About Me

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I am a social media manager, an avid reader and media enthusiast. I am always curious about how our culture is effected by technology and media and literature, and how the three topics intersect.

Friday, March 12, 2010

The author of most of my favorite books these days...

I loved this quote about Mo Willems, one of my favorite children's authors...

Mo Willems is really tall. His is audience is very short. (Think knee-high or lower.)
 I love to read to my girls. It's one of my favorite things to do. And I love how we are sharing some of my favorite books ever. As a college student, I had a professor who encouraged us to reminisce on our literary history, and so I tried to do this with my students one semester. I got a few stellar projects (I loved the collage I got of a shadow outline of the student surrounded by clippings of her favorite books) but many of them fell flat. Oh well. I think one day that student will probably publish some of her own work-- or at least I hope so, because she was an AMAZINGLY creative soul, so perhaps the literary history project will help. And maybe one day my girls will read Alice in Wonderland or Where the Wild Things Are, or Mo Willems, and be inspired and nostalgic. I hope so!! We live in these books,and they become part of who we are. Today Francie wanted to be a superhero. Or Princess Mulan, brave and fierce and intelligent. I know Ladybug Girl and the princess books are teaching her that as a girl, she has the power to be all of those three things, and MORE! My little artist. Mo Willems, look out. She can read, write and paint. I might have a new favorite author one day. 


I'm so proud of my kids. And I love to read. I'm glad these things can go hand in hand. :)

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Semicolons made less scary

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon

The Oatmeal is an ADD Onion/slashdot. It's a great place to find geek humor!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Read the Whole Damn Thing

Okay, guys-- let me start with an apology. I put all this blog to the side when I got into the fund-raising season for my team with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and then after that got underway I kind of couldn't figure out where to go next. Then mommy work got in my way, of course. Every parent can sympathize with that... but now I am going to get back to it. Even if I decide not to go back into teaching, I think the side of my world that includes reading and writing and talking about literature deserves some attention. So I'm going to publish the few posts I started last summer and then get back into the swing of it. So here is the first one about what I was reading last summer-- so this was written in July and then edited this weekend:

I finished Twilight last month, one book a week. I am pretty surprised, and everyone I know is usually surprised about this too-- I don't always finish what I'm reading, and often I take a long time to get through each read. Even though I'm an English teacher. But I get bored with a book pretty easily (as I am now with Slaughterhouse Five) and so often I put a book down to come back to it a year later. But on the other hand, perhaps this makes me a better teacher because I can look at a book more critically, instead of just loving everything.

Twilight was one of those books, like Harry Potter or Dr. Seuss, that everyone can find something in. One thing that came to mind over and over as I was reading it was the bridge that it can make to classical literature, because I find this is a good way to build a bridge for my students. Twilight was amass with them-- Frankenstein, Romeo & Juliet (Shakespeare in general, actually) and Bronte... and everything else. I'm sure there are so many others, I can't mention them all. This connection offers a comfort to readers and says, "Hey, you can understand this of course, because you've read it before." We like predictability.

Twilight was an overtly Gothic novel. The setting is outside Seattle (where several of my in-laws recently visited and couldn't stop raving about it-- born and raised Southerners) and the weather is always on Bella's mind, even though it doesn't change often. Whenever we do see a change in the weather, it is always significant. (Obviously-- any novelist wouldn't ever mention a change or a state of anything unless it was significant!!) This is a technique we saw often in Frankenstein. The choice of setting (aside from being a way to explain how the vampires are out in the daytime) was probably because in Washington, if you don't like the weather, you can wait a little bit and then it'll be different.

Now, I know all the people who got sucked into this series had so many different opinions about how the characters changed-- or didn't. I was recently talking to a friend who was trying to explain the plot of the novels very loosely and was discussing how each of the characters was flat or dynamic or how these traits were necessary for the the plot to progress. But this addresses one of the issues literature buffs have with pop lit: even if the work adheres to conventions of lit, and it is relevant to our culture, how do we determine the significance of that work? Yes, Twilight is cheesy chick lit. The movies (from what I've heard) are terrible-- and terribly addicting. But yet we continue to validate the place of these necessary evils in our culture because, honestly, not everyone needs to be an intellectual. Some of us need Bella and Edward, and if it keeps people reading and thinking that's okay in my book.

