More high school reading

Watched Field of Dreams with the kids on Friday. They were bored at the beginning - only the older 2 care anything about baseball - but once the ghost players appeared, their interest picked up. The subtext about the reclusive author Terence Mann started a conversation after the show. When Kevin Costner's wife stands up at the school board meeting and makes an impassioned defense of Mann's book, I was worried a minute – wait, who is this author? How did I miss this guy? Kids asked about him, so we hit up trusty Google and found he doesn’t exist. Phew. I thought I had missed something.

But what I missed the first and only time I saw this movie was the implications of the wife’s speech. When I saw this movie in high school, I probably cheered the wife on. But now as a parent, I pause. I wouldn't support government censorship, but mostly because I think the government will censor the wrong things. On the other hand, I don’t think school kids should be handed every book that is praised as a coming of age manifesto. Mann apparently is based loosely on J. D  Salinger. Catcher in the Rye is a book for adults who have already lost their innocence, not kids who are still trying to figure things out. Why not feed them more challenging books with rich vocabulary, more complex characters, and longlasting value? Make them read the classics they won’t have time or desire to read on their own. They’ll find Catcher in the Rye on their own; it doesn’t need to be assigned in class.

Then again, I can see an argument for knowing what books are being talked about, what books people are interested in,what books have influence.  But how many high school students have critical skills to discern good writing from popular writing?

I suppose I should add Catcher in the Rye to my to reread list, because all I can remember of it is Holden's self-absorption and visit to a prostitute.

Why read about where you live?

From Welty's "Place in Fiction":

"It may be that place can focus the gigantic, voracious eye of genius and bring its gaze to point. Focus then means awareness, discernment, order, clarity, insight -- they are like the attributes of love. The act of focusing itself has beauty and meaning; it is the act that continued in, turns into meditation, into poetry. Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is seen to be going on in the world."

and

"Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course. These charges need the warm hard earth underfoot, the light and lift of air, the stir and play of mood, the softening bath of atmosphere that give the likeness-to-life that life needs.  Through the story's translation and ordering of life, the unconvincing raw material becomes the very heart's familiar. Life is strange. Stories hardly make it more so; with all they are able to tell and surmise, they make it more believable, more inevitably so."

But sometimes, especially after long interstate drives past the same restaurants and billboards, I am afraid that places are losing their identities, paving over paradise, etc.

Then again, what place but the Gulf Coast would put a Walmart, Waffle House and Shell Stations on beachfront property?

Another list, to be continued

I started reading The Sound and the Fury again, in my attempt to reacquaint or newly acquaint myself with the literature of Mississippi. Despite having such a boggy, backwoods reputation, the state has certainly outshown my homestate of Indiana in producing literary stars. Not that Hoosiers are known for being particularly poetic, considering the best known poet of Indiana is James Whitcomb Riley, whose poetry is rarely found in collegiate anthologies, but can be appreciated for its dramatic effect.  Lew Wallace had a home near where we were living in IN several years ago, so I finally read Ben Hur and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Gene Stratton Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost was a favorite when I was in middle school; I should add it to my reread list.

On that list: in addition to Mississippians (and children's books), I've been trying to reread novels or authors I liked to try to remember why I liked them.  My adolescent reading was centered around reading a list of "classics" and "recommended for college" books that I plowed through without direction to get to the end of the list. The Sound and the Fury was one of these books, and a book I've read about more than I've spent time with. Faulkner has premier status among the American canon, and although I could tell you why others think so, I couldn't tell you whether I agree, except to parrot what I can remember of the lectures of Dr. Cowan, the mythological Southern Lit professor at UD.

So now I'm trying to figure out the chronology of what Benjy/Maury is perceiving.  This subjectivity of time reminds me of what my sister-in-law told me about 2012 and Mayan calendars, which led me to compare it to Pope B's description of the nature of time/eternity in The Spirit of the Liturgy. My head is starting to spin with the remembering.

But even though reading S and F is slow going, Faulkner's genuis is evident. What inspired him to take this perspective, and to take the risk of writing this back and forth chronology/ point of view that has been mimicked, often poorly (The Help comes to mind), ever since?

Other novels I relatively recently reenjoyed:
The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter
Cry, the Beloved Country
David Copperfield
Pride and Prejudice
Abel's Island
Mystery and Manners
Short stories of Eudora Welty
The Great Gatsby
Brideshead Revisited
A Severe Mercy (not really a novel, but...)

