"And Still We Rise", Miles Corwin

This book follows students throughout their senior year of high school while attending Crenshaw High's magnet program. The narrative follows the gifted students as they navigate their AP English course as well as their day to day dramas.

This book was assigned reading for me recently, and I have to say the material opened my eyes. Not in the way you may think. The students are from the 1996-97 senior year, which was the same year I graduated, and I too took AP English.

I'm from Sacramento originally, and the inner city environment of Los Angeles' Crenshaw High was a place I knew about only from movies like "Boyz in the 'Hood". The conversations in the classroom in the book stand in stark contrast to my own experiences in the same class during the same year. In the book, at Crenshaw, the students have animated and lively, and often combative, discussions of the material they're reading. My classes were never like that. We were all far more nervous and privileged.

That was my theory, in fact. I had an idea that when a student's environment is chaotic and they're used to confrontation, something trivial (to them maybe) like a classroom discussion could be a forum for opinions and bating in loud and forceful terms. In my environment, where grades and college plans are important both at home and school from sophomore year on. The pressure is high, which effects the nerves, which in turn effects the desire to really say anything during classroom discussions.

Just a different environment is all. I had to return this book, and it's no longer in my library.

"Eyes of the Skin", Juhani Pallasmaa

Many people have certain beliefs about the nature of "architecture". Some people think it's buildings. Some people think it's the character of a city or neighborhood. Some people think it's about the structure of back end computer programming.

In reality, "architecture" is space, as revealed to a person's senses through light. This tiny book by one of Finland's premier architects, covers just that topic.

In America, a person can be sued for calling themselves an architect when they haven't completed their licensing, and that reason alone causes the folks in the building world great consternation when hearing database admins throwing the term around casually.

This book is finally in a third printing. It consists of a series of essays covering different aspects of space and senses and how the two can interact. When it was first printed, every single copy was scooped up rather quickly, and the same can be said for the second edition. They became so scarce that copies ran for hundreds of dollars.

I know that side of it because my wife, the Missus Gonzo, has passed five of seven architectural licensing exams, and I've been around for the vast majority of her schooling. I'm the book guy, and she's the building girl, and I've been chasing this book for years.

It wasn't until this past Decemberween that I stumbled across it for sale, a third edition having been printed in the Uk. The book's dimensions are slight, eight inches by four, and not even 130 pages, the last 25 of which are bibliographical notes. It touches on many topics: a public square in rural Finland; Frank Lloyd Wright  and Le Corbusier; hill towns in southern Spain; Sartre, Plato, and Kearney...

When I saw it, brand new and reasonably priced, I knew it would make a great little gift.

For anyone interested in philosophy and space and how we experience the world, this little book is important.

"Ecotopia Emerging", Ernest Callenbach

Ernest Callenbach published in 1975 a utopian novel called Ecotopia. Set in 1999, Northern California, Oregon, and Washington have seceded from the US and formed a new country called Ecotopia. The novel has lots of up-to-date science and proved influential in the counterculture and hippie era.

In 1981, Callenbach followed it up with this novel, Ecotopia Emerging, which is a prequel to Ecotopia and sets the tone for the kind of world where the Cascade region could secede. It's mostly anti-Reagan, and uses his cadre of followers and their policies as the antagonists that prime the West Coast's attitudes.

The book was reviewed as young-adult material at the time, but wasn't reviewed too heavily. Some complaints have been that independence came too easily to the new nation. I imagine that if it wasn't an armed battle, it was probably too easy.

This book came to our collection by way of a former coworker of mine with whom I had long conversations about whales. It was hers, and somehow it became ours.

"Reunions", Harry Northrup

This is another book of poetry from Cahuenga Press, the same press that published my former teacher Jim Cushing's poems, a press founded and funded by the team of poets. In the poetry creative writing class I took with Doc Cushing this book was my group's book, and we had to do a presentation on different parts of it.

When I got my hands on it, I was sure I recognized Harry Northrup from the cover. Then Doc Cushing said he had spent time working as an actor, and some people might know him from some of his roles. That was it! For sure...I recognized him alright. I was going to put a frame of him on this post, but then I couldn't find my copy of this particular DVD.

