this was posted in feb, 2019:

i'm racking my brain for actual books that i read in grades 7 and 8 - and even 9 - and i'm not able to come up with anything. i remember being given photographed handouts and asked questions around an ability to prove very basic comprehension, or being asked to read short texts and then produce an opinion piece around it. but, i don't think anybody ever handed out books to us and told us to read them.

i went to both elementary school and high school under the rae/peterson curriculum (harris won when i was in high school, and didn't succeed in changing the curriculum until the year after i'd left), and i'm learning just now that it was kind of an experiment. i did not receive any actual marks until grade 10; my high school transcript, which i still have, simply states "completed" for grade 9. i have records of standardized testing where i scored in the 95th-99th percentile, but i don't have grades for these years.

what i remember about the report cards is that they had a long list of criteria, and you'd be evaluated on a points system, with 1 the highest and i think 6 the lowest. this was just the teacher's arbitrary, completely subjective opinion. i remember getting lots of 1s in english and math, 2s or 3s in phys ed and some pretty low marks in the "shows respect for authority" and "works well with others" categories. even my university profs would have scrawled "does not work well with others" on my report cards if given the chance, and i'm not particularly embarrassed about it - i don't work well with others, and i don't want to, either.

i'm not even sure i can pick out much of anything of shape in these years really at all. we were split into classes that taught core subjects, and then shipped into different rooms for specific topics. so, i remember having a science teacher, a french teacher, a geography teacher, a music teacher, a phys ed teacher, a home ec teacher, a history teacher and then a kind of general "grade 7 teacher" that was tasked with everything else, which i guess is math, religion and english. but, that really meant that the curriculum was focused on the peripheral subjects due to the more rigid scheduling, and that math & english were largely unstructured babysitting periods with a lot of pointless busy work. when we went to geography class, or phys ed, we were there for a short period with a defined curriculum; when we went back to the general class room, the teacher could organize it any way they wanted to, or not at all, which was often the actual reality.

so, the system put more of a priority on learning french or geography than it did on learning math or english. we did regular spelling bees in grade 8 english class. and, i don't really remember taking math in grade 7 at all. grade 9 was more structured, in the sense that there were separate math and english classes, but i still didn't get graded, and i still don't remember reading any actual books. i explicitly remember reading shakespeare, but we read it orally in the classroom. and, there's a text called the chrysalids that i can't otherwise place that i might drop into grade 9.

of course, there's some possibility that i don't remember any reading projects because i was so efficient with them. there's a few texts from later in high school that i remember putting off until the last minute and then reading through in an afternoon. there's certainly some possibility that i just devoured it so violently that it never really got digested. but, the thing is that i liked reading, so i don't know why that would have been true.

i think the truth is that i was mostly baby sat all the way to the end of grade 9, and consequently don't have a lot to report on.

if i remember something, i'll insert it, but i think the way we're going to do this is that i'll be doing independent reading over these years, instead.

the chrysalids was grade 8, and i have a copy of it that i found used. i also remember doing a man for all seasons in grade 8, and the shakespeare. the only thing i remember from grade 9 is the shakespeare, and i don't remember anything from grade 7 at all.

there are a few shakepeare plays i'm not sure if i read in class or not. i should get a collected shakespeare. that's a reasonable thing to have.

however, i read a lot on my own. i can generate a list of several hundreds of novels that i bought with allowance money and read on my own initiative from grades 3-9. starting around grade 9ish, i was spending more time playing guitar and less time reading novels, and the first demoes were recorded in grade 10 (1996). so, this is the period i'm really focusing on in rebuilding this.

i moved out of my mom's basement and into my dad's basement between grades 7 and 8. my mom smoked and my dad's third wife was highly anti-smoking (she used to smoke). she claimed my collection of science fiction and stephen king novels smelled like smoke and told me i couldn't bring them with me. so i left them there and never really replaced many of them. she was a clinical sociopath with no ability to comprehend sentimental value, so it didn't make sense to her to collect books; in her view, books should be read and disposed of immediately after, and keeping them around is just hoarding clutter. she hated keeping anything at all around past it's immediate use. when she realized this bothered me, she did try to compensate by buying me new books (because why would i want books i already read?), which ranged from ayn rand texts (which i just thought were boring and terribly written) to tom clancy novels (which were ok) to grisham, koontz and ludlum. i read most of what those four authors had written up to about 1995 or so, and i also bought some newer king, but i just didn't have time for books after i started playing guitar more seriously. i never replaced most of the king or the science fiction - asimov, clark, bradbury, wells, jules verne, cs lewis, lewis carroll, etc. i had everything stored on a large shelf outside of my basement bedroom. in later years, my mom claimed to still have these books and became evasive when i asked about getting them back when i was older. it was relatively clear that she wanted to keep them. i've been unsuccessful in even getting her to just write out a list of them for me.

if i'm doing this now, i wanted to see what i had written in 2019 and it's not all that helpful. that's ok. i'll have to just remember it.

i apparently also have a music list dated to the summer of 2008 to recover on my external drive.

hey, i've got some ideas for strain names for the tragically hip's new marijuana line.

