The New Godzooky

My next door neighbor, whom I've dubbed The Princess, is now on his third female roommate. Lest you think he's some kind of serial monogamist, I should tell you that he's gay and has never had a male roommate in the half dozen or so years that he's lived next door to me. I know he's not interested in these women romantically; he has one bedroom, and they are always assigned to the other.

Each of  the women who've shared the apartment has had her own distinctive personality. The first one has been discussed on this blog in the past. She was the noisiest roommate so far. In fact, she is the noisiest person who's ever lived next door to me. When she wasn't playing her music or television at the highest possible volume (or perhaps just singing off key), she was stomping around on the wooden floors. I once compared it to the noise Godzilla makes destroying Tokyo. Thus was her nickname born.

The second roommate was quieter, much quieter, but she had a propensity for shopping that bordered on the addictive or obsessive. Not many days would pass before a box would appear in front of the apartment door. Some weeks there were packages every single day.

Some days even saw multiple packages. I didn't snap a picture of the pile of three large boxes that appeared one day while she was still living next door, but I still don't see how she could have gotten in the door.

This most recent addition had been, until recently, the quietest. She won't speak to me, has never said hello to me in the hallway or even acknowledged my presence. I suspect The Princess has told her that I've called to complain about the noise level several times in the past and so she's decided that I'm a bad neighbor. I don't care, really, since I have nothing in common with the twentysomething crowd that tends to show up next door.

I thought everything had been going well until this winter break. Each year, The Princess and anyone else who lives next door tend to disappear for two weeks for Christmas and New Year's celebrations elsewhere. It truly is the most wonderful time of the year because there are no slamming doors or awful music or loud, chatty late-night guests. By the way, I think that young people talk so loudly these days because they've damaged their hearing from years of sticking in ear buds and holding phones close to their ears. In another decade, it will be older people like me who have good hearing and the younger people will all need hearing aids.

Since the return of the neighbors after the holidays, there has been a marked increase in the volume level next door. I did call the security patrol one night because it was almost midnight but I could still hear very clearly through the walls the conversations going on. And, to make matters worse, the newest roommate has started stomping around the apartment too. I don't know how one's feet could get so much heavier over a couple of weeks of vacation, but I always know when she's home and when she's walking from the living room to her bedroom and vice versa.

I'll admit it's not as bad as when Godzilla herself lived next door, but it is still annoying. There's no point in talking about it with them; they don't seem particularly aware that other people live in the building too. I'm sure that I'll adjust, although it will most likely be the volume that's adjusted so that I can continue to hear my own television, but I think she's earned a nickname for herself.

Godzooky was the nephew of Godzilla in an 80s cartoon. He was a bit of a fumbler, not quite as powerful or coordinated as his uncle, and somewhat prone to mishaps. Given that she stomps around the apartment but isn't quite as loud (yet?) as her predecessor, I'm dubbing the young woman next door Godzooky.



By the way, I never know why the roommates move out. I don't know if they get another job and have to move or if The Princess is just a terrible person with whom to share an apartment. One day, Godzilla just moved out, and The Shopaholic moved in. After about a year or so, The Shopaholic moved out too, and Godzooky moved in.

Clearing Things Up

I think that some people who read this blog might think that I complain too much about my students and their work. Honestly, most of my students try their best to be successful, and I admire their tenacity and their work ethic. I enjoy my job, particularly when I'm able to see students learn and grow in their writing abilities. Every teacher, though, has at least one student--sometimes at least one student per class--who just doesn't seem to grasp the concepts you're trying to teach.

In my introductory literature course last semester, I worked a lot on thesis statements. I tried to suggest that students should be interpreting literary works in ways that would allow other readers to feel like they were being asked to participate in the interpretation. In particular, I warned against making the analysis too personal in nature since that can limit the audience for the essay.

We covered many different aspects that comprise different works of literature based upon the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama. I encouraged the students to consider incorporating multiple aspects in their interpretations, but I reminded them that their thesis statements would need to be unified and their paragraphs would need to be directly linked to each other and to the thesis.

All of this sounds like regular freshman composition level stuff, doesn't it?

Here's the thesis statement for one of the papers submitted by the student who struggled the most throughout the semester despite my having read and commented upon each draft and despite having gone to get additional tutoring and despite having come to my office to talk about this paper in particular: "Regardless of what the focus is a story heavily focused on one aspect uses other aspects to further the main one and the story I chose is no different. The story I chose for this assignment was Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield. I chose to analyze this story for the assignment because the character of Miss Brill interests me."

If you read this thesis, do you have any idea what the essay is going to discuss in terms of how to interpret Mansfield's story? Are you any clearer after having read those sentences as to what the main point of the essay is going to be?

