Short Story: "Secret Incognito" (A Piece of Stones of Erasmus Juvenilia)

"Secret Incognito" is a short story by Greig Roselli (© 1996)

A YOUNG BOY DECIDED TO ENTER A FIELD.

Stone monoliths soared into the sky with shards of rusty metal and broken glass beneath.  The enigmatic structures beckoned the lad; the eight slabs of concrete called to him.  Stains of derision from his family clung.  He climbed the fence (which had a clearly visible sign stenciled in red: “NO TRESPASSING!”) to escape for a while. He penetrated quickly to elude the threatening noise of the close traffic. With quick steps, he had already entered the depths, but he wasn’t afraid. Rusted metal, a browned apple core, and aluminum scraps riddled the bare, gaseous earth. Thorn laden brambles engulfed the concrete slabs. A can of Moxie lay entrapped in one of its clutches. Concealed in the twisting vine one could find secrets and lost memories. All of a sudden it seemed an adventure to explore this vast void, to maybe find a truth. A way to prove to himself there was more to life than bitterness and homework. The collected, curly-headed youth looked upward: tall monuments to fallen bridges that once traversed mighty waters stood before him. Huge pieces of masonry, stacked one on top of another, looked enticingly climbable. He scaled it with much agility, using the large rusty appendages as an aid. A bead of sweat etched its way across the boy’s face: the first sign of effort, true gusto, true vigor.

Repost: Why We're All Glad English Carries Gender Type Information

Photo by JW on Unsplash

A repost from NPR by Jessica Love of a story about grammar - when gender sometimes matters in language.

---

When gender sometimes matters in grammar (and why grammar examples are fun). This is the funniest grammar story since the panda in the bar.

Last year, arriving late to a departmental Christmas party, I was immediately greeted by a waifish 10-year-old with pale skin, delicate features, neatly braided long brown hair, and a stuffed clown fish.The girl solemnly informed me that her stuffed animal was dying of diphtheria. “Oh no!” I cried in mock horror. “Is your fish contagious?” Perhaps fearing I would launch into a speech about how young ladies should be careful around contagious fish, a fellow graduate student quickly interjected, He’s sure the fish isn’t contagious. I asked him that same question.” And that is how I learned that the strange girl with the delicate features and the long braid was in fact a boy. How deftly pronominal information is delivered, and gleaned, by fluent speakers! How different the entire situation would have been were I a speaker of Hawaiian or Persian, where gender isn’t marked at all!

by Jessica Love, Excerpt from I ♥ Pronouns

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Seven Exciting Interview Questions for David Gordon Green

In this post, I imagine an interview with the film director David Gordon Green.

David Gordon Green, American Film Director, and Producer

David Gordon Green is most famous for his hash success Pineapple Express. He once said that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is the most beautiful movie ever made. He also wrote and directed George Washington, a film about black youth in an impoverished southern town. This earlier work interweaves the kids' lives, pursuits, dreams, and the consequences of choice and fate.

I liked the film so much, I concocted an interview I'd like to give:

1. You mentioned in an interview with Charlie Rose, that you were okay with making "C's" in school. Do you think creativity is different than academic achievement?

2. In your film George Washington, there is a scene filmed in an abandoned school, completely filled in with kudzu, making it invisible from the street. As an artist from the south, what do you think needs to be done to rejuvenate our educational systems? George Washington depicts kids who are brimming with life but cut at the buds because of societal limitations. It reminds me of Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men. What do you think?

3. You seem to capture the beauty and ambiguity of youth so accurately, and differently, than any other artist, I have seen. What is your vision for youth in America, especially in the wake of Columbine, 9/11, and No Child Left Behind?

4. Whatever happened to the Confederacy of Dunces? Is it a cursed project?

5. Have you ever dabbled in fiction?

6. How is your house in New Orleans coming along?

7. One final question. Will you marry me?

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How Five-Year Olds See Adults Who Try to Talk At Their Level

Movie Review: World's Greatest Dad

Read a movie review by Greig Roselli about Bobcat Goldwaithe's dark comedy World's Greatest Dad (2009).

