NCLB

Posted on by Dale

No Child Left Behind.

Well.

My sister Linda is a media specialist in Gwinnett County, where last year they gave their media centers zero dollars to buy books with, but that’s another story. A couple of weeks ago she forwarded to me a response she had gotten from her congressman, who shall remain nameless in his representation of Georgia’s Seventh District, about supporting H.R. 2864.

H.R. 2864 is an amendment to that most perfect of laws, No Child Left Behind. I know what you’re thinking, what kind of madman would advocate changing a law that has served our children so well? Without NCLB, how would we ever have gotten halfway to having every single one of our children performing at or above grade level? (In case you had forgotten, that’s the goal: in 2014, every single child will perform at grade level. We will achieve this by testing them until their ears bleed.)

But Rep. Paul Grijalva [D-AZ] has had an insane idea: what if we required every school to have a highly qualified library media specialist? I know, it’s crazy talk.

As you know, NCLB requires schools to verify that their classroom teachers are “highly qualified,” i.e., provide documentation of their competence in their subject area. This might mean passing a standardized test for teachers, well, duh!, or even having a degree in the subject. If you teach more than one subject, e.g., earth science and biology, then that means providing evidence of competence in both areas.

The more cynical among you have already spotted that “highly qualified” has nothing to do with “highly competent,” which is not adjudicated by NCLB, praise be to its name.

If you teach in a rural school, which by the DOE’s own calculations means about a third of all American schools, and you have to teach all kinds of things because it’s a little hard to get teachers out in the middle of Montana, don’t worry: you have three years to cough up evidence of competence in your field(s). If not, then you have to be fired. Because if we don’t fire you, there’s no way to get 100% of the students performing at grade level by 2014.

That’s “highly qualified.” As columnist Bob Herbert pointed out in his New York Times op/ed of 10/2/07, all that documentation and certification is not the same as effectiveness. (Of course, then Mr. Herbert weasels out of it with “New forms of identifying good teachers … have to be established before any transformation of American schools can occur.” Yup, that’s what we gotta do, all right, all right. Carry on.)

Why, you might ask, would I want to saddle media specialists with the burden of proof that their colleagues in the classroom have to bear? Allow me to point out that even if the amendment only required schools to have any kind of media specialist in their building, it would be a radical move. There are more than a few states which do not, in fact, require schools to have media specialists at all. So if we have to speak NCLBese to make sure schools have such a critical piece of the puzzle on hand, then so be it.

Back to Rep. X and H.R. 2864. My sister had emailed him, asking for his vote in favor of this amendment. Astonishingly, he responded that “quite frankly” he questioned “the need for a library media specialist in every public school.”

His reasoning? He sees maybe the need at the high school level, because high school students regularly engage in academic research for college. But “a fourth grade student has little need for a highly trained library specialist who can teach advanced research techniques.” What a fourth grader needs is a librarian who can “make reading enjoyable,” and “instilling a love of reading does not require an advanced certification in library media studies.”

Actually, Rep. X (I just know I’m going to slip up and call him John Linder in a moment), instilling a love of reading does in fact require advanced certification in your home state of Georgia. We have to have a master’s degree even to get into a media center in this state. So you’re wrong about that.

What else might you be wrong about? Those who keep harping on how our schools have to produce workers who are expected to maintain our nation’s competitiveness in the world economy, and I believe some might even be found in your party, Rep. X, might be startled to hear you say that we don’t need to teach our elementary students how to find and use information, how to evaluate information, how to solve problems with information.

They would approve highly of the fact that I start teaching second graders how to look up books and find them on the shelf, that in fact by Thanksgiving almost all of them can do it flawlessly, and that by the end of the year I have first graders and kindergarteners who have learned the same skill.

They would really approve of the fact that all of third grade spends the year learning to implement the Big 6 model using a wide variety of information sources, including the internet. These are eight-year-olds, Rep. X., and yet you would have me wait an entire year more before even trying to “instill a love of reading”? Are you talking story time, Rep. X? Honey, please.

