Alex Kudera's Blog, page 141
September 22, 2012
The Rise of Capitalism
This past week in contemporary literature, we delved into Donald Barthelme's comedy of death and sex in elementary ed. Which is to say, we read, "The School" and "Me and Miss Mandible." George Saunders (see "The Perfect Gerbil") might argue that Donald Barthelme's tension doesn't rise quite so much in "The Rise of Capitalism" as it does in "The School," but he certainly has some good thoughts and sentences throughout. Let's call it a fine blend of comedy and tragedy, or at least melodrama. I found the text online and also as a video reading from an anonymous fan.
I suppose that the profit motive is a main reason the other restaurants used cheap noodles to drive the respectable proprietor out of business in J.A. Pak's short tale of the woes of pho. The owner-turned-server is more clearly dismayed than Donald Barthelme's ironic narrator of "The Rise of Capitalism," but both stories leave us with doubt and fear about "the system."
From the Barthelme: "Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. . ."
Speaking of which, I need to lie down before I finally get out of the house.
I suppose that the profit motive is a main reason the other restaurants used cheap noodles to drive the respectable proprietor out of business in J.A. Pak's short tale of the woes of pho. The owner-turned-server is more clearly dismayed than Donald Barthelme's ironic narrator of "The Rise of Capitalism," but both stories leave us with doubt and fear about "the system."
From the Barthelme: "Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. . ."
Speaking of which, I need to lie down before I finally get out of the house.
September 21, 2012
Chestnut Hill Book Festival 9/30
Although the lovely and talented Cyrus Duffleman will be missed, this fall's Chestnut Hill Book Festival offers a competitive array of literature and politics. Perhaps no longer so "Easy" Ed Rendell is leading the charge to the evening's lasagna room, but
Philadelphia Stories
,
Painted Bride Quarterly
, Temple's Miles Orvell and so much more are proudly representing for the City of Brotherly Love.
September 20, 2012
bobos sneakers
I found myself trying to explain Bobos in class the other day. I can't remember the context, but I was able to sing a couple lines: "Bobos, they make your feet feel fine./Bobos, they cost a $1.99." Inspired by
When I was growing up, if your mom bought you bobos instead of Jack Purcells or Pro-Keds, you prayed they weren’t the kind with the conspicuous red or blue stripe running around the side. If they were (and God was especially merciful), your mom scraped up another $1.99 before the rubber began to crack.
When you got your new bobos, you threw the old ones up on the wire at the end of the block. Then you tried your best to wear out the new ones quickly, hoping your mom would get the message and buy you something better next time.
Long and short of it, bobos are bad news, and everyone from my generation knows it.
So when I came home last week and my wife, LaVeta, said, “Honey, I got some new sneakers,” I was expecting something along the lines of Nike Airs.
But when she removed them from the box, they were something else altogether. White leather with red stripes, rubber that was white instead of yellow, an intricate logo on the top. There was no denying it. Neither the quality of the material nor the fancy logo could hide the horrible truth.
Bobos.
To me, in the current culture it is almost apostasy to mention that poor children can also be happy, at least some of the time, but I like the way Solomon Jones has a way of reminding us that being poor is not an entirely misearable experience. I was never one of the kids who threw his sneakers over the wire, but I did play wire ball (an extremely modified urban street version of baseball) in my Bobos.
All the same, I don't mean to diminish the importance of writing from folks like John Scalzi.
When I was growing up, if your mom bought you bobos instead of Jack Purcells or Pro-Keds, you prayed they weren’t the kind with the conspicuous red or blue stripe running around the side. If they were (and God was especially merciful), your mom scraped up another $1.99 before the rubber began to crack.
When you got your new bobos, you threw the old ones up on the wire at the end of the block. Then you tried your best to wear out the new ones quickly, hoping your mom would get the message and buy you something better next time.
Long and short of it, bobos are bad news, and everyone from my generation knows it.
So when I came home last week and my wife, LaVeta, said, “Honey, I got some new sneakers,” I was expecting something along the lines of Nike Airs.
