Welcome to Five O'Clock Somewhere, where it doesn't matter what time zone you're in; it's five o'clock somewhere. We'll look at rural life, especially as it happens in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, cats, sailing (particularly Etchells racing yachts), and bits of grammar and Victorian poetry.
I know educators mean well, but have
they really thought the issue out?
I recently ran
across an “adaptation” of The Wind in the
Willows that nearly made me throw up. Sentences were shortened and
converted to simpler grammatical forms; shorter words were substituted for
longer (and more poetic and more precise) words; and the text was rendered so
flat and lifeless that I don’t believe any self-respecting third-grader would WANT
to read it. The Wind in the Willows
is ALREADY a children’s book, and so what if the language is a bit challenging?
That didn’t stop the Harry Potter books from being devoured by millions of
youngsters.
In fact,
researchers have found that reading
complex language such as Shakespeare’s causes the brain to become more
active and engaged, while reading less complex language triggers much less
brain activity. I have found with my own students that when I give them
something complicated to read, they generally work harder and get more out of
the work.
Yes, there are
those who argue that giving students something difficult to read may frustrate
them and make them give up on the struggle, to the point, even, of hating
school and everything about it. Thus, books should be “dumbed down” to make
them more accessible.
I disagree. I
believe that giving students something challenging to read will give them a
greater feeling of accomplishment when they discover it isn’t really “too hard”
after all. And being bored with school work—rather than being frustrated with
it—is a major reason students disengage with education and drop out of school.
Take, for example,
this sentence from the original The Wind
in the Willows:
“Believe me, my young
friend, there is nothing—absolutely NOTHING—half so much worth doing as simply
messing about in boats.”
And this from the
adaptation:
“If you’re doing
it in a boat, it’s the best time ever!”
Which of these is
more likely to benefit a third-grader?
Been on the receiving
end of a lot of schooling lately …
I just had a really odd dream. I dreamed that the community
college where I teach and the university just up the road got together to
provide a workshop for instructors working to prepare students for careers in
film production, not just instructors in the film programs, but those teaching
such things as English (e.g., script writing) and accounting (production
budgeting, etc.). It was a really intense workshop, a week long, and it
involved not only classroom work but field work as well; participants were
picked up from their campuses by bus and taken to each day’s lesson site. One
day involved going out on the water in boats – the one I was assigned to was a
nasty green aluminum runabout that seemed designed to make sure its occupants
ended up soaking wet and very cold.
At the end of each day of study, there were gatherings to dine
and socialize in a large banquet hall at the university. At the end of the
final day of the program, spouses were invited, and all went well until Pat
tried to hog all of the bread in the bread basket on the table. Then he was
told he had to pay for the bread.
As the gathering broke up, many of the participants said
they would be looking forward to the next year’s program, but the folks running
the show said there would be no repeat – this had cost too much money and was
too much hassle to put on.
As Pat and I were hiking out to where he had parked the car,
it was uphill. And then it was even more steeply uphill. And I was tired, and
getting more and more tired, and my muscles were aching. And the path kept
getting steeper, and I kept getting more tired, until finally, I couldn’t stand
up anymore, and I was crawling toward the car, which kept getting farther and
farther away.
I woke up, and I was still aching. Ugh.
But the whole idea of a workshop like the one I dreamed
about really seems like a good idea, since New Mexico is trying to encourage
the film industry to produce more movies in-state. We already have good
programs in place to train support personnel, and it would be great to have
more higher-level personnel close to home.
In real life, Pat and I have been spending a lot of time
lately in classes, although these classes are related much more to sailboat
racing than film production.
In early November, we headed up to Denver, where we took two
workshops over the weekend, one on race management, and one on race judging.
Our time there coincided with the first snowstorm of the season, small by
Colorado standards, but still enough to ice things over. One of the highlights
of that weekend was meeting people from regional and national organizations,
including a bit of information about changes in the rules that will be taking
place in the new year. We also enjoyed the company of some of our classmates,
such as the commodore of the Aspen Yacht Club (yes, there IS a yacht club in
Aspen!), and some people we’d already worked with at regattas in Colorado. Part
of the idea is to get people doing race management in places other than their
immediate home waters, in order to get regional race management certification.
Later in November, we came to Arizona for another workshop.
This one was put on by the Arizona Yacht Club, and it featured Dick Rose, who
is one of the people who actually wrote the new rules. It was great to learn
not only what the major changes in the rules are, but also why those changes
were implemented. For example, there is a new rule (although I suspect the vast
majority of sailors were already abiding by the practice) that bans
intentionally putting trash in the water. There are some adjustments to rule
changes made four years ago, for example, fine-tuning the rules about outside assistance.
Once my fall teaching was over, it was back to Arizona for a
long-term stay and another training session, this time in handling powerboats
and in operating such boats in support of a sailing regatta. There were two
four-hour classroom sessions, and then there was a day out on the water, in
order to learn hands-on how to operate a powerboat, and in particular how to
operate the boats that belong to the Arizona Yacht Club – after a couple of
incidents, the club decided to make a rule that those who wish to serve on race
committee duty must learn how to operate the boats. The classroom sessions went
well – they covered a lot of material, very quickly, since the people attending
the class were already reasonably familiar with boats and the water.
The on-the-water session, however, was another story. It was
cloudy and rainy, and although the forecast said the weather would be clearing
out by midday, it never did. We worked on low-speed maneuvers, and we began to
do the capsized-boat recovery, but by that time, it was raining heavily, and it
was breezy as well. I was on the first team to attempt the recovery, on a nasty
green aluminum runabout that seemed designed to make sure its occupants ended
up soaking wet and very cold. The 14-foot boat that we were to recover didn’t
just capsize; it turned all the way upside down, making the recovery even
harder. One of my classmates on the boat commented that the instructor had
certainly arranged realistic conditions, unlike the videos we had seen in the
classroom, shot in calm water and clear weather. The instructor decided to
declare a break, go to the marina restaurant to dry off, warm up, and decide
what to do next. Eventually, the decision was made to finish the training at a
later date, with better weather. Every
year, I get a performance evaluation at work, and one of the things I am
supposed to do is show how I plan to improve as an instructor in the coming
year or two. Continuing education is one potential way to do that. I’m not
sure, however, that my supervisors would count dreaming of an intensive film
program workshop or taking sailing race-management courses toward that
requirement. I guess I’ll have to find something else.