10. blown brain cells at high dumb

09. the tragic-saline drip

08. a head in the last century

07. systolic equipment attached to the back of a motorized wheelchair

06. 50 mission ct-scan

05. new lung transplant is sinking

04. saliva trickling down

03. disgrace, too.

02. an inch an hour

01. head cave

they were always too pompous to understand irony, and wouldn't understand it if explained to them, now. the band that lost their singer to cancer at 53 is now selling marijuana. astounding.

they've always been a microcosm of everything that is wrong with canada, so i guess this is kind of an expectation.

at 18:39

"my new lung transplant is sinking, man - and i don't want to hack.

*cough*"

at 18:40

Location:

i'd give their first record a three in my rating system (where 0 is the highest and 10 is the lowest), and the rest is 4 or 5. there's a greatest hits ep in there of around a half hour of music that's worth salvaging.

i got most of the way through cleaning my bedroom last night and stopped to catalog my collection of novels at librarything. these are just the fiction texts right now, because the fiction texts are going to be on shelves on the wall (the last thing to install) in the bedroom and not on the library shelf.  i also have a small overflow shelf that will hold books waiting to be read that, for now, will have everything on it, as i read and review fiction for the journal and alter-reality sections of the integrated multimedia project, which is first in the list. i finished entering the reduced fiction library i have left (it's only 70 books) and started typing out fiction books to buy to immediately fill in gaping holes when i had to pass out. i got sick yesterday when installing the aluminum. i think it was the glue, but i'm noticing some of these old books are giving me a sore throat. there's a type of hallucinogenic spore that lives in old books and can make you sick. i'm feeling a little better this morning, but i'm also now at 141.8 so it's time to make some toast.

i kept in the last bowl of soup i ate on...tuesday/wednesday.

this is a part of the process, as i had to move these old books into my bedroom and they've just been sitting out on top of boxes. they're all moving to the overflow shelf and will get up to the wall shelves in the next few months as i get through the journal project and move to the alter-reality. i'm going to buy a round of items this morning and add those to the list before i print the pdf and upload it to drive, but it's going to be similar to the cd collection. there will be a chronological list, an alphabetical list, an loc list and the library things pdf. the library things pdf will have information about exact pressings. all lists will have fiction and nonfiction, but i'm cleaning my bedroom so fiction is first.

i don't expect that i'm going to find as many book list snapshots as cd list snapshots, because i kept deleting it, and because the page didn't get as much traffic. i've long struggled with the question of whether this is pretentious or not; it clearly is, but it may be more pretentious to struggle with it. i think i should have a book list around in my insurance documents, when i had insurance in the 00s, but i tried to keep any list of books i uploaded anywhere restricted to references or reviews, strictly. so, the lists tend to be small, or focused on library books rather than books i owned. i'm worrying less about finding lists and filling the holes in out of memory for that reason. there's also the question of high school texts that i want to fill in while i'm at it and will be reviewing for the multimedia project, as well as some university level english texts that i sold and need to get back.

i have not, as an adult, read as much fiction as i did as a kid. that might change as i get through these writing projects. however, my broad perception is that storybooks are for youngish people, and reading novels is broadly something that most adults shouldn't have too much time for. there are exceptions, but it's not as much of a grown-up artform as symphonic music. grown-ups are going to focus more on reading as an academic process, for diy self-learning. we learn from reading novels, but it's a type of learning more valuable for young brains than older ones, as it's not direct information. grown-ups generally need more useful data. there's certainly a place for abstract learning for adults, but there's not always the time. i have more time than many adults, and this is exactly the kind of thing i want to use it for (i'm an anarchist. it's a part of the theory.), but even i need to be reasonable: this has limited use value. there is also the simple fact that the artform has collapsed into itself in the last 50 years and that fiction is going to find itself in a serious crisis when the 70 year olds and 80 year olds (and 90 year olds) start imminently dying. there isn't serious replacement happening. the form may permanently change in the near future.

i'm going to have a fair number of very old plays in my list. there was a time before the novel. we are on the cusp of a time after one. but we're not there yet and my personal library will have an assortment of novels, i just need to carry out a recovery process before i post it anywhere.

let me eat, then get through that, and the pdf should be up by the end of the day.