But when she removed them from the box, they were something else altogether. White leather with red stripes, rubber that was white instead of yellow, an intricate logo on the top. There was no denying it. Neither the quality of the material nor the fancy logo could hide the horrible truth.
Bobos.
To me, in the current culture it is almost apostasy to mention that poor children can also be happy, at least some of the time, but I like the way Solomon Jones has a way of reminding us that being poor is not an entirely misearable experience. I was never one of the kids who threw his sneakers over the wire, but I did play wire ball (an extremely modified urban street version of baseball) in my Bobos.
All the same, I don't mean to diminish the importance of writing from folks like John Scalzi.
September 19, 2012
horrible, evil world
And then you wonder how any of us can stand to participate in this horrible, evil world. 
September 18, 2012
graphic classroom
Thanks to Atticus's Dan Cafaro and Nathan Holic for the next installment of the graphic-novel interpretation of Fight for Your Long Day. There's a lot going on at the Atticus Books website as well, including the novel-in-emails,
The Book I Will Write
and a series on rejection letters from contributors far and wide.
September 17, 2012
Occupy Wall Street
They're back, and rumor has it the standard IQ test, if there is such a thing, will soon include a choose the video that represents the safest place to live, and then they show the one with peaceful protestors with cameras and phones costing at least hundreds of dollars per year or the one with the angry people, angry men, I should say. And then the five-year-old soon to be given an intelligence label, packaged, and sent to school will choose.
Please pardon the cynicism, but that contrast was noted as well as the fact that women seem fully integrated, even in the majority of the OWS protests whereas they are completely absent from the scenes of seas of angry men oceans away.
Maybe the question is how did we arrive at this place where people can afford amazingly sophisticated electronic equipment without necessarily having a place to live?
(One woman in the OWS video reports living at Bank of America for seven months after getting evicted from an OWS encampment.)
As usual, then, a muddle.
Time to get to work, folks.
Please pardon the cynicism, but that contrast was noted as well as the fact that women seem fully integrated, even in the majority of the OWS protests whereas they are completely absent from the scenes of seas of angry men oceans away.
Maybe the question is how did we arrive at this place where people can afford amazingly sophisticated electronic equipment without necessarily having a place to live?
(One woman in the OWS video reports living at Bank of America for seven months after getting evicted from an OWS encampment.)
As usual, then, a muddle.
Time to get to work, folks.
gender gap
The "gender gap" (not to be confused with the "debt ceiling" or "fiscal cliff" but no doubt viewed for free as long as we fund our national parks) in writing is something I've noticed, informally, for many years. I've never studied it or surveyed a class or even averaged my grades by gender to see what is in fact the what, but it has always seemed like there were more engaged girls than boys in my college writing classes.
And here is some support from a study of 8th and 12th-graders. And here are a couple paragraphs from the cnn.com article that describes the study:
Education analyst Susan Pimentel, one of the team presenting the test scores on Friday’s NAEP conference call, said that while this test cannot determine cause and effect, there are some clues as to why the gap exists. Students were surveyed to find out some additional information about them as they took the test. Among those surveyed, said Pimentel, 53% of girls agreed or strongly agreed that “Writing is one of my favorite activities”, but only 35% of the boys felt that way. Since writing improves with practice, she said this is “an important variable to observe.”
According to the survey, 39% of 12th-graders said they write only one page of homework or less per week in English, which is also of concern as high school teachers focus on college readiness as one of the goals of the Common Core State Standards, said Pimentel.
And my final two cents:
In 2012, there is tremendous pressure on many different kinds of professions where writing is the primary job task, and yet, it still seems like good writing skills are a path to college and an important complementary skill to almost any professional career.