Oh, and one more thing. … I did participate in National
Novel Writing Month this year, and as usual, I did get to 50,000 words, with “Murder
at the Wedding.” I got to bring back some of the colorful characters from the
family reunion a few years back, and various confusions, including a couple of
neo-Nazi skinheads who were attempting to assassinate a cat, only to find out
that the feline was more than their match. Even worse, the skinheads were the
last people (other than the murderer) to see the murder victim alive, so they
really didn’t have a good day.
And yes, I did, as usual, participate in National Cat
Herders Day, although I was so busy herding cats that I didn’t get a chance to
put up my usual post.
This past week, as I do at the end of every term, I participated in panel grading of portfolios for the Essay Writing classes. It’s a procedure we use to help maintain consistency; I hand my students’ portfolios over to other instructors for grading, and in turn, I get to grade portfolios of other instructors’ students. The idea is that we’re making sure that we’re all looking for the same characteristics, the same standards for what constitutes a passing portfolio.
This year, among the portfolios that I was grading, there was an astonishing epidemic of pronoun misuse – pronoun shifts, unclear references, case errors, and, most glaringly, agreement errors.
The basic principle is fairly simple: The pronoun must match the noun to which it refers. That means that if you have a singular noun, you must use a singular pronoun (he/him, she/her, or it), and if you have a plural noun, you must use a plural pronoun (they/them). The trick for most people is to figure out whether the noun is plural or singular. The easiest way to test this is to construct a sentence using is or are – if you use is, you have a singular noun, and if you use are, you have a plural.
·One item = singular: The horse is in the barn.
·Two or more items = plural: The cows are in the pasture.
·Compound using and = plural: The horse and the mule are in the barn.
·Compound using or or nor: Match what’s closer: Neither the cows nor the horse is hungry, OR Neither the horse nor the cows are hungry.
·Indefinite pronoun (everybody, anyone, etc.) = singular: Everyone is at the party.
·Topic of study or discussion = singular: Politics is a strange art.
·Group (collective noun) = singular: The team is enjoying a winning season.
One situation that causes problems is when there is a collective noun. I will often see, for example, a company name followed by the plural pronoun they. But a company is singular. Let’s look at the following sentence:
The Kimberly-Clark Corporation is proud of their products.
First, you can tell that The Kimberly-Clark Corporation is singular, because the writer actually acknowledges that fact by using the singular form of the verb, is. Therefore, the plural pronoun their doesn’t match. Instead, the correct version of the sentence is
The Kimberly-Clark Corporation is proud of its products.
(Slight digression: I’m not necessarily endorsing Kimberly-Clark, but the company often runs ads in writers’ magazines to encourage writers to use its brand names correctly. If you blow your nose, and the tissue into which you blow your nose is a product of some other company, you should not refer to it as a Kleenex. That is a brand name that applies only to one of Kimberly-Clark’s product lines. I go into more details in my lesson on proper capitalization, which I haven’t yet put online but plan to soon.)
The other situation in which the plural pronoun is improperly used is when the writer is trying to be gender-neutral:
A student should keep their backpack neat.
The problem with this sentence is that A student is clearly singular, but their is plural. If we’re going to refer to a singular noun, we need to use a singular pronoun. For many years, the solution was to use the male gender:
A student should keep his backpack neat.
That worked fine for centuries. But then, somewhere around 1970, somebody realized that about half of the human race was NOT male. One solution was to use slashes:
A student should keep his/her backpack neat.
That works, sort of. It’s a little bit awkward; for example, how are you going to pronounce it – “hizzer”? Some people like this kind of slash construction; Pat used to work with engineers who loved the supposed efficiency of slashes. He even came up with a universal all-purpose third-person pronoun to make fun of the engineers’ love of slashes: “s/he/it.” (In case you don’t know how to pronounce it, he’s from Texas.) So, at least when slash constructions come across my desk, that’s what I think of.
OK, so that still leaves us searching for a good pronoun solution. Here’s a possibility:
A student should keep his or her backpack neat.
That’s not so bad, at least in small doses. The occasional his or her or she or he in a paper is fine. It does solve the problem of being grammatically correct while also being gender-neutral. The problem arises when you have a whole paper full of such references. Piling on repeated uses of such phrases makes your writing wordy and tedious, and ultimately, you may lose your reader’s full attention.
Another solution is to use his half the time and her half the time. You may alternate every other paragraph, or you may flip a coin to decide which gender you’re going to use each time. A former teacher of mine recommended a “subtle feminist agenda”: use his when a negative connotation is involved and her when the connotation is positive, as in, “A good driver keeps her car well tuned; a bad driver has no idea what’s going on under his hood.”
But there is one other solution that avoids this whole issue altogether. Remember when I said that you can’t use the plural they to refer to singular nouns? Well, that’s true, but you CAN use they to refer to a PLURAL noun. Instead of fiddling with the pronoun, you can simply go back to the noun and make everything plural:
Students should keep their backpacks neat.
Presto! Problem solved! You now have a pronoun that is gender-neutral, and it agrees with the noun because the noun is plural. Probably 99 percent of all of your pronoun-antecedent problems can be fixed this way, by just making everything plural. Once in a while, you may have to keep to a singular form, but in the vast majority of situations, you can fix everything by going plural.
And believe me, your English teacher will love you for it when you get the pronouns right.
Don't bait your English teacher; you may regret it
My National Novel Writing Month adventures continue. I've fallen behind in my word count, so I'm trying to catch up. In this excerpt, Hannah has given her class an exercise similar to the one that I give in this post, in creating descriptive writing that aims to show, rather than tell, a highly emotional moment in the students' past. In case you're wondering, yes, this sort of thing has actually happened to me, more than once. And no, I didn't respond quite as, um, graphically as Hannah does -- much as I would have liked to -- or I probably wouldn't still have my job. But I did respond in a toned-down version of Hannah's response. Since this is an all-ages blog, I'm also redacting what the student actually wrote.
