Sleater-Kinney's Classic at 20

It's been a long time since I've posted -- a demanding job, a young(ish) child, and two cross-country moves have definitely hurt any sporadic groove I might have somewhat conjured up. Thought I'd return to mark the anniversary of Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out.

Years ago, in my rustic little shotgun shack in Sierra Madre, I popped a hand-made cassette into my pathetic little boombox. It was by a band I'd never heard of called Sleater-Kinney and the publicist had sent it to me because I'd written about someone -- Elliott Smith? -- and she'd thought I might like this new all-female trio from the Pacific Northwest. I'd love to say that I was instantly hooked, but I wasn't: The sound was strange and rough. The music felt like it was coming from the outer reaches of the moon. While I generally liked oddities, my reaction was a far cry from the lightning bolt that hit when I first hit play on Elliott Smith.

And so Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out, released two years later, nearly knocked me off my feet. The combination of Corin Tucker's punch-to-the-head delivery, Carrie Brownstein's fierce guitar work, Janet Weiss' blues-based drumming -- all combined to create an album that was incredibly intense and highly melodic. It was an absolutely unstoppable masterwork bringing together heart, head, and machine.

Photo by Robert Paul Maxwell.

Years later, the power of the album remains strong enough to earn its place as one of the '90s top albums and definitely an indie rock masterpiece. One of my regrets is not giving this record the four-star review that it clearly deserved. My original Los Angeles Times review of the record did not include the one-half star that Robert Hilburn urged me to add when he'd read it, but you can sense the enthusiasm here and in my review of their corresponding show at the El Rey. 

Every now and then Hilburn was right. 

Exploring religion with Jack Miles

Recent events have made me think a lot about some of the highlights of the past couple of years -- and most of these peaks are strangely tied to religion and philosophy -- Buddhist, Christian, Jewish. It's probably tied to getting older, losing a parent, and dealing with the death of someone who shaped my childhood (RIP, Prince).

One of my favorite conversations of the past couple of years was with Jack Miles, a writer who probably makes me think more than any other -- aside from Shakespeare -- about life, death, and the mysteries of the universe. Full of wonder yet brilliant and highly rational, Miles was the editor behind the Norton Anthology of World Religions. I kind of wish I had this man on speed dial. Here is my interview with Mr. Miles -- is definitely in my lifetime top three interviews ever.

Changing the Complexion of YA

                  

One of the biggest highs a school librarian can get is the charge that comes after pairing a student with the right book. Connecting young people – especially reluctant readers – with literature is a remarkable thing, potentially life-changing on many levels. In my library, kids who have spent their lives avoiding reading have come back for more after finishing novels like Tyrell, Snitch, Perfect Chemistry, and Tears of a Tiger. Even more exciting than the fact that they’ve actually read cover-to- cover is the obvious thrill they get when they see characters who talk like their friends struggling with familiar (if heightened) problems. Their enthusiasm -- and surprise -- is a wonderful thing.

Sadly, though, so many great YA books feature jacket covers that only represent a tiny fraction of the kids at my urban public school. If we want kids to read, we need books that reflect them. Again and again, I’ve found four or five books in my relatively current and well-stocked library that matched a newly-reading student's interests, only to come up short on the fifth visit. Four books? Is that the best we can do?

If we are going to boost literacy, we need to address this problem, as young adult writer Walter Dean Myers so eloquently states in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times. Tracking his own youthful reading, he describes how it felt to be in love with reading only to realize that reading was a window into a world, it just wasn't his world.  

"...there was something missing," remembers Myers. "I needed more than the characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine."

He implies that, had things been different, he might not have dropped out of school.

How can we lament the reading abilities of the kids in our public schools and not address this incredibly important issue? How many times can students read The House on Mango Street and Myers’ own Monster? The market, profit-driven and self-interested as it is, will not address this issue; publishing houses are focused on kids who are already reading (hence the disproportionate number of characters who are white and female). 

 As Myers states, children need to see themselves in books, but the books need to encompass a wide range of tastes – dystopian thriller, action-packed non-fiction, confessional memoirs, supernatural romance, and the more typical realistic dramas that the students at my school devour. We need tons of books for boys. We need 50 Coe Booths, 100 Matt de la Penas. We need foundations, grants, an infrastructure for Latino and African American young adult writers that will help them develop their craft and to survive doing it.