Two scenes are striking in Bobcat Goldwaithe's World's Greatest Dad (2009). THE FIRST is the scene where Lance Clayton, a beleaguered middle-age writer-cum-high school poetry teacher (Robin Williams) finds his strangled son, dead in his bedroom. The scene is doubly jarring for the viewer because, one, the first fifteen minutes of the film deliberately sets you up to despise the kid (Daryl Sabara, played with an acute douchebag factor). Kyle curses like a sailor, looks at scat porn, calls girls at school whores, proudly glorifies his own insouciant stupidity, uses his dad and his best friend Andrew to his own benefit, and is pretty much openly non-repentant about his deeds -- to the point of rebuffing every ounce of care his dad, Lance, has to offer.

     Second, is the cause of the boy's death (basically he dies via auto-eroticism). Go figure. Goldwaithe goes through extensive pains to make sure you absolutely hate this kid -- but at the same time -- when he is found in his bedroom, despite the embarrassing circumstances -- the viewer feels for Lance and the grief over his dull, insipid son. Even a douchebag son's death elicits authentic catharsis. Wow. I don't think I've seen this in cinema in a long time. I think this is partly due to Williams' engaging performance. Williams is an actor who can make you identify with the absurd. Think of The Night Listener, for example (which has eerie parallels to this film). The entirely silent soliloquy of finding the dead boy, checking to see if he is alive, releasing him from his makeshift noose, and mourning over his dead body was a genuine cathartic moment.

"The Dispute": Flash Fiction

Two dudes fight about what's better, bikes or boards.

BMXers are better for sure.

Nah.

I say, skaters.

BMX is an art.

Skateboarders just have that one board.

Bikes are intricate. Gears. Pedals. It's a craft.

More technical and you have to work 'em out.

But skating is like negative space. It is about the nothing between you and the board.

What?

You know what I mean.

No, really, I don't.

It's like - I don't know. Fuck.  

The skate park is empty except for Neil and Bryce. Neil kicks at the open gravel with his worn out tennis shoes. Bryce pumps air into his tire. The day is harsh. The air smells like turkey sandwiches and mace. The old garage-turned-park is grungy. A huge peace sign adorns the back wall. Metal siding decorates the corridors. The skate shop is closed. The place is closing down.

Hey guys, we're closing the place down. Time to get out.

One last go?

Hurry it up.

Bryce props his bike on the descending floorboard. The ground is uneven and raw. The place used to be a boat building company. Recently constructed by a Ph.D. student in urban planning to ostensibly curb violence and drug dealing, kids come to hang out mostly on weekends. Bryce walks his bike up the ramp. Saddles his bike as if it were a well-trusted friend. It is the force of gravity that propels him. The downward swoosh. His body does nothing. The bike moves with the flow of the earth's downward pull. Braced to the bike like a friend, he kicks off the ledge. The ramp takes a novice biker to the ground fast. After a few tries, you learn the ramp. You learn, like a Zen koan, the simplicity of the curves. The ramp is like a parabola. Arriving, at the other end the rider gives himself the needed push to make the trick. It is at this point the rider must fight gravity's pull and not let it take him. Bryce leverages the bike a bit to give it the control he needs, kicks it up and he is flying through the air as if he were to stay afloat forever. Nothing enters. His mind is a blank slate. As if he does not exist. That's the nice thing. The erasing of thought, he thinks. You don't have to think. Bryce hits the rough edge of the board's terminus. He spins the bike around on one wheel, bringing himself to a stop; adrenaline, like a rush from inside of him escalates and he wants to go again.  

Dusk is like charcoal. Both friends depart. Neil does an ollie in front of the ice cream van, as if to say, "Fuck you." And we get it then. What Neil said. It is the empty spaces. It is the nothing that exists between me and the board; the ramp and the air; my bike and everything else. Maybe I get it maybe I don't. The dude who owns the van is yelling at Neil. Neil laughs. We all laugh and joke on our way home about Bryce's stunt.

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Quote: Cheever on Marriage

 “Liza sent us a wheel of Brie.” “That’s nice,” she said, “but you know what? Brie gives me terribly loose bowels.” He hitched up his genitals and crossed his legs. “That’s funny,” he said. “It constipates me.” That was their marriage then - not the highest paving of the stair, the clatter of Italian fountains, the wind in the alien olive trees, but this: a jay-naked male and female discussing their bowels.

