On Van Morrison’s “Brand New Day”

I’ve never met a person who has not suffered from what we call the blues.  The happiest, most centered person I know, a guy who mimics Eastern philosophies without trying to, has been completely defeated by the harsher realities of our existence.  Of course, so have I. 

Then again, every once and a while, it seems that there are things out there that bring a smile to the coldest of stares – maybe it’s a puppy running, with ears flying like spastic kites and the grin of sunrise burning into an otherwise indifferent mood.  Or, maybe it’s being in love and how, regardless of the circumstances, it just makes you want to believe in something better, something higher. 

If there is a song to capture both of these experiences, I would like to put forth Van Morrison’s “Brand New Day,” the song that closes his 1970 sophomore album, Moondance.  Closing an album with a song revolving around sunrise is a cool enough idea that itches with plenty of irony, but the song, still, works perfectly ending an album as well as allowing the listener to consider what beginnings are now at hand.

As a teenager, when sunrise ends the long summer nights’ wild misadventures, I remember turning to this song often.  There were others (most notably the second side of The Beatles’ Abbey Road), but this song managed to continuously find its way into both the lower and higher moments of my twenties – the years we’re programmed to forget rock and roll dreams and sweat the games screaming for more players (more people boxed into cubes, ties and pencil skirts).  Then, I turned thirty and, as this third decade of breathing rolls on like the lyrics of “Ramblin’ Man,” Van Morrison’s song is still finding a place on the soundtrack of my experiences.  I wear a tie to work.  I am married.  I have kids.  I live in a nice suburban development.  But (thankfully), I do not feel contained, restrained, or obtained by any of those things.  I still feel moved by music, and few songs move me like “Brand New Day.”

Now, song for song, I think I still prefer Morrison’s Astral Weeks album to Moondance, but what matters, here, is one single song.  In an America where pay-cuts are a blessing because they’re not a lay-off and the scientific advancements responsible for traveling to work are in the hands of irresponsible businesses and government agencies that clearly put dollars over people (not because they’re evil for its own sake, but because they have to for their own “success” as it is defined by the society we all have agreed to be a part of), it seems like there’s not a whole lot of things to smile about.  Many people aren’t exactly psyched to go to work (I am – I’m not bragging; I just lucked out with things), as the only reason many of us work is to earn enough money for free time to smile.  An odd paradox that is much more complex than that simplification, but still odd, right?  If “Brand New Day” does anything – if it has done anything for me over the years – it finds the miraculous in rock bottom, offering a sunrise to a long, dark night.  This is to say, then, that hope is possible.

You don’t have to be down and out to enjoy “Brand New Day.”  The flipside is what do you listen to when life seems to offer you so much you think you might explode?  What happens when life is so good and then it gets better?  I just found out that an old friend of mine has started to receive national attention for a teaching method he came up with (this follows extraordinary popularity and success – that’s “success” as in “valuable to students” – in a 2000-plus student public high school).  I wasn’t surprised, but I was satisfied that good things do happen to good people.  Think about babies and what a magic experience they are – how much they offer not only the world they’ll inherit but the parents who get to raise them.  It goes on and on – maybe a hobby that you’d given up on all of a sudden takes a turn, reenters your life, and you’re right back into the thrill of creation that maybe you felt as a kid with a pile of Legos.  “Brand New Day” offers a contemplative appreciation for these moments, like an adult watching sunrise over the Atlantic for the first time in years, petting his dog because he feels he actually needs to touch something truly alive. 

Few people I’ve met would trade in their emotions for completely stoic existences; in other words, most people will deal with the extreme lows life offers because of the highs that seem to also be available.  Wherever you’re at, Morrison, an artist focused on the ethereal to begin with, really nailed something with “Brand New Day,” and I’ve been able to understand the moments of life that language isn’t good enough for a little bit better because of this song. 

I couldn’t find a version of this song on youtube, so you’ll have to find it on iTunes or Pandora.  Hope you like it.

Just Finished The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

I realize I’m the last person in the world to have read this book, so I figured I’d throw up a quick little review before I checked out any real formal analysis on the novel. Maybe you can remember your initial reactions, too.

I don’t know…for me, The Kite Runner can be looked at as a really good story, one acute for our times. The book is filled with hooks and the action moves, there’s horror and self reflection, there’s heroic falls (though I can’t say there was ever too much real grace to fall from, just privilege), and, in the end, there’s ambiguity. So, we have the modern world, and though that’s been done before a million times, it’s still a good story. Hosseini is a storyteller, which, apparently and according to one of the novel’s characters, all Afghans are. Will people still be reading The Kite Runner in a hundred years? I don’t care.

