Tucsonans inspired by last weekend's Festival of Books, listen up: Pima Community College is hosting a creative writing weekend this Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday. 

From the press release: 

What differentiates the impulse to write poetry from the impulse to write prose? Can that seed go either way?

These questions and other innovative ways of thinking about poetry, fiction, the essay and more will be explored during Pima Community College’s spring 2016 Creative Writing Weekend Workshop on poetry writing led by writer and editor Aisha Sabatini Sloan. We will look at literary models that hover – deliriously – between fiction, poetry and the essay.

The event will take place at Downtown Campus (1255 N. Stone Avenue, room AH 140) March 25-27. 

The workshop beings on Friday at 6 p.m. with a two hour session, and continues on Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

Pima students can enroll in the course (Writing 298T2, CRN 22557) as they do with regular classes. Non-students must fill out the college admission form before enrolling in the two-credit course. The cost of this three-day workshop is $177 for Arizona residents.

Visit PCC's website for more information. 

I taught To Kill a Mockingbird many times, and every time I reread it, I choked up. It's a wonderful, evocative piece of literature. As for the movie, forget about it. I lost it over and over as I watched; it's almost unbearably poignant during the last half hour. I would probably have a similar emotional meltdown with the book or the movie today, but that good, warm, self-satisfied feeling I used to experience at the end would be gone. Looking at Mockingbird from the perspective I have today, especially after reading Harper's first novel, Go Set a Watchman, which was just published recently, I find the book to be both paternalistic and misleading. If I were still teaching, more than likely, Mockingbird would not be part of my curriculum.

What a wonderful guy Atticus Finch is in Mockingbird! He's a lawyer who takes the case of a poor black man and defends him against a false rape charge. The loss in court makes his struggle to right the wrongs of society all the more noble. He's hated by the town's white racists and beloved by the black community, and by Scout, his very young daughter who idolizes her father and narrates the book through a child's innocent eyes. To me, the book always read like a parable for our time, about how good white people should act and how, in spite of all the losses, we must continue to fight until racism is no longer the written and unwritten law of the land.

But the book is not a parable of our time. It's a tale out of the 1930s. At the time, Atticus could defend the black community of Maycomb County and not worry that they might attend Scout and Jem's school or move in next door. His nobility was built on the well established arm's distance between Maycomb's black and white communities. I wouldn't have been able to say that for certain a few years ago, but Harper Lee told us it's true in the novel she wrote before she began Mockingbird.

Go Set a Watchman took place in the 1950s when it was written, during the beginnings of the modern civil rights struggles. In that book a grown up Scout, who, like Harper Lee herself, had moved to New York and returned to her home town for a visit, is horrified to find that her beloved father has joined with the KKK, and he was one of many among the town's civic leaders. Atticus despises the NAACP and its lawyers for coming into southern communities and stirring up trouble. He doesn't want black children going to white children's schools. He wants things to stay as they were back in the 1930s when he could defend members of the black community and rest assured they would still "know their place." His depression-era style of tolerance and acceptance had little to do with the genuine social change which was being demanded by civil rights leaders in the 1950s.

Con Man Fanfiction Contest Launch Video from Con Man Web Series on Vimeo.

Ages ago, we talked about Con Man—Alan Tudyk's long overdue Firefly spinoff/replacement/bandage. Tudyk and Nathan Fillion raised cash for the project through Indiegogo. Obviously, people were excited, all kinds of cash was raised and fan bonuses were added as the money came in.

One of those bonuses just took off, and it's even open to those of us who didn't put any cash into the project in the first place:

Alan Tudyk, star of "Firefly," "Serenity," and the soon-to-be released "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," is launching his own writing contest for his latest web series "Con Man!" The winner of the contest will have the first chapter read by Alan himself in a video personally addressed to the author!

Put on your fanfiction hats and get inspired by Firefly, Serenity, or Alan's latest show, 'Con Man.'

Start writing already, so you can submit as early as you can!

You can submit your creation (or peruse the others) online. The deadline is March 2!

And for the writers out there, here's a little Fan Fic inspiration: 

