Rocco Maiolo's Ramblings and Musings

You don't realize how good pulp fiction writers are until you try your hand at writing. It's not until then that you realize how difficult it is just to plot an engaging story -- let alone create characters that your readers are going to react to, throw in theme, setting, mood... Holy crap, it ain't easy. When I was at university studying English, I didn't even know who was on the best seller's list. Who cared? They had nothing important to say to the human soul; they were totally forgettable ; they were pulp fiction writers. We were reading Auden and Steinbeck and Pound and Shakespeare and Austen -- writers that mattered. Well, 20 years later, I'm not so sure that Grisham and Crichton and King and Archer don't matter and/or won't have contributed something to culture when literary history judges them. Back to my original reflection. It's not until you try writing a novel or even a short story that you realize how impressive someone like Steve Ma

Creative Procrastination Right now I have 60 exams to mark. After that, 80+ report cards. So what am I doing now? Blogging: working title -- "Creative Procrastination". Would that be ironic X 2 or is there an other word for it? Yes, when I have something pressing to accomplish, my mind supplies me with all kinds of other wonderful possibilities; under normal circumstances, I couldn't think of such sundry speculatives: writing a daily devotional based on the genealogies, trying to find and buy a Montreal Maroons hockey sweater online, inventing/patenting a binder for foolscap-size paper (maybe I shouldn't go public with that one...) reading! reading is always good. James Joyce's Ulysses sits on my bookshelf taunting me; it whispers, you're no student of English until you've read me ; then it says, above a whisper, wuss! look for the verse in Proverbs where it encourage drinking beer & wine if your life sucks And the proverbial list goes on. Speaking of

To My 2009 semester 2 EWCs: You're Great! In my second year of teaching I was observed by my then vice-principal and once former high school English teacher, Bob Majers . He observed a grade 9 class -- I have no recollection of what we were doing. Cue for Treason maybe? What I do remember is a conversation that went something like this: BOB: Wow, this is a great class. ME: Yeah, they're super kids -- smart and a lot of fun. BOB: Have you told them that? ME: No... BOB: Well, I think you should. ME: Good idea. That conversation has stuck with me. I often forget that the young people I get the honour to be with for 5 months are 14-18 yrs-olds -- kids in adult bodies. I don't mean that disrespectfully ; I just mean that they might look like they're adults but really they're only a very short few years past being 12-yrs old ... kids. So what's my point: high school students need to know that you're proud of them and that you think they're great. Specifically

Larry Sirranni, aka, Super Mario Yesterday I was at a retirement party for a man who is wholly human, doubtlessly flawed and yet -- dare I use the word? --great in what he has accomplished in his vocation as an educator. The point of this blog is not to honour the man, Larry Sirianni , although he is quite worthy of being honoured (as was he in the many speeches given on June 4 at the Thundering Waters Golf Course in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada). The point of this blog is to look at the concept of greatness. What makes Larry great -- what makes anyone great -- is that in his vocation he did not settle for the ordinary. He approached every minute, every day, every student, every colleague with the conviction that everyone, himself included, could be better after the encounter. As I watched Larry being so rightly honoured I found myself having many divergent thoughts. Is it then what a person does that makes him great? Does the greatness ( largeness , scope) lie in the magnit

The Death of Poetry... I read an interesting article today that said serious poetry was dead or at best irrelevant -- kind of like a priest in a town full of agnostics. Which isn't to say that some people somewhere still don't write poetry, read it and discuss it. They're just an elite few -- putting it nicely -- or an anachronistic few -- putting it not so nicely. As a teacher, I've gotta wonder if a lot of traditional forms have seen their day. I mean, this year, we were given -- that's right, "given", and that doesn't happen too often, I can tell you -- probably $1000-1500 worth of graphic novels. Why? Because it improves literacy particularly with adolescent boys. Now if I were to ask for $500 extra to purchase some Hamlet texts... well, I'm not so sure I'd get it. And here I am blogging about it. I guess that's what we'd call irony? I'm bemoaning the death of a traditional form using a 21st century mode of communication. Perh