Bright Spots in Mid-Michigan

At the State Board of Education meeting Monday, there was a series of three speakers, each representing a different point on the political spectrum, addressing the current fiscal crisis that has resulted in, among other things, an immediate cut in state funds to local school districts to the tune of nearly $300 per pupil. And that's just in the current school year; the cuts will likely be more than twice that next year, barring any changes to the school funding formula, tax system or tax base. All three speakers presented a broad consensus view that the old ways will no longer work for Michigan, that certain taxes need to be expanded and/or raised, and that the future of Michigan depends heavily on identifying and investing in durable, key competitive assets. It was an alternately bleak and hopeful meeting: bleak because the situation has been so grim for so long (news flash to out-of-staters: Michigan never recovered from the 2001 recession like the rest of the nation did) and is likely to get even worse before it gets better, especially without radical change; yet hopeful, because there are a lot of durable assets here (particularly in education) and many thoughtful visionaries in a position to influence public opinion toward radical change.

Anyway, while riding the bus back home after the meeting, I realized that I was partaking of one of those assets. Americans everywhere seem to complain about the lack of quality, reliable public transportation in their communities, at least when compared to other countries and certain cities like New York and DC (whose residents of course have their own gripes, but man, I love their subways!). This seems to be especially true in the Midwest, and doubly so in the state whose economic prosperity in the 20th century depended on Americans embracing the personal automobile over public, mass transit. However, the Capital Area Transportation Authority (CATA) is an exception that proves the rule. It has well-planned routes all across the city with easy transfers and articulation with transit systems to the outlying counties, highly reliable timetables, alternative fuel buses, and relatively low fares. It's been twice awarded the Outstanding Public Transportation System Achievement Award for efficiency and effectiveness by the American Public Transportation Association, most recently in 2007. I know that riding the bus isn't everyone's cup of tea, but as for me, I am proud of CATA's achievements and always look forward to opportunities to utilize it.

At one stop, an elderly woman in an electric scooter boarded. Now, I have a mild prejudice against those increasingly ubiquitous machines, which I call "WALL*E Carts," and which I won't go into here. However, I really like the fact that CATA buses are able to accommodate them, giving all of our citizens access to quality, reliable public transportation, even if the bus' slow transformation into a scooter-swallowing robot and back to bus again does add a few minutes to the journey. Once the woman and her scooter were safely aboard and belted in, the search for bus fare began. At first, she produced a bus pass that had unfortunately expired four days earlier. She swore she had a more up to date card, and rummaged through a fanny pack, a purse, some pockets and her scooter's basket. Failing to find one, she told the driver she'd be happy to pay cash instead, and again went through the same rummaging routine, which was greeted by much eye-rolling by her fellow commuters (including, I confess, me; I mean, it was taking forever).

However, one patient middle-aged passenger identifying herself as Sarah raised her hand politely and called out to the driver, offering her own bus pass to pay for the fare of the new rider. And she didn't stop there; she told the driver to give the pass, which had two or three more fares' worth of credit on it, to the woman in the scooter. "Just trying to help out," she said, humbly.

As bleak as the picture can get in Lansing (and boy, has it been bleak in recent years), it's comforting to know that that "see a need, fill a need" spirit survives in its people. People ask me why I don't move closer to work and save both time and money by not having to commute everyday. My answer is always simple, I like living in Lansing. I happen to think that, for all its faults, it's a great town that suits my mood, which usually elicits a raised eyebrow or two. Now I can back up my assertion with a little anecdote :)