John Cheever, The Falconer

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photo credit: canarygirl

"Short Story": Søren’s Problem

image credit: sacrevoir

ON A WOODEN, MOLDING PARK BENCH in Dante Square I watch people, in cars, or scurrying to the subway entrance, pass the bruised statue of Dante Alighieri, slightly smaller than a person, standing amidst some guarded poplars and dogwoods, a singed bronze laurel atop his head, an open book in his hand: abandon all hope ye who enter here; his hard eyes peer ahead to the steel, adamantine buildings, beyond the trees, etching out a damned vision. I do not smile as I sit, nor do I frown; I just sit here transfixed. Images. Pastels. Dot-matrix printouts of experience. A feature-length film queuing in my brain, snapshots of Christine placed between the frames. I snip the celluloid, hungry and bone-weary. I have a story to tell. In the Cinema Paradiso of reality, a guy runs up to me, a runner on his beat. He stops his stride and backs up a few feet, looking over my head.

Quote of the Day for a Recession

In this quote from Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, an unwritten law about capitalism is illustrated.

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Notes from a High School English Teacher: Letter to my Students

Copy of a high school teacher's letter to his students about their final freshman year writing project with an addendum of quotes:

Valediction

    IT IS OFTEN said, "words are like bullets."

    While, this may not sound true - how can a word be like a bullet? - it is VERY true.

    Our words matter. Like a bullet, words can DO something. Cause destruction. Words can cause a revolution. Words can shatter. Words rock.

    Here we have a collection of your words, strung together to make a PORTFOLIO.

Words matter.

    Writing has not yet deserved a funeral. But a resurgence.

    SO

    It has been a quirky, productive year. Even Susie Q agrees. Bon Qui Qui also concurs. Even, Mr. Roselli, that unkempt teacher, who barely gets his grades in on time and wears mixed-match clothes, seldom shaves, and looks like he is married to a coffee cup, agrees - words matter. Keep writing.

    I remember all of you:

    Especially these random things:

    1. Raised hands; 2. fixing my hair; 3. plushy fish dolls; 4. Au Revoir Les Enfants; 5. Oedipus at the Museum; 6. Mr. Hebert's benign interruptions; 7. Mr. Stabiler's talk on Greek Mythology; 8. big words; 9. "imitation is the best form of flattery"; 10. "familiarity breeds contempt"; 11. Google Hacks; smartboard mishaps; 12. "Y'all are hot (higher order thinkers)"; 13. "A MANNNNN?"; 14. literary rally champs; 15. "Hey, I know what hyperbole means!"; 16. "Thunk is my word!"; 17. "Does reading about Lady Gaga count?"; 18. "You're making us read this .... sophisticated newspaper ...?"; 19. "Can we read the Inferno? I like hell"; 20. "How can a guy survive on a lifeboat with a tiger? I mean come on."; 21. "Mr. Roselli, you need a hug?"; 22. "You know you love us."; 23. "OMG! I love that book!"; 24. "This may sound funny, but I wrote this paper last night. But, it's brilliant."; 25. "You guys are sick!"; 26. "You know, it reminds me of an episode from Sponge Bob ..."; 27. "Give me back the pen, buster."; 28. A severe whooshing sound; 29. pile of sweaters; 30. Free Writes!; 31. interactive notebooks; 32. scotch tape; 33. indecipherable handwriting; 34. chronic sleepers; 35. overachievers; 36. underachievers; 37. "Hitch your wagon to a star! Or, what's a heaven for?"; "Can you exterminate the lights, please? Or is it terminate? I can't remember." 38. There's a difference: To be is to do (Socrates); Yabba dabba doo (Fred Flintstone)
G. Roselli

New Orleans, LA

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What I Eavesdropped at a Recent High School Graduation

In this post, I write about what I overheard at a high school graduation I attended.

The Author as a High School Graduate

At a recent high school graduation, an honors student receives recognition for a music and science scholarship. A parent in the row behind mine, says, "That's interesting, but, what do you do with music and science? Nothing, I guess."

If we need another example of anti-intellectualism in America - there you go.

Or, it could be just ignorance. Legitimately, maybe she did not how music and science can inter-relate.