To an American audience – maybe even a Western one – The Kite Runner is a valuable novel for a couple of reasons. Never doubt fiction’s ability to reveal the more human aspects of history, something extremely important as many of us will not make the dramatic governmental decisions that fill history text books (most of us just live under the blanket or suffer the landfall of those decisions). In an America pushing ten years of war in the Middle East, having a version of the human beings that make up Afghanistan is extremely valuable. Hosseini, without harping on anything, simply incorporates the last thirty years of the country’s politics and social climate into the backdrop of his escape, return, and rescue story. I like that, and got a sense of Afghanistan that will lead to further exploration.

And in that sense, an American reader can learn of the horrors of political turmoil and maybe realize that discussing health care proposals at all is a great civic honor and privilege. On the other hand, an American reader can also learn of the dangers of extended political corruption and the effects of an irresponsible society. Both are valuable, as are considerations of religion, class, and gender and how each may be terribly abused in the socio-political spectrum. That stuff I appreciate in fiction and it’s why I’ve come to support more novels from across the planet, not just those from Britain, France, the United States, and a few from Russia. Hosseini may not be as literarily apt as Salman Rushdie and therefore may not be capable of pulling off something like Midnight’s Children for Afghanistan, but he has still left a good story for people to enjoy, connect to, and learn from.

Whatever.  What I’ll remember most from The Kite Runner is Hosseini’s portrayal of the relationships between family members and their close family friends, because these are human issues and an American reader can find all sorts of interpersonal connections to the Afghan experience and come to “we’re not so different, after all” types of conclusions – which are good. The complications of an individual’s past (the secrets no one knows) that are so overlooked in the modern world’s snapshot categorizations into stereotypes are fairly well-explored by Hosseini in a couple of characters. One of fiction’s strongest attributes is its ability to make us understand an aspect of ourselves by reading about something else. Simplifying? No way. The history of the world has been told through metaphor, and human beings understand this. Hosseini did a good job at shedding a little light on why it’s valuable – necessary, really – to look (to quote The Who) behind blue eyes. Everyone might not have a horrible skeleton in their closet, but they have reasons, that go unshared with most people, for why they do things the way they do. Maybe simply understanding our own motivations could help us get along with everyone else? It almost worked for Hosseini’s main character. I’m really reminded of the old Cat Stevens song, “Father and Son,” which hit on the complicated silence that exists in familial relationships between the generations. All of that unsaid stuff that the elephant in the room metaphor can’t cover is incorporated into Stevens’ song and Hosseini’s novel.

So yeah, I liked The Kite Runner. It’s a good story and it provokes academic curiosity in terms of both history and sociology, and though I gave you no quotes or real defenses for this, I wanted to post something quick on my blog so that maybe I’ll come to find out I’m not the last person in the world to read it, and that great title can fall to someone else. William Dean Howells might praise Hosseini for creating a marketable product that also offers a little value. Me too.

Here’s a link to Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q29YR5-t3gg

To Teach or Not to Teach: Ramblings on Canonical Literature (and Rock and Roll)

To Teach or Not to Teach?  Well, I’m talking choosing books, not career suicide, so to all you Fortinbras out there, call off the armies

 

The non-teaching public holds a bias against teachers concerning the “summer off” perk of the job.  Maybe some of the bad seeds literally shut down for a couple months each year, but for the most part, the teachers I know use the summer months to catch up on ways of improving their craft.  Now, obviously, the time required in the office is minimal, and I’m not denying the schedule’s quite nice, but the summer off phrase I hear in supermarkets and at swim meets can get a little condescending.  So, what have I been doing this summer besides bitching about people bitching about the career I love?  I’ve been (among a tie-dyed menagerie of other things) considering what books I teach and why I teach them.

 

The literary “canon” is the catch-phrase when deciphering curriculums in literature classes at the high school level.  This canon’s balls (you lose an “n”) are your Shakespeare’s, Huxley’s, Wordsworth’s, Hemingway’s, Miller’s, etc.  A work or two by these authors is typically taught at some point to most American high school students.  But, how do you work in present day authors when standardized tests, colleges, and parents want students to be aware of a few specific works by a few specific authors?  Is this the extent of the worthwhile literature of the history of humanity?  Of course not – but how do you pick, and then defend to the public, something new?  As Shakespeare asked more than once, what’s in a name?

