rocket to nowhere

Marina City at night close-up

Originally uploaded by Noel Cornell

I’m back in Chicago for a while, and even though I will miss Scottsbluff’s topography and my parents and my friends and my students (in no particular order), every breath of polluted air here is somehow regenerative. If you’re in Chicago and reading this, get in touch with me and we’ll go out for a beer. It’s going to be a summer. Yes it is.

And so that’s how it ends.

Alix G. of my GHS German 1 class won the drawing to design my coiffure. Here’s what she had me do:

The woman who cut my hair very definitely thought I was insane, but we had fun anyway. It’ll stay like this for a week now, and then it’s back to clean-shaven.

Tonight, I’m going draw the name of the student who will decide how I’m going to cut all this hair. I’ll write more about that later. In the meantime, here are some pictures of the beard at its end.

This is me attempting to look like a mean farmer:

And this is me trying not to laugh:

boingboing.net pointed me to the Reading Stack group on flickr. I couldn’t help myself. Hopefully someone will look at my benoted picture and write a comment to me about how it looks as though I’m trying to show off. Who knows, on the one hand, maybe I am. On the other hand, maybe it’s just that most of these books are books I bought when the best bookstore in Chicago had its going out of business sale.

I recently bought (impulsively, and at Wal-Mart no less, while shopping for groceries when J was visiting and unfortunately ill) and read The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. It is a fantastic piece of (young-adult (whatever that means)) literature and an even more fantastic mixing of standard narrative prose and sequential art (which is a fancy way of saying “comics”).

It is supposed to be the story of a young boy named Hugo Cabret, but it is really about Georges Méliès, who was a magician, maker of automata, and early filmmaker. He is credited with discovering that if you stop the camera and remove something from the shot before starting the camera again, you can make that something disappear. Here is a link to his Wikipedia page. In 1902, he directed one of the first sci-fi/fantasy films: A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune), which contains the iconic bullet-in-the-eye-of-the-man-in-the-moon image, and which you should watch right now (I’m embedding part one of this two-part version, despite its strange electronica soundtrack, because the all-in-one version has annoying, French-accented narration):

The film is incredible for its use of special effects, its playing with perspective, and its design (set, costume, otherwise). The book is incredible because it operates on many of the same platforms–I mean, mixing text and image is not a new concept, but I can’t think of many novels, young adult or otherwise, that begin with sequential art, interrupt that art with text, and then periodically interrupt that text with more art that advances the narrative. And I suppose one could refer to that as both “special effects” and “playing with perspective.” The book as object is well-designed: The black-framed pages, whether they be text or art, are reminiscent of silent films (in fact, many of the text pages only have a small amount of text, making them very much like intertitles). The book as narrative is also well-designed: Much of the story has to do with clockworks and automata, and I, as reader, was pleased to watch different parts of the narrative come, fit, and work together.

There is a certain amount of cheesiness in how well everything is tied up at the end, but considering the book’s two main conceits, clockwork and movies, are both well-known for their neat completeness, and also considering this is a work of (so-called) young adult fiction, I can forgive the perhaps too-easy happy ending.

At the very least, this book has renewed my interest in learning how to pick locks.

Esquire magazine recently published a list called “60 Things Worth Shortening Your Life For.” I found a link to it on boingboing.net. I read it. It’s pretty stupid, and mostly contains food you shouldn’t eat as well as other gems like punching Barry Bonds in the face and playing tackle football past the age of 25. There is a five-point section about “The five most decadent burgers in the United States of America.” Three of those five burgers can be found in the northeast: New York City, Manchester, CT, and Clearfield, PA. One can be found in Memphis. And the fifth can be found in St. Louis. Essentially, according to the fine editors at Esquire, all five of the most decadent burgers in the U.S.A. can be found east of the Mississippi river.

I don’t usually write letters to the editor. Everybody has an opinion, and we all know what opinions are like. However, on this occasion . . . I don’t know what came over me. I dashed the following off and quick sent it to Esquire:

1. The idea that all five of our country’s most decadent burgers can be found east of the Mississippi is a slap in the face of cattle country. Perhaps you’d like to visit Nebraska or Wyoming sometime and eat some beef that doesn’t have to be dressed with 7 different things in order for it to taste good.

2. It is obvious that none of you has ever attempted to teach public high school, for if you had, you wouldn’t have put those silly burgers on the list in the first place.

I got a response the other day: They’ll be publishing it in their July issue.