However she sussed out the situation for herself, it was still a dim reminder to me to of how much my job is often looked at askance - or in a larger view - the often conflicted view Americans have of education.

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Quote of the Day for a Viper

Why Madame Rawdon “was no better than a vipère”:

She became a perfect Bohemian ere long, herding with people whom it would make your  hair stand on end to meet.

William Makepeace Thackeray, - Vanity Fair

photo credit: ceillac

Is it Ethical for a Current Teacher to Publicly Write about their Job?

In this post, I write about the ethics of writing about what teachers do in our jobs. Is it right to write about what goes in the classroom?
Yes, it's ethical. Teachers should write about their jobs, not as journalists but as biased humanistic observers. It's unethical not to. With the recent outlash against teachers for not reaching the bar, teachers more than ever should write about what they do in the classroom.
Not just about education, but cliques, trends, clashes and what works and what doesn't work in the field. The department of education is cheering about the new trend, crowdsourcing.

Since education is failing, the Department of Education wants to champion this idea of great educators sharing ideas in the cloud. The problem is the bad teacher doesn't benefit from crowdsourcing. It's enough to teach most teachers how to update lesson plans.

I began to write about teaching, not as a criticism, but as logotherapy, two years ago. I've clocked 23,000 words on the subject. A book? The nut graph is this: teachers are not like Mr. Holland's Opus, but more like a beleaguered Yoda after the fall of the Jedi.

The first amendment protects my right to free speech but doesn't protect how people respond to what I write.

Can I get fired? Sure. So, I guess it depends on the writer. Can your students find your website, your article, or your blog? Sure. They can choose to agree or disagree, dispute or support. If someone disagrees isn't it the egalitarian nature of the web at work? As long as what you post is not slander, dishonesty, hate speech, or intentionally set out to harm someone (like cyber-bullying) then I think it's ok to post.

For me, I write publicly. It's pretty easy to trace my real identity. I do not claim to hide who I am.

If I were to write for a zine, a blog, a newspaper or a book, I think I deserve to be transparent.

I teach, "write to be heard" so I try to practice what I teach.

I do not include the real names of other people unless these people give me permission.

I sparingly include images of my workplace, students, logos, or anything that identifies my school. I try to write in a humanizing manner, and not merely to harangue on my own institution.

I will mention identifying information If I think such whistleblowing is for the greater good. But, I would write about the whistle-blowing and not use my website as a whistle. Proper channels should be used to expose corruption.

People are afraid of the power of writers.

The printed word is potent.

At the coffee stand, yesterday, the world geography teacher and I commiserate. He says I don't commiserate enough. I tell him about my writing. He says, "You know, I'm tired of this gig. The kids. You know. They're like robots."

His remarks strike me as remarkable. Here's a fairly intelligent guy, good looking, head on his shoulders, but I see the same dispassionate face in him that I see in my own face.

It's pretty rough out in the field. I don't see as many teacher bloggers as there are librarian bloggers. No teacher friends commiserating on the web. We need to represent. I'm sure our students write about us on the web, so we need a national writer's project upsurge to write about the class.

In France, a teacher wrote about his experience as a suburban French teacher in Paris. His story was made into a film, "Entre Les Murs" (The Class). It's a sobering chronicle. He does not represent himself as a champion in the classroom, but rather as a beaten down, yet prodigious, educator. Like my coffee buddy and I. All of us intellectually curious. But what beleaguers us?

Thoughts from a Newly Minted Teacher: It Ain't Mr. Holland's Opus

Teaching is fun though. You feel like yer making a difference - but it ain't Mr. Holland's Opus.