If we don’t find a way to put books that speak to our students in front of them, then we can only blame ourselves if our children can’t read -- or just don't want to.

              

The Strange Case of Boy21

-->

As a school librarian, I have the bi-monthly pleasure of helping to select books for our book club. This month’s club was full of amazing discoveries: Kate DiCamillo’s Flora & Ulysses; Teri Terry’s dystopian mystery Slated; and Rick Yancy’s twisted take on Frankenstein, Monstrumologist. There is always one selection in the batch that I think of as my baby, the one that I want all the students to read (and that –yeah, I’ll admit it – typically makes me cry). This month, my book club baby is Matthew Quick’s incredible Boy21.

With a backdrop of basketball and urban blight, Boy21 is a YA novel with amazing texture and unbelievable heart. Finley, a troubled narrator who barely vocalizes, nevertheless has a lot to say about human decency and loyalty. Russ, the deeply traumatized Boy21 of the title, a basketball wunderkind who introduces himself to Finley by saying “I have been programmed to treat all humans with kindness,” is bizarre and completely believable. It’s a tough trick, but Quick pulls it all off to create a realistic novel that crackles like a profound human connection.

Tablets don't inspire readers

Everyone thought I was a stick in the mud.  Fellow students in my children's lit class (taken for a librarian degree) reacted with dismay when I said I wouldn't hand my young son an interactive e-book. Interactivity seemed like the last thing a burgeoning reader needed. Looks like the research is showing that to be true -- at least according to an Atlantic article.

The research stats are pretty damning. The conclusion drawn --

A touch-screen device makes it all too easy for a child to dismiss reading as boring or “flat” in comparison with the instant gratification of games and apps. There are simply too many distractions just a click away. Children are most likely to engage with stories in the right environment and context, and that means away from a screen.

READ MORE

Reading slowly, reading alone

In yesterday's New York Times, Colin Robinson discusses the vanishing network of professionals that used to support readers. One topic -- the loss of librarians as guides.

This variety of channels for the expert appraisal of books has been replaced with recommendations thrown up by online retailers’ computers. But as with so much of the Internet, the nuance and enthusiasm of human encounters is poorly replicated by an algorithm. For more personal interactions, many have turned to social reading sites such as Goodreads or LibraryThing.

MORE ROBINSON

The day before that, David Mikics wrote about the importance of offline reading in developing a sense of self --

The digital world offers us many advantages, but if we yield to that world too completely we may lose the privacy we need to develop a self. Activities that require time and careful attention, like serious reading, are at risk; we read less and skim more as the Internet occupies more of our lives. And there’s a link between selfhood and reading slowly, rather than scanning for quick information, as the Web encourages us to do. Recent work in sociology and psychology suggests that reading books, a private experience, is an important aspect of coming to know who we are.

MORE MIKICS

The library as refuge

Henry Rollins seems to be following me through every stage in my life. First, in middle school, the moment I spied an incredibly tall eighth grader with spiked hair and a "Black Flag Roach Motel" t-shirt was the moment that I realized that the age of ELO and bland suburban innocence was over.
When I was a rock critic, I was sent to review one of his stand-up routines (I was unimpressed).

These days, I'm viewing Rollins as one of the reasons to love Los Angeles. His KCRW radio show is the best thing on air and I am both shocked and relieved that it's still on.

Now, in this LA Weekly column, he pops up as a passionate supporter of libraries and librarians.

No longer tethered to a space, a library is still a sacred haven for certain kids -- the ones who don't fit in, are bullied, and are seeking a sign that, one day, things will be different.

Here's Rollins on his own experience:

"I preferred books over people. They didn't beat me up or take my bike. There was something very empowering about walking into the building, past all the adults, and realizing that I could pull down any book I wanted to and just start reading. I don't know why but it was a huge deal to me."

I know why -- the library is an offering of what is out there in the world, and it's a chance for confused, alienated kids to take that piece of the outside world and bring it in. It's a chance to have a choice about what they experience.

In the conversations about why libraries matter, the idea of the place as a safe haven or sacred space for kids who need one the most rarely comes up because we have moved beyond the limitations of brick and mortar. The kids in the library know that, quite often, it's still a library's most important role.

Amish approach to technology

This NPR story about the Amish and technological advances aired a while ago, but it keeps coming back to me again and again when I talk to people about technology and how it impacts our culture. So the Amish aren't necessarily anti-tech, but they think long and hard about how technology might impact the community and the culture? What a concept. Maybe we should rethink our slavish approach to tech changes.

