Grammarly, Automation and Teaching English

As any English teacher would attest, grading essays does not tend to produce epiphanies - generally, the only epiphany I’ve gotten while grading is that I should consider another line of work (I’m kidding, of course; I love teaching).  However, one recent rainy afternoon, leaning resignedly over a batch of my sophomore’s latest missives, about to encircle an errant citation, I was struck by a sudden and arresting revelation: a robot could do this.

I put down my navy blue pen (like many of my progressive-minded colleagues, I’ve abandoned red pens as a relic of an ancient and barbarous era), and considered this thought.  Identifying citation errors is not very hard. The formula for MLA in-text citations is simple, and I know it well, and so I can identify and correct them when they are wrong. Now, I am an English teacher, and so while I have no idea how automated software works or how to build one (except, of course, for my Mushroom Name Twitterbot), I do know what automated software can do - and if automated software can beat me in Chess, fix the lighting in my photographs, identify my face for the NSA, or tell me what songs I’m likely to enjoy, they can definitely correct in-text citations.  It just can’t be that hard.

As I sat at my desk, the essay lying ungraded before me, I realized that a robot could do a lot of things that I do for money - or, even if they can’t yet, it’s only a matter of time.  Don’t get me wrong - my blue pen thing was a bit of a joke, but I’m actually a very progressive teacher: a teacher who takes student voice seriously, who teaches writing as a dynamic, recursive, social process, and who uses tutoring pedagogy to teach these things, who cares much more about whether a student is engaging in a real and meaningful way with the text than whether their essay’s matching whatever formula I think it’s supposed to follow, who teaches as a good school with excellent colleagues and without testing requirements, who sees their job as primarily inspiring, motivating and challenging students to grow, who thinks a good question is much more valuable than the correct answer, who teaches up-to-date student-centric literature, but who also teaches Chekhov for God’s sake, who leads Harkness discussions, assigns creative projects, who builds close relationships with students, whose classroom is filled with laughter, whose desks are in a circle, or actually a rectangle, but you get it - not rows, who has never once given a multiple choice test, used a scantron machine, or required students to adopt a certain interpretation of literature to succeed, a teacher, in other words, who cares much more about their students and real learning and growth than box-checking, arbitrary testing requirements and other measurable, committee-written nonsense that passes for standards / hinders good teachers in so many schools.

And yet - a robot could still do quite a bit of my job.

This is especially true in grading.  I try very hard to make my grading process meaningful and genuine, but a lot of it remains repetitive and formulaic.  Students need to learn where to put their citations, to write complete sentences, to incorporate and analyze their quotes, and to structure their paragraphs logically - and all these things are variations of formulaic pattern recognition, albeit of varying complexity, but pattern recognition nonetheless. I've written comments addressing those things hundreds on times, often in the exact same way. And that means an algorithm could learn to do it, or will eventually be able to - and a lot more quickly, accurately, and fairly than I ever could. Grammarly is coming for my grading, and frankly, there’s no way I can compete.

Even more unnervingly, more of my job than grading is susceptible to automation. An algorithmic piece of software could do a lot of tutoring pedagogy, most of which is asking students to reflect on their own work, and a piece of software could do that with all of my students at once, rather than as I do it now, which is one-on-one, over hours of class time.  A computer program could certainly teach grammar better than I can - and in fact, I already use Khan Academy and its remarkably well-designed program for just this purpose. I write pretty good student comments, but (just as they can write news briefs and even novels) a computer program could do that too, and even if they weren’t quite as good as mine, they’d be done a lot quicker.  

To think that my profession won’t be affected by automation is arrogant, even laughable - the kind of head-in-the-sand attitude that I would say characterizes many professions from lawyers to truck drivers.  In fact, the only profession I see taking automation seriously as a threat is real estate agents, who, under assault from a variety of digital startups hungry for their 5-7% commissions, have started paying for pro-real estate agent television ads.  These ads depict real estate agents as some sort of cornerstone of our American society, which is almost as silly as when Allstate tried to do the same thing with insurance companies. Absurd. As though I’d pay 3% more on a home - or sell my home for 3% less - just because I want a hefty dose of Karen-energy injected into the process.  Thank you, but I’ll use Redfin instead.

And yet, you don’t see me signing up to volunteer for Andrew Yang 2024. Automation will not cost me my job, and if you’re a good real estate agent, you probably don’t have anything to worry about either.  Automation will help me do the least efficient, most repetitive and dullest parts of my job faster and better, allowing me to focus on what I really care about: inspiring young people to learn and grow.  Same thing with real estate agents - accept lower commissions in exchange for higher volume, and spend more time making buying and selling houses easier and less stressful - and then you’ll sell yet more houses. Correcting my students’ citations matters, sure - but every second I spend on that is a second I don’t spend on something more meaningful and interesting.  Still: in schools, we need to see automation coming, and we can’t pretend that it won’t affect us. Especially in areas of education focused on repetitive, formulaic, box-checking kinds of learning, automation will be disruptive, but it will disrupt the progressive paradise of my English classroom as well. At the same time, however, we don’t need to be afraid; we need to be ready to use automation to make our work more meaningful and powerful.

So, robots, please come and help me do a better job grading my students’ essays. If a machine can do part of my job, that’s a part of my job that I’m happy to give up.  I’ll focus on the good stuff: working with kids, learning from books, and helping my students grow. In the meantime, however enjoyable writing this post has been, I have grading to do, and many citations to correct before I sleep.

A poem I wrote about fishing

Apology to a Fish, or, She Speaks     

A companion to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s “Love, that Doth Reign and Live within My Thought”

Glimpsed I your flashing fin and silvered cheek Amid the quiet pool of water clear, A lovely, living light within the creek. Yet death I threw to you who I revere. No thought had I before I tossed my line But how my subtle cast deceive you might. Yet now your lively play upon the twine, O, would that from my fly you’d turned in flight. My hidden hook empierc’d your jaw of gold, And dragged you thrashing cross the mirrored still; My brutal hand your gentle form did hold, And felt your tremb’ling frame and gasping gill. I’m sorry, I cried, and plucked the barbéd hook, And joyful splash, you fled across the brook.