You might be wondering if the essay "settled down" after the introduction and delved into the story with gusto and revealed some interesting analytical insights. What happened was each paragraph tackled a different trait of fiction, so there was a paragraph about the plot (which just retold us the sequence of what happened in the story), one paragraph about characterization (which just described the character of Miss Brill by telling us all of the things that happen to her in the story), one paragraph about the setting (which recounted each of the places where action occurs in the story), and so on.

Much of the rest of the class earned A's and B's on their essays and for their final grades. Of course, there are always C's and D's scattered throughout the roster as well, usually because students do not complete all of the work. It's seldom because they are unable to do the work or do it well; they just don't do it at all. Every now and then, though, you get a student who just cannot seem to progress beyond a certain point of understanding. It's perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of being a teacher when you cannot seem to reach a student like that. 

Taking Stock: 2013

Another year has come and gone, and I've looked over my list of what I read and saw and did once again and discovered that I need to get out of this apartment more. It's gotten tougher to get to the movies because of my work schedule and The Boyfriend's school schedule (and so many of the movies these days seem so disappointing), and going to see live theater has gotten pretty expensive here in Los Angeles. I continue to read a lot, but sadly, this year is not a record-setting one.

I managed to complete fifty-nine books this year, which still averages more than one a week. Someone--I think it might have been playwright Tony Kushner--once said that an educated person should average at least a book a week. Of course, he doesn't teach writing, so that might account for his ability to read more than I do. I have been reading more and more on my Kindle device because it is so very convenient. The books are often cheaper (cheaper even than used paperbacks sometimes), and I have more than 200 choices when I open up the device. If I get bored with what I'm reading, I can just quickly search for and switch to something else without having to plan ahead and bring multiple books with me. Before the book lovers start to complain, let me just state that it was just twenty-one books on Kindle this past year, so that's really only about one-third of my overall list.

Favorite Novel: Franny, the Queen of Provincetown by John Preston is a book from the early 1980s about a drag queen who becomes an activist and community builder in the era of the early gay rights movement, roughly from the 1950s to the time of Stonewall on through to the beginnings of the AIDS crisis. It's a very character-driven book with a central character who is, at turns, hilarious, touching, sentimental, brash, and always loving of her community. I'd owned the book for a couple of decades myself but had never picked it up to read until this past fall. I finished it in one afternoon because I couldn't wait to see what happened to Franny. Preston sort of famously dismissed this early work of his, but it's a remarkable book that deserves more readers. It's told in first person as if Franny and the other characters are being interviewed about their lives. There's a sense of immediacy because of this approach, and I think that's what I responded to most while reading Preston's novel.

Favorite Graphic Novel: I only read a couple of graphic novels this year, but The Arrival by Shaun Tan is so good that I had to mention it here. I read a few pages of the novel that were excerpted in my introductory literature anthology, found it fascinating, discovered that one of my friends had a copy of it in her office at work, borrowed it, and devoured it in one night. I'm not sure that I could describe the plot other than to say that a man leaves his family and encounters a strange series of events in another city. There's no dialogue, just masterfully drawn sepia-toned images on page after page. You can easily empathize with the central character and the members of his family, and I think the recurring image that looks like a dragon's tale could lead to some interesting discussions about its symbolic weight.

Favorite Nonfiction: When My Love Returns from the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old to Care? by Lewis Grizzard was a hearkening back to my years growing up in the South. I was familiar with Grizzard's work when I was in college in Mississippi and had read a couple of his books then (favorite title: Elvis Is Dead, and I'm Not Feeling So Good Myself). Since he died almost twenty years ago and would have likely been considered a regional writer, I figured his work was out of print, but thanks to Amazon and Kindle, I managed to purchase and download a couple of his books. This one, as you might surmise from the title, has to do with his romantic foibles (he was famously married four times), but that's not what I responded to in his book. It was the cadences of his writing, that laconic Southern style of storytelling. I don't like everything Grizzard wrote--he was a bit of an archconservative in some matters--but if I want to hear that particular kind of voice, he always manages to remind me of it.

I saw thirty-five movies in 2013, including two collections of short films (the Oscar nominees) and six more on DVD. I'm watching many more movies on television these days, and The Boyfriend bought me a Roku for my birthday which has led to me spending more time on the couch than in the theater. Not to worry, though, because I still prefer the experience of going to the theater to see movies on the big screen. Our new favorite theater is in Marina Del Rey because it offers large recliners and dine-in service for no additional cost on weekdays. You could learn to love going to movies there so long as you're prepared to have the experience interrupted now and then with dropped silverware.