 

The issue of what to teach has plagued me throughout my short career.  What interests students is typically more modern (as in present, not the literally movement) works where not only the theme, but the plot, dialects, and settings are more immediately recognizable.  But, Shakespeare is clearly worthwhile and, after some lumps, quite accessible.  Besides being pretty apt in iambic pentameter, the guy was one of the world’s more acute sociologists – and the way humans relate to one another is always good fodder.  So, he’s in?  Fine.  Hamlet or Lear?  Caesar or Henry?  Romeo & Juliet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream?  But, then the next questions:  how far removed is Kite Runner from Othello?  How does On the Road compare to Much Ado about Nothing? 

 

I could go on and on.  Vonnegut’s worked out OK, blending with both the canonical and counter-culture crowds.  Salinger goes in and out of style, and in my own experience geography seems to apply (the “f*#k you” on the wall that keeps Catcher out of some southern curriculums is no problem in the northeast).  Huxley is typically the dystopian author of choice, though Bradbury and Rand work their ways in.  Why not bring Rushdie and Byatt into the high school literature class?  Are we trying to get students to grasp themselves and themes or are we pushing strict narrative analysis?  Why even read anymore, anyway????

 

I’m not going near the last question, but I do worry a little about how to sell literature to an increasingly disinterested public (not high school students, public).  There was that movie, Dangerous Minds, where the hip young teacher brings in Bob Dylan and all the inner city kids analyze “Mr. Tambourine Man.”  Yeah, OK…but does Dylan hold up to Wordsworth or Whitman, to Chaucer or Pound?  Well, why not?  The question to ask is what does “hold up” mean?

 

I wrote my college application essay (applying early admissions to University of Vermont in 1995) on the first CD player I owned when I was in 7^th grade.  Remember, tapes where the musical medium of choice prior to CDs, tapes those things you would spend hours pouring your heart and soul into the ultimate mix for the one you love, designing cool covers no record company’s cronies could come close to.  But I wrote on about how I bought Springsteen’s Born to Run album, and how I started paying attention to the stories in the lyrics and how those stories made me think about what was being sung along with the appealing, moving music.  Rock and roll had created an intellectual curiosity – go figure.  But I listened on, to Dylan and Stipe and Westerberg and Strummer, the poets of rock and roll according to the Rolling Stone and Spin, the Atlantic Monthly and Paris Review of rock and roll.  Anyway, this somehow lead to me reading Allen Ginsberg and Jim Carroll and Walt Whitman – poets appealing to my high school mind.  By the time I got to college, I was actually somewhat excited to read the history of what lead to the literature I loved.  We call The Who “classic rock,” but we have Lao Tzo and Homer to fulfill literary classics.  So, when were schools at a mass social level formalized?  Oh yeah…recently.  Maybe that matters?

 

And I think about this experience of the essay that got me accepted early admission a lot when considering what to include in my own curriculums.  What is the point of that last paragraph?  Should I teach Bruce Springsteen, or was that just what caught my attention?  I mean, clearly the Boss has got a lyrical edge on Joey Ramone, but what about Greg Graffin?  Close call.  People from all angles of the literary and educational spectrums sound in (and off) on the pros and cons of teaching from the canon or teaching to modern interest.  Arguments arise for “History of Literature” classes as compensation (ironic in that history is written literature).  But, one thing that’s tough to deny the canon is that the works included are, typically, really good – and that’s on all levels of really good, from plot, character depth, narrative complexity, historical place, interest level, etc, etc. 

 

So is there no answer?  Have I wasted my “summer off” contemplating the unanswerable?  Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, and that makes me think of Yasunari Kawabata’s obsession with “wasted effort” in Snow Country, a great novel I didn’t come across until a Masters level World Lit class.  Are educators across the world acting out great metafictional irony by teaching Sartre, with all his concerns with social presentations of fabricated realities, while they’re simultaneously slaves to those presentations of what are the “right” books to teach?  Maybe you find it annoying that the “work” I discussed doing has consisted of reading and that I haven’t really presented any major schools of thought on either side of this argument.  True enough.  But, my goal, somewhere, was to get across the effort, wasted or not, put into what I present to the youth of America. 

 

Regardless of what ends up happening (or what goes into the curriculum), I care deeply enough to give the process all the effort I can muster.  And, really, I’m not sure the best answer isn’t just a good sampling of everything, showing students how amazing literature can be, what it can tell us about ourselves in both its themes and creation, and how art, history, philosophy and science can all be present simultaneously.  Teaching canonical works is usually good because those works tend to be more complex, and students need the guidance of a teacher, where they can plug through more modern works with their own insights and do OK.  Besides, to get back to Springsteen, if they decide to get in that open door, though the ride ain’t free, and ride all the way from Thunder Road into the heart of Jungleland, well, that’s a decision no one’s going to make for them, one they’ll have to make for themselves.  Maybe a teacher’s real job is to just make sure they have the option, to open the door the door for them?  Yeah, I like that.