Where the Wild Things Are

During the tail end of my freshman year in high school, I joined a ragtag troupe of musical theater enthusiasts to put on a production of The Mikado for one of Lafayette's annual downtown summer festivals. This was just after having been a part of my high school's production of HMS Pinafore, and a small band of us had not had our fill of Gilbert and Sullivan or backstage drama. Our fearless leader Peg, who sources tell me remains a fixture of the arts scene in Lafayette, was quite the impresario, a one-woman pit orchestra, choreographer, stage manager and unstoppable raconteur. My schoolmates and I were the youngest members of the company, which was as collectively eccentric a community as I have yet been privileged to participate in (and that includes two years of living in East Quad at UM). There was Peg, her parents (both of whom sang with me in the men's chorus), and her sister (either in-blood or in-law, I can't remember which), as well as a handful of Hoosiers with an infectious groove for Gilbert and Sullivan topsy-turviness. So very, very Waiting for Guffman. Rehearsals were often comically anarchic clashes and syntheses of creative personalities, and sometimes frighteningly magnified demonstrations of a host of neuroses, psychoses and mood disorders. I'm not exaggerating when I say that lithium was the least powerful of prescriptions shared by several members of the cast. The show itself remains one of my favorites, and I learned a lot about the depth and complexity of the human psyche from spending a couple of months in this crucible of humanity in extremis. Much of my perspective-taking ability, interpersonal patience and appreciation for the diversity of the human community has its roots in that period.

Why do I bring this up now? Because watching Where the Wild Things Are brought it all back to me. The irrationality and volatility of the beasts that populate Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' take on this story paradoxically make them more human than the relatively simple creatures of Maurice Sendak's original picture book. What on the page had been a tale about the misunderstood id of the preadolescent child finding a special place to rock out on the screen becomes a meditation on the hard work of love, patience and sensitivity to the "messiness of other minds" (to borrow a term from Ian McEwan) that weaves individuals together into a community, whether manifest in a family, neighborhood, kingdom or sleeping pile. Early on, when "big kids" crush Max's proudly constructed igloo in a bit of Max-instigated rambunctiousness, he is understandably upset, but what hurts him the most is that his sister doesn't "do anything" about it. While some argue that hell is other people, Where the Wild Things Are (and I, for that matter) would disagree; it's the disconnection from others that is the true hell, even if maintaining those connections proves taxing. Atlas Shrugged this ain't. Alternately joyful and bleak, Where the Wild Things Are is certainly one of the headiest family-oriented entertainments ever to make it to the big screen. It's also provides one of the best dramatizations of boys' emotional complexity I've seen in quite some time. In Fred Claus, the eponymous character played by Vince Vaughn observes that good boys may do bad things, but it doesn't make them bad boys. This is a cornerstone of my personal philosophy, and Where the Wild Things Are does a masterful job of demonstrating it. I've spent years studying (and, frankly, living through) boys' social and emotional development, and I must say that this film delivers as fine a case study of what's on a boy's mind and in his heart as anything described on the page by Michael Gurian or William Pollack. I will admit that I was not breathlessly awaiting a film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, primarily because the book did not play as big a role in my literacy life as it did in that of many other readers. However, when filtered through the minds of Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, two artists with an established track record for successfully melding post-modern anarchy with sincere poignancy, Where the Wild Things Are becomes essential viewing not just for children, but more critically for the grown-ups who shepherd them.

Around the World in Eight Questions

OK, I started this entry well over a month ago, which was already quite a long time after the events described. Life intervenes at every corner! Think of this as a long-delayed rebroadcast of an episode that you didn't get to see the first time around because it was preempted by the news. So let's go back to those care-free days of early July 2009 ...

My favorite park at DisneyWorld is EPCOT, and my favorite part of EPCOT is World Showcase, so it's no surprise that the most fun I had on our summer vacation was there, even if the whims of my children meant that I didn't get to spend nearly as much time as I would have liked hanging out there.

Not that I particularly like fulfilling the stereotype of the obnoxious American abroad, but I really enjoy initiating conversation with the workers in each pavilion with offbeat questions about their countries. I am genuinely curious about other cultures and nations, but, let's be honest, I think it's fun to flirt with the workers and, to a somewhat lesser extent, lightly embarrass my children.

I started my international goodwill junket in Canada, where I first asked the attendant at a snack stand if she could name all of the winners of Canadian Idol. She was stumped, and I explained that I was curious because I really liked the rerecording of the song in the Circlevision 360 movie inside the Canada pavilion. They said that it was sung by one of the winners of Canadian Idol, but I had forgotten the name. "Oh," the attendant said, "that's Eva Avila. But I don't really watch the show." I then asked her if she liked the Canadian health care system, because, as you may recall, George Bush #41 had once said if we thought government run health care was a good idea, we should ask a Canadian. The attendant was unequivocal: she didn't appreciate it until she had to pay $200 for a prescription here. She liked working at Disney, but prayed she wouldn't get sick or injured again until she could get back home.

