Professor Elam

Weekend March 9 2014

I just finished reading Russell Blake's Zero Sum novel. Blake is a self published author with two no make that three series going on and several stand alone boks. He comments on a Kansas School Teacher's lament here.

The English teacher wishes here male charges would read. Her idea is Steinbeck and Hemingway,k I guess because they were both guys but that is about all one could say for the idea. Blake suggests his JET series about a female assassin who originally worked for the Mossad and then faked her own death. See, you are interested already. 

English teachers also think reading Bill Shakespeare is a great idea. But stroll through an airport and how many people are reading King Lear? If you can find a film with Richard Burton doing the lead you migfht just might understand enough of the dialog to get  through the movie.

In college I became hooked on Tom Wolfe, that would be the Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby1 Wolfe. His gongzo whatshappeningright now style and descriptions  of the pop culture were right on. He rose to fame with an article on Las Vegas for Esquire. Hard pressed to describe his experience there

he wrote stream of conscious james Joyce style  beginning with the radio in the rent car that refused to turn off. Las Vegas was like that he wrote, it's on 24 hours a day like it or not. Back then Vegas was the only place with 24 hour grocery stores, open to cater to show girls when they got off work at 2 AM. Now 24 hour joints of all kinds are common place. 

Wolfe wrote more non fiction like Radical Chic and then had a mega hit made into a movie, The Right Stuff. Then he went fiction and frankly I lost him. 

And so I turned to Dan Jenkins who wrote Semi Tough, Dead Solid Perfect, and Limo, among others. Jenkins is a long time observer of pro golf and an all around expert about writing on life at the top particularly viewed from Fort Worth Texas. If that makes no sense, well pick any of the three above and see what I meann. 

Like a lot of parents at the time, this would be the late 1950s early 1960s, my Mother thought I would make a great piano player. Oh I learned to pay the notes but clearly I would never become a musician, it was that talent thing. But her idea was to put me with an elderly lady piano teacher who adored Beethoven. How  about a hip guy who adored Jerry Lee Lewis, now that might have gotten my attention. 

At any rate, I think I learned more about great writing from Jenkins and Wolfe than I ever did from Bill S. The same sort of prescription could be applied to other fields of study. If you want someone to like something, give them something like able about it to study. 

The tv series Numb3rs did a fine job of this.  The heroes used math to solve crimes, now how cool is that?   Answer a lot more cool than factoring polynomials. Never once in my life did anyone ask me to factor a polynomial, even though I spent three years studying how to do it. And that boys and girls is what is wrong with math education. 

At any rate, I am thinking of my first non fiction work of pride, and will spend this week outlining just that. If you want your teen agers reading point them in a direction they woud like.