Diane Ravitch says schools need librarians!

Sometimes Diane Ravitch sounds like the only voice of reason rising out of heated debate over public education. Recently, I interviewed Ravitch for Salon about charters, vouchers, Big Data, Teach for America and her new book, Reign of Error.

Here's one section of the interview that didn't make it into the Salon piece -- Ravitch on school librarians:

DMO: Since I am a public school librarian, I do have to ask about libraries. A lot of people have lost faith in libraries and they say that everybody can just Google everything anyway and so we don't need libraries. You do think we need librarians, and I'm wondering why?

Diane Ravitch: Well, I've always been a supporter of librarians and libraries because I think that libraries are the place where you learn how to use information. You learn how to use information in the classroom, but librarians are skilled — and much more so than when I was in school — in teaching you how to access information and provide tremendous resources.

I love the idea that you can go into a library and I have to say I still like books, no matter how much technology I use, no matter how many times I go to the Internet. I think that some of the most important learning experiences for me personally came from browsing in the library and finding unexpected things, and you don't find too many unexpected things on the Internet – you find what you look for. In the library, you can find things you didn't know you were looking for.

I think libraries are important because librarians are skilled in technology – they don't just file books away, they teach kids how to use the technology and how to use it responsibly.

Gen X's midlife meltdown

The reason for the long absence? This Salon article: Generation X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis? The piece is an examination of the elements -- some economic, some cultural -- that make Xers at midlife different from other recent generations. The state of X? We just can't get a break, can we? Maybe we can make an example of ourselves.


I'll be on WBEZ in Chicago tomorrow morning at 10:20 Central Time talking about the story.

Three out of four ain't bad

These days, there's a great deal of anxiously hunching over laptops because of a master's degree deadline that is rapidly approaching. Let's just say that the culminating assignment for an MLIS degree is no joke.

A tiny bit of reviewing in an actual newspaper was accomplished over the past couple of months, though. Ally Condie's final book in the Matched trilogy didn't thrill (go to the article here) but it wasn't nearly the slog of the second book of the series. Prodigy, the second book in Marie Lu's Legend series, was as solid as the first book. How often does that happen? (Check out my Prodigy review here).

Recently read and loved: Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick (hard to read but unforgettable) and Spellbinder by Helen Stringer (taking a bit from the Harry Potter playlist, but great fun nonetheless).

A very YA new year

At the top of DMO's must-read list.

Dig Me Out rang in the new year at a very cool Los Angeles party with a pack of writers who love YA books. Ones that came up in conversation: Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone (feel they blew the cover on this one -- kids don't dig the image -- but hear it's amazing), Marie Lu's gripping Legend series, the Matched trilogy, and John Stephens' The Emerald Atlas.

On top of adult book conversations were Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue and Cheryl Strayed's memoir. Working on Prodigy now, but the others are on the top of DMO's resolution list.

In library news, the New York Times came out with a discussion about the value of libraries. Hearing others argue about the value of you chosen career feels like someone taking apart your psyche while you sit idly by and listen, but these conversations matter.

Here's a link to the New York Times' "Room for Debate" forum, with school librarian Buffy Hamilton representing.

The curse of the trilogy

Every day I hear kids' excitement about the next book in a series, and then I get to witness their dashed hopes as the subsequent books don't live up to the promise of the first (or second). Here, I'm the one disappointed. Here's my Los Angeles Times review of Ally Condie's Reached.

Reading, Listening, Playing, More Reading

I haven't been posting on Dig Me Out of late, but I haven't been slacking. Instead, I created a new, improved books blog for teens, teachers, teen librarians, and parents who need books that grab older kids' attention. 

Here's my new blog, YA Reads (and other things). An added bonus is that it includes brain-challenging video games, fantastic audiobooks, and even music (so I get to dabble in my old profession -- music criticism -- a bit). 

There is a ridiculous bounty of wonderful stuff out there just waiting to be read and explored. I plan to add something to this blog every week (maybe posting that will make it come true!).

I really hope that you enjoy my new blog. If you run into something that you haven't read, listened to, or played, please try to find it at your local library. If they don't have it, request it. Make friends with your teen librarian. I've dealt with many and have found them to be exemplary human beings, both helpful and incredibly cool. They are your resources and we are so lucky to have them (and we need to keep them).