When she got to the end of the descriptive writing exercise, she had one student volunteer to read his piece, a student who had been something of a class clown while completing almost no homework and turning in essays that were so under-developed that they were really just outlines. As he stood to read, he and the other members of his group started to snicker. He held up his paper, on which Hannah could see he had scrawled only a couple of lines, and began to read: “I went in the room with the girl and she took her clothes off and laid down on the bed. I took my clothes off and laid on top of her, and then I ----ed her and she said she liked it and I did it again and she said I was the best that she ever had and it was my first time.”
By the time he got to the end of his reading, his group-mates were having a hard time containing themselves, but the student himself was looking less and less sure of himself, his voice becoming weaker and his face turning red. Hannah guessed he was now beginning to regret that his buddies had talked him into this. Still, she knew the original plan the the four of them had hatched was probably intended to shock her or otherwise disrupt her composure. She decided to take the offering with a straight face. “Surely you can do better than that,” she said. “We want description, and you had only two adjectives and only two adverbs in that entire piece – and two of those were in what the girl said to you. Since it was your first time, surely your memory of it was more vivid than that.
“What did the girl look like? Short? Tall? Young? Old? What color was her hair, blonde, brunette, red? Was it natural, or did she have roots of another color? Was she fat or skinny? What did her body look like after she took off her clothes – and what sort of clothes were they in the first place? How did you meet her, at a party or on the street or in a brothel? What did you say to each other before you went to the room? What kind of room was it – a motel room, the girl’s bedroom in her parents’ house, some other sort of room? What condition was the room in – was it clean, dirty, with new furnishings or beat-up stuff? What did the air smell like, musty, smoky, flowery air freshener? Was the air in the room cold or hot or just right? Was the lighting dim or bright?
“When you got into the bed with her, what did she smell like – was it some sort of perfume or just sweat or something else? What did the bed sheets smell like – were they clean, or did they smell sour from being used a whole lot since they were last washed? Were they smooth or rough? Did the bed springs creak when you moved? Did the girl make any sounds? When she told you that she liked it and that you were the best that she had ever had, what were her exact words? How did she say them? Did she have any sort of accent?”
Hannah knew that this line of questioning was perhaps a bit cruel. But what she wanted to get across was that vivid descriptions were essential to effective writing, no matter what the subject matter. She knew the old saying about people with inadequate vocabularies being the ones who resorted to obscenities, and perhaps that was the case with this student. She was hoping that thinking a little more deeply would lead the student to write a little more deeply. This was a student who turned in essays that were three-quarters of a page long, triple spaced, and she was trying to get him to stretch a bit. If he wanted to write porn, more power to him, if doing so helped him to provide descriptive words and phrases.
The student was now seriously red-faced, as were his group-mates. The rest of the class had mixed reactions. Some had gone red, some had gone pale, and a few had started laughing, especially a couple of the young women in the class who had previously found this student’s behavior annoying or maybe even offensive. They clearly enjoyed seeing him get some comeuppance.
“Um, Ms. Montgomery,” the student said in a somewhat subdued voice, “I’ll have to get back to you on those answers.”
It’s time for that annual ritual, in which I flog myself until I’ve cranked out 50,000 words in 30 days or less, participating in National Novel Writing Month. As usual, I’m writing a mystery, featuring Hannah Montgomery, community college English instructor and amateur sleuth, into whose life dead bodies continue to fall. In this installment, she’s working on planning her wedding to police Detective Harry O’Malley. Here is the first installment, cranked out in the first half-hour of Nov. 1.
Murder in the Photo Lab
a novel
by Carol Anne Byrnes
1.Plans Afoot
Hannah Montgomery sighed wearily as she pushed herself back from her desk, shoving a lock of fine blonde hair from her face. She was supposed to be grading papers, but it wasn’t working so well. Her mind kept wandering off to other topics, like the wedding. How was she going to pull that off? She knew that most people planned for a year or more, and here she was, trying to do it in just a couple of months. So far, almost nothing was coming together. There was the catering for the reception, the rental of the banquet hall from the yacht club, hairstyling to think of, makeup, arrangements for lodging for out of town guests, trying to find a band to play at the reception, or at least a DJ, and she was sure she was forgetting something. At least the wedding dress seemed to be on track; she had already had a rough fitting, although the final adjustments would wait until just a couple of days in advance, to fit her rapidly growing baby bump perfectly on the big day.
Her phone rang, and she answered it. “Hello?”
“Hi, dear, it’s Clara.” Hannah recognized the voice of her soon-to-be mother-in-law. “I was wondering if you’d arranged a photographer for the wedding portraits yet?”
Oh, no, that’s what she’d been forgetting, Hannah realized. “Uh, no,” she said. “That, uh, had sort of slipped my mind.”
“Don’t worry, dear,” Clara said. “I have an old friend from high school who’s out there, Lionel Eggleston, who’s a photography professor at Siete Mares State. Or at least he used to be. He’s now sort of retired, what they call ‘emeritus.’ I asked him if he’d do your wedding, and he said he would. I’ll pay – count it as a wedding gift to you and Harry.”
Well, that was a piece of good news, Hannah reflected. One piece of wedding planning that she’d forgotten, and it was going to be taken care of without much trouble on her part. “Oh, thank you very much,” she said. “That would be fantastic!” She hoped Clara couldn’t hear the note of desperation in her voice.
“There is one thing,” Clara said. “Lionel doesn’t like the new-fangled photography.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” Hannah said. If Professor Eggleston didn’t like digital photography, well, that would mean her and Harry’s wedding portraits would be more traditional.
“No, I don’t think you understand,” Clara said. “Lionel doesn’t like that new-fangled dry film. He uses wet plates. Says it gives him a more honest look. You’ll likely have to sit very very still for a long while when you pose, and then making the prints will take a long time.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem,” Hannah said. Actually, having an excuse to sit very very still for a while sounded pretty good. She had been running around so much lately, trying to tie up all of the loose ends. “Having wedding portraits that are totally different from anybody else’s will be something special.”
