PS. I'm not the only one with a problem

So, last night I thought maybe it was problematic that I occasionally talk about the various notebooks I appear to be collecting (and using, rest assured), but Lo-Fi Hi-Fi Me just admitted, rather elegantly, to the same thing. Check it out.

April Progress Report

April was a stellar month- perhaps my most productive since last August. Part of it's success comes from the declining demands of my "real" job as the ebb and flow of my work year sees my workload subside to something resembling more of an 8-4 job. Being less tired at the end of the day makes it easier to either sneak in a bit of writing at the end of the day, or wake-up early the next day, since I prefer to do most of my writing in the morning. During most of January and February for example, I was so tired, so often, that I was sleeping in most mornings and missing these prime writing sessions. Also, for much of April I had a really good trend going of starting to write early Saturday morning before everyone woke up and then continuing to write as I waited outside my daughter's music class.

The other thing that turned out to be surprisingly influential was sitting down and watching Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Limited. While most of my friends are evenly split on the value and enjoyment of Anderson's movies, I found Darjeeling Limited's depiction of a dysfunctional family trying to reconcile in the wake of the family patriarch's death extremely helpful to dealing with some of the themes of Games of Chance, a story I'm writing that has as one of its themes family dynamics between cousins following the death of their grandfather. My initial reaction to Darjeeling Limited was to borrow the model of the three brothers but the more I considered this and planned it out, the more options became apparent to me. In the end, Darjeeling Limited made me realize that their many different paths I could take to get to where I wanted the story to go, and once I saw that, a lot of words started flowing.

The other big thing to happen in April was that I shared some of the basic plot points from A Saturday Afternoon By The Slurpee Machine (relax, it's just a working title based on the opening scene) with Good Grief Lucy and she recommended some twists that I really like. Her feedback allowed a lot of other ideas to tumble out, so hopefully I'll be able to build on some of that momentum in May.

Finally, and this won't show up in the word count tally, I actually flipped through the unfinished writing I had done for The Liminal Trip looking for a description of something that I thought I might want to use in Games of Chance. It rekindled my interest in this piece and I even jotted down a couple of paragraphs - though of course, my writing style has changed a fair bit in the last ten years. It will be interesting when the time finally comes to edit The Liminal Trip to insure that it has a consistent voice.

Short Stories:
"Of Light and Darkness" - in revision*
* this is part of my Twilight of the Idle short story series along with"Labellypock", "A Night on the Fronde" and "Out of Time (Ped Xing)"
"How My Uncle Faught The Spanish Civil War" - 1000 words
"Il Brute" - 700 words, a short story about living in Bridgeland

Novel Ideas (and working titles):
A Saturday Afternoon By The Slurpee Machine - 6474 words, growing up in NE Calgary, circa 1990
Games of Chance - 23355 words, quasi-related to the current economic downturn
The Last Days of the Daily Wenzel - 8154 words
Father Borsato di Sangi - notes only, about a priest in small town Alberta, circa 1910, - 127 words
Mt. Pilatus Calls My Name - notes only, a corporate satire- 3111 words

Sisyphus In Hell/I Was Misinformed - 2402 words

Good Ideas At The Time (Whole draft novels):
joculatores domini - in revision, a novel about parking attendants and the Calgary Stampede
The Liminal Trip - in revision, backpacking through Europe,

Trump Project: 1533 words

April's Total Word Count:45156

Madder Than A Hatter

So my wife received this journal in the mail today as part of an Alice In Wonderland themed knitting kit packaged from Woolgirl. Since I'm always looking for notebooks to write in, she gave it to me, as she did earlier with the Cowardly Lion journal she received.

Alice In Wonderland is one of those stories filled with incidental yet highly memorable characters. I was surprised that some kind of online quiz asking "Which Alice Character Are You?"did not find it's way to me before the release of the Tim Burton movie. It seems like the kind of story made for those kinds of how-I-see-myself, how-I-think-others-see-me, how-others-actually-see-me types of personality tests.

Had one come my way, I would not have been caught off guard to see the results as follows: The Cheshire Cat has long been my favourite character, since I love the ambiguity and doubt that seems to trail after him wherever he goes. Philosophically these are the kinds of things that interest me: the limits of certainty and measurements, the boundaries of what can be known and what is necessarily unknowable.