Favorite Movie: Beasts of the Southern Wild is tough to describe. It's a depiction of one girl's life in a post-Katrina (almost post-apocalyptic) Louisiana. Hushpuppy, the young girl, lives with her ailing father who keeps disappearing for long stretches of the movie. She fends for herself, though, demonstrating a toughness that belies her young age. She lives in a community called the Bathtub, which is almost destroyed by a storm. There are evacuations and long passes of floating along the river and medical emergencies and large ancient beasts called Aurochs. The movie has a somewhat conventional narrative in some ways, I suppose, but that is perhaps the least interesting aspect of the movie. It's really more about the mood evoked by the images and events that the filmmakers and the filmgoing audience find intriguing. I found this movie to be mesmerizing and puzzling and melancholy and joyous.

Favorite Performance by an Actress: Cate Blanchett is deservedly receiving all kinds of awards for her performance as Jasmine in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine. She's remarkable in the role of a woman suffering a nervous breakdown when she loses her life as a Manhattan socialite after her husband is jailed for fraudulently taking other people's money. She flies from New York to San Francisco to stay with her estranged sister (the great Sally Hawkins), but finds it difficult to adjust to her new life. She gets a job and finds a new man to date, but both of these events contribute to her unease. The dentist she works for keeps hitting on her, and she worries that her new lover might discover that she has not been truthful about her past. It's a delicate, sensitive performance that Blanchett gives, one that will likely lead to her second Oscar in March.

Favorite Performance by an Actor: David Oyelowo plays the oldest son, Louis Gaines, in Lee Daniels' The Butler, and I found his character and his performance more interesting than Forest Whitaker's title character, a long-serving butler in the White House, or even Oprah Winfrey's performance as the butler's wife. Louis participates in an almost Zelig-like fashion in all of the key moments of the civil rights movements from the 1950s onward. It's, of course, rather preposterous that one person would have been present at the sit-ins at segregated diners and the Freedom Rides through the South and the formation of the Black Panthers and the PUSH bombings and so on, but you're willing to go along with this conceit because of the level of commitment Oyelowo brings to the role. He's fully engaged in depicting whichever historical moment is the focus, and you believe the depth of his involvement in the various changes that African Americans made happen. Oyelowo was overlooked because he was starring in a movie with Whitaker and Winfrey, but he commands the screen whenever he appears.

I used to go to live theater much more often when I was younger. I guess it's just gotten tougher to schedule an outing, and the cost of tickets has almost gotten out of control for the touring shows. The Book of Mormon is coming to Los Angeles again, and the good seats are almost $200 on a weeknight. I only managed to see four musicals, two plays, and one play with music this past year, and four of those were at the college where I teach (which offers some top-notch productions).

Favorite Theatrical Experience: Next to Normal is a musical about the impact that mental illness has on a family. You hear that description and you think you might be in for a depressing night at the theater, but this show is amazing in its depth of characterization and the impressive range of the music and lyrics. I managed to get four colleagues to join me in a matinee performance at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, and we all thought it was one of the best shows we'd ever seen. It did win the Pulitzer Prize the year it was on Broadway, but I don't think it's gotten a lot of attention since then. The lead character of Diana is a great part for a talented actress and singer, and each of the family members (and the doctor Diana visits throughout the show) are well-drawn and interesting.

Runner-Up: In honor of our college's centennial, the Theatre Arts Department did a production of Ragtime that was spectacular: a huge cast, a brilliant set, great costumes, and performances that could rival those of professional productions. You could tell that we spent a lot of money on this show, and it showed. Everyone who saw it was in awe of the achievements of our colleagues and students.

Favorite Theatrical Performance: I've never seen an actor throw himself or herself into a part as completely and as forcefully as Tracie Bennett does in End of the Rainbow. The play covers a period near the end of the life of Judy Garland, a time when she was trying to make a comeback at a club in London. She's in love with a new man, Mickey Deans, but she's falling into some familiar patterns in her life (well, familiar to anyone who knows much about Garland's addictions). Bennett doesn't really look all that much like Garland did, and in the musical numbers, she doesn't really sound all that much like Garland did either. However, you forget that while watching her perform because she brings such dynamic energy to her performance. She's astonishingly physical at times, leaping around the stage and over the furniture, and she shares with Garland an intense singing style. The numbers interspersed throughout the play recreate how it must have felt to be in The Talk of the Town in London to see Garland's performances. 