And so you can see why, when talk turns to reauthorizing NCLB, all blessings upon it, I just roll my eyes. Look who’s doing the reauthorization. Can we test them until their eyes bleed?

Our world

Posted on by Dale

Your president told reporters this week that Mukasey should be approved quickly by Congress, because “he’s plenty qualified to be attorney general.” And yes, he said it in exactly whatever Bush-parody accent you want to deliver it in. “Plenty qualified.” He said it in a first-ever, for him, press briefing in the Oval Office. He got the idea after seeing a photo of Truman doing the same thing. Pretty dang cool, huh? Maybe we should show him some photos of Nixon ending the war in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, Bush’s BFF Musharraf has all but declared martial law in Pakistan. That’s over there next to Afghanistan. Where Osama bin Laden is hiding. In the northwest regions so lawless that they’re simply referred to as the tribal “areas.” This is the country that already has nuclear weapons and has had them for some time.

Musharraf says he’s shut down the courts and the mass media out of security concerns. (He has left the Parliament functioning for the time being.) Dana Perino, White House press spokesperson, was asked about the situation.

Q: Is it ever reasonable to restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism?

MS. PERINO: In our opinion, no.

Mercy. Didn’t that set off alarms in the press room? I mean, when the irony meter blows a fuse, doesn’t that set off an alarm somewhere? I guess not.

In Lahore, a name which I’ve always tittered over, not unlike the word titter, now that I think about it, the main protesters against Musharraf’s power grab are the lawyers.

Yes, lawyers. There’s something odd about the photo on the cover of the Times, a man in a suit and tie hurling a tear-gas canister back at the police. There’s something odd about all the photos of these black-besuited barristers taking to the streets. There’s something awfully Monty Pythonesque about it.

Including the following scene: Two new judges who had taken the oath of office under the emergency rule were forced to leave the courtroom by hundreds of angry lawyers shouting, “You’ve taken an unconstitutional oath; if you don’t go we will throw eggs at you.” Apparently they left.

So, lawyers, eggs, and support for the Constitution. I’m in. Anyone else?

Fedallini’s Catalog

Posted on by Dale

It’s Tuesday, and I’m home with a raging cold, so not therefore up to writing an extensive post, but I did get some work done on Moonlight on Sunday that I could talk about.

In Act I, Thurgood (Groucho) is hiring Fedallini and Pinke (Chico and Harpo) to kidnap the girl so his son can be the hero. He expresses doubt that Pinke could die convincingly, whereupon Fedallini strikes up a cheesy saltarello and catalogs the many ways Pinke kicks the bucket.

Here’s the intro:

You think he look healthy,
like in-a da pink,
He no kick-a da bucket,
Dat’s what-a you think,
But he’s great at da croaking
and dat’s-a no lie;
Give him some room-a
And watch-a him die:

The rest of it’s in couplets, and I don’t have one I’m happy with yet, although this one comes close:

You can chop off his head wit’ da axes of steel,
He can cough up da blood like dat lady Camille.

One problem is that “I Would Never” is still fresh in my head (and why not, since it’s not complete, either) and that song’s triplet melody keeps intruding. No independent melody has suggested itself at this point, so I’m contenting myself with working on the words.

Another problem is that this kind of patter is very hard to write. It not only has to make sense and rhyme in a meaningful way (meaningful = within the sense of the lyric and often setting up a punchline if not a frisson of delight at the mastery of the lyricist), but it has to, more than most lyrics, be speakable. It can not trip the tongue. It can’t even approach tripping. That’s why the “dissociative disorder Delores” verse in “I Would Never” will be the first to be cut: dis-sosh-tive is impossible to sing.

There are two lyrics I’m very proud of that illustrate what I’m talking about, both from Figaro. The first is from Bartolo’s Act I aria:

Digging through cases for clarification,
I’ll cover our bases for alienation.

That’s damn good, folks. The crafty old lawyer is going to take up his housekeeper’s breach of promise suit against his enemy Figaro and has worked himself up into a lather at this point in the song. Notice the internal rhyming as well. Mostly notice how the singer’s tongue never has to make a false move here, especially if you ‘tip’ your r‘s like you’re supposed to.

