Returning to Dorothy Allison for Inspiration in Explaining My Own "Coming to Writing"

"It was a rough beginning—my own shout of life against death, of shape and substance against silence and confusion. It was most of all my deep abiding desire to live fleshed and strengthened on the page, a way to tell the truth as a kind of magic not cheapened or distorted by a need to please any damn body at all. Without it, I cannot imagine my own life. Without it, I have no way to know who I am [...] Writing these stories is the only way I know to make sure of my ongoing decision to live, to set moment to moment a small piece of stubbornness against an ocean of ignorance and obliteration. "


--Dorothy Allison, “Deciding to Live” preface to the first edition of Trash

The Original Tea Partier: Pap Finn

Check out this interesting literary analysis from Seattle's The Stranger blog! The key is that the writer locates the origin of the contemporary "tea baggers" in arguments about race and class and distrust of the government that Twain was able to document as far back as the publication of Huck Finn. Pretty neat. Conclusion: "No new arguments ever come up in American culture, just old ones in new clothes."

Siouxsie And The Banshees - Cities In Dust

Becuz who wants to read, right? I do, I do.

But no one else does. So. Now, I tumbl.

o btw last month i shaved a third of my head and got a tattoo

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

-G.K. Chesterton

Building My Future Teacher Self

I just subscribed to this. This publication does not come out frequently enough.

Also, I have already started collecting books for my classroom library, here is some of what I have collected so far:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
The Complete Persepolis
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Best of Blume (Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret; Blubber; Iggie's House; and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself)
Fallen Angels
Sunrise Over Fallujah
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
The First Part Last
After Tupac & D Foster
There's a Girl in My Hammerlock
Star Girl
Speak
Chains
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
Jellicoe Road
The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place
The Book Thief
Stitches
Bronx Masquerade

Very much into recommendations of good YAL.

Need to get People's History of American Empire for my classroom library. [Update: Got it!]

To acquire for my teacher library:

City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row (Ayers, William)
Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity (Wise, Tim)
Color Mute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School (Pollock, Mica)


IN OTHER NEWS, today I decided I do not like sun dried tomatoes.