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Like a deliveryman telling me I look like a movie star (he shouldn’t be driving with that kind of vision, though. I think the heat was getting to him).

Or taking a few minutes out of my day to find a whole basement room I never knew about in my favorite used bookstore. And getting my toenails painted a coral my grandmother would have loved.

Some days, those are the things you rely on. One of the three classes I am teaching this summer just started and I am excited about it — it’s one of my favorite grad classes to teach: the first class they take on the Nature of Reading. Plus this time it’s a hybrid face to face and online, which either will really work well in the summer or won’t and I will tweak it. I think it should work really well, though. Even though I have way too many students for this — 33 — they all have such wide varieties of experience and interests. We’re all going to learn a lot, that much I can definitely say.

One of the things I follow very closely in the blogosphere (and the web more generally) is lists of book recommendations. Maybe at some point I’ll write about who recommends what to whom and why — all of which I find extremely interesting. One thing about summer reading lists (as opposed to other reading lists most of the time): they often have really freakin’ stupid suggestions. Don’t put Kite Runner on the damn list. If I haven’t read it, it sure as hell isn’t because I haven’t heard of it but because I have chosen not to read it. Ditto for anything on the Booker, Pulitzer, and National Book Award Lists. Or the second book from the author of the Kite Runner, anything chosen by Oprah, and absolutely anything involving Rachael Ray (yes, I actually read cookbooks from cover to cover and maybe I’ll talk more about that another time).

And really, in particular, don’t put together a list for a prospective college student that lists nothing but the classics that all of these prospective students have been hearing about and being taught (forced) to read for years. It’s summer, you idjet. Give the kids a break and recommend something worthwhile, relaxing, fun, escapist, or unusual and if you can’t, start reading more than the Today Show Book Club picks.

Rant over. And just to show I can pony up and play, here’s my list of stuff I hope to read this summer although right now, I seem to be reading everything not nailed down but with text and/or images. Not sure about the nailed-down part either.

Dr. Dana’s Summer Reading List (of stuff she wants to read):

• Anything by Kingsley Amis
• Anything by M.F.K. Fisher
• Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell
• The New Thought Police (about political correctness)
• Sentimental Education, Flaubert
• Michael Ondaatjie’s new one — Divisadero, I think it’s called
• The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud
• Case Histories, Kate Atkinson
• Older Joyce Carol Oates’ work I haven’t yet read
• Dakota, Kathleen Norris (a lovely poet-writer whose work I love)
• Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s memoir on writin

OK, that’s what I have for you right now. Feel free to make other suggestions and I’m sure I will add to this list as the summer progresses. But — don’t. suggest. mitch. albom. ever.

Gracias.

I start teaching again tonight and will teach for virtually every business day the rest of the summer (except the fourth, but that one day only, and a couple of Fridays). So my guess is that things are going to take a turn toward the world of work and writing and thinking, for a wide variety of reasons. You have questions? Email me, and keep reading — the work stuff is actually pretty good too (I hope).

And post your thoughts on how best to spend the Fourth of July if you have 24 hours, yourself, and one dog to spend them with… I could use some suggestions.

So, things are humming along and working well and then I pull a bone-headed move and knock a full cup of tea into my imac keyboard. Fried it, completely. Now, yes, this is just the keyboard and thank God — but the book is on there, and that’s the machine I use to write (am on the increasingly slow laptop right now, man I just *wear* machines out!). So. I got to order a keyboard and pay for overnight shipping to boot. Excellent.

OK, maybe I am procrastinating a little bit, but I just downloaded the coolest thing EVAR (geek joke — bad, bad). It’s a plugin for Firefox (which you should really be using, trust me) that senses when you are looking up a book and shows you the prices for the book at all the major stores as well as links to local libraries, etc.

Check it out at book burro. Wicked cool for a girl like me who looks up books just for fun.

I was just in my first meeting back in a while, and you know how when you’ve been thinking about and doing other things, you lose the vocab and structure of communicating for work (as just one example)? I mean,  I knew what I wanted to say but I’ve been so focused on friends and family and writing the book (and definitely relaxing) that I found myself struggling for the right words to discuss new classes and curriculum — instead I kept coming up with, “You know… that thing…?” Really articulate, I can be (Chris calls that kind of backward writing my “Yoda speak” and that’s pretty much how things were coming out today). I felt like a total space cadet, with few cylinders firing. A good thing to think about and understand, especially as I am due to start teaching next week and I bet some of my grad students will need a little time of their own to get back into thinking about theory and literacy more deeply.