Wanting to reread:
More Faulkner
Tennessee Williams
Richard Wright
Shelby Foote
Walker Percy
My Antonia
To Kill a Mockingbird
Kristin Lavransdatter (if my lost copy ever shows up...)
Howard's End

But with all these good intentions, I sat up reading Matthew Pearl's latest, The Last Dickens, last night.

What everyone is talking about it seems

The health care debate makes me feel like hiding under a rock. I am against a single payer insurance system for efficiency reasons and because I don’t want to pay for someone’s abortion or other morally problematic procedures with my tax dollars. But I am a recipient of government healthcare as a dependent of a member of the military, and it hasn’t been all bad.

Granted, there are not many people who love Tricare, the military insurance. But there are also not many people who opt out of Tricare unless the dependent spouse works for a place offering a better plan, and there are a lot of retirees who prefer it. I complain about long wait times and subpar care, but I haven’t yet opted out.


Here is what we get with nearly costfree government care:

• Tired military doctors and nurses. There are a few good ones in the system who are beneficiaries of the free education, but they seem to drop out and join civilian life as soon as they can. My worst experience was my last delivery when my baby was nearly born on the floor because the staff was unprepared. I happened to be triaged at shift change, and apparently no one was checking the lady having her sixth kid. Guess they thought I could do it alone. One of the attending residents had never seen a natural birth.

• Trouble getting claims filed: During another pregnancy, I had to resubmit a claim for maternity care over and over because the civilian doctor didn’t want to reclassify the visit, but Tricare would only honor the claim if it billed a certain way.

• No continuity of care. I am constantly repeating our medical history. Blessedly, we don’t have any chronic problems that require special attention.

• Long wait times. When a trip to the ER is free, people take advantage of it. On our last trip for stitches, I was glad I had the GermX with us because everyone in the waiting room was there with the flu. Maybe because of the Swine flu, people are anxious, but didn’t you used to just sit at home and wait for the flu to be over? Unless you’re dehydrated, do you really need to see a doctor to be told you have the flu and to get a prescription for Motrin? The system is abused because it’s free.

• Long wait times to see a specialist. Apparently this has gotten better, but you still have to jump through hoops to see the kind of dr you need to see. And now there's a bill proposing cuts to the amount Tricare reimburses civilian doctors, which mean fewer will accept Tricare and fewer appointments will be available.

If you don’t mind waiting for appointments, for prescriptions to be filled, for test results to be returned, and you don’t care if your health care providers are grumpy and treat you as a number, you won’t mind government healthcare. There’s a part of me that feels like health care has become too luxurious anyway. When the private hospitals offer labor suites with fancy coffeemakers and gourmet champagne dinners after baby is born, and ultrasounds are ordered up every month, but people still sue their doctors when their babies are born with disabilities, you don’t wonder that the insurance business costs keep going up, and malpractice coverage keeps going up.

But isn’t there a better way to control the costs without turning them over to the government?

More on dead pets

My sister just told me she disagreed with our death management practices.  Animals don't have souls, so go ahead and put them down, she said.

But my point wasn't that the animal needed a peaceful death experience, but that WE needed a nonviolent one.  If the animal doesn't have a soul, then why worry about its pain? Animals die in pain all the time in the claws of their predators.  But what about the effect of watching an animal die vs. killing it on our souls?

I agree that if your dog has rabies like Ol' Yeller, or is vomiting or excreting all over your house, then you have to put it down. Or if your horse has a broken leg and will never get up again, but will take months to die, then you have to put it down. But our rabbit wasn't a nuisance, so why should we have to commit an act of violence to put it out of its imagined misery?  It would've caused us more pain than watching it die.

It's not easy to kill a pest, let alone a pet.  What would St. Francis say? Swat that mouse, or move it out of the house, like St. Martin de Porres?  While you hesitate, that mouse is growing fatter in your larder, BD . . .

A death in the family

We have a somber household today. This morning a member of our menagerie expired. Rosie, the friendly miniature lop rabbit, is no more. A couple of weeks ago, she began drooling, and I suspected something was amiss. But we were busy getting ready to go to OKC and finishing reading fair projects, so I didn’t call the vet. And she was a hand-me-down rabbit – hard to justify spending $60 for a vet visit. About 2 months ago, I did actually take her to the vet to have her teeth trimmed because she wasn’t chewing on anything. My suspicion is that she developed an abscess or infection as a result of this trimming, and maybe the vet would have discounted an antibiotic. But we didn’t go.