Next stop was the UK. I was curious to see if they had any Doctor Who, Torchwood or other BBC-related merchandise in their stores. Alas, no; they had plenty of Winnie the Pooh, British Invasion and Manchester United things, but no TV tie-ins (not even Jelly Babies!). I asked two or three workers, who politely said no and went about their business without further comment. I got my revenge by pointing out a punctuation error on a hand-made trivia quiz in one of their shops. Probably not the best way to endear myself to the Brits, but whatever. I asked the server at the chip shop if new episodes of Torchwood had aired back home in the UK (not realizing that Children of Earth was set to air over there the very next week), but he confessed that while his brother was a fan, he didn't watch it himself. Onward to France ...

The kids didn't follow me into France, where I went in search of some madeleines. I asked a couple of workers if they sold madeleines anywhere in the pavilion, particularly those magical kinds that make you recover lost memories. Politely yet humorlessly, they both pointed me in the direction of the pâtisserie. Sensing that they didn't get the allusion, I pressed further. "You know, like in Proust?" The first worker gave me a confused stare. "Proust? You know, Marcel Proust?" I prompted. "Don't you study him in school in France?" "Ah, yes. Le madeleiene," she said, before going about her business again. However, the other worker I spoke with got it after my initial prompting, blushed and told me I'd have to try it myself with a little tea. I then asked her if she knew any good jokes that would be funny to French people but not necessarily to people from other countries. She recommended I ask the busboys, since she didn't have much of a memory for jokes herself. However, she did know that the French like to tell jokes about Belgians and blondes, which are the equivalent of American jokes about the Polish ... and blondes. I did end up buying a bag of madeleines and a cup of tea from the pâtisserie, which I shared with August (see picture above). We got a little rush of sugar, but no great flood of memories. Of course, as Proust would no doubt observe, since madeleines play no part in my own childhood memories, there's no reason to expect that they would conjure up anything for me (Alain de Botton makes this same point in How Proust Can Change Your Life). However, give me a bag of chocolate Munchkins from Dunkin' Donuts, or the smell of the Oven Fresh bakery first thing in the morning, and we might have something ...

I had hoped to continue my line of joke questioning in the other nations, perhaps backtracking into Canada and the UK to get their perspective on national humor, but my children's hunger and general lack of patience pushed us forward past Morocco (which has always been one of my favorite spots in the World Showcase, so I'm sad to have not had a chance to spend any time there) and into Japan for a meal. While they ate, I went into the store and bought a few snacks. I headed over to their book and DVD section and had a brief conversation with one kimono-clad salesperson about Kurosawa and Tale of Genji. The upshot is that they had nothing for sale by or about Kurosawa and no copies of Genji. To add insult to injury, the salesperson admitted to never having seen anything by Kurosawa, because "those are very old films." Ouch ...

We continued around the lagoon to the American Adventure, an extravaganza that I told the kids always brings a tear to my eye. They thought I was exaggerating, then afterward took my hand in concern when they saw that I meant exactly what I said. I always start to lose it when the song starts in the end, then the bottom falls out for me during the JFK clips. They've updated that portion of the show now to showcase a slew of American masters and iconic moments from all fields, so it just knocked me out. What can I say ... even liberals can get weepy patriotic.

Time to complete a tour of the Axis nations, with Italy and Germany. While reliable sources tell me these are two fine nations to visit, I've always found their pavilions at EPCOT somewhat lacking. Yes, they each feature a great restaurant, entertaining street performers, boutique shopping and pretty architecture ... but so do all the other pavilions. No movies, rides, art exhibits or twisty pathways to explore and lose yourself in the ambiance. However, one of these pavilions features the some of the friendliest workers who were the only ones in the World Showcase to share a joke from their home country with me.

Ironically, it wasn't the Italians. There, I posed my question about native humor to a clerk in the Italian food shop (where I bought some fancy liqueur candies for myself and other chocolates for the kids), only to elicit a polite smile and small headshake. I pushed further, insisting that she must have a joke or two about the Prime Minister. The clerk gave me a puzzled look, to which I replied, "you know - Berlusconi, your Prime Minister. Don't you tell jokes about him?" Ah! That was the ticket; she smiled broadly, nodded and said "yes, yes! We have those." "Could you share one?" I asked. The smile faded, and she shook her head quickly. "No." "Ah, I see," I replied. "Too many kids around?" "Yes," she said, and that was that.