The other example is from the end of the Act II finale, when Bartolo, Basilio, and Marcellina burst in, waving the contract and demanding justice. Each has a little outburst, starting in eighth notes but erupting into sixteenth notes halfway through:

MARCELLINA
See the contract that he’s signed here,
It’s designed to be unbroken
With his promises unspoken,
And I want to make it clear!

BARTOLO
As her lawyer, I’ll defend her
And intend to publicize it
So the world will recognize him
As a scheming profiteer!

BASILIO
As a man who’s known for living
Well, I’m giving testimony
That he promised matrimony
If he couldn’t pay the dear!

In each case, I went da Ponte one better and threw in that quick cross rhyme at the end of the first line. The –eer rhyme was the “anchor rhyme” of the scene, the one that was used across the entire scene. That was a handy way to signal a shift in the proceedings.

The point is that “patter songs” are devilishly tricky. It’s not enough to have something that rhymes and makes sense. It also has to be singable in a way that is much more comfortable than every other kind of lyric.

It occurs to me, just now, that Fedallini isn’t going to sing this song anyway, he’s going to speak it, so I don’t have to worry about the whole lyric/melody/character nexus at all. Well, that’s one problem solved.

Write, dammit!

Posted on by Dale

Tomorrow is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. As an example of mass hysteria, it’s pretty hard to beat. You simply go to the website, register as an offender, and then strive to churn out 50,000 words in 30 days. Many people do this. I know a couple.

However, I am not one of them. I often wish I were, which I know is insane, but I have this secret desire to have written a novel. Notice that I did not say that I hanker actually to write a novel; I just would like to have done it.

I did it once, of course. Back in the Adolescent Lit course we all had to take, we were given a choice of either a) reading and reviewing 70 young adult novels, or b) writing one. Ptttt, I said, if S. E. Hinton can do it, I can do it.

So I did it. Every Sunday morning at church, during the sermon, I’d outline the next chapter, then write it during the week. I think it ended up being fifteen chapters (not counting the “suppressed chapter 13”) and followed the fortunes of some teen members of a community theatre. Go figure.

I still can’t tell whether it’s any good, of course. The kids at ECHS I let read it (not all involved in the theatre, thank you) enjoyed it and clamored for more. The one agent I sent sample chapters off too several years ago returned it with a snippy note saying it wasn’t “creative enough,” whatever that means.

So why not do it again? I had started a sequel. The first one was Twelfth Night, New Day; it balanced the main characters’ emotional lives against the lunacy in Shakespeare’s play. The next one was called I Love You in Earnest, and of course our gang was doing Oscar’s masterpiece. I had decided to see if I could write a teen novel using a quasi-Trollopian discursive style (this was the early 1980s; it’s been done since), and the focus was going to be on a newcomer who was openly gay and how this raised the whole question of who is/who isn’t. You can see how that would dovetail into the whole Wilde/Earnest thing.

I never finished it. Either I lost steam, lost interest, got too busy at the theatre/GHP/whatever. I seem to remember not being able to figure out what would drive the plot; I had used a false alarm over sex in the first one and didn’t want to repeat that gambit. I had some vague idea of our newcomer’s performing an act of perfidy, but I couldn’t pin that down. What on earth could he do that would deserve the name? I didn’t want to involve his sexuality; that was a separate theme.

Anyway, here we are at NaNoWriMo and I envy those people who are going to crank out 1700 words a day. So what’s stopping me from becoming one of them?

The main reason is time, naturally. I have to crank out a dozen more songs before Christmas for Moonlight, and I’m getting nowhere fast on that project. Adding another daily task would be madness. Of course, part of me suspects that I might find my creativity charged by the daily task. Stimulating the brain to knock out the 1700 words every day might carry over to writing of lyrics and/or music. It might.

I could even make it about a guy writing a musical. I could.

Another very real reason, however, is that I don’t really have anything to write about. I know, I could just start writing. No one really writes a novel in November. They just write 50,000 words, which I suppose they wrestle into shape in the months between this November and the next.

