Oh man oh man oh man. Got up early early to eat breakfast and dig my car out of the snow, but my landlord had (yay!) plowed our driveway and (boo!) buried my car in a small Himalayan. The temperature this morning was hovering around 11 Fahrenheit; that combined with the freezing rain that coated the snow last night rendered the whole Honda-snowpile construct something of a icicle sculpture. SO I dug at the wheels, to little or no avail. I even tried to gun it out, only to flood the air with the stench of burning rubber. Yikes.
Thank goodness for Beckness - she came out with boiling water, salt, and we shoveled and hammered and chipped at the snow and more or less power blasted the car through the drift until it came to a rest in the plowed part of the driveway. After making sure Beck's car was good to go, I headed inside to see the clock read 7:43. I had to be at school, 45 minutes away on a good, non snow-encrusted road day, by 9:30. I had yet to shower or shave.
Power shower shaving spectacle and 20 minutes later, I left the house to join the absolute freaking masses on the Mass roadways. I got to route 9, 17 minutes on a good day, at 8:35. Dios mio. And the road to Natick was a traffic-stuffed one - stop and go, and I didn't get to the Natick mall until 9:15. Egads. Basically pulled into school in the nick of time, but was literally setting bags down in the corner as class began; no bathroom or coffee or anything. Woe. But we managed to scrape out a good day - we discussed the pitfalls of ad hoc reasoning and started to examine utilitarian ethics in SASI, attended a dumb assembly, tutored some algebra II (domain and range, the bane of the graphically-challenged) and proctored a bio test. Knuckles cracked, I turned around and headed home on much less crowded and much less snowful roads. (I called Dan, Rice bud and groom's party member who is theoretically in town, but he did not answer).
So I'm back in the study saddle here after a quick wrestling match with the dogs (I won, though in their defense I outweigh them together(!) by about 140 lbs. Plus, you know, thumbs). And I'm remembering that I owe the reading public some tidbits...
The Blind Side by Michael Lewis: 67
This book's strengths lay outside of what the bulk of it covered. Michael Lewis's historical tracing of the passing game in football, most notably the "West Coast Offense," was great, and the game of personnel counter-attacks as he traced it from Lawrence Taylor to new offensive schemes to the left tackle's rise in prominence was a fantastic read. Unfortunately, those things comprised about 20 percent of the book - the vast majority was spent documenting the life of Michael Oher, a left-tackle prospect from the urban wasteland of West Memphis, and his rise to a sure-to-be prosperous prospect via the Briarcrest private school football team and his contact with a wealthy white family of Ole Miss alums. Michael's story is extremely endearing, and a lot of the things it reveals about learning styles, ability, the importance of education and the dangers of IQ tests (and the labels that come with them) were spot on and poignant. But his rags to future riches story ultimately rang hollow for me - he was TOO good, he was too much a pure victim of circumstance, just a fantastic beacon of human being who if ONLY.. GIVEN... A CHANCE... in short, Michael Lewis (whose writing and storytelling ability were enchanting) just ended up seeming severely one-sided, and given that some of his main characters were accused of impropriety by the NCAA, AND given that the family were friends of the author, i think his party line defense of them is suspect, true or not. In other words, Michael's story, for all of its past tense woes, was too happy, smooth and convenient. Even his traumatic smashing of a three year old boy was passed off as an afterthought. So an almost very good book - again, the actual football analysis outside of the Hallmark card story was great, so i am very much looking forward to reading Moneyball soon.
I also read...
Howl - Annotated Manuscripts (50th Anniversay Edition) by Allen Ginsberg: 94
Howl is most amazing to me on the front that it is actually a beat take on a theme that was echoed and echoed throughout the 20th century and one that continues to echo into the postmodern today: alienation in modernity. Metropolis and Modern Times and Brave New World, all made / published in the 1920s / 30s, all look at the mechanized now and scream at how it dehumanizes us. But while these films juxtapose modern man with his more natural (or savage) counterparts, and expose the ugly gears in the machine, Ginsberg takes the story a step further - it's achingly personal, it's vulgar (and/or obscene, depending who you ask), debasing, torturous, godawful and hellish - it's the "Beat"ific "beat" down, rendered nothing in the wake of culture-at-large's wheels.
(For your convenience, here is Howl Parts I-III, and here is the Howl's Footnote)
I found several thing awesome and inspiring specifically about the poem in this annotated form - one, you see the work as an evolving thing, and gain insight into just what a work of craftsmanship this was. Words, syllables, rhythms, moods, themes, symbols, all painstakingly placed. The structure alone is brilliant, but seeing its behind the curtain enactment brought a whole new clarity. Two, a major accomplishment of the poem is its bridging ability - the epic poem form laced with the language (and content) of modern times, forcing a constant recollection of classicism past while existing in the present. Even though the poem is entirely modern (and its style largely building upon experimentation done by Modernists like William Carlos Williams), it manages to instill the present with a bigger than here sense - a big part of the power of this poem does in fact lie in its thrusting of the profane into the exalted epic form. Three, I was amazed to learn how much of the poem is culled from stories, anecdotes, homages, allusions and plain liftings from the members and the works of the Beat generation. What seems like overwhelmingly imaginative imagery turns out in large part to be event reporting. Amazing, and it lends me to the power of the celebrity, even within the small circle of 1950s poetry - the concept of "Beat" turns out to focus upon this incestuous circle of characters - Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, to name a few - and the events that dotted their lives. Which on the one hand makes me jealous as all hell and wanting such a romantic, artistic life, but on the other hand reminds me that this art required a fair amount of low-level and sub-pleasant existence (street-begging, hitchhiking, EST and insulin-induced comas, not to mention the heroin and worse) to foster its creation.
Great poem, and a great book in which to read it - I highly recommend this seminal work.
And, in further reward for having read this far, I give you: more!
But in a new post...
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