We only managed to go to three concerts this past year, and all of them were good, but one stood out from the rest as being spectacular. For my birthday, The Boyfriend bought tickets to see Amy Grant at the Greek Theatre. While I enjoyed the show, there were far too many "serious" Christians there, and all of the Christian music made me a bit uncomfortable after a while. No one said anything, but when you're gay and surrounded by Christians, you tend to feel a little bit of unease. The trip to see Chris Young, another of The Boyfriend's favorite country singers, open for Brad Paisley was also entertaining, but I can only stand to be in a crowd of drunken rednecks in rural San Bernardino County for so long because I want to leave. Luckily, we managed to escape before the concert was completely over and didn't get stuck in traffic waiting for the crowd to disperse like we did the year before in Chula Vista when we went to see Luke Bryan. What is it with country singers and performing in venues in the middle of nowhere?

Favorite Event: If you want to feel like you fit in or that everyone in the audience is "together," you need to go see Diana Ross perform live. About a week after our trip to the Greek Theatre, we went to the Hollywood Bowl as my birthday present to myself. Ross is famous for being. shall we say, "tardy" in coming to the stage, but she showed up and performed a brisk concert of hits from her time with the Supremes all the way through her solo career. I've never seen a crowd so animated since I saw Bon Jovi at the Humphrey Coliseum at Mississippi State in the late 1980s (the Slippery When Wet tour, to be specific, if you're interested). Everyone knew Ross' songs, and they sang along and danced and clapped and cheered. It was impossible not to feel happy in the midst of that crowd. Even The Boyfriend, who hails from Taiwan originally, knows who Diana Ross is and could sing along at times. She changed outfits several times during the show, each time reappearing in something spectacular and sequined, always eliciting a gasp from the audience. She's still a star, and even though she's 69 years old now, she still has a great voice. I've starting saying recently that some people will stop performing and we need to see them while we still can, so I'm glad that we had this chance to see a legend perform.  

Misreading

Whenever I teach a literature course, I quiz my students a lot. In fact, they have a quiz almost every day so that I can make sure they are keeping up with the reading. I don't ask them interpretive questions on these quizzes; I'm just asking for them to recall significant details of the poem or story or play. Sometimes, their answers demonstrate that they either haven't read carefully or haven't read at all.

This past fall, I was teaching American Literature since 1800, the second-semester survey course. One of the plays I tend to assign during the weeks that we cover the 20th Century is Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Yes, I do show them a few clips from the movie, but we talk about the play because, of course, some of the more "sordid" details of the play had to be left out during filming. The quiz I gave that day led to some interesting answers. You can't attribute some of these misreadings to people having watched the film instead of the book. These are just wrong answers.

First, I asked them what reason Blanche DuBois gives at the start of the play for why she has come to New Orleans. One student said, "To work as a [sic] English teacher," which is interesting given that Blanche has been removed from her job as an English teacher back home. As open-minded as the citizens of New Orleans might be, I don't think that she's likely to find employment as a teacher again any time soon. The most baffling response, though, was "She doesn't belong in the country." I have no idea where that one came from. I don't know if we're talking about the "country" as in "not the city" or if we're talking about the United States of America. Either way, the answer just makes no sense.

Early on in the play, Stella tries to hide her pregnancy from her sister because she thinks Blanche doesn't approve of her husband Stanley Kowalski. I simply asked, "What secret does Stella initially try to keep from her sister?" One of the strangest wrong answers was "Stanley." Given that Blanche meets him in the first act, I don't know how Stella can keep him a secret. Another answer of "that she is in love with Mitch" might just be a confusion of which female character is which. However, if Stella is in love with Mitch, that's a secret that's been kept from the audience all these years too.

I also asked students about Belle Reve, Blanche and Stella's childhood home, and about why Stanley wants to see Blanche's papers about Belle Reve. Those are both significant to the plot of the play. They did okay with those questions, provided they answered at all, but when I asked about The Flamingo, all hell seemed to break loose. A sample of some of the more eye-opening wrong answers:

• "It’s a somewhat lucrative hotel"
• "It is a hotel that you can go to for just a few hours for prostitution"
• "A whorehouse in the town Blanche used to live in"
• "A brothel that Blanche work at"

The Flamingo is an infamous hotel near Belle Reve where Blanche does wind up living for a time, and she certainly does enjoy the company of men while she is there, but it is definitely not a whorehouse or brothel. In fact, Blanche has to leave town because even the owners and other patrons of The Flamingo think that she is too "loose." (By the way, I have no idea what the student was trying to say in describing it as a "lucrative hotel." I suppose it was, but still...)