But I really don’t have anything to write about, not like the way I have things to compose about. I have ideas and urges for the symphony, for Maila’s trio, for Moonlight, that I just don’t have for characters, plot, theme, and dialog.

There’s also the problem, and it’s personal, that any thing that I write about that looks even half like my life, and what else would I write about other than schools and theatres without having to go research the whole thing, raises immediate suspicions about just how much my characters are me. I’m thinking of our author Z now.

Finally, there’s the problem that I am not really an acute observer of humans, not even myself. In War & Peace, young Nikolai Rostov is finally about to see action in battle. He’s had a run-in with a superior over another superior who stole from his friend Denisov, and sitting on his horse waiting for something to begin, he starts to fret about this superior’s being so near to him and yet ignoring him. Within one paragraph, his mind concocts four different reasons for the man’s behavior. That’s the kind of incisive understanding of how humans work with which Tolstoy fills 1200+ pages and I can’t even imagine.

So, anyone else going to do it?

I Would Never

Posted on by Dale

I worked on “I Would Never,” Groucho/Thurgood’s Act II novelty song, in which he sings (for seven verses and choruses) how he would never disparage a lady just because she had some hysterically funny thing wrong with her. I wrote the music for the verse, then started patching it together.

It still lacks an intro, in which he’ll introduce the concept (referring to Lydia and Egyptian Ella in the process), and it lacks the end, in which he lets loose with a long catalog of names. I’m also going to work in a Gilbert and Sullivan-esque chorus for him.

Here’s the piano score, and here’s the mp3. This is a long song.

The question on the floor

Posted on by Dale

The question we failed to answer at last night’s colloquium: “Z*/Tolstoy: Do we have a choice?” continues to bug me.

I hope everyone felt that the topic was asking not only the flippant surface question, “What should we choose to read?” but also challenging us as creators: “Do we have control over our own creative output?”

This is a question with some girth. Clearly, the works of Z and Tolstoy are at opposite ends of the scale, and without a doubt our works are somewhere in between. It would hard indeed to create something beyond Z’s work, even deliberately; that is his special gift. But where do our works fall and how much control do we have over that?

I don’t think I’m talking here about posterity’s evaluation of our works. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there is at base a level of quality that I will dare to call objective. In other words, I think we can posit that each work has a base line of quality from which posterity will not stray very far in its assessment.

Our two goalposts can illustrate that point. No one is ever going to proclaim Z’s two novels as anything other than what they are, which is one human being’s noble attempt to fulfill that inborn urge to create. Likewise, Tolstoy’s War & Peace is not likely to fall very far from its current heavyweight status. The fact that there cannot be any serious argument about placing these works at opposite ends of any scale you want to devise is further evidence for my argument.

My not so secret fear then is that the stuff I produce will fall into Z’s range. I know the songs I’m writing for Moonlight, for example, are not really going to be that bad, but I am afraid that they will be at best insipid and at worst banal. And I am wounded by the knowledge that they will never approach the other end of the scale, either.

And here’s our question again: Do we have a choice? I know enough to keep my stuff from being bad, but is my inability to create a work of genius dependent on my knowledge? Was Tolstoy’s work a direct result of his artistic control, or is there something else going on?

This is getting into Tolstoy’s “man of destiny” territory, and it would be ironic indeed if his creative output is as great as it is simply because of the dictates of his own will. For those of us stranded below, it makes more sense, and is certainly more comforting to think, that there was some happenstance, some inborn-genius-thing that he could not control, and which we do not possess, that made War & Peace the staggering work of art that it is.

So, do we have a choice?

We’ve mentioned before the idea that a creative work is “abandoned not completed,” and nowhere is this more true than in the last five or six chapters of Z’s latest novel. There were misspellings, typos, repeated paragraphs/sentences, and an overall sloppiness that was actually distracting instead of just being a part of the delightful mise en scene. I don’t understand that. It cannot have been the case that his publishers were breathing down his neck like J. K. Rowling’s were for Goblet of Fire, causing her to slip up in the crucial graveyard duel scene. I cannot imagine that he was being rushed in any way to complete the thing.

