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August 25, 2005

wake me up when September is over

I slept with my window open last night so I could hear the late-summer night and feel the cool, late-summer night air. September is looming over our house. Herself says "I wish school started tomorrow" and Moo either ignores her or just looks disgusted and grunts. He had high-school orientation yesterday and maybe he's thinking about the summer's worth of homework he left until the last week of vacation.

One of Moo's assignments was to read Great Expectations and write a series of essays about it. Why anybody would think this book is a good summer read is beyond me--Dickens' language is so dense it makes me sweat just thinking about trying to negotiate it. Why not give kids a book meant for the beach or for those long, lazy evenings when it doesn't matter what time you go to bed ... why not a book that makes you want to talk about it? For that matter, why not one that makes you want to read?

Farenheit 451. Stranger in a Strange Land. The Left Hand of Darkness. The Golden Compass. The Shining. The Haunting of Hill House. Books about fantastic, other-worldly experiences. Perfect for summer, right? because summer is like that--an all too brief interlude when you feel like anything can happen, will happen, before September brings order and the clock and shoes and homework back to your world.

The other assigned book was A Day No Pigs Would Die, about which Moo mostly remembers--and described in detail to his cringing mother--a scene in which pigs are mating. All the time he was breeding into her, she squealed like her throat had been cut. Every breath. ...Her rump was bruised and there was blood running down her hind leg.

At the end of that novel is an exerpt from another by the same author, with a scene about horses mating. Again the female has a lousy time. The mare's neck arched, her head twisted one way and then another in an effort to escape the pain. ...[The stallion] was larger, stronger, and not to be denied his stallionhood. [He] dominated her with his superior weight, strength, and desire.

Uh ... yeah. So on the one hand we've got four-legged pornography; on the other we've got Miss Haversham, ditched at the altar and doomed to live the rest of her life watching her hopes rot--until the scene where she burns to death, anyway.

Maybe I need to meet Moo's English teacher.

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)