Last Monday I wrote about the way teachers have been portrayed in TV and film since the 1950s. I only looked at teachers of core subjects — English, math, science and social studies — because when people talk about how good or bad teachers are, they're usually talking about those folks. What I found was a general trend. Core teachers were portrayed as good to very good from the 50s through the 70s. Starting in the late 80s and early 90s, we had a crop of super teachers who weren't just good, they were great, transformative, life changing. At about the same time, we started seeing truly bad teachers who ranged from lazy to incompetent to evil. Here's that graph. (The circles with red centers are stories where teachers are the main characters).
Portrayals of teachers reflect societal attitudes, especially in the popular arts like TV and film where the way the studios attract consumers of their products is by reflecting sense of what the world is like. We had a generally positive attitude toward teachers from the 50s through the 70s, so TV shows and films showed us competent, hard working teachers. Teachers and schools were considered part of the solution, not part of the problem. In the 80s, that began to change. Teachers and schools began to be seen in a more negative light. The Reagan administration made this attitude official when it published a document which declared that because of our failing schools, we were A Nation At Risk. The negative views of teachers were compounded by conservatives' anti-government ideology which turned "failing schools" into failing government schools. At the same time, unions were demonized, so union teachers turned into greedy, coddled government employees who only cared about their paychecks and perks, not the students. Those attitudes were reflected in stories with teachers who were anywhere from bad to awful. The super teacher portrayals during that same time might seem to contradict the general anti-teacher trend, but really, they were just the other side of the same teacher-denigrating coin. The super teachers created a perfect contrast to the run-of-the-mill lazy, incompetent teachers. "That's what all teachers should be doing," the super teacher films say. "If some teachers can make students learn, what's the matter with the rest of them?"

In the graph below, I added TV shows and films that focused on administrators (usually principals), in green, and teachers in the arts and coaching, in yellow. Here, are all three categories together.

My friend Ron was halfway through a Kurt Vonnegut novel when he decided to reach out via Facebook for assurance that his particular book would get better. I replied, "It doesn't." A while later he replied saying that I was right. The subject of Vonnegut reminded me of one of his recurring characters, Kilgore Trout. Trout was himself a science fiction writer who could only achieve publication as filler for pornographic books and magazines (no internet in the 70's). Kilgore Trout, in turn, reminded me of a hilarious, wildly imaginative, and sometimes disturbing 1975 novel Venus on the Half-shell, by Phillip Jose' Farmer, originally published under the pen name "Kilgore Trout".

If you have yet to read it, Venus on the Half-shell makes for an absorbing, fast paced, escape from our crazy times. I told Ron as much.

Most authors will start a novel by painting a picture of the setting, then begin the introduction of the characters. Farmer starts Venus with the protagonist, Simon Wagstaff, having sex atop the Great Pyramid of Giza. Next came the great flood, literally. An alien race called the Hoonhor traveled from planet to planet checking out the state of evolution. If the state was not well, they cleansed it. Earth was one of these. The Hoonhor caused all the water vapor in the atmosphere to precipitate at once, washing the planet, and giving evolution another shot. 

Our hero, Simon Wagstaff, managed to float around long enough to float by an abandoned Chinese spacecraft which he boarded shortly before running aground on, where else, Mount Ararat. After learning how to fly the craft, Simon left Earth and traveled the galaxy far and wide to find the answers to unanswerable questions, like, "Why are we created only to suffer and die?"

The novel starts out with a bang, but that is only the first in a number of sexual adventures. There was, for example, the planet Dokal where all the people were identical to humans with the exception of possessing a five to six foot long prehensile tail, naked, save for a tuft of fur at the end. The Dokals insisted on fixing his lack of tail problem, and after the installation, he found it to be quite useful. Useful, he found, in ways he had not imagined, like when the King's young daughter named Tunc (an anagram) seduced him and... well, I'll leave it there.

Occasionally the humor could be a bit disturbing. As it turned out, faster-than-light travel was made possible by sucking energy from a parallel universe to feed the engine. Unfortunately, the globs of energy were actually living beings. They died in the process. The engine, in fact, transmitted the sound of their wailing death cries - the faster he went, the louder they became. Simon found it terribly unnerving.

Farmer was a great admirer of Vonnegut, and through the persona of Kilgore Trout he was able to take the Vonnegut style to far higher level of humor and creativity. Writing Venus was a joy for Farmer, and it shows in the writing. He speaks of laughing out loud while typing it, and concluded, "What a blast it was!"

Venus is a great escape novel for the science fiction buff, and the joy of the author in its creation touches you. Finish your summer reading with this!

Oh yeah, Ron's book that did not get better was Slaughterhouse Five.

When I wrote my earlier post comparing Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird with her just-released earlier novel, Go Set a Watchman, I was relying on a number of reviews and analyses I had read about the new book. I hadn't gotten my own copy yet. Since then, I've read Watchman, which reinforced the perspectives I got from others and added to them. Watchman isn't a great book—it probably isn't even a very good book in its published form—but it's an intelligent book with sharp analyses of attitudes in the south during the 50s, specifically after the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The contrast between the versions of the south and the pervasiveness of racism portrayed in the two books is what most resonates for me—the glossy, airbrushed version in Mockingbird versus the wrinkles-and-all version in Watchman. My general takeaway from the contrast between the two books is, we need to grow up about the way we perceive racism in this country—how substantial it is, how much it underlies the way we as individuals perceive the world and the way our society functions. We need to look racism directly in the face, acknowledge it and do whatever we can, not to eradicate it completely since that's impossible, but to lessen its impact by working to correct its most destructive aspects.

