Author: jdwhiting

Someday I hope to get a backlit tree picture that I love. Until then, this will have to do.

And here’s one more leaves and sky attempt:

These collections of flowers just looked like they had little personalities to me, like a family portrait or something. The flowers and colors remind me of some of Van Gogh’s paintings, especially because his flowers always feel to me like they have so much personality.

This is a great little spot, and a much better photo than this one could potentially be taken there. I need to learn and practice more.

All of these photos I’m posting day by day were taken a week ago in upper Weber Canyon. It’s really a beautiful place, and I’m rather lucky to be able to have some access to it. Hope you enjoy them a little bit.

Yesterday I had the unique privilege of going to our department staff meeting.  Usually whenever our department has any kind of meeting (or party) I get stuck on the phones.  So, like I said, yesterday I had a unique privilege.  Adding to the singularity of this event, it was not just any old regular department meeting, but a retreat to the family cabin of one of my co-workers, located a few miles outside of Preston, Idaho.  It turns out that Preston is kind of a long way to drive from Salt Lake just for a four hour meeting and lunch, but it was on work time, I didn’t have to drive, and I usually enjoy road trips to obscure locales.  Also, I didn’t really feel like going up the night before and staying over without my wife for the more “retreat” portion of the itinerary.

Beyond the fact that I was getting paid and hanging out with the cool kids, Preston actually turned out to be a very pleasant and beautiful little place.  Between what I’d seen of Southern Idaho from driving on I-84 and my impressions of Preston as it is portrayed in a little indie flick you may or may not remember from a few years back, I had kind of low expectations.  So I was surprised.  Preston shares the pastoral Cache Valley with Logan, Utah, and it’s possible it may actually have the prettier end of it.  The aforementioned family cabin was nestled in rolling mountain foothills next to a nice little reservoir.  The area is pretty much an all-american idyllic landscape.  I can still smell the hay just thinking about the drive to get there.  I’m really wishing I had gotten my camera out and tried to take some pictures, because now I have a head full of barns, rolling hills, tractors, old small town main street storefronts, and brown/purple mountain ranges in all directions.

It was hard not to feel the pressure of one the great cult comedies of my generation weighing down on me as we drove through town.  I felt that perhaps I somehow diminished or stereotyped the town and its good people by hoping for them to conform to my “Hollywood” expectations.  And yet despite such moral misgivings I persisted in my fantasies.  When some of my co-workers were about to go golfing at the close of our meeting day, I suggested that perhaps tetherball would be a more appropriate recreational activity.  I searched storefronts for the famous Deseret Industries thrift store, where in the past such incomparable treasures as nun-chucks, a dance instruction VHS published in 1982, and a really swank polyester suit had been found.  I was tempted to ask the waitress at Pizza Villa, where we ate lunch, if I could have an order of tater tots.  (They have pretty good pizza, by the way.)  I kept my eyes open for a llama.  Over the years I have seen llamas in so many small towns throughout Utah that they have ceased to be very remarkable to me, and yet in Preston I inexplicably kept my eyes open for a llama.  Behind each grassy knoll we passed I expected to see a camper van parked and perhaps a mustachioed man throwing a football into the fields for a camcorder.  As we pulled out of town and started driving south, I truly felt kind of ashamed for my pathetic, touristy behavior in regards to this place.

Since I didn’t have any pictures of Preston to take home with me, I decided to turn to flickr to fulfill my visual needs.  To my surprise I discovered that a good portion of the photos tagged ‘preston idaho’ on flickr pertain directly to scene locales of the allegedly abominable film.  Looking through the images, you will see the school steps upon which a boy drew a liger in a notepad, the house of Pedro, the Rex Kwan Do center, and so on, and so on.  You will also occasionally see glimpses of that idyllic landscape I was talking about.  Upon further research in the sacrosanct annals of Wikipedia, I discovered that Preston has fully embraced this humble motion picture as the central mythos of their town, as it has given rise to an annual grand celebration.  A schedule of events from 2006 indicates a literary/media-inspired ritual that could come to rival even Dublin’s Bloomsday, complete with bus tours of significant filming sites, a moon boot dance contest and tater tot eating contest, and numerous performances by the Happy Hands Club.  I now feel somewhat relieved and vindicated in looking at the environs of Preston through the eyes of Napoleon‘s storytellers.  After all, it is not many towns of less than 5,000 residents that are so honored and immortalized with such a sweet film.  I wouldn’t be too surprised if that waitress had brought me out some tater tots without a second’s question if I’d actually asked for them.