“A Mere Labyrinth of Letters”: Preoccupations of Librarianship and Epistemological Conjecturing in Borges’ “The Library of Babel”

An illustration of the Library of Babel by Erik Desmazieres 

Librarians share two major philosophical preoccupations:

1. The idea of a total library
2. The futility of such a library.

Librarians are “total” in their desire for a perfect, or a complete library, but, unfortunately, the totalitarian nature of librarians has fossilized the notion that if it isn’t in the library then it doesn’t exist. The "if it is not in the records it does not exist" idea is as old as recorded history. The promise of complete, total, accessible knowledge (the first preoccupation) is shadowed by the librarian's futile wading through miles and miles of totality (the hell) to search and find that one piece of totality that one is looking. The total nature of the catalog is supposed to mirror precisely what is on the shelf. But the maddening job of the cataloger is to constantly check the catalog against what is on the shelf and fix any errors; this process has the hope of finish but is bound to be endlessly nonfinished. Librarians spend hours cleaning records, assigning call numbers, shelving books in an endless cycle of return. This nature of librarianship is actually not only the preoccupations of Library Science but of Western Philosophy in general.  Ever since the philosopher Thales posited that there must be something material that underlies all existence — we will forgive him for positing water — philosophers have searched for a univocity, or an absolute to explain that which undergirds reality. Of course, the philosophical search comes short. There is a futility in this search (think of Adam futile search to name all animals or Aristotle's futile search to give names to everything) although it does not cancel out the desire to search. That, my dear, is the paradox of the quest.

Note on New Orleans Nightlife: Leaving the Bars

Nude Descending a Staircase

Now, in the city of New Orleans, a good time can be broken down into twos:

Hang out at a bar

Or

Hang out at a house (bar)

Both are pretty much the same choice in a city that looks with suspicion on people who don't drink.

If you tell your friends you're not drinking tonight, they'll inevitably say, "Oh, you don't drink?" and then whisper to each other, "Is he an alcoholic?"

Now, those who drink a lot are certainly prone to rules. If you hang out at bars, you'll find it's common practice to treat the bartender like a god. Don't mess with her (or him). Or you'll be kicked out.

Walking down South Carrolton Avenue near the Riverbend on most nights in the Spring, it is easy to find people outside drinking, grilling, walking, drinking - the local bars are filled and people are sitting out on patio decks in front of restaurants (this city has more food than the Vatican has indulgences) or coffee shops.

There's a grocery store near Dante and Cohn streets where people get a six pack: people ride their bikes along Carrolton, drink a bit, eat crayfish at the Fly (the park behind the Audubon Zoo). My buddy's getting married this coming weekend. He's having his birthday at the fly, a cozy municipal park with an unobstructed view of the Mississippi River.

A bit of nostalgia pervades this post.

This post is a valediction of sorts. I'm saying farewell. So, I conjure up images of a city.

New Orleans sleeps. The denizens here are notorious for the eazy but we still show up for work and we still dress snazzy when the occasion merits it.

It's funny. For a city that places emphasis on laissez-faire, it's easy to deconstruct that concept and rather interpret the city as rather insular and rigid.

We do party here. But our festivity borders on the vicissitudes of human suffering. Just today, a man doused in a sheen of silver paint loiters in front of the Robert's on S. Claiborne Avenue. He looks like a misplaced French Quarter performer. He shuffles around the parking lot as if lost.

On Facebook, a random user bemoans an LA Times article that paints a laissez-faire city more interested in the beat of tourist dollars and the mambo rather than collaborating to stop the oil leak in the gulf.

"Oh, we don't deal with crude oil, just the end consumer's access to gasoline."

Why so angry? The city is a paradox. When the mirror is put to the Cresent City's face we balk and turn our convivial nature to indignance.

Here the party scene is a masked insouciance for opting out of social responsibility. What can you do but pop another shot, neat? I think I finally understand Walker Percy's quote about dispelling anomie with a glass of bourbon. He must've lived here!

We love our traditions and culture (laissez-faire) but fail to wake up from our Mardi Gras slumber and DO something.

Our city is beautiful. The city struts herself like boys on a bar. We pop dollars (at Liuzza's last night, a feverish 30 something women showed we here stash of dollars she saved for her vacation here) and a group of petroleum engineers in front of John Besh's August raved about food but wouldn't even answer a question about the danger of oil exploration. The metaphor for the city (a parallax view) is of the nude descending a staircase.