If you've seen the movie, you might recognize him from a bit part in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. He was a fellow cabbie, trying to make a buck doing anything, particularly trying to sell DeNiro's Travis Bickle a piece of bathtub reportedly from the Errol Flynn teenage-girl tryst.

On to the poems. My group at the time had a hard time realizing the depth of Harry's poetry. Everything is written in lower case, which has no bearing on the content, but the poems themselves at first glance seem mundane and cover some of the everyday minutiae that an actor/poet living in LA or travelling to the Philippines might encounter.

We actually got lectured by Doc Cushing for missing the true beauty of Harry's work, for not using our imagination enough to embrace the poems. Um...okay. I just don't think sophisticated but still impressionable poetry fans can be expected to fully feel what Harry Northrup's dealing with and the way in which he deals with it. We were just too young for the full effect at that time.

Now, being somewhat older, I can at least understand better what he was trying to do. Do I like it much better now?

"Steve Allen' Bop Fables"

I may be a little too young to remember when Steve Allen was an important television personality, but seeing this little book "for kids" sheds a little light on what kind of personality that was.

"Bop" and "be-bop" were the catch phrases of his time, and taking a look at the names of the stories here gives an appropriate lesson in history:

1. Goldilocks and the Three Cool Bears
2. Three Mixed-Up Little Pigs
3. Crazy Red Riding Hood
4. Jack and the Real Flip Beanstalk

The history lesson here is in "coolness". What coolness is how certain folks (Steve Allen, Elvis Presley, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, et al) took the speech patters, music, and style of the black Americans and made it acceptable for other white folks to mimic. That's the essence of "cool"--copying black people.

And while this book may not be a milestone, it is a piece of very real history, and a history that I plan on sharing my own kids, whenever they show up.

"Whose Names are Unknown", Sanora Babb

Sanora Babb came of age before the Depression, and when the Dust Bowl came and swept the folks of the great plains west, she was among them hearing their story and recording it. She published a few books much later as non-fiction histories of the times. If the subject matter sounds familiar, then chances are good you've heard of The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck and Babb didn't work together, and maybe Steinbeck's people can show he did his own research and didn't crib hers, but The Grapes of Wrath and Whose Names are Unknown were set to be published nearly simultaneously, but Grapes... got to the market first, and then exploded. Babb's publisher decided the country couldn't handle two novels covering the same subject. Can you imagine that today? Once one thing is successful, there are hundreds of impostors almost immediately.

In any case, an act of literary injustice was committed when they shelved Sanora's work for 70-80 years. This book was just published in the last few years, and I wouldn't have heard about it if it hadn't been requested as a Decemberween present.

The title comes from bank eviction notices on foreclosed upon farms: "The Residents, whose names are unknown, are hereby evicted."

Reclaiming some American history...who says the ladies can't join the Okie exodus and take notes and write a novel about it...

"The Length of an Afternoon", Jim Cushing

This copy of poems is published by Cahuenga Press, a publishing house founded and financed by the member poets. Cushing's poems are both conversational and dense, but I'm not a poetry critic. I enjoy looking through the pages when I come across the book in its long life outside the bookshelf.

I mention it because while it may be a rarity, Jim Cushing was a professor of mine at Cal Poly in SLO. I had him for two separate classes. The first was during the beginning of my senior year, and my friend Dennis and I were able to hang out for a last hurrah as it were. I mention that class specifically in my post about Madame Bovary and how Dennis and I had to calculate what page we were on in his different edition.

The second class I had with Jim Cushing was a poetry composition class; a creative writing class. I took it with the creative writing short fiction class the same quarter, my last before graduation. I had the two writing classes (taking both CR/NCR), my senior project class, and a C++ class, and I had already taken C++ at some other school a few years before. That last quarter was a blur of of alcohol, bike riding, poetry, Denis Johnson coming to campus, and meetings with my adviser about the last touches of my senior project.

In any case, Doc Cushing had us purchase his own book as well as another Cahuenga Press poet who'll appear here in a hot minute. I have both books because Cushing was a fun, white pony-tailed stoner-type who was passionate about literature, and Harry Northrup, the other poet, on whom my group did our project, had his own interesting back story, and I'll be getting to that at that time.

Poetry, while highly respected by myself, does not make up a large portion of my library.