Prestonidaho.org – Preston, Idaho Chamber of Commerce Home Page
Photos Taken in Preston, Idaho – flickr.com
Napoleon Dynamite – official site

A Book Review

Rebelling against the structure and strictures of the traditional coming-of-age novel (with the very first sentence the narrator informs us that he’s not going to go into “all that David Copperfield kind of crap,”) this book instead gives us an unfiltered, uncensored and un-“adult”-erated flash into the life and brain of teenager Holden Caulfield as he wanders around New York City for a couple of days and nights after being kicked out of yet another prep school, not ready to go home and face his parents.  There is no epic adventure or crisis, we are simply pulled in by Holden’s hilarious, confessional narration, which from page to page is obnoxious, insightful, vulgar, sensitive, spazzy, intelligent, depressed, distracted and empathetic. Above all, Holden seems to be in search of integrity both in himself and in the world at large; he constantly rails against “phoniness” wherever he sees it. Salinger captures adolescent confusion and detachment like no one before probably ever had; we are right with Holden as he wrestles with his confusion over love, sex and the hypocrisy and evil of the world. Rather than showing us the boy growing into a man, we are thrust into a very vivid moment right in midst of the “growth,” and are left to conjecture what will ultimately become of our narrator.

Comparing it to my recent reading, it seems that much of contemporary adolescent literature is heavily indebted to this book; everyone from John Green’s narrators in Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns to Neal Shusterman’s Antsy Bonano,  Marcelo of Marcelo in the Real World and the narrator of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao seem to be taking at least some of their cues from Holden Caulfield.  It may just be that Salinger was so remarkably successful at creating an authentic teenage voice that subsequent teenage voices in more recent works remind one of Holden’s voice.  This preeminence will make Catcher in the Rye feel very familiar to readers of today’s YA fiction, but still occasionally shock in its frankness.

Something must be said in regards to the explicit language in the book; although it certainly is full of it, any reader that becomes fixated on its inappropriateness has completely missed the point.  The narrator simply has the guts to describe real and pervasive dialogue and circumstances that some people would want cut out.  Again, this speaks directly to Holden’s desire for integrity; to censor anything real because it might shock or offend would be supremely phony.  Furthermore, much of the power of the book comes as we recognize how troubled he is by these compromising circumstances and moral quandaries.  His oftentimes empathetic reactions to such situations are extremely insightful.

I’m not exactly sure if this is a book that needs much more hyping.  Almost sixty years after its first publication it is still moving more units than many books ever do at the height of their publicity cycles.  Clearly it is well known, and a lot of the kids are hip to it.  Still, I don’t think this book can be recommended enough.  This is a masterful and influential piece of literature that works as well as a high-interest read for teenagers as it does as a text for serious literary study.  Every high school library should have this book on their shelves, and it should probably be displayed because the students will pick it up; don’t make them go to the public library for it.  This is a tried and true classic that has only increased in relevance since its publication.

A Book Review

Marcelo is looking forward to his coming summer job as caretaker of the therapy ponies at Paterson, a special school for children with disabilities which he himself has attended for years.  He is an intelligent but sheltered teenager with a condition that places him on the Autism spectrum.   However, Marcelo’s father, wanting him to gain experience in the “real world,” pushes him into a job in the mail room of his Boston corporate law firm.  If he isn’t successful at the mailroom job and at following what his father terms “the rules of the real world,” he will be required to go to a regular high school for his senior year rather than his beloved Paterson.  And so the reader is thrust with Marcelo into the competitive, confusing and relativistic world of the law firm, viewing it all through his fresh eyes.