Three Shots: Spring

This has been a quiet spring, but quiet is also beautiful:

I’m inordinately proud of this picture, and it reminds me of one of the first pictures I took when I started to take photography more seriously. There is a grace inherent to the curve of a branch.

I couldn’t quite get this one to work; something about the depth of field just doesn’t quite isolate the subject enough. Or maybe too much? I don’t know.

My first beaver pic in the wild!

The Lion King is a better Hamlet than Hamlet

Insofar as my blog is known at all - I’ll have you know that I have tens (tens!!) of monthly visitors - it’s known for pictures of birds and chapters of a goofy mystery novel, not hot takes. Well, that’s all about to change, as I have a take so hot you could fry an egg right on there: Disney’s The Lion King is a better Hamlet than Hamlet itself.

It’s well known that the Hamlet was one of The Lion King’s principal influences, and if you didn’t know that, just consider the plots: in both works, the prodigal son of a murdered king seeks (and eventually gets) revenge from his usurper uncle. There are many analogous characters: Simba is Hamlet, Mufasa is King Hamlet, and Scar is Claudius. Gertrude and Ophelia get much more positive portrayals in Sirabi and Nala, as does the foolish toady Polonius in Zazoo. Other characters are a bit more a stretch, like Timone and Pumba as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Timone and Pumba are pals with Simba, but they don’t spy on him at the request of the king, and neither does Simba arrange their murder at the hands of the English), but still plausible. On the other hand, many characters do not overlap clearly, like Laertes, Fortinbras or Horatio in Hamlet, or in The Lion King, the hyenas, Rafiki, and the gopher who says “Sir, news from the underground!” which as everyone knows is the best joke in the entire movie.

This is the first reason that The Lion King is better than Hamlet: The Lion King is much funnier. There are exactly 3 funny jokes in Hamlet. The first one is when Polonius introduces the actors as “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited”. I think you will agree with me that this is hilarious, though my students never do. The other two good jokes both come from the same character: the gravedigger. The gravedigger, while wondering why Ophelia (who may have committed suicide - i.e., died sinfully) is to be buried with Christian rites, asks his partner: “How can that be, unless she drowned herself in her own defence?” Good stuff, good stuff. And, just a few lines later, he and his partner have the last funny exchange in the play, which is a pun on the meanings of arms:

First Gravedigger: There is no ancient gentleman but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers: they hold up Adam's profession.

Second Gravedigger: Was he a gentleman?

First Gravedigger: He was the first that ever bore arms.

Second Gravedigger: Why, he had none.

First Gravedigger: What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says 'Adam digged:' could he dig without arms?

I cannot begin to count the good jokes in The Lion King, but suffice to say there are many. Nathan Lane is hilarious as Timone the meerkat, but the best comic performance is Nathan Lane’s Pumba. Watch these two clips and tell me otherwise, I dare you:

So The Lion King is funnier. Sure, you might say, but Hamlet is not trying to be funny, it’s trying to be Great Literature; it is Serious Drama. Maybe - but even Serious Drama has to be drama - that is, have a coherent plot. A cursory examination of the plot reveals Hamlet to be a bloated, absurd, and melodramatic mess.

Hamlet begins after the King Hamlet’s murder, and Claudius’s marriage to his wife, Gertrude. Hamlet, now 30 years old, has returned from university to attend his father’s funeral, and finds himself troubled by his mother’s remarriage and the fact that he keeps imagining her and his uncle having sex. Hamlet then sees a ghost of his father (who’s been wandering around the castle at night, scaring guards), who tells him to avenge him. Hamlet does, eventually, but first he’s got to spend three interminable acts behaving as though he is insane, yelling at Ophelia, making snide comments to everybody, talking to actors for a really long time, and putting on a play that is supposed to make Claudius admit his guilt. Hamlet also spends a lot of time wandering around pondering existential questions. Before getting his revenge, he gets sent to England, arranges for the death of two good friends, gets captured by pirates, and makes his way back to Denmark, where he talks to a gravedigger, interrupts a funeral (the funeral of Ophelia, who may-or-may-not-have killed herself after Hamlet semi-accidentally murdered her father Polonius - sorry, I forgot about that whole bit - that’s why he got sent to England, sort of, and it’s also when Ophelia spends a couple scenes wandering around and singing in a deranged manner). Then, Hamlet FINALLY gets his revenge, though he does so by participating in an elaborate duel which ends up killing everyone, including himself, his mother and his uncle. Then some Norwegians show up and, mystified, decide to give Hamlet a soldier’s funeral, despite the fact that Hamlet has never been a soldier.

Of all of these characters, I relate most to the Norwegians. They stumble on a mess, and have no idea what to make of it, for, frankly, Hamlet makes very little sense. I’m teaching the play currently, and having not read it since high school, I’d forgotten all of the really bizarre scenes - especially the ones where Hamlet endlessly talks to the actors, or acts crazy around Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I think most people’s memory of the play is a couple soliloquies, the ghost scenes, the part where Hamlet almost kills the king while he’s trying to pray, and Act 5. If you had only those scenes, sure - this is a great play. It asks big questions, presents compelling characters, and you could stage it in less than 2 hours. As the play actually is, it would take 4, and most of those two extra hours are just ridiculous exposition about the machinations of the Norwegians, long, boring discussions of what makes good acting (including examples drawn from the speeches of other plays), and a lot of Hamlet stomping around acting crazy and making uncomfortable jokes about how quickly his mother remarried. It feels like an exploratory draft; Shakespeare needed a good editor on this one.

The Lion King, by contrast, is a tight 89 minutes. Also, despite covering a much longer period of Simba’s life (it’s longer even before adjusting for the average lifespan of lions; Simba begins the movie as a newborn, and ends it as a young adult, approximately three years later), the plot is much more focused. I won’t recap the plot; obviously, that’s unnecessary. Suffice to say that while there are some songs and side adventures that aren’t strictly tied to the main revenge plot (like “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” and the excursion to the elephant graveyard), they are short, closely connected to the movie’s themes, and also do important character work, like introducing the hyenas, Banzai, Shenzi, and Ed, and their scheming with Scar. Every scene in the movie has a discrete, comprehensible purpose, and none go on too long. The same cannot be said of Hamlet - this, after all, is a play which features at least three separate soliloquies in which Hamlet vows to get his revenge.