My professional work often leaves me in the role of kind of guide, so I would hope that people would see me in the role of the White Rabbit. However, my fear is that too often my appreciation of doubt and ambiguity, along with my willingness to push conceptual boundaries, leaves people viewing me as the Mad Hatter.

In fact, no sooner had I explained this to my wife, than my daughter came bouncing into the room to discover that the Mad Hatter journal was mine. "Of course," she laughed, "because Daddy's madder than a hatter!"

Is it really that obvious?

Music Update

A lot of good music came my way this month, though it started off with the somewhat mediocre release, The Brutalist Bricks, by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. I've seen and enjoyed Ted Leo live and like a handful of his songs when they come on the radio, so I thought I would pick this one up. While tracks like "The Mighty Sparrow" are good little rock numbers a la early Matthew Good, the album kind a runs out of gas with thirteen songs. I found it's best enjoyed interspersed with other things, which suggests to me that Ted Leo's songwriting isn't as strong as it really should be for such a long album.

Sweden's Love Is All and Austin's Harlem are two bands with a love of lo-fi rockers that know the value of keeping things short. I think both of these albums barely break the thirty minute mark, but the results are memorable indeed.

A friend of mine who records music as part of the local downtempo duo HeRajiKa had a single released as part of the Introducing Mellow compilation for the Japanese-based Introducing Records last month. It's a little tricky to get a hold of, but they've got another single out later this month that should be available here in town.

The new MGMT made it's quirky little way into my hands and "Siberian Breaks," a medley of sixties-styled songs, has been one of my favourites as it is quite reminiscent of "Suzanne"-era Leonard Cohen. The homage to Brian Eno is also pretty fun.

I also picked up a copy of proto-Weakerthan's band, Painted Thin's Still They Die of Heartbreak a staple from my CJSW DJ days. Nostalgia is nice, but the Weakerthans do everything much better, causing Painted Thin to sound a little too rough around the edges.

Finally, I've spent most of this week listening and enjoying the new Caribou album and trying to spread the love to all of my mathematician friends (put away your Rush albums, boys and girls).

The Joys of Reading to Your Child

There's a lot reasons to read to your child. You get to sit next to them and hold them. You get to relive the adventures of your childhood through their eyes and sometimes discover whole new worlds together.

Reading is also a fundamental skill and literacy is one of those gifts that also gives you a sense of accomplishment in giving. There's also a host of studies stating that the early you start reading to your child the faster they learn to read and spell. Furthermore the difference between reading to your child since birth and age three can be exposure to hundreds of thousands of words. Delaying reading until entry into school can result in a difference of hundreds of thousands more. Theoretically, all these extra words add up to better vocabulary, spelling, and grammar.

However, on of the more tangible joys is in the moment you notice your child loves to read, which is why the picture below is such a payoff for me. A few months ago I took my daughter to a bookstore to buy a book, since she had received a gift certificate as a present. She choose a book about monkey pirates. Sometime shortly after we started reading the book together, she felt strong enough as a reader to want to read on her own. I caught her, one quiet afternoon, sitting in this chair, reading to the stuffed sock monkey my wife had made her. My daughter had also scavenged the pirate outfit from one of her teddy bears and is what made the moment so special, for not only did she enjoy reading, but she also enjoyed our moments reading together.

Song of the Day, Waterloo Sunset

Described by Rolling Stone as one of the top 50 Rock 'n' Roll songs in history, and by many Londoners as one of the most romantic songs ever, I stumbled upon this Elliott Smith version of the classic Kinks tune and have had it in my head all day.

