The Ordinary Man

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


An ordinary man's life cannot really fit into a paragraph - and Ramsay sets himself to fleshing out a tossed-off tribute in honor of his retirement that offended him by its lack of depth and revelation.  He writes his life history to the headmaster of the school for boys where he taught all his adult life.  Ramsay is what Davies refers to as "the fifth business": not the lead or antagonist, but a character in dramatic works who carries an essential piece of the plot.   
In essence, then, Ramsay's narrative is a tragedy from this fifth business's point of view.  He became obsessed with a neighbor's wife as a child because he dodged a snowball that caused a premature birth and the woman's descent into a gentle madness.  All his life he is burdened with the responsibility for her child, Paul, and for her.  In his eyes she has worked miracles and he comes to think of her as a Fool-Saint.  This leads him to research and write hagiographies, although he was brought up as a dour Scots Presbyterian. 
I didn't find the saint business that interesting, but Davies does a wonderful job of depicting life in a Canadian town, the horrors of the trenches of WWI, and developing characters.  Ramsay is self-deprecating in that stereotypical way we associate with Canadians.  His antagonist/best friend, "Boy" Staunton, becomes rich and influential from the most mundane of businesses: sugar.  He also takes Ramsay's "girlfriend" away from him, saving him the trouble of dumping her himself - but he is unable to disentangle himself from their friendship.  Even amid the tragedies there are some laugh-out-loud moments.  I am tempted to continue the series, if only the third book which may pick up where this left off.





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Words of One Syllable Dept.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A light-hearted romp through the study of life's most serious business.  I picked this up because I enjoyed Stiff so much.  Roach writes the same way people chat about things, with wry humor and personal anecdote (Boy, is her husband ever game), which is engaging and yet she manages to keep it informative.  I am amazed that these researchers let her anywhere near them, considering the official opinion on their research. 




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Oh, Gawwd, Nooooo!

Ghosts by Paul Auster

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


[Just tossing words out] This must be one of those deconstructed, existential, minimalist detective stories for people who consider the genre beneath them.  It spent a whole lot of time going nowhere, which I suppose is the point, and then ends suddenly and Spillainely.  Perhaps it is just a send-up of the genre in an artier form for the cognoscente, but the observer/observed and writer/reader confusion was done to death by the 1960s and done by much better writers (Borges, for example). I kept hoping Mr. Blue would get the point sooner and ask Caleb Carr to help him with that Mr. Gold conundrum so something interesting might happen, but alas it was not to be.  Mercifully, the book was short, however it took me two weeks to read 96 pages. 



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Pre-School Storytime Pattern

I've been asked to detail my storytime pattern - which is pretty fluid but usually goes:

Opening song (Usually "If you're happy and you know it")
fingerplay/flannelboard
book (the more difficult one)
fingerplay/flannelboard
book (the easier one)
this spot reserved for puppets, creative dramatics, music making, major movement stuff
closing ("Now's the time to say goodbye" or, currently, my goodbye couplets: "See you later, alligator" etc.)
[Handout of some kind]

It's not hard-wired.  The usual rule of thumb is Lead with the most difficult. 
I've done three books or one book.  I usually have more than two books available on various levels so I can adjust by what age I've gotten.  Sometimes it's mostly 3s, sometimes 4s.  And, if they're particularly squirmy, the whole thing can get thrown out the window.  And sometimes I let them decide - for Halloween they had the choice of the funny book or the scary one (and, of course, they almost unanimously went for scary).

Sometimes they want to do something more than once, which is okay for fingerplays but I don't like to do books twice in a row. 

There are some flannelboards that I also have Spanish versions of, so I will do it first in English and then repeat it in Spanish, such as "Juguemos en el bosque."  As the lobo gets dressed, kids learn some Spanish vocab. These materials were prepared for our foray into bilingual storytimes ... which went nowhere.  We might try to revive them as more of our Spanish-speaking population discovers the new library.

The puppetry and creative dramatics go towards the end because they have a tendency to get the kids wound up.  The creative dramatics will often follow or be within a particular book - acting out part of it.  With the puppetry (I'll have some little story I can act out), it's just hard to put the puppets away.  The kids don't like it.  And they want to hug the puppets, so it's best to do it at the end when they can get up and hug a puppet on the way out.  Puppet can be used anywhere in the storytime, but this spot is reserved for a whole story.

More on puppets: I don't like little hands up my puppets' bottoms.  I'm just that way.  Yes, they can hug them, but they are characters, not toys.  There is a puppet theatre just outside the storytime room that has puppets for them to use. 

The handouts can be as basic as coloring sheets or activity sheets, or I have created pages with one of the poems/fingerplays/flannelboards we shared that day.  They are either the Add To Your Traveling Flannelboard (the sheet of felt glued into the pocket folder) type where they also got some stick-on felt to make them hang on the felt sheet or the fingerpuppet generator: Five de-colored cliparts of frogs etc. and five strips to cut out and tape to the back of the clipart plus the poem.  Presto!

I used to have a Ning where I shared stuff like this, but they went capitalist on me.  Heh!  If anyone else starts one, let me know.

It's Impossible

Impossible Major Rogers by Patricia Lee Gauch

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Gauch paints a warts and all portrait of a figure from the French and Indian wars. Neither all good or all bad, Rogers is a fighter and determined, and for that much he can be admired.  The book is punctuated with the refrain of his impossibility.  By stressing this, Gauch also does not try to paint him too much as a hero.  She shows him as a man conflicted by his hatred and admiration of his chosen enemy and as someone at a loss when the fighting is over.  At least in war he could fight his way out of trouble. 
Although later forced to fight on the British side because the colonists viewed him as a possible spy, Rogers' style of combat (developed from his experience of fighting the Abenaki as well as trading with them and studying them) was what the colonists chose.  Rogers' determination could have been interpreted as unscrupulousness and he ended badly.  He was jailed, apparently for his enormous debts, for three years and eventually had nothing left but his braggadocio. 
 



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