Sure, sure, sure, I can imagine you saying - but what about the ideas? One common criticism of The Lion King is (or at least it might be - to be honest, there are no common criticisms of The Lion King because everyone loves it, and no one except for me cares about its relationship to Hamlet) that it Disneyfies Hamlet - that by removing most of the tortured psychological musings, the Oedipal overtones, and the tragic ending, the movie sanitizes and brightens a play that is as gloriously dark, complex, and confusing as the human psyche itself. Hamlet, you might argue, is confusing because being a human being is confusing: we are mortal creatures with limited perspectives but infinite minds, and in our imagination, we seek to comprehend the incomprehensible aspects of our existence, especially death, that “undiscovered country from whose bourne / No traveller returns”.

If this straw man somewhere breaths, he is wrong. The Lion King is no less flinching than Hamlet in its examination of death. Coming to understand death and its relationship to life is a primary concern of the film, and it is the primary development in Simba’s character.

Consider the famous “everything the light touches” scene:

Mufasa’s lesson here is that death is a part of life. The sun is a symbol for life, and as Mufasa says, “a king’s time as ruler rises and falls like the sun” - one day, “the sun will set” on Mufasa’s time, and rise for Simba. This cyclical process - or perhaps, I should call it a circle, hmm, perhaps a circle of...life? - includes both death and life. As Mufasa explains when Simba notes that lions eat antelopes, “when we die, our bodies become grass, and the antelope eat the grass, and so we are all connected in the great circle of life”.

And yet, despite death’s centrality to the lions’ benevolent and orderly Rota Fortunae, there remains an eerie strangeness to death, at least to Simba. The film represents death in several ways, the first of which is in the previous clip: The Elephant’s Graveyard. That “shadowy place” where the light doesn’t reach is “beyond our borders” - not even a king, who “can do whatever he wants” can travel into death without consequences.

This image shows Simba’s understanding of life and death in a single frame: note the contrast between the warm light of the sun, and the cooler grays of the “that shadowy place” across the river, which I guess is supposed to represent the River Styx?

Young Simba does not immediately understand Mufasa’s semi-symbolic lesson about the nature of death, and (with Scar’s manipulation) brings Nala (and, in an echo of Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, Zazoo) to the Elephant’s graveyard. Even before the hyenas arrive, the imagery of the Elephant Graveyard is dark and filled with bones, and the young lions immediately (if childishly) wonder about big Hamlet-esque questions. Simba seeks to demonstrate his courage in the face of death (“I laugh in the face of danger” he blusters, just before the hyenas begin laughing), and Nala wonders what survives when we shuffle off this mortal coil: looking at an elephant skull, she wonders “if its brains are still in there”. When the hyenas arrive, the tone becomes even darker, especially when Simba slashes one of the hyenas across the cheek. This moment, especially the sound of the hyena growling, has stuck in my mind since childhood; it’s a huge tonal shift for the film. The images of the graveyard indicate Simba’s fear of and inability to understand death: they are hellish, dark, and eerie.

The analogous scenes in Hamlet might be King Hamlet’s ghost describing death to Hamlet:

But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part

And each particular hair to stand on end,

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood.

So, in both the film and the play, death is scary. For Simba, death is scary because he is young and does not understand it, and when he first sees death - not just its shadow, the elephant graveyard, but death itself - it is the traumatic death of his father in the gorge.

Notice the dead tree appearing in this scene. This image comes from the blues and grays of the elephant graveyeard, and these eerie colors (a contrast to the warm sunlight that symbolizes life in this film) symbolize the fearsome strangeness of death. These colors and images appear throughout the film: in the graveyard, in the gorge, in the Pridelands when Scar takes over, and several other times throughout the film. Always, when these images appear, the score supports the eeriness of the imagery.

They even occur in the beginning of the the famous “Remember who you are!” scene. Watch carefully as Simba follows Rafiki to the pool:

To speak with his father’s spirit, Simba must travel through a jungle filled with eerie images, images that remind the viewer of both the tree in the gorge, and of the elephant graveyard generally. To understand death and face it with equanimity, Simba must first pull himself through his fear of death. Only then can he learn the film’s truth: that the spirit is eternal for his father lives in him. Indeed, Simba sees his father by “looking harder,” as Rafiki says, into a reflection of himself. If we face the fear of death within us, we can find our soul and our destiny in there too.

This scene contains the film’s most direct reference to the play, and the differences between this scene and its equivalent in Hamlet reveal the most important difference between the two: The Lion King is optimistic whereas, at its core, Hamlet is nihilistic. In the film, Mufasa’s spirit tells Simba that “You have forgotten me...You have forgotten who you are, and so have forgotten me.” Mufasa’s ghost ends the speech with “Remember who you are!” a line that has stuck with me since seeing the film as a child. Now, I see it as an echo of King Hamlet’s ghost, who ends his conversation with Hamlet with “Remember me!” This basic human longing - to be remembered - is a longing to live on after death, a longing, in other words, to escape death’s obliteration. Both Mufasa (which, by the way, means king in Swahili) and King Hamlet share this longing, but more importantly, so do Hamlet and Simba. The ghosts may not even be real, whatever that means when we’re talking about a fictional movie about talking lions based on a fictional play about nonexistent Danish royalty - these ghosts, whatever else they are, are expressions of Simba, Hamlet, and our own anxiety about death.

Accordingly, this conversation restores Simba’s faith in the circle of life, and he runs immediately to fulfill his “place in the path unwinding”. The Lion King is the story of a young lion who fears death, and then faces it - and discovers that death, while scary, is good, that the spirit lives on in a great, harmonious circle. In The Lion King, death isn’t so scary after all, once you really look at it.

Hamlet is different. It is also the story of a young man coming to face his mortality, but when he comes face to face with his dead father in the first act of the play, the experience raises huge, basic questions in him: What happens when we die? What part of us survives death? If we can’t understand death, how can we understand life? How can we have meaningful lives if they end in death? How can we make moral distinctions or meaningful decisions in the face of morality’s oblivion? These unresolved questions explain his tortured behavior (and, by extension, the tortured structure of the middle three acts of the play).

