Results of Ruminations

As I mentioned earlier , I want to use the discipline I've generated by writing daily posts (almost) without fail to become involved in NaNoWriMo. While I'm not sure how well I'll handle this stress in my life, I'm excited to put forth the effort. Since it's only 1,667 words a day, and I can slam out about 1,200 in an hour, it is more time at the keyboard than I'm used to. However, due to certain circumstances and the way that my broken brain works, I've finally decided to upgrade from an "It's okay, I guess" machine to something that (I hope) runs better, longer. With a new toy tool at my disposal, I'm hoping that will put additional incentive to really focus on my writing. For years, I've argued that I needed a Muse to write well. That may still be true, since my blog posts aren't necessarily sterling wordcrafting. However, to simply write  I need a space and some time. The first one is taken care of, thanks to my personal offi...

I don't know all of the details, and I also am making some assumptions on his life based upon poetry (always a risky proposition), but it seems as though slam poet Shane Koyczan   lost his mother due to illness, lived with his grandparents ,* and has said goodbye to too many people he knew. But assuming his poetry is autobiographical, I think it's fair to say that he's had a pretty rough life. Yet his stories are filled with hope, his words with wisdom, and his warm voice with a fatigued but familiar friendliness that holds me when I'm lonely and no one else's arms are nearby to shrug into. And it got me thinking about the marvel of what it is to be so connected, and how much I owe to two Canadian grandparents, one from pre-war Austria, who did their best to raise a young man with a darkness in his soul that he wished to exorcise. Their hard work to raise Shane has, indirectly, led to the life of a guy in Utah Valley being improved, helped, and brightened. Thank...

I have received my ballot in the mail. I haven't, much to my shame, put in the time to vote quite yet. I should get that done tomorrow, and have it in the mail by Monday. That should be enough time to get it back before 8 November. The advantage of that is it will give me an opportunity to think about some of the down ballot issues that haven't been getting enough press. While discussing the presidential race with a friend, however, he pointed out that he had decided to vote for Evan McMullin, the low-polling third party. Since I already sounded off on third parties (and I still think they're a bad idea, especially since there's no party loyalty on which they can rely when it comes to the actual governing of the country), I don't want to reiterate anything else on the topic. Instead, I want to consider my friend's comment about voting for the person he thought would be best, rather than the one who would most likely win. That's kept me thinking since ou...

For many years, I resisted the urge to write science fiction. I've been a fantasy person for a really long time. While I took a sabbatical from it during my middle school days, I have been a fantasy reader for about as long as I can remember. Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern  was a formative series: I started reading it in elementary school. An argument can be made that the Pern series is firmly science fiction/fantasy (genetically modified dragons on a planet colonized by interstellar human beings that fly around on teleporting, fire-breathing animals), much of the stories take place in the fantastical world of Pern, rather than the other quadrants of McCaffery's shared universe. I'd even go so far as to say the first fantasy that I remember reading was The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, which I began with Mr. Soto in the 6th grade. I read all of those books (feeling as though Taran Wanderer  was a bit unfocused and that The High King  deserved its Newbe...

At writers' group tonight, we got to talking about the news that Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere (multi-book spanning cosmology) is being optioned and put toward film franchises. While this is cool news, it got me thinking about what Hollywood producers are aiming to get out of fantasy franchises. With the undeniable success of Peter Jackson's adaptations of  The Lord of the Rings , as well as the country's continued fascination with Game of Thrones , there's obviously a connection to well-rendered fantasy worlds that has mainstream appeal. I worry, however, that producers are reading the wrong message. For every Lord of the Rings , there are a dozen Eragon  or Percy Jackson  films. For every Game of Thrones , there's a slew of Legend of the Seeker -type IPs that get out there, flounder, and fade away. What's different? What sets apart some of the tentpole properties from the rest of the herd? First and foremost, the caliber of the stories has to matter. Whi...

Unfortunately for my students, I love expressing my ideas. In some ways, increasing my productivity on the blog was supposed to help reduce this experience in the classroom. If I had a cool idea, I could write about it in the evenings and then let them explore ideas on their own. So far, it hasn't worked out that way. Part of it comes from context. In order to trace interesting thoughts, I feel like I need to give some context to what's going on. By the time I've outlined everything so that I'm ready to talk about the new ideas, I'm kind of already done with the idea. I don't always feel the need to press into the same territory for the third time in the day. Result: Students get a gush of my thoughts that I can't seem to stop. Part of what's so exciting about it is that I feel pressure to provide something new to the text we're reading. Right now, we're in the beginning of Twelfth Night  in my Shakespeare class. I'm trying to illuminat...