Oh, and I saw Knocked Up. It was fantastic, really. I laughed my head off, at least partly at the ten-year-old sitting next to Chris who looked confused much of the time. This is definitely *not* a kids’ movie, fyi.

As I was reading something yesterday, I came across an interesting fact: black dogs, particularly big black dogs (known in the shelter biz as BBDs) are really hard to place. A tan, yellow, white, or brown dog is more likely to be adopted; one of the main complaints people have about black dogs is that their faces are harder to read. As a proud owner of a BBD myself, I wonder about that. I have also read that black labs are more hyper, harder to train, and physically stronger. Is this a case of color prejudice? Does it go back to the days of white = good and black = bad (those days, actually, I think are still around in some ways). It’s not racism, cause we’re not talking about race, but it’s clearly about stereotypes that the darker the dog, the worse it will be.

Now nothing about Willa says easy to train, I grant you that. But I think that’s all her personality, not her color. Some of it is labs being high energy and loving to chew on everything (ask our cat, Spenser) … wait, that gets me off thinking about cats, too. Our white cat, Spenser, is very laid-back and zen except when it comes to having to share the bed with anyone but me. Our black cat, Naima, is much more high-strung and difficult. Still, though, I don’t think that’s the color, just the personality. All three animals would still be who they are, if their coats were painted another color. Although, painting Willa yellow might not be a bad idea — it might keep people from crossing the street when they see us coming.

Hmmmm.

I went home for a couple of days, and then my best friend’s wedding was called off by his fiancee at the last minute, so life got a little hairy. I am home in NJ now, but swamped with work as I get ready to teach in a few short days. Willa is bigger than ever, I think every day of my summer is now planned or taken by something, and I get to invest in a PlayStation in order to get ready for the Video Games, Virtual Worlds, and Learning class in August.

Other things –  I *have* to see Knocked Up, so don’t tell me if you’ve seen it and it’s good (yet). I think I am getting a new laptop in a couple of weeks. My butt continues to grow. You know, the usual. : )

From Rebecca Blood’s what’s in rebecca’s pocket:

New Media Part II: How Ponds Shaped “The Starter Wife” “We wanted to make sure [Debra Messing's character] would go through an evolution that would make her a Pond’s woman,” says Doug Scott, executive director of branded content and entertainment for Ogilvy North America. According to Scott, Pond’s money bought it 1) a hand in shaping the story and character arcs; 2) some standard product placement; and 3) a few key “signature moments” in which an on-screen interaction with the Pond’s brand triggers a thought or motivation in a character.

One of the things using technology in teaching has really brought up for me is the need for a critical lens to understand how advertising is continuing to shape media, sometimes in some very insidious ways. Now I know Geritol sponsored television game shows and if you’ve ever seen the movie “Quiz Show,” you know that they got in trouble for shaping results to get the “right” kind of winner. This feels similar to me, in that Pond’s wants to reach the market of well-off women who go through a divorce young in their lives and have to start over. Great storyline, I resonate to it too. But the fact that this storyline was then shaped around a product placement in order to further define and reach their market *during* the movie itself is the kind of boundary crossing that I don’t support.

Commercials need to be clearly labeled, as do ads (seen the front page of the NYT lately? If you have difficulties reading and understanding complex, visually compressed text, you also have a hard time understanding some of the boundaries between news and advertising. Or that Google AdSense actively shapes the results you get from web searching). Kids and adults are less conscious of the forces at plaay in the information and entertainment they get and, to my mind, that means they’re making less informed decisions. It shouldn’t be this hard to know when you’re being shilled, you know?

I have had a fly in my room for six days now (although he disappeared for a while this morning). I’ve named him Seamus and think it’s cute when he sits on the windowsill and rubs his forelegs together. Plus, what was first annoying buzzing is sort of companionable when you name the fly rather than trying to kill it.

My brain hurts.