Eventually - especially in the gravedigger scene - Hamlet comes to accept the absurd, even humorous, unknowability of life and death. Let’s not take our lives and deaths so seriously, he realizes as he gazes into Yorrick’s eye sockets, and then, with the stakes lowered, can Hamlet finally act, achieve his (now much less meaningful/egotistical) revenge, and accept his mortality. It is not a coincidence that the funniest character in the play (the gravedigger) is the one who has the most “easiness” with death, nor is it a coincidence that the play ends just one scene after Hamlet meets this man. Hamlet never understands death, but when he is able to look it in the eye calmly, the play (and Hamlet’s inner turmoil) can finally end.

So both Hamlet and Simba face death, but in The Lion King, death makes sense. In Hamlet, nothing makes sense - and that includes death. Now I know I’m arguing that The Lion King is better than Hamlet, but here Hamlet’s metaphysics correspond much more closely to my beliefs than The Lion King’s. I have a strong intellectual bias towards the unanswered question, the ineffable feeling of resolution rather than the concrete bullet point, and the explanation that’s not really an explanation. But there’s a part of me - perhaps some part of me left over from my first few times watching The Lion King - that really, really wants Mufasa to live on within Simba’s shadow, to emerge from the clouds in a time of trouble to help Simba achieve his destiny. I can’t actually believe in that sort of spiritual positivity, but I can’t help but wish it were so simple and reassuring. So sure, Hamlet is more complex, provocative, and (I think) honest in its examination of life and death than The Lion King. But The Lion King is still better, and not just because of the jokes. The real reason is the songs. I mean just listen to this, and if you can tell me that there’s something better in Hamlet, well, you’re a got-dammed liar.

Water

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground

Into the blue again in the silent water
Under the rocks, and stones there is water underground

Murder in the Stacks is underway once again!

Hey folks - exciting news to share - now that I'm back in idyllic Vermont, I've started writing my literary-themed whodunnit Murder in the Stacks once again.  The story follows a graduate student of English as she discovers a series of grisly murders and shocking conspiracies all centered around a remote school of English in the mountains of Vermont. If that sounds good, and you like ridiculous plot twists and dumb jokes about books, enjoy!

 Begin here, or click the buttons below, if you haven't read the first five chapters, or, actually even if you have - there are new clues and red herring to discover!  Stay tuned for the chapter 6!

Ferns

The fern grows to be burnt in neglected fields.

7 Shots: Juniors in the Whites

I recently returned from a 6-day backpacking trip with 9 juniors in the White Mountains.  Now I know I normally do three shots, but this was 6 days....I mean come on.  So here's seven shots:

Swamp

Beyond that the river went into the swamp.

There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.

3 Shots: Three Ridges with the Freshmen

It's October, and that means hiking on the Appalachian trail with the Freshmen Outdoor Leaders.  Here are three shots. It very much still applies.

This is patently not a good photograph - it's blurred and distorted, and the sun is overwhelmingly over-exposed.  But I like it nonetheless; I think it captures the feeling of our first afternoon.

This one, on the other hand, captures 9th graders.

This isn't a great shot either, but it's a picture of 9th grade Chinese girl heading off on her solo hike.  This was the first time she'd backpacked at all, and here she is heading confidently into the woods all by herself (though to be fair, there were kids 5 minutes up and down the trail on either side).  But this is why I go on these trips

Bonus shot: a rock that I also took a picture of last time.  This rock is on top of another rock, which itself is on top of a 4,000 ft mountain.  Thinking about how this came to be really boggles the mind.

Virginia Beach is not the Best Big City of 2017

Over the last several days, my social media feeds have groaned under the weight of a frequently-posted 'study' - a better word might be clickbaity shitpost - that asserts Virginia Beach to be the "Best Big City of 2017". You can read the study (though I wouldn't recommend it) here.

To their credit, WalletHub.com, my second-or-third-favorite CreditKarma knockoff, did thoroughly explain their methodology. Needless to say, it is absurd.  Yes, they have a lot of numbers, and yes, they have an elaborate weighting system - but there is just no particular reason to think that "Building Permit Growth" should be worth 2.22 "points," whereas "Quality of Public School System" should be worth 1.82.  That is only one example.  All 50 "relevant metrics" from "Violent Crime rate" to "Beaches per capita" (Virginia Beach did well on that one, no doubt) have an arbitrary number assigned them, as though giving something a number makes it a legitimate data point.

My problem with the study, however, is not really its ridiculous design.  Of course it has a ridiculous design.  Even those who enthusiastically trumpet these results, like Virginian Pilot columnist Kerry Dougherty in her column "Virginia Beach the Greatest City in America? Of course!", notes that these sorts of studies are "arbitrary and capricious" in their ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ approach to methodology.  My problem is also not that I hate Virginia Beach, or that I resent people who like living there.  I like Virginia Beach. I love the beach itself, Gringo's Taqueria, my job, my house, its porch, my friends, and my girlfriend and cats.  (To be fair, the final items on that list would be equally great if I moved somewhere else.)   Like Kerry Dougherty, I like Spanish moss, sunrises, and good stop sign behavior, though I might mention that none of those things are endemic to Virginia Beach. And unlike Kerry Dougherty, I don't consider the city administration to be composed of corrupt operators who think their "dubious backroom deals" are now vindicated by the coveted WalletHub #1 ranking.  (I know you probably didn't click the link to the column, but you really should. And if you've got some time and blood pressure to spare, I recommend checking out her archive of hot takes here).

My problem is the lack of awareness I've seen in Beach residents about how and why Virginia Beach does so well on these metrics.  The main reasons Virginia Beach did as well as it did on the ranking were its low crime (worth 5 points!), its low poverty, its high graduation rate, and its high homeownership.  These are all good things, obviously, but what I think my fellow citizens don't recognize is that the reason Virginia Beach succeeds on these measures is because we are not a big city, despite our large population. We're a catchall white-flight suburb of 3 real cities: Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Hampton, and as such, we've shunted all of the difficult things about having a city - like having poor residents, or creating an inclusive community - onto them.  In other words, we've been able to remain as prosperous as we have because of exclusionary policies towards poor people and people of color.