Teaching Paradise Lost  is always a pleasure for me. Part of it derives from the beauty of the language. Milton can turn a phrase unlike anyone else, and his lines are almost as memorable as Shakespeare's, when he puts his mind to it. There's a precision and clarity that Milton cultivates that I don't see in other work. One of the things that I love is the ambiguity. Shakespeare's characters will be ambiguous, or have ambiguous motives (like Iago in Othello ), but Milton places layers of possibilities, only occasionally directing the reader to one interpretation. An example of the ambiguity comes from this passage from Book 1: His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n, And shook his throne. (103-105) Here, Satan is saying that he and the rebellious angels fought the war so well that they "shook [God's] throne." Yet in Book 6, Raphael explains this about the Son's engagement with the battle:...

Cooking In the perpetual, possible pointless process of self-improvement, I decided--around the beginning of the summer--that I would take cooking lessons from a friend. They're kind of sporadic--we both have full schedules--but it has been really fun to learn about the kitchen. I learned about proper knife-holding skills, how to mince garlic (which I love) and other herbs, as well as looking for other ways of prepping meals. Since it's definitely a hobby, with no expectations (aside my own) for success, I have been feeling my way forward. I want to be interested in the cooking, which is selfish, since my wife doesn't get to have the luxury when dinner time comes around. But, at the same time, I feel like, since I'm paying for lessons, I ought to be able to cook well immediately. That idea is ludicrous, but it's still what goes through my mind. Today, with a fairly sleepless night and a lot of sewing work ahead of her, my wife wasn't really up for making d...

I have, of late, and wherefore I know well, written a great deal more than I have in years past. Indeed, thanks to a couple of factors, I have put more of my thoughts into words in 2016 than I have in almost any other year of my life. Since this time last year, I have finished three novels ( Conduits, Dante, and  Ash and Fire ), become prolific on this blog, updated my website, tweeted and posted thousands of thoughts, and hand-written dozens of pages in a personal notebook. In a lot of ways, I have increased my writing so much that I almost feel like I'm a writer. Because of this output, I have also passed a milestone: I have run out of ink in my favorite pen. This mayn't sound too terribly tragic, nor even worthy of a paragraph, to say nothing of an entire micro-essay, but that's because I didn't explain this pen. Almost three years ago, I went to London for the first time. As the group leader of a tour, I had the pleasure of picking our different stops througho...

The last two years have been historic at my school. Now in its tenth year, our strongest athletic program is the girls' soccer team. Last year, they came in second in state; this year, third. I'm sure there's a lot of desire for those girls to take first next year, and I'm confident they can do that. Their coach and my good friend is currently in withdrawals from the end of the season--though his boys' soccer team starts up in a few weeks, so the mood won't last long. He's expressed on social media some of his feelings, and I get the impression that he's in that bittersweet cusp of appreciating what happened, wishing it could continue, and sadness that it's over. I could be wrong, but I daresay that's where he is. The last year has put me in a similar mood. As I mentioned before , I really fell in love with quidditch when I happened upon in it in January of 2012. I didn't know it would change me so much, and I didn't know that I would, ...

Last year, Hogarth Press announced that they had commissioned novels by top-tier writers that were retellings and reimaginings of Shakespeare's works. The titles usually don't invoke Shakespeare (which seems to be missing a crucial component of their marketing strategy), save for Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name . The rest that are currently published ( Gap of Time, Hag Seed, Vinegar Girl ) don't indicate the source material. I have purchased two of these, and aim to finish out the collection later today (we'll see how my schedule shakes out). In typical me-fashion, I have these books because I wants them (precious) and so I buys them. I haven't actually read  either of the two I have, but I feel like I need to buy them (and, though it's costlier, I ought to buy them new) to support the market for books like this. My biggest problem with them is that they're mostly mainstream fiction. I don't read a lot of mainstream fiction--I tend toward t...