And here is some support from a study of 8th and 12th-graders. And here are a couple paragraphs from the cnn.com article that describes the study:
Education analyst Susan Pimentel, one of the team presenting the test scores on Friday’s NAEP conference call, said that while this test cannot determine cause and effect, there are some clues as to why the gap exists. Students were surveyed to find out some additional information about them as they took the test. Among those surveyed, said Pimentel, 53% of girls agreed or strongly agreed that “Writing is one of my favorite activities”, but only 35% of the boys felt that way. Since writing improves with practice, she said this is “an important variable to observe.”
According to the survey, 39% of 12th-graders said they write only one page of homework or less per week in English, which is also of concern as high school teachers focus on college readiness as one of the goals of the Common Core State Standards, said Pimentel.
And my final two cents:
In 2012, there is tremendous pressure on many different kinds of professions where writing is the primary job task, and yet, it still seems like good writing skills are a path to college and an important complementary skill to almost any professional career.
September 14, 2012
Kentucky on my mind
Yeah, first they came for the Jews, and I was not a Jew, etc., but then, later, when the bars were closing down, they came for the KFC, and, well, frankly, I've lived most of my life like a fried, breaded drumstick stuck in the grease at the bottom of the bucket, wedged between an oppressive thigh and an angular wing with its pointy part in the small of my back, and what I'm trying to tell you is that even Chick-Fil-A cannot save us, no matter how well they crucify their Palin, from our complicity in the food riots that global future markets expect within a year.
Driving up here, I heard Michael Savage on the radio practically drooling as he described the murdered American embassy leader getting sodomized by the enemy, a story I have not seen acknowledged by mainstream media and hopefully this is not in the way that Savage would have you believe the mainstream media fails to acknowledge, and I guess all we can do is frequent KFCs the world over, with American pride and indigestion as we live our lives in defiance of everyone who hates us or just prefers we not hog so much of the dark meat and biscuits as we get caught reading and wondering about articles like this one.
(For all we know, Savage could be a secret Communist double agent because the weight loss advertisement in the middle of his website seems to clearly advocate against plucking from the bucket that extra piece of capitalist chicken!)
I guess it all returns to Kentucky, the last beautiful state I drove through before crossing into Ohio.
May God Bless The Less United States of America.
And you, too.
Driving up here, I heard Michael Savage on the radio practically drooling as he described the murdered American embassy leader getting sodomized by the enemy, a story I have not seen acknowledged by mainstream media and hopefully this is not in the way that Savage would have you believe the mainstream media fails to acknowledge, and I guess all we can do is frequent KFCs the world over, with American pride and indigestion as we live our lives in defiance of everyone who hates us or just prefers we not hog so much of the dark meat and biscuits as we get caught reading and wondering about articles like this one.
(For all we know, Savage could be a secret Communist double agent because the weight loss advertisement in the middle of his website seems to clearly advocate against plucking from the bucket that extra piece of capitalist chicken!)
I guess it all returns to Kentucky, the last beautiful state I drove through before crossing into Ohio.
May God Bless The Less United States of America.
And you, too.
Manacci
Read about Manacci's double mitzvah in the middle of his rather heroic life if you want to be reminded of how little we've done with our own lives. I'm not sure if this is enough to get him invited to the State of the Union, but he's scoring high in the Less United States of Kudera, which happens to be blogging live from a Starbucks close to the fiefdom of Manacci, Ohio on this calm new year.
And around the world, alas, some folks are not so keen to celebrate. What else is ever new?
Shana Tova, Manacci! Shana Tova, the miserable and wretched around the world, and Shana Tova, the rest of us.
Peace.
And around the world, alas, some folks are not so keen to celebrate. What else is ever new?
Shana Tova, Manacci! Shana Tova, the miserable and wretched around the world, and Shana Tova, the rest of us.
Peace.
September 11, 2012
james baldwin
In contemporary literature, we dove into James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"; I couldn't find the perfect snippet of video to share with students, so this one had to suffice. His expressed thoughts on his father are interesting: "He was. . . rigid. . . this is, in effect, what killed him. There was something in him that could not bend. He could only be broken."
Perhaps the malleable have the best chance of outlasting the rest of us?
Perhaps the malleable have the best chance of outlasting the rest of us?