Here's an example: I live in Shadowlawn, which is a very pleasant neighborhood.  There are kids in the streets; dads on the lawns, and it's easy to walk or bike to a lot of great places, like the beach, the Pizza Chapel, Back Bay Brewery, or the aforementioned Gringo's.  There's a lovely multi-use path connecting all of these things, and the city recently put in a sidewalk along Mediterranean, which makes my walk to Rudee's Cabana Bar much safer and more pleasant.  Compare this to Atlantis Apartments, or Harbor Club Apartments, the Judeo-Christian Outreach Center (a homeless shelter) or the Colony Mobile Home Park just across Norfolk Ave.  These places serve poor people, especially of color, and they're utterly cut off from my neighborhood - there is a massive chain link fence that runs the length of Norfolk Ave., separating these low-income housing projects from the multi-use path that would allow people who live there to get easily to the beach, or the taco shop, or the Brewery, or anywhere else in my neighborhood that they would want to go.  Instead, they've got to go down their neighborhoods' windy roads that open onto the much less pleasant and safe Virginia Beach Boulevard, or Birdneck Avenue - both busier and with much less pedestrian infrastructure.  And these are just the physical barriers.  Ever noticed how many police patrol the Food Lion on Birdneck? You know, the one people call the Hood Lion?  In my three years of living in Shadowlawn, I've interacted with a policeman once. He came to my door to conduct a survey about how safe I felt in my neighborhood.  I wonder if people who live in Atlantis Apartments would describe their relationship to the police in the same way.

Here's a map.  My house is the little gray house in the lower right quadrant.  Notice how the streets are an interconnected grid.  Then, look at the windy, disconnected, self-contained, dare-I-say-segregated streets of the upper left quadrant.  That's what I'm talking about.  See the little path along the north edge of Norfolk Ave, right down the center of the map?  That's where the fence is, directly separating those communities from a path that could help them get places, like, for example, the Pizza Chapel.

And imagine if they took down the fence.  You may have heard of an app called NextDoor.  It's a social networking app for neighborhoods, or in Shadowlawn's case, a person-of-color reporting system, allowing frightened white people to alert the neighbors to any 'suspicious' people spotted on our streets.  I can't imagine expanding access to my neighborhood would go over particularly well; I would imagine that the next time the cops came by to give us a survey, they'd get some pretty sharp comments about all of those 'suspicious' people getting tacos.  Oh, and I forgot to mention - the city is moving the homeless shelter to make room for new development.  It will be relocated to the section of Witchduck Road between Interstate 264 and Virginia Beach Boulevard, a place only slightly more friendly to pedestrians than the surface of Venus.  I imagine it's only a matter of time until the mobile homes and the Atlantic Apartments go too.

Here's my point: my neighborhood is a microcosm of Virginia Beach as a whole, and this is exactly why we're able to get the #1 spot. We're not a real city, with the difficulties and obligations, (or the moral legitimacy, diversity, or dynamism) of an inclusive community. We're a relatively white, relatively prosperous place cut off from the poorer, blacker areas nearby.  Take a closer look at this section of Kerry Dougherty's column:

That means that even without the pricey fripperies that some cities have – you know, the bike paths and the oxygen bars – the Resort City is numero uno.

Turns out a low crime rate – the Beach scored highest in that category – and low levels of poverty and taxes are more important than mass transit, coffeehouses and intricate networks of footpaths.

Who knew?

Lots of Beachites, actually.

Looks like the folks who voted to keep taxes down by not throwing money at a ludicrous light rail system had their priorities straight after all last fall.

The light rail system (which, by the way, would have been almost entirely paid for by an existing state infrastructure fund, which will now be spent elsewhere in Virginia), would have made it easier for people without cars to get between Norfolk and Virginia Beach.  I heard people tell me that the light rail would be bring crime to the Oceanfront; I heard people say that we have a lovely suburban community here in Virginia Beach, and we don't want to make it any more urban than it already is.   I think we know what these arguments are really saying. They're saying that we don't want poor people and people of color being able to live easily in Virginia Beach.

Needless to say, the light rail proposal was soundly defeated at the polls last November.  Also, by the way, I'm not sure what coffee desert of a neighborhood Kerry Dougherty lives in, but Virginia Beach has a lot of coffeeshops.  She is correct that we don't have any oxygen bars, though.

Now, I know the hipsters with their "pricey fripperies" like bike paths, footpaths and mass transit (you know, those useless infrastructure projects that help poor people live their lives), might look down on us "Beachites" and make us feel bad because of how racist, exclusionary, and uncool we are.  But aren't they right to do so?  Shouldn't we be ashamed of how our city got to be first on WalletHub's Best Big Cities to Live of 2017?

Let me tell a quick story. Three years ago, about a year after I moved to Virginia Beach, I invited a bunch of my college friends to visit me for the 4th of July.  While walking to the beach to go see the fireworks, someone in the passenger seat of a car yelled a racial epithet - I'll bet you can guess which one - at one of my friends.  I have never been more ashamed of myself and my city.  My friend has not been back, and I don't blame him.  Virginia Beach has been my home for three years, and I love many things about the city.  But let's be honest about why this city is the way it is.

Music for Twenty-Somethings

Turning on Bleachers' 2017 album Gone Now feels like waking up slowly.  "Woke up / I'm in the in-between honey" echoes itself on a bed of warm synth chords , invitingly, like your covers, or your lover's body, as you drift out of sleep and into that drowsy state before you're truly awake.  A few minutes earlier, you'd been asleep, lost in your dreams, and in a few minutes, you'll be awake: clear and oriented to reality.  But for a few minutes, you're "in the in-between," a place where your dreams rumble through your mind like "rolling thunder", a place where phrases and feelings swirl unbidden in the soup of your slowly untangling consciousness.

