Rebecca of Rebucket and I decided to try and help each other out in terms of productivity with a simple little exercise: I write, blog it; she sees it, draws an accompaniment.  So here goes. (Thanks to Simon for helping me think this should be written down and illustrated!) 

I’m teaching Dorian Gray (an abridged version) to my High Intermediate ESL students.  We just read a chapter where young, innocent Dorian talks to flippant, cynical Lord Henry and has his mind blown.  Lord Henry is admonished throughout the story for never giving things their proper gravity; everything’s a big joke to him.  In the chapter we’d just finished, Henry’s talking to Dorian about youth and beauty, dropping nuggets of wisdom like, “Always is a terrible word. It’s today that’s important.”  (Actually what he says is, “Always is a terrible word. Women use it too much. It’s today that’s important,” but I didn’t want anyone to get confused and think that we were discussing whether or not women are obsessed with the future.)

This apothegm, I decide, would be a great thing for my students, aged 20-24, to discuss.  I split my kids into groups. “Do you agree or disagree with Lord Henry? Is it today that really matters, or should we worry about the future?” I write this on the board and, after a brief explanation, give them time to talk.  As I walk around the room and observe their conversations, I notice two things: one, they are all emphatically agreeing with each other in English.  Excellent! Mission accomplished! Two,  I notice that my choice of words—“should we worry about the future?”—seems to be giving away a little bit more than I’m comfortable with as far as my personal fears and anxieties are concerned.  I might as well have written, “Should we worry about the future every day during the fifteen minute break when we go to the bathroom, close the door, and hold our heads in our hands while we take deep breaths?”

Time’s up! We regroup. It becomes instantly clear that everyone has been wholeheartedly agreeing that we do NOT need to worry about future and that today is the most important day of our lives. One of my students tells me that since we don’t know when we’re going to die, it’s more important to pay attention to today than to think about the future.  Other students nod in unison, like they’re all listening to the same song at a club.

Like Dorian, I am at a crossroads. Do I tell my students all the ways  in which they are horribly wrong? Do we even have time for that?  ”But is that always true? For everything? Aren’t there some situations where the future is very important to think about? What about when you get older? You’re getting older and older…. What if the future is starting to become now—like, the future is looming over the present, and it’s making a shadow over everything? Do you all know the word looming? L-O-O-M-I-N-G.”  

WANT

smugglersway:

• Gotten a rad part-time job at a bookstore I love
• Defeated the pile of clothes, papers, and magazines in my room that had grown to such a size that I’d taken to calling it The Pile and hallucinating that it was making demands of me like “Don’t fold that shirt; throw it on me. I hunger….”
• Gotten out of bed today when I really just wanted to pull the covers over my head and pretend to be in a coma

Can someone tell me why I don’t feel accomplished, because I’d like to know. 

lareviewofbooks:

LEE GUTKIND

on John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact.

Blackboard courtesy of Nieman Journalism Lab
A project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard

John D’Agata and Jim Fingal
The Lifespan of a Fact
W.W. Norton & Company, February 2012. 128 pp.

A writer colleague, referring to a document she had written, confessed: “I totally D’Agata’d this.” I couldn’t help laughing. But her comment was unsettling because she meant that she had fudged her story, made some of it up. And I suspected that the man behind the reference, John D’Agata, co-author of the book The Lifespan of a Fact, would be pleased.

The book’s backstory begins in 2003: D’Agata had written an essay on assignment for Harper’s Magazine about a teenager who committed suicide in Las Vegas. Harper’s rejected the essay because of factual inaccuracies, so D’Agata re-sold it to another magazine, The Believer. Jim Fingal, the co-author of the book, then a 23-year-old intern, was given the opportunity to fact-check the article, and a pack of red pens to help in the effort. He probably used the entire pack — to little effect.

The necessity of fact-checking nonfiction has been discussed and disputed off and on in the publishing world over the past 40 years, usually in the wake of discoveries of inaccuracies or outright deceptions. Clifford Irving, named “Con Man of the Year” by Time Magazine in 1972, sold a fake biography of the reclusive Howard Hughes and spent more than a year in prison for fraud. Six years before the flurry of discussion that has greeted The Lifespan of a Fact, there was the great debate — and much finger-pointing — following revelations that James Frey, author of the best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, had exaggerated or simply made up information about his traumatic life. In 2008, Margaret B. Jones’s lauded memoir, Love and Consequences, the saga of her biracial gangbanging girlhood in the 1980s in South Central Los Angeles was revealed as pure fiction and “Margaret B. Jones” to be a pseudonym for a white middle-class woman from Sherman Oaks, Margaret Seltzer. The book was trashed by Riverhead, its publisher.

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(Source: lareviewofbooks)