Phish and the Garage

The Garage…

So maybe four months ago now, my wife found this great deal on a garage door opener online and bought it. The garage – our garage, a “two car” home to bikes, old tricycles, lawn equipment, empty bottles, books, bags of wrapping paper from last Christmas, and more than a few species of spider – was not a place I really wanted opened up to the eyes of my neighbors. We live in a nice little development where garages back up to alleys that split blocks, so visibility is high when the door is open. Anyway, our cars hadn’t seen this as a parking spot in years, but now there was something to install that would, additionally, motivate me to allow the cars back in. That was four months ago.

South Carolina summers and manual labor do not mix. Mowing the lawn in July and August is an experience of tai-chi proportions, where the balance between pushing the lawnmower and holding up my glasses, attempting to stay on the waterfall of sweat cascading down my nose, is meditation (and meditation is what’s required to back the rage this process breeds). Wandering into a garage in the heat of July might be suicide to a Canadian, but we’ll just call it punishing for an out of shape teacher from Jersey. I wandered in.

And, I cleaned the damn thing. It took me three days, as many trips to the local dump, a trip to my parents’ house (where we now store a few of the kids’ vehicles of various sorts), and a trip to Good Will where I was able to unload a bunch of old clothes and actually feel good about doing something decent, too (I didn’t take the tax receipt…that felt cheap as I felt they were helping me out just as much). I swept. I drilled holes. I hung bikes. I organized boxes. I relocated spiders off to reservations in the West (and squashed others).

In an attempt at some psychological argument against all that was telling me I was intentionally engaging in the heat of Hell, Phish played consistently throughout this exorcism of the annex to the American home, this cleansing of dirty pasts for my vehicles’ repository. With the majority of their concert history digitally documented, it’s now fairly easy to access some of the happier moments of my adolescence. Trey, Mike, Paige, and Fish can still make me, thirty-one year old father, husband, teacher, pet-owner, (insert numerous other synonyms for “old nerd”), dance like a seventeen year-old with the freedom of a new drivers’ license. I still love the music Phish made and hope to always do so. Phish is summer and Phish is a smile, and Phish can help an aging bookworm clean a garage like nothing else. The Clash? I would have left the place as it was. Miles Davis? I would have contemplated the nature of the garage’s mess and its relation my own inner messes and, accordingly, given up on the cleaning. Guns n Roses? I would have made a bigger mess and walked away throwing things. Springsteen? I would have found a better job and left the garage for a more apt time. I could go on, but the point is that Phish’s musical explorations, silly lyrics, and nuances of nostalgia that were a large portion of my life’s greatest mix, got me through to the end: an organized haven for hanging bikes, shelving tools, and parking cars (and I can now fit two).

So now I feel entitled to wander the neighborhood with the moral superiority of a biker in shiny spandex at a high-traffic intersection, criticizing neighbors whose less than standard garages lie in disarray. Maybe if the lizards had only cleaned their garages…

Anyway, now it’s off to install the electric garage door opener.

Here’s a song that’s been great to my moods over the years, Runaway Jim:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTH2AMR4hRc

A Good Summer

One of the upsides of teaching as a career is the summer.  Summer means reading what I want, haning out with the kids and having all sorts of crazy misadventures under the suspended heat of time, and a chance to get something done artistically. 

This summer’s been good for the arts.  In late June, I released Pond, a full lenght collection of poems, available at www.amazon.com now (though it’s necesary to use periods when searching my name) and somewhere over the next two months, Barnes and Noble. 

Yesterday, The New Disco, a Charleston based power-trio I play guitar in, began recording a four-song demo.  Formed this past spring, it’s been fun being in band after a long absence.  Over the past ten years, I have done nothing but solo folk work, playing randomly with other musicians.  Being in a band again has reminded me of the comradery, the devotion, and the fun in a shared musical experience.

So, basically I wanted to get a post up.  I’m sure I’ll have more intellectual things to say as time passes.  I wrote a guest page on poetry that you can check out on my friend R.W. Ridley’s blog:  www.rwridley.wordpress.com.

About Me…

I grew up along the shores of Monmouth County, New Jersey, and now spend my time in and around Charleston, South Carolina with my wife and two boys.  I am currently the Head of English at Pinewood Preparatory School in Summerville, South Carolina.  When not teaching, I write both poetry and novels and play guitar for Charleston based band, The New Disco.