Gone Now takes place in this liminal space.  Ambiguous phrases ("Don't take the money," "rolling thunder," "upstairs neighbor," "kids downstairs," "lend me a favor," and many others) echo with songs and throughout the album along with their associated musical motifs, shifting and changing with each iteration.  Other voices of unknown provenance, some human, some digitized, some foreign, almost all female, float in and out of the songs like subconscious voices bubbling from the depths of your mind.  They don't obviously follow the rules of the melody or rhythm or even the content of the songs, and yet they feel harmonious, intentional, as though placed with the self-justifying, improvisational logic of dreams.  The sounds of the album are almost entirely warm and inviting, and the heavy and nearly constant stereo panning all add to a feeling of warm confusion, of drowsiness, of emotional openness. 

The "in-between" is a metaphor, of course.  In this album, dreams deal with youth.  Some are nightmares, or at least represent the trauma of his youth. "Goodmorning," for example, deals with the trauma and guilt of losing his younger sister to brain cancer and a cousin to the Iraq War when Antonoff was 18.  He's "always one dream away from the ones above," watching "all of the nights turn blue," as he yearns for help ("somebody lend me a favor") with his trauma.  Similarly, in "Everybody Lost Somebody," he describes a dream of begging on a corner, feeling the "pain of waiting alone" and the repeated desire to "get myself back home soon" - perhaps suggesting the desire to return to his intact childhood home in a time before the shattering deaths that marked the end of his adolescence.  In "Hate That You Know Me So Well," these dreams of loss become recurring nightmares: "So I keep talking about eighteen / Cause I can't let go of the same dream...and you know what? / I hate it!".  And again, in "I'm Ready to Move On," "I've got one dream, been hurting me forever".

Other dreams are more positive but still imbued with the emotional intensity and confusion of youth: "Days on his sister's rooftop / Watching our city burn into the night," or (also from "I Miss Those Days") driving himself to Florida at 16 - who doesn't remember, or dream about, the incredible freedom of your first solo road trip?  Indeed, "part of me never left that seat" because he can return to those times in the "nights that we could stand up before a dream".  "But it's all coming back, yeah / Like the feeling isn't over" - dreams bring back the feelings of youth, and just as a waking person may desire to return to the confusion of dream, Antonoff yearns for the emotional intensity of youth: "Hey, I know I was lost, but I miss those days".

A drowsy person can just go back to sleep, but - and this is the source of Antonoff's wistfulness - the person who is waking up from their youth can't.  Those days are Gone Now, and the album presents the challenges of adulthood with the clarity of day.  "Hate That you Know Me So Well" depicts the "pressure points" of adult relationships - they "pressure you right back".  As anyone who has been in an adult relationship knows (or should know), being close to another person is just difficult.  They keep you "up all night," their love is sometimes as malicious as a "heart attack."  Your lover, if you're truly together, knows you well, too well, and "sometimes" that be an awful thing: "I wish that I wasn't myself / No luck / And I hate that you know me so well".  "Don't Take the Money" is similar.  Proximity breeds conflict, and conflict between partners is intimate, intense, and difficult to escape.  As Antonoff sings about fighting and staying up late, "Different sides of the bed / Roll your eyes, shake my head / Now we're stuck in the storm".  The risk is that we "ignore" these conflicts, or take easy ways out - in Antonoff's phrase (one that, according to the email he wrote to announce DTTM's release, he uses to represent any shortcut through difficulties, especially emotional), we "take the money," rather than commit to the difficult work of sorting out our problems together.  The temptation is real, and Antonoff exhorts his partner again and again: "Don't take the money," and then, perhaps, they can wake up together in the "safe house" of "Let's Get Married".

I'm 27 years old. I have adult responsibilities: no kids or a house (yet), but a job, two cats, money, and a partner with whom I share the past 6 years, my home, my life, and my cats.  And yet, for 6 weeks this summer, I moved into a dorm on a mountain, where I spend my days reading books and writing papers that have nothing to do with any of the realities of adulthood.  I spend hours taking pictures of a creek, or writing reviews of albums, or writing mystery novels, or going to Pond Readings, or Barn East parties, or Literary Pairs themed dances.  I write intense journal entries that sound exactly like my journal entries when I was 16 - I'm actually embarrassed as I write them, and yet the words keep tumbling out onto the page.  Temporarily abdicating my adulthood for English teacher summer camp has brought back much of the emotional intensity of youth - I mean, when was the last time an album hit you hard enough that you listened to it straight through multiple times (let alone take several hours to write a detailed review)?  No music has meant this much to me since high school - this is like Justice in 2007, or the Shins in 2004, or Neutral Milk Hotel, also in 2004, though the album actually came out in 1998.  Or the Avett Brothers in 2006, or....I could keep going.  

The point is that this summer is my "in-between".   I thought I'd grown up, but here - especially listening to this album - I feel my youth lingering on just a bit longer.  I will not romanticize the feeling, and indeed, it's not really all that pleasant of an experience - which I think is something we forget about being young. Like Antonoff suggests in "I'm Ready to Move On," the drowsy warmth of the "in-between" can be cloying, or painful, or too open and intense.  A lot of insecurities that I thought I'd escaped have returned, including (embarrassingly) whom to sit with in the dining hall. And beyond that - it's not real.  Youth is a dream, and as real as dreams seem, they're not. I am ready to move on, to wake up to the clarity of my adult life again, to continue to work through the mundane difficulties of having to go to work every day, and feed the cats and clean their litter box, and share my life with another human being.

But, for another couple weeks, I'll let Gone Now swirl through my head like a fading dream.

Patience

Learning how to take better pictures has taught me many things.  Some are technical, like what an aperture is, or how to spell aperture, and how to navigate my camera's menu system, or how to navigate my camera's memory system when I accidentally set it to German.

Other lessons, however, are broader and, generally, humbling.  Today, I took nearly 300 pictures over about two hours of walking down a creek.  After editing, I kept 21, and of those, I think maybe 5 are interesting albeit somewhat flawed, and 1 is really good.  Actually, I just went back and looked again - that 1 has some issues.  I'll have to go back and try again.