The problem is time

(cross-posted with Exploding Beakers)

As education budgets decline, it remain static in the face of increasing needs, school districts tend to respond by asking teachers to assume more responsibilities, ranging from increased instructional duties (teach more students in more classes) to clerical (tracking attendance, inputting student course selections), to adminsitrative (monitoring earned student credits, writing individualized student performance plans). Advances in technology has made some of this easier; teachers with computers in the classroom can enter attendance or grades directly into central systems with the students right in front of them, other advances, like email an online learning management systems, extend a teacher's responsibilities to students beyond the ringing Tod the tradional end of day bell. Currently teachers, especially new teachers, are under tremendous pressure to contribute to the culture of schools through volunteering to host extra-curricular activities, such as hosting clubs or coaching athletics, all of which occur at the margins of the school day.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for good teachers to balance teaching with other aspects of their lives. Good teachers often became involved in teaching as a way to incorporate and share passions and hobbies in a constructive way. Lengthening commitments to schools leaves less and less time for these other interests. Furthermore, many specialized teachers view themselves as members of multiple communities. A science teacher, for example, might view him or herself as a member of an educational community, as well as the larger science community. Similarly a
music teacher could have membership in the local music scene in addition to the education community. Again, participation in these other communities is made difficult by the increased demands of the school system, which often responds to these criticisms by giving teachers the option of starting a school-based club around these interests, thus involving the teacher ever more with the life of the school and increasing their professional isolation from other communities.

It is clear that teacher retention is an issue for many jurisidictioms and I would contend that a contributing factor is the inability of school systems to allow teachers to maintain healthy lives outside of the school day.

The Best Sports Commercial of All Time

Ok, so maybe not of all time, but last year's NHL Playoff commercial featuring Sidney Crosby was awesome primarily because it wasn't for anything except hockey. Sports figures are no strangers to commercial endorsements, a strategy that uses their personal prowess and characteristics to sell goods by proxy, but this particular commercial was designed as a teaser for the playoffs themselves. It's Sidney Crosby's determination that's on display here as the camera focuses on an image of the Crosby and company during a timeout in the dying minutes of the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals, the look on their faces making it apparent to all that they know they are going to lose. The Penguins victory in 2009 makes Crosby's final words, "I never what to be in this photograph again" prophetic and chilling.

This year's NHL commercials are also pretty good, but only perhaps because I remember watching most of these moments the first time around, from Gretzky streaking in on a defenseless Billy Smith, to the young, skinny Patrick Roy's amazing playoff run. The best though is Mario splitting the Minnesota defense, a scene of sublime skill that's wrapped up in my mind with his subsequent back injuries and battles with Hodgkin's Disease. How much better could he have been?

Song of the Day

This came my way via the Sister Ray Says blog. Clearly, we have similar musical tastes. Enjoy.

Song of the Day: "Dracula's Lament"

The last few days of work have frankly, been quite depressing, but super props to GoodGriefLucy for bringing this to my attention, as this song has never failed to cheer me up!

How I Learned to Love Hip Hop All Over Again

I was lucky enough to grow up during the first flush of hip hop, when occasional forays tuning the radio could find Herbie Hancock or Curtis Mantronik. My early record collection was built around singles from Run DMC, EPMD, LL Cool J and the Fresh Prince. KRS-One, Chuck D, and Ice T were perhaps as influential on my political thinking as Minor Threat and the Dead Kennedys would later be. I think the peak was somewhere between Coldcut's 1987 remix of Eric B. and Rakim's "Paid In Full," a stunning song that I still use as yardstick for sampling and rhyme compositions, and De La Soul's 1989 debut, 3 Feet High And Rising. Later acts like the Young MC and Canada's own Maestro Fresh Wes and the Dream Warriors would round out my collection.



By the time I entered high school, the hip hop landscape was changing. The crime rhyme style of Ice T had been overtaken by the harder and more graphic NWA, and though I really liked Ice Cube's "How To Survive In South Central" from the Boyz n the Hood soundtrack, Straight Outta Compton never made it into my collection, since the whole PMRC warning sticker issue made it a very difficult album to find. 2 Live Crew also helped to shift things towards more explicit topics. The emergence of Vanilla Ice as a fabricated identity raised issues of authenticity that really troubled me. The MCs I admired the most engaged in social and political issues, whereas it seemed that by 1993 newer acts had divorced the substance from the style and seemed to celebrate the violence without representing its consequences.