At any rate, I finally put my finger on what is wrong with much of the dialog in this book. Almost all of it consists of the characters stating what they’re doing, have done, or are going to do. It is pretty much the way 8-11-year-olds play: “Come on, we have to fight the Balrog.” “You can’t defeat us, Balrog, we have Gandalf on our side.” “Oh no, Gandalf has joined forces with the Balrog.” “We have to run away.”

The rest of the dialog is made up of flat descriptions of the characters’ emotional status: “I’m so happy/scared/worried/in love.” Or agreements: “You are so right.”

It’s entertaining something awful.

—-

*Names changed to shelter the innocent

Nostalgia for the Motherland

Posted on by Dale

In Chapter 6 of Part II (we’re talking War & Peace here), we see Kutuzov and the Russian army falling back towards Vienna. (Kutuzov does a lot of falling back in this novel.) It’s October 23 (!), and the army is crossing the Enns River at Enns.

The day was warm, autumnal, and rainy. The vast prospect that opened out from the height where the Russian batteries stood, defending the bridge, was now suddenly covered by a muslin curtain of slanting rain, then suddenly widened out, and in the sunlight objects became visible and clear in the distance, as if freshly varnished. At one’s feet one could see the little town with its white houses and red roofs, the cathedral, and the bridge, on both sides of which streamed crowding masses of Russian troops. At the bend of the Danube one could see boats and an island, and a castle with a park, surrounded by the waters of the Enns falling into the Danube; one could see the left bank of the Danube, rocky and covered with pine forest, with a mysterious distance of green treetops and bluish gorges. One could see the towers of a convent looming up from the pine forest with its wild and untouched look…

This is, of course, the southernmost corner of Hofvonstein.

It was almost exactly at this time that Carl IV died under the usual Hofvonsteinian circumstances. Evidence points to Queen Mother Therese, Carl’s stepmother and lover, as being somehow responsible. His half-brother Georg took the throne as Georg II.

This is a rather obscure portion of our nation’s history, but perhaps my readers will remember Georg II’s son, Maximilian II. It was Maximilian’s assassination in 1879 that set off his son Leopold III’s liberal reformist tendencies, as well as his grandson Maximilian’s reactionary ones, culminating in that awful night in Vienna, December 31, 1899.

The castle in the Enns, in fact, was property of Karl Magnus von Ludwighof, Leopold’s prime minister and eventually king himself.

I know that there are still some who thrill at hearing this.

A little work

Posted on by Dale

I got a tiny little bit done this evening on Moonlight, just a couple of lyrics and some accompaniment for “Dream Land.” I’m in one of those phases where nothing’s coming and I don’t have the focus to make it happen.

In other news, I am extremely disappointed that David Wilson’s new play, John Wallace and the Vampires, is not being performed this Friday night after all. It’s only being performed on Saturday night, and I have a social engagement for then. Dang it.

On the other hand, I now own autographed copies of Curse of the Vampire and Wrath of the Vampire. I went to Scott’s Bookstore this afternoon and had the author all to myself. We chatted about Mrs. Marjorie Hatchett, our drama teacher in high school and a tremendous inspiration to us all, albeit clearly in different ways. David was ebullient and chatted freely about the issues the Grantville Playmakers have been encountering in their creative journey. Shame on the Grantville City Council! And shame on those no-loads who commit to a production with the GPers and then back out at the last minute. I cannot imagine such shoddy behavior.

I have read the first page or two of Wrath of the Vampire, and all I will say is that this roman à clef is living up to its predecessor right off the bat. It is everything you think it might be.

My reading of Tolstoy may be interrupted for a while.

Caught up

Posted on by Dale

I’m caught up and can begin my summarizing again. Hopefully I have gotten that out of my system and can settle down into more of what I myself expect from my 100 Book Club readers at school: no summary, more personal response.

Small points of the translation differences continue to stand out. When the elder Prince Bolkonsky is giving his daughter Princess Marya her daily geometry lesson, he exclaims against her stupidity, but then paces the room, “touched the princess’s hair with his hands, and sat down again.”