It is absolutely riveting to follow Marcelo’s thoughts as he confronts the politics, deceptions, and evils that surround him in the law firm and begins to wrestle with what is right and wrong and how he should conduct his life.  His observations and occasional misapprehensions of the words and actions of those who surround him are by turns humorous and startlingly insightful.  At times the reader is almost embarrassed at Marcelo’s naivety, only to be dumbfounded seconds later by his deft and logical breakdown of a common perplexity of human behavior.  The reader should not have any problem identifying with this character; his autistic-based obsessions and limitations come to seem not so different from those of anyone else in the story or in real life.  His social shortcomings are countered by great perception and moral aptitude.  A lot of credit should be given to the author for creating such a breathing character.

In a day when many young adult books deal with sex in an extremely casual manner, this book is refreshing and courageous for intelligently suggesting that such casual sex may actually be emotionally and spiritually destructive, and making cogent arguments for sexual morality and high ethics in general.  The book is also courageous for bringing religion to bear in these moral arguments in a sophisticated and respectful way; Marcelo is extremely interested in religion and God, and both leans upon and questions his religious knowledge as he is confronted with moral quandaries at the law firm.

Filled with believable characters, realistic situations, beautiful metaphors and stunning ideas, this is a brave, masterful, coming-of-age novel that is a likely contender for the major young adult awards of the coming year.

Marcelo in the Real World
Written by Francisco X. Stork
Arthur A. Levine / Scholastic
315 pages
ISBN: 978-0-545-05474-4
Release Date: Mar 2009
franciscostork.com

A Book Review

Mary lives in a place simply known as the village. It is surrounded by protective fences which must constantly be patrolled and repaired to keep the village safe from the forest beyond and its threat of the Unconsecrated – shuffling, moaning, infected undead that, for all the villagers know, may have overrun the entire earth, save this last sanctuary of normal human life. All her life Mary has heard the folklore passed down through her family telling of the ocean and a world that existed beyond the village and the forest. As much as the fences keep death out, Mary begins to feel that they are keeping her in as well. Her childhood friendships have matured into a troublesome love triangle which puts her at odds with the will of the Sisterhood who control the village, and breaches soon break out everywhere, not only in the fences, but in her family life, friendships,and what she thought she knew of her village and the world outside.

To a certain extent, Carrie Ryan has done with a post-zombie apocalypse world what Stephenie Meyer did with vampirelore, eschewing some of the horror elements in favor of romance and soap-opera-style melodrama. As a main character, Mary causes quite a bit of consternation. She is often selfish, lustful, whiny, fickle, rash, and illogical. On numerous occasions throughout the book I found myself arguing with her or telling her to shut up. It is not entirely clear whether it was the intention of the author to paint Mary in such a disagreeable, morally ambiguous light, or if it is partly due to a lack of details and characterization. For example, what Mary speaks of incessantly as her “love” for Travis we interpret mostly as lust, simply because for much of the book we are given few details about him beyond his good looks and her physical desire for him. My irritation with Mary is actually what kept me going on this book, as I was hoping to finish it just so I could give it a terrible review. However, she did grow on me as the book progressed. She eventually does come to question some of her own actions, asking herself the same questions the reader has wanted to ask her throughout the first part of the book. At one point even she becomes cognizant of the fact that, much like the Unconsecrated that surround her, she is on an inexorable path, ever hungry but never filled. Her selfish flaws and inconsistencies make her a frustrating, but nonetheless real and complex character.

Key questions never answered, too much “telling” of melodramatic feelings and thoughts, and a lazy lack of details keep this from being the book it could have been, but the events are so compelling and Mary’s erratic, destructive behaviors become so fun to follow that it is still an entertaining read. And of course a sequel, The Dead-Tossed Waves, is coming out next year. For the quality of the book itself I would generously give three stars, but for a teen audience four stars because it is a high interest read that may pull in reluctant readers. Thus, 3.5 stars all around.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth
Written by Carrie Ryan
Delacorte / Random House
310 pages
ISBN: 978-0-385-90631-9
Release Date: March 2009
carrieryan.com