Got a kitten, kitten, kitten, kitten in my hair

[sovay]

It is the seventh anniversary of Kittening Day, when the children of golden-eyed Hera left their fosterage with the family of a_reasonable_man and came to live with us. We celebrate them constantly.



Hestia, presiding over the remains of her scratch box. One of her cult titles is Death to Cardboard.



Autolycus, sacked out on my shoulder. A few nights ago he chased a plastic bottlecap through the apartment at exactly the hour we wanted to be asleep.

I learned tonight that in 1930, John Steinbeck wrote, shelved, but did not destroy an unpublished werewolf novel called Murder at Full Moon. "Its characters include . . . an eccentric amateur sleuth who sets out to solve the crime using techniques based on his obsession with pulp detective fiction." Take my money, please.

Comments

[sovay]

JFC doesn’t the pony get the strangles and need a trach and it’s just gruesome and futile?!

That's The Red Pony! I am genuinely unsure of the point or the value of assigning it to seventh-graders. Shane (1949), revisited, at least turned out to be great.

[jreynoldsward]

As a teacher I....did do The Red Pony with my middle school remedial reading class. But. In my defense, it's an excellent work to teach imagery and foreshadowing, especially to rural learning disabled kids, some of whom were English Language Learners. They could identify with Jody and his woods exploration, and we spent a lot of time talking about literary technique. For those kids it was a nicely accessible work and they could relate. I wouldn't have done it with urban kids.

One kid even said, "Aw shucks, don't tell me the pony dies...damn it, he dies!"

That said, I followed up with My Side of the Mountain, which was another big hit, and nowhere near as angsty. But we also watched the movie and critiqued how it differed from the book.

[jreynoldsward]

And I would never, EVER teach The Pearl. That one put me off Steinbeck until high school, when an advanced writing class teacher used Travels With Charley as a text. That one brought me to The Grapes of Wrath, Journal of a Novel, and East of Eden.

[sovay]

That one put me off Steinbeck until high school, when an advanced writing class teacher used Travels With Charley as a text.

I did come around to liking Of Mice and Men when I rediscovered it on my own time. We were actually shown the 1992 film in class, but it took until last year for me to catch the 1939 one.

[kore]

Journal of a Novel is SO GOOD, isn't it? His nonfiction is really underrated -- I was knocked out by Once There Was a War when I was a teenager.

[jreynoldsward]

Yes! It has been very inspirational for me as a writer. And Steinbeck's nonfiction is quite good. Better (I dare say) than Hemingway's, from that era.

[sovay]

For those kids it was a nicely accessible work and they could relate.

I am glad there is a group of seventh-graders it is accessible and relatable for! I have never known anyone who was anything but traumatized by it.

That said, I followed up with My Side of the Mountain, which was another big hit, and nowhere near as angsty. But we also watched the movie and critiqued how it differed from the book.

I never remember there's a movie; I wasn't aware of it until adulthood. Is it good, despite differences? I read the book in elementary school, although not for class. (I have read a surprisingly small percentage of things in English for class.)

[jreynoldsward]

I pre-taught about the trauma pretty aggressively by talking about foreshadowing. We read the book aloud together--the imagery works really well for that age because Steinbeck can convey a lot of image with concrete language. But again, these were rural kids so they knew what it was like to go to the woods to experience life. They'd also lost pets (a hazard of mountain rural life) so the experience wasn't new. And as a horse person, I talked about strangles (especially since it had cropped up in my barn) and what the issue with it was.

I'm meh about the My Side of the Mountain movie. I saw it first, in junior high, and I didn't like it as well as the book.