No, the really fun workers to chat with were the Germans, believe it or not, and in contrast to all the other pavilions, they cheerfully approached us as soon as we entered the German toy store. I started out by telling workers Sandra and Uta that in America, Germans have a reputation for humorlessness, and that it would be wonderful if they could dispel that stereotype by telling me a uniquely German joke. They picked up on the challenge with relish. Sandra said that her father was a big joker, while Uta offered the following without hesitation: "Why are blonde jokes so short?" "So blonde guys can enjoy them, too." Then she turned the tables on me and asked for a joke in return. Now, I know a fair share of German jokes, but wasn't sure they would be appropriate (e.g., Nazi jokes) or comprehensible (e.g., one in Spanish - "¿Cómo se dice ‘está lloviendo' en alemán?" "Gotas caen." - which translates to "How do you say 'it's raining' in German?" "Drops fall." See, you really need to speak Spanish and have a feel for how German sounds to the Spanish ear to get it.) Anyway, because there were kids around, I opted for a simple kids' pun - "What do you call a fish with no eyes?" "A fsh" - and I was pleased that they both found it funny. We then had a nice chat about differences between life in Germany and the United States, and the kids and I were sold on the idea of moving Berlin to the top of our list of international cities to visit.

Heading next to China, we were amused to discover that the workers there seemed highly focused on their tasks of closing up the shops, even though EPCOT would still be open for another 20 minutes. August joked that we should ask them if they had any fireworks (clever boy), but the lack of eye contact and silent industriousness led us to conclude that we weren't likely to learn much about world humor here.

And so we passed on to Norway, where we zipped through the empty queue to the ride. I posed my native joke question to the attendant at the boat loading area, prefacing it with the observation that in some parts of the United States, Norwegians are as likely to be the butt of jokes about dim-witted immigrants as are Poles. I asked her if Norwegians told any jokes about Americans. While the attendant was briefly taken aback to learn that her countrymen were so lampooned, she immediately came back with the cross-cultural insight that "those are the kinds of jokes we tell about Swedes." She didn't know of any about Americans, so I challenged her to then tell me one about Swedes, emphasizing that I wasn't a Disney spy trying to bait workers into saying inappropriate things, but she couldn't come up with one before it was time for the boat to be sent on its journey.

The final stop on the World Showcase tour is the one nation where I really didn't need to inquire about native humor because I already knew the kinds of jokes they told amongst themselves and about Americans - Mexico. Nevertheless, we made a beeline for the boat ride, and afterward struck up another nice conversation with a couple of workers from Cuernavaca. They were kind enough not to hustle us out of the pavilion, even after EPCOT's official closing time had passed, and we ended our evening on a high note of international goodwill and cultural exchange.

As we left the park, I spoke with August about coming back and taking a more systematic approach to the Q&A, possibly videotaping the interactions. We settled on a few additional questions that we could ask, most notably, what kinds of jokes do you tell about Americans in your country? I know at least one joke that Americans tell about each of the peoples represented in of EPCOT's World Showcase pavilion, and even if they wouldn't be appropriate to retell in a family vacation resort, they could be great fun to get the conversation rolling. Unfortunately, we didn't get back to the World Showcase on this trip, so my documentary dreams will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, the fine memories from this, perhaps the best Disney vacation I've ever taken, will keep me warm in the coming months (there was snow today on my way to and from work). So many other cool, fun things from this trip, but I'll save those for later (and probably shorter!) posts.

CV Updates

Due to a combination of hectic publication schedules, the start of school and my own personal writing habits, I have two Brief Reviews appearing in the same column this month at Education Review. The first, of Michael Bitz's Manga High, is what you might expect from my pen/word processor. The book is a terrific case study of a project that scaffolds mastery of academic literacy practices on students' pop culture passions, and I do due diligence to connect it with the giants on whose shoulders my own scholarly work humbly stands.

