(no subject)

Cordelia's English class this semester will be doing three different works of literature-- Romeo and Juliet, a collection of Hemingway's short stories, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I haven't read the Achebe, but generically approve of something not by a white guy. I'm not sure that they'll learn as much from a full book of Hemingway short stories as they would from shorts by different authors (and maybe some of those different authors could be not-white-guys? Maybe?).

I'm against Romeo and Juliet in high school because part of understanding the play is understanding that young teens do sometimes act like that. Most kids I know look at the play and feel superior because they would never, ever do those stupid things. They miss the fact that they're pretty much all likely to do other such things.

I'm not against Shakespeare in high school, but I'd go for Macbeth or Julius Caesar or possibly one of the English history plays with a discussion on propaganda and patronage and fictionalizing history. Most of the comedies are bad choices unless one has time to stage at least half the play. The comedies have more moving pieces and rely more on shared assumptions between text and reader/viewer. Understanding the comedies, really understanding them, requires a lot more history (just history of theater and literature) than the damned history plays do.

Of course, I'm very fundamentally opposed to teaching literature without context. I think that a big part of what makes literature interesting is seeing how it looks different from different cultural angles. Part of that is teaching that pretty much everything will have a different effect on different individuals. There is no such thing as universally appealing art.

I should probably see if I can dig up a copy of "Shakespeare in the Bush" to toss at Cordelia. She'd likely refuse to read it, but I think that what's in there matters more than being able to recognize blank verse or to recognize alliteration or archaic dirty jokes (not that that last is utterly without value).

I suppose that Romeo and Juliet, Hemingway, and Things Fall Apart are likely to be on AP tests or something. I just want the kids to learn tools for understanding their world and each other. I also think that reading in general is more important than reading specific texts and that writing coherently and grammatically is more important than reading.

(no subject)

I gave up on the WBEx story I was working on and went to work on a different prompt for the same fandom. My main worry about the second prompt is managing to get to 1000 words without it being really heavily padded. I've got 360 words, and I suspect that, by 500 words, I'll have exhausted my initial idea. I'm not sure how to twist things to continue from that. It's also a really weird sort of story, something I haven't tried before. My recipient's prompts and letter make me think they'd be open to it, and there really isn't another way to approach this one, at least not one I can think of. Well, maybe if I weren't utterly terrible at writing distant, omniscient third person.

I'm at 23K words for March so far which puts me at 79K (ish) for the year. I've got three WIP that might be postable soon (including the one due Friday that must be postable) plus the longfic which won't be ready for a long time and a second chapter to go with a first that's already posted.

Scott seems to have had a good day at work yesterday. He says it's going to take a lot of getting used to and that his FitBit is kind of cranky with him for moving around so much less. I had trouble wrapping my head around him not getting home until 5:45 but also not needing to spend two hours in the bathroom after getting home. We had some evening time. It won't be dinner together, but we weren't getting that anyway and won't while I'm still getting up with Cordelia.

My right index finger still hurts, but I'm either getting used to it or learning to work around it because I'm doing less swearing about it. I'm actually trying to make my own pain scale because the more I look at the standard one the less sense it makes to me. I've jotted down ideas, but I'm not sure that they're an actual sequence or a few sets of overlapping sequences. Probably the latter. A headache that's gone by the time I've been out of bed an hour is probably at the same level as 'it hurts when I do this specific thing that I only do once an hour.' Sharp pains that last less than ten minutes and don't recur are completely irrelevant and don't count at all.

(no subject)

We ended up watching last night's Legends of Tomorrow episode, and I... I have no idea what alternate universe history we were looking at. Memphis in 1954 appeared to have no racism. I didn't particularly want racism in the ridiculous time travel story about people trying to save the universe, but I couldn't accept the story as presented. My suspension of disbelief didn't stumble on ghosts or on Elvis having a magic guitar. No, it was something else.

None of the people native to 1954 Memphis seemed to notice that some of the time traveling characters weren't white. I have no idea how to tell the story they wanted to tell while still acknowledging the realities of the place and time, but... I know people who remember 1954. Handwavingly ignoring racism isn't quite the same as ignoring, say, sewage in the streets of medieval cities. Partly because most of us agree that the sewage existed and that we don't want it back.

We've still got the racism. It's not quite the same, but it's not gone. Taking it out of a story set in living memory is a punch in the gut to anyone who's still affected by what happened then.

Just... They ended the episode with an interracial couple (white man, black woman) dancing and kissing in a church otherwise full of white people. Not one of whom batted an eyelash. I didn't want an unhappy ending. I just wanted a happy ending that didn't do the historical equivalent of changing the laws of physics. Earlier bits of the episode had similar issues.

I think that part of the problem is that we, culturally, have difficulties with the idea that a person can be good in one aspect of their life and really horrible in another. My MIL can consider herself-- and in many ways be-- a compassionate Christian and still vote for Trump because she's terrified of the Other and doesn't want them to exist in her world. It's actually pretty damned easy to live those contradictions. I'm sure each of us (yes, including me) has some that we don't notice.

If all you've ever seen is sandstone, it's never going to occur to you that granite might make a better wall.