The final blow, as trivial as it may seem, was the development of the West Coast "p-funk" style in the wake of the copyright infringement lawsuit directed at 3 Feet High And Rising. For me, hip hop was based around samples, be they the James Brown and soul samples of Public Enemy, or the heavy metal sounds of Ice T's Power or Iceberg albums. The Dr. Dre produced Snoop Dog albums just sounded like high-pitched whines to me, a kind of hip hop version of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. With lyrics that seemed to be descending into caricature on the one side and music sterility on the other, the Beastie Boys' Ill Communication was perhaps the last "hip hop" album I bought in the 1990s until their Hello Nasty follow-up in 1998.

My discovery of the Ninja Tunes Record label helped to keep things alive during this period, as Ninja Tunes celebrated the anniversary of Coldcuts "Beats + Pieces" album opened up a whole roster of sample heavy DJs. Further, stumbling across What?What? on the Herbaliser's 1997 Blow Your Headphones suggested that there was still something meaningful in rap, and I fell in love with Ollie Teeba's jazz-focused rhythms. In fact, "Mr. Chombee Had The Flaw" has become a perennial favourite from this era.

Increasingly, as the decade ended, things started cropping up on my radar, such as Mos Def and Talib Kwelli or the Jurassic 5, but nothing that was strong enough to make me want to hunt it down on its own, though I think I might have come pretty close to purchasing k-os' 2004 Joyful Rebellion. In fact, it really wasn't until 2005's Breaking Kayfabe by Cadence Weapon that I finally bought another hip hop album. Between 1998 and 2005, my interest in Ninja Tunes had broadened into a more widespread affinity for electronica and DJ-work, but straight ahead MC-based hip hop was still something of an oddity. In fact, I didn't even notice that the Beastie Boys had released 2002's To The Five Boroughs until 2007's The Mix Up debuted.

By 2007 though, things had changed. I came back from SXSW with two new(er) Public Enemy records, New Whirl Order and How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul, and stumbled across Busdriver's 2005 Fear of a Black Tangent, along with miscellaneous things by Common, and eagerly anticipated Cadence Weapon's 2008 follow-up Afterparty Babies. The lead-off track, "Do I Miss My Friends" didn't disappoint and was one of my favourite songs, of any genre, in 2008. Last year saw my introduction to MF Doom's layered approach to identity in hip hop, and Mos Def's The Ecstatic entered my record collection, along with DJ Spooky's rap heavy The Secret Song, marking the first time in perhaps twenty years that I bought three brand new rap albums in one calendar year.

Afternoon Kino

gosh, I luv Wes Anderson.

March Progress Report

Slow on other fronts, March was a bit of a lion on the "literary" scene, and I enjoyed several potent writing sessions sitting outside the door of my daughter's Saturday morning music class. The focus of much of this has been developing the story arcs and character development of my "parking novel," although it's not to be confused with my earlier "parking novel" that some people saw circulating in early drafts halfway through the 1990s. This one's different, with the parking as an ongoing criminal empire threatening to take over the city and an integral backdrop to the relationship between the two main characters.

I've also started some preliminary work on a non-fiction project related to the educational writing of J. Lloyd Trump, a mid-twentieth educator whose ideas helped shape Calgary's own Bishop Carroll High School. His book A School For Everyone is surprisingly relevant.

Short Stories:
"Of Light and Darkness" - in revision*
* this is part of my Twilight of the Idle short story series along with"Labellypock", "A Night on the Fronde" and "Out of Time (Ped Xing)"
"How My Uncle Faught The Spanish Civil War" - 1000 words
"Il Brute" - 700 words, a short story about living in Bridgeland

Novel Ideas (and working titles):
A Saturday Afternoon By The Slurpee Machine - 4715 words, growing up in NE Calgary, circa 1990
Games of Chance - 17445 words, quasi-related to the current economic downturn
The Last Days of the Daily Wenzel - 8154 words
Father Borsato di Sangi - notes only, about a priest in small town Alberta, circa 1910, - 127 words
Mt. Pilatus Calls My Name - notes only, a corporate satire- 3111 words

Sisyphus In Hell/I Was Misinformed - 2402 words

Good Ideas At The Time (Whole draft novels):
joculatores domini - in revision, a novel about parking attendants and the Calgary Stampede
The Liminal Trip - in revision, backpacking through Europe,

Trump Project: 971 words

March's Total Word Count: 36925