“Oh, they’ll be special all right,” Clara said. “Lionel is known for his cyanotypes. They have a lovely blue shade to them.”
When you write an essay, you need to provide sufficient supporting details to prove the point that you are making. If you don’t have enough details, your reader may not be able to figure out exactly what you mean. The same holds true for many types of writing. If all you have is a collection of broad, general ideas, you may have a picture inside your mind of what you mean, but your reader may form a totally different picture inside of her head.
Short paragraphs have their place. Carefully placed following several long paragraphs, a short paragraph packs a punch, giving special emphasis to the idea it presents. It makes the reader take notice. But if every single paragraph in your essay (or whatever else you are writing) is only one or two sentences, chances are you haven’t filled in enough details. You need to bulk up those wimpy, short paragraphs.
Let’s start with this very short one-sentence paragraph from a hypothetical essay reviewing a restaurant:
The service was crappy.
Faced with a paragraph like this, I would start by asking the student, “What do you mean by this?”
“Well,” the student might say, “it was, you know, crappy.”
“No, I don’t know. Can you tell what you mean by ‘crappy’? What did the server do that was crappy?”
“He took so long bringing out our food that it was cold when we got it. He was never around when we wanted our iced tea refilled. And he had an attitude.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, you know, an attitude.”
“No, I don’t know. Was it a happy attitude, or a sad attitude, or angry? How could you tell what kind of attitude he had?”
“He acted superior. He never looked directly at us, and he always had a frown on his face. We had trouble getting his attention when we wanted something, as if we were invisible. It’s like he didn’t want us wasting his time and energy.”
Here’s a beefed-up version of the student’s paragraph that makes use of these details:
The service was crappy. Our server took so long bringing out our food that it was cold when we got it. He was never around when we wanted our iced tea refilled. And he had a superior attitude. He never looked directly at us, and he always had a frown on his face. We had trouble getting his attention when we wanted something, as if we were invisible. It was like he didn’t want us wasting his time and energy.
Now we have a stronger, brawnier paragraph that gives the reader a clear idea of how crappy the service was and in exactly what way. If you have lots of wimpy paragraphs in your writing, see if you can ask yourself the same sorts of questions to bring out the details. Or if you have trouble thinking of questions, try to find someone else who can help you. It doesn’t have to be a teacher or tutor, either. It could be a friend, family member, or classmate – anybody who can spot where you have a vague, general term that could use more explanation.
Here’s another activity you can try for developing a beefy paragraph. Start with the sentence, “As soon as I woke up, I knew it was going to be a(n) ____ day”; fill in the blank with an adjective of your choice. The day in question can be any day in your life – today, or some important milestone date – or something completely made-up. Now, write at least ten sentences supporting that statement. If you get on a roll and find yourself going beyond ten sentences, that’s great; keep going! But you must produce at least ten sentences describing how your day began.
These exercises may seem very hard at first. It’s going to take some work to beef up those scrawny paragraphs. But Arnold didn’t get those muscles overnight either. He had to do a lot of work. As you work on your paragraph-building, your writing will gradually bulk up its muscles, too.
Well, I wasn’t REALLY dead, but I don’t blame you if you thought that I was.
How time flies. I’ve been working on all sorts of other things, and now it’s been more than a month since my last post (“Father, I have sinned …”). The truth is that my life has gotten filled up with so much going on (most of it, for a change, of a happy sort) that all I’ve had time for lately is more short-attention-span media. But I hope to get back to the blog on a regular basis now.
I was teaching two classes over the summer term, which is condensed, so more time per week is required for each class, especially with the vast number of papers I have to grade. Yeah, I’ve had students suggest that if I didn’t assign so much work, I wouldn’t have to work so hard either. But then they wouldn’t be getting their money’s worth for their tuition dollars.
We’re also still dealing with Pat’s dad’s estate. The Old Soldier died a year and a half ago, and some things are still up in the air. That’s been a drain, especially on Pat’s time.
Meanwhile, in the happy news department, this spring, we closed on a house in Mesa, Arizona. “Why?” I hear the two or three people who still follow this blog ask. Well, Gerald is attending college at Arizona State in Tempe, plus taking a few classes at Mesa Community College that count for the same credit but cost less than a third as much in tuition (gotta love community colleges!). Instead of sending him rent money every month, we will now be sending him compensation for household maintenance and fixing things up. Also, we will no longer have to pay for a hotel room when we go to Arizona to visit him. In addition, at some point Pat and I will be retiring, and we already know we want to get rid of the house in Albuquerque. If we keep the cabin at Heron, we will be able to migrate seasonally between there and Mesa. Finally, home prices in Arizona are in the basement right now, but they’re bound to rebound, at least some. So we may have an investment that makes money even if we decide not to use the place as a retirement residence.
The upshot of the home purchase in Mesa is that we’ve been directing a lot of time and energy to getting that house up and running, learning the ins and outs of agricultural-style irrigation, and furnishing the place. While I was teaching, we took some long weekends for whirlwind trips out to get things done. Then the break between the summer and fall terms was only two weeks rather than the usual three, so we had to pack a lot of activity into a short time span that included a quickie trip to San Diego for some touristing.
Furnishing the house has been fun. One of our friends commented on the short-attention-span media that it must be like right after we got married. Actually, it’s lots better. When Pat and I first got married, we had no money whatsoever, so we took what we could get, which was mostly castoff furniture that friends and relatives had no use for. For nearly all of our adult lives, we’ve felt like we’ve been living in a junkyard. With this new house, we have a fresh start. We can buy things that we specifically like, and we can make things match. We’ve bought a few new things, but mostly, we’ve been getting great deals on high-quality furnishings at used-furniture stores. Serendipity plays a big part with used furniture – we may not know exactly what we want when we go into the store, but I will find something that just feels right, such as the bedroom set with the magnificent headboard that is now in the master bedroom. We also now have a place worthy of some of the art that we have picked up from family over the years – an elegant ceramic black cat, a bowl of fruit carved out of African wood, a pair pictures of prancing horses, an R.C. Gorman print, and more. It feels good to get those works out of the junkyard.
