The temperatures have gotten so low (around -12º F) that they’ve cancelled in-person school today. It feels like a bit of a … wimpy decision. Where I grew up, they would never cancel school for cold temperatures. Snow? Sure; cancel away! But, as far as my tiny alma mater was concerned, freezing to death in sub-zero temperatures was just fine. Some people would even say it was a right of passage.
Snow days are a thing of the past, though, even in “big city” districts like mine. These days we’ve got to create asynchronous lessons that students can do from home and then have virtual professional development meetings.
So, my students are watching a video about Arthur Miller while I’m having Teams calls about S.M.A.R.T. goals.
(There’s an unspoken understanding that we have so many virtual meetings because teachers in my district got a raise recently. and any time teachers get a raise the “I WIsh I GoT sUmMErs OfF!” crowd demands that some free time be taken away. It’s stupid, but this is Nebraska, and the true litmus test of a piece of Nebraska legislation is “How much can it hurt public employees, minorities, and/or homeless people?”)
The meetings will only take up the morning, however, so I’m not too bent out of shape. It’s not like it hurts anything to set goals for the upcoming months.
I adore Dorothy Parker. I’m working through The Portable Dorothy Parker (it’s technically Penguin’s Dorothy Parker Collected Stories) and just enjoying the hell out of it.
Parker, who was instrumental in the growth of The New Yorker magazine in the 1920s, has become somewhat emblematic of a New Yorker style that I don’t know the actual name of but exists in my mind as its own category. Parker is in there, along with J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and David Sedaris. The relationship between those people may seem tenuous, but I would categorize their prose as tight-knit. An entire story or essay might hang on a single word or phrase, and it follows that every word and phrase needs to be elegant. In the end, what you get is a meticulously crafted insight into some subtle aspect of the human character.
On a sentence-by-sentence basis, their writing is an absolute treat. (As opposed to my recent foray into Salman Rushdie, whose sentences are bloated for the sake of bloating.) They approach their writing with thrift and a great concern for how things sound.
There’s also an element of psychology to their writing that I’ve always enjoyed. The way a character speaks is a little glimpse into what’s going on inside them, what’s “wrong” with them, how they are damaged. There’s a belief in this New Yorker style that we are all a damned mess and only vaguely pretending to be well adjusted for the sake of appearances. Our voices, however, give us away.
It’s all great fun, and it’s honestly hard to believe that some of Dorothy Parker’s stories are 100 years old.
The sun is as high as its going to get, I’m afraid, and it is a balmy 8º F.
Once upon a time, there was a guy in a covered wagon rolling across the great plains with his family, an ox, and a big bag of corn. He stopped (here! of all places), looked around, and thought, “This’ll do.”
It boggles my mind.