Three Beautiful Things 05/10/08: Book of Brevity, Magic Realism, Mike Rose

1. I've been teaching a book of short short stories, sometimes called microfiction, sudden fiction, and other names. They are kind of a combination of prose poem and short story, but rarely over a page long. The stories I've been teaching are all from Latin America and were translated by one of my fellow teachers, Jose Chaves. Jose came to my class and talked about the background this genre emerged from and listened as my students shared their insights about the stories.

2. The stories often explore a dimension of reality known as magic realism. It's a way of writing stories that treat the realm of dreams and the absurd as if the incongruities and fragmented nature of dreams and the absurd live with us all the time. I want to strike the words "as if". Dreams and the absurd are always with us and these stories magnify that reality.

3. My WR 122 students have been reading the writing of Mike Rose and are doing a great job understanding Rose's thesis that we need to look at manual labor and recognize the multiple intelligences hard labor requires, even though it is common to regard blue-collar work as performed from the neck down.

Three Beautiful Things 05/04/08: Breezy, Limbo, Surreal

1. Walking the neighborhood with Snug and we were welcomed by a pale blue, slightly cloudy sky, warmth, and a tempering cool breeze.

2. It's been about a year since I first read Alfred Lubrano's book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams. While I don't enjoy the feeling of being in two world and often feeling out of place in both, I do enjoy his articulation of this experience and I enjoy the self-examination his stories and reflection inspire in me.

3. I've started to re-read my fellow instructor Jose Chaves' Book of Brevity, a collection of micro-stories (flash fiction) he translated from Spanish into English. The stories are from several countries including Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, and others. They are mind bending stories, told as jokes, parables, allegories, dreams, and other forms that explore life by means other than realism. It will be fascinating (I hope) to see what my students make of them!

Three Beautiful Things 09/21/07: Cheerleading, Memoir, War Again

1. The word of the day: sarcasm. My work place is on a downward slide fueled by budgetary woes and I can endure it, outside the classroom, with heavy sarcasm, acting like a cheerleader for the slide in quality and the bottom line driven poison that is coursing through LCC's veins.

2. Jose and I had a great lunch together. I'll keep readers here posted as to when his rollicking and insightful memoir is finally published. Talking with him today about the demands his writing has made on him was compelling. It might be a while before it comes out, but, trust me, this will be a book you'll want to read.

3. I started watching "Letters from Iwo Jima" and in the early stages of the movie, we see that the WWII Japanese war machine was fraught with in-fighting, inflexibility, ideological blindness, and a sense of tragic doom. So far, it's been most enlightening to gain further insight into the absurdity of war as seen through the experience of the Japanese fighting forces on Iwo Jima.