Genuine spoiler alert: I'm going to be talking about Watchman in some detail, so if you plan to read the book and don't want it pre-summarized and analyzed, this is a good time to stop reading.

In Watchman, a 26-year-old woman who is living in New York returns to her home town in the south for a visit. At the beginning of the book, the town and its inhabitants appear to be as she remembered them, especially her father Atticus Finch whom she idolized as a child and continues to idolize as a young adult. In her eyes, Atticus was a man who transcended his time and place, someone who saw beyond race and class, whose judgement was absolutely fair and even handed unlike most white inhabitants of the town, including some wonderful but flawed adults she knew growing up.

As the book continues, she begins to see that Atticus isn't the man she believed he was. To her horror, she finds he's a segregationist and something of a bigot. He's against school integration and making it easy for southern blacks to vote—or he's against doing those things right away, anyway. He wants changes to happen in their own sweet southern time, not on the timetable set by the Supreme Court and the N.A.A.C.P. To paraphrase one of today's much-used phrases, for Atticus, White lives matter, but Black lives — or at least the quality of black lives — don't matter nearly as much, especially if improving their lives has a negative impact on the privileges he and other southern whites have come to expect as their birthright.

It may be a sin to kill a mockingbird, but is it a sin to knock a Finch off his pedestal?

It turns out Atticus Finch was a segregationist and a bigot before he was the ideal vision of a white southerner who was able to rise above the racism of his time. Of maybe he was a segregationist and a bigot after he was that ideal man. It depends on which timeline you use.

Atticus Finch, of course, is the fictional southern lawyer in Harper Lee's wonderful novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and taught many times during my career as a high school English teacher. But a few years earlier, before Lee wrote Mockingbird, she wrote Go Set a Watchman, and in that book Atticus made some statements about segregation and race you wouldn't expect from the man we learned to love in the classic novel. That means the character was conceived as a bigot before he was re-envisioned as the perfect man in Mockingbird. But Watchman is set twenty years after Mockingbird, so it was an older Atticus who showed himself to be a bigot. Before. After. The whole thing is confusing on a number of levels.

In case you haven't read any of the statements Atticus made in Watchman, which is set soon after the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation, here are two of his most often quoted lines.

“Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

And

"[The south should] be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.”

An article in today's Star talks about a proposition to create an International English Spelling Congress to make the way we spell words more logical and consistent. The article mentions the letter string "ough," which can be pronounced at least seven ways—as in the words "though," "through," "cough," "rough," "plough," "ought" and "borough." As an old English teacher, I know more time is spent—"wasted" would be a better word—teaching and correcting spelling than would be necessary if words were spelled something like the way they sounded.

This isn't a new idea. In the 1870s, someone came up with the word "ghoti" as an example of our ridiculous spelling system. The "gh" is pronounced as in "tough," the "o" as in "women," and the "ti" as in "nation." Put it all together and it spells "fish." (I always thought "ghoti" was a George Bernard Shaw creation. Apparently not—according to Wikipedia, anyway.)

If they were talking about this 150 years ago, I doubt if anything is going to (gonna?) change any time soon.

Word Nerd Note: In James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, he made reference to "ghoti" in typical Joycean fashion:

"Gee each owe tea eye smells fish."

Now you know.

The Arizona State Library has become a go-to digital source for Arizona history, lore and legend. Its new Digital Arizona Library contains over 500 old and new books, pamphlets, databases and timelines related to Arizona. You can simply go to the site, find something you want and read it online, or you can sign up and get some added features.

For instance, go to Reading Arizona and choose from 12 categories, like "Arizona Cities and Towns: A Historical Collection," "Native Americans of Arizona: A Historical Collection," "University Presses: A Reading Arizona Collection" and "Poisoned Pen Press: A Reading Arizona Collection."

You'll find seven books and pamphlets relating to Tucson, like "Arizona: The Wonderful Country, Tucson its Metropolis," dating from 1881. Most of the material on Native Americans is old and written by Anglos, though the 1906 book, "Geronimo's Story of His Life" says it's Geronimo's words "Taken down and edited by S. M. Barrett."

The "Current Issues" section includes the 2014 "Aztlan Arizona: Mexican American Educational Empowerment, 1968-1978" and the 2012 "Innocent Until Interrogated: The True Story of the Buddhist Temple Massacre and the Tucson Four." If you're up for Arizona-based mysteries, you'll find the David Mapstone Mysteries by Jon Talton, the Lena Jones Mysteries by Betty Web and The Drive Saga by James Sallis.

Not for everyone, but for the interested dabbler or the serious researcher, there's a lot to chew on.

Someone has issued an award to find his or her missing bear that goes by Ka-Wa. The bear was last seen near East Sixth Street and North Euclid Ave, according to the flyer that has been plastered all over Fourth Avenue. The poster doesn't specify when the astray bear was last sighted, so Ka-Wa could have gone anywhere.