Movie Blog

 So I decided to get started on that blog project for my upcoming 1001 class. I established a new blog and wrote my first post today. I decided I would dedicate the thing to movies and the movie going experience because they are something that I care and think a lot about. The first post is intended to explain a little of why I chose this subject, and that will be everyone's first assignment once they get theirs going. Post #1 - why did you choose what you chose?

So, if you're interested, here is my post.

School's Out for Summer

Sunday afternoon. Warm and humid. The wind is pushing around the piles of loose, dead grass from yesterday's mow. We're all just chilling out post-church, post-lunch. Church was hot and, weirdly, crowded, and so everyone is a little worn out.

I turned in my final grades last week, and summer term doesn't begin until the second week of June, so I'm in that strange twilight time of not having my regular routine to dictate what I do with my days. I have plenty to do, of course. My goal is to have a nice, fat, working draft of my dissertation before we leave for the Day family reunion in August. I sat down on Thursday and started mining my old papers and prospectus drafts for useable material. I have an introduction and six chapters to write, each one dedicated to a specific topic. I cut and pasted a bunch of stuff I've written about spiritual film style, film and religion, the LDS church, and Richard Dutcher's various films, and I ended up with about sixty pages of stuff. One suggested guideline I've seen for dissertations is that it should be between a hundred and a hundred twenty pages. Now, while I certainly won't be able to use every bit of what I cut and pasted (there's a fair amount of repetition, I'm sure), it's still nice to have this big hunk of text that I can work with. I'm not starting with a blank document, you know?

Suzy is teaching one class this summer and two in the fall, so she is already losing sleep over attendance policies, schedules, and assignments. She's so much more careful and detail-oriented than I am, and I admire her for how hard she works to get it right.

This last semester was pretty lame as far as my teaching went. I was so distracted by the prospect of Delta College and all of that business that my classes suffered. I managed to remember to show up wearing pants and to not set anything on fire, so that was good. But overall, the semester started off shakily and never really regained much equilibrium or momentum.

So this summer and fall, my goal is to improve on this term. More content, more preparation, and more thought. I've selected new textbooks for each class to necessitate me not just coasting. With new readings, it requires that I pay closer attention, write new assignments and quizzes, and just generally be more mentally present. I don't want to be that useless professor who uses tenure as an excuse to not keep trying and improving.

So we'll see how it goes. I've actually decided I'm going to require that my 1001 students create and keep a weekly blog. The idea is that I want them to get comfortable with both academic writing (the essays I'll assign in class) and personal writing (a weekly blog post) so that by the end of the semester, they will have written pages and pages of both kinds. Nothing cuts down on fear like familiarity, I say. If they're familiar with the writing process, even if they still hate it, they at least won't fear it.

I'm going to have them choose a topic they care about - hunting, sports, family, raising kids, movies, cars, dancing, whatever - and give them a list of prompts like "My best experience was..." or "The first time I..." or "One thing I wish people knew about..." They'll choose from the prompts to write a weekly 300 word blog post. They'll get the familiarity and facility of writing, and I'll get to read something that ISN'T a soul-sucking, partially plagiarized garbage-fest (hopefully). 

In other news, the girls and I saw Iron Man 3 last week and enjoyed it. It's an improvement over the second one which was, in my opinion, a misfire. This one is smarter and certainly funnier, but ultimately it's still just a big summer movie. Nothing earth-shattering - just fun to look at and exciting to watch. Once it's over, there's nothing different in the world because of it.

Also I finished reading Ron Carlson's The Speed of Light. It dragged a little in the middle quarter, but overall, it was quite lovely. It's like an earthy, less mythic version of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. It's the same arc of boys maturing into young men over the course of a summer. Without a hesitation, I can say Carlson is one of the best American short story writers writing today and probably one of the best from the last century. However, short stories and novels are not the same thing.  I've tried two of his other novels and fizzled out after just a couple of chapters. I'm glad to have finally run across a novel of his that has some of the same punch and pop as his shorter stuff.

Anyway, it's evening now. Dinner is over, and I'm half considering a dusk stroll down the street. I'll go see if anyone wants to join me.

The Office

Let's be clear: The Office hasn't been particularly funny since Steve Carell left.

The show had a weird, loping gait during the Will Ferrell/James Spader times - there were some funny, enjoyable bits even though it was clear the real good times were over. The final season has irritated me and made me roll my eyes more than it has made me laugh. Andy Bernard as played by Ed Helms made a terrible, lamentable central character. The whole business of there being trouble in Jim and Pam's marriage was clumsy and seemingly totally out of place. Episode after episode went by without so much as a chuckle. Suzy and I wanted to stop watching but nearly a decade's worth of watching this show and being invested in its characters brought us back week after week.