The second, of Tara Star Johnson's From Teacher to Lover, is a horse of a decidedly different color. The book is a fascinating case study of two female teachers who crossed the line with older adolescent male students, with comparisons to two similar cases that received heavy media publicity. It requires a healthy amount of methodological belief to follow the arguments and evidence through to the final chapter, which is frankly the most stunning discussion section of a qualitative study I've ever read. Given its subject matter and a back-cover blurb from Bill Ayres, the book invites controversy, yet it raises provocative questions about the very nature of what it means to teach and the reciprocal effects of classroom interactions on students and teachers, which are largely ignored in heavily behaviorist-driven classroom management discussions.

Provocative Literacy Education Quote of the Day

From Thomas Newkirk's Holding On To Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones, regarding the "gold standard" of "scientifically-based research" in the NRP's 2000 report, and the IES's interim report of the Reading First impact study showing "no measurable effect on students’ reading comprehension":

"[T]he major problem is not with the assessment of research but in the desire to translate any research result, any demonstrably effective practice, into a national mandate. The problem is hubris - a faith in reading science as a panacea. Businesses call this a problem of scalability, that any system is likely to run into problems as it is expanded (this happens to food franchises on a regular basis). A teaching method that is effective in the voluntary and supported environment of a research study is not likely to be as effective in a textbook-driven, mandated system with less expert support and less buy-in from teachers. Bad things, as they say, happen to good ideas."

How I Know That I've Caught the "Glee" Bug

I have to confess that I missed the "Glee" pilot when it aired last spring. I think I had set it to record on my DVR, but something malfunctioned. In any event, I made sure that my new, more reliable DVR was set for this Wednesday's official season premiere. After President Obama's health care address and the Republican response concluded, I flipped over to FOX and time-shifted my recording of "Glee" back to the beginning. I watched it while surfing around online, paying closest attention every time Jane Lynch appeared on screen. It reminded me a bit of Hamlet 2, but with a more optimistic, candy-colored outlook. Overall, my first impression was that it was amusing and cute, definitely something I might tune into again if nothing more compelling were on, but maybe not "appointment television." I then went on my merry way to read the new Dexter novel on my Kindle (curse you, Doubleday, for not enabling text-to-speech on this! I'd swear that decision was made after I had placed my pre-order. Grrrr ...).

I felt fine the next morning, more concerned with following NPR's coverage of reaction to the President's speech than anything else on my drive into work. I continued listening to Morning Edition, On Point and finally Fresh Air in the office ... until they ran a quick promo for a later show, a promo that began with a clip of the "Glee" kids' version of "Gold Digger" from Wednesday's show. In less than a second, I reflexively turned my browser to YouTube and searched for "Gold Digger," and upon seeing the search results, I heard myself say aloud, "No, not Kanye's version. The 'Glee' version!" I hit play, smiled and leaned back to listen ... three times. I tried listening to the original uncensored version again (which I used to prefer to the radio version because it rhymes better), but stopped it about half a minute in and went back to the "Glee" version.

That's some powerful stuff there ...

Linguistic musing of little consequence

This morning, Alexis warned August that something was wrong with the toaster, that some sizable piece of toast or bagel was stuck in the bottom, ready to burn and set off the smoke alarm no matter how lightly you set it. I intervened, cleaning out all the crumbs and such, when I noticed that one of the spring-loaded bars upon which whatever you're toasting rests had become disconnected at one end. This made the whole operation sluggish, and of course would keep stuff from popping up when done, resulting in the whole burning thing. I unplugged it, and with nothing more technical than a fork, was able to push the bar back onto its track. Works like new. I then commented to Alexis that the problem was not with stuck bread, but rather that the mechanism was "out of whack" and now that I'd worked on it, the toaster was ... "in whack"? Hmmm ... What exactly would be the proper slang term to denote the opposite of "out of whack"? Since "whacked" is slang for murdered, that surely wouldn't work, and "in whack" is phonetically indistinguishable from "wack," which wouldn't work either. Interestingly (well, to me anyway), to call something "wack" is the same as calling it "wacked out" (both connoting craziness), so to possess wack or to be out of it are virtually the same thing. Whatever the answer to the "out of whack" conundrum may be, it would surely also solve parallel slang constructions like "out of kilter." In marching terminology, the opposite of "out of step" is "in step," so I guess "in whack" must be as close as it gets, as imperfect as it may seem.