So I guess I do feel guilty, especially as a person who considers myself somewhat intelligent, for being so easily sucked in to Twilight. But I am also I got it out of my system, and now I have the knowledge of the series to be part of the cultural dialogue that ensues when a fad is born. And also, chicks dig vampires. I'll admit it.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Summer love... catching up on junk reads.

I am ready for summer to begin! Oh, wait. This stack of research papers is not. They will dwindle here shortly... they are so much more fun to write than read, but I will find my way through them. I just hate taking off points, and so I end up just marking them and saying, "Yay! A for EFFORT!" and then the students never care to see what could improve it to say "A for astute academic discovery!!" and so I guess in that regard... Mrs. Rogers, you get a C for over praising average students. But I feel like they all deserve A's for doing the work.

SO then after that I am going to delve into my summer reading and reflecting on movies, books, information on my mind. I keep hearing myself talk about what I am GOING to do. Teaching really monopolizes your time like that-- if you have free time you are planning and grading and not reading and researching. And so I make plans to do it later. The first summer plan will be a good light reading novel. A nice 500 page light reading book about dark scary vampires. This is as close as I can get to a harlequin novel, so I guess it is trashy indulgence.

Last night I was feeling achy & cold sniffly, so I did not do any grading. I nosed into Twitter and Twilight. I am enjoying Twilight so far-- it's a cute little adolescent read, nothing too literary about it, and some so-so kind of use of imagery and realism and symbols. I can already in the first few chapters see how it really does fall into the adolescence genre, though. It can be pretty transparent at times-- Meyers is not hiding the story at all. You can already see in the first thirty pages that the group of weird kids at this high school are going to change Bella's life. She creates connections between Bella and the Cullen kids that are so obvious-- the light skin, being outsiders, her fascination with them... Very obviously setting up some themes for the book. So we will see what happens next. I think I can predict, but I will hold on and post about Twilight again after I finish the book.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Obsession: Twilight

Magic realism:Fiction which displays a mingling of the mundane with the fantastic, giving the narrative dual dimensions of realism and fantasy. One of its purposes is to draw attention to the fact that all narrative is an invention.

I am fascinated with this genre, and I am starting to write a treatment/screenplay something or another that is quite heavily influenced by the different fantastical works I have enjoyed so long. I have also introduced my World Literature students to the study of magical realism for our Latin American works, because of my love of Marquez.

I love Marquez (the Father of Magical Realism), and I love X-Men, superheroes, twentieth century, vampire movies... it just makes sense that I would follow magical realism. I even realized (as far as I can tell) that most children's literature follows the definition of magical realism, as we were discussing whether or not "SpongeBob" falls into the genre, and we discussed Twilight a lot. My students are OBSESSED!

I am going to have to read it this summer, but it brings me to wonder: Why is vampire literature so enticing? Or more so, as a film genre? Thomas Foster points out the symbolism behind vampirism, that it is sexual and at the same time represents our egocentricism. As I re-read what Foster has to say about it, I understand now why this is so intriguing to teens. I remember watching Interview with a Vampire over and over as a teen, and I understand why it is so alluring to teens. But is it magical realism? It mixes fantasy and reality, it addresses social issues (in a very broad sense), it uses the supernatural, all the issues surrounding MR. But there is never any feel that the work understands that it is just a narrative, and so one wonders if it stiill counts. And then the larger issue at that point is, now that CG is so advanced, and our children watch more TV and have no lines between reality and fantasy, is it in any way not real? Where is the line now? I need to know. I'm going to think about this one some more, and by think I mean go see X-Men Origins.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Entering the Imaginary

A blog. Finally. I’ve only been reading and writing blogs for the last couple months, but I have fallen in love with the genre, and I have made it a mental priority to get back to writing. I put other things ahead of the imaginary world in order to find purpose and meaning and structure in my life. Now that those purposes have gotten dull, I need to come back full circle.

And ahhhhhh! I have gotten my feet wet. I am ready to begin. I cannot wait to see what I find out there.