Slavoj Žižek--philosopher, writer, and lisp-talker-- wrote a book called The Parallax View. It is really dense, so I have only hit a few dozen pages in it, despite having owned it for years. Still, the concept of a parallax gap is interesting to me: ...the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible. (4) His introductory piece discusses the idea of the parallax view  as being one in which it's impossible to get both views to square: A strong either/or sensation. Of course, what is happening inside  that disconnect of similar ideas is what the rest of the 400 paged book explores. It's all very heady stuff, and, like I said, I haven't pushed more than twenty or so pages through. But the idea of seams is interesting to me. Perhaps it's because my wife has, in the last couple of years, become more and more interested in sewing costumes. It's a hobby (one which has made a lot more money than the one I do where...

In other news, water is wet. I have three kids, all boys, aged nine, six, and three. They're pretty great as brothers--playing well together (for the most part) and generally being wonderful little humans. The other day, my oldest mentioned some discrepancy in the way I told them to behave and how I behaved. I don't really remember the details, and they don't matter for the broader point, but I did get short with him about the false equivalency in his comparison (not that I used that term, though I should have). I do remember asking him if he ever noticed all of the good things that I do, all the times I'm consistent, all the positive examples I provide. He didn't answer, in part because he probably got distracted by something. Though I'm hardly the first to note this (Shakespeare has a good line about how the "good is oft interred with their bones" and another about our good deeds being written in water), it can be rather frustrating. I know tha...

Today, we had a comparative exercise in my classes. We juxtaposed the two versions of Satan that we've seen in the poetry we've studied this year: Dante's monstrosity... It might be hard to see, but this Satan isn't being pensive; he's eating souls. ...and Milton's manipulator: He's grappling with his new role as Prince of Darkness, not grousing about a headache. Both poets tackle the issue of Satan in a unique, world changing way. This video helps explain what I mean by that. Anyway, since we read both Dante's Divine Comedy  and Milton's Paradise Lost , we get a chance to look at the Arch Heretic in different ways. Dante's version is monstrous, munching on the three worst traitors: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot. He's frightening and impressive and...passive. He's a representation of what was lost when Satan rebelled against God. Milton's version, however, is much more human-like (save the wings) and his gifts o...

Cracking open Milton over the weekend was exhilarating for me. Now I don't want to touch the book. I don't normally go through bi-polar feelings like this--my depression ranges wide and wanders as it lists, but I don't often get whiplash when it comes to the pillars of support I have. This is a strange experience for me, since usually a bad day will push me toward  Milton or Shakespeare, not from them. But I was immensely disappointed in today's lesson. Not so much the students--they don't get as excited about Milton as I do, and I know that and I understand it. They're polite and engaged because, for some, it's engaging; the rest operate out of habit. No, I was disappointed in me. Part of it is that today was one of my most delicate, intricate lessons. We were talking about line 26 of the first Book of Paradise Lost . You know the one: "And justify the ways of God to men." Well, that requires an explanation about theodicy, and that is a th...

I'm starting my annual discussion of Paradise Lost  tomorrow, and it has me pretty excited. In my mind, Shakespeare rules supreme, but his heir-apparent is John Milton. Less well known than his dramatic almost-contemporary (Milton was eight when Shakespeare died, and I've yet to see any evidence that the future prophet-bard of England ever met the Soul of the Age), John Milton has still been immensely influential in English Letters. John Rodgers argues that Milton is in the dead center of the canon, while Harold Bloom puts Milton firmly (and unequivocally) in second place, preeminent save Shakespeare. I agree with both, and my preference for one over the other is a matter of what I'm reading/teaching at the moment. This year, I'm reading Twelfth Night  at the same time as teaching Paradise Lost , so there's some dissonance in my mind. Of course, there's no reason why I have to pick a  favorite. I'ma be like this little girl and refuse to choose: If pr...

Now that I'm over half-way through my edits--and, with Fall Break on the horizon, I'm hopeful to make additional strides--I need to spend time researching who would be interested in my "spaceships meet dragons" story. I wrote (under the tag of "story journal") about my lengthy process writing and revising Writ in Blood . I also talked about some of the failures of that book in terms of finding representation. I have continued writing in the face of that defeat, now well into my eighth book since I graduated high school (which isn't that many, when I put it that way). The one I'm working on now, however, was my sixth novel. That means I'm close to publishing, or halfway there, depending on whose success story you're reading. As I've put more time into my craft, trying to hone my feeble skills, I go through flashes of excitement and possibility, then crashes of dismay and defeat. It comes in part because I can't get consistent momen...