I would love to hear from you if you have any comments and suggestions! Welcome to YAROT! 

Can Byliner save writers?

Los Angeles Book Fest, Day One: A great start from the beginning, running into some of our favorite writers, M.G. Lord and Dana Gioia. Didn't get to see as many panels as I would have liked, but did get over to one that had the words "digital" and "narrative" in the title. At first, it was a letdown that most of the panel was about the writing business -- namely, can the digital landscape save (rather than obliterate) magazine, short story, and novel writers. But panelist Mark Bryant, co-founder and editor at Byliner, gave me hope that the state of online reading was on an upswing.

Anyone who's ever tried and failed to find a magazine or newspaper article by a certain writer within a site's clunky search engine should be pretty excited about Byliner. The site features original content but it also collects and, hooray!, CURATES excellent articles. I keep hearing that curation and editing will characterize Web 3.0, and here we go...

Another discovery from this panel is Atavist, a site that specializes in the kind of literary, lengthy magazine story that is becoming extinct. As the front section of the New York Times Magazine mimics a web-surfing 15-year-old buzzed on Arizona Iced Tea, web sites are stretching out and allowing us to luxuriate with a 25,000 word article. A positive trend.

Kid in a candy store

I just got back from Montrose, where I was able to spend some time with my favorite YA book expert, Kris Vreeland. Kris used to be at Vroman's but she now sells books at Once Upon a Time Books. Spending time with Kris is pretty dangerous, and she's inspired me to clear aside huge chunks of time to dig into these awesome-sounding books.
Here's a sampling (click on the title to see the Goodreads page for the book):


 

Wonder by Ed Palacio: The story of a misfit who now has to go to school. Goodreads readers give this one an excellent rating.



Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick: Crazy, apocalyptic horror.



 Starters by Lissa Price: In this dystopia, the old can rent out youthful bodies until this perfect set-up goes horribly awry.





 Other books I can't wait to read:

Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore. I loved Graceling so much, I was actually afraid to read the follow-up, Fire. Got to bite that bullet now; am hearing that the third in the series is amazing.



My big victory of this year has been in FINALLY convincing one student to read Green's Looking for Alaska. That student told another, and now they keep coming for it. This new one is getting raves.

Why reading matters

Photo by Richard Howard.

Back in 1991, I took a graduate course from Sven Birkerts, a charming and stubborn intellectual. Again and again, he came back to his misgivings over the flood of information that was coming our way and his fear that writing on computers (rather than by hand or with a typewriter) did not allow for deep thinking. Let's just say that his ruminations on the topic didn't do much for the self-confidence of all aspiring writers in the room.

The book that he was working on at the time was the praised and denounced The Gutenberg Elegies. Now, in this School Library Journal cover article, Birkerts argues, simply, for the act of reading. Instead of assuming that reading is good, he analyzes why it's a worthwhile practice.

While much has been written about the constant distractions of our digital world, Birkerts gets to the very root of why reading matters in this paragraph:

"Does it matter? What use is the imagination—as opposed to, say, the kind of mental agility, the quick-reflex thinking, that video games encourage? What is the argument we make for reading and daydreaming and cultivating inner resonances? I would say, to put it in the simplest terms, that imagination nourishes the primary self. As much as our skills and practical accomplishments bolster a sense of independent identity, imagination fills out the inner counterpart. It consolidates the “I” by making plausible the other. Imagination enables empathy, and imagination exercised through reading, through the work of inhabiting the language and sensibility of created characters—and of course the author herself—pushes continually against the solipsism fed to us by a marketing industry selling consumption as the index of our worth."

Slow type

And now I run the risk of seeming ridiculously retro and nostalgic, but I loved the story in the New York Times style section today about typewriter fetishists.

“I’m in love with all of them,” said Louis Smith, 28, a lanky drummer from Williamsburg. Five minutes later, he had bought a dark blue 1968 Smith Corona Galaxie II for $150. “It’s about permanence, not being able to hit delete,” he explained. “You have to have some conviction in your thoughts. And that’s my whole philosophy of typewriters.”

The article, "Click, Clack, Ding!, Sigh"...brought up a lot of buried misapprehension that I've always had about the slapdash approach to writing that the computer has created in all of us. And because this  is not just about the love of slow-brewed thoughts, but about the sad fact that we've embraced plastic over lovingly burnished metal, here's the slide show companion to the story.