Of course, the house isn’t perfect. It was originally constructed in 2000 with high-quality materials and workmanship, but one of the previous owners took out the original bedroom flooring and replaced it with the most God-awful, crappy, plastic pseudo-laminate, and didn’t even install it properly. So we’re now replacing it with high-quality engineered wood flooring, natural red oak. Actually, Gerald’s doing most of the work – that’s part of the aforementioned compensation for home improvements instead of rent subsidies. He got most of one room done by the time we had to return to Albuquerque, but since he’s taking a heavy course load this fall, it may take him a while to get all of the bedrooms done. Still, what’s been done so far is beautiful.
Meanwhile, now that we’ve got most of the time-consuming stuff out of the way on the house, I should now have time to return to the blog. Glad to be back.
The lucky person who happened to be the 100,000th person to cross the threshold of this blog was a seeker of knowledge. He or she is a Road Runner subscriber from Cincinnati, using Windows NT/Vista and the most recent version of the world's worst browser, late Monday evening, on a search for "find out what part of speech rescue is."
For quite some time, I've wanted to visit Cincinnati. A very good friend of mine from high school now lives there (actually, just across the river in Kentucky), and I've been told that Cincinnati chili (pictured above) is a dish not to be missed.
I even know where I want to go to eat in Cincinnati. The very first year I participated in National Novel Writing Month, my attempt at a novel (it reached more than 50,000 words, but it never reached a conclusion) was not one of the mystery novels I have been successful with since then. It was an ensemble-cast action-adventure thriller, and the adventure began in Cincinnati. Since I've never been there, I researched the place and found out a lot of wonderful things about it. The railroad station is an Art Deco masterpiece that has been preserved as a science and technology museum, while still serving as an active passenger depot. The downtown area has been revitalized and is a hopping place day or night. And there are places to eat.
I looked at restaurant reviews. I had two scenes involving my narrator eating out. In one scene, he had a casual lunch downtown, and I found just the right place for him to chow down on the most authentic Cincy chili available (served over noodles, with cheese and onions on top). It was a bonus that John Madden endorsed the place on Monday Night Football the following night. For the other scene, my character needed a really classy place to eat, and I found an Italian place with great atmosphere and, according to the reviews I read, a chef who believes, as I do, that there is no such thing as too much garlic.
So, while I did have a couple of good suggestions from readers for what the prize should be, I have decided that Pat and I will travel to the winner's location and treat him or her to his or her favorite meal. Cincinnati was already tentatively on the itinerary for next summer anyway, since I want to visit my old friend. Assuming the winner comes back to claim the prize, I hope he or she likes either Cincinnati chili or Italian food -- although I wouldn't mind trying anything else the winner likes.
To be fair to both of the entrants in the contest, I will extend the same prize: Pat and I, when next in your neighborhood (or neighbourhood), will treat you to a dinner of your favorite local food.
Oh, and as for the answer to the question for which the winner came seeking an answer: rescue can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective.
Noun: The firefighters attempted a daring rescue.
Verb: They had only a few minutes to rescue the cat from the tree.
Adjective: The cat's owners thanked the rescue personnel warmly afterward.
Exercises in getting from here to there, or there to here
In planning for this weekend, we had a bit of a problem. I had to return to Albuquerque to teach my classes Tuesday, but Pat has to stay at the lake until his dockmaster duties end Wednesday. So we had to drive up Friday in separate vehicles; Pat took Enterprise with the fifth-wheel, while Dulce and I had Galileo.
Being in a larger, clumsier rig, Pat took a route that emphasized big roads and faster travel. According to Google Maps, this route is 166 miles and takes 3 hours, 11 minutes. That seems about right.
Meanwhile, Dulce and I took a more scenic route. It's shorter in miles, but it's decidedly not suitable for bigger, clumsier rigs. Google Maps says it's 153 miles and takes 3 hours, 55 minutes. The time estimate is WAY off. This trip, Pat and I left at the same time, and while he had to stop for fuel and spent 15 minutes getting lunch, I arrived ahead of him by about the time he spent on fuel and lunch. On other trips, Gerald and I have arrived sooner via the scenic route than Pat on the big roads. My guess is that Google Maps underestimates the travel speed on New Mexico's state highways, some of which are unpaved but still can be traveled at a fairly high speed. Sure, I had to stop a couple of times to wait for some cattle to mosey out of the way, but, hey, that's part of the appeal of the back roads.
Then for the trip home, I chose a route that I already knew was going to be more time-consuming, but that would also be fantastically scenic. If Google Maps had an option to select the most scenic route, this is how it would tell people to go. It's 193 miles and 4 hours, 8 minutes -- an accurate assessment, probably because none of the roads are unpaved. For out-of-state visitors, the reverse of this route is what I would recommend to get from the airport to Five O'Clock Somewhere; it provides the best of the best of scenery, plus a nifty bonus: the chance to stop at Viola's Restaurant in Los Alamos for lunch. On this route, it wasn't cattle but deer that I had to stop for until they decided they wanted to wander over to the side of the road.
The few people who frequent this blog might have noticed a lack of activity lately. That’s primarily because Pat and I have been on the road for most of the past three weeks. For a detailed travelogue, including pictures, you can look at Pat’s blog, Desert Sea, where he’s gradually putting up posts about the journey. I’ll just touch on highlights here.
The trip seemed to have two major themes: barbeque and detours. Just about every day, we had at least one great barbeque experience – when I travel, I want to sample the best of the local food, and we kept stumbling on great barbeque places. And just about every day, sometimes multiple times in a day, we ended up someplace we didn’t intend to be, sometimes because of road construction, sometimes because of our unfamiliarity with the territory, and sometimes because of a little of both.
Barbeque, May 2: OK, this doesn’t officially count as part of the journey, but we had lunch at JR’s Bar-B-Que in Albuquerque with the guy who was helping his buddy sell the fifth-wheel trailer we just bought, and exchanged a check for the title to the trailer.
Detour, May 2: Not a really big deal, but our favorite motel in Gallup had no non-smoking rooms available, so we had to spring for a suite.
