The National Day of Listening

Today is National Day of Listening. On this day, you are encouraged to record and share conversations with loved ones and neighbors.

This is a project of StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.

Since 2003, more than 50,000 Americans have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps, making it one of the largest oral history projects of its kind.

On this day after Thanksgiving, set aside one hour to record a conversation with someone important to you. You can interview anyone you choose: an older relative, a friend, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood.

You can preserve the interview using recording equipment readily available in most homes, such as cell phones, tape recorders, computers, or even pen and paper.

Make a yearly tradition of listening to and preserving a loved one’s story. The stories you collect will become treasured keepsakes that grow more valuable with each passing generation.


http://www.nationaldayoflistening.org/listen/

http://www.nationaldayoflistening.org/participate/

a question generator  http://www.nationaldayoflistening.org/great-questions/

A Good Sign for Reading?

Should it been seen as a good sign for the state of reading that the top-selling, most wished-for and most-gifted item on the Amazon website is the Kindle?

I can see most-wished-for (as in their customer wish-lists) since it would be cool to have one, but they cost a couple hundred bucks. (Even with Black Friday deals).

The Kindle Store currently has more than 360,000 titles, including 101 of 112 books currently found on the New York Times Best Seller list. New York Times Best Sellers and most new releases are only $9.99, and there are a good number for less.

I suspect that if I had one, I would be even more behind on my To Read list.

Or should this be viewed as a positive economic indicator, rather than one about reading habits?

Why Man Creates

A brief history lesson from "Why Man Creates" by Saul Bass.

That 29 minute animated short documentary film looks at the nature of creativity. It was written by Saul Bass and Mayo Simon.

The movie won the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1968 and a portion of it was shown on the first-ever broadcast of CBS' 60 Minutes that fall.

"Why Man Creates" focuses on creativity and the different approaches taken to that process. It is divided into eight sections: The Edifice, Fooling Around, The Process, Judgement, A Parable, Digression, The Search, and The Mark.

I remember seeing it as a student and showing it as a teacher - in both instances on 16mm film. Great little film.

This is "The Edifice" section.



I don't know how long this will last on YouTube, but seeing it brought back more memories than any cup of tea or French cookie ever did...

Can You Write Like Sarah Palin?

Write Like Sarah Palin - A little challenge from Slate.com

What is the single worst sentence in Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life? According to Slate's Going Rogue index, it comes on Page 102:
"As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on."

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times didn't have to read past the first paragraph for her nomination:
"I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier."

Do you think you can write like Sarah Palin?

Write a sentence that could be mistaken for one from her book. A single sentence of fewer than 150 words.  Send your entry to writelikepalin@gmail.com by 11/25.


(Does it still count as an "Evening" in Paradelle if I'm typing at 3:41 AM but I still haven't gone to sleep? I'm thinking, Yes.)

Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann has won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel Let the Great World Spin.

Colum McCann's novel tells the stories of 10 New Yorkers on a summer day in 1974 when a tightrope-walker spun above the city on a slender strand between the towers of the World Trade Center. McCann, an American citizen who was born in Ireland, paid eloquent homage to the openness of the literary world in his adopted country.

"It seems to me that American literature is able to embrace, and American publishing is able to embrace, the other," McCann said. "I believe in the power of the word. I believe, as Dave Eggers said, you've got to take this honor as a challenge. And as fiction writers and as people who believe in the word, we have to enter the anonymous corners of the human experience and to make that little corner right."


Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in thirty languages. He has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory of Princess Grace. He has been named one of Esquire's "Best and Brightest," and his short film Everything in This Country Must was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program. He lives in New York City with his wife and their three children.

The Observers

I thought I spotted an Observer outside my office window.




Must put on my foil helmet...

Never argue with a 90° angle.

Never argue with a 90° angle. It's always right.,
originally uploaded by Threadless Mondays.

To Be Read

I will never get to read all of them - and the list is much longer - but here are the last 48 titles I added to my

to-read book list.

Ken's favorite books »

Got An Hour To Kill?

You're online. It's like TV with a billion channels - and you still don't know what to watch.
Give each of these a few minutes. Something will catch you.

beautifulagony.com  naked from the neck up and into la petite mort

1. http://whereiwrite.org/  I like snooping into writers' spaces
   
2. http://jacksonpollock.org/   yes, you can drip paint on a canvas
   
3. http://moodstream.gettyimages.com/   music + images and you adjust the mood settings
4. http://flixxy.com/   morphing presidents and other things you don't need to see
5. http://kukuklok.com/  set the alarm clock for that hour in another tab
6. http://live.twit.tv/  Leo or someone is almost always broadcasting
7. http://www.woot.com/  always something on sale
8. http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bullshit/  check a website URL for bullshit  (This site only had a small amount - 6 terms.)
9. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/   The Global Consciousness Project is meaningful correlation of random data. Hey, it's at Princeton!  Then again, that's still New Jersey...
10. http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends   What's everyone else searching for?

Got a nominee for my next list of oddities?  Leave a link and a line below and I'll check it out.

Steppenwolves

I gave it a second chance. I recently tried to reread Herman Hesse's novel, Steppenwolf.

I saw it on my shelf and realized that I remembered almost nothing of the story. Of course, I did read it 40 years ago. I recall liking it.

In the preface that Hesse wrote to the 1960s edition, he said that it was his most often misunderstood book - perhaps because he wrote it at 50 about being that age, but it was read by many young people. Now, I am age-ready for it, so let's see how it goes this second time around.

