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Movie Talk

School’s Cool: A Confliction of Two 80’s Movies

There are two movies from the late-1980’s that I’ve been thinking about recently. They are Stand and Deliver (1988) and Lean on Me (1989). Both are based on true stories, and both are set in inner-city schools and involve troubled youths.

I’m sure the movies are not exactly like the real-life events, but I’m just going with what the movies portrayed.

In Stand and Deliver, we have Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos), a teacher at a Los Angeles high school. In Lean on Me, we have Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman), the principal at a Paterson high school.

Both men cared a great deal about their students, though they were both quite ruthless and demanding. I don’t doubt that this was true of the real-life Escalante and Clark. I respect and admire their efforts to encourage and push their students to achieve better lives than the ones they seemed destined for.

But there is something in Stand and Deliver that I have a problem with and never quite understood. One of Escalante’s students wanted to be an auto-mechanic. Escalante strongly disapproved of this, to the point that he was bullying the student. He seemed to be implying that auto-mechanics are losers and that the student was seeking a dead-end career.

That was strange to me. Isn’t it enough that the student had a goal? What’s wrong with being an auto-mechanic? Who’s going to fix your car when it breaks down, Escalante, if you’re shaming people for considering a career as an auto-mechanic?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the nation, a girl at Joe Clark’s school is mad because the vice principal said she cannot take the auto shop class that she really wants to take. When Joe Clark hears this, he immediately writes a note and tells the girl to take it to the vice principal, adding “You know how much auto-mechanics make? $17 an hour.”

Misc

Betty White Challenge

It’s a grand idea.

Hockey, NHL, Sports

Go Wings

The Red Wings kicked ass tonight. 6-2.

On Writing, Writing

I Don’t Mind Rejections

There are times when I post about a story being rejected by some publication or another and people think I’m upset about the rejection. There were times that I expressed anger, but that had to do with what was said in the rejection letter. Sometimes there are comments in the letters that I feel are ignorant about people with disabilities and it gets under my skin. Also–and it’s not so common these days, they seem to be a dying breed–there are editors who think it’s their job to be an asshole and I don’t take that shit very well.

But the rejections themselves? No, I don’t mind. It’s just part of the game. I approach this whole writing thing like it’s a game. From the number of words I get down each day to the number of publishers a story goes to before one of them buys it.

It’s a game. A sport. Jay Lake called writing an endurance sport. I dig that. Looking at it that way makes it fun.

It’s also just business. It’s not personal. Publications get hundreds of submissions, some of them get thousands. They can only publish a few stories each issue. A rejection doesn’t mean the story isn’t good. It could mean they just decided not to buy it. They have to make these decisions and sometimes it’s a tough decision to make.

I have been on the other side. I’d been a slush reader, an assistant editor and a judge in a contest, for different publications, over a period of a few years. For the contest, I was a judge on a panel of other judges. We was like the Supreme Court, yo. That was my last editorial gig. After that, I decided I can’t do this kind of thing anymore.

One of the reasons I made that decision is that most of the submissions were pretty decent. At all of the publications I did editorial work for, most of the submissions were decent. I liked them. I enjoyed these stories. Some I liked better than others. Some I thought were better written than others. But most of them, I found enjoyable on some level. I didn’t like deciding which stories could stay and which stories had to go.

You know the opening scene from the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles? Where the guy is trying to make up his mind about two pieces of art? He can choose only one. Both pieces are brilliant and suitable to his needs. He has to reject one and he doesn’t know which one to reject. He has a tough decision to make. It’s like that for editors, though probably not to that extend.

Seasoned writers are more like Neal (Steve Martin). We just want an answer, yes or no, so we can sell or move on to another publisher. My biggest frustration isn’t getting rejected. My biggest frustration is that it often takes a very long time to get an answer on a story.

It’s just business. The writer creates the product, and the editor decides whether to buy it or not.

On Writing, Writing

Out They Go

Just made five short fiction submissions.

Misc

Down They Go

My aunt Barb gave me these iron bookends about twenty years ago when I was living in the apartment above Gerlach’s Bowling Center.

Since I got these floor lamps, I’ve had the bookends holding these books on the middle shelf, because I like them there.

My speedbag’s round board is screwed into the floor joints under that part of the floor.

Every day, before I’m halfway through my workout, I hear a monstrous crash that startles me, even though I know what it is. After my workout, I come up stairs and find the books and a bookend on the floor.