One of the most common questions I ask about stories or novels or plays is about the ending. I just want to make sure that the students have actually made it to the end of the work and that they have some sense of how the author has tried to wrap things up. Unfortunately, the last question is the one that is most often left blank. However, some will attempt an answer even when they haven't quite gotten that far in the literary work. One student summed it up: "The play ends when Blanche decides to leave because Mitch doesn’t want her anymore. She is done." Well, I'm not sure that Mitch is the most significant aspect of why Blanche decides to leave. I think Stanley (and Stella) have a lot more to do with it, and anyone who's seen the play would not attribute the ending to any decision on Blanche's part.



I have taken a different approach in the last couple of semesters to quizzes. Instead of giving the quiz at the beginning of the class session, I now hand them out at the end of class, after we've had a chance to discuss the work. You might guess that the scores have gone up since I started doing this. However, oddly enough, they haven't really changed all that much. I thought two things might happen: students who had done the reading would be reminded of specific details and those who hadn't done the reading could perhaps pick up some key information during the class discussion. As you've seen from some of the answers I've shared in this post, though, it doesn't seem to have made that much of a difference.

Random Thoughts on the Kennedy Center Honors

I realize that everyone else probably watched the Kennedy Center Honors in December when it was originally broadcast, but I only managed to view it this past week. (It's been a long but busy holiday break.) I enjoy this event every year because it really is a lovely tribute to outstanding creative artists. Most of the time I'm familiar with their work, but each year I get introduced to someone whose career is a revelation (and it's usually someone in the opera or classical musical arena). I'm not going to comment in this post on the people who were chosen for this year's honors: Shirley MacLaine, Martina Arroyo, Billy Joel, Carlos Santana, and Herbie Hancock. Instead, I'd like to concentrate upon some random moments during the show itself that struck me as interesting. Perhaps it's best to organize this sense of randomness by going in order of how each tribute was presented.

• Carlos Santana
• Tom Morello may just be the best damn guitar player of his generation. He performed on both "Black Magic Woman" and "Oye Como Va," and I was in awe of his virtuosity. I know I shouldn't have been, given how many of my friends are fans of Rage Against the Machine, but I've not heard a better guitar player in a long time, and I don't think there are many younger guitarists who can rival him at this point. By the way, just as an aside, at what point do we describe him as "former Rage Against the Machine guitarist"? Is there still a Rage Against the Machine?  
• Martina Arroyo
• I know very, very little about opera, but you must be a big deal if you get a Supreme Court Justice to introduce you. Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave a lovely overview of Arroyo's career. Apparently, she was a supreme interpreter of Verdi's operas such as Aida. All I know is that she is obviously filled with the joy of music. She sang along with everyone's performance during the evening, whether the music was rock or soul or show tunes. Not even President Obama or the First Lady sang along as much as Arroyo did. (And they sang along quite a bit themselves.)
• Herbie Hancock
• Bill O'Reilly has a sense of humor. Even about himself. I realize that isn't a surprise to viewers of his show on Fox News, but I'm not exactly a part of his demographic, so I wasn't aware that he could first shock the audience at the Kennedy Center and then begin his introduction of Herbie Hancock with "I know. I'm surprised too." It was a nice introduction, actually, but I'm still unsure why it was O'Reilly who gave it. Is he a big fan of jazz-fusion-r&b-soul-hip hop? And he even shook hands with Snoop Dogg, who did a wild version of "Flip Fantasia," at the end of the Hancock tribute!
• Shirley MacLaine
• At one point in our past, the entertainment industry knew what to do with people who could sing and dance and act. Shirley MacLaine's career is a fine example of that. She was a dancer who stepped out of the chorus in The Pajama Game to fill in for the lead one night and was discovered. She wound up in Hollywood making dramatic movies as well as comedies and musicals. I was thinking of this while watching the delightful Sutton Foster perform "There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This" from Sweet Charity. Foster is so supremely talented, but all she's managed to do is a television show called Bunheads that lasted only one season. I loved the show, and Foster demonstrated how adept she is at comedic acting on it, but where are the opportunities for her that mirror those that MacLaine had? Have we stopped using Broadway as a source of new, exciting talent?
• Billy Joel
• The Billy Joel tribute was perhaps the highlight of the show, and for me, the highlight of the tribute to him was watching one of my favorite artists, Rufus Wainwright, perform my favorite Joel song, "New York State of Mind." He also sang "Piano Man" with the rest of the performers who were honoring Joel, but it was the first song that really got me. I actually heard it the first time not on a Joel album, but on Barbra Streisand's Streisand Superman album, and then I searched for Joel's version because Streisand gave it such high praise herself. (I now have four different versions of the song on my playlist.) I wish Rufus would consider doing another entire album of work by other songwriters. I love his own material, of course, and I own all of the CDs he's put out so far, but I also love when he interprets someone else's material, as he did a few years ago with Judy Garland songs.