Postcard Memoir

She Says (she still exists, despite the 12/5/09 post - she's become enamored of facebook) sent me an email about how this teacher at the NOW Academy in LA, in a poor part of Koreatown, wanted postcards representing various parts of the world.

Rather than send her class actual postcards from Minnesota, I sent them Larry Sutin's book, A Postcard Memoir. Larry was my professor at Hamline when I was doing my Master's in writing and scribbling a thesis on dystopias. He's done books on Aleister Crowley and Philip K. Dick as well. But this book is beautiful, and contains pictures of postcards from his collection (he also collects pens from drug companies - a hobby my mother has been helping me to facilitate for him for years) from all over the world, with a bent toward Minnesota: pictures of old hotels (like the Leamington), Annandale, Lake Pepin, et al. If you want a postcard of Minnesota, Larry's pictures are unique.

However. It's a memoir. So some of the writing accompanying the postcards is a bit racy for 2nd and 3rd graders. I'm not so sure they care to know that Larry's mother was gang raped in the French wilderness when she was a Jewish resistance fighter in WWII (his parents are the subject of another book - also very good. Or that they need to know he first masturbated to Cyd Charisse. Twice. I'm glad I didn't know that when we saw each other several times a week. Singing in the Rain is perhaps one of my favorite things in the world. I hate to think of someone wanking to it. And there are a few postcards featuring the odd Greek/Roman statue with the highlighted phallus.

My hope is that the teacher will be sharp enough to simply pick out the postcards that are interesting and present them without presenting any of the text (at least any of the inappropriate text). After all, my teachers in elementary (one in particular) were kind enough to deal with me when I said "vagina" several times in several minutes without raising a serious ruckus. So I suspect they're experts at sifting and dealing with inappropriate material, yet might appreciate that the inappropriate bits are appropriate for them during non-school reading time.

Good luck with all that, Mrs. Sakai. I hope you show them the Annandale Card. That's probably very close to the field where I almost got hypothermia during a Scouting event!

Sock Hop

Pooteewheet went to play poker tonight and Eryn and I went to the elementary sock hop. My wife was bemoaning the fact she was missing something so fun, but Eryn only wanted to stay for about 45 minutes and then she was all done. I don't think she related well to the children who were pretending to jam on the plastic guitars and saxaphones they bought, or the ones (e.g. almost every little girl there) who knew all the words to the Taylor Swift songs. Instead she wanted to get home and check out her new Mac Book Pro. Obviously we've brought her up wrong. I can only hope she grows up to be the big sister who shows, sister in tow, wearing white short shorts and enough makeup for half a dozen women.

But she did get excited about dressing up and wearing my wife's pearls. She's looking a little sleepy here before we even got started. As a point of interest, she did try to dance with a boy, but he kept running away and hiding.

They're not Weeds, They're Plants!

I taught two 25 minute classes in art appreciation at a local elementary school today. In order to teach the kids about the T'ai Hu room exhibit (officially, The Studio of Gratifying Discourse) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I brought a number of plastic bowls full of sand so the kids could make mini rock gardens with rocks, sticks, evergreens, and multi-colored sponge pieces. While talking about how the T'ai rocks inspired the contemplation of nature within where one lived by serving as reminders of natural shapes like animals or people, inanimate objects like mountains and caves, and more, I asked the kids, "Is there anything we do now that's sort of the same? Do we bring nature into our homes in any way?"

One kid replied, "We have plants in the house!"

I agreed and asked, "And does everyone like the same plants? Do you have the same plants in your house as your friends do?"

Kid one, "No, my Dad has lots of flowers in all different colors. Red. Orange. Yellow."

Kid two, "It could be a cactus. Some people like to have a cactus.

Kid three, "We have lots of plants of all kinds."

Kid four, "My Dad dries plants in the basement."

Probably for scrapbooking.

World Dominion!

Eryn and her classmates sang at morning meeting today. Their secular version of "I've Got the Whole World" smacks of a bit of Pinky and the Brain global dominion.