Barbeque, May 3: Big Belly’s BBQ in Tempe, run by former ASU and KC Chiefs defensive tackle Bryan Proby, serves up massive portions of KC style barbeque. I didn’t have enough appetite for it this trip, but I’ve been told the giant potato is an experience I should have at least once in my lifetime.
Detour, May 6: This one was on purpose. On our way to the cruise on Saguaro Lake, we went to Arizona Cactus Sales to see what we might want to put into the landscaping if we buy a house in the Phoenix area – many of the properties we’ve been looking at have been bank-owned or otherwise neglected, and so the landscape is pretty much dead. We’d want to put in water-conserving landscaping, rather than recreating Scottish golf courses in the desert. We learned a lot about cacti and how to take care of them – which mostly means leaving them alone and absolutely not watering them or planting them anywhere water is likely to drain.
Barbeque, May 7: Right near our motel in Bakersfield was The Grill Hut. The menu is extremely limited (beef tri-tip or chicken breast, plus sauces and sides), but what they do, they do very well.
Detour, May 8: Trying to get from the Nimitz Freeway to Alameda Island is insane. The bridges that go to the island are not lined up with the roads the freeway exits lead to, and there’s road construction that makes things really “interesting” – such as semi-trucks turning left from an extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall into another extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall, during the extremely brief green-light interval of the temporary traffic light suspended from flimsy cables above the intersection, such that one truck takes three cycles of the light to complete its turn because of all of the other drivers who try to get around the behemoth and end up getting in its way, so it has to halt until they figure out that they have to back up to get out of its way. Apparently, “reverse” is not a setting that exists on the shift levers of most Californians’ cars.
Detour, May 10: Visited a friend on his boat in Marina Bay in Richmond, and then sort of got lost on the way out. Found the cheapest gas in the East Bay area, and also the mini-mart that was featured in the movie “True Crime.” Didn’t go in to see whether the potato-chip display had been moved.
Detour, May 11: Needed to do some financial transactions involving our credit union, so we used the credit-union branch-sharing network to find a participating CU in Berkeley. Google Maps got us there, but not back. We ended up taking a scenic tour of Berkeley and Oakland, including Chinatown, that we hadn’t intended.
Barbeque, May 11: We had already looked at our schedule for our time in the Bay Area and saw that the best time for us to hook up with family was Wednesday evening. My brother had the suggestion that maybe we could meet at Sam’s Bar-B-Que in San Jose, where our cousin often plays with a bluegrass band, Dark Hollow. As it turns out, the band was playing there that night, so my cousin saved us a table and we had a great time. The band played “Detour,” written by Paul Westmoreland and played by Spade Cooley, then subsequently by Patti Page and Willie Nelson, among others.
Detour, May 12: We had a coupon. We were hungry. We wanted seafood. Gerald’s Droid told us that Panama Joe’s atmosphere was “boisterous” but the noise level was “moderate.” I guess it depends what you mean by “moderate”; it was college night.
Barbeque, May 13: OK, we didn’t get to eat this, but our motel room was suffused with the aroma. We were right around the corner from the laundry room, which was also the housekeeping staff’s lunch room. Beneath the open window, they had set up a little electric grill, and the bulgogi smelled heavenly.
Barbeque, May 14: Free hot dogs and beer at the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club open house. Those folks are really proud of their new elevator, which is done up inside like a fine yacht, with wood paneling and cabin sole. We’ve been told that Black Magic used to be part of the Etchells fleet there.
Detour, May 14: Met Silver Girl and visited the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, then took an extended side trip to the Coyote Grill in Laguna Beach.
Detour, May 15: Sunday Brunch on the Queen Mary, followed by wandering all over the ship for several hours. We only got lost a couple of times …
Detour, May 16: Dropped Gerald off with the ASU sailing team for several days’ training at the US Sailing Center in Long Beach and made it out of the LA area with only one or two wrong turns along the way. Made it to Tempe, dropped off a couple of things and picked up a couple of things at Gerald’s apartment.
Detour, May 17: Less than an hour from home, we saw smoke rising and lots of red flashing lights up ahead. We got off the freeway onto Old Route 66 and meandered through the village of Paraje before getting back onto the freeway, which we then had all to ourselves until we got to the outskirts of Albuquerque.
Detour, May 18-20: You thought we were done traveling? Nope. First, Pat went to Los Alamos to pick up Dulce, who had been getting royal spa treatment at my folks’ house (dinner whenever she wanted it, an electric blanket to sleep on at night, and other general spoiling). Then we took the big truck (Enterprise) south to pick up the fifth-wheel trailer and learn how it works.
Detour, May 21: I had been scheduled to teach only one class during the summer term, but I was given the opportunity Friday to add another – this one on the West Side campus, where I haven’t taught before. Pat and I took a scenic drive to assess the layout of the place, and man, is it far away!
Today: No detours, but maybe some barbeque – chicken “wings” from JJ’s (they’re actually thighs, and therefore really meaty) should go well with the hockey game. Now I’m getting hungry!
Some of my students wrote such great essays in response to the cuisine topic that I have asked them to allow me to share their work here. The first (but I hope not the last) to respond to my request is Phil Coen, who wrote a review of his favorite restaurant. OK, so it’s hard to get to – if you ask Google Maps how to get there from New Mexico, one leg of the journey involves getting into a kayak. But then, part of what makes this restaurant a great place is that it’s located somewhere that … well, you have to cross some water to get there.
A Bit of Happiness by Phil Coen
When people ask me what my favorite restaurant is, I always hesitate and think about the wonderful memories of so many places, but, in the end, I always answer without a doubt that it would have to be Holuakoa Garden. When I am looking for a good restaurant, I am looking for several things; first of all would be the atmosphere. I look for the overall feel of the place, whether it is comfortable and whether I feel at home, as if I belong here. Next, I think about howthe food tastes in combination with the presentation of the dishes. Finally I analyze the experience and evaluate whether or not it was worth the price.