That phrase “touched the princess’s hair with his hands” struck me in several ways. First of all, it’s almost clumsy. Certainly if I came across it in one of David Wilson’s novels, I would consider it risible. (FYI, I do plan on attending his autographing session at Scott’s Bookstore on Tuesday.)

But here it is direct, blunt, and ambiguous. I went back to the Dunnigan translation, and sure enough, she has “lightly touched his daughter’s hair,” which is a very different and very much softer approach to Nikolai Andreevich’s character. In the new translation, it is not clear at all whether or not Prince Bolkonsky has a soft spot for his plain, religious daughter.

Of course, in either translation, there’s a lot of this. Tolstoy just gives a blank description of an action, much as Benjy’s narration of his section The Sound and the Fury, his father touches the wall and the lights come on, just the facts, ma’am, and none of the emotional underpinnings. I myself am not very good at reading any emotional underpinnings into these descriptions. Asperger’s, perhaps? Perhaps it’s very clear to everyone else that the Prince is stroking Masha’s hair tenderly if regretfully?

But I don’t think so. I think phrases like these are pivot points for Tolstoy’s approach to these characters. Prince Bolkonsky keeps alternating, at least in my reading, between savage martinet and sane if somewhat self-centered paterfamilias, and I think one way Tolstoy does that is to give us these emotionally empty descriptions of the character’s actions.

Another way I think he does it is to tell us what a character’s like, and then show us something completely different. Everyone’s terrified of the Prince, but he doesn’t really do much to be scary. Yes, he yells at people, and he seems extremely short-tempered. But he’s not an ogre at all; much of his anger is defensive, and I’m a little surprised that none of the women with whom he shares his house has figured this out.

The new translation

Posted on by Dale

Well, this is different.

First of all, of course, it’s significantly heavier than my old paperback. It’s really too heavy to hold comfortably. It has to sit in your lap or on a table. This makes it not very likely that I’ll get a lot of reading done at bedtime. I know, we’ll actually clean off that nice chair in the corner of the bedroom that was meant to be a sitting area rather than a storage zone.

It’s funny, too, that I was expecting, I don’t know, some kind of special binding. This is War & Peace we’re talking about. But it’s just a plain red buckram binding, and I’m not impressed with the cover design or the dust jacket design. That’s just quibbling, however.

Inside…

The first thing you will notice is that the first page is half in French. Every translation I’ve seen has Anna Pavlovna greeting Prince Vasiliy in French, but then continuing in English. It is a surprise to discover, then, that when Tolstoy says (in my other translation) “she said in French,” he actually wrote it in French. Our translators, like Tolstoy, have translated it for us at the bottom of the page, but I find that makes for bumpy reading. (Cf., The Infinite Jest or House of Leaves)

A little more disturbingly, there are endnotes. I am a compulsive end-note reader, especially if they are explanatory and not just bibliographic citations, and so every time one of those tiny little numbers is perched above a period, I have to struggle not to turn to the back of the book to see what it says. Often it’s stuff I already knew, so that’s doubly frustrating. One ends up reading with two bookmarks in place.

So how is it as a translation? How does it read?

Already I can tell it is less decorous than Ann Dunnigan’s, a little rawer in its descriptions of people and their motivations. The French sets a more complete picture of the rarefied circles of Petersburg and its society’s disjuncture from the Russian language and culture. Pierre is described not as “stout” but quite frankly as a “massive, fat young man,” and continuing descriptions make him sound almost Hagridesque, not quite our romantic hero that other versions try to conjure up. It’s much easier to see/understand Anna Pavlovna’s panic when this uncouth young person begins to argue with one of her star guests.

In the introduction, one of the translators discusses how other translations smooth out Tolstoy’s distinctive repetitiveness, i.e., he’ll use the same word over and over in one paragraph. This trait has already popped up, and the effect is rather startling, because it deliberately draws attention to the scene.

All in all, I think it’s going to be a good read. I’m starting over at the beginning, so you’ll be spared any summaries for a while.