I've only been taking pictures really regularly for about 6 months, but already it's begun to shape the way I think and see the world.  For one, I'm much more aware of light - though, goodness knows, much less aware than I should be.  I think the main effect, however, is increasing my patience.  I've always been a patient person -  I remember my dad once told me, I think in high school, that he thought my patience would make me a great third grade teacher someday.  He wasn't quite accurate, but I think the point still stands.

But the patience required to take good pictures is of another level entirely.  Take, for example, this picture I took today:

This picture took me about 15 minutes, and dozens of inferior versions.  I was lying on my belly in a wet field, with deer flies buzzing my ears and crawling into my hair to bite my scalp, and this friggin bee would not still still, or turn towards me.  And in the brief moments he did, I'd miss my focus, or fuck up the composition, or be unable to find the right flower in my viewfinder.  Even this one isn't ideal - the bee looks nice, but it would bd better if I'd rotated around a little and gotten the bud off to the side instead of directly over him.  But at that point I couldn't handle the bugs any more, and so I got an inferior shot.

Or, for example, take this one:

This one was the one I thought was good.  I mean I think it's a really cool picture, and one of the best ones I've ever taken, but it's not great.  I think the top of the frame isn't really adding much, and the most interesting part is the the contrast between the curve of the rock and the smooth water.  It would be better if I'd been able to zoom in a bit, but here's the thing - I left my tripod in Virginia, and so I've been trying to take all of these long exposures by hand.  It's already pretty freaking difficult to do that, since I've got to contort myself in the middle of a stream into some position that is very stable, but not too wet.  Anyway, zooming makes my hand shake worse, so I can't really do that - or go any longer with the exposures. This might look way cooler with like a 5 second exposure, but without a tripod, this is the best I can do.  And to do this - I don't know how time it took, or how many frames I shot off, but it was a lot of each.

I'm a firm believer that struggling is good for the soul.  We shouldn't feel like we've ever mastered something completely, because I doubt there's anything a human being - given our immense imperfections - could ever be perfect at.  Photography (and writing, actually) are like that for me.  They teach me how little I really know, and how far I have to come - and how much patience I'll need if I'm going to avoid burning myself out.  Anyway, here's some more pictures from today.

3 Shots: Rock Climbing with Students

Teachers do not often postpone their summer vacations, even by just 3 days, but sometimes hurricanes cancel your rock climbing trips and there's no other time to schedule them except for the three days following the end of the school year.  It's called dedication, or just very bad luck.  One of the two.

Anyway, here's three shots.  They all tell the same story: kids overcoming challenges.  It was incredible to see them climb cliffs they'd only just stared at, fearfully and unbelievably, from the bottom.

3 Shots: Whistler Weekend

After 34 very unpleasant hours of traveling, my friend Dillon and I eventually arrived in Whistler.  What followed was 2 days of incredible skiing.   Here's 3 shots: 

A bad plan leads to very wet feet

Following our White Hill Lake adventure last weekend, I was eager this weekend to explore deeper into the interior swamps of First Landing State Park.  Google maps suggested that the stream we crossed meandered quite a way into the park, and seemed to end in what looked suspiciously like a flooded cypress swamp.  It just might, I though, be possible to paddle my way up the creek and into the cypress trees.  There, I hoped to paddle around in the forest, which (having paddled the Roanoke River in Eastern North Carolina) I know to be very fun.

I anticipated some difficulties with this plan.  I knew the creek was narrow, and I knew that it had some logs across it.  After all, I had crossed it on one of those logs just last weekend.  I figured that I would just get out of my kayak and drag it over the logs when it came to that. Easy, no - but doable.  

It was not doable.

The title of the post really tells the whole story.  This was a bad plan, mostly because I drastically underestimated the number of logs across the creek.  There were none in the first 100 yards of the creek.  Then I dragged the kayak across the first one, the one I had crossed.  It was difficult, but doable.  I felt confident.  20 yards later, I ran into two in a row.  Fortunately, the creek bent around a small point, and so I just portaged my way around the obstacle.  10 yards after that, another, and looking up the creek, I could see 7 or 8, each with no more than 20 feet of water between them.  Well, I thought,  that's enough of that.  I had gone no more than 200 yards.

I stranded the kayak and walked a bit farther up the creek.  It was difficult, as it was a swamp, but given that I was wearing neoprene booties, it wasn't so difficult.  The wind rustled the swamp grass.  A bald eagle flew overhead.  I couldn't hear any sign of the city around me.  I sat and ate a granola bar, and took some pictures.  

My plan was bad, and my feet were wet.  But it seemed a small price to pay.  Here are the pictures:

I've paddled into this lake twice, and both times I've surprised more than 5 herons.  This one, however, surprised me.

Some day I will take the picture I want to take of a flying heron - close, focused, well-lit.  But not this day.

This is when the paddle was still going well.  Kayaking through a veil of spanish moss was great experience - until I ran into that log.

Well, shit.

This is close to the heron picture I want, but I had to crop way in, and so you can see how over-zoomed it is.

Exploring White Hill Lake

Some explorers cross vast oceans and inhospitable deserts, braving incredible hardship - hunger, storms, disease, without any certainty of success.  They seek new peoples, continents, or vast riches, and sometimes they find them.  Other times they find death and ruin, but whatever they discover, everlasting fame, or at least infamy, follows their name.

Marco Polo-esque

My friends and I are not this sort of explorer.  We sought to bushwhack our way from the parking lot to a place where I could take some pictures of snowy swamps.  We were prepared to brave hardships including very chilly weather, ankle deep snow, and possibly wet feet.  

Unfortunately, the 64th street entrance to First Landing State Park was closed. But, like Magellan or any other explorer you might name, we persevered in the face of difficulty.  We drove to the Shore Drive entrance, which was open.  We began our hike on the trails, but once we reached the junction of trails at the western end of White Hill Lake, we decided, like Hannibal to challenge ourselves.  Hannibal, as you no doubt remember, rode his elephants over the Alps to Rome when he might have just let them swim, or something.  I'm not too clear on the details.

In our case, we decided to get to the shore of Broad Bay along the northern edge of White Hill Lake instead of the southern.  There is no trail along the northern end of White Hill Lake, and there's no obvious way to cross the swamp that flows from its eastern tip.  Why did we go this way?  No particular reason - just a whim, I suppose.  Or, wait, what I really mean is: because it is there.

