Minus 2 points for sarcasm

Maybe I'm biased, because I seem to have a soft spot for Turkey, or at least for its Nobel laureates. So this story on Treehugger both attracted my attention and raised a little bit of pique.

It turns out that the Turkish government has provided free textbooks for schoolchildren. (Yay, obviously.) Except that they give them away, at a cost of $800 million and lots and lots of trees, and then they mostly get thrown out at the end of the year. And so they produce all new ones and the cycle continues.

"So [and here comes the snark] they’ve come up with an ingenious remedy that some folks have been practicing for centuries, book lending." Students will now return the books at the end of the school year, which is what I did through my years of public education. Not only is this good environmentally and economically, but it can offer Turkish children the opportunity to engage in such fun activities as seeing who had your textbook in years past, and writing in fake "funny" names to entertain future generations of textbook users.

oh, I read a book

Last week or so. Donald Antrim's The Headmaster Ritual. I've already returned it, so can't refer back for witty analysis. It's set at a posh boarding school, and the headmaster is a crazy Marxist. The main characters are the new history teacher, and the headmaster's sorta-loser son. They both have girl trouble, and work trouble, and get shot at by North Koreans, and it all works out in the end. It's funny, but not particularly memorable.

Politics = High School all over again

In between answering pledge calls for KCRW, I read the Opinion section of today's LA Times. And I am easily amused. While opining on how best to rein in the Iranians and their swaggering self-confidence, I came across the following:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite who lived in exile in Iran, held hands with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week during a chummy visit to Tehran, to the annoyance of President Bush.

I think Bush is just jealous because he remembers his hand-holding days...

Schools and Sabbaths

I'm dreadfully behind on the New Yorker (which is common enough, I admit). So I am still reading the January 15th issue. But here were a couple fun/interesting articles that I wanted to share:

"Expectations" by Katherine Boo. (it's not up on their site, but you may be able to read it here)
Since a lot of my work deals with "at-risk" youth, and since I am still mulling over teaching as a career, this article about Denver's Manual High School is especially compelling to me. MHS is mostly minority and poor, and rife with gangs. And... "for a decade, Manual High had been the object of aggressive and thoughtful reforms," none of which made any lasting improvements. In Boo's telling, along came new Superintendent Michael Bennet, whose plan to help the remaining student at Manual (which had dropped from 1100 students to about 600), was to close the school and transfer them elsewhere, offering extra mentoring and support. The students and community didn't buy it. I'm about halfway through the article, so not entirely sure where it's going to go. But I tend to have such conflicting thoughts about these kinds of articles: on the one hand, every time someone like a NYer reader is forced to face the ways we have failed public school students, that's a good thing. On the other, the wretchedness of the situation can become numbing, and I'm afraid that readers start seeing the students as symbols, rather than actual young men and women with dreams, aspirations, different skills and talents - they may not all be scholars, but that doesn't mean they're all failing.

"Playoffs" by Shalom Auslander (also maybe available here)
Auslander writes about the role of religion in his life, and how his childhood put literally the fear of God into him. Most poignantly for me, the crux of the story was whether God (hmm, since Auslander is Jewish, should I be writing G-d? He didn't in the article... but anyway, whether God) would allow his beloved Rangers to win their first Stanley Cup in 54 years. Playoff games kept happening after sundown on Friday or before sundown on Saturday; since finances had forced him and his wife out of Manhattan and into a Jewish suburb in New Jersey, he was under his neighbors' observant (pun, get it?) eyes all the time. The article catalogs Auslander's negotiations with God, which can be dizzying. He acknowledges that lighting a joint breaks two Shabbat taboos (Kindling a Fire and Baking, the latter of which made me chuckle); but also is keenly aware of God's (somewhat sadistic) onminpotence. Auslander has a great comedic voice (and hello? there's also hockey) so this was one of the more enjoyable NYer Personal Histories I've read in some time.

Also, during my search for online versions of the article, I can across this blog. Didn't read it much, but I'm quite intrigued.

The Curse of the Supersmart?

There is a list of authors who make me mad. Chief among the members are husband and wife team Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss. Really I'm just jealous because they are incredibly talented and doing something they love and are just about my age. Added to the list is Marisha Pessl, the precocious-seeming author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

This book enjoyed a good deal of buzz, although less than Claire Messud did for her book (see my review below). Like Foer and a growing number of young authors, she is a master of the gimmick. In this case, her protagonist is hyper-read, perhaps even more precocious than Pessl herself. Blue Van Meer narrates (from the distance of a year) her senior year in high school, the first time that she and her itinerant lecturer father have settled in a place for an entire academic year. Blue fills her narrative with in-text references to other works - of fiction and non-fiction. She mixes real and fake works willy-nilly. (I was particularly disappointed to note that "British chick-lit classic 'One Night Stand' (Zev, 2002)" does not seem to exist.) But these details add humor and insight to Blue's observations, and strengthen Pessl's characterization of Blue as a preternaturally smart young lady who really only knows things based on books, her father's proclamations, and her distanced analyses of her peers. When life gets "real" on her, she can barely cope.

But luckily (I guess), real life for Blue Van Meer is bizarre as f***. We know we're in a murder mystery, but the first 300 pages of what really is a tome are lead-in. With Blue as the Lindsey Lohan character in Mean Girls, more or less. It's a stronger and more sympathetic satire of (privileged) high school culture than Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep (more here and here). And then we get to the murder mystery and all hell breaks loose. I spent the last 200 pages wondering what on earth was going on. Blue has an over-active imagination, and it's a good thing she does, because otherwise she'd never keep up with real events.

That's it. I think anything more would start to give too much away. Blue and Pessl both take some getting used to. But if you take the time to get into it, you'll be rewarded with a strange and funny and almost Usual Suspects-like mystery.