You'd think I'd have more pressing things to obsess over, but hey, it's the weekend. And speaking of weekend wackiness, check out this album cover I found at Uncle Sam's yesterday. "Show Boat" is my grandmother's favorite musical, but I doubt that she'd find this an accurate representation of all that she enjoys about it. "John Wayne Gacy Sings Your Favorite Showtunes," perhaps?

And then there was this oddity, which elicited a light gasp ...

Listening to Kindle

If there are any book publishers or editors out there reading this blog, may I humbly suggest a cost-saving measure in the review process? Think of all the money you might save if instead of printing, binding and shipping advance reading copies of upcoming titles to libraries, book stores, media outlets, book-bloggers and various conventions around the country, you could utilize the Whispernet to distribute ARCs directly to early readers and reviewers. Yes, yes, yes, there are lots of big and little details to work out - like getting Kindles into the hands of everyone you want to have read your book and certainly inking some kind of Faustian deal with Amazon.com to get book files converted into Kindle-readable formats and pushed out through the Whispernet - but think of the savings! I hear publishers, agents, editors and authors bemoan the current financial state of the publishing industry, yet simultaneously watch publishing house representatives give out crate-loads of ARCs, which presumably had to be shipped in (and, in the unlikely event that all of the books aren't taken up, shipped back out). Since ARCs can't be resold - and I presume they're not recycled to make more ARCs - the used copies either sit around gathering dust once official copies can be purchased or checked out, or they get dumped in landfills/incinerators. Think of the environmental impact that e-ARCs could have. Maybe it's just a drop in the ocean of the world's paper & ink usage, but it's a step, right?

An added bonus from a reviewer's perspective is that e-ARCs could be experienced in multiple ways, either through the eyes or the ears, using Kindle's "experimental" text-to-speech function, which is what I sat down to blog about today in the first place. Those of us with healthy (or unhealthy, depending on your perspective) commutes could get through our to-review stacks that much more quickly by plugging the Kindle into the car stereo and turning on the latest ARC, and with the Kindle's storage capacity, you could lug around a whole bookshelf's worth of ARCs and other books wherever you go. Going to the gym? Plug in the headphones and take your reviewing work along for the ride. If you get a zippered carrying case for it, you won't have to worry about sweating all over it.

I've been a fan of audiobooks for a long time, but I'm frequently frustrated to find that a book I really would like to take with me on the road or on my various walking excursions is either: 1) not available on audio; 2) on audio, but only in an abridged format; 3) unabridged on audio, but not available at the local library or through MelCat; or 4) unabridged on audio and at a MelCat library, but is listed as non-circulating (typical for newish audiobooks, but some libraries hold their audio collections out from MelCat circulation). Of course, not every book is available on Kindle (notably, late 80s/early 90s Stephen King, odd for such a tireless proponent of the Kindle) and some come with the text-to-speech function turned off (grrrr ...). But for the most part, if it's new and notable, it's available on Kindle and can be turned into an audiobook with the press of a button.

Now, audiobooks aren't for everyone, and neither is Kindle's text-to-speech. Instead of a professional actor or the author of the book, you can choose a male or female voice and set the reading pace to one of three speeds. The AI reader isn't smooth enough to convince the listener that it's not a robot, but it is considerably more sophisticated than the computer that reads on the weather radio. It does surprisingly well at capturing the rhythm of a sentence, pausing at commas, rising inflection at question marks and lowering inflection at periods. It doesn't understand exclamation points, though, usually leaving a slightly longer pause after them than it leaves after a period, but not raising its volume. While it does occasionally have respect for paragraph breaks, it zips right through section and chapter breaks. Thus, it can be disorienting when it says something like "... and they rode off into the sunset. Forty-two: A New Dawn. John and Marsha were tired from the road," as if it were three sentences in the same paragraph, despite appearing on different pages.