It began easily enough.  The snow wasn't too deep, and while we encountered our share of greenbriar - the bane of any explorer - we were wearing big coats and snow pants anyway. The challenge came when we needed to start rounding the eastern tip of the lake.  It's a swampy land, with little islands of higher ground.  The vegetation is thick, and while the swamp was frozen, it wasn't that frozen.  Pretty much you broke through instantly, and it wasn't obvious how deep the water would be underneath.

Eventually, after a few sketchy swamp crossings, we reached the crux move: crossing the channel. It was about 8 or 9 feet of open water, flowing gently into the lake.  I estimate that it was between 2 and 3 feet deep, and we were not eager to overtop our boots in 22 degree weather, more than 2 miles from the car.  I'm sure Shackleton would understand our feelings.  No doubt he faced similar situations in his exploration of the Antarctic.

There were two options to cross.  One was trying to follow the high ground. It looked like it might curve off to the left and around to the higher ground across the lake. I was skeptical, as the creek flowed into the bushes over there as well.  There might be a crossing over there or there might not.  In any case, it wouldn't be easy.  The other option was a couple of logs, fallen in line with each other, leading across the creek and most of the way through the remaining swamp.  They were pretty wide, which was helpful, but they were also covered with snow.  There was also some weasel tracks or something leading across them.

In the end we went with the locals' recommendation.  I led, sliding on my belly alone the log.  Some comments were made regarding my technique from the peanut gallery behind, but when they faced the log, they quickly realized those logs were slippery as shit, and it was the only sensible way across.  

The rest of the hike was pleasant, if anti-climactic. The highlight was immediately after the log crossing when Greg felt he could find a better route through the swamp than I could, and then overtopped one of his boots. Our reward, however, ranked with Pizarro's room full of gold (and was achieved without kidnapping a single emperor): we went to Bay Local for brunch. I had biscuits with gravy and tater tots.  Brad had a steak with a pancake, eggs, tater tots, and a Bud in a paper bag.  Dipping my tot into my gravy, I felt that all of our deprivation was worthwhile.  No doubt our names will live forever as the circumnavigators of White Hill Lake, but brunch is better anyway.  Probably Europeans would have discovered the new world much sooner if they'd known you could have a meal between lunch and breakfast as a reward.

Bonus Picture: Domo, king of the backyard and patio, considers his newly-snowy domain.

3 Shots: Christmas in Maine

Christmas in Maine suggests barns, pine trees, lobster boats and snow, but while we had all three 4 of those things, my pictures seem to be mostly of dogs, family, and sunrise/sunset - in that order.  In fact, the hardest thing about choosing these three shots was not having them be all of dogs.  Without any further ado, here are the three shots:

Ok, so there's one lobster boat.  This wasn't actually the best picture I took that morning, but I already put the one of my sister and Argus (a dog) on Instagram, and as I said, I'm trying to minimize the dog photography.

This picture was taken on the same day as the first, but at sunset.  It was a brilliantly clear day - one of the clearest I've seen.  I know that because from the beach in Maine you can see a lighthouse about 8 miles off shore (It's called Boon Island, and it's a hellish rock).  On this day, you couldn't just see the spire, but the color of the bricks, as well as the rock it sits on, which is normally completely invisible.

These dogs are not fighting to the death.  They're playing, as they do for an hour or so each day, and normally they're moving too fast to see their horrific facial expressions (which is why my dad is smiling).  But I got a new camera for Christmas, an OMD EM-1, and it's fast enough to see this sort of thing.  Expect my cat photography game to rise to a whole new level.

Bonus picture:  Murphy and Aunt Minnie on Christmas morning.  You've really got to be a dog person to cut it in our family.

3 Shots: Storm Over First Landing

Today in Virginia Beach, it's a healthy 37 and raining.  Yesterday, however, it was 78 and sunny, and so I went to First Landing State Park around sunset to take some pictures.  I ventured off trail, and between extricating my feet from freezing mud and extricating my legs from dense thickets of concertina-like greenbriar, I managed to snag a few nice shots.  Here's three:

During the whole hike I experience exactly 30 seconds of direct sunlight, during which I took 7 pictures.  This is the best one.

Apparently these are called God rays, and for some reason they came out very orange in my pictures, which wasn't at all what I was going for.  So I made them black and white.

It was a choice between this one or a strangely attractive tree for the third shot - both were silhouetted against the same sky.  In the end I went for this one because I really like the angle of the stump. 

Bonus picture!  My leg afterwards.

3 Shots: Rudee Inlet

Until relatively recently, Virginia Beach was mostly farmland crisscrossed by the creeks and swamps of tidal estuaries.  The farmland is mostly gone today, except of course for the vast rural hinterland of Pungo.  In its place has sprung up a car-centric ecosystem of stripmalls, suburban neighborhoods, and military bases. The water, however, remains. Much of it is drained, displaced, or managed, but there are still places where land meets water without lawns or culverts or any of the obvious markers of human impact.  One of these is the upper reaches of Rudee Inlet, where  a busy inlet of whalewatching boats and charter fisherman becomes clam beds and swampgrass.  I took a paddle out there this weekend, and not for the first time, I was reminded of how lucky I am to be able to put my kayak in just a couple blocks from my house.  Here's three shots:

I don't know kind of bird that is on the right.  He was an active little bugger though, and getting a picture of him was pretty challenging - I was paddling all over the place to catch him still.  In the end, it worked out, though the noise level is pretty high.  I really don't know how to use the luminance slider in LIghtroom, but I plan to figure it soon.  The communications boom on the right, by the way, is from one of the Virginia Beach Police boats.

I couldn't get a picture of the actual sunset, as it slipped behind a dense cloudbank, but I think this is more interesting and attractive anyway.  I should have opened up the aperture more to get the foreground in focus, though it's awkward to do in my camera, and I would have had to figure out how to hold my camera still.  That would have been hard as I was holding the camera above my head on my paddleboard, but still I wish had tried.  Next time.

It's just a picture of a tree.  That's it.