She Treads Softly

Monday, April 2, 2007

Two of my son's good friends turned in articles for the April newsletter. They have restored my confidence in teens. Their articles were both well written; there were no spelling mistakes, no grammatical errors, and, most importantly, no "awesomes".

We stumbled across the book World Music: A Global Journey while looking at Amazon for ethnographies to use with anthropology. Just me is going to go ahead and do this next year. This course will be a logical progression from the music appreciation she did this year, which stressed classical and jazz. It will also tie in nicely with anthropology.

My mom sent me a photo of my cousins, one of her brother's children. They were all old people and I didn't even recognize a couple of my cousins in the photo. What's up with this?

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.