number of very immature students this time around. We're finishing up Judaism in my Comparative Religions class and getting ready to move on to early Christianity, and that means I always get asked, "why don't Jews believe that Jesus was the messiah?"

My least favorite student came into class 1/2 hr. late, which is actually early for her. True to form, she sat in the back of the class chit-chatting, and for the second or third time in two weeks, her cell phone rang. I swear, next time it happens, I'm going to march back there & confiscate it - but this time the guy next to her took it away from her and turned it off. Then something struck her as funny and she began laughing like a loon. She pays very little attention in class (the little amount of time she's in attendance), and her grades reflect this (she earned 27% on her most recent exam).

But when another student asked why Jews don't believe that Jesus is the messiah, she suddenly sat up to attention.

After class, she asked to speak with me, and blurted out, "I just don't understand why Jews don't believe what it says in the Bible!"

"Oh, but they do!" was my response. She looked at me in amazement, and another student began to laugh and said, "I think, Professor, that she means the The New Testament."

"Ah, I see. Well, that's easy: Jews don't consider The New Testament to be scripture. Do you believe the Quran to be scripture?"

She looked shocked. "No, of course not! It was written by Mohammed, and he was evil!" Hm. Okay, I see I'll have my work cut out for me when we get to Islam - as will the guest speaker who is lined up to come to class. "But that's different. I mean, New Testament is truth. Why don't they see that?"

"Not according to Jews, it isn't. Not according to Buddhists, or Jains, or Hindus, or Taoists, or any religion other than Christians. I'm not trying to make you doubt your religion or change it, but you need to understand that non-Christians aren't deliberately, perversely DIS-believing Christianity. Rather, they are believing what they see is the truth. This whole course is dedicated to understanding what adherents of each of these religions, including Christians, believe."

She stared at me for a moment. Then she got this faraway look in her eye & said, "Okay, I guess I see that all religions think they are right, and maybe they are sort of right - NO! WAIT a minute! Mine is the only one that is right! But maybe they all think they are right . . . ."

No, Rachel, I wanted to say. All the other religions KNOW that Christians are right. But it's a huge, worldwide conspiracy: we pretend we don't know Christians are right because we know it drives Christians nuts when people don't believe them.

Of course, I couldn't say that, so instead I just smiled and said, "Yes, that's right, they truly believe in their own religions just as you believe in yours. See you Thursday" and left, trying not to shake my head too obviously.

I don't think she got it. For her, the world is made up of black and white, right and wrong, her view and everyone else's. Some days I just don't know why I even try.

~Namaste

Book Ketchup

Stanislaw Lem's autobiography - well, it's not so much an autobiography as a ramble through the chambers of his childhood. Oddly enough, there are more objects than people in these chambers; when Lem reminisces about his father, it is his father's books and medical instruments over which he waxes sentimental, rather than shared moments of intimacy. The opening of the last chapter is telling:

What is it about the objects and cobblestones surrounding us in childhood that is so magical, so irreplaceable? Whence comes their demand that after the destruction of war and with them piled in rubbish heaps, I testify to their existence? Not many years after the idyllic time presented here, inanimate things were envied their permanence, for day by day people were taken from their midst, and suddenly the things were orphaned, the chairs, canes and knickknacks abandoned and monstrously useless. As if objects were superior to the living, hardier than they, less vulnerable to the catastrophes of time. As if liberated from their owners, they had gained force and expression - consider the baby carriages and wash basins on the barricades, the eyeglasses there was no one to look through, the piles of letters stepped on. Although in the landscape of war they gained the power of eerie signs, I never held that against them. I believed in their innocence.

This passage resonated with me, particularly because I read it during the time that my class was discussing the Buddhist concept of nonattachment.

I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of this all-too-brief book, with the exception of chunks of the penultimate chapter, in which Lem descends into a morass of tedious deconstructionism from which he emerges at the last moment, just before the reader - at least, this reader - is about to call it quits. The rest of the book is disarmingly charming and frank.

Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books: A Mobile Library Mystery was a complete surprise from beginning to end. The beginning was unwrapping it - it was a "spring break" gift from my friend S, blessings upon her. I'd never heard of it, so that made it an extra-special surprise: new author, hurray! It begins,

No. No, no, no, no, no.

Interesting way to begin, no? ;-) The protagonist is a nebbishy librarian from London named Israel Armstrong. He comes to Tumdrum, Ireland to take a new position, only to discover that 1) the library has been permanently closed; 2) they want him instead to drive a bookmobile; and 3) someone has stolen all 15,000 of the books. He's Jewish (every time he mentions Hanukkah, someone says "Bless you") and he's a vegetarian (which means, in Tumdrum, that pretty much all there is for him to eat is scones). He's from London, which means he can't drive worth anything.

It's a very funny, very Irish book, quite cleverly and entertainingly written. And now I need to read everything else Sansom has written, thank you very much!


Julie Kenner's Demon-hunting soccer mom series is a hoot. Sort of like Buffy the Vampire slayer, only I enjoy them, while I find Buffy tedious (has a lot to do with the poor acting, bad scripts and awful special effects). I've now read two of them and can't wait for the next in the series. They're light fluff, so I'm not going to go into more detail than to mention them here - Carpe Demon and California Demon.

Frank Miller has written and illustrated some marvelous graphic novels. I've been wanting to read 300 for a long time, so when I picked it up the other night I was very excited. I read it more quickly than I usually read GNs; I like to savour the art, but there wasn't much here to savour. It felt more like storyboards than graphic art. The layouts were good, but the art itself just didn't "sing" somehow. So unlike the "Sin City" books! I was very disappointed. I hope that the film coming out this Friday will be more interesting.

Cheers.