But the fact is that Steve Carell's performance as Michael Scott was the engine that drove that show. Without him, it went nowhere. What made it great was how he balanced the intensity of Micheal's pettiness, jealousy, lust, and complete lack of common sense or propriety with vulnerability and humanity. Even though he was horrible, he was loveable, and that's pretty hard to pull off.

So the show ended last night Suzy and I watched, and as big season finales go, it was pretty okay. No surprise, the best moment of the entire 75 minute episode, both the funniest and most touching, was the tiny moment when Michael Scott showed back up for a miniscule cameo at Dwight's wedding. I never would have thought that his patented "That's what she said" line could be both hilarious and touching - but it was. I loved that moment as much as any single pivotal moment on any tv show. It was brief, but it made the other 74 minutes worth it.

At its best, The Office was a very hopeful, optimistic show about love - romantic, familial, brotherly, you name it. It seemed to say that even amid the utter banality of daily life, despite our own ridiculous shortcomings, there is love. In a world where the sourness and hatefulness of garbage like Two and a Half Men just keeps going and going, I appreciate a tv show that touts the efficacy of love and friendship while simultaneously being hilarious. As I said, it lost some of its hilarity in the end, but nevertheless, I was sad to see it go.

I love books.

This is a seemingly obvious thing for an English teacher to say, but notice that I didn't say I love to read. I do, of course. I just finished James Ellroy's giant, brutal crime novel, L.A. Confidential, and am a third of the way through Ron Carlson's beautifully written coming-of-age novel, The Speed of Light.

But that's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that I love the physical object that we call a book. Cover, spine, text block, etc. I get excited by the material object as much as I do by its contents - sometimes more so. I can wander a Barnes and Noble, happily, for hours just to look at covers and hold books in my hands to feel the paper stock, the embossing on the cover, see the font the designer chose, and so on. I don't just love books for the stories or poetry or information they contain. I love them because of their physical, tactile properties.

This is why I will never be fully on board with e-readers. They're amazing pieces of technology, and they make the reading experience more portable, more convenient, and all of that. They're great. But I will probably always think of them the way I think of hard candy (as opposed to real candy like chocolate) - it's not as good as the real thing but will do until I can get my hands on something better and more enjoyable.

This affection is also why I love thrift stores. We regularly go to Goodwill, Lilly Pads, Second Time Around, DI, and any others that we come across in our travels. Suzy, ever practical, scours the racks for clothes and shoes that are nice looking and in good enough shape for the girls to wear. (Today's haul: two pair of shorts for Avery.) Parker rifles through the toys and always manages to come up with something she recognizes. (Today's haul: a Po the Panda figurine from Kung Fu Panda and a Barry B. Benson figurine from Bee Movie.) I am drawn to the book section like Odysseus to the Sirens.

Of course, so much of what is there is not stuff that interests me: self-help books (although Suzy might argue I should spend more time in that section), Dean Koonz novels, textbooks from the 90s, and stuff like that. However, tucked right next to that Barbara Delinsky novel or born-again Christian guide to marriage is some gem that I never knew I needed but now can't live without.

Today's haul: Mysteries of the Ancient Americas - a big coffee table book with lots of full color pictures of Machu Pichu, Mississippian mounds, petroglyphs, Olmec heads, and stellae. I've always loved the possibility that ancient ruins and artifacts might somehow link to the Book of Mormon, so I was tempted. The fact that there is a cool Aztec design embossed in gold on the cover under the dust jacket sealed it for me.

I also picked up Bill Peet: An Autobiography, a nice looking hardbound version of Peet's illustrated life story. Peet, besides working for Disney on projects like Sleeping Beauty, is the author of Chester the Worldly Pig, a family favorite of ours from way back. I love how he combines his loose, sketchy illustrations with his simply told story, and I intend to use it as an example of something my creative writing students might attempt as a semester project.

Best of all is The Wonderland of Tomorrow from 1961. This little beauty was aimed at YA readers of the day and features the coolest old school illustrations you imagine. It's this kind of hilarious non-fiction explanation of what the future might bring. Highlights include:

  

Pretty awesome, right? My favorite is the last one. If disposable dinnerware is the future, we are the freaking Jetsons.

Anyway, the real beauty of thrift stores? These three items together cost 2.25. Three lovely, hardbound books for less than you would pay for a Happy Meal. I love that. I have these fantastic little artifacts and everything they contain, and they cost practically nothing. 

Anyway, of course, I love to read. But the additional thrill for me is the book itself. Ten years from now, they may be quaint. Sitting on your porch reading a book may come to be seen as something pretentious and obnoxious like insisting on using a typewriter after the advent of personal computers or eschewing mp3s because you only listen to vinyl. Books as objects may become more of a collectors' item and a curiosity than anything else. But I don't care. They're too cool, too compelling, and too tactile to ever give up.