I've listened to three of the books I've purchased for my Kindle thus far (plus a fourth e-book that I had converted from .PDF into a Kindle-friendly format), and it didn't take long for me to get into its groove. It's like listening to a really talented decoder who has a pretty sizable stable of sight words to draw upon but for the most part rarely applies top-down knowledge or uses context to make many of the moment-by-moment decisions that fluent readers make unconsciously. Novice literacy researchers take note: if you still need evidence to convince you that reading is an interactive process, look no further than the Kindle, which is such a non-interactive reader that it fails to learn anything as it reads!

For example, it doesn't know the difference between "live" (short i) and "live" (long i), so it always uses the short i. It doesn't use context to know whether "read" is supposed to be pronounced as if it were in present-tense or past-tense, so it's always pronounced with a long e. If it sees "angel," it pronounces it correctly, but if it sees "Angel" (a frequently occurring word in Matt McCarthy's excellent Odd Man Out, a memoir of a year playing for a minor league affiliate of the California Angels), it says "angle." This extends to a mispronunciation of "Los Angeles" as "Los Angle-ese." Names pose an odd problem, too. Simple names like Jane, Harry, Bess and Jesse get pronounced the way you'd expect them to sound. "Braden," which by the rules of English decoding should have a long a, instead comes out "Brad-en" (short a), but multisyllable names that you might expect to give it a run for its money, like "Estes Kefauver" come out perfectly. Although you'd think "would," "should" and "could" appear with enough frequency in English to be sight words, they're not in the AI reader's database, and so it attempts to decode them, putting in a diphthong that sounds closer to "ow" than it's supposed to and pronouncing the "l" (thus, "should" sounds more like "showeled"). Words containing constructions like -tion and -cial, which are supposed to come out as single syllables, get an extra syllable here (as in "spe-shee-uhl" for "special"), and multisyllabic words often get the emPHAsis laid on the wrong sylLAble ("nonCHALantly," for just one of countless examples). Perhaps most humorously, the Kindle doesn't have a consistent approach for dealing with words in all caps. When Jane in L.A. Candy says "MMMMMM" to express that something sounds appetizing, Kindle says "em em em em em em," and when a chapter starts with the first word all in caps, that word better not be "IT," because Kindle will say "eye tee." However, sometimes it tries to read right through it when it's not supposed to. When Matt McCarthy talks about fellow baseball players who are graduates of BYU, Kindle says "byoo."

To be honest, I find the Kindle's text-to-speech quirks not only a constant source of entertainment, but also an interesting solution to many readers' chief complaint about audiobooks, that they get lost in sound and either lose track of the narrative thread or mesmerized to the point of falling asleep. The Kindle reader's failing actually make me a more vigilant listener, and I find myself paying closer attention to what I'm listening to than when I hear a velvety voiced actor performing a story. It's like a Brechtian distancing mechanism that simultaneously (and paradoxically) distances me from the flow of the story and spurs me to think more deeply about it. When I catch a mispronunciation, I usually smile and mumble the correct word, which then cements the author's words more firmly in my consciousness than if I just let them flow around me. Since it mispronounces on a fairly regular basis, I more closely monitor the individual words and phrases I'm hearing moment-by-moment, and thus hear more than I would have otherwise.

And you know what I really like about the text-to-speech feature? Whenever I want to stop listening, I can turn it off and go back to reading the printed text at the exact point where I stopped listening. When I want to listen again, I can press a button and start listening from the exact point where I stopped reading. Unless you're following along in a print copy with a traditional audiobook, then have the unusual talent of being able to magically cue up the audio to start at any location on the page, this is impossible to do with another delivery system than Kindle. This is how I read L.A. Candy. I'd listen for an hour while taking a walk, then curl up in bed to read a chapter or two, then pick up the audio again the next day, seamlessly and without having to find a "good place to stop" either while reading or listening. Now, I don't have to have my audiobook on CD for the car, a different audiobook on Playaway or mp3 for workouts, and my paper & glue books for every other context. I can pick up one book and dig into it across all my varied contexts of reading (except for reading underwater or in the rain I guess, which I really don't do anyway). The Kindle allows me to finish more books more quickly, which is awesome. That's what separates the Kindle from every other possible text or audio delivery system out there, and what for me makes it worth every penny. Now, if I could only get more of my professional reading onto it ...