In grad school, I was taking a class with Sven Birkerts when he was writing The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. In the class, he often threw out his theory about computers creating a lot of bad thinking and dashed-off writing (see Louis Smith, above). I'd even take it a step further to say that handwriting creates the best link between the brain and the hand, offering up more creativity and solid thinking. I remember casually asking a writer/editor if she ever tried writing in longhand first, because I always thought it brought better results. "Just sounds like a waste of time to me," she said with a flummoxed look, making me feel like a complete throwback...kind of like these typewriters.

The joys of independent reading

Recently, in light of some recent events at my school, I've been thinking a lot about the value of independent reading as part of the school curriculum. As standardized testing takes hold (and as independent reading assessment has become more time-consuming and difficult), kids are choosing fewer books on their own. It's a real loss, and it's happening at all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum. Our teachers have embraced independent reading, and we're seeing the payoff pretty clearly.

As an AP English student, I read scores of plays and novels. However, the books that I remember are the ones that I chose off of an approved but not core list. These books felt dangerous, outside the classic curriculum, fringe, and my attachment to them was personal. Those seared in my memory are Naked Lunch, On the Road, Turn of the Screw, among a few. They were generally books about people operating outside of normal society, often in deranged ways.

The middle and high school where I work has embraced a different kind of independent reading. Instead of edgy classics, our kids are reading YA fiction, often intense books with strong plots. Most are not reading Great Expectations, or even On the Road or Catcher in the Rye, but, quite frankly, they wouldn't anyway. While some lament the loss of the classic as more modern fiction is embraced, my feeling is that we are creating readers instead of turning kids off of reading for good, which is what would happen if I handed one of my students my personal favorites. My hope is that they will dig deeper and turn to classics after they build their reading muscles, which are often pretty lax.

The way that my school has promoted books and reading is through our "book club." An informal group of people who buy books and might start casual conversations about them. It is not a real book group, which, as a recent New York Times piece notes, is not always necessary. As Rebecca Stead notes, often a reader wants the book to only exist in the reader's mind. "For me, as a kid, a book was a very private world." Stead recalls not wanting to talk to people about the books she loved because it shattered that intimate relationship with the work.

People who want to promote reading, though, have to work hard to build a must-read excitement for a book. As book critic and author Laura Miller states, there's a whole lot of competing interests out there. Book groups and Internet book sites generate excitement and interest around an activity that, for most kids, might not seem worth their while.

“If you want to build a culture where people who could just as easily watch a movie are going to instead say, ‘Oh, I’m going to read this Tracy Chevalier book or ‘The Kite Runner,’ ” Ms. Miller said, “then they do need that kind of stuff like the book groups and discussion guides.”

Letting kids pick their own books is controversial, as this New York Times article -- "A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like" -- indicates. At this point, though, it may be the only way to get kids to read. And, if you can't get kids to read, then you really shouldn't be in the education business at all.

A new addiction with City of Bones

It's always fun to find a new book addiction, and I'm completely hooked on Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments Series. The opening nightclub scene in the first book, City of Bones, is an easy book talk. All I have to do is act it out (I knew those high school drama classes would pay off somehow), and the book is sold.

In this scene, the main character, Clary, a normal Brooklyn teenager, goes to an all-ages club. In line, she spies a cute boy -- who just happens to come to her (and the bouncer's) attention because he's got a sword. Inside, Clary's busy deciding whether or not to go talk to him as he ponders why humans are such easy prey and zeroes in on his first victim. The night ends with a killing and a dead body that can't be located. No one believes Clary's murder story, and she's wondering if it's all been a very strange dream.

The dream becomes the narrative as Clary bumps up against one otherworldly creature after another. My personal favorite is the sinister cabal of librarians -- archivists who resemble a cross between a Zen Buddhist monk and the Grim Reaper -- who can read minds and crack open memories, laying waste to the human hosts.

In one scene, these librarians, the Silent Brothers, come up in conversation. One character reminds another that he hates the Brothers.

"I don't hate them," said Jace candidly. "I'm afraid of them. It's not the same thing."

"I thought you said they were librarians," said Clary.

"They are librarians."

Simon whistled, "Those must be some killer late fees."

Clare's humor seems aimed at adults, but the romance and drama grabs kids. Let's just say that the series came to my attention when a student, normally calm and collected, checked out the third book and, with a wild look in her eye, grabbed it, explaining, "These are the most addictive books ever. They're like Twilight -- on crack."