I wanted to read The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow because I know a lot about witch history. I did my Masters on Witch Literature (about, not by) and I taught a course on witch mythology last summer.

Thus, this book did not teach me a damn thing, except that I don’t like this book.

As it’s about the last witchfinder, it’s set in the 18th Century. Fine and dandy. It’s narrated by a book. Not fine and dandy.

This is a book about how science is powerful, but we’re supposed to believe that books are sentient and have the ability to possess people.

And books as objects aren’t sentient–books as ideas are sentient. So even if there are millions of copies, there is only one book. And our narrator would have you believe that “good” literature is smart literature and that other books are dim.

The narrator, aside from being a book, is a pretentious asshole. The narrator likes to say how great the heroine is. It does this so it doesn’t have to show us.

Yes–hundreds of pages, but no emotional connection to the characters. And there is a plot, but the arc of the story doesn’t work and thus it’s basically episodic with what should be a climax, but is decidedly not.

Now, maybe I’m not supposed to like the narrator or the plot or any of the characters. Maybe that’s because this is a book about obsession, and might have you see that obsession makes you boring.

But I don’t think it’s that clever, even if it really thinks it is.

Yes–we are in an economic downturn, but I made sure that one extra person went to Vegas this Spring Break.

Last quarter, my advanced composition students had to write a letter addressed to someone they knew, using what they learned about persuasion, to changed his/her mind about something. One of my students was attempting to get permission from her very conservative/traditional parents to go to Vegas.

We went over it in office hours and I made a suggestion about adding a paragraph . . .

I found out today that she sent the letter to her parents and that she indeed went to Vegas. Her mother specifically cited my paragraph.

Success!

With the advent of Twitter, I don’t see how “twitterpated” won’t make it back into the regular lexicon. Denise and I are fairly twitterpated this week. A certain director of The Simpsons movie twittered us after Denise said she was working on the Linguistics section of the book.

Since, he’s asked to see my syllabus! It’s the best thing that’s happened in a relatively lousy week. I won’t go into the lousy stuff.

Instead, I’ll go back to linguistics–why do we call a twitter response a “tweet” and not a “twit”? Then we could say, “This twit says she’s eating egg salad for lunch.” And, as a friend suggested this week, is the past tense of “tweet” “twat”?

The matchflick column is here:  http://www.matchflick.com/column/1882

I reported a little while ago on Atwood not attending a conference in Dubai because the conference censored an author whose book had a gay muslim character.  Atwood (and the rest of us) have since learned that the conference says they didn’t censor the book or author, but that they did not choose the book for inclusion in the festival.  The author seems to have exaggerated.  Atwood is going to appear at the conference via satellite for a panel on censorship.

I think there’s going to be a lot to talk about.  Her own book, The Handmaid’s Tale, is still under review by a school system after a challenge.  Part of that book was inspired by Atwood’s visit to Islamic countries and her experimentation with a burka.

Also, while the conference says it didn’t censor the other author’s book, one interview I read did say that a conference organizer felt the text was “too controversial.”  As we asked in book group last night, what’s the line between “I censor your book!” and “Sorry, due to its content, we won’t work with this book–it’s too controversial/thought-provoking”?

So I tried crumpets for the first time day–Trader Joe’s rarely does me wrong.  Are they supposed to taste like doughy english muffins and sit heavily in the stomach?

I’ve been watching The Simpsons all week (from the beginning), making notes, and checking the wikipedia entries for things I may have missed (this has led to my new hobby of wikipedia editing–sometimes it’s grammar, sometimes factual.  The boy says I simply must do this service.  It makes me even whiter and nerdier than before!

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Nh9mVsBKwYs&hl=en&fs=1″></param><paramname=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Nh9mVsBKwYs&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

(Yes, the lego version.  I can’t embed the real one for some reason.)

Am also reading everything other people have written about my favorite show.  This in itself isn’t a problem (except that it’s taking a lot of time and I like reading more than the requisite taking of notes).  I’m going crazy with the little and big mistakes and growing increasingly more paranoid that I’m going to make some. 

But really, I’m tired of reading the same two things over and over again (especially when they’re in every article in a book).

1.  One may think it’s strange to write/study/learn from The Simpsons, but . . .

2.  (some description of the characters, e.g. Bart is the troublemaker . . .)

It’s all cliches now and I think I’m going to go mad.  Am tempted to keep a chart with how many times the same words are used (hapless, moral center, etc).

A little ways into The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, it occurred to me that the book had a lot in common with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I read Foer’s book with my book group, but I wasn’t that fond of it.  Krauss seems to be doing what Foer was trying to do–but actually pulling it off.

The History of Love has multiple points of view and books within books.  I enjoyed all of the voices and found them touching.  Ultimately, this book is about two people.  Leo escaped WWII only to find his love married to another and the book he was writing lost.  We meet him decades later, as he struggles to feel seen in a world where he’s been erased as a man, father, and writer. 

Alma is a young girl trying to find her widowed mother a new love interest, to shake her mother out of depression.  She must also contend with a younger brother who consols himself in religious devotion (to the point of building an ark) and a foreign born male friend who wants to be a boyfriend.

Are the lives of our two heroes going to touch?  Of course.  Will all secrets be revealed?  Not exactly.  And even those that are will be more clear to you than to the characters.  While there are amazing coincidences in this book, the realistic streak comes from several characters dying before they find out secrets or before cathartic confrontations.

Speaking of coincidences, Krauss and Foer are married, but they didn’t meet until they had written the books about writing and love that I find so similar. 

I highly recommend this.

These days, the only people who are commenting on the blog are people from .ru. At first, I was getting a bunch of messages that said “yoooo, dr-karma is the best name ever!” They were accompanied by links to other pages, which basically made them ads. Today I have five comments all pending for “A Proper Blog,” the blog that included the glossary at the very beginning of all this:
You may use Yahoo for this question, it can be interesting.
Most interesting blog of this month!
How may I begin won journal?
I agree with all in this post! Thank you
I should find morer infprmation about this post
[sic]
These are not accompanied by ad links, though they may be a gateway (once you get approved, you get to post whatever).
Am I being too cautious about spam or should I embrace my Russian fan club?

Atwood has pulled out of an appearance at the International Festival in Dubai after a British author was banned from the conference due to homosexual content in her work. Dubai is supposed to be the Vegas of the Arab world, but as many countries’ leaders have told us (I’m looking at you, Iran), there are apparently no gay people in the Arab world. This is especially funny since the Arab world seems fond enough of Michael Jackson (maybe they have it mixed up and think he likes little girls?)

In other news, the school board in Canada who heard a complaint about The Handmaid’s Tale has decided that the book is still recommended and has value to students. The newspaper story I read about it quoted the father who complained about the book as saying he wasn’t sure what his son was supposed to be learning from the text. Maybe he’d like to come to book group and we could help him out with that?

First lesson–the book teaches you that the freedom to read is more important than the freedom from having books out there you don’t like.

MacHomer, my absolute favorite blending of Shakespeare and Simpsons, is getting a New York run. I’ve seen the play twice (and it’s amazing–pee in your pants funny). It’s postmodern, fun, cultural, and political (some of the jokes change each week).
Readers: have you seen it, do you want to see it, if you’re in New York, how are you going to thank me for telling you to go see it?

Check out the website here:  http://machomer.com/news/56  If you go to the main page, you can see clips of the show!