I've been thinking a lot about death this life, and I still don't understand it. Not the physiology of it (though my understanding of how the human body works is rudimentary and fractured) or the psychology of those who survive it (for a little bit of time, anyway). Those are fairly clear. For many, death invokes what Shakespeare wrote in King John . In Constance's words: Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then, have I reason to be fond of grief? Fare you well: had you such a loss as I, I could give better comfort than you do. I will not keep this form upon my head, When there is such disorder in my wit. O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! My widow-comfort, and my sorrows' cure!  It isn't mourning that I'm...

I'm listening to a recorded book version of The Hobbit  with my boys as we commute to and from work/school. It's fun to be back in Middle Earth, especially since my kids are familiar with the story of the book, thanks to the LEGO video games. I've been wanting to revisit Tolkien's world for awhile now--it's been almost two years since I last looked at it during my Winterim--and it's the kind of story that deserves revisiting. Because today is my anniversary (12 years!), my wife and I decided to sit down and watch the extended edition of The Battle of Five Armies  that's been sitting on our shelf for nearly a year. Without the kids at home, we could listen to it loud and do the whole thing without interruption. I know that The Hobbit  films are much more polarizing than the original adaptation of The Lord of the Rings . I will concur that, taken as a whole, The Hobbit  is structurally weaker and feels more bloated than LotR . The structure, sadly, comes f...

Despite the fact that my teacher-sense was tingling, I went ahead with a bit of an experiment today. The details aren't really what matters--the kids in one class will try an alternative assignment while the other class will go through my standard set up. Instead, it's the idea of what I'm trying to accomplish with my classes. Last year was a bit of an existential crisis for me in terms of how I teach. (I had already gone through the "Is this what I really want to do with my life?" existential crisis some years before. Thanks, Class of 2014.) I didn't feel like anything was working right, I didn't feel as though my choices, questions, conversations, or techniques were worthwhile. I decided against changing everything, instead trying to streamline what I've done in the past to try to make it more engaging--trimming, consolidating, and tweaking where I felt I could. In an attempt to remain flexible to student desires, I let the classes decide how to ...

With the election nearing and more and more coverage (as if we weren't already saturated in it) coming out about both the Trump and Clinton campaign, a lot* of people are talking about third party candidates. I'm familiar enough with American history to know that third parties are almost always a bad idea, and history can hinge on these things pretty heavily. Since most everyone who reads this blog was likely alive to see what Nader did to Gore in 2000, and also how Perot tweaked the '92 election, I don't need to point out that most of the time, third parties don't advance their agendas, but instead muddy the waters enough so that the race is more difficult to manage. To see the largest swing in the last century, consider what the Bull Moose Party did: If you look at the election numbers, there were more votes cast for the Republican-style candidates. However, because Roosevelt started his own party, it split the support enough that the country voted for Wilson inst...

About 2,400 years ago, a chap dismissed writing as being, at best, an unworthy successor to speech, and at worst a tool for reminding that gives people the feeling of being wise without distilling wisdom. While Socrates has a point --discussing writing, what is written, and why it was written are worthwhile aspects of my pedagogy and the way in which people live and learn--I think, in this case, Socrates underestimated the purpose, point, and power* of writing. There are a lot of lessons to learn from Socrates' points--which is why he's still popular, still quoted, still discussed, still taught--but the takeaway from me is actually one of a cautionary tale. For Socrates--an illiterate--the concept of reading and writing was insufficient. In many ways, the latest technology had no immediate purpose to Socrates, and as a result, he insisted its flaws outweighed its benefits. Today I saw a TED talk about audience being held captive by the darkness . Part of Mr. Cohen's com...

While attending the annual Utah Shakespeare Festival/Southern Utah University Shakespeare Competition in Cedar City, it came out that the GOP nominee for president laughingly confessed, in a private situation in which he happened to be recorded, that he liked the idea of sexually assaulting women. I listened to the whole tape, and, like almost all of America, I've been trying to figure some stuff out as a result. I was never going to vote for Donald Trump. I already expressed my dismay at what the Republican party has done in the name of party politics. I wasn't about to give my vote to the party anyway, so, for many months, I got to watch with bemusement as I wondered how Utah was coping with the identity crisis. What to do when the Republicans' hateful rhetoric, racist policies, and misogynistic attitudes came to a head and that head was Trump? What would Utah do in the face of seeing what their party long believed in? Now, some of you may be bristling at this depicti...