Reading: Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry

Not yet given up on: John Milton, Paradise Lost;

On deck: Don Quijote, The London Rich, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Moving: gardening

House:

Garden: planted beefsteak, plum, and cherry tomato and eggplant seedlings

17 May 2002: Train Go Sorry

Oh, I just slay me.

I don't even know why--actually I do, there are at least two reasons--but I am at least passingly interested in Things Deaf. Passingly, mostly. First I saw "Children of a Lesser God" with its umpteen emotional implications and consequent ramifications on my emotional life. Then--well, no, I'll just skip that.

The Usual Suspects were talking a while back about something or other that led to someone's recommending Train Go Sorry (ASL for "missed the boat") as a good insight into deaf culture. I recently borrowed it from the library. In the first chapter, the hearing author sets up her interest in her subject matter: she was raised in a deaf school with its tight social group and did not at all like being uprooted in about middle school for a dreary suburban mainstream school.

And, parenthetically, I just listened to Possession with its bit with Maud trying to write an essay on metahpor without any metaphor in her writing, such that she could not say "a body of work," and I remembered that A.S. Byatt intended to write Still Life as a novel without metaphor but could not. I wanted a figure of speech for "did not at all like," eschewed a metahpor for less descriptive verb with adverb phrase, and then grinned when "uprooted" came out of my fingers. Heh. I have recently been reprimanded for my use of metaphor, which is another story and one worth pursuing, since I can feel in myself the difference between writing for a single person who knows me and rephrasing for public, including this, space, where make-likes are so often misunderstood. (Like using the phrase "make-like," which anyone who hasn't read The Amber Spyglass--and really, why haven't you?--might not understand.)

So there I was reading Train Go Sorry and already, in the introduction, discounting the author's stance as overly emotional. Of course she didn't want to leave the school: it had been her home. Her parents could have been prison wards instead of teachers and she wouldn't've wanted to leave the penal colony. (Did Papillon ever mention that the officers had offspring as well as wives with them? I remember he sold fish to a wife but I don't remember any children. However, that is the one of my teenage favorites that I have not revisited in over a decade.)

Papillon is another tangent. The Jean Auel brouhaha and my adolescent reading tastes recalled that gem to mind. In eighth grade, Mr. Connell (U.S. history teacher, WWII veteran, never could keep his hand from suspiciously deep in his front pants pocket and used coyly to perch on a stool when to stand at half-mast thus was too obvious even for him but to sit would preclude proper access, especially in a chair behind a desk that would deprive him of his exhibitionism) excoriated us one day for not reading the right books. I still haven't read The Red Badge of Courage, which wasn't a class assignment (I think) but the book he was currently promoting. Anyway, embarrassingly enough, I said I had just read Papillon. I was thirteen, and this must be my excuse. I did know better than to suggest V.C. Andrews. Mr. Connell sternly said that Papillon was not a classic. It wasn't? But it was about a grown-up, not a kid; even Auntie Mame had a child narrator if not a child protagonist. And it was long, very long. This didn't make it a classic? Oh.

I interrupted the book (Train Go Sorry, now) for Shelters of Stone and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Invisible Man and just picked it up again. The senior class of a deaf school is staging "Into the Woods," and figuring how to translate the written English into ASL. There is no ASL sign for "branch." I can understand there not being a sign for Rapunzel, but "branch"? Yet ASL is purportedly a full, independent language. I liked how the students worked it out, not fingerspelling because that's tedious (and difficult to follow from the audience) but making a sign out of a gesture for or idea of a branch.

The reason I slay me? I was thinking maybe I should have found this book on audiotape.