I could not get into the story this time. It was just depressing. It gets less depressing if I could have made it that far. Eventually, the protagonsit would find Hermine and she would introduce Harry to the indulgences of what he calls the "bourgeois" - teaching him to dance, introducing him to the casual use of drugs, finding him a lover and forcing him to accept these as legitimate and worthy aspects of a full life.

I didn't make it with Harry to the Magic Theater.

I did make it back to the bookshelves and found amongst my albums those by Steppenwolf, the band. Their music goes back before I read the Hesse book. In fact, I think I got the novel because of their first album.

They disbanded in 1972. You probably know a few songs by them - at least "Born to Be Wild," "Magic Carpet Ride," and maybe "The Pusher."



Steppenwolf's biker anthem, "Born to Be Wild," hit hard in the summer of 1968.

The song made it onto the soundtrack of Dennis Hopper's film Easy Rider.

The song's reference to "heavy metal thunder" ended up getting attached to a new genre of music.

Their next hit was the sort of psychedelic "Magic Carpet Ride," and then came "Rock Me," and "Move Over."

 When I was older, I was supposed to be a better candidate for the novel, and probably supposed to lose interest in the music.

It's not happening.


http://www.steppenwolf.com/

Teachers Writing About Teaching

I'm reading Pat Conroy's newest book, South of Broad, this week, but I looked back on my bookshelf at his books and remembered when I first encountered him.

It was the book, The Water Is Wide: A Memoir, which is about his teaching experience on a very poor South Carolina island in 1969.

The book came out while I was an undergrad and I read it along with a shelf full of other books about teaching by teachers as part of my prep to start my own teaching career.

Many of those books were about well-meaning, optimistic young teachers who were in frustratingly impossible classroom situations.

Conroy's isolated island community had the same students who were far behind where they should be, no funding, no real curriculum, no textbooks, racism and bonehead administrators that I found in books from To Sir, With Love to Up the Down Staircase.

All these books painted a really horrible picture of what I should expect in the classroom. But, they also offered humor and, ultimately, teachers triumphing over adversity. Conroy also realized that he didn't all he wanted to accomplish. A good lesson.

The book also became a movie called Conrack (the name his students gave him).

I don't know that I ever consciously used any of the book in a class I taught, but I bet that Pat Conroy's books have had an impact on me as a teacher.

The Twilight Zone

This month is the 50th anniversary of The Twilight Zone’s debut on American television.

The Twilight Zone was one of my favorite childhood TV programs - even when I watched it with my parents while hiding behind a pillow on the couch.

It's an occasion for fans of sci-fi, horror and suspense.

The site TV Squad has a 10 Best Episodes post and also interviews with Rod Serling.

You can watch a bunch of episodes on http://www.cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone/.

Ain't the Internet wonderful?

It's Not Just Oprah

Oprah likes a book. People buy the book. Simple economics.

But it's not just Oprah.

There's also a Dan Brown effect.

Dan Brown's books - Angels and Demons, The DaVinci Code, The Lost Symbol - often boost other authors' sales.

In The Lost Symbol, he mentioned The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World and sales on it have risen steadily since his book's release.

“…human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body. A highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. Katherine (Solomon) had been fascinated by McTaggart’s book ‘The Intention Experiment’, and her global, Web-based study – theintentionexperiment.com - aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world.”

Anyone can learn to do effective intention in their life, but it does require some learned techniques.

To find out how to ‘do intention’, Lynne McTaggart interviewed many intention masters – Qigong masters, Buddhist monks, master healers – as well as scientists.

She extrapolated this program from the common practices of all these diverse healers, plus scientific evidence describing circumstances that created the most positive results in mind-over-matter laboratory experiences.

From this research she offers a blueprint for using intention effectively in your own life through a program she calls Powering Up.

Oh yeah, it's controversial. Religious groups are opposed to people praying without Praying.

I'm just saying - there's a Dan Brown effect.

Of course, if you want to make me your Intention of the Week, I could use the good karma, vibrations or whatever goodness comes my way.

The Swell Season

Back in 2007, I saw the low-budget indie musical Once and was surprised and taken away by it.

Glenn Hansard and young Czech singer Marketa Irglova played the struggling musicians who start a tentative relationship in Dublin.

They became a couple in real life.

The film took off.

They went on a world tour.

Once became a best-selling soundtrack.

They won an Academy Award for the movie's "Falling Slowly."

The have since split up (amicably) as a couple but still record and tours as The Swell Season. Hansard also plays in the Irish band, The Frames.

I actually prefer Marketa Irglova's (classically trained Czech pianist and vocalist) pieces, but I can't find any solo efforts by her.

Here's a track from their new CD, Strict Joy, that features her.






The name "The Swell Season" comes from Hansard's favorite novel by Josef Škvorecký from 1975 bearing the same title.


http://www.theswellseason.com

You Looking At Me?

Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver is now free to watch on YouTube. That came as a surprise to me.

You can click here and watch this classic film (starring Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, and Harvey Keitel).

It doesn't seem to be available outside the United States now from what I read, but this is a big film to get a free view on YouTube. And it's rated "R" you you need to get past a disclaimer log in. And there are some ads. And it is a "YouTube promotion" that is "sponsored" by Crackle.com. (That is a Sony Pictures site where you can watch other major films online.) But it's there and it's free.

You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talking... you talking to me? Well I'm the only one here.