What makes Holuakoa Garden stand out from all the other restaurants that I’ve been to is the ambiance of the restaurant. The restaurant has a romantic feel from its small waterfall to the freshness of the gardens in the middle of the restaurant. The ambiance creates a relaxing dream-like state of mind. All that would be enough to set the full experience Holuakoa Garden has to offer apart, but Holuakoa Garden is located on the side of a mountain overlooking a breathtaking ocean view. I would recommend that you go there at sunset, to get the full experience Holuakoa Garden has to offer. Most of the restaurant is outside, giving it an open unrestrained feel with lovely smells of all the local flowers of Hawaii.
Being in an outstanding setting is only a small part of Holuakoa Garden, for the culinary masterpieces were worthy of a king’s last meal. When I had the pleasure of eating there, I started off with a caprese salad. The salad was one-of-a-kind, involving fresh heirloom tomatoes and basil from the restaurant’s own garden, topped with a type of balsamic vinegar dressing, pine nuts and of course the mozzarella . The tomatoes made this salad because they were sweet, ripe and juicy, maintaining a bright red and yellow tint. I was left wanting more and wondering, if a salad can be that good, what type of masterpiece did I have to look forward to next?
I ordered the filet mignon since the island was famous for the beef because of the quality of grass due to the volcanic soil. It was something I had been looking forward to the entire trip, so I felt it was a now or never moment. Knowing that I was anticipating a moment of genius from the chef, the staff took its time, building on the anticipation of the upcoming entrée. This made my anticipation of the entrée all that more magical. The filet mignon was artistically centered on the platter with an array of colorful vegetables and potatoes, and lightly drizzled with a savory balsamic reduction making the entrée like a painting. The filet mignon was cooked perfectly to my individual taste. There was nothing that I would change, making for a perfect entrée.
What better way to end a perfect meal than with a special dessert? Earlier in the day I had been hiking in the Hawaiian forests and came across a fruit called lilikoi. After hearing the dessert menu I knew that having a cheesecake with this fruit would be amazing. To bring the night to an eventful close I ordered something I knew would be amazing. When I finally got the dessert, it lived up to my expectations and, in fact, exceeded them. The cheesecake was able to satisfy not only the desire to have something amazing but to have an adventure come to a memorable closing.
In conclusion, I recommend this restaurant to anybody that is visiting the Big Island of Hawaii. The only regrettable thing about this restaurant is that it is so difficult to return to, to be able to enjoy it once more. I’ll always have a desire to go back, to enjoy not only the wonderful food, but the ambience and landscape that went with it.
All right, so the turnout for the invitation to write about cuisine was less than spectacular. We had a total of four entries, by three contributors.
First, we had Tillerman with his entry answering New Mexico’s Official State Question: “Red or Green?”
Next, O Docker popped up with “A Kernel of Truth,” technically past the deadline, but close enough.
So then, I extended the project deadline in hopes of getting more entries. Captain JP came in with two, both having to do with coffee: “My favourite drink” and “Alas poor cafetiere.”
Thanks to the three who entered. But, dear readers, you may not have heard the last of this topic. Some of my students wrote great essays, and I plan to invite them to submit their work as guest posts. We’ll see what cooks up.
OK, so the official deadline has passed for my latest writing challenge. I got one entry before the deadline, from Tillerman, with his own take on New Mexico's Official State Question, "Red or Green?"
In addition, I had one other entry that missed the deadline for the Pacific time zone, but which I allowed because O Docker made a persuasive argument that it's always 11:55 somewhere: "A Kernel of Truth," exploring the nature of popcorn.
Given the paucity of entries, I'm giving Tillerman and O Docker extra-credit points, but I'm extending the deadline for entries until April 15.
Essay 4 (in-class)
Choose one of the following topics and write an essay that meets the English 0950 course objectives (clear main idea, good support, consideration for an educated reader, organization, reasonably correct mechanics):
·What is your favorite cuisine? Give details to explain why.
·Define “American cuisine.” What sets American cuisine apart from others?
·How does the enjoyment of food bring people together? Give examples from your own experience and/or from materials you have read.
·Red or green? Explain.
·Write a review of your favorite restaurant. Use details and examples to show the reader why he or she should eat there.
·In what way does the cuisine of a country or region reflect its culture? Show the connection using specific details.
The basics: Write a blog post and put a link in the comments here, or if you don't have a blog, send your entry in email to byrnes.carol.anne (at) gmail.com . It doesn't have to be an academic essay (my definition of that format is pretty broad anyway); just write what you want to write.
So far, I've had a grand total of ... uh ... zero entries in the current writing challenge. With only 24 hours to go, that's not exactly a great turnout.
To recap, the challenge was to write a blog post in response to an essay prompt that I used in my essay writing class this term. The students had chosen an unusual topic, cuisine, instead of the oft-used contemporary social or political issues. So I thought I'd open it out to my readers and see what you could come up with. Unless you're actually enrolled in a college-prep essay writing course, you don't need to constrain yourself to what you might consider to be an essay (although I actually have a pretty broad definition); instead, write in response to the prompt in whatever way you feel moved.
So, write a blog post and put a link to it in the comments here, or if you don't have a blog, send your entry in email to byrnes.carol.anne (at) gmail.com and I'll post it here. Deadline is midnight (in whatever time zone you're in) March 31.
Essay 4 (in-class)
Choose one of the following topics and write an essay that meets the English 0950 course objectives (clear main idea, good support, consideration for an educated reader, organization, reasonably correct mechanics):
·What is your favorite cuisine? Give details to explain why.
·Define “American cuisine.” What sets American cuisine apart from others?
·How does the enjoyment of food bring people together? Give examples from your own experience and/or from materials you have read.
·Red or green? Explain.
·Write a review of your favorite restaurant. Use details and examples to show the reader why he or she should eat there.
·In what way does the cuisine of a country or region reflect its culture? Show the connection using specific details.
For the past few years, Pat and I have been operating on an austerity budget. Part of that program has meant that I haven't had much in the way of new clothes for a very long time -- we've been shopping at thrift stores for most clothes. But now, at long last, I have the first pair of actual new shoes that I have had in about five years. And they're magnificent: delightful little black numbers that fit my feet like gloves, but with just enough extra stretch that in really cold conditions I can wear a pair of wool socks underneath.
