War literature

"How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is."

"Our thoughts are clay--they are moulded with the changes of the days--when we are resting, they are good; under fire they are dead. Fields of craters within and without."

  All Quiet on the Western Front was the required summer reading for the class that I'm teaching this year, and I came across these quotes from it today that I thought were particularly moving.

Sometimes I feel that there will never be enough time to read all of the things that I want to read, so I keep an updated list with me wherever I go so I can make sure that nothing important gets left out. There are many books on the list that are classics, some that are a tad obscure, and a few recommendations from friends. But the overwhelming majority of the books on my list fall into the category of war literature. War is a subject that has always fascinated me. My grades were mediocre in history class, yes, but only because I am not interested in the when's and where's. I want a personal, down-in-the-mud, gut-wrenching point of view that ninth grade history books cannot provide. The Things They Carried made me cry. The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell disturbed me. Night gave me nightmares and showed me the best and the worst of humanity in a single page. There is something in the novels, the memoirs, the firsthand accounts, and especially the poetry that digs down deep inside of me and touches something that is all at once frightened and heroic and desperate for the bonds that result from wartime experiences. I have found nothing else in life that touches me in the same way that these stories do. And so I will continue to make my list ever longer and continue to strive for, to grasp at an understanding of the lessons that cannot truly be learnt except by harrowing experience.

From Asar Nafisi

"I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams."

- From Reading Lolita in Tehran

Yoda: Master Jedi and author of the Star Spangled Banner?

My job as a librarian requires me to have weekly contact with preschool through grade seven. Frankly, as per my penchant for tiny, adorable things, I tend to greatly enjoy my time with the little bitties. Not only do they still sort of have that new baby smell (like new car smell, but nicer), but they're also hilarious without trying to be. I come home almost every day with stories about what the kids have said and my mother has advised me to write them down so I can bask in their amusement at a later date. So, for your entertainment and my reminiscing pleasure, here are some of their finest moments.

During a discussion of a book we read about American symbols:
Me: And who knows who wrote the Star Spangled Banner?
Second Grader: Yoda!
Me: Wait, what?! Why do you think Yoda wrote the National Anthem?
Second Grader: Well, cause it was written before I was born and Yoda lived before I was born.
Me: But lots of people lived before you were born, didnt they?  [Notice my inability to tell the child that Yoda has never actually lived].
Second Grader: Yeah, but the title has the word "star" in it and that's where Yoda lived.
Me: No, sweetie, Yoda lived on a planet called Dagobah, not on a star.
Second Grader: I thought Dagobah was a system, not just a planet.
Me: [Stunned silence at the fact that this seven-year-old knows that Dagobah is called "The Dagobah System" by Luke Skywalker, but believes that Yoda wrote the Star Spangled Banner].
Another Second Grader: I thought some guy named Keys wrote it.
Me: Yes! Francis Scott Key wrote it during the War of 1812.
Yet Another Second Grader: Is he related to Alicia Keys?
Me: No, I don't think so. Moving on....

Kindergartners on their second trip to the library:
Girl: Miss Allison, I don't have my book cause my mommy forgot to put it in my backpack.
Me: Oh, that's--
Boy: It's not mommy's job, it's your job. Is mommy gonna put your homework in your backpack when you get to college? Nooooo.
Me: [under my breath] Oh snap! [out loud] Well, no, she isn't going to help you when you get to college, but y'all are in Kindergarten, so it's okay if mommy helps.

To the preschoolers:
Me: Okay, everybody sit on your bottoms and open your ears.
Girl: Miss Allison, you can say "butts" if you want. We won't laugh. We're mature.

Reading List Experiment: Inspiration and Drudgery

As an English major during undergrad, I frequently felt like I was on a forced marathon of reading. Most nights, I read two to three hundred pages, depending on how many literature classes I was taking. During my last semester, I took three literature classes, an upper-level Latin class, and an anthropology class. The amount of reading was almost enough to make me want to never look at a book again. And yet, when I arrived home after graduation, the only thing I wanted to do was to read. Not to read something productive, mind you, but something that I could blow through with little to no effort in comprehension. All I wanted was a good story. No biographies, no plays, no Old or Middle English, nothing that required the slightest bit of brain power. I found my book soul mate in Brian Jacques' Redwall series. Yes, I am 22 year old college graduate, and yes, those books were written for children. But there was something in them, something in Martin the Warrior and Mariel and Matthias that no book I had ever read in college had given me: simplicity. They were written by Jacques as a way to entertain children who attended a school for the blind in England. Sure, they contain messages of the importance of hope, truth, and courage; and every single book contains an epic battle between good and evil. But these books weren't written with any social commentary that I needed to parse out. They weren't written to tell of someone's tragic life story that contained lessons of the limits of humanity. Nor were they written to reveal any mysteries of the universe. And that was what I loved about them more than anything else. It was so refreshing to not have to slog through a list of texts that had been deemed "IMPORTANT" by a college curriculum or a professor or society as a whole. Not that I have anything against important books and their revered authors; in fact I advocate having children read them whether they see the value in them immediately or not (admittedly, Shakespeare's value wasn't apparent to me until my sophomore year of college--Titus Andronicus' hilarious gorefest is one of the most underrated works of all time). It's just that after an entire educational career based around reading "important" books that are good for you--like broccoli is good for you--it was nice to have some cake.  

And this brings me to my Reading List Experiment. After having exhausted the entire collection of Jacques' menagerie, I've decided to turn my attention back to books that are more useful in an academic setting. So, I compiled an ever-growing list of books that I've been hearing people rave about as being "important," and I am currently on book number two. Book number one was Sapphire's Push, the novel that the award winning movie Precious was based upon. Book number two is Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road. And since there is no such thing as a book club in my neck of the woods, I'm going to start my own with only two members: myself and Hippolyta the semi-functional laptop. I say semi-functional because she's getting quite old and her screen just isn't what it used to be. As a matter of fact, she has decided that she has done enough work for today and is beginning to get crotchety, so the one-sided discussion of Push will just have to wait until next time, or I won't be able to see what I'm typing.

"You can tell a lot about a guy by the way he responds to the words "BBC miniseries."

-A

From Reyes García

"When language
touches land,
place is created."

Treebeard writes fortunes now?