New Reviews & Other Writing

My review of Pearl North's new YA sci-fi novel Libyrinth is now up at ALAN's Picks (scroll down a little bit less than halfway down the page to find it). In the professional books for teachers department, my somewhat less glowing review of Emily Cayuso's Flip for Non-Fiction Comprehension is up at Education Review (that link is direct!).

Yay! Two more little publications for the CV. I'm hoping to get a review out to EdRev for Michael Bitz's terrific Manga High: Literacy, Identity and Coming of Age in an Urban High School sometime in the next week, hopefully for their August Brief Reviews column.

And then it'll be time to tackle some long-in-development manuscripts on media literacy for peer review before prepping a full menu of presentations for NCTE in November.

Why all this attempted scholarship when my current position isn't on the publish-or-perish tenure track rat race? As they might say in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, it's all about the Whuffie ...

In the blog IOU department, I should probably say a thing or two about that big vacation trip to DisneyWorld we had last week, my take on Lauren Conrad's first foray into YA literature, L.A. Candy, some musings on science fiction that have been rattling around in my head (related both to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and our vacation there), and some off-the-record reviews of professional books that have been piling up on my desk. All in good time ...

Obligatory Michael Jackson Blog

Near the end of the Board of Trustees meeting last night, I felt the urge to take a peek at my email alerts on my cell phone and read the news (from a TV Guide Breaking News email) that Michael Jackson had been rushed to the hospital with cardiac arrest. Surprised and feeling not a little amount of dread, I immediately pulled up CNN.com to see that the King of Pop had died. I nudged our marketing director who was sitting next to me and showed her the news on my phone screen. She was shocked, took my phone and passed it on to the next person, who nodded and pointed to someone at the table who had apparently heard the news just before the meeting commenced.

Needless to say, I was pretty shocked. Shocked like when I learned that Elvis had died (yes, I do remember that) and that John Lennon had been murdered (I remember that awful December morning even more vividly). I'm still having some difficulty accepting it as reality, despite having listened to various jaded pundits asserting it as an inevitable outcome of his addictions and despite not having been a particularly big fan of his music in recent years.

That of course was not the case thirty years ago, when Off the Wall (along with ELO and the soundtracks for Saturday Night Fever and Grease) provided the soundtrack for my weekly elementary school roller rink excursions. That was one of my brother's first vinyl possessions, while Thriller was one of the cassettes I received in my first introductory pack from Columbia House. The debuts of the "Beat It" and "Thriller" videos were big moments in my MTV-addled tween years, as were Weird Al's parodies over the years. I coveted a red leather (probably not really leather, but I had no eye for such things) jacket with zippers all over it that some store in Tippecanoe Mall was selling. I fondly remember trying to impress girls at Mike Fleeter's bar mitzvah party with attempted moonwalking to various Thriller tunes (ummm ... it didn't work, incidentally). When a-ha's "Take On Me" was on top of the charts, I gave up on Top 40 radio and MTV in favor of Motown, Beatles, classic rock and Broadway, so I was pretty much oblivious to Bad until I saw Weird Al's "Fat" video at a cross country team pre-meet dinner. I enjoyed it, despite not having prior knowledge of the source material, and I still know Weird Al's parody better than MJ's original. When Alexis was a baby, I remember seeing the premiere of the "Black or White" video, which became quite the cause celebre of my intro to video production class at U of M (well, the morphing part at the end anyway), and on our first Michigan-to-Texas marathon drive that same Christmas for Alexis' baptism, I swear I must have heard that song at least once or twice an hour the whole way down. I ended up buying that album (on cassette), but only ever listening to "Black or White." The Michael Jackson episode of The Simpsons remains one of my favorites.

And that's pretty much it, to be honest. I really didn't follow the molestation scandals and found the reduction of his reputation into a too easy trope for lazy comedians to invoke eccentricity and perversion really distasteful. My kids' sense of Michael Jackson is as a primo weirdo, which is really unfortunate. Thankfully, his contributions to pop music and the music video age remain to be enjoyed, and will hopefully get more frequent airplay as the media that promoted him like a freakshow for the past 15 years or so now falls all over itself to commemorate his legacy. I'm very much hoping that EPCOT Center rolls out Captain EO for special showings while we're down there next week. Then the kids will know just who that odd looking guy used to be.