Especially over on Facebook, many friends, including old high-school classmates, have reveled in their shoes -- how many they have, the special virtues of each pair, the stylishness, the excitement of finding just the right pair. Now, I can join them.
Meanwhile, it's not just my feet but also my boat, Black Magic, that is enjoying the end of austerity. We came down to Elephant Butte Friday with the hope of sailing with Zorro as well as working on boats. As it turned out, it was too windy to sail. First, I helped Zorro with patching some cracks in Constellation's deck and re-rigging the outhaul, which had been fouling far too often. Then Pat joined Zorro and me at the mast-up storage lot where Black Magic is, and we replaced a lot of the rigging: backstay control, mainsheet, jib sheet, traveler (including some blocks and other hardware), jib tack, mast block shock cords, and tiller tamer. Zorro also mixed up some epoxy filler, which he used to patch up some gouges in the keel as well as some dents in the deck.
Saturday, we had hoped that at least in the morning, we could get in some sailing; the weather forecasts predicted a breezy morning and a windy afternoon. But it was blustery from the get-go, much too windy for sailing. Zorro did some work on Constellation while Pat and I paid a visit to our favorite used-book store in the universe, Black Cat Books in Truth or Consequences. Gerald has a rule of thumb that a used-book store is not a proper used-book store unless there is a cat on the premises. I think I agree. Pat and I ended up getting a wide range of books, including a German grammar book, a collection of essays about what it means to be human in a technological environment, and a James Patterson (plus one of his more trustworthy co-authors, Maxine Paetro) thriller.
After that, Pat and I stopped by the hardware store to look for bolts to use when replacing the old cam cleats on the boat. In stainless steel, the longest bolts the store had were two inches, so we bought only four, two flathead and two pan-head, with the idea that whichever fit best, we could come back and buy more, and if neither fit, we weren't out much money.
Then Pat and I returned to Black Magic, where Pat set about working on replacing the old cam cleats on the console with the new ones that we had ordered. The old cleats were ancient and decaying even when we first got the boat, but we had never had time or money to replace them all -- when one of them failed, we put a new one in, and we kept saying that we needed to get them all replaced. It took Pat 20 minutes to remove just one cleat. We discovered that flathead bolts were the best for the new cam cleats, but two inches was too short -- we needed three-inch bolts.
Meanwhile, Zorro had done some more work on Constellation but had learned that the Sunday weather forecast was for even more wind, far too much to go sailing, so he decided to put his boat away and head back to El Paso. He stopped by Black Magic before heading south, and he and Pat worked on the shrouds -- we're looking at replacing turnbuckles at the very least and possibly at replacing the shrouds completely. We made plans to do more boat restoration next weekend, including new bottom paint at least on the parts of the keel that got patched. In the meantime, we can get the three-inch bolts and a few other bits of hardware we need. Top of the agenda for next weekend is completely redoing the outhaul on Black Magic so we can depower more effectively in a gust. There have been a lot of those lately.
Zorro is super-eager about all of these repairs and refurbishments, because he really, really wants to see Black Magic racing next weekend. And I do have to admit, I'm excited about seeing my boat finally getting back into a condition where she can sail well. But I'm feeling ambiguous about actually racing. I'm not sure I want to support the RGSC's current leadership -- the current commodore who, when he was vice commodore, tried to call meetings of the board even though the club constitution doesn't give him that power, and on shorter notice than even those who have the power are permitted to do; Zorro's replacement as race committee chairman to whom I gave the blog nickname "Space Invader" because of his creepy behavior toward me even before I learned of the New Mexico court records about him and the many restraining orders women have taken out against him; the club management that failed to notify one of our favorite restaurant owners that the sailing club was planning to hold a skippers' meeting in the restaurant's back room and thereby royally pissed off the restaurant owner ... I don't know that I want to race and thereby seem to support the current club leadership.
I think I'd rather just go sailing. And wear my new shoes.
OK, I've been accused of trying to turn this into a food blog. It does seem lately that I've been digressing into food-related matters. Well, here's another digression -- and everybody is invited to go foodie.
The origin of this writing project is an assignment in my Essay Writing class. During the term, the students write two in-class essays as a way of learning how to take essay exams -- preparation, time management, and those sorts of skills. The students are given readings on the essay topics and discuss them in class ahead of time, and then on the day of the in-class essay, they have the whole two-hour class period to write the essay in the form of an open-book, open-note exam.
Because I believe students write better when the topic is something they care about, I let them choose the in-class essay topics each term. Usually, the topics are fairly standard issues: DWI, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, and the like. This term, however, the students chose two unusual topics: Egypt and cuisine.
Egypt is a challenging topic because it's such a rapidly moving target. One of the students has proven to be a great resource in class discussions -- her husband is Egyptian and they lived there for seven years. With the insights she provided, the students had really good background to write their essays.
And then there's cuisine. There are all sorts of directions a writer could go with that one. The readings I gave the students included an article about the revival of home cooking and a very, very scholarly treatise from the James Beard Institute.
By the time I got done writing the essay prompt, I realized I had some interesting questions that might be fun for more than just my class. So I'm opening it out to my readers in the form of a writing challenge. Pick one of the topics in the essay prompt below and write a blog post about it. Unless you're actually enrolled in a college-prep composition course, you don't need to restrict yourself to the conditions of an essay exam; just write what you want to write about the topic. Once you have written your post, put a link to it in the comments here. Or if you don't have a blog, email your entry to byrnes.carol.anne (at) gmail.com and I will post it here for you. Deadline for entries is March 31.
Essay 4 (in-class)
Choose one of the following topics and write an essay that meets the English 0950 course objectives (clear main idea, good support, consideration for an educated reader, organization, reasonably correct mechanics):
·What is your favorite cuisine? Give details to explain why.
·Define “American cuisine.” What sets American cuisine apart from others?
·How does the enjoyment of food bring people together? Give examples from your own experience and/or from materials you have read.
·Red or green? Explain.
·Write a review of your favorite restaurant. Use details and examples to show the reader why he or she should eat there.
·In what way does the cuisine of a country or region reflect its culture? Show the connection using specific details.