When we returned from our trip, she looked worse: a bald patch appeared under her chin from drooling, and her cheek looked swollen. I finally called the vet to schedule an appointment on Friday. But Friday afternoon she had blood under her nose and was wheezing. She also had shrunk from not eating. I hemmed and hawed about taking her. I didn’t want to pay for treatment for a dying animal. I also didn’t want to look like a bad pet owner to the vet and my kids. After consulting my rabbit killing father, my husband agreed to put her “to sleep” himself. I cancelled the vet appointment.
By the time husband returned home, the rabbit was lying on her side. She looked like she was going to breathe her last any minute. Why knock her head with a blunt object or smother her if she was just going to fade out on her own? The kids all patted her and went to bed bawling about how nice she was and how sad to wake up with one less pet.

But she was still alive in the morning.

I started to feel a little guilty. Should we put her out of her misery? She didn’t seem to be suffering visibly. Neither I nor my husband wanted to be the one to “put her down” with a swift bludgeon to the head. Why is it that we feel compelled to kill animals near death? I try not to anthropomorphize our pets, but if they aren’t miserable, why go ahead and kill them? Is there a little unconscious sadism at work? How many dogs die naturally these days? Of course, dogs start to pee the carpet and get snippy when they are dying. This rabbit was just lying there. And eventually she died, like my 11yr old’s rat, who spent about 4 days shrinking until he finally breathed his last.
If we keep our small pets partly as teaching tools for our kids, they are useful for teaching about caring for the dying as well as the living, a reminder of that forgettable 7th corporal act of mercy. I was a bit squeamish about touching dead things, but my kids reached in and patted the rabbit and carried her out to her grave in the backyard, and wept as they shoveled dirt on her already stiffening body and said a few prayers of thanksgiving for her life.
The younger kids were similarly without fear this past summer when my grandmother lay in her coffin. They reached in and patted her hands and stared and said goodbye without self-consciousness, while I held back and felt awkward standing at her coffin. This grandmother was free with her commentary on the appearances of corpses, and I think she would have been pleased with her own appearance, although she looked thin. May she rest in peace and find happiness in Heaven.

Friday Quick Takes

Some good Christmas ideas from Jen at conversiondiary -- is it already that time?

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We just returned from a trip to OKC. Another 24 hrs in the car round trip. But this was one of our easier trips: maybe the kids are getting used to getting carted around for days. Movie fare on the little TV included Anne of Green Gables. Even the boys liked it. The tension between Gilbert and Anne is much more thrilling and realistic than Twilight’s Edward and Bella.

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I didn’t get much reading done in the car because Husband drove when it was dark, and I took the afternoon shift.  But I did get around to listening to part of Walden and then to the Dalai Lama’s book on the Mind and Life, which had been downloaded for me on my ipod by my brother in law.

It has been years since I read Walden, and hearing it made it seem as if Henry David was in the room telling me about his experience. At first I envied his detachment from material goods, but then I grew a little frustrated. His continued insistence that to work is enslavement began to bother me, because work also has a liberating side. Work well done is cause for satisfaction. But then he means more the work for pay done by the people living in the little shanties like the one he buys.

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The Dalai Lama’s book was definitely interesting. He talks to a lot of scientists about how the mind works. Every time he would say something like “in Buddhist tradition,” I was struck with the similarity between Buddhism and monastic Christianity. From what I can determine, a chief difference is that Christians focus on love for others and transcend suffering by accepting it and trying to see/make something good in it, whereas Buddhists transcend suffering by detachment from the things that cause it. The Buddhist looks within; the Christian looks outward.  Wish someone other than Richard Gere read it; I can't get his smarminess out of my mind.

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We were greeted at the Texas/OKC border by a huge new casino decorated with facsimiles of famous buildings around the world. It rises up in a no man’s land, garish and glitzy. Like the casinos near my parents’ house and near where we vacation, these casinos, though somewhat remote, have huge parking lots. Here, there are parking garage after parking garage. Where do the people come from?

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The wedding was one of the least stressful weddings we’ve been to. There wasn’t the rushing to be places on time that seems to accompany weddings. Instead, it was a 3 day series of parties. My biggest stress was fearing that my 5 yr old, the ring bearer, would do something inappropriate during the ceremony.  When he started getting antsy on the steps, his father made him sit down before catastrophe ensued.

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The second biggest stress was my bad haircut. Why oh why oh why do I always seem to get bad haircuts before picture events? Why are my worst haircuts the ones I spend the most for? Maybe if I spent 45 mins doing my hair, using good products, and a straight iron, I might look something like the stylist intended but instead I look like I have helmet head. Where’s my bandanna?

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Although the trip was long, and we're still putting away laundry, the time spent with all the cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents was worth it. Love those guys. Thankful that we have extended family whose company we enjoy.