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Flash Fiction: "Tar Pit Dream"

I dreamt last night that I lost Harrison. We were sitting in my Honda Coupe exchanging glances and soft words, not knowing it would be my last and as it started to rain I just figured it was the time-worn pattern of weather, not a thick wet shield that drenched the Crescent City in a goldfish bowl-like flood. We managed to cling together despite the rising of the dark, dirt water all around us; the cars, stacked neatly in row upon numbered row, submerged evenly, then the streetcars, then the first floor, then the second — water even filled up the cages in the Audubon Zoo. In my dream we both found refuge on Monkey Hill — I remember that, the highest spot in the city — and I could see from where I stood the spire of Saint Louis Cathedral — and the more I spoke to Harrison the more he sank and the more the cathedral looked dry and welcoming, the soot and sin scraped off Decatur and Bourbon like it had gone through a full-service gas station. When I awoke in my fevered drenched four-poster, a faint halo of Harrison's crown sinking into the tar colored water dovetailed in my mind's eye and with a throaty taste of peanut butter from the night before, stuck somewhere in my neck, and I gasped.

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Image Source: 'The naked young man sitting by the sea' (1836) by Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin; Musée du Louvre, Paris

Printables: Blank World Map for Printing (with borders)

In an effort to raise Geography Awareness, here is a blank World Map.

Can you :

• Name all the oceans spelled correctly?
• Name the continents of the world spelled correctly?
• Identify the state and capital you live in currently

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Check out my Teachers' marketplace on Teachers Pay Teachers for more resources I have made for use in any classroom.

Facebook Haiku

his profile pic reads

want love eyes on status

an orgy of likes

Quote of the Day

makezine

You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can't express your individuality in sterling prose, I don't want to read about it.

Ted Genoways

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Poem: “Backyard Fantasyland”

We hop around bridges, we dance with
trolls. We have a blast with ants. We
meet with nymphs and fairys.

Rabbits show the way. It is so nice
to know they have something to say.

A Badger invites us to tea, with a little
sponge cake.

A faun entertains us with a dance in
a meadow filled with dew.

All of these things happened in a five
year old’s backyard.

---

All you need is an imagination

See the mind, see the bridge, see almost
anything. All you need is an imagination.
Say, you are doing good.

January 13, 1994

Photo: Bike

Common French Phrases with English Translations

French	Literal Translation	English Equivalent
Avoir mal au coeur	To have a pain in the heart	To feel sick to the stomach
Bouche cousue!	Mouth sewn up!	Mum’s the word!
La bête à bon Dieu	God’s fool	A ladybug or a ladybird
Dites, “Qurante-quatre!”	Say, “Forty-four!”	Say, “Ah!”
Poisson d’avril	April fish	April’s fool
Gober la mouche	To swallow the fly	Swallow the bait, a gullible person swallows it, “hook, line, and sinker”
Ecriture de chat	Cat’s writing	Scribble scratch
Avoir le cafard	To have the cockroach	To be down in the dumps
Mets le dans ta pouche avec ton mouchoir dessus	Put it in your pocket with your handkerchief on top	Put it in your pipe and smoke it
Jouer à saute — mouton	To play jump-sheep	To play leap-frog
Revenons a nos mouton	Let’s get back to our sheep	Let’s get back to the subject
Vouloir, c’est pouvoir	To wish is to be able	To wish is to be able
A bon chat, bon rat	To the good cat, a good rat	To the good cat, a good rat
Le chouchou de prof	The teacher’s cabbage	The teacher’s pet
dent-de-lion	Lion’s tooth	a dandelion
Il m’aime un peau...beaucoup...passionnement...à la folie...pas du tout	He loves me a little...a lot...passionately..madly… not at all	He loves me…he loves me not
Si jeunesse savait, si viellesse pouvait	If the young only knew, if the old only could	Youth is wasted on the young
Le champ est libre	The field is clear	The coast is clear
A bon chien, il ne vient jamais un bon os	A good dog never gets a good bone	Nice guys finish last
On aurait entendu une mouche voler	You could have heard a fly fly	You could have heard a pin drop
Mettre la puce à l’oreille à quelqu’un	To put the flea in someone’s ear	To annoy someone
Avoir le main verte	To have a green hand	To have a green thumb
Être beurré	To be buttered	To be plastered
Latin de cuisine	Kitchen Latin	Pig Latin
C’est du chinois	It’s Chinese	It’s Greek to me

Lagniappe:
Words with ugly meanings but beautiful sounds in French

la poubelle	garbage can
un ronfleur	a snorer
une mouffete	a skunk
une toilette	a toilet

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